This weekend I’ve been working on a new fifo.sh layout. It’s still a work in progress, but a preview can be found on http://beta.fifo.sh/.

I hope to put it live next week.

Lately, a lot of stuff happened in my life. Time to be more open to the world about them.

Andrea and I recently broke up after 6+ years of being and living together. We decided it was wise that I move out, so I did. I am staying at a friend’s, who was so kind to rent an empty room to me. Andrea and I still see and speak each other quite often, and we have no intention of changing that. I think I can speak for the both of us if I say that we both learnt a lot from our relationship as well as the following breakup. I am currently looking into buying a house, preferably in Amsterdam Z-O, which is also where my employer’s offices are located.

Speaking of which: I have been busy for already half a year at Nedstat BV, as a network and systems administrator. Since it’s quite fun there, all plans in regards to starting my own IT consultancy company have been postponed.

Sadly, one of my most important and fun projects, AwkwardTV, got a lot less attention from me since the breakup. Although I still really care a lot for the project, I just can’t find the time right now to mingle myself in it. However, I have planned a come-back and a total revamp of the project. For now, the project seems to run itself, which is totally awesome. Lots of thanks go to the people who feel spoken to!

Anyway, that’s all for now.

As I wrote before, I have a new project. AwkwardTV is the name of it, and it’s the biggest AppleTV hacking/modding/extending community around right now.

Lots of media attention, but, more importantly, lots of fun. The people in this community are great, and really supportive. Initially it was just me and Probono, a German fellow fanboy, but in just a few days it grew and grew and grew. Amazing.

Thanks to the guys at Moofspeak.net we have a nice and decent place to IRC on, and they generously offered to host the forums.

Today (or actually yesterday) Apple, inc. announced two new things: an AppleTV with a 160GB disk. It’ll be around 400 dollar/euro. The funny thing is, Apple is a bit too late with that. It’s already being done. In fact, it was one of the first hacks ever done for the AppleTV.

Also, Apple and Youtube announced YouTube is going to be available on the AppleTV. Again, they’re a bit late. It’s already done! Ok, that one’s not completely fair. Youtube is also going to serve their content in Apple’s H.264 format, making it possible to (finally) have high-quality video on YouTube, AND available in your living room – Awesome!

All in all, it’s a great load of fun. For now, Apple is playing along real nice (read: not suing us to shit), and we hope it stays that way.

…since I blogged. I was busy. Lots of stuff happened. I got a new job, and I have a nice, new project. Also, a new family member has been added.

I guess that’s it, for now.

This year there was a HabbieFest again. All was a bit different this time, since Habbie and Liessa moved.

The party was excellent. There was food, drinks and lots of fun people.

Pictures by Wh|teRuss here.

De afgelopen dagen hebben we veel cabaret voorbij zien komen. Die-An postte al een leuk artikeltje over Guido Weijers (en ja, Lebbis en Jansen ook, maar die vond ik echt totaal niks), maar ook heb ik ergens vandeweek Jochem Myjer voorbij zien komen. Vanmiddag, na een beetje prutsen met google video kwam ik een oude show van hem tegen, genaamd Adéhadé. Deze naam doet ontrecht aan de show, want Jochem is extreem ver voorbij een “normale” ADHD’er.

Thanks to a blog posting by Liessa I got motivated to alter the fifonet.org site somehow. We now have a sidebar with channel quotes and a list of contributors.

I had to modify the plugin somewhat, because I get the plugins in RSS format. Here you can find the modified code in a tarball. Just drop it in your wordpress wp-content/plugins dir and enable it from the admin menu.

I also added some features so you can address the error message from your css. All modifications should be 100% backwards compatible with the original version.

usage:

<? if (function_exists(displayQuote))
displayQuote(); ?>

for normal usage. To use a non-default quote source, you can add a URL as the 1st and only parameter to displayQuote().

For a few weeks now, I’m trying to get Asterisk to work on the KPN Telecom network here in the Netherlands, by means of an ISDN2 (BRI). This seems trivial, since there’s more than one way to do it.

The hardware I use in this case are 2 Cologne HFC-S cards, which are quite popular since they support TE (Terminal Equipment) as well as NT (Network Terminator) mode. The software used in this case is Ubuntu Dapper with Asterisk from packages as provided by dapper-backports (part of the official Ubuntu project). A goal I set is to use as much as possible from the official repositories.

The setup I’m trying to build is an Asterisk machine with 2 HFC-S ports, one in TE, one in NT mode, with the TE side connected to KPN and the NT side connected to an ISDN->analog converter like a KPN Quattrovox or Moduvox (for a fax and some analog phones). Later on I will add a fax2email solution and a sip2gsm box (more about those in later postings).

First off, there’s vISDN by Daniele “vihai” Orlandi. A really promising project. It’s built completely from scratch, and tries to implement EuroISDN and onderlying layers q.931 and q.921 as strict as possible. The modular setup of his design gives room for lots of other applications, up to using the supported cards as a full blown network interface. Also, the framework is set up so that support for other hardware can be easily added.

Since the project is new, it’s not quite polished. Setting up can be quite frustrating, especially because there’s no packages (yet — working on that). Also, the author indicated that he doesn’t have a lot of time at the moment, and since there’s no one else developing, development has come to a standstill. Debugging, however, is almost too easy. With an altered version of libpcap you can even use tcpdump for packet debugging.

After installing and configuring the driver and the chan_visdn asterisk module (yes, own channel module – doesn’t use a bit of zaptel or libpri) all seems to work nicely. Small testing was done. I called from one of the analog phones to a cell phone, and it worked. some more testing was done. All hell broke loose.

Using the transfer option from features.conf crashed Asterisk. Routing a call back to the outside world resulted in even more crashing. Not really a motivation to stick with vISDN, but I did. Later on I found out vISDN is using it’s own timing source, and this got screwed up after a while in a conversation, giving choppy sound as a result. MusicOnHold was not usable at all because of this. Next to that, the driver does not implement any form of buffering right now, which results in even more choppy sound.

Also, due to the strange implementation of EuroISDN by KPN here in the Netherlands, we couldn’t have a call going for more than 3 minutes. After that, the Quattrovox sends a packet about a timer that was supposed to be reset, and the conversation gets cut off.

In the end, I chose for the quick-and-dirty solution in the form of BRIstuff. Bristuff is a big, fat patch on Asterisk, zaptel and libpri that implements BRI support piggybagging on the Zaptel driver. PRI support in Asterisk is lost, and while the project is actually about as old as Asterisk itself, there’s still a lot of bugs. More about BRIstuff in a later posting.

Why did I stick to vISDN for so long? I think this project has a lot of potential to be the number 1 choice for HFC-users. It requires no patching of Asterisk, your kernel or libs whatsoever. I hope Daniele will continue to bring us the good stuff that is vISDN, so we can all enjoy our Asterisk to the fullest.

In following postings I will talk about my experiences with BRIstuff, mISDN and other methods on how to use Cologne’s HFC-cards with Asterisk and/or OpenPBX. Keep a close watch!

Als reactie op “Tsunami Blues :)” van Die-An: Baas Bea

Today, I enjoyed a great lasagna at Habbie & Liessa. Also, I migrated the fifonet.org backend to WordPress + the FeedWordPress plugin, and I hacked a new theme.

An added feature of myself is the avatars with every posting. I intend to add some more stuff, more about that later.

If people see any problems regarding lay-out and/or content, do not hesitate to drop me a /msg on IRC.