London at Night

I am fortunate (or unfortunate depending on your view!) that I work in London. Yesterday (Saturday) I was working at another location which allowed me to travel a different route through London, givving me the opportunity to take one of the photos that I've seen done many times, but wanted to do myself. The London Eye at night.

I had expected to finish work late afternoon, so had packed my camera, 28-135 lens (next time I'll take the 10-20 I think), my gorrilapod and my TC-80N3 remote (which I got for christmas and don't really know how to use yet - but I'm learning - what there's a manual!).

I'd taken some pictures of the Houses of Parliment lit up at night a few years ago, so I went and tried to recapture them - not sure how happy I am with the results - so no posting of those. I then went onto the embankment and picked a few spots for the London Eye shots. These are my two favourites.


London Eye and County Hall


London Eye

I used the Gorillapod on walls for support, and eventually worked out how to set a long exposure through the remote (bulb on the camera, set the time for the exposure and press start on the remote). It's so much better than getting the shakes - it was just above freezing.

Ah well - that's a tick in the must do photos of London - plenty more to shoot.

Coomera River Before Sunrise

Picture gadget time!

This was taken from the jetty at the holiday home we had during our trip to Australia in March 2008. It was taken about 5:45am just before we were to go out deep sea fishing (we didn't go deep sea fishing in the end - too rough - wouldn't think it looking at the river!)

When to MTP, when to transcode ?

That was a question I saw on NetPro today (paraphrased slightly), which made me think of something I'm currently working on.

I'm currently involved in the implementation of a new Audio Conferencing system, which involves Avaya conferencing connected to Cisco IPT. This involves SIP trunking between the IPT platform and the conferencing system. This brings into play the usual "how do I get my DTMF to work?" question.

Normally, I'd just create an MTP resource on an IOS gateway, add it into a Media Resource Group and apply that to the SIP trunk. This works fine when calling from an IP phone to the conferencing system, but when an MGCP gateway gets involved, its time for some interesting behaviour - if you type your DMTF quickly, digits get dropped - not all though. If I use a Transcoder (same gateway etc), it works fine.

Now a transcoder by default uses two DSP sessions per call (even when going from G711 to G711) as the default configuration sets up allowed codecs to include G711 and G729. So take away the G729 as an allowable codec and its down to one DSP session per call, just like an MTP.

I'm guessing this could be a bug with UCM 6.1.2 and the IOS version I'm using, but I have a project to complete, so I'll have to come back to this at a later time as the workaround is suitable

So to answer the initial question, I guess the answer might be, use a transcoder all the time and control your codecs to optimise your DSP usage - unless you are doing a certain lab exam!

Introduction

I guess an introductory post is always a good idea for a new blog, so here's a little about me.

I'm a UK based contact centre consultant who specialises in the design and build of IP contact centres using Cisco products. This include Unified Communcations Manager (CallManager) and (usually) Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE).

I've been doing this since 2002 when I was involved in the design and build of a large contact centre for a UK retailer which grew to a significant size with centres in various locations including South Africa and India. This managed to cover not just Cisco IPT, but Nortel Symposium and Avaya integrations. I've been involved in the design and imlementation of a few IPT and IPCC systems since then.

I am a bit of an early adopter, and like my tech to come with a beta tag, not in a production environment of course!

In my spare time (what spare time!) I follow Everton in the English Premiership, and have an affection for photography (or at least I have the kit!).

Anyway enough of an intro, I'm sure more will come out in time.