Cricalix.Net

As I work on the current big project at $work, I’m getting more exposure to ISDN (otherwise called It Still Does Nothing by my boss), and the tools used to diagnose ISDN connectivity issues. We’ve got a few bits of kit lying around here, including handsets that can emulate a PBX or monitor an ISDN channel, and something called a Siemens K1197 ISDN Protocol Tester. No longer made, and around 20 years old, it just fired up and ran today. Dan hooked it up, tapped on the keyboard a few times, and I made a test call. We were all amazed to see it displaying call information - right first time.

Well, almost right. The information we were after wasn’t displaying, and no amount of fiddling with short vs comprehensive output would show it. There was a slight smell of smoke, and then Dan tapped in a few more instructions, and I made another test call. Hey presto, full ISDN session setup information, flags indicating the type of call and number types and all sorts of other information.

Very, very nice tool. Quite expensive too.

Now to run a series of test calls to get the information I need, and then contact our ISDN supplier to see if they can’t sort a few things out for us.

Well, one of the things I expected to happen with the job change last year was the return of my energy to write code for random projects.  After several years of coding for a living, any desire to pick up a keyboard and hack on either my own projects ( or public projects ) was pretty much non-existent.

I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past week or so cleaning up the Value Editor mod for the EVE Killboard, along with patches to the core code, such as implementing the ability to store raw mails and fixing the portrait grabbing code.  I’ve also spent several hours providing support on the killboard forum for various other users of the software, and I have to say, I’m quite content now.  There’s something about providing code (for free) that people find useful.

Not sure what I’ll tackle next (other than the value editor, it needs a few more tweaks) - perhaps the mod that shows ship fits as a graphic.  One of the forum users has reported that it whacks their Apache installation load wise.

Yeah, I’ve let things lapse a bit more than I normally do. New job has me quite occupied, and I had a house guest for the past month. House guest has now gone home, and I’m back to being a lazy bachelor. Yes, this means I need to do the dishes in the sink. Perhaps tomorrow.

Work has thrown up an interesting project recently; I’ve had to learn a fair bit more about Asterisk, and some lingo for a totally different world than computing. The project has also given me more reason to knuckle down and get a distribution server up and running, using knowledge from the previous job. It’s certainly different working for a (slightly) larger company - in comparison to both the previous job and my work in academia post-degree. That said, I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and picking up more Windows administration skills than I will ever admit to knowing (like using VBScript + HTA + ODBC to make a 30 minute task take 1 minute).

On the EVE front, the corporation I’m in is back into Empire space, having grown tired of the antics of the alliance we were in. Three other corporations have ever so kindly declared war against us, so we’re having fun shooting them, not playing by their rules, and never talking to them in the chat channels. The ‘never talk’ one seems to really get their goat. Led a fleet operation on Saturday, and managed to lose no ships while destroying four of the enemy. Only four battleships though, we missed the heavy interdictor.

Also on the EVE front, I’m doing more work on the kill board software that we use to track our kills and losses. I wrote a value editor module for version 1.2 of the kill board, and have been keeping it compliant with 1.2, 1.3 and the latest 1.4 release. Also been contributing patches to fix other issues with the software, though mostly minor ones. Assuming no one reports problems with the value editor, I should be submitting a rather large patch to the KB folks to get the latest version included into 1.4 (they have an old version, and it confuses people!).

And just because I’m living in the UK: My, what strange weather for this time of year.  Unseasonably warm.  Frogs are spawning already.

Well, I’m officially a year older, and it’s also 2008.   Suppose I should bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies for $work, given the apparent tradition of ‘bring treats in on your birthday’.