Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

20/09/2007

Originally uploaded by TrX07

Just a quick one to test Nokia N95 direct flickr uploading! And then the wordpress XMLRPC API that allows you to add photo’s to your blog direct from flickr!

I think with this i’m going to start adding more photo’s to blogs (now it requires so little effort!

So to start off, here’s a selection of beer on sale at morrisons! :P

-Enjoy
//Matt

I MUST promise myself to update this more than I am doing at the moment!

Another month has passed, and Ive done quite a lot, the majority of which will dissapear from my memory as soon as I start trying to write about it.. *Wait for it…. there it goes*

This month things have started to heat up at work, As all but one of last years interns have now left (and lamsey (the last intern) is here mainly to continue some in house development of our day to day lab management tools) I, along with 2007’s other interns are picking up the tickets, and dealing with the majority of problems on our own, which feels pretty good. It’s also amazing how much we are helping each other, as some of us will have spent a day over one peice of missbehaving hardware, and then the next week can provide knowlege to another person in the same boat.

On a social side,

We had a BBQ sometime last month (told you i’d forget things when i started writing) as a late housewarming and early leaving do for the 2006 interns. Lamsey, James, Kim and Charlotte came (from the 2006 bunch) and most of 2007’s guys were there (except fraiser and mike c)

Much alcomahol was enjoyed, the music was loud, and the party went on till 4 with much merryness! (also, the specticle of a drunken Robin trying to tell his girlfriend the differences between Vi and Vim :P)

A few weeks later (beginning of this month when we had all been paid) we headed out to a club in farnborough called quarantine. Was a pretty good night, with most of us not remembering the later hours (and it was also nice to get out of the house, as fleet is a pretty quiet place, and no-one seems to be up for going out that much…)

James crashed on our couch that night, and spent most of the saturday in the same position recovering!

On the techy/geeky/whatever side, I moved my routing box to gentoo this month, and got all the services back up and running. It also gave me a chance to neaten up my firewall /routing rules and FINALLY work out a way to fix a reverse path routing problem I was having when performing static routing + DNAT up a openVPN tunneled interface.

(The jist of it was a packets journey through IPTables looks up the destination interface in the kernel routing table too early for what i wanted to do, before it has been un-dnatted, and so rules to send matching data up a certain tunnel never got matched)

I now have a much more customisable platform for starting my next projects (QoS, Ldap auth etc)

Mike also got himself a VOIP Deskphone, supporting the IAX2 protocol (a ‘better-than-sip’ SIP protocol that only requires one UDP Port) and a voiptalk.org account, we linked his phone upto my asterisk pbx, and now calls from his phone use his voiptalk trunk, and mine use mine. Icoming calls also work perfectly, with excellent call quality even if we are both on the phone at the same time. (Using usenet dosn’t help call quality much though! I think some QoS traffic shaping may be on the cards)

Talking of VOIP, this brings me neatly onto my new toy! I finally got fed up with my windows smartphone, chucked it out (well.. look the sim out and permenantly installed it in my car as a tomtom) and got myself an N95 on a shiney new T-Mobile contract (winged so much about how crap my windows smartphone was that they let me end my last contract nearly three months early)

Got the new phone two days later, and I have to say, unless something MAJOR changes in the phone industry, i’m ONLY buying nokia’s from now on. They just always hit the nail on the head, nice phones, decent weight, feel well built, sensible connectors, good interface (everything is really nice and integrated) and it JUST WORKS! even the software, for backing up my phone and all the settings (even what shortcuts i have assigned to my softkeys on the idle screen!) syncronising my messages (+ sending and receiving messages from the PC)

If you don’t yet get the picture, I am VERY impressed with the phone. UMTS 3.5G (HSDPA), WIFI, GPS, Bluetooth (and seems to have a sensible bluetooth stack that scans pretty fast too), decent size screen, 5 megapixel camera, nicley laid out buttons, cool sideways slide gally viewer thing… and TV OUT!! yup.. comes with a nifty little cable (that plugs into the standard size 31/2mm headphone jack and gives composite out plus audio onto a PAL or NTSC TV (looks pretty damn good for watching a movie (has a 2GB microSD card) or showing photo’s you have taken to your mates)

Also the software on the phone is really nice too, its still running on symbian S60, but with cool things like a SIP VOIP client, properly integrated (so everywhere there is a number and you can click call… you can just as easily click options>internet call instead to route through to your SIP provider)

I hooked it upto my internal WIFI and asterisk PBX, works perfectly, can make and receive calls via wifi with excellent quality and hardly any latency. I then tried setting the phone up to connect to my asterisk PBX via the internet (lots of port forwarding later) and I still could not get the SIP protocol to live with my NAT (it really, really dosnt like nat) I was getting the RTCTP packets, and so my internal phone rang when I called it from my n95 (via t-mobile web and walk) however I got no audio.

I even tried the new (beta) SIP_conntrack and SIP_nat modules which should dynamically sort all the SIP Nat problems out for me by changing the IP info stored in the realtime audio control section of the egress packets, but to no avail (I am still planning to have another bash at this sometime. I was going to cheat and VPN in. however no-one has made an openvpn client for S60 phones (I’m already missing it as a feature :( )

Another feature I found out about today, is that it has built in functionality in the photo gallery to ’send to flickr’ as well as ’send via mms etc etc) which I tested out, and it worked great! both with a wifi point I was near the first time, and through UMTS 3G the next. (May have to get flickr tied into this blog now it uploads pics so easily)

The only thing I have not really played with is the GPS yet. I am waiting for tomtom hackers to get the internal GPS chip working with the symbian tomtom software.

There is other stuff I want to ramble about (such as plans for the next solaris ZFS fileserver running xen to virtualise some other stuff) but I think that requires a little more research first :)

That should have made you leave one page open long enough to make your browser feel loved again! Night!

//Matt