We’re currently developing an application for the Ingenico iCT 220/250 Telium terminals. Nifty little devices, ARM9, Linux, GNU C with an Eclipse based development environment.
It’s pretty bare bones from a development perspective however, so the first thing we developed was a unit test framework (pretty hard to do TDD without one!). Here it is in action:
Ingenico iCT 220
Not that I have much faith in burglar alarms (having a dog is apparently more of a deterrent for thieves) but we were fast becoming the only house in our small estate that didn’t have one. I got a quote to have one installed but thought it was a bit on the high side (to put it politely), given that the alarm units themselves don’t cost all that much (and there’s also not really *that* much to them 
. So I went down the DIY route.
If you’re thinking of doing the same (or getting one put installed for you for that matter), first figure out what your requirements are, i.e. broadly speaking, do you want:
– wired or wireless alarm (probably depends on if your house is already wired for an alarm)
– with or without auto-dialer (i.e. do you want it to contact you or not)
– how many door contacts and IR detectors you need
Like securing anything, the more secure you make it the greater the costs involved, and this is particularly true when it comes to figuring how many sensors you need to secure your house to a level that you (and your pocket) are happy with. E.g. for our house, I went with a wireless alarm with an auto-dialer, contacts for all the external doors and enough IR detectors to protect the main downstairs areas and the upstairs landing.
So product wise, I eventually went with a Friedland Response alarm. I got the base SA5 package with the few additional sensors I wanted and an additional remote control. The main reason I went with Response is because they have their instruction manuals all online here, so you know in advance how it all fits together and whats involved in installing it. (When also get a really handy DVD when you buy the kit; its a pity they don’t have this online too as its a better illustration of what’s involved in installing each component).
After a bit of shopping around, I found that Amazon is cheapest for an SK5 kit, however (and rather annoyingly) they don’t deliver to Ireland (apparently they don’t/can’t fly batteries across the pond for security issues – don’t know if this is actually true or not). I also found the the local B&Q are selling an SA5 kit for €380, that’s quite a paddy tax guys! There also wasn’t much available on ebay at the time (although there are quite a few generic looking wireless alarms for sale if you want to chance a cheaper kit). So in the end I bought it from the Response website themselves, they do deliver to Ireland if you ring them up and ask them to courier it (costs an extra £11.50).
Installation wise it all went quite smooth (I’ve had much harder self assembly jobs!), but I did take my time at it and it’s always fun to get the drill out. You definitely don’t need to be an electrician to put in a wireless alarm. Configuring everything from the control panel (i.e. the zones, numbers to dial, etc) is just a case of following the steps in the manual. The one thing I was a bit worried about before hand was how to drill the door contacts in to the patio door, but thankfully they optionally come with sticky bits so installing them only takes a minute, result!
So in all it’s worked out very well all told. If you are considering the DIY route and have any questions, leave a comment below or drop me a twitter“>tweet.
I was doing a bit of research into SIP development and I struggled to find to pre-built binary for PJSUA (a sample console application for the excellent PJSIP) for windows.
There are quite a few steps involved in building PJSIP on windows, so if anyone is looking for a pre-built binary for PJSUA for windows, here it is. It’s built with MS SDK 7, and version 2914 of the pjsip trunk.
Although it is billed as a reference application, PJSUA is really quite comprehensive in terms of functionality, and works very well when run against my Blueface account.
Many thanks to everyone behind the PJSIP project, I hope to use it in earnest in the near future.
Myself and John have released a Budget Calculator for this emergency 2009 Budget which you can run here.
Your not likely to find good news, so please don’t shoot the messenger! By the way, RedOakTaxRefunds is the relaunched & rebranded version of Tax123.ie.
Plenty of disquiet around the country over this budget, a lot of unhappy campers (myself included!):
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bludget
http://www.scribblelive.com/Event/Irish_Emergency_Budget_2009
In the past few weeks, Twitter has crossed over to our living room and is now a part of our TV viewing experience, primarily for Dragons Den. The Irish version of Dragons Den is mediocre in my opinion, but the fun part is when you combine it with the ‘back chat’ on #ddire. For an explanation of how these ‘hashtags’ work on Twitter, see here.
(apologies for the poor picture, but you get the idea
In the picture above, Twitter is running on my media PC box (which I built a few months back) and our TV supports PIP, so that’s a mini-screen Dragons Den with various peoples ‘tweets’ about whats happening in the show in the background.
Dragons Den is the only show at the moment that I watch like this, have tried following twitter groups while sporting matches are on (for example, George Hook live tweeted during last weeks Ireland/Scotland rugby match) but personally I find I’m a bit too engaged in the match and the tweets are too much of a distraction (although I do scan them at half time). I’ve also heard that people live tweet during the Late Late Show, but I’m sorry, no amount of amusing Twitter comments would make me sit though that
I know there are many ways of following Twitter whilst watching TV (i.e. laptop, mobile, etc) but I think it would be really great if it was integrated directly into the TV itself. You could optionally have tweets relating to the show your watching scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen (like a stockticker), or superimposed like you can do with teletext – all controllable from your remote.
Late night last night developing the first version of the 2009 Budget Calculator for Tax123.ie, you can run it from here:
https://tax123.ie/Budget2009Calc.php
Harsh budget this year, don’t expect to be better off!
We will be improving it over the coming days, the main omissions at the moment are the changes in Mortgage Interest Relief and also the Car Parking changes.
I attended the first Transition Town Tramore (t3.ie) event back in September and was very impressed by it, not having heard of the Transition Towns movement before. It was a very informative presentation from Dave Philips from the Cultivate Centre in Dublin and was quite well attended.
What impressed me most is that we hear a lot about how doomed the planet is, etc but very little about what we can do about it at a local practical level, and the Transition movement has plenty of ideas here. It’s also heavily based on the idea of community involvement and transition at a community level, and anything in my view that promotes community spirit and getting to know our neighbors better should be supported by everyone.
So the next event is on this Thursday, 8pm in the Grand Hotel Tramore, brief as follows (more information can be found at http://t3.ie/):
Transition Town Tramore Presents
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
In the second of a series of events to raise awareness about the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change, the Tramore Transition Town Initiative is showing the award winning film The Power of Community on October 16th at the Grand Hotel Tramore.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half ‐ and food by 80 percent ‐ people were desperate.
This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call “The Special Period.”
The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis ‐ the massive reduction of fossil fuels ‐ is an example of options and hope.
“Global Oil production has not grown since May 2005” says Stan Nangle, a member of Transition Town Tramore ”and we have been on a plateau of about 85 million barrels of oil a day since them. We know that sooner or later total daily production of oil will start to reduce ‐ as it has in individual oilfields such as the North Sea ‐ and this is going to have a major impact on how we live and how our economy works.”
The Power of Community offers an insight into how Cuban society adapted to meet the challenges posed by Peak Oil, often without support from the Authorities, and how the Cuban people turned the situation around by using their initiative and working together to achieve a common goal.
“We are constantly hearing and reading about the problems we will face from Climate Change and Peak Oil, but nobody in authority is telling us what we need to do to overcome these difficulties” says Edel Jennings of Transition Town Tramore. “This film shows very clearly how Communities can pull together to find solutions to the problems they face and it gives people a positive example of what can be achieved.”
Background:
The Tramore Transition Town Initiative is a community group which is actively working to find answers to the question: “ how can our community respond to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”
The Tramore Initiative is based on the Transition Town model developed in Kinsale Co Cork by Rob Hopkins, and currently being implemented in more than 800 communities worldwide.
The Tramore steering committee is currently working to build awareness of the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change in our community by running a series of public events, and through direct contact with community groups, clubs and societies in Tramore. The series of awareness events will run on a monthly basis from September 2007 to February 2008 and will be followed in March 2008 by the setting up of working groups to look at how we might mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and Climate Change in the areas of food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods.
I have need of more storage space, I currently have two portable hard drives which contain a mix of movies, music, photos, etc and are filling up fast. They’re small (500G in total) also a few years old now at this stage. I’m not worried about data loss if they fail (anything important is backed up in multiple places, including the cloud) but it would be an inconvenience if one were to die.
So I’m looking for something:
1) big’ish (capable of storing a few years of data)
2) networked access (so we can access content from any machine in the house)
3) somewhat reliable
4) cheap
There’s a bewildering amount of choice when it comes to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for home use when you start looking into it. There’s the high end of the personal market there’s the likes of ReadyNAS and Drabo, both of which sound fab and have really good reputations (and have great expansion options), but are a bit outside of my budget. At the other end of the scale there’s the option of building your own, and I think long term it would be a great pet project to build a ZFS system (something similar to what Søren Ragsdale has built).
For now however, I’m going to go cheap and cheerful with a 1TB Western Digital MyBook, reasonably good reputation and very good value at €190 from Misco.ie. Will see how it works out, should do for a few years and hopefully it won’t be a case of “at that price, they’re sure not to last long” (as the old adds for Quinsworth used to say!
Also, thanks to John & Aman (via twitter) and James & John (via lunch time chats) for guiding me through the selection process!
I recently installed Ubuntu on my home laptop (and subsequently on my work laptop also, but thats a different story). The primary motivation for this was to get Vista off my home laptop (a Dell Vostro 1700). So why ditch Vista?
Well for starters, I never wanted it in the first place. When I went to buy a laptop last December, the best deal by far was for the Vostro, but, there was no option to get it with XP, it had to come with Vista (damn you Dell!) Secondly, Vista really is as crap as everyone says, here’s a summary of the problems I had with it:
Now that I’m up and running and fully migrated all my apps/work over to Ubuntu, how has it worked out? Quite frankly, it couldn’t of worked out better! I did have some installation issues, which I’ll blog about again, nothing major just a few things that cost me some time that really shouldn’t of. I also should point out that I have used Linux on the desktop in the past and had to take an 7 year break as such (as the last company I worked for developed software explicitly for windows) so I’m not a complete linux novice (although close enough at times!)
The most notable difference is a general increase in productivity, which is what I had hoped would happen. The Vostro performs so much better under Ubuntu, its sharp, its snappy. It’s also incredibly stable, and I’m finally feeling happy about the machine and seeing some bang for my buck in buying a slightly higher spec machine.
I should point out what tools I use to do my work and their equivalents on Ubuntu (as there isn’t that much difference between the two operating systems from a tools perspective):
So now that I’ve moved, and never going back, how do I get my ‘Vista tax’ back from Dell? (and Dell if your listening, note that I’ll never buy a machine from you again thats preconfigured with any flavour of Windows!)
(Creative commons, courtesy of Hannes Pasqualini)
Interestingly that only after 5 days since the Economist gave her a glowing profile, Diane Green of VMWare got the boot, bad timing for all concerned. I also remember they did a glowing report on Enron (which I just dug up here) a few months before it went bankrupt, again bad timing for all concerned!
However, this story about Ahmad Batebi in last weeks edition is both tragic and amazing that having your picture on the front cover of the Economist could land you in so much shite. Will be keeping an eye out for translations of his blog which may well be what is under construction here.
I know we have (and have had) our own troubles in this country but I think the most of us would take recession over repression any day..