By Travis Whidden on 8/23/2008 7:20 AM

 

wow.. just wow.

By Travis Whidden on 8/20/2008 6:46 AM

 

Just nuts. 

By Travis Whidden on 8/13/2008 6:58 AM

Yea, ummm... I am down with this.  

 

 

I just put in a Cisco 3640 router with several FastEthernet ports.   Going to use my Cisco 806 at my office.

I pay for the top tier service from Cox, but my mom and father in law have the low service and they get these same speeds?  Well, I am still very happy with this.

Maybe one day, we will have 100/100 speeds.. or even better 1000/1000 speeds!

 

Travis

By Travis Whidden on 5/2/2008 3:33 PM

OK, so many of you may have ran into the same problem that I have had trying to set up a number from the sip provider VoiceStick.  My specific application requires that I buy 50 - 200 DID numbers. I did a lot of searching, and found a few providers that I wanted to try.   These people at VoiceStick were very helpful and seemed to have the most support for non-24 hour services from what I could find anyways.

Now, the only things I can see being a problem with VoiceStick is that they don't do the following:

1. They give you an IP address instead of a DNS name to point at their server.  If they ever change, well, lets just say you would be in trouble until you found out about the change
2. They don’t have any kind of network fail over option so like if their network goes down, or they cant hit your server, it wont forward to another number
3. No 24 hour support options - If you are down over the weekend, lets hope they know about it.

A huge advantage is that you can buy there .99 cent DID number, and only pay one cent per min on the usage.  So if you have a call center, a number that cost more means you are doing some good calls on it. Lets hope the telemarketers stay away.

After some short and quick email correspondences with VoiceStick, I got the details needed to setup my TrixBox with their SIP server.  It worked right away, and the quality seems to be very nice!

Settings:

 

Now, the kicker is you need to adjust your /etc/host file to include the following line:

72.5.80.116     i2telecom.com

Once that is setup, your system will be registered without any issues!  In and outbound work just fine.

Hope this helps --- lets just hope they don't change the IP address of the server any time soon!

By Travis Whidden on 2/15/2008 11:16 PM

I get so irritated when I read critics from web sites such as rottentomato.com where people say "there are to many plot holes" or "not realistic".  the "ending leaves for another movie"

WHO CARES! 

I went tonight with April and two friends of ours.  We all really liked it.  Maybe set set the bar really low because of these review, but overall, we felt like it was a good, adventurous movie.  People need to get off their stool and try to enjoy the movie a little bit.  IT NOT REAL... get over it!  People expect for a movie to be real even though they are walking into a sci-fi type flick.

Anyhow, anyone wanting to enjoy an adventure just needs to go see it. if you question it, go see a matinee movie.

For those friends of mien who have opposite film likings... don’t go see it ;)

Sit back, relax, and enjoy a fun movie.

By Travis Whidden on 1/27/2008 8:35 PM

Lol, well, we went and saw Rambo tonight. I knew it was going to be corny, but guys like lots of blood and gore.  April said it was going to suck, but she went with me on this one. I have totally forgot what the other Rambo movies were about.  After watching this one, I actually want to go and rent them just to see if I was missing anything. The story starts out kind of slow. Just building the plot for the movie.  SS is just getting old! SS is obviously going to be the hero of this movie. This movie was FULL of guts and gore.  Actually, that made the movie even better!  I love when they pull out the 50 cal and I love the use of the sniper rifle by one of the other characters of this movie.  April went in giving this a D, and she bumped it up to a C.  I give this movie a C+ / B- but its worth seeing, especially with a bunch of guy friends. 

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By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 1:43 AM

Its not often you go to a movie and hear real computer terms. I am so pleased when someone that knows nothing about computers actually uses real terms instead of making stuff up (like in Firewall with Harrison Ford).   I was glued to the screen at the start of this movie as they talked about DNS servers, TTL, Bots, etc.  It really did build some credibility to the story. The movie itself was actually quite good.  I loved how there are some clues in it that tell you information later in the movie. I also like how they didnt hold back on some things. There were some gore scenes.   I did hear something about "net neutrality" in it, but I couldn't figure out if they were saying that its needed or not.  All I know is that it should stay like it is now. I would give this movie a good B+/A-.  I really enjoyed it, and so did April, and she isn't even a computer person. Worth a night movie ticket and a DVD rental when it comes out ;)

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By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 1:38 AM

Well, I have been quite pleased with ModernBill lately.  There are still some quirks.. but overall I am very pleased.  It has handled our business the way we have expected.  Now, the hardest part is to get all of our customers moved.  Our old billing system is so screwed up, that its hard not to have Garbage in, Garbage out.  I am waiting on a new release of their software which will include some long needed fixes.  They still have problems with Plesk and creating 2 or more accounts for one user.  I have done a lot of complaining about it, but we are not very pleased with Plesk anyways, so we may dump it. We noticed that hostgator is running an older version of the software (4.x) and we are running 5.x.  That made us happy to see that a major competitor to us is using software that has been "questionable" at times.   I am hoping that this will continue to become a solid product over the years, as we are making a considerable commitment to use it and move all of our customers into it.

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By Travis Whidden on 1/26/2008 12:17 AM

I am seriously happy that I could move my vista partition to another hard disk.  I recently just bought a 750 gig Western Digital that has nearly double the read and write speed.  I didn't want to go and re-install Windows Vista for the 3rd time this month.  My new computer is just smoking fast, but hey, disk IO is very important also.

So, I did a quick Google search, and I found some people saying it could not be done, reinstall.. blah blah.  Then I saw in a thread.. it was the very last post.. "use Gparted".  I was like "what is gparted" so my Google search changed to looking for this new tool.

I downloaded it. It was an ISO. I burned it to my CD, and away I went.

Now, at this point, I was prepared to re-install windows if it came down to it.  I would recommend you do a backup, although I think you will be ok without.

The program includes a screen shot option, but I didn't use it.  I am going to give you the instructions from memory if you are trying to do this yourself.

Some more links before we get started:
GParted home page:  http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php
GParted screen shots: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php

 

1. Download "GParted" from sourceforge.net: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828
2. Burn the ISO (using something like Nero)
3. Shut down your computer
4. Install your new hard drive
5. Make sure your computer is set to boot of CD-ROM - keep the freshly burned disk in your cd drive.
6. Let the program boot up. I selected the first option, and things went perfectly.
7. A nice GUI will boot.. and you are now using the GParted tools.  This is very powerful and you can toy around with some cool stuff including a nice shell
8. Go to the disk that contains your Windows Vista Partition (/dev/sda1 usually)
9. Right click on the disk, and click "Copy"
10. Go to the destination disk that you want Vista to be on (or any OS really) and right paste.
11. Apply the changes.  This will take a while, depending on the size and data content of your disks.  It took my 30 gigs of storage about 10 - 20 minutes to transfer
12. Right click on the new disk and select "flags" and click on the "boot" check mark which will make that partition bootable.
13. Double click on the exit button at the top left.  Shut down
14. Open up your computer, and put your primary disk on SATAII0 or what ever port you can to make it be the first drive in your system
15. Attempt to boot your machine.  If your windows vista starts up and throws a huge error that it cant find the boot files.. dont sweat it.  If it boots right up.. you dont need the rest of this tutorial.

The following is if you rebooted and your windows system did not start.  Just whip out your Vista Install disk.  You will love this new feature of their installer.

1. Pop in your Vista CD
2. Boot into the Vista Installer
3. Click on "Repair Windows" -- This is cool. It detected my problem, and fixed my system to point at the right device.  My old windows was Dynamic, so I assume it pointed the boot to the new basic disk.
4. Click on "update and restart"
5. Pull your Vista CD out of your CD drive.

If all worked out.. you will now be on the way to booting your Windows Vista on your new hard drive.

I used this tool GParted to also resize my 60 gig partition to 120 gigs.   I don't usually install anything on the OS partition, but stuff that has to be re-installed on a Windows re-install usually gets placed on that drive.

My admin at my hosting company (www.amhosting.com) will be very pleased that I used Linux to fix a Windows Issue. He is hardcore, and is always getting me to use new linux tool sets.  He has saved my windows windows machines a couple of times using other cool Linux tools. I am actually becoming very fond of Linux.  If I was not obsessed with the new UI and performance of Vista, I may be doing an Ubuntu desktop.

Good luck.  This really was a cool tool to use. 

By Travis Whidden on 1/25/2008 10:48 PM

I am nerding out here.  I recently just bought a Core 2 Quad Core 2.4.  The price for these processors has dropped amazingly low.  I am a huge newegg.com fan also.  I bought everything I have from them.   Even pickup up a nice Gigabyte P35 board.. with 8 SATAII ports on it. Well, this post isn't about my computer, but more about my new hard drive I just picked up.  I was reading online that this hard drive is out performing some of the top line hard drives.   I almost bought the Raid Ready drive for my personal machine (well, I did, but I canceled it).  The only real difference is the firmware on the Raid Raid drive designed for hardware raids (plays nicely with it), the nice 5 year warrantee instead of 3, and the fact that they only do 8 hours of testing instead of 24 on this drive.  Well.. that's fine with me. I did a full Q/A check on it using badblocks in linux. So, here is the cool stuff. My Computer Spec: Quad Core 2.4 4 GB 1066 DDR2 Memory 1.75 TB storage (Would have been 2, but a 250 died on

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