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.

My parents gave my brother and I a “Toy” for Christmas: Hasbro Power Air Surfer Skywolf RC airplane’s. They told us that it had been years since we got a toy and they decided we needed something fun. What a very appropriate present! I’m an IT Architect and have started a business this year with 3 partners, which is going very well, but it’s been full of tension. My brother is a captain for a major airline and flying is business to him. Wonderful choice by the folks!

I flew mine last night in their yard and found that it actually flies! This morning I took it over to the local park and put a full charge on it and flew it around. It seems quite underpowered, but does fly. I’ve since come home and taken a heater to one of the spare props to give it a bit more bite. I’ll see if that gives enough performance boost so I can keep from holding “full back” on the stick.

An update: I’ve fixed up my Skywolf and it’s flying like a dream now. First, I installed the “tweaked” propellor. Next I straightened out the control arms to the rear elevons which put them into a slight up pitch at rest. Finally, I tapered and taped the leading edge of the elevon to cut down on drag. I can now fly my Skywolf at “cruise” speed and straight and level at full power results in a slight climb attitude.

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.

We had a very bad 23rd. With the weather so poor we let all of our dogs into the house while we were out at my wife’s mothers. We came home to find that the dogs had killed our oldest cat. It was a horrible situation and we are still unsure what we are going to do with the dogs that were involved. We buried Dodi today at my mother-in-law’s farm. We’ll miss Dodi dearly, he was a wonderful cat who just wanted to be a cat and hunt around the yard.

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.

Our local Pizza eatery, Mr. Gattis has great pizza. They use nice ingredients on well sized pizzas, in short, we really like them. The pizza is hot when you pick it up, comes with plenty of extras and is reasonably priced. So why the rant? It’s their customer service. You can generally call them without much issue, but once you go to the store to pick the pizza up the shit starts. First off, they have 4-5 people behind the counter, but only ONE of them is normally minding the cash wrap and pickup window. This person is taking walk in orders, taking phone orders AND trying to run the register for the people there to pickup their pizza. This single person is way overloaded and often makes mistakes as it seems the least senior person gets cash wrap duty. They grab the wrong pizza, they can’t work the credit card machine and have a gaggle of customers staring at them impaitently. Maybe, just maybe, they should get some of those other folks back there to move their lazy asses and actually help out at the front where the cash is being delivered for a pizza.

It’s not a huge thing, just make someone back there have dual duty in high traffic times, I mean WTF they have great product, just shitty customer service and that shitty service isn’t the fault of the poor teenager working the cash wrap, it’s the fault of a manager or higher who’s deemed that one person on the register is enough.

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.

I’ve taken the plunge and ordered two hardphones for a VOIP test with Asterisk OSS PBX. I’ve ordered two Sipura SPA-841’s from Atacomm after extensive conversations with folks on the Asterisk IRC channel. The phones won’t be in for a week or so as they have just been released, but initial information is very encouraging.

I also put down $5.00 with VoipJet as a IAX termination service (PBX speak for outbound provider). The $5.00 gets us about 380minutes of US talktime, which should be enough for a good test.

Once I get the devices and have them configured, I’ll be sending them to my partners for testing and we’ll see how this VOIP/Virtual office is going to work for us.

I spent some time last night and got my Asterisk PBX up and running. I’m currently using Xten’s X-Lite phone with my Logitech USB headset and it works great! I was able to leave myself voicemail and go through the demo extensions and actually contact Digium’s IAX PBX. Very cool stuff! On top of that, I found that VOIPJet has a free $0.25 account you can setup and I made several calls on it. With their rate of $0.013/min, it’s quite economical. I’ll be doing more tests and see about getting some of my partners setup for a pilot program.

It’s worth noting that Gentoo comes with Asterisk in portage, so all you have to do is emerge asterisk and you are off and running.

I’ve started a search for a decent video camera. I’m currently looking at MiniDV devices, but could be talked into a MiniDVD device if I see the right one. We played with a good friends Sony HSC40 and also with my brothers older device. Both were very fun to use and the ability of the Sony HSC40 to use USB to transfer video directly into Microsoft Movie Maker was VERY enticing.

My wife did some tests and let me know we were going to need a DVD writer soon, so I went to NewEgg and picked up a NEC 3500A for 62.99, it does 16x DVD-R and is still fast on DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-DL, CD-RW, CD-R and just about everything else! It’s gotten very good reviews and I had just been looking for an excuse to pick one up.

Today we went to Best Buy and played with the different devices there. I was already impressed with the Panasonic DV GS200 from reading reviews and it’s still at the top of my list. The Sony HSC40 is also a good option. For a cheap device I was fairly impressed with the Panasonic DV GS9 ($249 from Amazon). It doesn’t do all the fancy SD + Photo things, but does have a USB port for video to PC, which seems like the place everything is going to happen anyways.

I’ve read Asterisk before, but really didn’t see where it would play with my requirements. Well, now I do. With our small business and with our home offices it looks like Asterisk or IAX/SIP provider might be exactly what we need. The way I see it now, there are a couple of options that would work for us, after we each get a SIP phone:

• Go out and find a provider (Packet8) who will handle our current number and be able to add virtual numbers. This has a monthly rate attached to it in the rage of $20-$40/mo per line. They also charge for other features on a monthly basis. So we are looking at around $200/mo for 4 of us. That might or might not include long distance.
• Build a Asterisk machine myself and put a two port card (I think that’s a FXO) so we can have a single inbound line and a single outbound line for local calls. This would give us complete control of the the PBX, but we’d need an upstream provider to handle our long distance and to route ‘virtual numbers’ to us. I’m not sure how you go about doing that right now.
• Just do Vonage, they supply the Phone to SIP converter and all that jazz, not sure what price advantage or service advantage we would see from vonage.

I’ll keep looking and thinking on this subject, as it sure would be nice to have easy dialing between us, even with a soft SIP phone.