Cricalix.Net

I recently ordered Vonage’s UK service so that I could get a US telephone number that routed to my UK address. The box arrived today, and had to be the easiest VoIP connection I’ve ever set up. A little black box, with their branding - hook up the phone, power and ethernet jacks, and within 60 seconds, I had a connection that worked for inbound and outbound phone calls.

The real proof will be tonight, when I ask a friend of mine in the US to ring my virtual number that presents into the USA. If it works, I’ll be working on jacking the output of the Vonage ATA into the FXO port of my Asterisk server, and implementing a ‘follow me’ style service so that anyone calling my US number (after entering a PIN) will be able to tell Asterisk to hunt me down.

MySQL is far from a perfect bit of software, but it does certain jobs quite adequately. I found out today how little I can trust myisamchk to tell me about data corruption though. A few days ago, I had an issue with lack of free blocks, and MySQL stopped processing data. This is good. I expect this (arguably, I should have known the disk was low, but I had been away and the disk usage rate shot up while I was away). One of the jobs that relies on a certain table wasn’t completing properly, and was throwing ’severe’ errors in the web interface that talks to it.

A quick check with myisamchk -dv said ’status: changed’. Not ’status: crashed’. A myisamchk -r, however, said ‘oops, something is wrong here!’

I realise that myisamchk is meant to deal with index data, and not table data, but you’d have thought it could tell you that the data file was out of whack too!

There are a few YouTube videos that I’d like to keep permanently, one of them being Gir2007’s Barbados Rocks. A quick bit of net-scouring led me to KeepVid.com, which will let me save the source FLV file (Macromedia Flash). A bit more scouring leads me to 409’s page on converting with ffmpeg, and presto, I have a 13 MB file that I can watch whenever I want, without firing up a browser or needing an internet connection.

Yay for British Summer Time - the clocks moved this morning, so it’s now dark by 5:30 P.M., and winter isn’t even fully here yet.

I think I need to change latitudes.

Well, I’ve shipped my ZyXEL off to my grandfather so that his DSL setup for wires only won’t be too painful. I’ve ordered a Billion 7402r2 as a replacement for it, and I’ve also ordered a Digium TDM card for my Asterisk server. Both bits of kit have arrived today (and were only ordered yesterday!), and I should be installing them later this evening if things go well. I’m using a Mentor at the moment for DSL access, and while it’s certainly more stable than the ZyXEL, it has a pile less features - no multiple IP support, no SIP support, no SNMP. Here’s hoping the Billion works out - it actually has a few more bells and whistles than the ZyXEL, and they might actually be useful ones (like VPN support, and tuning of the ADSL signal power).

October 27th -

The Billion seems to work so far, and I’ve even got the VPN support working from $work. There seem to be some issues with the VoIP quality, so I’m going to have to fiddle with the bandwidth settings, perhaps set aside a 64kbit channel for it, along with the QoS settings.

I didn’t see much of day 3 of UberCon, as I spent from about 5 PM on Saturday until 2 AM Sunday morning, and then from about 10 AM Sunday morning until 4 PM Sunday afternoon talking to my best friend. Around 4 I helped with the LAN teardown - full LAN to fully-boxed LAN in 50 minutes. Then there was the post-con meeting to attend (even though I was technically an attendee) - one of the first we’ve ever had I think. Proved to be very useful, and we started addressing a few of the things that need to be sorted out by the next con.

We fell a bit short of the expected number I think, but the feedback, in general, was that VIII was a great con.

06:00
Awake. I think.

09:00
Regi is open, people are trickling in. Normal for a Saturday morning, it takes a few hours for everything to get into motion. Loony Labs Rabbit is running a game across the way. Some folks are playing UT2004. Been discussing with Dave what might be giving us trouble with CONGO on the virtual server that runs ubercon.com.

…

and here ends the majority of the con reporting. A friend of mine who I haven’t seen for ages has shown up, so I’ll be spending the rest of the con talking to her.