Lexy and The Onion (The princess and the pea?)

About a month ago, two of my favorite sites inked a deal in which Lexy.com will be the distributor of mobile media for TheOnion.com.

Why is this good news?

It means that Lexy is becoming a major player in mobile audio and I get to listen to TheOnion's news shorts on my cell phone.

For those that don't know, TheOnion is where I get all of my real news. Not like those other places like Fox or CNN. Oh wait, did I say real news? I meant real ENTERTAINING news. Anyway, if you haven't checked it out yet, I'd suggest doing that.

Links:
Lexy blog
TheOnion Radio News

What have we learned from the iPhone

Next year when you want to get the newest version of the "hottest" phone around, it might be a good idea to wait a couple days to go buy it.

With the stories of activation servers being down and long lines to wait in, I think things would go a bit smoother after the hustle and bustle dies down a bit.

Follow up on AS3 and red5

It is looking like I screwed up and didn't read the documentation properly and I am grabbing the first microphone instead of the default microphone.

I was using

var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();

and instead it should be

var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone( -1 );

I think the default should be the default microphone. Doesn't that make sense?

RTMP and Red5, how does it work?

This is just a little question I have.

How do RTMP/RTMPT audio streams work with red5 and Flash 9?

I have been searching around the internet looking for how these transport protocols work, and though I've found little snippets, I haven't found definitive answers. The main aspect that I'm looking at is the interaction between a router/firewall, the external red5 server, and the inner Flash 9 client.

I've done packet traces on a working computer and also a non-working computer using wireshark. It doesn't appear to be blocked by the firewall or router which I know have a problem with RTP. What I have come up with so far is that, on the Flash 9 client, the NetConnection will communicate perfectly, the NetStream seems to initiate, but it won't send any audio packets. Is there something I'm missing in the client?

If anyone has any answers, please feel free to post. I will keep this updated with any progress I find.

Open Source Helpdesk Software

I was looking around for some helpdesk software for just me to use to help me organize my tasks. I came across a few different solutions.

OTRS: This is the one that I ended up with. It is perl based, has many enterprise type features, and seems to be updated quite frequently. Another plus is that it has it's own ubuntu package, making it very easy to install. I did run across one bug during the installation where I just had to aptitude the libperl apache module.

OneOrZero: At first glance this appeared to be the one that I wanted. I tested it out and found a few bugs in a short amount of time. On top of that, it looks as though their free version isn't supported any more.

eTicket: This was actually my second choice after OneOrZero. I decided not to go with this php based software because there seem to be some big changes with their managment. I may go back later and look at this though.

Upgrade Fedora Core Through Yum

I just went through upgrading an old machine that wasn't really doing much but didn't want to lose the setup. Found a pretty simple guide that helped me get through it painlessly. Maybe that link can help a few people out.

Recently there was a bug added to the formatting. Hopefully they will fix that soon.

Red5...just $%@*& work

Disclaimer: The title is just what I was thinking when I came up with compiler errors.

Well Red5 is turning out to be a great product and the price can't be beat. Like any software, though, there are a few bugs that need to be worked out. The biggest thing standing in it's path is a totally broken 0.7.0 release that won't even work out of the box. It's okay though, after searching around for a long while, I came across a fix from their bug reporting system.

It basically involves going back to the working ivy from the 0.6.3 release by replacing the ivy library jar in the lib folder, downloading a revised build.xml and ivyconfig.xml and placing them in your base installation directory, and then building with and. It may seem like an easy fix but I would think they wouldn't let this release out if you can't even run it.

I really want this software to progress so it is everything that Flash Media Server is and more (really it is more already). Just need to get those bugs worked out. So now I just want to say keep up a great project red5 guys, it's coming along great.

Update for Update for Firehol's get-iana.sh script

No, the title isn't a typo. The firehol mailing list received an update from ktsaou, the creator of firehol that the update had already been implemented in the CVS. I just wish that the changes would actually make it to release instead of just sitting inside of a CVS that seemingly no one checks. Enough of my little rant. If you want the updated version, you can get it from the CVS.

Update for Firehol's get-iana.sh script

I didn't notice very quickly but it was brought to my attention through the mailing list for firehol that the IANA Reserved IPs list formatting was updated. So I went through and did a little update to get it working again. This isn't 100% tested so use at your own risk.

#!/bin/bash

# $Id: get-iana.sh,v 1.11 2008/05/02 23:38:31 bdewong Exp $
#
# $Log: get-iana.sh,v $
#
# Revision 1.11 2008/05/02 23:38:31 bdewong
# Updated parsing of ipv4-address-space
#
# Revision 1.10  2007/05/05 23:38:31  ktsaou
# Added support for external definitions of:
#
# RESERVED_IPS
# PRIVATE_IPS
# MULTICAST_IPS
# UNROUTABLE_IPS
#
# in files under the same name in /etc/firehol/.
# Only RESERVED_IPS is mandatory (firehol will complain if it is not there,
# but it will still work without it), and is also the only file that firehol
# checks how old is it. If it is 90+ days old, firehol will complain again.
#
# Changed the supplied get-iana.sh script to generate the RESERVED_IPS file.
# FireHOL also instructs the user to use this script if the file is missing
# or is too old.
#
# Revision 1.9  2007/04/29 19:34:11  ktsaou
# *** empty log message ***
#
# Revision 1.8  2005/06/02 15:48:52  ktsaou
# Allowed 127.0.0.1 to be in RESERVED_IPS
#
# Revision 1.7  2005/05/08 23:27:23  ktsaou
# Updated RESERVED_IPS to current IANA reservations.
#
# Revision 1.6  2004/01/10 18:44:39  ktsaou
# Further optimized and reduced PRIVATE_IPS using:
# http://www.vergenet.net/linux/aggregate/
#
# The supplied get-iana.sh uses 'aggregate-flim' if it finds it in the path.
# (aggregate-flim is the name of this program when installed on Gentoo)
#
# Revision 1.5  2003/08/23 23:26:50  ktsaou
# Bug #793889:
# Change #!/bin/sh to #!/bin/bash to allow FireHOL run on systems that
# bash is not linked to /bin/sh.
#
# Revision 1.4  2002/10/27 12:44:42  ktsaou
# CVS test
#

#
# Program that downloads the IPv4 address space allocation by IANA
# and creates a list with all reserved address spaces.
#

IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL="http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space"
IANA_RESERVED="IANA\|Future use"

tempfile="/tmp/iana.$$.$RANDOM"

AGGREGATE="`which aggregate-flim 2>/dev/null`"
if [ -z "${AGGREGATE}" ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "WARNING"
       echo >&2 "Please install 'aggregate-flim' to shrink the list of IPs."
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
fi

echo >&2
echo >&2 "Fetching IANA IPv4 Address Space, from:"
echo >&2 "${IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL}"
echo >&2

wget -O - --proxy=off "${IPV4_ADDRESS_SPACE_URL}"       |\
       grep -e "${IANA_RESERVED}"                      |\
       cut -d ' ' -f 1                                 |\
(
       last=-1
       while IFS="/" read range net
       do
               range=`expr $range + 0`
               net=`expr $net + 0`

               if [ ! $net -eq 8 ]
               then
                       echo >&2 "Cannot handle network masks of $net bits ($range/$net)"
                       continue
               fi
               
               if [ $range -gt $last ]
               then
                       echo "$range.0.0.0/$net"
                       last=$range
               fi
       done
) | \
(
       if [ ! -z "${AGGREGATE}" -a -x "${AGGREGATE}" ]
       then
               "${AGGREGATE}"
       else
               cat
       fi
) >"${tempfile}"

echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "FOUND THE FOLLOWING RESERVED IP RANGES:"
printf "RESERVED_IPS=\""
i=0
for x in `cat ${tempfile}`
do
       i=$[i + 1]
       printf "${x} "
done
printf "\"\n"

if [ $i -eq 0 ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "Failed to find reserved IPs."
       echo >&2 "Possibly the file format has been changed, or I cannot fetch the URL."
       echo >&2

       rm -f ${tempfile}
       exit 1
fi
echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "Differences between the fetched list and the list installed in"
echo >&2 "/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS:"

echo >&2 "# diff /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS ${tempfile}"
diff /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS ${tempfile}

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
       echo >&2
       echo >&2 "No differences found."
       echo >&2

       rm -f ${tempfile}
       exit 0
fi

echo >&2
echo >&2
echo >&2 "Would you like to save this list to /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS"
echo >&2 "so that FireHOL will automatically use it from now on?"
echo >&2
while [ 1 = 1 ]
do
       printf >&2 "yes or no > "
       read x

       case "${x}" in
               yes)    cp -f /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS /etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS.old 2>/dev/null
                       cat "${tempfile}" >/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS || exit 1
                       echo >&2 "New RESERVED_IPS written to '/etc/firehol/RESERVED_IPS'."
                       break
                       ;;

               no)
                       echo >&2 "Saved nothing."
                       break
                       ;;

               *)      echo >&2 "Cannot understand '${x}'."
                       ;;
       esac
done

rm -f ${tempfile}

Skip Annoying OpenOffice Registration Screen

I just wanted to post about a helpful tip that I came across to skip the registration wizard in OpenOffice.org when installing from an administrative install point. Edit the setup.xcu file in "OpenOfficeInstallDirectory\share\registry\res\en-US\org\openoffice\setup.xcu" to look like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<oor:component-data oor="http://openoffice.org/2001/registry" xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" name="Setup" package="org.openoffice">
<node name="L10N">
<prop name="ooLocale" type="xs:string">
 <value>en-US</value>
</prop>
</node>
<node name="Office">
<prop name="LicenseAcceptDate" type="xs:string">
 <value>2008-04-29T06:44:17</value>
</prop>
<prop name="MigrationCompleted" type="xs:boolean">
 <value>true</value>
</prop>
<prop name="FirstStartWizardCompleted" type="xs:boolean">
 <value>true</value>
</prop>
<node name="Factories">
 <node name="com.sun.star.text.TextDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>48,67,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.sheet.SpreadsheetDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>180,199,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.drawing.DrawingDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>246,265,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.text.WebDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>139,194,952,723;1;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.presentation.PresentationDocument">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>92,111,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
 <node name="com.sun.star.frame.StartModule">
  <prop name="ooSetupFactoryWindowAttributes" type="xs:string">
   <value>136,155,952,723;4;0,0,0,0;</value>
  </prop>
 </node>
</node>
</node>
</oor:component-data>