SoftIVR

We now have UK 0844 numbers available at price points of 2-5p/minute to the caller.  These numbers earn you a rebate - up to 3p/minute for a 5p/minute 0844 number, which can be used to cover the cost of outdials, the sending of SMS and then some.

Let us know at support@softivr.com if you'd like some.

The record function now takes an additional optional parameter:
max_silence=n
which will result in audio being terminated after n seconds of silence.  More details here:
http://www.softivr.com/wiki/index.php/RecordFile

The IPC functions and the new 'bridge' command are now documented at http://www.softivr.com/wiki/index.php/Javascript_functions

The first installment of a series of articles showing how to build a find-me application is now on the Wiki at http://www.softivr.com/wiki/index.php/Find_me - this shows some of the new stuff, such as message passing and independent outdials.

Crikey - I didn't realise it's been quite so long since this was updated. We've a bunch of new things implemented, new outbound carriers, new functionality, and we'll be updating the Wiki and posting news of updates here over the next few days.

In the meantime, one announcement - we'll be going to Cluecon in August, and we'd very much like to meet you there. More details at http://www.cluecon.com

SoftIVR's now handling about 100,000 calls a week.  We're quite pleased..!

--Dave

We checked off our last significant milestone yesterday with the completion of the integration of speech recognition in to SoftIVR.  For now, there's scant documentation, but there's an example as to how to build a voice dialling application on the Wiki which, for added Web 2.0 goodness, uses a Google contacts book as its source of data.

Happy Christmas!  We've extended outdialling to be able to call Google Talk users, and to allow arbitrary caller IDs to be set.  Dial docs here.

We've made it easier for your SoftIVR applications to use the database functionality: there's now an SQL terminal available in the portal, so you can get directly at your database.  More information at the Wiki page for the SoftIVR SQL console.

Now for something a bit different.  I've been spending a happy day virtualising Linux machines on to VMWare - a process known as P2V (physical to virtual) conversion.  Here's the recipie, in the hope that it'll help someone else achieve the same thing.  The instructions below assume you've everything in one partition on the original machine; you'll have to repeat the dump and restore steps for each partition if not.  In my case, the partition with everything in on the physical machines was /dev/hda1 - the instructions below assume that to be the case, and that Grub's the boot-loader of choice.

1. Dump the contents of the physical machine's hard drive to the box hosting the VMs.  To do this, stop as much stuff on the physical machine that you can, remove any extreanous cruft (e.g. vast log files from last year) and then:
   dump -b 256 -0uf - / | ssh -c blowfish root@vmware.host.machine dd of=/var/dump-identifier
   
   
2. Create a new VM on your host.  Have it boot from a Knoppix LiveCD, and make sure it's got a big enough virtual disk attached for the data you'll be restoring.  If your original machine had an IDE drive, then configure your VM with one: you'll thank yourself later.
   
   
3. Start your VM - type 'knoppix 2' at the Knoppix boot screen, and it'll boot in to text mode.
   
   
4. fdisk /dev/hda and create two partitions.  Partition 1 for your data, set it to partition type 83, and make it bootable; partition 2 for your swap, set it to type 82.
   
   
5. mke2fs /dev/hda1
   will create an ext3 filesystem on hda1.
   
   
6. mount /dev/hda1
   mounts it.
   
   
7. cd /media/hda1
   
   
8. ifconfig eth0 inet <an IP address on the same subnet as the host>
   - if it complains that it can't assign the requested IP, ask again.
   
   
9. ssh -x root@host "dd if=/var/dump-identifier" | /sbin/restore -rvf -
   copies the dump file from the host, and restores it in to the current directory, which is the root of /dev/hda1.
   
   
10. grub
    we need to install Grub on the new disk.
    
    
11. find /boot/grub/stage1
    will tell us where Grub thinks its first-stage boot doobrie lives - (hd0,0) in my case.
    
    
12. root (hd0,0)
    setup (hd0)
    writes a new master boot record on the disk.
    
    
13. Exit Grub.  We're nearly there; we just need to
    e2label /dev/hda1 /
    to tell Linux where to mount the partition, and
    tune2fs -j /dev/hda1
    to add a journal to it.
    
    
14. Reboot, and, if you've got it right, you'll have a clone of your physical machine running under VMWare.