Tobias McNulty

Tobias co-founded Caktus in 2007 and, as Chief Executive Officer, guides the strategic vision of the company. He has been an active member of the Django development community, is a core developer of the RapidSMS framework, and makes regular contributions to both the projects. He is the co-author of and chief advocate for the messages framework that was introduced in Django 1.2 and has helped  Colin organize several successful Django development sprints in the North Carolina Research Triangle area.

Tobias is also a passionate believer in the power of technology to improve public health and obtained a Masters of Public Health at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill in 2016. When he’s not writing software, Tobias loves cooking, making pottery, and cycling.

2009


Solving NFS issues on embedded machines

As part of my work on EveryWatt, I setup an NFS-based development environment for one of the data loggers we use for energy monitoring in the Caktus office. The stock 2.4 Linux kernel in the machine seemed to have some trouble mounting the file system root I had exported from one of our servers. The symptoms included long delays for most if not all activities that used the file system and lots of messages like these in dmesg:

Why Caktus Uses Django

Here at Caktus, we use the popular Django web framework for a lot of our custom web application development. We don't use Django simply because it's popular, easy to learn, or happened to be the first thing we found. We've written web apps in PHP, Java, and Ruby on Rails--all before we discovered Django--but were never quite satisfied. Following are just a few of the reasons that we both enjoy working with Django and believe it gives you (the client) the best end-product.

2008


Entering Contacts in CiviCRM

One of our non-profit clients recently asked for help entering the numerous business cards they get at trade shows, etc., into their Customer Relationship Management database, a copy of CiviCRM that we setup and manage for them. The best path for entering contacts isn't necessarily obvious from the get-go, but the following procedure is the best we've found and has the lowest up-front investment (you might be able to do something more efficient with a Profile, but that doesn't seem as flexible with respect to matching existing contacts).

Caktus' New Web Presence

In honor of our recent one year anniversary (August 31st), we revamped our web presence to address a couple concerns about the original site:

Free and Open Source security scanning software

I was pretty disappointed when I discovered today that Nessus, the security scanner I've used for many years now, had discontinued its free plugin feed. The plugin feed is used to disseminate updated security alerts in an automated fashion to the security scanner, as they become available. The price tag on Nessus' new "Professional Feed": $1200.

2007


Is Asterisk More Silent Than You'd Like?

At Caktus, we use the Asterisk open source telephony platform. While setting up Asterisk, we tested a number of different system environments and configurations to help determine what would best fit our telephone needs. This involved running Asterisk on both real and virtual machines and testing several configuration front ends, including FreePBX and DeStar. This article discusses a fairly technical problem we confronted while installing a basic Asterisk setup on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system (on real hardware); namely, when the ztdummy Linux kernel module was loaded, Asterisk was unable to play back any recordings (even its own). When we unloaded the ztdummy module, however, recordings would play back fine. The catch, of course, was that we needed ztdummy loaded for conference room support.