Chris's Random Ramblings
I've been meaning to try voip and have a play with Asterisk for a while. I finally got around to getting an Analogue Telephone Adaptor (ATA), the Sipura SPA-3000 during the week.
This ATA has an ethernet port, a socket for a phone and one for a PSTN line. This makes it possible for me to use my cordless phone to accepts and make calls through my normal telephone as well as voip calls. There is a nice fail over function where if the voip connection fails or there is a power failure then it falls back to routing the calls through the PSTN line.
Registered for a free account through SipPhone and setup turned out to be very easy. Stephen also bought and setup an ATA and I gave him a call - was most impressed by the quality of the sound. The ISP which I use, Internode are meant to be setting up a voip service, so I am looking forward to getting an account through them. Having a DID in Adelaide would be great for having really cheap phone calls with my parents.
I mentioned to a few people at the conference that I was thinking of using the same codebase for the Hackfest at next years Linux.conf.au. So to be fair I thought I should mention it more publically as well.
I'm still thinking about different ways we could run the competition - perhaps a cyborg type competition where humans play against each other with the help of AI programs. I'd welcome any ideas that people may have. In the meantime there is quite a lot of work to be done on the server. It really needs a test suite and given the experience of running the competition this year there are quite a few features that I want to add in addition to the standard spellcast rules.
The Linux.conf.au 2005 organising committee arranged for speakers at the conference to go on an early morning balloon ride over Canberra as a thank-you gift for speaking at the conference. On Thursday morning, Kelly and I went along with some of the speakers, meeting at the Hyatt hotel at 5:30am.
We drove along with the basket and uninflated balloon to a field near Canberra airport where our balloon and 2 others were setup for flight. The winds were blowing in different direction compared to the previous time I had been on a balloon ride, and this time we headed westward over parliament house towards Schrivner Dam. It was a beautifully clear morning and visibility to the surrounding mountains very clear.
About halfway through the flight, there was a rather strong smell of burning hair, and I turned around to see Kelly patting at her hair which was on fire. It turns out that some leaves had fallen from inside the balloon and caught fire as they fell through the burners. Luckily Kelly only lost a small amount of hair. A small part of my jacket was melted as well. Afterwards the pilot claimed that it has never happened in a balloon he has piloted before, though apparently someone else was singed during the inflation of the balloon the next morning.