Reading Hackspace has recently aquired a physical space to work in, and in order to help things along I offered to build the RFID based door system. As with all systems of this manner, the spec was changed a couple of times along the way, and probably will be changed again in the future.

The door system is composed of three parts:

1. An Arduino based card reader connected to an electronic lock
2. An MQTT server (namely the epic Mosquitto)
3. A python script that uses a SQL database to authenticate users running on an Ubuntu server.

A full write up is in progress on the Reading Hackspace wiki . Here’s a quick pic of the reader screwed to the door.

And a video of the system working!

My little team in the office has expanded since I started as the only developer. With two other devs on board managing the bzr commits has meant a little extra overhead to make sure I know when new revisions have been pushed. Thinking there had to be a better way then getting people to email me when they do a commit and push to the main branch I went digging through the bzr docs.

It turns out I’ve been “doing it wrong™”. The bzr repo was setup so that people could connect to it using sftp as that was a quick easy way to get things rolling when it was needed. Apparently bzr has an inbuilt “smart server” that can run scripts on certain hooks when certain events take place. This looked like the way to go!

First thing was setting up the smart server. I threw Apache onto the dev box, install mod-wsgi (because it’s so much better than mod-python) and started reading through the instructions. About an hour of screaming and poking I got the system running  as a smart server, meaning I could push using bzr+http instead of sftp. Now came the difficult part.

It seems that only very specific events can be hooked into on the server side. This wasn’t immediately obvious from the bzr docs, but a little shouting, throwing things at the monitor and emptying nerf after nerf at the keyboard eventually got me to the hook I wanted specifically.

Now I had the ability to hook into things with bzr, but where could I send the events that it was generating? EMail was a bit dull, so I went back to MQTT, with the thought of commits could now light a lamp in the office when they happen The code for the server side bzr plugin is below. You just need to drop it into your .plugins directory for your smart server (ensuring you set this up in you wsgi configuration).

from bzrlib import branch
import mosquitto as mqtt
import os

mqttServerIp = "192.168.0.250"

def post_push_hook(push_result):
    branchFolder = [x for x in str(push_result.branch.__dict__['_base']).replace("//","/").split("/") if x]
    connectSendDisconnect("new branch revision: "+str(push_result.new_revno),branchFolder[1])

def connectSendDisconnect(msg, branchName):
    mqttc = mqtt.Mosquitto("bzrlib"+str(os.getpid()))
    mqttc.connect(mqttServerIp, 1883, 60, True)
    mqttc.publish("/code/"+branchName, msg, 1, False)
    mqttc.loop()
    mqttc.disconnect()

branch.Branch.hooks.install_named_hook('post_change_branch_tip', post_push_hook, "My post_push hook")

Magic! Now a message will be sent on the “/code/branchName” topic every time a commit happens Using some borrowed python magic from http://chemicaloliver.net/programming/first-steps-using-python-and-mqtt/ I’ve made it integrate into the default Ubuntu notifications system so a nice little box pops up informing me of a commit and the new revision number of the branch Doubles aces!

Installing Mosquitto is a doddle. I added the ppa to one of my household servers, then just apt-get install mosquitto. MQTT broker up and running in a matter of minutes. The first thing I setup to check if it was working was a simple python program that would just connect to the broker and send “Hello World” to the “hello” topic. I wrote a second little python script to just listen to the “hello” topic and print out the message from any updates. Most of the code was borrowed from this blog post which was incredibly helpful

With that running happily, I moved on a stage. Digging out an old shield for my arduino that I made to control the lights in my flat using some home easy sockets and an RF chip, I added an LDR and used the thermister that was already on the board. This simple set of components means I can now monitor both the temperature and light levels in one of the rooms of my flat. Using an ethernet shield for the arduino also means that I can then report that information to my Mosquitto broker using the arduino mqtt library.

What will I do with all this information? Well, initially I’m going to write an mqtt to sql bridge (might use this an excuse to learn postgres now mysql has an uncertain OSS future) and will setup some scripts to graph the information. I’ll probably change this sketch to control the lights in the flat, so I could have a machine somewhere sending a message to the mqtt broker at a set time to turn the lights on in the bedroom (a simple mqtt powered alarm clock ). Hopefully I’ll write a small application using the app indicator framework for Ubuntu (and growl for OSX) to tell me when certain thresholds are passed, especially for the other sensors I have coming (Alcohol, Gas, Smoke and humidity). I might write another bridge to use the google cloud messaging system to add an alert on my phone as well.

There’s a whole world of possibilities out there, thanks to so many people building these various components and libraries that make hacking fun toys so much easier Many thanks to all those who have developed the frameworks, libraries and services that I’m using and for making the F/OSS to make life even easier.

*/10 * * * * DISPLAY=:0.0 XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority notify-send “Don’t forget”  ”you’re awesome”

Then every ten minutes, this will happen:

Just to cheer yourself up after a really rubbish few weeks.

c# uses the .net framework to do all the heavy lifting. It’s a bit like Java in that it’s compiled into byte code and then interpreted so isn’t as fast as something like C++ but makes up for that by being easy and fast to develop in. Some of the widgets that come with the new .net framework (such as the graphing widget) are pretty fantastic and really do make life easy. In a couple of hours I’d refamiliarised myself with the language and written a short program that took in a CSV export from my Current Cost recording box and turned it into a nice graph. Doing the same using the GTK toolkit would probably take a bit longer with a little hacking around as there’s no dedicated graphing widget (that I’m aware of), so you’d have to generate the graph either on the fly by drawing it at a lower level or by creating a jpg and then displaying that in an image box.

One minor issue with the Visual Studio express suite is that there is no built in in subversioning system. At work, and most of the time at home, I tend to use the bzr suite of tools. A quick look on the bzr website and that’s also available for Windows. Download, install and it integrates very nicely into the My Computer interface, and can be called from the command prompt. Easy.

A lot of my dev work is for server stuff, so putty and winscp were downloaded and installed successfully on top of that as well.

Printers are another problem and a bit of a nightmare. I have an HP Photosmart C4180 All-in-One that I bought some time ago while I was at university. Having long since lost the driver disk for this, I nievley just plugged it in and hoped Windows would just find it as Ubuntu does. No such luck. It goes away and gives me a list of printers which mine isn’t in and then offers me the option to go to the Windows update site to find even more. I click that button and wait 5 minutes… then another 5 minutes… then it gives me a bigger list of printers. My printer is in this list (why it couldn’t just have said “We found your printer! Here is the driver.” rather than me spending 5 minutes scrolling through a badly sorted list I don’t know) and then installed it. The scanner wouldn’t work without the software from HP, but otherwise the thing worked as expected.

I have to admit, the boot time for Windows is now slowing down considerably. But my games work and it’s not overly getting in my way yet. So we’ll see.

Googling around, I found that windows has a command in the command prompt called robocopy (I’m on windows and forced onto a command prompt, go figure) The command seems to be “robocopy z:\ c:\Users\Matt\Music /MIR”, and this seems to be working!

Windows Media Player seemed to pick up all of my MP3 files relativley quickly, and found/retrieved the album art where it was missing as well. However, all of my Ogg files where not found and not playable. A quick google around for an ogg codec for windows finds vorbis.com and a codec for “DirectShow based players”. It seems to imply WMP is one of these, so I grab it, install it, and can play my Ogg files! Although it doesn’t show the total running time in the playlist like it does MP3s for some reason. Never mind!

The only other music I tend to listen too is from Spotify. A quick trip to their website to grab the Windows client, and that wors straight away. Nice and easy

Photo’s are a completley different kettle of fish. I have a total of 56.7GB of photos on my network storage. When I’m in Ubuntu I tend to only keep a smallish selection of these on the laptop. So for the purposes of this experiment, I’ll just import the ones from this year. At a mere 6.67GB, this should take about an hour off the slow network storage. I left this to copy, came back and tried to find some photo management software. Windows 7 seems to come with the “Windows Live Photo Gallery”, so trying to use the default software I fired this up. It asked me to sign in with my Windows Live ID (which I have courtesy of my XBox 360) and the quite quickly shows me all the photos I’ve just imported.Helpfully it also throws me a message saying it can’t open some file types (namely my Canon RAW files) and I need something called a “codec” to view them. It then takes me staright to the Canon download site for the raw codec. Quite handy. A 28MB download later and a reboot, all my pictures are now visable and viewable.

This seems to be just as usable as Shotwell, I can tag pictures, browse by dates, see the various metadata for each image, there is a small amount of editing possible. It feels a bit clunky though. Occasionally you can’t double click to preview a photo, you have to right click then go preview. Otherwise it seems more than capable for my mediocre photo managing tasks.

Tomorrow, I’ll attempt something a bit more taxing. I’ll try and get the printer working and have a look into application development in Windows.

Modern computers don’t tend to come with any recovery media, just a partition on the HDD to recover your system if it’s broken. Mine had a Utility to create some DVD’s to replicate this if there was an issue with the drive itself. Now the recovery partition on my laptop is apparently corrupt So I dug out my DVD’s I created when I received the machine, popped disk one into the drive to find that the DVD had perished sitting in the drawer for 14 months or so. “No worries!” thought I, Packard Bell support should be able to ship me some recovery media!

A 20 minute phone call later (at 10p a minute) and they offer to ship me the recovery media for the bargain basement price of just £51.16. Considering I could buy a new copy of Windows for £60 I wasn’t impressed at all and promptly told them so. After failing to justify the charge for software I already own, I gave up. About to consider the whole thing a waste of time, someone offered to loan me a Windows 7 OEM install DVD that I could just type my serial number into. The serial number would be on the sticker on the laptop, “Huzzah!” I thought.

But no, the sticker has in fact worn to the point it’s unreadable. Now completely stuck, I went to bed with the thought of giving up on the whole thing. If I was an average user I’d either have been stiffed for a charge of £51.16 now, given up and bought a new laptop, or just given up completely.

As I slept I had a dream…. many moons ago, when I created the recovery DVDs I vaguely remembered making ISO files of each one. Rummaging through my assorted boxes/drawers of old computer kit I found my old external hard drive (without the case, which had failed). Popped it into a USB SATA dock and found the ISO files. How a non-technical user is supposed to get through all this rubbish I have no idea.

DVD’s burnt, I popped them into the laptop. An hour and 2 dvd changes later, the system reboots to a “Starting Windows” screen, then reboots again. Another windows loading screen with “Preparing your system for first use” appears, then “Setup is checking video performance”. Then, a miracle happens! Something actually worked and I can setup a username, password, timezone, security settings and network. Windows goes away for a bit to “Finalize settings” , pops to a welcome splash with a symbol of a clock and “2 min” underneath it. 3 minutes later I’m presented with the chance to register my laptop (which I decline) and the chance to activate my free 60 day trial of Norton antivirus (which I decline). Then I have a desktop!

Since I told Windows to download important updates it goes away and does so immediately after the preinstalled rubbish passes. While it’s doing that I promptly remove Norton and start removing the preinstalled rubbish that Packard Bell decided to bundle with the machine. After loading the control panel, I’m immediately interrupted by “Launch Manager” installing something…. Apparently this is PB preloading more rubbish I probably don’t want or need. Best to wait for that to finish I think. Oop, and thats decided to reboot the machine for me. Good thing I did wait in the end. After that reboot, I set about removing all the packard bell rubbish, and Norton Antivirus. About half an hours work there to get it all off the machine, and in that time Windows has downloaded yet more updates. A reboot to install those and clear out the last of the preinstalled gumpf, and I have a clean Windows 7 install! Check the windows update status, 82 more updates to install. Button clicked, sit and wait. Another reboot, and I get a box asking me to choose my browser. I ask it for firefox and it goes away and downloads the setup program. I install firefox, just clicking next, then browse through to get AVG (the free virus scanner). Download and install and windows pops up telling me more updates are ready to install. Install those, reboot again, and I appear to have hit the last of them! Finally!

Now! All of my documents are in ODF format, so a quick trip to the Libre Office website and …. the machine hangs. HDD spinning, but UI unresponsive. Shall leave it a little while to see what happens. Oop, it reboots and tells me it’s not shut down normally. Let it boot backup normally and try again! It appears it was installing new updates again. Let it update and rebooted again. Install LibreOffice.

This time all is successful, and I have what I consider to be a useful desktop machine! Now to just use this now and see how things go.

For the past …… many years I’ve used Linux (of various flavours) as my primary desktop OS. I’ve used Windows in the past for games and the like, but haven’t used it for anything else since Windows XP was new. Very ingrained in my mind these days is the “Linux way” of doing things. If something’s broken, try and fix it, help others fix issues they may not be able to resolve themselves and so on.

The experiment I propose is this, I intend to reverse the article quoted above. There are a few caveats on this however, I’m a slightly more advanced user than the chap writing that article, and have used Windows before (sometime in the past!). I’ll try and keep this more or less regularly updated with how things go with various productivity tasks and my day to day jobs. Hopefully the things I learn will be useful somewhere!

There are a lot of things that annoy me with various tasks I perform every day. This past week I’ve been taking note of each one, and I count 78 in total. Each one of those 78 things could probably be fixed very easily, but because I’m generally running around like a headless chicken trying to get things done, I don’t even think about fixing them, I just put up with them and carry on. A fair few of these are things that take a while to fix, like the office being short of physical space because of all the orders coming in/out at the moment. Other issues are easy to fix, like the fact that it takes me 30 minutes to an hour to do a quick analysis of some testing data. This is a problem I can solve easily with a smattering of python and a little concentration. In fact, I’m intending to tackle this on Sunday by going into the office when it’s quiet, and just making this problem vanish.

A few other problems on that list of 78 can also be solved with code, some easily, some not so. Some can be solved by a few simple changes in my work routine, like the fact I constantly go to do a task, get pulled away by something else, and then forget what I was going to do. Keeping a simple log book of what I’m doing during the day would solve this easily. It would be better if this was digitized in some form, but for now a simple notebook will probably make a huge difference. This distraction on its own has probably caused me to lose my train of thought more times this week than any other on the list.

So how id my fight going? I’m much more aware of what causes me to be distracted after the past week or so. It’s taking me time to come to terms with each of those distractions and to deal with them, but ultimately, I am becoming more productive in a given period of time. The next big thing I’m going to have to tackle is project methodology. Since I don’t even have a passing familiarity with any of the standard methodologies, this is going to take some research, some thought and  a lot of conversations in order to find the best one to suite the needs of my team at work. As always, any pertinant reading material suggestions are always welcome.

From what little intelligence I can bring to bear on the problem, this should be able to be broken down into a few different variables:

1. Environmental
2. Physical
3. Grey-mushial (?)

Environmental

Fixing environmental problems is relativley easy. If I want to concentrate on a task now I use my Mac Mini. Not because OSX is any more productive than Ubuntu I hasn’t to add, but because it is in a room on a desk with a comfortable chair in a comfortable working position. There is no television, no games consoles or anything else around to take my attention away from what I’m attempting to do.

In the office at work, I try and keep my desk clear of clutter. When there is a lot going on, or a lot of noise around, the twin help of Spotify and a decent pair of headphones can help keep me inside my own head and in my comfortable work zone. Anything I would sit and watch constantly for updates or results is now being reworked to email me or notify my some other way so that I can carry on concentrating on the more important tasks rather than waiting for something else to finish.

Physical

With this I refer to my general physical fitness and general wellbeing. I am quite aware that I don’t get enough exercise, but have yet to generate a plan to resolve this. Until recently I had no idea how well I ate. Throwing together a nasty hackey database in Django (code), I actually discovered I don’t eat too badly… but can binge on chocolate when things get a bit stressful! This is quite easy to rectify by stopping buying lunch and making it in advance. I still crave the chocolate quite a lot during the day, but hopefully this will fade away given some time!

Grey-mushial

This is what’s going on in my head and possibly the hardest part of the whole cycle to change. When I get frustrated with something I lose the will to carry on with something. This is normally the major factor in why I jump from project to project, task to task without completing things. I get frustrated and annoyed that I can’t do something so move onto something else I can do. This has a lot of negative impact as it means that sometimes I struggleto learn something new and overcome certain issues. This is quite hard to change, but I’m attempting to bring some positive re-inforcement to bear on the problem. Craving chocolate when being frustrated isn’t helping things, however, if I now manage to solve a problem that’s frustrating me then I can have some chocolate. This helps me motivate myself to push through the problems that keep me stumped, frustrated and annoyed.

Actually keeping my mind on task is another seperate problem. This, at the moment, I have no idea how to solve. I’ve started reading around this and started reading up on Zen as a lot of Zen practice seems to be based on either keeping your mind on a single thing or emptying your mind of all things completley. This may help, this may not help! Anything I struggle to concentrate on I make a note of what it is, hopefully some kind of pattern will emerge from the mess over time. For some reason, one thing I really can concentrate on without being distracted is painting my 40k models. I have no idea at all why this specifically is so easy to concentrate on, but an interesting observation none the less.

Why bring all this up on here? Well, for a start this place is one of my projects that gets overlooked quite frequently, and secondly so that if anyone does have any dealings with myself where I start something and don’t necessarily stick to it for a period of time….. let me know in case I haven’t noticed. There is a lot of Ubuntu stuff I’d love to do if I could just get over these daft concentration issues!