I attended the Toronto Asterisk Users’ Group meeting tonight and one of the hot topics discussed over dinner was speech-to-text (i.e. speech recognition). Text-to-speech (TTS) in Asterisk is already well-handled by Festival and the corresponding Asterisk application, but I think you’ll agree that speech recognition is a far more interesting topic. (Except if you hate [...]
The default ring tones that come with the Sipura SPA 941 IP phone are a bit lame, and actually the "Classic" tone is very jarring. I’ve been playing with my Super Nintendo (yes, that 16-bit dinosaur) again recently, and I must say that the sound effects and music in Super Mario Brothers 2 are very [...]
I didn’t think you could do this, but it is possible to export SSL certificates creating under a Windows IIS environment for use in Apache. Here’s how to do it: On the Windows box, fire up Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe) and add the Certificates snap-in. Choose Computer Account and then Local Computer. Find the certificate [...]
I recently returned my fancy-pants Cisco 7960G IP phone to Devlin, and in its place I purchased a Linksys (formerly Sipura) SPA-941. I’d spoken with my friend & colleague Dan Fraser over at One Stop Media who are using these handsets quite successfully in conjunction with an Asterisk PBX system, so I decided to pick [...]
Those of you who know me know that I am a huge fan of the online comic Toothpaste for Dinner. Drew’s brand of humour matches mine very closely, only he has far funnier jokes. Often they hit pretty close to home, if you’ve worked in IT for any length of time. For example, I often [...]
Some time ago I had promised to reminisce a little bit about the Unisys ICON terminals that I used through elementary school and high school, and some of the fun things we did with them (not all of them sanctioned by the school, of course). After reading in ;login: magazine about Dru Lavigne’s efforts [USENIX [...]
Today I’m going to digress a bit from modern IT topics and talk about an aspect of turn-of-the-century IT that many of us have forgotten about: the venerable analog clock. It was less than 100 years ago that a wall-mounted, spring-driven, windup analog clock was still considered a major appliance. Salesmen used to go door-to-door [...]
For about the tenth or fifteenth time in my career, I’m (re-)configuring a virus and spam scanning gateway machine using amavisd-new and ClamAV as the virus filter. This process has admittedly gotten easier over the years, but by no means is it totally foolproof. You still have to know what you are doing, and fortunately [...]
Spurred on by a recent thread on the TAUG mailing list, I’ve been thinking about the cost vs. benefits of Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE is a way to use the extra 4 wires in 10/100/1000-baseT Ethernet wiring for powering devices. The obvious application is to power IP telephones. Cisco has been doing this for [...]
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