Getting pretty good at this now. Wish I knew how to customize the endpoints back when I was at the school, my artwork would be on every phone in the entire school. Worst thing about it is, it’s dead easy!
Only works for the Cisco SCCP firmware on the 7940 and 7960 phones. Other phones will load the image, but as they have higher resolutions (and in the case of the 7945, 7965 and especially the 7975 colour touchscreen device (and their video conferencing endpoints actually) it might appear a bit weird.
I did this in Cisco Unified Communications Manager 7, but I believe it’s the same in 8 and later. You can apply it to the entire enterprise by going in to Unified CallManager and hovering over “System”, then clicking “Enterprise Parameters”. Scroll down until you hit “Phone URL Parameters”, and in this section you will see two fields. The first being “URL Idle” and the second “URL Idle Time”. “Idle” is when an endpoint device has been left alone for a specific amount of time, as determined by the “URL Idle Time” field. In my configuration I put 2. In the URL Idle field, set it to a web service accessible by the voice VLAN, and point it to your phone idle/image XML file. Reset your endpoints, and you’re done. You can do this on an individual basis also by going in to the device settings for a single phone and changing the same fields.
The XML file mentioned is generated by a Cisco utility called “gif2cip” (use it on the command prompt, invoking it like: “gif2cip mygifimage.gif idle.xml”). Basically, create your 16-colour greyscale image in Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing program. The canvas size must be no more than 125x60 for the IP Phone 7940 and 7960 as the LCDs, although large, are ultra low resolution, unlike the 7975, 7965 Java phones, which are higher res, but I have none to test with so this is for the cheaper 7940 and 7960 devices. Once you’ve created your image, save as a GIF, use gif2cip to convert it to XML and then open the XML file in notepad. In this file, you can specify the softkey template to use when the phone is in “Idle” mode. My University uses it to allow quick calling of support numbers. I use it to call other phones on the network for ease of testing different functions as I learn how CUCM works (Planning to be CCVP certified eventually, along with CCNA cert). To give am example of what you can do, you can actually have the softkeys go to various functions of the phone, but I only use them to tell the phone to dial a specific number for each one, like so…
Within the <CiscoIPPhoneImage> context and below your <Prompt> line, set this:
<SoftKeyItem>
<Name>My7940</Name>
<URL>Dial:9050</URL>
<Position>1</Position>
</SoftKeyItem>
<SoftKeyItem>
<Name>My7960</Name>
<URL>Dial:9051</URL>
<Position>2</Position>
</SoftKeyItem>
<SoftKeyItem>
<Name>Operator</Name>
<URL>Dial:2001</URL>
<Position>3</Position>
</SoftKeyItem>
<SoftKeyItem>
<Name>VoiceMail</Name>
<URL>Dial:5000</URL>
<Position>4</Position>
</SoftKeyItem>
To quickly summarize, <Name> is used to tell the phone to set the name of the softkey. <URL> is used to tell the phone what to do when the softkey is pushed, in this case, dial the number given. <Position> is used to tell the device in which order it should present that specific item. The 7940 and 7960 have four softkeys, whereas the higher end 7975 devices have five. The <Name> cannot contain unicode characters. The 7940 and 7960 can only display the first 6 characters of the <Name>, where the 7975 can display 9 or so I believe (I don’t have one, but I am using the Cisco IP Communicator Softphone which behaves just like the 7975).
If this is useful, let me know. If you know of other cool tricks you can do with the XML file, be sure to comment. :)
Gooood grief. I’ve spent the last half hour browsing Tumblr’s “Fractale” tag. Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks Nessa is freaking awesome and adorable in every freaking way.
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This goes way back 7 or 8 years ago now, but something interesting happened on one of the communities I ran when where the words “Mod”, “Interview” and “unique” came up in the same sentence.
Admittedly, I did some web-work for a friend of mine at the time for their own Internet Radio Station and the idea came from this. Initial proposal was met with “THIS GON BE AWSOME LOL”, and so there I was configuring Windows Media Services on a Server 2003 box, Windows Media Encoder as the client, and a quick little web frontend where people could pick up the stream from Winamp, musikCube or whatever player they used, for a new Internet Radio Station called “PinkFloydYoshi Radio” from what I can remember (which was an old old alias).
I ran a couple of interviews of staff members for the community I was working with, which turned out to be hilarious and I enjoyed myself while doing it. Not something I could continue doing unfortunately due to time required to pull it off (Mostly technological and dependent on my own time available; all material was completely improvised during broadcast). In addition, as I was interested in it I decided to look up on what the deal is with some stations saying they were licensed. It was at this point I decided to ease up on it as there were plenty of things to stop me from doing the show, and because I wasn’t serious about doing it anyway I decided against continuing after a while.
It was a good experiment. It all happened before everyone started broadcasting their own things on Youtube, LiveStream or Broadcastify so I had no-one to take experience from. I’d never done it before, never knew how I’d be like when broadcasting in front of a group of people (I surprised myself, but I’m actually quite calm and get in to it quickly), learned a bunch of new buzzwords, and some of the details to make it licensed so I could, you know, broadcast music like every other radio station. I also learned that there is a lot of time that needs investing if you’re going to do it on your own. I found setting up the server to be ok, but it needed preparing, as did the encoder on the PC I would be using to do the broadcast on to make sure everything was loaded ready to go, and as people I interviewed had various packages for conferencing I had pretty much all the popular softwares installed, and I had accounts for them all. Everything was improvised on the spot based on what happened in the IRC channel so this was lesser load, but it’s arranging time to do it, across different timezones that also made things complicated.
Experiences gained afterward? Oddly enough, I was a host for a specific time slot for a friend of mine on his own internet radio station. No experience gained as much of it was basic filler while the original guy was ill, but I help my friends out.
Would I go back if I fancied the opportunity? Not live broadcasts, however I am interested in doing short podcasts or videos, but not currently sure on what content I’d do.
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Chibi Disney Eeyore by *princekido
Saw this in my Tumblr timeline and thought it was sweet, but the person who uploaded it didn’t refer back to the original author and they disabled right-clicking, so I did some research and this is directly from the artists deviantArt page. :)
dA added the links to David Gilson’s profile above. :)
We’ve fallen out of love with the games console.
Gaming has been a big part of most of our lives now for over 10 years. Me? 25 years. I loved my NES, SNES and at the time I could be considered a raging Nintendo fanboy. I became platform neutral around 15 years ago (shows how old I am) when I started playing Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Spyro The Dragon and Metal Gear Solid which were all not available on the Nintendo platform, but were all bloody brilliant.
At the time, a friend of mine explains to me that getting in to game development was about getting your idea on to your favourite console. That was ‘the dream’: Seeing your code or designs or storyline in use on the console you cherished the most, and he was right. When you bought a games console, you didn’t just bring a console home, you bought years of entertainment (and in the NES and SNES’ case, decades) around that single device. It was the harbinger of excitement and emotion, and we all lapped it up like a pack of thirsty kittens around a bowl of milk. For the developers and designers of your favourite worlds, it spurred inspiration and a desire to make ideas come to life on the big screen, but where did this inspiration come from?
If you played a Nintendo console, it’s possible you were inspired by the bright and colourful worlds of Mario or the fantastical and majestic Legend of Zelda, titles inseparable from Nintendo, and for good reason: Nintendo tailored their consoles around their titles, and this resulted in perfect harmony. Everything made sense. They also never released anything until they were happy that it was worthy of the Nintendo Seal of Quality, a scheme that is now sadly long gone.
Unfortunately today, the ‘dream’ of running your output on your favourite console is not something people factor in any more as something more curious has replaced it. It used to be called ‘homebrew’. You knew that if you took part in this scene, you invalidated your consoles warranty. It reduced (and to be honest quite rightly) the return and fix rights of consumers if they made their device do something it wasn’t designed to do. For 20% of the people who took part in homebrewing, it meant forcing your code to run on the console, and watching it crash and do weird things when errors existed, but for 80% of them it was a gateway to piracy or playing pirated games.
Today, however people demand this level of access to their consoles, and I blame Google for this. As Google’s Android operating system was pushed as “Open Source”, fanboys and apologists demanded access to the bootloaders of their mobile phones under the guise that “Android is open, I have the right to do this!”. They cried censorship at anyone who challenged this, especially the carriers who had services being stolen from them by people who owned Android devices. Internet tethering was an issue since day 1. If the carriers demanded it disabled unless you paid for the service, many people with Android devices felt ‘entitled’ to receive services they weren’t paying the right to use, and they ‘rooted’ their devices and added binaries that piped the phones internet access out the USB port or wifi. People got their contracts cancelled for breaching their terms, and deservedly so. Just like only being able to connect approved devices to corporate networks (if it wasn’t approved IT security would find you and beat you with a sledgehammer, and your device) I fail to see why people should be allowed to use other peoples networks in such a way and is unfair to the rest of us who pay the extra. The word for this is “entitlement”. Another word that is common among many successful indie game developers and open source obsessives (and I say this while wearing a Linux Foundation t-shirt) is “belief”.
I disagree with many beliefs more than I agree, but this is where I lose a lot of respect for many indies. 3 arguments for your delectation:
Argument 1: Games development should be free!
Maybe so, but Unity exists. UDK exists and all are free. What’s wrong with all these? Oh yeah, they run on Windows. A massive problem with enthusiasts of ‘open’ is that if it’s proprietary, it’s evil. This means Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft is evil for creating the experiences they have and fathered in to the games industry some of the most amazing talent, all names many people will recognise like Hideo Kojima, Tim Schaffer, Shigeru Miyamoto. All evil, because they work for organisations who create their experiences around proprietary technology. The argument for games development being free was never an issue in the days of these amazingly talented people. Free versions of IDEs or the design tools never existed back then but it didn’t stop them getting in and doing amazing things, so this argument is pointless. If this really bothers you, get an Ouya and enjoy building games that won’t captivate audiences like a good Zelda title (read: all of them).
Argument 2: Developers should take Linux seriously!
My argument for Linux has already been made: It’s the definitive server (until LDAP is mentioned), but a lousy desktop OS. How much money do you spend building a Linux game to build it around all the possible configurations, versions and distributions of every single possible library, package and distro? On Windows, you don’t have to consider this unless you’re going between Windows versions or you’re relying on frameworks that aren’t a core part of the Windows OS. This is why: It’s cheaper. Want another excuse? Not only is it cheaper, but it’s cheaper to build a game for an OS that has such a massive portion of market share than it is to build a Linux version of a game for only a very tiny share of people. Doesn’t stop that tiny share of users being very very vocal though. Don’t get me wrong: I love Linux. It’s an incredibly powerful OS and is perfect in my eyes for two things: Serving users and dealing with big data. If you go to a web site, chances are it’s a Linux box serving you the page.
Argument 3: Multiplatform is the way it should be done!
If you speak to enough of these ‘open evangelists’, the meaning of their use of multiplatform changes to ‘every platform; except any Microsoft or Apple platform’. If you’re speaking to a particularly militant open evangelist, it’s ‘Every open platform. If it’s proprietary fuck ‘em’. These are the Ouya fanboys, the ones who recently went all Donkey Kong on The Verge when they did an admittedly early review of the Ouya and gave it 3.5 out of 10, possibly the worst score they’ve ever given a piece of hardware, but to stay on topic I’ve had this argument before. My argument is that as a developer you should focus on the tools you are most comfortable with, and not keep changing them. You only become a great developer by sticking to your tools. If you want to settle with simply being ‘good’ then OK but when a developer looks at your experience in a job interview, they’ll bring this up as a problem topic.
Notch (Minecraft) makes some interesting arguments. Many of which I don’t agree with, but a recent one where he was quoted made me think “Maybe he’s not totally crazy”: “just make games for yourself”. This is actually how it used to be as I mentioned right at the beginning, getting in to games was about seeing your ideas run on your dream console. Today however it’s about money. This is why Battlefield and Call of Duty exist (also known as churn-churn-churn), they are cash cows and don’t take the player in to consideration. They don’t create them because they have a dream, they most certainly don’t create them because they want to. The only reason an immersive experience gets in to these games is because there are creative individuals who have ideas. Unfortunately, these creative individuals are non-creative people (managers with pointy noses and a ‘demanding ethos’) who order someone else who has the talents to do this to go crazy with the “immersion” and “innovate”. Innovate all you want, but innovation isn’t what makes a successful game. Sometimes, innovation can get right in the way of you enjoying a title as evidenced sadly by Zelda: Skyward Sword where I found myself constantly fighting with the controls to do basic things in a game with a story and visuals that gave me the impression that this was going to be the best Zelda game ever. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
To finish up, gaming today is in a sad state of affairs. From SimCity 5’s always-online mode that the next XBox is also having according to rumour, to the Ouya, an Android powered games console. Ouya, is possibly the most toxic as it allows game developers that create cheap throwaway experiences to infect a part of the industry that is desperate to keep players playing their machines and games, not because they make one hell of a killing (not true, see next:) but because they create game experiences that last 150+ hours, with massive stories, beautiful graphics and fantastic environments and an experience that will live with you for many years to come. It takes a lot of people to put games like this together, and a lot more to make and support the consoles they run on. It also takes a hell of a lot of time, and with this generation having come 8 years late (this console generation is 4 normal generations in the making) it also means workload to create experiences that challenge these next generation platforms is higher than ever before, meaning many developers will be asking if it’s worth creating these massive games, or if they will have an easier life in developing on mobile platforms and Ouya. Due to many studios closing, there is already a massive talent drain. Many of those people exit the industry altogether, many end up developing 69p games on iOS or Android.
It’s a massive shame. I feel like I’m watching the industry turn itself inside-out, and I’ve got a lot of really fond memories.
Spyro: Not Again by ~Lifefantasyx
Oh the memories. This stage took me so to do. This is also a pretty awesome drawing, don’t see enough of classic Spyro, especially Sheila.
“You shut the fuck up! Right now! Relationships are of equal standing! I don’t give a fuck if you think you’re the man of the family just because you have a dick. Fuck you! She works just as hard. And she has a nice dress.” — Cry (via cryaoticquotes)
(Source: youtube.com, via cryaoticquotes)
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