Retroactive change?

One more reason to be extremely careful about what you do or say on the Internet, especially if you think you're hidden behind "anonymous": retroactive changes to privacy policies. MS surely isn't winning points this week, what with this policy change and announcing the per-hour Office subscription.

Grandstream GXP-200 BLF

I've added notes to the wiki for configuring the Busy Lamp Field (BLF) on the GXP-2000 so that it can "watch" phones via Asterisk.

More phones than I know what to do with...

There was definitely a VoIP theme this year for presents. I rec'd:

• 2 two-line phones
• 2 four-line phones
• a Phillips DECT 6.0 cordless with two handsets
• and a Linksys SPA-3102

I can now return the borrowed VoIP phone as I now have enough to experiment with whatever configuration (except for video calls).

Weather update

The original script for the weather wake-up calls was based on Swift. I've added the lines for Festival (see the wiki). Please note that the Swift-based output sounds much, much better than the Festival-based output. In either case, tweaking the speech parameters will improve the output.

Wake-up weather

The good news is that I've added my notes for generating wake-up calls with weather forecasts to the wiki. The bad news is that I managed to "lose" the web interface for it. I'll remedy this shortly.

Lesson learned: scheduled backups are fine when little happens in between. If you code heavily, backups should occur more often!

VoIPSupply

Well, VoIPSupply lost a $200 sale today. Between their checkout cart (web) being broken and their offices being closed (what retailer closes on the weekend before Christmas?!), I went elsewhere for my purchase. Don't think I'll ever use them again either.

On a related note: Sparks! Phones for your Greenville trip won't be an issue.

Liquidsoap daemon script

Savonet/LiquidSoap tends to be Ubuntu-specific (for now). Building it on other systems requires a bit of work. I've put a Fedora 10 startup script for LiquidSoap in the wiki.

Starbucks++

Amazing! Starbucks actually honored a gift card that I'd won in a drawing five years back, had subsequently misplaced, and discovered while moving my desk this past week. Let's see, after today, I still have 3 free Venti's coming to me... (heh)

Liq + Icecast error

(Mostly for my own records) If you receive the following error, try explicitly declaring the username on both ends (Icecast and the Liquidsoap script).

2008/12/06 09:50:33 [threads:1] thread "root" aborts with exception Shout.No_connect !
2008/12/06 09:50:33 [main:3] Shutdown started!
2008/12/06 09:50:33 [threads:3] thread "non-blocking queue #1" exited (1 remaining)
Thread 4 killed on uncaught exception Shout.No_connect