A Paradox of Fundraising

Seen in the NPQ Winter 2005 edition.

For all donors, unrestricted grants are the most positive financially and should be the rule and not the exception. This is because anything else, generally speaking, create cost for the recipient. There may be exceptions, and giving unrestricted funding does not mean that funders cannot or should not be actively involved in communicating with the recipient about plans for the funds, budget, and program strategy. However, anything but unrestricted grants genreally creates cost within the grantee's operation.

Tech Friday - Installing the Asterisk PBX system

New phone system day.

I spent Friday and much of Saturday installing the latest and greatest Asterisk PBX system using TrixBox, a pre-configured version of Asterisk which comes with the underlying Linux operating system already in place. On a single downloadable CD, you get:

• Cent-OS - The open source version of A Major commercial Linux Distribution
  
• Apache web server
  
• Asterisk - the open source PBX
  
• freePBX - a web browser based interface for Asterisk configuration and management
  
• mySQL - which is the back-end database used by freePBX
  
• The SugarCRM - an open source Customer Relationship Manager which integrates with Asterisk
  

Rather than setting all this stuff up yourself, the TrixBox setup scripts do it automatically, which, in my case, would save hours if not days of futzing around. In addition, if you have existing Digium hardware (i.e. Zaptel) for connecting analog phones or connecting to a regular phone line the setup scripts will configure those cards as well.

So, you could consider the TrixBox implementation a superset of Asterisk.

But wait there's more!

There is even a super-set of Trixbox, which installs Trixbox on a virtual machine within Windows. This is available from Nerd Vittles. There are also instructions on setting up a slew of extra applications at the Nerd Vittles site, like an extension number to read back the latest weather forecast.

Personally, I prefer setting up the Linux version. Right now my system is working happily on an older 450Mhz 256Kb RAM Dell Optiplex.

There are several set-up tutorials available. One good one is from Sureteq. Looking at these, it is clear that just by setting up a TrixBox, you aren't out of the woods by any means. What these superb pre-configured systems do, however, is bypass hours of setting up the base system, and get you to the point where you can start working on your dial plan.

Desktop Videoconferencing Reloaded

Finally, something that works!
A friend recently got himself a new Mac Powerbook, which comes with a built-in video camera and video software. He emailed asking to try a video conference, and I emailed him back with the web address for SightSpeed which has a free desktop video client available for both the Mac and Windows. We installed it on our respective machines and had it up and running in a jiffy.

It worked well. I'm in Vermont on a cable modem, he's in Pennsyvania on a DSL line connecting through his wireless router. We got what I would rate as 24 frame-per-second video, with no visible artifacts, and fully synchronized sound with flawless echo-cancellation even though we were both using external speakers. Our call went on for more than a half hour; and we talked about a lot of other things other things besides videoconferencing.

This is how it should work. When was the last time that you spent more than a minute of a telephone call talking about the phone call? (unless it was a bad cell-phone connection). The technology "fell away"... and we didn't have to think about it. Not bad for a first call.

Of interest, then, was the quality of the second call....which was to the SightSpeed tech support people. The guy I got was located in Chicago. This call still had good video and audio, but it broke up several times..probably from a slow internet connection. But then I had already been spoiled by the quality of the first call. This call was still better than anything desktop video I had experienced, with exception of the Polycom PVX software talking to a Polycom room unit.

Like Skype, SightSpeed appears to be a closed system; it will be interesting to see if there will be any way to open it up, and connect to other SIP-based end points.

There has been a lot of buzz about SightSpeed. I think they are on to something.

Word 2007 macros

Just updated Word 2007 with the five macros which I assign as:

ALT-1 Heading 1
ALT-2 Heading 2
ALT-3 Heading 3
ALT-N Normal text

I have another macro assigned to a toolbar button to take the current highlighted address, presumably an inside address in a letter, say, and print out an envelope.

The VBA, Visual Basic for Applications code for these macro code is in the archives.

The only change is that the default VBA now requires variables to pre-declared by inserting an Option Explicit in the "declarations" section of the macro code. This requirement affects the envelope macro. and after the first line, I had to declare the string variable using

DIM lkAddress AS String


The full macro code is repeated below.
Using these macros eliminates much of the hunting around that I seem to require in Word 2007. The headers change color and font if you change the document theme.






Sub Envelope_Address()
'
' Envelope_Address
' Macro recorded 6/18/2004 by Lawrence Keyes
' Modified 6/18/2004, to hold the selected text
' This macro is assigned to a toolbar button. Select the adress that you want to print
' on the envelope, then click the "Print Envelope" button.

Dim lkAddress As String

'Assign the currently selected text to the local variable lkAddress
lkAddress = Selection.Text

ActiveDocument.Envelope.PrintOut ExtractAddress:=False, OmitReturnAddress _
:=True, PrintBarCode:=True, PrintFIMA:=False, Height:=InchesToPoints(4.13 _
), Width:=InchesToPoints(9.5), Address:=lkAddress, AutoText:= _
"ToolsCreateLabels3", ReturnAddress:="", ReturnAutoText:= _
"ToolsCreateLabels4", AddressFromLeft:=wdAutoPosition, AddressFromTop:= _
wdAutoPosition, ReturnAddressFromLeft:=wdAutoPosition, _
ReturnAddressFromTop:=wdAutoPosition, DefaultOrientation:= _
wdCenterLandscape, DefaultFaceUp:=True, PrintEPostage:=False
End Sub


Foxfire 2.0 The Darker Side

Foxfire has been touting its 2.0 update for a couple days now. I just downloaded it and ran the install program...when what did I see? A message box saying:

"Foxfire cannot install the Onfolio extension".

Back to version 1.5 for this webboy. Fortunately, I didn't see anything in 2.0 that I was dying for.

Looking at Access 2007

I've been playing with Microsoft Access 2007, the beta, and so far it seems to have improved to a certain extent. The rational and discussion of the development has been well described on Erik Rucker's blog over at MSDN. Don't know if this will stay up, because Microsoft has released Office 2007 to manufacturing. But it makes interesting reading, especially if you start from the first posts from October of last year, and work forward.

The development team for Access 12 is about 7 times as large as the one for Access 2003, and this has allowed us to do a lot of work weÂ?ve wanted to do for a long time. Our goals for Access 12 are to make new users more successful, to make existing users more productive, and to enable a whole new type of database application built around Windows SharePoint Services.

A couple items of interest so far.
1. It is backward compatible with Access files for Access 2003 and earlier
2. It has a new file extension for Access 2007 files
3. It will not allow replication if you use a 2007 version of the database file.
4. It has extensive connections to Sharepoint. It allows you to connect to a SharePoint, cache a data table from Sharepoint, and then reconnect and upload your changes. So this is 'sorta, kinda' like replication.
5. You can still replicate files that are stored as Access 2003 mdbs.
6. Forms are more attractive in their default state. No more pinched 8 point text.

The one thing holding me back from moving directly is that lack of the runtime, or the Office Extensions, which allow distribution of Access applications to computers which don't have Access. This customarily appears some months after the release of the parent product. Since general release of Office 2007 isn't scheduled before January, it could be awhile before developers can transition to 2007.

Our article in Telemedicine and eHealth

Our article Group Tele-Exercise for Improving Balance in Elders using home-based videoconferencing over the internet has been published in Telemedicine and eHealth. The abstract is located here.

And, if may use the expression... "Woohoo!"

Monthly Introduction October 2006

Welecome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. We feel that non-profit corporations and NGOs deserve the same advantages that technology can bring to for-profit business. To that end, we've dedicated ourselves to finding cost-effective ways to bring the benefits of wide-area networks, computer databases, IP videoconferencing and Voice over IP to our clients and friends. Check out our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide.

OneNote 2007 Synchronizing

Something that works beautifully: OneNote shared notebooks. Since I use OneNote on both my desktop workstation and my laptop, I have always been copying the files back and forth between the two machines in a daily ritual, hoping that I always copy the most recent version over the older version. Now, OneNote 2007 has refined the synchronization option so that if you have a shared version of the notebook, each machine will share changes against the shared version.

How it works

Each machine maintains its own copy of the notebook file. So, for example, when I take my laptop away from the office, the current version of all of my OneNote notebooks is on my laptop. When I get back, I place the laptop in the docking station, start it up and open OneNote. As soon as OneNote opens it synch any changes with the shared copy on the network server.
So far, no big deal. But what is the big deal, is that the sharing is by page entry. So, if you have changes on both machines, they will be combined in the shared copy. Changes to existing pages will be made and new pages will be added.

There is an exhaustive discussion of synching OneNote on Chris Pratley's blog which includes a number of different scenarios.

Symantec Client Security - Updated Finally

Another day, another hour trying to update my three workstation and 1 server network with Symantec Anti-Virus.

1. It turns out that the when you renew your corporate server, which is called "gold maintenance" you receive a new serial number, different than the one you are "renewing" or "upgrading". This is the number that must be used for generating the serial license file. I began to suspect a flaw in the renewal process when, after renewing and then going online to generate the license file, I noticed that the expiration date was the same as before, rather than in another year.

2. When communicating with the Symantec management Server software which is installed on the network server, workstations that have been updated with Windows XP service pack 2 will have the workstation firewall installed and turned on by default. This blocks ports used to install the updates from the server. After poking around on the Symantec web site to determine the ports that needed to be open, I found that there at least a half-dozen, depending on the products and versions that you used. It was simpler just to reactivate each anti-virus client on the workstation, after I opened a couple ports, and nothing happened. And I was going to turn off the firewall all together, but then found that is controlled by a group policy.

There are several issues with the renewal process, none of which are obvious:

1. When you want to renew your anti-virus definitions for another year, they don't say that is what you are doing, they say, you are renewing "gold maintenance".
2. Although you renew, and pay, you then have to go online and download the product. Or rather, when you start downloading, you don't download a new license file....you download the product i.e. Symantec Anti-Virus 10.1...not the license file required to activate the product.
3. But you already have the product....you just want to renew! That is another trip to their site to dig around and find the license file generation site. To do this, you need to have the serial number of the upgrade/renewed product.
4. You then get an eMail for the product which contains the renewal license. This gets copied to a shared folder on the server, where it can be used to update clients either from the System Center (if you don't have local firewalls installed), or from individual clients.

Woof.