Zen with Xen + a terrible perl program

I know I am very late to the Xen party. I try to stay on top of the life changing software, but there have just been so many new things out there over the past two years or so. I tried running a Xen kernel a while back under fedora core 6, but there were serious problems with xen and the ivtv kernel module driving my pvr500. I was using that for my mythtv backend, which the wife had gotten used to. Guess which had to go. FF >> 2007. I am priming my hardware for a complete replacement, and have already ebayed the tuner card. I figured what the heck; I have a free afternoon. Why not install a xen kernel, and experiment? Good times. Between xen and perl I blew the weekend. I started to write a screen scraper for surfthechannel.com but I got bored. Here is what I have so far….

Continue reading Zen with Xen + a terrible perl program

I am using rsync.net for backups now.

I was using the included backup application that came with OS X, and their online .mac backup solution, but now that my .mac subscription is dead and done, I have decided to go with rsync.net for those few files that I absolutely cannot lose. For just under $6 US a month I get 3 GB of offsite storage that I can access via any of the ssh flavors (ssh/scp/sftp), rsync, or my personal favorite rsync over ssh. It was really easy. After I signed up I just put my public key up, then ran something like…
rsync -azvrpg –progress -e ssh backup [email protected]:/username/dir
This basically says sync the directory named backup on this machine with a directory of the same name inside of /username/dir on the machine myserver.rsync.net, and oh yeah use the lovely encryption that ssh affords us. I’ll probably make a cron to do this for me once a day/week tomorrow.

didx.org api

didx.org offers wholesale only did numbers and peering service solutions for ITSPs. The per DID rate is set by the DID owner and thus varies. US DID’s average at about $4.50 per month with 5000 included incoming minutes. The best part about this service is the fact that they have a working api. Here is my code for using their api, based on their examples.

1) getdids.pl

This small perl program basically takes two arguments, country code + area code, and returns available DID’s that match that pattern. To view all DID’s availabe for a certain country code simply pass -1 as the area code. Make sure you replace the user and password variables with your username and password.

2) getdidcost.pl

This program takes one argument, the did that you want to order, and returns all associated costs. Again make sure you replace the authentication variables.

Asterisk 1.2.1 Tiger installer

I finally got a minute to finish the Asterisk 1.2.1 installer for Tiger. I am uploading it now and you can get it here.
md5 = ae04a2dc289735dd068936200434b6da

NOTE: Bruno pointed out that the path in the readme is wrong it should be /opt/local/asterisk/usr/sbin/asterisk not /opt local/asterisk/sbin/asterisk. This version doesn’t include the asterisk-addons, or asterisk-sounds packages. I hope to have these included later this week. For now please test, and enjoy.

UPDATE:
I just finished packaging a version that includes asterisk-sounds. You can get that version here.
md5 =5d5006af4b5b960525398e638f9a4a9b

I need help from the community to make it better, please post suggestions. Enjoy.

One must never stop learning.

I’ve decided that I must become a better web developer. I set of over the Christmas weekend to start learning php. After about two hours down that road I discovered Ruby On Rails, and the next twelve hours of development time were scheduled. A few hours later I discovered AJAX, after glancing through months of slashdot articles and not really knowing what it was. I made my first page using both techlologies today. I am hooked.