Drupal! Its my favorite CMS and the only one that I use on the sites I setup. Chadarius.com is a Drupal site. In fact I'm so lazy with themes that I still haven't really changed the default drupal theme here since I upgraded to 5.3 over a year ago. One of these days I'll get around to it!

Chicago has its own great Drupal user group at http://cdmug.org. Those guys are putting on http://drupalcampchicago.org.

I recently needed to bring up a java app that I hadn't used in quite some time. At least as long as before I had Kubntu 8.04 installed. Back then I was using Java 6 (1.6.x) as the default JRE on my latptop. Now however, the app was failing with all kinds of errors.

As with any OS that can use Java, just because you have a java version installed, doesn't mean that version is the one that is launched by default. I have Java-gcj, Java 5 and Java 6 all installed on my Kubuntu 8.04 laptop. Java-gcj was currently the default java version.

In Linux, the way the java default is setup is both elagent and confusing all at the same time (Linux in a nutshell if you ask me, and I love it!). In Linux the /usr/bin/java file is really just a link to the java version that you want to be the default. But /usr/bin/java links to another link to /etc/alternatives/java which in turn links to the actual java binary at /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java. 

I've been fighting with Asterisk the last few days. I think now I have almost tamed the beast though. At first I was running into problems with the web interface. However, at the time I was running the packages that come with Ubuntu 8.04 server. I decided that it would just be better to just compile the latest stable version on my own.

This is fine except that the latest stable version's config files don't actually work. When I started Asterisk I would get an error about how it could not create /var/run/assterisk.pid. This, inspite of the fact that after looking at /etc/init.d/asterisk, it was telling asterisk to create the file in /var/run/asterisk where the asterisk user and group had full rights. Bizaar.

After leaving it for the weekend (My family went to go visit Grandma at her new house) I took a fresh crack at it this morning. It sfunny how when you leave something for a few days you get a whole fresh new look at things.

I decided that even with hacking the /etc/init.d/asterisk file to hard code the startup command to ensure it was passing the right parameters and getting no where, that the /etc/asterisk/asterisk.conf file must be the culprit. 

In the asterisk.conf file that the make command creates, it just housed one section called [global] with a number of directives for where Asterisk should find and create files. 

Well it turns out that this is horribly wrong, and people know about it. Lovely.

I changed the file to look like this instead:

I've decided to go even cheaper than Vonage. Don't get me wrong. I like Vonage. But I found this article on using Asterisk with the Broadvoice service, and I just couldn't resist anymore. I already had plans to setup an Asterisk server for the twice monthly podcast I run over at http://lordsoftyr.com. But having my own voip PBX system and being able to reduce my current $50 per month Vonage plan (Voice and Fax line) down to $20 per month is just too good to pass up.

Now all I have to do is get it setup properly! The Ubuntu repository binaries are a little old so I'm working on a script that will download and install all the bits that I need in a relatively automated fashion.  I'm running into a few compiling issues at the moment, but as soon as I work those out, I'll post my install script. Until then... check out that article on Asterisk from above. There are so many things you can do with it. I can't wait to start podcasting with my crew using it.

So my Pidgin has been without sound for some time now. I figured it was about time I figured out why. It turns out that Ubuntu 8.04 and its use of Pulse Audio is the culprit. If there was one thing about Ubuntu 8.04 that they really blew, it was the sound.

I'm sorry but there are just too many apps that don't handle Pulse Audio well or at all. Even some amazing sound utilities and apps. Hello? Audacity?

So how do I get around this issue? Well I noticed that under the Preferences | Sound tab I can change the method to "Command". So as a lark I put in aplay and the path to a wave file. Sure enough it worked just fine. The next problem was how do I get the individual sounds to play rather than the same sound for everything?

Simple! A Google search later and I find that you can just slap a %s in there instead. So the command I use is "aplay %s". Now I finally have Pidgin sounds again.

Ubuntu! Hey! Get going on how to get all this sound stuff working without having to tweak all of this stuff! Sure I understand that not everything is going to work with Pulse yet, but if there is a work around, then you should have it in your packages to use it. Perhaps it was a bit early to move to Pulse. Perhaps moving early will speed other apps to adapt faster. Either way its annoying while everything is caught in this transition. 

<rant>I just read this article iPhone Coders Miffed Muzzled By Apple s NDA - Webmonkey. Steve Jobs. You can kiss my ass. There is nothing insanely great about Apple, who uses BSD under the hood of their OS for God's sake, and then has draconian and stupid NDA's like the iPhone app developer one. I hope Linux phones bury your iPhone. You can believe me when I say that will never ever use an iPhone. In fact... I'm thinking of selling my iPod classic (not that it has ever been sullied by any DRM iTunes) now too.

What an assualt on our freedoms to have something so potentially cool also be so horribly corrupted by control and fear. If you think your product is best then put your access to it where your mouth is. Open everything up so that it can be freely enjoyed.  Apple frustrates me so much, because the potential is so great. But the constant over-control and fear that is clearly there behind almost every product is just maddening to me. 

As I was doing some research on some Dungeons and Dragons 4th Ed licensing, I happenned upon this Wired article about some whack job that spent $250,000 on an Elizabethen MMOG. If I wasn't so damn tired right now I think I might have fallen out of my easy chair.

But wait. It gets better. The creator of the game says this about it.

It's no fun," Castronova says ruefully. "We failed to design a gripping
experience." The scholar says he has, however, gained a deeper
appreciation for the challenges of game design: "I always had respect
for the people who made World of Warcraft," he says. "But now it borders on worship."

It turns out that its not really even an MMOG. Its built on the Neverwinter Nights engine. It can handle about 16 people at a time maybe? I kept on thinking that it must have been an April Fool's joke, but it was published in March. 

How about we all just go see a great performance of Shakespeare instead? The bard's word was meant to be performed after all! My wife and I saw an awesome performace of Romeo and Juliet that my friend Gregg was in last year. We had a wonderful time with it. 

As for MMOG's based on a writer's work? Well they couldn't even get Lord of the Rings Online to be as well liked as World of Warcraft, and Age of Conan wasn't all it was cracked up to be for me either. Maybe books should just stay books. 

We all know that Linux can read NTFS partitions. Right? Well maybe. Maybe not. But you can. NTFS-3G works great and it comes installed with Ubuntu. I hate to say it, but I still have to dual boot sometimes. So while I spend 95% of my time in Linux, I still game everyonce in a while with Windows. Its nice to be able to grab files from Windows while I'm in Ubuntu.

Its especially handy when I find out that I can run yet another game in Wine or Cedega. I can often just go and grab save files or configurations from the Windows partition when I set it up in Linux. I did this with both City of Heroes and with Wow. Both of which run faster in WINE under Linux than they did in Windows.

So what happens when I need to read a Linux EXT3 partition from Windows? Well its easier than you think! Firstly we can thank the EXT3 design for being backwards compatible with EXT2. Because there is a great EXT2 driver for windows called fs-driver (Often called IFS). There is no journaling support because it is using the partition in EXT2 mode. In fact, if for some reason you try to use an EXT3 partition that still has data in its journal, IFS won't mount it at all.

As the article "Should We Fear the (Microsoft) Geeks, Bearing Gifts?" states, we should be wary of Microsoft's intentions here. Microsoft's worst market and the one that has the most growth is in the web server space. But should we really be all that worried?

There is no end to the stupidity of decision making in IT, but when it comes to dollars and cents, especially these days, it is hard to justify an expensive Microsoft Windows operating system. On top of the Microsoft cost, it will also require lots of other expensive security programs and management tools just to keep it running and secure. Thousands of dollars worth of software just to run the worlds best free web server, Apache? 

That sounds monumentally stupid and costly. Perhaps we shouldn't be worried until Microsoft starts giving away their operating system to everyone and just charges for support.  Free as in beer will only get you so far, but I think that is the only way that Microsoft will ever be able come close to competing. Open Source will swallow them whole in few more years. They already know it.

It will be even worse for them with the economy in the state it is in. Everyone is looking to save a buck. I think it will cause a lot of true blue Microsofties to rethink their purchases like I finally did over 10 years ago. There is no room for loyalty when the company you are being loyal to is pretty much ripping you off. 

Microsoft director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow is quite frankly a jerk. He thinks that a person, organization, city, state, nation, or continent, can't take advantage of open source unless they can code it. I've added a few extra items in the list, but I'm just extrapolating his idea, which is ridiculous. The reason is simple. Microsoft doesn't allow you to code their operating system or applications, yet he is asking you to use them. How silly is that? One system allows you do jump in and code away, if you have the skills to do it, while the other system keeps their crap bloated code to themselves whether you have the ability or not. I can't help but find it funny that Matusow can't see the irony in his complaint.

I think that they should put their code with their mouth is and open everything up to South Africa. Make all of their software truly free and open source just to apologize for Matusow's ignorance. I know that won't happen. But hey, it would be a fun experiment. Oh but that won't work because no one in Africa can code right? 

Someone better tell that to South African Mark Shuttleworth who started Thawte and then created the Ubuntu Linux Distro. I wonder where he learned to do all that?