brentashley

Go ahead, Rupert Murdoch. Block the Googlebot (and presumably, all other such content indexers except your Bing buddies). Stop moaning about it and do it now. I’m itching to see how this turns out.

I’ve been a land-line hold-out for a long time. I’ve resisted the marketing campaigns of my phone provider (Bell Canada), my ISP (Rogers), and my long distance provider (Primus), and have continued to pay $40 per month for a wired land line with voicemail, forwarding, call waiting, and unlimited local calls, and an additional (average) $35 per month for long distance services to the UK at about 6 cents per minute, a great rate considering I paid at least $1.00 per minute when I first brought my English wife to Canada 23 years ago.

This month I finally changed over to Voice-Over-IP. I chose to go with Unlimitel, a Canadian voip provider with whom I was able to keep my existing phone number.

Unlimitel charges $3.50 per month for a DID – a Direct Inward Dialing number. That means a specific phone number is assigned to your provider who then provides a system for you to connect to it to receive and send calls. You connect to the provider over the internet.

You can connect to most providers via SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) or IAX (Inter-Asterisk eXchange). Generally, SIP is used by software or equipment that acts as a single end point, such as a VOIP handset or a soft-phone such as the free X-Lite software, whereas IAX is used by PBX software such as Asterisk or FreeSwitch, which will act as a switchboard to manage multiple extensions, Interactive Voice Response menus, voicemail, etc.

I decided to connect to Unlimitel via IAX, so I can run a simple PBX at home and play with some of the features. I chose to run SwitchVox Free Edition from Digium, because it’s a free, full-featured yet turnkey solution. I’m running it on a used Dell Optiplex box I got for $89 at Factory Direct.

In order to connect my existing home analog phones to the SwitchVox software PBX, I bought a Linksys PAP2T 2-line analog telephone adapter for $51 from Canada Computers.

After ordering the DID from Unlimitel by asking them to transfer my existing line to them, I received the login info from them and entered it into my SwitchVox software. When the line was transferred over, I disconnected my home phone wiring from the incoming wires, and plugged Line 1 of my Linksys PAP2T into one of my home jacks to connect it to all the rest of the phones in my house. I configured it as Extension 100 and told SwitchVox to route all incoming calls to that extension.

I have also set up other extensions for myself and my family members, so we can connect via our computers to make and receive phone calls. I have not yet routed incoming calls to IVR to give directory access by last name etc, but I can do that if I like.

I actually have another DID in addition to my original home number so I can play with things. I can route incoming and outgoing calls based on rules that I define. I’m even considering buying a cheap UK DID so my wife’s family can call us on a local number and avoid long distance charges.

I have 5 channels, meaning I can have up to 5 incoming/outgoing calls at any one time, including callers to a conference bridge on my PBX. Local calls are now charged at 1.1 cents per minute. UK calls are 3 cents per minute. I anticipate my total monthly charge to be less than $20, down from $75 before.

Unlimitel provides Basic 911 service, which means that I will be able to dial 911, but they will not automatically get my location (as they would with the usual E-911 service) – I will have to provide it when they answer. I have mitigated this somewhat by making a rule that says that whenever 911 is dialed from the extensions that are connected to analog handsets in my house, the Caller ID that is transmitted is my Postal Code and street number and name.

To summarize, I now pay about a quarter what I was paying before, I have up to 15 extensions, 5 channels, voicemail, call waiting, customizable Caller ID based on outbound call rules, detailed call logging and daily and monthly billing summaries. My intial hardware outlay was about the same as 1.5 months of my original bill and it runs on my existing broadband connection.

What the heck is not to like?

Tell me your story. How much have you saved, how much flexibility have you gained, what lessons have you learned?

Being the command-line type of guy that I am, in the Windows world, I will often find myself at a CMD prompt wanting to start up Windows Explorer in the current directory, run a file with its associated program, or start a browser and send it to a URL.

In Windows, one uses the ‘start’ command to do this. It is essentially like typing something into the ‘Run’ dialog from the Start menu. If you specify a URL, it starts up your browser at that page. If you specify a path to a local directory or a UNC to a share, it will start up Windows Explorer with that target. If you specify a file whose extension is associated with a program, it will start up in that program.

Now that I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS for a couple of years, I have found that you can do the same thing in Gnome with the command ‘gnome-open’. I even went so far as to alias it to ‘go’ by putting the following line in my ~/.bashrc file:

alias go='gnome-open'

Then it is a simple matter of using ‘go’ to do all sorts of things:

Open a pdf in Document Viewer:

# go document.pdf

Open a file browser in the current directory:

# go .

Open a URL:

# go http://www.google.com

Compose an email:

# go mailto:someone@example.com

Search for all the people who have blogged about this very topic:

# go 'http://www.google.ca/search?q=gnome-open'

Yesterday, I came home a little late after dinner to find I’ve missed about an hour of tweets related to the long-anticipated DemoCamp 19. Visiting the Democamp site, I found no front-page information about the upcoming event, but there was a link to Register for DemoCamp Toronto 19. All the regular tickets were already sold out! As it happens, I had recently completed my year-end and had budgeted to sponsor the event, so I grabbed what was probably the last remaining sponsor slot.

Today David Crow announced DemoCamp 19 and a new issue of Networking Only tickets to the event, again over the dinner hour, and by the time I saw it, the new set of tickets was also sold out.

I’m starting to see the value in an iPhone. I really don’t care to be a blackberry-toting tethered business drone, but there are certain things that are worthy of my immediate attention.

After almost 7 years of uninterrupted service, Blogchat will soon be shut down.

I started Blogchat right here on this blog in February of 2002.

It was pretty well the first of its kind – an Ajax-style live chat (although the techniques were not called Ajax until three years and three days later, when JJG coined the term).

If you read through my posts [in reverse order on each of earlier and later pages] over those days, you’ll see that it was a great collaborative effort – a real early example of the social web pulling itself up by the bootstraps whereby the people collaborating to build a chat tool were using the chat tool itself to provide the input to the developers.

Tim Aiello and I ended up building it into a hosted service and ran it together until Tim took the reins last year, but without a large following, the care and feeding have become more than the service is worth, especially since so much advancement has been made in this sphere during the life of the project.

A testament to the simplicity of the thing is that it had been running essentially unchanged since at least 2003.

A few stars aligned recently and the result is fascinating.

1) I got myself 2G memory, a 320G disk and a 20″ display (and a putty knife!) and upgraded my Mac Mini. Then I upgraded to Leopard and hooked up the old drive in an external USB enclosure as a Time Machine drive.

2) I got a promotional copy of Visual Studio 8 from Microsoft. I’ve been using Visual Studio 2005 and wanted to give 2008 a spin, and with Joey as a new MS evangelist, the timing was right.

3) I subscribed to Technet Plus, which gives me evaluation copies of Vista and XP, among other things.

4) I installed Sun’s VirtualBox on my Mac, with its Seamless Mode feature that’s available when you have the Guest Additions loaded onto the virtual machine.

Sooo, I loaded up Vista Ultimate in a VM with Visual Studio, TortoiseSVN and the AnhkSVN plugin for VS2008, set up the IPSEC and OpenVPN connections to my office, and loaded up some code.

I now ready to do some serious evaluating in a killer hybrid environment, as you can see by the picture. Where to start?!

VirtualBox’s Seamless mode means that I can essentially run a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously. For someone like me who uses both environments, it’s a nerdy dream. I could even throw in a Linux VM if I wanted to confuse myself further.

I’m also trying something similar with my Acer Aspire One. I have it running Ubuntu as its main OS on the 8G SSD. On the 8G SDHC card, I have a VirtualBox-powered XPPRO VM and I’m running it seamlessly with Ubuntu. With one toolbar on the top and the other on the bottom, it’s quite useful, especially when used in conjunction with an external monitor, but still workable in 1024×600:

The best part is that both of these setups perform very well on modest machines.

The Brad Blog has a story with videos documenting electronic voting machines flipping votes.

Apparently the scenario is this: Someone makes their vote for candidate X by pressing the corresponding box, but the machine puts a big green check mark against candidate Y instead.

…so far, all of the confirmed reports of vote-flips this year have been away from Democratic candidates

I guess the implication is that the machines have been programmed this way by nefarious GOP operatives as yet another way to rig the election.

Now, my tinfoil hat is among the shiniest when it comes to believing the worst about what America’s neocons have done in the past and will stoop to in the future, but even I can’t believe that when a programmer has the power to simply ignore whatever input is received and concoct whatever output their evil overlords mandate, they would then go all Donald Norman on us and insist on giving the user visual feedback that the deceit is happening.

Interviewer: Do you agree with the Model-View-Controller pattern?

Candidate: In what respect, Charlie?

Interviewer: The Model — what do you interpret it to be?

Candidate: Controlling the view from the model, Charlie?

Interviewer: No, the MVC software architectural design pattern widely used in various web development frameworks.

Candidate: … I believe that design patterns are designed to rid us of the burden of reinventing the wheel over and over (…and other such generic drivel).

Interviewer: (closing the candidate’s file and marking it with a red X) Thanks for your time. We’ll keep your resume on file for six months.