Barcamp Auckland is an annual gathering of developers, designers, start-ups and social-media types. It’s a full day event held in an ‘unconference’ like style, where the attendee (see my attendee & interested folks list on Twitter) set the schedule – and people turn up to discuss topics which interest them.
The following are the session notes I took during this years Auckland Barcamp
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.
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.
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.
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:
The attacker gets a user to browse to a staging site
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.
When the user next scans their open tabs, they recognise the familiar tab and switch to it – believing it to be the genuine article.
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.
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:
Install the OS (release date is 29/04/2010)
Install and configure parental control on the boys user accounts
Lock down the rest of the system on the boys accounts
Let the boys at the notebook and observe what usability issues crop up
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 announcementof 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).
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.
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.
The embedded video came across my Twitter feed this morning (thanks @rgoodchild) under the heading of ‘The Perfect Geek Rapper’. Now while m0serious may not be in the same league as NerdCore rapper MC Frontalot,his material will still coax a smile from those of us who have an interest in site design, UI and Ux – as well as imparting some good coding behaviors…
Slap on your headphones and have a listen:
Peace out yo… (Man, I’m soo hip and street and stuff… *makes complicated gesture with fingers*)
The following guide will take you through installing VMWare Server 2 on a minimal install headless Ubuntu v9.04 (Jaunty) Server. For a step by step on setting up the minimal server, read the article I posted here.
Getting the Pre-requisite Packages
First up, you will need to SSH into your server, and paste in the following command to install some additional packages which allow for the changes required to the kernel and the building of the VMWare server.
Once the extra packages are installed, you will need to grab the TAR ball from the VMWare site, and drop it into the directory where you wish to run your VMs from. For me, I’ve chosen to keep them under my users home directory in a directory called (imaginativly) ‘VM’. The following commands will make the directory ‘VM’ under your users root directory, then change to that directory:
mkdir ~/VM
cd ~/VM
From the PC you are using to SSH to the server, open a browser and visit the VMWare Server page from here you will need to download the server which will require you to create a VMware account, and login so that a licence key can be emailed to you.
Once logged in, you will be directed to the download page containing all the binaries for VMware Server.
Download the relevant TAR image for your architecture and linux version to your local machine, and do an MD5 checksum to make sure it arrived intact.
There is also a patch which you will require, you will need a login to the Ubuntu Forums however, to access the file below:
From here, transfer the TAR and the patch file in whatever way works best for you. If you followed my server build guide and installed the optional SAMBA extensions, you should be able to easily open the home directory on your server via a Windows network share – or similar for you particular operating system.
Running the Installer
Back to our SSH session now, unpack the patch into your “~/VM/” directory, then extract the VMware Server TAR ball and run the installer:
tar xvfz VMware-server-*.tar.gz
cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo patch ./bin/vmware-config.pl ~/VM/vmware-config.pl.patch.txt
sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Accept the default options (there are a LOT of them) throughout the installation and allow the installer to build any modules or kernels it needs to during the setup.
Choose the Administrative User
When prompted for the name of the current administrative user, select YES and type in YOUR user name (otherwise it’ll use root)
Select the Directory to Store the Virtual Machines
When prompted for the directory to store your virtual machine files, type in /home/[YourUsername]/VM/Virtual Machines and allow the installer to create the directory
Entering the Serial Number
Next you will be prompted for the serial number which should have been emailed to you for your VM Server installation, simply copy out of your email and paste into the SSH window.
Back to selecting the default values now until you are returned to the prompt.
Just in case things didn’t go well
If you think you may have made a mistake in the configuration, you can easily re-run the configuration tool by typing:
sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl
If you REALLY made a hash of it, you can always remove the installation by typing:
sudo /usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl
and start again
Accessing the VMServer Console
After you installation sucessfully completes you will be returned to the prompt in your SSH session. That’s it – you’re done. All you need to do now, is attach to the VM Server console via your browser by typing in the address of your server box which will look something like this:
Read the documentation, and start setting up some Virtual Machines, or download any useful looking Virtual Appliances that catch your eye from the appliance marketplace.
Note: If you experience issues with the web console appearing to ‘hang’ ensure that you have loaded the lastest Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – get it here.
![Vodafone NZ Tweets about it's new Android lineup [24th June 2010]](http://rob-the.geek.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/20100624-VodaNZTweet-Droids-300x171.jpg "20100624-VodaNZTweet-Droids")
