I’ve just launched qurl.co.uk, a little URL shortening site. Instead of pasting long URLs into emails (which usually get split across lines and break), generate a short link on qurl.co.uk and give that instead.
The site’s a bit primitive right now but I’ve got a raft of new features lined up and I’m happy to accept suggestions!
The slides from my Asterisk talk at WYLUG are available.
This covers a bit of the background of Asterisk, along with some dialplan examples.
Last weekend, we visited some friends in Leicester and went to the Christmas steam day at Abbey Pumping Station. The massive engines were in steam, so I shot some video. It was nice to see them again - I haven’t seen them running for about 15 years since I used to visit with my Dad. The experience brought back a lot of memories.
Here’s a video I made of the engines running:
They were built in 1891 to pump sewage out of Leicester and up to the Beaumont Leys treatment works. Each of the four independent engines has an effective output power of 174 horsepower. Each flywheel is 21 feet in diameter and weighs 21 tons. They stretch from two floors below ground where the bottoms of the pumps are, to two floors above ground where the massive 15 ton beams sit. A steam pressure of 80psi is needed to run the engines.
Macworld is reporting that MySpace will use ‘audio fingerprinting’ technology to automatically identify copyright infringing material at the point at which it is uploaded.
The system is provided by Gracenote, and appears to be a mixture of ID3 tag recognition and audio waveform matching.
Of course, there are many valid reasons to upload material that the system may tag as infringing, such as parody or critical review. It’ll be impossible for any blogger to add clips of songs to a music review now.
I’ve been playing around over the weekend with speeding up this website a little. It runs on a virtual server with not much RAM, so it’s important that I keep the number of Apache processes as low as possible.
I’ve installed lighttpd another IP to serve static content such as images and stylesheets. This means that I won’t have the overhead of Apache to serve up all the little bits of content that don’t require PHP.
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Nokia’s E-Series phones have a few codes you can key in to access various hidden features:
Also, if the phone won’t boot and hangs on the startup screen (white background, blue Nokia logo), you can initiate a factory reset by holding *, 3 and the green button.
Some or all of these seem to work for other S60 devices too, eg: N80.
Ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ was released today. It’s available for Intel x86, AMD64, UltraSPARC T1 and PowerPC architectures.
You can get a copy from the download pages, or via their Shipit service.
The great open source browser, Firefox, has reached a new milestone with the release of version 2.0.
I’ve been using it for the last day or so and I’m impressed. There’s a spell checker for forms, which makes writing blog posts like this much nicer, there are also new tools for reporting phishing sites and sites that aren’t compatible with Firefox, so that the Firefox team can check them out.
Also, tab handling has been improved. There’s now a menu entry that shows recently closed tabs, which is very useful. I’m always closing tabs I didn’t mean to.
It’s not a ground-breaking release, but a nice incremental update that keeps Firefox comfortable ahead of the competition.
Moller International are auctioning a prototype of their M400X VTOL flying car.
Current bidding is up to $2,501,500.00, which is a bit out of my price range. The bidders questions and answers are hilarious!
Q: Does it come with a Flux Capacitor or similar?
A: The M400X prototype is powered by eight, internal combustion rotary engines…
It seems a little strange to be writing about a piece of Windows software here, because I’ve not used Windows for about 5 years. It turns out that, while I’ve been happily ripping my CDs and encoding them with Ogg Vorbis, the unfortunate souls still using the other OS are having to put up with some sort of ropey media player that tries to stop you from transferring your media files to other computers you own, to your portable music player and so on.
All is not lost for those people though, because some enterprising chap has produced a utility that defeats this control mechanism. Because it seems that Microsoft deem possession of the utility to be copyright infringement (which is obviously isn’t), many sites are unable or unwilling to host the program. I don’t agree with Microsoft’s stance against fair use, so I’m hosting a copy here for anyone who wants it. You can get it on the FairUse4WM download page. The copyright of this file belongs to the author of the utility, not Microsoft. If the author wishes that I remove the file, then I’ll gladly do so.
