Blog-Ed

Rainbow 5

[This is a pre-rant really. It might turn out to be complete bollocks and not happen...]

On the way back from the city centre I was passed a flyer than looked something like this (I'm sure shortly the flyer won't be at this address... so if it's a generic Rainbow 5 page then you've missed the boatbus).

in august 2008 rainbow 5 will be getting a major makeover. There'll be brand new buses, with a brand new name and a host of new features to make getting in and out of Nottingham a better travel experience.

Full air-con will keep you cool in the summer and warm in winter. And you'll love the colour co-ordinated interior with its stylish leather seats and wood laminate floor.

Of course the first thing on your lips will be.... "Yeah, thank god for that it's about time they replaced the buses on that route they're all ancient man" (for people who aren't local, they're probably less than 3 years old).

I'm sort of convinced that the price of the bus will go up (if it's at the same time as the relaunch it'll be laughable). I hope when people moan they don't have the audacity to reply with "it's the price of fuel, it's crippling us" and have a more of an honest answer with "it's the dead cow on the seat and dead tree on the floor".

I'm a bit of a fan of the TJ Walsh approch in Halifax myself - that being cheap second hand buses, and in turn cheap ticket prices. That said, these old beasts might not be as good for the environment.

JJ's Stag Do!

Howdy.

Over the weekend I went back up to Halifax for JJ's stag do. The main event was going to Jongleurs in Leeds. It was good fun - although to be fair it felt more like it was our own comedy, rather than that provided. I'll be fair Mitch Benn was good, as was Steve Day, the last guy was a bit of a dick though - I can't even remember his name - which might have been useful so I know to avoid him in the future.

He got consumed by a shit who heckled him and just came back with generic responses, over and over... he seemed to forget to tell any jokes.

The food was also interesting. The ordering was done on magic wireless handheld things. What was worrying was that the food was arriving at the table before the order for the table had been completed. And the drinks arrived after the food! The food was cheap and cheerful and it's clear that they'd prepared a lot (given that the menu isn't exactly vast). If we'd come later I wonder if we'd have had a longer wait.

The food thing all seems a bit backwards. It appears that there's staff to bring drinks, staff to bring food, staff to talk away empties, and staff to take orders. It's somewhat hard to judge the overlap. One guy wanted a glass of water... fine, except he asked someone who only cleared tables... whoops. That said, she brought him a jug of water a bit later on. No glass mind. Clearly, wasn't trained in beverages. So, he asked someone else for a glass... "I don't deal with drinks, only with hot food". Bloody silly.

The whole place had the feeling that it was being run like those expensive events that holiday reps try to get you to go on package holidays - albeit more expensive!

This was kinda compounded by most of the other people there being dog ugly hens on hen-nights - of course you could say we were dog ugly stags on a stag do, so I can't complain about that too much...

So, yeah, an enjoyable night, but it's a good job we brought our own humour.

Ed's been reading the news again...

Just reading an article entitled Britons fear cost of living will double this year and thought we were moving towards crazy inflation... do Britons really think that the annual rate of inflation this year will be 100%?

Of course there is a chance that I'm an ignoramus and the "cost of living" is somehow a way of saying "rate of inflation", but I thought that the rate of inflation was near enough the "rate of the increase in the cost of living" ...

I wish I could set it on Google news to not show me stories from journalistic sources I think are shit, The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Times immediately spring to mind at the moment.

Out of date stock photo?

OK, so all I seem to talk about now is the news... and its poor reportage.

Just been reading the news (as always) and come across this story about falling house prices.

From the photo at the top of the page you might be led to believe that loads of houses are on sale on the market (I'm not disputing that their aren't, but the photo doesn't prove anything)... but wait, the photo's really old. Like pre-020 old (before April 2000), even pre 0171/0181 (before April 1995) old... more like 071/081 old. That's old, not as old as 01 (before May 1990), but still old.

Crazy Exchange rate...

Just read this and then had to read it again...

MONACO (Reuters) - Ferrari's Formula One world champion Kimi Raikkonen paid 200,000 euros (159 million pounds) for a 1974 Chevrolet Corvette owned by Hollywood actress Sharon Stone at a Monaco Grand Prix charity auction, organisers said.

Reuters

I think there's a typo... I'm hoping it's with the million pounds 'cause 159 million is a lot of money for a car. No doubt by the time you read this they will have corrected it!

Which idiot came up with this?

So this sort of thing has been in the news quite a bit recently... UK mulls big brother comms database

I can't help feeling that it won't happen. Well and if it does happen it'll be a big waste of money and the goverment are more idiotic that I first thought. This post isn't about the privacy issues that every other news vendor seems to be leaping on - they're somehow worried that the government isn't good at keeping data safe... and having a lot of data at the same time is asking for trouble.

It's more about the technicalities of it.

First of, are they going to ban encryption/mean that they need a copy of everyones private key? Is online banking (for example) going to remain secure?

Are they going to log web addresses visited or the whole content downloaded (in case you're wondering that's a lot of data... I'm sure if you look somewhere you'll be able to find the volume of data transferred over the net by HTTP by UK people). Just storing web addresses visited is kinda point less as it's very easy to make it so that the page delivered by the webserver is different depending on who's viewing it...

So, emails right. Are they going to sniff out every IP packet and find things that look like email being sent over SMTP and then grab it, or are they just going to install their email grabbing software on the servers of big ISPs? I don't send any email via an ISPs server... so they'll have to do the sniffing or convince me by fear of a fine/jail that I'll be installing their spying software on my server.

Of course that's for legitimate emails, suppose I'm an evil terrorist and I want to send emails to my evil friends, what's to stop me using a botnet (group of computers hypontised by the evil to do their evil deeds) to send the emails?

Maybe they plan on getting the emails when they are received not sent (or both). Once again, my email isn't received to an ISP server, so that's me not being counted in the stats... unless I'm forced to install their evil software.

Once again, do the store the whole email or just who it's from and to? And are encrypted emails going be illegal? If they're doing it properly they'll sure as hell be storing a lot of spam.

What about tunneling/proxying? Could I for example rent a server in Peru? And then proxy my Internet communications via that box, away from the prying eyes of the government? Of course, they could plan on storing details of every IP packet sent in the UK... and might think it suspicious that I'm talking to a computer in Peru a lot. And maybe my evil friends are talking to the box too... woo suspicious. We might even be using internal email on the server to plan our evil intentions of English soil.

Of course they might see that... so why doesn't my evil friend get a box in Panama? And then he can log on to my evil box via Panama to send me a message.

Anyways, I can't help thinking that the whole idea is flawed. It'll only manage to catch people who are evil and stupid (who send each other messages in plain text without trying to protect what they are saying). I'd have thought that you can do a shed load more damage if you're evil and intelligent and they'll never know it's going on.

So, in conclusion, I reckon that this plan is infinitely more pointless than the ID cards for stopping terrorism.

All go around here today

Not one 'news' story but too from around these parts...

A fire down the end of our road

And some (ex)students getting arrested under the terroism act.

Here's a photo I took of the smoke from my bird's eye view in the lab this morning...

Worthy of the FAIL Blog?

You might have heard of the FAIL Blog. A muchly humourous site where there are photos of things that have FAILed. There's a lot of photoshopped stuff there, so be warned.

Anyways, I was messing with Google Maps new "Take Public Transit" thingy. Of course, it is clear that they've not got a full database of all forms of public transport yet. But this route is just silly... (clicking on the image may or may not take you to the actual page - I have a feeling that it'll change the routes it shows you depending on the time of day... pick different routes from the side [the walk bus walk one!])

In case you're slow, the route involves walking to a bus stop by the station, to get a bus back to nearly where you start from, to walk the rest of the trip back to Dunkirk.

Made the hangups work...

In my last post (about getting Skype and Asterisk to play nice) I said I'd look into getting it to tear down the call correctly if an incoming call from Skype is cancelled before the SIP call is answered.

After some debugging... it turns out that mjsip was trying to CANCEL the call, but instead of cancelling it, Asterisk was returning 503 Server Error, which wasn't helpful.

After digging about on the net as to why Asterisk would do such a thing - CSeq numbers of the CANCEL request not being correct.

I made a quick and dirty fix... that once again may not exactly be the most elegant way of doing it... (so unelegant and possibly broken it could be embarrassing...)

I've simply changed mjsip_1.6/src/org/zoolu/sip/message/BaseMessageFactory.java as follows...

The line that reads...

return createRequest(SipMethods.CANCEL,request_uri, to.getNameAddress(),from.getNameAddress(), contact,proto,host_addr,host_port, rport, method.getCallIdHeader().getCallId(), method.getCSeqHeader().getSequenceNumber(), from.getParameter("tag"),to.getParameter("tag"), branch,"");

to

return createRequest(SipMethods.CANCEL, request_uri,to.getNameAddress(), from.getNameAddress(), contact, proto,host_addr, host_port,rport, method.getCallIdHeader().getCallId(), method.getCSeqHeader().getSequenceNumber()+1, from.getParameter("tag"), to.getParameter("tag"),branch,"");

I have no idea if that breaks anything though! Maybe I should read RFC3261 ?

Skype+SippySkype+Asterisk

Some of you will know I like to play with VoIP...

Quite a lot of the time when people I speak to online want to talk to me using VoIP, they want to use Skype. To a VoIP purist, this have levels of wrongness. In the past I've convinced people to install Freshtel Firefly. This means that they can talk to me on VoIP with little setting up required at their end (like Skype, but without the bad karma of using Skype).

Anyways, I've decided it's a bit unfair to people making them install another piece of VoIP software if they've got Skype... so I've been looking into getting Skype to integrate with Asterisk.

Most bits of software to do this cost money. I've found SippySkype, which does the job (sort of) and costs nowt. It's a Skype to SIP gateway, so can be used to get Skype to talk to any SIP device (and a SIP device to Skype).

It's taken some doing to get it working though...

Here's some handy hints should you be trying it.

• If you get it working, but audio remains on your PC instead going to the SIP device.... check the version of Java installed on your PC (with java -version). You need Java version 1.6 or greater.
• If it refuses to register with asterisk... try setting the realm in sippyskype.cfg to asterisk.
• Also try setting the SIP username in asterisk to be your skypeuser name - it seems to try and authorize with that rather than the username you set in the config file.

• Calls from Skype to SIP not working? I think there's a bug in mjsip. Basically, when a call is being sent to Asterisk and Asterisk sends back a "407 Proxy Authorization Required", mjsip just sends back another INVITE, with the authorization digest. It doesn't first send an ACK to let Asterisk know it's got the 407. When Asterisk doesn't get the ACK, but gets the INVITE it sends back a "491 Request Pending" and the call fails.

  I hacked mjsip_1.6/src/org/zoolu/sip/dialog/ExtendedInviteDialog.java and added

  Message ack=MessageFactory.createRequest(this,SipMethods.ACK,null);
  TransactionClient acktc=new TransactionClient(sip_provider,ack,this);
  transactions.put(acktc.getTransactionId(),acktc);
  acktc.request();
  

  Between

  { attempts++;

  and

  Message req=tc.getRequestMessage();

  This of course might not be exactly correct and might cause a memory leak if a lot of calls are handled - it was a quick fix... if someone knows the best way of doing this let me know!

The SIP bit of my sippyskype.cfg file looks like this...

host_port=5061
transport_protocols=udp
ua_jar=ua.jar
contact_url=sip:myskypeusername@ipaddressofmypc:5061
from_url="Skype Account" <sip:myskypeusername@myasteriskbox.example.com:5060>
username=myskypeusername
realm=asterisk
passwd=myreallycomplicatedpassword
expires=6000
minregrenewtime=60
regfailretrytime=15
do_register=yes

I'm using port 5061 because I run a soft phone on the machine, which is on 5060. You can use 5060 if you want!

And that's that. The sip.conf file for Asterisk has...

; skype gateway account
[myskypeusername]
username=myskypeusername
type=friend
context=default
secret=myreallycomplicatedpassword
host=dynamic
nat=no
dtmfmode=auto
canreinvite=no
port=5061
defaultip=ipaddressofmypc

I've noticed that if someone from Skype calls and then hangs up... the call does not get torn down; the phones keep ringing. I'm looking into trying to fix this too... and if I do I'll get back to you.

I hope this helps someone, if so let me know.

Why not try it out?