posted by steve | Category: Useful Items That I Forget

During the Debian dist-upgrade from sarge to etch, I uninstalled aspell and associated packages on one of my servers. So, when I got around to installing it again, it apparently didn’t install a language or word list. Trying to run a spell check from mutt resulted in: No word lists can be found for the language en_us. I installed the aspell-en package and all was well. Turns out I didn’t have any spelling errors in [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

Asterisk 1.6 will include a new option for distinctive ring called dringNrange, like dring1range, dring2range, dring3range. These ranges specify how much variance is acceptable in the cadence of a received distinctive ring. Background: The local telco seems to send distinctive ring cadence in an inconsistent manner. On one call the cadence might be 175,100,0 and on the next the cadence is 201,102,0 for the same dring context. Therefore, I added and submitted patch to add [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

I’m currently working on a new book for Microsoft Press. The book is JavaScript Step by Step and should be out late 2007 or early 2008. The book is, yes, a book on JavaScript. It’s a beginner-level book and though still taking shape, the book will cover everything that one might need to know in order to do some fun stuff with JavaScript. For those that have read my books before, you’ll know that I [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Asterisk 1.6 since last November. I contributed a patch to the Asterisk code base and it was accepted. Naturally, the patch was just that much too late to get into the 1.4 release, so it had to wait for 1.6. Until then, I’ve been running the latest Asterisk beta code on production systems (*shudder*) in order to take advantage of the additional feature. I’ve had good luck with [...Read more...]

posted by steve | Category: Current Projects

I’ve been accepted as a contributor for the Techdirt Insight Community. I’ve found Techdirt to be an excellent site for technology issue analysis, with the authors on the site having a particularly acute understanding of the issues facing intellectual property, open source, economics, and several other areas. I’m excited by the opportunity, even being accepted as a contributor, though admittedly I don’t know how stringent the criteria is for acceptance, maybe someone can fill me [...Read more...]