I'm currently working on a server that will make use of a piece of software called astmanproxy.
astmanproxy is an Asterisk Manager Protocol proxy application. It addresses a known reliability issue with the Asterisk manager API; namely, the fact that Asterisk has had a history of problems related to handling these connections. Many PBX applications communicate with Asterisk over this protocol, which has resulted in the development of proxies such as astmanproxy to relieve the buggy Asterisk code of the burden of handling individual, short-lived connections.
astmanproxy looks at least functional though I'm not greatly impressed with the code quality. In a hurry to get it up and running, I skimmed the documentation, compiled and installed it, and had a go at editing and trimming the default configuration file. The result was an astmanproxy that would connect to Asterisk but then get rejected as it tried to authenticate.
After a half hour worth of frustration attempting to debug the issue from an Asterisk perspective, including setting new passwords and trying new accounts, scanning debugging output from astmanproxy and finally leaning on tcpdump, I realized the issue: astmanproxy's configuration file parser converts everything to lowercase.
The documentation doesn't say a word about this, of course. Nor does the configuration file. But the consequence is that you just can't use passwords with astmanproxy that contain an uppercase character. I admit surprise at the fact the application is up to 1.21 and this issue has been neither documented nor addressed. Am I the first to notice?
Posted by Chase Venters on Mar 04, 2008
My last post dealt with the frustration I felt in trying to find a garage door remote that wasn't huge and would support more than one version of one single manufacturer's protocol.
I'll make this brief: the "Clicker" I purchased developed a rather annoying problem. It now eats 9V batteries like popcorn. Fresh batteries will be destroyed in a matter of days, which may only include a single use. It appears to drain said batteries while the remote is not in use, and without lighting the activity LED you'd expect to see if it were a mechanical problem along the lines of a stuck button.
In the end, I had to cast that crap aside and settle for an official single-button Chamberlain remote made for the specific protocol of the door. It's certainly bigger than it needs to be, but it is smaller than the Clicker, and so far, it gets the job done.
Posted by Chase Venters on Feb 24, 2008
People often find technology to be incredibly frustrating. For many, it's a matter of the difficulty in using technology, or the ways in which it misbehaves... but for me, the frustration often bubbles up when I come across technology that could and indeed should have been better.
Presently, my primary frustration is with the garage door opener market. There have been many technologies and protocols used by wireless garage door openers over the last decades. One of the consequences of this is vast incompatibility.
This bit me in the ass once when I cluelessly purchased a Genie-brand remote to open a Chamberlain Security+ door. That was actually a while ago, but I've now got a useless Genie remote. I ended up with the proper Chamberlain Security+ remote. It's a bulky unit, which is frustrating when space in my Miata is at a premium.
I moved to a new apartment recently. The garage door opener in this apartment is a LiftMaster, also bearing the Chamberlain name. Pleased that I wouldn't need to buy a new controller, I attempted to link my remote to the door with no success. Apparently, the "billion code" technology in this unit is obsolete.
Frustrated, I tried Home Depot, hoping to find a decent controller that would open both the new garage door and the old one. My purchasing choices were limited between mini-remotes (in a form factor I would much prefer) that wouldn't open the apartment garage door, equally bulky units that would only open the apartment garage door and not the old one, or an absolutely large "Clicker" with two buttons that was allegedly compatible with both.
I had the Clicker in my hand, about to give in and fork over the $20, but I was too disgusted with the size of the unit to make the purchase. I reasoned that I must be able to find a better unit on the Internet.
Unfortunately, it looks like I'm not in luck -- not in the slightest. Just shopping for an opener is a challenge -- the brand names, the color-coded learning buttons, frequencies, and manufacturing years all create a muddled mess. And just in case the shopping experience doesn't make you want to vomit, you'll find that nearly all of the devices will.
At this point, I have to step back and catch my breath. It's a fucking garage door opener -- a very simple RF device! Why are they all so bulky? You could probably cram 2... maybe 4 embedded Linux systems in the Clicker. Actually, with some of the "Linux in an ethernet connector" technology, you might be able to get 8 or 10 in there.
It's also gross that the landscape is littered with incompatible devices. I'm particularly surprised that Chamberlain doesn't sell a reasonably-sized opener that will open both their new and old doors. Perhaps what's holding back the market for a sane universal remote is that companies like Chamberlain would rather file disgustingly frivilous lawsuits against competitors making compatible openers than do any kind of real innovation themselves.
At times like this, I wish the landscape could all be blamed on one incompetent engineer or clueless manager - someone I could walk up to, then proceed to punch squarely in the face. But alas; I'm dealing with companies, industry and government. You can't punch a patent law and you can't punch proprietary "intellectual property." All you can do is hope that some day, the industry will behave more like the software industry is beginning to behave, by implementing open standards that benefit customer and the market alike.
Posted by Chase Venters on Sep 15, 2007
Trying to organize your desk and your life can be a real chore sometimes. Lately, I've been going through spurts of undoing the madness I've accumulated in the years passed.
I've been a pack-rat of tangible things, and so I've been throwing away much I feel is now unnecessary (such as old issues of PC Gamer from my years of youth). But no matter how much ends up in the garbage, there is always more work to be done.
Lately I've taken a diversion to cleaning up my PC. This is going to be a much more difficult challenge: data is easier to pack-rat than physical goods, because all the data I have fits into a power-sucking RAID array inside a small tower. But I have identified one area where I can make progress, and so I have.
Over the last few years, I went on a subscription spree. I signed up for the mailing lists of KDE, xorg, the Linux kernel, hal, dbus, Familiar, mod_perl, Apache, Gentoo, and others. I am genuinely interested in what is going on in each of these fronts, but I barely have the time left to read lkml, much less any of the others.
I let messages accumulate from these lists into a set of Maildir folders underneath one of my email accounts. My mailer (KMail) wept visibly trying to keep up with all these messages. Strange glitches were common. Kontact, the organizer application that wraps KMail, consumed on average 25% of my available page frames (2 GB). I mitigated the glitches with a Perl script that would archive the messages of high traffic mailing lists into an archive subfolder, keeping only the most recent 2000 in the main folder, but the memory usage remained.
It took forever to come to the common-sense realization that there was no way on Earth I could personally consume all this information. When I decided to go on an unsubscription spree, I had over 170,000 unread messages. Deleting them brought Kontact's RSS to 5%, and became one more step in my ongoing process of learning to pick my battles.
I've decided to keep my subscription to two lists: lkml, and cryptography@metzdowd.com. I don't really have the time to read either of them right now, but I couldn't let these ones go. :P
Posted by Chase Venters on Aug 27, 2007
Ugh. This is so depressing:
turbotaz ~ # df --si
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md/1 628G 589G 7.6G 99% /
udev 1.1G 312k 1.1G 1% /dev
shm 1.1G 0 1.1G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/md/0 104M 11M 88M 12% /boot
Posted by Chase Venters on Jul 24, 2007