Day: November 3, 2004

As mentioned previously, I’ve installed Asterisk and started testing it out to see what it could do, and I now have a phone system in my home. You can call the basement office at 776, or the upstairs office at 777. Xten’s X-Lite is running as the softphone. (Though I think the little iMac in the upstairs office could use a bit more RAM.)

Right now it “works” and that’s all I’ll say. I haven’t done anything fancy yet. Performance isn’t great, but we’re running Asterisk on a medium-powered Linux box, and as mentioned the iMac is a little underpowered. The G4 seems to work well though, and I’ve also got Asterisk running on an old G3, though that box hasn’t been stressed much yet.

I told everyone in the house that they could call me, and leave a voicemail and I’d get it as an email. I don’t think they were terribly impressed, but then, it’s the mom and kids, not an O’Reilly conference.

It’s all so very exciting. If you’re into that whole computer, phone, VoIP, talking thing…

It’s been a while since I hacked at Feed on Feeds, but I’ve finally got my rating stuff doing something useful. In Yet More Aggregator Madness I mentioned a feature I wanted:

Ratings, similar to iTunes, so if I was in a hurry I could just choose to read the feeds/items designated as 5 *’s

This is now in place, and when I’m using my aggregator I can easily present the list of feeds and filter it via the ratings, so if I have minimal time, or want to start with my favorites, I just view the “5 star” feeds. as I move down to the 4 star, 3 star, 2 stars, etc, the number of feeds increase, since it’s really doing a “show me all feeds that have at least x number of stars. It seems like Bloglines could make great use of this sort of data among it’s users. I mean, just because I subscribe to something does not mean I love it, it might mean I just want to keep an eye on it. It’s another ‘voting’ system I guess. There is the extra step of having to rate a feed, and I think I have to make that easier. Right now new feeds come in with no stars by default, perhaps they should start as 5 stars (increasing the likelyhood I’ll see them) and I can then drop them down as needed… Just a thought.

Anyway, this is the reason I like using an aggregator I control over a service or commercial product, it’s extremely easy to add in a feature like this quicky, and if it doesn’t fly, it’s just as easy to get rid of it.