Rob the Geek

The following is intended to be a summary of various links covering Barcamp Auckland 2010 as my notes only capture what I was able to attend.

Much of the discovery was done via a twitter search, so I’m not expecting it to be an exhaustive list – please let me know if I’ve missed anything so I can update to include you [Note: I'm using your shortened links wherever I can to retain your ability to track clicks, so let me know what links you'd rather I use...]

Thanks once again to Ludwig Wendzich @Ludwigw for doing the hard yards to make it such a successful day.

Slide Packs:

• HTML 5 Session: Slide Pack | Questions | Guides – Darren Woods @darren
• Augmented Reality: Slide Pack | Lego Example – @mikael_letang
• InnovatioNZ: Slides(?)
• Ruby: Slide Pack- James Harton @jamesotron
• Building Facebook Applications: Slide Pack
• Vinyl Flashback: Slide Pack
• Illustration Friday: Slide Pack

Flickr Shots (please tag yourselves): Here & here

Coverage / Notes:

• Simon Gianouts (@gianouts): Blog
• Floyd Wilde (@floydwilde): Notes
• Social Media NZ (@SocialMedia_NZ): Notes
• Roger: Notes, MongoDB, 5Min Talks, CodePress, Automating CMS, Startups, Kite Cameras, Home Tech, Social Good
• Kite Photography: Kite | Reel | Camera Mod
• Simon Lyall (@slyall): NZ Post Redevelopment, SAAS & APIs for workflow, Kiwi Startups, Open Data, Wikiphobia in Schools, Lightning Talks

The following are the session notes I took during this years Auckland Barcamp

• Session 1: Seadragon & Data Visualisation
• Session 2: Doing Less. Using SaaS and API’s to automate your workflow
• Session 3: What next for Digital TV in NZ
• Session 4: Open Data in NZ – Where we’re at, and Where to next
• Session 5: What do you want from your Telco / Service provider?

• Five Minute Slots
  • Pacific Fibre
  • Day without Media
  • Is EVAL evil
  • Interclue
  • Judson Steel
  • Augmented Reality

• Session 6: Ragtag Leadership: How organisations need more Captain Mal and less Captain Kirk
• Session 7: Getting the most out of Home Tech – Gadget stories and Connectivity nightmares
• Session 8: Social Good: Using your TechFu

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To celebrate the introduction of the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS^*) in New Zealand today (1 July 2010), I thought I’d publish the following article on what I’m doing in terms of residential Power Monitoring.

Read on for:

• The Back Story
• The Unboxing
• Installing the Device
• Configuring the Software
• Results

The Back Story

A few years ago, I was working on what devices would sit in an ‘average’ connected home and, given the sheer volume of ‘things’ – it be came clear that not only would a homeowner need to justify the existence of each device, but also their unseen costs in terms of installation, maintenance and ongoing power usage.

To answer the last of these, I bought a device called a Centameter which, aside from the benefit of being designed in NZ, measured the current power usage via an induction clamp and transmitter which sits in the power meter box and sends the data through to a LCD display.

After a couple of attempts to elicit a response from the manufacturer, I asked an electrical engineering friend of mine to see what information they could pull from the display unit as we wanted to capture and graph this data over time. The short story is, while we could get some information out of the device, the time required to make this meaningful far exceeded what he was able to donate to the project so things were shelved – until now.

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This post has been far too long in coming – mainly because some miscrent broke into my car and stole a bunch of my gear – including the charger for my 6 hour old ASUS EEE 1005PE. The replacment charger took over 40 days to source (that’s what you get for living in New Zealand).

Anyway, this georgous wee netbook replaced my vintage EEE 701 4G and came pre loaded with Windows 7 Starter – and a bunch of trialware which took an absolute age to purge from the drive. It’s now dual-booting Win7 and Ubuntu 10.04 (which is my primary OS of choice).

As a side note – under Ubuntu 10.04, the Atheros AR2427 wireless card fails to be detected due a different hardware device ID of 002c which the ath9k wifi driver in the current (~ June 2010) kernel does not understand. However, all is not lost – simply follow the HOWTO written by James Little to add the patched driver to your current kernal and, 5 minutes later, you’ll have a wireless Ubuntu netbook once again (Thanks James!!)

Hat tip to @VodaphoneNZ for re-igniting my interest in having another crack at the following post which I originally wrote for an internal publication for my employer. I’ve changed some of the phraseology,but the basic content – apart from the opening paragraph – remains pretty similar. Once again, these are my personal opinions and are presented as such.

If you are in any way connected to the mobile phone world, you would have heard of the Android phones, an increasing number of which are now starting to make their way into the New Zealand market. Vodafone have been quietly selling android phones since the middle of last year, and third party importers have been importing them in increasing numbers since around the same time. With the release today of ‘FroYo’ (Android 2.2), Vodafone NZ have come out with an impressive looking list of devices sporting the Android stack.

The disappointment for me being that, like other Telcos in the space, a number of the devices announced are running some fairly old versions of the stack, and there is no clear message for the as to how to update their devices, or indeed if this is even possible. I’d certainly like to see the Telcos, or the community, or a collaboration of the two – to come out with some simple HOWTO guides (or simple “Sorry – but you can’t” messages) around updating the device to more recent software. Let me know in the comments if you have come across anything which may help the average Joe (or Jane) with this…

What is ‘Android’

‘Android’ is a software stack including an operating system, middleware and core applications – kind of like Windows on your PC. It was first unveiled in 2007 by a firm who was subsequently bought by Google, who’ve since released most of the code under the Apache (software and open source) license. And that decision is what has captured the attention of the community.

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Wow – I’ve just finished reading a recent blog post by Aza Raskin (creative lead for Firefox) and he presents an interesting new phishing attack vector for us to be(a)ware of, that of ‘Tabnabbing’.

For many of us, phishing attempts, (that is – attempts by ‘evil’ sites or emails to pretend they are from legitimate sources and then dupe the user into revealing login credentials or other useful information) are fairly easy to spot. Some are stupidly obvious such as the now well known tale of the government official who needs to get large sums of money out of the country, others are less blatant and use shortened URL services or minor misspellings to trick people into clicking their links. But now, joining the ever growing list of ways to socially engineer an inattentive user into revealing useful information, is some very clever javascript which seeks to fool us when we’re not looking!

The attack is structured as follows:

1. The attacker gets a user to browse to a staging site
2. When the user switches focus to another tab, the staging site then changes the favicon, and the content displayed on the page to something which the user will be familiar with – in his example, Aza uses a Gmail login or ‘credentials expired’ page.
3. When the user next scans their open tabs, they recognise the familiar tab and switch to it – believing it to be the genuine article.
4. Because it’s an existing open tab, they implicitly trust that the domain is what it should be – and from there the credentials are captured – and the user is redirected back to the legitimate site, oblivious that they’ve been scammed.

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With my wife adopting a new notebook we’ve found ourselves with an additional, usable machine which we’ve earmarked for our boys use.

The unit in question is a rather dated IBM Thinkpad R51 which ran fine with Windows XP, but given that our boys are now of an age where they are being more inquisitive, I’ve decided that something a little more robust would better fit the bill than the aging Windows OS.

As a keen open source OS user myself, I’m planning to drop Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) onto the notebook and then lock down the configuration to allow the boys to experiment, but not break the environment.

So, looking at the task list ahead of me, I’ll be looking to run through the following:

1. Install the OS (release date is 29/04/2010)
2. Install and configure parental control on the boys user accounts
3. Lock down the rest of the system on the boys accounts
4. Let the boys at the notebook and observe what usability issues crop up
5. Tweak

The next few articles getting posted to the blog will be following through this list so I’ll be making extensive use of search engines, forums and any other resources I can leverage to get the best info to make this happen as painlessly as possible. Suggestions in the comments please

The first week of April 2010 saw the announcement of Telecoms first Android handset, with the exclusive launch for the XT network of the LG GW620.

Telecom is not alone in the New Zealand market with Android handsets. Vodafone have been selling the HTC Magic since the end of June 2009 and independent device importers also have a range of Android phones.

Globally, the industry is expecting big things from the handset manufacturers as well as the Android platform in 2010. At the Mobile World Congress (the world’s premier mobile event) in February, it was announced that 60,000 Android handsets are shipped every day (though what ‘shipped’ means was not clarified).

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Okay – after a bit of fnarkling, we’re back with Temperature, Humidity as well as that ever useful Wind and Rain data.

Not only are we transmitting in elegant Flash interactivity, we’re also on Twitter – should that be your thing (note, this is currently set to tweet every 15 minutes).

So – there we go, weather data is being captured, next steps (after house wiring) is to get a live weather cam up and running so you too can enjoy our lovely view.

..well, mostly.

Over the last week I’ve managed to run some power to a nearby cupboard where the La Crosse WS2300 LCD has been sitting and I’ve now got a PC in there gathering the data, and spitting it out to the Weather Page via a very slow WiFi link.

The biggest stinker about this is the external temperature/humidity sensor is not producing data, giving me a flatline of 10.2 degrees C, which I assume can only be a remnant of the last data held when the station was disconnected back in June 2009 in preparation for the house move. So, while there is some data being delivered, it’s not quite 100% – or that interesting due to the lack of the outside temperature.

I’ve raised a ticket with the excellent folk at Scientific Sales where I bought the unit and hopefully, they will be able to suggest a remedy which won’t involve too much expense. Until then, bask in the oh so interesting data of wind direction and speed, as well as the temperature inside the cupboard in which the data logger is stashed.

/sigh