Just added support for Canadian numbers into Bell’s Mind FREE for Android.  Go pick it up now or just go to the Android Market and get the update if you’ve already installed it.

Bell’s Mind FREE gives you the fastest way to look up the city, state, and phone company associated with any US or Canadian number you want.  Doesn’t use your data plan or SMS so you can use it even without service.  Lookups are instantaneous and up-to-date.

If you’re browsing the site on your phone just click the QR code below to install Bell’s Mind FREE right now.

Bell’s Mind FREE

Another day, another application. Today’s application allows you to look up the city, state, and phone company of any US number instantly. The data is all in the application so there’s no need to connect to the Internet or use up SMS. When you start up the application it will show you the last number in your call log so you’ll immediately know where your last call came from.

So scan the QR code below and let me know what you think.  You’ll never wonder where those random calls are coming from anymore.

Currently the application only supports US numbers.  Canadian and international support will come later.

Bell’s Mind FREE

Today marks my first app release on the Android marketplace.  Tone dialer and Tone dialer FREE are tone dialers that let you play with DTMF tones (0-9, A, B, C, D), payphone tones (US and UK), and CCITT-5 (AKA blue box) tones.

Tone dialer FREE is ad supported. Tone dialer costs $0.99 and has no ads.

Just search in the Android Marketplace for Tone dialer or Tone dialer FREE or scan one of the QR codes below.

Tone dialer FREE

Tone dialer

Wow, it’s been a year already.  Stay tuned for some updates.  WordPress made my brain hurt and all of my old links are now broken.  I hope it works itself out soon.  :P

Since September 11th, 2001 flying has been a nightmare in the US. If you are unlucky enough to be on the watch list then you’ve experienced the worst
of it. Even Senator Patrick Leahy said that there are “very real and negative consequences to which people on the watchlist are subjected“.

If you don’t know what the terrorist watch list is then you either don’t fly or are very lucky. The watch list is an incredibly advanced tool used by
law enforcement that identifies terrorists by infallible information such as their first, last, and sometimes even middle names. Do you have the same name
as someone on the list? If you do you’ll be subjected to secondary screening, being detained for an unknown period of time, and the possibility of missing
your flight entirely with little or no recourse. Don’t worry though, the watch list
contains just crazy terrorist names and aliases like “Alawanna Do IsBombU”, “Maki U Xplod”, and “Adam Curry” (as he has mentioned on his “No Agenda” show).
There are actually, by some estimates, over 1 million names on the list so
I hate to burst the bubble of humor but not even the great US government can come up with 999,997 more funny names to look for. A lot of these names are
generic “Joe Schmoe”-type names that will get you yanked out of line for being one of the thousands of people that have the same unfortunate name as you.

The original system was a hodge-podge of cooperation between the Terrorist Screening Center,
the TSA, and the airlines. This list would get sent out to airlines and they were the ones in charge of flagging people
for extra security screening. The problem here was that there were no good controls to make sure the lists were up-to-date or being applied properly. This
left some people with the problem of getting extra screening on some airlines and not others.

Section 4012(a) of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 required DHS to take
these duties over. In record time (5 years) they have finally made some sweeping and incredible changes to the system. First, they have changed the name
to “Secure Flight“. I believe this was a move to strike fear into the hearts of
terrorists and those who share their names and it’s very effective in this regard. Second, they have added even more information to their highly
technical list of names. This list now includes two more pieces of information… birthdate and gender. Luckily they didn’t waste taxpayer money and
incorporate any silly fluff like a picture of the person. No, they went straight to the data that works the right way, all the time.
Five solid years of effort and now the country is safe. The TSA added two fields to a database that probably runs on Microsoft Access and we can all sleep
a lot better.

Of course, if you want to avoid watchlist trouble altogether you should just change your name
according to security expert Bruce Schneier. He has done a lot of work showing how broken the boarding process is
and how even someone with very limited skill in producing fake documents can get past all of this stuff.

If you don’t want to change your name there are other options too. About.com has an article entitled Top 7 ways to avoid no-fly list problems.
I only see 6 ways on their list so maybe one was so good it had to be redacted. Secrecy is the key in air travel today. If you want to do it the proper,
official way you really need to go straight to DHS TRIP. After completing the process
you’re guaranteed a response in 30 days. If they realize that you’re not a terrorist they’ll assign you a redress number that you can give to your airline
when you make a reservation. Airlines do not require this information to make a reservation but the TSA requires that they give you a place to enter the
information if you have it, and they also require that that information is sent along with your boarding information. This will all be taken into account
when your boarding pass is being processed and avoid the situation where you’re denied a boarding pass or subjected to additional screening. HowStuffWorks
also has a page dedicated to freeing yourself from the watch list along with some
information/speculation on how you actually get on it in the first place.

In conclusion, the TSA has an impossible and thankless job. On the one hand I can sympathize that they’ll really never make anyone happy by screening
them at security checkpoints, but on the other hand I don’t feel too bad for them because they just continually make it worse. Correction, Secure Flight
actually makes more sense than the previous system and is some kind of improvement. But they set the bar way too low and any change at this point would’ve
been an improvement. The fact that it took them five years to implement the system is mind boggling. Yes, any large system takes a long time to change
but five years just seems excessive. If anyone out there knows what really went into this five year effort please message me on Twitter
or post in the comments below.

Wanna try something extra funny? Change your name to the name of someone you don’t like, find a way to get on the terrorist watch list, then change it
back. Priceless.

A few years ago I started two projects that have been dormant past their first initial beta releases. These projects are tt-dec a post processing touch-tone decoder,
and SHELLcast a weird Perl hack that would record your activity in a console session and then play it back with eerily accurate timing. I’ve been working way too
much and I hope to get these projects going again so they at least compile on modern distros to give me a bit of a break from my normal schedule.

Anyone out there ever use these applications? tt-dec got a lot of mileage when it first started and was actually embedded in someone’s art project in England I believe. SHELLcast never made it that far aside from
producing the infamous cocot-15.avi and one other live SHELLcast of a game of Tetris over a modem, over Packet8, to some friends in CT. Ridiculous? Yes. Sad? Mostly. Fun? Absolutely.

To a CentOS newbie this is really frustrating. Maybe it’s the fault of the dependencies so I won’t place blame anywhere yet.


To install LumenVox on CentOS 5 you’ll need to follow the instructions from LumenVox and do a few more things. This quick list will give you all of those steps in a no-nonsense format. You won’t have to deal with getting stuck with instructions that just don’t work on CentOS 5.




Step 1: Add the YUM repository for LumenVox by creating /etc/yum.repos.d/LumenVox.repo with the following contents:

###################################################
[LumenVox]
name=LumenVox Products $basearch
baseurl=http://www.LumenVox.com/packages/EL5/i386/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
###################################################

Step 2: IMPORTANT! This is 32-bit only. . Download the libjs RPM from DAG by issuing this command: http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/js/js-1.60-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm




Step 3: Install the RPM with this command: rpm -i js-1.60-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm




Step 4: IMPORTANT! LumenVox claims there are issues with version 8.6 and CentOS 5. Install all of the LumenVox 8.5 components with this command: yum install LumenVoxCore-8.5.401 LumenVoxClient-8.5.401 LumenVoxSRE-8.5.401 LumenVoxLicenseServer-8.5.401




Now the last thing to do is to start the licensing server and start using LumenVox. Since I’ve had some difficulties getting it running past this point it’ll have to wait for another article…

Disclaimer: I had never used CentOS 5 or yum before last night.



I signed up for a new hosting package using CentOS 5 to test out Lumenvox for a client. I’ll be putting up a quick log of what I did in case anyone else out there ends up having to do this and hits any of the issues I ran into.



First, we’ll do the basics. This includes pulling Asterisk from Subversion, installing the necessary packages to build Asterisk, and finally building Asterisk with all of the documentation and sample configuration information.



Step 1: Install Subversion if necessary. Run “yum -y subversion“.



Step 2: Fetch Asterisk with Subversion. Run “svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/trunk asterisk“.



Step 3: (Optional) Fetch DADHI. Run “svn co http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/linux-complete/trunk dahdi“. For some reason Asterisk.org’s own “Getting Started” still has references to the old Zaptel repositories that don’t work. Avoid them.



Step 4: Install GCC and the necessary libraries. Run “yum -y gcc gcc-c++ libxml2-devel libtermcap“. Another post online indicates that you may need to install other libraries but my configuration didn’t require it.



Step 5: Run “./configure” in the Asterisk directory.



Step 6: Run “make && mail install” in the Asterisk directory.



Step 7: (Optional) Run “make samples && make prog_docs“. If you want to make the documentation you may also need to install doxygen with “yum -y install doxygen“.



That should get you started. If you want to learn how to actually use Asterisk then you should check out Asterisk Guru and VOIP Info.

I ran into this today on my home server and thought I’d share the love. With Google I found a similar but incomplete bug. Using strace I found that these are the magic commands that will make things work:

ln -s /opt/vmware/server/lib/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.7/libcrypto.so.0.9.7 /opt/vmware/server/lib/bin/libcrypto.so.0.9.7
mkdir -p /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libssl.so.0.9.7/
ln -s /opt/vmware/server/lib/lib/libssl.so.0.9.7/libssl.so.0.9.7 /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libssl.so.0.9.7/libssl.so.0.9.7

Why are these paths hardcoded, wacky, and completely unchecked? I have no idea. VMware rocks anyway.

Just added Disqus to all of the permalinks. Let me know what you think especially if you know of a better commenting system that can easily integrate with nanoblogger.