Joe Terranova

A while ago David posted about how he switched to using FsckVPS over Linode. He showed that it was cheaper, faster, etc.

Today I saw this on Reddit. Take a look at the linked picture. Basically, it’s Fsck saying that it’s too hard to not store passwords in plaintext, and then an email saying that they were hacked, and lost tons of data.

This is David’s original post. I went to go comment, but his site is down…

Btw, David, that’s the difference between Linode and Fsckvps.

I’ll be presenting on Asterisk at CHLUG tonight, so if you’re in the Cherry Hill (New Jersey) area, come on down! I’ll be presenting to what I think will be a mostly empty room, so if you have questions about Asterisk, tonight’s a good time to get them answered.

Christina is looking to get into graphic design, but doesn’t have much experience in it. Does anyone know/recommend an open-source project (or other similarly noble effort) in need of graphic design?

I posted a thread on reddit asking the same question, so if you have any suggestions, I’d prefer you post there (but here is also OK if you’re Web 2.0 phobic).

Of course, the obvious elephant in the room is “why not Ubuntu artwork/marketing”? She’d like to, but from our impression it’s mostly “post something complete and maybe we’ll use it”. If she can do graphic design for Ubuntu, while getting direction and feedback, she’d be more than happy to.

The LoCo Team went to the Trenton Computer Festival on April 25th and 26th.

Here are some pictures (courtesy of Christina):

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

While at TCF, I gave a presentation on VOIP, Asterisk, and FreePBX. As promised, here are the presentation slides.

I’ve also written a how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX in Ubuntu. The how-to can be found here. If I’ve left out a step, done something incorrectly, or if you have a better, cleaner way of doing something, feel free to edit the article, or let me know. I’m open for putting the how-to elsewhere (the Ubuntu wiki, voipinfo.org, etc) if people want me to.

Update Voicepulse replied in a comment to this post. Though my post was a bit venomous, they replied thoughtfully, and they’re considering GPLing their FreePBX module. Keep in mind, while the Freepbx module annoyed me, and the contract annoyed me, I’m still using their service, I’ve switched to it full time, and I may be switching my mother to it if she goes VOIP. A 19 ping (versus 100-120) and 4 channels will do that.

1. Write a FreePBX plugin that automatically creates trunks and inbound routes for people using your service.
2. In the process, do the following
   1. Blindly try to install curl (using yum. On my Ubuntu machine.)
   2. Include FreePBX and your own function files with hardcoded paths for Trixbox, instead of using relative paths.
   3. Make tar.gz backups of my /etc/asterisk directory and quietly add them to your modules directory. Make sure not to do any checks for file size or free disk space.
   4. Write to my sip_general_custom.conf and extensions_custom.conf (bad FreePBX extension! bad!)
3. Use PHP Obfuscator on your code, and copyright it, so that no one can see all the horrible things you’re doing to their system, or figure out why it doesn’t work.

• I installed the extension and saw the paths didn’t work.
• I looked at the code, and was appalled that they obfuscated it.
• I symlinked /var/www/html so that it would install, then found out none of their actions (adding trunks, adding inbound routes) actually worked.
• After seeing some of the fun things it does, I’m quite glad it didn’t work at all!

Thanks Voicepulse! Your rates are good, the voice quality seems great, but emailing you a signed contract and waiting for “verification” was annoying, and I wouldn’t touch your FreePBX extension with 9 1/2 foot poll. Your customers (including me) would probably clean up your mistakes if you GPL’d it. The only downside would be the possibility of helping someone you didn’t intend to.