Trixbox and Cisco 7940 MWI
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Asterisk, Trixbox on June 3rd, 2010
It seems as if Cisco makes it nearly impossible to make there phones 100% compatible with SIP PBX’s like Trixbox. I recently migrated my companys 20 phones from a Hosted PBX running Call Manager to an in-house Trixbox a few months ago and everything wen through without a hitch thanks to some careful planning. Recently one of my users complained that she was not being notified whe she had a New voicemail waiting. All 20 phones are Cisco 7940’s that are running the POS3-8-12-00 Firmware. As I started to look into the issue I came across multiple forum threds citing the issue and each had their own way to solve. As you probably already know the 79xx series has a red light on the handset and an icon on the phone screen call the “Message Waiting Indicator”. One of the threads stated that the extension were incorrectly configured under the Mailbox textbox. They should have said XXX@default instead of XXX@device. This is a bug in asterisk and must be fixed manually. In my case this did not work. I had some phones that were working so I compared the configurations to those that were not working and found that the @default does not necesarrly work. It only works if default is the Voicemail Context. Good for us that under the configuration for Voicemail it has a field called Voicemail Context. All you need to do is replace what comes after the “@” in the Mailbox field with whats in the “Voicemail Context” field.
Its extreamly simple. I have only tested this on the 7940 but I am fairly confident that it should work for almost any phone in the 79xx series and may be even other SIP phones.
If your still running into issue after going through these steps feel free to leave a comment and I’ll be glad to help out.
osCommerce Slashes acumelating in product name and description fields.
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in osCommerce on May 28th, 2010
I recently ran into an issue in osCommerce 2.2RC2. In the admin area when adding, editing a product everything is fine but when you hit back on the the on the preview screen your product name and description have a bunch of extra slashes in it. This happens because osCommerce is escaping the quote you put into the name and description and not removing them on the way back.
Heres a quick fix
Go to “admin/categories.php” and find the following line
<td><?php echo tep_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i]['directory'] . '/images/' . $languages[$i]['image'], $languages[$i]['name']) . ' ' . tep_draw_input_field('products_name[' . $languages[$i]['id'] . ']', (isset($products_name[$languages[$i]['id']]) ? $products_name[$languages[$i]['id']] : tep_get_products_name($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i]['id']))); ?></td>
and replace it with
<td><?php echo tep_image(DIR_WS_CATALOG_LANGUAGES . $languages[$i]['directory'] . '/images/' . $languages[$i]['image'], $languages[$i]['name']) . ' ' . tep_draw_input_field('products_name[' . $languages[$i]['id'] . ']', (isset($products_name[$languages[$i]['id']]) ? stripslashes($products_name[$languages[$i]['id']]) : stripslashes(tep_get_products_name($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i]['id'])))); ?></td>
Then replace this line :
<td><?php echo tep_draw_textarea_field('products_description[' . $languages[$i]['id'] . ']', 'soft', '70', '15', (isset($products_description[$languages[$i]['id']]) ? $products_description[$languages[$i]['id']] : tep_get_products_description($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i]['id']))); ?></td>
with:
<td><?php echo tep_draw_textarea_field('products_description[' . $languages[$i]['id'] . ']', 'soft', '70', '15', (isset($products_description[$languages[$i]['id']]) ? stripslashes($products_description[$languages[$i]['id']]) : stripslashes(tep_get_products_description($pInfo->products_id, $languages[$i]['id'])))); ?></td>
Thats it its as easy as that.
Google Gears, Prism, and Linux 64-bit
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Gears, Gmail, Google, Google Apps, Linux, Ubuntu on August 6th, 2009
I recently started using Prism and I really like having my Google Apps as Desktop apps and not in the browser. The only thing that was missing was offline support for Gmail and Google calendar. Google doesn’t officially support Gears on 64 Bit Linux but Niels Peen compiled a working version for Firefox. I downloaded that version and then I un-zipped the “.xpi” (.xpi files are just renamed 
zip files) and edited the “install.rdf” as per Douglas Meyer’s Blog post and it worked perfectly. Here is a link to my compiled version. google-gears-x86_64. I tested it on Ubuntu 9.04 64 Bit with Prisim 0.8
Updated: I have recently stopped using this since it became unstable with Prisim 1.0 . Google has also dropped development for Gears. They have opted to go with Standards Compliant HTML5 Storage in the future. You can see what google has to say here. I wouldn’t recommend using this anymore.
Net Neutrality
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Business, Law on August 3rd, 2009
Net neutrality has been an issue which has been underplayed over the past few years. Net neutrality, a network design principle, aspires that all content and data is treated equally (Wu). Ever since its creation, the Internet has been neutral, but with the advent of new technologies this neutrality has been threatened (Anderson). Today, the Internet is one of the most important means of communication. It’s neutrality is crucial to all aspects of society. No corporation, government, or individual should be allowed to censor public networks. Read the rest of this entry »
First Look: Windows 7 Ultimate RC
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Microsoft, Windows on June 13th, 2009
On June 2, Microsoft confirmed that Windows 7 will lunch on October 22, 2009. Since the release candidate has been out for over a month I decided to give it a shot on my old Dell Inspiron 630m. This system has never run Vista and it’s not officially supported by Dell to run it. Here are the specs for my 630m:
- Intel Pentium M 1.86GHZ
- 1GB of RAM
- 80GB HDD
- Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG
- Broadcom 440x 10/100 NIC
As you can see, it’s not the most impressive system. I downloaded the DVD image from the Windows 7 website. The down load was a bit over 2GB which I found a little excessive but then again it’s Windows. After burning the image I inserted the DVD into my laptop and booted from the DVD the installation loaded fairly quickly compared to older versions. The disk petitioner has a straight forward UI and formating process was quick. The whole installation took just over 45 min which is decent. Once I booted into the OS, it ran perfectly and it installed all my drivers as soon as I ran the Windows Updates. That’s great since in XP you would spend a good portion of your time downloading and installing drivers.
Ok, so the installation went well. Now its time to get a feel for performance. Through out my uses the system didn’t freeze even though it maintained a high CPU and memory usage during my testing. The new taskbar feels a lot more intuitive than Vista’s. Things like the wireless network management in the task bar make it a much nicer experience. Microsoft also reduced a lot of the permission prompts for basic settings which makes the security much less annoying. System restarts are also less prominent.
The only major problem I had with Windows 7 is that when I unplugged the AC Power the screen goes from 32 bit color to what I believe is 8 bit color. This is a major problem if it happens on newer system but I believe that it is a driver problem since this system does not officially support Vista.
All in all Windows 7 is shaping up to be a good release. Much better than Vista was. I look forward to being able to recommend people to upgrade from XP.
Google Wave: First Take
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Google, Web Services on June 3rd, 2009
I have to admit that I am very impressed with Google’s latest endeavor. Google has set out to reinvent one of the internet’s most basic tools e-mail….
Google Wave UI Prototype
Google Wave was introduced at Google I/O on Monday to a large group of developers. During the conference the wave team introduced the concepts behind wave and previewed the early prototype of the project. Development of wave was start in 2007 and is still in its very early form. Wave integrates features from email, forum (discussion) boards, blogs, and social networks all together. The wave protocol will be open sourced, allowing for open collaboration with developers around the world.
You can watch the preview here:
This is a very exciting concept and one that I look forward to working on.
For more infromation go to http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
Ubuntu and ATI: Not a good combination
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Linux, Ubuntu on May 12th, 2009
Last weekend, an update to the Linux kernel was sent through the hardy repositories… As I usually do I am eager to update when the little red arrow comes
up in the notification bar. I ran the update and it asked for a restart so I did. After GRUB loaded, I found a nice little error message saying “Undefined video mode number: 2f6″. I currently have a Quad-Core Dell Vostro with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 2600HD running Hardy. Hardy doesn’t support multiple monitors which I have so I had to install the ATI fglrx drivers to get them to work, these drivers were the main source of my problems.
This isn’t the first time I have had this problem after a kernel update but they have never been hard to fix. So I turned to Google to find the answer…
After almost 2 days of scouring through forums and blog post and trying endlessly to find a permanent fix to the problem (or at least until the next kernel update). I was about ready to go and buy a nVidia card . Then it hit me that I heard Jaunty(9.04) improved support for multiple monitors dramatically so I booted up my live cd in a last ditch effort to save my ATI card. The live cd automatically detected both monitors and I was able to get them working perfectly without installing anything. I then proceeded to backup my system and do a fresh install with Jaunty and EXT4. I have been running the open-source drivers that currently run only in 2D mode which is a bummer to some people but I don’t need the 3D effects.
(Updated: If you need 3D effects check out the new ATI drivers.)
In the end I got to upgrade my system which was something I was planning to do when i had some time.
BTW, The ATI propitiary drivers for jaunty are still in early development and leak a lot of memory making the system almost usable.
I would love to here any other experiences with ATI cards I know they are just trouble for most people running Linux.
Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) Released Today!
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Linux, Ubuntu on April 23rd, 2009
Congratulations to Canonical and the entire Linux Community for another successful and on-time release of Ubuntu. Jaunty has some great advances and things are looking great for future releases (9.10 Karmic)…
Codeigniter: My PHP framework of choice
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Codeigniter, PHP on April 21st, 2009
Lately I’ve been looking for ways to organize my code and be more productive. As i was reading my RSS feeds I stumbled upon an article that linked to the Codeigniter web site. After reading up on the benefits of Codeigniter I decided that I should look at other PHP frameworks and compare to see which ones I liked. I reviewed Zend, CakePHP, and Codeigniter because they use the MVC model that i find is a logical and effective way to organize my code.
While downloading Zend the first thing I realized was how heavy it was it was 24 MB zipped i didn’t even continue with the download. 24MB is way too much and it still doesn’t have the application in it so without even downloading it 
i crossed Zend out.
Next was CakePHP, Cakes download size is much more decent at just under 700kb once I downloaded it I started to read through the documentation. While looking at the way that Cake’s classes are organized I found them to be sort of a hassle to work with. Also even though there is good documentation I found that some of it I had to read 2 or 3 time to actually get a full grasp of what a function or class does. At this point i hadn’t ruled out Cake but i wasn’t convinced that it was for me.
Finally I went back and reviewed Codeigniter. Codeigniter is a little heavier than Cake at 900kb but it is still a very reasonable size. The first thing I noticed about Codeigniter(CI) is its user guide I it took no more that 5 min to understand how CI implemented the MVC model. Almost immediately i fell in love with CI I find it super easy to use and it takes care of all the little things easily. Its DB class implements the Active Record Pattern which makes thing so easy. I don’t have to worry about where i missed the quote in a 10 line SQL statement and I don’t have to worry about escaping characters since it’s all take care of.
All in all I think Codeigniter takes care of all the simple things that take up most of your time. Take a look at CI here.
Review: Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty) Beta
Posted by Jorge Fernandez in Linux, OpenOffice.org, Ubuntu on April 16th, 2009
I installed Jaunty today and I have to say I am pretty impressed. The beta is rock solid. I have not tried everything out yet but I have not experienced any application crashes and ext4 seems super stable. Jaunty come with Openoffice.org 3.0 by default a big upgrade from OOo 2.4. So far Jaunty seems ready for it’s release. I am running on a brand new Dell Latitude E5500 Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.40GHz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Bluetooth, b/g Wifi, DVD-RW. It recognized all of the hardware automatically making it easier to install then any other OS that i’ve used including Hardy (I haven’t tested Interpid). I love the new notification system it’s very simple and intuitive. The boot time is incredibly fast even though i have timed it.
Conclusion: Super stable and i will be upgrading my hardy desktop to it.
