who can identify this gear? we’re moving into a new building and all this telecom gear is in there. i’m curious what each and every piece is/what it does.

if you can identify it, please leave a comment below. thanks!

you can view the originals photos (higher resolution) on my flickr photostream.

if you need a beta code for ping.fm, use “pingofpings”. it worked for me a few minutes ago.

what is ping.fm?

ping.fm was created for the sole purpose of making it as easy as possible to share your posts with the world. now you don’t have to fumble around the web in order to post anymore, you can just post once, and be done with it.

the idea came about when making some posts to twitter and tumblr . the idea of posting the exact same information in two places seemed a bit tedious, so ping.fm was born.

if you happen to be going to cfunited (like me) next week, be sure to read through the cfunited attendee packet — some good info in there to know ahead of time.

this will be my first time attending cfunited and my first time in washington, dc, in about 15 years. anything i should know beforehand? =)

from the mozilla developer center:

after more than 34 months of active development, and with the contribution of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. it is our expectation to ship firefox 3 this upcoming tuesday, june 17th. put on your party hats and get ready to download firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.

go figure they’ll release it the day i’m heading out to washington, dc, for cfunited. oh well, maybe i’ll find a celebration party in dc.

yes, google, that’s what i meant.

in the battle against spam, yahoo said this week that it’s making headway in getting sites to adopt its e-mail-authenticating technology.

called domain keys identified mail, the program confirms that an e-mail is not faked, that it’s actually coming from the address it purports to be.

this has been tried before, in a number of different ways by a number of different companies (including microsoft). it hasn’t worked yet.

yahoo is hiring engineers who know how to identify networks of bots and is investing in technology that will allow yahoo servers around the world to respond and adapt automatically to threats, risher said.

yeah, right. since i’d say 99% of spam comes from botnets, this means we can expect that 1) yahoo will stop allowing spam to be sent through its servers and 2) it’ll stop blocking all of us .edu’s as spam, right? ask any mail admin at a .edu how much of a pain in the ass yahoo is to them if you wonder what i’m talking about.

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i’m curious if anyone is using voip at home, with service from a commercial voip provider — and integrated with asterisk. i’m one of the younger generation who hasn’t had a home phone in almost two years. the last year that i had one was only so i could have dsl and a fax at home (for my business). i use my work-issued cell phone (blackberry) for all my phone calls (except when i’m in the office).

i’ve been toying with the idea of setting up an asterisk box at home lately. i don’t really need to, but when has need ever had anything to do with the reason a geek does something? because i wouldn’t really use it much, i’m looking for something cheap.

what i’d like to do is just use voip at home without being tied in to any vendor-specific hardware (i.e. if i switch providers, i still want to be able to use it), and to be able to purchase an “x minutes/month” plan. i want something that’ll integrate with asterisk and give me a fixed number of minutes per month for a fixed cost. i’d probably pick up a couple of cisco ip phones to use.

if i can get that working, i have another house in another town that i’d connect as well. it has dry dsl, so there’s no actual phone there (i’m only there once every few weeks). i’d put a cisco router in there, set up an ipsec vpn between that house and my primary residence, and put a cisco ip phone there as well (assuming the latency and jitter are okay).

i’ve briefly looked into broadvoice and packet8 and would be interested in any opinions or recommendations.

if, like me, you run bind, then you’ve probably encountered the “lame server” error messages in your logs at some point.

to be honest, they’re really not errors. they’re more warnings than anything, because the problem is actually with the remote server and not yours.

nevertheless, they can really build up over time and i, personally, don’t really care to see ‘em. to keep them out of your logs altogether, put the following near the top of your named.conf, then reload/restart bind:

logging { category lame-servers { null; }; };