Since Jaunty was just released last week and I am only at home for a few more days, I decided to go with Xubuntu 9.04 rather than wait for Linux Mint to come out with a XFCE flavor. All in all I was happy with the install and setup. Everything was detected, even two of the older AGP video cards. The one thing I suspected to have problems with was the Samsung SCX 4100 hooked up to my dads computer (and shared through CUPS to my mothers). I would usually have to install the Unified Samsung Linux Drivers to detect the printer, however to my surprise Jaunty detected a printer (when I told it to look), and then displayed a list of drivers. But to my dismay, there was no SCX-4100, only SCX-4200. Since the two printers are almost identical in function (the same cannot be said for aesthetics) I decided to tell Jaunty that it was an SCX-4200 and print a test page. Lo and behold I had the printer test page in my hands.

Additionally, to switch from Letter to Legal was much more simple and didn’t require changes to CUPS settings. I just did it within the printer properties (from the program I was printing) and it worked like a charm. I suspect that because I didn’t use the Unified Samsung Linux Drivers, that changing between letter and legal was allowable through the Ubuntu Printer GUI rather than the CUPS web interface.

Hopefully that helps answer some of your questions.

Here’s how to solve it:

1. Open a remote desktop connection to your Windows Home Server computer, and be sure to log in as administrator (should be same password you use when logging into the WHS Console).
2. Once at the desktop and Internet Explorer pops up (it usually does), just close it.
3. Open the start menu, right click on My Computer and go to Manage.
4. In the left “Tree View” double click on Local Users and Groups, then double click on the Users folder.
5. In the right pane a list of all user accounts should be populated, some you will recognize, some you won’t. Anyways locate the account you are trying to “Unlock”, mine was Marf. Right click the account, and go to properties.
6. Then you will see a little checkbox in the bottom of the window that says “Account is Locked Out”, uncheck this box, click okay.
7. Now you can minimize the Remote desktop Connection and try to connect to the share \\yourshare from your actual PC, if it works, then you can go to Start Menu and Log Off.

Enjoy!

So rather than download and execute separate program to clear a directory of all *.svn files, I wanted to add an option to the Windows Explorer Context Menu. So I wrote a little .NET Console Application that takes in an argument of the parent directory, and I made an NSIS installer (and uninstaller), to add the appropriate menu item to the Context Menu.

You can read about it and download it here: SVN Cleaner

Screenshot of the program being executed from the Context Menu:

Hope you enjoy it, and let me know what you think!

Thanks

Review

When I first saw the homepage (couple months back when I signed up for the beta), it felt very “Skypey”. There’s nothing wrong with that, they have adopted the Web 2.0 design technique. There is some ajax splashed in the main page but not much, which I appreciate because some newer websites give you the bells and whistles overkill and they just try too hard. This isn’t the case here. The only moving part of the homepage is when you either click “Log In” or “Reset it”. I found this out because the first time I tried to login I saw that it said “Username” and my usual choice of marf had failed. So I quickly realized that the username actually meant the e-mail that you signed up with. So it was slightly misleading, but this is beta so hopefully they either support a username in addition to the e-mail you sign up with, or make it clear that it is an e-mail, because even the best of us forget sometimes.

Once logged in you’re greeted by a home screen, with easy access tabs along the top as well as a list of some common businesses and a news feed of your recent account activity. The only thing that appears out of place in the home screen is the “How to use it in four steps”. There is nothing wrong with the information this mini slide show offers, in fact it is great. The problem is it’s color scheme doesn’t match the other colors on the homepage, therefore it is kind of an eyesore. Not to mention the rotation from Slide 1, to Slide 2, to Slide 3, seem to have slightly different heights, and so you can see the numbers and top borderline shift from picture to picture. A simple fix is all it needs and then the main page will appear that extra bit polished.

Now I’m not going to go through every tab in detail and show pictures, but I will try to mention them. The My Account tab has the typical profile fields to edit, even the time zone (allowing the History to log the correct time the call took place). The one disabled field is your username (aka your e-mail).

The Help tab has your typical list of Frequently Asked Questions with the nice Web 2.0 (hide/show) slide revealing and hiding the answer to each question. Basic but effective.

The Feedback is your run of the mill html <textarea>. It is very generic (no topic or category selection) and I assume it will get a face lift before it is released publicly.

Finally the Invite your friends tab. I need not explain this further.

The Service:

Now lets get to the actual core of the Fonolo services. Every tab page has a left navigation menu which has three primary links ‘Home’, ‘Directory’, ‘My Companies’.

I selected Best Buy (Canada) and was presented with a ‘Common Actions’ section. It had a few buttons, of which the primary one was to Expand the whole menu. I click the button and it expanded a HUGE menu. Each node in the menu list has the description of commentary as well as option to expand (if it was long commentary). Additionally there is a Call Here for each menu node where I can only assume it does just that. So I find the menu option “Store hours/directions/phone numbers” and click “Call Here”. A nice little ajax window pops up, where you can select the current phone number you’d like it to call you at from a dropdown list.

After it starts calling you are brought back to the web page with a little status dialog that shows you the status of the call (and when it will phone you).

After this, its pretty straightforward, it will call your phone once it has reach the destination. It will continue to say call in progress where you can proceed to hang up via the web interface or your phone. After the call has been placed you can see it in your ‘My Account’ page under the recent activity. All in all it works just as expected.

Interview

I contacted Fonolo by e-mail and was lucky enough to have Shai Berger (the co-founder and CEO) respond. He was extremely helpful and not to mention offered to answer any questions I had. So this got me thinking about a few questions I have as a Fonolo user, and potential Premium Service client in the future. I fired the questions off to Shai and got answers back shortly after. Continue reading for the mini Q&A session.

Marf - So Fonolo is a great idea, however large businesses can often add or change their IVR options. In these cases, how long could it take Fonolo to update their mappings? I ask this because an incorrect mapping could have users end up at a destination that they didn’t select.

Shai - We regularly validate every tree in our database. (Most trees get re-validated every day.)

Shai - When you click to start a deep dial, we call the company and actually listen to the audio as we navigate, comparing it to our database. i.e. every call re-validates that particular path through a tree. (A nice consequence of this is that the more people use Fonolo the more synchronized our database becomes.)

Read more here: http://www.shaiberger.com/?p=71

Marf - In the case of an incorrect mapping, will the user be able to “Report a Mapping Error” therefore flagging it to be fixed or re-spidered more quickly?

Shai -Yes. I discuss that in the same blog post referenced above.

Marf - The Intelligent Call History Recordings (and future transcripts) sounds like a great feature, however is there an option to turn it off for a certain call or delete a phone calls recording and transcript history? The reason I ask is because sometimes we make call to a Bank, or to a business where we purchase something then we might have to give a lot of personal information (Credit Card #, name, address, maybe even SIN or SSN), and all of this information could be saved in the Recordings and potential Transcript feature.

Shai - Yes. You turn can recording off and on for each call. You can also pause recording during a call if you are about to give some sensitive info. Note that call recording isn’t enabled in the private beta at the moment.

Marf - In continuation of my previous question, there is a potential that some of our personal information could be stored, what measures has Fonolo taken to ensure the privacy and peace of mind for their users?

Shai - We take privacy of our users very seriously. We store and protect the recordings, phone numbers, call history, and all other user information according to strict industry standards. Our privacy policy is here:
http://fonolo.com/privacy

Marf - One of the more annoying parts of calling large companies phones is the customer service “please hold for the next available representative”. Does fonolo have plans in the future to wait on hold, and when your call is connected to a representative it then transfers the call to you? If not, then I recommend putting this on the list of “Future Improvements”.

Shai - Yes. But I can’t comment further at this time.

Marf - Does Fonolo plan on having a Premium service offered to users in the future? If so, what extra perks could a premium user be looking at?

Shai - Yes, there will be a premium level of service in the future, but we haven’t settled on the specifics yet. There will always a free level of service as well.

Marf - Shai, Thanks for your assistance and answering the questions.

Shai - My pleasure.

Conclusion

One initial thought came to mind is “How often do I place calls to these IVR menu systems?”. Of course this service isn’t crucial if you only call them once a month, but heck, it’s free, and if it can save you some time navigating convoluted menu systems then it’s at least worth a try.

Overall the Fonolo is a great innovative Web 2.0 service. There are hundred of sites that are simply reinventing the wheel but Fonolo is truly unique. If they release a stable service with a comprehensive directory of mapped menu systems, then I imagine it will become very popular.

1. Open a Terminal and enter the command sudo tasksel
2. A command line setup will open and you probably already have * by Print Server (CUPS) and Samba File Server. So use your arrow keys and highlight the LAMP Server and press the Space Bar.
3. Now with the * showing for Lamp Server, press Tab Once, and then Press Enter. Now it will show a progress bar with 0%, and may stay there for a while, this is okay because it is just downloading the necessary packages.
4. Then it will prompt you for a MySQL root account password. Since we are running this service locally on your computer, hopefully just for development purposes, then you can choose a basic password. I made my password root. Press enter once, and it prompts for the password one more time.
5. Now it should install everything it needs, and at the end it brings you back to the terminal.
6. To verify that it installed either go to http://localhost OR go to System > Administration > Services, scroll down to the bottom and look for Web Server (apache2).
7. Next we want to enable mod_rewrite, because this lovely module gives us pretty URLS (like wordpress.com/archives/145 instead of, wordpress.com/?page=archives&id=145). So enter this command into your terminal window sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load
8. Now we want to move the default location of the web root. Right now it is in /var/www, which you can keep if you want, but I prefer it to be in my user directory. So enter the command mkdir /home/marf/public_html/ then we want to edit the default site conf file and change “DocumentRoot /var/www” and “<Directory /var/www>” and add “ServerName localhost”. Enter this command sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and add this text mentioned above to look like my picture.
   
9. Now there won’t be anything to display there, so we want to make sure it is working, so in the console enter the command cp /var/www/index.html /home/marf/public_html/. Finally we want to restart the web server so we can enter the command sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart Some warning messages may flash by sayin “Could not reliably determine servers fully qualified domain name…” that is okay, just ignore it. Give it a few seconds and it should say [ OK ] and a terminal prompt should be back. Now go to http://localhost and hopefully you see the It Works! message.

Now if all you wanted was the simple LAMP stack, then stop there. However virtual hosts can be very useful in separating your projects in development as well as organizing them in a ~/Projects folder. So I recommend you to complete the next section even if you don’t fully appreciate it right now.

Multiple Virtual Hosts

1. First make the directory where you want your Virtual Host to be located. I chose /home/marf/Projects/example. mkdir /home/marf/Projects/example. Then enter the command gedit /home/marf/Projects/example/index.html and insert the text Example Page.
2. Now if you go to http://example it probably won’t work. This is because your request went to your ISP’s DNS servers ( or one you’ve specified in your Router if your an advanced user ). So we need to add the url to our hosts file allowing us to browse to that url and the request is given locally and the apache2 server handles the request. So enter the command sudo gedit /etc/hosts and I add a line to the top, mine top 2 lines look like 127.0.0.1 example
127.0.0.1 localhost
   
3. Next we need to tell apache what to do with an incoming request for the url http://example, enter this command in the terminal sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and insert the following code at the bottom of the file.
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@example
    DocumentRoot "/home/marf/Projects/example/"
    ServerName example
    ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/example-error.log"
    CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/example-access.log" common
    <directory "/home/marf/Projects/example/">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride all
        Order Deny,Allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.1
    </directory>
</VirtualHost>

   It should look like this.
   
4. Now again, enter the command sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and then browse to http://example and it should show Example Page.

There you have it, a Root public_html folder as well as the ability to add as many extra local domains as you wish.

Enjoy!