This one almost slipped by: another classic Joel on Software: “
“A management consultant at Bain wrote me a nice email, that included the following sentence: … I didn't understand a thing he wrote.”
An excellent riff on the management par-a-dig-m of the day.
I installed HylaFAX yesterday on a Fedora Core 4-based staging server, in preparation for installing on-site at a client. Installation was pretty easy, thanks to the clear RTFM provided on the website's documentation links. Then, I needed to test remote access to the server, so I installed PDFCreator and WinPrint HylaFAX, a Windows printer driver that prints to the HylaFAX server, on a WinXPPro workstation and confirmed I could create PDFs and “print” a fax directly out of Windows. Again, installation was pretty easy and configuration straight-forward. Now, to figure out where the errors could crop up – network disconnection, bad fax numbers, no answer – and ensure I understand where they appear and how to notify the operators about them.
Last night's meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group was great. Computerborough's Tim Lind demonstrated TrixBox, the CentOS-based distribution that integrated FreePBX, Asterisk and SugarCRM into a one-stop-shop for SOHO and SMB telephony needs. A surprise guest at the end of the evening topped it all off. Read Bill Sconce's summary of the meeting here.
U.S. agency recommends e-voting paper trail.
(InfoWorld) – “The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recommended that the U.S. government require touch-screen electronic voting machines to include independent audit technology, such as printouts.”
We can't just let the computer count the votes and then recount the votes with no feedback to the voters and no accountability nor audit trail. The HAVA act was well-intentioned, but throwing computers at the problem just makes the problem bigger and more efficient. Let's hope the new Congress will make some rational modification to the voting system.
Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer points to “My WSJ debate with Scoble about innovation & Microsoft.” He and Scoble are friends, and I enjoyed the friendly tone.
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.
For December’s meeting, Tim Lind of Computerborough will present TrixBox, the CentOS-based distribution for running the Asterisk PBX software, formerly known as “Asterisk @ Home.” Trixbox (http://www.trixbox.org) is an open source PBX product that allows one to setup a full featured telephone system with extensions, personal voice mail, auto attendant and many, many more features within their home or office. Tim Lind of Computerborough has installed it many times and is using it on a daily basis within his company. Tim will show us around the configuration, and show some of the nifty things that can be done with it. Tim is a Red Hat Certified Engineer, A+ Certified Technician, Microsoft Certified Professional and is also Network+ certified. Tim has been using Linux since 1997 when he got bored with Windows and runs his business almost exclusively on open source products.”
January’s meeting falls on the first, so we’ll likely skip the month’s meeting. However, stay tuned for some exciting meetings coming up in 2007! Tentatively, we hope to have Andy Bair present Digital File Carving Forensics and Matt Brodeur talk about PGP and help us with a key-signing early in the year.
More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.gnhlug.org.
Columbus Day holiday gave me the chance to set up a MythTV back end. It was a good chance to see how complicated it was to set it up (not hard). But sitting around the office to watch TV was no fun. So, the trick was to cobble together another machine to run the front end in the entertainment center in the living room. Thanksgiving Day weekend gave me the time to work on it.
A ThinkPad A31p served as the front-end machine. “Lucky” is over four years old and has fried USB connections, a dead wireless card and a dead backlight — perfect for repurposing. The display was a Samsung 23″ LCD via a VGA connection. A remote control made by Phillips and a USB-based IR receiver was included with the WinTV PCR-150mce thats in the backend digitizing the videos. Like the back end, I followed Jarod Wilson's Fedora Core MythTV HOWTO. only installing mythfrontend rather than the entire mythtv-suite. Installation was a piece of cake.
The gotcha (and the good reason this was saved for a weekend) was configuring the video. The ThinkPad A31p has a built-in ATI Radeon FireGL Mobility 7800 M7 with VGA, S-Video-In and TV-Out. While ATI supplies proprietary drivers, there are several Open Source projects that support many of the features. The trick was working out the combination of them that produced the optimal video. Laura and I watched “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” last night, it was a bit like a stop-action flick, probably about 10 frames per second. Today's hacking involved learning more than I wanted about xorg.conf, the radeon driver, X, DRI, DRM, Xv
Some other neat links that helped me along: unlike many Open Source (and proprietary!) underdocumented applications, MythTV has a remarkable User Manual
The remote control has good pointers for configuring here
here, and here.
Things still left to do: configuring ACPI to leave the laptop running while closed.
A review of the MythTV-enabled distribution KnoppMyth in the article “Linux as a Media Centre:”
“First impressions… Wow… I have played with Windows Media Centre before, concluding that it was an overpriced clunky frontend for Windows Media Player aimed at no market in particular and ultimately doomed for failure. This was another kettle of fish altogether.”
In “A Costly Addiction, ” Lawrence Lessig says the debate over Net Neutrality is a lot deeper than whether the telecoms/videocoms/internetcoms get to deliver whatever kind of service they choose by arbitrarily limiting competition to their monopolized wires:
“Of all the things that have not gone according to the framers' plan, perhaps this is the most significant. Practically everyone in Washington, DC, is now dependent in precisely the way our founders feared. All but a few members of Congress devote the majority of their time to raising money for reelection. Doing the job we've hired them to do – governing – takes a distant second place.”
The GNHLUG-discuss mailing list has been abuzz for the last month with disucssions about MythTV. I've learned a lot I had not yet gleaned from the documentation:
I hadn't realized that it was possible to receive and record HDTV-level broadcasts from the analog cable feed for those “broadcast” channels in the local area.
One GNHLUG member posted his How-To on building a MythTV front-end with no noisy fans or hot hard drives. This little box would work well in the entertainment center.
A link to a great discussion of the Architecture of MythTV.
At the MerriLUG meeting on Thursday, the January topic was announced: we'll be meeting Jarod Wilson, author of the Fedora Core MythTV HowTo. That's a meeting not to miss!