Projects

For those of you not following my Accomodation Services Saga (lmao i just realised that acronyms to A.S.S…..ok childish i know), anyway, here’s a quick round up.

Big dispute over direct debit and payments – they failed to notify my in writing the direct debit dates so i cancelled the direct debit. They threatened to charge me ?5 for every week that went by and i didn’t pay off ALL of the remaining balance. I called their bluff and no extra charges have gone on my account. But i did make the payment, by card. This is just so that they can’t take money when they feel like it, i’d rather pay monthly but this isn’t an option (even though it would be sensible and reflective of real world rentals).

So after all that died down, i recieve a letter stating that they wanted access to my room – not stating why, but only that stuff on floors and desks could be damaged! So i disputed this, left a letter on my door stating that unless i was there they couldn’t come in – most landlords will accept this as if the tenant is present it means they can’t dispute any damage or stolen property. The university refused, they did read the letter as the motion sensitive CCTV clearly shows someone looking at the door and reading it.

The letter also stated that all access to the room is monitored by CCTV, and also a large sign on entering the room stated this. This is to comply with basic laws which state that you cannot record someone (either audibly or visually) without notifying them. Hence why company call centres sate the “all calls may be monitored or recorded” line. I did however neglect to put in that i may or may not publish the images to the internet as i was in a rush and forgot. Having then published the images and linked from the USSU forum, i get an e-mail from the Union stating that i would be suspended if the link was not removed by 5pm that day. I happened to be at work until 5:30, but i did remove the link in the end.

The USSU forum user agreement however, does state the following:

You remain solely responsible for the content of your messages, and you agree to indemnify and hold harmless this forum, and any related websites to this forum.

Now, it’s not exactly my fault that the user agreement has not been edited from the YaBB default, but it is still legally binding, and therefore the Union is absolved of all responsibility for my actions anyway.

I did get to thinking though, what would happen if i was banned from the union?

Can’t go to the Pav…big deal, i’ve been there twice this year i think…it’s not my local anyway
Can’t join clubs or societies….not a member of any anymore, i’ve left Shock and i have absolutely no time to join any others

That’s about it that would have affected me really, ok so i can’t vote or run in union elections – doesn’t really make any difference to me. But anyway, i’ve had a good rant now and feel slightly better, i need to get back to uni to see if anything was damaged or stolen then see if further action is required.

Needless to say i won’t be going back into uni accomodation, this saga is the culmination of 3 years of being dissatisfied with the service. It can easily work out cheaper to go externally – i know plenty of people who have good nice houses, havn’t had any crime problems really and are just generally happier with the result – and they’re paying less even after bills – which can include cable internet and TV!

Anyhoo, had better get on, got a laptop to look at. Oh, one final thing, car passed its MOT! Only a couple of things wrong – rear numberplate lamp and a slow puncture, came to ?53 in the end – including the test!

I think i’ve had a well spent evening – i have set up an Intranet site, found at http://intranet.lewty.org.uk, its only wordpress but it’s private its only accessible from select IP ranges – any on my subnets/VPN, Salford University and davhodg. if you want to be on it, then all i need is static IP or DNS (no-ip/dyn-dns is fine) and i can add you to the access list.

Made a full list of in use IP subnets for people i know – its huuuge, this way if we route together we can do it easily without range clashes.

It’s so damn complicated!

I’m trying to set my rules properly and its difficult to make sure everything i want accessible is accessible. Getting there now though, just waiting on OpenVPN test then the incoming traffic is sorted. Then to do outgoing and routed traffic…fun fun

Well i got the new firewall installed today!

So thats Ubuntu Edgy, iptables, openvpn, hamachi, dhcp and webmin all in one box. Had a bit of trouble getting stuff to run on boot, but eventually it all became right. The port forwards are still a bit messed up as are all the iptables rules, but until then only the required ports are forwarded to the firewall from the router anyway. Eventually it’ll go into DMZ, but i need to change the ip range its all using to avoid clashes with dave.

OpenVPN works a treat, and so far definatly seems better than hamachi, i’m about to try it on my phone so we’ll see where that gets us, if it works, that means direct access to ALL of my network from anywhere in the world! I had foz in St Andrews pinging my uni PC via home!

Tomorrow i might look at the firewall rules and lock it down some, as currently its wide open.

My apologies people! The website has suffered some downtime since wednesday but we’re back up rock and rolling. The outage was due to a power cut in the…ahem… ‘datacentre’ and the webserver didn’t turn itself back on again. But i didn’t lose any e-mail other than during the approx 4 hours of downtime, thats all dealt with seperately.

So, i’m back home again for the holidays, got quite a bit of uni work to do, plus i’m at work work and i’ve got to find time to catch up with friends during all that, so i think its going to be a busy time.

I did however get the chance to fit powered USB to the car, there is a hub in the glovebox powered from the inverter in the boot and it carries non-essential stuff (ie. windows doesnt complain if it loses it even though its supposed to be hot-plug…yeah..pull the other one).

Probably won’t have time to do any interesting stuff in the near future so the blog may go blank for a bit, but if somthing comes up i’m sure i’ll get it written.

Website and e-mail may be on and offline for a while in the next few weeks as im upgrading the firewall/gateway to somthing better, plus i need to put more RAM into the webserver.

Ok so Matt has coined Car-Fi (can i have Wi-Car then?) but i’ve beaten him to it, my car has a fully fledged access point in the boot with DHCP and everything!

You can logon to the wireless then onto the web interface for winamp and control ALL the music playback, there is even a special PDA format version of the client for my phone (though i need to make the buttons bigger) But it is ace, finally people won’t complain about the music – they can simply choose what they like via the phone, their phone or laptop on wifi.

No internet yet, i need to sort out the USB hub situation and then a bluetooth dongle for hopping onto the 3G, but the access point will run in bridge or client mode onto another network which could work if theres one nearby.

Anyway, just a quick update, i had better go wash the dishes, and curse some more at my flatmate – he cleverly unplugged the fridge at some point this afternoon so its mostly defrosted!

[Insert insane amount of explitives here]

I got up this morning and when i got to my car there was a notice on the windscreen which read:

FINAL WARNING NOTICE

Your car is incorrectly parked etc etc etc

Ok so fair enough…ish i was parked on the yellow hatched area – but so were many other people, none of whom had any noticed, what annoys me even more is that it says FINAL – i have never recieved any other notice!! Now they threaten to clamp my car if it happens again, well, good job i keep a hacksaw in my tool kit then isn’t it?

The next annoying part of it was that the time on it was 5 min after i’d got home and parked up – why didn’t they challenge me on my parking instead of waiting until i was safely away in the lift before coming out of their cosy warm office to annoy me?

Quite a few things have riled me this morning other peoples driving is one of them! But nevermind, i should be in a Digital Audio lab right now but sshhh! (i was running late and theres no point in turning up 20 min late to an hour of sitting in front of MATLAB which i can do at home) Should be off to the proper lecture shortly though

As an aside i spent most of last night at Matt and Martin’s doing stupid amounts of tech stuff – building Matts car pc (he’s seen mine and got jealous, even more so when he actually saw the interface and display!) Looked at web based control for VLC, MPC and Winamp – the winamp one is by far the best as its just URL requests for control ie. http://machine/play for play. So expect a new front end for pocket-pc and WiFi in the car!!!! It’s going to have to be on it’s own subnet….

Matt’s looking into a 3G datacard from T-Mobile for proper mobile web, turning his car (Car-Fi) into a big access point…which could even have AD Auth!

‘llo there, today i attacked the psychoacoustics coursework – which, as it turned out, was surprisingly not-bad. The bulk of the MATLAB has been written it just needs tweaked and the report written which i’ll do tomo after lecture.

Also nipped out to the trafford centre this afternoon with Holly just to have a wander round then somehow i’ve wasted the rest of the day, i did begin editing Shock’s BOTB video footage…now thats a project and a half, i need someone who is good at graphics to make it look pretty, but thats almost a secondary thing – i still need to get footage off DVC-Pro (damn Panasonic and propriatary formats!) as well as the audio from ROT tape. But hey ho im sure it’ll get done eventually, i should have looked at my monitoring controller but, thats for another day now.

Well i’ll be off, go enjoy whatever it is you’re doing instead of wasting your life reading about my exploits!

Ok, so i know there are better ways to spend a saturday night but i did get the balanced input stage of my monitoring controller working! I must be tired as i’ve been having so many muppet moments today! Firstly, the reason i was blowing up the chips the other day was because i had the power wired in backwards as i was convinced i’d got the colour coding wrong – seems i had that right. So then, plugged it in, no blown chips, no dodgy voltages on input or output stages. Plugged in a source, fired up a software sig gen and away we went…

Or so i thought… it works but for some reason clipped at about 1v p-p inpu..why? well i hadn’t actually plugged it in again…..

So got it all together and woohoo it works, sat here listening to music through it right now, good healthy level, can’t see any clipping on the scope, i can’t really test bandwidth properly, and CMR is tricky also – but it does work i just dont know how well.

Shoving an input to only hot gives a -6dB reduction on the output which is correct.

Attached is a pic in it’s current state, at the moment it ain’t pretty but the 3 connectors on the back look nice! Even if they’re not Neutrik….

Will have to order some more connectors – need quite a few in various guises. So watch this space, now i’ve got some confidence in actually building something which works it may move forward quite rapidly!

http://www.lewty.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/p3170001.JPG for imagery

And not the software variety! Yes thats right i have finally got the stupid lock of my room window, i can open it more than about 6″, my room is no longer boiling hot – everything gets great ventilation! So proud…

I got it off as i was so annoyed with the heat – particularly being unable to sleep last night by attacking it with my power drill, this actually unlocked it rather than destroying it so i now know how they work!

Then re-attached the netting to stop the birds getting in – need to block a couple of holes, will get some netting and hooks tomo and get that sorted. My plan to bring my fan back down with me and rig up some sort of ventilation need not be bothered with now, will try leaving my PCs on tonight to see if i can cope with heat/noise/light.

Got a random e-mail from Ledwood Technology (sounds fancy) today wanting to give me a phone interview for a placement, its about DSP and recording in RADAR systems, could be quite interesting, i’ll know more later, still waiting to hear back from Siemens and Clyde but fingers crossed. Got a ton of coursework to do this week but, no matter, im sure i’ll cope!