Author Archives: lkeyes70

Monthly Introduction February 2007

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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.

Ongoing projects this month include our small office phone system using TrixBox and Asterisk. We’re finally installed the production version of Office 2007, and are evaluating several different web-based programs that, for want of a better term, I call “collaboration platforms”.

Regular 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 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.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. They are moderated, so they may not show up immediatly.

Microsoft Action Pack: Vista and Office 2007

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Sooooo….the Microsoft Action Pack Q1 shipment arrives with Office 2007 Enterprise and Vista Business Edition upgrade. I spend 90 minutes digging bits of the Office 2007 beta 2 Technical Refresh out of my workstation before it allows me to install Office 2007.

Conversley, the Vista install has to be done over an existing XP install. WTF? That means if you want a clean install, you first have to install XP, then install Vista on top. This has to be a mistake, I’m sure that Bill’s boys and girls will be fixing this momentarily, right?

So I skipped Vista for now, and went with the Office 2007 Enterprise. This not only includes the usual suspects but a few others, like Groove, Expressions Web (The replacement for the unlamented FrontPage), Visio 2007, and a bunch of SharePoint stuff.

By my count there are at now at least three different technologies for “shared workspaces” offered by Microsoft; Groove, Sharepoint, and within some versions of Vista. Actually, four, because you can share OneNote notebooks in real time as well.

Before investing too much in the Microsoft versions, check out the Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet. I had a two-hour shared telephone conference with budget spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheet this morning, which worked out fine. It is a little funky when downloaded back into Excel, but it worked. And of course, we still like Backpack, I mean Basecamp.

Access 2007 Runtime

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Well, I wish I was pointing to the Access 2007 runtime, but I’m not, however, this Microsoft page, discusses several points of interest:

  1. The runtime will be available “shortly after the release to the general public of Microsoft Office Access 2007
  2. The runtime and developer extensions will be free downloads.
  3. The Extensions will include a packaging wizard, similar to the one for 2003, which optionally includes the runtime files, and any other files, necessary to create an MSI
  4. The Developer Extensions will include hooks for Source Code Control
  5. The Extensions will not include the Property Scanner or Customer Startup Wizard that were previously available in earlier versions.
  6. Links to the download locations will be posted on Office Online and the Access Developer Portal on MSDN.

Chron This Week:

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This week the Chronicle of Philanthropy includes their 2007 Technology Guide, which is a special advertising section for technology consultants, and fundraising software companies. An article by Scott Westcott attempts to make the connection between social networking sites like YouTube and MySpace with online charity fundraising, and attracting volunteers.

VolunteerMatch has attracted more than 1000 people who link to its online profile since joining Myspace in July.
[A]s of this month, MySpace listed 15,587 non-profit organizations. The largest is People Helping People, a group of people who want to work together in promoting the common good, which has 17,000 “friends” on MySpace.

There are additional articles on virtual communities, video games, and using cellphone text messaging for fundraising.
Another article discusses the relationship between charities and the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress.

Charities and foundations, which have devoted much energy in recent years to defending their organizations from charges of wrongdoing, and to trying to persuade Congress not to impose onerous new regulations, are hoping for a friendlier climate now that Demoocrats are in charge on Capital Hill.  

Trixbox Webinar

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Just got off the Trixbox webinar, conducted by Kerry Garrison and Andrew Gillis and thought there were some interesting ideas that came out of it. Here are some rough notes.

Call Queues
You can set up call queues which are not to be confused with ring groups. A call queue is where you stack up calls and where the caller can be told “You are caller number 5. There are four callers ahead of you. The average wait time is 2 minutes”. and so on. You can have a call queue point to a ring group. (A ring group is a set of extensions that are called by some kind of rules, in a specified sequence, say, or based on the amount of time since an extension was last connected on a call.

Bandwidth and Latency
DSL typically has lower latency than cable, even though cable typically has higher bandwidth.

TDM Hardware connections vs. Internet SIP/IAX phone termination services
Many of the example installations they gave involved hardware connections. T-1s. ISDN PRIs, etc. This supports the notion of having conventional hard connections for important inbound and outbound calls to your company, rather than rely entirely on a VoIP termination provider.

DTMF Tones
There are at least three different ways that phones can send DTMF (the numeric tones that are generated when you press numbers on the phones). They are not all compatible with each other.

Seminars and Training
There are starting to do seminars. March 5-6 they are offering a two-day course in Los Angeles for $1495 for Trixbox beginners. In the second quarter of 2007 they will offer two more courses; Advanced Trixbox Administratrion, and Advanced Troubleshooting. More on their training site.

Asterisk documentation:
VoIPSpeak.net (Kerry’s Blog)
AsteriskTutorials.com – A set of free screencast tutorials for Trixbox, FreePBX, etc. These are great. You can see demos of how to set up some of the basic and advanced functions like inbound and outbound routes, how to do a follow-me function, etc.
Book: Trixbox Made Easy
Web Documentation: Trixbox Without Tears
#FreePBX IRC channel

Vendors:
VoIPSupply.com
VoIPLink.com
ATAComm.com

TDM cards
Sangoma
Rhino
Digium

Using Trixbox under VMWare (software emulation)
VMWare drivers are required when emulating, so you can’t use hardware cards. That said, emulation works great for training, and I see that is the plan for their traning seminar; you are to bring a laptop capable of emulating trixbox and you’ll walk away from the seminar with a fully configured system.

Compare Trixbox Training vs. an Asterisk Boot-Camp
Boot camp concentrates on the Asterisk configuration files
Trixbox training goes into how to use the Trixbox configuration tools (FreePBX, etc.)

Recommended way to Upgrade from 1.2.3 to 2.0
Upgrade 1.2.3 from 2.0
1. Download and upgrade FreePBX
2. Do a backup using the FreePBX backup functino
3. Do a clean install for 2.0
4. Then do a restore (using the new FreePBX)

n.b. I manged to upgrade by running the upgrade script from the Linux command line, and also running an update of modules from FreePBX. This seems to have worked OK, from my end, but they suggested the above steps as being more reliable.

Relationship between Asterisk and Trixbox
“Asterisk is the engine…Trixbox is the car.”

Should you editing Trixbox Config Files
How does FreePBX treat the Asterisk config files… can/should we ever update the config files themselves, or will they get overwritten?
Example of the extensions file:

Extensions <-usually only overwritten when upgrading ASterisk
Extension_Additional <-overwritten from FreePBX (don't edit directly)
Extension_Custom <-changes that are never overwritten by the system – use for customization

DUNDI
There is no web interface for DUNDI, but you can edit the DUNDI config file manually

HudLite – “Heads Up Display”
HudLight – OutLook Integration and Heads-Up display

Distributed PBXs
Remote extensions (single phones in a branch office connected over VoIP0
Remote Trixboxes, (whole trixboxes in branch offices, federated together).
DUNDI – Sort of a DNS which points to IAX and SIP peers. Totally distributed. Created by Mark Spencer of Digium (inventor of Asterisk).

Voice Recognition
Voice Recognition in the IVR – They are working with a couple vendors to make this available, Right now there isn’t anything in open source available.

Additional multi-language support is coming.
Trixbox 2.0 has multi-language support

The webinar was a kick. They had 800 participants (!) Both the slides and the commentary will be available later today.

Gizmo Project – web based calling

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The Gizmo Project now has a web-based version of their soft phone which works with Firefox or I.E. I was a little confused about this, as it requires the Adobe 9.0 Flash plugin. So if you go directly to the Gizmo Call website and get an error, download and install Adobe 9.0 and then try again. You’ll also be asked to install a Firefox plug in if you are using Firefox.

You can test this with up to 10 minutes of free calling each day. It works also if you already have a Call-Out (pre-paid) account for 2 cents per minute.

Not quite sure when I’d use this…since I already have the normal Gizmo softphone installed on my laptop. But if you want to make calls from a “foreign” computer, in an internet cafe, for example, this would be a way to do it, and be able to connect to your own account.

Vista: Hold Off

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Microsoft is planning the officially introduce the successor to Windows XP this evening, Windows Vista. There is little in Vista to justify the hassles of upgrading a working XP system. Better to deal with it when it shows up, inevitably, on new computers, which presumably will have the optimized memory and graphics capability.

Recommendation: Sit this one out.

SQL Command Box for Microsoft Access

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Among the many things I miss in Access from Foxpro is the ability to enter SQL statements on-the-fly into the command box. So, as a first cut, I created a form with a textbox and a button. The textbox holds the SQL code, and a button that calls a subroutine to stuff the code into a scratch query defined in the .MDB Queries collection.

There are lots of possible refinements, error checking, parsing of other commands, etc, but already I’m taken with this as it eliminates half the clicking around when doing SQL queries. Thanks to Martin Green’s Office tips for most of the code. Here is the VBA code for the command button. 

Private Sub cmdExecute_Click()
' The following code processes an on-the-fly SQL command
' entered in the text box. The command requires a "scratch"
' query be included in the database query collection. The code
' takes the SQL string, passes it to the scratch query, and
' then executes it.
' Code cribbed from Martin Green's Office Tips at
' http://www.fontstuff.com

Dim strSQL As String
Dim db As DAO.Database
Dim qdf As DAO.QueryDef

strSQL = Trim(Me.txtQuery.value)

'Here is the code which will apply the SQL statement to the query:

Set db = CurrentDb
Set qdf = db.QueryDefs("qryScratch")
qdf.SQL = strSQL
Set qdf = Nothing
Set db = Nothing

DoCmd.OpenQuery "qryScratch"
End Sub

Hardware Notes – Dells and Home-Brews

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Over on Slashdot there is a note that reminds us of the fact that Dell will sell desktop machines without an Windows operating system. These are called the ‘n’ series. They’ve actually been doing this for a long time; maybe in fits and starts; but my three-year old workstation was also an ‘n’.

For non-profits, this may be something to look into. If you run Windows, and you are already eligible for discounted Windows licenses thorough Tech Soup or you can get academic licenses, do a quote with and without Windows, and see if you can save a hundred bucks on a machine.
Of course, if you are running any of the Linux operating systems, (current favorite is Kubuntu) then this might also be the way to go.

Robert Bruce Thompson, and Barbara Fritchman Thompson’s Building the Perfect PC has come out in a second edition as of December 2006. It is also available for reading online on Safari. The second edition is another fascinating building-block appoach for putting together a variety of desktop and server computers from parts. The range goes from a $350.00 email-reading machine, to a full-blown server, to a no-holds-barred gaming workstation. Virtually all the hardware suggestions from the first edition (circa 2004) have been superceded by new motherboards, processors, memory and cases.

I built a “pizza box” “Pundit” machine using an ASUS case and motherboard and ideas from their first edition, and it came out very well. The box is in constant use as a terminal server and testing platform for both Windows and Linux. Details are in the TFNP archives.

Jeff Dunteman has just posted an update about the Dell SX-270 that he (and I) was enthusiastic about. Seems like there is a capacitor problem. Dunteman is the author of the Degunking Windows series.

Finally David Pogue has found a possible solution for lack of eye contact when desktop videoconferencing.