Mickblog

Found this in an old archived branch for a project I’m working on.

revno: 1
committer: Adrian 
branch nick: cat
timestamp: Fri 2007-05-11 15:14:08 +1000
message:
  FIRST POST

For those that were wondering why knobbits.org was misbehaving,

Yesterday I was alterted to the fact that connections into my server were timing out. I checked up on this and discovered that the server’s IP was effectively being blocked. Pings to said IP were being responded to, but not by my machine. Other traffic to the same IP wasn’t making it to my router. Other IPs on my public subnet, however, seemed to be working just fine.

I have since moved the server to a different IP address (DNS servers were on the same address, fun) and everything seems to be behaving now, as of this morning.

If anyone has any idea why this might happen, let me know.

I needed a function to do this to help me do my budget. It was PITA to write so I’m sharing it in case other people find it useful.

Here are versions in perl, python and OpenOffice/MS Office macros. There are also functions to do the reverse, and some extra cruft, but it’s still there.

(I started with the perl version because I didn’t want to be distracted by an unfamiliar language, wrote the office version because I wanted it to work in my spreadsheet, and wrote the python version beause I thought openoffice supported python macros and I wanted to use a real language)

Basically the way it works is do approach the taxed vs untaxed income graph as a series of straight intervals, and finds the one that is intercepted by the taxed-income line in question. The tricky part was figuring out the numbers for each line, given a list of the tax brackets and medicare levy thresholds (well, threshold).

The result is actually ambiguous for a small region around the $50k (taxable) mark, because when your taxable income hits $50k and you get the medicare surcharge, it’s an instant $500 jump in tax. The function returns the lowest taxable income for the taxed income passed in these cases.

The tables in the functions are for the 2006/2007 tax year, and have the medicare brackets set assuming you do have to pay the surcharge (ie don’t have health insurance).

Anyway, hope someone out there finds it useful.

So while I’ve been looking for work I’ve also been dabbling in all sorts of things. Let’s see:

- I modded my x-box, which you already know about

- I have bought a PS2 and plan to mod it as well :) I sure hope this is a moddable version - I haven’t found a web site yet that identifies its version from its model number.

- Been having a play with gEDA and a, um, *cough* evaluation version of Altium DXP (the new name for the Protel electronics design suite, that costs a house). geda is pretty complete in the sense that it’s got the functionality for designing very complex boards, but its interface is awful at the moment. But I’ve only so far tried the version that is in dapper’s universe, which is a year old now. I’m thinking of either helping out with it, or starting a similar project (not on my own of course)

- I’ve bought 2 big fat text books, one on engineering mathematics and one on linear circuit analysis. These two books, along with The Art of Electronics , I plan to go through slowly and thoroughly. We’ll see if I persevere.

- For a while there I thought I could get a contract doing some embedded development. I narrowly missed a job doing some kernel coding which I would have loved, so I kept looking for a similar kind of job. Looks like that was as lucky as I’ll get. Anyway in the meantime I spent a bit reading up on kernel programming.

- Been playing with povray again. I finally found the scene files for the povray scene that got me into raytracing so long ago. It’s improved a lot since then. It’s got media, radiosity,photons (what they’re for I don’t know) and isosurfaces, which can essentially render almost any aribtrarily complex mathematical function, with a bit of guidance. Turns out the rendering algorithm isn’t impossible to understand. Regardless, it’s cool. If you can figure out how to play with the math you can make all sorts of interesting shapes

- Been collecting a list of places where I can get cheap surface mount components, so when I am ready I can
start making prototypes with them. I reckon using SMD will making the process less painful, since it will at least mean I don’t have to drill at least 2 holes for every component on the board.

- Searching for an FPGA development board. FPGAs are essentially huge reprogrammable logic circuits - you can turn one into a CPU, and more. I’m hanging out to design my own processor :) I learned the basics of processor design in a subject about it at uni many years ago. Never had the chance to apply it.

this is a simple ebay sniper, designed to be run from an always-on linux box inside screen(1).

It’s different in that I tried to make it resistant to changes in eBay’s site layout. It did break when I tried it a few days ago for the first time in a year or so but it was able to be fixed without too much trouble.

Hell, I’ll take a shot at it.

I’m looking for someone that needs a linux driver for their device. For the right job, I can do the work for payment of a flat amount, agreed upon beforehand and paid upon completion, or at least almost entirely upon completion. I can agree to a timeframe for completion, and support the work for 12 months or so after completion.

If thiis sounds interesting to you, give me a yell. (I can be contacted by phone on 0418 438374). Or feel free to refer me to someone who you think might be interested

I’m taking this approach because I would like to get into this kind of work, and the only way to do it as a job is to work for peanuts. A device driver is a well “contained” project (little room for scope creep etc) and the effort involved can be estimated pretty accurately.

Mick.

Okay, so I’ve decided I’m not famous enough and I’m going to show off a bit to attempt to get more famous. So sue me.

I am going to start putting some of my small but not insignificant work on my web site for public use and amusement. Some of it will even be useful.

But not this.

It’s a raytracer I wrote to see if I could do it. It does absolutely nothing that povray can’t do, but I think it’s cool.

And yes, I know, I really have to make my web site look more, uh, mature.

It’s official.

This must be what winning the lottery feels like. I’m as happy as a girl can be.

I was reading through Slashdot’s interview with Billy West and midway through it casually implied a confirmed comeabck of Futurama. Interesting way to find out.

“WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK??!”

A little part of me had always thought it would be cool, and make sense, for Futurama to come back. Apparently Fox ditched it because it wasn’t wholesome and “family” enough for them, and of course because it didn’t bring in enough bling. The creators thought no other network would buy it. When I heard that I thought “What about Comedy Central? They’re brave enough for South Park”. But it never happened. Until now.

Maybe the world is not so screwed up after all.

So yeah, in case you can’t tell, I like the show and am happy to hear of its return :)

(And yes I know I’m late by about 2 months)

Has anyone else ever done this besides me?

sloccount is the program used to come up with that estimate of the “cost” of the linux kernel, that made some noise on slashdot way back when.

I have been running it on a few of my projects, to attempt to get an idea of what my programming time is worth. Now I know the figures given by that program include a whole bunch of cruft like documentation and administrative overhead and the like, but even if I multiply by fractional factors to account for these, the results are, um, interesting.

Rather than post the results I got, I’ll show what I’ve been working with:

• leechnews.pl, a perl usenet binary leecher, is about 70 hours of work.
• ray is a simple raytracer I wrote. There’s about 50 hours of work in this. (here is a tarball)

I’ve also been using stuff from work but I can’t show you that :)

I’d be interested to see other people’s projects and respective sloccount numbers, if you’re proud/brave enough.

I saw Mark’s entry about this and I must voice my concern. The sentiment of certain “experts” is that we are going to run out of oil in 2025 or so and then we’re going to “go back to the Stone Age”.

I don’t share their pessimism. Here’s why.

While I won’t argue the amount of oil we have left, I can say with confidence that we’re not going to all suddenly go to our respective local petrol stations one day and find big “SOLD OUT” signs on all the pumps. What’s going to happen is petrol prices are going to increase between now and then, like it already is, until nobody can afford it.

This is important because when petrol does start to become expensive, the free market will kick in and work properly to come up with alternatives for transport (and other things) for us. In about the time we have, the Internet was turned from something localised to the defense industry and a few universities into a global network that everyone has already gotten bored of.

It’s already happening - we’re seeing prototype hybrid, electric, hydrogen and biofuel cars already. It’s just that they’re not being mass produced or heavily developed yet because nobody really wants them yet.

The view of these “experts” seems to be that none of these alternatives are viable, for one reason or another. I’ll avoid getting into the details for now and just say that their views tend to ignore current and future developments in the different technologies. I’ve read into some of the stuff that’s being developed, and some of it is pretty impressive and encouraging. Yet the doomsayers blurt out things like “electric cars use batteries and batteries suck”, “hyrdogen can explode”, etc etc. and seem convinced that this closes their argument.

Now when petrol starts to become properly expensive, entrepreneurs will start putting some serious money into developing these alternatives, and things will start moving.

Yes, there are other things to consider, i.e. oil isn’t used just for petrol - it’s used for cleaning agents, plastics etc. But the same free market rules apply. I imagine we will figure out a way to synthesize most of these other materials, if we haven’t already.

So yeah, there will be some friction while we figure out how to live without oil. But it won’t be with a new Stone Age or Armageddon.