geek frustrations

Man, there’s nothing more frustrating than scouring the internet for a good free program to meet a need you have, find nothing of acceptable quality, and then finding out that there’s a program that comes with Windows that does everything you need perfectly… but it won’t work.

For a few weeks now, Steve and I have been trying to find a good way to video conference with each other for coding sessions on Monday nights. At first, we looked into NetMeeting, which comes with Windows, but there were sites all over the internet (including Microsoft’s) that said NetMeeting on XP and 2K can’t talk to one another. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with. So I ran the usual gamut of freeware sites, and found out that there are two main competitors for NetMeeting. One of them just started charging, so the other one was Yahoo Messenger. Steve and I installed it, and it kinda worked, but caused problems for steve, and was pretty low quality, so we removed it.

Around then, I discovered that NetMeeting was installed on my computer, despite it’s supposed incompatability with XP. On a whim, Steve and I called each other, and it worked perfectly… except Steve couldn’t see or hear me, even though I could see and hear him.

Well, after a couple hour’s research tonight, we’ve found out that XP and 2K NetMeeting *will* talk to each other just fine… but not through a firewall. In order to talk through a firewall, you have to open all ports over 1024, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having a firewall… and since fojar is the firewall, that’s not going to happen.

So even though the perfect tool is sitting right there, built into windows (in fact, it’s impossible to uninstall), we can’t use it.

*sigh*