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Archive for August, 2009

Cisco TSP – Wave goodbye

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

I’ve been wrestling with the Cisco Telephony Service Provider (TSP) today. We’re doing an install of ARC console, and having set everything else up, it wouldn’t start. I traced back and found that the issue lay in the TSP module itself. ARC tell you to try a utility called TAPI Soft Phone. Every time I ran it I got a vague error about not being able to connect.

I found the TSP was actually dropping logs into C:\Temp. I found these lines:

CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPWaveList::GetAvailWave() *ERROR* No wave available|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>
CiscoTSP001.tsp|   CSelsiusTSPDevice::OpenDevice() [ARC-SrvQueue3] *ERROR* GetAvailWave() returned WAVELIST_NOT_ASSIGNED|<LVL::Error><MASK::0001>

I was aware there was a Wave driver in there, but it supposedly gets installed when the TSP installed.

Right?

Well, it would seem not. Whether it’s meant to or not, I don’t know. I could find plenty of reference to reinstalling it, but not a lot of mention of how to install it in the first place (or reinstall it for that matter). A bit more digging, and I found this Cisco document which tells you how to install.

It mentions Windows 2000, but it’s roughly the same for 2003, which I’m using. I selected Add New Device, Game and Audio controllers, and just pointed it at the driver.

One thing that struck me is that Windows claims the driver is unsigned. I’m wondering if the TSP installer is trying to shoe-horn the unsigned driver in, failing, and just silently giving up. Like I say, that’s assuming it actually does it in the first place.

Anyway it now works. A simple thing, but it took me a while to find the root cause and fix it.

Posted in Computers, General, Links, Rant, Unified Comms | 1 Comment »

Recipe: Rocky Roads 1.0

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

This recipe is a sort of mish-mash of ideas from other recipes. Rocky Roads are actually pretty easy to make – not so much a recipe as a ‘collect some random stuff and mush it together with chocolate’.

Anyway, this is what I made this weekend:

  • 50g Butter
  • 40g White Chocolate Buttons
  • 100g Raisins
  • 100g Marshmallows (either small, or large ones cut down smaller – random sizes are more fun)
  • 200g digestive biscuits
  • 460g Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate
  1. Melt three quarters of the chocolate with the butter. Save the remaining chocolate until the end (don’t melt it yet). Be careful not to cook the chocolate.
  2. Break the biscuits up into smaller pieces, and mix with the white chocolate buttons, raisins and marshmallows.
  3. Pour the chocolate onto the dry ingredients, and mix it all until evenly coated.
  4. Line a shallow tin with greaseproof paper, and place the mixture into it. Spread it out evenly
  5. Melt the remaining chocolate and pour it on top of the main mixture
  6. Set in a refrigerator for two to three hours
  7. Cut into slices/squares/consume as one piece

That made a pretty nice mix. I think you could put in more fruit, and definitely more buttons. You could probably also get away without having the butter, but it helps to thin the chocolate a bit and make it spread and stick better.

The end result looks vaguely like this:

23747104“Om nom nom” are the words you’re thinking of, I believe.

I might take another whack at it with more fruit. Anyway, enjoy!

Posted in Food, General, Rave | 1 Comment »

7 into 2133 does go

Friday, August 14th, 2009

I’ve been running Windows 7 on my main PC all this week, and I’ve very quickly found myself getting used to it. Even the new Start Bar is growing on me daily.

I decided today to see if my little HP 2133 netbook could take it. The HP has no optical drive, and I have no external USB drives. I had a IDE-USB converter thingy I’d used with an IDE CD drive in the past, but I’d blown the PSU on it. I needed another solution.

I’ve installed Linux from USB drives in the past, and I knew it was possible to install Windows onto HP Proliant servers using Smartstart and a USB drive. I was vaguely aware any PC could do it, you just needed a method.

A quick google turned up this blog entry:

HOWTO: Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive – Windows Live.

I reasoned that Windows 7 is basically Vista so the theory was probably the same. I got my 4GB SanDisk USB drive, downloaded the Windows 7 Home Premium ISO from Technet, and started setting up the disk.

After plugging it into the netbook, I powered up, and selected it from the boot menu. Imagine my surprise when it worked! Not only that, but it booted, and installed perfectly fine. I wondered if it had done something stupid like installed the boot loader on the USB drive (had that happen before) or messed up the drive letters, but no, everything is where it should be.

What impressed me the most was that during the setup, it found my wireless controller, and set up my connection to the AP. Next it activated with Microsoft (although oddly told me it had expired, and must be activated), and I was in. Windows Update was already showing activity so I had a look and found all the other drivers waiting to be installed. Once they had installed and rebooted, I have a fully set up Netbook!

The start bar looks like it could be very useable on the netbook, and it seems pretty nippy. I’d run XP on it before as I decided Vista was a pointless excercise. Don’t get me wrong, I rather like Vista, and had been running it for some time, but it really doesn’t get on well with low-end hardware. This little machine seems to be OK with Windows 7 however, so I’ll have to see how it goes.

Posted in Computers, Links, Rave, Windows | Comments Off