My weekend (by alaric)

Friday night - worked until about 10pm, getting things done that were meant to be done for Friday.

Then helped pack and prepare to go into London, a 3 hour drive. Sarah's choir reunion starts at 9:45am tomorrow.

Not sure what time we set off, but I remember leaving a service station at about 3am after stopping for a nap because I was starting to nod at the wheel, but I had barely fallen asleep when I was awoken by Sarah's parents ringing her on her mobile, and found my leg had gone dead from trying to sleep curled up on the driver's seat.

I slept in at Sarah's parent's place, but then had to get up in order to go and buy some baby milk powder for Jean, since there was none there. The little nearby chemist turned out to be shut so I walked back and took the van to a large supermarket, braved the Saturday morning queues, and then brought it back. I spent some time fruitlessly trying to fix Sarah's mother's computer which had come down with Microsoft Windows Goes Very Slowly disease, but there were no obviously out of place malware processes running, and it's slow right from the very earliest stages of booting. Then I managed to grab a couple of hours to myself to do some shopping (a shiny thing to put across the windscreen of the van when parked to prevent it from becoming a solar oven, and part of a wedding anniversary present for my wife), and to go for a walk, before picking up Sarah's brother and going to the choir concert that evening. Then to bed.

Then up early Sunday to pack all of our stuff away and go on a delivery mission of various things to various people as we crossed London back towards home, then get home, do work that needs to be done by Monday, then to bed, now at 1:30am. To be up about 7:30am tomorrow morning to take Jean to nursery, then for a conference call to start the next week of work.

Zzzzzz.....

VoIP (by alaric)

Well, while I still don't know where my CD-ROM drive is, at least I now have Asterisk working.

Since I work from home, we have two phone lines, work and home. What I hope to set up is to have the phone lines from BT terminate in "FXO ports" on a little box, which then has an Ethernet interface it uses to connect to my Asterisk server with SIP. The Asterisk server will then answer incoming calls, as well as being able to route outgoing calls to BT.

Also, the Asterisk server will be connected to from SIP and IAX telephones on my LAN, and software telephones on our desktop and laptop machines - even when the laptops AREN'T on the LAN, but out on the Internet.

Given this, Asterisk can then function as a PBX. It'll be possible to call extensions from each other by dialling the extension number, or to dial out via the work or home line by prefixing the number with a 9 or an 8. Also, when I dial friends of mine with known VoIP addresses, the system will notice that their number is listed in a local database or any of a number of global ENUM databases, and route the call over VoIP for free.

When people dial in on the home line, all the connected extensions will ring, and the first to answer gets the call. The same will happen for work calls, except that I'll send a different caller ID string so the phones will show what line the call is from, and if I don't answer in four rings it'll go to voicemail. Similarly with incoming VoIP calls.

The voicemail won't be one of those horrible systems where I have to ring in to get my voicemail, either.The server will record the message to the file, and email it to me.

Since I hate my mobile phone's voicemail system, I'll reconfigure it to route calls to my work number when I don't answer, so all my voicemails will end up in one place.

NetBSD upgrade (by alaric)

Bah!

I've upgraded my main home server from NetBSD 1.6.1 (ancient) to 3.0 (current), for two reasons.

1. There was a bug in the VIA Rhine network driver, causing it to drop packets and/or stop working (drop ALL packets until brought down and back up again) under load
2. I need to install Asterisk, and 1.6.1 wasn't up to it - Asterisk requires a native pthreads implementation.

So I bravely reinstalled. NetBSD's upgrade process is a bit ropey, so I had to hack around a bit to get it all up and running.

But now I've lost my CD-ROM drive!

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I need to restore coolness to my life (by alaric)

Once upon a time, I worked for Internet Vision. I started as a programmer, then towards the end of my time there, I was their chief technical architect also looked after the internal library (which I found incredibly satisfying). The technical architect thing meant I was involved in nearly every project, working on the design of the software and troubleshooting problems that the developers hit as they coded.

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Poorly baby! (by alaric)

Poor Jean - she's had a snuffly nose for a few days, and has been generally unhappy about it and hard to get to sleep at night. She's been spending lots of nights in with us.

However, today, while I was away in Bournemouth, she started projectile vomiting, so Sarah took her in to the doctor, who said she had some kind of virus. She has to go in again tomorrow to see how she's doing, and in the meantime is on high dosages of Calpol.

I will probably postpone my visit to London tomorrow, because it's been pretty hard on Sarah looking after a very grumpy baby on her own 🙁