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APRIL 2005 |
26th April 2005
Been buying bits and pieces of hardware stuff recently for my latest project. For the past couple of years now I've been always going on about SIP and how VoIP is going to be such an important technology in the future, its now the time for me to actually put my ideas in practice. Of course, I'm only mucking about really, I don't have anyone to talk to using SIP... that means its got to be done on a budget, and just recently prices have come down on the bits I need where I can buy them just to play with. So what did I get?
A Clone 'Digium X100P' FXO PCI Card. This card is based on the Ambient MD3200 chipset and is an interface from a PC to a telephone line. Basically it allows the computer to pick up the phone and talk/listen down it. So, yes, its a little like a modem but designed for voice. Cost me a tenner plus a couple quid P&P.
A Yuxin YGW-10 SIP ATA. An ATA is an Analog Terminal Adapter. What this means is that it is an interface to a telephone line. It can pretend to be a telephone line, and you can plug your phones into it. The point is that this is connected to your network and is like a 'SIP Phone' - a networked voice over IP phone... so you can call a phone thats plugged in over the network. Nice little bit of kit. Paid about 40 quid or so for this toy
Abit BP6 Motherboard with a pair of Celeron 500's and 512MB RAM. Bought this on eBay because the current motherboard in my fileserver simply hasn't got enough PCI slots for me. Also, I've always wanted a BP6! Its legendary, and as a bonus it has a Highpoint IDE controller onboard so I can add more and more harddrives to my collection. These Celerons are going to be no faster than my old PIII600EB, so its not really much of an upgrade. Another annoying thing was I had to recompile my whole machine in Gentoo Linux because it was all originally compiled with SSE optimisations. Damn, that took a long time. I think I'm probably the only person whos downgraded their processor class.
Enough rambing! Whats the plan? When a normal phone call comes through my computer will detect the ringing, and ring the SIP phone (the phone connected to the ATA). Someone picks up, it connects the call. If someone does not pick up, it will play a message, record what the caller says after the beep and email it to me (local mailserver) as an mp3. Nice, but also my fileserver will be acting as a SIP server, which we can connect to - incoming VoIP SIP calls will be routed over to the SIP phone.
I've already (re)done all the telephone wiring. I can unplug a cable, plug it into a different socket and I can run all my household DECT phones off the ATA. Now all I got to do is get the software going. This is not going to be easy, Asterisk has quite a reputation for being a pain! I should really make a 'project page' and document in detail what I will do to get this working... but the reality is I purely don't have enough time anymore.
Track of the day: Gorillaz - November Has Come
16th April 2005
At work today twiddling my thumbs wondering what I'm going to do for the rest of the weekend. Called a few friends and found a few people in Nottingham - it sounded like a party was goin' on. After work I stuck some clothes in a bag, got in the car and got there just in time for a little BBQ. So many people I haven't seen for so long. The night was still young and we all head into town to the Bluu Bar where we scored some comfy sofas and listened to the great live funk. The band had a double bass, and maaaan it was awesome. When we did finally get back, chilled for a while and head to bed. Its great to be back with friends again.
Track of the day: Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack
12th April 2005
Downloaded the Ubuntu Hoary PowerPC Live CD to try out on my laptop today. Desktop Linux has definately come a long long way from times when every little upgrade is guaranteed to break your fonts. Ubuntu looks pretty, and it is certainly fast on my laptop, its got the nice snappy feel you don't quite get in OS X. I hear a lot of work is going into trying to make software suspend as robust as Apples own. There are a few issues. There is no hardware acceleration for my nVidia graphics on PowerPC, which means although I do get a picture, moving windows around is CPU intensive (though very smooth) and I'm not sure how good movie playback would be. Yeah, well this is an issue with my 12" Powerbook and people running late model 15", 17", and iBooks (all have ATi graphics) shouldn't have this problem. The deal breaker is... total lack of support for the Airport Extreme, aka Broadcom BCM4306. No wireless really sucks. I've signed the petition, and am waiting to see whether any wizards come up with a working solution in this sourceforge project, but I'm not holding my breath for a solution in the next year. Anyway, the big question is why run linux at all, when you have OS X... I'm not quite sure, and I was asking myself the same thing. Just for fun and a change I guess.
Track of the day: Tricky - Evolution Revolution Love
