Microsoft Installer Transforms for Open Office 3.0

It look like Openoffice has made quite a few changes in the newest version. Some of them being graphical and others being functional. Both of the afforementioned changes I would consider improvements.

There is one change that seems to happen with every version that is very annoying. That is the change of the installer. Every version has the installer change just enough so that if you apply the an older MST and the same setup.xcu to the new installer, like in my previous advice, that things just don't work.

Well the same is true of the new version and it looks like some major changes were written for it. The setup now needs to run completely for things to work.

This is just one of the main reasons Microsoft Office is easier to use.

Trixbox is awesome

I need to tell everybody that trixbox is awesome. A few days ago, I set up a trixbox virtual machine in order to route traffic to a SIP application that wouldn't register correctly with a SIP trunking service.

The configuration was very easy, and after looking at a few blogs because I missed the how to section, everything was up and running. Now, I don't want everyone to think that any idiot can set it up, but it is pretty straight forward and there is a lot of help out there on their forums or other places.

The best thing about it is that it runs Asterisk which is compatible with most SIP trunking services out there as well as SIP devices. It also has a nice clean and easy to use GUI web interface. It makes administering it very easy.

I did run into one bug during my short (so far) usage, and that was logging on to download packages. I had the account set up for the trixbox forums and entered that information into the packages screen and it didn't return any errors or display any success. From browsing around the internet, I found out you have to fill in the registration form for the machine and everything will work.

I will hopefully be replacing our aging PBX system with a trixbox system. Because it is awesome.

SellVOIP.com service

Today I just wanted to post a review of SellVOIP's service. I have to preface the rest of the post by saying "read through the whole post."

Out of the many SIP trunking services I looked at, sellVOIP one was by far the best in terms of features and pricing. They had DID(Direct Inward Dial) numbers in all 50 states and has unlimited minute incoming channels for about $5 a month. Their channels would roll over into a per-minute charge if you went past your subscribed amount. They had an easy to use CDR that I could copy into a spreadsheet to plan for expansions. There was failover routing that could go to voicemail or another PBX. Also the service could be bound to IP. I have to say that this provider made me fall in love with VOIP.

That was great -until- they stopped all support. I had pretty quick support from a person named Alex early on in the service. Timely and he resolved all the problems I had. But at the end, the channels started charging for all incoming calls. I tried to contact their support staff but they didn't respond. This is when I found out there was really no way to reach them but through email. I continued for about a month trying to email them about once a week, all the while searching for a new provider. The money ran out in the account and service stopped.

Their website is still up with links to google checkout to sign up for services. I want to warn anybody thinking of signing up for service, that they might not receive any and just be throwing away money.

I am now working with Thomas Hsieh of SplinterRock who was able to get me an account with Aretta Communications. I'll have to see how that goes. Thanks for the help Tom.

Launch of Attentionplus.com

I know this won't be big news to probably anybody, but Attention Plus Care has launched a new design of its website. It was a joint effort by Adam Funari and me to bring it all together.

The main changes are:

• Much cleaner code
  The old design was made of absolutely positioned elements with absolute sized.


• Much more information
  We added a lot more information and put it in much more intuitive places


• Updated graphics
  If you saw the old site, you'd know what I meant :)

There are also tools on the back-end for clients and employees to use such as:

• Checking your schedule


• Viewing the news


• Downloading files


• Providing feedback
  

If you do happen to check it out, please write back and comment.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 released

Just in case anyone missed it the newest stable version of OpenOffice was just released. Everyone must have already heard as the website is down with only links to the downloads. Version 3.0 should be bringing along some new features that help it compete as an office suite. One of the biggest improvements I am looking forward to is the native office 2007 format compatibilities (docx and the like).

One thing I'm hoping for is that there is an easy way to write a group policy to skip the annoying registration screen for the install. If the past is any indication, that will not be the case and there will be a brand new work around. I'll be installing this within a week and will let people know how it went.

Firehol get-iana scripts

Wow. I just found one of the best scripts out there for cutting down the amount of Iptables commands that Firehol generates using two little Perl scripts.

First off, let me preface this by saying I am not running Debian and getting aggregate-flim setup and running was a little too difficult. But no matter, perl can be used to pull off the same functionality by aggregating the CIDR records. A big thanks to zwitterion.org.

The first script, list-iana-reserved-ranges grabs all of the IANA reserved address ranges and outputs them.

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
# [MJS 22 Oct 2001] List IANA Reserved ranges (for firewall purposes)
# [MJS  3 Mar 2008] IANA reformated document to use /8s and not ranges

use strict;
use LWP;

#
# Download Official IANA document
#
my $ua  = new LWP::UserAgent;
my $res = $ua->get('http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space');
$res->is_success or die "HTTP request failed: " . $res->message . "\n";

#
# Print all the /8s.
#
print map { "$_\n" }
   $res->content =~ m{ ( \d{3} \/ 8 ) .+? (?: UNALLOCATED | RESERVED ) }gx;

# $Id: list-iana-reserved-ranges,v 1.2 2008/05/17 07:00:42 suter Exp $

The second script, aggregate-cidr-addresses, aggregates all the addresses into larger subnets, cutting down on the amount of lines fed into iptables.

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
# [MJS 22 Oct 2001] Aggregate CIDR addresses
# [MJS  9 Oct 2007] Overlap idea from Anthony Ledesma at theplanet dot com.

use strict;
use Net::IP;

## Read in all the IP addresses from <>
my @addrs = map { new Net::IP $_ or die "Not an IP: \"$_\"."; }
   map { /^\s*(.*?)\s*$/ and $1; } <>;

## Sort the IP addresses
@addrs = sort {
   $a->bincomp( 'lt', $b ) ? -1 : ( $a->bincomp( 'gt', $b ) ? 1 : 0 );
} @addrs;

## Handle overlaps
my $count   = 0;
my $current = $addrs[0];
foreach my $next ( @addrs[ 1 .. $#addrs ] ) {
   my $r = $current->overlaps($next);
   if ( $r == $IP_NO_OVERLAP ) {
       $current = $next;
       $count++;
   }
   elsif ( $r == $IP_A_IN_B_OVERLAP ) {
       $current = $next;
       splice( @addrs, $count, 1 );
   }
   elsif ( $r == $IP_B_IN_A_OVERLAP or $r == $IP_IDENTICAL ) {
       splice( @addrs, $count + 1, 1 );
   }
   else {
       die "$0: internal error - overlaps() returned an unexpected value!\n";
   }
}

## Keep aggregating until we don't change anything
my $change = 1;
while ($change) {
   $change = 0;
   my @new_addrs = ();
   my $current   = $addrs[0];
   foreach my $next ( @addrs[ 1 .. $#addrs ] ) {
       if ( my $total = $current->aggregate($next) ) {
           $current = $total;
           $change  = 1;
       }
       else {
           push @new_addrs, $current;
           $current = $next;
       }
   }
   push @new_addrs, $current;
   @addrs = @new_addrs;
}

## Print out the IP addresses
foreach (@addrs) {
   print $_->prefix(), "\n";
}

# $Id: aggregate-cidr-addresses,v 1.3 2008/05/17 07:00:42 suter Exp $

To put everything together, you just need to replace your get-iana.sh script with something that uses the perl scripts, like the following:

#!/bin/bash

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

perl -Tw "/etc/firehol/list-iana-reserved-ranges" | perl -Tw "/etc/firehol/aggregate-cidr-addresses" >"${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}

There you have it, updated and compact RESERVED_IPS.

OTRS on windows

Today I setup OTRS on a windows server. It's always fun to work with systems designed specifically for *NIX but ported over to be usable on win32 systems.

In all actuality, things went fine and wasn't too difficult to work with. But I did run into a couple problems and thought I'd share them.

Apache config:
The pre-configured apache config that comes with the OTRS windows installer is setup to use /otrs as the home directory and also doesn't use index.pl or customer.pl as the default document. The following are the changes I made to use the base website as the host.

ThreadsPerChild 250
MaxRequestsPerChild  0

ServerRoot "C:/OTRS/Apache2"

Listen 80

LoadFile "C:/OTRS/Perl/bin/perl58.dll"

LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so
LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so
LoadModule asis_module modules/mod_asis.so
LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so
LoadModule authn_default_module modules/mod_authn_default.so
LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so
LoadModule authz_default_module modules/mod_authz_default.so
LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so
LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so
LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so
LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so
LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so
LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so
LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so
LoadModule imagemap_module modules/mod_imagemap.so
LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so
LoadModule isapi_module modules/mod_isapi.so
LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so
LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule perl_module modules/mod_perl.so
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so
LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so

<IfModule mod_perl.c>
   Perlrequire C:/OTRS/otrs/scripts/apache2-perl-startup.pl
   PerlModule Apache2::Reload
   PerlInitHandler Apache2::Reload
   PerlModule Apache2::RequestRec
</IfModule>

ServerAdmin admin@site.com

ServerName otrs.site.com:80

DocumentRoot "C:/OTRS/otrs/bin/cgi-bin"

<Directory />
   ErrorDocument 403 /index.pl
   Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   DirectoryIndex index.pl index.html index.htm default.htm
</Directory>

<Directory "C:/OTRS/otrs/bin/cgi-bin">
   ErrorDocument 403 /index.pl
   SetHandler  perl-script
   PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry
   Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
   PerlOptions +ParseHeaders
   PerlOptions +SetupEnv
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
   DirectoryIndex index.pl index.html index.htm default.htm
</Directory>

<IfModule dir_module>
   DirectoryIndex index.pl index.html index.htm default.htm
</IfModule>

<FilesMatch "^\.ht">
   Order allow,deny
   Deny from all
</FilesMatch>

ErrorLog logs/error.log
LogLevel warn

<IfModule log_config_module>
   LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
   LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common

   <IfModule logio_module>
     LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio
   </IfModule>

   CustomLog logs/access.log common
</IfModule>

<IfModule alias_module>
   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "C:/OTRS/Apache2/cgi-bin/"
</IfModule>

<Directory "C:/OTRS/Apache2/cgi-bin">
   AllowOverride None
   Options None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
</Directory>

DefaultType text/plain

<IfModule mime_module>
   TypesConfig conf/mime.types
   AddType application/x-compress .Z
   AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz
</IfModule>

<IfModule ssl_module>
SSLRandomSeed startup builtin
SSLRandomSeed connect builtin
</IfModule>

#------------@@Changes for OTRS@@-------------
Include "C:/OTRS/otrs/scripts/apache2-httpd-new.include.conf"

Aspell
Aspell is a nice feature if you aren't using a browser with built in spell checking. This also doesn't work out of the box. First of all, you need to download it. Then you need to install it making sure the path has no spaces. The default is in the "Program Files" folder, so that won't work. Then you need to go into the SysConfig and change the path to the executable.


Sendmail
The default config for the SMTP mailer uses sendmail. Well, Windows doesn't have send mail. So that was an easy fix in the SysConfig changing from sendmail to SMTP and inputting your SMTP server.

I believe those were all the major changes. One thing I am woried about though is upgrading using the installer. I believe that it will overwrite the files. I guess I'll have to worry about that when the next upgrade comes.

Creating PDFs through PHP

I have some experience using PDFs through a website. What we basically did was take an application, run it through an FDF generator and the results could be shown through a PDF.

How does that work? Well the FDF just stores the data for the input fields in the PDF.

There are so many problems with doing it this way though. The first being that Adobe no longer supports FDFs through their newest versions. Another is that we went through revisions in the application form in what information we took and stored. This meant that any changes in the PDF would alter the information the original FDF had stored. Thirdly, to keep the changes disparate between revisions, we would have to make a copy of the PDF, edit it, and tie all the new FDFs to the new PDF. Great, another 100+MB file to have to store.

What kept me from changing that? The company wanted to keep the PDF format for layout in printing.

What will be the solution (has not been implemented yet) is to generate real PDF's to store the information. That way the original information is preserved in the way that it was created. The tool I found for doing that is TCPDF. One of the best things I have seen about this tool is a large amount of updates. In the past couple weeks, there have already been more than 5 updates. You just gotta love that support.

I have already installed it and tested out the demos and it seems to work fantastically. The next step is to actually implement it.

I think I'll post up some more PHP tools that I like later. Please comment in on ones that you find useful or ones that you hate.

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.