To that end, I joined the Philadelphia Domain of the Camarilla, which has games on Saturdays in the Philly area. I went out for a Requiem game, and to my surprise, it didn’t suck! And the people didn’t suck! I’m now playing in both the Requiem and Sabbat game (ie Old and New World Vampire), and it’s a blast! Now I’m in charge of their website, and trying to get the word out (*cough* *cough*)

If you’re in the Philly area, in to Roleplaying, and around on a Saturday, look us up for a game. You (probably) won’t regret it.

Today I saw this on Reddit. Take a look at the linked picture. Basically, it’s Fsck saying that it’s too hard to not store passwords in plaintext, and then an email saying that they were hacked, and lost tons of data.

This is David’s original post. I went to go comment, but his site is down…

Btw, David, that’s the difference between Linode and Fsckvps.

I posted a thread on reddit asking the same question, so if you have any suggestions, I’d prefer you post there (but here is also OK if you’re Web 2.0 phobic).

Of course, the obvious elephant in the room is “why not Ubuntu artwork/marketing”? She’d like to, but from our impression it’s mostly “post something complete and maybe we’ll use it”. If she can do graphic design for Ubuntu, while getting direction and feedback, she’d be more than happy to.

Here are some pictures (courtesy of Christina):

The rest of the pictures can be found here.

While at TCF, I gave a presentation on VOIP, Asterisk, and FreePBX. As promised, here are the presentation slides.

I’ve also written a how-to on how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX in Ubuntu. The how-to can be found here. If I’ve left out a step, done something incorrectly, or if you have a better, cleaner way of doing something, feel free to edit the article, or let me know. I’m open for putting the how-to elsewhere (the Ubuntu wiki, voipinfo.org, etc) if people want me to.

1. Write a FreePBX plugin that automatically creates trunks and inbound routes for people using your service.
2. In the process, do the following
   1. Blindly try to install curl (using yum. On my Ubuntu machine.)
   2. Include FreePBX and your own function files with hardcoded paths for Trixbox, instead of using relative paths.
   3. Make tar.gz backups of my /etc/asterisk directory and quietly add them to your modules directory. Make sure not to do any checks for file size or free disk space.
   4. Write to my sip_general_custom.conf and extensions_custom.conf (bad FreePBX extension! bad!)
3. Use PHP Obfuscator on your code, and copyright it, so that no one can see all the horrible things you’re doing to their system, or figure out why it doesn’t work.

• I installed the extension and saw the paths didn’t work.
• I looked at the code, and was appalled that they obfuscated it.
• I symlinked /var/www/html so that it would install, then found out none of their actions (adding trunks, adding inbound routes) actually worked.
• After seeing some of the fun things it does, I’m quite glad it didn’t work at all!

Thanks Voicepulse! Your rates are good, the voice quality seems great, but emailing you a signed contract and waiting for “verification” was annoying, and I wouldn’t touch your FreePBX extension with 9 1/2 foot poll. Your customers (including me) would probably clean up your mistakes if you GPL’d it. The only downside would be the possibility of helping someone you didn’t intend to.

patch -p1 < fms-3.5-ubuntu.patch

That gets it to install. I’ve not tried running it though. If you run into problems running it, please let me know.

Overall, Sunday was much slower than Saturday — we gave out around 75 CDs, as opposed to 300 on Saturday. However, this is to be expected; despite their best efforts, TCF is very much a one day event. However, on Sunday we still talked to a lot of interested potential users, so it was definitely worth being there both days.

I also bought a rack server. It’s 2U, dual Xeon 2.8Ghz, 2 GB of ram, and a 80GB SATA hard drive. Cost? 90 bucks. This was a steal, except for one problem: I don’t own a rack! I was later amused by the juxtaposition of me building a microatx server to use 40 watts of power and make no noise, and then sitting a 2U rack server next to it, which consumes 300+ Watts of power and sounds like an airplane. Lucky for me, my boss was interested in it, so it’ll be our new Asterisk server in the coming months.

Overall, I was pleased by our outcome this year, and will consider going back next year. Next year, I’d like to try to have multiple presentations on Linux and Linux-related topics. Perhaps I can get someone else to do the general Linux/Ubuntu stump speech, and focus on a more specific topic — such as Bash, PHP, or Asterisk.

In other news, I’m almost done with University forever. I have about 2 weeks more of wrapping up work, and then I graduate on the 17th. After that, I’ll only be working full time, so I’ll have some time to pursue actually developing open source software, instead of just shilling it to crowds

(Author’s Note: Wondering why these pictures have so few people? I was the cameraman, so these are from times when I could actually stop shilling Ubuntu CDs and take a picture).

I brought 200 Printed Gutsy CDs, and I planned on bringing 200 burned Hardy CDs — unfortunately, mtx had other plans, so I couldn’t get my media changer to burn more than one CD before losing permissions on the cd burner. There were 5 machines there, burning Hardy CDs continuously — they were still going as fast as we could burn them.

At 1:20, I left to give my presentation on Ubuntu. As Matt mentions here, early in the presentation, the projector went to sleep on me. He doesn’t mention that a) the projector was limited to 640×480 resolution, b) the internet was borked in that building. I didn’t get to show off everything I wanted to, but overall it went well. As I left, I led a train of around 20 people back to our LoCo Table.

Overall, today went very well; we gave out around 300 CDs total, and, more importantly to me, talked to a lot of people about Linux groups in their area (I expect a rather good turnout for the next LUG/IP meeting). Tomorrow will be just as fun, albeit a bit slower than today turned out to be.