Google is piloting a new patent search site. Results are a couple years old, but it is interesting, to say the least, to do a search to find patents related to Voice over IP.
Patent Search via Google
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Author Archives: lkeyes70
Look and Stuff in Microsoft Access
I think any database analyst or programmer has heard this common client request when doing mailing lists:
I want to be able to look up the organization data if the person is a member of an organization, and copy all of the relevant information into my mailing list. But I also want to be able to type in (or over) any existing organization information. And if the person isn’t a member of an organization, or if the organization doesn’t exist in the table, then I want to be able to add it right then…
So we stand in really odd positions to make this work, trying to relate the person table to an organization table and put together some kind of logic that works like QuickBooks (which no doubt cost $2.45 million to develop…)
This recently came up again, and because it turns out that the Organzation table gets replaced periodically, I gave up on the idea of relating the two tables, and just decided to duplicate the organization’s fields in the person table. So shoot me.
If you press the “Look and Stuff” button, it brings up a subform which contains a single control, a combo-box pick list which picks an organization from the organization table.
The code behind this takes the field contents for the chosen Organization record and copies them to equivalent fields in the person table. The code:
Private Sub cmdFill_Click()
On Error GoTo Err_cmdFill_Click
Dim dbs As DAO.Database
Dim strSQL As String
Dim rstTemp As Recordset
Set dbs = CurrentDb
'Only do the following if the user has chosen a company
If Me.cboCompany.Value > 0 Then
strSQL = _
"Select * FROM Company Where Company_id =" & Me.cboCompany.Value
Set rstTemp = _
CurrentDb.OpenRecordset(strSQL, dbOpenDynaset, dbReadOnly)
'Stuff the results into the Mailing List Form
Form_Maillist.txtOrganization = rstTemp![Organization]
Form_Maillist.txtAddress = rstTemp![Address]
Form_Maillist.txtCity = rstTemp![City]
Form_Maillist.txtZip = rstTemp![Zip]
Form_Maillist.txtState = rstTemp![State]
End If
'Close the chooser form
DoCmd.Close
Exit_cmdFill_Click:
Exit Sub
Err_cmdFill_Click:
MsgBox Err.Description
Resume Exit_cmdFill_Click
End Sub
Find Non-Profit Buddies
And while we’re on the subject of on-line databases…you can find non-profit organizations at TaxExemptWorld.Org
You can search by name, zip code, county or city. Full results of your search with enhanced data can be downloaded into a spreadsheet for $10.00.
The Foundation Center Web Site
The Foundation Center web site has a two-page Foundation Giving Preview which is a prelude to their full report to be issued in February 2007.
Education and health remained the top priorities of private
and community foundations included in the Foundation
Center’s grants sample in 2005. Support for most major
subject areas grew, with international affairs and the
environment posting the largest gains. By type of support,
the share of foundation grant dollars allocated for capital
projects rose to 18.5 percent, following five consecutive
years of decline. These findings are based on all grants of
$10,000 or more awarded by 1,154 of the largest
foundations.
The site includes a free search engine for foundations for searching on name, state or zip code. Once you have found a list there are links directly to the 990 reports for each foundation. There are prospect worksheets for both institutional and individual donors. They have listings of Requests For Proposals as well as a training materials for proposal writing.
Desktop Hardware Costs Going Toward Zero?
Prompted by an entry over on Jeff Dunteman’s Contrapositive Diary, (scroll down past the fluffy dogs…) I have been I’ve been watching with interest some eBay sales in the $250, range for Dell Optiplexes. I just saw an SX270 Pentium 4 3.2 Mhz with 512 K of RAM and Window XP Professional Service Pack 2 go for $255.00. This is a small notebook sized unit. Even with $40.00 shipping it still seems to be pretty interesting. As Jeff mentions, these were going for $1800 or more just a couple years ago. Little guys like these are ideal for mini servers or media center PCs.
Other low-end machines seem to be going for $150.00 and under. Many times you’ll see that they have things like 10 gigabyte hard drives; you have to wonder if perhaps the parts have been diddled. (a technical term for “swapped out with junk lying around on the bench…”) But, say, you find one with a 2.4Ghz processor, and 256Kb or maybe 512Kb of RAM and a 20 gig hard drive. Install kubuntu for an operating system and desktop applications. Total cost $300.00?
For the past few years, PC hardware has been relatively static. Each new generation of hardware brought only incremental performance improvements. I’m still using 2.8Ghz processors in my office machines (both refurbs as is my Dell laptop), and servers are using slower processors. I’d recommend avoiding the Intel Celeron processors, but Pentium 4s at 2.4Ghz and up still have legs, especially with Linux.
The new Windows Vista wants to see more of everything; duel core processors and two gigs of RAM will help it on its way. But that means recent hardware that led up to Vista is both a bargain, and viable for the medium term, when matched with Windows XP Service Pack 2. If I was looking to round out my office with a couple new machines, and I had more time than money, I’d check eBay and the Dell Outlet for refurbished desktop machines. Look at the Optiplex line especially.
Chron: This Week
This week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy has a couple of themes:
The cover story is about conservation, land trust, and housing organizations.
Inside there are several articles about foundations, and how foundations need to be more accountable and transparent.
This week the Chron quotes a study by the Center for Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College which compares giving by state, adjusted for the state’s cost of living and tax burden. Utah is listed as the top giving state, with an average after-tax income per household of $53,425, and an average charitable donation of $3405. The data is from 2004. In the study, there is an extensive discussion of Massachusetts demographics and giving.
Also this week is a discussion of non-profit blogs, with a list of “10 Non-Profit Blogs That Get Attention”. (the main article is free, the list of ten blogs requires registration).
Tech Friday: Asterisk/Trixbox quirks
A couple of interesting quirks have come up after about ten days of using Asterisk/Trixbox as our “home office” phone system.
1. The Grandstream Budgetone 101 and 102 SIP phones that we are using are not (apparently) FCC Type-B accepted. That means that they are not shielded to prevent television or other interference. So the phones make a hash of Channels 5 and 33 on our non-cable television….thereby rendering these phones essentially useless in a home environment. To be fair, they are a couple years old….maybe the new Grandstream phones are better shielded? So, the way we’re coping is to plug in the phone when we want to make a call. Saves power, that way, of course.
2. As described earlier, I’m using VoicePulse as our outbound call service, and it seems to work very well indeed. However, the IAX2 channels sometimes become unregistered with VP during the course of a day. When this happens, if you place a call via the VoicePulse trunk…you get a ring-no-answer…that sounds just like a conventional ring-no-answer..i.e. you can’t distinguish whether this is a problem with the VoicePulse registration, or if in fact the person really isn’t at home. As a precaution, in the morning, I’ve been making check calls to my cell phone….if the cell phone rings, then I know my outbound trunk is working. At the Asterisk command line, if I type IAX2 show channels, it should show two registered VoicePulse channels. Even if channel voicepulse1 is unregistered, I would have hoped that channel 2 would take the call, but there doesn’t appear any to be any logic that can deal with this issue. What I’d really like to see is some kind of real-time indication that the channels are not working, and/or some kind of fall-back or re-registering function.
3. I’ll be checking the power consumption of all the components, but I was pleased to see that the idle power consumption of the Dell server that I’m using goes at about 44 watts. This seems pretty reasonable for a server.
Online Diagnostic Tools
Time to mention some online, free diagnostic tools:
www.dnsstuff.com
Are people having trouble finding your web site, or is expected eMail not getting through? Use this site to verify your DNS mappings and Mail Server mappings.
www.broadbandreports.com
Are you getting all the bandwidth that you are paying for? Find out by running the speed tests from this site, and find out how your site is compared to others in your region, or from the same provider.
My current results: 
Hmmmmm…
Shields Up!
Go to this site to see your current “public” IP address. The site will also check for open or closed ports on your firewall.
All three sites have tons of information explaining how the tests work, and the underlying internet plumbing.
Earn $600.00 in ten minutes — Web Hosting Change
My web host, intermedia.net who provides space for this blog as well as my modest corporate website has a number of hosting plans which include a variety of options. They have full Windows plans, with SharePoint and ColdFusion (but not both on each plan). They also have Apache/Linux plans. Plans include database back ends, mySQL, SQL-Server, and add-ons like MIVA for web stores, Coppermine for photo sharing, bulletin boards, Exchange eMail, you name it. Technical support is fast and usually excellent.
So, I downgraded my web server, which involves changing IP addresses and the DNS pointers. So if you find that TFNP is “blinking”… that’s why…we’ll be back momentarily and we regret any inconvenience this may cause. I figure this change will save more than $600 next year. Not bad for sending a couple eMails, and spending a few minutes to make sure that everything will work.
Also, if you read TFNP via an RSS feed, you may need to reset it after the change happens in a couple days.
Monthly Introduction: December 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.
Ongoing projects this month will include our small office PBX using TrixBox and Asterisk, database development projects, and some additional hardware evaluations.
It seems to be a personality quirk of ours that our default position is one of optimism and interest when confronted with a new product or new version of an older product. This is especially true if it passes the Five Minute Test(tm), i.e. if I can actually create or do something after fooling with the product for five minutes. The critical juncture is what happens immediately after the five minutes… Does it hold our interest? Does it get incorporated into our daily work? Is it something to recommend to others?
A little about our shop: If you look at previous entries, you’ll see we’ve dated Linux, but are married to Microsoft. We have two Windows XP desktops, 1 Windows XP laptop and a Windows 2003 Small Business Server as our production machines. These have to work every day, and they do. We use these for programming, database development, web development and general office stuff like accounting. We depend on several entities located in cyberspace, including Intermedia.net for our web site and eMail, and as host for a couple production web-based applications, and Logmein for remote access to clients for whom we have ongoing network management or software development projects. Oh, and our ISP, Comcast, (only recently changed from Adelphia).
Comments are welcome (Thanks Mom!) and are moderated, so they may not show up immediatly.
tfnp 