In addition to hosting phone services for other people, I also host my own phone numbers (personal and business).  I prefer to not have different phones for each line, but I like any phone to be used for either number at any given time.  I haven't gotten around to setting up distinctive ringing for the different lines, but instead, our home computer audibly announces the caller's name and number, and, for the business calls, which menu choice they made.

Some of my customers have a hard time creating the space-efficient .gsm files for their voice menus, so I created a simple extension where they can call up the Asterisk server, and record the menu as they want it, and then it can be placed into their dialplan.  (The number of voice menus that are created are small enough so I haven't gotten around to making the system more robust, where it would automatically move the file into a customer accessible place (and keep track of which customer recorded which menu).

There are a number of tutorials for people trying to setup blacklisting for their Asterisk server, but they all seem to assume that there is only one user on the server, or at least all users want to share the same blacklist.

Since I host for multiple, unrelated people, they don't necessarily want to share the same blacklist, so I had to come up with a configuration that would work for all customers.

I've not been happy with any of the choices that are available for content management, but lately I've been warming to Drupal. Each system has its downfalls, and upgrades seem to be pretty bad on all of the ones I've used extensively (webgui, drupal, joomla).

After spending hours trying to get the HAL/FDI method to work, I resorted to modifying the xorg.conf directly, though I was able to only add a couple lines, since my current xorg.conf is basically empty, with everything being auto-detected.

The main difference that I wanted (from lots of other posted information) was that I liked the fdi method of configuring things (xorg.conf has always been a scary file to play with) and so I didn't want to have to hard-code everything, which means, as far as I could figure out, to not have a ServerLayout section at all since once I added that to get the touchpad to work properly, it broke everything else.

Some people have been talking about whether they think in blogging, as in: "this is so much fun, I should blog about it", or, "look how cute the kids are being, I should grab a camera so I can post it on flickr", etc.

I didn't particularly relate to that, but this morning I re-discovered a cipher book I liked as a kid, and thought it would be fun to go through some of it.  And then thought, I could write a script to do this for me, and then, maybe I should blog about that. hrm....

The IRS hasn't published their calculator yet, and I have been reading about lots of people trying to figure out what to do with line 70 on their 1040 (ie. the famous RRC that is causing probably more time wasted than was worth the money that was sent out last year.

So, I wrote a calculator this morning.  I went through a bunch of cases, so I think I got all of them, but of course, who knows, with all of the tax tricks, etc. if my understanding of the credit is how it actually works.

And if the IRS ever gets around to actually publishing their calculator, it will presumably be better than mine.  Have fun.

As I wrote earlier, I use worklog to keep track of my time.  I use some other scripts to help manage worklog's output, and now that I made one of the scripts work even nicer today, I figured I should post them.

I have been quite behind in my magazine reading, and this morning I caught up to August (2008 - at some points, it has been necessary to specify the year when saying how far behind I am).

There is an interesting article in Dr. Dobbs, by Scott Ambler, regarding methods of estimating costs of software development, and whether the typical, fixed price model is even ethical.

I think I have written before about DenyHosts, but this evening, it prevented somewhere around twenty thousand individual hosts trying to login to one of my servers. The hackers have gotten smarter - that they used to just try from one host, which was trivially blockable, even manually. But, thanks to denyhosts (and the fairly easily trackable behavior by the hackers), they think they get a couple chances to guess a password before being blocked. Note, that I say "think", because they actually don't get any, due to the way they are doing it.