Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes

After an unbelievable rain storm that swept into central NJ, the old victorian took on a lot of water as rain poured onto the soffits, made it’s way into the house, the roof, and then finally onto the desk: of all places. The water poured onto the desk in a perfect line from the ceiling and finally dripped its way onto the powered up MacBookPro. All the while I am busy doing something else downstairs. I finally get upstairs to finish up some work, I hit enter a few times on the keypad and when the system comes back from sleep I see two pointers for the mouse. This looks rather strange, so I power down the computer and when it starts booting the second time I see wavy lines on the Apple grey booting screen; then I notice the water pouring from beneath the computer.

Instantly I unplug the computer flip it over and pull out out the battery and curse the damnation of mother nature for filling my MBP with water. As I turn the computer over water literally pours out of the case and I fear the worst. I open the case to the computer, and try my best with a hair dryer to dry
any water that may have made it to the inside of the logic board. Finally, (the next day) I power things up and low and behold everything looks pretty decent, until I try and login; the keyboard is sending strange electrical signals to the logic board and when it is plugged in, it sends various key commands. Of course I was able to bypass this issue by pulling the keyboard connection out of the logic board once I power up, then plug in a USB keyboard (picked up the new slim Apple keyboard) and was able to login. Everything else works.

I had work looming on my mind and many things to get done, so I popped down to the Apple store and picked up a new MBP 2.4Ghz, 3GB of RAM and migrated things from my old (and slightly damaged) MBP. I discussed the issue with my water damaged MBP with Apple geeks down in Menlo Park, NJ and they had a few things to say about it, unfortunately I was not able to buy the keyboard as this is a serviceable part and not for sale. Fortunately I was able to find the part from powerbookmedic.com and when it arrives I will pop it in and see how it goes. BTW, I recommend powerbookmedic.com, this company is fantastic when it comes to ordering mac parts for fixing up apple’s; they even shipped to me when I was in Melbourne with a replacement OEM superdrive and their instructions are easy as…

Its been a few weeks since we arrived back in the US and already there has been so much going on; although I haven’t really been writing with as much regularity as I used to; the context of my writing has been technical in the past or some random quip, however lately I have been far more involved in tasks and thoughts that encompass other matters.

I do have a few technology items to discuss: Firstly, I ordered an installed a new Western Digital 320GB SATA disk into my 1st generation Mac Book Pro (Core Duo). This took my HD from a 100GB factory installed drive to this new giant drive that can store all the applications, files, and virtual machines that I need/want for various tasks.

During the hardware upgrade I took the time to upgrade to Leopard. I must have been one of the only users not to upgrade to the newest OS; I took my time as I looked at the 300+ features of Leopard as nice to have’s but not entirely essential. Way back in the day, when OS X was still relatively unstable (circa 2003 – 2005 ), I used to jump on the newest software as soon as it came out with the hopes of alleviating issues with Mail.app or some kernel crashing issue, however I would have to say that 10.4 has been very close to rock solid. Admittedly I am not a normal user. I install kernel modifications, work quite a bit in the command line, run many network oriented applications that open raw sockets, keep a vmware instance open on another display, etc all on my MBP and still I was able to keep an uptime of over 30 days while commuting between work and home, on airplanes and crossing various countries and still jump close the lid to suspend the system. I have come to understand and deal with various OS X bugs that pop up sometimes in the name resolution stack, and other quirky things. That being said, 10.4 has been pretty decent, and I really hope that 10.5 is equally as stable.

July is starting today. Central New Jersey and New York weather is fantastic and it paints the sky at dusk with hues of cotton candy (the pinks and blues) while the sun sets and the beaten down concrete has a chance to calm for the night.

The PPC mac mini was stuck at the blue screen with the spinning wheel; and after attempting a few reboots it required the disk utility from the OS X boot disk. First step, needed to eject a DVD that was already in the drive: holding down the left mouse button on boot caused the disk to eject; then it was just down to the Disk Utility to clean up the problems on the hard drive.

Once it was fixed up, the PPC mac mini was back in action. Since we are lugging this little guy back to the states for a bit, I am glad its working again.

Replaced the superdrive in MacBookPro; finally! The factory DVD burner slowly died last year. At first it stopped reading DVDs, then data CD’s had issues, and finally it gave up on reading any media. I was able to get some cash back from AMEX since they match warranties on hardware; so AMEX paid for the cost of replacing the drive and labour.

However, I noticed that it made sense to make the replacement myself with an OEM drive ordered from powerbookmedic.com. The ordering process was easy and I was able to get the drive sent out to Australia via Fedex. In less than a week I had the drive in hand and was able to follow the step in opening up the case, removing the ribbon cable, replace the mounting brackets, and finally replace the drive. All screws are back in and it is working well. Played a CD of  cesaria evora and all sounded brilliant.

Strangely enough, real audio on OS X couldn’t open the audio device, and it looks like the issue was that some audio options changed inside [applications - > utilities - > midi ... ]. This link over at macosxhints helped:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050817093959692

spending some time cleaning up the harddrive by copying off some media files that have been hanging around for some time. i mostly have tv episodes in xvid that I bring on flights.

Just caught up with Prison Break S2E16. The series is still pretty good, although I hope they end it soon, its getting a bit long in the tooth.

Was checking out Amarok for Linux as a music player. Wow, linux audio applications have improved so much since I was a linux user. These days, I rarely leave the macbook pro running OS X, since I use it for work and at home. It just works, and all the applications that I need work great.

Also, I ordered another USA DID number for the house and setup the home asterisk (running 1.2.12 because of problems with 1.4) and peer’d up with Teliax. The cool thing is that Teliax supports almost all codecs including g.729 . The quality so far is great, and it really helps to be able to give my friends in USA a local number to ring. So I tweaked out a few things on the extensions so that instead of just ringing it will also answer and then play some music while the home extension is ringing.

For anyone who has a spare laptop hanging around, they actually make good little servers because for one, they are standalone, and secondly they already have battery backup. I opted to roll my own asterisk, primarily because I wanted to have more control over the system instead of just installing trixbox. I went with Fedora Core 6, Asterisk 1.2.12 and Asterisk Addons (btw, you need the add ons if you want to play mp3 audio on extensions).