It's been a little while since I wrote about Asterisk. It's about time to update the story. I've been using Asterisk at home for awhile, but now we're going to use it at work. The need We have approximately 150 internal extensions here, and they are being supported by a Nortel PBX. This PBX is being end-of-lifed, and it would cost well over $100,000 to replace it, once the cost of the two required Windows servers (!) was factored in. Not only that, but it still isn't as flexible as Asterisk. Along with that, we have a need for internal wireless phones. We have a large manufacturing area, and we have people that would like to be able to use a wireless phone anywhere on the shop floor or office areas. No single cellphone company provides a signal that is strong enough to reach everywhere in the building -- not to mention that there would be big airtime fees. So we are planning to deploy 802.11b wireless phones for this purpose. Hardware The decision was made to go ahead with Asterisk. We will be replacing all office phones with Polycom IP501 units. This means running about 90 new runs of CAT5 to people's desks. For our Asterisk server, we got a HP DL385 2U server with dual dual-core Opteron 2GHz CPUs. We've really had good luck with Linux on these DL385s, and with HP's support. We got redundant power supplies, disks, fans, etc. on that machine. The CPU on here is probably more than we need, but telephones are very important to us and we wanted to make sure that we don't have any issues down the road. We purchased two A104d quad-T1 interface cards with hardware echo cancellation. Very nice cards. The drivers have been a little troublesome. But Sangoma's tech support is awesome. They logged onto our box and I was watching as they were hacking on the kernel module right there. Tech support like that is rare. I highly recommend Sangoma. We really need only one of those cards, but they're the only component of the Asterisk server that isn't completely standard. So the second is on hand as a spare. For our analog phones, we are using two Adtran TA 750 channel banks. Each has a T1 interface and a 50-pin telco ("Amphenol") connector for a punch block. So we can run 24 channels off each of those. Our consultants (see below) suggested getting them used from Colspar Communications. We found them fully loaded with FXS cards for $250 each. We bought three -- two for production use and one for a hot spare. These are very solid and nice units. The only problem we had is that the voicemail indicator lamps (MWI lights) on our old analog phones wouldn't light up. Turns out that Asterisk with a T1 channel bank uses digital FSK lamp, whereas our older analog phones expected a certain line voltage to indicate messages waiting. After some Googling, I found add-on FSK lamps from American Science & Surplus for $1.50 each. Nice. In our other building, we have a gigabit fiber-optic link, so we purchased an AudioCodes MP124 SIP-analog gateway. It's working well so far, except it's not working with voicemail indicator lamps at all. It seems to be a firmware issue that is incompatible with Asterisk in some way. We're investigating now. For wireless phones, we're using the Hitachi IP5000. We're not terribly pleased with the quality of wifi phones in general, but this one seems pretty solid. And it doesn't crash every few minutes like the Zyxel model we tried. The Telco Our current phone system has about 23 analog lines for interaction with the outside world. We wanted to get a voice T1 with PRI channel for the Asterisk system. Our local telephone company is Sprint, and this has been the annoying part. First they tried to quote us an Internet connection. Then it took a very long time for them to even get us a quote for the voice T1. And now we have signed the contracts but are still waiting for an install date. Consultants While I had used Asterisk before, it was in a home setting. Not exactly business-critical, and not dealing with hundreds of extensions, T1 lines, and all the rest. So it seemed reasonable to get someone experienced with that sort of thing to help us out and make sure we weren't making mistakes that would cost us down the road. I posted on the asterisk-biz mailing list describing what we would like to do. I got a bunch of supplies from consultants, and we wound up selecting Asteria Solutions Group. At the beginning, we wanted some advice about server sizing, phones that work well in business settings, etc. I think that most consultants are not used to working with people that have significant Linux experience, and a good deal of Asterisk experience, already. Asteria was a little surprised with our situation at first, I think, but has been very helpful. They've educated us on the ins and outs of T1 technology, pointed us to Colspar (which saved us a ton of money on analog gateways), and helped us with some obscure questions. They were also fine to have a much smaller involvement with our project than they would probably normally have. I highly recommend them. Surprises You'll never believe just how hard it is to buy phones from Polycom. They won't sell directly to people, nor will they even list authorized retailers on their website. You have to call them, leave a message, and in a few days they'll let you know where to go. Some online retailers such as atacomm sell Polycom phones, but they're not authorized to do so, so you don't get any warranty or have the right to get firmware from Polycom. What's more, Polycom usually expects people to need configuration assistance with their phones. But I think that when I told them we need 90 IP-501s, had already configured 5 on our network, and needed no assistance, they were happy to work with us. Reactions We've deployed desk phones all over by now. So office workers have two phones on their desk right now (one from the old system, one from the new). We've heard a lot of positive comments from people about the new phones. And all the features of Asterisk -- music on hold, flexible queues, etc -- will be really helpful here. Cost Even with the cost of all new phones, new CAT5 runs and labor for that, consulting time, etc., we still expect Asterisk to be far cheaper than the latest Nortel PBX. Also... I recently wrote an article about Asterisk for Free Software Magazine. I'll let you know when/if it gets published.

Yes, the title of this post is yet another FTWCA. The question is, do YOU still care about the Debian Project ? I refused to take part to the recent flames, aka the FTWCA threads, but given the upcoming DPL election and the recent events, I feel it’s time to write something up about the current status of the Project. I’d like my readers to ask themselves: “Do I still care about the Debian Project, about its goals, about its spirit, about what it really is ?”. You may find that the answer to this question won’t be the one you expected, either way. Before reading further, you may want to quickly google for “Teletubbies” if you don’t know what this thing is. It may help you better understand the rest of this post. This post is a long one, thanks in advance to all of you who will read it until the end. I may refer to some people in this post. This is by no mean a personal attack, so please don’t take it as such. Recent events I mentionned “recent events” earlier, here are the events I am referring to: the FTWCA threads, DDs willing to expel Andrew Suffield because of his post to d-d-a, listmaster deciding to block Andrew from posting to d-d-a again, Rapha l Hertzog promoting his “social pressure” thing again, and some other bits that happened here and there. The problem: a bunch of Teletubbies
The Debian Project is a technical community, which some DDs are now trying to turn into a social community. Obviously, this can’t work. Why ? For a start, because the NM process has not been designed to select people based on social abilities (there’s a minimum, though, but other than that, that’s absolutely not the point of the NM process). New developers are selected on purely technical criterions, which is what you would expect from a technical community like ours. Adding social tests and whatnot isn’t going to help; the NM process is enough of a pain in the ass already for the applicants. We are a thousand Free Software hackers collaborating to the Project, dedicated to producing the best operating systems ever, and we want these operating systems to be Free Software, as defined by our guidelines on that matter, that is, to say, the DFSG. We all agree with the Foundation Documents of the Debian Project, we agree with the DMUP, and that’s pretty much all we all agree with. We never agreed to be nice to each other, we never agreed to group hugs at developer’s meetings or anything else. Our beloved Teletubbies are complaining about the “frequent” flamewars that happen on the Debian lists, and to be honest, one must acknowledge the fact that those flamewars have been a bit too frequent recently. What I find quite amusing, really, is that most of these flamewars have been started by one of the Teletubbies and mention Ubuntu. Now the same people want to come up with a mailing-lists code of conduct, similar to the one Ubuntu has. Ironic, isn’t it ? The same people are willing to expel Andrew for his post on d-d-a. Is it coherent ? The whole “social pressure” thing is nothing less than intimidation, and this is not acceptable. Similarly, the reactions to Andrew’s post on d-d-a aren’t acceptable either. Why ? Because this Project used to be open-minded. It looks like a bunch of people lost this, and I really feel sorry for them. Your reactions to Andrew’s post are really over-exagerated. You need to take a break and a reality check. If you aren’t open-minded enough to grok Andrew’s post, you’re not open-minded enough for this Project, or even for Free Software. Some of you also need to come back down to Earth. We are a volunteers organization producing Free OSes. We are doing it all for fun, so stop being so fucking serious and pull that tree out of your ass. You’ll feel better afterwards. It’s also quite amusing when the same people are announcing, on side channels (IRC, …), that J. Doe made it to their kill-file. I don’t use kill-files myself, because I believe that everybody has something interesting to say, because this is an open-minded Free Software Project, because the people I would kill-file might be maintaining something someday related to the packages I maintain and I’d need to work with them. No matter what I think of my fellow DDs, I never refused to work with anyone. People please, learn to put the Project’s interests before yours. Why ? Why now ? Why ? Because I joined a technical community of Free Software hackers, not a social community of Free Software integrists to spend my holidays with. Why now ? Because the vote on GR 2006_01 is currently running. Because the DPL election is on its way too, it’s that time of the year again. Because out of 7 candidates, 5 are, to diverse degrees, Teletubbies and 1 is the worst DPL candidate EVER (if you don’t know why and are a DD, log on to master and grep for his email address in the -private archives. Not his name, because his firstname at the time was Jonathan — something you must think about when you’ll vote). That leaves one sane candidate only; Bill, I hope your platform will be good. Solutions ? Realize that the Debian Project is the Debian Project and has nothing to do with Ubuntu, remember its goals, its spirit, remember why you joined (if you joined to get the @debian.org address, GO AWAY). This means:

• Debian is not Ubuntu, stop trying to copy everything Ubuntu does;
• Stop the social madness, we’re a technical community;
• People need to learn to put Debian’s interests before their owns.

Remember that there is only a limited number of people making a lot of noise. So if you belong to what I believe is a silent majority, please raise your voice. Help tell those people to FOAD and let’s get back to work. When you’ll vote for the DPL election, please, think twice. Be extra-careful, most of the candidates are really good politicians.

Joey replies to my post from yesterday with his own example of leaving:

The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it’s time to leave, that’s all.

His posted logs suffer from unescaped angle brackets so aren’t very easy to follow; and also from the fact that for rather obvious reasons they don’t include any of the conversation that took place after he left. Extended logs and the other side of that story below the fold: Read the rest ...

Tonight I met Eric House, who wanted to get his GPG key signed, as we was interested in becoming a Debian Developer. We had an interesting discussion about packaging and sponsorship and the general mechanics of how Debian works as a distribution. It's motivated me to get my act together and get back into things a bit more actively. I've been having a bit of a hiatus since moving to the US, generally because I've been far too busy with real life. I think I've only made a very few uploads in the last 3 months. It also made me think as I was madly brain dumping all my tips on how to package stuff, that I should write it all down, so for any future people, I can just refer them to the document, rather than again brain dumping at them, or trying to write it all down in a lengthy email. One of the biggest problems now is plain old spare time. In my old job, I had enough idle time because things went so slowly at work, that I could sneak in a bit of Debian stuff during the day. In my new job, I'm always busy on something, so I don't have the time or inclination to be doing anything that isn't work related while I'm at work. So that leaves my evenings or weekends for Debian. Evenings have seen me tinkering with Asterisk, and will probably see me tinkering with MythTV soon. Weekends have involved doing sightseeing and other touristy stuff. So I guess the sooner I can finish my other projects off, the sooner I can devote a bit more time to Debian again. I think in the meantime, to ramp up again, I'll try to get back into doing QA work and upload one orphaned package with the wrong maintainer field a night. The list has grown long again. I think I had it down to the single digits when I last stopped. It'd be cool to get it down to zero.

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it’s a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath’s presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there. Saturday (25th February 2006) RMS Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can’t understand all the GPL3 changes but I’ll try to read some more articles about it. Putting ‘Free’ into JFreeChart The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I’d like to find some charts to do just to use it! Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the “Don’t build automatically” hack. Everything should be on the Classpath’s wiki. Xen A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn’t know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing! Sunday (26th February 2006) I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I’m sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway. Women in Free Software I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing . So maybe I’d better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don’t know *BSD… I’m sorry but I don’t know more. And I still don’t know the difference with Linux and don’t know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port? Debian-Java Meeting After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom… and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM — the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don’t understant these thing During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian’s talk. Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)… I’ll send an email about the meeting, don’t worry Future of Classpath It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It’s a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It’s wonderful. Maybe it’s the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the ‘Classpath’ (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect. Then came the camera… A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy , nobody tells me 100 times I’m sexy ). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works. Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I’m not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses. Back! I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don’t know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on… I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)… we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday. I’ll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I’ll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

So, I guess this is an example of the sort of self-recusement from debian-tech that aj is <a href="http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2006/02/28#2006-02-28-debiantech">referring to: @1130344829 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> aj: sigh, did you realy have to break d-i yet again right as we're trying ot release it?
@1130344847 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> ?
@1130344881 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: (also, please try to avoid making things overly personal on this channel, cf the charter)
@1130344919 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> fine, did one have to ignore the d-i release and make a package upload with lots of changes that broke d-i internalls. Yes one did
@1130344928 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> for at least two values of one
@1130344967 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: please explain what you're talking about, in technical terms
@1130344989 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you do so, it might get fixed
@1130345337 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: hello?
@1130345448 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> joeyh, i guess you're referring to the debootstrap-upload of aj ?! /me wonders why an upload to unstable breaks the d-i beta, isnt that build+based on etch ?
@1130345451 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> sorry, busy fixing the beakage
@1130345474 <Sledge!steve@217.147.81.17> looks like a debootstrap change is causing problems in CD builds
@1130345481 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> well, there has not been a usable combination of apt, debootstrap, and d-i in testing for well over a week
@1130345634 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> so you're saying i didn't break it just as you're trying to release?
@1130345720 <joeyh!joey@kitenet.net> no you broke it just as the fixed NMU was ready to go into testing
@1130345758 <h01ger!~holger@bone.digitalis.org> .oO( ah )
@1130345783 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> sigh
@1130345792 <neuro!~rmurray@h24-80-164-222.sbm.shawcable.net> ...and we're still waiting for the technical details
@1130345813 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: second warning. this channel's for technical discussions, eg "here's what broke: ...", not accusations, eg "you broke it" "why'd you have to break it" "yes one did".
@1130345869 <aj!aj-irc@azure.humbug.org.au> joeyh: if you want, there's still time to put 0.3.1.9 into testing
* Logging finished Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:58:19 -0400
It's worth noting that the d-i release in question was etch beta 1, which eventually released 2 weeks after the above conversation. Probably my fault for not being a big believer in ridigly defined topics for communications channels. After all, I still filter all of my 20-some Debian mailing lists into a single folder; I'll happily talk about anything on the one irc channel (typically #debian-boot) that I nowdadys limit myself to; and so #debian-tech seemed like the obvious place to bring up the issue since aj, sledge, and other relevant people were active on it at the time. The technical details remain as irrelivant today as they were at the time, the relevant problem being that developers who are not involved in the installer development rarely consider how their actions can affect it. When a policy gets int the way of solving a problem, it's time to leave, that's all.

I'm trying to put together a SELinux packaging team for Debian and Ubuntu. Current SELinux is still a major pita to get running... so we need to join our efforts in adopting policy to our needs and such. Upstream development is of an rather "uncooperative" model: both the selinux libraries and the reference policy are updated by a single person each, by exporting an internal VCS to a public CVS on sourceforge. If you want to add patches, you always have to send them through a mailing list, and hope for them to appear in the archive sometime soon. Or not. While this works okay for the libraries and utilities - which are fairly stable by now - I have doubts that this is appropriate for the policy. Given the amount of fixes/additions we'll need at least for the reference policy, I think more people should have write access to a shared repository. For this I've setup a subversion repository on svn.debian.org, with currently two branches: unmodified upstream and a debian branch. Note that we might also switch to an arch repository, when some big contributors prefer so. If users of other distributions (Gentoo?) want to join, they are welcome to do so. They can have their own branch, of course, albeit I don't think it's really necessary (maybe I should have named the "debian" branch "alioth-trunk" or so...) Basically anything is okay with me, that helps the reference policy and SELinux in picking up speed. If you'd like to get write access, send me an email with your alioth user id. Given the "unmodified upstream" branch, it should be fairly easy to extract patches from our repository to be included upstream, too.

Phillip, my blog has no comments feature for similar reasons as madduck has pointed out. As you may have read, I wrote "[Debian Live will be] first [an] unofficial [project], then trying to bring it into Debian and become an official subproject". As you may have read too, Joey wrote "Debian Live [...] is an official sub-project of Debian". I just created those ressources on my own webserver for beeing quicker and more flexible in the beginning, I would be happy to move everything to debian.org. However, this would need a large amount of time for bureaucracy (especially for a poor little NM like me). Time, which I don't have and neither want to invest nor want to waste at the moment. If you volunteer for that job, feel free to be my guest (to avoid misunderstandings: alioth isn't an option, hosting several ISO images isn't possible on haydn due to lack of bandwith and space). And yes, I agree... I'm unworthy to run something officially because I'm not a DD. I'm patiently stuck in the queue since nearly a year, currently waiting on my AM who has the major PITA to check 75 packages... (my earnest and deepest sympathy to you, rene).

The OpenVox A400P02 I'd ordered arrived during the week while we were away. I installed it last night and had a brief play, but wasn't able to get things working with our Vonage ATA. Tonight I made a bit more of a concerted effort, and got everything going with both the line coming out of the Vonage ATA, and the SBC PSTN line. In the end everything just worked, but for some strange reason I had to swap the ports I had the SBC PSTN line and the Vonage ATA plugged into. Very weird. Driver and configuration-wise, the A400P02 walked and talked exactly like a Digium Wildcard TDM02B, only much cheaper. All that remains is some serious tweaking of dial plans, to punt the appropriate calls out the appropriate links, and setting up voicemail properly, and I think I can call this project sufficiently completed to move on to MythTV... At a later date I'll get an FXS module so I plug in one of our existing cordless phones.

I have an Application Manager! Took six months of wait, almost to a day. Decent enough, given the backlog. I won’t complain. (This girl is incredibly excited.)

My suggestion for the GFDL vote is 1342

( 1 ) Choice 1: "GFDL-licensed works are unsuitable for main in all cases"

of course that only means documents only available under FDL or only available under FDL or other non-free software licenses. Documents also available under BSD, GPL or whatever are still free. That "in all cases" means without looking at the loudness of the proponents of some document.

( 3 ) Choice 2: "GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free"

This does not mean "without unmodifiable sections", it means "without additional unmodifable sections". FDL has always to include the license within the work. (I still do not know how to include the license within a binary easily. But as the FDL as GPL-incompatible anyway it perhaps makes such work-flows impossible, anyway).

( 4 ) Choice 3: "GFDL-licensed works are compatible with the DFSG [needs 3:1]"

That's even worse. We have non-free for non-free stuff some of our users might not live without. (Or think so). Foist non-free stuff on them will severly hurt them in the long run.

( 2 ) Choice 4: Further discussion

Don't forget this option. If you do not like choice 2 (perhaps because you think like me that it is almost choice 3), rank 4 above it. Otherwise with equally many [3214] and [1234] votes, choice 2 would most likely win.

So only rank 2 above 4, if you want to see 2 in action. Otherwise vote 4 over 2. (same with 3 and 4, but 3 does not look so innocent as 2)

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

Since the demand for blosxom anti-comment-spam solutions respective appropriate blosxom plugins seems to be really high, I’ve decided to polish up my apparently quite well working although still in beta state being anti-spam enhanced version of the comments plugin (ZIP) by putting the blacklist outside in an external file and writing some (still short) docs. I use it since 11th of January this year and got only two spam comments and many more normal comments since then, so it should work. Although: I also got a question if my trackback doesn’t work. Hmmm. So no warranties, just an offer for help fighting against comment spam. ;-) Another feature which is basically ported from the writeback notify plugin is notification of the blog owner about new comments by mail. Since on the server on which my blog runs the used Perl module Mail::Sendmail was not available, I used Mail::Send instead for my version. For installation you first need to download the ZIP file of the original comments plugin, install it’s templates and then install my anti-spam enhanced version of the plugin itself.

Now playing: Rockapella — Come on Eileen

I use now extensively lib(pam nss)-ldap and was really tired having to forge my .ldif to add users. Since I don't need samba, smbldap-tools does not work (I don't use samba.schema whatever the name is)... So I discovered ldapscripts, those worked, even if they don't provide a lot of functionnalities. At least, you can :

• add/delete users
• add/delete groups
• add/remove users from groups
• change the default group of your users

I've just written some bits of magic that make the ldapscripts discover its settings from libpam-ldap and adduser config files, so that the average user will see those script work out from the box after having configured libpam-ldap. Now I'm a fully happy pam-ldap user. And btw, I've submitted an ITP, and look at the magic :

• Bug#324296 ACK : 6:33:21 -700
• ldapscripts_1.2-2_amd64.changes is NEW : 08:02:04 -0700
• ldapscripts_1.2-2_amd64.changes ACCEPTED : 13:48:32 -0700

w00t