Here’s an excerpt of the e-mail going around about Skype for Asterisk being delayed:

Thanks again for your application to the Skype For Asterisk beta program. Since
the announcement at AstriCon we've had nearly two thousand applications. We're
very excited about Skype For Asterisk (SFA) and can't wait to see the kinds of
Asterisk + Skype solutions you cook up.




You might have noticed that we've not yet sent out anything to test. When we
did the demo at AstriCon we were optimistic that our proof of concept code could
quickly be enhanced into a production-ready product. Unfortunately we uncovered
a number of issues that have taken a bit longer to fix than we expected. Digium
and Skype are committed to releasing a stable, scalable and feature-rich product
that can be used in a wide variety of scenarios, so while we regret the delay
we're glad we found the bugs first.




The good news is that our engineering departments have had the opportunity to
work together and to test the product thoroughly. We're planning on releasing
the initial beta to a very small group in the next few weeks. If all goes well
we will quickly expand the program. We really appreciate your continued
patience. Keep an eye on your email for additional updates.

I guess we’ll have to wait a few more weeks and see what happens.

Here’s an online version of a tool that I wrote four years ago to generate the necessary files to change the default Asterisk MeetMe sound. Upload a WAVE file and magically you’ll get either an enter.h or leave.h file back.




So… change your Asterisk MeetMe sounds!




Yes, the interface is ghetto.

Finally! I’ve written something to mirror the exit polls provided by CNN in JSON in HTML. Enjoy!

Ok, borrowing some code to make this one more elegant I’ve written something to mirror the maps provided by CNN in XML. Enjoy!

Are you looking for a way to mirror the poll results? Here’s a Perl script that you can run to fetch the raw JSON that CNN provides to its Flash-based election tracker.




Please let me know if you find any bugs. Run it in cron once per minute!

I finally gave up on iWeb. While it made things slightly easier when I wanted to add graphical content I just couldn’t get away from the simplicity and elegance of a command-line system.




I’ve got some interesting code to share with everyone looking to get themselves off of iWeb. Expect an article on that soon.

After my last upgrade to GWT 1.4.61 to fix the Leopard issues I hadn’t had a chance to try it in the debugger. I did a rebuild and test of all of my code but I didn’t actually use the GWT “hosted mode”.



When I tried that today I kept getting error messages about com/google/gwt/user/User not being in my classpath. The one step I forgot was to update the user library in my project properties to point the new GWT. The build script knows where to go for GWT since I updated it manually but the Eclipse environment has a different way of figuring that out. To fix it, do the following:



Right-click on the project

Select “Properties”

Select “Java Build Path”

Find anything resembling GWT and remove it

Select “Add Library”

Select “User Library”

Select “User Libraries…”

Open GWT and edit each GWT JAR entry. You’ll just need to find the new versions of the JARs in your 1.4.61 directory since they’re probably pointing to your 1.4.60 or earlier directory that shouldn’t exist anymore. You did delete it, right?

Click “OK” and rerun your project. You should be running in hosted mode again.

I just nuked Sabayon from an old PC in my office and installed a fresh copy of Gentoo. Sabayon was nice but the older version I was running was getting a little wonky. On top of that, the new version of Sabayon doesn’t install on my machine for some reason.



After the bare metal system was up and running I went through and started installing all the usual suspects… vim, rdiff-backup, samba, and OpenVPN.



To my surprise the Gentoo kernel from the installation CD doesn’t come with TUN and TAP modules. When I tried to start it up I kept getting an error that TUN didn’t exist. I fired up genkernel and added what I thought was the proper option “Networking -> Networking Options -> IP: Tunneling”, rebuilt the kernel, rebooted, and tried again. Still no dice.



Well, as it turns out, the correct module to include is under “Device Drivers -> Network Device Support -> Universal TUN/TAP device driver support”. I added that, performed the usual kernel build and upgrade ceremony, rebooted, started OpenVPN, and everything worked like a charm. If you’re puzzled by a missing TUN or TAP module see if helps!

Since I’ve installed Leopard I’ve really been having a tough time with things. Mail didn’t work right (but I fixed it), iDVD chokes on the most basic tasks, and I’ve had to hard restart my machine many times. I just installed an operating system update last night that hopefully addresses these issues so I’ll check back in with regard to that in the next few days.



While on the train today I decided to try to use my phone as a modem. The difficulty level in getting this to work with Sprint has been pretty high. They claim they can’t add “phone as a modem” to my plan because I already have Vision, then they claim it will cost $50/month, and it just never ends. For now, I’ve given up on it even though I’m really itching to get Internet access while I spend nearly two hours on the train.



Something interesting that I noticed when I paired my phone is that iSync claimed it could now sync my contacts. Last time I tried this in Tiger it really didn’t work at all. The phone just timed out and never wanted to play nice. Today, however, after feeling like all hope for any Bluetooth fun was lost I tried syncing my contacts and it worked without issue. It looks like Apple spent some time fixing iSync to work with the Sprint RAZR. Now if only I could send and receive SMS with it I’d be set. I guess I’ll have to download BluePhoneElite v2 again (although not while I’m on the train… ) and see how it has progressed since the last time I tried it.

My Leopard mail troubles are over. I don’t get Growl’s cool mail notifications anymore but I’m sure the Growl team is working on fixing that. Until then, if you want to be able to get your IMAP mail in Leopard again you can do it by following these simple steps:



Delete anything that looks like Growl in the /Library/Mail/Bundles directory

Restart mail



Yup, that’s it and now even GMail’s IMAP works in Mail. It’s important to note that if you have GrowlMail installed it’s not enough to disable it (both in Growl and in Mail itself), you really need to delete it. Enjoy!