Converting multiple exten => lines to using same => in Asterisk dialplan

Last week I wanted to start changing some 1.4 based Asterisk dialplan to a 1.8 based Asterisk system, and in that process wanted to convert lines like: exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,NoOp() exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,2,GotoIf($[...]?reject,1) exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,3,Dial(SIP/foo/${EXTEN}) ... into using the same => prefix: exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,NoOp() same => n,GotoIf($[...]?reject,1) same => n,Dial(SIP/foo/${EXTEN}) In order to do that, Mike King helped me out with the following regular expressing which I used in vim: Read On →

Commodore 64 Turns 30 This Year

Having found an article about the Commodore 64 turning 30 this year, I reflected back in a comment on that page about what it is like to be only 1 year older than the Commodore 64, a computer which spiked my interest in technology away from a games system to something much more. The original article is available at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/commodor-64-30-year “I just turned 31 a couple of days ago on January 7th, and when I was in grade 2 (about 8-9 years old I guess) I started getting interested in the Commodore 64s we had at our school that were plentiful, but rarely used. Read On →

Now working with CoreDial

As of January 3rd, I’m now working with the CoreDial team full time. I’ve worked with them as a consultant on their infrastructure over the last few years but now will be spending significantly more time working with the engineering team :) From the announcement, “_CoreDial is pleased to announce the addition of Leif Madsen to the CoreDial team,” said Alan Rihm, CEO at CoreDial. “Leif is a well known Asterisk consultant who specializes in distributed telephony deployments and database integration. Read On →

Cooking With Asterisk (Video)

And I found the Cooking With Asterisk presentation as well! Apologies for the low quality on the video (as this one has a lot more text than the Distributed Call Centre video), but you can follow along with the presentation on your screen as available on my website at: http://leifmadsen.com/sites/default/files/AstriCon%202011%20-%20Cooking%20With%20Asterisk.pdf The video presentation is available here: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=5741&title=Cooking+with+Asterisk#

Asterisk Powered Distributed Call Centres (Video)

Looks like TMC has posted my presentation from AstriCon 2011! You can see the presentation in its entirety over here: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=5821&title=Asterisk-Powered+Distributed+Call+Centers And the presentation along with the demo configuration files is available on my website at: http://leifmadsen.com/sites/default/files/AstriCon%202011%20-%20Building%20a%20distributed%20call%20centre.zip

.bashrc trick for git repo and branch information

The other day I was talking to my friend Russell Bryant who pointed me to some .bashrc magic that would show me which branch I was currently working with inside a git repo on my system. I found it incredibly handy and have modified the ANSI colour coding slightly. export PS1='[\u@\h \[33[0;36m\]\W$(__git_ps1 "\[33[0m\]\[33[0;33m\](%s)")\[33[0m\]]\$ ' On Fedora Russell mentioned that you need the bash-completion installed. We’re unsure if you need anything on other distributions. Read On →

Relaying SMTP via Gmail (or Google Apps) Using Postfix

Today I had the need to start relaying mail through my Google Apps account since Super-Evil-Bastard-ITSPRogers blocks sending email (it’s probably a good thing, however it’s quite annoying when running some services from home). Found this article while Googling, and it worked great first try. I like when things are this easy. http://www.zulius.com/how-to/set-up-postfix-with-a-remote-smtp-relay-host/

Controlling outbound bitrate using tc

Today I was using the VMware vCenter Converter application to build a VM from a physical machine so that I could replace Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS with VMware ESXi (and move the functionality that the server is performing now to a VM instead of it being the base OS). Because my server is colocated in a friends rack, and the bandwidth is shared, I needed to limit the rate at which the data was being sent from the colocated server to the virtual machine server. Read On →

#AstriCon 2011 Quote of the Conference (@abalashov)

I think the best quote I heard the entire time came from @abalashov (Alex Balashov) during the AstriDevCon when we were talking about Asterisk documentation, and how we might better organize it within the source. We were discussing perhaps moving some of the existing configuration file examples to a manpage, and Alex piped up to say, “Manpages are a vestige of our glorious, prehensile, curly-tailed past.” There wasn’t much left to be said after that :)

#AstriCon 2011: Cooking With Asterisk

My other presentation at AstriCon 2011 was Cooking With Asterisk, an overview of some dialplan snippets (pulled from the Asterisk Cookbook). http://leifmadsen.com/sites/default/files/AstriCon 2011 - Cooking With Asterisk.pdf