Autoscaling like a Pro on AWS

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.

Server side mail filtering

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.

Asterisk for the novice, part 2

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).

Asterisk for the novice

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.

A new PBX aka playing with Asterisk

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.

GDB 7.3a and a new elfutils

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.

Binutils 2.21.1a on CentOS 5.6

I just uploaded binutils.2.21.1a. It can be found on my RPM repo. GDB will be uploaded begin next week. Happy compiling !!!

GCC 4.6.1 on CentOS 5.6

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.

VIM 7.3 with Python 2.6 on CentOS 5.x

I've been a OSX user for some time, but my main C development happens on CentOS. OSX has TextMate as editor, which has snippets : A sort of runtime macro's on steroids. It saves lots of time with common language constructs such as loops. Vim has a UltiSnips, but that has some preconditions : It need vim 7.3 with Python >= 2.6 compiled in. CentOS has neither of them. You can't just upgrade Python on a CentOS machine, since lots of things (yum being one of them) depend on a specific version.

Migrating to JIRA 4.4

Migrating to JIRA 4.4 is now complete. It has't been without hickups however : JIRA 4.4 en Fisheye 2.6.0-2.6.3 don't get along when using trusted authentication. You get Seraph errors : Error handling trusted applications authentication attempt:BAD_SIGNATURE Make sure the user that is authenticating the application link (and managing the JIRA project) has read errors to Fisheye projects. Else you can't link you repo to the JIRA project.