Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

It’s been way too long since I’ve blogged. And this post isn’t going to be all the impressive unfortunately. However, I recently have been running a BBS and some friends and I have been playing LORD.

We’ve been playing this for the last few months, and I think I’m going to run a tournament. Perhaps with some sort of buy in like $10 or something, winner takes all.

Going to build it out in such a way that first person to beat the dragon 3 times will win the game, and at that point that person will win the pot.

Additionally, I’ve been reading a lot about the Go language and trying to get myself up to speed on that. Very interesting programming language. Essentially C but for concurrency (multiple processors).

I’m hoping to start blogging in the near future, but my current work has just kept me too busy and I haven’t really had anything all that worth of blogging about. I hope to start changing that around soon and get back to blogging on a semi-regular basis with things I’ve learned in the world of telecommunications and cloud platforms / virtualization.

Additionally, I don’t have any confirmation yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be attending AstriCon in Las Vegas this year. I’m going to figure it out either way, so hopefully i can meet up with some of you this year! The last few years I’ve just kind of mostly kept to myself and hung out with those I’ve met previously. I’m going to make a better attempt at reaching out to those I haven’t met before, so if you see me, come say hi please!

Digium D40 and D70 Phone Unboxing

Today I received a couple of phones from Digium; the D40 and D70. I’ll be using these phones for testing and documentation in the 4th edition of Asterisk: The Definitive Guide (which Jim Van Meggelen, Russell Bryant and myself are working on right now).

Here is my unboxing of the phones and some commentary about my initial impressions of the hardware itself.

Pretty boxes!

Phones arrived in some nice looking boxes.

Digium D40

Comes with a little pamphlet to help you get the phones setup on your network.

Comes with all the little things you need to get the phone up and running, including a network cable. I was just using POE to power the phone, so I didn’t end up with the 5VDC power adapter.

Nice looking base. Easy to put onto the phone. Just uses friction to hold the phones on the base. Not sure how well that’ll work over time, but this isn’t something that should be getting attached and detached a lot. The space for cables in the base is also quite large.

Holes to mount to wall. Requires adapter.

Easy access!

Lots of space for my hand to plug in cables. Much nicer than any of the Polycom bases where I usually give up and just remove it.

Boot screen

Booting up with the Digium logo.

Handset hook access

The tab on the back here is well designed so that you don’t require a tool to pull out and flip around. I prefer to have the hook for the handset so it doesn’t fall off the base easily. On the Polycoms (which have the same type of setup) it’s nearly impossible to remove with your fingers

D40 vs IP335 size comparison

.Size comparison between the D40 and IP335.

Digium D70

Open box

Hidden compartment

Back of the D70

I don’t quite get the base with the wall mount holes, but impossible mounting angles on the base. Must have something to do with the manufacturing process and not having separate molds for footing.

Update: Michael pointed out that the A-frame is actually two separate pieces, so with a (separately purchased) piece, you can attach it to the base and make the system wall mountable. With the number of phones I’ve actually wall mounted in deployments (I think the number is only one or two), I think I prefer the 2 options for steep and shallow angles. Neat idea.

Side cut outs for cables that I didn’t even notice the first time through. Michael pointed out they are for cable management. Nice!

Oh my! So much space! Very roomy 🙂
Side by side comparison of the D70 vs the IP650 w/ sidecar.
Front to back comparison of the D70 vs IP650 w/ sidecar.

bash creating files named ‘1’ everywhere!

So I ran into something kind of stupid today 🙂 Adding a little note for anyone who might run into a similar instance.

I have some ssh-add stuff that gets run in my .bashrc file, but when I was outputting it, I was doing:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/some_key > /dev/null 2&>1

Note the 2&>1 at the end. That means to redirect output to a file named 1. You need to flip the &> into >&, so the fixed version looks like:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/some_key > /dev/null 2>&1

Commodore 64 Turns 30 This Year

Having found an article about the Commodore 64 turning 30 this year, I reflected back in a comment on that page about what it is like to be only 1 year older than the Commodore 64, a computer which spiked my interest in technology away from a games system to something much more. The original article is available at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/commodor-64-30-year

“I just turned 31 a couple of days ago on January 7th, and when I was in grade 2 (about 8-9 years old I guess) I started getting interested in the Commodore 64s we had at our school that were plentiful, but rarely used. I remember the first thing the teacher taught me; $p$g

The Commodore 64 replaced my interest with Nintendo (which I still have) to a greater interest that shaped me and caused me to grow technologically. This grew into the Packard Bell 486/25 my parents bought where I played flight simulator (after my Dad purchased more RAM for the computer at $100 a MB), and ran a BBS (the first month I played around with the 2400 baud modem calling Las Vegas BBS numbers that a friends father gave me; I lived in Sarnia, ON, Canada which is north-east of Detroit), and eventually ran my own BBS. Running a BBS gave me the sense of community that I possess and the love of telecommunications that is my career to this day.

So thank you Commodore for your C64 which has allowed me to carve out my career and greatly influenced who I am; and not just professionally.”

#AstriCon 2011 Quote of the Conference (@abalashov)

I think the best quote I heard the entire time came from @abalashov (Alex Balashov) during the AstriDevCon when we were talking about Asterisk documentation, and how we might better organize it within the source.

We were discussing perhaps moving some of the existing configuration file examples to a manpage, and Alex piped up to say, “Manpages are a vestige of our glorious, prehensile, curly-tailed past.”

There wasn’t much left to be said after that 🙂