One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is time, or more specifically pace of life. British life seems to be so pressured and hectic, and I find it really easy to be drawn in to charging from activity to activity. So when the train is 10 minutes late to see those 10 minutes as “wasted” somehow.
The most notable exception to this in my life is Christmas Cake. For the last six years I have made a Christmas cake, and this year is no exception. It’s a very slow process. Everything about it is slow. You have to start the recipe the day before the main cooking, as the dried fruit has to soak overnight. The cake goes in the oven for at least four hours. Nothing else I’ve ever cooked (except perhaps a large Turkey) has come close to needing four hours in an oven. I suppose you sometimes leave meringue in the oven overnight, but that’s more drying than cooking.
But the best bit is that you cook the thing eight weeks before you eat it! So I made this year’s last weekend. You get it down every few days to feed it, but it basically just sits there doing its stuff for 8 weeks.
Even that’s not the end of the story! If you’re using marzipan, that has to go one a week before you ice it (so that the almond oil evaporates, and doesn’t leech through the icing.)
And of course the icing itself needs several hours – probably ideally a day or two – to dry out and set before you eat it!
Obviously there are shortcuts – you could make it, marzipan, and ice it in a weekend. But I don’t think it would taste half a nice, and for me that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun or enjoyable as slowly bringing it together over the winter months. It would be a yet another chore, rather than a delight.
Watching ‘ol Heston on the telly last week marinating his chicken for 36 hours doesn’t even come close. EIGHT WEEKS!!
I can honestly say that making the Christmas Cake is one of the highlights of the year for me, and I start looking forward to it in August or September.
Well, I had my first proper encounter with Voice over IP today. I’m on Skype, of course, but people really mean SIP/IAX and RTP when they speak about VoIP…
I have to say I am absolutely stunned. At 11 ‘o’ clock this morning I had never knowingly made a VoIP call, and had no immediate plans to. At 4.30 I had a software PABX with two softphone extensions (but they could have been real phones if I’d had the hardware), both of which rang in response to someone dialling my new 0845 number, and either could pick up the call and speak. Both extensions could also make out-going calls, quite possibly at the same time.
By far the longest part of the process was getting my PBX up and running properly, and that only took a couple of hours. My friend (and SIP provider) Gordon Henderson, at Drogon, set me up with a trial SIP and IAX account and 0845 number in about 10 minutes flat – one download of ZoIPer and I was up and running making/receiving calls on my PC. It does caller-id and everything. You try getting BT (or anyone else) to install a phone line and get an 0845 number up and running 10 minutes after you say you’d like it! Needless to say Gordon can do other numbers besides 0845, but he had a spare one to lend me. 🙂
This wasn’t enough for me, oh no! I want to be able to get lots of calls in on my 0845 and let my minions squabble over who answers it. Well, ok, so I don’t have any minions, but by logging into another PC I could pretend to be two people. So, I downloaded and installed Asterisk (a software PBX that can handle VoIP, and physical lines with the appropriate hardware) onto one of our Linux servers. That’s another 10 minutes gone (literally download, make, make install). I set it up to handle my two extensions, and straight away they could register and dial one another.
This was as simple as about 10 lines in the config files, saying here’s user 1, here’s user 2 (in sip.conf), oh yes and user 1 is on this extension number, and user 2 is on this one (in extensions.conf). Throw in the time spent reading the manual, and that was about another 30 mins.
The last bit took a lot more effort, namely allowing incoming/outgoing calls via the IAX account from Gordon. I eventually got it to answer incoming calls on the 0845 with its demo app. Not quite what I was after, but a start. Short step later was to get it ring my extension instead, and even shorter step was to ring both and let the first to pick up have the call. I could have left it there, but I really wanted the outgoing calls to work as well. 🙂
After a lot more faffing I finally cracked it – incoming calls make both extensions ring, and both extensions can make outgoing calls. Probably took another couple of hours (although I was doing other things at the same time). Happy bunny. And again, you try and install a hardware PBX by yourself, having never done one before, with the incoming/outgoing functionality I was after, in less than 2 hours. Impossible.
Of course Gordon normally provides an entire package, including PBX if you need one, all properly configured and supported – but this was really an experiment (and learning exercise for me!)
Upshot? I’m enormously impressed. The setup was 1,000 times quicker and easier than I could have imagined. I set up a telephony solution for our company in half a day. Oh yes, and the call quality is the same or better as normal phones. The line rental would be a few quid, I think. Of course my install is particularly straightforward, with no hardware phone lines to worry about – although Asterisk seems to deal with those fairly easily too. In the end my 3 config files were very short and easy – I’ll pop them down below just in case anyone else is trying something similar.
I didn’t have to change my asterisk.conf
sip.conf is where I set up my internal extensions. There was no need to use SIP internally and IAX upstream, but there were a couple of good reasons. Firstly, SIP can be a bit twitchy through a firewall and NAT, which doesn’t matter for internal phones but does matter for the uplink. IAX is much happier with NAT. Secondly, IAX is meant to be more network efficient, and as it’s going over our ADSL it seemed liked a good idea to use that there. Again on our internal network the bandwidth VOIP uses wouldn’t even register. You also probably don’t need many of the directives I’ve left in.
iax.conf has my link to the outside world, from Drogon.
The important bits are to register with the IAX provider, and then indicate how incoming and outgoing calls are managed.
It’s quite possible that you don’t need two separate entries here – the top one is handling incoming calls (user type), and the bottom is for outgoing
(peer type). The friend type is meant to allow both – as in my extensions in sip.conf, but I had trouble getting it to play nicely, and to be honest I gave up as soon as it started working.
This one says all numbers in the incoming context should dial both me and Ian (which is what the & does). It also says calls from the internal users should be handled such that calls to 1 go to me, to 2 go to Ian. Finally anything with two or more digits should go out on the IAX link.
I confess there’s some lines left it which I’m not entirely sure what they do, and could probably be deleted.. but as I said once it was working I was happy. In a production system I would probably want a stand-alone VoIP PBX, rather then running it on a server which is already doing enough, and I’d set up some QoS metrics on the switch (and router if I could) to prevent phone calls being destroyed by file uploads. If I was really exited I might put it on a VLAN.
The thing about blogging is that you can go for months without putting anything in, then you do one post and suddenly think of 101 other things to write about.
Anyway, I thought I’d do a little experiment on Facebook to see how various people responded to a random question I posted. Just for fun!
Because I don’t really know how long stuff stays on FB, I thought that I’d record it here for posterity (and that’s the second time today I’ve used that word!). Although I have taken the liberty of changing the grammar in places.
Should I stay or should I go?
Go where?
JA
I say go. Although there will be double, I say the more the trouble the better.
DB
If the question is one to ponder then I say stay and think for a while, go for a think, then postulate for a while.
MA
Is not one of the better Clash songs. Try London Calling or Spanish Bombs instead.
DM
Don’t leave me this way.
SA
Go definitely go go go go now now before its too late.
CKJ
It’s really an existential question and far too complex for me to possibly answer like this.
AT
Both; hire a double and after 2 hours see which one of you is having the most fun and then swap if you are losing out.
SM
Now?
CD
I should stay for the moment, you can always go later… but remember it’s so much harder to do the other way round. 😛
BD
Really brought a smile to my face.
I think my two favourite responses are Don’t leave me this way., which nicely picks up on the lyric reference but in a left-of-field way, and
Go definitely go go go go now now before its too late which appeals to my spontaneous side that I always suppress ‘cos I’m far too sensible.
Had I been answering I probably would have done so along the lines of DB.
I wonder if I’ll remember who the initials are this time next year? 🙂
They’ve got a link to the US Patent Office with the full details, and this includes a short explanation of why a single sensor doing true RGB is a good thing!
That’s it. The end of the Harry Potter series. Just finished Deathly Hallows. Now I know whether Snape was Ever-So-Evil, or double-agent extraordinaire.
I know whether Harry, Hermione, and Ron survive. Come to that I know whether ‘ol Voldy makes it, or is beaten. It’s probably no spoiler to say that at least one of these four names is no more by the end of the book.
I also know who (else) dies along the way.
And it would be brutally unfair to say anymore, especially as there’s no clue in the title of this post. Suffice to say I really enjoyed it, and intend to read it again in a few days time… this time savouring it all.
Wow – what a finish! I am seriously in awe of Russell T Davies and the writers of Dr Who. To have planted so much so early on (like at the start of the new Series 1). Makes me wonder what other unresolved bits and pieces are waiting to pounce on us.
And The Face of Bo. What can I say? I defy anyone to have seen that coming (although, in retrospect, I kinda think I could have). In that way, it’s a bit like Harry Potter. All the clues are there, and it’s kinda obvious after the event… but before hand, even though you know it’s coming, you still can’t spot it.
Was it planned from the start? It feels like it. But to put all that planning in without being certain anything more than series 1 would be filmed. Wow. It was clear (to me) that the You are not alone thing was about The Master – just had to be.
They still manage to catch me off guard too – who’d have thought Martha Jones would be (partly) bowing out and we’d get someone new? I knew she would be in the next series, so I didn’t pay it another thought, but now she’s off to Torchwood. Crazy (to quote King Louie).
The only downer is that my next fix isn’t until the Christmas special. That and the fact I only managed to watch up to episode 9 or so of Torchwood before it disappeared off the “TV on demand” thing. BBC iPlayer, don’t let us down!!!
Friends on Facebook will already know my broadband suffered an outage on Saturday. Well, actually it’s still out. The set-top box stopped responding at 06.50 on Saturday morning, and the usual prodding didn’t bring it back to life, so I did what any computing professional would do in this scenario – unplugged it from the mains, and plugged it back in.
Unfortunately, it didn’t actually work – instead of springing back into life, it sat there looking at me with all it’s LEDs and bar segments on. 88:88 is not what you really want to be seeing on your STB.
At that point I had a nasty feeling that it might have been in the middle of flashing it’s firmware or something (I didn’t actually bother to turn on the TV to see if there were any messages to this effect.. rebooting the STB is a fairly regular occurrence), but it was well and truly door-stopped.
Nice man from Virgin media is coming tomorrow to give us a new one (hooray), but in the meantime I’m rediscovering the ‘joys’ of dial-up Internet. I’d forgotten how painful and frustrating it is to have stuff trickling down at 56k. I’d never really minded about the spam coming in (my spam filter eats it before I see it), but when you see 60 messages coming down … oh…. so …. slowly … and none of them are for real. Arrggg.
Then there’s trying to just pop onto Google maps while you’re on the phone to someone – but no, doesn’t work. Grrrr.
I did manage to get a whole bluetooth GPRS thing going with my Samsung on Orange (a whole 115 Kbps too), but my contract doesn’t include any data, so that would work out even more expensive then the dial-up.
For what it’s worth, the magic was actually straightforward:
Pair phone with XP
Set the initialisation on the bluetooth modem that appears to
at+cgdcont=1,"IP","orangeinternet"
Set the number to dial to *99#
I found this info on various sites, such as this one.
Still, a useful reminded of the importance of anti-bloat on websites. MySpace is a particularly bad offender over dial-up, incidentally. It’s slow over broadband, let alone over a piece of wet string.
I never used to be able to see a guitar anywhere without starting to get itchy fingers – wanna play it, wanna play it!! I don’t know at what point it went away, but some point over the last 5 years my desire to play the guitar has waned.
To be sure when someone like KT Tunstall came along I had a minor relapse, but not the same craving I used to have. I think it was probably to do with having a baby, because (a) that left me too tired to do anything sensible, and (b) playing it would only wake him up, and the absolute cardinal number one rule of parenthood (early parenthood at least) is
DON’T WAKE THE BABY
One of the few times a blink is justified, I think. Actually maybe not, but I’ll leave it in for now*.
Anyway, we were away with out church last weekend, at Sneaton Castle, and the guy playing in our sessions had a gorgeous Taylor… and my fingers started itching!
He let me play it, so I had a luscious half an hour session of pure indulgence, just me and the Taylor. It was fab. And just this evening, it’s been another half an hour – maybe more – of hammering out power chords and worship songs and some of my own songs (had to blow the dust off those, must were written last millennium). Really really enjoyed.
Guitar playing James just might be back. 🙂
*Turns out <blink> isn’t standards compliant, so it’s come out. Probably for the best.
