Ok, so I admit it - I love the movie War Games. I recently built a new PC and on it went 3 x 23” LCD screens running 1920x1080. My girlfriend noted that it looks like ‘the computer from that movie’. I knew she was talking about. She was talking about the WOPR - which became the name for this new machine. She has now inherited the Mac Pro known as Enigma.

I hunted around for a bit and couldn’t find a suitable background to use for this and came up empty. So I created my own. It’s attached for anyone else that would like to use it.

It’s native at 1920x1080 resolution and should hopefully bring back a few memories :)

For those of you lucky enough to have 3 x widescreens - here is the whole thing stitched together…

It’s been a while since my original script to use greypag.es for Australian caller ID lookups and since the online database disappeared, my script went into the archives.

Now its back.

Thanks to the API functions offered by Reverse Australia we can now have caller ID lookups back in Asterisk!

You’ll need a few things to achieve this:

1. Obviously a Linux PC running Asterisk
2. Asterisk::AGI Perl module
3. LWP::UserAgent perl module (should be included with your distro)
4. A running MySQL Database
5. My cid-lookup-v4.agi script.

Setup the MySQL Database with a table called ‘cid’ and two fields called ‘name’ & ‘number’. We use this to store unidentified inbound callers as well as cache looked up details from Reverse Australia. This means you can go edit the details later and have them show as you want rather than as unknown or the content returned from Reverse Australia.

Setup is VERY basic. Throw cid-lookup-v4.agi into your agi-bin directory, then place AGI(cid-lookup.agi) in your extensions.conf where you process incoming calls.

You will need to edit the script and change the setup for your MySQL database - as well as add the Reverse Australia API key.

Looking up calls online is optional.

This has been tested with the following configurations:

• CentOS 5.5 with perl-LWP-UserAgent-Determined from rpmforge.
• Fedora 14 with stock F14 perl-LWP-UserAgent-Determined package.

If you use CentOS, it is much easier to use the prebuilt perl packages from rpmforge. If you use CentOS, save yourself the heartache and use rpmforge for perl modules!

As an update to a few previous posts, I decided to give HTC some credit where it is due.

HTC organised Fedex to come and pick up my Touch Pro 2 (after some confusion about the actual pickup date) and ship it off to HTC Singapore. While I was still annoyed that it had to travel to Singapore, the fact that HTC was going to pick up the tab for shipping - as well as sending it international priority (26 hours doorstep to doorstep!) made up for it.

I was expecting that my phone would be out of action until 2011 - however to my surprise, less than a week later I had a delivery from Fedex with my repaired Touch Pro 2. Later that day I even got a phone call from HTC to confirm that I had received it! Most of the issues seem to be fixed - some weren’t but are minor enough to ignore.

I have to say thank you to Francis from the HTC Australia call centre (I think he is in the Philippines?) for organising a lot of this. If this level of service was standard from HTC then I would have been singing their praises instead of almost converting to an iPhone guy.

I hate politics. I hate both political parties. That being said, I would support any political party that drew up the same plans for the NBN as what we have on the table. It just makes sense. Australia has been short changed in broadband and all the wonderful advances that it can make possible for many, many years.

Telstra was sold off and now are driven by making profit for their shareholders – not what is in the best interest of every Australian. This kills expansion. This gives the bush a raw deal. This is not acceptable.

The NBN isn’t as much a political tool as it is a catalyst for change in ways that we never even imagined. It’s about supporting business and fostering growths in IT and technology. With much faster broadband, we open up the opportunity to decentralise city areas providing more jobs to regional Australia. We open the door to working at home more. A better work life balance. More time for the family.

Screw the politics – this is about changing a nation for the better.

The plan that was tabled by the Liberals was a good attempt, but fails to address the many weaknesses of wireless technology. Noise & Distance. I’ve been involved with wireless for over 10 years now - and I will attempt to explain some of the reasons WHY wireless is just not up to the task.

1) Speed needs Hertz! - The higher the frequency, the more data you can squeeze into it. 802.11b/g uses 2.4Ghz and gets ~54Mbit air speed. This translates to about 22Mbit wire speed - that is close enough to 2.2 Megabytes per second.

2) The more Hertz, the more you lose! - You can only squeeze so much data into a certain frequency. The higher you go in frequency, the quicker that signal fades. This is called Free Space Path Loss. This gives us a limit on both how high in frequency we can go, and how much distance a base station can cover. 802.11b/g using 2.4Ghz can be unusable past 500 meters!

3) Noise - Radio Frequency or electrical noise is a fact of life. There is not much you can do about it. To overcome noise, you need more output power from the radio. The down side of this is that the more power you use, the more likely you are to interfere with other users.

4) Security - Wireless is a broadcast transmission. This means that EVERYBODY can see what you are doing over your connection - as long as they can hear your signal. This means that over several kilometers there may be 50+ people who can eavesdrop on your connection. Encryption can solve this, however even current wireless security encryption can be cracked in as little as a few minutes.

There are still more reasons as to why wireless is not suitable for large scale deployments to entire suburbs - however I believe that these are some of the more basic ones that would cause major issues. In short, Fibre is one of the best solutions available. It will give us the flexibility that the copper network has since its installation - but without the limitations of copper! That is something to be really excited about.

This is a clip of Danny created by Emma and I. Danny is one of Emmas ponies horses.