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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

Change Healthcare's Ransomware Attack Costs Edge Toward $1 Billion So Far

Apple Opens Web Distribution Option for iOS Devs Targeting EU

Justice Department To File Antitrust Suit Against Ticketmaster-Parent Live Nation

Boston Dynamics Retires Its Hydraulic Humanoid Robot

Microsoft Takes Down AI Model Published by Beijing-Based Researchers Without Adequate Safety Checks

Ask Slashdot: Are Movies Becoming More Derivative?

NASA Says New Plan Needed To Return Rocks From Mars; Current Mission Design Can't Deliver Before 2040

Baidu Says AI Chatbot 'Ernie Bot' Has Attracted 200 Million Users

Alleged Cryptojacking Scheme Consumed $3.5 Million of Stolen Computing To Make Just $1 Million

YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Now Includes Third-Party Apps

World's Coral Reefs Hit By a Fourth Mass Bleaching Event, NOAA Says

California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days

T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs: Report

Meta To Close Threads In Turkey To Comply With Injunction

Adobe Premiere Pro Is Getting Generative AI Video Tools

the register

Gentoo Linux tells AI-generated code contributions to fork off

Latest AMD Ryzen Pro chips are similar silicon, more smarts

Torvalds intentionally complicates his use of indentation in Linux Kconfig

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Alleged cryptojacker accused of stealing $3.5M from cloud to mine under $1M in crypto

Microsoft to tackle spam by restricting Exchange Online bulk email

SIM swap crooks solicit T-Mobile US, Verizon staff via text to do their dirty work

US Equal Employment agency says Workday AI hiring bias case should continue

NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack

Open sourcerers say suspected xz-style attacks continue to target maintainers

AI gold rush continues as Microsoft invests $1.5B in UAE's G42

Micron says it's first to QLC NAND with over 200 layers

Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

Blackstone wants to plug hyperscale datacenter into former Britishvolt battery site

Google location tracking deal could be derailed by politics

KPMG bags £8.5M NHS gig as cheerleader for Federated Data Platform rollout

AI cloud startup TensorWave bets AMD can beat Nvidia

Intel's effort to build a foundry biz is costing far more – and taking longer – than expected

NASA needs new ideas and tech to get Mars Sample Return mission off the ground

Broadcom throws VMware customers on perpetual licenses a lifeline

Alibaba Cloud reveals network telemetry tool that helped cut number of engineers needed by 86%

OpenAI launches Asian operations in Tokyo to avoid being lost in translation

Konica Minolta and Fujifilm ponder JV to cut costs of printer businesses

Los Alamos Lab powers up Nvidia-laden Venado supercomputer

CISA in a flap as Chirp smart door locks can be trivially unlocked remotely

What's up with AI lately? Let's start with soaring costs, public anger, regulations...

Senator Warren slams Intuit's 'junk fees' as America's Tax Day rolls around again

Samsung snags $6.4B in CHIPS Act funds for Texas fabs

US lawmakers rage over Intel Meteor Lake-powered Huawei PC

Japan turns up heat on Apple, Google with threat of hefty fines

Tesla decimates staff amid ongoing performance woe

Backblaze cloud storage buzzes with added Event Notifications

Roku makes 2FA mandatory for all after nearly 600K accounts pwned

NASA tries to jog Voyager 1's memory from 15 billion miles away

Microsoft lifts years-old compatibility hold for Windows 11

Delinea Secret Server customers should apply latest patches

World is finally buying more phones and prices are rising

US senator wants to put the brakes on Chinese EVs

North American S/4HANA migrations ramping among SAP users

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

Feline firewall woke developer to declaw DDoS disaster

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

After delay due to xz, Ubuntu 24.04 'Noble Numbat' belatedly hits beta

MIT breakthrough means there's no material too weird for 3D printing

Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it

Microsoft hikes Dynamics 365 prices by around ten percent or more

Hyundai picks Palantir to help it build automated navy ships

Salesforce apparently poised to slurp data management outfit Informatica

US House approves FISA renewal – warrantless surveillance and all

Australian operation of web host BlueVPS laid low by storage failure

 

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