joatBlog

When worlds collide

My project list for the weekend:

generate wiki pages to show off the conference room manager
solder together a serial-to-IR interface for MythTV and document it

My wife's project list:

clean the entire house, top to bottom (company coming)

I wonder how much this will conflict with... What's that? Yes, dear...

Yawn!

Norfolk to Detroit to St. Louis to O'Fallon to St. Louis to O'Fallon to St. Louis to Chicago to Norfolk in 67 hours is exhausting. Fattening too, but that's a different story.

Back online

The system upgrades took much, much longer than expected. If no one else has commented on it, it appears that MP3 functionality has disappeared from just about all of the leading Linux distributions. Avoiding the reasons why this is happening, it creates a number of issues which must be worked around.

One loss is the ability to use LiquidSoap as a source for hold music in Asterisk (even though the capbility can be recovered, it doesn't yet "fit well" with Icecast or Asterisk inputs).

At first, I attempted to use 64-bit Linux, with the objective of using LiquidSoap for a number of features. I had so much difficulty in getting Liq to work that I abandoned the 64-bit effort. Little did I know that it wouldn't work in 32-bit either.

To make a long story short, time constraints have left me with a 32-bit box with a borked Liq (only plays OGGs) and a number of work-arounds to get a few functions (Asterisk, MythTV, etc.) working. I've even resorted to using SqueezeCenter as a hold music source in Asterisk. It's overkill, using way too many processing cycles to provide a single function, but it works.

Temp offline

I'll be offline for at least part of the weekend, updating OSs on a couple boxes (translation: recompiling a number of kernel modules and fighting packaged installs). Hopefully won't be for more than a day or so.

AOL

You've gotta love AOL. Ten plus years after the first infected email with a spoofed source address and their virus scanner still sends complaints back to the spoofed address (in this case: me!!), with instructions to contact my email administrator (again: me!).

If 1 in 200 messages is infected, I'd guess that 1 in 400 is a return message (I receive a lot of these). Although the mail was sent with good intentions, it demonstrates a lack of understanding of infection vectors and is basically a waste of resources. For AOL, the message size was 4K. Because it was an error message, it was sent to my account and root on my mail server, so I get to delete this twice. This also ate up 8K of bandwidth. For me, it's not that bad. For AOL, it has to be monstrous (i.e., they're wasting their own money).

If your anti-virus utility scans inbound email for viruses, please TURN OFF your auto-response feature. It actually compounds a number of problems (bandwidth, storage) rather than prompting the owner of an infected machine to fix his junk.

Scary item for the holidays

I've added notes for counting matches in multiple columns in Excel to the wiki.

There, that should scare the beans out of some of you (me, offering up a workable MS tip). Happy Halloween!

Wut?!

On Friday, I realized that hearing "Sweet Patootie" sung in a thick Southern accent, by a Larry the Cable Guy clone, is actually quite scary. I'm not so sure that I'm going back to that store...

Copying between wikis

Notes for copying pages between different version (or not) MediaWikis are in the wiki.