Adventures in IT

For something to be truly awesome, it must be "web scale" right? The rather excellent video just below shows how hype can blind us to the real values of a technology. It's quite a famous trope in some circles and I think is a useful parallel to the excitement about blockchain. In it an enthusiastic user of a new technology repeats marketing hype despite having no understanding of the technical concerns involved. Watch the video and you'll hear every piece of marketing spin that surrounds NoSQL databases. I usually get very excited about new technologies but I'm quite underwhelmed by blockchain. In the commercial context I see it as a great solution that really just needs to find a problem to solve. Lots of companies are looking for the problem that the blockchain solution will solve. Facebook has a blockchain group that is dedicated to studying blockchain and how it can be used in Facebook. They don't seem to have found a particularly novel use ca...

Our office (who wants me to mention how awesome they are) had a need for a means to send/receive automated sms messages relating to online banking. We decided to give a Raspberry Pi the job and so I have had the fun of setting it all up. First off I installed Rasbian (  http://www.raspbian.org/  ) which is a Debian fork and is sufficiently easy to do following the guide on eLinux ( here  ) which is linked to from the Raspberry Pi project website downloads page. Next came a standard LAMP stack install.  I needed to have a web-server running because we will be running a management package on the box to track messages etc. Next came Kannel.  I used the default package available from the Rasbian repositories so there was no need for fiddling. My kannel.conf file was the next hurdle.  For the most part this is pretty easy to set up from the examples given on Kannel's site and elsewhere on the web.  I want to just mention the modem part, which was pe...

Asterisk is an Open Source "all in one" telephony system. It's really hard to configure, but that's a story for another day. Asterisk and g.729 Asterisk supports the g.729 codec to compress audio. Digium, the guys who support Asterisk development, have a commercial offering on their site . There however is an open source g.729 codec implementation for Asterisk developed available ( click here, for some reason Blogger is hiding my link ). Installation questions are answered in the discussion on the Google group ( here ), but the installation is actually very simple. All you need to do is wget the appropriate file to your /usr/lib/asterisk/modules directory and then mv it to codec_g729.so (or codec_g723.so as may be). It should take you only a few minutes to work out which file version to download. Other Asterisk resource links I found these links to be invaluable in sorting out my installation: Click on this link if you are getting a Non existent user in As...