Congrats to Robert Mullins and his team on getting 1st place and winning the Ericsson Mobile Application Awards 2010.
June 14, 2010
May 22, 2010
“Gorilla” Update
I’ve not been in the shack all that much recently (being part of the organising team the the Irish IPv6 Summit kept me busy) so I have not been doing much checking up on the PV installation and how it is working. Today, after assisting the South Eastern Amateur Radio Group set up a station for the EI2GEO special event station, I got to sit down and do some investigations. I have a second 60 Watt solar panel that I mentioned before. We hooked it into the battery system on Jim, EI8IG’s camper van to keep the battery topped up via solar power, and ran the radio from the same battery bank. This evening I dropped out my little 850 watt generator to keep the battery topped up overnight (and to give it a good run).
Today over a 12 hour period between approximately 08:00-20:00, my rrdtool graph says the system produced an average of 148 watts. 148 x 12 gives 1776kw, or approximately 28.5 cents of electricty (including vat). If we have about 7000 more days of sunshine like today (unlikely) then the system will have “paid for itself”. While it doesn’t seem like a whole lot, it is currently averaging about 1/6 of the ESB bill (over 30 days).
That is the first part done. Next I intend to replace my power hungry dell dimension desktop (approx. 125 watts, 24/7 or approx. 48 cents per day ) with a more efficient machine (approx 20 watts or approx. 8 cents per day). To do this I have purchased an Intel Pine Trail base D510MO a 40GB SSD drive, 4GB of ram and a DC powered case (I already have a DC supply in the shack, plus I can experiment with it in the car as well).
Thus far the machine seems to be able to do most of the tasks I need it to do, time will tell though as I need to get 6 RS-232 ports operational on it to control all the items I have running.
As an aside, we recently replaced the old washing machine (at least 10 years) with a super duper A rated new one. Initial testing seems to suggest that it is no more efficient than the old one. My suspicion is that I tested the old one (which I no longer have) in late Autumn, where it would have the benefit of taking hot water from the cylinder (Central Heating). The new one doesn’t have a Hot water input, so has to heat the water itself.
April 21, 2010
Irish IPv6 Summit
Its taking up quite a bit of my time at the moment, and rapidly approaching (19th May). Registration opened today (finally!), and the (draft) agenda is:
08:30 Registration and Coffee/Tea
09:00 Ministerial Launch
- Minister of State, Science Technology and Innovation, Conor Lenihan
09:30 Welcome Address
- Mícheál Ó Foghlú , (Chair, Irish IPv6 TF)
NATIONAL CONTEXTS
10:00 KEYNOTE New Zealand and Ireland: IPv6 Deployment Challenges for Islands
- Brian Carpenter, Professor (University of Auckland)
10:30 Irish IPv6 Policy
- Roger O’Connor , Director of Business & Technology (DCENR)
11:00 Coffee/Tea Break and Networking
MOBILE WIRELESS AND FIXED BROADBAND
11:30 Dutch Experience with Fixed IPv6 Broadband
- Marco Hogewoning (XS4ALL)
12:00 Campus Deployment of IPv6
- Tim Chown (University of Southampton)
12:30 Irish Experience of Wireless IPv6 Broadband
- Martin List-Petersen CTO (AirWire)
13:00 LUNCH and Networking
DEPLOYMENT AND POLICY ISSUES
14:00 KEYNOTE: RIPE NCC and IPv6
- Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist (RIPE- NCC)
14:30 Irish IPv6 Deployment for Hosting Providers
- Michele Neylon Managing Director (Blacknight Internet Solutions)
15:00 The Story so Far: IPv4 Depletion
- Geoff Huston Chief Scientist (APNIC) (via Video)
15:20 Coffee/Tea Break and Networking
ENTERPRISE ISSUES AND DISCUSSION
16:00 IPv6 Enterprise Strategy
- Yanick Pouffary , HP Distinguished Technologist in IPv6
16:30 Panel Session: IPv6 Deployment Challenges
- Yves Paindaveine (EU Commission)
- Mat Ford (ISOC)
- Tim Chown (University of Southampton)
- Dennis Jennings Board Member (ICANN)
- Dave Northey (Microsoft)
17.30 Finish
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Has computer Security improved in 15 years?
Not much apparently:
Matt Blaze
Don’t get me wrong; cryptography was, and is, important. But in 1995, broken or weak cipher algorithms and implementations were the least of our problems. Has anything improved since then?
Hmm. We’ve made some progress on #4 and #10, but basically, not much has changed in 15 years.
Read the full text here. Worth reading for anyone with any interest in computer security.
January 8, 2010
Speeding fines
I travel one of three different routes into work every day. i tend to follow one most of the time that brings me onto the Waterford City outer ring road. Now, given that I’m not exactly the slowest driver on the road, and have been known to do the odd doughnut myself, I’m astonished at the speed many many cars overtake me at. If there was ever a speed trap, they’d be done for (and I would probably get a telling off).
Imagine my surprise over the last few days, with the icy threat of mashing their car off a roundabout or off someone elses vehicle, that I’ve been overtaken by precisely 1 driver in the last 3 or 4 days of driving into work.
So my disturbing conclusion is that the speeding fine and penalty points are of little interest to habitual speeders, and that the fine should be increased substantially (think of the price of replacing a panel or wheel or maybe a front bumper).
Now, what can we do with the folks that just drive too slow and hog the white line?
September 2, 2009
Sean Kelly Tour – a different view
And this is it…
What has this got to do with the Sean Kelly Tour? well, the Sean Kelly Tour took place last Sunday (August 30th), and from all accounts it was quite successful with roughly 2700 hardy cyclists taking to the roads.
The above screenshot (covering an area of roughly 900 square kilometers) is taken from the xastir window of my home Ubuntu desktop after I got home from the event. It shows the trails left from the APRS equipment in several vehicles (including some of these, these, one of these and one of these), several objects and a few home stations. As the screenshot is from the end of the day, it is quite confused looking.
AREN was at the event to assist Civil Defence in maintaining an accurate location of as many of the three different sub-events (50k, 100k and 160k) as we could, allowing them to more cleverly deploy their own medical resources around the course. Great use was made of the SEARG APRS digi-peater network, and it definitely (as can be almost seen) proved it’s usefulness on the day, allowing the guys in Net Control Tim, EI2KA and Bernard, EI8FDB (see below) to keep both the the Civil Defence and event organisers updated as to the locations of various items almost in real time, throughout the day.
It was a good days exercise for AREN, and best of all I wasn’t manning Net Control!
May 21, 2009
OSX go-slow.
I’m still running 10.4 on my MacBook Pro. This morning when I came into work there was a security update for Safari available which I duly installed. At this point it all went horribly wrong. Securityd swallowed 1.7GB of Ram (out of 2GB) and it caused my machine to page-in and out continuously.
A quick bit of googling, and I came across this post. Suffice it to say, it worked a charm.
The summary (I wasn’t brave enough to just rm the file)
sudo mv /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase.org
and then reboot the machine.
Many thanks to the poster, you have, most definitely, saved my day!
April 14, 2009
SHIM6 ISO
Following up from my previous post. John McLoughlin and I have a SHIM6 enabled Ubuntu Live CD ISO available here. If there’s a problem with the ISO contact John or Myself. Sébastien is busy enough.
March 2, 2009
Engineered – A week of wonder!
“During the week of the 9th to 13th of February over 18,000 students took part in a range of interactive engineering related activities in 20 counties across Ireland. The activities ranged from the following:.. more
I was asked if I could co-ordinate with Waterford IT the running/scheduling of the event on behalf of the Irish Radio Transmitters Society. The IRTS had developed a Morse Code Oscillator Kit, along with a presentation to be given beforehand. As it turned out, I ended up doing the presentation myself, along with assistance from a colleague.
We entertained students from Waterpark College on the first day and students from the Ursuline Convent the second (some pics here). I say entertained, as all the students were quite sceptical at the beginning of the class. But seemed prepared to give the kit a chance after watching the Jay Leno Clip (below).
At the end of the first day, only one group from Waterpark hadn’t got their oscillator going, the second day, there were a two or three kits that weren’t fully functional by the time they had to leave. That said they all seemed to have a go at it, glad of the distraction from normal classes. Some even had a go at sending Morse Code to one another.
I was reliably informed last week that at least one student out of the two classes intends to have a go at the Radio Experimenter exam, so I guess we can chalk that down as a ’success’, and as good experience.
February 22, 2009
LinShim6 v0.9 Released
“I am glad to announce that LinShim6 version 0.9 has been released. The major additions are the followings:
——————
- Support for Keepalive Timeout option
- Faster failure recovery for TCP applications (thanks to RTO reset upon path change)
- Shim6 can now be compiled as a module. The trigger heuristic is defined as a separate module. So that it can be
unloaded or replaced depending on the needs. For example, a server that does not want to initiate a Shim6
negotiation by itself, but only answer to requests, can simply unload the heuristic module.
- Added a console option, that allows dynamic setting of the failure detection timer.
——————
The useful links are the followings :
* LinShim6 main page, where you can download the kernel patch and the daemon : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/LinShim6
* Updated draft shim6-impl (implementation report) : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/shim6-implementation-report-linshim6
* Documentation (not yet updated for 0.9, however) : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/linshim6-implementation-shim6-protocol
regards,
Sébastien.
–
Sébastien Barré
Researcher,
CSE department, UCLouvain, Belgium
http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/sbarre”
We (TSSG) have been working with Sébastien, for quite a while, debugging the implementation, and adding features to it. Specifically in the EFIPSANS project, we are looking at SHIM6’s failure recovery capabilities in the event of one network interfacing (or, indeed one upstream provider) loosing connectivity. We have been sidetracked for a while with lots of project documentation to be delivered to the EU, hopefully we can get a linux iso prepared once again to allow others to experiment.