Well, I’ve now got my DTA310 answering calls from Asterisk! Sounds works well, too, once the firewall rules were adjusted on the client. 🙂 The volume controls on the client also need to be tweaked a bit.

The only hurdle remaining is to get the DTA310 to properly authenticate to Asterisk for INVITE requests. If I can do that, I can dial out from the DTA310, meaning I can make all calls to and from the Internet using SIP. Way cool.
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I read from Jeff Pulver‘s blog that the FCC granted his petition to declare FWD an information service. This is great news for the budding VoIP industry, though it still leaves questions unanswered.
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Look like the building where I work may be getting a generator. We’ve had electricians in today installing an automatic transfer switch. This should help put an end to the bizarre power outages where one bus goes down, leaving us 80 volts of electricity instead of the usual 120.

Still, there’s no sign of the actual generator, so there’s no telling when it will actually happen. And besides, what will I have left to complain about?

I’ve been revisiting my idea for combining the power of Bittorrent to TiVo-like boxes. One little-known project which does just this is called konspire (and kast). It provides Bittorrent-like distribution of virtually any media. Even offers “channels” and ranking of sources.

From this page describing kast:

kast is similar to a blogging system in that you can use it to regularly “post” new content to a group of readers. Of course, a blog, like any website, has limited bandwidth. Thus, the kinds of content you can post to a blog are usually limited to text and pictures, especially for popular blogs that are read by many people. By leveraging the distribution power of konspire2b, you can use kast to post files of any size to essentially as many readers as you want.

[…]
a free radio or television station

using konspire2b, you can run a multimedia channel that reaches a large audience. As with any broadcast system, your receivers need to be “tuned in” (with their kast nodes on and subscribed) in order to receive particular broadcasts. However, as long as your receivers have their nodes on during your broadcast, they can interact with the received content later at their leisure. For video distribution, this makes konspire2b more like TiVo than ordinary television. Also, with konspire2b, you are not just limited to sending audio or video: you can send any kind of file.

Kast fits the bill for sharing content, especially content that is user-generated. It comes so close to meeting my needs that I’m surprised it took me so long to discover it. Right now, however, it’s about as useful as Alexander Bell’s first telephone: great concept, but if no one else is using it, its a doorstop.

Download kast, put in some content, and help change the face of media.

(I’m running out of bad puns. Send help.)

I finally got sound between my Packet8 DTA310 and Asterisk (or more specifically, to Sipset running on my laptop)! It is the first time I’ve gotten any audio from the DTA310 to anything else since I dropped Packet8 service. Not to give you the wrong idea, I have to tell you that I only got audio one way: from my laptop back to the DTA310. There was nothing but silence in the phone plugged into the DTA310.

I changed so many parameters around during my testing that I have no idea what got me as far as I got. My thought is that the DTA310 uses a narrower range of RTP ports than I’ve got defined, and I got lucky by hitting upon the right port at the right time. I did manage to capture packets from some attempts, so perhaps I can find a pattern.

Another thought is that the DTA310 isn’t designed for reinviting. That is, it expects to always talk to the SIP server and not interface directly with other SIP UAs. That seems to be the way it works with the Packet8 service, so it’s plausable that the DTA310 has this limitation.

More experimenting is in order, but it seems I’m getting closer!

Great. More freezy stuff on the way tonight. If this keeps up, I’ll actually look forward to my Orlando trip at the end of the month.

At least there’s no mention of that dreaded word “ice.”
—

WINTER STORM WATCH IS IN EFFECT THURSDAY

SNOW IS EXPECTED TO BEGIN OVER THE NORTHWEST PIEDMONT SHORTLY AFTER
MIDNIGHT…THEN SPREAD EAST THROUGH THE EARLY MORNING HOURS. AT THE
ONSET…THE SNOW COULD BE MIXED WITH RAIN. ADDITIONALLY THE SNOW
COULD BE HEAVY AT TIMES BETWEEN SUNRISE AND NOON THURSDAY. THE SNOW
IS EXPECTED TO CONTINUE INTO THE AFTERNOON HOURS…AND MAY MIX WITH
RAIN BEFORE ENDING LATE IN THE AFTERNOON.

AT THIS TIME…SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES ARE EXPECTED.
SOME UNCERTAINTY STILL REMAINS IN REGARD TO THE EXACT TRACK OF THE
LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM…WHICH WILL IMPACT THE AMOUNT OF SNOW
ACCUMULATION.
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I got back tonight from watching the Wolfpack defeat the Seminoles in basketball. This game was notable in that it was Hallie‘s first basketball game. My parents also joined us (in fact, they got us our tickets. Thanks again!)

While the “T-shirt toss” was happening during a timeout, I ranted to my mom about how an oil-change company shouldn’t sponsor giveaways that will likely become oil rags. That moment, the seat got brighter as a spotlight shone down. The crowd around me began to yell, and a rolled-up T-shirt bounced off the head of the guy in front of me and into my lap!

Look for my “oil rag” to be worn on important game days, like Sunday when we knock Dook down a few notches.
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I finally found a Linux SIP user agent that will work with Asterisk behind firewalls. It’s Vovida’s Sipset.

Most Linux UA’s are crap, and this one is only part-crap. It hogs the soundcard and doesn’t release calls. It has no DTMF, or phone book. It’s bare-bones, to say the least. But at least it can surf through NATted connections. And it’s native Linux.

I had fun with it today, making Greg‘s phone ring with a the touch of a mouse key. (Man, I love to torment Greg. As if his work life wasn’t tough enough already.)

I’ve located Red Hat 9 RPMS for Sipset, which is a must, considering that compiling Vocal is a mysterious process. Vovida’s idea of package building is wack.

Some day I’ll find a decent Linux SIP phone which doesn’t require 300 MB of KDE dependencies (a la kphone).

President Eisenhower sent ten letters to private citizens, giving them enormous authority over the economy and society in the event that “the bubble went up.” The Conelrad website has collected these letters, known as The Eisenhower Ten and posted most of them.

Thus the idea of “shadow government” was born. For a while, nine unelected individuals were walking around with authority to take over the government. Check out the list of would-be leaders.