Somewhere out there!

I’ve been having some trouble running Windows Update on my Crossover Internet Explorer installation. With a little searching I discovered the following FAQ item which seems to have fixed my problem, which was due to having my home directory on NFS: 7.1.3.5.2. My home directory is mounted via NFS. How can I install Internet Explorer?.

Very comprehensive list with mini-reviews of python web development environments.

Couple of useful articles about the need for a Content Management System from the managers and developers points of view.

Couple clever WordPress plugins:

• Lists Management and,
• Spelling Checker.

One day I figure out how to get OTP working for everything. Then I’ll be able to run sudo in some random internet cafe without much worry. Of course the trick is to find a useful set of clients that work on whatever PDA, phone and computer I have access to in a secure fashion. Freshmeat has a good selection of these, pam_sotp and Paranoia looking like the most useful.

Bit Torrent can only be restricted by the the OS for its downrate rate. Brian’s BitTorrent FAQ and Guide: My internet connection drops, often during very fast downloads. What can I do? has some hints regarding this.

Xandros have released an Open Circulation version of their distribution. You can give pay for a http download or get it via bittorrent. There is also an interesting review of xDMS – a Enterprise Desktop Administration tool. Seems basically to be a front end for managing pools of debs.

Xandros and Ubuntu seem to be the Debian distributions to try at the moment.

For a long time I’ve been meaning to join the voip revolution and develop a solution with Asterisk for my personal use. Once I’d tested it for a while, my goal was to develop a decent voicemail-to-email solution rather than play a few thousand dollars for some black-box to be added to our business PBX.

Couple days ago I finally purchase a set of equipment as I could begin working on this goal. A set of OEM X100P – FXO cards plus an ATA device. This guy has purchased the OEM X100P card and had a good experience, so I’m expecting things to go well with the hardware.

One of the things that really interest me is Asterisk fax. Using spandsp its possible to turn the OEM X100P, which is a winmodem, into a software based fax. According to a FAQ:

The higher speed modems for FAX are encumbered by patents at this time. spandsp implements only unencumbered standards, so it may be distributed freely. The faster modems used for FAX – principally V.17, and V.34 – are supported by a surprisingly small percentage of FAX machines used today. The last time I checked the logs of a large public access FAX server, which supports V.29 and V.17, only a 2% to 3% of calls used V.17. The remainder used V.29. Unless a lot of your FAX traffic is with companies using high-end FAX machines, you problem won’t miss the higher speeds very much.

My second goal is to develop a stable inward fax-to-email gateway. Our business fax machine goes though almost 100 faxes per week, and about $100 per month of consumables.

Some useful information for NZ is located here: WLUG-Wiki – Asterisk, and Scoot has developed some really clever ideas with asterisk.

Elliott Back has cleverly extended Matt’s spam stopgap solution, which sends precomputed hashes to be echoed back by the user-agent’s form and added dynamic generation of the md5 hash. He’s calling his method Spam Stopgap Extreme.

Zoe is “Google for your mail“. Written in Java it uses Lucene for its index engine.

Another interesting package to add to the queue of applications to trial.