Tag Archives: JKL5
Consulting Blues – The Expensive Customer
Recently I put a bid forward on a “Request For Quotation” (RFQ) as part of my telecom consulting job. Unfortunately, the potential customer’s RFQ was essentially “go watch this YouTube video, and build something like that. It should be easy, so I only want to pay $200″. The video was essentially someone talking about a proof-of-concept project they had done. None of the back-end infrastructure was discussed; it was apparently Asterisk based, and used a database of some kind to …
Quick Hacks: Asterisk account codes, Ruby programming, and the Freshbooks API
I put together a quick hack last night that will help with managing truant accounts on JKL5′s “Cloudphones” SMB VoIP PBX. Ostensibly, it’s a pre-paid service for small to medium businesses, as well as a couple of residential customers. However, we have a couple of problem accounts that require checking on the accounts payable report followed by a few nagging emails to get to pay their bills at the 45 day mark. In each trunk and phone configuration, I have the customer’s …
Clever Call Recording With Asterisk PBX
In addition to being an author, I’m also a telecom/ linux geek. Someone recently posted on “StackOverflow” that they couldn’t find a good “how-to” on call recording for Asterisk PBX systems. I’m not convinced they looked too hard, but I figured it would not take me too long to post one up. This works with both Asterisk 1.4.x and Asterisk 1.8.x. YMMV on other revs. Please note that this post is written for someone that has a basic understanding of …
Testing your Ruby/Rails 3.x Model with Cucumber
So I’m working on a Ruby/Rails development project for a customer, and using TDD/BDD from word “Go”. The weapon of choice here is Cucumber. I know some of the more serious code-cutters prefer RSPEC, but I just like the “feel” of Cucumber. Naturally, part of the job includes ensuring that the various Models in the project pass very basic tests, such as if they are defined properly. In RSPEC, you can use a solid set of tools to do that, …
Recovery In Progress
Well, my day went sideways this morning… a customer called at 8am to tell me his office had a fire and his server closet with his firewall and PBX got sprinklered to death. I’m getting a disaster system set up for them on one of my Cloudphones PBXs and then spending the afternoon mapping out next steps. This is going to be one of those times where 20/20 says that if the customer had prepped the disaster recovery plan in advance, …
We’re still online, but SOPA/PIPA could change that
As you may have heard, today many websites around world and across the Internet are “blacking out” in protest of the USA SOPA & PIPA bills. You can check the list of who is participating in the “SOPA Strike” if you like, but JKL5 is not one of them. I wish to be clear that we are staying online today because of our commitment to servicing our customers, not because we support SOPA/PIPA. In fact, if these bills pass, we …
