Joe Terranova

(and why I hate gift cards).

For the past several months, I’ve been drooling over the n810. I decided that, following Christmas, I’d be getting one for myself. My boss decided to give us our Christmas bonus in the form of a Best Buy gift card — no big deal, right? Best Buy will of course be selling them.

So, I currently have 275 in Best Buy gift cards total, and 150 in visa gift cards.

This is the n810 on CircuitCity.com . They have it, full price.

Here’s the n810 at Buy.com. Note that not only is it in stock, it’s also already on sale.

And here’s the n810 at Best Buy

When I searched for it previously, I was just told no search results were found. This confirms my suspicions — not only do they know the n810 exists, they’re purposefully not stocking it, and want people to buy n800s instead (which is of course absurd, as the n810 is better in every way). Perhaps this is because they’re really bad at turning over inventory. Perhaps it’s because they hate me.

Maybe this is why Best Buy makes so much off unused gift cards. However, if I go buy it else where instead, I’ll have to figure out something else to spend 275 on — it’ll probably end up being something dumb, like a PS3 or Windows Vista Ultimate. I guess I’ll wait a few weeks to see if Best Buy gives up on their stock of n800s and ships them all to Woot.com

Haven’t written in a while.

While I didn’t get a gPC (not a Walmart fan, and it was underpowered), I did get the motherboard for the gPC. The motherboard, 1GB ram, decent microatx case, and 500GB hard drive set me back around 240. It’s much quieter than my previous server, and is happily running Ubuntu Server downstairs.

While we’re talking about the new server, here’s a picture of what my basement computing stuff currently looks like:

I’m currently moving all my stuff off my previous server to the new one, including my bip and bitlbee install, folding at home, and FreePBX. On my old machine, I had used Fabian’s How-To on setting up Freepbx, particularly on setting up using the Xorcom Etch repositories. Unfortunately, Gutsy has continued onward while Etch has not, so what works on Feisty doesn’t always work on Gutsy, and that was the case with the Xorcom packages. Hopefully they’ll be moved to Debian in the near future.

Instead of using the Xorcom packages, I followed this how-to, which, besides version changes and some redundant steps, was pretty spot on. In short time I was up and running, and it didn’t take long to move over my previous configuration to the new server. The new FreePBX, by the way, is much, much shinier, and has AJAXed everything (even the Gigabytes).

Why am I moving everything, you might ask? Well, since the new server will have these permanent duties, I’ll be using the old server as a game server for the New Jersey Team’s LAN Party!

That’s about it from now. Here’s a video of Dave miming a “PodCast” on using The GIMP.

I’m currently working on the approval application for the NJ LoCo team, and part of it is giving actual evidence of what we discussed — this includes IRC logs. Unfortunately, I never set up a LoCo bot to log the meetings, so I’m currently going through my bip logs for relevant convos. However, bip keeps very precise information. So, while in your irc client it may look like this:

16:16:22 <gQuigs> hi
16:16:49 <harda> gQuigs: You coming Saturday?
16:17:04 <gQuigs> what time does the fair end?
16:17:10 <harda> 14:00.
16:17:18 <gQuigs> oh

In my bip logs, it looks like this:

19-09-2007 16:16:22 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -hi
19-09-2007 16:16:49 < harda!n=harda@pdpc/supporter/silver/harda: +gQuigs: You coming Saturday?
19-09-2007 16:17:04 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -what time does the fair end?
19-09-2007 16:17:10 < harda!n=harda@pdpc/supporter/silver/harda: +14:00.
19-09-2007 16:17:18 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -oh

Lucky for us, we live in a world of regular expressions. A php script and some regex mojo later:

<?
   if(STDIN)
   {
      while(!feof(STDIN))
      {
         $line = trim(stream_get_line(STDIN,10240,"\n"));
         $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:<|>)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^:]*)?: (?:-|\+)?/','\1 <\2> ', $line); //   normal text
         $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:<|>)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^ ]*)? /','\1 \2 ', $line); //emotes
         $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:-!-)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^ ]*)? /','\1 \2 ', $line); // actions
         echo $line."\n";
      }
   }
?>

And we’re right as rain (results can be seen here). That can probably be condensed some, and you could, of course, do that in whatever language you like. On a side note, you won’t realize how difficult WordPress’s Rich Text Editor can really be, until you have to wrestle it into showing properly indented code. Every time I save this post, WordPress mangles my code again.

(and Comcast Voice, Voicewing, Skype, and most other VOIP Companies you’ve probably heard of)

SIP. Asterisk. FreePBX. Open standards, Open Source. The back bone of VOIP. Yet  most VOIP users have never heard of them.

I have an asterisk server set up in my house, connected to a Linksys PAP2 sip to analog client, which is hooked up to two phone lines in my house. I have an account with sipphone.com, which provides me with POTS (plain old telephone service) for free incoming calls and 1.5 cent outgoing calls. I have a direct SIP address for my asterisk box, which allows for completely free direct internet calls. Furthermore, my phone number is registered with ENUM (a service which allows for phone number resolution, ie this phone number goes to this sip address), which allows anyone using ENUM to simply put in my number and connect to me directly through SIP. ENUM allows completely seamless integration of VOIP and POTS: if you’re calling someone still using a regular telephone, your provider connects for you and you’re charged accordingly; if you’re calling someone whose also using SIP, it’s completely free. As more people switch to the new system, the system runs even better.

A few acquaintances of mine (who I apologize to for this rant) use VOIP,  and are one of the reasons I set this all up — so I can have a cheap, low-traffic number which I can use from anywhere with an internet connection, and doesn’t wake up the whole household when someone calls. I gave them the number, but said that they could also just dial my sip address, to connect directly.

Their response?

“What’s that?”

The reason? Almost every provider handles all their telephony using SIP (or AIX) and uses asterisk (or similar) PBX to handle it. Yet, though the protocol is built to do it, none of them use enum, none of them provide a SIP address, and none of them support direct internet connections.

Can you imagine if you were charged every time you emailed someone using a different email provider, because your provider printed out the message, put a stamp on it, and mailed it to the other provider? Of course not! Yet we allow VOIP providers to take our call, run it over an analog phone line, to send it to another VOIP provider, and charge us for it. And why would they do otherwise? Comcast Digital Voice charges 27 cents a minute to make a call to Argentina. If you and your other party were both using a provider that used an open SIP system, you could connect directly, through SIP; instead, they’re collecting quite a bit of money for not a whole lot of effort.

As a result of greedy, commercial VOIP services, we’re transitioning from our analog phone system; instead of transitioning to free, ubiquitous voice service over open standards, consumers are buying into walled gardens, paying for cheap(er) phone service when they can be getting it for cheap(er(er)) and, much of the time, free.

The devices sold in stores are locked to a specific provider, locking out choices and other services. The PAP2 is a Linksys adaptor, coordinating SIP connections with analog phones.  Yet, you’d be hard pressed to find one that isn’t locked to a provider,  stopping you from having incoming or outgoing direct (and free!) SIP calls. Search for SIP at Best Buy, or Circuit City. Nada. Search for voip on Best Buy or Circuit City. Tons of stuff … locked to Vonage, Skype, or some other VOIP provider (many times this is in fine print). I ended up buying mine on ebay from a company in New York. You can usually buy SIP devices online, but you’ll never find an unlocked one in the store.

The world is slowly moving to VOIP, and those of you reading this will be among the first to switch over (if you haven’t already). Please, please, before switching over, consider how the provider you’re choosing 1) handles control over the hardware (usually you have none), 2) connects to other VOIP services (usually it doesn’t). Odds are, you’ll find yourself in a position you’re not very comfortable with. Look at asterisk (a free pbx server), FreePBX (a free frontend to said pbx server), and Trixbox (a free distribution that sets up said systems automatically). Check out Fabian’s How-To on installing FreePBX on an Ubuntu server if you’d like to use Ubuntu instead (like I do).

Most importantly, don’t accept a VOIP provider until you understand exactly what you’re accepting. There is choice, it just won’t be found in your local electronics store.

Yesterday, I walked around campus with my Ubuntu shirt on, going to 2 classes over the course of 4 hours. During that time, I met 2 people that stopped and said “nice shirt!”, who also used Ubuntu, and were interested in the NJ LoCo team.

Therefore, what I think I need to do is wear as much Ubuntu propaganda I can — an Ubuntu shirt every day, an Ubuntu hat, a bumper sticker that says “Honk if you like Ubuntu! (Also go to nj.ubuntu-us.org)”, maybe even a huge button on my shirt that says “ask me about Ubuntu”. Around 65K people should be using Linux in New Jersey at the moment, so hopefully we’d have a very large LoCo team in a short time span.

Also, as a result of some annoyance yesterday, I wrote a rather long rant about why I hate most commercial VOIP providers. I think I’ll hold onto that until I’ve culled it into being “Informative” instead of “tearing off faces and using them as hats”.