Category: Awareness

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), as part of the Special Initiative of the Swedish Government to strengthen democratization and freedom of expression, is extending grant support to NGOs, individuals and other civil society organizations in developing countries. In this context, it has currently launched a call for proposals “to support actors for change where they operate with difficulty and where there is little room for political pluralism with the view of promoting a holistic approach to human rights and embodying a pluralistic and non-discriminatory view of society.” The Initiative is an opportunity for organizations and individuals to seek funding support for activities that will lead to democratization, transparency, policy changes and pluralism by having better access to information, sharing of opinions and achieving greater freedom of expression.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides self-serve, on-demand servers where you pay for the capacity you use.

The Ubuntu and Debian images listed above are built for Amazon EC2 using a collection of best practices collected from the EC2, Ubuntu, and Debian communities.

Part 2: Asterisk in a Cloud

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we covered why you should consider using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for your telephony solution. In this article, we will:

* Sign-up for Amazon Web Services (AWS);
* Setup the Elasticfox Firefox Extension for Amazon EC2;
* Configure an Amazon EC2 instance;
* Assign an Elastic IP address to the instance;
* Install Asterisk 1.6;
* Create Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for the Asterisk configuration, voicemail and logs storage.

This is a summary of Ronald Lewis’ how-to efforts for creating a working asterisk server in the clouds… Why repeat it here? Ron’s staging his howto in Scribd! 8-(

Comodo puts out some pretty nice looking and FREE anti-virus and firewall products for PCs…

Here's the pitch: a 10-inch, almost-pocketable computer running Snow Leopard, the latest, greatest version of OS X. It costs just $300. Sound good? Here's how to make your own.

As everyone probably knows by now, Doom has been ported to Android.

This is exciting for two reasons,

1. It’s Doom!
2. It’s actually native code running with a Dalvik frontend.

Now, Dalvik doesn’t have JNI, so how can you write something in C and run it?

This guy will lead you down a link-clicking rabbit hole that’ll tell you how. The important parts are the compiler (Choose ARM GNU/Linux and IA32 GNU/Linux), and the technique of running system commands from Dalvik, which is detailed on Gimite’s page.

Why still Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) server? I just don’t have time to upgrade it. For a server, as long as it is secure and stable, no need for the cutting edge.

Why VPN? Check wiki. For me, I want to access some location sensitive files while I am on the iPhone via 3G network.

How? There is an excellent How-To in Chinese. I followed it and it works! This post is a summary of what I did.

自从实验室放了台 Linux 服务器后，可玩的东西就越来越多了。虽然这台服务器主要的工作是 Web Server，但鉴于我们那小站压力非常之小，服务器资源绝大多数还是浪费着，所以让它多干些活是个不错的选择。实验室的内部网络中有不少非常有用的资源，例如科研用的文献资料，个人的实验数据等等，这些内容一旦离开实验室就不那么容易访问到了。解决这个问题最好的办法就是 VPN。在 Ubuntu 上搭建 VPN 服务器的方法非常多，比较著名的有 PPTP, L2TP/IPSec 和 OpenVPN。这三种方式中后两者的安全性比较好，但配置较麻烦。其中 OpenVPN 在 Windows/Mac 平台上还需要额外的客户端。而 L2TP/IPSec 方式虽然比较好，但我配置后，虽然 Windows 和 Linux 用户没有问题，但 Mac/iPhone 却始终无法连上，所以暂时删掉了，日后搞清楚是什么问题再换到这种方式。