ENUM NL has set up the ENUM Linked In group for developers and others interested in new technology. The initiative is intended to increase familiarity with ENUM and stimulate the development of new applications.
âThe ENUM Linked In group is a global forum for knowledge, good ideas, applications and talent,' commented Elmar Duiveman, ENUM Project Manager.
By creating the Linked In group, ENUM NL is looking to encourage discussion about ENUM and its potential applications. Before long, demos will be made available to inspire more developers to start working on new uses for ENUM technology. An on-line âENUM lab' is also planned, where developers can put their innovative ideas to the test. If you would like to learn more about ENUM or share what you know, visit the ENUM group.
"In Wellington on the steps of Parliament on Thursday 19th at MIDDAY
with a petition handover at 12:30pm. This is a postive event where we
will hand out hundreds of CDs and thank the politicans that support us -
so please keep it friendly and polite. While we appreciate people
arranging their own demonstrations it might be best if we don't dilute
our numbers with multiple events.
We want everyone reading this to email everyone they know in Wellington
about this. We can't let this be another internet protest that results
in few people turning up. This is important so we need to prove it in
numbers.
NOTE: Please don't wear all black as that has negative associations with
other demonstrations but instead come along with bright clothes and
BLACK PLACARDS!"
I just realised that I hadn't blogged about this at all. I'm hosting the MythTV mini-conference at linux.conf.au 2009 in Hobart, Australia in January. How could I have forgotten about blogging this?!
The little blurb about the mini-conference is:
MythTV is a personal video recorder (PVR) for Linux which allows
you to decide what you want to watch; when you want to watch
it. MythTV has been increasing in popularity since Isaac Richards
first started working on it in 2002. It is now very usable, and has
several dedicated Linux distributions, as well as several books
written about it.
This mini-conference is intended to bring together both users and
developers of MythTV to discuss topics of interest to both groups.
The programme is looking really good, and it should be a rocking conference. I'll post another blog entry once the programme is officially released.
Here's an email I've just received about a new IPv6 group in New Zealand, if you have an interested in the future of IPv6 in New Zealand, please join:
A workshop at held at InternetNZ on the 28 November in Wellington
saw the formation of a New Zealand IPv6 Steering Group. This group includes
representatives from telecommunications carriers, internet service
providers, ICT vendors, and industry and user associations. The members of this
steering group consist of invited senior representatives from the following organisations:
InternetNZ
TUANZ
ISPANZ
Telecommunications Carriers Forum
Digital Development Forum
Telecom
TelstraClear
WorldXChange
Orcon
FX Networks
REANNZ
Canterbury Development Corporation
Kordia
Cisco
Vodafone
Juniper Networks
Alcatel Lucent
Braintrust
This steering group will primarily be concerned with high level discussion
regarding the deployment of IPv6 within New Zealand. The steering group
will not necessarily be a place where technical discussion takes place.
As with so many things these days, a combination of business and
technical expertise must be bought together to solve a given problem.
To this end at the same workshop a Technical Special Interest Group
(TechSIG) was also established.
The goals of this group are:
. To act as a central point for IPv6 technical discussion within the
New Zealand Internet community.
. To identify to the IPv6 Steering Group any business related barriers
to IPv6 deployment which have been identified by the SIG's
technical contributors.
. To comment and provide potential solutions to technical related barriers
identified by members of the IPv6 Steering Group.
. To stimulate the production of relevant technical documentation.
The co-conveners of this group are
Andy Linton
Nathan Ward
Brian Carpenter
Dean Pemberton
A mailing list has been created and membership is open to all interested
parties. Subscription details can be found at the link below;
http://listserver.internetnz.net.nz/mailman/listinfo/ipv6-techsig
I would encourage anyone who has an interest in the deployment and growth
of IPv6 to join and contribute to the list.
Please do not feel that this is a 'Networking Specialist Only' list. The
deployment of IPv6 (and depletion of IPv4) has just as significant an
impact on system administrators and content/application providers as it
does on network administrators. I welcome all technical viewpoints onto the list.
Thank you for your time.
Dean Pemberton
(Co-convener, IPv6 Steering Group Technical SIG)
S and I are looking at switching ADSL providers to a provider when also provides a phone service over VoIP, and I thought, "Hey, since I'm going to switch our phone over to VoIP, and our 'net connection will have to be online all the time for the phone to work, it'll have a fixed IP as part of the plan, right?". So I finally found the right person to ask at the new ISP and was told "No". It turns out I need to pay an extra $10 a month for a fixed IP.
Is it just me or is the whole attitude towards fixed IP addresses on ADSL lines crazy? First a little bit of history.
Back in the early days of dial-up Internet usage all users were allocated a fixed IP address. You just got one, I still have my letter from Actrix Networks from 1996 which had my connection information, including my allocated IP address. Then when the number of users grew large enough that ISPs didn't have enough IP addresses available to allocate to more users, users were switched to dynamic IP addresses (so you received a different IP every time you connected). This worked okay since most people were only online for short periods of time, and allowed for the customer base of ISPs to grow, without further exhausting the IPv4 address pool.
So, the reason that the industry switched to dynamic IP addresses was to make the best use of a limited resource.
But now, having a fixed IP address is seen as another revenue stream by the ISPs. Which is crazy. I'm going be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm going to be using an IP address from that dynamic pool the entire time. That IP address will never be available for anyone else to use.
I can get around this by using a dynamic DNS service (which is what I'm already doing). But this seems crazy when my plan new will require me to be online 24 hours a day. If I'm not online we won't have a working phone.
The up-shot? I won't be paying the extra $10/month, I'll continue to use my dynamic DNS service and I'll continue to consume a dynamic IP address never allowing it to be used by anyone else.
Update: It was suggested to me that this could be due to the APNIC IPv4 Guidelines, but APNIC classify DSL as a permanent connection, therefore static allocations are fine, in fact it appears that they expect organisations to use static IP addresses for DSL connections.
Well, as of debian-maintainers version 1.39 (uploaded on 2008-07-08) I'm now a Debian Maintainer.
w00t!
Francois will upload a new version of MythTV Status soonish which amongst other things adds the magic fu required to allow me to upload it directly. Oh, and I've changed MythTV Status to be GPLv3.
It seems that the iLiad might be really nice eBook reader. It supports PDF, allows you to annotate documents using a touchscreen and lots of other fancy things.
I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.6.1.
Notable new features:
Details on disk space are reported, and individual storage groups[0];
If there isn't enough program guide data, a warning is shown;
The --email-only-on-conflict option has been extended to mean
"Only on alert" which now includes both the previous points
(this means, you'll only be emailled if there is something which
needs your attention);
For each recording (scheduled, current and conflict) show the channel
name it is related to;
We do a little bit of rinsing on the XML data now to remove some
invalid unicode characters that occasionally appear;
Suppress some warnings if the user doesn't have access to MySQL and
handle some other error conditions in a nicer manner.
If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the
email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some
email addresses).
[0] To get the details on the individual storage groups you need to
apply a couple of patches to MythTV. Please see the FAQ in the tarball
or for Debian type boxes, /usr/share/doc/mythtv-status/FAQ .
Update: I've disabled comments for now as I'm tired of all the spam.
I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.5 0.5.1.
Notable new features (from the shiny new ChangeLog):
Add support for printing colour in the encoder status display.
Show any schedule conflicts, or if the MythTV Perl API isn't
usable, a warning is displayed.
Display the amount of time until the next recording.
Add --version & --help options.
Allow suppressing blocks of output.
The report can be sent via email with the subject set correctly.
With an option to only send out email if schedule conflicts are
detected.
If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the
email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some
email addresses).
The other day I was recompiling some kernels during the day on our
MythTV backend, which at the time happened to be recording my wifes
favourite program (Grey's Anatomy, we discovered it part way through the
season, so the repeats are good). It turns out the compilation caused
some issues with the recording (which reduced the WAF).
So to increase the WAF, I'm making sure this doesn't happen again. I've
written a script that spits out the MythTV status which is then
displayed in the MOTD. It is available over here.
I've found this is a pretty effective way of letting me know of any
upcoming recordings and what is going to be happening on the system in
the next little while. It is a whole lot easier than using the status
page on MythWeb.
Sample output:
MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status: Mon Oct 15 2007, 8:41 AM
Encoders:
cerberus (9) - Idle
cerberus (12) - Idle
Scheduled Recordings:
2007-10-15 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-15 18:00:00 - 3 News
2007-10-15 20:30:00 - Mythbusters
2007-10-15 22:00:00 - Flight Of The Conchords
2007-10-16 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-16 18:00:00 - 3 News
I run Debian, so there is a .deb. For those not running Debian there is
a tarball (but the MOTD updating glue is Debian specific at the moment).
For those interested in hacking there is a git repository.
Hopefully I'm not the only one that finds this useful.
What do you do if the back of your stereo cabinet is a mess and you've been a network monkey in the past?
Simple, you grab some cable management brackets from your good junk pile[1], some bits of MDF and you hack your stereo cabinet.
I think it came out much tidier, and now I can safely push it back without risking damaging cables!
If you're wondering why some of the power cords aren't plugged in, they belong to devices we don't use very much, why have them plugged in and drawing power if we aren't actually using them?
[1] "Good junk pile" every geek should have one, it is that collection of odds and sods that you don't really need, but which - just might, one day - come in handy. It should be noted however that they don't tend to have a very high Wife Approval Factor.
There is another computer recycling event happening at the Wellington Stadium.
I don't know much about it, but here is the contents of the email I received about it:
Not sure what to do with the old computer in your garage? Or the old mobile phones cluttering your drawers? How about free disposal in an environmentally sustainable way?
The Computer Access NZ Trust (CANZ) is organising eDay 2007, a free community computer recycling day for households, small businesses and schools on Saturday 29 September at the Westpac Stadium car park from 9am-3pm. This follows on from the very successful Dell Free Recycling Day held in September 2006.
The average New Zealand household has more than one computer, representing a total of over seven million electronic devices. Their eventual disposal represents a potential challenge to our environment. eDay 2007 is part of a nationwide effort by communities and industry to start to address the electronic waste problem.
Bring in your old computer equipment on 29 September - there is no charge. All computers will be broken down and the parts will be recycled for other purposes. Mobile phones will also be disposed of in an environmentally sustainable way.
Vehicle access for the Westpac Stadium car park is off Waterloo Quay. CANZ is organising the day in partnership with the Wellington 2020 Communications Trust, Remarkit, the Wellington City Council and a number of industry sponsors.
Only computer equipment and mobile phones will be accepted so please do not bring other electronic equipment. If you have any queries about the event, please contact Mike Ennis (partsplus@actrix.gen.nz).
We normally see quite a few people finding this blog via Google. It can be quite amusing to see what search terms led to us.
Earlier this month I decided to check it out again, there were no hits from Google. At all. This was kinda odd, as the googlebots (both for the search engine and for reader) normally hit us quite often.
Looking back through the logs the last time Google hit us was the 14th of March. Which is quite some time ago.
I cruised over to Google and checked Reader, and sure enough the most recent article from our blog is dated the 14th of March. I then tried telling Google to index blog.etc.gen.nz using the WebMaster tools. No dice, it says:
I added AAAA (IPv6) records to some of my hosts, which is why I moved to FreeDNS. DynDNS doesn't support that.
It appears that one of those changes caused Google to start ignoring us. And in fact, it is the change to FreeDNS.
Damn.
I think it is finally time to bite the bullet and start running my own nameserver. Which I want to do anyhow to start using DNSSEC...
Some further investigations with the help of a mate (you know who you are) I've discovered that FreeDNS is rejecting DNS queries from Google. I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem.
Update: The issue is FreeDNS. Updated entry to reflect that. Update 2: Okay, the FreeDNS maintainer is now allowing Google to access our DNS entries again, so we're back in Google. But still, bizarre.
