Donald Jackson

What should be the next game in the ‘Hero’ series?

Donald Jackson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:14:06 +0000

I posted a question on Twitter this morning about Violin Hero (being a former violinist myself this seemed obvious) and I had some other suggestions, so I wanted to check the opinion of the general public on what the next ‘Hero’ game should be. Let’s see how the results turn out.

Outraged – An Open Letter to Mr Delivery

Donald Jackson — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:49:58 +0000

I would like to add comment here but I think the letter says it all, we received the worst possible service from Mr Delivery last night and I simply cannot keep quiet about it. Here is an ‘Open Letter’ to Mr Delivery below.

TO whom it may concern,

We placed an order this evening (the 2nd January 2009) at 8pm online as we have done many times previously.

By 9:30pm we had heard nothing, our order was not confirmed as usual. We tried repeatedly to contact Mr. Delivery Sea Point with no answer. It was our intent at this stage to cancel the order as we had made other eating arrangements. Eventually someone did answer and said that our order was “on its way”, with expected arrival approximately 10 minutes.

After 20 minutes had elapsed and we had still not heard anything; we called Posticino’s directly to check if our order had actually been collected. They informed us it had just been collected a few minutes earlier. After waiting another 10 minutes we still had no joy. We called Mr. Delivery Sea Point once again, thankfully someone answered and then informed us that the restaurant had been very busy, causing the delay. A few minutes later the door bell rang and the order was delivered, cold, of course. According to the driver, the delay was because of the huge amount of traffic on the roads. (I basically live 3km’s from the restaurant, so that is pretty hysterical!)

I indicated to the driver that I had opted to pay via credit card for our order as I usually do, but this was not reflected on the slip. The driver said that the office would be contacting us to confirm payment. He seemed happy to accept our signature, but left without leaving us any copies. This was at 10pm; at this point we had actually already eaten after waiting so long and retired for the evening. Pretty exhausted and disappointed about the whole ordeal.

Not long after, we were woken up by the door bell, I was quite shocked to find that the delivery guy, Kingsley, had returned and was demanding immediate payment. We explained to him calmly that he should contact us in the morning to claim his money as we were now in bed and not willing to conclude this at this hour.

He then threatened us and said he would contact the police to claim his money. He was unreasonably aggressive and persistent. We eventually managed to get him to leave the door. A few minutes later the ‘manager’ of Mr. Delivery Sea Point called us again, to claim their money. No apology was offered whatsoever. We explained our story and to our immense surprise, instead of offering an apology for causing us so much hassle, he proclaimed that it was actually our fault the payment didn’t go through when we made our online order. He refused to take any responsibility and then advised us to take up the matter with the driver!

We then went back to sleep, only to be woken up again at midnight (00:00) by an insistent and persistent knock on our front door (which is in a secure complex). We opened the door to two armed policemen and the aforementioned driver. The police were quiet while the driver ranted on about his money and us not having any sympathy for him. The police repeatedly told him to keep his voice down as it would disturb the other residents of our building. We explained the situation completely and calmly to the police officers and the driver once more which we believe was very generous of us given the circumstances. In an effort to calm the situation I offered to pay the driver in cash, less his tip and delivery fee, which he declined with the police as witnesses.

To be made to feel like criminals in our own home amongst our neighbours and friends is completely and utterly unacceptable for the sake of two pizzas. Not only was this a complete invasion of personal space, it completely ruined our evening. This kind of behavior can only be construed as harassment on the part of Mr. Delivery. The very epitome of Poor service delivery. The Manager spoke to me as though I was a complete idiot – he was thoroughly insulting and unsympathetic – in all fairness we believe he had the same attitude towards his employee.

We cannot imagine how something like this can be acceptable in an organization such as Mr. Delivery in a world class city like Cape Town. We are also astounded by the management’s lack of control and accountability in this situation, as we feel it could have been easily rectified.

In closing, we would like to have some basic questions answered.

1) What is an acceptable turnaround time for food ordered? When we ordered the delivery time was indicated to be 9:05pm and it had not arrived by 10pm (2 hours).

2) Is it acceptable that food is delivered cold?

3) After a late delivery where Mr. Delivery was at fault with the billing, is it acceptable to be harassed for a further two hours after the fact?

4) Who is responsible for the systems in place at Mr. Delivery, the client, or Mr. Delivery?

5) How is it possible that our order was placed successfully online and yet our payment details were somehow misplaced?

6) In a matter like this, especially given that it is impossible to get through to your call centre’s, who does one phone in this situation?

UPDATE: 2010/01/04 – Response from Mr Delivery

I received this email from Laurence Levine yesterday.

Dear Mr. Jackson

Please accept my humble apologies this type of behaviour is definitely not condoned by my Company and all guilty parties will be dealt with accordingly .

I am currently oversees and I will get my Head of Operations to take care of this matter in my absence( Mrs Zettie Potgieter ) .

However I will be following up personally on this matter on my return to SA .

In the meanwhile I would like to offer you two complimentary pizza’s and free delivery on your next order or if you wish to eat at Posticino I will pay for your next meal there .

Lastly thank you kindly for contacting me with this unacceptable service without customers like you I can never fix problems such as these .

Kind regards

Laurence Levine

While I am thankful for the gesture and also the apology, I really hope something is done to prevent something like this in future. Mrs Zettie Potgieter did indeed call me today, and I discussed the issue with her further. She indicated to me that she would be following up with me further based on what action was taken. I will be posting all the details here as they come in.

The Christmas Presents

Donald Jackson — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:08:37 +0000

So admittedly I have been one of the most useless blogger’s around over the past year. It has been an intense year after going it alone business wise. Now that the dust has settled on an amazing 2009 I have given myself some Christmas presents. My blogging frequency is largely to blame on the hate for my previous wordpress theme, so in an effort to combat this…

Gift #1 – The blog update

So yes, I have updated my blog to the latest wordpress version and removed any in script hacks that I did previously and just moved to plugins to keep things simple. I must say, the wordpress platform has come a long way since my old blog and I am extremely impressed! In addition to this I ‘refreshed’ my about page to be a bit more relevant to where I am and what I’m up to now.

Gift #2 – The product site

I have developed quite a cool SMS gateway product (IMHO) but I have done absolutely no marketing for it thus far. I have just been distributing it via word of mouth and through connections of mine in the industry. I decided it was time to release it into the wild and get a site up and running to spread the word, hence I have setup the site for Elite SMS Gateway. Yes, I know the name is a bit cheesy but my marketing creativity leaves much to be desired

Gift #3 – The photo blog

Those of you close to me, will know that I recently aquired a Canon EOS 7D and before I even received the camera I had planned on launching a photo blog. As they say about a panel beaters car, the same applied to my own personal blogs. So finally I managed to get it up and running at www.badphotographer.com. I called it ‘the bad photographer’ as a play on the idea that there is no good or bad photography, it’s all a matter of each person’s tastes. I’d love to get some comments on this blog on the photos.

So that’s it on the gift front, I am excited to keep the blogs moving and get a big of feedback from the community.

Have a safe festive season

Kannel presentation to GeekDinner

Donald Jackson — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:49:15 +0000

Apologies for the delay as I promised to have this up the day after GeekDinner Thanks to all those involved with organizing these events, they are really enjoyed by all. Thanks to the sponsors Delheim for providing the wine for the event.

Anyway, without further ado here is the presentation I gave on Kannel at GeekDinner on Monday the 28th of September 2009.

I hope it provides some insight into the gateway

Technorati Tags: Kannel, GeekDinner

Kannel for Windows – Some Cygwin Binaries

Donald Jackson — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:56:27 +0000

A customer of mine recently asked me for a windows version of Kannel. Prior to this I had no experience with Cygwin/Windows development at all. It was actually extremely simple to build Kannel using Cygwin (thanks to the Kannel developers for being, well, pretty cool ).

Obviously it’s not the easiest thing in the world for non-developers so I thought I would make it easy for everyone to just simply download some binaries of Kannel and get going.

So with that said, I have built two installers for Kannel to run on windows. I have built against the stable release 1.4.3 and then I have done a CVS snapshot build against CVS dated 2009-04-07.

If you are interested in these, please navigate to my kannel for windows page which I will keep up to date as more stable releases get done.

Just a bit of background of how to build your own versions on Cygwin below:

Download latest version of Cygwin
Install, making sure you select the development packages (gcc, automake, libxml2-devel, openssl-devel, etc)
Download and extract the source of Kannel from www.kannel.org
Change directory to the extracted source
Run ./configure
Run make
Then if you wish, run make install to install (need privileges unless alternative –prefix was specified)

Easy !

Just as a final note, Kannel on windows should NOT be treated as a production ready piece of software, so this should be used strictly for convenience, testing, development, etc.

As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment or mail me via blog@ddj.co.za

Technorati Tags: Kannel, Windows, Cygwin

Extracting meta-data from SMPP TLV’s with Kannel

Donald Jackson — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:18:13 +0000

I have been relatively quiet the past few weeks with various operations going on, but seeing as I have a few minutes to spare I thought I would do a quick post explaining how to extract SMPP TLV’s using the new Kannel meta data features which are in the current CVS branch.

These are scheduled for the 1.5.0 stable release of Kannel, so for now you’ll need to do a CVS checkout of the main branch (as described in my previous posts).

I will be demonstrating how to set a test TLV and then extracting this data when a reply is received. Once you have setup your ’smpp-tlv’ group, you simply need to specify an additional parameter in your smsbox request. This parameter is named ‘meta-data’. The format for this variable is ‘??’ currently the only supported bind type is ’smpp’ but it was done this way to allow future support.

The dataset argument, is a URL encoded key/value pair string. So for these tests I have configured a smpp-tlv group called ‘my-custom-var’. In order to set this, I need to build a string like this for meta-data purposes.

?smpp?my-custom-var=This+is+a+cool+var

As you can see my-custom-var is set as a URL encoded variable, this will still need to be URL-encoded for submission in the meta-data parameter sent to smsbox.

So just to demonstrate, using PHP how you would build this string, you would use.


$bind_type = "smpp";
$my_custom_var = "This is a cool var";
$meta_data = "?".$bind_type."?my-custom-var=".urlencode($my_custom_var);
/* Now we need to urlencode this string */
$meta_data = urlencode($meta_data);
/* So URL would look like */
/* cgi-bin/sendsms?to=...&from=...&meta-data=$meta_data */

So now, when you set this to smsbox, it will be sent via the smpp bind as a TLV. Easy!

Now on the converse, if your smpp bind returns a TLV in a deliver_sm or other PDU, this will also passed to your URL (if you have configured it. Here below is a basic function for parsing the meta data out of this string.


/* This function will take the meta-data string and return an associative array */
function parse_metadata($var) {
        $pos = strpos($var, "?", 1) + 1;
        /* Simply stripping out bind type 'smpp', this can be modified if you need it   */
        $var = substr($var, $pos);
        $data = parse_str($var, $out);
        return $out;
}
/* Example: */
$meta_data = parse_metadata($_GET['meta-data']);
echo "My custom var = ".$meta_data['my-custom-var'];

I hope this helps you with your SMPP TLV requirements. Good luck, don’t forget to email me if you need any assistance with Kannel/SMS, etc and I will do my best to help you as best I can.

Technorati Tags: Kannel, SMPP, TLV, Kannel Support

Send SMS using Java Midlet/J2ME and Clickatell

Donald Jackson — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:31:08 +0000

I have had some time to experiment with J2ME which is something I’ve always wanted the time to do. So during the course of this week (maybe a few hours total) I have put together my first Midlet. It’s a simple piece of software which allows you to send an SMS via the Clickatell SMS gateway.

You’ll need a Clickatell HTTP API Account to do so, if you don’t already have one click here to get one.

I have posted the source code here or you can point your mobile device directly at:

http://www.ddj.co.za/s.jad

Alternatively, download the jar file directly (I had to do this to get it working on my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone) at http://www.ddj.co.za/s.jar

I wrote it using a Mac with Eclipse (with ME add-on’s) using mpowerplayer as the emulator. It is *just* a prototype and by no means uses best practice programming so don’t judge me on this quick hack
Enjoy! If you like this app and you want me to modify it for you please get in touch via midlet@ddj.co.za

Technorati Tags: SMS, J2ME, Midlet, Clickatell

Midlet running in mpowerplayer

Kannel Web Configuration Tool v0.1 available

Donald Jackson — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:04:44 +0000

Hi everyone,

I have ‘released’ version 0.1 of the Kannel Web Configuration tool. I have created somewhat of a home page for it here for those who are interested.

It is available as ‘donation-ware’ with full source code. Admittedly it was done in a hurry so hopefully later releases will see some code enhancements.

I am more than happy to provide assistance wherever necessary on this project.

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Kannel, Web Configuration, SMS

Kannel Web Configuration Tool

Donald Jackson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:24:44 +0000

Following on with my previous themes of making Kannel easier to use for everyone, I have spent some time creating a tool which I think makes it easier to configure Kannel. It is a web based configuration tool which edits Kannel configuration files directly (doesn’t rely on any third party databases etc). I wrote it in PHP to keep it simple.

Current features

Edit existing configuration files
Add new configuration groups (smsc’s, smsbox-route, sendsms-user, etc)
Based on the cfg.def from Kannel CVS 1.4.2 as of 2008/12/18

Features in progress

Live updates to Kannel without restart for SMPP/EMI and smsbox-route’s (patch of Kannel CVS required)

Coming soon

User authentication
Kannel analytics and monitoring
Audit trails of changes
Other live updates

I am looking for feedback on the tool and when I believe it is stable enough and usable enough I will release it. You can see the beta of this tool here: http://www.ddj.co.za/kannel-config/web/

Enjoy! Please comment on the blog or email me at kwc@ddj.co.za with feedback.

Technorati Tags: Kannel, Web, Configuration, SMPP

HOWTO: Connect Kannel to an SMPP Server

Donald Jackson — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:36:04 +0000

Today I will be covering how to connect Kannel gateway to an SMPP Server.

Following on from my previous post, you should have a wapbox, smsbox and bearerbox binary now compiled on your machine. Just to put your minds at ease, I want to cover some basic architecture of Kannel, so you can understand how your messages flow through the system, and potentially give you an idea of where to start your troubleshooting.

What this diagram indicates is, the bearerbox is the binary with ‘the muscle’, it directs the flow of messaging traffic, and connects to all your upstream SMSC’s, GSM modems, etc. These upstream SMSC type’s include, by default in Kannel, just to name a few, CIMD2, EMI, SMPP, AT modems, HTTP SMSCs and a few others. Seeing as Kannel is open source with a really flexible license, its easy to write your own custom SMSC’s, but that is way out of the scope of this document

So today, we will be focusing on getting the bearerbox, to connect to an SMPP server, seems simple enough!

Before you connect to something, you’ll need some basic details which your SMPP service operator will give you. This will include a system-id (username), password, hostname / ip address. This is what is required at minimum. Some operators will also give you things like default character set, system type and so forth. For todays demo I am going to connect to an SMPP server I have setup on my machine (should be fast! ).

So my details for connection (yours to be provided by operator):

IP address : internal.smpp.ddj.co.za
System-id (username): donsmpp
Password: strngpas
Port: 9102

So, at this stage my ‘bearerbox’ configuration looks as follows:

group = core admin-port = 13000 smsbox-port = 13001 admin-password = bar log-file = "/tmp/kannel.log" log-level = 0 box-deny-ip = "*.*.*.*" box-allow-ip = "127.0.0.1"


group=smsc

smsc=smpp

smsc-id=internal

interface-version=34

host=internal.smpp.ddj.co.za

port=9102

system-id=donsmpp

smsc-password=strngpas

system-type=default

transceiver-mode=1

group = smsbox bearerbox-host = 127.0.0.1 sendsms-port = 13013 log-level = 0

Now you’re probably wondering where those other config settings came from, I’ll attempt to give you a really quick explanation.

group = core, all settings under this group, are related to the core bearerbox configuration, ie which ports to listen on, log level etc, as you can see I have put the log-level on 0 which will give me tons of debugging information which is pretty useful (not recommended for production servers though )
group = smsbox, this group specifies on which port/ip address to allow inbound connections from smsbox/wapbox/sqlbox/smppbox (see architecture) and isn’t really covered in this post, maybe next time
So that just leaves our smsc group, which is to connect to our smpp server. I’ll quickly try to explain the non trivial configuration directives.
- smsc-id – this is a name given to the smsc, which can be used later for routing etc
- interface-version – This is to tell us what version of SMPP to speak to the server with, I have specified 34 which indicates version 3.4
- system-type – This is required by Kannel, but its not always required by the server, I have just specified a ‘junk’ value to stop Kannel from complaining.
- trancseiver-mode – This indicates that I want to bind as a transceiver to the server (as opposed to transmitter / receiver) what this will allow me to do is send AND receive messages over the same connection. This is a SMPP 3.4 specific option.

I’m sure you’re tired of reading now and just want to see ! So let’s start this sucker up. I will start it up from command line, some of you (using Ubuntu, CentOS etc) will start it via init scripts, ie, /etc/init.d/kannel start, I will start it up simply by executing /usr/local/sbin/bearerbox /opt/kannel/etc/my_bbox.conf – this will of course only start the bearerbox, not the smsbox/wapbox, etc. Here we go!

2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: Thread 6 (gw/smsc/smsc_smpp.c:io_thread) maps to pid 28431. 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP[internal]: Sending PDU: 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU 0x50dab0 dump: 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: type_name: bind_transceiver 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_id: 9 = 0x00000009 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_status: 0 = 0x00000000 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: sequence_number: 1 = 0x00000001 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: system_id: "donsmpp" 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: password: "strngpas" 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: system_type: "default" 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: interface_version: 52 = 0x00000034 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: addr_ton: 0 = 0x00000000 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: addr_npi: 0 = 0x00000000 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: address_range: NULL 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU dump ends. 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP[internal]: Got PDU: 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU 0x50dab0 dump: 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: type_name: bind_transceiver_resp 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_id: 2147483657 = 0x80000009 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_status: 0 = 0x00000000 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: sequence_number: 1 = 0x00000001 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: system_id: "DDJSMPP" 2008-12-05 09:26:08 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU dump ends. 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP[internal]: Sending unbind: 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU 0x50dab0 dump: 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: type_name: unbind 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_id: 6 = 0x00000006 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: command_status: 0 = 0x00000000 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: sequence_number: 2 = 0x00000002 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP PDU dump ends. 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: SMPP[internal]: io_thread: break and shutting down 2008-12-05 09:26:12 [28431] [6] DEBUG: Thread 6 (gw/smsc/smsc_smpp.c:io_thread) terminates.

Success! Due to the log level, being on debug, we can see almost too much info, but great because our bind was successful! Our bearerbox is now bound to the SMPP server and ready to start sending messages. The great thing about Kannel is, its built in status page, so even if you don’t see this output, you can browse to the local web status page, http://:/status (or http://localhost:13000/status in my case) which will give you an output like this:

Kannel bearerbox version `cvs-20080824′.
Build `Sep 7 2008 12:04:32′, compiler `4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)’.
System Darwin, release 9.5.0, version Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Wed Sep 3 11:29:43 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.7.58~1/RELEASE_I386, machine i386.
Hostname donald-jacksons-macbook-pro-6.local, IP 192.168.1.82.
Libxml version 2.6.16.
Using OpenSSL 0.9.7l 28 Sep 2006.
Compiled with MySQL 5.0.67, using MySQL 5.0.67.
Using native malloc.

Status: running, uptime 0d 0h 0m 55s

WDP: received 0 (0 queued), sent 0 (0 queued)

SMS: received 0 (0 queued), sent 0 (0 queued), store size -1

SMS: inbound 0.00 msg/sec, outbound 0.00 msg/sec

DLR: 0 queued, using internal storage

No boxes connected

SMSC connections:

internal SMPP:internal.smpp.ddj.co.za:9102/9102:donsmpp:default (online 55s, rcvd 0, sent 0, failed 0, queued 0 msgs)

As you can see by this status output, I have no smsbox’s connected and am just demonstrating the bearerbox part. I will probably do a part 3 tutorial which will cover configuring smsbox and sending a few messages.

If you have any questions for me I’ll be happy to answer, even via comments or email. I hope this helps some of you connect your Kannel instances!

Technorati Tags: Kannel, SMPP, Architecture, Smsbox, Bearerbox, SMS

What should be the next game in the ‘Hero’ series?
	Violin Hero
	Bagpipe Hero
	Triangle Hero
	Saxophone Hero
	Aeolian Wind Harp Hero
	Didgeridoo Hero
	Flute Hero
	Tambourine Hero