That Last 5%

April 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I've been working on writing a new set of code to run blogdowntown (which was a big deal in itself, but not my topic at the moment). I've been at work on it off and on for a little over two months. Only really in the last week have I dug in and decided to get it finished, though.

Today I've been working on the code since about 7:30am. I'm maybe 98% to being launch ready, but that last 5% is killing me. Everything works, except for the little things here and there that keep needing to be tested or needing a tweak.

I really just want to be done, push it live, and head out for a bike ride. At this point I'm doubting the first two parts of that are going to take place today, but it's too nice out to skip the ride.

Asterisk: Ruby Fun with Adhearsion

April 26, 2007 by Eric Richardson

We're still waiting on a few pieces to come together before we really roll with the VoIP changeover, so things have been mostly quiet for me on the Asterisk front. Today I took a little time to play with dial plans and thought I'd do a short write-up about the fun I've been having with Adhearsion.

Asterisk has the ability to pass call logic off to external applications via what's called the AGI interface. Adhearsion speaks AGI and allows the call logic to be written in Ruby.

More after the jump... — Continue Reading...

Gannt Charts

April 13, 2007 by Eric Richardson

This is the sort of thing I've been looking at over the past few days. No bigger image since it's all internal project stuff.

Sometime soon I'll try to round-up the project management apps we tried before settling on Merlin.

Asterisk: Phone Showdown

March 29, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned in my first post that I was going to be comparing a few different phones in choosing what we would build out with. We needed phones for ten employees, a break room and a conference room. I called up VoIP Supply and they agreed to send me three used phones so that I could make my choice and not pay a restocking fee returning the unchosen two.

I ordered the snom 320, the Polycom IP501, and the Linksys SPA942. When the phones came in I set them up and played around for a week or so, messing with configurations and calling between extensions. Finally last week we set up all three phones in the conference room and three of us sat down to compare features and (most importantly) voice quality. — Continue Reading...

Asterisk: Music on Hold

March 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I started a couple times to write grand posts about my progress building an Asterisk PBX and kept not finishing, so instead I think I'm just going to write up little things I figured out.

When I first installed Asterisk, I wanted to be able to call and hear something. Particularly I thought it would be kind of cool to use KCRW's music stream as a test music source (though it wouldn't be legal to use it as a music on hold source in production).

Vaguely following this wiki entry, here's how I got it working... — Continue Reading...