Daily Archives: 1/30/2006

Warty Visitor

Frog Visitor

Well, this evening I was staring out the door into the darkness to see if our sometimes-feral cat Scrappy wanted to be let in for some additional kitty chow, and I found this little guy peering in instead. He’s a good sized frog, probably three or four inches in length (just the body, not the legs), and he stood still as I tried to catch several pictures of him through the glass. I tried to get some motion video of his little chin pulsing, but it didn’t really turn out with the 1/2 second exposure times. Still, he’s kind of cute.

I mean, for a warty, slimy amphibian.

I’ll move him off into the bushes so the cat doesn’t get him when he comes back.

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Boing Boing: Google logo redesigned by Students for Free Tibet

I usually don’t post links to Boing Boing stuff, since everybody in the known universe already reads Boing Boing, but I thought this logo design for Google by the Students for a Free Tibet warranted a bit wider distribution.

Sorry Google, but if your motto is to “don’t be evil”, you are seriously off course. If your motto is “don’t be evil, except when there is a large, potentially lucrative market for us to exploit as long as we hold our noses and pretend that we aren’t evil”, then you are a lot closer.

Boing Boing: Google logo redesigned by Students for Free Tibet

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What I know and don’t know about Asterisk…

Well, I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but here is what I know:

  1. It’s not hard to compile asterisk for the amd64, but…
  2. You need to be careful compiling the ztdummy kernel module: in particular, you must define USE_RTC when compiling, because the sourcefile incorrectly only checks for USE_RTC if __i386__ is defined, which is not the case for 64 bit machines.
  3. Getting mpg123 to compile seems hopeless on the amd64.
  4. You can get a phone number for $11/month, with unlimited incoming calls and about $.02 a minute for outgoing calls to the United States via VoicePulse Connect!.
  5. I can, with a minimum of effort, create a simple dialplan that allows incoming calls from that number to be forwarded to some phones attached to my hacked Linksys PAP2 adaptor.
  6. BestBuy has a nice 5.8 ghz phone on sale for $25 with a $10 rebate.
  7. I can make calls from my Linux console (using a headset) to those phones.

What I don’t know:

  1. While the phones attached to the PAP2 can receive calls, I haven’t figured out how originate calls from them.  There is obviously something stupid about configuring them that I don’t understand.
  2. Sometimes the voice quality from the console seems bad, which I suspect is some kind of codec mismatch.

Ultimately, I’d like to make a simple “dialplan compiler” that allows you to enter some basic information, (account numbers, logins and the like) and generates the necessary asterisk configuration files.  I’ll probably write it in Python…

Hopefully, I’ll have this up and ready for human testing in the next week or so.  Then, I’ll unveil the deeper purpose!  Stay tuned.

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Monday Malais

Well, I’d hoped to announce the results of some of my experimentation with Asterisk, but the weekend didn’t conspire with me very well. My mom ended up in the hospital (she’s back out, but it was worrisome) and I was nursing a borderline migraine most of the weekend. Yesterday I ate most of a pound of chocolate M&Ms (first time I’ve done that in two years, ever since I started Weight Watchers) and was generally not very pleasant to be around. Today, I feel like crap, but it’s back to the sugar mines of Pixar Disney…

I’m glad Mom’s out of the hospital and feeling better, but Mondays still suck.