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Monday, May 28, 2007

Nominet really didn't plan this well...
(posted at 12:14AM BST)

Nominet recently announced that they were going to perform some essential database restructuring in order to accommodate some new systems they are bringing online on 10th June 2007.

These changes require each tag holder registrar (e.g. Spilsby Internet Solutions) to inform Nominet of each and every domain which is associated with the same registrant and to ensure that registrant data is up-to-date when they perform their auto-merge operation this morning.

I submitted a massive update to the Nominet Automaton in the form of around twenty PGP-signed e-mails (the Automaton will only accept 250 commands in a single e-mail) and I have yet to receive a single confirmation back from the Automaton that my instructions were received, let alone that they were either accepted or rejected.

I personally think that some brain-dead large ISP has sent single mails for each and every .uk domain they have on their tag (some ISPs have over 250,000) and that Nominet are now suffering from a DDoS of PGP-signed e-mails from one or several ISPs who are not used to performing bulk maintenance on their .uk domains.

I guess I don't have much choice but to throw a few WHOIS queries at Nominet in the next couple of hours to see if my changes have actually been made...

Friday, May 25, 2007

BBC iPlayer Trial
(posted at 08:17PM BST)

"We thought you'd like to know that we're in the final stages of preparations for the trial. We'll e-mail you your account details in just a few weeks and then you’ll have access to hundreds of hours of programmes.

We'll be bringing you a range of radio and television programmes from the 1930s right up to the 21st Century, including dramas, comedies, variety shows and some stunning documentaries. You'll also be able to witness key moments in history, discover the lives and stories of incredible people, and see well-known faces in their first TV appearances.

We'll be back in touch with more information very soon, but for now we'd just like to thank you for registering and let you know how much we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the trial."

... looks like I'm on it!

I'm extremely interested in hacking the player software to work with WINE; although, if the BBC do this right, I might be buying a much bigger hard disk for my MythTV PVR if I can throw entire BBC series' on to it.

With this, the continued funding of new Doctor Who episodes and the BBC's recent stand against Scientology on Panorama, I sincerely believe that they totally and utterly rock...

Monday, May 21, 2007

Industrial Strength Telephony Systems
(posted at 09:19PM BST)

While those who read my journal regularly will acknowledge that I do indeed like to blow my own trumpet on occasion, I did feel that it was worthwhile sharing my most recent accomplishment with my beloved readers.

Today, I completed a deployment of Asterisk for a large company based in Lincolnshire using over 100+ telephones and an ISDN-30e circuit courtesy of BT - install took just over two hours and used heavily-customized packages as per customer requirements.

This builds on my most recent adventures in hacking Asterisk and while I have yet to deploy a system based on Asterisk 1.4, I'm confident that I will be doing so within the next six months once I am familiar with any little foibles it may have; for now, my customer is happy to be using a more-than-stable codebase for their mission-critical PBX.

My customer is pleased as punch as their investment looks to save them many tens of thousands of pounds in calls across the country between their main office and their branch offices.

There is something special about building a system *exactly* to customer requirements plus sticking a few extras on top which they never even thought of and then having the users actually praise the new system rather than complaining that they preferred the old one - job satisfaction is a nice feeling which I haven't had in a while but today, I certainly got it!

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Plodding through code...
(posted at 09:51PM BST)

I have just spent the last four hours wading through hundreds of lines of source code to try and track down an annoying echo cancellation problem that one of my customers is having with their Asterisk install.

I'm not going to bore you with the details but it turns out that their ISDN hardware does not have inbuilt echo cancellation and the Asterisk software echo cancellation routines only work with Digium hardware (or hardware which happens to be compatible with the Digium Zaptel drivers).

The problem turned out to be that the drivers which these cards use simply flip a single bit in a register telling the DSP to enable its' echo cancellation routines - of course, if the card doesn't support echo cancellation, no error is logged anywhere or any info given that the card doesn't support hardware echo cancellation.

More importantly, the drivers don't fall back to any kind of software echo cancellation as they do not have any and the Zaptel drivers do not export their own echo cancellation routines so that third-party drivers can use them.

So, I find myself playing with a software echo-cancellation module for Asterisk that appears to have reasonable licensing costs and *should* solve the echo problem.

... fingers crossed, folks!

 
slashdot

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Microsoft's New AI Tool Outperforms Doctors 4-to-1 in Diagnostic Accuracy

the register

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How to get free software from yesteryear's IT crowd – trick code into thinking it's running on a rival PC

Anthropic chucks chump change at studies on job-killing tech

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How Broadcom is quietly plotting a takeover of the AI infrastructure market

Uncle Sam wants you – to use memory-safe programming languages

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HPE customers on agentic AI: No, you go first

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