Monday, 06 February 2006

Our neighbour dropped a copy of the local rag around this morning, because of this story on the front page.

Maybelline is now back at the animal shelter because she got big enough to be desexed, and is now awaiting adoption.

I've fiddled and tweaking, Googled, read the book, swore a lot, rang lots of people in Australia and made nuisance calls where they couldn't hear me, and finally got both inbound and outbound calls working. Two different sorts of IP phones are currently on their way. Couldn't have done it without X-Lite. The fact that they make a Windows, Linux and Mac soft-phone that is functionally the same (and gratis) is very cool. Props to them.

So this setup is very cool. People in Brisbane, Australia can dial a local number that costs them whatever their telco is charging them for a local call (let's say it's between 10 and 20 cents) and it pops out over here in Mountain View, USA on my Asterisk box, and they get an auto-attendant asking them what extension they'd like. Dialling 1111 gets them the X-Lite on my laptop, and dialling 2222 gets them the X-Lite on Sarah's laptop.

Conversely, I've setup a few dial plans that match the three main types of Australian numbers that sprang to mind, which routes them out via Engin, and depending on where in Australia we're calling, costs us between 10 cents (local and national calls) and 27c per minute to mobile phones. That is so sweet. That knocks the socks off 5 cents (US) per minute to call Australia via Vonage.

Engin, you guys rock so hard it's not funny. I'm buying some shares.

Once I've cleaned up my config a bit more and worked out exactly what I need and what is cruft, I'll do another post explaining it all.

Now I just need to figure out how to do QoS...

So after much swearing at things, and some musings on #debian-devel, I've managed to mostly unfuck my blog's feed.

The problem came down to my recent fiddling with Blosxom's RSS flavour, in an attempt to get the RSS feed to be encoded in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1. I created a content_type.rss file in my flavours directory, and put in it text/xml; encoding=utf-8, which had the desired effect of influencing the encoding, but then caused Blosxom to stop escaping all the HTML tags as HTML entities, which rendered the feed totally bogus.

If I ditch the ; encoding=utf-8 part, the escaping problem goes away, but then the encoding is no longer utf-8. Smells like a bug to me.