Mike Dent's Blog

Out with the old, in with the new! (Windows Server that is!)

2010-02-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

Over the past few days my company Ubertechs Ltd has been working on a clients Windows 2000 server migration. Our customer has had the same Dell server since the year 2000! It has served them well and has certainly earned it's keep. At the time it was over £4500 and about 5 years ago we installed a second raid 5 array and some additional memory.
However the time came to replace the whole unit with a much faster and more efficient server.

The new Dell box is based on Windows Server 2008, it operates as file and print server also hosting the usual DNS, DHCP and Windows Active Directory.
We successfully migrated all server roles from the old Windows 2000 server to the new server, including about 50 group policy objects (which needed some modification), 40+ user account and about 80 workstations.

It's been an interesting few days and now thankfully things are once again running as normal, albeit much faster!

Ubertechs Special Offers!

2010-02-13T03:43:00.000-08:00

About 4 years ago I had a smaller batch of door to door cards printed, these worked well, so I thought it about time I did a slight re-design on them and had some more printed!
As usual I used the Lancaster branch of Printing.com, who have always produced great results for me!
Here is a pile of some of the cards ready for delivery. I have a few people standing by to deliver them in different areas!
So if you need your PC or Mac computer or laptop repairing, look no further than Ubertechs Ltd.
Serving Lancaster and surrounding areas.
I've also started a customer referral discount scheme, details of this are here. And finally in my shameless plug! You can follow Ubertechs on twitter at http://twitter.com/ubertechs .

Some missing Android features.

2010-02-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Android is Google's operating system for mobile devices, initially smartphones but perhaps others. There are several very big over sights in my opinion.:-

Firstly is the inability to search your calendar. Surely not! I hear you gasp. Oh yes, it's true, unless you have a HTC Hero, with HTC's modified android applications, you are unable to search your calendar.

So, here is the link to the google code bug I filed about it. When I filed this bug , Android was at version 1.1 so perhaps it was fine for it not to be included. Now we are at version 2.1 on some devices! If Android want to compete with the Blackberry or iPhones of this world then they must include this basic feature very quickly.
Please check it out, comment and be sure to 'star' the issue so it gets the attention it deserves from the android developers.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2518&can=5&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
By the way, the search facility is implemented in iPhone version 3.0 and above software.
(23 stars @ 12/2/2010)

Next up, not as serious but still very inconvenient is the lack of 'click-to-dial' in email messages.
One of the reasons I switched from iPhone to Android was because I use the calendar application a lot and found it was not possible on the iPhone to click on a phone number in the description or body of a calendar entry and have the phone dial for you. This feature was already there in the early version of Android 1.1 and so this was one of the factors that made me move.
Now further down the line, I realise that a phone number sent to you in an email, is not 'click able' in Android!
This was possible on the early version of the iPhone, pre version 3.0 software. Now the iPhone wins, you are able to click-to-dial on numbers both in email and calendar.
Yes you guessed it, I have an android bug filed.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2383&can=5&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20Stars
Please visit that link, comment or at least 'star' it, thanks.
[Update. Just checked this on a HTC Hero and it seems to work! It does not work on my G1 though.)
(5 stars @ 12/2/2010)

Garstang Booths.

2010-02-06T08:21:00.001-08:00

Having a coffee in the Booths cafe after doing some shopping. Free WiFi with your drink and 50p off each drink for every £10 you spend. Not too shabby.

[Uploaded from mobile]

Dent Family History.

2010-02-05T03:35:00.000-08:00

My Gradnfather Alan E (left) with his brother William H.

Over the past few months I've been working on finding out as much as possible about my family history. I've been mainly concentrating on my fathers side. I've had a good start with it as my aunt had done a lot of work on this many years ago.
Most of my work revolved around using the Ancestry.com website. This has proved very useful and has allowed me to fill in many gaps and even find relatives that my father did not know about in the USA.
Last night I received two unconnected emails from Dent relatives in the USA. I'd not made contact with these people before and I was very surprised when I found out that neither of them knew the other had written to me!

Things I've discovered so far include:-

My family originates from Burnley in Lancashire where they were stonemasons and later brick-makers.
My great grandfather moved to Lancaster area to manage a brickworks near to Caton.
My grandfather was a carpenter for Waring & Gillows, he was in the Royal Engineers and I have been able to find all his military papers.
My grandfather worked for just over a year in Buenos Aires, South America on the woodwork in the prestigious Plaza Hotel. This was 1913 to 1914.
My grandfather came back from Buenos Aires and within 6 months he was in the Royal Engineers until the end of the war when he returned to Waring & Gillow.
Lots more...

I'm currently waiting for the will of my great, great, great grandfather to arrive, he died in 1835.

Router/Firewall upgrade - or - Xbox peace at last!

2010-02-05T02:42:00.000-08:00

Last night I switched my Soekeris net4801 router from m0n0wall to pfSense. I'd been running m0n0wall for several years and it had served me well. However recently I upgraded it to 1.3 and noticed that I had trouble getting NAT to work correctly for my 2 Son's XBOX 360. As the days past this had been causing more and more 'fun' with the eldest.

Before I upgraded their nat type would display as moderate and this would work fine for most things. After I upgraded to 1.3 the nat setting on their xbox dropped to strict. I tried several nat rules and short of putting their xbox's in the DMZ, and re-wiring their rooms, I was stumped.

I read up on alternatives that I could load on to my embedded Soekris box and it seemed pfSense, a fork from m0n0wall, looked a good candidate. It supported UPnP, which would allow the correct opening and closing of ports to forward traffic to their xboxes.

I downloaded the latest non-beta version and wrote it to the compact flash card in the router, not before having taken a backup of the latest m0n0wall config! I had to dig out my null modem cable and connect in to the router via serial interface to do the first configuration but after that it can all be looked after by a web interface or ssh.

All went well, I was even able to import my last m0n0wall config, after making some changes, to have it setup pretty much as I previously had. Only now I had the option to turn on UPnP and even configure it so that it would only affect certain hosts.
Ahhhh peace at last....

[5th Feb 2010 Here is a link to the network bunny site that has some more details on the xbox nat issue]
[9th Feb 2010 Had a reply on the m0n0wall mailing list. Here is a link to the authors page with details on how he got open nat working with m0n0wall]

Sun.

2010-01-31T07:28:00.001-08:00

went to the field near our house with Morgan and Cameron today.
A very nice and sunny day it was too. Almost February 2010.

Dads MythTV box.

2010-01-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I built my dad a MythTV system out of an old PC. This is a dual tuner system, combined frontend/backend with a 200gb disk in I think. It's running MythTV 0.21 and he has been using it without much problem for the past 12 months or so.

Recently our TV system in the UK begun switchover from analogue UHF signal to digital UHF. This required several re-tunes of our TV's and of course I needed to visit to re-tune his mythtv box. I think the whole switch over process required 3 retunes before everything was straight.
Somewhere along the line it seems that one of the tuners was not tuned or tuning in right. The result is that he is now missing recordings and does not have the ability to record more than one program at a time. This causes him to miss recordings of Emmerdale and Coronation Street, shock, horror!

Not long after I set the system up for him I configured his router for remote VNC access and ssh access to his mythtv pc, so I could connect remotely for maintenance and updates. He is 82 and so I can't really expect him to find his way around the bash shell at his age can I?

All was fine until his router decided to go belly up. He called Plusnet and another one was sent, only this time it was a crappy single port Thompson 516 or something similar. I attempted to configure the firewall and port forwarding but I don't think I ever got it working. Tonight I managed to talk him through enabling remote access to the router so I could connect in and try and set the forwarding up.

Talk about watching paint dry! Each time I tried to navigate to another page took over 30 seconds! I did as much as I could and then I was kicked out! I think there is a 20 min idle timer in place on the remote access but I've no idea why it threw me out. Anyway I didn't have the patience to talk him back through enabling the remote access so I will pay him a visit and do what I should have done in the first place.

Missing audio on H264 videos & Mythtv.

2010-01-11T03:57:00.000-08:00

Recently I did a reinstall of my Mythtv frontend. Everything seemed ok apart from the lack of audio on
H.264 video clips which are taken with our Creative Vado HD camera.
This was working before the install so I'm not sure what I changed.
Anyway I posted a query on the mythtv-users list and a kind person called David Linville replied they had a similar problem which was fixed my changing the audio output device from ALSA:hdmi to something else.

After I had enabled all the ALSA devices in 'alsamixer', see first screenshot, I managed to get the audio working again! I took a quick photo of the settings for future reference and just in case it helps anybody else.
I'm using an Acer Revo 3610 for the frontend with Mythbuntu 9.10.

Rather annoying Google calendar bug.

2009-12-08T06:47:00.000-08:00

Recently I noticed that the location field, or the 'Where' field as Google call it in their calendar was
not being synchronised back to my G1 Android device. This had worked flawlessly for many months.

I thought it was perhaps a bug in my android operating system on my phone but the same thing was happening on my wifes HTC Hero.
I did some searching on this and could not find anyone else with the same problem. I'd came to the conclusion it was not an Android bug I decided to post about my problem on the Google Calender support forums.

If you are having the same problem I would urge you to report it at the above forums. Until google acknowledge the problem it is unlikely to get fixed.

[Update January 2010. Rather oddly this problem seems to have fixed itself. Several people have also commented that it has begun working for them. Obviously Google did some magic to fix this. Would have been nice if they had followed up with a quick note to say it was working]

2009-12-01T14:49:00.001-08:00

Today I went to a customer with a rather old PC, this is the BIOS screen as it booted. It used to have 128mb of ram in but about 18 months ago I upgraded it to 512mb. It's slightly faster than it was! Check out the Pentium 3 processor running at 500Mhz. Suffice to say each reboot cycle of XP took about 10 mins!
Anyway I managed to fit a ethernet card in it and connect it to their BT Homehub and get it back on the intenet.

MythTV 0.22 Tuning?

2009-11-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

I'm currently having some fun trying to tune my DVB-T cards in correctly with MythTV 0.22. The process seems slightly different to that of 0.21 and I'm struggling a little. Mainly posting this in the hope somebody on the MythTV mailing list is able to see what I am doing wrong! :)

Above is what I am left with after removing all channels and transports and doing a full scan. I have to then go through each channel and add it. Once I do this I end up with numerous duplicates and lots of channels which do not seem to work?

Above is a photo of the transports that I see after the full scan. I am beaming towards Winter Hill transmitter in the north of england.
If you have any ideas where I might be going wrong I'd be more than happy to hear from you!
Thanks.

MythTV status....

2009-11-29T08:13:00.000-08:00

Well I've managed to backup my existing mythtv database from the 0.21 version of Myth and reinstall my main MythTV box with Mythbuntu 9.10. I've also managed to restore the database and recordings.

Here are some statistics:-

Oldest recording is the film 'Cypher' recorded on Apr 22, 2007.
I have a total of 610 programmes.
Which are using 630 GB.
There is a total of 1.3TB of storage space.

I've also managed to configure the new frontend which is an Acer Revo (see post below) this is setup using the VDPAU profile and I can report that video playback is very smooth and looks great so far.

I need to do some more setup to configure mythmusic, photos and video etc.

Sky+ Problems.

2009-11-25T01:11:00.000-08:00

We had Sky+ fitted about 8 months ago, in that time we have had the following problems.

Some programs as part of a series link did not record.
Attempting to record a program which is in progress fails silently.
Signal level drops over time.
Using FFW to skip adverts. When pressing PLAY, the program then plays from the start?
Probably the worst programme guide in history.

Most of these problems seem to fix themselves if we switch the unit off and on again. The box has been replaced and still bugs remain.

The whole interface is cumbersome and out of date. In many places you cannot go back to the program guide where you left off from, you are forced back to the top level.

Try choosing a program by its title to search and record. You are forced to wade through literally hundreds of programs before you reach yours, am I missing something here? Lets say I want to record Poirot, I go to 'P' then I am forced to scroll or page down, until I get to Poirot?

I'll update this list as I find more bugs.

Moving Backend in to the Garage....

2009-11-24T15:27:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I mentioned a MythTV upgrade, well it's about to happen.
I've ordered a 1TB disk to add to the current 750GB of storage in the present combined backend/frontend. I have also ordered an additional USB dual tuner, digital tv adaptor. This will take the minimum possible concurrent recordings up to 4, with the option to record several more per tuner, as long as the channels are on the same multiplex. I may well limit it to 4 recordings anyway, as I am not sure how well the current AMD 3000 processor will cope.

My plan is to move this to the 19" rack in the garage and install a new, quiet and low power front end under the TV in the lounge.

With this in mind, I have ordered a Acer Revo 3610 (above), Atom 330 Dual Core, 1gb ram 160gb, hdd. This is a small 'nettop' box for about £150 running Linux. To control this I have ordered a MCE infra red remote control from Maplin.
I will be installing MythTV 0.22 on both of these. Not sure yet if I will attempt to upgrade the 0.21 install on the current box or just start again.

MythTV Upgrade time.

2009-11-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

With the recent release of MythTV version 0.22 I am considering upgrading my home PVR/MythTV/DVR system. After our Sky box became faulty several months ago we upgraded to Sky+, this upgrade was also partly due to the demise of analogue TV and thus our beloved Tivo system becoming redundant.

Sky+ does not live up to the hype though. The day to day use of the system does not compare to the Tivo’s.

The Sky+ TV guide is next to useless. Several obvious actions are missing and navigating your way round it is frustrating.
Try to search for a program beginning with a specific letter and you can say goodbye to several minutes of your life.
Pauses, lockups and missed recordings seem common place, this is after we had the box replaced recently.

Sadly many of the geeky TV channels like Discovery are missing from Freeview, we don’t subscribe to the movies or sport so it’s only those which tie us in to Sky really.

Anyway, I digress. MythTV 0.22 brings about many new features, a complete rewrite of the interface and the incorporation of VDPAU. Basically speaking this off loads much of the video decoding process to the graphics chip. This is only supported by Nvidia hardware and only then on 8400 series and above (with the exception of some 8800’s).

My current MythTV box, a combined frontend/backend has an older 5200 AGP card in it, sadly an upgrade of the card is not an option!

One possible way round this is to move the current MythTV box in to the rack in the garage, upgrade it to 0.22 version and run a small/silent frontend only in the lounge.

There is currently a lot of talk of the Acer Revo ‘nettop’ boxes in the Myth community. They are small, practically silent, low power consumption (Atom processor) and best of all have the Nvidia ION video chipset, which doessupport VDPAU.

So, watch this space, I’ll write more soon, maybe!

Blackpool Illuminations 2009

2009-10-03T15:44:00.000-07:00

After saying last year that we probably would not come to see the Blackpool Illuminations, or "Blackpool Lights" as they are often known, here we are, yet again in Blackpool.

This year we decided to return to our old plan of parking at the Bispham end of the promenade, getting on a tram to the far end and returning back to Bispham.

Here is Cameron waiting for his Fish and Chips in the cafe before we headed out in to the dark and windy night!

Brightkite adds 'via android' to posts.

2009-06-29T14:24:00.000-07:00

Great news. Today the uber-cool social networking site Brightkite added the 'via android' marking to photos which have been sent from the Android Brightkite application.
iPhone & recently Blackberry users already had this cool marking at the bottom right of all photos they uploaded from their mobile apps, now the Android crowd can join them.
Thanks Brightkite :)

And then the phone rang....

2009-06-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

It was Sunday 28th June 2009 at about 11:22 am when the phone rang. I answered it and was greeted by a loud male voice asking me if I WOULD PARTICIPATE IN SOME MARKET RESEARCH. I said:-

"No I am not interested" to which he replied,
"Wait Sir, I'm not trying to sell you anything", again I said,
"I am still not interested", then he said,
"Well is there anybody else in the household who I could speak to?" That's the bit which really got my back up, I said
"No, goodbye" . and I hung up the phone.

Nothing too unusual about that I guess, except that I've not had one of these calls on a Sunday morning for as long as I can remember and secondly our number is registered with the Telephone Preference Scheme. So this got me thinking :)

I rang 1471 and expected it to be a withheld number but no, the number claimed to have come from 02084 336081. I called it back and got a recorded message which said I had received a call from Kantar Operations, a bonafide marketing company and this was not a sales call and that if I wanted to check I could call the "Market Research Society" on 0500396999.

So, guess what, I called them back. I was sure nobody would be there on a Sunday at almost mid-day but sure enough, they answered in 2 rings. I explained I'd had a call from

"Kant...." I was interrupted...
"Oh they are absolutely fine Sir, no problem with them"
"But how did they get my number?" I asked
"They just random dial Sir." Hmmmm I thought...
"Well they should not have called our number as it is registered with the TPS?"
"Ahh but the TPS does not cover marketing calls Sir" (not sure about that I thought)
"Well, I will be looking in to this, thanks goodbye"

So, there seems to be at least two things wrong here:-

Random number dialing, also called random digit dialing, is probably an illegal practice if before dialing they do not check the number against the TPS lists and secondly, the TPS does cover sales and marketing calls, it says:-

What is TPS?

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a central opt out register whereby individuals can register their wish not to receive unsolicited sales and marketing telephone calls. It is a legal requirement that companies do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS.

The original legislation was introduced in May 1999. It has subsequently been updated and now the relevant legislation is the Privacy and Electronic (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

Kantar Operations on the face of it do seem to have a legitamte website but I could not find an address for them, though a phone number is listed

Anyway I will now go and fill out a complaints issue against Kantar on the TPS website.

Animation Workshop.

2009-06-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Just got back from an outing with our youngest, Cameron. I took him to a local arts/cinema venue in Lancaster called The Dukes.
He attended a short stop-motion & animation workshop which was put on by a guy called Bary Skillin who runs a company called Animation Nation.
Basically the kids get to make some figures or whatever they want from Plasticine material and then they can move to an animation table where an Apple Macbook and video camera is setup. From here they can use the iStopmotion software to create a short animated movie.

These movies are then uploade to Youtube for the kids, their friends and family to see. You can see some of the animations here.

Great value and goof fun for £4.50!

Mini-roundabouts, just like big ones only smaller.

2009-06-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Mini roundabouts are just like large standard roundabouts only on a smaller scale. As far as I know the rules for using these tiny roundabouts are pretty much the same as you would use for their bigger brothers.
The main objective is to approach the roundabout, generally slowing down as you come up to it and then carefully look to your right side to see if any cars are coming on to the roundabout or already progressing round it.
If either of these are true, then the recommended action is to slow down and stop, thus you are giving way to traffic coming from your right. Not exactly rocket science I am sure you will agree.
Now there lies the problem, many people treat them as just some kind of bump in the road, some think perhaps you should slow down a little for this bump and perhaps drive round it slightly, others will just keep going at their normal speed and drive over the top of the roundabout, perhaps seeing if they can get a little thrill as their car quickly rises up as they traverse the bump.
Often they will not even glance to their right to see if you are coming on to the roundabout, no they will just keep looking ahead, perhaps they will have a mobile phone pressed to their ear, or are attempting to light a cigarette which understandably may be distracting them a little.
Anyway the whole point of this blog post is to make you aware that mini-roundabouts are just like big ones and should be treated with the same respect.
The photo above is courtesy of a great min-roundabout resource which I encourage you to visit, http://www.mini-roundabout.com/

Kinda quiet round here today?

2009-06-23T04:39:00.000-07:00

Firstly, thanks for visiting this page and taking the time to read this.
Secondly, part of me is telling myself I should not be doing this, it might wreak of desperation but another part tells me I should and if I don't I will be cutting my nose to spite my face!

Anyway, I decided to go ahead and here I am! I've ran my own business for the past 4 years or so and things have been fine. However just recently, maybe the past month or two, work has taken a nose dive and I'm getting less and less work.

As a result I am looking for some part time work, which I can fit in around my normal work which in essence is fixing computers and other related technical stuff.

So a job of a technical nature would be good but I am fairly flexible. As long as it is not sending out spam emails or breaking captcha's all day and is legal I don't mind.

Preferably something I can do from my office at home in Lancaster would be nice too.
I have computers and Internet access as you would expect.

If you have something in mind please use the contact form by following the link above and get in touch!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks.

Are you considering changing phones?

2009-06-12T02:43:00.000-07:00

Perhaps an iPhone to a Palm Pre or an Android- HTC Dream, HTC Magic to a Symbian phone like the Nokia N95, N96, N97 or maybe a Treo to a Windows Mobile device?

Well I have created a forum which might hopefully help you.

Each time I changed smartphones, most recently from a Blackberry to an Android G1, I would visit some forums for the phone I was switching to, and ask questions about it and hopefully get answers to how it differs to the phone I presently have.

Now there likes the problem! You see if you visit an Android forum, a Blackberry forum etc you will find it is very biased towards that particular platform. So when you start asking questions like:

"How does the calendar layout on the iPhone differ to the layout on the Blackberry I have now?"

You might get a few sensible answers but you will likely also attract some of the forum trolls and end up in a small flame war of your own. This has happened to me on several occasions.

So the idea behind my forum is you can hopefully get impartial advice from people who have already made the particular 'phoneswitch' you are considering, or who are also considering switching and may be able to help with your questions.

I'll also be hanging out there and will help wherever I can!

The forum is called "Phone Switchers" and can be found here, http://forum.phoneswitchers.com, please give it a try.

Stuff to do in London?

2009-06-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

You might have stumbled on this post following one of my posts to twitter or brightkite. It's simple really, we are going to London soon for a short break; myself, my better half and our two boys aged 9 and 13 - I'm looking for sensible suggestions of things to do.

Hopefully things that won't cost a fortune! I've got a few ideas myself which I am posting below, most of these came from watching a program with Griff Rhys Jones about London.

Some of these I have no idea if it's possible to do at all, please tell me.

If you can think of anything, please add it in the comments, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!!

Some ideas :-

Old London Stone - Canon St. The Roman centre of London (other centre is horse statue near trafalgar sq) DONE

Any secret tunnel trips or visit the old telephone exchange underground?

10:26am every day Houses of Parliament staff do a traditional walk?

Old Doctor Butlers Head pub, 1662. (Ale Conner's test any new beers?) DONE

Burlington arcade in Bond St area is worlds first shopping mall? DONE

St Pauls Cathederal maybe. DONE

At 10pm a toilet comes up from underground outside Palace Theatre, right side as looking at front entrance. DONE

Tower 42 is tallest building? doubt we can go up this.

And ideas from visitors, thanks! (updated as I get them):-

The London Dungeons are good for adults and kids alike. http://www.thedungeons.com/en/london-dungeon/index.html

The Science Museum has a good set of “hands on” exhibits for kids.

The Cartoon Museum (which costs to get into) is also good if you’re interested in popular art.

The Lyceum Tavern on the Strand is good for interesting beers. Also try de Hems in Soho for Dutch beers.

China Town is very interesting to walk around – as are poking in to the shops & restaurants there.

Go to the official Half Price Ticket Booth (TKTS) in Liecieiseir Square – turn up early to get the best seats.

There’s an excellent calendar of events athttp://www.ianvisits.co.uk/calendar/events/

SugarCRM, Asterisk PBX and Android...

2009-05-30T05:50:00.000-07:00

Due to some power cuts recently I lost some of my asterisk PBX hard disk to corruption. It messed things up which kind of forced my hand to upgrade to a more recent Linux distro, something which was on "My List" of jobs to do.

I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu server 9.04. I then installed the latest 1.4 branch of Asterisk and all the bits that go with it from source. I wanted to be able to upgrade easily again in future without wondering what I might mess up on TrixBox (my last asterisk distro).
I had some fun initially as I ended up compiling asterisk without zaptel support, and only dahdi support, this messed my Sangoma A200 card setup but eventually I sorted it and was back on track.

I then installed the latest SugarCRM community edition and imported all my customer records in to this, fairly painless.

Next I wanted to be able to get a browser window opened in SugarCRM when a customer telephone and their phone number was already in my sugar database. I achieved this with Notein.
The local browser window opening is controlled by the Asterisk Desktop Manager, a java program that you install on your desktop computer.
Once you have installed the Notein files on your sugar server you need to configure the ADM 'Manager' menu with the hostname and other details of your asterisk server. Make sure you modify the manager.conf file on your asterisk box to allow connections from your PC's IP address.
Then you need to add the setting in the 'Browser Popup' menu of ADM to tell it what URL to connect to when a call comes in. The documentation on this is sparse, it needs to be in the format:-

http://192.168.1.30/syrup/pp_index.php?number=%number%

Replace 192.168.1.30 above with the IP address of your Asterisk server. Now when a call comes in it should open a browser window and show details of the customer phoning in. If the number is withheld or not in your sugar database then you will be displayed with an error.

Next I thought it would be neat to be able to access my SugarCRM from my recently acquired G1 Android smartphone. Yes I could use the standard web browser on the G1 to access it but I felt sure there must be a 'proper' application to do this? Searching on the Android Market drew a blank, then I did some searching on the web and came across SugaDroid. It was written by Pierre-Yves Ricau whilst he was working as a trainee at his employers. They wanted an application to use internally, they allowed him to develop it and release it as open source.

The next thing I am working on is getting SugarCRM to connect to Google calendar and have it automatically create entries in the google calendar for my appointments and tasks, I'll report back soon.