So, I’m waiting with semi-partially baited breath to see if the least worst viable candidate party can take control over the US Congress later on today. I obviously can’t vote but I would encourage US citizens to go out and exercise their democratic right. For me to take sides would obviously be cheap point-scoring and a complete waste of screen real-estate…
(because sanity is a great thing when exercised en masse)
Jon.
So, I wasted time hacking on my Asterisk configuration over the weekend (I was feeling crappy, spent a lot of time asleep and then decided just to watch TV shows off iTunes while hacking this stuff). The result is that I’ve got two linked Asterisk servers with synchronized call menuing systems and way too many options…
When you call me on one of my cellphones, if the call is not answered immediately, it will divert to Asterisk. The centralized configuration presents the following menu:
I like this setup, just a little bit. The system annotates redirections and keeps you informed while it’s trying to locate me by calling out “Call forwarding. Home. Please wait while your call is being connected”, “The number is not answering” and “Call forwarding. Voice Mail System. Please wait while your call is being connected”. And a lot more stuff I won’t even write about here.
The point is, if you like doing silly things with Asterisk, you might like this setup a little bit too. Next step, weird custom Asterisk applications (cmds) to properly handle two geodiverse Asterisk servers – since the current infrastructure support is pretty damn lame (you can use IsAvail and SIPPEER/IAXPEER to determine if a server is online, but you can’t easily say “on this remote Asterisk server, tell me if the extension is currently not registered or DND”). But I’m not complaining, I think Mark’s software rules.
I bought some more funky stuff in Whole Foods to celebrate.
Jon.
I’ve been hacking around with Asterisk configurations, DID and IAX in general. I’ve now got two Asterisk servers (one in the US, one in the UK) that have various ways of communicating with oneanother and handling my calls according to overly complex and pretentious configuration. Here’s a little more about how my configuration works. Let’s start by looking at what numbers I need to drive this:
I generally give out two numbers – my US and UK mobile (cellphone) numbers – and let the network forward unanswered calls immediately to my (country specific) DID number (cheaper not to redirect internationally), which Asterisk has control over. This means incoming calls either get answered immediately or go to Asterisk – it then handles voicemail and call routing to my home/laptop SIP phones. The net result is that you can call either official published number and get routed through to me (or to my global voicemail service). It doesn’t matter where I really am when you call my number.
I’m not currently forwarding one cellphone to the other via Asterisk because I need some additional (and complex) scripting in order to avoid circular call redirects. In the worst case, Asterisk will timeout but I don’t want to have calls bounce around too long before they go somewhere – at the moment, it’s better they go to voicemail than spend a minute hunting to find where I’m at. I’ve had to add an artificial ring while Asterisk does its stuff as it is – but right now, it’s about 10 seconds for it to go figure.
Jon.
So, back in the Land Of The Free, and I’m catching up on email and news. I wanted to write a few words about living with the insular US media from my experiences so far. As many sane people will know, one of the major failings in the States today is that the mass produced TV media here have a general aversion to international news coverage. Sure, they’ll cover Iraq (because of its implications back home) and they’ll cover the North Korean nuclear test (after it happens) but many other news items just aren’t there. This is one reason I don’t own a TV (yet) and I’m undecided about getting one.
Fortunately, the BBC stream their major news broadcasts via their website. I’ve signed up to the premium service but will probably cancel since it doesn’t include a high resolution news broadcast, just certain content (I’ve emailed the BBC to ask why they don’t fix this obvious shortcoming). At any rate, I watch at least one of those newscasts each day, if I can. The BBC also make various forms of news available via podcasts on their website and on Apple iTunes. I pull down a version of their breakfast TV show each day.
CNN (the “Clinton News Network” – i.e. not Faux) provide a commercial online service called ipipeline. I’ve signed up to this too, since I can stream everything from the excellent CNN International I used to watch (not available in the US on regular TV) to live feeds of UN debates, and a whole range of other stuff that you just can’t get here any other way either. It’s a small amount of money to pay each month and in return I’ll be getting a lot of good news options that just aren’t avilable through regular TV programming.
Apple iTunes provides various free (as in beer) podcasts. I run iTunes more than I used to because I can, for example, easily pull down the following:
In concert with NPR (my morning alarm) and the New York Times (and other quality print media – actually I’m thinking about subscribing to the NYT, mostly because they have a backbone) I am actually doing a lot better than I thought I would be. It’s a shame that the regular TV options here are so unbelievably crap when it comes to news, but there are modern day alternatives out there even Murdoch’s empire can’t keep down.
Jon.
Photo: Fireworks with my family.
So I was in the UK speaking at LinuxWorld Expo 2006 and got to hook up with some family and friends. A leaving party took place on the weekend prior to last week and then, after a much needed day of rest Friday, I was getting ready to fly back to the States when I turned up at Heathrow to find an empty row of checkin desks. I had missed the flight due to a mixup over the timing and had to go out the next day. As it turned out, this wasn’t such a bad thing as we had time to do some family stuff on the weekend.
We had some fireworks to mark the unique British celebration of Halloween/Bonfire Night (unique in the sense that the latter gathers more attention around this time than does Halloween itself). It is traditional to mark the failed 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up parliament with fireworks to commemorate foiling this treasonous act. Personally, I do not celebrate the preservation of the British Monarchy (nor would I, since I believe it is fundamentally wrong) but I don’t believe in a violent removal either (certainly not for the pseudoreligious reasons of Fawkes himself). I just enjoy having an opportunity to purchase fireworks and enjoy them while it’s still legal to do so (without having an anal-fingerprint in a government wankerbase) 
I did eventually fly back. This was return flight number 13 to North America (26 single flights across the Atlantic and counting) and I’m not superstituous, but when you miss one flight and then the taxi runs out of fuel on the way to the second attempt to get it – well, you start to wonder. As it actually turned out, the flight got here but we had heavy turbulance and my meal request got screwed up (probably due to the change in flight). Unlike American airlines (who had no excuse for screwing up my meal requests, leading me to stop flying with them), United apologized and prepared me a first class pasta meal in place of the regular pigeon class offering that I had “missed”. That was the best airplane food ever.
Jon.
Catching up on news (actually, I stream BBC News anyway), and I’m enjoying reading about the following little beauties from the past week:
Anyway. Don’t worry, fellow Brittons. You can spend your time criticising the US and other countries – or you could wake up and smell the coffee (smell that liberty being burned all around you) and realise where the UK government is heading too all in the name of making us safe from ourselves.
Jon.
So I was just watching a Michael J Fox political advertisement on behalf of Missouri Senator candidate Claire McCaskill (YouTube rocks). In the years since Back To The Future, Mr. Fox has been diagnosed with young onset Parkinson’s and is now at quite an advanced stage. He’s one of a growing number of Hollywood celebrities who do more than just making headlines but actually do something useful – in his case speaking out against certain right-wing nutjobs who try to side with Bush in damaging the advancement of science in the United States (while trying to dumb-down the populous overall).
Like many sane people, I believe in the great potential of Stem Cell Research as a means to developing new cures to debilitating disease affecting millions of people. Yes, we need controls and processes in place to ensure a high standard of research – and we need to find more sociopolitically acceptable ways to obtain research stem cells – but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to get caught up in religious debate when it comes to advancing the state of scientific knowledge. Psuedo-religious crap has no place in politics anyway.
It’d be a nice side-effect of Bush losing his grasp over Congress if there were a little more sanity in areas such as these.
Jon.
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