Linux, programming, computers and life

Recently, i upgraded my internet connection from 750Kb/96Kb to 1.5Mb/128Kb (all in bits), with hope to get better skype/gizmo/other voip applications quality. But it somehow did not help at all . Skype to Israel works great, but to US the quality is unbearable. I tried ekiga (a gnome SIP soft phone) and several others linux SIP soft phone apps with a free sip account from voipbuster.com but once again the quality was intolerable. While my parents (i called them for test) were able to hear me, i was able to hear about 2-3%. And i do not know how can i debug these problems, where is the bottleneck and how to find it. I believe the connection is wide enough for voip calls.
So, anyone - how to debug these voip problems?

Technorati Tags: voip, linux, skype, problem, quality

Usually, if there’s a problem with some aspect of my linux system, i google a little, take a look at the archlinux forums, and usually find a solution pretty fast.
Now i’m trying to deal with a problem of low importance for me - mounting my usb memory stick - and i don’t know what to do. I did not even find where to look. I’m using thunar and xfce. Thunar, as far as i know, uses hal for mounting. The usb key is mounted, but with ’sync’ mode - which means every write goes down to the hardware, instead of being cached. This causes both slow performance and faster death of the memory stick. The mount should be done in ‘async’ mode. Here’s a thread in archlinux forums i opened, but so far no answers there.
Help, anyone?

Technorati Tags: linux, xfce, thunar, automount, usb, disk on key, sync, async