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'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.

<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 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?

Yet another sucker Linux vendor caves to Microsoft.

So I guess there are a lot more supposed open source OS vendors that don't give a crap about what open source stands for than I thought there were. How could so many Linux distributions make deals with Microsoft?

I'm so mad at SuSE, TurboLinux, Linspire and Xandros. For shame! All of you. Have you no backbones? Morals? Brains?

Thankfully, no one can steal Linux away from me. We have Canonical (Ubuntu), Redhat, and Debian still standing their ground.

I hope that Microsoft and these other bozos realize that every time they make another deal like this they anger and dissolution even more people. SuSE was, up until they completely lost their minds with Microsoft, one of my favorite distros. In some strange way I'm glad they made themselves irrelevant to me and pushed me into the waiting arms of Ubuntu.

I just read this article over on Linux-watch.com. Its about Storm, which is an Object-relational Mapper (ORM) tool that is used as an integral part of Launchpad. While its not the full open sourcing of Launchpad as many critics of Canonical may want, I think its a step in the right direction. Its an intriguing direction at that. Launchpad is made up a a bunch of components.

Who is to say that all of the underlying technology for Launchpad can't be released as FLOSS, but not the way that each piece interacts and is used to create Launchpad as a whole? While this is technically speaking a perfectly fine thing to do, I think that Launchpad as a whole could still benefit from a more community based approach as a product. 

The topic of imaging Linux partitions came up at the COD LUG today. I thought I would drop some links to some FLOSS software that can replace much of the functionality of Ghost. In the past I've used Knoppix to run gparted and partimage to backup Windows and Linux partitions. 

Now there is a new bootable Live CD called Gparted-Clonezilla. Its a very small distro that can fit on the business card sized CDs. They also have a script that can convert the iso to a bootable usb key.

I'm going to have to check out the bootable usb key this week. That would be great to have on an old 128mb key for imaging and backing up PC's.

I had a great time at Flourish. My Dad has been learning about Drupal for a while and since a Drupal person (Hey Angela!) was presenting, I thought he might be interested in spending some good Father/Son time together. He really seemed to enjoy himself. On Saturday it was really all about meeting up with the rest of the Ubuntu Chicago Loco. What a great group of people! I really enjoy our enthusiasm for open source and Ubuntu.

I enjoyed the Chris DiBona during his key note. It was interesting to hear more about Google's Summer of Code project. Especially after hearing Angela Byron's talk on Friday. She was, by far, the best speaker of the weekend. I wish everyone had the chance to listen to her talk. You might think to yourself... Women in Open Source? Why would I want to go to that? I'm not a women. Well duh! That is exactly the point. It turns out that women make only about 1.5% of the participants in open source projects. That is so much lower than I would have guessed. Her talk on tolerance and openness in a community really hit home. This is exactly why I think that Ubuntu is so successful. The Ubuntu community, much more so than other Linux distro's that I've dealt with, is so much more open to all kinds of people. The attitude from Ubuntu is everything. Linux is Linux. We are all using the same code more or less. What makes a distro for me is the community backing it. I think Ubuntu has a lock on community right now, and I want to make sure that it stays that way and even gets better.