Tech Friday: Asterisk/Trixbox Update

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Tech Friday is our occasional Friday afternoon dweeb-fest, where if we are going to publish actual programming code (rarely), or get technical, it tends to happen on Friday.

Since installing Trixbox, the pre-configured version of Asterisk I’ve been playing with all the features. I’ve got it connected to a single phone line, with a simple automated attendant, “press 1 for Larry, press 2 for Bob” kind of thing and that part seems to work fine. I’ve got two Grandstream Budgettone 101 phones working fine. They have message ready lights, tell the date and time and will show the caller-id on their LCD read-out.

I read the O’Reilly book about Asterisk, which serves as the Asterisk user manual, and it was very helpful in figuring out the intricacies of trunks, routes, and extensions, and how these all fit into a dial plan. But now I’ve hit the wall, and am trying to figure out two show-stoppers:

Hanging up the line

Sometimes the hardware phone line doesn’t “hang up” after a call. Example: Somebody calls through the landline, leaves a voice mail and then hangs up. There are times when the hardware card doesn’t hangup. Searching through through the archives, I found several mentions of this, so far with no good solutions. It applies to both the X100T Digium cards, and apparently the T4xxxx cards as well. Supposedly the Sagamore cards are more reliable. But, I’m hesitant to shell out another couple hundred bucks for more cards.

Configuring software “trunks”

As an alternative to hardware trunks, (destinations for calls placed outside your own organization), you can configure either free or (usually) paid-for internet destinations where your call is sent and then connected to other subscribers or to landliness. Ultimately, of course, this is indeed what you want to do…any phone system is useless if you can’t connect to other phones. I first tried Free World Dial-Up a free service that was one of the first available termination services. My box seemed to register with this without problems, but any calls sent out to the destination were unanswered.

So then, I subscribed to VoicePulse using their plan for Asterisk. VP will provision your Asterisk service with four trunks, two for the IAX2 protocol, native to Asterisk, and two SIP trunks. The SIP trunks appear to register, but the IAX2 trunks do not. According to the VoicePulse tech support, I may have problems with closed ports at my router.

You need to have port 5060 open for SIP and/or 4569 UDP open to use IAX2. Using my D-Link DI-604 router I tried several different configurations; I put the Asterisk machine in the DMZ, which means that is should be exposed to anything coming to the router, and I forwarded specific ports to the Asterisk box. No cigar.

I then checked the availability of the ports using Steve Gibson’s Shields-Up. These show both ports as “closed”. Uh oh. It may be related to the router or possibly something else. However, if they have been closed by Comcast (our new owner who has taken over from Adelphia Cable) then I may be SOL.

Tech Friday: Working with Bar Codes

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I’m working with an ID Automation SC5USB bar-code scanner which a client has asked to use for an inventory program. I found ID Automation on the web, and ordered their plain vanilla bar code scanner for about $150.00. They sell everything necessary for bar coding, including the printers, the software and the scanners.

To a computer, the bar-code scanner “looks” like a keyboard. I plugged it into my laptop, and it was instantly recognized, with no software required.

I opened up Notepad on the computer, and scanned the bar code on a CD jewel case that I had lying around, and shazzam! the equivalent set of numbers for the bar code were “typed” into NotePad. A highly gratifying out-of-the-box experience.

The scanner can be further “programmed” by scanning a series of bar codes contained in the instruction manual. I think my next step is going to be to create some bar code labels from my database program, and see if those can be accurately scanned.
It doesn’t matter which direction you allow the reader to read the bar code, it can read up or down.

There is a nice introduction to bar codes on wikepedia.

Here is another barcode faq.

Grantsmanship Seminar in Laconia New Hampshire

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Just got word that tgc is coming to our neck of the woods (Northern New England).
I took the seminar years ago and found it was outstanding.

The Grantsmanship Center’s signature Grantsmanship Training Program is coming to Laconia, New Hampshire, December 4-8, 2006. The program will be hosted by The Teen Center of the Lakes Region.

The Grantsmanship Training Program covers all aspects of researching grants, writing grant proposals and negotiating with funding sources. More than 100,000 nonprofit and government personnel have attended this comprehensive 5-day workshop, which now includes a full year of valuable membership services.

During the workshop, participants learn The Grantsmanship Center’s proposal writing format, the most widely used in the world. In addition to practicing the most advanced techniques for pursuing government, foundation, and corporate grants, they develop real grant proposals for their own agencies.

Upon completion of the training, participants receive free follow-up, including professional proposal review, access to The Grantsmanship Center’s exclusive online funding databases, and an array of other benefits.

Tuition for the Grantsmanship Training Program is $825 ($775 for each additional registrant from the same organization).

To ensure personalized attention, class size is limited to 30 participants. To register online, to learn about scholarship opportunities for qualifying organizations, or for more information, visit http://tgci.com/gtptraining.shtml. Or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512.

The Grantsmanship Center
PO Box 17220
1125 West 6th Street, 5th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017
(213) 482-9860
FAX (213) 482-9863
www.tgci.com

A Paradox of Fundraising

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.