A Life Without Compunction » Technical

Switching to Windows 7

Dan — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:01:04 +0000

So I’ve done the unthinkable. I have Windows 7 64-bit as my primary OS and Ubuntu Linux booting up in a VM. My reason for switching was business related and had nothing to do with OS preference. My Reasons:

I’m going to begin deploying some Exchange/Sharepoint solutions on our network and wanted to see how it really affects our end users.
I need to do some page layout over the next months and Linux does not have a good solution for this.

So my Windows 7 OS runs my mail and all tasks and I have Linux now solely as my development center. I’m working on a write up of the difficulties moving from Linux back to Windows 7 as well as the positives.

The one real nasty aspect of moving to Windows 7 is my bluetooth doesn’t work. I’ve tried everything outside of installing the 30-day trial Toshiba BT Stack to no avail. I can’t get any of my bluetooth devices to properly connect. I’m runing on an Asus G1S so if anyone has ideas of how to get bluetooth running properly. LMK.

And a rant against ASUS, for a laptop that came with Windows Vista, and was for gamers/high end users it seems logical to release Windows 7 drivers!!!

FreePBX: Remove Extension from Company Directory

Dan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:01:32 +0000

If you want to remove an extension from the directory with FreePBX, simply edit the file: /var/www/html/admin/modules/core/agi-bin/directory

On line 479, replace:

if (!empty($box["name"])) {

with:

if (!empty($box["name"]) && (substr($box["name"],1)!="(") && (substr($box["name"],-1) != ")")) {

Now you can simply set the Display Name of the extension you want removed from the directory to be enclosed in parentheses such as “(John Doe)”.

Since June 09

Dan — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:46:30 +0000

An update has been due on this site for a while now. And I do have some content coming up that may give this site a needed jump start. But in the meantime here’s some highlights:

I got an iPhone 3Gs. Still getting used to the device but it’s definitely been a boost for my connectivity and responsiveness. Let’s see if it will help my blogging too.
Relaunched My Conclusion with a new thrust and archiving old material. Worth taking a look. Should get interesting. And My Conclusion is also twittering in case you didn’t see.
Getting down to the wire on a big project but just waiting for a new logo and some imports and testing to be complete.
Gave OpenID a serious spin in the last few weeks trying to plug it into activeCollab. About 75% progress but still have a few issues to hammer out.
Going on vacation starting tomorrow for 3 weeks so maybe I’ll have more time to devote to my social life. We’ll see.

Firefox 3.0.10 slow on Ubuntu 9.04

Dan — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:22:56 +0000

Firefox has been taking about a minute to start up each time I load it and was underperforming. Granted I have a fair number of Extensions installed, I still expected more from it. Finally found something to speed things up. Here was the solution:

1.) Go to about:config
2.) Acknolwedge that “I’ll be careful, I promise!”
3.) Type “dns” in the filter box.
4.) Double click on the line network.dns.disableIPv6 to set it to true.

Firefox should be nice and snappy once again.

Tweets crawled on your website

Dan — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:26:22 +0000

Definite benefits to having your tweets show up on your website. I tweeted the following yesterday:

finished migrating from #trixbox to #pbxinaflash. Still not happy with my AgentCallbackLogin replacement, but it will have to do 4 now

Did a Google search today for “agentcallbacklogin pbxinaflash” (no quotations on search string) and saw my site sitting at #4. It’s not a huge term so easy to sit at that spot. But does show the value of having your tweets hit at least the frontpage of your website providing fresh content for the crawler.

Infostore 3 .deb and .rpm coming soon

Dan — Wed, 06 May 2009 04:28:26 +0000

Started working on an installer for Infostore 3 for Linux that would take care of all dependencies including setting up Adobe Reader, am about 70% of the way there and then will put it up on the Infostore page. It’s not native but will definitely make the install process easier.

Strange Dual Core CPU

Dan — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:10:34 +0000

As seen in my WHM panel

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntel
Processor #1 Name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz
Processor #1 speed: 3400.000 MHz
Processor #1 cache size: 2048 KB

Processor #2 Vendor: GenuineIntel
Processor #2 Name: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.40GHz
Processor #2 speed: 2400.000 MHz
Processor #2 cache size: 2048 KB

Glubble

Dan — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:22:52 +0000

I twittered not too long ago that I setup Glubble on my kid’s computer the other day. Glubble has a lot of online features for families such as an online “message board” where they suggest you move your kitchen bulletin board online, share photos, etc. However the main feature I wanted from Glubble was to allow my kids to visit only certain websites and block everything else. Not a lot of software allows you to do that.

Apparently version 1 of Glubble didn’t do this too effectively and I’m thankful that my experience came with v2. So far I have to say it’s done exactly what I want it to do. I can even see if my kid attempts to access a site they aren’t allowed to. If I want them to be able to access it I can easily enable it from my computer using the Glubble website. Not too bad.

I think what would be best is a free program that you didn’t have to make an account to run. But since there’s nothing out there with that spec, Glubble will just have to do.

I highly recommend the program to any parent who has a kid computer and wants to restrict access to the web. If you do use it, be sure to remove all shortcuts from the menu and desktop to Internet Explorer or other browsers. Eventually your kid will grow up and find their way around it. And when my daughter hits that stage … well I guess I’ll have to firewall her outgoing connections.

YouTube Network Ranges for Blocking

Dan — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:04:18 +0000

I needed to block YouTube for certain portions of the day to certain part of the network. However since at present I’m using pfSense embedded so I can’t install any add ons, and thus I was unable to block based on domain name. I spent the better part of an hour searching for their IP ranges.

Finally I found them! Putting them here for my easy reference:
64.15.112.0/20
208.65.152.0/22
208.117.224.0/19

Source: http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi-bin/as-report?as=AS36561

Ubuntu 8.04 on Toshiba Magnia SG20

Dan — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:34:30 +0000

I got Ubuntu 8.04 running on my Magnia SG20. Dropped it into an old Athlon XP system and installed with a USB cable plugged into the 2.5′ HD. If you are going to do this, make sure you isntall OpenSSH before moving the drive into the Magnia otherwise you won’t be able to get into your machine.

Now all I need to do is edit the LCD app from the Magnia SG20 Yahoo Group for my kernel and setup Shorewall and I have a greatly customizable firewall. Only bummer is there’s no extra ports so I can’t do a true DMZ.

The system is relatively snappy for being a Celeron 533.