11.18.03

Stupid benchmark chart of the week

Posted in General at 3:55 pm by Craig

This absolutely is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while: Stupid chart Hmm, so let me see, that chart says that the software that’s available for the PC only supports playback of 5 streams. The Mac software supports 7 streams. Uh, what’s the point of mentioning the CPUs involved on the two setups? And their GHz numbers? Lies, damned lies, and Apple benchmarks.

Upgraded to Apache2

Posted in Sysadmin at 9:52 am by Craig

Heard back from the mod_torrent guy, who’s a student, and has been pretty busy, which is why it took him a while to get back to me. I’m now added as a project admin on the mod_torrent project on sf.net, and I’ve decided to actually spec this sucker out and start coding. First step in this process was finally getting around to upgrading this box to apache2 (don’t think it makes much sense to start a new dev project based on apache1 right now). The upgrade seems to have been pretty seamless — in any case this blogs seems to be working, as do most of the other bits I’ve looked at on the server here so far… Let me know if any of you notice anything broken. Especially if it looks like it’s due to the upgrade.

11.13.03

Vonage voicemail WAV to MP3 conversion

Posted in Tech/Geek at 10:24 am by Craig

Latest update: Vonage has modified the WAV format that they include in the attachment, breaking the above scripts. See this new post detailing what to do now Ok, so Vonage voicemail can be delivered by email. Except the attachment comes as a WAV file, so it’s HUGE if the voicemail is of any length at all. Can’t be helped that I have to receive these gigantic files, but I’ll be damned if I store them in WAV format, or if I have to download them to my MUA when they’re that big. So, to work around this “feature”, I wrote a perl one-liner which can be called from procmail to replace the WAV attachment with an MP3. To have this work, you’ll need to install lame, MIME::Parser, and of course perl. # Check if this is a voicemail message from Vonage :0fw * ^X-Mailer: CommWorks * ^From: .*your_phone_number@vm.vonage.com.* | /usr/bin/perl -MMIME::Parser -e '$p = new MIME::Parser; $p->output_to_core(1); $e = $p->parse(\*STDIN); $f = "/tmp/$$"; open(PIPE, "|/usr/bin/lame --preset phone -v -q 0 -V 9 --quiet - $f"); print PIPE $e->parts(0)->bodyhandle->as_string; close PIPE; open(PIPE,"< :bytes",$f); { local $/; $mp3=<PIPE>; } close PIPE; $fh = $e->parts(0)->bodyhandle->open("w"); $fh->print($mp3); $fh->close; $e->parts(0)->head->replace("Content-type","audio/mpeg"); $e->parts(0)->head->mime_attr("content-type.name"=>"voice-mail.mp3"); $e->sync_headers(Length=>"COMPUTE"); $e->print; unlink($f);' UPDATE: Vonage has fixed voicemail emails so that they now include caller-id information in them. But they did it by inserting a MIME part in the mail. So the script needs to change to the following (also X-Mailer changed, and this also now rewrites the From line with callerID info from the message body):
this is a voicemail message from Vonage :0fw * ^X-Mailer: UTStarcom * ^From: .*your_phone_number@vm.vonage.com.* | /usr/bin/perl -MMIME::Parser -e '$p = new MIME::Parser; $p->output_to_core(1); $e = $p->parse(\*STDIN); $f = "/tmp/$$"; open(PIPE, "|/usr/bin/lame --preset phone -v -q 0 -V 9 --quiet - $f"); print PIPE $e->parts(1)->bodyhandle->as_string; close PIPE; open(PIPE,"< :bytes",$f); { local $/; $mp3=<PIPE>; } close PIPE; $fh = $e->parts(1)->bodyhandle->open("w"); $fh->print($mp3); $fh->close; $e->parts(1)->head->replace("Content-type","audio/mpeg"); $e->parts(1)->head->mime_attr("content-type.name"=>"voice-mail.mp3"); $e->parts(0)->bodyhandle->as_string =~ /From: (.*?)\r$/m; $b=$e->head->replace("From","$1 <voicemail \@hughes-family.org>"); $e->sync_headers(Length=>"COMPUTE"); $e->print; unlink($f);' UPDATE:Wordpress consistently buggers up the formatting of perl documents. The perl script from above, updated, cleaned up is available for download here

11.12.03

Signed up with Vonage

Posted in Life at 10:43 pm by Craig

Ok, so I signed up with Vonage just now for VoIP service for my home phone. The number was immediately active, and I now have the number forwarding to my old home number until the hardware box comes in the mail. Once it arrives, come Nov 24th I’ll switch the home phone # to my wife’s cell phone, and disconnect the POTS phone service. The best part? I get more features (voicemail, caller ID, conferencing, call forwarding, etc) for less money than I used to pay for my regular phone line without those features. Plus my voicemail now automatically arrives in my email inbox. Of course, it’s a WAV file, not MP3 or something more sensible, but then I guess that’s what procmail is for ;) Anyone who wants the new phone number, let me know and I’ll email it to you. If you want to sign up for Vonage too, also let me know, because they have a refer-a-friend feature which gives both referrer and referree a discount on service, so I can refer you before you sign up. btw, I might as well blog this now to establish a datestamp (though I’ve mentioned it in other forums before this): I think VoIP is going to be bigger than the Web.

11.09.03

A well-worded expression of the apparent economic “bounce”

Posted in Politics at 3:30 am by Craig

Surfing the blogs of folks whose political compass scores are close to mine, I ran across this, which was a great expression of how I’ve been thinking about the issue as well. It doesn’t go into the other thing I’ve been feeling about the recent economic news, where I feel just a little bit odd about such extremely high (unexpectedly high according to all the analysts who predict these things) growth numbers. How can the numbers be rising so fast (productivity up 8.1% in the quarter, GDP growth rate at a ridiculous 7.2%). Well at least the market doesn’t believe it either. At the back of my mind, I keep having this nagging suspicion that the Bush administration decided to redefine what “job” means when doing their study or something. Anyway, I still feel confident that Dean will be better able to explain to the voting public what the looming baby boomer retirement means in the face of unprecedented deficit spending than did Al “lockbox” Gore.

For those still in the UK

Posted in General at 2:42 am by Craig

I suspect I won’t be in the UK for long enough over Christmas to get very far with this, but all of you who haven’t wised up enough yet to flee the UK might be interested in trying it out. Certainly there have to be worse ways of spending hours on end stuck in traffic jams on the [ABM][0-9]{1,3}.

Political compass

Posted in Politics at 2:12 am by Craig

So it turns out I’m quite the centrist: Your political compass Economic Left/Right: -1.38 Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.03 Not sure why the left/libertarian directions are negative — I suppose probably because lefty libertarians don’t object to being protrayed as negatives as much as righty-authoritarians. In fact, lefty-libertarians probably relish being able to point out that the system is out to get them, where the righty-authoritarians would just jail/execute anyone who portrayed them as negative… Ah yes, should point to this too, so y’all can find your belief buddies out there. Of course, Justin is the anarcho-communist we all knew him to be.

11.08.03

Semantic nonsense

Posted in General at 4:57 pm by Craig

Sticking a link to Shirky’s exposition of problems with the semantic web, and with computer-processable ontologies in general. This article will be useful next time someone asks me to build a computer category tree of everything to simplify email classification.

11.05.03

This will change the internet

Posted in Tech/Geek at 6:50 am by Craig

So I was just talking at lunch the other day about how cool bittorrent is, but how it has 2 big problems:
  1. It’s not easy to serve content
  2. It’s not easy to find content which is server via bt
The discussion basically led to the conclusion that the way to do bittorrent “right” is to basically have a mod_torrent plugin for apache, which autodetects when you’re serving a large file and load is heavy, and under that circumstance, instead of returning the file via HTTP, it automatically sets up a torrent for that file, and returns the .torrent file to the original request. The browser then automatically kicks off a bt client to fetch the file, and the load on the web server is thereby automatically alleviated, as the people consuming the bandwidth automagically start to server the content as well. Goodbye slashdot effect. Well, so it turns out mod_torrent is an existing project on sourceforge. But the project seems to have no activity, and the “click here to mail us to get involved” link on the page bounces email you send to it… If/when this thing actually happens though, it’ll change the internet. The cost of sticking large-sized files on web servers suddenly gets shifted to some degree to the consumers of that large content. Large sites would likely see significant bandwidth cost reductions. And suddenly it’ll become clear why P2P technology is not just a tool for stealing music. If anyone does know how to get in touch with the folks working on mod_torrent please let me know — I’d love to help out to make this thing happen. Update: Ok, I tried mailing again, and it hasn’t bounced yet this time…