We need your help. Chris was actually going to throw this out. Aaron came to the rescue, preventing what would have been a tragic, tragic loss.
So now that we’ve got it (safely out of Chris’ possession), we feel obligated to do something clever with it. We need suggestions. What do you suggest we do with it? (Whatever we do, I’ll post pictures.)
Friday when I stopped to get gas in Acworth, I saw one of the Google Maps camera cars. Google has been sending cars driving around certain metro areas to give a photographic view to Google Maps users.
It’s a pretty cool feature, and I’ve often wondered about how these cars are setup. This one was a Chevy Cobalt (with California tags). There was a laptop mounted in the front seat (like a police car might have), and the wires went through the back door window on the driver’s side up to the camera equipment on the car roof.
While my gas was pumping (and while the Google guy was still inside), I grabbed my camera and got a few pictures. You can click on any of these for a bigger version.
First, a look at the equipment mounted on the roof.
And then a few shots of the car.
I suppose that maybe this means that street view photos of Acworth are coming soon (though I’m not sure the world is ready for pictures of everything in Acworth).
A little tip for the Exchange admins among us…
In Exchange 2007, if you add an address for a user as an additional address (under the user properties dialog), when the user receives mail at that address, the “To:” line shows as his primary address. If you add the address as an email Distribution Group, the user will see the secondary address in the “To:” line.
Why does this work this way? I don’t know…why does Microsoft do half of the weird things they do? But at least if you’re an Exchange admin, and you have people in your organization with “Chief” and “Officer” in their title who care about this issue, now you’ll be able to fix it for them.
Mom always said that all that procrastination would catch up with me. I guess she was right.
It seems that I didn’t renew my domain registration in time. So if you tried to visit moreron.com earlier today and got adsense ads for Ron Paul, Ron Jeremy, some other Ron Davis, or “more” of something else, I apologize.
All is back in order now, and we’re good for at least another year.
We were sitting at lunch yesterday, and an interesting idea came up: a call center podcast.
We have a product that’s fairly young in its life cycle. It will likely be one of our corporate focus points in 2008, which is great because I really believe there’s a tremendous potential for the product.
As we move forward with this product, we need to know things like:
We record phone calls already, and they’re reviewed for things like training employees and improving our call center staff. For that we use Asterisk to record the calls to a .gsm file. (I can’t say enough about the awesomeness of Asterisk.)
I parse Asterisk’s queue log and store the records in a MySQL database. This allows me to look up information about calls and calculate things like average hold time, number of calls taken, average talk time per customer service representative. It lets us be proactive about customer service (which is always a good thing).
To do a podcast, I’d need to convert those .gsm files to .mp3 files. For that, I used SoX and LAME, whose command line awesomeness allows me to script the conversion of the files. So I do a SQL query to get the calls that came into that product’s queue, grab the .gsm file for each call, convert it to mp3 (if it hasn’t been converted already), and generate the XML for iTunes.
Now the appropriate management can just subscribe to that podcast (hosted internally on our network here) and be able to easily listen to those support calls. It’s quite cool.
Oh, and for anybody out there who’s looking for a way to use SoX and LAME to convert files from gsm to mp3, here’s the command I came up with:
sox -q filename.gsm -t wav -s -w - | lame –silent –resample 44.1 -h - filename.mp3
I tried calling Comcast today. I needed to speak with someone who can talk to me about network abuse issues. The first guy I called said “network - as in the internet?” I swear to you all, that’s a direct quote. The second guy I called hung up on me.
If anybody who reads this knows how to get a human within Comcast’s network abuse department (or, as they call it, Customer Security Assurance), please let me know.
This is one of those posts that I hope ends up in search engines so that somebody will find it and get the answer that I had trouble finding.
I wanted to have my Facebook status appear on my blog by using the Wordpress RSS widget. I went to Facebook and found the RSS feed for my status updates, but when I put that URL in the RSS widget, it never showed on the blog. When I went back into the widget’s properties, it said that it “could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL”
After tinkering with it a bit, I went to feedvalidator.org to see if something really was wrong with the feed. Turns out that it wasn’t validating. So I logged into feedburner, burned a new feed using the Facebook status update RSS URL, and now it works.
I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft. I like them more than I like Hillary Clinton, but, honestly, that’s not saying much. That said, we migrated to Microsoft Exchange a while back, and I actually like the platform. It integrates well with Active Directory, and it’s fairly easy to manage (once you get over the learning curve of figuring out the Microsoft way of naming things).
So, yeah, Microsoft got one right on the corporate email solution.
The problem I’ve had is that for months (6, maybe) all of the Microsoft documentation on Exchange references Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1. The problem is that Service Pack 1 has not been available. It’s a massive service pack (800MB) with major GUI changes (meaning they put a GUI where previously there wasn’t one).
So what do you do when you want to know about how to create/manage a public folder? or grant “Send as” rights for one user on a separate mailbox? You do the rational thing - you Google it. And when Google takes you to the proper page, the Microsoft KB article tells you the GUI implementation of Service Pack 1. What it doesn’t tell you is that you really have to run some ambiguous “cmdlet” (commandlet) in the Exchange Management Console.
Well, no more. This week Microsoft got around to releasing Service Pack 1. Let there be much rejoicing in the land. I downloaded it - all 800MB of it - and I’m all ready to install it, now that I’ve actually got the file.
Now I’ll wait the standard 2-3 weeks after a Microsoft release before actually installing it. If any of you fine folks find yourself in a situation where you are installing Microsoft Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1, let me know how it goes.
About a month ago, Chris pointed me to a cool Wordpress plugin that formats your site for the iPhone. I didn’t immediately jump on this because I don’t have an iPhone (so it doesn’t directly impact my life) and because the iPhone has the best (by far) mobile browser available.
Today I finally got around to installing the plugin and setting it all up. Very impressive. You need the plugin file as well as a theme. (You don’t actually activate the theme; you just put it in the Wordpress themes directory.) So yeah, if you’ve got an iPhone, now you can read my rants much more easily.
You can get this (pretty awesome plugin) here from ContentRobot.com
