UPDATE 19/01/2010: I got a call from Patrick at Digium this morning. He had a quick step through the problem I was having regarding the Fax for Asterisk application. Apparently the free / trial 1 license Fax for Asterisk does not come with support. From what I have been told, the ones you actually buy should have a link for support. I can’t test this to verify it, but this is what I’ve been told. Patrick has also started a bug report on the license issue so hopefully this will get fixed for everyone.

For those of you who do a lot with Asterisk, you know how this story goes, those who don’t need a warning!

Digium is the creator of Asterisk - an open source telephony project - and probably one of the worst companies to deal with in the history of computing. The Asterisk open source people are quite - well - disowning of anything done by Digium and it is almost considered a sin to try and get help in the Asterisk IRC channel.

So what makes Digium so bad?

1) Quite a while ago I purchased a number of g729 licenses. These are $10USD a piece and should (in theory) allow you to legally transcode between other codecs and g.729 on your asterisk server. These license for these codecs are tied to the MAC address of your network interfaces.

Sadly, if your network interfaces are changed, or the machine that you run Asterisk on changes, then your licenses are now invalid. If the boot order of your network interfaces change, your licenses are now invalid.

Digium is kind though. If you request Digium to relicense your codecs then they will - once. After that, you need to buy them again. I have had Digium flatly refuse to relicense my g.729 licenses after experimenting with running Asterisk in Xen and needing to relicense 5 times. I now use the fully functional and freely available g729 codecs for asterisk.

2) I recently got a couple of Digum Fax for Asterisk licenses. These are Digiums commercial offering for sending faxes using either T.38 or falling back to g711. You are offered a free license for 1 fax at a time and multiple concurrent faxes can happen at once if you purchase more licenses.

This is all well and good, however when you get a free license, or when you buy these, there is ZERO support. If you try to find somewhere to lodge a support case then you find that it is just about impossible. The support area of their web site tells you that you need to register one of your hardware devices to get support. If you email the address that sent you the licenses, you get told (after a 3-4 day wait):

“This request for technical assistance was sent to Digium Customer Service. Our technical support team can be contacted at +1 256-428-6161 or http://www.digium.com/support .”

My options are to be awake and call them internationally at 3am in the morning, or tough it up and get no support at all. Great customer service!

So what do I need to contact Digium support for? Well it seems there is a SLIGHT bug in their fax product that doesn’t release a license slot when a fax fails under certain conditions. This means if you have 10 licenses and 10 faxes failed in a certain way then the only way you can send or receive any faxes is to restart asterisk - causing ALL calls to drop. This probably should have been picked up by their testers before releasing their commercial offering, but I’m starting to think that their customers ARE their testers!

Overall, my dislike for Digium is growing at a rapid pace and wonder how long they will continue to ignore their customers with shonky procedures and if it will eventually mean the end of them. Time will tell.

I’ve written up a quick page on how to use USB drives as removable storage on TSM.

Feel free to leave a comment on that page if you have any questions.

Well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted an update on here. Things have been quite insane in the last few months with a number of fun things happening.

• I lost nearly 1Tb of data when 3 x hard drives died within 24 hours
• I’ve had to restructure my entire backup system
• I’ve been working my butt off at Melbourne Airport
• I’ve been working hard to get my PPL happening<
• …. and probably more!

Talk about exciting! I’m trying to save up some cash to get myself a HTC Touch Pro 2 to do some development work on and provide a port of my ROM for owners of that device - it shows a lot of promise! If you feel like helping out, feel free to throw $1-5 my way via paypal ;)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about the 2 way radios in my car. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time (4 days in total!) reworking the entire boot of the car to tidy things up and make them much more presentable!

Here are some photos of the new setup.

There is still a little bit of tidying up of wiring etc - but it’s a very nice setup and leaves HEAPs of boot space available for every day usage.

Ingredients

• 2 cups plain flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon pepper
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup cold water
• 1 cup cold milk

Method

1. Sieve flour into a bowl and add salt and pepper.
2. Make a well in the flour and add the eggs.
3. Add water and milk.
4. Beat with a electric beater until smooth.
5. Leave to stand for about 30 minutes.
6. Place a teaspoon of oil into each of 12 muffins pans, place in a preheated oven at 220C and let heat for about 10 minutes.
7. Remove from oven and pour the batter into the pans.

Cook for about 30 minutes or until the puddings have risen and browned slightly.

Recipe notes You may have to add a little extra milk and water if the batter is too thick. It should be like a pikelet batter. The batter can be strained to get rid of any unwanted lumps.