Thought that I would write a very quick and dirty write up of an issue that I had when I upgraded Kubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. Normally my upgrades within the Ubuntu family fall into two categories, dead laptops and working desktops.

This fall into the dead laptops group, for most parts the upgrade worked fine apart from when it loaded up to KDM (Login Screen), an error was thrown about some theme not being there. Instead of doing something remotely useful it just crashed out and did nothing. I didn’t have any virtual terminals either (due to some pain in the arse Via graphics card hack i’ve had to do). I have also noticed that GRUB is pretty buggered too, but that’s another story when I have time and have got to the bottom of it.

Net result was, boot the system up on a independent media, mount the file-system. Look for the KDM config file, and edit it to point to a theme that was there. Not too much hard work if i’m honest.

Question I was left asking, if your going to remove a theme during an upgrade maybe a warning would have been nice, and why isn’t there a fall back in case something gets corrupted.

All in all nice upgrade, apart from some daft little things. Does seem to boot a lot faster, and a couple of little glitches fixed. As upgrades have gone, I have survived, each upgrade makes me a little wiser.

Sorry guys for the long delay in posting anything. As some of you may know I’ve had a pretty hectic life at the moment with out sign of it calming down.

I split up with the mother of my youngest child Ava over two or so months ago. Since then I’ve had my contact with my daughter constantly threatened by my ex. It will seem once more I have to step into fray and fight for my rights as a father. Those that have known me for a couple of years know that I had to do a similar thing over three years ago. I have a great affinity with fathers rights, due to finding myself in this very position and I have seen many friends in similar situation, and not just in the United Kingdom.

I am lucky that my children where all born after 2006 and there for I have some legal cover under the guise of Family Scotland act 2006. However this act is not retrospective meaning for those poor fathers and children who where born before 2006 are not afforded the same rights.

So long story short, the situation is as follows;

I split from my ex, we previously had split up and got back together. It was agreed at the minimum that I would have 2 nights a week with my daughter. All though I asked and had been denied 2 nights one week and 3 nights the following week, which would account for 10 nights out of 28. I have for the past 8 weeks looked after my daughter every weekend. During this time I have started seeing a friend of mine who I have known for over 7 years, she has been of great support to me over the past couple of years through various ups and downs. She has a daughter of similar age to my eldest and they have play together. However long story short two old friends have moved on to something deeper.

It is this issue that my ex is sighting as a reason that I should no longer be allowed contact with my youngest daughter. It is also fair to point out here that my ex has new lad in her life and I have made no mention or commit about this.

She now demands that my new girlfriend and her daughter not be present at any time during Ava’s time with her father. This all arose from a chance meeting at a bus stop when I was looking after my girlfriends daughter whilst she sat an exam, Ava wasn’t in my care that day she was with her mum. My girlfriends daughter innocently asked the women pushing Ava’s pram if she was “Ava’s mummy?”. From this day forward my ex has made a number of assumptions. That my girlfriend and her daughter are with me always and that Ava in fact isn’t be looked after by me, but by my girlfriend. Which I have on numerous occasions said isn’t the case. Her additional premise is that I’m dragging someone into her life to drag them back out in a couple of months, well none of us have a crystal ball. Ava only spends her time with me.

Two days after the chance meeting at the bus stop, I got a text asking if I could pick Ava up early. Which I agreed then she started to send aggressive texts about me having a girlfriend. When she picked up Ava after her last visit she started arguing with me again which I just walked away from. On the 27^th of April she told me that I would no longer get my daughter for two days and that I would only get her for the one day. On the 30^th of April she told me that I could have my daughter for two days as long as I had her on my own and with no one else with her (which I do). I told her that she doesn’t have any superior rights over me, so she then said that I was unable to have my daughter at all if I have my girlfriend around, and if it was found out that I had she would stop me from seeing my daughter and take me to court.

I have been left with a tough decision, I could agree to a lot of unreasonable demands, however in the past eight weeks I have had my contact threatened at every opportunity by my ex. All though its tough for me, I think that I have to now stand strong and say no. I do have rights, if it goes to court I will get contact, however my poor little baby will spend the next two to three years with her life in a court room. She is just over 14 months old at the present. The question is if I agree to this now, what an earth to I agree for me and my daughter in the future.

My eldest daughter is missing her young sister and that hurts very much, and Ava is too young to express missing either her father or her sister.

Before we split my ex made numerous comments about how she would never stop the father of her child from seeing them, which to this date she has done three times. When ever she is angry she uses my contact with my daughter as a weapon. We see this commonly throughout the developed world.

All though nothing is guanteed in a court, the fact of it is that she no longer makes the self-appointed choices for Ava, and that a third party namely a Sheriff (yes they’re called that in Scotland) will. I have been a single father for quite bit, I have already been awarded joint custody of my eldest.

So in short this post is more about getting this off my chest then anything else. If you know anyone else going through a similar situation, do me a favour. Drop them an email, give them a call and just remind them to remain strong.

Hi Guys,

Well i thought that i would write this blog post on something that i played about with recently.  As some of you know i’m a little bit of an Asterisk junkie, and love playing with it.  I have to be honest as a geek its a pretty awesome tool to have.

If your unsure what Asterisk is, basically put its a telephone systems that you may have seen in your work place, its able to handle internal calls like extension to extension, and external calls.  It uses SIP (VoIP) to handle incoming and outgoing calls.  The really awesome thing is lots of companies will give you local land-line numbers for free, that regular telephones on PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) can call.

Now this post isn’t about installing and setting up Asterisk , they are plenty of resources on the Internet for that.  However what i do want to talk about is Google Voice and Asterisk.  Now if you are in the states the first part of this is useless to you, however getting it integrated into Asterisk maybe still something of interest.  Now really i want this to be just a collection of resources i found and my thoughts on them.

Google Voice is a nice service really, it gives you free calls in the US and Canada and a Universal number that you can assign to any of your phones.  There is a web interface for it.  So basically you can give this one number out and then you can decide which one of your phones it rings (Mobile Phone, House Phone, Work Phone, your mum and dad’s house that your visiting for the week).  It enables you to send SMS’s and it will take voice-mails and send them to you email inbox.  I probably not doing Google Voice much justice, but you get the idea.

You maybe wondering why a dude from the UK would want this, the short answer is; why not.  The long answer is, i have some friends and contacts in the states.  I have interviewed a few people from the states for podcasts and now i have a US number that rings to UK phones (doesn’t cost me a penny/cent either).

There is an important thing to point out here, that the service is only available to those in the states.  You need a US number to register for Google Voice and you need an invitation to the service as well.  Now at this point you start to worry that all of this sounds like a little bit of a pain in the arse, and having a US friend to register your number is the best you could hope for.  Wrong.  In fact i actually have the feeling that you maybe able to get this to work without using an Asterisk server, however i haven’t tried it so i’m hoping someone who reads this can confirm it.  I’ll make special note of the idea in this post

Firstly i’m going to list some resources and then i’m going to talk about them in stages.

tortunnel – One hop proxy for Tor by Moxie Marlinspike
FoxyProxy – Firefox add on for using proxies
IPKall/Sipgate – Free SIP providers that give you numbers, such as a free Seattle number.
PBXinAFlash – A CentOS distro designed to be a full Asterisk/FreePBX

Okay, so you have your Google Voice invite, your not in the states and every time you click the link Google tells you the service is not available in your country.  Which is an obvious problem and the beginning part of our problems.  I mentioned tortunnel by Moxie Marlinspike.

The answer to this problem is that we need to have a US IP address, now they are lots of proxy services on the web you could use and i would suggest that you go for that.  Personally i like tortunnel but that’s as a security bod i like that.  Tor is known for being slow, but its very good for getting out of your network segment.  Moxie wrote a program that instead of using the three hops Tor uses to make it hard for you to be tracked, it just uses one.  We choose the exit node that tortunnel uses.  So lets say that Boston University has a Tor exit node, and we use it for tortunnel, we go and check our IP on the one of those numerous sites and hey presto where in Boston.  So we go to our Google Voice invite and accept all the terms and conditions

The next problem is we need to have a US number to register for Google Voice, i know it sounds a little crazy at first, you need a US number to register for a US number however this is really the key concept behind Google Voice, it points to a number rather than being a ringing number.

So as i have an Asterisk install, i have what is termed as SIP Proxy which is an electronic address that VoIP clients can call, its basically an email address for VoIP.  so you could have fin...@voip.finux.co.uk and the lines would ring (however the new version of FreePBX there is an option when setting up a extension to give it URI).  Now a company called IPKall in the states will give you a free Washington state number and forward it to a SIP URI, i already had these setup in the past.

Now i know that Sipgate, who i have a few UK numbers with (www.sipgate.co.uk) also offer US numbers.  Now as i have said i haven’t tried this but my idea to do this without Asterisk and still have a ringing phone (well client or VoIP hardware phone) is to register a US number with Sipgate, you should be able to find on their site or with a little Google kung-fu how to configure that service for a SIP client like Ekiga or if your lucky enough to have a VoIP hardware phone then setup the details for Sipgate in that.

Once you have your US number its time to pop back to Google Voice and give it the US number you got from either IPKall or Sipgate, it will give you an Authorization code which you input.  Hey presto you have registered for Google Voice and you have your Google Voice number that should ring your IPKall/Sipgate US number.

Its also worth noting that once you have registered with Google Voice and the phone number has been activated you no longer need tortunnel or you American proxy to go to the web interface.

Now as an Asterisk user i want to be able to pick up the phone dial a special outward call code which will use the Google Voice line and make the US call for free.  Thankfully the leg work on this is done, thanks to the legend at Nerd Vittles (Very handy site, here is the specific guide http://nerdvittles.com/?p=635).  Now if you don’t use FreePBX then it shouldn’t be too difficult to reverse engineer what he is doing.

So in summary, if your outside the US then your going to need to get a US IP address, if you fancy the challenge then try and compile and install tortunnel (might be a bit much if your a windows user i’m not sure if it has been ported, i also found the apt-file command available on Debian Linux distro’s very useful, and have used it a lot since.  Its basically a tool, that you can query the apt source list for a specific dependency).  I managed to get it installed on Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, a little Google kung-fu and you should be able to find some how-to guides.

As i said this is more a collection of ideas about ways that you can get Google Voice outside the US and the process for getting it integrated into a Asterisk server.  Like i say if anyone tries the Sipgate process let me know, be pretty awesome if people could use Ekiga on their computers and make and receive Free US calls.

Well guys, its sort of news.

I’m very glad to announce that as well as my HackerPublicRadio.Org show, i have been in talks with a few people and we have a new podcast in the making.  Its still very early days, and a couple more logistics things to be sorted but TRACsec podcast was born yesterday.

Its a security show which follows a pretty much tried and tested format, however half the crew are currently studying Ethical Hacking at a British university and the the other half of the crew involved in it in a full time basis.

I’m very excited about this show, I think its going to be something a little different as the crew have all varying expertise.  So it should be nice to take ideas and stories and work it from the ground up.

You can bet your arse I’ll let you know more when i do

Finux

Well in a break from the norm i’m doing a non-hacker/podcaster post, which is a bit cheeky of me to say as i haven’t posted anything. Hey it was damn interesting day, and if your in Dundee then its well worth it.

My friend does historical tours, and he has one about Dundee. I’ve been meaning to go for sometime however as the story of my life goes i have been ‘putting it off’. However for the first time in a while i was left with some free time on a Saturday, and rather than spend the day sat in front of a screen i decided to go out, and as an organic an idea as it was i ended up on his tour.

Now i have to be honest, i’m no historian, but i have heard my friend talk about history a few times but only in the pub. I’ve lived in Dundee for quite a few years, in fact most of my twenty’s have been in the ‘city of discovery’ and i’m pretty ashamed to say i know very little about the place. I have the sneaky feeling that i’m not alone in this, however it really rocked my world to actually see the immense history Dundee has.

I’m used to seeing the brutal face of industrialization, and the even uglier face of when industry up sticks and leaves. In the face of gray and black, with ‘Desperate Dan‘ watching the shoppers go by its hard to think of Dundee’s medieval past, but peeling the layers away like a proverbial onion its history is revealed.

The tour starts at Discovery Point, which is the home of the RRS Discovery the vassal used by Scott to go to Antarctica, however the tour focus on even further back in time than that. Even at this point in the tour i’m pleasantly surprised and shocked that where i’m standing is actually where the ‘River Tay‘ flowed, and we are all standing on reclaimed land. Throughout his tour, i was truly impressed by it all and never a moment past with out me learning something new.

Dundee has a history the spans the world, sometimes its forgotten, but the jute trade put Dundee’s industrial finger prints in far reached places of the world. Those far reached place also left their impressions on Dundee itself, and if you dig a little deeper through the streets and ‘wynd’s‘ of Dundee its that history that is revealed.

The tour was excellent, and i learned a great deal in a couple of hours. If your in Dundee, or visiting then you really should make the time and go on the tour. For those of us that live in Dundee or near it, there is no excuse.

A chance to see real life history in the streets we walk in everyday, and for those visiting Dundee getting everything out the city they can.

Tayside Historical Tours

Monday’s & Saturday’s 2pm

I thought the prices where incredibly fair, £6 and Students get it for £4.

More info can be found here http://www.taysidehistoricaltours.com

Finux signing off