On my last post I described how I get my asterisk box to know the caller name from a csv data file. The thing is, my address book keeps changing on my iphone. People change their phone numbers, I meet new people (can you believe it? I don’t let it happen too often though)… I wanted to be able to sync it automatically to my asterisk. This synchronisation also doubles up as a backup for my address book.
Category: Technology
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who’s calling?
Caller ID is a wonderful feature. Don’t we love getting a call from someone we like, and perhaps more importantly, ignore those annoying callers who we really don’t want to talk to.
But this is yesterday’s news. We all have caller IDs. It just works. Well, yes. It does. But what if we get a call on our landline? We get the caller ID there too, but do we know who it is?? All our contacts are on our mobile phones. Standard phones don’t usually have the capacity to hold more than 10 names on average. And even if they did. Who’s got the energy to key in those numbers?
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Get in shape
ISPs are a strange breed. They’re supposed to give a very straight-forward service – plug me in to the Internet please. That’s all. Plain and simple. It seems like some ISPs have different ideas as to their roles and responsibilities. Traffic shaping is one of those. Port/Service blocking is its ugly cousin. I don’t like either. You’re not my Big Brother. If I wanted one I’d move to China.
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Guilty Pleasures
Perhaps yet another misleading title for this post, but bear with me. When I was a child we used to play outside a lot. I always remember the neighbours complaining if we made too much noise. Such is life. There was one period of time that I knew I would get in trouble though. We would get told off big time!! When?? Every day between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. There was even a sign in big red letters telling us all to keep quiet at ‘rest time’ (loosely translated). There was no sign about making noise after 11pm, but there was one for the afternoon nap. It was THAT important.
These days seem long gone now. Does anybody have time for an afternoon nap?? I certainly don’t recall seeing any such signs around.
This is something I never thought would concern me. All those domain ownership issues, I thought, were with people who just aren’t organised enough to renew their domains, forget their passwords, or pick domains that others try to steal.
I’m currently managing a couple of .DE and one .CO.UK domains on Godaddy. The .co.uk domain was bought for a fairly long period, so no problems there, but recently, both the .de domains were up for renewal. I received a couple of email reminders from GoDaddy, but when I logged into my account I noticed they are only due to expire on 26th March. More than a month away. On the last email I received on the 20th, I decided it’s probably time to renew, so clicked on the link and was getting my credit card ready.
To my surprise, the GoDaddy domain portal did not allow me to renew them, and marked them as ‘pending expiration’. hmmm… weird. Oh well, I emailed GoDaddy and asked to renew, not even worrying too much. Maybe a system glitch of some sort.
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Postcode, Barcode and python code
I’ve had a strange thing happening a while ago. I sent a CD in a padded envelope to someone, and it was returned to me. Well, it didn’t look like it was returned, more like they actually delivered it to me instead of to the person I sent it to.
Then I noticed something. I was re-using an old envelope. For environmental reasons of course (read: being so tight-assed, saving money on padded envelopes). I did write the destination address on the right side, so my address was nowhere on the envelope. What was left there however was this tiny printed barcode used by the previous sender with my address.
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sniffing some fresh tomatoes
Perhaps the title is a little misleading, but it’s an opportunity to combine two of my greatest loves: food and computers. I suppose even this intro is misleading. Oh. Forget it. Lets get down to business. And this time our business is rather short (and sweet).
Running tcpdump on my Linksys router (well, Buffalo WHR-54GS to be precise, but the same famous WRT54G clone that runs open source firmware).
I don’t like being late. It runs in the family. My dad is so obsessed with being late that he’s always early. How embarrassing. Unfortunately I seemed to have inherited it from him. I do however try to compensate. I am deliberately late on-time. I usually plan to be a bit late.
Anyway, enough about me.
Not a particularly interesting post, unless you happen to be running Debian 4.0 etch running on Virtuozzo host and are trying to install JDK5. I saw a post with a user reporting the same error on the parallels forum , but couldn’t find a clear solution, until I bumped onto a weird forum in German, which luckily linked to a related bug report (in English).
Just so to set the records straight, I’m the real dummy here, as you would obviously see.
I absolutely have no experience with python, lighttpd, turbogears or wsgi, fcgi but I was given a task to set it up on a server. All I used was some online posts and common sense. Normally I wouldn’t have to post a blog entry about it, most of the stuff is already out there. On this occasion however, I felt there’s some missing documentation, or else – simply because I don’t know anything about any of these it was more tricky than it usually is. Perhaps it’s one indicator how this all seems from the sysadmin perspective, as opposed to a turbogears developer.
