stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

An awesome weekend

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:54:00 GMT

I don't tend to write personal things here all that much any more, but I just wanted to say that I had an awesome weekend. It started off with a mate I haven't talked to in years inviting me to go checkout the U brew it place in Hume that the Riot ACT tried out... That was great fun, with the mate putting on a great barbecue, and us producing about 200 liters of beer for bottling in a couple of weeks. I don't think its cheaper than the beers that I would buy from the store, but when you factor in the social event, the barbie, and the fun of doing it yourself it was a great deal. Let me know if you're interested in coming along next time.

Following on from that Catherine and I went and bought the road bike I have been eyeing off for the last week or so. Its a straight bar road bike, which makes it fast without having that bent over stance that I think looks so silly. Its a very fast bike, and I think my skill level is going to need to increase before I feel fully comfortable on it.

Then today was my birthday. I had a nice breakfast with half my family, checked out the ANU food coop, had a nice lunch at home with the rest of my family, and then got some chores done. I now have a fancy gray water tank in the yard, with an immersible pump. That was especially cool because it got it for a great price. Oh, and I got some really cool presents too, like new tools (I like tools), and three Clarkson books.

Overall, I had fun, got stuff done, and ended up with a great bike. I'm stoked.

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Taking over a launch pad project

Wed, 27 May 2009 07:35:00 GMT

A while ago Thomas Mashos registered a launch pad project for MythNetTV (here for those that care). Launch pad annoys me quite a bit, although thats probably because I'm failing to understand how to use it in some way. So, perhaps people have guidance for me. Some questions:

How do I take over ownership of the project?
How do I mark bugs as resolved / fixed / finalized? They just seem to hang around in "fix committed".
How do I delete a blueprint that someone submitted that isn't going to get implemented?
Given I wrote all the code, and fixed all the bugs, how come someone who writes a two paragraph blueprint that is never going to get implemented gets more Karma than me? Not that I think the Karma system really matters, but it does seem ridiculous.
How do I tell launchpad the code is stored in an external SVN repository?

Here's hoping someone can make launch pad less annoying for me.

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Early Father's day

Sat, 16 May 2009 18:21:00 GMT

The kids aren't going to be in the same country as me for US father's day (I get two this year!), so they gave me my present early. I now have a complete set of UK police riot armor -- the helmet, shield, and leg protectors. This has already come in handy whilst parenting hyperactive children. I wonder if its legal for me to own such things in Australia?

Digging a bit further, it appears:

Possessing soft body armor (for example ballistic Kevlar) is illegal in the ACT except for those employed by licensed security organizations -- PROHIBITED WEAPONS REGULATION 1997, section 12.

In fact, the Commonwealth customs regulations mostly seem concerned with the possession or import of armor intended to stop bullets -- CUSTOMS (PROHIBITED IMPORTS) AMENDMENT REGULATIONS 2005 (NO. 4) (SLI NO 249 OF 2005)

I can't see any mention of riot armor (which wouldn't stop a bullet) though, nor a reference to militaria, apart from militaria fairs needing a permit. I wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this?

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CCD Barcode Scanner

Thu, 14 May 2009 21:46:00 GMT

I just picked up a CCD barcode scanner cheaply on eBay. The plan is to use it to bulk enter a bunch of books into my book database. Many US books don't have bookland barcodes, but instead have something which looks like this:

So, the barcode has no problems with the big barcode on the left, however it doesn't recognize the little barcode on the right. So, does anyone know what format that little barcode is in? What mode do I need to put my barcode scanner into to get both barcodes read, either at the same time or individually?

Update: once again the Intern has earn his Intern-chow (or whatever it is he eats when he's allowed out of his cage). The deal was I needed to scan the magic "make all possible barcode types work kthxbye" barcode in the book of exactly 1 billion configuration barcodes. It all works well now. I wont mention the Intern's name, because I want to hire him and need more security through obscurity in my life.

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LinkedIn and Facebook

Tue, 12 May 2009 19:48:00 GMT

I just went through and dealt with my huge (some from 2006!) backlog of LinkedIn and Facebook invites. I'm terrible with names, so if I mis-rejected someone I apologize. I'm also trying to keep FB and LinkedIn separate -- LinkedIn is for people I know professionally, and Facebook is for people I don't mind telling about my hat collection.

I am sure you found this post enthralling. That is all.

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Link mailing list complains about twitter, news at 11

Wed, 06 May 2009 16:03:00 GMT

I'm starting to get quite annoyed with the level of complaining about twitter on the Link mailing list. It seems that people can't understand why a short form status publishing service is interesting. Fine. But the bit I don't get is why they can't just ignore it -- its not like anyone is forcing them to use it... Its a bit like MySpace. If you don't like it, just ignore it.

That is all.

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I love my intern

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:45:00 GMT

Will Nowak rocks. I have no other way of saying it... He's been interning with me at work for a few months now (although this is something like his third internship with the company), and he has this amazing ability to dive right into a project and make it fantastic. I say this not only because he's doing a great job on the project he was handed at work, but also because he's taken the code for my iTunes replacement (which was always a quick and dirty hack), and done awesome things with it as well. We should hire this guy.

Why am I saying this here? Because I couldn't contain my delight any longer.

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iTunes replacement part three

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:47:00 GMT

The iTunes replacement progresses, as a combination of obsession and hobby. Its now good enough that I am using it at my desk at work instead of an iPod (I'm using the HTML interface from home via a SSH port forward, but have a local cache of the MP3s themselves), and the MP101 just works. The MP101 support is pretty basic though, and needs some polish. Overall I'm please with how well it works at the moment though -- pleased enough to have just bought a second MP101 off ebay.

I bought the second MP101 because I couldn't find any good modern uPnP audio hardware clients. Any suggestions?

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Redirect to a file:// URL?

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:43:00 GMT

Apparently firefox doesn't process 302 redirects to file:// URLs. This annoys me, although its perhaps because of some sort of security reason. I'll go an sulk and rewrite my code some other way.

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iTunes replacement progress

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:29:00 GMT

I got dug into the iTunes replacement again today. It now has uPnP support, which means that the MP101 I've never got to work before finally is a useful device. It only took three years of it gathering dust. I haven't tested the uPnP support on any other devices yet, so no guarantees there. I will note that my MP101 doesn't work with MythTV though...

I'm quite happy with my progress... I thought this would be a much harder project. Next stop: iPod syncing.

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iTunes replacement

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:57:00 GMT

A relatively simple request from Catherine (please sync my iTunes library with reality) caused me to go off in an orgy of python development yesterday. Basically I'm fed up with fighting iTunes every time I want to do something trivial sounding (merge duplicates, rescan a directory for new songs, update ID3 tags from disk, etc). I spent most of yesterday writing hacky python code, and I am most of the way to a solution I prefer.

I've got a script which imports my playback history from iTunes (that XML file iTunes exports) into MySQL. I also have a python web server which serves songs over HTTP and uses a flash player and some javascript to record which songs are played fully, versus which songs are skipped. I use that information to decide which songs I like and should therefore be synced to my iPods.

Next steps -- iPod syncing, play lists, some sort of business logic for song selection.

The code is at http://www.stillhq.com/svn/trunk/mp3server/.

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How Amazon lost the sale

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:04:00 GMT

I wanted to buy a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff this week (some DVDs and a iRobot dirt dog). I added them to my Amazon cart, and went to make sure my wife was cool with the purchases. I forgot about the whole thing until the next day, at which point Amazon had raised the price on those items by over $50! Fine, I didn't buy them. Today I found the DVDs random in Target for less than the original price on Amazon, and I'll buy the iRobot thing from Fry's for a tiny bit more than Amazon originally had it for.

So, Amazon lost the sale by having volatile pricing, and they taught me to go to Target for DVDs instead of buying them online. Nice job Amazon.

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Roomba Battery Repack 1

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:43:00 GMT

I bought two different versions of the Roomba battery repack kits from ebay and the first one arrived today. This is the nicer of the two versions, because it includes pre-soldered tabs on the battery wires. It cost me an extra dollar, and was about $26 including shipping. To be honest, if I'd found this one first I probably wouldn't have bought the one without the tabs.

Here is the contents of the kit:

Note that there are no instructions in the kit.

The first step is to open up the battery case. The screws are pretty obvious, although the triangular screw driver than the kit ships with sure made this easier. Then you need to crack open the case, which for some reason is glued shut. That took a bit of patience, a jewelers screw driver, and in the end a hammer. I started out not wanting to bash the case too much, but it was glued pretty solidly. In the end it opened up just fine though:

Now you just need to put the new pack in, making sure to get the tabs in the right places. Screw the lid shut, and go for it. My roomba is charging at the moment, and I'll let you know how it goes once that's done.

(You might recall this means that I now have two fully functional roombas. I'm thinking of building the serial control cable, hooking up arduinos, and having some sort of swarming vacuum system. Its a pity I don't know anything about swarming algorithms...)

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Thinking about IDL style descriptions of document formats

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:58:00 GMT

I've been background processing about IDL style definitions of document formats for the last few days. Specifically, I'm interested in ways of expressing the structure of a document outside of code, and then having code generated to process the specified document. Sort of like lex and yacc, but more flexible and not language specific. This would mean that when you wanted to process a document in your chosen language, you wouldn't have to deal with things like SWIG -- you'd just generate the native code and go for it.

Obviously these ideas aren't new. DCE RPC's IDL language is like this, as is Google's protobuffers. However, I want something more generic. Has anyone seen something like this?

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New Roomba batteries

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 14:32:00 GMT

For some reason I am the Roomba battery kiss of death. I've been through two batteries in about three years. Last time I just bought a new Roomba on special instead of replacing the battery. Its hard to justify three Roombas in the house though, so this time I'm trying something different -- I've bought replacement cells for the batteries from ebay, and will install them in the yellow shell myself. This sounds like its pretty easy to do, and there are several supplies who sell these cells.

I'll let you know how I go.

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Security Hyperventilating

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 21:02:00 GMT

Erik comments on security advisories based on a brief examination of the ChangeLog. I had a similar experience in July 2007 -- at one point the US government issued a unified warning in my case. It seems a bit worrying that the best that security advisory companies can do is sensationalize ChangeLog entries, instead of actually acting in the interests of the users.

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Parenting advice

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:35:00 GMT

Top tip for parents -- don't teach your kids to "wet willy" people. It might seem like fun at the time, but they'll end up wet willying you when you least expect it. Oh, and when you ask why they don't do it to mum, they'll say "because we love her". That is all.

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Blocking hotmail.com

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 21:20:00 GMT

I've just blocked people with email addresses from the hotmail.com domain from posting on this site. This will only affect people who put their email address into the comment form, so if it really bothers you just don't enter an email address or use a different one. Why am I doing this? Because about 99% of the spam over the last week has been using various hotmail.com addresses, and I am fed up with moderating it.

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Blog spam

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:14:00 GMT

I occasionally complain about blog spam, but it seems I should take special time to mention that there have now been over 400,000 spam comments on stillhq.com. Specifically, the site current tells me "1335 comments today, 1335 of them spam. 401209 comments ever, 400220 of the spam.". Dear spammers -- you suck.

I wonder if there is anything useful which can be done with all this spam? Just in case, its available at http://www.stillhq.com/allcomments/.

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Internet traffic

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:34:00 GMT

I estimate (badly, I might add) that I currently use about 200gb of Internet traffic on my DSL link a month. If I'm going to move back to Australia sometime, that's going to become a killer. Unfortunately, because my ISP doesn't bill for traffic here in the US, they don't appear to track my use at all. I think it might be time for me to do some tracking myself.

So, one of life's little questions. Do I use pcap to snarf traffic on the DSL, or use iptable's conntrack stuff in /proc? Just one more thing to ponder.

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