Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for February 23rd through February 24th:

• Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates: FOWA/Miami (Feb 2009) – Aarrrrr! Some practical notes for web startups.
• Experience with the Skype for Asterisk Beta – Skype for Asterisk is working and includes access to presence data. Open beta apparently coming soon.
• Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street – Felix Salmon writes about David Li, the Gaussian copula function, and its widespread (mis)use in pricing derivatives based on correlation only, leading to parts of today's financial crisis.
• Cloud Personality Types… — Dave Graham’s Weblog – What sort of cloud computing personality are you? A growing list of categories and descriptions.
• Xming – PC X Server – A free X server for Windows platforms.

I spent the whole day this past Saturday at Barcamp, arriving at 10am and not making it all the way out the door until almost 1:30am. I didn’t know any of the organizers beforehand, so it was nice to be met by someone (who turned out to be Andy Smith) keeping an eye out for new arrivals.

I’ve been working with so many either geographically dispersed or very buttoned down corporate teams lately that it’s been a long time since I’d spent this much time in non-stop, face-to-face, somewhat random yet unpredictably creative conversations with a bunch of just-do-it tech hackers. Spent the entire time there going from one interesting presentation to another, with several interesting discussions thrown in along the way.

All the talks were informal and held in very close quarters, scheduled by signing up on the scheduling wall. In many ways, the strength and weakness of the Barcamp presentations was the short lead time for the event and the relative intimacy of the discussion spaces. This format put an emphasis on less structured presentations, by people who were comfortable enough with their topic that the slides weren’t the primary content. At the same time, having everyone literally elbow-to-elbow, sitting on the floor, an armslength or two away from the speakers, tends to eliminate random anonymous verbal potshots, and encourages actual conversational questions. Some of the presentations rapidly turned into something like topical roundtable discussions, which would have been hard to set up as such. (The Industry Darlings talk is a good example.)

Among my notes:

• Tom Conrad’s demo of the Pandora (formerly Savage Beast) music discovery and streaming service, which is based on the Music Genome Project. I’ve signed up for a trial account, which I’m listening to right now. It’s coming up with pretty good selections so far. More on this at TechCrunch. Looks like Scoble likes it too.
• Chris Messina gave a demo of the Flock browser, which extends the Mozilla platform to provide a lot of blogger- and social-software-friendly hooks. (review by Roland Tanglao here)
• Demo of Mobido, by Mike Prince. It’s a social photo sharing service for mobile camera phones, as well as e-mailed images. Among other things, it’s could be used for people to other people who attended an event during or after the fact if they’re using the service. The service also includes provisions for anonymizing contact info.
• Demo of a personal phone management system (forgot the name) by Brad Templeton. The general idea is to allow people to advertise their availability for making or receiving calls, and having the system set up calls when both parties are actually available, rather than having them play phone tag. The system is built on Asterisk, and uses Caller ID to invoke its rules, which may have some future problems based on…
• Jake Appelbaum’s demo of phone insecurity and other security hacking, in which he walked us through the social engineering and general weaknesses in most cell phone systems, Paris Hilton’s Sidekick, and US airline security, and also demonstrated the Asterisk hack for Caller ID spoofing, which makes your calls appear to come from anyone you choose.
• Nicholas Chim demoed The Personal Bee, an aggregator for building your own version of something like Google News. It appears to scan a collection of feeds to assign weights to “interesting” keywords, which it uses to build the page. More on this at TechCrunch.
• Riana Pfeffercorn’s on buying and writing ads for search engine, and Google Adsense specifically, with a few bonus tips on Yahoo Paid Inclusion by Beau Lebens
• Caught pieces of discussions on making AJAX-y applications faster, KaPing Yee’s presentation on improving web security (anti-phishing), a discussion on how to visualize the effects of social behavior to help save the world (resource consumption)
• Other conversations with Bill Lazar, Ross Mayfield, Kevin Burton, Brendon Wilson, Rashmi Sinha, Wolfgang Zeglovitz, and many others.
• Ran into a couple of other Koreans there: Eugene Eric Kim, and Min Jung Kim. Pleased to meet you.

Although there’s a constant background question of “how do you make money doing this”, the basic feel of the weekend was about sharing interesting ideas and work in progress with other people interested in making something new and better. These days, that attitude may be a bit old school, but it could be the cure for what ails Silicon Valley. And there’s apparently interest in organizing similar events elsewhere.

Lots of appreciation goes to Andy, Chris, Eris, Ryan, Ross, and all the Barcamp organizers, sponsors, and other contributors!

Update 08-27-2005 00:05 – Barcamp – The Video

In a previous post I observed that the PhoneGnome looks like a SPA-3000, with a simpler configuration process for normal people who aren’t interesting in hacking their phone system.

Today, PhoneGnome is offering to convert unlocked SPA-3000 hardware into PhoneGnome adapters for $34.95. (link)

Not sure if you can undo the firmware change afterwards, or what’s in their load. I may check this out when I get some time for Asterisk and phone hacking.

See also: Using the SPA-3000 as an Asterisk PSTN Trunk, PhoneGnome Analog to VOIP adapter

Update 08-23-2005 – the upgrade offer appears to be temporarily suspended, due to configuration issues between various customer supplied SPA-3000 hardware.

Om Malik writes about a new product called the PhoneGnome, which combines an analog phone line and a LAN port for use with a VOIP service.

But the best part about the gizmo is that, when you try and outgoing call, it basically uses your selection of service provider to place that outgoing call. For someone else with a PhoneGnome to call you for free. They would not have to dial any different number or address. For instance, if my # is 415-555-1212, (and I have PhoneGnome), as a PhoneGnome user, you call 415.555.1212. In case I don’t have PhoneGnome, your call will get routed over the PSTN. On this website, my.phonegnome.com website, PhoneGnome can select a provider for national long-distance, international calls, or both, and select separate providers and plans for each.

The photo looks pretty similar to my Sipura SPA-3000, which also provides both analog phone interfaces and VOIP and a laundry list of configurable bridging functions. I’ve been using the SPA-3000 as a front end to Asterisk, so I’m not as familiar with it’s standalone modes. The PhoneGnome looks like it might be the Sipura hardware, but bundled as a consumer-friendly solution. The SPA-3000 provides lots of configuration options, but isn’t exactly user friendly.

Step-by-step article on using the Sipura SPA-3000 for Asterisk PSTN trunking at GeekGazette, via Sineapps:

For us serious Asterisk PBX geeks out there, the SPA-3000 provides a cost-effective means of bring a PSTN trunk into the PBX while still functioning as an ATA. Not only can you use the SPA-3000 as inbound and/or outbound trunk, you can also easily configure the SPA-3000 as a PSTN failover should the primary trunk into Asterisk fail. Considering what you can buy the SPA-3000 for right now, this is one of the best deals going.

I see from the GeekGazette site that Slashdot has been here as well.

This follows a recent firmware upgrade to the SPA-3000, as described at Voxilla a few days ago:

The enhancements to the SPA-3000, a very popular adaptor among “do-it-yourself” VoIP enthusiasts because of its built-in gateway functionality, includes an often-requested feature allowing PSTN calls to be routed directly to a VoIP destination without the SPA-3000 “answering” the PSTN line until the VoIP destination answers.

Light Reading notes that today’s Q3 report from Cisco had “disappointing” performance in the advanced technology group (VoIP, wireless, security, and other “new” stuff), but

Still, the IP telephony group “blew past” the $1 billion run rate, joining security in the billion-dollar club, Chambers said. Orders in storage networking cooled down, to “mid-single digits” sequentially, but that was after a 40 percent boom in the second quarter. Orders in wireless grew double digits sequentially and in the “high teens” compared with last year’s third quarter.

Cisco is in the process of buying Sipura, which should help grow that $1B run rate as VoIP interfaces sprout in everything on the network.

Update: 08-16-2005 20:46 – You can convert the SPA-3000 to a PhoneGnome, if you’re interested.

Last updated: April 5, 2005

Here are some notes on building multi-site VOIP PBX services using Asterisk and SIP Express Router.

General approach:
1. Use Asterisk for PBX functionality at each site
2. Use IAX for inter-site traffic to minimize NAT-related issues
3. Use SIP Express as a front end to SIP clients at single sites

Platform technology:
Both Asterisk and SIP Express Router run on Linux and don’t require very powerful hardware. SIP Express in particular can handle hundreds of calls on a small generic Intel-compatible server. Asterisk provides more extensive functionality, including voicemail, transcoding, and conferencing, and requires somewhat more server resource. For a small office scenario, any current Intel-compatible server should be adequate. In the recent GeekGazette article Kerry Garrison implements Asterisk on a Pentium II/450MHz/386MB RAM/12GB HDD/48x CD-ROM/Intel 10/100 system combined with a generic Intel Winmodem card for line access.

The Asterisk@Home project packages a pre-built CD image for Asterisk running on Linux

SIP Express Router installation is simple, and it can easily be downloaded and run nearly out of the box, especially if call accounting is not required.

Continue reading Notes on Building Asterix and SIP Express VOIP PBX