Joe Terranova

Saturday was the NJ LoCo Team’s April LAN Party. Another LoCo Team member, and professional Linux writer, Dave Harding, gave a detailed account of our last LAN party. Dave hasn’t posted a report on Saturday’s, so I assume this time it is my turn. What follows is a detailed report, without the detailed part.

11:30 It started off with quite a bang. I had planned on waking up at 7 or 8 to start setting up downstairs. Christina woke me up around 11:30, because Dave had been ringing the doorbell for 3 minutes. Dave, Christina, and I then spent the next 40 minutes or so setting up.

Noon. Randy from the PA LoCo team shows up, with his friend “Teddy”. Setup continues.

12:30: We’re set up, Bryan shows up, and play starts. We start with Urban Terror.

1:30ish: Jerry and his son show up for the scheduled Frozen Bubble Tournament. As Jerry’s son is 8, we quickly switch to Armagetron.

2:20: Frozen Bubble Tournament begins. I realize that I’m horrible at Frozen Bubble. Christina takes my spot while I run off to shower.

3:30ish: Frozen Bubble Tournament is complete, and Teddy is the undisputed Champion.

I put together Planet badges for both of the tournaments; unfortunately, Teddy doesn’t blog, so he won’t get to use the champion one. You can tell who participated, as they have this badge:

4ish: We play some more Armagetron. Jerry and son leave. We switch back to Urban Terror, “lunch” (burgers and fries) gets ordered.

5: More Urban Terror. John (aka “the ringer”) shows up.

6: Mostly Urban Terror.

8: Brett shows up. Like John and I, Brett spent much of his childhood playing FPSes like Counter Strike (which is very similar to Urban Terror). Teams are split up to make ringers as even as possible.

We play through a number of different modes: Free For All, Team Survivor, Team Deathmatch, Follow the Leader, Capture and Hold. Of all of them, Bomb is the most popular. It’s a throwback to the general Counter Strike scenario — the Red team has a bomb, which they must plant; the Blue team has to stop the Reds from blowing up the bomb, by either stopping it from being planted, or defusing it before it goes off. This usually involves “hunt down and destroy the opposing side”, but planting the bomb forces the blue team to track down the red team and defuse the bomb within 30 seconds.

10: We grab dinner. Three people split a pizza, and everyone else grabs food at WaWa.

11:30 Randy and Teddy head out. More Urban Terror.

1AM: I’d been planning an Urban Terror Team Tournament, but I wanted 2 or 3 person teams, so I had held out for more people (8 had signed up, many more said they were coming; 6 showed, plus Jerry and his son for Frozen Bubble). Once the LAN was officially over, I held the mock tournament. As I said previously, we tried to split up the ringers as evenly as possible. Teams were as follows:

Blue: Me (almost a ringer), John (“Ringer of Ringers”)

Red: Dave, Bryan, Brett (ringer)

We played a bomb match (as previously described). Play was intense, but it was quickly obvious that when teams are 2 to 3, and the 3 have the bomb, 3 definitely have an advantage, regardless of average skill level. Play went as follows:

1. The round would start
2. Within 20 seconds, Brett would run to a bomb site and plant the bomb.
3. John and I had 30 seconds to figure out what bomb site they were at, and beat 3 people.
4. Terrorists win.

The final score was 13 Red, 8 Blue

We decided to do another round, with switched teams (Red switched with Blue). This round was much more fierce, and a lot closer. In the end, the score was Red 15, Blue 14.

To beat the tie, we decided to play a Team Survival Match with knives only (ie, the dumbest idea in history). When John and I were winning 14 rounds to 3, we decided to call it.

For the Frozen Bubble Tournament, Dave made an amazing Frozen Bubble Trophy. Not to be outdone, I had equally impressive awards for the Urban Terror Tournament — specifically, gold and silver painted plastic dollar store bling necklaces.

“2nd Place”: Dave, Brett (MVP), and Bryan.

“1st Place”: John and Joe (me)

Not pictured: Christina, MVP (Most valuable Non-Player).

Given that we really tied, and the other team didn’t have to play another round, I will forgo the champion badge: , and we’ll all use this one:

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of these events — specifically, the times people came and went. If you notice any glaring inaccuracies, please comment and I’ll correct them.

In Conclusion, despite having fewer players than last time around, the LAN went great, and I’m glad to have been a part of it. We’re planning on having a combined LAN and BBQ sometime over the summer.

Martijn van de Streek posted that he’s set up Asterisk on his server. Good job, and glad to hear it!

Unfortunately, if you care about security, it’s not as easy as “sudo apt-get install asterisk” — the package is in universe, not main, and therefore hasn’t been getting security updates. The package is at 1.4.10, Asterisk is up to 1.4.19, and the package hasn’t been patched for the myriad security problems in between. Take a look at the Asterisk security list and cringe.

While that may not be an issue for home, at work we own a C Class, which gets scanned night and day for holes by bad, bad people. So when I set this up for work, I had to super lock the server down, and I had to compile Asterisk from source, as the ubuntu package is too big a risk.

For both home and work, I’m using FreePBX, which makes Asterisk much easier to configure. At this point, I can configure Asterisk myself, I have a handle on most of the internals of Asterisk and FreePBX, and I’ve written a few macros and AGI scripts — but that doesn’t help my bosses if they want to add an extension when I’m away. Though there is a distro called TrixBox that includes Asterisk and FreePBX, I’ve never liked “vocational” distributions (or CentOS), so I always set mine up on Ubuntu Server.

After I move my work Asterisk server from “former employee’s tower pc under the rack” to “server in the rack”, I’ll log my steps and make an up-to-date how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX on Ubuntu Server (plus all my little tricks I’ve added). Over the summer, after I finish my degree, I plan on making a repo that has a) an always up-to-date version of Asterisk, b) a package for FreePBX, to make it easier to set this stuff up. Of course, I will also try to get both into Ubuntu as quickly as possible. After that, I’m considering making a Python-based program to manage Asterisk, as a replacement to FOP and iSymphony.

Once again, I’m glad to see one more asterisk user. Be sure to add Enum to your trunk, and register your number with e164.org!

Well, I’ve updated to WordPress 2.5. With that, I’ve also changed my theme to one that supports widgets.

This is spurred by a request Dave made the other day, to have a way to print blog posts in a readable way, without comments. To this end, I added the wp-print plugin, which gives you a link to a printable version, without comments, and with all links as footnotes at the bottom (all of this configurable, of course). Note that, if you’re using WordPress 2.5 like I am, at the time of this writing you need to use the beta version located here.

So, in the interest of making Dave happy, please add a print link, or I’m afraid Dave might take drastic measures, possibly involving kittens.

As I said in my previous entry, Best Buy didn’t sell the n810, and they still don’t. However, “Best Buy Mobile” does, and I finally found one with one in stock.

And it’s awesome!

In celebration, here’s a video of me doing a barrel roll.

(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