Sad I know, but honestly I've had enough of mainting the infrastructure and the Google blog sites are pretty clean and easy to setup and use. I've got a great plugin for firefox that makes it really easy to tag, add etc... (Scribe fire by the way)

So its official... I've become less geeky... (hangs head in shame)

So from here on, if you wanna keep up with my rambling commentery... (why i have no idea... I mean really... geeez)

You will need to checkout this site http://angryduckling.blogspot.com/

Matt

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Setup guide for the Draytek 2910 router

Link to guide with screenshots here

Introduction

With the latest firmware, a 3.5G HSDPA USB modem (such as the Virgin USB modem) can plug into the Vigor2910 USB port and operate as one of the WAN ports. Load Balancing (the internet traffic is spread across multiple WAN ports) and Fail-Over (when the secondary WAN is used only when the primary WAN is not available) are both supported. Because 3.5G uses wireless which has a very good mobile coverage, it can make an effective emergency backup connection.

Requirements

A Vigor2910 Router

A Virgin USB Modem (Huawei E220)

The 3G SIM card provided by Virgin

STEP 1:

In web browser (IE or Firefox) access the menu page of Vigor2910 (default IP address is http://192.168.1.1)

STEP 2:

Go to WAN > General Setup In WAN2

Note Virgin uses PAP for authentication unlike the other mobile broadband providers in Australia so we need to force the router to switch from CHAP to PAP.

Work around

1. Select Enable: YES

2. Configure wan2 Physical Mode as Ethernet, then click ok.

3. Go to WAN > Internet Access

4. Select PPPoE for the WAN2 connection

5. Click the details button on the WAN 2 connection

6. Configure PPPoE ,PPP Authentication as PAP only.

7. Click ok

Go to WAN > General Setup In WAN2

8. Select Physical Type: 3G USB Modem

*** IMPORTANT NOTICE: WHEN THE WAN2 IS SET TO 3G USB MODEM, THE ETHERNET PORT P1/W2 WILL BE DISABLE. PLEASE DO NOT CONNECT ANY NETWORK DEVICE INTO THIS PORT.

STEP 3:

Go to Internet Access. In Access Mode select PPP and click Details Page.

STEP 4:

In Details Page

1. PPP Client Mode: Enable

2. SIM PIN code: < enter your PIN code if required >

3. APN Name: VirginBroadband (Warning it is case sensitive)

4. Click "Apply" button

5. Click "Ok" button

• You do not need PPP Username and Password for Virgin 3G.

STEP 5:

Power off DrayTek Vigor2910, connect the 3.5G HSDPA USB modem to the USB port and power on. You can also check your online status in Vigor2910 or check ACT status on the modem.

Note: All credit for this guide belongs to Draytek, not only did "borrow" their exising guides, they also provided the work around. Thanks Roy and the team at Draytek

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Talk about an incredible day...!!!

One of the guys I fly with convinced me to make the 3 hours drive to Stanwell Park today... and man was it worth it.  We took off from launch around midday and I flew until 3pm.. it was incredible.

The folks at Stanwell are awesome, the duty officer was happy to spend time walking me through the site and even helping me get off the launch.  (Thanks Ant)

I spent the afternoon practising turns, big ears, speed bar and just generally playing around and getting the feel of the wing, 3 hours gave me plenty of time to start working on the designs for a airborne latrine.. cause let me tell you... after drinking 2.5L of water on the drive up and then 3 hours in the air... i REALLY needed it.. lol

Oh and I have to say, Stanwell Park is gorgeous...  tucked away in a valley, nice bearch, awesome scenery...  LOVE IT..!

Matt

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Well its about time I blogged again...

Lots has happened but I've kinda been self concious about posting and of course when your focused on that then thats all you can think about. Short version of things is that I had some health challenges which are now sorted and as a side benefit I've lost around 55Kg...!

I decided to reward myself with a lesson in paragliding and of course got hooked... lol

So, told you I was self concious about it, so lets just move along...

So I completed my training course back in November and bought all the gear and finally got signed off in February.

Today was my first day as a restricted pilot (means I don't have an instructor in my ear, but I do need a safety officer observing me.) and it went GREAT....!

One of the popular flying sites is Lake George and whilst the conditions weren't the best a group of us decided to head out and have a go anyway. Got to Geary's and it wasn't happening, so the call was made to head up the ridge to Collector. It's a GREAT launch nice big top, plenty of space, can handle wind on a fair arc.. Huuuuuge landing paddock even a newbie would have trouble stuffing up .. lol

So my first two flights where “sleedies” basically a ride straight down the hill to the landing paddock.. which for a newbie is still fun. But my final flight was MAGIC...!!! Some of the senior guys gave me a bunch of advice regarding timing the take off so you launch into the start of a big thermal.. and well.. dang it worked... I went straight up to 1,000M...!

I lost height a few times and worked back up to 1,200M before I was finally unable to keep aloft and came back in for a landing... My first REAL flight and an airtime of 45 minutes...!!!

Wooo hoooo.

Matt

PS Now if I can just get rid of this darn flu I'd be a REALLY happy camper.

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Well, thats been an interesting experience....

Upgraded my video card to a dual DVI card and all of a sudden my Chimei CMV221D start displaying in 640x480 resolution... which is a long way from its native 1680x1050.

After lots of research it appears that the EDID is non compliant to the standards and hence the latest nvidia drivers rejected it and went back to the lowest resolution.

The EDID is effectively the monitors firmware and is used to report the monitors capabilities to the opperating system. When it works its brilliant... true plug and play... but when its bad, well its REALLY bad...

I've done some reading about how to read and reflash the EDID and that sounded like I might end up with a dead monitor which I really didn't want.

So after more research I discover that under Linux the nvidia drivers allow you to insert a fake EDID... WOOOO HOOO... Lucky I own two 1650x1080 monitors the second is a AOC 210V.. it works just fine so I used the nvidia-settings tool to aquire the EDID basically save a copy to a file on the disk. Then in my xorg.conf file simply pointed the second monitor to that EDID file.. bingo all working.

The man pages for the nvidia driver say you can put this line in either the device or the screen section.. I found it ONLY worked in the screen section. (For my xorg i have two screen and two device sections, so i put it in the correct screen and after a reboot it worked.

Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-1:/etc/X11/edid.bin"

I've also uploaded the EDID in case it helps anyone else, check the downloads section.

Matt

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Python ISP Usage Meter based

Background:

I've been writing usage meters for ISP's now for about 6 years and generally using vbscript and Samurize.. I really liked the combo as it allowed anyone to modify the UI without having any coding skills and the code was also pretty simple for people to have a hack at.

Having recently made the move to a Linux desktop (i love ubuntu) Samurize is no long an option and obviously vb is seriously limited., (although there is a project to provide a framework for .net on Linux.)

So I decided to look at a simple cross platform language to provide the same functionality and finally decided on Python.... easy to use, heaps of modules and no worries with Windows and Linux.

I got the backend written pretty quick, ie login to the ISP and scrape the usage data. The challenge was going to be a UI that could be easily customised.... frankly i haven't found anything like Samurize for Linux and so fell back to finding something that people could still learn pretty quickly... gDesklets looked like the best solution but frankly i drove myself nuts trying to get the backend wrapped in a class etc... it just kept erroring and after a few days i gave in...

So another search and I found Screenlets... no documentation but it looks good and there was enough examples for me to hack around and get my UI working.

If your looking at something and think... hmmmm.. thats stupid... you gotta give me some slack, new to Linux, Python and Screenlets... lol

Code

So my code comes in two parts;

1. isp_usagescraper_ - This part is the work horse, you give it a bunch of parameters and it logs into the usage site, scrapes the data and returns as a dictionary or can alternatively write to an XML file.. The idea is that we can keep adding mode modules to provide meters for other ISPs... yeah i built it to be extensible...!

2. The UI – For windows this is a simple Samurize interface that extracts data from the XML file and displays it... Feel free to customise and modify as much as you like.. its really easy.
   
   On Linux the UI is built in Screenlets and unfortunately your going to have to really hack around in Python to change the look and feel.

Installation Notes

Windows

Download and install ActivePython (needed for Samurize, other versions don't seem to work).

http://www.activestate.com/Products/activepython/index.plex

Download and install Samurize

http://www.samurize.com/

Download my samurize package and double click, this will offer to automatically install it.

http://www.taet.com.au/mb.nsf/DOWNLOADS/8A51B3BC7BB4A6FCCA257366000129A5/$FILE/Netspeedv3.sam

Once installed you will need to load the Samurize config editor and work through all the properties for your usage plan.

1. Click Start\All Programs\Serious Samurize\Config Tool

2. As marked in the diagram above click on the black text that says “Update: [Not”

3. Then Click Edit Meters

4. Then Click Source

5. Then Click Change Parameters (each one should be self explanatory.. Login name is blah@netspeed.com.au)

You should now be able to click test on check that it works and the file is downloaded, double click the file to check that the data looks right.

ISP Notes

WARNING – Netspeeds usage data updates infrequently and can lead to very expensive over runs. I used the meter to keep a rough eye on things and then use my router to track things properly... If you cop a huge excess bill don't blame me...!!!!

Version history

Rel 1 – Virtually no error checking.. so if it works great it not.......

Rel 2 - Minor fixes

Rel 3 - Huge update, now includes current session downloads so is far more accurate and updates without having to disconnect etc.

Future plans

Improve the error handling and generally make the code more robust.

Port the backend so it can be used for gDesklets

General notes and thanks

Huge thanks to Angelo at Velocity who whipped up a custom HTML page to make scraping really easy.

Thanks to the creators of Screenlets and Samurize for providing tools to make an easy to use and modify UI.

Thanks to all those people who created the great examples and howto's which I leverage to hack this thing together.

Zero thanks to Netspeed for making no effort to provide any information or simple site etc... out of 6 isp's the ONLY one who hasn't helped..

Disclaimer

Basically use at your own risk, no warranty, blah blah... I'm providing all the source code and your getting it for nothing.. don't wanna hear about how you over ran your usage and cost you money. In fact if you have a need to blame the rest of the world for your issues then piss off and don't download it at all.... geeeez

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Well... Seems I am the only one being caught out.. but just in case it helps someone else.

Firstly credit to Coort to providing virtually all the idea's for this (note he and he borrowed them from notes.net forums).. stolen from http://coort.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/install-lotus-notes-8-beta-3-on-ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn-step-by-step/

If your running Compiz Fusion or Beryl switch back to metacity as the window manager otherwise the install screens are all blank.

Change to switch from DASH to BASH (seems to fix some issues)
sudo ln -sf bash /bin/sh

Download and extract the tar file (You can just do this with the gui)

Run the setup
go to the directory you extracted the files to
sudo ./setup.sh

I just accepted all the defaults except i didn't install Sametime as i'm running it at home.

Set permissions on the program and data directories.
sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/ibm
sudo chmod -R 777 /etc/lotus

(I know this is bad, but i tried 755 and still got issues.. even tried assigning to me as the owner.. still errors..)

Delete the data directory in your home directory (it will be recreated when you launch notes)
sudo rm ~/lotus -r -d

Finally reverse the DASH to BASH thingo
sudo ln -sf dash /bin/sh

Re-enable Beryl or Compiz Fusion.

Finally to get the fonts working properly load Synaptic Package Manager and install "ttf-xfree86-nonfree".. and actually they still sucked so I changed the default fonts in the Notes prefernces to the "FreeSerif, FreeMono.. etc" and now its much nicer.

Now Notes won't appear on the menu's until you either logout or restart, so logout and login and launch Notes.

The errors I was dealing with;

could not launch application
Failed to execute child process
Permission denied

Error
notes setup cannot write or create pernames.ntf

Error no license key found

Hope it helps someone else out...

Matt

PS I'm a complete ubuntu noob, so be gentle... 

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smb4k – Great util for connecting to windows shares. I found the default network browser wouldn't allow me to see my Windows 2003 server, this util hit it no worries at all. Installed from the ubuntu repositries.

GnomeBaker – Awesome tool for burning CD's and DVD's.

Gaim – Instant messaging client with support for all the main networks. (Now replaced with Pidgin new version of gaim.

Notes 8 – I just love my notes... lol.. Email, database, webserver all rolled into one nice neat package. Installation was a nightmare but these instructions worked for me.

http://coort.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/install-lotus-notes-8-beta-3-on-ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn-step-by-step/

Hamachi - But I want it with a GUI..!

Complete HowTo for Hamachi and gui on ubuntu including adding to menu's etc
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=478863

Tremulous - Great FPS game that the kids and I really enjoy playing. Not to heavy on the hardware, heaps of servers around the world and lots of fun.

http://tremulous.net/

Beryl - Incredible eye candy for Linux

This thing makes the features in Vista look about as interesting as a DOS box...!

Screenlets - Desktop widgets in my attempt to replace samurize

After a search the options I found where gdesklets, adesklets and screenlets... none of them are really as good as samurize (IMHO) but I did get my usage meter working in screenlets after lots of pain and agony.

All for now, will add another one soon... so much software so little time.

Matt

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