Matt-J.co.uk : Ramblings

Hi again, Easter holidays, A time to do coursework, and sleep, and thats pretty much it! Not been out much but thats probably more to financial stuff ;S

Anyway, bought myself a new mouse to go with my G15 Keyboard, my old one wasnt very sensative and was starting to get crapper, so I chose a ‘Logitech MX Revolution’ as my replacement. I know.. its just a mouse… but its bloody amazing, seriously, it’s really nice to use, very sensitive, rechargeable, and using the software you can have each of the 7 buttons doing different things depending on what program you are in! (for example, counterstrike:source)

Very Impressed!

Nothing much else happening really, Joe and Connor are over in Ireland, Martin is still around, but he’s heading to Scotland with Paula for a week on sunday. Im probably heading home for easter weekend.

//Matt

Hello hello, A few of us are currently in the kitchen battling with a centurion!

*shot 29*

(If anyone dosn’t know what that is A, Don’t come to uni, and B, allow me to explain:
Every minute, on the minute, you all drink a shot glass of beer *shot30* the idea is to get too 100 shots (100 mins) it may sound easy, as its only about 4 pints, but damn! its hard!)

So anyway, since the laptops in the living room (where we are) to do the 1 min recursive countdown, and play music, I thought I may as well get my blog upto date, as well as read some crazy new BOFH! *shot 31 and 32 somewhere in there*

Anyway, Today and yesterday (Mainly in the early morning, as iv’e been pretty nocturnal these past few days) *37* my focus has been on one of the things on my todo list.. VOIP!

(This post will be updated throughout the centurion! So thats all for now! (more on voip later, or maybe tomorrow) *38*

Back again!
im sure the ‘dings’ for each minuite are getting closer together, either way, I think we are all feeling the effects! Were now on shot 45! Anyway, VOIP, I have been looking into asterisk (*) which is a software PBX for the linux platform. It allows for all the standard pbx features (call routing, extensions, call transfer multiple trunks etc) plus voicemail, Automated attendants, queueing, and as its GPL’d there are a tonne of add in modules. It supports SIP and AIX2 Voip Trunk protocols (amongst others) and then inbound and outbound routes based on anything from caller id, to incoming line, or serial port (for POTS ‘Plain old telephone system’ lines… (you do need a seperate (80 quid) voice card for that tho))

So yeah, i’d suggest you try it out if you need a small-medium pbx. Im just using it at home, but its great, because as I will be moving out of student halls soon, my phone number will stay with me wherever I am, and I dont need to pay BT a line rental :D

Im using a VOIP company called ‘voiptalk.co.uk’ to buy the IAX trunk credit. (This gives you setting to route calls through a IAX asterisk trunk… to the POTS (ie 0161 xxx xxx - standard phone numbers
(mobiles too)) for really cheap prices (1.2p/Min UK Landline, 11p/min Mobile UK) which I didn’t think was bad.

Anyway, if your interested have a gander. (Search for ‘trixbox’ its asterisk packaged up in an easy to install Linux distro, based on CentOS, with built in web gui (freepbx) and call routing manager)

//Matt

PS. Me and Joe beat the hell out of the centurion, stopping at 138 out of sheer ‘This is getting tedious now’-ness Not really sure what the fuss is about :P good fun tho!

Back at uni again, about to goto bed (Gotta do tech for a gig at the pint pot tomorrow so can’t sleep in) martin and joe are having a friendly game of chess in the living room/box listening to music from our house’s TASTY NEW SHOUTCAST SERVER!

We had a spare pc knocking around, so thats now in the living room, with a t-amp and some speakers, on ubuntu, constantly connected to a shoutcast server which martin is currently running. This in turn is getting its content from a instance of winamp on the same server, which is running the winamp web interface, so anyone in the house can put songs on / add / change the playlist from their pc / pda. Seems to be working quite well.

Of course, anyone else in the house can also connect to the stream and listen to the same music in their rooms! (Killers - Everything will be alright) at the mo :)

apart from that, has been quite a quiet day, Although i have started putting together the pieces (based on an old laptop) for an in car music PC (made a lot easier due to the winamp web interface) that will sit in my boot, and hold my music library, connected up to my cars speakers, allowing me to then use my phone/pda as a remote (woo.. no more radio1!)

Still on my todo list are IPv6, Solaris ZFS (think i may do that on vmware with a few virtual disks, instead of having to wait till I have the money to buy new hardware) and now, BGP (cisco’s border gateway routing protocol).

Funfun!

Later people

//Matt

Hihi Again,

It’s Sunday, And I’m Codeing looots of java, and probably will be untill the early hours of monday morning.. (uni work deadline tomorrow).
Other than that, Our new guy started in IT on thursday, and so I was in on Thursday and Friday to show him around;
Seems like a decent guy, and definatley knows his stuff, so all in all im happy with it, should releave a lot of IT related load off me, allowing me to cencentrate on server and network development. Still need to set him proper permissions up and deligate the parts of the AD tree I want him to use… But all in time.

Went home for a family birthday last night, Had a few beers and crashed at mine. Woke up this morning, ready to drive back to uni, to find a flat tyre :P (biig screw was the culprit) luckily the spare was in good nick and its got me back to uni after stopping for air and petrol.

Still have not heard from SUN, were meant to be calling me on Friday evening.. Hopefully i’ll hear something tomorrow *fingers crossed*

Anyway, back to the java!

//Matt

Hey, It’s quater past 10pm, Im sat in bed in a B+B close to where I need to be for my sun interview (tomorrow at 2pm) came down on the train, arrived at 7.30.
Purchased myself a new suit for the occasion, and had a haircut :P

Hoping everything goes OK tomorrow, But at the moment it’s not causing any nervous-ness.. They asked me to research into the SUN Ray thin desktop client in preparation for my interview, And its quite impressive, Tiny power consumption, more secure, easier to manage, and MUCH more user friendly than any other thin solutions I’ve seen before.

In other news, Work has decided to hire the new IT guy already, which is fine, however, looking at his CV, he’s pretty overqualified for the job we want him to do.. *shall be guarding my servers closely.. Especially since i’m not in the office much at all* .. Work better not try and screw me over after all the work and weeks worth of off the clock research and dedication i’ve put into building a reliable network over the years…

Anyway, Will let you know how everything goes after the interview.

//Matt

*PS. Moved to windows 2003 Enterprise as the OS on my main desktop, may move back to linux, just fancied a bit of a change, gonna try 64Bit Vista before I do though. All my data is stored on my NAS, and so changing OS’es on my main rig is nothing to worry about ;)

Oh, and the Laptop and company phone still haven’t become a reality… Ahh well, same old work… And I was actually expecting things to go smoothly after that meeting :(

Woo, exams are finished. Life is good, cash is good, work is good (but more about that in a bit!)

Got my speakers replaced from richersounds :) (didnt argue at all, just gave me a new pair) Which are both sounding much much tastier, and came with the correct stands and spikes, so thats tightened the bass up.
Sitting here typing this, totally immersed in tasty audio!

Anyway, yesh, last exam this morning (Data structures) went ok I think, not as well as the other ones, but it was mainly java so shouldnt have done too badly i hope.

Went into work to sort a few things out, now just back chilling on the irwell!

As for work.. Well that went damn well too! Had a meeting about the companies IT roadmap.. and they have decided we need an IT helpdesk type person to handle the little user problems side of things.. Which is FECKING GREAT!! as I can concentrate on what I’m meant to be doing instead of piddling about with little user problems :)

Also, a new works phone contract and laptop may well be in the dealio!

Got my SUN interview coming up on the 24th, so need to get the old suit out, and book some travel. Then just got my java project to finish and were good to head into the next semester.

P.S. I want a paint ball gun.

//Matt

Database’s exam didn’t go as badly as i thought. Hoping ive passed it..

Connypoo’s and joejoe came back to the house after the exam.. So we all went down the pav, had a few drinks and a catchup. Simpson met us at the pav, then we went back to ours for a few more beers. Ended up staying up all night just chilling with Joe, watching house, scrubs and numb3rs. (just started watching numb3rs, tis good.. have a look. Anyone on our NET its on the NAS at 192.168.2.5)

Also wanted to buy a paintball gun, a decent one, Worked out EXACTLY what I wanted, and because of the great exchange rate with the US at the moment, managed to get everything for under 200 quid.
Then my dream was brutally taken from me… by the greedy sods at UPS!.. would have cost 260 Dollars to ship it!! nearly as much as the paint ball gun itself, and buying the same stuff in the UK is just as expensive as us prices + stupid delivery.

Ahh well, Maybe some other time.

Headed home today, met up with hana then crashed at home for a few hours (mmm home cooking!) Back at uni now.. and when I was home, I realized MY GREEN LASER HAS ARRIVED!.. packaging has never been ripped open so quickly (tho it was from china, so I may now have sars)

It’s pretty powerful, can see the beam!!

(maybe put pic’s up soon)

//Matt

Up late again revising for the next exam (database systems, 2pm tomorrow)

Bought some new tasty speakers yesterday!! went out after my exam. Got some floor standing TDL KV6’s They sound great! One has been dropped tho, it’s obvious as the foot is smashed, surrounding wood out of shape. As a result, it sounds noticabley quieter than the other. So im takeing them back, but will be swapping them for the same model. Not a great first time experience from ‘Richer Sounds’ Ahh well.. Back to the revision.

Sat round at Sam’s with the laptop laughing at the OSM test paper, as its pretty much what we had to do for real last night to get sam’s Linux server running!

Gonna get my own NAS sorted out later tonight, and routing and IPtables set up to the rest of the house. Student loan tomorrow! Thank god! New HDD FTW!

Anyway, back to a tad of revision… Going Asda later tonight for a few bits.. Anyone need anything? lol

//Matt