Matt’s Blog

I’ve been wondering for a while now whether I should put together an Asterisk PBX setup. Granted, it would be totally overkill for anything that I need (I’m lucky if I get one phone call in a week), but Asterisk does look like a nice bit of technology to play around with. I like the idea of being able to integrate VoIP calls with regular phone calls so I could pick up VoIP calls from my regular DECT handset for example. It would also be cool to then have voice mail which would work seamlessly for both types of calls. Additionally, I suppose if I was away from home I could have normal calls routed via VoIP to whichever hotel I happen to be in? As I say, all this would be totally overkill for anything I need, but hey that’s what half of being a geek is all about isn’t it?

Skype seems to be gaining a lot of popularity as a VoIP client for the masses which maybe a good and a bad thing. Good that people are getting into this technology, but bad that it’s proprietary and therefore not compatible with SIP based products. Currently the fact that it is all proprietary means that there doesn’t seem to be a way of integrating Skype with Asterisk at the moment, though I’m sure it will happen as I can think of several (albeit somewhat hacky) ways of implementing such a bridge even if it’s still proprietary.

Incidentally, Adrian Bradshaw had some things to say about VoIP on his blog today (parts 1, 2 & 3) and he mentioned the Asterisk@Home project which is a full Asterisk distro so that you can install it and have a working Asterisk setup out of the box. Might be a good way to give this a go if I feel the urge at some point… Yet another project for the list! But for now I shall stay focused on my current projects I think!

When I first came across Really Simple Syndication (RSS) I thought that it was a fantastic idea, and granted it does offer a great way for keeping up-to-date with blogs and other news on the internet (personally I find it best for relatively infrequently changing sites such as blogs which are updated only every few days of more or notification of software releases).

RSS is not without its problems though… The whole polling nature of RSS is obviously non-perfect. If each of the blogs were sending me an email when they changed it would be a lot more efficient use of network resources, rather than me polling every hour to find out that it hadn’t changed. The other problem I’ve run into is that RSS is not very easy to deal with when you want to check your feeds from several locations. If you have separate RSS aggregators in each location they will both end up alerting you to the same articles, even though you may already have read them when you were in your other location. My solution to that one is to use rss2email which checks for changes to RSS feeds and emails them to me instead - works for me at least.

The jury is still out on RSS for me. I think it is a good thing, which has solved a problem, just not necessarily in the fullest way possible. I don’t think RSS will be the end story on syndication.

I was listening to the latest episode of The Linux Link Tech Show (ep.78) last night and they were having a go at Richard Stallman whom they had approached for an interview. RMS had only been willing to do the interview if they changed all the ‘Linux’ references on their website to ‘GNU/Linux’! They declined the offer

Don’t get me wrong, I think RMS has made some fantastic contributions to the whole free software world and I use some of the software he’s helped to create almost every day; but his whole insistence on the ‘GNU/Linux’ thing is really not doing him any favors at all, it just feels incredibly petty. Get a life Stallman, or I might switch from Emacs to Vim!

They went and did it again… they are going to take another couple of weeks out of my life by releasing the latest Grand Theft Auto game… If it’s anything like the last one I’m not going to be doing much else for the next few weeks until I complete it! I get hooked on these things way too easily and I’m not even a big game player at all… The latest release, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, seems just as good as the last two and I haven’t really done much else all weekend… Oh well, there goes my life for the next few weeks… again.

My latest phase has been to play around with electronics, mainly digital electronics with microcontrollers. I know that this is just yet another phase that I’m going through and no doubt some day soon I will drop it to lie dormant for any number of years, but for now at least it is giving me some fun.

Last night’s task was to rip apart a Fantazein clock… I’d really love to modify one of these things so that I could connect it to a computer and display custom messages - maybe stock quotes, news headlines and who knows what else. This is a bit of a daunting task for someone with only a small amount of electronics know-how like myself though! Whilst googling for information on modifying this clock I did come across T.J.Bordelon’s website. TJ wrote the firmware for one of the versions of the clock and after emailing him he has given me some good information to set me off in the right direction. He’s an incredibly impressive guy, some of the projects on his website are just nuts, such as trying to get an object into space! I also came across a project with some info on connecting a JStamp (some sort of Java based microcontroller?) to a Fantazein clock. This JStamp Fantazein project isn’t exactly what I want to do, but not far off and may well give me some help and ideas along the way…

I made some progress on one of my other electronics projects last night too which is to create an auto-scorer for a table football game. I was able to write (or steal from other of my projects) about half of the code neeeded for the microcontroller so that’s ready to have a circuit built now and some testing done - hopefully I’ll get going with that this weekend if I get the chance…