My iPhone 4 got here a day earlier than expected. Go FedEx! I have only played it for a few hours so far, but it’s quite a nice upgrade for me from iPhone 3G.

Things I like so far:

• Multi-tasking. So far, I believe this is actually a better implementation than Android’s. (Yes I have an Android Phone)
• Folders
• Multiple Exchange accounts
• Speed. So much faster, sooo much faster…
• Outstanding build quality. The whole thing just feels really solid, unless you drop it.
• Price. Such quality for this low price.

Things that are kinda disappointing:

• Worse cell reception than iPhone 3G
• Both front and back are glass. That makes me nervous while holding it.
• The notification system on iOS still suck badly comparing to other platform.

I haven’t got time to play with the iOS 4 SDK yet, been extremely busy lately. So can’t say much about that.

It’s totally possible to receive and make calls using your Google Voice number for free! Basically we will setup a PBX server with Asterisk and FreePBX, and Sipgate.com provides unlimited free inbound calls. Here is how it works, quoting Nerd Vittles:

For outbound calls, we’ll combine a little dialplan voodoo with pygooglevoice to instruct Asterisk to place a click-to-dial call using your Google Voice forwarding number. Then we’ll stuff in the destination U.S. phone number. When you dial GV-678-1234567 from any of your Asterisk phones, Asterisk will park your initial call in a reserved parking lot slot and then join the called party to the originally parked call. The entire procedure is virtually transparent both to the caller and the callee. And, unlike the MeetMe conference, the parking lot fades out of the picture as soon as the call is connected. Thus, if either party hangs up, the active channel for the call is terminated on your Asterisk server.

For inbound calls from your Google Voice number, we’ll tweak the dialplan so that it can distinguish between a RingBack call that Google Voice initiated and a true inbound call. We’ll peel off the real inbound calls and route them to a separate Inbound Route in FreePBX for processing in any way you desire.

With this method, you can make free calls on your smartphone whenever these is reasonable Wi-fi or 3G connections available. Or you can set up a SIP phone or connect a regular phone to an Analog Telephony Adapter at home and uses your Google Voice number. A free land line. You can also forward your calls from Google Voice to both your cell phone and the SIP home phone, when you are at home, you can pick up the home phone instead to save cell phone minutes.

Here is a comprehensive guide to how to set up Asterisk and FreePBX along with Google Voice in order to make and receive calls for free on your DNS-323. I did not come up with all these, but learned from various sites. The credits go to them. I just put them together specifically for DNS-323 users.

Before we start, I assume that you:

• Have a brand new DNS-323 on firmware 1.5 or 1.6 with fun_plug enabled and have SSH access. If not, follow this guide first.
• Basic Linux knowledge and comfortable with command line interface (CLI).
• Have a Google Voice Account. If you don’t have one yet, request an invite here or ask those who have one to invite you.
• Have a SipGate account. Sign up here, it’s free. Make sure you write down the SIP Credentials in Settings.
• Forward your calls in Google Voice to your SipGate number.

It’s much easier to do this on a regular computer/server than on DNS-323, which involves many extra steps. On a regular computer you can simply install PBX In A Flash with minimal effort. But our frugal motto makes us squeeze out every drop of juice out of DNS-323 for our money’s worth.

Step 0. Clean Up DNS-323

First of all, we need to stop all unnecessary services on DNS-323. Of course you can leave them all if you have to use them, but it’s recommended to stop what you don’t need.  If you run too many programs on DNS-323, it will have to use swap frequently. Then you hard drive will never spin down, not good.

1. Stop uPNP server.
2. Stop iTunes Media server. You can install FireFly later on on Debian.
3. Remove the built-in Bittorrent client. Simply delete the folder “/mnt/HD_a2/Nas_Prog/BT“. You can install rTorrent on it and start it whenever you need to instead of having a daemon always on. You can install rTorrent later on on Debian.

Step 1. Install Debian Lenny on DNS-323

1. Download http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/debnas/debnas-0.5.tar.bz2
2. Extract the two files “fun_plug” and “linux.tar” to the root directory of your DNS-323 volume.
3. Reboot DNS-323
4. Wait for a few minutes

You should be able to access DNS-323 via SSH. Username root, default password is 12345678. Make sure you change it! Now we are going to upgrade all the packages to the latest version.

First we need to edit the repository file: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/etch.list and replace the word “etch” with “lenny“. Save and  go back to command prompt:

dlink-xxxx:# apt-get update
dlink-xxxx:# apt-get dist-upgrade

Debian is now installed.

Credit for this part goes to Mike Gore and Manuel Treitinger.

I haven’t have time to dig into the codes yet, so the fix is rather primitive and simple, but it works. The problem is that both ZuckerReports and CE Teams have a field called “team_id” in the database but they have totally different meanings. So when CE Teams read the info from “team_id” in Zucker’s database table, it acts weird. Admins are not affected since they are above CE Teams’ rules.

The fix:

1. Make sure in CE Teams you keep the team “Everyone” and add all the users to that group.
2. Fire up your favorite MySQL management software, most likely phpMyAdmin, and go to your SugarCRM database
3. Go to table “team” and record the id for team “Everyone“. (If you didn’t delete the default team, the id is “1″)
4. Go to table “zucker_listingtemplates” and update all their id to team “Everyone‘s” id.
5. In order you don’t have to modify future new templates by hand, change the default value of “team_id” to match “Everyone’s” id.
6. Repeat step 4 and 5 for the tables “zucker_querytemplates“, “zucker_reporttemplates“, and “zucker_wordtemplates“.

Now everyone in team “Everyone” should be able to run all the reports.

But after installing it, I noticed there is a bug while creating a Listing Template, whenever there is a custom field (user-defined field) involved in filtering, the returning result is empty. So I dug into the code and found out that the bugs were simple to fix. Just modify one function in each of these two files:

modules/ZuckerListingTemplateOrder/ListingTemplateFilter.php

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function create_where_clause($parameter_values = array()) {
	global $beanList, $beanFiles;
	$result = "";
 
	$beanName = $beanList[$this->module_name];
	$beanFile = $beanFiles[$beanName];
	if (!empty($beanName) && !empty($beanFile)) {
 
		require_once($beanFile);
		$seed = new $beanName;
 
		$field_def = $seed->field_defs[$this->field_name];
		if ($field_def["type"] == "relate" && $field_def["source"] == "non-db") {
			$result .= $field_def["table"].".".$field_def["rname"];
		} else {
			if(substr($this->field_name, -2) == "_c"){
				$result .= $seed->table_name."_cstm.".$this->field_name;
			}
			else{
				$result .= $seed->table_name.".".$this->field_name;
			}
		}
		$result .= " ".$this->comparator." ";
 
		if ($this->value_type == "parameter") {
 
			$rpl = new ReportParameterLink();
			$rpl->retrieve($this->value);
			$result .= "'".$parameter_values[$rpl->name]."'";
		} else {
			$result .= "'".$this->value."'";
		}
	}
	return $result;
}

modules/ZuckerListingTemplateOrder/ListingTemplateOrder.php

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function create_order_clause($parameter_values = array()) {
	global $beanList, $beanFiles;
	$result = "";
 
	$beanName = $beanList[$this->module_name];
	$beanFile = $beanFiles[$beanName];
	if (!empty($beanName) && !empty($beanFile)) {
 
		require_once($beanFile);
		$seed = new $beanName;
 
		$field_def = $seed->field_defs[$this->field_name];
		if ($field_def["type"] == "relate" && $field_def["source"] == "non-db") {
			$result .= $field_def["table"].".".$field_def["rname"];
		} else {
			if(substr($this->field_name, -2) == "_c"){
				$result .= $seed->table_name."_cstm.".$this->field_name;
			}
			else{
				$result .= $seed->table_name.".".$this->field_name;
			}
		}
		if ($this->order_type == "asc") {
			$result .= " asc ";
		} else {
			$result .= " desc ";
		}
	}
	return $result;
}

Basically what it does is checking if a field ends with “_c”, if so meaning it’s a custom field so loads it from the correct custom table. Hope this helps with those who have problem listing custom fields from ZuckerReports.

And here is a group photo of the crew, photoshoped in the actors =P:

From left to right (human only):

- Chris Diller
- Kendal Gifford
- Me
- Jason Williams
- Derrick Birkes
- Kenneth Williams
- Jason Scott
- Shawn Hall
- Alexander Johnstone

Stumbled upon a very nice screen saver, even better, it’s free. Download it here.

The two files are ddccy.dll and opnnljj.dll. You can Google them to see what they do. I made use of Windows XP Professional CD.

1. I booted the system with the XP CD.
2. (Then inserted my RAID driver since I’m using RAID. You can skip this step if you are using IDE drives).
3. Choose "Repair" mode. Then choose an installation and log in.
4. Navigate to the folder where the files are located, use "del" command to remove them.
5. Reboot back into Windows XP and run HijackThis.
6. Choose "Scan" and check the result
7. Select the items that are related to the files you deleted, and click "Fix Checked"
8. Done.

Good luck and be careful next time.

I heard of some good things about Fortran in the old days: lots of programs in engineering fields, more efficient than C, wide spread, etc. But that’s not the case anymore. Things have changed greatly after, er, 1/3 of a century.

Although there is a lot to complains against Fortran 77, what I hate the most is the line length limit and the fields in a line. Let me explain what it means:

• A line in Fortran 77 has fixed length of 80 characters, anything over that the compiler will report error
• Column 1-5 is for descriptor number, yep, that’s for “GOTO” statements…
• Column 6 is for continuation character, that’s to indicate this line is continued from last line
• Column 7-72 is for actual coding
• Column 73-80 is for whatever that will be ignored by the compiler

That’s where the idea came from, yes, PUNCH CARD! Now you know why some older Fortran 77 programs’ variable always have horribly short names.

This limit really gave me a lot of problems while I was writing the program. Especially I can only write my code from column 7 to 72. Sometimes I get weird bugs because of this. I guess this will train my attention to detail, heh!

Here is a book I bought that helped me quite a bit. I’m not sure if it’s DI best Fortran 77 book, but I think it’s at least one of the best for those who are relatively new to the language. If you already have programming background in other language, you can pick Fortran up really quick just by speed reading this book. Get a used one for a reasonable price on Amazon