I love this day. It’s our five year wedding anniversary. And what a beautiful day it is. Sunny and breezy, and if we’re lucky, the temperature might get up to 80 degrees.

Kelly, Hallie, and our pre-son will be taking a stroll down the greenway soon. Tonight, Hallie will be spending the night at her cousin’s house while Kelly and I enjoy a romantic dinner.

I discovered the secret to getting SIP phones like X-Lite and Packet8‘s DTA-310 working well with Asterisk. It’s the silence.

Yep. A little-known fact is that Asterisk uses the incoming RTP stream for timing its outgoing RTP stream. That means if your SIP client stops sending audio (i.e., its silence suppression is activated), you will stop getting audio from Asterisk. While at the beach, I first noticed this when I would have to make a noise on the phone before the audio from the distant party would resume. I wound up breathing into the microphone just so I could continue the conversation. Really freaky.

Turning off silence suppression fixes the problem. Then your SIP clients continue sending audio, and continue receiving audio as a result. You can do this in X-Lite under the “advanced settings” menu.

Turning it off on the DTA-310 is far trickier. I have no way of adjusting silence suppression using the earlier firmware. As far as I know, it can only be disabled using fresh firmware and an unlocked “advanced configuration” page. That’s what stumped me about the silence problem at the beach. I was using what I thought was an identical DTA-310 as the one I knew to work, but the truth was the “malfunctioning” one did not have its silence suppression activated while my working one in the office did (its unlocked).

So the big issue now is discovering how to disable the silence in the older firmware, or how to unlock the DTA completely. Or maybe the answer is to scrap the Packet8 DTAs altogether and switching entirely to Sipuras.

Bonnie Charley and Frances have all been the warm-up acts. It’s time for the headliner. Hurricane Ivan is now a devastating category five hurricane, and overnight weather service models are beginning to predict a northerly turn – straight over the Florida penninsula. Maximum sustained winds are over 160 MPH. Incredible.

There’s still time before it hits land, and plenty of room for it to pick its landfall. Keep an “eye” on this one.

Just when you thought it was safe to be a state near the water, Hurricane Ivan approaches. Word on the street is that Ivan will make Hurricane Frances look like a cakewalk. Someplace on the north side of the Gulf is going to get clobbered, and clobbered bad.

Right now it ain’t looking good for the area between Panama City and Tallahassee.

I’m back from Doc’s talk at UNC. Nice to finally meet him face to face, if only for mere seconds. Popular guy, you know.

Walking across the UNC campus in the rain, I wished I’d remembered to borrow a William and Mary shirt from my buddy Wade.

More writeup after dinner and playtime with the Buggle.

I saw a license plate yesterday which reminded me of the cool Flaming Lips song Yoshimi. In honor of this quirky song, I was going to post the lyrics on my page today, but my stupid friend Larry read my mind and beat me to the punch.

My tinfoil hat needs thicker aluminum foil.

I’m thinking about going back to school. No, I’m not going back to N.C. State this time. This time, I’m enrolling at the University of Nigeria.

Today is Hallie’s first day of preschool. I’m so proud of her. I know she’ll do well, because she’s so incredibly curious and smart. Yet, it’s never easy letting go of your kids.

She’s heading into class as I write this. And so our little girl will never be the same.

We were discussing how the National Hurricane Center comes up with names for storms. Nobody here knows how names are retired. There isn’t any threshold which earns a Camille or Hugo-size storm retirement. This led to the idea of allowing companies to sponsor storms. Rather than having to come up with scores of names each season, the weather service could sell the naming rights.

Imagine! “Hurricane Home Depot is heading your way. Get all your weather supplies now for a great low price!” Or how about “The State Farm Insurance Storm will strike land tomorrow, spawning Lowes Home Improvement tornadoes and damaging Johnson Roofing winds.”

It could happen.
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