Too much slashdot disease here lately, again. In English, the apostrophe never means plural, and "it's" always means "it is". Please.

To get VoIP working I ended up having to use a binary tarball of IAXComm from three releases back ("rc1"). The Debian experimental version using PortAudio19 (which is supposed to understand ALSA and Jack) suffered persistent assertion failures. I wonder why all the community-oriented VoIP web sites (Free World Dialup, e164.org, etc.) seem almost deliberately opaque. FWD makes it hard even to get out of their splash page, until you spot the "site map" tag concealed in the extreme lower left corner.

One of the odd things I found while getting IAXComm working was that nobody documents what Linux ALSA mixers do, and what all those damn sliders and switches are really for. What I was able to figure out was

• Gamix seems to be the least annoying GUI mixer.

• The "Mic" slider only controls how much of the Mic signal is fed back to the headphones. If it's not muted, people hear loud static at the other end. Putting it at zero doesn't really zero it; you have to push the mute button on it. (I don't know if this is an es1978 problem or an ALSA oddity.)

• The real mic sensitivity control is labeled "Capture". Its mute button is the right one to use in conference calls.

Congratulations to everybody who had a hand in Gcc-4!