Rammblings and Madness

Background dad’s bike which has happy sat out the frount of our house for the past 6 years was stolen a couple nights ago. managed to take the bike not wake up the dog or anything.

So I starting thinking how can I set of a alarm when people open the front gate or any gate which leads to our stuff.

So pretty simple hard hack

Requirements

• Door bell
• Magnetic Reed Switch NO (normally open)

Method

1. Pull apart door bell switch, the part with the button on it.
2. locate the button
3. solder the Magnetic Reed Switch across the button so that if the switch is ON it shorts out the button.
4. put back together.

Pictures will follow.

For those who don’t know magnetic reed switches are things you see on doors and windows where they actually installed a real security system

Install the door bell / switch tomorrow see how it goes.

Notes:

• With the HPM door bell it only rings once and doesn’t ring again until you’ve closed the gate and reopened it.
• Yes I know it would be much easier to secure the bike eg. not full view of the street or not locked up.
• Need to look at adding a override device so when you come home at 3 am in the morning you don’t wake the whole house.

Ok yesterday was the first day I worked as a Access grid support officer.

And as a whole the software is pretty cool.

3 Universities inside the country live video and audio the software reports back it’s moving data at about 1 Mb/s

My problem is how they use VNC….

Lecturer has a powerpoint presenation he wants to show the other end they log into a VNC server on the presenating computer.

1st problem differing resolutions at the other end. Our vnc server desktop is 4 screens long. so it’s got a combined resolution of roughly 1024 x 30724096×768. where the other end appeared to only have a single screen and that of only 1024×768. so the powerpoint presentation had to be windowed and shrunk so the didn’t exceed the display of the other ends.

2nd problem is that then the power point has animations. Now we have a pretty fast link at the university and so do the other universities. But VNC wasn’t designed to broadcast video, It sends still screen shots at a fast enough refresh rate that remote administration is doable most of the time. But here is a screen of size 1024x 3072 4096×768 and we are being asked why the image being received by the Unis in Melbourne and SA, doesn’t have smooth animations.

I understand why VNC is used it allows both ends to have control of the screen so other students in the topological groups course can actually write there questions on the electronic whiteboards (smart boards ) and the lecturer and other students can see them and edit the question and answer it. But oddly enough Microsoft had a solution to this years ago and that was Microsoft’s Netmeeting has a whiteboard application so multiple users can write on the same “whiteboard” space .. .now this was well before the smart boards came along.

looks like there is plenty of room to improve methods. And the challenge in this new job isn’t getting your room in order but if one of the other locations don’t have a techie on hand.

Also if you know any great applications for this sort of stuff leave a message.

Edit: got my resolution the wrong way 4 screens long so 4096×768 . Always get confused with the is it height then width or width then height.

This afternoon after an interview before Easter. I was offered the job of Access Grid Support Officer working for 17000 at the University of Newcastle.

It looks like it’s going to be a great part time job while I’m at Uni.

Basics of the Job is that I’ll be running and tech support for the Universities Teleconference suite. (or Access grid)  The University has 2 of these rooms both located at the top of the maths building. (one equipped with smart boards a the other a touch screen TV)

At the moment the only group using the room is the Maths department for topological groups and other distance education courses. But there are plans to open the rooms up to other departments as well as offering a commercial service to the public sector.

I’ve been told the software running the room is open source, which should be another plus.

Firstly I’ve had a hard time getting to the rhythm of uni life again. For those who care I’ve changed degrees. I decided to after spending a lot of time last year in the engineering building, it holds my interest more than maths I changed degrees this year from my B. Mathematics degree to a B. Engineering (computer) / B. Mathematics Combined. Of course this makes everything feel weird as I go from ELEC1700 first year subject to a 3rd year subject in programmable logic then number theory.

A lot of people had a good laugh at my last blog post actually it has been my most popular to date. I didn’t really mind people laughing since if I did I wouldn’t of blogged. I did get a couple strange comments though, a lot of if its a server config use a server.. someone said to use a Mac ?! and this guy from windows watch, miss labeled Mandriva as a live cd which it isn’t (sorta technically you can argue) and then segwayed into why having no screen or keyboard is good.

I don’t really see my computer as a serious server, yes it’s on 24/7, it is my personal SVN server but why spend a tonne of money I don’t have just so I can easier sync my uni work between my laptops and desktop, and have some revision control on the programs and latex files I write.

Just a note for me while I slowly re-build my computer. Some documentation that comes in handy.

• Subversion installation
• Nut UPS software

I’ve also applied for a Job with 17000 to be the techincal help with the access grid room. It would be a nice job since it looks to require you to sit in the room during the access grid lectures, and work the equipment and according to my mates in the maths deparment the lectures can be pretty interesting. Haven’t heard back yet, and I’m not sure I will get it since I did direct them to this blog as a refrence and the last couple of posts don’t make me look smart…

Ok I have a computer it generally stays on 24/7. it does important work like download files during off-peak download periods. It also is my svn server. samba etc…

It is also used by my family to surf the web since it’s always on and they don’t need to wait for computers to boot.

Ok so the short of the story is my computer got reformatted.

Distributing the blame

• Me – should of know better than to leave a mandriva install disk in the drive, (virtualbox install is why it was there) and when I finished my linux install I SHOULD of changed the BIOS setting to disable boot from CD.
• Dad – shouldn’t of turned off the computer he knows is always on.
• Mum – shouldn’t of continued to click yes through the mandrivia install, by the time i found the computer it was asking for a username and password for the new mandriva install. so it already had FORMATED and INSTALLED mandriva.

Coming soon !! more blog entries on the success or failure of data recovery tools in linux. If you have any pointers please tell me.

Aside welcome planet.linux.org.au readers !

By default you can not browse samba shares in Linpus being based of XFCE there is no XFCE file browser that support samba, you can still doing it using a hack and fuse smb. ok so everything is done in command line so start with Alt+ F2 then type in xterm to get our command line.
sudo yum install fuse-smb
We then need to add our linpus user “user” to the fuse group
sudo usermod -a -G fuse user
We can check that this command worked with “id user”
Create a new folder in our home directory
mkdir samba
Mount fuse to our new directory you will also need to run this code every time you reboot.
fuse /home/user/samba

cd into the samba folder or open up thunar and navigate to the /home/user/samba folder and there should be your samba network.

Last night we had a another successful Linux Owners Group In Newcastle meeting

I gave a talk on the OLPC XO and sugar. Main point is that sugar is now available on Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora after my talk William talked to the group about bidding for the open source developers conference (OSDC) to take place in Newcastle.

Sugar on Toshiba and XO

Useful links:

• Talk Slides
• OLPC Website
• OLPC Australia
• Getting Access to a XO in Australia
• Australian Deployment of the XO
• Sugar Labs

Stuff on OSDC

• OSDC website
• Newcastle Lug wiki

I did struggle at the end of the meeting to explain to a linux newbie that he doesn’t really want to install a program from source… as he told me linux isn’t as easy as they say it is… I also no nothing about Mandrivia. We also discussed the Linux.conf.au inner circle and that too many of the LCA talks are repeats!

The guys at Kuki Linux, have released a deb package of a slightly more custom kernel (latest wireless added etc..) than the vanilla ubuntu and debian kernel.

You can view the Tutorial on Kuki website:

http://www.kuki.me/tutorial/installing-kuki-linux-kernel-on-ubuntu-810

Hopefully it means that it will be easier to install ubuntu and debian on to a Acer Aspire One.

Marching South

HyKim ready to March

Flight leaves tomorrow 6 AM

Ok it’s been an odd morning.

This morning i got a phone call on my home line from some old man wanting help with his ubuntu install, well more to the point is that he wanted to format ubuntu and start again.  After asking a couple of questions about what he wanted,  I told to format the drive and do a fix MBR in windows is probably abit more complex than he wants, and since he was dual booting that he should just continue to launch windows instead.

His orginal problem was he couldn’t get on the internet at the time, It didn’t click at the time when he said he was with optus that the reason he couldn’t get on the net is the weird way that optus modems are setup.

After talking to him for a while i finally got around to asking how he got my number because it was becoming more clear i didn’t know the guy.

Apparently he found my ubuntu wiki page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gabz and assume I could help him looked up my phone number in the address book since my last name isn’t very common my home (parents house) is the only listed number.

So this was the first time i’ve been rung by a 85 year old man wanting to know how to fix ubuntu. It was an odd experiance.

If how it all ended, was well I got over the slightly weird feeling told him to keep ubuntu there, since he mentioned he lived in Toronto (NSW) we exchanged email address and I sent him the link to Westlakes Linux Learners

Anyone else recieved random phone calls asking for linux help ???