Jeff Dunteman's Shop Tips

Jeff Dunteman has put together a very nice summary of tips for building a shop. He mostly does electronics and metalworking so most of the tips apply to those sorts of activities as oppposed to woodworking. Some of the definitive woodworking shop ideas come from Taunton Press

Access Runtime: Never Mind!

Never Mind. Here is the post on Erik Rucker's blog.

First HIPAA Audit

Here is an article from ComputerWorld about the first HIPAA audit.

Windows XP Embedded - Taking a look

Installing the Windows XPe --

The installation files come on 4 CDs.

Includes the database of Windows XP components. This is installed in a MSCE (older version of SQL-Server Express.) The installer doesn't appear to be smart enough to use existing SQL-Server or SQL-Express that may be present from other Microsoft Developer products.

Once the database engine is installed, it then puts in the components. These include all of the third-party hardware drivers that are included in Windows XP… even things like support for U.S. Robotics modems.

Once XP SP1 is installed, the SP2 is installed over it. This updates the Windows binaries, and refreshes the database.

Install includes a remote boot service which allows PXE and TFTP updates to remote devices. This could be interesting, as it would allow automatic updates to deployed devices.

Working through the tutorials, it assumes that you want to incorporate a "Hello World" .exe file into the final image that is to be loaded on the target hardware. The sample file is a simple .exe which uses the Microsoft C runtime. Both of these items are packaged as a "component" by using the component designer.

Component files are stored with an .sld extension
Configuration files are stored with an .slx extension

Microsoft touts XPe as having the ability to run existing Windows applications without having to port (rewrite, or recompile) the application. Still, assuming an application requires registry entries, when it is installed, you have to figure out what all the registry entries are, and how the application is configured.
MSDN to the rescue:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms838332.aspx

The Configuration Manager includes several pre-configured devices, including:
Kiosk,
Network Appliance
Rich Media Player
Basic Media Player
Set-Top Box

Microsoft Access 2007 Runtime is now available

The Microsoft Access 2007 runtime is now available at this link. Hooray!

You also need to download and install the Developer Extensions to allow you to build an Access 2007 solution that includes the Access runtime.

After installing these, I was a little nonplussed, as I couldn't seem to find any of files to start the Packaging Wizard...which is the wizard to step you through the creation of a set of installation files for your Access application. This is now tucked under the "Developer" tab within Access 2007. There is no separate menu item off the Windows start menu.

More on Dell

More "inside information" on purchasing from Dell. All I can say is...who has time for this nonsense?

Dell: Read the Fine Print

Got a new Dell "home" catalog today... Its as random as ever... a dozen laptops, a dozen desktops. No coherency among product lines. Reading some of the fine print:

Dell's Return Policy: If you cancel your purchase for any reason within 21 days, we'll refund your purchase price minus shipping and handling and applicable restocking charges. You are responsible for the cost of shipping your system back to us.

Warranties: You can get a copy of our limited warranties and guarantees by writing Dell USA L.P., Att: Warranties, One Dell Way Round Rock TX 78762. To purchase warranty only or for more information on other service options, please call 1-800-915-3355 or visit dell4me.com/termsandconditions

And I thought this was an interesting technical note:

Shared Memory on Select Dell Dimension, Inspiron and XPS systems:
Up to 512MB of system memory may be alocated to support integrated graphics, depending on the system memory size and other factors (Dim. C521 and E521, up to 512MB, Dim E520, XPS, M1210 and 210, Insp. E1405, E1505, and E1705, up to 224MB, Insp. 1501, up to 256MB)

To paraphrase a well-known technical curmudgeon "we read the fine print so you don't have to".

1. Dell used to have a 30-day no questions asked return policy. Clearly this has now been reduced to 21 days, and you may end up paying an applicable restocking charge of how much? If you return a machine, I'd be surprised if the return shipping, fees and restocking are less than $100US.

2. They don't publish their warranties in the catalog, because they are mostly legalize designed to protect the company and the customer be damned.

3. If you think you have 2 gigs of memory in your machine, you may only have 1.5 gigs of "useful" memory, as a chunk of it is going to the video board.

Note that these gems appear on two full pages, A14 and A15 of similar legal ass-covering.

Trixbox Boston

The cockpit. Laptop with the VMWare image of Trixbox installed. You can see the version 2.2 management screen. To the right, a Polycom 330 phone. These were part of the package that everyone took home. These are really nice phones, a real step up for those of us who have been using lower-end phones in our Trixbox experiments.


Andrew Gillis tries to debug problems with David Mandelstam's Polycom phone. If David can "brick" a phone...is there any hope for end-users? ;-0



Andrew, Kerry and Stefanie Chao-Narayan handing out diplomas.


The object of our affection. A pre-production TrixBox. This one was the enterprise version, with dual power supplies. It runs cool as a cucumber, but belongs in a server room or wiring closet, not under your desk.

Monthly Introduction June 2007

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and half-baked ideas that we run across as we provide software and database development, network support, and R&D for a growing list of clients in education, health care and non-profit organizations.

Occasional features include Tech Friday, which may include code(!), our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide, Stuff That Works for hardware and software items that have passed the Five Minute Test, and Chron This Week, which is a synopsis of technology articles of interest in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Topics on grantwritng and fundraising appear as we seem to have one or more grant application in progress most of the time.

I've just come back from the TrixBox Fonality Training in Boston, and will be posting a lot more about open source communications adn telephone systems.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. They are moderated, so will show up shortly after you add them.

At the Trixbox seminar in Boston

Day 2 at the Trixbox seminar in Boston...not that I've learned a whole lot of new things, but we are all finding that our prejudices are confirmed. Yesterday we spent much of the morning installing the VMWare version of Trixbox and connecting a couple of SIP end points. We have the X-Lite softphone connected to a Polycom desk set. My seat partner is David Mandelstam of Sanoma, one of the sponsors at the conference. We're having a terrific troubleshooting session by Mike Joyce of Fonality. Lots of tidbits/opinions and debate. For example:

Mike Joyce of Fonality

Sizing the machine adequately.

The load is especially heavy with software echo cancellation
Use hardware echo cancellation

AppConference will be added for conferencing….and will be an alternative or replace MeetMe.

Recording --- Recordall - is really a bottleneck. DiskIO is the issue, and you need a quad Opteron, huge disks, etc.

"Bus Bubbles" interrupt conflicts.

PatLoopBack - Zaptel repository

Ethernet Card Considerations
Cache optimization
9 out of 10 on-board Ethernets on motherboards are good

Rhine Chipsets
Intel Ethernet Express is not good for VoIP
For cable modem and DSL setups (Motorola Surfboard…etc)

The routing equipment at the CPE that has packet optimization that sucks on cable modems. You can't see more than a couple concurrent calls on a typical cable or DSL connections. Not a problem with the carrier, but the problem at the CPE….the DSLAMS are OK,

Problem is shared cache for inbound and outbound
The cheap modems can't do context switching enough between the two to support more than a couple of calls.

Under 50 concurrent calls is where Asterisk has a sweet spot..with all the features of a more expensive system. Asterisk doesn't scale up higher (easily), the big guys don’t scale down (easily).

Using VoIP on the Internet
Limitations of Broadband Connections
Ping 20 millseconds at As you lower the interval, you have
ping -c 0.02 -c500

Need to see 0 packet loss.

Place in the DMZ setup sometimes…and make sure that the DMZ is located

SIP compatible routers don't work unless it is under $1000 dollars. Finality

Linksys BEFSR81 - DMZ host.
PFSense - OpenBSD - Live installation, etc.
IPFW

People try to overcomplicate things.

NAT issues - Don't install the phones and the PBX on different NATs.

InGate - Sipperator --- Sip Proxy Session Boarder Controller

Aeronaut 1050G
Astra 480Et (?) wifi phone

Fonality: The vast majority of problems are related to networking.

Don't ever ever ever sell a system without RAID
Software raid is better than hardware
Don't use RAID 5 for a Linux or Asterisk
80 gig drives work fine.
Never been able to justify the cost of SCSI disks
Rebuilding a RAID 1 drive takes about 10 minutes.
Hot swapping
They have to be able to fix things over the network. All PBXtra stuff is supported remotely.

MDADM man
SATA RAID at the install Disk DRUID, etc.
there is also a setup RAID.
Swap needs to go on both disks.

For 50 bucks a month offer back up service with a chron job, and ftp the data to a NAS at a co-lo.

AGIs are super easy to write.
If you don't have friends who write perl, get some.
Call Files - Click-to-Call, Ticketing Systems, CRM systems
split() on csv for easy archiving Tie the call records into a CRM system. How much does it cost you to convert a prospect to a customer.
If you go into the operations side a company, you'll have an easier time, rather than go into the IT side a company.