Trying to avoid the outside world for fear I might vent (or worse) I've been updating my personal website and also getting a lot of code cleaned up and tested. Also been playing with Mattermost with a few normal humans. It's impressive.

The basics. There is no reason I flew to NJ, spent a long night debugging and fixing things, except for a "lack of the basics" by multiple very smart, educated, and well motivated people. I can not blame anyone, or anything other than that. Look at a problem. Look at everything around it. Has it always been that way? Why? Simplify. Question everything. Be paranoid. Trust little, maybe even nothing. Especially not that cable between A and B. Or that both versions of the client and server software are compatible. All modern signaling cables are essentially RF antennas. Treat them as such. No sharp bends. Shielding and adapters matter. Less adapters are better. Basics. I have not been a "biomedical engineer" since the 90’s. My understanding of the "basics" has been re-validated in 2025 after an insane level of shotgun efforts by multiple parties. Sigh. I fear for the future. Go read "The Marching Morons" my living nightmare as I ask myself, how much of the world can I keep running.

The short version: The Marching Morons

Answer to the obvious question: The Siemens site engineer had made multiple visits and serious efforts to solve issues amidst attempts and finger pointing my in-house IT staff, external IT staff and others. Sometimes it just takes an old geek to ask "WTF?!?" with spare cables, and a SharkTap and WireShark to prove the network is awesome but the application client and server is dropping packets and not re-transmitting.

2am brain: I bet you can not do the whole monthly billing data creation using just SQL, ready for import into QuickBooks (as a CSV). 5am brain: Got You! Did It! Using only 49 lines of SQL and only 1 variable. Not sure which brain won, but going to try to get some sleep now. #SQL #MariaDB

Just ran/requested chkdsk /f on reboot on a venerable Win2k server via remote (VNC) It's attached to / controls $600k worth of hardware, yet apparently the OEM has no other options. Seems all the old geeks that could rewrite code for new hardware/OS are all gone. Been lookin at it, it's mostly VBS scripts and some unix emulation code. Cuz the original was apparently on Sun OS. Prayers requested. #chkdsk

Been beating on some code to do serial port control for controlling a Numato USB attached solid state relay board. Code looks awesome. Should work. Even seemingly worked once. I was sending commands with a slash N \n (line feed) instead of a slash R \r (carriage return) I feel stupid, but also it's been a LONG time since I wrote code for a serial port. #serial

While it hypes being simple, it is powerful. Am setting up yet another DokuWiki site for someone for geeky documentation, and again: DokuWiki is awesome. First time really needing complex ACL (Access Control) and am impressed how well enforced they are by single page and namespace. Donation on the way to @dokuwiki@phpc.social #DokuWiki

Years ago, I built a very simple mailing list server to run a few mailing lists (chugalug.org and others). As I moved it to a new server and updated the code, I had to eat my own dog food. As I read my readme.txt and figure things out from scratch: I sucked. Younger me that had just written the software had a lot of stuff stuck in his head that did not make it to the docs. Now updated.

Got the basic Melee working. Easier than I was expecting. Need a few tweaks like using port 993 and SSL instead of depreciated TLS on port 143. for imap. I think it's time to migrate Chugalug.org to the new server.

Having fun testing code, but also noting that MELEE (the Mail Engine) has not been tweaked for PHP 8.x and needs to be. This is my reminder to self.

I need to make a web UI for my website posts that allows easy uploading and posting of pictures, in my spare time. Buwahahahaha..

I remember when almost any UUCP or SMTP mail server would accept and forward an email from any address to any other address. It was considered the polite thing to do. It often took multiple hops, as everything, even mail servers, were not connected all of the time. This is also a test of venerable code to post to Fosstodon, but why be boring? #old

The old geeklabs.com server was Debian 10, and that was an in place uprade from Debian 9. Spent the weekend cleaning up DNS, DKIM, PostFix, OpenDKIM, Dovevot and movig a handful of sites. Got more to move including Chugalug.org. If you see something weirder than normal: reach out. Please.

Stepping out of my normal role as just a geek to attend ITExpo and Astricon (this week in Ft. Lauderdale) to network a bit more. Am here in both a technical learn and share role, as well as trying to figure out future business development angles for Ring-U.com. Not normally a biz-dev guy (anymore), but I can fake it. If you are also around and want to rant technically or biz-dev together, hunt me down. #asterisk #astericon #itexpo

Could not use x0vncserver as it was b0rk3n badly. 0: Make sure it has a vnc module for X. locate vnc.so works 1: vncpasswd /root/.vnc/passwd 2: Add to /etc/X11/xorg.conf

 Section "Module"         Load            "vnc" EndSection Section "Screen"         Option "SecurityTypes" "VncAuth"         Option "UserPasswdVerifier" "VncAuth"         Option "PasswordFile" "/root/.vnc/passwd" EndSection 

Diving into OBS/Open Broadcast Studio for possibly streaming some live events. There is not much there. Yet. This is mostly a test post for when there is. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqsH6pnnpOWjlNpjfRdNmFw

I keep tossing new ideas at the ring-u.com team, which does small business phone systems in a repeatable supportable manner to do some "special projects". I get it. Cognitive load is a real problem at scale.

So... time to officially open the door for some telecom special use cases. If it:

• Helps people solve a problem
• Can at least cover costs
• Interesting - very important.

You are going to see me doing it as GeekLabs. Excuse me while I go set some things up for someone. There will be more later. --Mike-- aka --Meuon--

Problem: Transfering an outgoing call causes MixMonitor to close the recording file. There are insanely complicated ways to solve this, bridges, pre-dial handlers, etc. Rabbit holes. The answer was simply start a new recording in the local dial setup [Internal-Setup]. Works for parked calls, transfers and internal calls. The difference was how we thought about the problem. #asterisk #thinking

Anyone else type a password in via SSH a couple of times and the third time it refuses you the first thought is: Oh no, the servers hacked!

Then you realize you are misaligned on the keyboard you were not looking at as you typed it.

Or you were hitting caps lock...

Maybe the caffiene keeps me paranoid.

Again and again, I read code that shows bare cURL examples and cURL-ish syntax in a language and applied it to a different one. And it Just Worked(tm)!

I'm blown away when I meet a "programmer" that escews learning cURL. You don't have to be an expert, that's what documenation is for. Please at least experiment with it. If you are a web centric programmer, it is the gateway to understanding what is really going on, especially with API's.

https://curl.se/

Playing with code to post/save, organize, search, categorize and display content is EASY! What's really hard is creating content worth doing those things for. We've got to work on more / better / relevant content. Not just reposting, sharing and linking to things. CREATE! Me included.