Blogospheric Refraction

Well, I really didn’t think I’d be writing a post like this.

This is following on from, and indirectly in reply to, an operator who decided to call in on the Australia-Wide Night-Owl and Insomnia net which is held every Friday night at 3595kHz.

Now, this net is pretty laid back… all are welcome. There are however, some things that just are not done on radio. Just as much as they are not done here on the internet. One of them, is to air dirty laundry on air.

Without going into detail… we had an operator call in from Victoria (a VK3V.. call, standard licensee) who then proceeded to make allegations about the off-air activities of another operator (VK2.., advanced licensee), in particular, the allegations involved claims of abusive phone calls and threats. The VK2 station responded pointing out some other misdemeanors allegedly purpotrated by the VK3 station, before (thankfully) moving on with the net. Thank heavens both had the decency to leave it there rather than tie up net time arguing.

Now, undoubtedly, the vast majority (me included) are not privy to all the information. They may be completely false, or there may be some truth to them. That isn’t for me to decide and does not concirn me. What I object to, is the usage of the amateur bands, as the platform for this kind of debate. It does not help any of the participants, or bystanders at all… and perhaps what both sides should realise here, is that by airing this material on-air, they are opening themselves up for a potential defamation case.

It is no different to me for instance, making similar allegations on this site… I could be sued for defamation. This is one of the reasons why I did not reveal the callsigns, or even the names of the guilty culprits. In the past, I recorded the net and provided it as a podcast (and had I done this, the recording would have been up for the world to hear)… but sadly the computer that I used for this is not operational at the moment. In any case, those who were listening, know to whom I refer.

I would ask that all people, who make use of radiocommunications services, whether it be amateur, citizen’s band, marine, airband or any other service out there… please bear this in mind. Your personal squabbles have no place on the air, as I for one (and likely countless others) am not interested in hearing them.

Telemarketers are a pet hate of mine. I’ve made my point about them before, so I won’t repeat it.

Tonight we had a different class of telemarketing. That is… a company that you do have dealings with, contacting you to advertise another service. In this instance, it was Telstra offering us a discounted internet service. We currently have our telephone services (a landline and two mobiles) with them.

My disagreement with this sort of marketing is one of principle. We pay you to provide us a service, we do not pay you to pay telemarketers to harass us via the aforementioned service. I’ve also had SMS messages on my phone from Telstra, thankfully this is rare.

Now… they’ve unwittingly called us thinking we’re the typical non-technical household. Okay, fine, they weren’t to know that. However, one would think the telemarketers would know something about the product they’re selling. I initially answered the phone, and of course, when the woman at the other end asked for my father (who holds the account) I naturally transferred her.

A few points:

• She did not seem to understand the limitations of what was being sold… yes, Cable internet is theoretically faster than ADSL… especially 512/128kbps ADSL (which is what we have). But cable is a shared medium, ADSL isn’t.
• My father immediately asked about getting a static IP address. She had no clue what this was. Tsk tsk tsk… Internetworking 101 people.

The plan offered was only discounted (half price) for 12 months, after which, the price would double, resulting in a monthly rate only marginally less than that offered by our current ISP, who we’ve had a service with since 1996 and have been quite happy with.

Should an ISP be thinking of offering their services… first and foremost, don’t contact us with your offers… if we were looking to change, we’ll contact you. However, since Telstra have come to us, I guess that gives us the right to dictate what we expect… Our expectations:

• Static IP is a must. (At last check, Telstra only offer this on ADSL for an extra $10/month… not sure if this has changed)
• IPv6 native is highly preferred, but a tunnel is livable (currently we have one via AARNet)
• We must be able to run our own server with any arbitrary service we choose including but not limited to:
  • HTTP and HTTPS
  • DNS
  • SMTP (both directions)
  • IMAP/IMAPS
  • NTP
  • XMPP
  • SSH
  • OpenVPN tunnels
  • IRC
  • VoIP services (including Skype, EchoLink and Ekiga… not ruling out D-Star, IRLP or other systems in future either)
• We must be permitted to maintain, reconfigure and replace any and all network infrastructure components within our property boundary at our discretion… This includes choice of hardware and software!
• In the event of a problem, I expect to talk to a competent tech support person who at least understands basic networking principles such as the TCP/IP model (or the OSI model which it is frequently compared to)
• Related to the above, when contacting tech support, I expect that any findings I report are taken on board, and that appropriate troubleshooting techniques are used. I did not go to university studying IT and EE for 6.5 years for nothing!

Some of this is due to frustrations I’ve had with ISPs, particularly Telstra when troubleshooting issues on others’ behalf, and hitting this exact problem of being treated like a dummy because the other end is only reading a script. iTel haven’t given us any issue thus far… it’d be nice if they offered native IPv6, but that’s about my only nit I have with them… they’ve provided a very reliable service and haven’t gotten in our way. Whenever there has been a problem, it has been quickly identified and rectified. Thus, we have no reason to change… finance alone is not going to cut it.

Specific to Telstra… it’d be nice if they fixed the broken DNS server that fails to resolve yi.org domains. (If you have trouble viewing my site directly, but can see my post on Planet Gentoo… try changing your DNS server settings over to an alternate one such as OpenDNS, then please contact your ISP about it.)

The telemarketer tonight had to end the call prematurely while she found out from her employer whether static IP addresses were possible with the plan they were about to try and sell us. She’s apparently going to call back tomorrow evening. All I can say is watch out for low-flying aircraft.

Seriously… don’t ask.

Once upon a time, I used to know quite a bit about running a PC with the Windows operating system.  People used to turn to me for assistance in solving technical issues with computers.  This was fine, I was happy with that.  I still am happy to assist in areas where I am knowledgeable.

The Microsoft world today, however, is not a field with which I am comfortable anymore.  The Windows OS has changed to such a degree… and with all the technical issues faced by users of this OS… I have lost all patience with it.  I almost never use it at home or at university unless absolutely necessary.

So long is it since I’ve used the OS, I can no longer recall the layout well enough to guide people without seeing it in front of me… and of course, Microsoft keeps changing the layout at every given opportunity.  Add to this the constantly changing procedures for maintenance… it’s a nightmare to keep track of.

To those around me… if you choose to use this OS… that is fine.  Your personal choice, not mine.  Have a question?  I may be able to give some hints… but you are on your own… I now refuse to spend time trying to fix the issues thrown up by this foreign and arcane environment.  I have wasted much energy, fixing the troubles that in my opinion, should not have occurred in the first place.

I don’t know anything about this OS anymore… I left that community a long time ago.  Just because I have been using a computer for much of my life, does not mean that I am an expert in all fields of computing… and to the Windows users, I repeat… don’t ask, as refusal may offend.

Lately I’ve been looking around at microcontrollers.

With my work with Eze Corp, I’ve gotten quite accustomed to the MSP430. It’s a nice little MCU, with a very low power drain, gcc port and is in general, quite easy to drive. At my workplace, I use a Windows XP machine to do development under MSYS, using a MSP FET-430UIF JTAG device for programming and debugging. This is not my preferred mode of development, I’d much rather be doing it on a Linux host (or at least something that properly understands POSIX)… but it’s tolerable.

For my home projects though… this isn’t an option. I do not own a Windows computer any more, and in any case, I dislike working with it at my workplace — to hell with using it in my recreation! (The reasons why are best saved for another rant at some other time. No, I’m not a free-software hippie, I have other reasons.)

There are a number of MCUs available that I’m aware of. The biggest hurdle with many of them is the requirement of some piece of hardware which is either proprietary, expensive and/or unavailable. I like the MCUs that provide a JTAG interface, since it’s a well defined protocol that allows real-time debugging of the device as well as programming. JTAG for what its worth is little more than an SPI bus at the hardware level, it’s what’s layered on top of this that differs between devices.

JTAG can be implemented via GPIO. Since a computer parallel port is merely a specialised form of GPIO port, this enables people to wire up a JTAG port to a parallel port, and bit-bang the signals. There’s a couple of issues with this approach:

• Parallel ports (I mean real ones) are getting harder to come by, especially on portable computers (understandable on netbooks, but I don’t see why full-size laptops don’t have them…anyway)
• Most USB Parallel cables only have the smarts to drive a printer, they don’t allow arbitrary bit-banging of data. (e.g. the PL2305. And try explaining the difference to a salesperson…)
• USB introduces a 1~2msec latency… which stuffs up timing at high speed.

I’ve seen some programmers (for PIC and AVR chips) that use RS-232. Now these are usually specialised devices for a given range of MCUs… that’s fine… but they suffer the same problem as the parallel-port JTAG cables… that is, most modern computers don’t have RS-232 anymore for some silly reason (as I say, understandable on netbooks… but are they saying they can’t cram a mini-din8 somewhere on a 15″ laptop?!)… and the USB latency screws timing up (I suspect this is the issue with the PL2303-based adapters we have here).

That leaves me with native USB devices.

A lot of the ones used by ARM devs are based on a FTDI chip which offers UART (RS-232) and SPI… so you get a serial console and a JTAG in one unit. Nice… In addition, there’s a open framework for debugging with them, OpenOCD. I don’t have the knowledge necessary to port this across to other MCUs… I guess one hope is that a MSP430 guru might contribute an OpenOCD port, but in the short term this isn’t an option.

For many ARM devices, there’s the J-link developed by Segger.  I’ve mentioned this one in past posts.  For MSP430, TI provide their MSP FET430UIF.  Both of these devices are on the nose from a usability point of view.  Both require you to use proprietary software in order to access their device.  This is fine if you’re on a supported platform, and the tool is well maintained.

For the J-link… well, if you’re not on Windows… forget it, that’s all they support.  The advice from them is to just run a Windows computer purely to run their GDB proxy software (which costs too I might add).

TI’s tool is theoretically a little better for support… the userspace drivers are proprietary freeware… but again, if you’re not using Windows or Linux on an i386 PC, forget it.  More to the point, the Linux version doesn’t seem to get updated as often — so the only real option is Windows.  Bad luck for me and my Yeeloong.

For what it’s worth, I do not understand why these things need to be proprietary… it’s a flipping programming cable.  Just moves data from one end to the other.  If they need to load firmware into the RAM of the chip being programmed, fine… but why can’t this be an ELF binary or something that just gets picked up by OpenOCD (or equivalent) and stuffed down the wire?

Devices like the Rabbit Semiconductor series of microcontrollers drive me insane with their non-standard nonsense… they decided to chuck many years of C history down the gurgler and invent their own “wannabe C”. #include <foo.h>? Nah… don’t be silly, we’ll just stuff everything into .lib files and #use them. Urgh!

I’d love to know what low-end microcontrollers exist that don’t exhibit the proprietary nonsense that is outlined above. 8 or 16 bits wide… I like ARM, but I’m not needing something that flashy. I like the low current drain of MSP430, and the fact they use gcc… which I guess pushes me in the direction of AVR and maybe PIC, but I’d be interested in other options. Cheap is important too, I don’t have a lot of cash for expensive tools or chips.

The other thing in the favour of AVR/PIC MCUs, is that there’s a local shop that I can buy them from — no need to order on-line. Farnell and RS have a wide variety, but I have to purchase from their website, which is awkward for me.

The applications I’d have in mind? Well, one idea is a more modern version of my headlamp… some of these MCUs draw less power than the 74HC14 chip used in that project (a few mA in standby mode) and would offer more functionality. Other applications include small controllers for amateur radio projects (not SDR though).

I’m really interested to know what controllers are out there, which are open-source friendly. Once I have a clear picture of what’s on offer, I can look more closely at my applications.

Open letter to Minister Stephen Conroy regarding the proposed internet filter.

Over the last year, we’ve heard a number of people step up, complaining about this proposal, and what it will mean in terms of freedom-of-speech, and internet speeds.  I also heard a rumour that mentioned the blocking of peer-to-peer traffic.

Now, it is very noble of the government to be that concirned with the issues involving pornography and other objectionable material, that they are pushing forward with developing and introducing this filter to the masses.  Others have already pointed out many of the ethical and technical issues with the proposal, which I note, to date, are still not addressed.

The latest proposal however, has been to block peer-to-peer traffic.  I strongly urge those in the government to carefully consider the consequences before taking on such a drastic action.  Ignoring the fact that Bit-Torrent and similar protocols can, and are, used for legal purposes (such as distribution of open source software) as well as for piracy… a lot of other peer-to-peer protocols exist, that many people expect to be able to use freely.

Consider the following applications/protocols:

• Skype
• MSN Messenger
• Ekiga
• Yahoo! Messenger
• TeamSpeak
• EchoLink
• IRLP
• IRC DCC
• VNC
• RDP
• SIP (most VoIP systems)
• Hamachi
• … etc

All of these, rely on peer-to-peer traffic to operate, and are used lawfully.  Blocking SIP could be disasterous to our telecommunications, since many people rely on this protocol as their primary home phone service! Such a move could proove highly unpopular with the voting public, and deadly to businesses that rely on VoIP services.  In a time of global economic crisis, is this really what you want?!

It is true that many of us absolutely hate it, when a politician breaks an election promise.  However, we are more than too happy to forgive politicians for breaking such promises, when such promises are mearly implementing bad policy.  I urge this government to consider the above, in addition to the comments made by others on this topic, before going ahead with such disasterous propositions.

Some of you may be wondering where I have been the last two days. I have not been on IRC, forums, or on the radio much at all this last 48 hours. I did call in to the BARC 2m net the other night… put in one over, then handed it on to the next station, going clear and turning the radio off.

I’ve been studying for a digital communications subject. I was planning this would be my last subject… but alas… the university threw a spanner in the works there by deciding to choose now to inform me that I was not elligible to graduate, due to a deficit of about 36 credit points (3 subjects).

The last two years of university have been the most stressful. This last one would have possibly seen me meet my end had I gone the full 4 subjects/semester. The high levels of anxiety and stress this course has put me through have been unbearable at times, and there have been some close calls.

The email I received delivering the above bad news… had me literally inches (or is that litres) from taking my own life. It’s a little known fact that when you drink too much water, it causes one’s kidneys to shut down in a process known as water intoxication. I clearly didn’t get to that point, but I had a few pains that suggested I was nearing the ballpark figure needed.

I have no idea how people are meant to complete such a course, and still remain in a sane mental state fit for employing. The various support services within the uni have been great — but that’s not an option for everyone.

At the moment, I’m only really studying now to see if I can actually pass this subject… but my heart isn’t in it anymore. I’m fed up with uni, and I really don’t know what to do now.

Guess I’ll be joining the dole queue next year after all.

For those who were thinking of trying the double IT/EE degree offered by QUT (formerly IF59)… I would not recommend it to anyone. The stuff-around I have experienced during this course is as such I would not even recommend it to my greatest enemy.

The attacks on the US that occurred 11th September, 2001, killed 3000 people, injured about 7000, cost and less than a billion dollars.  Maybe a little more when welfare payments and rebuilding is factored in.  The US following the attacks was still going strong.

The mismanagement that has lead to the current economic crisis will likely cost trillions of dollars, and has achieved what no terrorist organisation has managed to do thus far — cripple economies.

Nicely done fellas… but you can save the encore… we’re in enough of a mess already.

The Mt. Coot-tha repeater, VK4RBC has been plagued by interference for as long as I can remember.  Usually the interference problems have been nothing more than annoying, but tonight it’s been particularly bad.

It appears that somewhere on Mt. Coot-Tha, someone is operating an illegal pair of cordless headphones, at a frequency of 433.525MHz (input frequency for VK4RBC).  Prior to tonight we knew something local was causing interference, but none of us could identify what.

Tonight however, the interference was particularly strong… so strong in fact, we could distinctly hear (although badly clipped) the audio being listened to via the headphones.  Thanks to the illegal broadcaster, we got to listen to the ABC News, and for the last hour, Channel 7.  It has subsided somewhat, but the interference is still there, and you do get the odd bit of a word.  No doubt the owners of these headphones will cop amateur interference whenever someone near them transmits.

A complaint has been sent to the ACMA, and I urge other radio amateurs inconvenienced by this interference to do the same.  I see no reason at all why we should put up with such severe interference.  LIPDs do not belong on 70cm!

Well, presently I’m reading through the semester’s lecture slides to familiarise myself with the content I’m going to be examined on shortly.

And I’m noticing there are some bad habits that lecturers seem to be keen on repeating… again, and again.  Here’s some of my pet hates, as a student.  These relate to the presentation of the material we’re given, the actual format they’re provided in is another matter.

Many of these were provided in PDF, which is good.  My first niggle however, is when they do their “print to PDF”… in black-and-white… but don’t adapt their slides to suit this monochrome medium.

The above image is from a real presentation.  Those studying “Professional Studies II” (EEB781) at QUT might recognise it.  It was shown to us in colour during the lecture… but now when we review our notes, we only have it in shades of grey.  Thankfully we’re not being examined on that chart!  Then there’s this little gem…

This is a small section of a slide… Must I say, that black looks great on dark grey.  Mind you, the same criticism could be levelled at consumer electronics designers, who think it’s great to microprint 2mm high light-grey text on a dark grey panel!  But I digress…  Colour doesn’t necessarily improve things either… as shown by this example:

If it isn’t masking much needed information by discarding the colour information… the other trap they fall into, is scaling bitmap images up in size, and/or deforming their aspect ratios.  I’ve got loads of examples of this, dating back over 5 years of studies… Here’s a brilliant example of the former.

Uh huh… you honestly are going to tell me you can read every word of that?  Well yes, if you look closely, you can make things out… but why should we?  That slide is so blurred and pixellated, it’s hard to see what is being said.

Here’s the lesson… Vector graphics are your friend.  You can scale a vector to any size you like, and it won’t pixellate.  SVG is great for this… EPS isn’t too bad too.  Or WMF.  They all allow for graphics that can be scaled to any size.

Some things of course, are inherently bitmaps, such as photographs and scanned images.  If you must use a bitmap… make sure it’s a decent resolution to begin with. Making a bitmap smaller (by resampling) is fine… but don’t try to make it bigger… it’ll look like utter shite.

And of course, if you do try to resize a bitmap (or any graphic really, vector or bitmap)… at least preserve the aspect ratio.  Nothing looks worse than a stretched and distorted photo…

If you look closely, you can see the top-left photo has been stretched (made bigger!) horizontally slightly (not too bad, but still).  The worst is the bottom-right photo, which has been compressed vertically.  It’d be okay had the image been compressed horizontally in proportion… but instead, it looks squashed.

Just about every presentation package I have used, provides the means to scale images while preserving their aspect ratio.  Some do it by default… some require you to hold down Shift or Control whilst dragging it out.  In either case… it’s trivial to do.  If something doesn’t fit the hole in your slide… consider cropping the bits that aren’t needed so that it matches the aspect ratio of the hole.  But don’t squash it!

Anyway… that’s enough ranting from me… about time I got back to my studies.

… is not a pretty tale at this point.

At the moment, I’m a bit pissed off. Some inconsiderate bastards in my neighbourhood are playing crap music at top volume (Yes… I’m talking about YOU, at the Settlement Road/Kaloma Road intersection!) — so loud in fact, that wearing earmuffs with a 80dB attenuation rating, does not stop the noise. However, this isn’t what I’m really annoyed about.

I’ve switched all the radios off, and the mobile phone… in this state of mind it’s better I don’t go talking on air, as I’m likely to say something I’ll probably regret. Likewise the phone. I’ve just tweaked my blog’s config, so now this won’t appear on planet.gentoo.org or anywhere else stupid enough to syndicate the entire blog.

Worth noting, that save a few isolated examples, my presence doesn’t seem to be wanted at all. A couple of the senior devs (and former devs) in the Gentoo/MIPS team for instance — regard me as an incompetent idiot (I have IRC logs and email archives of this), I’m only tollerated because they need the numbers.

My big beef at this present time, is where my future is headded. I’m almost through my education. I’ve been at it now, non-stop, since 1991… 7 years of primary school, 5 years of high school, a year of straight IT at Griffith, and now, 5 years of IT/EE at QUT. Well almost… it will be 5 years at the end of the year.

I’ve managed to organise some work experience with a mob out at Laidley. This is great news — it means I might have some chance of graduating this year. However, it’s a long commute from Brisbane to Laidley… and I’ve just been given a direct order by my father that I’m to be home by 7:00PM! Wonderful… it was going to be a struggle accumulating the hours up as it is.

The work experience issue is a big problem on my mind. Where as most students I’d imagine, at this stage of education, would be filling in job applications for graduate positions… this isn’t an option for me. Without the industrial experience, I don’t graduate!

This is a point I can’t seem to get through to people. If I were to apply to a graduate position, they’ll expect someone who has done the 60 days experience as required by the Institution of Engineers. Someone who already has this experience will instantly get preference over someone like myself who hasn’t been successful obtaining this experience.

Now… 60 days in this case, is 60 8-hour days. So with the above kerfew in place, that pushes that well past 80 days. And I’ll be studying during this period too, so I won’t be able to travel out to Laidley every working day to get the experience.

Why did I go to an outfit that’s so far from home? Well, I had little choice. Outside of Campbell Scientific, and Powerlink, nobody else has been willing to talk to me. I’ve sent off numerous job applications, if they contact me at all, it’s an impersonal letter saying your offer was declined. No explaination why. And the job sites are pretty much barren with respect to job ads.

I realise the vast majority of job vacancies aren’t advertised… but what’s 70% of nothing? By my maths… nothing. It seems you have to know people… and in there lies a problem.

I feel like someone’s smashed both my legs, then told me to go take a hike. Yeah, very funny! If I was suicidal 6 months ago… you can imagine what my mental state is at the present time. Here’s hoping this is temporary turbulance, and things will settle. There is the possibility of getting paid work with this company in the future (presently it’s unpaid)… in which case, it’s “See ya later Brisbane… I’m moving out!”… yeah, I’m sick of this rat race and I want some peace and quiet!

I’ll be glad when this year’s over… then I can see where I’m at. Hopefully I’ll be done with uni… and it’ll be off to find work. Exactly where I do not know — my ideas of what to do have shifted quite a bit since I started. The engineering studies have been a valuable — I’ll see how it is after I’ve done some industrial experience. At the very least, I can say, I have tried.

All else fails… I might talk to the TAFE or something, see if I can fast track an electrical tradesmanship… as that’s most closely aligned to what I know, and there seems to be a lot of demand in that field at this time.

Time will tell… but for now, I just had to get the above behemoth off my chest.