This is Nomad’s Land

This project started out as an idea to build a remote controllable robot, that can connect to a PC, and that can charge itself by seeking out sources of light and generating electricity from solar power. Since I live in a third world country (with a dismal exchange rate at the moment), and have limited funds and access to components, I am taking extensive measures in finding the cheapest and simplest components available, so this will probably be one of the most cost effective DIY electronics robotics projects you will find online.

The Wiimote, which I also wrote about here: 2007-12-15/wiimote-ultimate-hackers-toy, provides the perfect (and cheapest) platform for bluetooth connectivity with a PC, as well as useful sensors such as an infrared camera and tilt sensors. Check out the project page for updates: Wiimote Warrior - Wiimote Robotics Project.

On 30 October, 2008, The University of Stellenbosch’s IT department decided to cut the network links between residences. This follows after intermittent network instability issues started occurring, possibly due to network software distributed by students.

The student software, titled “Rooihub” was mostly blamed for the network issues, but no evidence was available to back these claims. The following e-mail was sent to network users the day before network routes were severed:

Date: 29 October 2008

After numerous complaints of an unstable and frequently unavailable network, the Management of Information Technology in collaboration with the Student Council agreed on the following: All the network traffic between residences will be blocked If the cause of the unstable network cannot be identified soon. This is necessary to minimize the load which the assumed ”rooihub” users are causing on the network’s performance. It will also ensure more stable access to central services such as email and WebCT.

There was no other e-mail or warning from the IT department, only this mail that states “rooihub” is suspected of causing problems. In fact, the Stellenbosch University IT department is known for not communicating important network issues to its (paying) users.

The IT department had several alternative options available:

1. E-mail network users and warn them not to make use of “Rooihub” software.
2. Block the UDP port that the software used.
3. Configure switches for better handling of possible packet floods.

The decision to cut inter-residence traffic is severely lamented by network users, and is criticized by  individuals who also note that they should be entitled to a non-crippled service since they pay for it. The poor choice in solving the problem is wholly un-academic and not on par with the standards of first-class tertiary institutions. Limiting network functionality undermines the academic environment and stifles innovation.

Ironically, at time of writing there are several websites, including Wikipedia, which cannot be accessed due to misconfigured proxy settings.

As noted by a former member of the student council: “This is the kind of thing that happens when people see something as a technical problem rather than a political one.” IT’s unfortunate behaviour does nothing but damage to Matie pride.

UPDATE: As of 2 November, 2008, the network is once again unstable and unusable. This is after inter-residence links were severed. This just makes it more probable that the network issues are due to bad configuration or hardware rather than the “rooihub” software.

Last week, James Lennox, CEO of the “SOUTHERN AFRICAN FEDERATION &nbsp[sic]AGAINST COPYRIGHT THEFT“, sent an e-mail to the IT department of Stellenbosch University, accusing them of profiting from illegal file sharing activities by students on their network. Regardless of how ridiculous this claim is, this resulted in the banning of twelve students from the Stellenbosch network and the complete shutdown of the popular Stellenbosch file-sharing application, “DC++” and all other forms of P2P activities. One week later, the campus is in a great depression because of the sudden lack of TV series and movies…

SAFACT is sponsored by Nu Metro, Ster Kinekor, MNET and Multichoice. The University was targeted because students are seen as soft targets. None of them will stand up and point out that neither MNET nor Multichoice provides them any alternative for keeping up to date with their favourite soapies. Students living in residences are not allowed to have satellite dishes or TV antennas installed for their residence rooms, therefore there is no way they can even obtain a Multichoice or MNET subscription.

Buying DVD’s and DVD sets is also out of the question. The complete DVD set of “Lost” seasons 1 to 3 costs $99 on Amazon - about R804 at the current exchange rate (less than half of two months subscription to DSTV @ R468-99pm). South African retailer, wantitall.co.za, sells the same box-set for R 1,517.00 with an indicated retail price of R 2,629.00. Somehow paying double for the same product while living in a third-world country doesn’t seem fair… Needless to say, limited student budgets does not allow for such exuberant spending.

MNET and Multichoice should keep in mind that the people they are pissing off today are their customer base of tomorrow. Because of SAFACT’s boorish behaviour, I will now never consider subscriptions from either MNET or Multichoice when I one day earn a salary.

Moved here: Stellenbosch Filesharing Network Shut Down; Why SAFACT is full of crap.

By far the most fascinating aspect of Spore is the Spore Creature Creator. If you enjoy customizing every single little aspect of your very own race of 7 legged fish-men, then you will probably waste hours on just this aspect of the game, and admittedly it is impressive.

Cellular Stage:
The first stage of Spore was done remarkably well, in terms of actual game play, this is probably where you will have the most fun. You start off as a little single-cell organism and grow as you feed on other cells. The coolest part of this level is being able to “see through” to the higher levels of life.  You can see the outlines of giant, blurry scary creatures lurking in the background until you eat enough food to reach their level, and then you pop into their reality - your previous predators now suddenly smaller than you. This continues for a while until you’ve accumulated enough genes to start evolving legs.

Creature Stage:
Here you evolve the major features of your creature and determine its ultimate shape and attributes, while attacking or befriending neighboring creature burrows. This stage is slightly repetitive maybe, but still entertaining. Make sure your creature looks exactly the way you want it before advancing to the tribal stage, and get wings.

Tribal Stage:
As with the creature stage, you befriend or destroy neighboring settlements with the addition of rudimentary tools,weapons and instruments to enhance your creatures. More entertaining and diverse than the creature stage.

Civilization Stage:
More diverse than the tribal stage, you need to manage cities and people. You can build land, air and sea vehicles. Less fun than the tribal stage and can get slightly repetitive.

Space Stage:
Irritating as hell! The spore developers realized it would take you about 4 hours of gameplay to reach the final stage, so they try to squeeze 30 more hours out of this level. You fly around in a single spaceship, establishing trade routes, terraforming planets and conquering rival civilizations. The only problem is that, every time you want to go on your own mission, 5 alerts pop up informing you that two of your planets are under pirate attack and three are in immenant danger of ecosystem collapse, all requiring your immediate attention. So you spend 95% of the time flying to random solar systems, killing pirates and frying infected creatures, and in the mean time you’re told to try and reach the center of the galaxy to discover some ultimate treasure that the Grox (An evil, super-powerful alien species who literally collonized every planet within a 5000 planet radius around the galaxtic center) are guarding.

You can build a 4 ship fleet, but the other three ships -have- to be allied units, and of course they are useless at both attack and defense, so they get vaporised within seconds (and this pisses off your allies). So you pretty much have to battle your way through the Grox alone for a couple of hours (while ignoring the total collapse of half your and your allies’ planets because they are too useless to defend/take care of themselves.) And when you finally reach the center of the galaxy you find:

**Spoiler alert!**

A space-ship with the name “Steve”, who is basically a parody of god, telling you that you are now “One of us” and giving you 42 staff’s of life or something. This amazing gift allows you to completely terraform a planet in one go. Super useful for my militaristic race of space conquerors who rely on the hostile takeover of planets of course… Biggest let-down ever. So, returning home again through the hordes of Grox, you complete a couple of missions to fill up the green experience bar at the bottom of the screen, just to find that you actually had no reason to do so since nothing happens when it is complete. Yes, apart from reaching the galactic center and having a chat with Steve, there is no point to the space stage whatsover.

Conclusion:

This game is seriously overhyped. Get it if you like games like the Sims and like designing your own creatures, vehicles and buildings. Otherwise, the only part of it that’s really worth it is the first 25 minutes.

Throughout the movie, some of the beach scenes and actors/actresses looked suspiciously familiar - typical Western Cape surroundings. Living about 1000m from the Afrikaans Taal monument, I almost fell off my chair when I saw this:

Afrikaans Taal Monument featuring in Starship Troopers

Epic

This straight-to-DVD movie wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. Definately far better than Starship Troopers 2, you will probably enjoy it if you are a Starship Troopers fan. Yes, it contains senseless nudity just like the shower scene we so loved in ST1, it even has the same giant brain bug. If anything, it’s worth seeing just for the challenge of spotting the particular parts of the Western Cape where the scenes were shot.

If anybody knows which church this is (It also features in the movie), I’d be very happy if you could let me know:

Unkown (ZA?) Church

“Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again.”

http://adblockplus.org/en/

http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

I had the privilege of being introduced to the next generation of bleeding edge web development tools this weekend. This post is mainly about DivMod’s “Nevow” which is a web templating framework, running on Twisted Matrix’s Twisted Webserver and using DivMod’s “Athena” for asynchronous AJAX- and COMET-style browser communications.

If you are familiar with web dev, you may immediately develop a headache on the mentioning of AJAX, but believe me if I say that not only does Nevow not induce migraines, it gets you more and more excited as you realise its potential.

I really cannot properly express how nice it is to work with these tools here, so please take a moment to skim through this (very) short tutorial on creating an AJAX style chat server/client using Athena: http://divmod.org/users/oubiwann/howto/chattutorial/part01/index.html

As a first attempt, I created an AJAX style event notification system:  A site is provided with two children: /alerts and /event . When an arbitrary child page of /event is visited, such as /event/anyrandomword, a new event is created with the name “anyrandomword”. Visiting /alerts will display a list of events as they are created IN REAL TIME (without a page refresh) by anybody visiting /event/NewEventName from anywhere.

I recommend you read the source from the bottom up, most of it should be self-explanatory. The python source is available here: myelement.tac.py (About 100 lines without comments). Also required is the javascript source for adding table rows and the nice background fade-in effect: mymodule.js and an xhtml template for the alert form: tabletemplate.html

Here is the complete package, better named, better structured, but without comments: firstattempt.tar

Further Reading:
http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodNevow/Tutorial
http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodNevow/Athena/Tutorials/LiveElement
http://open.thusa.co.za/enamel

I am really excited about my final year project. I wil be designing a wireless (802.11) enabled RFID scanner for class attendance register purposes. This may seem a little lame, but once developed the concept can easily be ported to a very nice access control system (think wireless enabled, RFID doorlocks). It will definately be superior to the crappy Saflok locks they recently installed for us. The link to the project blog is: Secure Attendance Register System.

A friend of a friend tells me that their ISP forwarded an abuse message to them from the RIAA. Apparently they were downloading a torrent from http://tracker.torrent.to . Obviously the RIAA is monitoring that particular tracker, so beware of torrent.to. Moral of the story: Even if you are in South Africa, the RIAA can still complain to your ISP.

Linking to the above page sends spam bots to a site filled with randomly generated email addresses. The bots harvest these addresses for their spam mailing lists. This is an attempt to “overload” the spam servers by making them send spam to thousands of non-existet domains.