On VoIP, SIP and phones

There have been several developments in the world during my home decoration and furnishing related hibernation. In fact many of these developments occurred long before in the area of VoIP and its application at home.

• My ISP Plus.net started to provide fixed telephony services with prices a bit more attractive than cheapest BT option for the same price. Will not go for it just yet to avoid potential customer service trouble as the service has not potentially yet stabilised.
• The same Plus.net started to offer SIP based VoIP services. Having Plus.net as an ISP gives you bandwidth advantage (read: voice quality). Moreover, some UK land line calls allowance (240 mins) is included in most of their internet packages. Will definitely use it.
• The very same Plus.net (oh no, not again!) is offering Broadband Your Way Pro package with allegedly prioritised VoIP and gaming traffic. I've already switched!
  
• There are DECT SIP phones on the market, such as VoIP phone Siemens Gigaset S450. This particular one offers standard land line connection, VoIP SIP service (up to 6 accounts and 3 calls in parallel) through ethernet connection on the base, Outlook contacts sync, web admin interface, jabber messaging (this means gmail's gtalk and all other IM systems!) and it checks for your email too. I'd gladly swap email and IM for an ability to connect bluetooth headset though. Currently costs around £95 - that's for a base and one handset. If I live it through without it until January I know what is going to be my birthday present!

All these yummy developments combined together can lead to a convenience of:

• having a very good cordless home phone installation with all contacts up to date
• cheap local and international calls without a need to dialling any prefix numbers and then keying in full international number
• potentially multiple external numbers each assigned to different handset
  
• handsfree operation with headset
• freedom in VoIP provider choice (unlike similar Skype based phones)
  
• and god knows what else.

I want it all and I want it now!

Every time I change job I always tend to spend too much time remembering how to search for "pre-1.4 style" custom exceptions that try to store their root causes in a field. So here is the IDEA custom template for that:

class $Class$ extends $Parent$ {
    $Throwable$ $varName$;
}

Variables $Parent$ and $Throwable$ should be constrained with "text/regular expression" set to "Throwable" and "apply within type hierarchy" checkbox checked.

Fishing in North East Thames Region

There is a very good guide and maps for fisheries in the North East Thames Region, including Watford and surroundings:
Map (pdf)
Guide (pdf)
Through this guide I found the web address of the secret Watford Piscators club (just look at those carps!) that manages fishing permissions on most of the waters around Watford.

Picasaweb: album/photo location feature and language settings

Just found out that Picasa Web will not show you a nice mini map with album and photo locations if it thinks that your language preference is not English (US). If you're logged in with your google account, you should go to picasaweb settings and choose English (United States) as you language preference. If you are not logged in, ensure that in your browser's language preferences "en-us" is on top of the language list. Other languages may do the job too but English (US) is known to work.
After you've made the changes you should see a map of album locations in my photo album home page.