Saturday, March 28, 2009

What it ain't...

Having just listened to Steve Balmer's speech (it wasn't an interview) on the Gartner podcast, I offer this in response: you should notice that no one is saying that 7 is rewritten from the ground up. That's right kiddies: when you line up to buy 7, what you'll be getting is Vista with various stuff scraped off (but not the DRM).

Could this be why MS is still going with the six different versions?

Don't get me wrong, 7 Beta runs wonderfully. However, you should be paying attention to what's not being talked about by the marketing department (i.e., there's stuff there they'd rather not discuss).

I imagine that the Home Basic version will still suck royally and that MS will expect a few hundred (if not more) bucks for the upgrade. It'd be nice if we could get out of the Vista morass for $99 (flat). I'm not holding my breath though.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Conference Manager

I've posted the code for the conference manager. The code works (I use it) but it isn't exactly clean enough where I'd normally share it. However, since I've received at least four requests for the code, I've posted it. Look for the link most of the way down on the wiki page (link above).

The issue with the Hang Up function turned out to be caused by how Asterisk tags locally originated channels. Where a SIP call might be tagged as "SIP/1701-098f7ae0", the channel tag for a local call will look something like "Local/191@default-de5a;1". Where I'd originally thought the issue was caused by the "@" sign in the channel name, it turns out that the issue stems from the last two characters (the ";1"). While my solution for this probably isn't the proper fix, it should work for now.

The Record function turned out to be a bit more difficult than I'd previously thought. For now, you can record by clicking on the Record button, but you'll need to have access to the system to retrieve the resulting file. I'll build this out in a future revision (or you can create your own).

If you have features you'd like to see in it, want to complain about bugs/bad logic, or just want an explanation, email me or post your input as a comment on the wiki page.

Enjoy!

Saturday, March 21, 2009

MS vs. Mac

I stopped doing the editorial/opinion piece type post awhile ago, but Steve has forced me to post this one. Apologies to any offended and, no, I will not responde to the usual flame wars that follow any mention of this topic.

With that said...

The argument that a Mac costs more than a MS PC is a tiring one. It's complete BS and smacks of a marketing playbook that should have been thrown out in the 90's.

If you load up equitable hardware with similar software, they cost about the same, thanks to the prices you'll pay for Office (though MS still hasn't come up with a decent competitor to Keynote), a decent media editor, and upgrading within the confusing array of MS OS versions to make it equitable.

Don't get me wrong, MS is a decent OS. To tell the truth, if I owned either type of laptop (I'm without one at the moment), I'd quadruple boot the sucker as I also use SunOS and Linux in my work. This will probably mean that my next purchase is an Apple because you can't boot into OSX on a non-Mac machine.

My problem is that Mr. Ballmer's statements are exactly what's annoyed me about the company for years: it's the marketing department in action. I want the tools, not the hype. Would someone ask Mr. Ballmer to please sit down and shut up?

Saturday, March 7, 2009

AdZapper and Squid

Web surfing, of late, has become an annoying experience. My browser stalls while attempting to load advertisements from various third party sources. In researching redirectors for Squid, I rediscovered AdZapper, which is extremely simple to incorporate with Squid. I've added notes to the wiki which explains how to set up Squid and AdZapper to filter ads with a non-caching Squid proxy.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Wiki spam update

To be honest about it, there hasn't been a whole lot of spam showing up in the wiki comments. Is this something that's no longer done much? What spam did show up was caught by Akismet and auto-expired. I've not had to do much other than approve legitimate comments.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Wiki Spam

[*Sigh*] Wiki comments weren't turned on but for one hour and already the spammers are testing the feature. I've just realized that Akismet could suddenly demand $20 from each of their users and they'd probably get it (just to keep things like spam for "anime family sex" off of their blogs/wikis).

In any case, I've updated the code behind the wiki and have added a number of features. If you had author-level access in the previous version, please contact me so that I can re-enable your account(s).