Status: ✅

A few months ago we decided we wanted a worm bin, as we were eating a lot of vegetables, and tossing away bits that weren’t used. We were also buying soil for our plants, so it made sense to try to turn one into another.

One of our friends gave us some worms from her compost - no idea what kind - and I build an experimental CFT worm bin (sample plans). We harvested once at about two months, but I don’t think it was quite ready. We’ll keep experimenting.

Status: ✅

I’m currently studying French, and if you’ve read any of this site, you’ll notice I’m a bit of a techie. Often several of my interests collide, which is what happened today. I was searching for the “most frequent french words,” and while I found some lists, nothing was exactly what I wanted.
My desire was to have a PDF of the top few thousand most used French words. With the English translation next to it. In order. I’ve found some great resources, which I’ll list now

• 347 most frequent French words (78% of French conversations)
• Wiktionary entry of 1750 most frequently used French words

I’ve also found 100s of sites with 50 words or so - not exactly what I wanted. This spawned a question for me: if I were to search a popular French newspaper website, what words would be the most frequent? I would want to learn those first. A few hours later, and I’ve compiled that list. I’ll write the details of how I did it at the end, but just know I collected over 16,000 unique words, and “read” over 80,000 words from a variety of articles. Below is a PDF of the most popular words, ranked in order, with (maybe incorrect) English translations.

The 625 Most Unofficially Frequent French Words

More to come…! I’m going to continue building the database to make sure the ranking is correct, and will make some pretty graphs when I have time. I will also likely modify things to include what type of word it is, and an example in a sentence.

Please feel free to use this list as you see fit in accordance with CC by 4.0

Status: ✅

My house is cold. I want to start playing with simple electronics before starting Operation Field, so have created Operation Cold House.

This is just simply sticking a temperature sensor onto an Arduino, linking that up to my little home “server”, and uploading that to my website. I’ll display some nifty graphs, too, and link it to Pachube. Stay tuned.

Update: Complete! The proof is in the pudding. I now have a personal website from home (sorry, not public) that displays the daily and weekly temperature at home. The process is basically like this: my little Arduino gathers the temperature, and is polled every minute with a python script via cron. This script then sticks the time and temperature into MySQL. It also exports the temperature to Pachube. Every 30m I have a script that queries MySQL and uses Google’s Chart’s API to graph the temperature. Looks great, I’ll post a graph soon.

Status: ❌

It is time for a new project. I’ve finally decided I want to do some electronics stuff - at least play around in that realm a little. However, I want to “get out and about” a little as well, so this leads me to my idea: a controllable long-range RC plane.

I’ve been debating whether to go the embedded Linux route, or the more simple microcontroller route. One of the first things I stumbled upon was ArduPilot, a cheap Arduino-based board allowing for a UAV. However, after looking through the requirements I would have needed to purchase an RF transmitter, and they aren’t cheap. This made me rethink the ArduPilot route and to evaluate what I really wanted to do: control the plan. My ultimate goal is to attach a joystick to my computer and be able to control the RC plane. This presents another problem with the ArduPilot, however, as there isn’t an extra Rx pin available on the ArduPilot board (or so the forums say), I wouldn’t be able to transmit coordinates on the fly.

After much research, I think I’ve determined what I’m going to do. I’m ultimately going to adopt the best parts of the ArduPilot, and fill in the gaps with my own board. I’m going to take an EasyStar, combine it with an Arduino Mini, Xbee, XY Sensor, GPS module, servos, H-bridges and a custom PCB, and hope it works.

One thing I’ve learned from YS is to stage our the things I buy. For instance, instead of signing up for a year at a local gym, try a month first. This project won’t be any different, and while most of the equipment is very reasonably priced, I still want to make sure I enjoy this type of thing. The first stage is going to be to buy the Arduino Mini, breadboard, servos and h-bridge (and a cheap DC motor), and see if I can get it all working. If I can, I’ll buy the EasyStar and see if I can control it with a joystick. If still successful, I’ll acquire the Xbees and GPS module - and these represent the majority of the cost.

Another element I’ve considered is how to visualize the RC plane flying around. I had contemplated looking into using Google Earth, but I’d really prefer to use a free variant. I also want to strengthen my Java knowledge, so have opted to use the SDK for WorldWind. I was very excited to see that they also have support for OSM, which is just spectaculous. I plan to have a HUD that on the right displays the plane’s location in WorldWind, and on the left display current altitude, tilt and RF strength. Since I’ve been flying through a book on Processing, this looks like a perfect real-life opportunity to use it.

I’m likely to start putting my money where my mouth is in the next two weeks.

Status: ✅

You can likely tell that I’ve been having some fun with graphing and mapping recently. I was reading a few articles about GIS and stumbled upon a pretty darn cool project at Webopticon, which included cool pictures. I showed it to a friend thinking they would find it interesting, and then realized: oh! KML has an altitude attribute. That could be interesting.
One of my projects is to create maps of Sydney’s traffic, so I have been experimenting heavily with Mapnik and OSM. I figured I could have some fun and finally parse some gps tracks and display the data.

I first started off trying to play around with the KML files my gps logger natively stores. After a while I realized it shouldn’t be this hard to parse the XML, and realized it also stores data in gpx format. I opened up one of the gpx files and immediately saw how much easier it would be to work with. I quickly created a parser for the xml in Python (using the dom method, yet I think I’m going to rewrite it using sax), and then with the aid of an article by Sean Gillies, converted the needed objects into KML. I used the speed attribute (with some magnification) as the altitude, and voila, a pretty picture.
This picture is as Victoria Road crosses James Rouse Drive – a spot that is always congested in the morning.
I’ll likely post some code shortly, I would like to rewrite the parsing section to use something event-driven – hopefully it will be a little faster.

Status: ❌

I’ve heard that Sydney is one of the most liveable cities in the entire world – a statement I would generally agree with. However. whoever made this statement obviously didn’t drive to work every day. I’ve reached the conclusion that one of the biggest (and only) drawbacks to Sydney, is the traffic.

So why is the traffic this bad? I have a few theories. The first theory is that Sydney drivers aren’t particularly cordial. I mean, the road could be ending on the merging lane and drivers still won’t let you in. I’ve literally sat for two blocks in near deadlock traffic with my blinker on, and nobody would let me in. Combine this with the fact that whoever designed Sydney’s roads was drunk at the time (roads that suddenly veer off to one side, other roads that go from three lanes to one, roads that steer around a park causing 20 minute delays, or roads always having a bottleneck whilst crossing the rail tracks, etc.,). This plays a role in how everybody typically drives – they drive very close to each other. I don’t just mean tailgating, it is something else. I’ve been to quite a few cities in the world, and I’ve never seen people drive so close to each other.

This close driving has one serious repercussion: there are accidents every morning. When I list to the radio, I continually hear of several major accidents every day. Now, I can’t stop people from tailgating, nor can I stop the accidents – but what I can do is at least try to plot the bottlenecks around the city. I mean, after driving a route several times you’ll already know the bottlenecks – but I think it would be fun to visualize them.

I’ve already done a fair bit of the research how to technically graph it, although there is still quite a bit more to do. My plan is to use OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap, Mapnik and of course Django to glue everything together. I’ll let you know when I have a prototype working.

Status: ✅

I’ve recently been hired for a company that does consulting for small businesses. Naturally, I haven’t had a huge exposure to SBS. My employer asked me to take the SBS MCP Certification, and this afternoon, I passed. The exam was pretty easy – I think Microsoft basically took the easy questions spread out across the MCSE and dumped them into the SBS exam (some of the questions were very similar). My tips to anybody taking the exam:

• Really know the benefits and drawbacks of SBS; for instance, it has to be the root of the forest, Premium vs. Standard, it comes with Exchange/SQL/ISA, always use the wizards first…
• The exam is a showcase for SBS, and then a showcase for 2003.
• There is usually a logical answer.

Well, I know that isn’t helpful at all. But a start.

Exam 70-282: Designing, Deploying, and Managing a Network Solution for a Small- and Medium-Sized Business

Status: ✅

My buddy Ian and myself have decided to get our MCSEs. However, Ian is a Mac lover, and I can’t seem to stay away from Linux (and I’m too cheap right now to buy a MacBook). The irony might be subtle, yet we are still studying and making progress. For the most part, I have decided to take the tests in the following order:

70-290, Security+, 70-270, 70-291, 70-293, 70-294, 70-298, 70-299

Update: So, now I’m MCSE. I’m still debating whether or not to do the final Security test. I really need to get caught up with Exchange, so I might do the Messaging test at some point, but who knows. At this point I’m calling it good.

Core Exams: Networking System

✅ Exam 70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment

✅ Exam 70-291: Implementing, Managing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure (notes)

✅ Exam 70-293: Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure

✅ Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure

Core Exams: Client Operating System

✅ Exam 70-270: Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Security Specialization: Core Design

✅ Exam 70-298: Designing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network

Security Specialization:Core Security

✅ Exam 70-299: Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network

✅ CompTIA Security+

Status: ✅

I’ve played with quite a bit of virtualization, especially VMWare for ages. About eight months ago I started to play around with Xen, and got it to work great, except for the fact that the nvidia driver wouldn’t work with the Xen kernel. That said, I’m gonna give another go.

Throughout senior high, and especially my last year, I managed to score a bunch of old motherboards and random parts and pieces. Six or so years later, my parents are still finding old motherboards. Considering these computers were mainly P120s with 64-128 megs of RAM, they weren’t so hot. What is one to do?

As you could guess, when I started university I had quite a few computers in my room. I had about three or so P120s (one in a hampster cage, don’t ask), one AMD600, an AMD1ghz and one iBook (500 whooping mhz). Computers would die, get replaced, but overall they worked quite well. Considering almost all the computers ran Linux (the AMD1ghz also ran Windows – to play games – and the iBook sort of ran OSX – and YDL), every system was quite happy. I had an OpenBSD box as my gateway. Life was good.

But now I don’t like having five+ systems. Electricity alone is a strong factor, plus, I don’t really want to manage all those systems. Plus noise.

Because of this, I have two systems: my workstation/test lab, and my laptop. I hopefully will never need anything more. But, because of thise, I needed Xen to play nice with my Nvidia closed source driver – which when I tested it eight months or so ago, it wasn’t. Since then I have been using Linux-Vserver, and while it works great, my requirements have started to change.

Luckily Nvidia has released a few new updates, and a few hackers have patched the driver to include support for a xen-based kernel. Maybe I’ll write up a tutorial at some point.

Since I’ve already done the creation of the doms before, and it is somewhat similar to Vserver, everything went smoothly. You can expect some fun screencasts and experiments in the near future.

Status: ✅

After consulting several vendors in Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get the right Cisco with the right IOS. One of their technicians came and installed it, and that night I hooked it up to our VPN. Besides the fact that the internet distribution is still a little shady in Kuala Lumpur, the connection remains somewhat stable, and yet another node is brought on the company intranet.