I logged onto facebook earlier and a poll popped up on the right hand side – which sport could you not live without?

• Football
• Rugby
• Cricket

I selected Rugby – and the following were the results:

• Football – 73%
• Rugby – 18%
• Cricket – 9%

Of course, it was limited to the three sports, Rugby includes the League/Union split, and there are probably many other options.  I’d hypothesis though, that Cricket is the second favourite sport of Rugby Fans and Football fans.  Therefore moving the poll to an AV setup, rather than the FPTP that it is currently – would provide an interesting insight – and probably move cricket above Rugby – but not affect Football?

There’s only one way to find out – and that is to run the poll and get the stats for both answers.  I won’t delude myself and pretend I can get enough readers of this blog to vote in order to generate a fair sample – so instead can anyone devise a method of collecting this information that would get us a fair sample?

Andy

I’ve recently been playing with FreePBX and Asterisk and have upgraded my Gentoo setup to:

We have a slight nuance with the way we initially setup FreePBX. In order to split users/physical devices, I set up all users starting at 1000, and physical devices at 5000. My personal extension is 1013. I manage my follow-me via the Web Interface, which I set to my deskphone, 5108. I also set the follow-me on 1013 to my mobile on 07777777777# (not my actual number).

This has worked well for about 4 years, enabling us to add more phones and more locations. However, today I hit a new problem.

At around lunchtime, my boss called to say people that call up our number are getting our IVR, (where they can either enter an extension, or are forwarded to a queue) and are simply being put into the queue (5200) and it’s ringing out. I attempted a call and looking at the verbose logs that is exactly what was happening.

With some help from the #freepbx IRC channel (especially [TK]D-Fender), I was advised to run ‘queue show 5200′. This showed all our user extensions as (unavailable) – which they were, as they are all forwarded on to follow-me.

comms*CLI> queue show 5200
5200 has 0 calls (max unlimited) in 'ringall' strategy (0s holdtime, 0s talktime), W:0, C:0, A:17, SL:0.0% within 60s
   Members:
      Trevor (Local/1004@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
      Michael (Local/1001@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
      Bob (Local/1012@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
      Carlos (Local/1002@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
      Andy (Local/1013@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
      Steve (Local/1007@from-queue/n) (Unavailable) has taken no calls yet
   No Callers

It was pointed out to me that because they were unavailable, they would not receive the calls. That makes some kind of sense. In reality they’re permanently disconnected SIP devices, which simply forward on to their follow me.

At this juncture, I should point out that there is an option in the Queue Management page in FreePBX called ‘Agent Restrictions’, which specifies the following:

When set to ‘Call as Dialed’ the queue will call an extension just as if the queue were another user. Any Follow-Me or Call Forward states active on the extension will result in the queue call following these call paths. This behavior has been the standard queue behavior on past FreePBX versions.
When set to ‘No Follow-Me or Call Forward’, all agents that are extensions on the system will be limited to ringing their extensions only. Follow-Me and Call Forward settings will be ignored. Any other agent will be called as dialed. This behavior is similar to how extensions are dialed in ringgroups.
When set to ‘Extensions Only’ the queue will dial Extensions as described for ‘No Follow-Me or Call Forward’. Any other number entered for an agent that is NOT a valid extension will be ignored. No error checking is provided when entering a static agent or when logging on as a dynamic agent, the call will simply be blocked when the queue tries to call it. For dynamic agents, see the ‘Agent Regex Filter’ to provide some validation.

I therefore expected the extensions there to adhere to the follow-me. This was not the case.

The next step was to add a physical device to the list of SIP extensions in the queue, one that would show up as available. I added my deskphone extension (5108) and it showed up in the queue as the following:

APL-DESK (Local/5108@from-queue/n) (Not in use) has taken no calls yet

So I now dialed the queue and expected just extension 5108 to ring, but to my surprise now every extension listed in the queue now rang their follow me. It was as if adding a physical extension to the queue ‘bumped’ asterisk into respecting the follow-me of the (unavailable extensions). True enough I then removed 5108 from the queue only to return to the same behaviour as before – no phones ringing.

What confuses me is that if the phone is marked as (unavailable) and therefore that is the reason why it doesn’t ring, then why when only one phone in the queue is marked as (not in use) does it then ‘make’ asterisk respect the follow-me of the (unavailable) extensions?

Please let me know your thoughts

I’ve recently diversified into preparing for a new role with my current employer. I’ve really enjoyed my time here so far; it’s coming up to 5 years this June, and up until these last few months I’ve really felt as though I was stretching myself – both learning new things and working pretty hard.

So this new challenge is a bit of excitement for me, it’s something a little bit different and challenging. I’m still in the preliminary stages at the moment, where we work out whether or not the ideas and strategies I’m coming up with have potential, or if I’m in way too deep.

One of the most interesting exercises I’ve done so far is the creation of a business plan. Now, having watched Dragon’s Den (and studied a BA in Business), I’ve got a fair idea of what makes a good business plan. Interestingly, outside of the hypothetical scenarios we’d discussed at University, I’d not actually completed one.

The bit I’ve enjoyed the most so far is the market analysis. It’s incredible to find that only ~2% of the UKs output (GDP) is created by the IT sector. Another ~2% is generated by the telco industry. Finance counts for 10% of GDP, and industrial output is up at 23%. Thanks Wolfram Alpha!

The interesting thing though is that nearly 45% of British GDP is described as Misc. I don’t know what makes that up, that’s what Misc means to an end user accessing the data. Can anyone fill in the blanks?

The other interesting analysis was that of the North West. 1 in 8 legal professionals work up here. 130,000 people are employed in finance/insurance, there are 3,000 individual accountancies and the market for Management Consultancy has grown from £6.3bn in 1998 to £14.05bn in 2006.

It’s all interesting facts, but going back to Wolfram Alpha – if you can provide tips on how to get more out of it I’d love to hear it.

I’ve now moved my Registrar to gandi.net, and setup my own nameservers with bitfolk providing my secondary ones.  As of now I consider myself ipv6 friendly.  Let me know if you spot anything which is ipv6 unfriendly, and I’ll try and fix it!

One of the things I like to publish the least are my politicial leanings. Not because I’m ashamed of them, but because I’ve yet to reach ‘political maturity,’ that is, the firm believe that what I believe is the right and only course of action. I agree and disagree with policies from all the main political parties, and like most view the UK’s political system with a healthy dose of cynicism.

I can’t get into facts and figures on this blog, for that is not my expertise, and I wouldn’t want to waste your time in reading my analysis when there are far better analysts out there. All I seek to share is my opinion.

My view of the HoC and HoP probably doesn’t fit with what the system has become, and not having studied it, I’m sure that I’m making assumptions and observations that are incorrect. Please either bear with me or point out my mistakes.

Here are my assumptions:

Therefore, where we stand at the moment is a Coalition Government where the Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties have had to alter their core policies in order to promote a stable Government that can operate for the length of their tenure. Unfortunately for the Lib Dems, this has meant having to concede on matters of principal, such as tuition fees.

The bashing the LibDems have got in the press I believe to be very unfair. Had they ended up forming the LibLab Coalition, then there would have been many other matters on which they would have had to concede – and tuition fees would appear to have still been one of them.

Had there not been a Coalition, we would have either struggled along with an unstable Government (not a good message to send out to the markets who want a solid political ‘path’ to chart their forecasting against) or another vote. If we’d have had another vote, then I should imagine due to the swing to the right after 12 years of Labour government, we would have ended up with either a very small Tory/Labour Majority (with the Liberals squeezed out by votes choosing either Lab/Con). This would have lost the Liberal voice completely – so by acting has he did, Nick Clegg was able to ensure the Liberals had influence. I doubt very much that the Liberals would have built on their progress in a second vote.

So that’s where I believe us to be now. I’m not in agreement with the policies of the current Government, but don’t like to constantly hear the complaints against the LibDems. They’re having to partner with a party who they’ve got less synergy with than the party they’re opposing.

As for the tuition fees debate, there’s a much larger topic that is outside the scope of this article; I’ll hopefully have that one written soon.

Comments and ideas appreciated.

Addendum