zooloo

This days I’ve been helping with VoIP billing. There’s a quintum VoIP enabled gateway that is not configured to use radius, it just spits its own formatted CDRs (csv with information about calls). We had been searching programs to do this but seems that every one needs radius output or it is veeeery expensive.

My first move was to find an opensource one and modify it to understand this files. I failed miserably. I started making a quintum CDR to asterisk CDR conversor but what I had not notized was that programs compatible with asterisk uses special log files that came with a patch for the code (enables logging directly into mysq database). I gave up this approximation.

Having done a little library to deal with CDR reading I offered myself to calculate billing using the code I made for the conversor. It came out a pretty library to manage CDR data and do billing and people in charge of this VoIP gateway was very satisfied about the results. They asked me to make this program a bit more friendly (right now is just a script in ruby without command line interface). Posibilities to make this more friendly for them (they do not have technical background) is a GUI that runs on windows (ugh) or a web interface. I started reading some documentation about GUI’s and how behave in windows, also taking into account that I am developing this on MacOSX.

Yesterday in the train (one trip of 1:20 and other of 2:40) I started mocking up a rails application. After creating mysql tables some functionality from old library was added to the table objects so my main billing class could run independent of table clases (I mean, it could use old classes that just deal with arrays or with activerecord ones I added some functionality from the old ones). Now it transparently adds this data to mysql database and I can even get calls for different telcos or clasify them by time window. I’m pretty fond of class organization for the old version, so I now sould only move some functionality and I can reuse most of the code with rails.

I’ll try to comment more about this but provably this code wont ever see the light. It will be an internal application that will die when new equipment or software is brought.