I’ve been using Skype a fair bit lately. More precisely, I’ve been using Skype Out a fair bit lately. Skype Out allows you to make calls using Skype’s interface to pretty much anywhere in the world. It’s a prepaid service where you purchase a minimum of 10 Euros worth of talk time which is deducted per their rates (calls within the US are €0.017, a little over 2 cents/minute). The international rates are great (it’s €0.017 to a UK landline, but calls to UK mobile phones are €0.205). This is a handy service for me right now, because I keep running over my minutes on my cell phone plan (I’m switching plans soon).

The call quality has ranged from excellent to almost walkie-talkie-ish, but almost all calls are pretty clear. And my set-up is not very sophisticated… just an old boom mike and headset that didn’t cost very much.

The two disadvantages of the service I can think of are the lack of DTFM tone support (being able to send touch tones for voice systems) and the lack of an address book for contacts that don’t have a Skype account (this may exist, but I looked for it twice).

I hated that the calendar (currently in the top right corner of my blog) links just linked to the first post written on that day. It should link to a page with all the posts for that day. I fixed this by creating a daily archive in Movable Type, and replacing this code in the calendar section of the sidebar template:

@@
<a>"&gt;
@@

with

@@
</a><a>"&gt;
@@

The nugget — archive_type="Daily" — creates a link to the daily archive. One issue with this implementation, is that Movable Type has to create individual and daily archives if you want your site nice and neat. Just more storage and CPU overhead (noticeable when rebuilding — regenerating — your site).

Check out Google Maps. It’s in beta, but it works really well right now. Maps, driving directions… all the usual suspects. The application rocks because the UI doesn’t change as it reloads data, just like Gmail. Very nice, and how web applications should work.

Update: 2005_16_02
Check this post out for details on how Google coded their maps application.