https://www.autodeist.com/posts/ Recent content in Posts on autodeist Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2023/Building-an-entity-component-system-in-Rust/ Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2023/Building-an-entity-component-system-in-Rust/ For as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in game engines and their internals. My last foray into engine development was writing a (very limited and inefficient) renderer in C# to get my head around Binary Space Partitioning (BSP). More recently, I’ve been interested in learning Rust to implement other parts of an engine using a systems programming language that is more appropriate for the task. One of my all-time favourite GDC talks is Tim Ford’s 2017 presentation on Overwatch Gameplay architecture and Netcode which talks about Blizzard’s implementation of the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture. https://www.autodeist.com/2021/Holy-Smokes/ Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2021/Holy-Smokes/ For many years now, I’ve wanted to try my hand at Amercian style barbecue. My interest was first piqued hearing about Dave’s legendary ribs, though I don’t think I ever got around to trying them. More recently, I’ve actually tried some of the goodness from Side Door BBQ and joined the BBQ Club of Australia Facebook group. As if being bombarded daily by people’s mouth watering bbq-grams, things hit peak BBQ when one of my closest mates got on the bandwagon and started dishing up delicious brisket. https://www.autodeist.com/2018/vr-gaming/ Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2018/vr-gaming/ VR! My first experience was playing the tech demos on the Occulus DK1, and since then I’ve been following Valves progress on their technology powering the HTC Vive. There are even some particularly good presentations from GDC. I’ve been thinking about picking up a head unit when the next iteration of headsets come out (which seem to be a thing, but had the opportunity to borrow a friends Vive for a week and give it a go. https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Metadata-Retention/ Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Metadata-Retention/ In 2015, Australia passed a new piece of legislation entitled the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 . Following the introduction of this act, service providers have obligations to retain various data associated with services provided to customers. Despite having taken effect in October 2015, I still see a lot of confusion in the service provider and broader community about exactly what customer data should be and is retained by providers. https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Elasticsearch/ Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Elasticsearch/ Over the last year or so I’ve been looking quite a bit at Elasticsearch for use as a general purpose time series database for operational data. Whilst there are definitely a lot of options in this space, most notably InfluxDB, I keep coming back to Elasticsearch when we’re talking about large volumes of data where you’re doing a lot of analytical workload. More than a few times, I’ve been asked to explain what Elasticsearch looks like to the would-be developer/operations person. https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Hiatus/ Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Hiatus/ … Oh, hello there. Hello? Hi. Is this thing on? Well, uhh.. welcome back. It’s been a smidge over two years since I last posted on here, so I figure I should pop in an update - things have been busy but at the same time not really. Along with the new content I’ve given the site a fresh lick of paint, I’m not going to spend ages getting it where I want because, frankly - the longer I spend on it, the less I’ll be happy with it. https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Mobile-Dev/ Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Mobile-Dev/ Having been writing apps (poorly) with AngularJS for a while now, I was pretty excited to realise that combining this with Phonegap/Cordova - I could start writing portable mobile apps! For the uninitiated, Cordova is an open source mobile app development platform. Basically, it bundles your app for your device and runs an embedded (lightweight) webserver and runs your app in a fullscreen browser control. Nifty. Phonegap is the Adobe commercial version, and they kindly donated the core of it to the Apache FSF (thanks Adobe! https://www.autodeist.com/2016/nntp2p/ Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/nntp2p/ After a suggestion by someone, I got it in my mind that a certain group could really do with a NNTP (Usenet) caching proxy. NNTP Proxies and Caches do already exist, but none of them support cache hierachies - that is, trying to resolve articles from peer caches before talking upstream. The use case here is WACAN, a wireless network where each participant may want to offer their article cache for use by members on the network. https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Projects-Update/ Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2016/Projects-Update/ I had to split up my posts to avoid my hiatus post from being an unreadable mess. This post is a bit of a recap of some projects I’ve worked on or am working on. There are another two posts following this one covering some larger posts. Startup weekend mentoring I haven’t participated in another Startup Weekend in Perth since my first one. I don’t think I ever wrote it up in its full glory either, needless to say it was pretty intense and despite not having the experience I was after, I learnt a bunch and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in that kind of thing. https://www.autodeist.com/2014/StorageRefresh/ Wed, 05 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2014/StorageRefresh/ Hooray! I’ve finally updated my home file server. This is the first non-drive change made to the system since I built it back in 2010. The original build allowed up to 20x SATA drives sitting on top of LSI 2068E cards and a motherboard with three 8x PCIe slots on an Intel X58 chipset. This design was to allow for enough bandwidth back to the CPU for full controller-speed (SATA II) for all 20 drives in the chassis. https://www.autodeist.com/2014/AngularJS/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2014/AngularJS/ I mentioned in a recent post that I’ve been working with a cool piece of technology called AngularJS recently. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done any regular web work - but since picking up Angular, I can honestly say that building web applications has never been more enjoyable. As a developer, I found the documentation reasonably sucky - it has a quick tutorial and jumps straight into API documentation. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/WhiteNoise/ Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/WhiteNoise/ I got dragged into another philosophical argument the other day regarding white space in code. It’s one of those quintessential tech discussions that does nothing more than rile people up over something that, for the most part, doesn’t achieve anything of value. Generally speaking, I try and stay out of these discussions - however given I was trolling the person in this situation, I feel entitled to claim at least some small victory - someone has to. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/GameEngine/ Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/GameEngine/ I recently stumbled across a post by Timothee Besset about his plan for an experimental framework for low latency, high fps multiplayer games. TTimo is a games programmer who wrote QRadient and has worked at id software, so knows a bit about what he does. His post outlines the architecture for a modern FPS game engine, which struck a chord with me. Mostly because at a high level, it’s similar to an idea I’ve had before, a message-oriented game engine using ZeroMQ and its zero-copy message model. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/2013Update/ Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/2013Update/ Time for another update I suppose. Last year I noticed that it seems I’m most intellectually active around April and October, which definitely seems to hold true this year. Coworking This year, I’ve been trying to force myself to spend four hours a week at a coworking space. I’m a member of a local space called Spacecubed, who host the local Startup Weekend events and have become a great hub for local special interest groups. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/NewSite/ Mon, 01 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/NewSite/ Another thing that has been on my shitlist for quite a while now - is this site. The original system for this website was custom PERL/PHP loading articles straight from a MySQL database - I would use phpmyadmin as an editor of sorts and all was good, for a time. In 2005 I wanted more flexibility on what kind of entries I could post. I wanted to move to a format including the main article content, as well as a micro-blogging feed. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/IPv6/ Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/IPv6/ One of the big things on my todo list for a while now has been to get as many services on my VPS running on IPv6 as possible. Getting up to speed on v6 is important to me for both personal and professional reasons - however, an important part of testing this is having somewhere to test from. So for the first part of my challenge, I needed to get IPv6 working at home. https://www.autodeist.com/2013/HalfBaked-Sunday-Left-4-Dead-Map/ Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/HalfBaked-Sunday-Left-4-Dead-Map/ I’m quite notorious for picking up an idea, half-completing it and putting it back down again. It’s pretty frustrating for me, let alone other people - and probably one of the reasons I don’t share a lot of what I’m working on; but I still think it’s a great way to scratch an itch and move on. Anyway in the interest of getting out there a bit more, I’ll try to share things I come across in my project boneyard… https://www.autodeist.com/2013/2012-Recap/ Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2013/2012-Recap/ Whilst I’m usually loathe to use the new year as a milestone on which to measure things - 2013 is promising to be a good year once I get some things sorted out. But first, lets cap off some of the highlights of 2012 since my last posts… image Personal Scrum - I’ve been giving “Personal” Scrum a go for tasking. The image is a cumulative total of tasks (green is complete! https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Startup-Weekend-Perth/ Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Startup-Weekend-Perth/ Startup Weekend is a worldwide event that allows business people, designers and developers to come together and explore ideas for startups. I was lucky enough to take part in Perth’s first Startup Weekend event this weekend. Somewhat unsurprisingly (depending on your point of view), the inaugural event sold out rather quickly, making a new Australian record (I believe). Whilst writing this, we’re in the final hours of the weekend and everyone is getting their pitch ready and putting the final polish on their ideas. https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Links-May-2012/ Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Links-May-2012/ I’ve been meaning to start putting out links posts for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve actually remembered. So, some cool things you should check out this month are… image Sync - An awesome feature length web series from the equally awesome Sam and Niko over at Corridor Digital. image bammo - A YouTube channel that happens to all the VFX and regular YouTube’rs I follow on it - including, funnily enough Corridor Digital. https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Projects-Update/ Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2012/Projects-Update/ image (This post has been a bit of an effort to get out, and I’m not 100% happy with it - so you’ve been warned.) I’m a big believer that creative people need to exercise their creative muscle, that you need to regularly do things that scratch the creative itch within. Ok, I realise programming isn’t socially recognised as art, but can you honestly tell me that anything involving creativity isn’t? https://www.autodeist.com/2012/On-clouds-virtual-clouds-and-desktops-therein/ Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2012/On-clouds-virtual-clouds-and-desktops-therein/ I’ve recently moved house, sharing with $partner and her Mum while we save for a house. Whilst this is a good thing, I haven’t really sorted out internet access to my computer - so everything has been moving at a snail’s pace. One of the worst things is trying to use my IMAP email on 3G. Being slow isn’t so much of a problem, but the latency of 3G kills it. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Gastronomicon/ Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Gastronomicon/ It’s been a while since my last post, work has been keeping me fairly busy lately and my free time has been spent giving me a bit more time to have some time to myself. On the brewing front, things have been quiet - the liqueur thing isn’t really working out too well, I’m still having issues with the sharp nose on my spirits - but I’m still attributing that to the quad-stacked Turbo Yeast in my 100L wash… still trying to finish that one up so I can start stilling my normal recipe… expecting that to be a bit better. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Runtime-handler-registration-in-NET/ Sun, 05 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Runtime-handler-registration-in-NET/ I’ve been working on some home automation software in C# for a friend and hit a bit of a stumbling block the other day. I needed to be able to register some message handlers for this application at runtime. To do this, one needs to use the reflection framework - this allows you to inspect the assembly types and metadata at runtime, and is useful for this type of thing. This isn’t exactly rocket science, and one can quickly throw together a quick example to discover each of the types that implement a given Interface/Subclass and make a method call to a static method on the class: https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Minitruth/ Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Minitruth/ Quick update on (mostly) non-brewing related stuff. Video Streaming After somehow missing that gstreamer XML pipelines have been deprecated, and after futile attempts several months ago to get them working - I had a chance to pick it up again and start trying to use the library directly. It works really well either wrapped up with something like the CPAN wrapper for Perl (yeah, I know, I know) - or directly via C/++. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Holding-Pattern/ Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Holding-Pattern/ Having been house sitting for the past two weeks and having to catch up on a variety of things outside work - I haven’t had much time to do anything on the brewing front. But I have been able to get into the rhythm of the daily commute to work, at least - from where $partner and I were house sitting. A nice 12.8km ride in either direction, with some nice challenging climbs (by my standard) along the freeway. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Catchup/ Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Catchup/ After my computer’s power supply dying earlier this week and barely being at home, I managed to spend half my weekend catching up on my todo list - hooray! My liqueur attempts seem to be going well. I’ve pulled the first two rackings off the Apple and pear schnapps, and can probably pull another two(?) off before I’ll be faced with coming up with an ideal blend of each racking for a final product. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Smells-like-teen-spirit-2/ Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Smells-like-teen-spirit-2/ Hell yeah. With my wash ringing in at a final 1.000 SG, I fired up the Turbo 500 still for it’s inaugural run on Monday. All I can say is: wow. The still fired up quickly, and boiled hard for little over an hour before putting out product. Not expecting it to start putting out so quickly, I ended up taking 150mL heads instead of 50mL (dissapointing) and got things underway. https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Brew-Update-Jan-2011/ Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2011/Brew-Update-Jan-2011/ Just checked the wash, which currently has a gravity of 1.005 - meaning there’s about 15 grams of sugars to each Litre of the wash that hasn’t yet been turned into alcohol and co2 yet - 96% done. I’ve agitated the wash and will let it go through until tomorrow, but I’m not really expecting it to get through much more. At this point, I’m expecting to get about 25 Litres of 40% spirit, depending how much I throw away in heads and tails. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brewhaha/ Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brewhaha/ To celebrate the silly season, leaving my job and regaining some sanity and the situation in general - I bought myself a present. Heh, any excuse would do - but in any case, I am now the proud owner of a Still Spirits Turbo 500 Still… image Isn’t she pretty? I think she is. I’ve had a serious brewing hard-on for this piece of kit for at least the last six months now… now I’ve got to come through with the goods, so while the weather is good and I have some time off between jobs - it’s brewing season! https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Dodgy-hack-TCP-Sockets-in-BASH/ Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Dodgy-hack-TCP-Sockets-in-BASH/ Helping a mate out setting up an embedded system to report to his GNUDIP server. At one stage, we weren’t trusting the ez-ipupdate code (which by the way, is horrible). In any case, did you know you can do some simple sockets programming from BASH? No? Me neither, until now…. it turns out if you try to open a file at /dev/tcp/HOSTNAME, BASH will open a socket for you…. Not that you should really do this, unless all you have is busybox… https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brewing-Update-Beer-BEER/ Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brewing-Update-Beer-BEER/ Spurred on by a special at my local brew store, I’m thinking of doing a few beer batches this summer as well… as if I didn’t have enough plans in the works. I’ll start of with a cheap and nasty kit beer. Why? Because it’s a good excuse to refill the beer fridge for cheap! Whoops, I forgot my housemates read this… Hi Guys :) Beyond that, my brewing friend Joe has kindly offered me the use of his brewing rig at his place if I want to do a brew… so I need to figure out what I want to do in the new year - buy the grain and get crack-a-lackin! https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brew-Season/ Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Brew-Season/ While my storage project is on hold awaiting a replacement chassis, the weather is warming up and I’m keener by the day to get back in to brewing - and I should have started weeks ago. Ginger Wine My Ginger Wine is still a bit of a flop, I divided the batch into two 5L demijohns and poured a starter over the top - which helped but didn’t do anything amazing. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update-22112010/ Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update-22112010/ The fine folks over at Techbuy have confirmed that they have the new hardware revision of the Norco RPC-4220 in stock, and that my modifications to the chassis shouldn’t be a problem for RA. Time to pack up the server and book a Pack and Send appointment for tomorrow methinks! Hooray https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update/ Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update/ I just received an email from the place I bought my NorcoTek RPC-4220 storage chassis regarding my problem… Dear Will, We are sending you an e-mail to confirm that your request to return your Norco RPC-4220 Rackmount Server Chassis, No PSU - 4U Inc. 20x Hot-Swap SATA/SAS Drive Bays (BackPlane Included w. 5xSFF-8087 Mini SAS Connectors) has been approved. Your RA Number is: XXXXX We have contacted Norco and it turns out that the backplanes that you have in your case are not compatible with 2TB drives. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update-and-woes/ Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Storage-Update-and-woes/ As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve had my Norco case sitting around gathering dust for quite a few months. Well, all the bits and pieces finally arrived and I had a chance to build it sometime around mid-September. Boy, she’s a beaut! The philosophy behind the build was to only build it once - I’m not going to build another storage chassis for the next 5+ years, just you see! https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Im-not-normal/ Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Im-not-normal/ Thanks to iiNet’s latest round of quota increases (read: buying capacity on PPC-1 made us drop our pants data is so cheap now), quota is now a problem again. Being able to consume 600GB/mo of traffic opens the doors to all kind of silliness that one might not have previously thought practical. And as such, I’ve found that we once again have the need to schedule our downloads so we don’t blow our quota during the peak/offpeak periods. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ginger-Wine-halp/ Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ginger-Wine-halp/ Quick update on the ginger wine front, I’m having real trouble getting the yeast to do its thing on the wine. I’m using EC1118 at the recommendation of the fine people over at Brewcraft, but it’s been difficult to get it to do anything much past pitching it. At first I thought it was temperature related, but keeping it insulated and actively heating it during the night hasn’t helped any. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Vroom-Update/ Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Vroom-Update/ So I’ve had my bike for a month now, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I’ve ridden approximately 90km on it over six rides, including two commutes. The plan, if I see it through - is to do four 12km commutes to/from work in a week, and at least one 20+ km ride on the weekend. But I’m not going to kill myself to do it, so we’ll see how that goes. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/VPS-Choices-Upgrades/ Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/VPS-Choices-Upgrades/ For about a year or so now I’ve been hosting my Email, Website and other related services off Slicehost. As I don’t host people’s websites en masse any more, this makes sense financially - which frees up money for other projects. When I evaluated where to put my slice originally, I looked at a few VPS providers: Slicehost RedWood Virtual Linode GANDI Based on price and feature sets, I ended up trialling Redwood, GANDI and Slicehost to see what their service was like. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Vroom-kind-of/ Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Vroom-kind-of/ Malvern Star Insight After thinking about it for a while, I’ve finally bought a new bike! Hooray, now I can start being active in a way that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. No really, exercising because you know you should isn’t very exciting, and who says you can’t enjoy it? The last bike I bought was wayyy back in… 2004, a mountain bike that got stolen when our house got broken into - and was (suprisingly) recovered by the police in Mirrabooka, complete with damage to the rear rim, shifters and a few other things - fixing it up was going to cost a few hundred and why not get a new bike suitable for where I’d now be riding. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ginger-Wine/ Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ginger-Wine/ Whilst carefully evaluating a number of the proprieters of fermented goods at the local Good Food & Wine expo, or rather - trolling for tastings, I came across the booth for Stone’s, a popular european brand of ginger based goosd - most notably their ginger wine. If you haven’t sampled their mouth candy, you must. Their alcoholic ginger beer and ginger wine is worth it - and I’m sure I’ll be a regular buyer - once I find a bottle shop that stocks it nearby. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/DesignMotivation-Fail/ Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/DesignMotivation-Fail/ It seems that turning 25 has put a bit of fire in my belly. Actually no, that’s not true. I think that recently I’ve hit a point where I’ve realised I have spent a lot of my short adult life pandering to other people. If you wind back the clock, as many as five or ten years - I was a lot more intellectually stimulated than I am today. Programming, digital art, design and whatnot coming out the wazoo. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Live-Linux-USBKey/ Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Live-Linux-USBKey/ For a while now I’ve been wanting to put together a system-on-disk, a USB stick I can use on the road which gives me a comfortable linux desktop with all the apps I might need. It turns out that the Ubuntu Desktop LiveCDs already have a nifty persistent mode, where it will save any filesystem changes to a seperate partition with the label ‘casper-rw’. That’s great, and a lot of the work out of the way towards getting the project done. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Cheese-Wine/ Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Cheese-Wine/ Not too long ago I found myself flicking through the SixThousand site, which is supposedly covers the Perth subculture. Right, anyway. Flicking through I saw a post about making your own cheese. Awesome. The recipe explains the very simple process of boiling milk then curdling it to seperate the curds and whey. If you take the curds away you’re left with a Paneer Cheese, which is a pretty bog standard soft cheese. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-End-in-sight/ Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-End-in-sight/ After almost a month and a half of fermentation, it looks like I’m ready to move on my wine project this week. In order for the wine to be ready to go, it needs to have a specific gravity of less than 1005. Currently the wine is registering slightly above 990, which means that almost all of the available sugars have been eaten by the wine yeast and turned into ethanol. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ubuntu-Update-Manager/ Tue, 04 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Ubuntu-Update-Manager/ Was just pointed to the new update manager that helps you dist-upgrade with a higher success rate: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades Very nifty, whilst my stuff is built for throw away and reinstall - I’ll definately have to have a play… https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-Destemming/ Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-Destemming/ You know what sucks? De-stemming grapes. It really, really sucks. After returning from Margaret River with approximately 100kg of wine grapes, I was faced with the task of washing, de-stemming and crushing the grapes. If you’ve done this by hand before, you’ll understand why winemaking and brewing stores charge a small fortune for the destemming & crushing machines. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d seriously suggest ransoming your nerves and getting one of these machines, especially if you’re doing a larger quantity than 100kg. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-Step-one-finally/ Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-Step-one-finally/ After the torture of nearly fourteen hours of destemimng grapes, I was keen and ready to get started to actually make some damned wine. Having already added crushed campden tablets into the must - for this is the name we give the juice on the pulps - I came back the next day to find that the wine was already fermenting a little bit - Shit! (or as they say in France, Merde! https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-The-picking/ Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-The-picking/ Despite the fact I have a backlog of spirits to make for people, I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at wine for a while. One fortuitous work trip down to Margaret River (life is so hard sometimes), I decided to see if I could source some good quality wine grapes. I ended up finding a really helpful viticulturalist listed on the Wine Industry of WA website who was not only happy to sell me locally grown grapes of a wide variety, but was also happy to hook me up with some free grapes as I was after such a small quantity. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-The-long-haul/ Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Winemaking-The-long-haul/ It took about two hours, but I managed to strain the must off the skins and ended up with about 80L of juice to go into the secondary. After adding about 15L of water with dextrose dissolved until it had a specific gravity of 1090. (NB: Photo is before I added the 15L of fluid… 80L of pure grape juice… Ohhh yeah!) This vessel has an airlock and assuming it stays out of the sunlight (as I’m not fermenting in glass or stainless steel), should be ready in a few weeks or months - once it hits a specific gravity of 1005. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/REALLY-Dodgy-Hack/ Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/REALLY-Dodgy-Hack/ Earlier today I was throwing together a five-minute RADIUS server using FreeRadius. The idea was to quickly get it to authenticate users from an existing MySQL table on a database server. Unfortunately the existing table only has the user’s password in an MD5 format, and as far as I’m aware FreeRadius doesn’t deal with MD5 passwords except in EAP (which this is not). Herein lies the dodgy hack. First, as this system is a throwaway that only needs to do basic authentication - let’s dodge up a quick view with the data in the following standard FreeRadius table. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/What-I-think/ Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/What-I-think/ Okay so my lovely partner was apparently up at all hours engaged in a riveting conversation with a good friend of ours. Chatting to him afterwards it sounds like it was a very epic conversation, so I felt obliged to say something about my beliefs. Actually, I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a while (hooray for the little extrovert who *could*!), so it’s as good enough excuse as any. https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Windows-7-Update/ Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2010/Windows-7-Update/ Okay, so I’m not a big fan of Windows Vista or it’s service pack successor, Windows 7. In the months since my last rant, I’ve been running Windows 7 on my work laptop - and the results have been, well… pleasing… Okay, so it still killed about 700gb of my data when hot-swapping SATA drives on the RC. It killed Quicklaunch, and explorer looks like a retarded pug dog - but gosh darn it if I haven’t started to adapt… https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Car-PC-User-Interface/ Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Car-PC-User-Interface/ Now that I’ve got the touchscreen hardware working properly, I’ll be using some of my time off over the Christmas break to start developing the User Interface for the Car PC project, which I’ve revived in a fit of motivation. For this project, I’m going to be using Trolltech’s Qt library to handle everything to do with the user interface and media playback. I’ve chosen this platform as it’s fairly lightweight and fast, which are good choices for an embedded project like this. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Lilliput-touchscreen-under-Xorg-Ubuntu/ Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Lilliput-touchscreen-under-Xorg-Ubuntu/ After suprisingly little stuffing about, I managed to get my Lilliput 7" touchscreen working under X.org in Ubuntu. The lilliput touchscreens are powered by eGalax touch controllers, which is supported by usbhid in the 2.6 kernel - so if you check the contents of dmesg, you will see an entry corresponding to the touchscreen device. For example: input: eGalax Inc. Touch as /class/input/input4 input,hiddev96: USB HID v1.12 Pointer [eGalax Inc. Touch] on usb-0000:00:1d. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/site-migration/ Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/site-migration/ After almost twelve months of procrastinating, I’ve started to migrate all my data off my nearly seven year old dedicated server to a VPS with the good folks at Slicehost. I’ve had this hardware (AMD Athlon XP 2000+) since late 2002 and it’s hosted a number of reasonable traffic websites for years. Now I’ve ditched the hosting (except for two good friends), it’s time to save some money. I’ll have to hold a midnight vigil for the old box or something. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/bizarre-motivation/ Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/bizarre-motivation/ As part of a project I’m currently working on, I need to generate multiple types of hashes of a set of very large files. The not-so-quick and dirty method for doing this might need to pass over each file a single time for each hash. Donning my ill-used C hat, I spent a little time today looking at some libraries I could use to do this. This was quite trivial and within minutes I was ready to cut some code. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Why-you-shouldnt-jump-on-the-FUD-Bandwagon/ Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Why-you-shouldnt-jump-on-the-FUD-Bandwagon/ I just saw a lovely comment on the Slashdot thread about SPF records pointing at an article outlining Why you shouldn’t jump on the SPF Bandwagon. Normally I’ll ignore FUD sites like this, however this one has hit a nerve particularly because I’ve had to have arguments with people here at work about their misconceptions about SPF as well. For the uninitiated, SPF is a DNS TXT record you can place in your domain’s zone to tell SPF-capable mailservers where mail for the domain is allowed to originate from. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Brew-Update-Dec-2009/ Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Brew-Update-Dec-2009/ Brewing is going well at das brewhaus. I’ve finished distilling the last of my second wash with the new run, and I’m getting a reasonable yield to the Still Spirits Turbo yeast, so I’m extra happy. I managed to pick up a beer hydrometer on the weekend and the second wash came in at a respectable 990 Specific Gravity, which means that most of the available dextrose was consumed by the yeast. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/iiNet-vs-AFACT-Closing-Statements/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/iiNet-vs-AFACT-Closing-Statements/ Whilst I’m reading through the summary of closing arguments from iiNet, I can’t help but laugh at the way layers get to ridicule their opposition in such flowery phrases. Some of my favourites: Perhaps the overexcitement with which the applicants sometimes manifested the argument is to be understood in this way. If one looks at the issues raised purely from the perspective of movie studios, and on the assumption that the most important thing on iiNet. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/MSN-display-name-fix-for-win32-Pidgin/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/MSN-display-name-fix-for-win32-Pidgin/ For the last week or so, I’ve been annoyed by changes Microsoft have made to servers causing your MSN display name to get reset each time you log in. The behaviour affects genuine and other MSN clients, and there’s no sign of it being fixed any time soon. So in the meantime I’ve built a Pidgin 2.6.3.0 set of win32 binary with retrospectacus’s contributed patch which gets around the problem (for now). https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Brewing/ Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Brewing/ Okay so it’s been over two weeks since I posted about the brewing thing. Not having done anything for almost a year, I put on another wash somewhat haphazardly with the dextrose sugars and EC118 yeast. After fermenting for a total of two weeks (longer than I had originally planned for), I started to distill the product. The lower yield from this lot was coming off at approximately 60% ABV and as expected, without the horrible chemical smell from the previous recipe. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Das-Brewhaus-2/ Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Das-Brewhaus-2/ Having moved house since das brewhaus, I’ve set up a space at the new house for brewing beer and experimenting with spirits. Somewhat unoriginally, I’ve dubbed it Das Brewhaus #2. I’m already two days into the first fermentation towards my spirit base. After speaking to the guys at Brewcraft and giving them some money, I’ve decided to make the following changes to my (cheap ass) sugar washes: Using a yeast other than Still Spirits Turbo Classic. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Quirky-References/ Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Quirky-References/ Last week whilst looking at a Wikipedia page, I saw a reference to a notable historical figure Nicholas Flamel. The name struck a chord, as I’ve read the Harry Potter books a number of times, and I was suprised to see such a person existed. It turns out that Nicholas Flamel is a legendary alchemist, and was concerned with finding the Philosopher’s stone, a means of obtaining immortality. For those who haven’t read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the charachter by the same name is clearly intended to be the same. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/The-Case-FOR-Apple/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/The-Case-FOR-Apple/ In reply to Jason Calacanis’s recent post entitled The case against Apple - in Five Parts, one of my coworkers asked for my input. What follows is my somewhat lengthy reply which I thought I would share with everyone. Jason has some good arguments, but I think he’s essentially missing the precepts of Apple’s design (as I see it): It has to be immensely intuitive and simple to use It has to be a masterpiece of industrial design Specifically looking at the case of the iPod, it does one thing (plays music) and does it well. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Windows-7-Usability/ Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Windows-7-Usability/ My work system has taken a beating over the last 12 months and is due for is bi-annual reinstall of Windows. In the last 6 months I’ve given Gnome (on Ubuntu) and OSX a fair go for an everday operating system, however whilst their UIs are certainly easy to use - it’s the small things that catch you up and bring your productivity down to a grinding halt, and Windows 7 is no exception. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Fluent-UI-Sham/ Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Fluent-UI-Sham/ My recent post on OpenOffice & MS Fluent UI got me to thinking about User Interfaces again, and specifically - the Fluent UI used in Office 2007 In an interview with the UI team we are told that the Ribbon was developed as a replacement for the ubiquitous toolbar, a UI concept that has been around for decades and is almost universally understood. Recently, while investigating Microsoft’s royalty-free licensing program to use it in a project, I realised something - the licensing program is pointless. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/OpenOffice-MS-Fluent-UI/ Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/OpenOffice-MS-Fluent-UI/ It looks like the folks over at OpenOffice have put together a prototype for a new interface, which seems to be heavily based on Microsoft’s Fluent/Ribbon UI. Whilst there’s a lot of hate out over the fact that the two interfaces are very similar, I’m curious to know what kind of analysis and research they put into the new design. It’s very hard to not sit there and wonder if they’re doing it to stay relevant as an alternative to Office 2007. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/On-projects-and-discovery/ Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/On-projects-and-discovery/ It’s been a while since I’ve posted, though on the whole I’ve been happy with the subject matter and quality of my posts recently - it seems I’m managing to be doing a lot more of the things that interest me, perhaps this is a good sign that things are well in my world, or maybe I’ve just reached a point of delusion where I’m too far detached from reality to notice. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Naughty-Tax/ Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Naughty-Tax/ One of the most interesting concepts I’ve taken from Scott Adams book God’s Debris, is that laws are made for the common good of society as certain behaviour is detrimental to the community for a number of reasons. Whilst on the surface this is a reasonably obvious statement, I’ve spent an increasing amount of time thinking about this. Things that don’t work for society have punishments attached, and there’s a whole hidden economy here - for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call it Naughty Tax. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/streetview-car-outline/ Sat, 09 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/streetview-car-outline/ Interesting fact: in order to hide the Google Streetview car from view in Google Maps and Google Earth, it looks like the “ground” below the car is composited from the shots immediately before/after each other and projected over the car’s outline. As a result of this process, you can usually detect a rough outline of the car by seeing where the road texture is elongated and tracing a border around it. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/das-brewhouse/ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/das-brewhouse/ Das Brewhausist geoffnet! Err… Das Brewhaus is up and running! After stinking out the house with my fermenter going nuts for a week, I cleared out the back shed and set up a home for all the gear. Well, all of Mitch’s gear - I don’t own the AirStill or Filter. The first run of spirits was coming out at between 45-55% ABV, with a lovely yeasty smell… ugh. After dropping it all down to 40%, filtering it all (and getting rid of that small) - I ended up with 4. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Smells-like-teen-spirit/ Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Smells-like-teen-spirit/ After my initial foray into beer making a month or so ago (my super-sickly-sweet Pale Ale will be ready to drink in three weeks, yay!) - I’ve decided to try my hand at spirits. With a minimum turnaround of <1 week (unlike beer), it looks like it’s going to be a better hobby than beer with instant gratification, always a plus. Not to mention that I drink considerably more spirits than beer, I think this is a winner. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Playing-EVE-again/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Playing-EVE-again/ Okay so I’ve been guilty of every six months picking up EVE-Online and playing it for a day or so before getting sick of it. And I’ve succumbed yet again, but this time it feels a little bit different. I’m approaching the game with a clear plan for what I want to acheive and am having a longer-than-usual run. But in order for me to progress, I think I’m going to need to get some mates playing cooperatively so we can do group missions, etc - making it easier for the group as a whole to progress. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Ultimate-EVE-setup/ Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Ultimate-EVE-setup/ Okay, so it looks like I’m babysitting my housemate’s EVE account until he gets home, so I just had to make the setup work: From left to right: Laptop running EVE-Mon; EVE running on work laptop; EVE running on PC. I’m using Synergy so I can control everything from the one set of keyboard/mice. I had a bit of an issue with EVE dropping out when it was losing focus, but there’s an option in Synergy to stop this from happening. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Hacking-the-WDTV/ Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/Hacking-the-WDTV/ Western Digital have released a fantastic product for playing back media from a USB storage device onto your TV. It’s called the WDTV and uses the Sigma Designs SMP863x chipset for decoding 1080P video in a variety of containers. In short, it’s a fantastic product - but not suprisingly from Western Digital, it’s only intended as an accessory to their hard drive products - leaving the device without network connectivity. I’d really like this device to support network 1080P playback, as it would make a welcome replacement to the Xbox running XBMC in my room. https://www.autodeist.com/2009/2009-Year-of-Storage/ Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2009/2009-Year-of-Storage/ Western Digital’s 2TB hard drive comes out in February this year, and it looks like storage density is continuing in it’s trend of awesomeness. So much so that even at a price of AUD$419 per disk at release (versus $159 for a 1TB in the same series), storage is now reaching the density that I’d consider using an off-the-shelf NAS storage solution again. Historically, I’ve been quite keen on the Thecus N5200BR Pro https://www.autodeist.com/2008/Mysterious-Fruit-Tablets/ Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2008/Mysterious-Fruit-Tablets/ Okay so after seeing the Wikipedia entry, I couldn’t help but order some Miracle Fruit tablets! It cost about AUD$30 for three packets (around $1 per tablet) to order online, and they took about three weeks to arrive, but hopefully it was worth the wait… Stay tuned for my next entry where my workmate and I test these out! https://www.autodeist.com/2008/Mysterious-Fruit-Tablets-The-Taste-Test/ Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2008/Mysterious-Fruit-Tablets-The-Taste-Test/ Here I am, ready to report on the Magic Fruit after my first experiences. For this experience, we went to the shops and purchased a variety of sour foods. Here’s the results: Lemon Juice - Tastes like honey with a twist of (non-sour) lemon. If you’ve got a cold, I’d highly suggest having a glass of hot lemon juice straight (after taking Magic Fruit.) Lime Juice - Much the same as lemon juice, just not as sweet. https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Screen-Printing/ Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Screen-Printing/ The other weekend we decided to pick up some screen printing materials to try our hand at making some tshirts. It was a bit impulsive, however there’s something about being able to put something funny on a tshirt that your friends will understand. We gave it our first go today, and I have to say that considering we didn’t have any instructions or guide - we did a bloody good effort, though we’ve definately figured a few things out for ourselves. https://www.autodeist.com/2007/o-rly-ya-rly-no-wai/ Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2007/o-rly-ya-rly-no-wai/ id software have released their entire back catalogue on Steam, which means I’m now the proud owner of…. id’s entire back catalogue… https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Who-is-RAB/ Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Who-is-RAB/ I hate being dragged into a guessing game about who RAB is in the sixth HP book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. No wait, I think I’m looking forward to the next book, due out on the 21st July 2007. Obviously the smart money is on RAB being Regulus Black, who we know is listed on the Black family tree, and was in Voldemort’s service until he realised what was going on. https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Somethings-not-quite-right-here/ Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Somethings-not-quite-right-here/ So there’s been a bit of an uproar over the MPAA’s attempts to block the spread of their recently cracked HD-DVD Processing Key, which can be used to unlock the contents of most consumer HD-DVD titles. Quite understandably so, as it will make the choice for movie studios on which standard to adopt fairly obvious, given recent events. Yours truly, who is on a never ending quest to find the perfect coffee cup for the workplace, thought it would be a quaint idea to get a coffee mug stamped with the HD-DVD decryption key. https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Life-the-Universe-and-Everything/ Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2007/Life-the-Universe-and-Everything/ So as a few people have noticed, I’ve removed the placeholder from the front of the website - which has been in place for the last year and a half, sneakily updating itself to say the website will be back within a month. In a whimsical moment of motivation I installed Drupal and ported what little I have of my old content. Please bear with me (if there is, indeed anyone reading this) as the site gets poked and prodded into something a little more interesting. https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Drupal-Shits-me-to-tears/ Mon, 02 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Drupal-Shits-me-to-tears/ It looks like I will be finding a different CMS system to manage this site, as I’ve decided (yet again) that Drupal shits me to tears… What could make this web developer cry? The fact that all content on the front page is cut off after a certain length? Yes, but what’s more irksome is that you can’t turn it OFF. The article browsing is pretty poor also. So look out for change after my current assignments are due, because I’m probably going to write my own CMS (again) at some stage. https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Where-did-my-Storage-go/ Mon, 02 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Where-did-my-Storage-go/ A prime candidate for procrastination, and wanting to play with MythTV - I installed Ubuntu Linux (clicky). Reports from people I know suggest it’s a nice debian-based distribution that’s a little more bleeding edge than Debian/Unstable (my previous linux desktop). For the most part, installation went smoothly and within twenty minutes I had a working Gnome2 desktop running X.org. Despite some problems with sound and sudo, which are mostly fixed now… it all seems well. https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Digital-TV-and-all-things-nice/ Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2005/Digital-TV-and-all-things-nice/ So I bought a Digital Broadcast Card today… I can now watch Digital, High Definition broadcasts on my computer. Much assignment procrastination is to come! I must say I’m impressed with the reception I’m getting without an aerial, getting signals ranging between 60% and 97%. Channels 9 and 10 are a bit of hassle though, but I expect this won’t be a problem once the card gets plugged into a real aerial. https://www.autodeist.com/2005/New-website/ Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.autodeist.com/2005/New-website/ So I finally updated the website. It’s running Drupal, a nifty content management system, using a contributed theme called ‘Kubrick’. The choice of this CMS and theme are so I can actually get started posting regularly. I will probably change the theme a bit later. The site will be divided into categories, but pretty much everything I paste will be pushed onto the front page. The only irritating thing so far is that the Categories box to the left only shows categories with content in them already.