September 2010 Posts

At dealnews, as I’ve written before, we run Asterisk as our telephone system. I find it to be a pretty good solution to our telecom needs: we have multiple offices and several home-based users. And, for the most part, for hard telephones, we use Polycoms. We run mostly IP-330s, with a couple of IP-4000s and a few new IP-331s. We also have softphones, a couple of PAP2s and a couple of old Grandstreams from our original Asterisk deployment in 2007 that I’m desperately trying to get out of circulation. But it’s mostly Polycoms. Recently, I changed how we were doing provisioning. I’ll write a more in-depth post about this later, but the short of it is that since Polycom phones use XML for their configuration information, we now generate them dynamically instead of creating a configuration file. It’s what I should have done back in 2007 when we bought our first round of Polycoms. But this presented me with a problem: how do I re-provision the older phones - some of which I don’t have easy physical access to (at least that doesn’t involve an airplane ride) - to use the new configuration system? In doing some research, I discovered that Polycom allows you to set, via certain commands, the provisioning server from within a config. With this information, I crafted a custom re-provisioning config that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <deviceSettings> <device device.set="1" device.dhcp.bootSrvUseOpt.set="1" device.dhcp.bootSrvUseOpt="2" device.net.cdpEnabled.set="1" device.net.cdpEnabled="0" device.prov.serverType.set="1" device.prov.serverType="2" device.prov.serverName.set="1" device.prov.serverName="server"/> </deviceSettings> And included it at the top of the 000000000000.cfg file (one of the default files downloaded by each Polycom phone): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <APPLICATION APP_FILE_PATH="sip.ld" CONFIG_FILES="update.cfg, phone1.cfg, sip.cfg" MISC_FILES="" LOG_FILE_DIRECTORY="" OVERRIDES_DIRECTORY="" CONTACTS_DIRECTORY=""/> Then, using Asterisk, I issue the check-config command: asterisk*CLI> sip notify polycom-check-cfg peer The phone should reboot, pick up its new config, then reboot again with with proper new provisioning information from the new provisioning provider. Next post, I’ll show you how to use PHP and mod_rewrite to eliminate the need for per-phone config files.

My home entertainment center is probably second only to my computer(s) inn “things I interact with every day.” Barely a day goes by when I don’t spend a little relaxing time watching TV or movies. I have a Hitachi 1080p 42-inch television, an Onkyo receiver attached to a 5.1 surround sound system (Polk Audio subwoofer and Energy speakers), a DVD player (that rarely gets any use anymore), a VCR (that gets even less use) and a PlayStation 3. But the star, and my single favorite piece of equipment in my living room is my AppleTV. Yup. My AppleTV. You might be asking why I profess love for a device that many people consider to be a failure. After all, the way some people, including some of my coworkers, talk about this device, you’d think it was Battlefield Earth bad. The kind of bad that you ask for your money back after using. The kind of bad that makes you regret waking up that day, and makes you want to drown your sorrows with a pitcher of Natural Ice. And yet I, as an AppleTV owner, am trilled with it. I love it simply because of its typical Apple simplicity: it’s all the best parts of a HTPC without all the bull** that comes with having a HTPC. Powerful enough to be usable, and yet simple enough that my wife - whom I love, but is most definitely not a computer person - can figure it out. It was simple enough to set up that all I had to do was plug it into my TV and get it on the network. And, it integrates incredibly well with the rest of the Apple products in the house. And now, Apple has come out with a new AppleTV, and I could not possibly be more thrilled, because it addresses almost all the issues I had my current AppleTV, and with an upgrade price of $99, it’s a no-brainer. I might buy one for every TV in the house. Let’s go through some of the differences: No onboard storage. I have two AppleTVs. One in the living room - a 160gb model, and one in the bedroom, a 40gb model. You know how much storage space I’m using on them? Zero. Nothing. I stream everything off my iMac upstairs. Sync’ing is slow, and I have way more content than could even fit on the 160gb model. Moreover, streaming from iTunes shares works seamlessly, so there’s really no reason to use the local storage at all. Apple did away with it. No composite. Non-issue. I use all HDMI. The new AppleTV has only three plugs on the back: power, HDMI, and ethernet. Perfect. Movies from the iTunes store are rental-only. I don’t quite agree with this, but it’s not very strong. I never purchased a movie from the iTunes store. But I did rent on more than one occasion, so I don’t foresee this being an issue, especially because of … Netflix support. That’s right. You can stream all the free content on Netflix straight to my AppleTV. This in and of itself is enough reason for me to want to upgrade. In other words, it’s as if Apple fixed the device to exactly reflect how I use my current one. Since Steve Jobs never called me, I can only conclude that there were a lot more people out there using AppleTVs in the way I use mine. Frankly, at this point, the only things that it’s missing that I really wanted were 1080p and Hulu.

Two days ago Apple announced Ping: a social network geared towards music sharing. And a bunch of iPods too. Personally, I was more excited by the new AppleTV (I have two of them and absolutely love them) but more on that later. This is about Ping. My thoughts on **Ping: Apple’s first real attempt at social networking reminds me of Google’s countless attempts to get into the social networking space: they’re like that guy that shows up to the party really late - I mean beyond fashionably late - when the party is already over and everyone else is already drunk and thinking about stumbling across the street to IHOP or Taco Bell. They say they were at the library studying and now they want to go out and drink, but the keg has floated, the bars and liquor stores are already closed and all you want to do is eat a burrito supreme and find some sofa to pass out on. Ping is a good first start, but it has some problems: What is the target here? Am I supposed to follow people or artists or both or what? And what are they supposed to do? All this feels like is Twitter or Facebook + iTunes. The people I’m following can share messages and pictures? Yep. Twitter in iTunes. I can like and share and post comments? Yep. Facebook in iTunes. Why not allow independent artists into the fold? Some of my favorite artists (such as Matthew Ebel - check him out if you love piano rock) are independent. Right now there are like 10 artists you can follow, and that Lady Gaga is one of them makes me want to break something. The only ones on there I’m remotely interested in following is Dave Matthews Band and maybe U2. I can’t access it in any way other than in iTunes. No web access. While this means I can fire it up myself on my computer and laptop, and (currently) on my iPhone via the iTunes application, I can’t check Ping at a friend’s house. I can’t go to the Apple store and check Ping. Everything has to go through iTunes, and this absolutely cripples it. Think that’s overkill? Go to the Apple store and watch for  15 minutes how many people walk in and use one of the computers to check Facebook. I can only “like” and “share” content I purchased from iTunes. I have purchased 58 songs from iTunes over the years, out of 3,621 songs in my library. About 1% of my library is available. If Apple fixes these (and other, more minor) problems, Ping could be really cool. The problem is that these aren’t code fixes. They’re not something they can test and roll out a change for. These are conceptual problems relating to what their idea of Ping is versus the what the rest of the world is going to use it as. The question is, will they be Google and throw this out here, not maintain it and mercifully kill it a year later (a la Google Wave and the impending death of Google Buzz), or will they adapt and change it to better suit the needs of the public? Because that’s the thing about social networking: you have to embrace the users thoughts, opinions, and ideas. It’s a lesson digg just learned the hard way and a lesson that frankly, given Apple’s reputation as wanting to control everything, I don’t see them embracing. As a side note, I will however salute Apple for not giving into Facebook if the rumor is true. Facebook plays fast and loose with people’s information, and I really don’t like how it seems to have become the de facto standard for social network usage (and thus the reason you can comment with your Facebook login). That, and Zuckerberg. I hate that guy. Still, Ping is yet another player in this social networking space. A space that is becoming increasingly full … Social Overload I’m already Facebooked, Myspaced and Twittered. I’m LiveJournaled, Wordpressed, and Youtube’d. I’m Flickr’d, LinkedIn’d, Vimeo’d, Last.fm’d and Gowalla’d. I’m on any number of dozens of message boards and mailing lists that predate “Web 2.0” and the social networking “revolution,” and I follow nearly 100 various blogs and other feeds via RSS. They’re on my desktop, on my laptop, on my tablet and in my phone. And now, apparently, I’m Ping’d as well. Le sigh. Now, to be fair, I don’t check all these sites. I last logged into Myspace about 9 months ago. I last used Gowalla about a year ago. I usually only look at Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo when I need something, and haven’t updated a LiveJournal in about 3 years. But at what point does all this interaction - this social networking - become social overload? Are any of these services adding value to my life? And at what point does a social network - Ping, in this case - simply become yet another thing I have to think about and check? Or will it become yet another service I sign up for, try for awhile and ignore?