I’m busy fixing up all my web properties at the moment but heres a little story about a CMS i discovered (Well actually Dan told me about it)

It’s the best modular CMS I’ve seen that is also easy for “users” to use. Dan tells me that it is also very easy to customize, although I haven’t tried that yet. I’ll be relaunching danielfaulknor.com with concrete5 (I also need to get my act together with samjmason.com)

Until next time!

When Asterisk loses connectivity, it can also affect the likes of PSTN fallback, not to mention Asterisk just outright behaves funny with DNS at times. The pdns-recursor package I’ve found works better than the likes of dnsmasq.

This screencast will open in an overlay. To close it, simply click outside of the video.

As always, if you found this useful, please leave a comment and introduce yourself!

See for yourself by going to your Elastix system and adding this in to the URL:
/admin/

You will see yourself presented with a new login box. Type in “admin” as the Username & Password.

Many people don’t know, or don’t change the Unembedded FreePBX password, so we will show you how to fix this issue.

This is the first of hopefully many screencast tutorials.

This screencast will open in an overlay. To close it, simply click outside of the video.

As always, if you found this useful, please leave a comment and introduce yourself!

1. FaceTime – It looks awesome, but c’mon .. WiFi only? I did video calling some 5 years ago now from my Motorola v1075, and I could call other Motorolas, other Sony Ericsson phones, Nokias, the works, and I didn’t have to be near WiFi. Their solution? We’ll make it an “Open standard” so others can also do wifi-only video calling. Sounds to me like a step backwards from what’s been done before, with the exception potentially of higher quality. Switching between front and back cameras? Yeah been there, done that (5 years ago), got the T-shit.
2. Multitasking – They’ve left it off the iPhone 3G which is a shame, I know that it doesn’t have the most RAM in the world, but I jailbroke mine and it works, albeit a little shaky on memory-intensive apps. Anyway it’s a little hypocritical to change your tune on Multitasking, after they’ve been saying for years now that it’s just a battery-suck that you don’t really need anyways. You know what else Apple have also been saying is a battery suck? Flash!
3. Flash Player – Sure it may drain the battery, and sure I can’t stand it, but I like the thought that if I want to run a video on my Cellphone, or browse a certain website, then I at least have the *option* of Flash, knowing fully well it may shorten my battery life. I don’t like the prospect that one mans idea of what I want takes precedence over my free choice.
4. Retina Display – Sounds nice, but it’s only marginally higher resolution than the Nexus One, and apparently at 12 inches it’s still not at the specs it’s being touted at. However, I don’t really care too much, it looks like a nice screen to say the least
5. A4 CPU – Essentially the same as the 1Ghz Snapdragon that powers the Nexus, so I wan’t blown away by it. Initial reports were that the iPhone4 had only 256MB RAM, but apparently the final shipping version does have 512MB, just like the Nexus One. Relatively moot point there I suppose

What is cool about it though:

1. HD video recording – There are other phones that do 1280×720 video recording, but not at the same framerate as the iPhone4. While it’s not a big leap or bound, the quality is certainly a nice, welcome improvement.
2. Video editing from the Phone – Who cares if it’s going to cost another $5-10 from the App Store, it’s just cool to be able to do it!
3. The phone redesign – It looks slick, no two ways about it, but there’s apparently already issues with the reception dropping out if you hold it wrong around the edge. Being the thinnest phone is also nice, but it’s about to be beaten by some Samsung device, apparently only by 1 or 2mm!

So I guess I saw what my existing iPhone 3G was able to do in comparison to the new one, and while decent video recording (Lets face it, the apps that do video on the 3G aren’t the best) is out, and so is video calling, the rest I can pretty much already do. There’s no big bonus reason for me to upgrade. Naturally, I went off and ordered a Nexus One that day. Here’s what I found about the ordering process:

1. You have to be within the US to order, so use this link to “fool” it: http://google.com/phone?gl=us
2. Shipping is free within the US for the Nexus One, so ship to a mail forwarder that’s in a state without taxes. I got stung with around USD$60 Sales Tax, so avoid it if you can.
3. When shipping using Shipito.com it was free for me to choose to have the phone insured, I just selected it from the dropdown box. It was only an extra couple of bucks for the expedited shipping so naturally I went that route. Shipito were pretty prompt, but delayed the whole process by around 24 / 36 hours in total. The shipping via Fedex only took around 48 hours: http://www.fedex.com/Tracking?action=track&tracknumbers=793638429235
4. Don’t forget you’re going to be charged GST on everything when the phone arrives at customs. It didn’t take long to clear, but I specifically asked them to hold it there for me so I could pay in-person and pick up the device at the same time. I got myself the car dock and the desktop dock too, so don’t forget GST is payable on them also.

So I’ve had the phone for a week now. What have I found? Likes and dislikes?

• Well the apps are all tiny compared with their iPhone counterparts. For some reason the download sizes are just smaller all around. Maybe it’s just me?
• The feel of the “SoftTouch” casing is awesome, it’s a real suede like feeling that’s smooth, but has just enough grip to stay nicely in your hand.
• Initially the Headphone controls didn’t work with the music application. Why, I’m not sure, but I only tried once, and it’s working now I have Cyanogenmod on the phone, so I don’t really care. I was also disappointed with the audio quality at first of the headphones until I took off the little cloth covers. I’ve since discovered they suck and you don’t need them, they just dampen the noise a lot and kill a lot of clarity and crispness. Don’t bother with them.
• Live wallpapers are freaking cool. From the standard, to leaves on water, to music waveforms, they’re awesome. They don’t use much battery life at all.
• Speaking of battery life, having a breakdown of what’s using the battery, how long it’s used the processor, and other things is a very welcome addition to a Smartphone! I dunno why it’s not been done before, but it should be standard!! I can see as a percentage of use since last full charge how much juice the display has sucked, how much battery has been spent on cellular standby, playing back music, wifi, or just the phone being in an idle-on state.
• The syncing with Google is awesome. I use Google Apps for all my domains, and having the emails pushed down (Just like the exchange emulation it does that I used on the iPhone) is pretty standard, but having the contacts and everything else syncing flawlessly is brilliant!
• Voice input is amazing. I’ve done things before like Voice Dialing (“Call dad mobile”), and basic voice commands like “Play Music”, but this takes it to a whole new level. It’s not just predefined things, but basically voice input pretty much anywhere there is a text box for you to type in to. It’s not quite perfect, and it won’t allow you to dictate a long email into it yet, but it’s still pretty good, and a nice direction for things to be going in!
• Having a full browser is wicked cool. I didn’t quite realize how crippled the iPhone browser was until I used this one. I used to loath having to look up addresses, for example when I was driving somewhere and wasn’t sure to go. Now with the Android browser, the browser can finally make use of the high-speed network!!
• The Android Marketplace seems a little empty by comparison. I’ve been able to pretty much find anything I want, but it’s clear there’s not as many apps as the Apple App Store, but to be honest most of the App Store apps are duplicates. There’s no need for a dozen flashlight applications which essentially all do the same thing.
• Did I mention the speed? Yeah I mentioned the browser speed but overall it’s just blisteringly fast and it’s so good!
• The buttons down the bottom are “different” from the iPhones one. It leaves more screen real-estate to do other things, and to be honest it took all of a days getting used to. It’s nice having the search button, the back button, and to be honest I’m really enjoying it. It’s far from the “too many button” syndrome I thought I would feel, or at least that Apple told me I would feel.
• The trackball is cool! It lights up when you receive a txt / email, it’s useful in games (Replica Island), it feels nice, and you can use it to basically navigate around everywhere if you don’t happen to have a touchscreen (Which I do).

Overall, I’m very, very pleased with my latest investment. Considering I just read about how Vodafone and Telecom are about to release a small army of new devices (Well Vodafone are at least), adding to the current ONE model that’s available on Telecom currently, it’s nice to know that Android is starting to take off in NZ.

I’ve read that Apple have ordered enough parts for 25,000,000 iPhone4′s, and that there’s a whopping total of 100,000,000 iOS devices out there. That’s insane! I also read that there’s now 160,000 new Android device activations per-day ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/celebrating-android.html ), which means that Android is certainly the fastest growing mobile OS platform, and will very soon take the reigns. It’s also worth noting that the 100,000,000 iOS devices also includes iPod Touches, but to be honest there’s also likely a small army of Android Netbooks helping the Android figures along too.

The numbers just go to show that people like choice, they like freedom, and it’s awesome to see it really starting to take off the way that it is!

I have no doubt that the iPhone is here to stay, and I’m sure the two will very happily co-exist in the mobile space, but as far as I’m concerned the competition is great and will only spur innovation, new features, and greater benefits for us as consumers.

The built-in Elastix Backups is great, but only if you remember to do it. I have the memory of a sieve so unfortunately I rarely remember.

The good thing is it’s now no longer difficult for you to backup a system automatically!

Because I don’t do any faxing or the likes on my systems, it doesn’t get backed up. This also won’t backup FOP2, your amportal.conf and other such things.

Here’s what it will do:

• All core Asterisk files in /etc/asterisk
• Custom sound files used in voicemails / recordings
• Voicemail boxes
• CDR records
• FreePBX custom system files
• Differential backups from the previous day, so you’re not wasting storage space and transferring large volumes of data regularly.

It’s enough for you to basically take a stock Elastix system and be back up and running in seconds.

Scenario: Your HDD died. You didn’t have any monitoring in place and so the SMART warnings went undetected. Your system is now down. Thankfully you have the ISO of Elastix, so you quickly throw it into the machine and reinstall (Or if you’re like me, you have a “vanilla” system ready on another HDD).  It boots the brand new Elastix installation and you’re now in a position to restore from your backups.
You now restore from your backups by simply copying everything in your last daily backup to your / folder, and it overwrites everything it needs to. You quickly reimport the .sql file into MySQL and you’re back, with minimal disruption.

1. The script
2. The prep work
3. Adding it to your crontab (So it works automatically of course)
4. Testing
5. Password-less logins
6. More testing = Success!
7. Restoring

Here’s how you do it:

1) The script

#!/bin/sh
# Version 0.1
# Written by Josiah Spackman - www.c2s.co.nz

# Run on the client machine that you want to be backed up to another server
# Set the local SQL server details. Pretty generic across all Elastix, so hopefully your MySQL port isn't public
MSQLU="root"
MSQLP="eLaStIx.2oo7"

# Set the destination username and servername
DSTUSER="backupuser"
DSTHOST="destination.backupserver.com"
DSTFULLDIR="/home/backupuser"
# We want the Hostname of the current box so we can backup multiple boxes and easily distinguish them with as little modification to this script as possible
# NOTE: You need to create this Dir on the remote host prior to the first backup run
HOST="elastixtest"

# Set the local tempdir to store the files in. Default is usually sufficient
TMPBACKUPDIR="/tmp/asteriskbackup"

# Setting the day
DAY=`date +%a | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`

case $DAY in
  sun ) PDAY=sat ;;
  mon ) PDAY=sun ;;
  tue ) PDAY=mon ;;
  wed ) PDAY=tue ;;
  thu ) PDAY=wed ;;
  fri ) PDAY=thu ;;
  sat ) PDAY=fri ;;
esac

# Setting options for rsync to run with
OPTS="-aHL --link-dest=$DSTFULLDIR/$HOST/$PDAY/ --delete --stats"

# Copying everything locally and doing it all in one go
mkdir -p $TMPBACKUPDIR/etc/ $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/spool $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/lib/asterisk/sounds $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/www/html/admin/modules/core
cp -Rs /etc/asterisk $TMPBACKUPDIR/etc/
cp -Rs /var/spool/asterisk $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/spool/
cp -Rs /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/custom $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/lib/asterisk/sounds/
cp -Rs /var/www/html/admin/modules/core/etc $TMPBACKUPDIR/var/www/html/admin/modules/core/

# MySQL Dump so we have all parts of the server
mysqldump --add-drop-table -h localhost -u$MSQLU -p$MSQLP -A > $TMPBACKUPDIR/database.sql

# Running rsync now
rsync $OPTS $TMPBACKUPDIR $DSTUSER@$DSTHOST:$HOST/$DAY/

# Cleaning up afterwards, no point in keeping the database or other links...
rm -rf $TMPBACKUPDIR

Now here’s how you use it:

Copy all of that text and save it as /root/backups.sh using your favorite editor

2) The prep work

Change a few values, namely the DSTHOST, DSTUSER and DSTFULLDIR.

You need to specify the full directory where the files are stored remotely, usually this is just the home directory.

Now we’re going to give it execute permissions:

chmod +x /root/backups.sh

3) Adding it to your crontab (So it works automatically of course)

As root, run:

crontab -e

Add in the following line by pressing “i” to “insert” text:

0 1 * * * /root/backups.sh

This will run the backup every night at 1AM

To save and quit, write:

:wq

Then press enter

4) Testing

Run a test backup, by using:

sh /root/backups.sh

See if it runs OK.

Chances are it’s going to fail. This is because you need to remotely create the “host” directory. Example:

You’re backing up a machine called AcmeInc, you want to create a directory on the destination backup server called “AcmeInc” first, and then it will do the rest. This should be the same value as $HOST, remember it’s case sensitive.

Now that you’ve got your directory on the server, run it again:

sh /root/backups.sh

It should do a successful initial run.

But it doesn’t stop there.

5) Password-less logins

Up until now it’s been prompting for your password. This isn’t going to work if you’re trying to run the job automatically via a scheduled cron job, because naturally you’re not going to be around at 1AM (Or at least you shouldn’t be).

We’re going to create password-less logins with:

ssh-keygen -N '' -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Now you should have /root/.ssh/id_rsa.pub so run this to see the contents

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Now you want to copy that and on the server you’re backing up to, you want to edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Put in the contents of the id_rsa.pub file.

Now, we’re going to secure it down just a little more:

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Great stuff, you’re almost there!

6) More testing = Success!

Now if you run:

sh /root/backups.sh

It should complete successfully, and not ask you for a password!

What we’re now going to do is time-warp forwards a day and make sure it’s doing the differential transfers correctly. Login to your backup server and rename the folder so that the day is the previous days. For example if today is tuesday, then rename “tues” to “mon”. The day is always the first 3 chars of the day name. Easy enough yes?

Now, login to your server and make a change of some description, perhaps even create a dummy Extension, just so that some of the files will change.

Re-run the script and it should tell you it’s completed happily and it should only take a *very* short time to run, under 7 seconds for me on a barely used system.

If you see an error such as:

--link-dest arg does not exist: mon

This means your absolute path is not correct. Double-check your home dir and the DSTFULLDIR variable in the script.

7) Restoring

It’s all well and good to have a flashy system like this, but if you don’t know how to restore, it’s relatively useless. Thankfully it’s incredibly easy to restore!

Grab the contents of the last “day” that you backed up, for example yesterdays backups and save them in /root. We’ll use Tuesday as a reference. Run this on the PBX server you’re wanting to restore:

scp -r user@backup.server.com:~/hostname/tue/ /root/
cp -Rvf /root/tue/asteriskbackup/* /
mysql -u root -peLaStIx.2oo7 < /root/tue/asteriskbackup/database.sql
/etc/init.d/mysqld restart
amportal restart

However, it’s going to prompt you for each file, so you might want to edit /root/.bashrc and remove the line:

alias cp='cp -i'

It is basically forcing you each time to answer “y/n” to the cp command, even if you don’t want it to. You then need to either log out and back in again, or you could just run:

su -

Re-run the cp command and anything after it and you should now be back up and running!

As always, I’m open to feedback, comments and suggestions. If this has helped you in any way, please just leave a brief message and say Hi!
This has also been posted here: http://blogs.elastix.org/en/2010/06/offsite-differential-nightly-backups-for-elastix/

The flip side is that it has also increased the amount of people who are “being heard”. That in itself is not a bad thing at all, in my opinion, however the problem lies in the fact that people state their opinion as fact.

Recently I joined a Facebook group for John Key. I figure, what better way to stay informed about this countries political news? I was shocked to see just how many mis-informed people were screaming all over the place, usually with some of the worst grammar or spelling you can possibly imagine. Then, aside from them stating their mis-informed opinions as fact, there was this tone in so many posts that the person was right, and simply not interested in listening to what anybody else had to say.

So why is having an opinion a bad thing?

Granted, you’re reading the blog right now of a similar person. I very frequently get worked up about issues, however I would also like to believe I’m slightly different. I (would hope that I) look at the “story” from more than one angle, that I’m educated about the topic I’m discussing and providing my opinion on  (Or if I’m not educated I’m asking questions so I can become educated), and I’m also happy to be corrected in the instance I’m proven wrong, or rather that somebody else is proven more “right” than I am.

The issue I see is when people state their opinion as fact, I can think of a couple of examples to go along with this:

1) On a technology forum I’m a member of, there is a regular poster who is relatively well-respected amongst the other regulars. This person is generally quite knowledgeable, however when this well-respected member is unsure about something, he doesn’t say.
We get fact mixed up with opinion, and unfortunately for this character, when he states an opinion on a subject he’s not informed about, it usually misses the mark, badly. This can be disastrous if you’ve asked for technical help, and somebody is telling you the wrong thing!
Imagine going to your mechanic, asking what sort of oil should go in your car, and they say “Well it’s a Hybrid card, so you could just put water into it instead of oil”. How much damage could that then cause if you happen to do as instructed. Better still, what if you go home and before doing-so tell your friends on Facebook or Twitter about this great new way to save money by using water in your engine instead of oil, and because of the way social networking works, you start this domino effect of people who decide to try it. Imagine now your mechanic tells you “Look mate I’m not entirely sure, I don’t often work on Hybrids. What I would guess you can use water, because of this other factor here. However, I’m just taking a guess, you should get a second opinion”. How much more would you respect your mechanic for being honest with you, and admitting “Hey I’m only human and my experience in the field ends here”.

2) When the masses get to have an opinion, such as I’ve recently seen on the Vector Fibre website. People are asked to have their say as they vote “Should we get Fibre to the door”. The problem is that roughly 9/10 of the things people state are grossly mis-informed, yet they state them as fact. Here’s a prime example:

Sorry Jordan, you’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Coppers gaming capabilities. High-speed doesn’t equate to less latency. Latency is quite likely affected by a myriad of other things, especially when playing internationally. When playing nationally, I can frequently get 10 millisecond ping times, so data takes 10 milliseconds to get from my computer, across New Zealand to the gaming server, and back again. I’m on Telecom Big Time, and not on an upgraded roadside Cabinet.

Lets look at the next down the list:

Sorry Miranti, Fibre doesn’t mean you’ll have instant web sites any more than ADSL does. Fibre is literally the difference between half a second vs 1 second for a website to display, due to varying technical reasons I won’t go into. If you’ve got “slow” websites, then get yourself a full-speed broadband plan, and fix your PC, don’t blame ADSL.

Because I’m on a roll, lets have a look at one last post on the Vector Fibre comments page:

Hi Robert, you would be talking about the likes of England right? Where the Govt has just proposed a similar scheme to our Govt to provide broadband to homes? Except they’ve got a time-frame similar to what Telecom Chorus in NZ have set, the end of 2011? Telecom Chorus in NZ have the goal of 10-20Mbps, with the current average being around 14-16Mbps I believe at the time of writing. Do you know how incredibly fast the English Govt is dedicated to bringing to their country? 1Mbps. That’s right, just 1 megabit. Sounds like a step backwards to me, but sure thing, if that’s what you really want?

So as you can see it’s all too easy for people to state opinion as fact. Of the 25 comments on that page, just two were “on the money”! One was from a “Software as a Service” provider, who has created web applications, and the other was just a generic comment about technology improving that was more a statement was “not wrong” than it was “correct”.

That’s a lot of mis-informed people having “their say” about something they clearly know nothing about!

Is this a bad thing?

I’m all for the right to an opinion, as you can no doubt tell I have a very strong opinion on specific topics. I regularly state my opinion as fact, usually because it’s something I’m well-informed about.

Because I like scenarios, I’ll ask you this: Can you imagine asking your mechanic for advice on renovating your bathroom? Sure your mechanic may have done their own home renovations here and there, but at the end of the day their advice doesn’t supersede advice that you can get from somebody else such as a qualified and well-educated bathroom specialist, nor does it really make the mechanic qualified to make comments about how the Govt should invest in fixing up “leaky homes” does it? The problem is tracking down these bathroom specialists because they are so rare.

Food for thought

So how do we wade through all these varying opinions, many of which are obviously grossly mis-informed and half the time downright incorrect?

How do we know when we are “well informed” on a topic, or educated about something? I feel the state of broadband in NZ (And fibre to the home) is something I’m well informed on, because even though I have no qualifications, I live and breath it for 10+ hours a day. What about a Uni graduate who’s just done Computer Science, but never seen broadband outside of their own home connection?

How do we battle the rapidly growing trend that because people have learned to use a keyboard, they suddenly their human right to state their opinion as fact to all who hear?

How do you tell the difference between fact and opinion? Is it the number of page views, or “likes” that a Facebook status update gets?

How do you educate the masses? Showing them “Hey you were close, but still off the mark” as well as “Dude you’re totally wrong, reality is over there at the opposite end of the scale”.

Is there a way we can simply shut up people who have no idea, yet rant on and on like they do? Going back to John Keys Facebook page, the amount of negative comments on there from people, again most of whom are grossly mis-informed, is terrible? What happened to the days when we built each other up, both as a country, and as the human race?

Is there a way we can educate people, and to show them it’s OK to have an opinion, that it’s not what was said, but rather how it was said?

Is there a way we can build up a spirit of encouragement, where we get alongside people and build them up, rather than pulling them down at the first chance we get? New Zealand is fast discovering it actually deserves the badge of “Suffering from Tall Poppy Syndrome“, but I fail to see why so many people wear that badge proudly.

Is it possible to show people that it is possible to have something constructive to say, rather than just destructive comments?

Can people be shown that just because they have a keyboard and a monitor to hide behind, that doesn’t negate the fact that there are real people at the other end of the internet connection?

I’m reminded of the phrase “It is better to let somebody think a fool of you, than to open your mouth and prove it so“.

As always I’m more than interested in any feedback or comments that people have around this topic, please feel free to have your say, though constructive comments are appreciated over all else.

What I can appreciate is the quality of the Mac hardware. From the iPhone to the Magic Mouse to the Macbook, the hardware is *nice*. Sure you can compare it to similar models from the likes of Dell, Toshiba, HP or Asus and it generally works out marginally more expensive, but what I’m getting at, is that there are some very valid reasons why you would want to (Or why I wanted to) get one over a traditional windows-based machine.

This isn’t about to become a windows-bashing exercise, but my thoughts on some of the good and the bad around my new Macbook.

Note: I’ve already noticed that a newer model is out in April, I’ve only had mine 2 months, it must have just come out after I purchased mine. That said I bought mine from PBTech instead of from Apple or Magnum Mac, and got mine for just under $1500 Incl GST. The improved graphics card would have been a nice bonus, but I’m not complaining.

I’ll look at the Hardware first.

The single-sheet glass touchpad is so nice, for me it was essentially like having an iPhone as a touchpad, and the two-finger scroll, pinch to zoom, things like that. It’s a nice quality touchpad, that you very quickly adjust to. Somehow, I’ve not once had an accidental mis-click from resting the palms of my hands on it, though I’m certain it happens semi-regularly as I have that issue with almost every other laptop.

The screen is very nicely balanced compared to the rest of the laptop, when you open it you don’t have to hold down the base as you do with so many other laptops. How this is accomplished, I’m unsure, but it lifts so well and it holds its position no matter where you stick it, half closed, standing upright, wherever.

The Magic Mouse is an absolutely awesome mouse, being able to scroll up, down, left, right, and it’s just such a nice mouse. Being bluetooth is great because it means that I don’t have to worry about having a dongle, even though you can get the Micro receiver mice.

One of my favorite features is the mag-lock AC Power adapter. Having it magnetized is awesome, the number of times I’ve had it get pulled out, rather than place strain on it, I can see it saving both the laptop motherboard AND the power adapter, it’s something that *all* laptops should have! Seriously an incredibly useful feature. A few times it’s even saved the laptop from flying off the couch.
My family goes through a fair few laptops, and the most common reason for them failing is the power adapter, where it plugs in to the laptop. It’s happened now on a couple of Acers, an HP, an Asus, so none are immune to it.

The battery life on it is freaking awesome, I’ve done over 4 hours of solid 3D gaming on battery, using WiFi and Bluetooth, and it still had some juice left in it. That’s crazy! I rarely shut the device down because it resumes from standby instantly, and can stay in standby for a day or two and the battery barely takes a hit.

I don’t know what it is about that Keyboard either, but it’s just plain nice to use!

The LED screen is absolutely stunning. It’s very bright, looks great in all light, and I’ve never seen such a nice screen on any laptop as this.

Hardware = 10 / 10

Then we get to the software

To be honest the Mac OS is nothing super special. One thing I find is that more and more I’m doing less and less in the OS and more and more in the browser itself.

It starts up nice and quick, shuts down fast, it behaves well with respect to asking for Administrative privileges unlike Windows. It’s basically on par with how well Linux does it, only asking for the password when it needs it, when you could potentially be hosing the whole system.

I use Chrome on Windows, Linux & now MacOS, so I don’t really care for Safari, though it shares a lot of similarities with Chrome, it’s certainly a better browser than IE.

Quicktime is nothing short of a PITA which I can’t stand, but installing some random add-in that I found allowed me to play back some non-default-supported codecs and formats such as MKV video. VideoLAN Client also does the same job.

It works nicely with networking too, potentially better with Windows shares than Windows itself. Most of the time when I access my Win7 Desktop, 3/4 the shares are open, but theres 1/4 that need a password. If I’m accessing it from any other windows device they usually just fail. From MacOS I was able to easily hit a button and authenticate with the correct Username and Password details.

Installation of applications is nice, mostly it’s just “drag and drop” to the Applications folder. Same for uninstallation, just drag it to the trash.

It’s also nice not to have to worry about the likes of Anti-Virus or Spyware. While I’m not saying Macs are vulnerability free, it’s still nice.

The way things tie in is also quite nice, like the ability to drag an image from the browser to the desktop just saves it.

Parallels is also pretty cool, albeit a bit slow. The system really needs a little more than 2GB RAM to be fully happy running Parallels without taking a decent performance hit. Lucky for me I don’t need to use Parallels, as everything I do there are Mac-native apps for, or it can be done from the browser.

It’s not an issue opening the likes of windows stuff such as MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint files, and I must admit that iWork is pretty nice. Using Keynote was relatively simple, fast, and the output options are great such as to a Video File, or PDF. +1 to the score there!

Then there’s the stupid things.

If you’ve got multiple monitors, and you thought it was bad in Windows having the Start menu on the wrong window, you should try a Mac. Having the top application menu on the wrong window is even worse! It was simply not well thought-out.

Tried taking a screenshot? Who opens the “Preview” application to do that? Honestly?

There’s a few other stupid things like that, but lets just say that with all it’s nice features, there’s just as many dumb things too.

I would liken it to a Linux distro with some more spit n polish, but after using the latest Ubuntu 10.04, I don’t even quite think it’s on-par with that.

So, while it’s nice in some places and rough in others, all I care about is the ability to load a Browser, so I have to admit I’d rather have the likes of Ubuntu Linux 10.04.

Overall

Things work quite well. The package as a whole is great, and things generally tie in quite well.

To be frank I’d probably only buy Macbooks for laptops, though I like the ability to upgrade Desktops too much to buy a Mac desktop machine. The quality of the hardware is the big thing for me, and it’s a real big thing! It truly is top-notch.

I’m not so sure about the rest, but thankfully for me it doesn’t matter terribly much. It’s not that much of a learning curve compared to what most people think, and to be honest you could sit down most semi-literate people and they’d have no worries. Of course if you were to take your grandma or those people who for some reason can’t deal with change, they’d naturally throw a wobbly about the minor differences. However, they’re just that, minor differences.

Should you buy a Macbook? Yeah, definitely. Don’t expect it to be identical to Windows, but if you can get over that you’ll really enjoy them. I’m yet to find somebody else who’s used my Macbook who hasn’t liked it, when most of them come from a windows background. Should you stick with MacOS on the hardware? To be honest you could install Windows 7 or Linux on to it and probably just as happy either way, if there was no way you could live without Windows. Seems a bit silly because it’ll cost you a fair bit, and if you were going to go with a Mac you might as well use Mac software and make it work for you, but again, it’s realistically a small detail.

I would however be interested in running a small business from Macs, with a Mac server, however for me I’m happy with Google Apps for email etc, it works well enough for me.

As always the usual disclaimer applies, and the last thing I’m looking to do is to get into a debate with Mac / Windows / Linux fanboys in any way, shape or form. That said if you have a genuine question I’d be more than happy to answer it.

Cheers

Chill.

I can safely say it was well worth the money. The support was top notch and Joe really knew his stuff.

In under an hour, we have a system that will let us bill customers for their calls in to your PBX, for example if you were doing a Helpdesk / Support-style offering to your customers. Because it’s for regular support customers (Not once-off customers), the first time they call in it will prompt them for their PIN. After that, it will remember their PIN based on the incoming Caller ID.

I’ve also been encouraged to do this write-up on the process of billing for inbound calls with A2Billing. While it’s not the most straight-forward setup, once explained you should have a fair idea on how it works and how to modify it. The A2Billing guys have been nice enough to let me post up this How-To for everybody else to enjoy! Don’t forget if you need assistance at any stage, head on over to http://www.star2billing.com and contact their sales team, they’ll be most happy to assist with this sort of setup.

This has been moved to here: http://forum.asterisk2billing.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7741

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Google Wave has been in private-beta status since Google I/O 2009, and one year later it’s being opened to the public.

Google Wave is a realtime multi-user combination of both Instant Messaging, Email and Document collaboration service. Basically it means that as you write, the other people who are in the Wave with you (Think of it like a chat conversation) see what is being typed as it happens.

So, how do we get started?

If you already have Google Apps for your Domain, you can easily enable this feature for all of your accounts.

To enable this, simply login to your Google Domain dashboard:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/Dashboard

Obviously adjust yourdomain.com to your actual domain.

It will probably prompt you for your password.

When you’re logged in, you should see a list of of all your enabled services, such as Email, Calendar etc

You want to click on “Add more services” which is just above the enabled services.

You’ll be taken to a new screen where you can select the service you wish to Add to your domain, in this case you want to select Wave.

Anyways, follow your nose a little, but one useful thing that I found was the ability to change the url you access your domains Waves from, much like you can with mail. For example, instead of using:

https://wave.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/

You can have:

https://wave.yourdomain.com/

Much better!

To do this, all you need is to add a CNAME record from wave.yourdomain.com to ghs.google.com

Then, back in your Google Apps Dashboard, if you click on Google Wave, it’ll take you to the subpage to edit the Wave settings for the domain. The first option is: Web Address

Click on Change URL, then enter in your custom URL just as you’ve set it up with your DNS provider.

All done!

Stay tuned as I look to migrate blog hosts to my own provider, so I can start playing around a lot more with Wave and other fun things.

As always, if this has helped you, please leave me a quick message just to say Hi.

Cheers

Chill.

First off, you will want to start with a blank Linux system if you can. If not things could get messy

Run this command to install all the required tools:

www:~/apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server mysql-client php5-mysql build-essential

Now, enable mod_rewrite

www:/# a2enmod rewrite

Switch to /var/www:

 www:/# cd /var/www

Next, run this command (modified for your use) to create the directory structure (domain in this example is blog.home.volturi.co.nz)

www:/var/www# mkdir -p nz/co/volturi/home/blog/web/pub

If your domain was blog.google.com the command would be:

www:/var/www# mkdir -p com/google/blog/web/pub

Next you need to create the file /etc/apache2/drmap.c with the following content:

#include stdio.h
#include string.h
 
#define BUF_SIZE 4096
 
int main(void) {
  char host[BUF_SIZE];
  char *pos;
  while(fgets(host, BUF_SIZE, stdin)) {
    pos = host + strlen(host) - 1;
    if(*pos == '\n')
      *pos = '\0';
    while(pos = strrchr(host, '.')) {
      printf("%s/", pos + 1);
      *pos = '\0';
    }
    printf("%s\n", strcmp(host, "www") ? host : "");
    fflush(stdout);
  }
  return 0;
}

This code will do the mapping required for dynamic vhosts.

Now compile drmap

www:/etc/apache2# gcc drmap.c -o drmap

Now, replace /etc/apache2/sites-available/default with the following:

RewriteMap drmap prg:/etc/apache2/drmap

RewriteEngine On
# Global directory aliases
RewriteRule ^/icons/(.*)$ /usr/share/apache2/icons/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^/phpmyadmin(.*)$ /usr/share/phpmyadmin$1 [L]

# Catchall vhost mapping
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /var/www/${drmap:%{HTTP_HOST}}/web/pub/$1

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

Don’t forget to restart apache!

www:/# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Add the following to the hosts file of your client:

10.124.24.34 blog.home.volturi.co.nz

Of course replace the IP with the IP of your server, and the domain with the domain that you setup.

Now load up blog.home.volturi.co.nz in your browser.

You’re all done!