Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Published by kyle on 05 Jan 2009

Asterisk Jabber Call Notifications

The other evening I busied myself with tweaking Asterisk to do some more geeky things. One such item was where I configured it to send a message to my Jabber account every time there was a call to a particular extension. Great for call logging, integration, and general user friendliness. If I was so inclined, it could message a Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or AOL account through the Jabber platform to inform me of a new call. How rather flexible.

Published by kyle on 31 Aug 2008

Track-It Madness

Sadly we’re having to migrate to Track-It at work, and muggins here has been tasked with ensuring the agent can deploy nicely. After some initial crazyness with manual installs, or login script launched installs, I managed to wrap it into an MSI. Details can be found over here.

Published by kyle on 18 Aug 2008

100Mb/sec to 95.5% of the country?

As Steve points out, Ofcom have recently released their study on the potential future of the UK broadband network using the existing copper telephone network.

There’s two main methods of DSL delivery to end users. One is to have the DSL modems hiding in the local exchange, and the other is to have the modems stashed inside the cabinets on the streets. The latter is similar to the cable network, and hence why Virgin are touting their ‘fibre’ network. It’s really just fibre to the cabinet, and then coax to the home.

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Published by kyle on 21 Feb 2008

Vodafone 3G

DSC00021Looks like someone has taken design classes from Apple, and failed. It is, however, still rather dinky and shiny. Now, if only Vodafone would activate them before they send them out to us, like they used to.

Published by kyle on 26 Nov 2007

Hadoop

A while back I mentioned Hadoop as The Next Big Thing. Looks like demand has been high in the intervening months, and the Yahoo Developer Network has recently announced a new blog all about Hadoop. An open source Mapreduce implementation with a scalable, clustered and highly redundant storage system? Yes please… Now you can keep up to date with your favourite RSS reader.

Published by kyle on 21 Nov 2007

Zenworks Unattended Windows Upgrade

I’d been looking at how to upgrade our Windows 2000 machines to XP at work recently, without losing all the data on them. We would normally just reimage them, and put up with the lost data, but that seemed awfully heavy handed. Nobody on the web seemed to have detailed how to do it with Zenworks, so I came up with my own method. In the process of writing it up for our wiki, I put on the web for others to use as a resource should they need it.

Published by kyle on 04 Nov 2007

Deforming a character?

During my evening ramble down the overgrown alleyway of what we call the information superhighway, I stumbled across Elliott Backs commentary on the ridiculousness of some of the suggestions on Ask.com.

Curious, I carefully massaged the keybaord in such a manner that would provide a suggestion similar to the ones encountered prior. The end result was slightly disturbing…

Sue for deformation

Should I want my character deformed then I know where to go. To be honest, I suspect it’s illegal in many civilised parts of the world. In others, most likely just frowned upon. Maybe you can get ointments for such an ailment, but frankly I’d rather not try to find out.

Published by kyle on 31 Oct 2007

Armadillo misses by inches


Armadillo Aerospace and their Mod-1 lander miss out on the X Prize by mere fractions. The slight oscillation slowly amplified, and unfortunately during landing the sideways motion caused it to tip over. So close, yet so far. Maybe second time round.

Published by kyle on 27 Oct 2007

The Day The Routers Died…

The Secret Working Group of RIPE 55 find another memorable way to summarize the event :-)

And for those who want the lyrics… grab the POEM-RIPE55-SONG object… whois -h whois.ripe.net POEM-RIPE55-SONG

Published by kyle on 17 Oct 2007

New Nokia Tablet

Well, first the Nokia 770 tablet was being sold at cut rates in favour of the new 800. I was sorely tempted to get one of the £99 770s as a toy, but just couldn’t justify it to myself (or Charlotte for that matter). The proverbial cat is now out the bag, and Nokia have just announced the release of the new N810. Now I have to ask myself if I can justify a cheap N800 :-)

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