Talkathon

You have joined Talkshoe and you have set your 10-digit PIN.

Download X-Lite for Mac or Windows and install it as you would any program.

Set the SIP settings:



You need to put ideasip.com in the "domain" field. The others can be anything. Make sure "register" is unchecked as in the image and that "target domain" is selected. Click "Apply"





Now you are going to add a contact to phone the Talkshoe server and enter our conference directly:

Put Turkers Talk and anything you want in the tops fields, they don't matter at all.

Under "Contact methods", Select "softphone on the left and enter the sip numner on the right:

Here is the first part of the SIP number : 7463 # 22603 #

followed by your PIN (in the example image, it's 0123456789)

followed by the rest of the sip number @proxy.ideasip.com

SIP numbers (called URI) look like email addresses. Example: talkshoe@vuc.onsip.com is a SIP URI.

Another tutorial here

Join Talkshoe if you're not already a member

Search for Turkers to go to the page from anywhere on Talkshoe

This is the result of the search when we are conferencing only.

Now, click on Talkshoe PRO as below:

You should be prompted to download the software if you don't already have it installed. If you do have it installed, clicking this should start the software running.

Hello,

I find my address (see enclosed address label) on your mailing list and pursuant to the laws of this country, I am asking you to hereby remove this address from your list.

In addition, I would like you to know that we will no longer deal with companies who waste resources in an irresponsible manner such as mailing unsolicited paper catalogs or communications of any kind.

In this day and age, your company needs to understand how to use the Internet to save resources, and use the Internet responsibly, without annoying people with unsolicited communications.

In the future, we will be dealing only with companies who understand how to use the Internet and how to avoid the wasting of valuable resources like trees and the energy used to convey printed matter.

Thank you for your understanding. We hope you will be on the list of companies who have made the transition to the 21st century.

Although I have had HTTP running on my local box to provision my Polycom 650, I was always wanting to use the server to update the phone directory and also to be able to see log file. Without PUT capability, I could not write to the server. Here's how I got that working.

Problem: allow Polycom phone to PUT log and updated directory via HTTP.

After some investigation using telnet (the only real value of telnet
these days) and some help from #voip-users-conference I came up with
this:

To see if PUT is working on your server, enter these lines from a terminal on the same box (or change the ip address):

telnet 127.0.0.1 80
PUT /path/file HTTP/1.1
Host:127.0.0.1
(CR an empty line here)

If PUT is working read no further.

If you have a problem it is probably because the file mode needs to be
changed either of the file you are putting or of the directory, or PUT
isn't working. The error message you see should tell you which it is.

Anyway, I needed to install WEBDAV in order for the Apache 2 server
installed on this box would handle the PUT method. I was getting a 405
(METHOD NOT ACCEPTABLE).

To make this happen,

1) Load the webdav module in the load section of httpd.conf

LoadModule dav_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav.so

2) Add this line somewhere OUTSIDE any Directory or Location entities:

DavLockDB /tmp/DavLock

Make sure
3) Create the directory
mkdir /tmp/DavLock and
chmod 777 /tmp/DavLock

4) Add the line

Dav On inside the Location or Directory configuration section you want to use


Dav On


5) Make sure any directives are not disallowing the PUT or add
an .htaccess file with a specific

Allow from 192.168.1.xxx
#Your Polycom IP address


6) Close httpd.conf

7) sudo apachectl restart

Start testing and look at the eror and access logs. One test would be
to call up the phone's directory and add an entry while watching the
Apache access log and or looking at the date of the directory file
itself.

Apache Errors:

Unable to PUT new contents for /Polycom/0004f09099858-app.log. [403, #0]

403 = the file mode isn't allowing you to modify that file.

Could not open the lock database. [500, #400] The directory you
specified in the DavLockDB directive isn't right or isn't writable

If I say anything dumb or wrong, please comment and correct it

I have a problem: Excess credit for calls to the USA. I need to find someone serving in Iraq who would know how to install a free software phone on a PC and set it up to use this credit. If the setup is successful, maybe we can even get further donations, but for now I've got about 24 hours worth of FREE calls for servicemen and women to telephone in the USA.

The challenge is to find the person who can set up the software. Please send a D message on twitter to 'voipusers' if you can help.

Or send an email to the temporary address: voip-zeeek (-at-) SneakEmail.com

Or, post a comment here (it won't necessarily be published, but I will see it)

Who do I talk to?

Several months ago I needed to export a blog from Serendipity to WordPress. WordPress has an RSS import that works fairly well, only the images required a little extra work. Yesterday, a former customer asked about exporting their blog content to whatever their new host is using. It turned out to be Movable Type. It also turned out that this company didn't know how to import data into MT.

I Googled for "import to movable type" and immediately got back the results that you can see if you do the same. The MT manual page and data format schema are the first two results.


MT uses a text delimited format for imports, for some reason not caring that most blog software can export to RSS 2.0. Why make it easy if they're leaving us, eh? Because you should care about things like this, that's why.

It took about 15 minutes to write a (bad) php script that would spit out the contents of the blog, which is after all a mysql table like most. Once I did that, a global replace for image URLs would fix most of those. Here's the basic idea (after the connect):

// First the query, which will obviously vary depending on what the source is
$sql="SELECT title,author,timestamp,body,extended FROM serendipity_entries";

$result = mysql_query($sql,$db);

while( $row = mysql_fetch_array($result) ) {
echo "TITLE: " .$row['title'] . "\n";
echo "AUTHOR: ".$row['author']. "\n";
echo "DATE: " .date("m-d-Y h:i A", $row['timestamp']) . "\n";
echo "PRIMARY CATEGORY: $primary_category\n";
echo "CATEGORY: $category\n";
echo "-----\n";
echo "BODY:\n";
echo $row['body'];
echo "-----\n";

etc.

So the Twitter API changed and authentication no longer works in the same way. As a result, if you use Twhirl, you can't post to Twitter. If you are cross posting to Twitter from Laconica, it will still work. The symptom is that if you change your credentials for Twitter (Settings->Twitter) or if you are entering your Twitters creds for the first time, it will appear as if you are not giving the correct password.

A change in the Twitter API broke Laconica and Twhirl last night. Here's a quick way to get the issue fixed in Laconica before the updates are available. Nothing to do for Twhirl but wait. Continue reading "Twitter API change broke ... »

I was curious how long it would take to install my own microforum using Laconica of which I've spoken many, many times.

It took me about 16 minutes, but I cheated. I've installed it a few times before.

Get the latest version by grabbing the link at http://laconi.ca

Today, at the top of the list: 11/23/2008 Laconica_0.6.3

The version will of course advance as time goes on. Continue reading "Set up a Laconica Instance ... »

You can post to your Laconica instance via email. Extra steps are needed to use email-related functionality.
On *nix platform servers if you are running sendmail email is configured in the /etc/mail directory in files virtusertable and aliases. Skip the rest of this if you run Windows or qmail.

In /etc/mail/virtusertable either modify or add the line to route ANY unrecognized address to the Laconica mailerdaemon, which is not a daemon at all but a filter.

@yourdomain.tld laconica_mail_script

In /etc/mail/aliases add this line using the full path to the file in the Laconica distribution

laconica_mail_script: "|/full_path_to_your_installation_/scripts/maildaemon.php"

Make sure this file is executable and if it isn't, do this:

chmod +x path_to_it/maildaemon.php

What the above does is this: if an email arrives that is not for an address listed in virtusertable, it will be passed to the filter included in Laconica, a file called maildaemon.php

What the filter does is check the address against the list of valid users and if it finds it, and if the email is coming from the associated address, it publishes the email contents as a post.

Note that if your address is compromised, it's trivial to then spoof the From email and post to your account. Laconica should probably add a password to the title of emails sent to it.

Note in passing, you can run several Laconica instances on different domains on one server and use one domain to send the mail. All that is configured in the config.php file.

Speaking of email, Laconica currently uses email to send SMS. On my particular provider, all I get is a free SMS with "you've got mail" heads up, so it isn't too useful, but if your provider allows SMS via email, you might want to try this. In the meantime, the email post allows you to talk to your Laconica instance from your cell if browsing is not comfortable (i.e., you don't have a modern phone, which I do not) or if browsing is too expensive.

Let's back up and look at the most basic uses of a microforum built on Laconica.

Suppose we have a local Alpha-Roméo club. Further suppose they have an active forum built on the excellent the phpBB. What could our Elm Street Alpha Club ("ESAC") possibly do with a microforum?

Realtime news
First, insert feeds from the existing traditional forum into the ESAC Microforum using TwitterFeed. This excellent service will take an RSS feed and post it automatically on your Laconica instance. The forum titles with links to the posts are now available without visiting the forum. Suppose you're the admin of that forum. You can look at what's going on there simply by monitoring the Laconica instance.

Other client apps
I need to pause here to mention something I find crucial to the choice of Laconica as a platform: the fact that Twhirl works perfectly with it. If our club members want to be on Twitter and monitor their club site, they can do this in two different windows with Twhirl. The Twhirl client also refreshes automatically and takes up less space in a window. Continue reading "Basic Microforum Features ... »

Even if you use only Twitter and have some close friends, co-workers or your own company, you would want to set up an OpenMicroBlogging site that communicates with Twitter. Here's why.

Evan pointed out to me just now on http://identi.ca that Laconica isn't meant to be a front end for Twitter. I'm just pointing out that it can be used that way, that it's a nice feature but not the principal interest of Laconica.

Twitter is not under your control, it has outages (like anything in the cloud). If you set up Laconica (or other software) instance on your own server,

Members can configure their Tweets to be sent to Twitter AND keep them archived and they remain searchable on your server.

Members can subscribe to friends on Twitter or indenti.ca and see their activity on your/their server.

You can set up a "network" of these communities on the model of say, branch offices of your company or your family.

You can communicate with any other Laconica instance.

Currently, Laconica works with Twhirl, which is an excellent thing. If you like TweetDeck (in beta, but looks very promising) you should consider visiting their site and voting for Laconica support.



Laconica isn't necessarily to replace Twitter, it is a tool, like Twhirl or Tweetdeck, to be that can used with Twitter. It shines on its own, of course, but the use with Twitter makes it easier for some.

I just installed an instance from scratch to see how long it took. I tried to document what I did here: http://tr.im/ageless but I probably missed some things.

Laconica remains my favorite choice today only because of Twhirl support and its stability to date. OpenMicroBlogger.org is certainly a viable choice if you want to access only on the web. Their plugin archetecture is a winning idea and a whole ecosystem could evolve around that in this day of published API.

The rest of this will be about the name (again) and making more people aware of Laconica. Continue reading "Twitter Rocks: Long live ... »

If #magpie or other monetizing services bother you, but you don't want to drop people because the rest of their stuff is of interest, we'll need to be able to drop messages containing certain tags.

I think this is as valid for any keyword, since tweets (or mu) are short, just allow an unlimited list of keywords which, if encountered, "drop" (don't display in main feed) that post.

So, the next time people start with the bacon or the iphone, you can avoid allt hat by having a client that culls the posts. Does TweetDeck do this? (yet?)

La nouvelle version de Chez DiDi est ici : http://didi.declic.com

Elle est moderne, se branche avec Twitter (si ça te branche), SMS, email.

Il existe une appli pour Mac ou Windows qui s'appelle Twhirl. Twhirl permet d'ouvrir une petite fênetre sur DiDi qui t'avertis quand il y a du nouveau.

Voici Twhirl avec le serveur de Chez DiDi. Il est très simple d'installer et ensuite, plus de problème pour se tenir au courant dans la journée et pour nous tenir au courant de tes pensées !

Viens t'inscrire et télécharger ton image avatar et remplis ton profil. Ensuite, rajouter tes infos Twitter si tu veux suivre tes amis or bien diffuser tes postes sur Twitter.

Marquer des mots cls avec le signe # pour les rendre plus facile à suivre, par exemple, #sujet.

A Bientôt Chez DiDi

I'm not a blogger. And now to prove it, I'll post in this blog, again.

I'm not a social media expert or a web site designer. I don't have a zillion followers on Twitter (randulo) and no one cares what I say on Friendfeed or anywhere else. So what do I know?

I know that my company got its best account, one we still service, on a Compuserve forum in about 1996. I answered a single post on that forum, emailed and went to see the person and we've been working together for the last 12 years. I know how forums work having written my own (in C and in PHP) and having set up most common open source forums. I've maintained large instances of phpBB for the last 15 years. Fifteen years on the Internet is like saying, "founded in 1855" in other businesses.

Continue reading "What do we know about ... »

Let me count the ways

#1: One real address is for known business relationships and trusted, clued friends and family. For clueless friends and family, use #2. This real address is for you. It's your professional address if you are a small business owner. It is not info@ or contact@ or any other role account. It is your name or some readable and recognizable variation of it. It can be first name only like fred@flintstones.com or the more formal fred.flintstone@test.com. Capitalization helps make it more readable such as FredFlintstone@heh.com. You do not use this address to inquire about dance lessons or sign up for the NY Times site. You'll use #3 for this.

#2: One or more generic address such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. or even a paid account at something like http://Fastmail.fm. Paying will get you better filtering, more options and less ads. Gmail is probably the best free option around today.

#3: A method for easily creating "throwaway" emails. One such service is http://trashmail.net which is fine. I choose to use http://sneakemail.com which costs about $3 per month but has a lot of flexibility. Sneakemail lets you make up addresses as you go. For example, a newspaper site asks for an email. You give them your made up one from Sneakemail or the one from Trashmail.net which you set to expire in one week. Since both Sneakemail and Trashmail allow creation of addresses on the fly, you can actually have thousands (hence the title). I've certainly created several hundred.

If you keep control over your email by making sure you wait until you know the level of trust of your correspondents before revealing your true email (#1), you will lead a peaceful, happy and prosperous life, at least where email is concerned. Continue reading "You need at least 1,000 ... »