Bend in the Weather (Entries tagged as Internet)

Innocent Farmville hostage.

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:23:00 +1100

It would appear that even whilst I don't use either Twitter or Facebook -- I happen to be held hostage often to Farmville.

I have elected not to join either two communities for several reasons:

I seriously spend far too many hours a day on a computer (12-18 hours a day). I don't need something else to add to the hours.
I like keeping some level of personal privacy. I really don't have a need to post what I ate for breakfast, what my favourite book/movie/music/clothing is. (You really want to know my favourite music is -- follow me on last.fm). I also have a blog where I can write down my thoughts/opinions/frustrations already.
I have multiple methods to keep in touch with those I elect to already. (Email, IM, Telephone, SMS). I seriously couldn't give a flying razoo about people I went to primary/high school/Uni with. I haven't seen them for over 20 years, and I don't have the desire to kindle the relationship due to the mere fact we attended the same education institution (and for the majority of that time -- compulsory; I'm sure neither of us wanted to be there!)

Having said that -- I don't object to others that do use the services. Each to their own I say. (But don't expect me to accept invites for either -- both are duly ignored!)

Pauline is a Facebook user, she enjoys it... she catches up with a lot of old friends via it. She has put off joining Farmville for months, but finally caved to the constant barrage of invites and joined.

I now seems our daily life resolves around 'harvest time'... a classic case of seeing the Farmville Alarm come into effect. An often quoted phrase at present is

'Ohh, I have to go harvest X .... gimme 10 mins.'

This can happen at the most inconvenient times.

So at present, I feel I'm affectively a Farmville hostage. I'm wanting a virtual world-war to break out so that bombers blow up the fields. I might get a bit of normality back in my life.

NPZN Oynpxyvfg

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:30:05 +1100

(Content removed)

Those after the blacklist may find it at either Wikileaks or google for the list.

Mobile Internet for the entire household and universal mobile phone chargers

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:27:00 +1100

Huawei, the Chinese company that ruffled a number of Cisco feathers have been pushing out a number of wireless 3G devices for wireless broadband for some years. You can find the Huawei devices like the E220 and E169 available from several Australian telcos for 'mobile Internet'.

I personally own a E169 on a Optus Pre-Paid Mobile broadband connection as a 'backup' for when my ADSL connection goes down.

This week at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona Spain, Huawei has announced the release of i-Mo; a combined 3G wireless modem and Wifi router unit. This means one connection can now support multiple people.

Many people are already dropping a dedicated telephone line and the cost of ongoing line rental, such a device is certainly only going to grow this market more, as it can now move from a single user device to a household device.

However, the biggest news from the Mobile gathering is that we're likely to finally see a universal power adapter for mobile devices (so no need for a new charger whenever you upgrade that mobile phone). They are also suggesting up to 50% power savings when charging your phone. Don't hold your breathe, it won't become active until 2012. If only they could do the same with damn data connectivity cables!

Internet Usage Monitoring - conky style!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:18:00 +1100

In Australia Internet users are limited to the amount they may download. Each Internet Service plan normally involves a speed and download limit. Failing to keep an eye on this and exceed your limit normally effects the user in question either by:

Paying exorbitant excess fees that can be as much as $150/GB!
Being 'throttled' by your ISP, in effect turning your lovely xDSL/Cable connection into something slower than dial-up.

As you can image, most people wish to avoid these. As a result ISPs provide a usage meter normally on their site, however you have to remember to view it, which unless you're diligent in doing so, you can still run over your quota.

Previously I've relied on the fabulous Firefox extension NetUsage, however this meant you had to have a browser open. This isn't always the case, and I found it frustrating to have to load a browser just to check my usage. (I could just login to the ISP's usage meter if I had a browser open).

I've seen others produce mrtg graphs and even Cacti graphs to display their usage; however they too also rely on having a browser open.

Ideally, I want to have my usage available, when I wanted, and without loading a browser.

I use conky on my desktop to display a range of information. It seemed a logical step would be to integrate a meter into my conky setup.

As you can see from the graph in the picture to the left, it displays a raw percentage of what has been used, as well as a visual bar graph. Below that is the raw data, showing exactly how much I've downloaded (~11.5GB), what my ISP believes my quota to be (55GB in this case), and when this billing period ends (the 13^th of every month).

I can now view my current Internet usage at a glance, without the need to load any additional program.

So how did I achieve it? Like many ISPs, my ISP provides an interface to the raw data. This is used by 3^rd party utilities like NetUsage and others to parse and generate the information. Internode (my ISP) has such an interface.

A quick and dirty script and I was able to spit out the graph in a format conky liked. Whilst this works directly with Internode, similiar ISPs have such interfaces and you will be able to hack the script to suit your own environment.

Below is the simple bash shell script used to generate the data:
#!/bin/bash # Get usage information from Internode's web page. # Setup to run once every half hour. # # Set the username and password Username=INTERNODE_USERNAME Password=INTERNODE_PASSWORD # Grab the details Temp=`wget -q -O - --post-data "username=${Username}&password=${Password}" --user-agent="Conky ISP Quota Grabber 0.1" https://customer-webtools-api.internode.on.net/cgi-bin/padsl-usage` # Generate the percent used. echo $Temp|gawk '{print $1/$2*100}'> /tmp/node-graph.txt Percent=`cat /tmp/node-graph.txt` echo $(printf %.0f $Percent) > /tmp/node-percent.txt # Break up the values into their respective parts Values=($Temp) echo "Used: $(printf %.0f ${Values[0]})MB Quota: ${Values[1]}MB Period Ends: ${Values[2]}" > /tmp/node-text.txt # Time to leave. exit

Sure it's not the most secure script (It stores your username/password in plain text). For me, the script sits on my desktop machine... and is protected by file permissions. The password I use for my ISP I also don't consider highly sensative. (It's important to note that most people throw around their password in clear-text across the Internet when picking up their mail with POP3! ). It does however do the job.

The above shell script I run every 30 minutes from cron.

It is then up to your ~/.conkyrc file to display the results. Here is the snippet of the appropriate code for the ~/.conkyrc file that will do that for you:

${color orange}INTERNET USAGE ${hr 2}$color ${execi 900 cat /tmp/node-percent.txt}% ${execibar 900 cat /tmp/node-graph.txt} ${execi 900 cat /tmp/node-text.txt}

There you have it, a simple ISP usage meter sitting right on your desktop.
It's not the most elegant or complicated program, however it serves it's purpose extremely well. YMMV.

Back online after moving into the new house

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:44:00 +1100

In my last post, I mentioned I was moving out of the city (Melbourne, Australia) and heading to the country.

Well the transition has occurred and I'm more than happy with the move. Our neighbours two deep on each side have all come out and introduced themselves, and the general atmosphere around the place is warm and uplifting.

The sense of community runs strong outside of the capital cities by the look of it.

Bannockburn is by no means a small town, though it's no thriving metropolis. It's about 15 mins drive from Geelong, but you would think you're thousands of miles away or in a parallel universe. Hand-waves whilst driving, a chat with a stranger (soon to be become an acquaintance/friend) are all common place. At the time of the 2006 Census, the population was a mere 2,486, but has more than doubled in the following two years. By 2015, they are expecting a population of around 15,000. If you're down this way, be sure to drop in. It's a quaint part of town and quite charming.

All the majority of our daily needs are here (local Woolworths, petrol, green grocer, butcher, baker, vet, auto repair, post office, pub, restaurants, fast-food, legal and accounting services,etc can all be found in the town). Those not here (ie: the not-every-day purchases) is only a 15 minute car-drive into Geelong.

I'm loving the lack of police sirens/choppers and cars doing wheelies until 4am most nights. The only noise we hear at present is the 6-7am chatter of the native birds found in abundance. (Not a real problem -- we're up at 6-7am anyway -- working through to late at night getting the house set-up).

Bannockburn for me was a natural choice. It's closer to loved ones, as well as the type of environment, community I would like to raise a family one day. The hustle and bustle and dog-eat-dog attitude that the big cities portray is not the values I would like to instil into my own children.

So how did the move go on Friday? As many know there was a deluge across a lot of Australia. In our neck of the woods we had the pitter-patter of a few rain drops from about 10:30am whilst filling the removalist's truck. By 3:15pm they had finished unloading the truck and literally seconds after the truck doors had been shut down it bucketed!

I'm glad we got our water tank hooked up prior to the move. Those 24 hours resulted in approx 70mm of rain. The tank is now full!
That much rain ensured we had a natural inground swimming pool over most of the backyard. The dogs found this too irresistable (they had never seen so much rain in their young years), and decided it was time for swimming. Shortly after we had dual-coloured dogs.... The original colour on their top half and a nice brown/muddy underbelly.

Saturday/Sunday saw us return to clean up our vacated premises. On Wednesday we return the keys to the landlord. It's a great feeling moving out of the rent cycle and into our own home.

Monday I had our networking guys in to terminate off our wired house. We now have 48 GigaE running throughout the house. The 19" racks I have in the garage look all very impressive now. I'll take some photos in the next few days and post them up for all to see. (Once I find the box with my camera data-cable! )

The new 48-port GigE Managed Switch also has PoE on all ports, and makes powering the Snom VoIP phones a breeze with no need for a power pack anymore (frees up on power point, and also one less cable to tangle unde rmy desk!). Cabling the house was a great idea -- being able to just plug an Ethernet cable into the wall in nearly every room of the house is just a god-send and something I would recommend to anyone who's building (do it during the framing stage, prior to the plastering).

The mountain of boxes strewn around the house are slowly disappearing. It will take us some time but we're hoping by Christmas to have everything fully unpacked/setup. That will leave me with the daunting task of establishing our gardens/plants/lawns outside during this crazy drought/summer. Something I am looking forward to getting up and running.

One of the benefits is since moving that my ADSL1 connection is indeed faster and cleaner here than our previous location (though we are about the same distance from the exchange (1-1.5kms). I'm pulling down pretty much the physical limits of ADSL1 and squeezing 100-150Kb/sec more then I previously have. Once ADSL2+ becomes available through my provider (Internode - due in the next few days), I may consider the move up if the price is 'reasonable'.

The garden shed and vegie garden will probably be first off the ranks, with the rest to follow after that.
I'm seriously considering putting in a large sandpit for the dogs so they can dig til their hearts content (and not in my lawn/vegies/plants! )

Though, all in good time. In the interim, I'm just enjoying country life, and not missing the glare of the city at all. A few more weeks of setting up house and I'll be as happy as my dogs running around in mud!

A visit to Ballarat this week

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 04:35:00 +1000

This week saw me head to the Victorian regional city of Ballarat for a few days to undertake some RHEL5 x86_64 builds for work.

Whilst it's not as exotic a destination as an unnamed colleague visited nor did it see me returning without my pants or shoes ( sorry Jon, I couldn't resist! ), it was a productive visit.

Traditionally we undertake builds remotely, however these servers are likely not to appear on our network or even administered by ourselves, so it made sense to go onsite to undertake the work.

I stayed in the Doherty Ballarat Hotel and Convention Centre which literally is on the opposite side of the road to Sovereign Hill (and no I didn't have time to go there!)

View Larger Map

Whilst I spent most of my time in the office battling with hardware that had been incorrectly ordered (ie: missing hardware and/or non-compatible hardware (ie: 3.5" SATA drives ordered instead of 2.5" SAS drives for the internal enclosure)), I did venture back to the hotel in the evenings for some R&R.

The hotel room was quite pleasant, and what something a corporate traveller expects. There was no surprises out of the ordinary (which you really don't need when travelling), though I did have two strange nights of sleep due to external factors:

1^st night: Apparantly it's Koala mating season. Staying in a hotel room surrounded by forest is lovely to look at during the day, but it's also the playground for randy koalas of a night. So thumbs up to the 'big boy' who kept me up for several hours in the early hours whilst he ravaged the local female population. Koalas aren't dying out in this region whilst this bloke is still kicking! Seriously, I thought those types of noises I may have heard from other hotel rooms, not above my hotel room.

2^nd night: Local Football season must have finished. Seems some of the local players didn't head over to Bali to celebrate but decided our hotel was a great place to party.

In depth conversations at yelling level could be heard at around 3am. Answers to lifes biggest questions such as "Can you scull beer or bourbon faster?" were asked repeatedly. Finally after about an hour when it took that long for the gorillas to realise that they couldn't order a pizza to their room (and yes their was going to be surcharge for anything delivered to their room), the group of 6 decided that bundling into a car and heading down to the local McDonalds whilst tanked was the sensible thing to do.

I passed out after that, though it appears they were successful (if not foolish) as their car was there in the morning without any visible signs of damage. It seems the drink and driving campaigns don't apply to footballers.

I made sure I made enough noise as I passed their room at 7am heading off for breakfast, however in their drunken state the night previously, I doubt I would of woken them. It did bring me mild relief to my simmering frustration/anger from the previous nights interruption however.

The crazy and overpriced Internet costs in the room ($0.20/1MB with both uploads/downloads charged or $0.15/min) ensured I had a relatively Internet free week night. I really didn't miss being connected, though it did remind me how often I relied on just 'quickly looking up something'. Items like news, weather and even a TV guide via the Internet seems to have become the 'standard' method of information retrieval for me. It became more of an inconvenience than anything. I realised then that there was indeed a TV guide in the room. I gathered a quick round-up of news/weather using local radio. So this is what life was like prior to the Internet? (It seems so long ago now!)

Traditionally I use Google Reader to keep abreast of my feeds (as it allows me to bookmark, tag and share feeds easily), but being disconnected from the Internet was going to make that impossible.
I did however utilise a RSS reader, and was pleasantly surprised how easily it actually integrated into my Gnome desktop (particularly as it's a KDE app). The tray-icon and minimize/restore from tray all worked flawlessly (mostly due to the fact it's probably coded using FreeDesktop specs). I went with Akregator over Liferea after hearing reports that recent versions were prone to 100% CPU usage.

One thing I did notice, is that current RSS readers do allow for 'offline' mode - though it would be nice if it gave you the option of a 'full download' of certain feeds. Offline mode that only sucks down text is quite frustrating at times, as the associated image (being discussed in the article) isn't available. It feels like over-hearing a discussion you weren't meant to hear!

Whilst it's probably prudent allowing it to be set as a 'per feed' setting as I suspect many people may not want to download a full page for every article on every feed. (Particularly those feeds you only 'scan', and read a small amount of, or those that are overly heavy with graphics/flash, and embedded video.)

Since returning I did notice that Gnome also has the Straw Reader. Hopefully that comes along nicely as it appears to be in early development.
Ideally I would love to see an RSS reader that integrated WebKit with a good OPML import/export feature, as well as good support for RSS (0.91, 1.0 and 2.0), RDF as well as ATOM formats. Having a feature that allowed you to selectively do a full download of certain feeds for offline mode would be fantastic. I'll whack that down on my ever growing todo list (I think I'll need to live to 800 to ever complete it!)

One nice feature I discovered is the room had direct dial-in, and due to poor mobile reception in the room it was much more cost effective to have Pauline call me direct over VOIP. It also meant we could speak for much longer.

The staff I met at the Ballarat office were extremely friendly and actually quite enjoyable to be around. ( Sorry MrPointy, they were more cheery then you! ) They appreciated the effort I put in whilst down there (it's always nice to get some recognition) and appreciated the attention to detail. It was quite good timing as I will relocate offices to this one once I move into our new home (probably 4-6 weeks away). Heading into the Ballarat office is much closer than the Melbourne offices from Bannockburn. I've already made some good inroads into getting to know people there. I'll be the only member from my team at this office location, so it makes sense to build some bridges.

I did add two things to my 'travel-list' when travelling for work:

A cheap mini 10/100 switch.
This is invaluable when you're stuck in a room with one Ethernet port attempting multiple server builds, and also wishing to have your laptop online at the same time. I headed out the first day a picked up a cheapie TP-Link 5-port 10/100 Switch. Cost me $20 from a local computer store, but saved hours of frustration.

A decent power board with surge protection
In hindsight I should have also taken/purchased a decent power board. The room only had 4 power outlets which meant I could only have one server up at a time. It would have been nice that I could have multiple machines up at the same time, as these were identical builds (besides their hostnames), I could have used something like clusterssh to undertake the same tasks across all the machines at the same time -- ensuring I could have finished the job in a fraction of the time.

We live and learn.

Microblogging and Planets

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:14:00 +1000

I recently posted a subtle article in relation to microblogging. It may have been a little too subtle for many.

It seems a few other Linux Australia Planet readers also feel the same way about microbloggings from sites like twitter, delicio.us and the like.

I like reading the posts of what others are upto in the Linux community, even when not directly related to Linux per say. (it's a great way to discover new gadgets, general thoughts/opinions, and general useful information). We truly are a diverse community!
I find that microbloggings offer no substance of value to anyone but the author. That said, they are best left not syndicated. It appears that both Tim Connors and Andrew Pollock share my view.

Mary Gardiner has an interesting spin on the concept particularly when it comes to syndicating in a blog, actually her idea does have merits.

It's good to see that Michael Still has recognised it is an issue for people and provided a non-microblogged version of his feed. Though that didn't come without a retort.

Let's hope that PLA picks up this version... others that want the microblogged version can still then get it directly from him.

People that know me realise I'm not overly fond of the so called 'social' websites. Why?

Not because I'm anti-social (I'm far from it). I personally however find my time on the web is used more as a tool for research and my personal enjoyment. You won't find me Linked In, Facebooked, Twittered or MySpaced. I don't even have a delicio.us account (I have used a system very similar to delicious on our internal LAN for years prior to delicio.us so I have no need). I also don't feel the need for web-based group hug sessions which these so called 'social' websites appear to be all about. I'm also not in it for the popularity contest.
If someone wants to contact me, there are plenty of avenues available to do so. (I sit multiple IM and IRC networks and find these much more personal anyway) I keep in contact regularly with those that matter and really aren't that interested in chatting aimlessly to someone three-friends removed.

Personally, I feel microblogging has it's place. However it's best confined to the bounds it was created for (on twitter, facebook, etc). Microblogging needs context to make sense to the outside reader, and as such doesn't make sense to have it syndicated to planets. If I feel the need to pick up such microbloggings I can go directly to those sites.

Sure I can skip or filter it, but should I really need to?

The mobile connectivity we're starting to see now 3G is starting to become more widespread, will ensure microblogging will become more popular. I still see it in it's infancy and not too advanced. I suspect that future microblogging generations will allow people to use it to automate tasks (microblogging -> Home automation anyone?!). I suspect a microblog to a bank may in future also give me my account balance and other useful things (Microblogging -> street directions returned, etc). However, we're not there yet.

All in all, if you are happy with microblogging, more power to you. Ditto goes for social websites. For me, it doesn't meet my needs and something I choose to exclude myself from. I don't feel I'm missing out, in fact I feel empowered not being caught up in the hype that surrounds them all. I also find I can better use my time.

Anyway that's my $0.05 on the topic.

</rant>

Firefox 3 - Come break a world record!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:25:00 +1000

At 3:00am AEST on Wednesday 18^th of June will herald the release of Firefox 3.

It's a big jump ahead from the heady days of Firefox 1 and Firefox 2 days. This version includes over 15,000 enhancements from the 2.x series. It's faster, funkier and doesn't eat anywhere near the memory Firefox 2 did!

The guys over at SpreadFirefox are attempting to set a world record, with the most downloads in a given 24 hour period. You too can be part of it!

I'm currently running one of the Release Candidates, and I've found it brilliant, all my favourite add-ons are now working flawlessly in it.

So help spread the world, Australia has around 30% of it's Internet users using Firefox these days. So people do understand and utilise the crazy fox based browser.

Moving more people off Internet Explorer will also ensure that Australian websites that wish to remain 'visible' will also start writing websites that are browser agnostic and follow the W3C standards (something IE only websites break heavily).

Microsoft claim that they are going to be moving fully to standards compliance with IE8, but don't hold your breath. We've been hearing that for years. As long as nasty ActiveX still hangs around like a bad fart in a crowded elevator it's not going to be compliant (or safe for that matter). And yes, IE8 will ship with ActiveX.

So hop to it! Pledge to download Firefox 3 on Wednesday, and become a World Record Holder!

Visit Disney World - in the luxury of your own home

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:28:00 +1000

We all enjoy a good holiday. Getting the time to take one always seems to be the problem for me however. I think I may have just found the answer...

If you're like me you grew up watching The Wonderful World of Disney at 6:30pm every Sunday. Here we marveled at cartoons of Mickey, Goofy and other great Disney characters. (So much so, many the hostnames on my home network are now named after Disney characters! ).

It also introduced us to classic 'childrens' movies like Herbie, 101 Dalmatians, Mary Poppins and Alice in Wonderland.

It's probably the dream of every child to visit the magical place of Disneyland or DisneyWorld.

With the help of Google you can now explore DisneyLand without leaving your chair!
Google has produced a 3D interactive representation of Disneyland inside Google Earth.

If you've got Google Earth installed try the following:

Once Google Earth loads, search for "Disney World".
Click on the golden Disney Mickey Ears - This will load an information window.
In the info window click on Show Disney World in 3D.

The 3D world contains over 1,500 3D models and will let you explore right through the park. The models are highly detailed and a sight to behold!

It's nearly as good as being there!
Just think - no more queues for rides, no long-haul flight getting there, and the park is now open 24 hours for you.

Have fun exploring!

Sourceforge mirror now on Internode

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:19:00 +1000

On Tuesday, Internode announced that they are now mirroring Sourceforge.

This is fantastic news for all OSS lovers down here in Australia.

Whilst we have had the up and down again service from Optus for some time, it's great to have an alternative. (Having said that - I don't see Optus being offered on Sourceforge any more? Has Optus mirroring disappeared again?)

Even better, customers of Internode will actually get those downloads for free now. (Whilst I don't download Gb's of data each month of Sourceforge, I do grab things regularly off it! -- and every little bit helps.) More importantly, having a speedy mirror to grab code off is what counts.

It's great to see Internode -- a company that uses a lot of OSS software in their service delivery give back to the community that makes it happen.

Their range of free mirrored content is quite appealing. They run their own download mirror site and for a Linux lover there is a huge selection of distros, and updates mirrored. Even better it supports rsync so you can grab your updates quickly and easily! Add to it, now Sourceforge and MajorGeeks (for Windows software lovers). I regularly make use of their free streaming radio content. They have stuff also for gamers (who's got the time ?! ) as well as some other content. You can take a peep here.

The Sourceforge content is hosted here: http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/ but you'll need to use the Sourceforge website to pick a download, then select Adelaide, Australia from the list of download options. (The direct link to the Internode mirror isn't browsable).

— — —

After reviewing this post, it does sound like an advert for Internode!
Having said that, I've used a bunch of ISPs over the years, and I haven't been happier than I am now with Internode.

The service is always faultless, 13-NODE (Tech support) is answered always promptly by someone who actually understands technical details (and not a messenger service for a tech team).
I've even had technical staff diagnose and fix routing issues whilst I've been on the phone with them!

So if you're in the market for a new ISP, give them a go. Sure, they aren't the cheapest ISP going around, but they are probably the best technical ISP and have some real added bonuses for OSS fans.

Tip: For those that do wish to sign up with Internode, one way to pickup an ongoing discount of 15% is to register as a SAGE-AU member. Get the benefits of being a SAGE-AU member -- and cheaper Internet access. (You will need a valid SAGE-AU membership number to be entitled to the discount).
For me, the cost of the SAGE-AU membership is less than the discount.. so I come out ahead!