If you happen to have a license of SVH Enterprise Edition, or like me, have a trial license, you also can use the CLI features of SVH.
A few things on the CLI. As of the 2025.3 release, the CLI is part of the VSCode extension, but by default, it ends up in a bit unconvenient location :
/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/sigasi.sigasi-visual-hdl/cli/sigasi-cli
for me. You will need to add that to your path (or better, symlink it in $HOME/bin. I prefer a manual CLI installation.
On a build agent, you will need the separate installation anyway, else it will require a headless VSCode installation, and that is way harder then a download + unzip of the sigasi-cli installation.
As some of you might know, next to a BsC in computer science, I also have a degree in electronics. I never used to do anything with that long-gone knowledge, but since a few week backs, I revived an old hobby of mine : Retro computing.
I’m especially fond of the MSX, which I also own myself. It was also the first computer I get aquited to.
Going back to that era also mean going back to the time you can create your own hardware, and writing software often meant assembly and in-depth hardware knowledge. There days, most is abstracted away by drivers and high-level interfaces (DirextX, OpenGL), and modern compilers take away most need to learn and use assembly language.
The Amazon cloud (AWS) is a great place to deploy your application to. It’s flexible, cheap, you pay by-the-hour, and it offers great additional services to make your life easier. AWS also offer a great API, with properly written tools, that can act as a complete replacement for the AWS console. If you can manage something from within the console, you can also do the same thing from within the API. I’ll cover the AWS tools a later on.
When you get a lot of mail, and go on vacation, you usually pull in all that mail over your expensive roaming 3G connection.
I use filtering to make sure certain mails end up in the right folder. I usually don’t want to read all mails that come from mailinglists. You can use filtering from within your mail client and that works well. That has one huge disadvantage : Your mail client needs to pull in at least the headers to see if it matches filtering. Not nice if you’re for example subscribed to the LKML.
Let’s start with the dialplan. I’ve put it on github : extensions.lua Yes, it’s a beast. It’s also the first piece of LUA I’ve even written, so yes, a LUA guru can probably shorten it by half or so.
SQLite database
Our user list is in a sqlite db. That’s also what lines 1 and 4 are about : Adding the LUA extension (line 1) and opening the database (line 4). It’s a bit buggy : Sometimes we end up with a locked SQLite database, and all further operations fail. The solution is either a MySQL database, reverting back to textfiles, or fix the locking issue. I haven’t fount the cause yet.
We switched to VOIP : Our old PBX was lacking features, and the prices for phones went sky-high. I purchased an Asterisk EuroISDN card, and some Aastra phones.
Some lessons I learnt the hard way :
A GUI
If you installed a GUI, deinstall it. If you have the GUI config and installation in a backup : remove it from the backup also. Then, print the GUI sources, and shred them. Really, do so. If you have a real problem, and a GUI, and no knowledge of Asterisk, you’re totally screwed.
We started out with 1 employee back in 2001. Now, we have 11. We started out with a Siemens PBX, and one ISDN-2 line. That Siemens has 8 digital ports, and 1 expansion slot. That slot has been taken for a second ISDN-2 port, since customers where getting a busy signal.
Now, people share a phone. Not something we want. The Siemens PBX is also as extensible and flexible as solid concrete. We had 2 options :
I just uploaded gdb 7.3a It can be found on my RPM repo. I’ve also added new elfutils packages, since these are required by this version of GDB.
I just uploaded binutils.2.21.1a. It can be found on my RPM repo. GDB will be uploaded begin next week. Happy compiling !!!
I’ve just created packages for CentOS 5.6 that replace the default compiler with gcc 4.6.1. That version has some interesting options, so I wanted to use that as my default compiler. It’s also more strict, so it’s a good check for my own code.
Packages can be downloaded from my RPM repo
Later today I’ll upload my binutils and gdb packages.