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What have I been up to? LARPing! [20 Oct 2010|12:14am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Last month was White Wolf’s first annual convention, The Grand Masquerade. I decided that I was going, but then saw that half the convention was events for The Camarilla, a LARPing group for White Wolf games. I’d previously ignored the Cam, because of the stigma on LARPing in my roleplaying group, but I figured I’d give it a shot. To that end, I joined the Philadelphia Domain of the Camarilla, which has games on Saturdays in the Philly area. I went out for a Requiem game, and to my surprise, it didn’t suck! And the people didn’t suck! I’m now playing in both the Requiem and Sabbat game (ie Old and New World Vampire), and it’s a blast! Now I’m in charge of their website, and trying to get the word out (*cough* *cough*) If you’re in the Philly area, in to Roleplaying, and around on a Saturday, look us up for a game. You (probably) won’t regret it. JoeTerranova.net Link File a Complaint

Re: David Rubin: Down Time, Changing Hosting Provider To Fsckvps [08 Jun 2009|10:54am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. A while ago David posted about how he switched to using FsckVPS over Linode. He showed that it was cheaper, faster, etc. Today I saw this on Reddit. Take a look at the linked picture. Basically, it’s Fsck saying that it’s too hard to not store passwords in plaintext, and then an email saying that they were hacked, and lost tons of data. This is David’s original post. I went to go comment, but his site is down… Btw, David, that’s the difference between Linode and Fsckvps. Link File a Complaint

Presenting Asterisk at CHLUG Tonight [05 Jun 2009|12:16pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. I’ll be presenting on Asterisk at CHLUG tonight, so if you’re in the Cherry Hill (New Jersey) area, come on down! I’ll be presenting to what I think will be a mostly empty room, so if you have questions about Asterisk, tonight’s a good time to get them answered. Link File a Complaint

Anyone need graphic design work done? [17 May 2009|09:35pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Christina is looking to get into graphic design, but doesn’t have much experience in it. Does anyone know/recommend an open-source project (or other similarly noble effort) in need of graphic design? I posted a thread on reddit asking the same question, so if you have any suggestions, I’d prefer you post there (but here is also OK if you’re Web 2.0 phobic). Of course, the obvious elephant in the room is “why not Ubuntu artwork/marketing”? She’d like to, but from our impression it’s mostly “post something complete and maybe we’ll use it”. If she can do graphic design for Ubuntu, while getting direction and feedback, she’d be more than happy to. Link File a Complaint

TCF, Asterisk Presentation, installing FreePBX in Ubuntu [17 May 2009|07:31pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. The LoCo Team went to the Trenton Computer Festival on April 25th and 26th. Here are some pictures (courtesy of Christina): The rest of the pictures can be found here. While at TCF, I gave a presentation on VOIP, Asterisk, and FreePBX. As promised, here are the presentation slides. I’ve also written a how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX in Ubuntu. The how-to can be found here. If I’ve left out a step, done something incorrectly, or if you have a better, cleaner way of doing something, feel free to edit the article, or let me know. I’m open for putting the how-to elsewhere (the Ubuntu wiki, voipinfo.org, etc) if people want me to. Link File a Complaint

How to write a great FreePBX extension [08 Feb 2009|04:50am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Update Voicepulse replied in a comment to this post. Though my post was a bit venomous, they replied thoughtfully, and they’re considering GPLing their FreePBX module. Keep in mind, while the Freepbx module annoyed me, and the contract annoyed me, I’m still using their service, I’ve switched to it full time, and I may be switching my mother to it if she goes VOIP. A 19 ping (versus 100-120) and 4 channels will do that. Write a FreePBX plugin that automatically creates trunks and inbound routes for people using your service. In the process, do the following Blindly try to install curl (using yum. On my Ubuntu machine.) Include FreePBX and your own function files with hardcoded paths for Trixbox, instead of using relative paths. Make tar.gz backups of my /etc/asterisk directory and quietly add them to your modules directory. Make sure not to do any checks for file size or free disk space. Write to my sip_general_custom.conf and extensions_custom.conf (bad FreePBX extension! bad!) Use PHP Obfuscator on your code, and copyright it, so that no one can see all the horrible things you’re doing to their system, or figure out why it doesn’t work. I installed the extension and saw the paths didn’t work. I looked at the code, and was appalled that they obfuscated it. I symlinked /var/www/html so that it would install, then found out none of their actions (adding trunks, adding inbound routes) actually worked. After seeing some of the fun things it does, I’m quite glad it didn’t work at all! Thanks Voicepulse! Your rates are good, the voice quality seems great, but emailing you a signed contract and waiting for “verification” was annoying, and I wouldn’t touch your FreePBX extension with 9 1/2 foot poll. Your customers (including me) would probably clean up your mistakes if you GPL’d it. The only downside would be the possibility of helping someone you didn’t intend to. Link File a Complaint

Flash Media Server 3.5 on Ubuntu [30 Jan 2009|02:01pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. On Linux, Flash Media Server only supports Redhat. In February, Markus Bertheau posted a patch for FMS 3, so that it would run on Ubuntu. Based on that patch, here is a patch for FMS 3.5 . It’s patched in a similar way. From the installer directory, run: patch -p1 < fms-3.5-ubuntu.patch That gets it to install. I’ve not tried running it though. If you run into problems running it, please let me know. Link File a Complaint

ICQ woes for Pidgin [01 Jul 2008|02:22pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. ICQ just broke support for pidgin in Ubuntu. There’s a thread about it here, the patch is here. If you don’t want to apt-get source, apply the patch, and build it, you have the following option: if you are on Hardy, x86, and trust me a lot, I have the packages built here. I’ll leave them up until the update gets released, or my server goes down. Link File a Complaint

Second Day of TCF [02 May 2008|06:31pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. This is about the second day of TCF. You may recall the first day of TCF, which I posted about five days ago. Overall, Sunday was much slower than Saturday — we gave out around 75 CDs, as opposed to 300 on Saturday. However, this is to be expected; despite their best efforts, TCF is very much a one day event. However, on Sunday we still talked to a lot of interested potential users, so it was definitely worth being there both days. I also bought a rack server. It’s 2U, dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2 GB of ram, and a 80GB SATA hard drive. Cost? 90 bucks. This was a steal, except for one problem: I don’t own a rack! I was later amused by the juxtaposition of me building a microatx server to use 40 watts of power and make no noise, and then sitting a 2U rack server next to it, which consumes 300+ Watts of power and sounds like an airplane. Lucky for me, my boss was interested in it, so it’ll be our new Asterisk server in the coming months. Overall, I was pleased by our outcome this year, and will consider going back next year. Next year, I’d like to try to have multiple presentations on Linux and Linux-related topics. Perhaps I can get someone else to do the general Linux/Ubuntu stump speech, and focus on a more specific topic — such as Bash, PHP, or Asterisk. In other news, I’m almost done with University forever. I have about 2 weeks more of wrapping up work, and then I graduate on the 17th. After that, I’ll only be working full time, so I’ll have some time to pursue actually developing open source software, instead of just shilling it to crowds Link File a Complaint

TCF - Day 1 [26 Apr 2008|09:06pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Today was the first day of the Trenton Computer festival. Bryan and I left for Trenton around 8:30 AM (after a few false starts) and got there to set up around 10 after 9 — Mike and his brother arrived soon after. This year we had two tables — one for demo machines (one Kubuntu, one Xubuntu, an OLPC, an n810, and an Ubuntu Desktop running Compiz Fusion on dual LCDs), and one for handouts (and room to talk). (Author’s Note: Wondering why these pictures have so few people? I was the cameraman, so these are from times when I could actually stop shilling Ubuntu CDs and take a picture). I brought 200 Printed Gutsy CDs, and I planned on bringing 200 burned Hardy CDs — unfortunately, mtx had other plans, so I couldn’t get my media changer to burn more than one CD before losing permissions on the cd burner. There were 5 machines there, burning Hardy CDs continuously — they were still going as fast as we could burn them. At 1:20, I left to give my presentation on Ubuntu. As Matt mentions here, early in the presentation, the projector went to sleep on me. He doesn’t mention that a) the projector was limited to 640×480 resolution, b) the internet was borked in that building. I didn’t get to show off everything I wanted to, but overall it went well. As I left, I led a train of around 20 people back to our LoCo Table. Overall, today went very well; we gave out around 300 CDs total, and, more importantly to me, talked to a lot of people about Linux groups in their area (I expect a rather good turnout for the next LUG/IP meeting). Tomorrow will be just as fun, albeit a bit slower than today turned out to be. Link File a Complaint

A warning for those using encrypted partitions [25 Apr 2008|06:26pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. I’m upgrading my laptop to hardy today, as I’m giving a presentation on Ubuntu and Hardy tomorrow at the Trenton Computer Festival — I’ve been running Hardy for months, but I like reinstalling after release, as I get rid of all the junk in the corners, and make sure all the important stuff gets enabled. I set up my desktop with Hardy already, as I usually have that at our table showing the latest and greatest desktop effects on dual lcd monitors. When I installed Gutsy on my laptop, I used the new-fangled encrypted partitions system. I didn’t encrypt the whole drive — I like to keep my home directory separate from everything else, and that includes encryption — instead, I did the following: /boot, ext2 / , ext3 encrypted partition 1, lvm 1 encrypted partition 2, lvm 2 Then in lvm 1: /var, ext3 /tmp, ext2 swap and in lvm 2: /home, ext3 and then, all done. When I started up the machine, I was prompted for 2 passwords — one for each encrypted partition — , but other than that, I had what I wanted. Encrypted home, encrypted var, tmp, and swap, and everything else unencrypted (because it doesn’t need to be, and there’s no reason to slow it down). So, today, using the alternative install CD, I set up my partitions exactly as they are. It prompted me for my passwords when I configured my encypted partitions, did its stuff, etc. Then I selected to use them as lvm groups, and figured i was ready to go. It wasn’t until I stared at blank LVM groups that I realized when I entered my password, it was asking for the password for my new encrypted partitions. That it was making. While it was erasing all my data. My first reaction: a loud shriek. Ever see those cheesy slasher films, where some woman runs screaming through the forest? That was me. My second reaction was to go through a mental inventory of what I erased. Upon recall, I remembered that I backed up my home partition to an external about a month ago. Besides that, I keep my password lists on a remote server as an encrypted file, my senior project is kept in a subversion repository remotely, and I haven’t done much else important in the past month. I also moved tomorrow’s presentation to a flash stick, so I could work on it on my desktop (which I’m writing this on right now). In total, I lost: my xorg.confs my script to change symlinks back and forth for glx, depending on whether i was using intel or nvidia my cool php script to check an ubuntu cd’s md5sums.txt agaist my derived md5s my notes from my friend’s Orpheus game. Overall, not very much, but I dodged a bullet. Nonetheless, as usual, back up your data before a reinstall — especially if you did something similar to what I did. The alternative installation CD is a fickle diety, and her wrath will be upon thee if you did not do full disk encryption. Next release, I think I’ll play it safe and configure my encrypted stuff manually. Link File a Complaint

15 hours in my basement [14 Apr 2008|06:36pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Saturday was the NJ LoCo Team’s April LAN Party. Another LoCo Team member, and professional Linux writer, Dave Harding, gave a detailed account of our last LAN party. Dave hasn’t posted a report on Saturday’s, so I assume this time it is my turn. What follows is a detailed report, without the detailed part. 11:30 It started off with quite a bang. I had planned on waking up at 7 or 8 to start setting up downstairs. Christina woke me up around 11:30, because Dave had been ringing the doorbell for 3 minutes. Dave, Christina, and I then spent the next 40 minutes or so setting up. Noon. Randy from the PA LoCo team shows up, with his friend “Teddy”. Setup continues. 12:30: We’re set up, Bryan shows up, and play starts. We start with Urban Terror. 1:30ish: Jerry and his son show up for the scheduled Frozen Bubble Tournament. As Jerry’s son is 8, we quickly switch to Armagetron. 2:20: Frozen Bubble Tournament begins. I realize that I’m horrible at Frozen Bubble. Christina takes my spot while I run off to shower. 3:30ish: Frozen Bubble Tournament is complete, and Teddy is the undisputed Champion. I put together Planet badges for both of the tournaments; unfortunately, Teddy doesn’t blog, so he won’t get to use the champion one. You can tell who participated, as they have this badge: 4ish: We play some more Armagetron. Jerry and son leave. We switch back to Urban Terror, “lunch” (burgers and fries) gets ordered. 5: More Urban Terror. John (aka “the ringer”) shows up. 6: Mostly Urban Terror. 8: Brett shows up. Like John and I, Brett spent much of his childhood playing FPSes like Counter Strike (which is very similar to Urban Terror). Teams are split up to make ringers as even as possible. We play through a number of different modes: Free For All, Team Survivor, Team Deathmatch, Follow the Leader, Capture and Hold. Of all of them, Bomb is the most popular. It’s a throwback to the general Counter Strike scenario — the Red team has a bomb, which they must plant; the Blue team has to stop the Reds from blowing up the bomb, by either stopping it from being planted, or defusing it before it goes off. This usually involves “hunt down and destroy the opposing side”, but planting the bomb forces the blue team to track down the red team and defuse the bomb within 30 seconds. 10: We grab dinner. Three people split a pizza, and everyone else grabs food at WaWa. 11:30 Randy and Teddy head out. More Urban Terror. 1AM: I’d been planning an Urban Terror Team Tournament, but I wanted 2 or 3 person teams, so I had held out for more people (8 had signed up, many more said they were coming; 6 showed, plus Jerry and his son for Frozen Bubble). Once the LAN was officially over, I held the mock tournament. As I said previously, we tried to split up the ringers as evenly as possible. Teams were as follows: Blue: Me (almost a ringer), John (”Ringer of Ringers”) Red: Dave, Bryan, Brett (ringer) We played a bomb match (as previously described). Play was intense, but it was quickly obvious that when teams are 2 to 3, and the 3 have the bomb, 3 definitely have an advantage, regardless of average skill level. Play went as follows: The round would start Within 20 seconds, Brett would run to a bomb site and plant the bomb. John and I had 30 seconds to figure out what bomb site they were at, and beat 3 people. Terrorists win. The final score was 13 Red, 8 Blue We decided to do another round, with switched teams (Red switched with Blue). This round was much more fierce, and a lot closer. In the end, the score was Red 15, Blue 14. To beat the tie, we decided to play a Team Survival Match with knives only (ie, the dumbest idea in history). When John and I were winning 14 rounds to 3, we decided to call it. For the Frozen Bubble Tournament, Dave made an amazing Frozen Bubble Trophy. Not to be outdone, I had equally impressive awards for the Urban Terror Tournament — specifically, gold and silver painted plastic dollar store bling necklaces. “2nd Place”: Dave, Brett (MVP), and Bryan. “1st Place”: John and Joe (me) Not pictured: Christina, MVP (Most valuable Non-Player). Given that we really tied, and the other team didn’t have to play another round, I will forgo the champion badge: , and we’ll all use this one: I can’t guarantee the accuracy of these events — specifically, the times people came and went. If you notice any glaring inaccuracies, please comment and I’ll correct them. In Conclusion, despite having fewer players than last time around, the LAN went great, and I’m glad to have been a part of it. We’re planning on having a combined LAN and BBQ sometime over the summer. Link 1 Complaint|File a Complaint

Another asterisk user [05 Apr 2008|03:30pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Martijn van de Streek posted that he’s set up Asterisk on his server. Good job, and glad to hear it! Unfortunately, if you care about security, it’s not as easy as “sudo apt-get install asterisk” — the package is in universe, not main, and therefore hasn’t been getting security updates. The package is at 1.4.10, Asterisk is up to 1.4.19, and the package hasn’t been patched for the myriad security problems in between. Take a look at the Asterisk security list and cringe. While that may not be an issue for home, at work we own a C Class, which gets scanned night and day for holes by bad, bad people. So when I set this up for work, I had to super lock the server down, and I had to compile Asterisk from source, as the ubuntu package is too big a risk. For both home and work, I’m using FreePBX, which makes Asterisk much easier to configure. At this point, I can configure Asterisk myself, I have a handle on most of the internals of Asterisk and FreePBX, and I’ve written a few macros and AGI scripts — but that doesn’t help my bosses if they want to add an extension when I’m away. Though there is a distro called TrixBox that includes Asterisk and FreePBX, I’ve never liked “vocational” distributions (or CentOS), so I always set mine up on Ubuntu Server. After I move my work Asterisk server from “former employee’s tower pc under the rack” to “server in the rack”, I’ll log my steps and make an up-to-date how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX on Ubuntu Server (plus all my little tricks I’ve added). Over the summer, after I finish my degree, I plan on making a repo that has a) an always up-to-date version of Asterisk, b) a package for FreePBX, to make it easier to set this stuff up. Of course, I will also try to get both into Ubuntu as quickly as possible. After that, I’m considering making a Python-based program to manage Asterisk, as a replacement to FOP and iSymphony. Once again, I’m glad to see one more asterisk user. Be sure to add Enum to your trunk, and register your number with e164.org! Link File a Complaint

Site updated [04 Apr 2008|09:52pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Well, I’ve updated to Wordpress 2.5. With that, I’ve also changed my theme to one that supports widgets. This is spurred by a request Dave made the other day, to have a way to print blog posts in a readable way, without comments. To this end, I added the wp-print plugin, which gives you a link to a printable version, without comments, and with all links as footnotes at the bottom (all of this configurable, of course). Note that, if you’re using Wordpress 2.5 like I am, at the time of this writing you need to use the beta version located here. So, in the interest of making Dave happy, please add a print link, or I’m afraid Dave might take drastic measures, possibly involving kittens. Link 3 Complaints|File a Complaint

RSS Feed Generator for DeviantArt [11 Feb 2008|04:10pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Just a quick post. Wrote an RSS Feed Generator for DeviantArt Galleries. To use it, replace yourusername with … your username. http://www.joeterranova.net/code/deviantart.php?artist=yourusername Source code is available here. Brief attempt at a man page. How it Works When life gives you lemons, use regular expressions. I monitored http requests to find DeviantArt’s back end ajax interface (which they use to do previous/next on galleries). From there I wrote a regular expression to parse out each entry, along with entry url, image url, date, and title. From there it’s pretty straight forward. Keep in mind, I can’t guarantee this will work for you. If it’s been some time since I posted this, you may want to check if they’ve reintegrated rss feeds. That said, unless they change their layout, I doubt they’ll be purposefully breaking this script. Right now, the only thing it does is get the latest entries from the given user’s gallery — no tags or anything like that. That stuff is probably doable. If you want anything specific, you can a) use the source and change it yourself, or b) leave a comment, and I’ll add it (within reason) when I have time. If you make good changes, let me know and I’ll post them here. Options: artist — the artist to get the feed for (ie, your username) ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername count — the number of items to return. The default is 24. If set higher than your total deviations, it’ll return all of them. ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&count=10 export — if set, instead of returning an rss feed, it’ll just output the results in an array using var_export. Useful if you’re just trying to get your deviations on your site (and your site uses php). ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&export=1 nolink — by default, the rss feed will show the thumbnail image as a link back to the main deviation. Add this to disable the link part. ex: deviantart.php?artist=yourusername&nolink=1 I’ll leave this up, but if I notice real major traffic, I’ll be taking it down and putting it elsewhere (I’ll of course leave the source up). Please don’t do anything silly like hit my url every 10 seconds. For maximum reliability, host it yourself. If you host it yourself, there’s 3 parameters at the top of the script to change: $usecurl=1; $url = 'http://www.joeterranova.net/code/deviantart.php'; $webmaster='joeterranova@gmail.com (Joe Terranova)'; $usecurl — set this to 1 to use curl instead of file_get_contents. If your host doesn’t have the curl extension installed and you set this to 1, you’ll get an error — conversely, if your host has remote file opening off (like mine does), and this is set to 0, you’ll get an error. $url — set this to the url of the script. $webmaster — set this to your email address and name. For any questions, comments, or feature requests, leave a comment here. I release this code under the GPL v3 (see code for details). Link File a Complaint

Got it! (Re:My Futile Pursuit of an N810) [12 Jan 2008|02:23am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. As I said in my previous entry, Best Buy didn’t sell the n810, and they still don’t. However, “Best Buy Mobile” does, and I finally found one with one in stock. And it’s awesome! In celebration, here’s a video of me doing a barrel roll. Link File a Complaint

My Futile Pursuit of an N810 [27 Dec 2007|05:44pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. (and why I hate gift cards). For the past several months, I’ve been drooling over the n810. I decided that, following Christmas, I’d be getting one for myself. My boss decided to give us our Christmas bonus in the form of a Best Buy gift card — no big deal, right? Best Buy will of course be selling them. So, I currently have 275 in Best Buy gift cards total, and 150 in visa gift cards. This is the n810 on CircuitCity.com . They have it, full price. Here’s the n810 at Buy.com. Note that not only is it in stock, it’s also already on sale. And here’s the n810 at Best Buy When I searched for it previously, I was just told no search results were found. This confirms my suspicions — not only do they know the n810 exists, they’re purposefully not stocking it, and want people to buy n800s instead (which is of course absurd, as the n810 is better in every way). Perhaps this is because they’re really bad at turning over inventory. Perhaps it’s because they hate me. Maybe this is why Best Buy makes so much off unused gift cards. However, if I go buy it else where instead, I’ll have to figure out something else to spend 275 on — it’ll probably end up being something dumb, like a PS3 or Windows Vista Ultimate. I guess I’ll wait a few weeks to see if Best Buy gives up on their stock of n800s and ships them all to Woot.com Link 1 Complaint|File a Complaint

Some Updates [17 Dec 2007|01:41am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Haven’t written in a while. While I didn’t get a gPC (not a Walmart fan, and it was underpowered), I did get the motherboard for the gPC. The motherboard, 1GB ram, decent microatx case, and 500GB hard drive set me back around 240. It’s much quieter than my previous server, and is happily running Ubuntu Server downstairs. While we’re talking about the new server, here’s a picture of what my basement computing stuff currently looks like: I’m currently moving all my stuff off my previous server to the new one, including my bip and bitlbee install, folding at home, and FreePBX. On my old machine, I had used Fabian’s How-To on setting up Freepbx, particularly on setting up using the Xorcom Etch repositories. Unfortunately, Gutsy has continued onward while Etch has not, so what works on Feisty doesn’t always work on Gutsy, and that was the case with the Xorcom packages. Hopefully they’ll be moved to Debian in the near future. Instead of using the Xorcom packages, I followed this how-to, which, besides version changes and some redundant steps, was pretty spot on. In short time I was up and running, and it didn’t take long to move over my previous configuration to the new server. The new FreePBX, by the way, is much, much shinier, and has AJAXed everything (even the Gigabytes). Why am I moving everything, you might ask? Well, since the new server will have these permanent duties, I’ll be using the old server as a game server for the New Jersey Team’s LAN Party! That’s about it from now. Here’s a video of Dave miming a “PodCast” on using The GIMP. Link File a Complaint

Regular Expressions For The Win [17 Oct 2007|12:23am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. I’m currently working on the approval application for the NJ LoCo team, and part of it is giving actual evidence of what we discussed — this includes IRC logs. Unfortunately, I never set up a LoCo bot to log the meetings, so I’m currently going through my bip logs for relevant convos. However, bip keeps very precise information. So, while in your irc client it may look like this: 16:16:22 <gQuigs> hi 16:16:49 <harda> gQuigs: You coming Saturday? 16:17:04 <gQuigs> what time does the fair end? 16:17:10 <harda> 14:00. 16:17:18 <gQuigs> oh In my bip logs, it looks like this: 19-09-2007 16:16:22 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -hi 19-09-2007 16:16:49 < harda!n=harda@pdpc/supporter/silver/harda: +gQuigs: You coming Saturday? 19-09-2007 16:17:04 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -what time does the fair end? 19-09-2007 16:17:10 < harda!n=harda@pdpc/supporter/silver/harda: +14:00. 19-09-2007 16:17:18 < gQuigs!n=bryan@c-24-0-106-77.hsd1.nj.comcast.net: -oh Lucky for us, we live in a world of regular expressions. A php script and some regex mojo later: <?    if(STDIN)    {       while(!feof(STDIN))       {          $line = trim(stream_get_line(STDIN,10240,"\n"));          $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:<|>)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^:]*)?: (?:-|\+)?/','\1 <\2> ', $line); //   normal text          $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:<|>)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^ ]*)? /','\1 \2 ', $line); //emotes          $line = preg_replace('/\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4} (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2}) (?:-!-)? ([^!:]*)(?:![^ ]*)? /','\1 \2 ', $line); // actions          echo $line."\n";       }    } ?> And we’re right as rain (results can be seen here). That can probably be condensed some, and you could, of course, do that in whatever language you like. On a side note, you won’t realize how difficult WordPress’s Rich Text Editor can really be, until you have to wrestle it into showing properly indented code. Every time I save this post, WordPress mangles my code again. Link File a Complaint

Why I hate Vonage [09 Oct 2007|11:51am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. (and Comcast Voice, Voicewing, Skype, and most other VOIP Companies you’ve probably heard of) SIP. Asterisk. FreePBX. Open standards, Open Source. The back bone of VOIP. Yet  most VOIP users have never heard of them. I have an asterisk server set up in my house, connected to a Linksys PAP2 sip to analog client, which is hooked up to two phone lines in my house. I have an account with sipphone.com, which provides me with POTS (plain old telephone service) for free incoming calls and 1.5 cent outgoing calls. I have a direct SIP address for my asterisk box, which allows for completely free direct internet calls. Furthermore, my phone number is registered with ENUM (a service which allows for phone number resolution, ie this phone number goes to this sip address), which allows anyone using ENUM to simply put in my number and connect to me directly through SIP. ENUM allows completely seamless integration of VOIP and POTS: if you’re calling someone still using a regular telephone, your provider connects for you and you’re charged accordingly; if you’re calling someone whose also using SIP, it’s completely free. As more people switch to the new system, the system runs even better. A few acquaintances of mine (who I apologize to for this rant) use VOIP,  and are one of the reasons I set this all up — so I can have a cheap, low-traffic number which I can use from anywhere with an internet connection, and doesn’t wake up the whole household when someone calls. I gave them the number, but said that they could also just dial my sip address, to connect directly. Their response? “What’s that?” The reason? Almost every provider handles all their telephony using SIP (or AIX) and uses asterisk (or similar) PBX to handle it. Yet, though the protocol is built to do it, none of them use enum, none of them provide a SIP address, and none of them support direct internet connections. Can you imagine if you were charged every time you emailed someone using a different email provider, because your provider printed out the message, put a stamp on it, and mailed it to the other provider? Of course not! Yet we allow VOIP providers to take our call, run it over an analog phone line, to send it to another VOIP provider, and charge us for it. And why would they do otherwise? Comcast Digital Voice charges 27 cents a minute to make a call to Argentina. If you and your other party were both using a provider that used an open SIP system, you could connect directly, through SIP; instead, they’re collecting quite a bit of money for not a whole lot of effort. As a result of greedy, commercial VOIP services, we’re transitioning from our analog phone system; instead of transitioning to free, ubiquitous voice service over open standards, consumers are buying into walled gardens, paying for cheap(er) phone service when they can be getting it for cheap(er(er)) and, much of the time, free. The devices sold in stores are locked to a specific provider, locking out choices and other services. The PAP2 is a Linksys adaptor, coordinating SIP connections with analog phones.  Yet, you’d be hard pressed to find one that isn’t locked to a provider,  stopping you from having incoming or outgoing direct (and free!) SIP calls. Search for SIP at Best Buy, or Circuit City. Nada. Search for voip on Best Buy or Circuit City. Tons of stuff … locked to Vonage, Skype, or some other VOIP provider (many times this is in fine print). I ended up buying mine on ebay from a company in New York. You can usually buy SIP devices online, but you’ll never find an unlocked one in the store. The world is slowly moving to VOIP, and those of you reading this will be among the first to switch over (if you haven’t already). Please, please, before switching over, consider how the provider you’re choosing 1) handles control over the hardware (usually you have none), 2) connects to other VOIP services (usually it doesn’t). Odds are, you’ll find yourself in a position you’re not very comfortable with. Look at asterisk (a free pbx server), FreePBX (a free frontend to said pbx server), and Trixbox (a free distribution that sets up said systems automatically). Check out Fabian’s How-To on installing FreePBX on an Ubuntu server if you’d like to use Ubuntu instead (like I do). Most importantly, don’t accept a VOIP provider until you understand exactly what you’re accepting. There is choice, it just won’t be found in your local electronics store. Link 1 Complaint|File a Complaint

I need more Ubuntu Shirts [05 Oct 2007|03:02pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Yesterday, I walked around campus with my Ubuntu shirt on, going to 2 classes over the course of 4 hours. During that time, I met 2 people that stopped and said “nice shirt!”, who also used Ubuntu, and were interested in the NJ LoCo team. Therefore, what I think I need to do is wear as much Ubuntu propaganda I can — an Ubuntu shirt every day, an Ubuntu hat, a bumper sticker that says “Honk if you like Ubuntu! (Also go to nj.ubuntu-us.org)”, maybe even a huge button on my shirt that says “ask me about Ubuntu”. Around 65K people should be using Linux in New Jersey at the moment, so hopefully we’d have a very large LoCo team in a short time span. Also, as a result of some annoyance yesterday, I wrote a rather long rant about why I hate most commercial VOIP providers. I think I’ll hold onto that until I’ve culled it into being “Informative” instead of “tearing off faces and using them as hats”. JoeTerranova.net Link File a Complaint

Gutsy Continues to Impress [03 Oct 2007|12:21am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. On Tuesdays, I have a 3 hour night class, in which all the outlets don’t work, so I’m only running on battery. Two weeks ago, I hardly had enough battery for 3 hours on a full charge; today I came with 80% charge, which lasted the entire class, and still had some to spare. Looks like those intel patches are starting to pay off for battery life. Gutsy includes Firefox 3 (gran paradiso) in universe. While I have noticed some strange rendering in places, and some strange crashes, it uses less memory, and starts in 2 seconds instead of 15. Today I was using Valknut, a Linux Direct Connect client, but noticing some issues with downloads. I went to look for another client, and found that DC++ (for those unaware, the best windows DC client there is) was ported to Linux and in universe. Lo and behold, works and works great (including those pesky downloads) As for what I’m doing besides slacking off, I wrote a little script to solve sudoku (still needs a little work), I’m working on the approval application for NJ, I’ll be at CHLUG on Friday, and hopefully I’ll nail down plans for a release party very soon! Update: As markrian pointed out,  the sudoku script had a parse error! Shortly after my post, I fixed an sql injection problem, and accidentally introduced a parse error. Fixed. Fabian asked  what the heck Direct Connect and Valknut were. Good point! Direct Connect is a file sharing protocol. It’s really popular at universities, as it’s very easy to set up local Direct Connect servers for the University LAN. DC++ is the most popular client for Direct Connect on Windows; Valknut is based off the linux project dc_gui, but never really worked well. Link File a Complaint

Events! Pictures! [23 Sep 2007|01:11pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Hey people, long time no see. Okay, first up is Software Freedom Day at PACS. The NJ LoCo Team helped out the PA Team with this event, and Dave Harding gave the main presentation. Pictures: The rest are here. Next up, the NJ LoCo Team was at the Columbus Farmer’s Market on Saturday. Farmer’s Market, you say? Well, we certainly talked to quite a few people who had never heard of Ubuntu (or linux) before, and we gave out at least 30 OpenCDs and 50 Ubuntu CDs (we never seem to count these things). Pictures: More are here. Link File a Complaint

A Follow-Up on Touchy Subjects [11 Sep 2007|01:54pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. As a follow-up to this, I figured I should post to let people know that I will not actually be posting a tally of expenses for September’s Event (though I will still be keeping a tally for myself). After talking to a friend, I’ve decided to table this line of discussion for now, as it’s causing more animosity than it should. I’ve set an entry on my calendar for June 1st, at which point I will bring the issues — handling funds, handling liability, handling sponsors — up for discussion again. There will be disagreements, there will be long discussions, but — most importantly — there should not and will not be hurt feelings, accusations, falling outs, or any other behavior which has tainted current discussion. In 9 months time, we must have matured — both as teams and as team leaders — enough to be able to discuss issues larger than ourselves and our individual teams. If we haven’t, we’ll have larger problems than handling money. I apologize if I’ve stepped on any toes. Expect a message from me on June 1st. Update: apparently we’ll be discussing this at our next meeting, which should hopefully resolve this and help us move forward. Huzzah! Link File a Complaint

LoCo Teams Don’t Need Money [09 Sep 2007|09:49pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. For those of you unaware, there’s been quite a bit of discussion recently in the US Teams Project about the possibility of starting a non-profit organization, to accept donations and to shield individual LoCo teams of liability; the main conclusion has seemed to be that having users sign waivers is good enough for liability, and that “teams have and are more than able to function without funding and without liability coverage” (see discussion here and here). In response to this, this blog is going to have a fun recurring theme over the next few months: how Joe spends his money. I’ll be keeping you all updated on all the things I spend out of pocket (or other people chip in) for LoCo Team events, and I’ll accept suggestions for alternative methods which require 0 dollars. I will also be making requests to Canonical to fund all of these needs, and letting you know of the results. I don’t mean to call people out, start a fight, or sound bitter; I’m quite happy with my team, and its situation. Other teams are attempting to get donations, and this strange notion that LoCo teams don’t need money for anything is holding them back. Let me make this clear: not all locations are donated, not all us of have Google, Sun, or Novell offices in our back yard, and not all of us are willing to have advocacy events in our basements. Not every LoCo Team can survive on t-shirts and CDs alone, and it’s time this is made clear to those who refuse to accept that notion. I encourage other team leaders in a similar position to also keep us updated on what they’re spending money on. Expect an itemized list for our next event on September 22nd. Link File a Complaint

owwww [08 Sep 2007|05:32pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. ow ow ow owwwww :(( Link File a Complaint

Shh [04 Sep 2007|02:49pm] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Touch screen iPods tomorrow. Not that I care, but I’m sure someone does. Link File a Complaint

A great day for LoCo Teams in the US [01 Aug 2007|01:28am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Last week I had set up ubuntu-us.org as a portal for US LoCo teams, since the page was previously a placeholder. On Saturday the US Team Project met to talk about various things, including how to promote US teams. One of the things that came up was getting on the front page of Digg. When I got into work this morning, I saw that jono was finishing up talking to US mentors about this article. Shortly after, it was submitted to Digg. 472 Diggs and quite a few new teams later, I’d say today was a great success for LoCo Teams in the US. I’d like to thank everyone who helped out in #ubuntu-us today, and good luck to all those new LoCo Team members! As well, the New Jersey Team had a very productive meeting today to talk about what we’ll be doing for Software Freedom Day. Hopefully we’ll have more concrete details soon, but so far great progress guys! Link File a Complaint

Cherry Hill June Installfest a Success, et al. [03 Jul 2007|01:04am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. First of all, hello Planet Ubuntu , and goodbye Planet Ubuntu Users. For those who aren’t aware, Planet Ubuntu Users is a great project which provides a blogging community for Ubuntu users. If you’re only familiar with Planet Ubuntu, check out Planet Ubuntu Users, as there’s some great posts you’re missing out on. Even though I’m a member now, PUU still gets a spot in my aggregator. The Install Fest on Saturday went great! We did a new install for a new user, fixed weird font rendering problems (the culprit was a bug in FreeType), fixed wireless issues with an upgrade to Xubuntu Feisty, and, equally important, talked to several people who came by just to ask questions and get CDs. We’re having a follow-up new user night at CHLUG this Friday, and it looks like we’ll be getting great attendance. I’d also like to thank everyone that helped out, and everyone that stopped by to show support. It went great, and I look forward to more events in the future. Some highlights: The rest are available here. On Friday CHLUG will be having a follow-up meeting on how to use Ubuntu. Should be fun! Link File a Complaint

On free speech and related topics [29 May 2007|12:39am] Originally published at Joe Terranova. You can comment here or there. Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and we expect you to take those consequences into account when making decisions. In response to this question. For those not familiar with the issue, here. To be honest, the associated party’s vision of free speech is skewed. (In America at least), free speech merely shields you from reprisal and censorship from the government, as well as government agencies and organizations; free speech does not cover a) your employer firing you, b) an organization disowning you, c) a newspaper, magazine, or web site censoring or removing your work. Therefore, I am constantly amazed when people both in and out of the Ubuntu community are surprised that their words have consequences, especially on Planet Ubuntu; Planet Ubuntu is basically a casual press release to the world, and should be treated as such — not in that every post must be directly related to Ubuntu (though I’d appreciate if it was more so some days), but that those that aren’t shouldn’t be offensive. Likely to start a friendly argument? Sure. Controversial? Sure. Repeated posts of an offensive or sexual nature? On your blog, that’s perfectly fine … but if you check off the tag that gets you syndicated on Planet Ubuntu, it’s expected that you act in a way that complies with the letter and spirit of the Code of Conduct. Don’t be shocked and appalled when you’re asked to obey basic community standards. Likewise, if someone points out that your post is patently offensive, there are a number of different ways to respond. The correct response: apologize? provide an explanation learn from your mistakes The incorrect response: rant about your free speech rights Blaming the person who pointed it out for not being more open-minded Leaving all of your attachments to the community in a brash and indignant huff. Don’t tell people to grow thicker skins. Don’t tell people they should ignore your posts if they’re offensive. We’re a community, we have community standards, and we expect you to follow them. Update: Thanks for all the comments, but I’ve disabled further commenting to stop this from digressing any further. Let’s focus on more important things. Link File a Complaint

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