According to this interesting and funny article in Forbes, Windows Vista is in fact so boring that journalists that were excited to cover it didn’t even bother to keep their voices down while they were mocking it in front of Steve Ballmer.
Apparently laughter broke out about some of its “features”.
You’re probably wondering what “it” is. Maybe you have a few guesses:
Spring? Nope.
The next version of Debian? Guess again.
Winter? Getting closer.
Yes, it really is here. That season known as the Kansas springtime winter storm blizzard/monsoon season.
Today is the first day of spring. Most of Kansas is seeing its worst winter storm of the season today. Parts of the state are expecting 14″ of snow. Here we just had sleet and steady rain for 2 days.
I’m sure that in a few days, it’ll be dry again. But every so often, once or twice a year, we get one of those days where we have 6″ of rain (or more) in about 12 hours. Then we sit dry for several months.
Kansas weather happens only in extremes, it seems.
Just about everybody hates backing up computers. But it’s important. With more of our information being stored digitally — even photos — it’s critical to back them up.
At home, I’ve been using rdiff-backup for years now. Very slick. It stores backups on the filesystem — they look as if you had used rsync. It also stores metadata (owner, mode, etc.) in separate files, so you don’t have to back up using root. But the neat thing is how it handles incrementals. Incremental backups will update the backup image files to the current state, and store binary diffs to the past state. So you can access the latest backup instantly, and re-generate the previous state if needed. Very nice.
I had just been backing up to a regular IDE drive. But this week, I ordered two Seagate ST3400601CB-RK external drives. The drives support both USB2 and FireWire. We will get a safe deposit box at a bank. At any given moment, one drive will be at home, and one will be safely at the bank. They’ll be rotated periodically.
At work, we’ve been using Amanda for years. It does its job well. (Except on AIX, where both dump and tar are broken in obscure, hideous ways, but that’s not Amanda’s fault.) Recently, I discovered Bacula. This looks very slick. It seems to be the direction Amanda would evolve, if it would ever evolve. We’re going to test it out soon.
And besides, who wouldn’t love a program whose slogan is “Bacula: It comes in the night and sucks the essence from your computers”?
I’ve got episode 2 of my new podcast Sound of History online.
It’s been really interesting to find these old recordings. For this episode, I found Kennedy’s famous 1963 speech in West Berlin. I keep being struck with what an amazing orator Kennedy was. It is quite the captivating and amazing speech.
Reagan’s speech to West Berlin in 1987 is also in this episode. It’s three times longer than Kennedy’s, and probably less inspirational, but still an interesting listen.
Next week I’m going to have one of the forgotten opposition speeches, trying to argue against Reagan. Also some good material out there from that perspective.
In other news, ourmedia.org is being terribly annoying. It’s much easier to upload to archive.org directly. I don’t know why I ever bothered with ourmedia.org (or why anyone does, really).
It’s been a little while since I wrote about Asterisk. It’s about time to update the story.
I’ve been using Asterisk at home for awhile, but now we’re going to use it at work.
The need
We have approximately 150 internal extensions here, and they are being supported by a Nortel PBX. This PBX is being end-of-lifed, and it would cost well over $100,000 to replace it, once the cost of the two required Windows servers (!) was factored in. Not only that, but it still isn’t as flexible as Asterisk.
Along with that, we have a need for internal wireless phones. We have a large manufacturing area, and we have people that would like to be able to use a wireless phone anywhere on the shop floor or office areas. No single cellphone company provides a signal that is strong enough to reach everywhere in the building — not to mention that there would be big airtime fees. So we are planning to deploy 802.11b wireless phones for this purpose.
Hardware
The decision was made to go ahead with Asterisk. We will be replacing all office phones with Polycom IP501 units. This means running about 90 new runs of CAT5 to people’s desks.
For our Asterisk server, we got a HP DL385 2U server with dual dual-core Opteron 2GHz CPUs. We’ve really had good luck with Linux on these DL385s, and with HP’s support. We got redundant power supplies, disks, fans, etc. on that machine. The CPU on here is probably more than we need, but telephones are very important to us and we wanted to make sure that we don’t have any issues down the road.
We purchased two A104d quad-T1 interface cards with hardware echo cancellation. Very nice cards. The drivers have been a little troublesome. But Sangoma’s tech support is awesome. They logged onto our box and I was watching as they were hacking on the kernel module right there. Tech support like that is rare. I highly recommend Sangoma.
We really need only one of those cards, but they’re the only component of the Asterisk server that isn’t completely standard. So the second is on hand as a spare.
For our analog phones, we are using two Adtran TA 750 channel banks. Each has a T1 interface and a 50-pin telco (“Amphenol”) connector for a punch block. So we can run 24 channels off each of those. Our consultants (see below) suggested getting them used from Colspar Communications. We found them fully loaded with FXS cards for $250 each. We bought three — two for production use and one for a hot spare.
These are very solid and nice units. The only problem we had is that the voicemail indicator lamps (MWI lights) on our old analog phones wouldn’t light up. Turns out that Asterisk with a T1 channel bank uses digital FSK lamp, whereas our older analog phones expected a certain line voltage to indicate messages waiting. After some Googling, I found add-on FSK lamps from American Science & Surplus for $1.50 each. Nice.
In our other building, we have a gigabit fiber-optic link, so we purchased an AudioCodes MP124 SIP-analog gateway. It’s working well so far, except it’s not working with voicemail indicator lamps at all. It seems to be a firmware issue that is incompatible with Asterisk in some way. We’re investigating now.
For wireless phones, we’re using the Hitachi IP5000. We’re not terribly pleased with the quality of wifi phones in general, but this one seems pretty solid. And it doesn’t crash every few minutes like the Zyxel model we tried.
The Telco
Our current phone system has about 23 analog lines for interaction with the outside world. We wanted to get a voice T1 with PRI channel for the Asterisk system.
Our local telephone company is Sprint, and this has been the annoying part. First they tried to quote us an Internet connection. Then it took a very long time for them to even get us a quote for the voice T1. And now we have signed the contracts but are still waiting for an install date.
Consultants
While I had used Asterisk before, it was in a home setting. Not exactly business-critical, and not dealing with hundreds of extensions, T1 lines, and all the rest. So it seemed reasonable to get someone experienced with that sort of thing to help us out and make sure we weren’t making mistakes that would cost us down the road.
I posted on the asterisk-biz mailing list describing what we would like to do. I got a bunch of supplies from consultants, and we wound up selecting Asteria Solutions Group. At the beginning, we wanted some advice about server sizing, phones that work well in business settings, etc.
I think that most consultants are not used to working with people that have significant Linux experience, and a good deal of Asterisk experience, already. Asteria was a little surprised with our situation at first, I think, but has been very helpful. They’ve educated us on the ins and outs of T1 technology, pointed us to Colspar (which saved us a ton of money on analog gateways), and helped us with some obscure questions. They were also fine to have a much smaller involvement with our project than they would probably normally have. I highly recommend them.
Surprises
You’ll never believe just how hard it is to buy phones from Polycom. They won’t sell directly to people, nor will they even list authorized retailers on their website. You have to call them, leave a message, and in a few days they’ll let you know where to go.
Some online retailers such as atacomm sell Polycom phones, but they’re not authorized to do so, so you don’t get any warranty or have the right to get firmware from Polycom.
What’s more, Polycom usually expects people to need configuration assistance with their phones. But I think that when I told them we need 90 IP-501s, had already configured 5 on our network, and needed no assistance, they were happy to work with us.
Reactions
We’ve deployed desk phones all over by now. So office workers have two phones on their desk right now (one from the old system, one from the new). We’ve heard a lot of positive comments from people about the new phones. And all the features of Asterisk — music on hold, flexible queues, etc — will be really helpful here.
Cost
Even with the cost of all new phones, new CAT5 runs and labor for that, consulting time, etc., we still expect Asterisk to be far cheaper than the latest Nortel PBX.
Also…
I recently wrote an article about Asterisk for Free Software Magazine. I’ll let you know when/if it gets published.
How can you go wrong with this headline:
Physics students, duct tape extend faded couch’s mileage
Yes, that’s right, by using a lawn mower engine and duct tape, they have motorized a couch.
Well, it’s finally time to announce my new podcast, Sound of History!
The Sound of History is a weekly podcast featuring full-length, unedited, and uncut historic audio. You’ll hear speeches, broadcasts, and events from around the world. Sometimes you’ll hear famous people, sometimes not.
Episode 1 is up now. On this episode, you’ll find John F. Kennedy cracking jokes about Marx in front of a bunch of newspaper publishers, Ronald Reagan talking about the Challenger, some blues from 1922, and an Edison recording from 1902.
Thanks to Cliff for mentioning that Reagan speech in a comment. That prompted me to go find it.
I’m finding material for this podcast from around the Internet. Some of that music comes from archive.org, and there are various sources for presidential speeches.
I’d like to find some British prime minister’s speeches as well, but I’m having difficulty with that. If any of you Brits reading this know of a good site for uncut audio, accessible to Americans, please do let me know.
I haven’t had a chance to check this out much yet, but it sounds interesting, and I think Cliff would love it:
The Fray is a site where people tell stories and others comment on those stories, and once a year there are worldwide gatherings to do open-mic storytelling live. (from a post on the Creative Commons blog)
UPDATE: I should have linked directly to the audio archive, which looks like the really interesting part of the site, and the one that CC linked to.
Have you noticed the incredibly annoying dialogs appearing in new Gnome/GTK apps in sid? They no longer allow you to use the keyboard to enter a filename. Not only that, but they are *incredibly* slow when working with large directories. You better go get some caffeine when if you need to open something under /usr/share/doc.
Here’s an example from Firefox:
Other apps, such as Gimp, also have this problem.
I have one thing to say to these people: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?
The keyboard is still a useful part of a computer, and I have absolutely no inclination to wait 45 seconds for some annoyingly slow dialog to populate because you prefered to remove the ability for me to enter a filename in a dialog box myself.
Check out The Mozart Quiz over at the BBC. They play 10 music clips, and you have to choose from among the 3 composers listed.
I got only 8 out of 10 correct. Sigh.