Really Simple Cynicysm

My online presence is quite spread out over numerous different sites. That list of sites i have added to recently with my creation of a tumblr blog. So i thought i’d clarify what uses i’ll put the different profiles and sites to.

First and foremost, there’s this blog, to which i intend to post most of my technical and large scale project posts involving things such as programming and details on any major developments that arise. From time to time there’ll be some photographs and less technical entries but not too many.

My twitter account will be used for up to the minute bite-sized updates and thoughts from the everyday mundane things to the more large scale events. It’s a place where i can easily contact people and they can in turn contact me and get involved in conversations on everything from my gaming interests and computer upgrades to my dog. Be sure to follow me there if you’re a fellow twitter-er (i hate the word tweople).

Friends of mine can find me on Facebook by a quick search for my name – i can assure you there is no-one else on facebook with my name (something to be proud of in a way i suppose), so be sure to add me there if you know me and haven’t already.

Skipping over a few of the minor ones that i probably don’t use very often, at least not in an everyday capacity and going right to the last item – my new tumblr blog, located at cianh.tumblr.com will be mostly for items which don’t really fit into the niche i intend this blog for, and don’t really fit into the compressed nature of twitter. It’s a sort of place where everything goes, and anything might turn up, including music i record, some of the pictures i take, and possibly little excerpts of whatever i get around to writing… (i’m sure i’ll get to it at some stage).

So come and follow me wherever you feel will most suit your interests and i hope you keep reading what i put out there.

As far back as last summer when i was working in Redmond, i was considering a big bout of travelling for this summer. When Microsoft offered me the job, in fact, i told them that i’d not start for a few months especially so i would have the time to do so. The college year came and went, and i found myself faced with the summer… plan-less…

After about a week or two of sitting at home and passing the time away with all the best intentions of travelling still in mind, i finally took the plunge and started seriously planning a big trip. Europe was the first thought, with preliminary plans to travel around Europe on the InterRail ticket, visiting quite a few countries and spending nights on trains and in hostels, etc… But my mind continued to wander, with the pull of Japan and the Far East in general always on my mind.

And so, i woke up one morning and decided that it was more important to me to visit Asia than Europe. It was less than three days later i had a complete trip planned and booked, and it’s just a week later right now.
That brings me to today – my travels have begun – I’m in London, and i leave tomorrow morning for Tokyo, Japan.

The trip, all in, is about 7 weeks, which gets me back into London on August 5th, to the best of my knowledge. I booked a couple of days here in London to get into the travelling mood and to meet up with a friend from Microsoft, before i launch into visiting Japan for three and a half weeks. Following that I’ll be heading to Hong Kong for a few days, hopefully to meet up with another friend of mine from Microsoft. From there, I’ll be flying to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, at which point the trip becomes a little… open ended. I have from the time i land in Ho Chi Minh until about 3 weeks later at which point I have to be in Bangkok, Thailand for my pre-booked flight back to London. The time in between is my own, but my provisional plan is to stay in vietnam for about 5 days after which time i’ll make my way through the Mekong Delta and through Cambodia, the journey which will take roughly 4-5 days itself, and then spend about a week and a half in Thailand… somewhere

Due to the fact that i’m not just travelling to Japan and straight back, i’ve had to make some sacrifices in terms of what I bring with me. To that end, i decided to travel without my laptop, for the first time, almost ever in my few years of solo travelling. I also decided to leave my Canon 400D DSLR at home, both due to bulk and safety concerns. To keep from being completely technology-less, i bought a Nikon Coolpix S220, which will allow me to take photos, without the bulk and cost of replacement worry in case of theft of my camera. The camera cost less than 200 euro, and is a lot less obvious under my clothing. I also brought my phone, and might consider a cheap Japanese SIM card while i’m there, as roaming costs are prohibitively expensive (2.99 euro PER MINUTE) from Japan…

Problem with not having my laptop is that i need to keep on top of my college / microsoft responsibilities (results are out soon, and must be sent to MS), so we’ll see how things pan out, but for now, i’ll rely on my iPod touch’s wireless capabilities and inernet cafes for my web fixes. I’ll blog as much as i can, but can’t promise anything.

Tokyo flight tomorrow from Heathrow, so if you’ve got any tips for me for things to do around Japan (i have an unlimited rail pass for 2 weeks), leave a comment here with your suggestions, and your musts and must-nots.

2009/05/24 - 1/250s :: f/10.0 :: 18mm

Now that I’m finished college, I’ve had some time finally to get around to a few things i’d been putting off constantly for the last few months, one being learning to drive, two being photography which had reduced to a trickle of photos every few weeks, and the third being this blog.
So, what better way to restart things here than to combine all three at once ! Having got my learner’s permit a couple of weeks ago and taken a few lessons, I drove the folks down to Cobh here in Co. Cork a couple of weekends ago to see the Royal Caribbean cruise ship “Independence of the Seas” docking at Cobh, and with the lovely sun we had that day, while i was there waiting for the ship to appear on the horizon, i managed to snap this shot of the harbour, with Spike Island visible across the water.

Looking forward to my travels this summer, wherever they take me and my camera.

I’m currently finishing up a project (Event Propagation in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks) for my degree, and, since i’m working in wireless networks using TCP, i ran into the problem of TCPClient not having a good timeout on connection.
Sure, one can set the timeout for send and receive, but not for the actual connection itself. The .NET framework TCPClient has a default timeout, indeed, but the timeout is far too long, and cannot be changed in code.
And so i spent a little time digging around, and came across two main solutions.

– The first, which i found on Chris Hulbert’s Blog [solution] utilizes a background thread which handles the connection for you, and the thread itself has a timeout, meaning that if the thread doesn’t return with a connected TCPClient within the timeout period, the main thread will kill the background thread and thereby kill the connection – in a roundabout way, a connection timeout. Chris rounded all of this up into an easy to use class, and even provides a little sample of how to use the class – all in all very easy, but possibly needlessly overcomplicated.

– The second option that i’ve found is, however, a much shorter and simpler idea – being only a couple of extra lines on top of a normal TcpClient.Connect();
Utilizing the IAsyncResult return value of the TcpClient.BeginConnect method, one can construct something like the following.

  //C#
  TcpClient connection = new TcpClient();
  IAsyncResult result = connection.BeginConnect(serverIP, serverPort, null, null);
  bool success = result.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(500, true);
  if (!success) {
    Console.WriteLine("Failed to connect to server");
    goto END;
  }
  connection.EndConnect(result);
  NetworkStream stream = connection.GetStream();
  Console.WriteLine("Opened Connection to server");
    // SENDING & RECEIVING DATA GOES HERE
  stream.Close();
END:
  connection.Close();

The “bool success = result.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(500, true);” in this case means that the the asynchronous handle will wait for a maximum of 500ms, before returning the result.
If the handle returns within the 500ms, the bool will be a true, however, if the timeout hits, it will be a false.
As far as i can see, this will achieve the same goal as Chris’ solution, but i wouldn’t go anywhere near calling myself a C# expert, so by all means if you see any problems, or have another suggestion, leave a comment.

The NSLU2 from Linksys is a fantastic accessory for any home user to have attached to their network. It is a way of connecting any external hard drive (be it a HDD or a memory key) to your network, allowing it to be accessed from anywhere.
The greatness of this little device however, expands ten-fold when you replace the official firmware with any of the multitude of replacements available for it. If you’re still using the official firmware and you’re happy with it, that’s perfectly fine, but if you’re looking for a little bit more, take a look at the offerings available over at the NSLU2-Linux site.

In a previous post, i detailed that i had replaced the firmware on my slug with Debian. I opted for Debian as i am quite used to working with linux machines, and it offers me total control over every aspect of what happens on the slug.

This post will show you how to firstly upgrade your Debian/NSLU2 install from Etch to Lenny, and also how to fix the only problem i encountered during my upgrade process.

Firstly, as the upgrade steps for the Debian/NSLU2 are the same as any other linux upgrade, they’re extremely simple so i’ll put them here for anyone who might be a bit lost and / or hasn’t yet upgraded.

Disclaimer: you will need root access for this process. As root access comes with responsibility, please take care, and know that while the upgrade process itself is mostly safe, the possibility always exists that something might go wrong, rendering your linux install useless. ALWAYS make a backup first.

1. SSH into your NSLU2
2. su to root.
3. run ‘vim /etc/apt/sources.list’
4. provided you’ve not messed with your sources.list file previously, you will still have a clean sources file. if this is the case, your list should contain a couple of lines that look somewhat like the following :
   deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org etch/updates main contrib non-free

   The entries all contain either the word stable or the word etch. (If all of your entries have the word stable in them, you should skip to step 7)

5. replace all mentions of the word etch, with the word lenny.
6. your list should now contain entries like the following :
   deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org lenny/updates main contrib non-free
7. quit vim, and back at your root terminal, type the following commands one at a time, hitting enter after each.
   apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

   During the upgrade and dist-upgrade process you may be asked on occasion whether or not you want to accept what it’s going to do, you will need to type y or yes, depending on the question’s expected answer at each prompt to complete your upgrade.

Note: at step 5, you may change the mentions of etch to “stable” instead. The effect of doing this will be to have your slug upgrade automatically to the newest stable release automatically during your normal ‘apt-get upgrade’, ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ use. People sometimes prefer to know precisely when they are about to upgrade to a new distro version release, and so specifically name the release (ie. etch / lenny) instead of using stable. They would then force the update by changing the sources.list file as is done in these steps.
Choose whichever system suits you best.

Once your Debian/NSLU2 is upgraded, it will need a reboot.
Here, however, is where my problem kicked in.
Apparently, somewhere in the upgrade process, someone thought it would be a good idea to rename the ethernet port from eth0 to eth1. The problem with that is that, when you reboot your slug after the upgrade for the new kernel to be loaded, the slug’s network/interfaces file tells the slug to bring up eth0, which no longer exists…!

Thankfully, despite its alarming nature, it’s a simple fix.

The easiest way to do it, in hindsight, is to edit your interfaces file before rebooting after your upgrade, but if you’ve found this page by googling “problem with etch to lenny nslu2 upgrade” or something similar, chances are you don’t have the option to do this.
Still, not to worry – simply shut down your slug, unplug your hard drive from it and mount the hard drive in another machine. The file you need to edit is in the slug’s ‘/etc/network/interfaces’.
Make sure you’re editing the file on the slug’s hard drive and not the /etc/network/interfaces file of the machine the hard drive is currently mounted in!
Within the file, the easiest fix is to just replace any mention of eth0 with eth1.
This issue is mentioned near the bottom of the Debian/NSLU2 Troubleshooting page.

Post-upgrade and post-reboot, make sure to take a look at what is no longer necessary – probably things such as old kernels which are now not in use. Just run ‘aptitude’ and it can quickly tell you and help remove you what you no longer need.
Hopefully this entry is of some help to fellow Debian/NSLU2 users – enjoy your new Debian Lenny install !

For more information on apt in debian see the official manual entry. That page also contains details on the sources.list file if you run into trouble.

My chihuahua, Sparky, staring at the front door - waiting for people to come home.

Along with my quest to expand my SLR photography gear, i am keeping in mind my plans for the summer. This year i intend to spend as much of my summer travelling as possible, during which this blog will become a temporary “where i am in the world, what i’m doing” blog, all before i head to Vancouver to start my full time job.
With that in mind, i came upon the idea that an ultra portable (read: compact) digital still camera that also does some rudimentary video might be quite handy for those days i’m travelling and don’t want to lug the SLR with me, few as those days might be. The video capabilities, while the quality would not be exactly HD or even close, would more than make the camera a useful purchase at the very least.

I took a break from my late nights at college to stroll into the city today after my classes, and spent an hour or so looking around at the various pieces of camera-ware on offer. Of course everything was far more expensive than i intend to pay, and by buying online i’m sure i’ll save more than a bit, but it doesn’t hurt to see the things in person, get advice, etc.
The recommendations in the compact department were to either wait for the new Canon range of 8MP cameras coming out (this was a vague recommendation to say the least, so the price is undetermined, but most likely sub €200), or an Olympus 12MP mju 1200 for €259. The 12MP Olympus is a little overkill i think for what i want – something around 8MP i think would do for my needs, considering i have the 400D for when i need the extra quality in the shots.

To make a long story short, i’ve two questions.

• Which camera do you use for these kind of escapades – do you simply use an (or multiple) SLR(s) for everything or do you have cause to have a favorite compact to complement your SLR? I’d like to hear your thoughts – pros and cons for either way.
• When you’re traveling (either for short trips or for more than a few days), do you have a select kit you bring with you – a travel photography kit per se, or do you bundle up everything you can find to take care of every eventuality?

Sound off in the comments if you have any thoughts on either.

Honan Chapel, UCC, silhouetted against the evening sky and moon

I’m looking to expand my core set of photography gear.

Right now my scarce collection of gear is as follows :

• Canon Digital Rebel XTi
• Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
• Canon 90-300mm f4.5-5.6
• Manfrotto 680B monopod

The main things i’m looking for next are a tripod and a lens hood for my 18-55mm lens. I’d also welcome some suggestions on the next steps in gear purchase for a highly amateur photographer to take – be it lenses or ND-Grad filters or something else entirely, no matter how big or small. If you have any thoughts on this, please leave them in the comments, thanks.

Taken around 3.30am in Cork City - 5sec :: f/13.0 :: 18mm

With my final project being so much to the forefront of my activities for the past month or so, i’ve had little to no time to work on things like this blog, or any personal projects i’ve been meaning to get around to. I’m sure i’m not alone in having a “to-do” list that feels more like a “put-off” list, but i’m hoping, with things coming to a close soon enough, that i’ll get a bit more time to do the things i’ve been meaning to do.

Obviously, blogging is one of those things that i’ve been meaning to invest more time in, but also my Japanese has fallen a little by the wayside, along with the whole “learning to drive” thing… I’m hoping to rectify all three in the coming week or two, or at least make a start if that’s the best i can afford with my time.

However, photography is another thing I’ve been toying with for the past year or more – on and off. I’ve gone through periods of large volume of output, and dry spells where i wouldn’t even look at my camera for a month or two, but recently i’ve hit a good patch, with some incentive in the form of friends and I posting up photos every day, or every few days to Flickr.
One of my main areas that i want to address soon, before my move out of the country, is to get some shots of UCC and its surroundings, because despite having been a student there for almost 5 years now, I can only think of a handful of days where i’ve taken more than one or two shots, and i know there is some great shots just waiting to be found in and around the numerous buildings – old and new alike, and even down near where the river lee runs through campus.

Also, having thought about organizing my own photo walk around cork for sometime in april, i decided to do a quick search around on google, and it seems that, in fact, there’s one this coming sunday, so i might pop along to that and see if i can’t get a few interesting shots and have some fun.
[UPDATE] Donncha from ocaimh.ie informed me that i was a little inaccurate in my reading of his post, and this walk was in fact, last year ! Will have to keep an eye out for more.

For those of you interested either in seeing photos of Cork, or if you’re interested in actually posting photos of Cork, our group is here and everyone’s welcome.

My Flickr is account is zerophyte, so if you feel so inclined, go ahead and take a look – always interested in comments and advice.

Once more i return to this blog…

A re-invention has been promised quite a few times now, i know, but for once, i’ve actually put some thought into what i might be interested in doing with this whole blogging thing (mostly while i was supposed to be doing something else, like right now).

I’ll be putting a little more effort into the ideas in the coming days, and yes, i’m not blind to the self-evident reality that anything is more than nothing, but hear me out – I’ll keep posting as i formulate a direction for this blog once more.

That reinvention however, although near in time, is, for now a little further away than the present, and right now i just want to post – firstly as i’m a chronic procrastinator and am trying to avoid doing some real work on my final project presentation (due tomorrow), and secondly, to just get something, anything, out there and find out if i can’t get my writing moving once more.

First on the list for the reinvention for me to do – clearly define the difference between tags and categories, if not for readers, then for myself, because right now when i make a post, i’ve no idea which descriptor to use as a tag, and which category describes it best… Taking advice from Carthik Sharma – Tags are not Categories. Though, knowing me, it’ll take a while for those to get cleaned up.

Right now, it’s back to watching The Wire, to give my mind a rest from pretending to itself that i’m working on my presentation.

I do intend to revive this blog at some point in the near future. But for now, most of my time spent posting things on the web is either on twitter or facebook these days, so until i find the time to put some more time and effort in here, feel free to find me and add me as a friend there.