mehblog

The recent announcement of video calling in Skype 2.0 prompted me to download it and have a look

For some reason I haven’t looked at it before.

Anyway, downloaded it and it worked first time, something I have yet to see with other voip providers.

The interface is polished, theres no setup to speak of and their pricing is very competitive as far as I can tell (I primarily use voip to call the family back in Ireland, none of whom have a landline…).

Good stuff.

Well I probably won’t be able to afford the real thing for christmas, but maybe one of these will do.

We’ve been using Asterisk here in the office for several months now. It handles our voip phones and also incoming faxes.

We have always had a problem with the fax line ‘jamming’. Every now and then the fax would get stuck while receiving a fax. To rectify this we would have to restart asterisk.

This morning one of our clients couldn’t get a fax to us. It kept jamming at our end. They must have tried about four or fives times. Same problem each time.

So I decided to try and fix this problem.

To cut a long and boring post short, I found this posting to the Asterisk Users mailing list which has a fix. It involves increasing the gain on the card that has the fax line.

I gave it a go and on the next attempt the client’s fax came through perfectly. Coincidence?

Perhaps, but this tip from Paul is definitely worth a look.

The rails express blog written by Stefan Kaes, author of railsbench is a great resource for anyone interested in wringing a bit (or a lot in some cases) more performance out of Ruby on Rails.

Some great tips on there.

Good stuff.

As a fairly direct result to having my 125 stolen I decided to bite the bullet and do the direct access motorbike training course.

I went along to Sussex Rider Training one saturday for an assessment and we worked out a plan.

This past week I did their three day course, culminating in my practical test on Friday afternoon.

The weather this week got really cold. Well below zero with wind chill. This was a challenge but preferable to rain I suppose.

Day one of the course focused on the slow riding techniques (slow speed riding, U-turns, emergency stops). This is essential. Once one masters controlling the bike at slow speeds, the rest is easy (well, easier).

Day two of the course focuses on the faster stuff. ‘A’ roads, bends and dual carriageways. It is important for passing the test that you can show the examiner that you can get up to the speed limit quickly and safely. Its all about ‘making progress’ apparently.

The third day is spent warming up and drilling the U-turn and emergency stop. Do both of those a few times, then off around the test routes for a while, then more U-turns etc.

Mine was the last test for the day, and it looked like it was about to snow at any moment. Mid afternoon and the parents where out picking up their little darlings from school. Sticking their 4×4s in stupid places.

I was very nervous. However, once we got going I wasn’t too bad. I was sure I had failed the test on a number of occasions though.

The training I’d received really paid off, especially going over all of the ‘awkward’ parts of the various test routes. That really helped.

Towards the end of the test we were heading down this stretch of the A27. National speed limit (70). We’d been down this road several times over the last few days, so I knew what was coming.

Round the corner at 70. Speed limit changes down to 50, watch for cars to the right as outside lane vanishes. Down to 40.

“Ah crap, he’s going to make me to that nasty right turn.” The instruction is given. “Next right turn”. Spot the turn, move right, into the small run off area. Sit and wait for a gap. Of course its bonkers busy so I get stuck for a while. Gap comes and then I’m off.

Run through it in my head. Hmm, tight left hander at end of this street. Don’t run wide.

“Turn left at end of street”.

“Bugger.”

Nail it.

Back to centre.

Test passed.

Sweet!

4 minor faults in the end. All for not making progress, i.e. too slow on the twisty A road and being a bit hesitant at some of the junctions. I’m happy enough with that though as it is something I know I need to work on. It’ll come with experience.

So, I can thoroughly recommend Sussex Rider Training in West Worthing if you are thinking of doing some bike training. Great guys and top training.

Hmm, now how much for an R1 …

My pride and joy has been stolen! A black and red KMX 125.

Last night and tonight a car driver felt the need to park half of their car in the motorbike bay. This meant that I had to park my bike at the other end of the bay where I couldn’t anchor it to the lamp post.

I came back from networking to see a big kmx shaped hole where my bike should be.

My first reaction was “did I park it there?”. I definitely did.

We drove around the area trying to find it, to no avail.

I now have a crime number. It may or may not show up.

The bike was worth around the grand mark. But there was another 100 pounds worth of locks on it too (three seperate locks).

As it wasn’t anchored, and there wasnt any debris from severed locks, it must have been a ‘lift it into the van job’.

During the evening though? Damn cheek!

Anyway, poor me. Just need to make sure Im covered insurance wise.

There is a wee problem with the latest version of typo.

One of the lib files is in the wrong place.

Find the fix here

This post over on the RoR blog a few days back talks about upgrading to the new mysql native bindings for ruby to get the best performance.

However, I’ve been unable to get it to install using gem, a la :

gem install mysql

as I have been getting compile errors:

ERROR: While executing gem - (RuntimeError) ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Despite the number of solutions to this out there, I’ve only now found one that works with my particular setup, namely centos 4.2, and that can be found in this post

I should point out that I didn’t need to edit the makefile or anything, I just ran make, make install in the /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 folder.

All working now, which is nice.

Last week was unseasonably warm; around the 20 degrees mark. This week however winter has arrived, with a vengence. The air temp has dropped and its been lashing down over the last few days.

Personally I don’t really mind this as I quite like winter. I’m built for the cold rather than the warm as they say.

Dark, wet weather always reminds me of christmas for some reason. Sitting indoors, the lights are on. All warm a snuggly.

Ahhh.

Want to find out how many records there are in a table?

You could do a table.<a href="http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M000674">find_by_sql </a> "select count(*) from table",

You could get all the records from the table and then count them, say records = table.find(:all).

Or you could do count = table.count.

How cool is that!