Steve's Blog

Windows Live Messenger 8.1 goes into Beta

Here’s your chance to once again be part of the select group that makes Windows Live Messenger better. We’ve added new features and we need your help to make sure they’re perfect. The new features include:

  • Redesigned, smarter contact cards give you more data about and easier access to your friends
  • Your display name, status and personal expressions roam with you to any computer
  • Two free calls to virtually any phone in the world

    You can download from here. As always, Ahmed has wasted no time and has the ad remover for this version here.

  • Xen, Asterisk, and a TDM400P

    When you throw them all together, you have a nice virtualised VoIP server with excellent support for up to 4 FXO or 4 FXS modules per card! Although this seems quite simple, giving direct hardware access to a virtualised machine is not the most simple thing to do. This being the case, I’ve documented how to do it over here.

    Let me know if there’s more that should be added!

    X-Plane/MSFS/VATSIM/IVAO Australia charts Updated

    It’s been a while since I’ve posted due to lots of work lately. For those interested, I’m in the middle of doing a 500-600 user VoIP rollout at work as well as the normal stuff. It takes a lot of time to get this stuff right ;).

    In the mean time, Airservices Australia have released updates to their Australian DAPS (the SID/STARs for Australian Airports). To reflect this, I’ve updated my charts page with all the updated pages. It seems the biggest change that affects me from YMML is the DOSEL5 and LIZZI1 approach. Grab all the updates here.

    Multiple PCM streams on Fedora Core (rawhide) using Alsa

    Alsa has been a big step forwards for multimedia in Linux over the past few years, however there are still a number of tweaks that need to be done to optimise it fully. One of the things I found today was the capability to play multiple sounds at once. This comes in great when you’re using XMMS to play MP3s and still want to hear noises from programs such as gaim.

    To enable this in Fedora Core, a little bit of tweaking is required to make it work. Firstly, you need to edit /etc/asound.conf to contain the following:

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    pcm.card0 {
        type hw
        card 0
    }
    
    pcm.!default {
        type plug
        slave.pcm "dmixer"
    }
    
    pcm.dmixer {
        type dmix
        ipc_key 1025
        slave {
            pcm "hw:0,0"
            period_time 0
            period_size 2048    #1024
            buffer_size 32768   #4096
            #periods 128
            rate 48000          #44100
        }
    
        bindings {
            0 0
            1 1
        }
    }
    

    After doing this, if you use esd in gnome to play the wonderful events such as warning beeps etc, you need to edit /etc/esd.conf to contain something like:

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    [esd]
    auto_spawn=1
    spawn_options=-terminate -nobeeps -as 2 -d default
    spawn_wait_ms=100
    # default options are used in spawned and non-spawned mode
    default_options=
    

    After this, reboot your PC, and away you go. Set everything such as gaim to use alsa (you may need to pick “command” and using “aplay %s” to make it work). Everything should be peachy from then on in!

    Update: It seems this now works by default and was a bug in the setup for multi-soundcard systems on the particular version I was using during the Fedora 6 testing :)</body></html>