Google Wave is now available, and on your domain too!

Yes, that’s right, if you’re using Google Apps for your Domain, you can now enable Wave domain-wide! Best part is it’s totally free, and very easy to dive right in!

Google Wave has been in private-beta status since Google I/O 2009, and one year later it’s being opened to the public.

Google Wave is a realtime multi-user combination of both Instant Messaging, Email and Document collaboration service. Basically it means that as you write, the other people who are in the Wave with you (Think of it like a chat conversation) see what is being typed as it happens.

So, how do we get started?

If you already have Google Apps for your Domain, you can easily enable this feature for all of your accounts.

Well done Google, we know you care about the future of the web with your WebM Project (VP8)

Yes, it’s been announced as predicted:

http://webmproject.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html

All I can say is well done Google, they’ve truly done the right thing and could have single-handedly helped to preserve the future of video on the web! They’ve also hit the ground running with a very impressive list of people backing the format, such as:

nVidia
Intel
ARM
Qualcom
Adobe Flash platform
Opera
Mozilla / Firefox
CORE Codec
AMD
Logitech and more!

Why is this all so important?

FTTH (Fibre-to-the-Home) and ADSL2+ in NZ

Having explained this now 5x in the last 24 hours, I decided it was time to blog about it.

This post summarizes why NZ broad band doesn’t “suck”, why FTTH isn’t going to solve what your problems are, and what you can do about it in the mean time.

It’ll also explain to you how “The Internet” works, here in New Zealand, as well as giving you some figures to compare us against the rest of the world.

Installing ADA (Asterisk Desktop Assistant) on Elastix

Formerly SnapANumber, ADA is now offered by Digium. However, the first thing that you’ll notice is that it was written for their Asterisk Business Edition.

That’s great if you have ABE, but not so good if you’re one of the millions of installs out there that uses vanilla Asterisk.

This guide presumes you already have ADA downloaded and installed. If not, you can get the latest (At the time of writing) version 1.1 from here:

http://dl1.digium.com/ADA1.1/ADAInstall.exe

Now you’re going to ignore any instructions you’re previously read, and we’ll start from scratch. Don’t worry, you’ll be up and running in a matter of moments!

Why VP8 matters

This post was made prior to the Google IO conference which is May 19 -> 20th, and as such things may change after this date.

VP8 is potentially a game-changer in the realm of both streaming, High-Definition, and mobile video devices. It also has the potential to help in the killing of Adobe Flash, and solve the HTML5 Video format war.

Currently there are two formats that are used in HTML5 Video by differing browsers: Ogg Theora and h.264

Both have support from different browsers, both have different camps fighting for their success, and both have their pros and cons.

Migrating a windows user profile directory

Many times I’ve found myself wanting to do this, and only just recently learned how to.

If you’ve disconnected from a Domain for example and are now part of a workgroup but want to retain your existing “setup”, or perhaps you’ve got yourself something like an EeePC 900 and your C: Drive is running out of space, this can be a great way to free up additional space, and it’s a better all-round solution that purely moving the “My Documents” folder.

The whole process should take only 2-3 minutes!

Using the Patton SN4554 for ISDN with Elastix

For any business migrating to SIP, the Patton SN4554 is a brilliant way to bring two ISDN lines (4-channels) in to their new PBX system, especially considering you don’t have to break open your PBX Server to install a PCI card.

This basic How-To shows you how to set it up to work with your Elastix system:

DIY FreeSWITCH & FreePBXv3 from LiveCD

This is a bit of a follow on from my previous post: https://chillingsilence.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/initial-thoughts-on-freepbxv3-and-freeswitch-vs-asterisk/

Everybody is starting to talk about FreeSWITCH as the next big PBX software (Amongst other things), and FreePBXv3 is shaping up to be a damn fine GUI.

The more I use it, the more I start to like FreeSWITCH as a progression from Asterisk. One will likely never completely kill the other, I can see a world where they both live happily, but for me I struggle knowing that Asterisk doesn’t 100% accurately do all CDR stuff, and it bugs me recommending that to a client.

I’ve blogged before on FreePBXv3, and the dev guys are still as friendly as ever (Granted they seem to be a truckload busier lately, but who can blame them).

What follows is a guide on booting a LiveCD (Debian!) and running FreeSWITCH & FreePBXv3 from this live system. From there, it’s up to you if you want to simply reboot and forget it ever happened, or potentially install it to a HDD. The choice is yours, I’m just going to give you a quick How-To on getting FreeSWITCH & FreePBXv3 up and running nicely, and in a flash! In fact, on a decent machine (C2D 2Ghz+) and a decent internet connection, you could be up n running from scratch, in less than 20 minutes 🙂

How-To: Hotel Management System for Elastix

Two blog posts in 24 hours? We’re on a roll here!
Based off PIAF’s Hotel Management System, we’re going to make some minor adjustments to have this work with Elastix. This is a brilliant Hotel Room Management system with the ability to restrict the calls from Ext’s when they are not checked in, per-second billing, and more!

Contents:

1. Installing the base system
2. Updating the config
3. Fixing up HTTPS
4. Updating dial-plan
5. Closing words

Initial thoughts on FreePBXv3 and FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk

As I’ve been testing out FreePBXv3 with FreeSWITCH, I figured I should blog my experiences, as they’ve been surprisingly pleasant!

After I got notification on the Elastix Beta mailing list about FreePBXv3, I was stoaked to learn it’s been released, even in an unfinished form! I went looking a while back for a FreeSWITCH GUI and was sadly disappointed. I found a few like tcapi and Phonebooth, but couldn’t get tcapi working and Phonebooth had just had all its code donated to FreePBX. So for the time I’d given up.

Anyway, so I grabbed the latest Install CD for FreePBXv3 which is based off CentOS. Ran through smoothly, no issues, got it installed, but I didn’t really do anything much with it.

For one reason or another I jumped into IRC in #freeswitch on freenode, I’ll have to look over my logs and figure out why. Anyway it turns out that some of the FreePBXv3 devs hang out there, and they’re actually friendly! It was a nice change from some of the other projects I’d had involvement in. I think Elastix is probably the only other project that’s been so friendly.

So I got chatting with one of the guys there, and it came up that I was happy to do some testing, so he asks me to do a clean install from a vanilla distro (And not the LiveCD. Again I’m not sure why, I’ll go re-read the chat logs later). No worries, so I install vanilla debian and get to work. Anyway a few bug reports later, 3 SVN updates later, and I’ve got a nicely working system running currently in VirtualBox.

I’m pleased to say that FreeSWITCH as a product from what I can see appears quite mature, but still growing at a steady rate. They even recommend you install from SVN, they’re that confident in the code. Most projects would have you install from a “stable” peg in the code and update as & when they release a new “final” version. The first and most obvious thing I’ve noticed about FreeSWITCH is the sounds. Even just the female voice that guides you through recording a Voicemail sounds *so* much nicer than the Asterisk one, it’s absolutely crazy! There’s also the nice feature that Voicemail automatically stops recording when you’re silent for 2 seconds. Quite cool I thought!

There was no “additional” configuration of any endpoints that I needed to do, tested with ZoIPer and an SPA942 successfully. It simply “just worked” making calls between the devices, as was to be expected. I’m still yet to setup an external trunk to test over.

FreePBXv3 is still a *little* rough around the edges, but overall I must say that the infrastructure that they’ve built, or framework, seems like a great improvement over the current FreePBX 2.X! Not only that, but the developers are very approachable, keen for feedback, they seem to be excellent coders who love doing what they do, and they’re rapidly pumping out an awesome project! It still crashes at times, or at least doesn’t display what it should, however the changes seem to get saved at least even though the correct followup output isn’t shown. Some features aren’t 100% implemented, but overall there’s most of the basic things in there that the majority of people would use. The developers also seemed pretty keen for suggestions and improvements, even just the trivial little things.

I’m just looking forward to trying this out on an Alix system soon to see how it handles the load from FreeSWITCH 😀