Binaryfaith

Just finished installing FreePBX onto a Sheevaplug Plug computer. At $99 for the dev kit, its about one of the most cost effective embedded systems you can get.
The process is very simple, go to PlugPBX and grab the image for the FreePBX install that gets imaged onto an SD card. Grab an SD card and dd the image over. Then upgrade the uboot on the Sheevaplug so that you can boot from the card and viola. The device boots in under a minute with Asterisk, postfix, munin, mysql, and everything else you need to get your pbx up and running. The only hard part is configuring the pbx to make and receive calls through your DID and provider. If you’ve configured Asterisk you pretty much know what you’re doing.

I finally got the Adafruit VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) clock. Took about 3 months to get it shipped due to backorder (parts sourcing) on their part. This clock was well worth the wait! For $70.00 you get the PCBs, parts, tube, case and power supply.. This is a great deal…

Thanks to N6IL, I managed to get a nice DAC that is small enough to stuff in an Altoids tin with a CmoyBB headphone amp.
The mod was quite easy. The altoids tin needed some nibbling around the area where the USB ‘B’ connector goes through and I just needed to pull left, right and ground off the CmoyBB into the DAC. The whole thing took about 2 hours to assemble the DAC and about 5 minutes to add it to the headphone amp. The only reason the DAC takes that long is that there are LOTS of surface mount components to install and test. Totally worthwhile project.

There are a few posts on the net showing you how to spoof your browser’s user agent to make it look like you’re using an iPhone but it appears that Starbucks has gotten wise. So an alternative is to do the following. (Warning, typical mac users are going to cringe cause this requires *gasp* Terminal usage…)
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I’m testing out this new editor. Normally I try out software for the trial period, and wait to purchase.. But after watching the tutorials and running a few tests of my own, I have really come to appreciate this tool. I’m not sure if it would replace VI or VIM (Though it does give you an alias in /usr/local/bin or anywhere you want for that matter to open files from the command line).
The TextMate interface is definitely geared towards the hacker/coder/admin types with the ease of use and generally intuitive interface. I’m actually posting this blog entry directly from the app. Very Cool

I went to SuperHappyDevHouse yesterday and it rocked. I spent most of the day in the back Robots/SunSPOTs room where we hacked on java based computers. At the end of the day, A very nice Sun person gave 5 of us a SunSPOT dev kit. OMFG it is awesome. If you like hacking on Java and hardware, I would highly recommend picking a set up.

Sometimes in our community, it’s important to point out when people do the wrong thing. In the case of Sys Admins, who regularly get blasted by end users for not respecting them, sometimes we actually do the wrong thing. In this case, the Sys Admin who has been doing this for years should really know better. The behavior is called being a “Cowboy.” This is where a sysadmin makes a change to a system w/o letting other sysadmins know, or letting the users know that the change is being made. It’s really our responsibility to do the right thing and 1) ask first and 2) notify of the change in question.

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Bought a Vantec UGT-ST450-CB eSATA Expresscard/32 card a couple of months ago. Had it running perfectly in Tiger. When I upgraded to Leopard, it worked just fine until I re-installed (fresh) for a completely different reason. I realized that I had not had the latest driver. I contacted Vantec and asked for a new driver. (You can’t download MacOSX drivers from their site. Only Windows. heh…

The tech essentially told me that the card wasn’t supported, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nice job! (I do tech support for my company and know better than to tell customers that in the way that he did it.) After a bit of shock and dismay, I asked him for the chipset manufacturer. He told me it was Silicon Image.. Well 30 seconds of googling led me to their site and found the driver.

All is well.

Once again, tech support at crappy companies makes us look good.

My bluetooth LCD controller is working beautifully. I have lcdproc running with GrowlLCD, an awesome plugin written by Eric in San Diego.  I then wrote a small applescript that Mail.app calls when I get a Nagios alert.

Works like a charm!