Matt Daubneys Blog

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.

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

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

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.

I’ve been playing with a velleman k8055 USB experimentation boad and think I’ve finally come up with a use for this first board. I’m going to attempt to automate a few things in my room using a Linksys NSLU2.

The first thing to attempt is a nice simple one and does not involve touching any household electrics. A simple motor arrangement on the curtain rail to open the curtains in the morning and force me to get the hell out of bed!

The second thing I intend to do with it is a little more complex and will require some more research. I intend to somehow replace the dimmer switch in my room using the analgue output from the board. If anyone has any good references on what I need to read up to do this, let me know!

Well, now that Uni has finished, I need a job. Having been doing a Physics degree at Swansea, I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that I don’t really want to go into a Physics field, and would rather move across into a computer networking position. This comes with a few problems. Firstly, I have no professional experience with this kind of work, I do have lots of amateur experience, having networked my house and helped administrate the University Computer Societies network. I have been exploring the option of doing a CCNA to give me a kick start into a career, but these are expensive.

Why does this mean anyone should hire me? Well, I’m incredibly eager to learn. Having no professional experience means I will have to learn fast, and I fully intend to do so. I’m more or less convinced I want to do a CCNA, to the point where I’m willing to fund it myself and just need to find the funds to do so. I have heaps of experience with Linux servers, I’ve administered several for friends over the years and attempt to help people fix their Ubuntu machines in #ubuntu-uk and on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. I also have experience mending windows machines, again largley for friends and family. I am incredibly enthusiastic and really want to get on and work, having been sat on my bum for the past 2 weeks just applying for jobs, I’m now reaching the point where I just want to get on and work. I’m reliable, hard working and eager to get involved.

My CV can be found here in pdf and here in MS Word format, so if anyone has any opportunities going, please let me know!

I’ve discovered recently that I don’t sleep well if I sit on the internet too late at night. Here is my solution.

I’d been intending to learn Lua for a little while now, so this entire project was written in lua, with some bash scripts to call stuff. Essentially what it does, is every minute it checks the time. If the hour is greater than or equal too that set in /etc/bedtimer then it uses iptables to close all the ports I use that go out to the internet. This allows me to continue using my local network stuff (except ssh) if I had things like coursework to do. The server part continues to run every minute after that, incase I try and override it (bad me). There is also a gnome bit that is loaded when I log in. This part simply uses the ubuntu notify-send thing to warn me when I have 15 minutes before the net shuts off, and when it shuts off.

The bit that does all the work is loaded at boot using an initscript. I have yet to reboot and test this, as it’s my first initscript, but it looks ok

Hopefully this will force me to actually stop wasting time on the net in the evenings and actually go read a book or do something to wind down at the end of the day.

The files can be found here. There is a shell script to install it all, but it’s rubbish and may not work on your machine! BE WARNED!

My knowledge of linux is sadly lacking, but every day I improve on it. Since I had a few days free over the easter holidays I thought I’d try and improve this further by installing Linux From Scratch. This is essentially building up a linux system from it’s base packages and takes a LONG time. This to me seemed like a good idea, it would exponentially increase my knowledge of what makes linux tick, and what depends on what.

I started on Monday night by reading through all of the LFS documentation. As bedtime reading goes, it’s actually quite interesting, and it seemed like a good idea to get an overview of what needs doing before I started.

Luckily for me my laptop has a fairly large HD (320GB) so finding some space on a partition was quite easy. A quick boot into a livecd and resizing my /home partition created a nice little 10GB partition for LFS to go in. That was at 9am in the morning. By 10:00am I had downloaded all the required programs in the mounted partition as directed by the book and started to build them.  In the first day, I managed to build the initial toolchain and got into the chroot and got to chapter 6.15 in the LFS PDF. The longest thing to build was probably either glibc or GCC, which took just over an hour, but did give me time to cook some tortillas from scratch for lunch

The second day, it took me from about 10 in the morning till roughly 3 in the afternoon to finish installing everything.  Was a bit quicker than I expected, but also a lot more involved.

I did hit a few roadbumps, I didn’t have gawk installed on the host system, so at one point something didn’t compile properly and freaked out a bit. A simple sudo aptitude install gawk fixed that though. When I was recompiling glibc all of the tests failed, it took me a few minutes to realise that the reason this was happening was because I’d forgotten to run “make”.. oops.

The last major bump was that when I chose which options to compile with the kernel, I forgot to add the drivers for my ethernet card and my wireless card, so when I booted the machine I had no network! A quick scan through the options and a recompile sorted that out (to include the b44 driver)

What have I learnt from this? Two things mainly.

1. Where everything should live on a linux system and why its there
2. Package Managers are beyond fantastic. They save so much time and hassle!

Tomorrow I intend to try and make my LFS install useful by installing openssh initially, wget and possible x.org and gnome. That may be a bit ambitious at the moment though!

One of my modules has recently involved writing a set of monte carlo models. I’d heard of these mystical things before, but never implimented one myself (or understood the statistics behind them). I’ve become fairly interested in how these things work now, but one thing I didn’t understand was how the number of random numbers you use affected the final result. This seemed like a fairly easy thing to calclate and graph, so I bodged som outputs into my code, wrote a short python script to do a few hundred runs and see what came out the other end.

What came out, I really wasn’t expecting. I assumed the uncertainty (or variance) would decrease as an exponential curve as you incresed the iterations, what really occurs can be seen in the graph below.

WTF?

That horrible wiggly bit at the beggining was completley unexpected. I am now wondering if it’s a sign that my data hasn’t been thermalized properly.

Any one out there with any experience of this want to comment?

Over the past couple of months I’ve found myself becoming sluggish, and very slow at completing various tasks. This all reached a peak when I found myself unable to sleep a lot of the time so just over a week ago I went to the doctors. Since then I’ve been diagnosed with depression and put on some anti-depressents to try and alleviate things a bit.

The problem I have now is that I have lost my work ethic because of the past few months of lethargicness. I’ve now also found it relativley difficult to actually get out of bed in the mornings. In order to try and rectify this I am giving myself a couple of challenges.

1. Be up everyday by 8am
2. Go for a walk every day
3. Regain my work ethic and concentration by sitting at my desk and working for at least half an hour before a break
4. Take a decent photograph every day next week (Mon -> Sun)

As far as I’m concerned, 1 and 3 will be the most difficult, however they’re the most important in that list as it stands. Each day I’ll try and post a progress report, and my photo of the day.