Tonight whilst Googling for random numbers that call us up and don't make it through the Asterisk menus, I discovered Who Called Us, a user-driven site to identify the people behind the numbers, for callers that provide a number but no name. Very cool.

One such number seems to be drawing a reasonable amount of ire.

Generally speaking, we're not bothered by telemarketers, because of the menu Asterisk presents to all callers. It's just interesting to see the cases that continually call back.

Australia's continued refusal to sign-on to the Kyoto agreement made the BBC World news tonight, and it got me thinking.

After seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and learning that Australia just doesn't rank when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, it's really a moot point whether we get on board or not (but for the record, I think we should anyway, to put more pressure on the US).

Beazley's taken the opportunity to say that if he got into office, he'd sign the agreement. But here's the deal: there are coast-to-coast Labor governments at the state-level. So what if Howard won't sign the agreement at the Federal level? If every state independently decides to legislate such that carbon emission levels are restricted to those of what the Kyoto agreement would require, then Australia has in essence signed on to it, whether Howard wants to or not.

So all Beazley has to do is show a bit of political will, and that the states can tell the Federal government what to do. I'd like to see it happen.

Lost was one of those TV shows that I caught irregularly in Australia, but often enough for it to pique my interest.

We started grabbing episodes from season one via BitTorrent, but it was all too hard, so when we saw the box set at Fry's for $40, we just bought it.

We were hooked instantly.

So we bought season two when it came out, and just finished watching it. Whoa, what an ending.

MythTV has been catching the season three episodes while we caught up, and tonight we watched episode one. Wow. I'd been a bit dubious about how long they could keep stringing the series out, given that it was originally supposed to be a one season job. Given what I've seen of season three from episode one, it looks like they'll be able to make the mother of all plot twists last for at least another season.

I just hope that they quit while they're ahead. I'd hate to see the series die an unnatural death before it manages to adequately explain all of the totally weird shit on this island.

Apparently I should be outraged.

Reasons I'm not: I have an enormous stash from when we moved over here, and the micro-kitchens at work don't have bread, so Vegemite on toast isn't part of my breakfast regimen any more.

We have bagels every other Friday, but I found them too heavy, so haven't bothered with Vegemite for a long time.

But seriously, WTF?

I've finally caught up on all the backlog of email to mirrors@debian.org, and I've been added to the webwml group, so now I need to go through all of the outstanding mirror submission bug reports, and figure out which ones are still valid for acting on.

There were probably less than 20 legitimate emails in the 12 months of backlog, and one metric crapload of spam.

Cool, I'm heading to Spain for the QA meeting in Extremadura in December.

Not quite so cool is that I'll be flying out two days after getting back from a holiday in Australia. I suspect I'm going to be totally shagged by the time I get back. $DEITY only knows what timezone my body will be in.

Better get my QA pants back on again.

I'm not bashing Ubuntu, but I find stuff like this

apollock@icarus:~/bin$ grep-status -s Package,Version -F Status "install ok installed" | grep -B 1 ubuntu
Package: update-manager
Version: 0.42.2ubuntu22-5

in Debian to be a little bit gross.

Sure, our users would have to have been under a rock for the last couple of years to not know about the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu, however I think it blurs the lines a bit to have packages in Debian with "ubuntu" in the version string, and changelog entries relating to distribution names that have no relevance to Debian.

That's my humble opinion anyway. Seeing a package with "ubuntu" in the version string today was the straw that broke the camel's back. I've seen plenty of packages with Ubuntu codenames in the changelogs.

After much more work than was necessary, I managed to get Asterisk to blat on the TV the caller ID information of an incoming call. Next I need to see if I can pause the TV, and resume it when the call ends.

The MythTV side just needed to be configured to listen on the UDP notify port, the XML templates and whatnot were already there for it (I think installed by MythPhone), so all I had to do was get Asterisk to run this script when a call came in:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Asterisk::AGI;
use IO::Socket;

# Set this to the broadcast address for your network
$netbroadcast = "172.16.0.255";

$AGI = new Asterisk::AGI;

my %input = $AGI->ReadParse();

my $num = $input{'callerid'};
my $name = $input{'calleridname'};
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime();
$date = sprintf("%02d/%02d/%4d %d:%02d:%02d",$mday,$mon+1,$year+1900,$hour,$min,$sec);

$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerPort  => 6948,
                              PeerAddr  => $netbroadcast,
                              Proto     => udp,
                              Broadcast => 1 ) or die "Can't bind : $@\n";

print $sock <<EOT;
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mythnotify version="1"><container name="notify_cid_info"><textarea name="notify_cid_line"><value>Unused</value></textarea>
<textarea name="notify_cid_name"><value>NAME: $name</value></textarea><textarea name="notify_cid_num"><value>NUM : $num</value>
</textarea><textarea name="notify_cid_dt"><value>$date</value></textarea></container></mythnotify>
EOT
close $sock;
exit(0);

That was accomplished by just adding an AGI(mythcid.agi) application call to one my existing extensions that handled incoming calls. Future enhancements will involve displaying who the caller wants to speak to after they've selected the appropriate response from the menu we give most callers.

The Asterisk::AGI Perl module was a bit hard to track down. I've made a 2 second (dh-make-perl) Debian package of it, available here. If I get sufficiently motivated, I'll consider cleaning it up and uploading it to Debian.

Writing your first Asterisk AGI script, putting it in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin because that's where another package has put one, and all of the random documentation on the Internet refers to that location (even though it's in violation of the FHS to go sticking scripts there), and after a marathon debugging session, discovering that Debian's Asterisk package ships with astagidir set to /usr/share/asterisk/agi-bin (which it appears you need to create yourself).

You can pipe figlet through cowsay?

That is all.

Huzzah!

That only took seven months.

I think leaving the country and coming back and restarting the process helped.

After I went back to Australia for SAGE-AU'2006, I had to get a new I-94 when I came back into the United States, and as the I-94 number is what the DMV was verifying my legal presence with the INS for ever and ever, I had to go back and get them to start again with the new I-94 number.

Seven weeks and one day later, my licence arrived in the mail. This concluded my bootstrapping - I have every bit of Government issued ID I need.

I think starting over was what helped. I asked a lot of questions as to how the whole "verifying my legal presence" worked. It seems they photocopy my passport, visa, and I-94 and mail it all off to the INS with a request that they sit on it for as long as possible. It wouldn't surprise me if it gets lost in the mail and/or they have no tracking for it, so requests can just disappear off into the ether.

I've been a bit busy lately, so I've only now skimmed through my linux-aus backlog, as well has had time to put some thoughts together on the whole AUUG/LA thing.

I will point out that I had a similar rant back in July last year, and a lot of what I said then still holds true.

So one of the problems is we seem to have too many organisations. OSIA, AUUG, LA, SAGE-AU, ACS, to name a few. They've all got a bit of overlap. They've all got different names (well duh) that imply different things.

So AUUG, as the Australian Unix Users Group, is losing is relevance. So much so, that the "About AUUG" page doesn't even discuss what the hell the acronym stands for. Somewhere along the line, they've adopting the tag line of "the Organisation for Unix, Linux and Open Source professionals". So they're clearly still trying to remain a "professional" body.

As is SAGE-AU. Clearly with a name like the System Administrator's Guild of Australia, it's obvious what demographic this organisation is for. Now of course a lot this organisation's members are going to be administering Linux. You could also argue they're using it as well. SAGE-AU is operating-system agnostic though, and doesn't really get all community about the operating systems its members administer.

Which leads us to Linux Australia. An organisation that (at least in my opinion) that is more about the community around the operating system than anything else. And in this case, by operating system, I'm talking about a lot more than just the kernel.

OSIA, on the other hand, is an organisation I haven't heard a lot about, and know even less about. The name though, pretty clearly suggests what they're on about. If OSIA didn't look like it was more about corporate members than individuals, I'd be saying that this is where a large chunk of AUUG members should go, if AUUG were to fold. It does leave a certain demographic out in the cold: ISVs that make closed-source software for Unix and Linux. Since, for example, CheckPoint seem to be sponsoring the AUUG conference, they obviously feel that they have some sort of affinity with the organisation.

Finally, there's ACS. Another organisation I don't know a lot about. I would think that maybe this could be another potential destination for AUUG members if it were to fold.

Back to Linux Australia, and whether that name is the best thing for the organisation. I personally think it is not. Linux Australia is way more about F/LOSS evangelisation and the community that exists around that, than anything else. To a lesser degree, it tries to act as the "mother LUG" of all the Linux User Groups around the country, but given the loose structure of the LUGs, this is more of an assumed position than anything else.

So what to call LA instead? Steal AUUG's tag line? "The Australian Linux and Open Source Community Group (ALOSCG)"? "The Australian Linux and Free Software Community Organisation (ALFSCO)"? Hmm, the second one could be mutated in "Alfresco". Cute.

Funnily enough, the same arguments apply to renaming linux.conf.au, however I'm not in favour of that. I agree with what Maddog said on the linux-aus list, about it being easier for sponsors to identify with something more specific like "Linux" than something more amorphous like "Free and Open Source software". I also think linux.conf.au has a pretty strong brand associated with it.

Finally, I want to bang the drum for organisational change.

There was some discussion about membership tiers. I think this is a good idea. I think having paid members (and some member services) would be good. It would provide Linux Australia with an additional revenue stream, and it would allow it to provide something to its members.

If there was a membership structure like "student" (which would be free), "associate" (paid, but cheap) and "professional" (paid, but slightly more expensive), you could allow all categories to vote, but give the paid members some additional services like a sticky email address, dynamic DNS hostname, maybe if LA got direct sponsors, the sponsor organisations could provide discounts to members like what SAGE-AU does.

I also think that if LA were to employ a full or part-time administrative person (like SAGE-AU did until recently) would also be beneficial. This person could do heaps of administrative stuff and coordination for the organisation, as well as be a resource for the linux.conf.au organisers, and be cheaper than having to pay an Executive President or something like that. it would allow for the organisation to go to the next level, and be a little less amorphous and have a tangible existence.

I don't get sick very often, so I'm not a big consumer of off-the-shelf drugs. I had noticed that Panadol equivalents (i.e. pain killers containing paracetamol) didn't seem to exist in the US, until Sarah said that Tylenol's active ingredient (acetaminophen) was what they call paracetamol in the US. Sure enough, Wikipedia confirmed this.

It's funny how the same thing can have different names depending on what country you're in.

Paracetamol is certainly a damn sight easier to pronounce than acetaminophen.