GnuDailer

I am starting a weekend project of building a GnuDialer box with Aserisk and the old CentOS server in the kitchen, Guess I have enough bandwdith, might even get my cable bill paid, by this. Wow, it is cool to run a seismograph on your Mac: 

Heard Charles is looking for a job, perhaps my GnuDialer call help him contact recruiters, or not, who wants to be tele-marketed. Anyhow if you need a SysAdmin, post a comment here, he is in the 818 area code, good with Linux and Cisco. Go to his blog for a brief description of tonight's talk at the IEEE, dinner is always free, meeting :) and if you are looking to hire, here is the rather old resume I found.

Decided to test bandwidth on the DSL at work, and surprise we have more then the 512K up that the modem reports, interesting.

Richmond Street fair

Today El Segundo has a street fair on Richmond and Grand.

These flat bottles are really cool to run into, but wow, where did they find such a hot place, this probably started as a drunk idea, cool, look the empty bottle is flat :)

Planes

Last night I was looking out the window for CA983 to land, and then the airport pickup. Had a radio, but only got to hear ground crew, too bad, would have been a good channel to listen too know when the gate is reached, I was at the airport way to early, resulting in parking :( But then I went early to drop Gareth off, so I guess it works out. So again it was a rather claudy morning, but I guess that is normal, perhaps soon it might even rain ;) This video upload has taken over an hour, don't know if there is a bug, because I also uploaded the other 2 pictures after starting the video upload.



This morning we went to the beach and I found Andrew from GoodNight Mattress flying his WWI like Red Baron single wing plane, but must have been based on a biplane, amazing how great today's batteries are, this thing has enough power to fly straight up and can go for 30 min. Seems the LiOn battery is really good, and the electric motor really cool too. I left my phone at home to finish uploading, but disappointed to see it didn't. So I used YouTube, and here it worked

old blogs

I was looking at Twitter today saw something about a bun in the oven and followed the @ to Sara Lane, she has a blog. In it she talks about blogging since 2003, made me realize that I need to put some sort of headline in this blog to invite you people in. I have actually been blogging since 1994 when I started a GeoCities account TheTropics/1174 if I remember correctly, that later became Yahoo and they then summarily deleted as I wasn't updating it for a while, until I started this blog, I was out of it. I kind of think I may have a backup on ZIP100 or maybe one of those Gig. ZIP disks, perhaps on CD of that blog, who knows, I haven't been into my old media for a long time, but it sure would be interesting to go back to my old stuff someday, when I have time. Unfortunatly Archive, didn't do it, but since this is information that was openly sitting on the internet, who knows, it may be cashed somewhere. There could be backup tapes at Yahoo or simply lost.

Anyhow staying home longer today and then an airport pickup, I have been on my own for so long, this will be something new.

sick

I feel like I am getting sicker today so I didn't go to the office, however having a house guest, I might pollute the east coast with my bug, I have been biologically powned.  Anyhow will probably have lunch from Havana Sandwich.  But keep your distance, maybe I will go shopping, might be longer lasting in case I get worst.  I have to say thought that lunch did lift my spirits. Fight on antibodies.

Hacking

Drove to SFVlug for the first time.  It is an interesting group meets across from the sex shop at a Dennys in the Valley, they rule this back room, have all kinds of gear plugged in, desktops and routers.  Some of them dumpster dive really neat stuff and others have an amazing nack to buy cheap equipment.  All will be geekier when they leave and questions can be answered, lightning presentations where about iPython and screen, internet access by Sprint and the raspberry ice tea is very nice.  Feel free to join if you like, someday a real company might spawn from this grass roots effort to learn from each other. Long drive back though, must carpool next time. 

Today yet another session of BizzBuzz, perhaps some day I will describe what this is, but meanwhile we are working on something.

BarCampLA6 is coming around :)  Ah, yet another telemarketing call, I want to record something on the answering machine along the lines of: "Hi                 I won't come to the phone right now because chances are you are trying to sell me something. BEEP"

Olympic medals cool sites

On Friday our CTO showed me these really cool things to put on our product, one of them I sent to my dad as he is a big Olympic buff, but I thought it was a really good way to present information visuallly. This Olympic visualization takes the medal count and shows it as geo-circles. What a great way. So on searching I found an Excel spreadsheet that does the same, it won't open very well on OpenOffice, so really haven't played with it yet :( And I uninstalled 2007 from the other partition on this Dell, grrrr... almost regreted that right away. So there it is my finds of the week.

Today thinking of going to LAMPsig as I need to learn more svn for work and following flight AA263, have a friend landing at 16:30, so may do an airport pickup and as I hear on SCRUM every day, "that will be my day."

WiFi on Main St.

[5:36:59 PM] Stephen - El Segundo says: ah, success. Havana sandwich ordering DSL connection. Should be in by Wednesday.

Python Piggies

After going to the Internet Telephony Expo at the Convention Center, I found that if you turn North right form Pico and left before the 110, there is a great little street for parking, so I got to the floor in time to toss my bingo card in for the Prius, but alas Wayne from Hermosa Beach won it, I took his card as he is starting some kind of a VoIP business, who knows, I could need his help for a company sometime.  I thought I had a good talk with someone from CyLogitics. seems they could have a billing and PBX solution worth looking into, both hosted and sold.

So Python Piggies didn't allow cameras, too bad, that was a great meeting, nice food and great company. Pythoscope seem like something we can use. The second presentation was "How we use Python in Toontown", from Joe Shochet - lead game designer and programmer on Disney's Toontown Online. Very entertaining and well done, but probably more of a Python is great and we use it testimonial, where we some some impressive properties: Panda3d a tool they use looks cool, nice story of Disney open sourcing it and everyone looking at them in disbelief. Some games they made: ToonTown and Pirates of the Carribean. Would have been nice to get pictures of the meeting, but hey Disney gets to ask for none, I guess.

bash

I don't do bash very often, and got to say that this very simple, httpd restart, where you actually stop and start, would take me a bit to write, however, I guess I will try to get Dallas to help.

service httpd stop&&service httpd start
Might acutally work, tempting. I seem to be at a point where I am learning and trying to avoid it, so I can get things done. Then there is Python, might be a better option for me right now, as it is a far more useful language or Ruby, so much to do, so little time.

Drupal, learned lots and yet, don't have time to implement any of it.

DrupalCampLA08

So I finally made it to yet another camp, this one is totally focused on Drupal and isn't an unconference, as much as the past events I have been going have been, in fact other then the free location, the City of LA, 9th district donated the rooms at the Convention center, and other then the fact that it seems there will be no food, too bad, it does seem to be a good event to learn Drupal and it is rather well organized and the speaker track was avaiilable before starting out. Sitting next to another blogger from NorthWind, guess the power brings us together, need to keep the Mac battery charged, in track 3, where the room is smaller, but the speakers are better.  I did walk out of the Building a static, corporate site from the ground up - Steven Chan (Resonance Visuals) talk as other then installing Drupal, the filling out the forms seems to be obvious.  The best question at the beginning was about MAMP, to get your Mac running LAMP fast and effortless.  However to cool things in the room, I as able to project the LISA08 after the opening talk, sweet, and the get Steven to put LiLAX.net as the example in his Drupal intro.  Sweet.  But installing Drupal is pretty easy, and I figure that a quick google would yeld a way to do it, or I can simply ask Stephen. So I went to the expo room, although they called it chill, guess they don't have that much to show, and it is nice to have a room to chill out, food would be nice, didn't eat breakfest today, thinking I could get out earlier, but hey whatever, neighbor had me wait 30 min, but I got to use the carpool lane so it is all good, even washed a car while waiting, and if you saw it, it hardly looks clean, baked on grime, didn't come off, I have to soak the car next time before applying the water, to soften backed on dirt.  Since I now drive 2 cars on alternate days, I have gotten a bit behind. But again, who cares about my personal stuff, uilding APIs for Modules- Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit sounded much more interesting, but being the advanced track, must be over my head, and since I am blogging, I guess I spent my time getting the power.

Check out the schedule at DrupalCamp08. I am now listening to Dreamweaver & Drupal - XTND.US (Chris Charlton) who is a pretty good organizer for this event and does an amazing job at LADrupal as well, but I must be on the wrong track, as I don't use DreamWeaver anymore, it is a free download, but then you have to pay after 30 days.  I used to use it and it was great, but I am more on Linux lately and perhaps I can now revisit it and setup this XTND.US and play with it, because after hearing someone talk about it, you have to think it is useful, even if you are only half paying attention as you blog. I got to say that after talking to a prominent security guy, I decided to hang out in the front of the Camp to get more of the hall talk, since I don't really do Drupal, and we are a Django shop anyhow.

darkness

So I wake up at 6am, it is now dark at that time, fall is here, it feels cold in the morning and at night. I woke up this morning as if I had a 6th sense and right as I sat at the computer get a phone call from the other side of the world, support for our night shift, a very apologetic voice on the other side asks me about some of our recent changes, and I knew the answer, wow, high availability, I just happened to be up, cool. I remember years ago getting that 4am call from somebody clueless as to what area code they were calling me in, geez. This is why Skype is cool, it lets you know if I am really on the computer or forwarded, that is definitely a good feature. But I will have to test if strangers get to use the forward feature, or if you have to be authorized, haven't got a forwarded SPAM call yet, but who knows.

work is boring, meetings are cool, but tomorrow back to work

Went to the EC2/S3 event at UCLA, was pretty good and the neworking had great catering. Hadoop was the most mentioned piece of software in conjunction with the use of distributed instances, so will have to learn about that. I then went to a Terracotta talk, again about scalling to bigger clouds.

Quiet weekend

Crashed, turned on the TV and watched some movies.  I didn't even go to a sfvlug hacking session where they might tell me how someone broke into our server.  I don't know how to get more done right now, but I sure have lots of demands on me these days. I took a look at how close I am to collecting on the ads, bu still at $48.50, I truely have to think i am blogging for myself, there isn't money in this, but on the bright side I get a free place to do it, and that is a good thing. I had written a bit more, but I guess this doesn't autosave in Safari or the suspend of the laptop somehow got in the way.

The missing part was about positive things statements make you happy. I was watching this program about achieving happiness and they cited a study where people wrote 3 things they were thankful for in a journal every day. Interesting idea. Lets see, I got a good job, wife and kid :)

Moving sucks

I have been busy trying to restore services like internet, phones and just finding things in boxes after moving, not very productive, just busy work. Now I have to figure out how to connect to an AdTran with a RS-232 serial port so that we can use our T3, the only cool thing to come of the move.

Yesterday coming back from lunch there was a Channel 9 helicopter hovering over El Segundo, seems an American Airlines 737 blew a tire on takeoff and had to return to the airport.

Also playing with a MacBook Pro, love the lit keyboard, sleek elegance, nice laptop, hear it is the best performer for Vista too.