Matt Daubneys Blog

A few days ago I received a pair of Easy Radios to help with a project I’m working on. Since I’ve never used these before (having only got my first arduino a couple of weeks ago) I had a dig on the net for information on how to use them. Since this information was quite sparse, I thought I’d put up my experimental rig to show it working. This setup requires 2 arduinos, an easy radio transmitter and an easy radio receiver.  First, the transmitter layout.

Transmitter Layout

Now the receiver layout.

Receiver Layout

and finally the code.

#reciever code

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void setup() {
    Serial.begin(19200);
}
void loop() {
    if (Serial.available()){
        Serial.print(Serial.read(), BYTE);
    }
}

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#transmitter code
void setup() {
    Serial.begin(19200);
}
 
void loop() {
    Serial.write("Hello\n");
    delay(1000);
}

This should result in the receiver outputting “Hello” over and over across the USB serial in the arduino environments serial monitor. If you have any problems, feel free to give me a shout! Oh, make sure you unplug the easy radio receiver from the arduino before flashing it, it’ll throw nasty errors otherwise. (Simply unplug digital 0 pin on the arduino board)

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

A couple of weeks ago now I bought myself a new laptop. My poor Dell had been battered too much and was finally giving in to it’s poor treatment. Dead pixels, missing keys, noisy fans, it just had to be put out of it’s misery. So now I have a shiny new Packard Bell.

I’d actually been in the market for a Thinkpad, based on their reputation of being practically indestructible. I soon chaged my mind after being promised deliveries that never arrived by a few online retailers. I ended up going to PC World, pretty much ignoring the sales staff and wandering around with my Pre checking compatibility and pricing on the interwebs. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the build quality of Packard Bell for a little while, but this seems quite a solid machine. Time will tell whether it remains that way or so I must admit, but one can hope!

Spec wise, the machine is a 2.2GHz Core2Duo (T6600), it comes with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB HDD and an nvidia Geforce G210M card with 512MB of dedicated graphics memory. It’s got a broadcom wireless chipset (b/g/n) and a gigabit ethernet port. All of this works out of the box with Ubuntu bar one. The driver for the NVIDIA card has a nasty bug. It doesn’t seem to detect the EDID information correctly for the monitor, so some hackery is required in the xorg.conf to prevent you getting 6 miniscreens instead of 1, or for getting a horribly fuzzy screen. Nvidia has recognised this bug, so hopefully it’ll get fixed soon. The open source nv driver doesn’t have this bug, but you lose a lot of the shiny 3d effects and so on, which is a bit of a downside.

The webcam in he lid also works out of the box.

All in all, it seems quite an able machine, but time will tell if I made the right decision or not!

Friday marks the beggining of a new year under the gregorian calender, so it’s a good time to reflect on various things from the last year, and suggest some changes for the next.

Last year was, for 6 months at least, a rubbish year. With Uni going rapidly down hill, being diagnosed with depression, and everything generally going wrong, I’d rather forget most of it. The last few months have been significantly better. Acquired myself a CCNA, and a job doing things that I enjoy.

So what needs to change next year? Well, in no particular order:

1. One of the downsides of having a job that is largely programming is that I don’t get that much exercise any more which has led to me putting on some weight. Ideally I’d like to turn this around, but would initially be happy for it to be stemmed. Hopefully a bit of Wii fit every other night will help this while it’s dark in the evenings, and as it lightens up I’ll try and start doing some walking or some such.
2. Start putting away more moneys, now my debts have gone (hooray) I can start to put away some pennies for the future.
3. I intend to increase my participation with Ubuntu community in the coming year as well. Hopefully culminating in gaining Ubuntu membership. In order to achieve this, one evening a week will be dedicated to contributing to Ubuntu, be it through support, bug squashing, testing or whatever. This will probably be aimed at Wednesday evenings, but will shift around a little as real life things will undoubtedly get in the way.

I think 3 is enough to be getting on with. Hopefully this year will be better than the last

For the past few weeks life has been busy, and when I say busy I mean hectic beyond belief. In that time I’ve had a few OSS revelations I’d like to share.

As an experiment at work I thought I’d try using eclipse as an IDE instead of my normal vim+terminator job. Scary as it is, I find myself actually quite liking eclipse. It may be that my work machine has 4GB of RAM, and so copes better than the machines I’ve used in the past, or it may be that I’m starting to lose my qualms about what tools I use to do a job, as long as a job gets done. The PHP and Python tools inside eclipse have made my life a lot easier, and I really do find little things, like it reading out the docstring I’d put in a function when I hover over that function when it’s called, useful. Has eclipse evolved to where it’s useable or has affordable technology caught up with eclipse? A bit of a quandry for me that one.

The other small revelation I’ve had recently is that KDE4 is now inherently useable, and quite shiny to boot. when I’ve tried it in the past I quickly got fed up with things that didn’t quite fit or where missing completely, but now time has passed, and like KDE4 I believe I’ve changed a bit, and actually quite like it. I won’t be using it at home for a while, as the 7″ screen on this tiny little netbook certainly won’t make it very use-able compared to the  20″ odd monitor I have at work. The one big thing annoying me with it at the moment though is that konquerer doesn’t seem to fit with the default theme. Niggly annoyance I know, but surely that should be a papercut?

The last revelation I’ve had, though it’s not really a revelation, is a pang of guilt. I’m inherently a consumer in the whole Linux ecosphere. I consume by far more than I give back, and at the moment I simply don’t have the time to give back as much as I’d like. So this is my decree, and a proclamation that as of next year (with certain exceptions) I intend to deem one night a week free software night. On that night I will help to squish bugs, I’ll sit on IRC and be patient with people trying to help them through problems, I shall try and get involved in the various mailing list debates I sit and read, and I shall attempt to stop consuming quite so much and start giving back as much as I can.

In order to do this I will need a little help. The whole software workflow thing is a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve had little formal training in such things and as such tend to wing it more than I’d like. Can people point me in the direction of some good literature to help mend this? I’m quite willing to get my hands dirty if people are willing to be patient with me as I learn how the OSS developer crowd works so I can learn and adjust. In a way I’m hoping that this will flow back and help me at work as much as it’ll help me contribute back to the community in general.

If anyone also has a project they might want a hand with one evening a week from the of the month, feel free to drop me a line by your favourite communications method

Last weekend was LugRadio Live 2009 and the first ever Oggcamp. Since, for a couple of years now, I’ve been meaning to get more involved with the Ubuntu and greater Linux community, and having now got a job and be able to afford these wonderful things, I thought this would be a good time to put some faces to names.

Since this was the first event of this size I’d been to, I was a little nervous in all honesty. The only person there I’d ever met before was Popey and I’m not particularly good in a crowd of people who are essentially strangers. What actually happened turned out to be the complete opposite. People were welcoming, open and incredibly friendly. It was good to feel included.

What about the events themselves? Well, LugRadio was very insightful. Wandering around listening in to the talks was incredibly interesting and has actually helped me with my day job. The talk on the OpenStreetMap has got me fired up and interested in finishing mapping my village. I’ve also become reinvigorated in hardware hacking. Given a little time I might start looking at trying to get a hackspace going in Reading, however I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate at the moment taking precedence, if you’re interested though, let me know! A shared work load is less work for me!

Oggcamp was just as fun for other reasons. Actually being involved in the day and helping out gave me a fantastic opportunity to meet people and have a bit of a day of random chatting. If this event happens next year (maybe I should be saying when to drop a hint) I’d love to be involved again! Meeting the people in the various communities really has driven me to push forward with community involvement, and hopefully pushing forward with some testing with kit at work that the general community may not have access to to provide more information on bug reports and what not. As my programming prowess increases as well, I’ll start trying to contribute more code to the community as well.

Overall, I have to say a big thanks to everybody who made me feel welcome over the weekend, and an even bigger thank you to the organisers of both events. Seriously guys, well done on an amazing weekend. My advice to anyone attending one of these for the first time, come say hello, get involved, honestly you’ll feel better for it! Hopefully see you all next year.

In a fit of overwhelming generosity, popey lent me a couple of books, The Code Book by Simon Singh and a python book, which is downstairs so I don’t have the title to hand. Ignoring the python book for the moment, I’ll concentrate on The Code Book.

The Code Book is an overview of the history of codes, ciphers and code cracking. Encryption in all its forms is incredibly interesting to me, simply because some of the methods involved are incredibly clever and very subtle. The book goes through the evolution of codemakers and codebreakers from it’s very beginnings  with Ceasers’ cipher through to some predictions on quantum computing and the effects of this.

The book starts with the story of Mary Queen of Scots. She was put on trial for Treason, but her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, would only convict and execute her if it could be proven without doubt. This story of how code-breaking had been a life or death situation is continued through out the book. These stories in themselves are intriguing for the huge effect codes and code-breaking have had in our history. The constant creation of new codes and the subsequent breaking of them changed various events in our history.

The author leads us through history, story by story, cipher by cipher, talking about various famous cryptogrophers including Turing, Vignere, Zimmerman and many others.

The book is very easy to read and incredibly insightful. It’s certainly made me a bit more paranoid about security of my various machines!

Thanks again to Popey for lending me this book, and also allowing me to pass it on if anybody else would like to delve through it! Just drop me an email and let me know you’re interested

I finally got one of those mobile broadband dongle thingies in the post this week, and I’m impressed. Admittedly I don’t get any 3 signal at home, so it’s a bit useless there, but once I’m out and about its fantastic. I’m sat in
starucks writing this on my eee and it’s really quite quick. Much quicker than hanging the eee of my mobile, whic
h I used to do previously.

The dongle I’ve got is a ZTE MF627, which was a bit of a fiddle to set up on chruncheee, but I’ll do a screencast
later on showing how to do it. Anyway, my coffee is getting cold!

It’s been etched into my diary now, so I’m going to both Lug Radio Live 2009 and Oggcamp. Both of these will be quite exciting for me as they’ll be the first large scale linux events I’ve been too, however judging from the general community populace, both should be quite friendly and cool!

I’ll be travelling up to wolverhampton from the Newbury/Reading area, so if anyones heading up from that area as well, let me know and see if we can organise some kind of lift share. Hope to see a lot of you there!

Next week I may not be around so much. I’m off to Cambridge to do a week long CCNA course. This is going to be hard going at 12 hours a day for 6 days, but should be very rewarding.
Why am I doing this to myself? Well, I need a job, and it’s very hard to distinguisj yourself from the current crowd, so I believe that achieving a CCNA off my own back should help prove how determined I am to progress in an IT environment. I’ve been going through and making notes all over the prereading today, and it doesn’t seem too bad. It’s going to be a bit of a push on my memory, but I believe it’s do-able.
It’s a little bit daunting I will admit, this being the first professional course I’ve enrolled on since I finished Uni. Hopefully the people will be as nice as the Ubuntu community.
If I’m slow to respond to anything this coming week, I apologise and will get on to it asap once I get back.