Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems

Code and Hacks Creating A Basic Date Dimension Table in MySQL

Posted by Admin • Monday, March 23. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks
After some searching I determined that nobody wants to share ...

So I had to sort it out myself - the result is a pretty basic stored procedure you can call whenever you like.

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Code and Hacks Turning the Iphone 3G into an almost useful always-on IM device

Posted by Admin • Saturday, March 14. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks

I've had a Blackberry for quite some time now, and came to take for granted the basic ability to be always available via Google Talk, Latitude, email, etc - not to mention have fine-grained control of when I get notified about each one. Running multiple apps (gtalk, maps, ssh, browsers, etc) - was never a problem, and there is even an Alt-Tab equivalent for toggling between running apps. Blackberry even has an integrated push-IM system for Blackberry to Blackberry communication.



All that changed with the IPhone (if it was not paid for, I would never have gotten one, but now I'm trying to make the most of it while saving the money I used to spend on the Blackberry). The IPhone (3G, 2.2.1) proved to be unable to do any of the above well. No mail alerting rules, no running multiple applications !!?? Basically this is an always-on device that cannot provide most always-on services. So this is my quest to make the device useful.



Yes naturally I realize that there are downsides to both devices, and I gladly give credit to the IPhone UI, but personally I'd rather deal with a command-line UI if I had to choose between functionality and having a fancy but incapable toy.

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Asterisk My Not So Great Experience with Grandstream HT-502 ATA

Posted by Admin • Friday, March 13. 2009 • Category: Asterisk

I got 3 of these Grandstream HT-502's for a client's Asterisk setup, and I picked Grandstream basically because they were cheap (client on a budget) and I found no bad reviews. They were ordered February 2009.



First impressions: They are tiny, like two EZ-Passes stacked on top of each other. They are cute, and have all the features you'd expect or even desire in such a device: Dual WAN (routed or bridged, with port forwarding), two FXS ports, some status LEDs, remote configuration and pull provisioning, syslog support, etc.



Well that was the good news...

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