After close to 3 years with my Treo 600 I finally updated to the new Treo 700p.

I’m quite impressed with the critter. Beautiful screen, lots of memory, excellent keyboard and a decent browser.

Unfortunately, it got some software issues which make the Bluetooth marginal and the app switching speed is bad. Hopefully we’ll see an update soon.

We love the new camera, the 630 was the right choice for us. We are carrying it just about everywhere and have some amazing pics and video of our daughter. One the issue with the camera is that it captures video in MJPEG (yuck!), which leads to huge file sizes. I did some searching and cobbled up this script to do the conversion for me. It requires mencoder, but who doesn’t have that installed on their Linux box?

Anyways, here is the script:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Set the bitrate
BITRATE=1800
#
# Remove the log if it’s there
#
if [ -e divx2pass.log ]; then
rm -f divx2pass.log
fi

#
# Loop through the mencoder process twice for dual pass
#
for i in 1 2; do
/usr/bin/mencoder $1 -oac mp3lame -lameopts preset=medium -af-adv force=1 \
-mc 0 -channels 1 -srate 11025 -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:autoaspect:vbitrate=${BITRATE}:vpass=${i} -o MPEG4-${1}
done

#
# Cleanup
#
rm -f divx2pass.log

Since I’m carrying a bigger laptop around these days with enough room to have a dev environment and real desktop replacement work environment I decided that I needed some way to secure my confidential data. I found this link (Encrypt /home and swap over RAID with dm-crypt) and used a subset of it to encrypt my /home directory, at a minimum. It just seems like “The Right Thing(tm)” to do where you might have sensitive data that could be stolen.

I was able to bypass some of the step since I’m not using a RAID array. Here is the gist of what I did:

Create the logical volume called “sec”
lvcreate -L 16G -n sec vg0

Fill it with random noise
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/vg0/sec bs=1M

Do the crypt setup, setup the encryption, create the /dev/mapper/device
cryptsetup -y -c twofish-cbc-essiv:sha256 create sec /dev/vg0/sec

Make a filesystem on the encrypted device.
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/mapper/sec

Edit the startup script to taste.
vi /etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh

Run the script and mount the volume
/etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh

I also linked in the /etc/init.d/encrypted_home.sh script into /etc/rc3.d and /etc/rc5.d so my machine prompts me for my crypt password on boot, which FC5 handles quite nicely.

On Friday morning I missed capturing my daughter, Madeline, enjoying the intro song to the Backyardigans and that started the quest for a new camera. We have a Canon S300 Digitial Elph which has been a great camera, but it’s getting a bit dated, being CF and all. I went looking to see what was the latest and greatest. I found that the Canon SD line looked pretty much like the best deal these days (much as it was when we got our S300) I was able to narrow it down to the PowerShot SD600 and PowerShot SD630 which seem identical except for the LCD on the back. The SD600 has a 2.5″ LCD and a viewfinder while the SD630 has a 3″ LCD and no viewfinder. One feature we really want to use is the 640×480x30fps video, which is AVI, but MJPEG…but conversion to AVI/MPEG4 isn’t all that difficult.

We took a trip to Best Buy to browse the cameras and played with both a SD450 and a SD630. We (my wife) decided that the viewfinder was of almost no use to use anyways so that made it a go.

I found Beach Camera had the best price and free shipping, so I orded it. Much to my suprise, it shipped about 4 hours later. I also hit Newegg for a 2GB SD and a spare battery.

I recently picked a Dell Precision M50 laptop. It’s a nice machine, P4M 2.2GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB 5400RPM drive and Nvidia 64MB Quadro 500 GoGL card driving a 1600×1200 display. It’s quite a contrast with my Sony Z505 Vaio, but I’ve been thinking of a paradigm shift in laptops anyways. I now carry my Treo which allows me to SMS, IM, Email all on the go without having to open up my ultra-portable laptop. Since the Treo means I only need my laptop for real computing (Hotel room, customer site demo, presentation or technical work) why not have a desktop replacement with plenty of guts?

I have built it up with a 2915 802.11a/b/g Mini-PCI card for wireless to complement the internal Ethernet and have added an extra battery to replace the floppy (floppy is dead, really). I ended up loading the machine with the required Windows XP + SP2 + Office 2k3 (our standard load) and then put on Red Hat Fedora Core 5. I hadn’t run FC in years and thought it was about time to come around and see where it stood. I’ve been very impressed and think that I’ll be leaving this as a FC machine for the duration.

More info to come as I carry it more.

I’ve recently been in a minimalist mood as far as themes go so I decided to try creating my own GTK+ and XFWM4 theme to see if it was a workable solution.

My reasoning is why use up so much space and cycles drawing what is nothing more than a functional item (scrollbars, buttons, etc.). We all know how to use a scrollbar and push a button and having a gazillion “pretties” around it doesn’t change it functionality, so why? I talked to systemx a bit in IRC and he gave me some great suggestions.

Anyways, HERE is the screenshot and HERE is the actual XFCE+GTK theme.

Please note that it’s 0.01 and still has a few funky colors that I’m hunting down and the proper attribution isn’t in there yet.

I’ve been using this hacked up WP theme for a couple of months now and I decided to tar it up in the off chance someone else wants to see it. It’s heavily based on Borderline Chaos which is based on Benevelonce which I think is a Kubrick derivitave. Anyways, here it is: Rob’s BC 1.0

I’ve used the Morphix 0.4.1 distro on 8cm (mini-cd) disks for a handy fixit or debug system for a year or two now. What makes this distro so nice is that I can put my 8cm (mini-cd) into almost any sysytem and reboot it and have a fully functional Linux system with X + XFCE + fully loaded kernel + network and fs debugging and probing tools which doesn’t touch the system hard drive. Tell me that’s not handy for forensics and/or getting some real work done when all a customer has is a few dozen Dell desktops with Windows on them.

Now there is a Morphix 0.5 light, but it’s 256MB and won’t fit on a 210MB 8cm mini-cd. This wouldn’t do for my handy utility 8cm system so I went hacking and have created a 170MB Morphix 0.5 based distro and the ISO can be found here.

I’ve finally managed to get around to updating my Cygwin -> Gentoo tool-chain. I messed with getting the current stable and patched gcc and binutils working on Cygwin without much luck, so I’ve turned to using Dan Kegel’s very fine crosstool scripts to build the chain completey on Cygwin. This is built with glibc-2.3.5, gcc 3.4.4 and binutils 2.15.(don’t remember). Since I’ve moved to using Dan’s script the install location has changed from /usr/local/cross-linux to /opt/crosstool.

You will need to make sure you have the distcc package installed under Cygwin as I’m no longer building it one off…no reason to now that it’s included in the Cygwin distribution.

The mkservice script has been updated and can now be found along with the distccd.sh wrapper in /opt/bin.

So here it is: Latest stable Cygwin to Gentoo tool-chain with distcc wrapper and script to make the service.

NVIDIA just released new 7664 drivers which support y 6200 AGP. They’ve worked like a charm over the weekend and I’m pleased to have my new card running!

I recently burned out one of my Ti 4200 GF4 cards and needed some thing new. I’ve loved my 4200’s since I got them back in 2002, but the fans seem to stop and then they burn out. One will still work, if I can find a replacement fan.

Anyways, I went looking for something newer that didn’t have a fan, if possible. I found the NV44a 6200/AGP at Newegg. It’s a AGP 8x part, 128MB of RAM (no TurboCache crap) and passive cooling for $78.

I promptly ordered a ASUS N6200/TD/128 Video Card and Newegg delivered quickly as usual.

I quickly found one BIG problem: The NV44a (6200/AGP) isn’t currently supported by the Nvidia 7174 Linux drivers! Argh, my new card will be sitting on the bench until we get some new drivers.

We are upgrading Stu’s phone from the Sipura 841 to a Cisco 7960 IP Phone due to the better speaker phone and his high call volume. I first ordered from Compu-America since they had a great price ($263) and said on their site that they shipped in ~24hrs. After a week I called them and they told me that “Oh, we ran out them the day you called.” I pointed out that the website still said “Usually ships in 24hrs” and he muttered. I then asked when I should expect my phone to which he replied that they would get them in in 7 days and then ship it out, making my total time 3 weeks. I canceled my order.

I then called Volt Depot who had the phone for $270 and spoke to “Frosty”. He went over the differences between the 7960G-CH1 and the 7960. He also pointed out that they don’t come with a powersupply and had one for $15 (Not $40). He also offered to ship it out overnight AND sent me the SIP firmware and instructions.

Guess who’s going to get our future Cisco IP phone business?

This is the script I’ve put together to do my QoS on my Asterisk PBX server and my Apache Webserver. It sets VOIP as the highest priority, then HTTP with mail and other stuff falling into 30 or 40. Feel free to use it if you would like. Feedback is always welcome.

IPT=/sbin/iptables
IP=/sbin/ip
TC=/sbin/tc

# Specify ethernet device, Queue length, and MTU size
# ((qlen * mtu) / rate) / 1024 = time
DEV=eth0
OUT_QLEN=100
MTU=1492

# Set to ~80% of tested maximum bandwidth
UPLINK=10000000

# specify class rates - We grant each class at LEAST its “fair share” of
# bandwidth. this way no class will ever be starved by another class.
UPLINK_1_R=512 # VOIP only
UPLINK_2_R=256 # Interactive services (HTTP)
UPLINK_3_R=256 # Default
UPLINK_4_R=128 # Bulk

# Each class is also permitted to consume all of the available bandwidth
# if no other classes are in use.
UPLINK_1_C=${UPLINK}
UPLINK_2_C=${UPLINK}
UPLINK_3_C=${UPLINK}
UPLINK_4_C=${UPLINK}

# remove old qdiscs
$TC qdisc del dev $DEV root 2> /dev/null > /dev/null
$TC qdisc del dev $DEV ingress 2> /dev/null > /dev/null

# reset iptables rules
$IPT -t mangle -D POSTROUTING -o $DEV -j MYOUT
echo “first”
#$IPT -t mangle -D PREROUTING -o $DEV -j MYOUT
$IPT -t mangle -F MYOUT
$IPT -t mangle -X MYOUT

# set outgoing queue length
#$IP link set dev $DEV qlen ${OUT_QLEN}

# lower the MTU to decrease latency
#$IP link set dev $DEV mtu $MTU

# Create HTB root qdisc with an htb default of 30
$TC qdisc add dev $DEV root handle 1: htb default 40

# create main rate limit class
$TC class add dev $DEV parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate ${UPLINK}kbit

# create leaf rate limit classes
$TC class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate ${UPLINK_1_R}kbit ceil ${UPLINK_1_C}kbit prio 0
$TC class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:20 htb rate ${UPLINK_2_R}kbit ceil ${UPLINK_2_C}kbit prio 1
$TC class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:30 htb rate ${UPLINK_3_R}kbit ceil ${UPLINK_3_C}kbit prio 2
$TC class add dev $DEV parent 1:1 classid 1:40 htb rate ${UPLINK_4_R}kbit ceil ${UPLINK_4_C}kbit prio 3

# attach qdisc to leaf classes - here we at SFQ to each priority class. SFQ
# insures that within each class connections will be treated (almost) fairly.
$TC qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:10 handle 10: sfq perturb 10
$TC qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:20 handle 20: sfq perturb 10
$TC qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:30 handle 30: sfq perturb 10
$TC qdisc add dev $DEV parent 1:40 handle 40: sfq perturb 10

# add MYOUT chain to the mangle table in $IPT - this sets up the table
# we use to filter and mark packets.
$IPT -t mangle -N MYOUT
echo “second”
$IPT -t mangle -I POSTROUTING -o $DEV -j MYOUT
echo “third”

# add fwmark entries to classify different types of traffic - Set fwmark from
# 10-40 according to desired class. 10 is highest prio.
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -j MARK –set-mark 30

# outgoing VOIP rules - trumps everything else
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 5060:5063 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 5060:5063 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 4569:4569 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 4569:4569 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 5036:5036 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 5036:5036 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 4569 -j MARK –set-mark 10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 4569 -j MARK –set-mark 10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 5060:5070 -j MARK –set-mark 10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 5060:5070 -j MARK –set-mark 10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –sport 16000:17000 -j MARK –set-mark 10
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport 16000:17000 -j MARK –set-mark 10

# default for outgoing interactive ports rules
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport 0:1024 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport 0:1024 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport 0:1024 -j MARK –set-mark 20
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport 0:1024 -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport smtp -j MARK –set-mark 40
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport smtp -j MARK –set-mark 40
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport rsync -j MARK –set-mark 40
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport rsync -j MARK –set-mark 40

# the ack rule ¿ for ack packets smaller than 64 bytes –it must be
#added using
# tc filter instead of iptables for now because the length module appears to be
# broken and/or missing from the wrt54g iptables
$TC filter add dev $DEV parent 1:0 prio 1 protocol ip u32 match ip protocol 6 0xff match u16 0×0000 0xffc0 at 2 match u8 0×10 0xff at 33 flowid 1:10
$TC filter add dev $DEV parent 1:0 prio 1 protocol ip u32 match ip protocol 6 0xff match u16 0×0000 0xffc0 at 2 match u8 0×60 0xff at 33 flowid 1:10
$TC filter add dev $DEV parent 1:0 prio 1 protocol ip u32 match ip protocol 6 0xff match u16 0×0000 0xffc0 at 2 match u8 0xb8 0xff at 33 flowid 1:10

# outgoing DNS rule
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport domain -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p udp –dport domain -j MARK –set-mark 20

# cheap outgoing ping rule
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p icmp -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20

# outgoing ssh connection rule
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport ssh -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport ssh -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport ssh -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport ssh -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport 2545 -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport 2545 -j MARK –set-mark 20

#
# Web
#
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport http -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport http -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –sport https -j MARK –set-mark 20
$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -p tcp –dport https -j MARK –set-mark 20

# outgoing P2P rules ¿ these are close to last b/c they use relatively costly layer 7 matching
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -m layer7 –l7dir /etc/l7-protocols/protocols –l7proto directconnect -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:40
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -m layer7 –l7dir /etc/l7-protocols/protocols –l7proto fasttrack -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:40

# outgoing default rule - unmarked packets get schleped into lowest prio
#$IPT -t mangle -A MYOUT -m mark –mark 0 -j CLASSIFY –set-class 1:30

# No Classify, so we need to assign them
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1:0 prio 0 protocol ip handle 10 fw flowid 1:10
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1:0 prio 0 protocol ip handle 20 fw flowid 1:20
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1:0 prio 0 protocol ip handle 30 fw flowid 1:30
tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1:0 prio 0 protocol ip handle 40 fw flowid 1:40

# All done, exit ok
exit 0

After a long absence, I’m going to be rebuilding my Cygwin distcc toolchain for Gentoo today/tonight. I’ve upgraded to GCC 3.4.3 on my Gentoo boxes and want to have that and new binutils and glibc available. binutils and glibc will be from stable, only GCC will be ~x86.

My partners and I often find ourselves using our laptops at customer sites and always seem to end up having 2+ laptops and 1 Ethernet port available. I decided to start looking for a USB or battery powered hub or switch. I’ve found a couple of options:

3 port 10baseT USB powered Ethernet Hub

4 port 10/100baseT USB powered Ethernet Switch

I was looking over the logs of our colo’ed server and found that several random folks were trying to do bad things to the forum I recently setup. I took a few packets that Snort had grabbed for me and looked them over in Ethereal and verified they we up to no good, so I needed a fix.

I have always been a proponent of active firewalls, it’s just the “Right Thing(tm)” to do. You can’t possibly have a set of static rules that stops everything bad from happening, but if you find that they are…drop their ass. I have some code that I found a few years ago that parses logs and finds strings set by iptables and puts in a DROP rule via iptables, but I wanted to go with something that was a few layers higher and I had the info I wanted from Snort.

I looked at the options and picked a IDS reactor and after a bit of mucking around I got it working and it’s doing it’s thing as we speak. It’ll take me a few days of tuning to make sure I’m not turning off the wrong folks, but I’m pretty pleased with it so far.

The moral of the story is: Review your logs often and make sure you have a decent IDS and probably something that can act on the findings of the IDS automatically, if you don’t, bad things will happen.

Now that I have our VOIP implementation working, I’m off to my next adventure. I see that I need to do some work on our QoS policies due to having our PBX also being a webserver and a rsync mirror for CentOS. So I’ve jumped off into the next thing with the goal of priortizing our VOIP traffic to be higher than everything else so as to give excellent VOIP performance first, other traffic second.

Here are a few links I have found that seem to be related to what I want to do. I don’t have the CLASSIFY option available to me as I want to run stock kernels on the router boxes, so I’ll have to do some munging and testing to see if I can get things working the way I want.

Links:

Asterisk QoS
IPTables + tc shaping
NetworkQoS
Linux Traffic Shaping - Examples

Well, my Sipura SPA-841’s finally arrived last week and I spent a couple of days testing on my local gentoo box before I rolled to our colo’ed server. The phones work wonderfully, but I’m not sure it’s really that the phones are that nice, but the the Asterisk PBX and IAX2 infrastructure is so well implemented. I did run into one serious problem that I attributed to NAT, but turned out to be a simple error on my part where I had an invalid Caller ID string. It took me 2 days to figure it out and in the end I was kicking myself. I finally found it when I broke out Ethereal out and looked at the packets and saw that my packets were getting across the Firewall + NAT. This ment that the issue had to be at the device, so I started poking around and it was indeed something simple.

We have our DID lines through IAX.cc/SixTel and our outgoing via VOIPJet. We setup one incoming toll-free for $0.02/min, one local Houston DID for $0.0143/min and our outbound for $0.013/min.

I’ve delivered one of the phones to one of my partners in Houston and we now have real office extension, conference rooms, multi-line, transfers in our homes…VERY cool stuff.

I’ve created a phpBB site for ex-Landmark employees to keep in touch with each other and general chatting. I had been thinking of doing this for several months and then I was included on a email thread about a unoffical reunion and it perked my interest. I chatted it over with the folks in the thread and then went a grabbed the xmark.org domain and threw up phpBB, did a quick logo/favicon and we were off and running. We’ve brought in 150 users since we went live 1 week ago, that’s pretty cool!

Here is the site

I’ve created XFCE4.2RC3 ebuilds for those interested, you can find them here.

cd /usr/local/portage
tar xvzf /download/directory/xfce4.2rc3.tar.gz

If you haven’t done all the tricks with package.unmask and the like, you’ll need to see the Gentoo Forums for instructions.

I’ve continued to play with my keyboard and mouse and it’s is great fun. I have found one thing that people might run into out in the wild. I use a 2 port KVM switch between two systems that switches between the two machines on . I did some exploring and found out it was related to the fact that I didn’t have in the same state on both machines, once was consistent, it switches everytime.

Merry Christmas to everyone! I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas and that Santa is very good to you, if you’ve been good.

Santa brought me a Microsoft Wireless Elite Keyboard and Mouse, which I had been wanting for sometime. It is actually very nice and I’m loving the features. I’ve got it up and running under Windows without much trouble, just download the drivers and viola. I had anticipated quite a bit of fun getting it working under Linux, but I’ve got basic functionality up and going already. So here is my setup for getting the Microsoft Wireless Elite Keyboard and Linux working together.

I needed to edit my /etc/X11/XF86Config as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

and then I needed to add the following to my .xinitrc (or ~/.config/xfce4/xinitrc in my case):


/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
#imwheel -k -b "67"


It turns out that it actually seems to work better with imwheel killed and straight X to get the codes, I’ll test more later.

For the keyboard I had to add some stuff into /etc/conf.d/local.start (may be different for other distributions, but this should give the idea…could go into rc.local,etc.)


# /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# $Header: /var/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.start,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to load any misc.
# programs on startup ( 1>&2 )
setkeycodes e073 227
setkeycodes e074 228
setkeycodes e075 229
setkeycodes e076 230
setkeycodes e077 231
setkeycodes e078 232
setkeycodes e016 233
setkeycodes e025 234
setkeycodes e03c 235
setkeycodes e064 236
setkeycodes e059 237
setkeycodes e001 238
setkeycodes 55 200
setkeycodes 74 201
setkeycodes 75 202


The last 3 entries are my so far abortive attempt to get the wheel on the keyboard working, so they can safely be ignored for the time being.

I then put the following into ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode 115=F13
keycode 116=F14
keycode 117=F15
keycode 161=XF86Calculator
keycode 174=XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176=XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 160=XF86AudioMute
keycode 234=XF86Back
keycode 233=XF86Forward
keycode 214=XF86Launch0
keycode 215=XF86Launch1
keycode 216=XF86Launch2
keycode 217=XF86Launch3
keycode 218=XF86Launch4
keycode 228=XF86Favorites
keycode 239=XF86Documents
keycode 236=XF86Mail
keycode 178=XF86WWW
keycode 142=XF86Away
keycode 162=XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164=XF86AudioStop
keycode 237=XF86AudioMedia
keycode 153=XF86AudioNext
keycode 144=XF86AudioPrev
keycode 241=XF86Pictures
keycode 240=XF86Music


Then I just mapped away into XFCE, but should be fairly straight forward for other WM’s.

I’m kind of a terminal freak. I really like the functionality of Konsole, but it’s so heavy to run! I went looking and couldn’t really find what I needed until recently. I’ve discovered my old friend rxvt in a new incarnation. Behold mrxvt with tabs, title changing and all light and FAST.

I’ve just installed XFCE4 RC2 to test it out and I’m really liking what I see. I’ve been a KDE dude for several years, but I’ve been searching for a fairly full featured alternative and I think I’ve found it. It’s SO nice to have terms popup before you release the mouse button after having to wait for buzz/grind under KDE. XFCE4 may be a keeper!

I got an email today saying that my SPA-841 SIP phones have been delayed until January. Ouch, I wanted to play with them over the holidays.

In other VOIP news, I’m starting to consider iax.cc as my DID service, they look pretty reasonable and have the area codes I need. If anyone out there has used them and has some experience with them, I’d love to hear from you.