Brent’s Thoughts

i have been setting up the Teleyapper Nerdvittles Script at work on our Asterisk server and was really surprised that there was no web interface for putting entries into it.  Since they recommended using phpadmin to enter numbers and I knew that would never fly I wrote a little cgi script that would work for it.

You can download it at the bottom of this post.  You should be able to just plop it and proccgi into your /cgi-bin directory on your webserver, take the .txt off of the end of it and edit the block starting at the fourth line.  There you can set the DNS entry for your asterisk server, set the account used to login to mysql, set the password for mysql, and set the database used by teleyapper.

The scipt does require proccgi to work as it is written in shell.  I have attached my copy that is compiled for 32 bit Linux.  If you need it compiled for something else, or just don’t trust me then you can use the above URL to get the source.  It is easy to compile if you have gcc on your box.

Callees CGI Script

proccgi

**EDIT** After I posted this to a thread on Nerdvittles site, it looks like they might add it into the distribution of Teleyapper.  So that is pretty cool.

Hello all, I just thought that I would write in with an update on Julie. She is precious. She is sleeping less during the day and better at night. Occasionally she is cranky for no reason and she prefers to be held all the time, but other than that she is a joy. I guess I have lucked out with a good baby. Currently, I am spending my days maintaining the house, feeding and tending to Julie, watching TV and working ever so slowly on plans for a thesis. I have emailed a few specialists with questions on something I wanted to try. If they write me back and indicate that it might be worth a shot to try it, I will start my experiments once I get back from maternity leave. Current stumbling blocks include a lack of being able to access older articles online. Most items before 1997 are only available on hard copy at the library.

Currently the plan is to go to work 4 days/week at 9.5 hours/day and try to take Wed off so that I can watch Julie on Wed leaving my mom to watch her on Monday and Tues and Linda to watch her on Thurs and Fri. At least I guess that is the plan… As a fall back I have filled out an application to the daycare at Western. I get preference due to being staff at Western, but I get moved farther down the waiting line since Brent and I aren’t finacially bad off and Julie is white with no disabilities. I don’t know if she would get in at Western, there are only 8 spots for birth-2 years.

Taken from bash.org:

<Nukleon> the greek “hell” was cold
<Nukleon> like the norse
<@amz> the christian hell is also pretty cold, compared to its heaven
<Nukleon> uh
<Nukleon> wut?
<Nukleon> heaven is bliss
<@amz> it has liquid sulfur in it, so it can’t be over 400 celsius… on the other hand, the bible describes the sun in heaven shining like 7 suns, each 7 times as bright
<@amz> which gives an estimate of 2000-3000 celsius

That was just too interesting. I had to post it.

I just thought that I would write down a few thoughts regarding my childhood and what kind of childhood I hope Julie will have. As a child, my sister and I were always going places. Some of my fondest memories are of my grandfather’s yard with all the flowers, trees, colored rocks and paths, not to mention the swing sets or the gazebo where we had many a “tea party” or played cards. We also played a lot with our neighbors Shelly and Debbie, we collected flowers or made decorations for our little “club house” (a space secluded in their yard, on two sides their was a fence on one side there was a shed of some kind and the other side was partially open only slightly blocked by a tree). It was a perfect place for a little “club”. We also had our cousins to play with, Janie and Danny. They lived on a larger piece of ground and there were a lot of interesting places to hide. We often played hide and seek or threw a ball around. Dad took us a lot of places too. We went to the pool, any fairs or parks that were within driving distance, out to play putt putt golf, out to Hubers Orchard and Winery to go on horseback rides or to the petting zoo. We also tried a little badminton in our backyard, just for a little while; we weren’t that fond of it. It seems like he was always available whenever and wherever we wanted to go. Now, as a working adult, I wonder how he had the time.

I always figured that I would do the same kinda things with my child, but I wonder about that sometimes. My grandfather was right up the road (he walked to our place on Sundays). Both sets of Julie’s grandparents live about an hour away. We don’t have any other family that is close, no cousins to play with. I don’t know of anyone in our neighborhood looking to have children anytime soon. The closest public pool is in Glasgow I guess, but even so, Brent and I will both be at work during the day during the summer. Hubers Orchard and Winery is hours away. I don’t even know where you go for putt putt golf around here. I guess there is the occasional fair once a year… I guess there is always badminton.

Last night I was watching an episode of 1 vs 100 that MythTV had recorded and was greeted by famed “psychic” Allison Dubois on the show. Many people know her as the supposed inspiration for the TV show “Medium”.

She was in the mob and given her “abilities” I expected to have to wait for a long time for her to miss a question. She was out on the second question. She did last one question longer than Dr. Ruth though.

They allowed her to come back in so she could win some more money for her “charity” when the next contestant came out. This time she was a little better and lasted until the 5th or 6th question. Still not that great of a showing in my opinion for someone that can supposedly see the future, read minds or whatever the hell she claims to do.

Pauline tried to cop out for her and say that she probably didn’t want to use the gift on the show. Why not? She was playing for some charity. What better reason than to win money to help a charity? Is her psychic gift limited to only a few usages? If so it doesn’t seem like she would be wasting it on one-on-one phone readings for money, when she could use it once and win tons on the show.

This isn’t the only time that 1 vs. 100 has had psychics on. Another time they had like six of them in the mob. They were all out within 3 questions, if I remember correctly. Not a very good showing for these supposed psychics. I guess it is hard to cold read a multiple choice question that you have to answer without being able to see anyones thoughts on it.

Well maxx has finally decided to call it quits on his webhosting company. That means I had to spend some time looking for a new host. I had already looked at Dreamhost.com a few times so I picked up an account with them. Everything works great and while I mourn the loss of my free hosting with maxx the change will allow a few things to happen around here that I have been putting off.

The system that Dreamhost provides is great and even with the low level hosting plan that I took, I have all the features that I had on maxx’s servers, including shell access. I moved my blog by just using mysqldump on maxx’s machine and then running the resulting sql file on my new account on Dreamhost after I scp’ed it to the machine. Worked great.

If you would like to sign up with them and help me out a little you can do it with this link: Dreamhost.com

I also had to move Coachpowell.com over there too.

The comments in the post about Laser Solutions made me think about the fact that I have never mentioned Homeopathy on here.

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Finally got a good method down and it works consistantly… You can read it in straight HTML too.

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and you don’t already know about proccgi, then you are missing out. I like writing shell more than anything else, but the one big problem that I have had with them is there isn’t a decent way to parse submitted HTML FORM data in them. That was always Perl’s realm. Well now with this program my shell scripts can be CGI scripts easily.

When called in a script it parses all the FORM data and returns it to you as variables with the same name as what is in your HTML page.

It works great for me.

You know that is the really cool thing about using shell scripts for things. If you need some functionality that you don’t have, all you have to do is find a program for Linux that does what you need and then you can enhance your script with it. Their is no need to memorize the proper way to call it and the proper way to pass arguments to it and if you should dereference a pointer to it or not. Just feed it the info you need to it work with and wait for the output.

They may be slower, but they more than make up for that with the fact that I don’t have to search random includes and such trying to find a pre-built funtion and then read the source code for it to see if I need to pass 4 arguments or 6 plus the linked list reference… bleeck.