Well I have started the chicken coop, or as in Austrailia, a chook house.

We were going back and forth between sticking the coop in the pole barn and a free standing one. The advantages to the pole barn are the presence of electricity and water, but the disadvantage is that the southern wall has a drive right next to it and we didn't want to clean that out from the barn.

So we decided on a chicken tractor, and got some of the ideas from "blog of a readhead" The biggest problem is that I am too cheap to pay for plans, so I am using that site as a guide.

The basic idea is a 8x6 foot square on the base. I have reinforced these with a couple of 45 degree blocks on the corner. This was the easy part. The biggest thing here is that you need the 8' sections on the outside to make sure any other boards used inside will span the difference. I would rather cut 1.5" off a 8' board than to cut just under 2' from a 10' board.

All the wood so far is 2x4 AC2 (treated). I will also be using some 2x2 AC2.

The reason for only going 6' on the sides is weight (it is heavy enough as it is), and managability.

With my pinched nerve, this is a good project to get the kids to help.

Like all things, the blog site needs regular attention, and to be honest, the past couple of years have been busy.

So I have taken the time today to clean out the bugs (spammers), and air out the links.

I have been thinking of a change to the content of the site.

Most of the items in the past have been regarding politics and guns. This is due to the never ending need for comments on the state of affairs in our social experiment in this grand US of A.

As I see it now, the problem in the area of social concerns goes deeper than just the current state of political affairs, but more at the heart of the matter.

Maybe, just maybe if God is willing, I will get the opportunity to expand on these thoughts.

The homestead continues to be a work in progress. We have horses and chickens now. So maybe I can shed some light on these ventures.

Good news is we are finally getting grass in the front yard, well maybe.

Overall, there will be changes here. I have two businesses that I am attempting to start. One deals with equipment auctions (more on that later) and the other is an independent consulting gig in the Supply Chain.

Well off, to clean up more of this closet called a website...

Well, it has been a while since I posted, but I thought I should at least chronical something that we are doing, which is an interesting experiment.

I have been following the goings on at the Sugar Mountain Farm Site as Walter and family are preparing their tiny cottage. When I say tiny, I mean tiny. We are talking 252 square feet of living space for 5 people.

So in an attempt to try something new, we also shrunk the living area of our family this winter. No, we are not below the 300 mark, in fact we are still at about 1600 sq ft. from our prior 2400.

What we have done is to move ourselves to the first floor. The kids have their beds in the greatroom and we are in the "guest" bedroom.

The purpose of this is to get the family closer, reduce our heating footprint, learn to deal with one bathroom, and see what stuff we can live without.

To many times we find ourselves in a toxic level of "stuff". I have no clue what I was thinking collecting some of it, but be sure, it is going, albeit, not as fast I would like.

We have taken and placed some insulation in the stairway to the loft to block off the upstairs.

Right now, we are looking at the location of the Christmas tree this year. This should be fun..

Well, hopefully I can post more often, but things are looking busier despite my best attempts at slowing down.

Funny that in one day, I will be posting on two different errors that do not seem to be covered.

When you are installing unixodbc 2.2 and myODBC 3.51 (mySQL product), be aware that the environment needs to have an ODBCINI value with the path to your ODBC.ini file.

The unixodbc will find the file okay without this but mySQL seems to have left this precious little hint out of their documentation.

If you do not do this, you will get the following error:

[08S01][unixODBC][MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

You do this by running the following command and then editing your /etc/profile to fix it permanently:

EXPORT ODBCINI="/usr/local/etc/odbc.ini"

Then, when you actually create a DSN for mySQL, don't listen to unixodbc when they tell you that the host should be host={name/IP}, myODBC requires this parameter to be server={name/IP}.

Oh, did I mention that this only occurs when you are trying to connect to a mySQL server at a remote location. If you are connecting to localhost, this all works just fine without these changes.

Looking on the Digium forums, I found a very nice idea for a patch to the logger.c file in Asterisk from vixtor {link is above}.

The patch was created for 1.2.3 by vixtor so I ported the patch over to 1.4.0 and causes the queue log to be written to SQL in real-time. This allows you to get the statistics for the queue in real-time instead of having to import the existing queue log.

I always have issues with bulky patches to code because they are not a quick hook of the code but a lengthy addition. Therefore, what I have done is move the bulk of the code out of the patch and placed it in a file to be included. While I should have created a .h and a .c file to be proper, this will have to do to make things simpler.

That way the changes to the core files can be minimal and even if you need to hack this for future version, all you need to do is place 4 lines into the existing code.

I doubt that Digium will include this in their production system due to the difference between Digium licensing and mySQL licensing, so my guess is that we will need to patch this for each version.

1. You will need to place the logger-mysql.c file in the main directory below your build directory.
2. You will need to create a sql table something like this:

CREATE TABLE `asterisk_queue_log` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`time` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`callid` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '',
`queuename` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '',
`agent` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '',
`event` varchar(20) NOT NULL default '',
`arg1` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
`arg2` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
`arg3` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ;

3. You will need to patch the Makefile and main/logger.c fiel, which is also here.

diff -u -r ./Makefile.sav ./Makefile
--- ./Makefile.sav 2006-12-22 16:33:46.000000000 -0600
+++ ./Makefile 2007-01-07 10:19:04.000000000 -0600
@@ -183,6 +183,8 @@
ASTCFLAGS+=-pipe -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations $(DEBUG)

ASTCFLAGS+=-include $(ASTTOPDIR)/include/asterisk/autoconfig.h
+ASTCFLAGS+=-I/usr/include/mysql
+ASTLDFLAGS+=-L/usr/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient

ifeq ($(AST_DEVMODE),yes)
ASTCFLAGS+=-Werror -Wunused
diff -u -r ./main/logger.c.sav ./main/logger.c
--- ./main/logger.c.sav 2006-11-10 20:04:28.000000000 -0600
+++ ./main/logger.c 2007-01-07 02:51:54.000000000 -0600
@@ -86,6 +86,9 @@
static int filesize_reload_needed = 0;
static int global_logmask = -1;

+/* Added for mysql */
+#include "logger-mysql.c"
+
static struct {
unsigned int queue_log:1;
unsigned int event_log:1;
@@ -337,6 +340,9 @@
if ((s = ast_variable_retrieve(cfg, "general", "event_log")))
logfiles.event_log = ast_true(s);

+/* Added for mysql */
+ init_mysql_logger(cfg);
+
AST_LIST_LOCK(&logchannels);
var = ast_variable_browse(cfg, "logfiles");
for (; var; var = var->next) {
@@ -359,6 +365,8 @@
fprintf(qlog, "%ld|%s|%s|%s|%s|", (long)time(NULL), callid, queuename, agent, event);
vfprintf(qlog, fmt, ap);
fprintf(qlog, "\n");
+/* Added for mysql */
+ write_mysql_logger(queuename,callid,agent,event,fmt, ap);
va_end(ap);
fflush(qlog);
}


4. You will need to add these lines into /etc/asterisk/logger.conf:

[mysql]
hostname=localhost
dbname=asterisk
table=asterisk_queue_log
password=*
user=asterisk
port=3306
sock=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

UPDATE: Fixed the diff file so it is more proper