"Bell Atlantic is now Verizon", and they finally managed to
install my loop, and I have DSL. I haven't had this kind of
connectivity at home for ... probably the better part of a
year now. Of course I have to abuse it for a little while
;-)
Napster seems to be marginally useful, so unfortunately I'm
not ready to Burn All MP3s yet (though I've been steadily
amassing Ogg Vorbis files of my vinyl/CD collection). I
found the
(fairly common but out of print) GISM bootleg CD whose name
escapes me (with the tracks from "Detestation" and "M.A.N." on
it) as well as the recent INFEST bootleg and of course the
usual assortment of hard-to-find satanic heavy metal.
Sounds like the
new Catharsis album is rather good too, guess I'll have to
buy it (being lame, I missed not one, but two shows on their
tour ... one in Ottawa before I moved, then one in
Pittsburgh after. Doh!)
Lots more Perl and XS hacking (fun) and some C (not as fun)
at work. I'd forgotten how time consuming and aggravating
it is to write networking and text-munging code (i.e. for
text based network protocols) in C. But Perl and
asynchronous I/O don't play nicely, and though POE is pretty
awesome, it adds a lot of latency to the system which the
telephony junk proved unable to cope with.
That said, I am rather proud of the design of the telephony
server I've written to get around this problem. To satisfy
the petulant telephony device it uses an async-I/O core
driven by realtime signals (of course, I had to hack the
driver to do proper siginfo based notification ...) then
layers a single-threaded server on top of that to talk to
clients and queue and dequeue events and data. Single
threaded servers are good, people! Don't believe the hype!
It's unfortunate that AsteriskPBX is so
keen on using
threads for everything (grr), because otherwise we'd just
use it since it already has exactly the architecture and
hardware support we need.
Looks like sourceforge were moving when I had issues with
them. So maybe I should edit out the comments below.