gundy dot org

There is this new thing called “broadband” and together with this other new thing called “bittorrent” you never have to download things at <56k again!

I love 2006!

I’ve been busy this weekend hacking together a little something I call ZoolTone.

What is it you ask?

It’s a Firefox extension (my first, but not last) that will allow you to “Click and Dial” phone numbers on a web page. It adds a pretty little icon after every phone number it finds. When you click the icon, it sends a message to Asterisk to make the call. Asterisk then rings your phone with the caller id of the number you clicked. When you answer, it connects you to the other party. It should be pretty sweet for offices that run Asterisk.

It’s called ZoolTone because it’s written with JavaScript and XUL which is pronounced “zool.” I kept all the logic in the backend to make it easy to add Thunderbird support later. It would be so sweet to be reading a business email and call that person simply by clicking on the phone number at the bottom of page.

With real work starting on Monday, this will get neglected for a bit. I do hope to have a working version out in a week or so. Any longer would kill me.

This site has some very cool VoIP news/information. The creator of Asterisk and Gaim talks about Asterisk teaming with Google to bringing Jingle to Asterisk. What does it matter?

Jingle uses the same Jabber protocol between clients for voice that it does for IM. With Jingle, the actual content of the call, the media stream , travels directly between GoogleTalk end points. The signaling used to setup and control the call travels across the Jabber infrastructure. So as those Jabber servers federate with Google for IM, they implicitly create a federated framework for carrying VoIP calls as well.

I have a feeling that we are on the cusp of something very, very cool.

The planet is looking good. We’re now pulling down 40 feeds. The Google maps hacks are up (you web two.oh heads can trick them out if you like - I’m still web one.zero). However, people need to get their remaining information to me. And there are other Utah locals that should be on there still.

Here are your jobs…

• Get me your missing info.
• Send a headshot if you haven’t yet.
• Get your lazy Open Source friends to aggregate on the planet.

We could use some Google juice. When Elijah mentioned our planet on planet.gnome.org, we got tons of visits from that. Jayce^ and fozz also sent a lot of traffic our way. As more visitors see the planet, more visitors will discover your site. Consider linking to the planet to bring it out of darkness!

No, I didn’t get Google Maps integrated into Utah Open Source Planet (been *way* to busy at work). But, while messing around with it, I noticed my neighborhood has been updated. Here you see (bottom right) the plot where my house was built.

Anyway, If you are on the Planet, please send me your longitude and latitude so I can place you on the map. Point us to your home, work or a park near by. The best site to find your longitude and latitude is GeoCoder.

UPDATE:

I should have been more clear. Can I get longitude and latitude like this?

lon = ##.######
lat = -###.######

Email them to gabe(a)gundy.org.

Let’s hope that we can get a sweet Planet going on for Utah’s Open Source community! If you are reading this via the Planet and are an Open Source blogger, join us!

“Fedora Core 5 Final” torrents from the official site have been posted! It’ll be interesting to see if the ISOs are exactly the same as those posted by unofficial sites yesterday (not that I really care).

file: bordeaux-binary-i386
size: 3,296,658,079 (3.1 GB)
dest: /home/gabe/store/bordeaux-binary-i386
progress:______________________________________
status: finishing in 18:04:55 (0.4%)
speed: 41.9 KB/s down - 140.2 KB/s up
totals: 13.2 MB down - 33.1 MB up error(s):

Everyone knows that the best Free/free desktop is GNOME :) But did you know that GNOME 2.14 just came out?

Get a high-level preview of all the goodness.

There is a new Planet hosted at OpenClue for Open Source hackers/users/zealots who are active in the Utah community. Why would OpenClue host this? From their web page:

We believe in Open Source. We believe in sharing information.”

Let’s hope that sharing these feeds will make Utah’s Open Source community a little bit stronger :)

D’oh! Bug #34606” says it all! This is bad, bad, bad. Wow, what an oversite!

I’m currently running Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386 on my single user desktop. Let’s see how I do…

gabe@office:~$ sudo grep MyPassword /var/log/* -R
/var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword
/var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword

Ouch, Ouch, Ouch! The admin’s password in PLAIN TEXT! Oh, this is embarrassing for Ubuntu! It gets worse still. Check out the permissions on the file:

gabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat

gabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat

That’s right, world readable. Doesn’t get much worse then that. Well, it’s only locally exploitable. Little consolation!

“Welcome to my server. Would you like to own it?”