Category: Technology
April 6, 2008
Xeyes: Inviting an Old Friend to Microsoft Windows
In the early 90s, we worked on these large black and white Sun monitors with X‑Windows. The problem was that with monochrome screens, we’d lose our cursor if we glanced away for a second. The solution was xeyes: a charming set of…
March 26, 2008
Using a Wii Controller on Mythbuntu
My wife and I love our MythTV box (a great set of open source projects that allow you to make your own TiVo-like machine), so we just needed to have a front-end box for our treadmill. But, we didn’t have an extra…
Creating an RSS feed From an iCalendar Zimbra Stream
At TCG, we have moved to using Zimbra for company-wide collaboration and are rather pleased with its mail and calendar capabilities. Within the system we created an event calendar to hold vacations or company events, and I thought that an RSS…
March 18, 2008
Big Dog: $10m of your money put to good use
Big Dog is a quadruped robot developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This thing can traverse rough territory while carrying significant payloads, which could be very useful in situations such as battle, health…
March 14, 2008
Asterisk (Evolution) and Cisco 7960 phones
Asterisk plays very nicely with Cisco 7960 phones, and we have quite a few of them. Unfortunately there are some interesting configuration issues, and I thought I’d get them all down, with explanations and workarounds.
We were having a problem where our phones,…
More on Asterisk (Evolution)
I wanted to change the email message that’s sent out when someone leaves a voicemail. The easy way would be to modify /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf, adding the following to the “[general]” section: emailbody=New voicemail message received\n\nDuration: ${VM_DUR}\nTime: ${VM_DATE}\nSender: ${VM_CALLERID}\n\n\t\t\t\t–Asterisk\n
Of course, on Evolution…
March 9, 2008
Asterisk and Evolution
We’ve just switched from a regular VOIP vendor to an in-house Asterisk PBX with a T‑1.
The results have been good so far — we have much less delay on calls, and a heck of a lot more control over our phones and our…
March 7, 2008
J instead of smiley face in Thunderbird
So I’ve been using Thunderbird for about 16 months now, and I finally decided to fix an annoyance. Anytime I get an email from someone using Outlook (often), any smiley faces they use in their message come across as the letter “J”.…
February 5, 2008
Write Permission Problems with Apache? Check for SELinux…
While trying to install MediaWiki on my CentOS 4.5 box, PHP could not write the Wiki configuration file. So, I conducted the standard checklist:
Figure out what user and group Apache was using (apache/apache),
Ensure that the path to the configuration…
January 29, 2008
Choosing Between Being Hacked and Accidentally Breaking Services
As is good practice, on internal mission critical systems that are accessible from the Web, we run automatic security patching utilities (like yum and Microsoft Update). For example, we are currently running (and enjoying) Zimbra 4.5.10 OSS as our mail…