HighWire

Today I came across a new Phd program launched by Lancaster University, UK. It has tag-line which says "Creating Innovative people for radical change". According to the university they have gone beyond traditional multi-disciplinary programs seeking creative fusion between three key discipline. They describe it as a cross-disciplinary users centric program. Even though I'm not sure whether I got the idea correctly, three disciplines are Computer Science, Design and Management. University is damn serious about this course, they have build a new 10M Pound building call HighWire specifically for this.

Is this the new direction education moving in new millennium? I believe YES. All those years as we know Phds are more about theoretical side, that may not 100% correct, but I think that is correct for majority of Phds. Professors say Pdh is about depth. This program is surely radical approach to conventional doctorates. I believe it would become a success. Today's world need more people with multidisciplinary knowledge to innovative new technologies and push human race forward as it as been for many millenniums.

take a look at it, http://highwire.lancaster.ac.uk/

Coder Girl

I accidentally found this video in Fake Steve Jobs blog. Interesting video if you are into coding.

Installing Asterisk in "Jaunty Jacklope"

Last week I was trying to install Asterisk in "Jaunty Jacklope" Ubuntu 9.04, but turns out be not a straightforward task, I had to spend several hours Googling and experimenting before getting it up and running.
Actually the problem is not with Asterisk, but with the Zaptel driver, which comes from Jim Dixon's open computer telephony project (Zapata Telephony) named after Mexican revolutionary Emilinao Zapata. Asterisk uses zaptel was various reasons. Such as timing source for various operations, mixing conferences, for zaptel interface cards etc. Now digium develop zaptel driver. If you also want to Install asterisk in Jaunty Jacklope follow this steps, this should also work for any Linux distribution with kernel version 2.6.28. Before installing Asterisk its important to have Linux kernel source installed in /usr/src

Installing Asterisk is straightforward. Download the latest asterisk version from official web site. Or latest code can be checkout from SVN sever. If you choose to do that this how to do it
#cd /usr/src # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk/trunk asterisk # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/linux/trunk dahdi-linux # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/dahdi/tools/trunk dahdi-tools # svn checkout http://svn.digium.com/svn/libpri/branches/1.4 libpri

for information available in asterisk website

--$tar xvzf asterisk.xx.xx.tar.gz (only if you download tar ball)
--$cd asterisk
--$./configure
--$make
--$sudo make install
You can also install samples, which can also be helpful
--$sudo make samples

Installing zaptel driver.

But due some reason that I really don’t know. It turns out that latest stable version cannot with be compile against 2.6.28 kernel. After Googling few ours I found out that downloading latest SVN snapshot form Digium web site rather than installing the stable version might work, and it worked out for me.
Here is how I did it.
You might need these packages if you have not already installed them
apt-get install subversion
apt-get install build-essential libnewt-dev libusb-dev

$cd /usr/src
$sudo su
#svn co --revision 4636 http://svn.digium.com/svn/zaptel/branches/1.4
#mv 1.4 zaptel
#cd zpatel
#./install_prereq test
#./install_prereq install
#./configure
#make
#make install
#make config
#modprobe zaptel
#modprobe wctdm24xxp

Here is a good video about Asterisk and how configure it.

After 16 months

It has been close to one and half years, since last post which is about Richard Stallman's event at SLIIT. Looking back at the time, I couldn't realize why didn't I post after that, mmm..... may be I was too lazy, may be not, there are some unpublished posts. One about installing Linux on my old Acer laptop which is not working now, and about Fedora Sinhala, one about transforming Linux look-n-feel to OS X. but they never saw daylight. And I also started writing another blog in Wordpress which I completely dedicated to FOSS GIS related things. Managing two blogs hard, and project that I worked is finished, so I might not completely focus on FOSS GIS stuff which I did for last 18 months. I have interest in learning mobile and ubiquitous computing. Therefore I thought it's better to restart this blog, and merge wordpress blog to this. Anyway I conclude hoping that this time I would be able to pull my self back to blogging. Adios!