Over the last couple of days I've started to find my interest in technical geekery coming back. For a while now computers have been my day job and as such they ceased to be an interesting hobby. Well, after nine months away from working with them I'm starting to find green shoots of technical interest showing through again.
Over the last few days I've been playing with various new things, and for my own amusement I'm going to try to keep track of new things I play with with the newtoys tag on blog posts.
First up Awesome: A modern, fast, configurable window manager for X Windows based primarily around the tiling paradigm but with a Lua-based configuration engine which allows you to do pretty much whatever you want with it. It's certainly slick and small and I'm pleased with my initial set up of it and am looking forward to playing with it more.
Lua: An lightweight, extensible, embeddable scripting language designed for customising and extending the behaviour of applications and tools. You wouldn't (please) write an application in it from scratch, but if you expose the relevant parts of your internal API to it, users can cutomise things in ways that you didn't think of.
Asterisk Caller ID support: Finally got around to tracking down the problem that has left me without working Caller ID on my Asterisk PBX. It turns out it was a (known) bug in the Sipura-3102 firmware. Unfortunately Sipura got bought by Linksys who then got bought by Cisco. Cisco are the company I least like dealing with when it comes to bugs and firmware. Their procedure for downloading anything (including the release notes) makes signing up for a bank account look easy. I mean, really. And on top of that, their Web site is buggy. It took me over an hour to persuade it to give me the firmware which finally arrived as a Windows executable which refused to work in Wine. Luckily I eventually found some help on the 'net, extracted the firmware and uploaded it to the Sipura by hand. It was really easy once I had the information -- the firmware needs to be on an HTTP or TFTP server and you can type the address into the Sipura's http://device/upgrade?... URL.
Anyway. The upshot of that is that the nuisance calls we frequently got are now officially a thing of the past. The PBX answers the phone and plays a recording of the Monty On The Run theme music to our unwanted caller.
On the back of the Asterisk success I decided to put some code into the asterisk dial plan to notify my jabber account when people were calling. That was easy but still, it's not quite what I wanted. So I've coded up a multicast messaging service in python with a CLI tool to send a message and a libnotify based client for displaying the result. Now we're getting somewhere.
Well... with all this libnotify fun maybe I could get my Facebook notifications popping up there too, instead of requiring me to log in and clear them manually. So I've been playing with the Facebook API. Unfortunately that's lead to some grumbling because their Terms of Service aren't Open Source friendly (you are required to keep your application key secret, which you can't do with a freely distributable application, Open Source or not). It makes sense for a hosted app, but not for a "desktop" app. They also, I notice, don't open up access to your inbox and the much-vaunted Jabber-compatible Chat interface has gone silent too. It looks to me like they're trying to keep their crown jewels to themselves here for fear of losing visitors.
But all in all it does feel like my geek streak is starting to come back again.
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