Aug 25, 2010 · 2 minute read · Comments
Being ProductiveBusinessLife
The following is an interesting article about not tracking workers time spent at work, or on vacation, but rather tracking their productivity. As a consultant who doesn’t have a fixed set of hours in the day that I work, I tend to judge my productivity by the number of hours I get to bill each week (i.e. how productive was I working for customers, rather than playing Flight Simulator :)).
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Aug 10, 2010 · 2 minute read · Comments
Being ProductiveProgrammingUseful Tools
Russell Bryant just sent me a link to a neat site that allows you to do online collaborative mind mapping: MindMeister. If you’re not aware of what mind mapping software does, it is a method to quickly and easily allow you to brainstorm ideas without getting in the way too much. It works by starting from a central node and breaking out in lines from there where you start with an idea or thought, then break that thought down further with additional lines from that node.
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Aug 3, 2010 · 2 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
Hey everyone!
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We’ve been hard at work on the next version of the Asterisk book, which is shaping up to be the best book ever written on Asterisk. The scope and detail we’re working towards is ambitious, but will be very much worth it. Of course the book will be focused on the upcoming Asterisk 1.8 releases (which was recently branched and betas are now available for testing!
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May 3, 2010 · 1 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
In case you missed it, I wrote an introductory article about the Asterisk Test Suite on the Asterisk blog. The post takes you from a minimally installed Ubuntu 9.10 up to the point that you can run the tests in the test suite by going through all the possible errors you might encounter getting it loaded, and how to resolve those errors (most of them being missing dependencies).
Enjoy!
http://blogs.asterisk.org/2010/04/29/installing-the-asterisk-test-suite/
Apr 15, 2010 · 2 minute read · Comments
LifeMusings
Recently, @jenspeedy of http://www.yourhome.ca interviewed my fiancée and I about our recently purchased townhouse in Caledon after our designer @melissadavis of http://www.melissadavis.ca and http://www.designerfriend.ca recommended she speak to us. Danielle (my fiancée) and I had a pretty good idea about the items we wanted for our new townhouse build, but were looking for a designer to make sure we didn’t get too far off track, and to steer us into the direction we ultimately wanted to achieve, while not breaking the bank (i.
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Apr 13, 2010 · 1 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
Recently (over the weekend and continuing into today) there have been several attacks from Amazon EC2 hosts running scanners looking for open SIP accounts. I’ve gathered a couple of links that I think are useful in knowing more about the attacks, along with methods of stopping the attacks. The Joshua Stein blog has a very clever way of stopping the attacks that impressed me.
http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2010/04/11/properly_stopping_a_sip_flood
http://www.voiptechchat.com/voip/457/amazon-ec2-sip-brute-force-attacks-on-rise/
http://www.stuartsheldon.org/blog/2010/04/sip-brute-force-attack-originating-from-amazon-ec2-hosts/
Update (2010/04/18): It seems the story has made it at least as far as Slashdot now.
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Mar 19, 2010 · 5 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
There was some talk in one of the IRC chat rooms today about someone trying to get their E61i working with Asterisk. I haven’t had an issue getting that phone or my E71 phone working, but regardless he was having issues. I figured I might as well spend a little bit of time today going through my configuration, both for my own reference, and so that other people can get their Nokia’s setup with Asterisk as well.
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Mar 17, 2010 · 2 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
I will be speaking again at the IT360 conference in Toronto, ON, Canada in the Asterisk & Open Telephony portion of the conference. IT360 is on April 7 this year (2010) being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I will be speaking on the Super Panel – Enterprise Use, Security, Virtual Hosting, Mobility & More along with John Todd, Kevin Fleming, Steve Sokol, and others.
My primary focus will likely be on the large scale call centre implementations I’ve done, along with clustering, database integration, and distributed information.
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Feb 23, 2010 · 1 minute read · Comments
Asterisk
So AstriCon 2010 has been officially announced (although the information for where and when it was going to be held has been on the http://www.astricon.net site for a bit now – perhaps contracts have been signed now?), and they are soliciting for speaker topics due for May 1st. I’ve either attended, spoken, or assisted with every AstriCon since 2004 (the first one!) and I’m looking forward to submitting another talk for this year.
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Feb 22, 2010 · 1 minute read · Comments
AsteriskTechnology
Just got my new Plantronics headset from http://www.e4voip.com (or rather, the hardware store at http://www.8774e4voip.com/) and am extremely satisfied with the service. We had an issue with Purolator not wanting to deliver to the building and then not bothering to call me to let me know the address was incorrect. By the time I noticed and got the address corrected, they just decided to send back the package.
So after letting the guys at e4VoIP know what happened, they just drop shipped a headset via FedEx overnight and I had it by lunch the next day!
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