Da’ Pen.
I know, to many this will seem random and silly. But I found an excellent pen! Random grab at target when picking up a Moleskine. Not only is it a great little aluminum bodied clip on but it has a rubber nub on the end that works with capacitive touchscreens (ie. your phone.) as a stylus. Best writing pen I’ve personally used. The stylus works great on my Galaxy Note II. The ink wicks-dry just write on the moleskine paper and doesn’t smudge. Couldn’t be happier. Comfortable in the hand. Excellent pen. Sadly the manufacturer, The Board Dudes, do not have a link to the product to share here. It’s from their The Write Dudes line and I’ve already tossed the packaging and it doesn’t identify itself on the pen. Target doesn’t list it on their website either. Hopefully it’s not from a discontinued line or something. The stylus makes me think it should be relatively new. Excellent pen though. Gonna go buy two more when I get a chance because theirs no identify information on the refill either… and I don’t want to lose this pen. heh.
It’s amazing how carriers differ in their handling of local number portability. MagicJack essentially just pretends they don’t have to do it. We’ve not had one, out of dozens, of requests successfully port to us. The other VOIP type providers usually have a Firm Order Completion Date (FOCD) within hours. Comcast takes a week or so, and occasionally has issues. CentryLink? They were good. Lately they deny EVERY port with “Account cancelled.” Then we have to have customer call and complain. Then they each get rejected for “Account frozen” until the customer complains and threatens to call the Utilities Commission which gets the port to FOCD in a matter of minutes. Are DID’s becoming so hard to come by that it’s worth this fight? I don’t know, we get ours from Verizon for cheap.
So… we moved our first commercial PBX customer away from one of our vendors to our self hosted solution based on VMWare, OpenSIPs, and FreePBX. From my perspective it worked exactly like we wanted. Our Network Administrator was on-site doing some other upgrades and a misconfigured router made it look like it wasn’t… but once that was resolved everything just behaved as expected.
Once again another FLOSS project well researched and tested “just works” at implementation time. Love it. Now to go do a dance in the parking lot.
Finished interoperability testing for the new trunks through Onvoy at work today. Only a couple of weeks into the OpenSIPS ebootcamp training and we’ve not gone over anything I needed to get this stuff running but through some great users of OpenSIPS I’ve been able to figure out enough to do simple dynamic routing (inbound for DID’s and out for all the calls) and things are working great. Now we can host as many FreePBX implementations as we can sell and be set to go. Onvoy was quite helpful and OpenSIPS is doing it’s job admirably. Yay to a whole new product at work.
Work has finally decided that it is time to move forward with our self-hosted voip products. We start Interop-Testing with 360.net early next week. Built out two OpenSIPS servers to handle failover/load balancing which will then feed all of our products as simple un-authenticated (Secured by IP) SIP Trunks. We already have about 4 commercial accounts that will be hosted PBX’s and then it will be time to build out our residential product. The boss has chosen VoipNow from 4psa. Looks like a nice robust product.
Work is also setting me up for the OpenSIPS eBootCamp that starts on 9/10. So I’ll be well trained moving forward. That’s nice.
Recently gave Build 32 from the Android Open Kang Project… and it’s nice to have an ICS ROM that works solid enough for use as a daily driver. Only issues have been that there’s no video in Netflix (rarely use that) and for some reason asking it to reboot always loads CWM. I seem to be alone on that CWM one. Other than that… nice solid ROM. Games work well. Camera works. Meant to test bluetooth last night but forgot to. We’ll see how it goes, but so far… very good.
Been playing with OpenSIPS for our outbound trunking needs. That way we can make decisions, based on dialed number, as to which of our telco providers to route down. Should be nice. So far it’s going well. Have the pbx servers communicating with OpenSIPS for the outbound calls. Working on inbound and the dynamic routing functions next. Good times. Insane what you can accomplish with OpenSIPS.
Built out another PBX for work. Used the FreePBX Distro this time… which comes with 2.10 by default. Our existing templates for Endpoint Configuration Manager no longer function so I get the fun of digging through them and getting them functioning. Fun times ahead.
FreePBX makes things so simple. Setup a sip trunk from SipStation. Works marvelously. Added in a couple of extensions. It allows me to use my Google Voice number as the outgoing CID ensuring everyone stays calling the right digits. Now my GV number rings my home and my cell simultaneously, and all outbound calls from either show up as coming from my GV number. Nice and flexible. Only issue that had to be resolved was I couldn’t call to my GV number because I was calling as my GV number. Setup one additional route for just that outbound number and changed the CID so it shows up as it’s actual CID. Problem solved.
Needed some resources for a presence online. Went ahead and purchased another VPS from empire-hosting.net. Hands down the best deal for me I could find. Unbelievable support and plenty of stability and resources.
