30 Days of Geek – Day 14 – Favourite computer conference?

Posted on by

Seeing as I’ve never been to one (yet) I can’t really have a favourite. However, I’ve been to the National Computer Science School (ie computer camp) and it was possibly the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. A week of writing scripts in Python, having access to powerful computers and a fast Internet connection, and most importantly, making friends.

During the week we had to write a search engine spider as part of a website we built for a charity. My fondest memory of the week is, along with my good friend Jack Scott, modifying the spider and setting it to work downloading as much of the Internet as we could before Python crashed. It took a while.

I’m looking forward to attending linux.conf.au (named after its domain name) in Brisbane in January 2011. It should be a blast.

30 Days of Geek – Day 12 – What area do you want to expand your skills into?

Posted on by

This is an easy one. Data Communications.

The world we live in is pushing more and more demand on fast and reliable communication for computers and automation systems. Applications are pushing for 1GbE and even 10GbE speeds, which means backbone networks need to keep up and reach 100Gb and 1Tb. Reliable communication and address space exhaustion are currently number one issues for customers and new technologies are being implemented every day to combat this (IPv6, MPLS, HSRP).

More and more everyday tasks are being moved onto the internet, eg VoIP pushing the demand higher and higher.

Data communications is an ever growing field that is easy to be left behind in, and it’s something that I want to be apart of.

30 Days of Geek – Day 10 – Picture, screenshot and specifications of your primary computer.

Posted on by

CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 940 Processor (4 core a 3GHz, in winter overclocked to 3.2GHz)
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 260+
RAM: 4x2GB DDR2 800
HDD: 2x500GiB
Monitor: 2×19″ Widescreen – 2880×900

Really I overclock it for shits and giggles, I have no need for so much CPU time, so boinc/world community grid is constantly running in the background.

I feel running Linux the 8GB of RAM is unnecessary, however when running Windows along with some games it is handy to have. I’m looking at dropping my HDD space down to 500GiB and configuring up a NAS to store everything other than the OS. I would take a picture but it’s in a plain case with no cool mods.

30 Days of Geek – Day 7 – Preferred smartphone platform. And which do you use?

Posted on by

Android wins this one, but only just. I’ve sampled Windows Mobile, S60, iPhone OS, and Android, and all have decent operating systems, features and quirks.

The reason I’ve chosen Android as my favorite is that you can run unauthorized programs on the phone and it allows the application more control over the OS than iPhone and S60, while not allowing complete system domination like Windows Mobile.

I have two griefs with Android though, it’s applications are made with Java (which is too bad, as long as I’m not coding them), and the way Android is advertised as open. Android handsets (at least in .au), require jailbreaking and hacking to replace the OS with a truly open copy, which kinda of limits the amount of hacking and improving that can be done on the phone. I haven’t jail broken my phone, but I am told that the hacking community have crafted the OS to run quicker on some platforms.

Android also seems a bit clunky. It’s not as smooth or well designed as iPhone, and I think some users would much prefer the elegance of iPhone OS.

At the end of the day, my phone can make calls (and seamlessly integrate with SIP), and send SMS messages. The rest is a bonus.

30 Days of Geek – Day 5 – Quick nifty hacks you’re proud of

Posted on by

Well I didn’t really think this through well, I have kinda depleted all my hacks in my last post.

One physical hack I like that’s quick, dirty and nifty is using CAT6 for audio cabling. It’s typically in surplus, and provides decent quality for the average speaker.

While some people have put more time and effort into CAT6 as speaker cable, I find this a nice hack.

Another dirty and quick hack is getting a little bit more out of an old modem. The issue with this modem is that it’s CPU load was too high and being in QLD the modem would get too hot and die. Simple solution, drill a large hole in the top and stick an old P2 fan on it.

Other notable hacks include:

30 Days of Geek – Day 4 – Greatest application written to date.

Posted on by

I thought about this one for awhile. Since I’m not exactly the programming type I don’t exactly have one killer application. Really I have several applications/hacks that get the job done, for both home and work uses. Some examples:

  • Dokuwiki hacks
  • Mapping of Cisco work nodes and links onto a Google Earth overlay
  • Network configuration collection scripts, usually with a SVN back end
  • Import of multiple spreadsheets (200+) into one
  • Radio man down to email pager system
  • RSS to gopher script (I used to use this with inetd to provide my blog in gopher form)
  • Various Ti-83 foolery
  • Various Excel to Database conversions (one day people will wake up to them selves and realize that Excel isn’t designed for storing rows of data, but is actually designed for computing and displaying them)

While this isn’t a complete list of all the things I hack up, it gives you an idea of the sort of applications I make. I’d have to say I’m most proud about taking the topology information from Cisco Works and rendering it on Google Earth is my favorite because you can actually the size of the network you manage and looks really impressive. The best part was seeing how many switches and routers you can remember the exact location of.