Lunatic Platitudes

From Backyard Theater

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Yay!
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/05/hands-on-with-the-kindle-reader-for-android.ars

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Here is a quote from a below linked story. It’s encouraging to me that maybe there are limits to the reaming society is getting from copyright vultures in the music and movie industries.

“In tort law, as the Court recognized, Op. at 29, a landowner is subject to liability for physical harm to trespassing children caused by an artificial condition upon the land where there is a substantial risk of serious bodily harm and the landowner fails to exercise reasonable care to eliminate the danger. An unfenced in-ground swimming pool is the classic example. In this case, the plaintiffs facilitated and enhanced the comparative availability and attractiveness of their songs on the peer-to-peer networks. They failed to fence off the songs they published on CD by encrypting them, and they refused to provide an unencrypted online alternative for obtaining them. In consequence Tenenbaum, along with millions of others like him, fell into the vast, unfenced pool of unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing.”

And the link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/tenenbaums-p2p-use-the-labels-made-me-do-it.ars

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I love robots. Quite a few years ago, Ellyn bought me an R2-D2 robot that blew me away with it’s autonomous operation. It has IR and microphone sensors and does a pretty decent job of navigating around on it’s own. This year, Ellyn did it again with the WowWee Rovio webcam. This one doesn’t do anything on it’s own but it is pretty awesome. Rovio attaches to your local wifi network (WPA/WPA2 is supported in the latest production code). First I will say you must go get the latest BETA firmware before you try to do much with it. The beta code is located in the developer connection website found by browsing www.myrovio.com. I’m not going into detail about all the reasons why, suffice it to say it made this robot much more useable.
I will say brightness is an issue but since the new beta firmware uses VLC, you can adjust it better. The snapshot function works great. The image here is pretty dark because all the lights are out except the Christmas tree… and rovio emailed this shot to me and I posted it here. Additionally, you can pull up the rovio stream address with VLC on your local network and stream it, applying whatever post processing you like.

The controlling web interface is great, and it is trivial to get access to it from the Internet. It makes for fun and interesting situations… I’m using mine right now to watch and make sure Amrin doesn’t get up.

Thanks Ellyn, you satiated my Geekness once again.

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Cisco VOIP is sort of a defacto thing because Cisco is the world’s greatest marketing company. Their position is not completely without merit however as anyone who has had to deal with production networks might attest. While there are a few really good choices, Cisco is a consistent leader when it comes to product quality and support.

There are two main parts I have been working with lately, related to our VOIP deployment in our New York office. First is Cisco CallManager Express (CME). The second is Cisco Unity Express (CUE). CME handles call routing, phone registrations and loads, and configurations. CUE provides voicemail and auto attendant. It can do more, but that’s outside my scope.

CME

CME is pretty simple. Since this runs directly on IOS on the ISR router in my lab, I started by upgrading to 12.4(24) IOS. Then I downloaded the 7.1 CME software and installed it on the router. Things pretty much happened by themselves as far as adding the code to the device and getting to the point where I could offer the necessary services like tftp and call manager and SIP. I basically just followed the installation guide and started getting a feel for how to add phones and whatnot from the command line interface. Later, after installing CUE and getting it running, what I found is that the integrated GUI for both CME and CUE was pretty convenient for adding phones, etc. Oh, and remember, the CME is self restricting based on the ISR platform you are running it on. On a 2811, you are limited to 42 ephones (numbers/lines). On a 2851, you can add more than that.

CUE

I want someone to buy me a new wig. I pulled ALL my hair out trying to figure out the incomplete and enigmatic licensing process for the 7.1.1 CUE. This was ridiculous. What I know now is that 7.1.1 licensing is brand new for Cisco and all the tools for it are pretty much just not complete yet. A mixture of my being new with the software and the license process not being fully fleshed out by Cisco led me to lose my hair. A friend at Cisco helped point me in the right direction, first by pointing me to the cisco licensing site: http://www.cisco.com/go/license. Since I installed 7.1.1 fresh out of the box, what I needed to do was go through the “Migration tool” at the bottom of that page. This was not intuitive because I didn’t have a license to start with. This was generated for me from the serial number and part number of the box. The whole PAK number or whatever it asked for by default is part of what is not yet implemented. Also, while it SAYS it will email it to you within an hour, you better hit the download button it provides. I never got an email.

The CUE NM module is interesting in and of itself. It is a PC on a blade that slides into an NM slot and works like other ISE modules you will work with. It has 8 soft ports which you divvy up by licensing. These ports connect the NM-CUE module to the innards of the ISR router, specifically the CME application . There were three licenses I had to think about in my case:

1. Voicemail Boxes
2. Voicemail Ports
3. IVR Ports

The voicemail boxes are self explanatory. We bought 75 licenses for those, so when I went through the license tool I told it to give me 15 units of 5 licenses each on voicemail. The second two items are of particular importance. You divide the number of soft ports (which is a hard limit on the module) up between number 2 and 3 above. I didn’t know that — at all. It was painful, but once I was told (again, the same friend at Cisco) it all made perfect sense. Since I am not using IVR in my system, I opted to set the number of IVR ports to 0. This allowed me to activate the voicemail application on the module which in turn allowed calls to transfer into voicemail instead of getting a busy or fast busy signal. The command I used was “license activate ivr sessions 0″. Then I reloaded the router. When it came back up, I was able to go into the ccn application voicemail subsection and configure “maxsessions 8″. Then dialing my VM pilot number got me to the voicemail attendant. She sounds cute.

This may seem simple to you, but trust me, with the maze of documentation, it was not obvious to me.

Overall

I have to say, there really isn’t all that much to this. I still need to figure out the voice vlans, qos, the site to site tie for local toll dialing to Atlanta from NY and all the Fujitsu integration and other things. But just to get a local network talking is a piece of cake. Most of what I have left to work out are the finer details of the deployment plan which are all subjective decisions to some degree. What we have will work and work well no matter what we decide about a million other details.

I have not yet figured out the custom background images for our 7945 phones, but I am not worried about it. At least I won’t be completely unprepared when the consultants show up to help stage the gear. I want to write me some applications to run on the phone, and the message of the day banner will be really fun. I want ours to say “Carlton is the greatest!”

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My friend, Thomas Huynh, wrote a book examining the ancient Sun Tzu text. He has studied for many years and has discovered much enlightenment and is gifted in sharing what he has learned. His book is an excellent resource.

This is a talk he gave at Google talking in pretty good depth about the book…

His website is located at the following URL: http://www.sonshi.com.

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I found a really cool firewall management tool today that mimics the GUI functionality of Checkpoint and can manage a host of different kinds of firewalls, all in the same user interface. I am currently testing with version 3.0.2 straight from the Ubuntu 9.04 repositories, managing my local workstation iptables configuration. When you add a new firewall to the management GUI, you can choose from an FWSM, IOS ACL, PF, ipfilter, ipfw, PIX or iptables and can specify the firewall platform as being Linux, FreeBSD, Cisco PIX, Cisco FWSM, OpenBSD, Linksys/Sveasoft, MAC OS X or Solaris. I am going to test managing a set of IOS ACL configurations in the lab next to see how well this works. The error checking int he access lists seems to work well, telling me when I hide one rule with another less specific rule. I have not yet gotten around to troubleshooting the actual application of the iptables rules on my local machine, so I have been manually running the “compiled” rule base it creates, which is just a shell script. This has worked fine, but it will be nice to be able to just do a compile/verification+install with the GUI. My favorite feature taken from the CheckPoint GUI? Where Used. It is great to see free software like this that absolutely kicks booty.

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We so rarely go to fancy or special restaurants. With Amrin’s entire summer spent watching Ellyn get over surgery, we decided to take him out on the town this past weekend. We went to see a friends rock band, which was hard because there were 6000 smoking teenagers standing around. Then the next day we went school shopping, we got him his first really good pair of tennis shoes from “Just Sports and Tennis” in Rome. We spoke to Steve, who has a great depth of knowledge about what people need. Ellyn has always known Amrin is a severe pronator, so he has shoes which help with that now. After school shopping we took Amrin to this Japanese Steakhouse (Sumo something, located in Rome). It was hellafun. Then we got a hotel room and camped out all night.

It was a great deal of fun, and maybe made up a little for having a crappy summer.

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I’d love to be able to find a card for my MythTV box that will accept hdmi and not cost $900+. The card pictured above is just over $100 and is designed and built specifically for Linux. It’s a tuner, so no HDMI in, it would be FTA or digital cable in, but still, it is interesting for an antenna or something. Also, I am too dumb to be able to tell from this, but I think it means it outputs mpeg2 streams, because it says decoding is left to software… that sounds like it means encoding is done in hardware? I am probably missing something obvious.

This is a bookmark for me.

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Here’s an idea, someone should write a book that is all Google Voice voicemail transcriptions. I’ve gotten a couple of doosies. I live in the south and everyone down here has an unhandled accent fault that happens within the transcription process. I hope Google never fixes it. Here’s a funny one I got today:

“and hey carl for the salad like a give me a call at (***)***-**** you just passed through or all ha ha ha alright talk to you later bye”

I am “Carl for the salad” and that was my buddy calling to tell me he and his wife just drove through “all ha ha ha alright” which translates to “Laurel, Montana” which is a town I used to live in.

I do love salad in moderation though.

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