Professional Geekism

For those of you who don’t follow XKCD, you really are missing out. It’s just genius, and today’s comic really did tickle me.. (Click for a larger image!)

This really is a true story, and she doesn’t know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn’t worked for weeks.

Well, I laughed at least. And it reminds me of a famous euphemism, too!

Nick: “Jon, why have you locked your door?”
Jon: “I’m re-compiling my kernel!“

I absolutely adored my Sony Ericsson K800i. What a phone; everyone’s had one or used one at some point. Given that they’re quite long in the tooth now, you’d be hard-pushed to have not come across someone that had/has one.

So when the K850i came out, I was quite eager to get my upgrade. And so far there’s been only one real drawback to it, that I’ve found: using it as a modem.

When I first moved into my current abode, I didn’t have any ADSL for a few weeks. Predictably one can steal some wireless broadband, or one can attempt to use some form of mobile broadband. Before signing my life away for a few months, I decided to test my phone (which at the time, was the K800i) with Ubuntu. To my sheer delight, the phone presents itself as a USB Ethernet adapter, and Ubuntu’s network-manager simply sent a DHCP request and received an ACK. No messing about here: I had 3G broadband within 5 seconds of plugging the USB cable in!

So obviously when I attempted the same trick with my K850i, I was really quite dismayed to find that you can’t do this any longer. The USB Ethernet device is there (grep -i CDC /var/log/messages) but for the life of me, I cannot find a way to obtain a DHCP lease via the usb0 interface.

Yes, it works perfectly (and with HSDPA speeds, thanks to my city-centre location) if you use wvdial or one of its GUI front-ends (gnome-ppp worked well) and I’ve been able to connect like this..

But I can’t understand why the Sony Ericsson engineers would want to remove such a simple mechanism in favour of the greatest faff-about in history. I’d be interested to hear from anyone that’s managed to get this working.. Although I fear by the time I get an answer, I’ll be back on some ADSL goodness: HSPDA is alright in a pinch, but T-Mobile UK’s data network seems so heavily sensitive to peak times (I suspect insane levels of contention) and the latency is atrocious. Half a second? Ugh. That’ll be the Deep Packet Inspection they do…

Many people already know that I dabble with Asterisk on a daily basis. Our Linux distribution of choice here at work, also happens to be Gentoo.

Now, when updating Gentoo’s ‘world’ package base, you do get some problems occassionally. This is a downside to being ‘on the cutting edge’ and, it’s obviously no wonder why distributions such-as Ubuntu, Red Hat and SuSe, stick to well-tested release schedules.

Recently, after a well over-due profile update (from 2006.0 to 2008.0) and the following emerge -av –newuse –deep world command, Asterisk simply stopped working. No warning, and it took a while for me to notice.

Once I had noticed, it became apparent that something was really quite awry. Asterisk wouldn’t start via the init script (with has a seemingly immortal, and hideously annoying process), nor via just calling the executable. I eventually realised, with the help of this bug report and the /var/log/asterisk/full logfile, that Asterisk was failing to find the speex modules it required.

Long story short, as per the bug report, you need to downgrade (and mask for good measure) speex to 1.1.12 to retain functionality on anything older than a January/Febuary release of Asterisk 1.4.x.

The fact that Portage still only has Asterisk 1.2.x, means that unless you switch to using the voip overlay, you’re going to find this issue will affect you.

Oh Gentoo, how I love and hate you!

First thing’s first: AAAAAARGH!!! *waves arms in the air maniacally*

I’ve spent the evening getting my RoutITX project off the ground and into service. But to do this, I needed an ADSL2+ modem. So, rather than persist with using my Netgear DB834GT, I thought I’d try out a P660R-D1 from Zyxel. Simple little thing, only about £25, and claims to be able to do bridging to its (single) Ethernet port.

Can it hell. I’ve tried everything I can; it can sync the DSL to a lovely speed, but it can’t get any further than that.

What I’d like is a nice, small, cheap, ADSL2+ modem (preferably including Annex M) that does a perfect bridge, with good reliability and performance.

There’s got to be one out there? I’d love to know.