What I would like is a phone system that I could sync to my computer so I could update the phone book over all the units (if not sync with Address Book or Outlook)
My trixbox Asterisk system at home does this halfway (http://carlstrom.com/trixbox/). For my Cisco phones, I generate an XML phone directory from my Emacs BBDB contacts database which is then served to the phones over HTTP. Unforunately my Hitachi Wi-Fi phones have to have the directory synced via USB, even though all other settings can be set via a web server. Certainly there other other options for Wi-Fi VoIP handsets that probably won't have this problem.
keep a log of caller IDs
Asterisk keeps a CDR (Call Details Record) database with that information
or even forward me new voicemail notifications.
I haven't bothered setting it up, but Asterisk systems can forward voice mail as email. I do have web access to the sound files, but largely just access via the phone handsets.
Does anyone know if such a system exists?
I believe that you can have what you want from an Asterisk based system, but the hardware isn't cheap. The computer to power it doesn't have to be anything special though, I use an old discarded 450MHz Dell box.
I'll note that I am strange and use my Asterisk system with a POTS connection, just using VoIP inside the house. My wife insists on it for emergency power-outage 911 reasons
I recently discovered MisterHouse because it has a module to talk to my Pentair Compool pool controller. I'm documenting my experience here: http://carlstrom.com/pool/
I've found MisterHouse documentation to be frustrating but I've gotten it to do what I need so far for my pool project (allow remote control and to log temperature information over time). I will say that it could use some serious rearchitecture to go along with some better documentation. If I were going to do some more serious HA I would consider trying to improve things, but its good enough for my needs, so I'll just be submitting some minor bug fix / corrections...
I've been happy using my old HP OfficeJet printers under Ubuntu with HPLIP. It is nice to see a mainstream vendor actually support their hardware under Linux. I had thinking of ditching HP for Canon until this. I've been using it more for bulk scanning with the automatic document feeder that industrial printing, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
I had the free account for real-time quotes since before I was actually had an account with any equities in it. When I actually was forced to get an eTrade account for my employers stock plans, I kept it a separate account.
pssh on the Palm Treo is the only thing that seems to work for me. Keep in mind I want to use Emacs via my smart phone, so I need Control and Meta (aka Alt) to work well. pssh uses the center key for these, with one click for Control and a second for Meta. It also has a very small font which allows me a 80 column wide view.
I have considered switching to a HTC phone such as the AT&T Tilt with Pocket PuTTY. Unfortunately, it seemed to hard to use for two reasons. One, I couldn't easily find a way to have a really small (but usable) fond. Two, I couldn't find a way to easily enter Control and Meta. I tried this mostly at the store, so if there are solutions to this, please let me know!
I have tried the iPhone with server side ssh script on a friends iPhone. Again the font and keyboard issues made it seem not too feasible. It seems like the font issue would be easy to fix, but the keyboard Control/Meta issue seems even harder to address on the iPhone. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking of getting an iPhone 2.x in July... web surfing has become more important than my ssh access.
> Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
I think this is becoming the standard operating procedure at more and more places as stories about data leaks through old "disposed" of hard drives become more widespread. I think part of this has come as part of HIPAA compliance.
At Stanford University any computer disposed of needs to heave either the drive wiped or removed for destruction separate from the computer itself. It has been a pain because when we are disposing of really old computers sometimes it requires some creativity to figure out how to get all the drives out when the computer itself is no longer functioning.
I had used Fedora for years, primarily because it was the only distro I could get to work on our bleeding edge PowerMacs in our lab. However, as we acquired more machines the need to reinstall machines to get new versions became tedious. Yes, occasionally an upgrade could be forced, but often it just did not work.
I first tried Ubuntu via the VMWare Browser Appliance, using it for some development on a Windows laptop. The biggest change was converting certain idioms from yum to apt, but that was relatively minor in the long run. The next time one of my desktops reached Fedora end-of-live, I figured I might as well try Ubuntu since I have to reinstall anyways and haven't looked back...
So long Fedora, it was nice knowing you.
My friend and I both have Dell XPS Gen 2 laptops. With mine running Windows and his running Wine Ubuntu, he can get into a game slightly faster than I can.
> What the hell do you do if you have kids and you have to hire a babysitter? Leave her your cellphone?
Uh, all the babysitters I have hired have had cellphones. We leave them our numbers so they can reach us where they are. Much better than the old procedure of leaving them the numbers for the restaurant, theater, etc. Once there was an actual crisis and the babysitter called our cell and we were able to return home immediately. Its a good thing for the cell phone, since we decided to stop at Target between dinner and the theater and she would not have know that. It also has been good to be able to call them on their cell directly if something comes up such as a flat tire, without worrying that they won't answer the home phone line. And yes that happened to us on the way home from the theater on a different occasion.
And yes, I am over 30 and have a 2 land lines, one for voice and one for fax/DSL. But if I had to choose between cell and land lines, I'd ditch the land lines and switch to a cable modem.
I think I saw this set at Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, CA, last night (Friday, 28 July 2006). It was just insider the door on the right under the "Electrical Components" sign and there were a few of them, around 5 that I recall. I have the old Mindstorms set and several of the Star Wars Lego ones (AT-AT and R2-D2) so I'm pretty sure its not just the same old set, but the new one. Unfortunately, I was on a mission some friends to repair a dying TiVo so I didn't spend much time looking at it, plus I probably am supposed to wait for xmas to get it.:)
Ah, I see, just like Mach 3.0 from CMU I guess. But in any case, I was trying to correct the rampant misconception that Mac OS X is running a FreeBSD kernel that I see so many places. The Mac OS X kernel is more Mach than BSD.
As the other reply said, Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel, they take stuff from the BSD userland as well as the GNU project, amongst others.
The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel", which itself used to rely on BSD code to fill in the gaps to make a fully functional Unix-like operating system. The Mach system is a direct decendant of what NeXT ran on its computers and came to Apple through the NeXT acquisition.
The TEACH Act provides a fair use framework for classroom use, including distance learning. There are strings attached. However, if your use falls under the scope of the TEACH Act, it should give you some clarity on what you can use without fear of reprisal.
In the long term, PG&E has found that undergrounding cables is cheaper than fixing cables knocked down by trees, at least in Bay Area I'm sure part of this has to do with the cost of labor in California, so it may not make sense in all areas, perhaps not in all areas in California where labor may be cheaper or there are just fewer trees. Sometimes it the issue is getting towns to go along with it, especially if other utilities are sharing the poles.
I was disappointed to see that only the i386 and x86_64 FC5 sets were respun. When official updates are made by Fedora itself, they include new packages for all supported platforms. However, the Fedora "Unity Project" respins, they don't really seem to have unity in mind.:) I personally don't care as I've stopped downloading the 5 ISO sets in favor of installing from a rescue CD.
Uh, but this is JPL, the Jet Propulstion Lab. What does that have to do with space?
The fact is that JPL has already left behind its jet propulsion roots to become a NASA contractor for robotic space exploration, presumably because that is where the money was when the jet propulsion money dried up. So now they are simply following the money again, this time to the DoD.
It would be cool to apply their unmanned robot experience to military unmanned air, sea, and ground vehicles, with potential for commerical spinoffs.
I'm back in school now myself but I did college recruiting and was involved in a lot of hiring decisions.
Keep it short. One or at most two pages. If you had two pages it better have summer job details or discussion of some major class or personal projects you work on. Did you have a senior project?
keywords, Keywords, KEYWORDS. Unfortunately, the people/machines/managers than often process incoming resumes tend to look for certain keywords. J2EE. C++. I usually put this in a skills section on the bottom, listing programming languages, tools, operatings systems I am comfortable with.
Since it has to be short, try to customize it for the target employer if possible based on the job you are submitting it for.
Cover letter (or email). If you are sending an email or can provide a comment when submitting, make sure you say why you are interested in the position posted and why your background qualifies you.
Persistence and followup. a lot of times organizations can be disorganized. I remember one summer we were so busy we didn't really go over the resumes to look for interns. so the two or three people that emailed to reiterated their interest got hired.
Unfortunately, in the end, a lot of things come down to having an "in" somewhere. all my jobs, including the one out of college, came via a referral of some sort. where are your friends working? are they hiring? what about former classmates from previous years? go to a couple alumni events if your school has them. it is more effective than posting 1000 resumes to websites.
This tree was a HUGE oak tree though - had to be 100 feet tall at least, with a trunk that was probably 5 feet wide. And it sat there in a big planter box waiting to be "planted." The transportation costs alone must have cost a fortune.
Sometimes to get a permit they have to preserve trees especially oaks. So if they were doing construction, that tree could have just been dug up and boxed on site. I know a group off guys that do this for a living in the bay area specifically for oaks.
But in general I agree, they have been distracted. However the fight with Microsoft and against Linux have been the bigger mistakes. Java a least gave them some respect for a while.
I think they should have focused on being a hardware company and just moved from Solaris to Linux. Unfortunately IBM made this move and that makes Sun less likely to do it, if only to not be seen as a copycat.
Ironically enough, some of Google's first setup (possibly the one pictured) is sitting in a display case in the basement of the Gates Computer Science building at Stanford
Slashdot Mirror
What I would like is a phone system that I could sync to my computer so I could update the phone book over all the units (if not sync with Address Book or Outlook)
My trixbox Asterisk system at home does this halfway (http://carlstrom.com/trixbox/). For my Cisco phones, I generate an XML phone directory from my Emacs BBDB contacts database which is then served to the phones over HTTP. Unforunately my Hitachi Wi-Fi phones have to have the directory synced via USB, even though all other settings can be set via a web server. Certainly there other other options for Wi-Fi VoIP handsets that probably won't have this problem.
keep a log of caller IDs
Asterisk keeps a CDR (Call Details Record) database with that information
or even forward me new voicemail notifications.
I haven't bothered setting it up, but Asterisk systems can forward voice mail as email. I do have web access to the sound files, but largely just access via the phone handsets.
Does anyone know if such a system exists?
I believe that you can have what you want from an Asterisk based system, but the hardware isn't cheap. The computer to power it doesn't have to be anything special though, I use an old discarded 450MHz Dell box.
I'll note that I am strange and use my Asterisk system with a POTS connection, just using VoIP inside the house. My wife insists on it for emergency power-outage 911 reasons
I recently discovered MisterHouse because it has a module to talk to my Pentair Compool pool controller. I'm documenting my experience here: http://carlstrom.com/pool/
I've found MisterHouse documentation to be frustrating but I've gotten it to do what I need so far for my pool project (allow remote control and to log temperature information over time). I will say that it could use some serious rearchitecture to go along with some better documentation. If I were going to do some more serious HA I would consider trying to improve things, but its good enough for my needs, so I'll just be submitting some minor bug fix / corrections...
I've been happy using my old HP OfficeJet printers under Ubuntu with HPLIP. It is nice to see a mainstream vendor actually support their hardware under Linux. I had thinking of ditching HP for Canon until this. I've been using it more for bulk scanning with the automatic document feeder that industrial printing, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
-
HP Linux Imaging and Printing
Print, Scan and Fax Drivers for Linux
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html
Great idea. I just emailed Rep. Anna Eshoo. Hopefully other Silicon Valley nerds will do the same. Here is the URL:
http://eshoo.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=420&Itemid=44
He was the second conductor, after Ringo Starr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Conductor#Mr._Conductor_II
I had the free account for real-time quotes since before I was actually had an account with any equities in it. When I actually was forced to get an eTrade account for my employers stock plans, I kept it a separate account.
eTrade has had free real time quotes with a free account for over a decade. For those that really want/need this information, it was not hard to get.
/.
It is good if you can avoid an account, even a free one, to get this information now, but this seems a little over hyped to be on
pssh on the Palm Treo is the only thing that seems to work for me. Keep in mind I want to use Emacs via my smart phone, so I need Control and Meta (aka Alt) to work well. pssh uses the center key for these, with one click for Control and a second for Meta. It also has a very small font which allows me a 80 column wide view.
I have considered switching to a HTC phone such as the AT&T Tilt with Pocket PuTTY. Unfortunately, it seemed to hard to use for two reasons. One, I couldn't easily find a way to have a really small (but usable) fond. Two, I couldn't find a way to easily enter Control and Meta. I tried this mostly at the store, so if there are solutions to this, please let me know!
I have tried the iPhone with server side ssh script on a friends iPhone. Again the font and keyboard issues made it seem not too feasible. It seems like the font issue would be easy to fix, but the keyboard Control/Meta issue seems even harder to address on the iPhone. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm thinking of getting an iPhone 2.x in July... web surfing has become more important than my ssh access.
> Nobody uses that on Windows and Mac OS X :)
You are wrong. I use it. So does my wife.
> Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
I think this is becoming the standard operating procedure at more and more places as stories about data leaks through old "disposed" of hard drives become more widespread. I think part of this has come as part of HIPAA compliance.
At Stanford University any computer disposed of needs to heave either the drive wiped or removed for destruction separate from the computer itself. It has been a pain because when we are disposing of really old computers sometimes it requires some creativity to figure out how to get all the drives out when the computer itself is no longer functioning.
-bri
I had used Fedora for years, primarily because it was the only distro I could get to work on our bleeding edge PowerMacs in our lab. However, as we acquired more machines the need to reinstall machines to get new versions became tedious. Yes, occasionally an upgrade could be forced, but often it just did not work. I first tried Ubuntu via the VMWare Browser Appliance, using it for some development on a Windows laptop. The biggest change was converting certain idioms from yum to apt, but that was relatively minor in the long run. The next time one of my desktops reached Fedora end-of-live, I figured I might as well try Ubuntu since I have to reinstall anyways and haven't looked back... So long Fedora, it was nice knowing you.
My friend and I both have Dell XPS Gen 2 laptops. With mine running Windows and his running Wine Ubuntu, he can get into a game slightly faster than I can.
> What the hell do you do if you have kids and you have to hire a babysitter? Leave her your cellphone?
Uh, all the babysitters I have hired have had cellphones. We leave them our numbers so they can reach us where they are. Much better than the old procedure of leaving them the numbers for the restaurant, theater, etc. Once there was an actual crisis and the babysitter called our cell and we were able to return home immediately. Its a good thing for the cell phone, since we decided to stop at Target between dinner and the theater and she would not have know that. It also has been good to be able to call them on their cell directly if something comes up such as a flat tire, without worrying that they won't answer the home phone line. And yes that happened to us on the way home from the theater on a different occasion.
And yes, I am over 30 and have a 2 land lines, one for voice and one for fax/DSL. But if I had to choose between cell and land lines, I'd ditch the land lines and switch to a cable modem.
I think I saw this set at Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, CA, last night (Friday, 28 July 2006). It was just insider the door on the right under the "Electrical Components" sign and there were a few of them, around 5 that I recall. I have the old Mindstorms set and several of the Star Wars Lego ones (AT-AT and R2-D2) so I'm pretty sure its not just the same old set, but the new one. Unfortunately, I was on a mission some friends to repair a dying TiVo so I didn't spend much time looking at it, plus I probably am supposed to wait for xmas to get it. :)
Ah, I see, just like Mach 3.0 from CMU I guess. But in any case, I was trying to correct the rampant misconception that Mac OS X is running a FreeBSD kernel that I see so many places. The Mac OS X kernel is more Mach than BSD.
As the other reply said, Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel, they take stuff from the BSD userland as well as the GNU project, amongst others.
The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel", which itself used to rely on BSD code to fill in the gaps to make a fully functional Unix-like operating system. The Mach system is a direct decendant of what NeXT ran on its computers and came to Apple through the NeXT acquisition.
The TEACH Act provides a fair use framework for classroom use, including distance learning. There are strings attached. However, if your use falls under the scope of the TEACH Act, it should give you some clarity on what you can use without fear of reprisal.
IANAL...
In the long term, PG&E has found that undergrounding cables is cheaper than fixing cables knocked down by trees, at least in Bay Area I'm sure part of this has to do with the cost of labor in California, so it may not make sense in all areas, perhaps not in all areas in California where labor may be cheaper or there are just fewer trees. Sometimes it the issue is getting towns to go along with it, especially if other utilities are sharing the poles.
I was disappointed to see that only the i386 and x86_64 FC5 sets were respun. When official updates are made by Fedora itself, they include new packages for all supported platforms. However, the Fedora "Unity Project" respins, they don't really seem to have unity in mind. :) I personally don't care as I've stopped downloading the 5 ISO sets in favor of installing from a rescue CD.
Uh, but this is JPL, the Jet Propulstion Lab. What does that have to do with space?
The fact is that JPL has already left behind its jet propulsion roots to become a NASA contractor for robotic space exploration, presumably because that is where the money was when the jet propulsion money dried up. So now they are simply following the money again, this time to the DoD.
It would be cool to apply their unmanned robot experience to military unmanned air, sea, and ground vehicles, with potential for commerical spinoffs.
Why is it that Europeans get the DRM disks and US/UK get regular ones?
And when did the UK leave the continent of Europe?
I'm back in school now myself but I did college recruiting and was involved in a lot of hiring decisions.
Keep it short. One or at most two pages. If you had two pages it better have summer job details or discussion of some major class or personal projects you work on. Did you have a senior project?
keywords, Keywords, KEYWORDS. Unfortunately, the people/machines/managers than often process incoming resumes tend to look for certain keywords. J2EE. C++. I usually put this in a skills section on the bottom, listing programming languages, tools, operatings systems I am comfortable with.
Since it has to be short, try to customize it for the target employer if possible based on the job you are submitting it for.
Cover letter (or email). If you are sending an email or can provide a comment when submitting, make sure you say why you are interested in the position posted and why your background qualifies you.
Persistence and followup. a lot of times organizations can be disorganized. I remember one summer we were so busy we didn't really go over the resumes to look for interns. so the two or three people that emailed to reiterated their interest got hired.
Unfortunately, in the end, a lot of things come down to having an "in" somewhere. all my jobs, including the one out of college, came via a referral of some sort. where are your friends working? are they hiring? what about former classmates from previous years? go to a couple alumni events if your school has them. it is more effective than posting 1000 resumes to websites.
Good luck!
Sometimes to get a permit they have to preserve trees especially oaks. So if they were doing construction, that tree could have just been dug up and boxed on site. I know a group off guys that do this for a living in the bay area specifically for oaks.
But in general I agree, they have been distracted. However the fight with Microsoft and against Linux have been the bigger mistakes. Java a least gave them some respect for a while.
I think they should have focused on being a hardware company and just moved from Solaris to Linux. Unfortunately IBM made this move and that makes Sun less likely to do it, if only to not be seen as a copycat.
Pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from the basement of Gates.
More pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from Stanford CS Department's Computer History Exhibits Photo Tour.
You can physically see this display in the basement of the Stanford Gates Building.