Nick Pegg

I’ve been struggling getting my work phone number verified with Google Voice. The way that number verification works is that Google Voice calls you and asks you to enter the two-digit code that’s displayed on the website. But for some reason when I get a call on my outside line and I press a number button, it doesn’t send that DTMF tone. Instead it tries to place another call.

My solution? I found a DTMF tone generator online and I played the code DTMF tones through my computer speakers.

It’s nice to see that these old phone tricks still work.

Those of you who know me fairly well know that I’m a total HTPC geek. It’s to the point where I outright refuse to subscribe to cable television or even hook up an antenna to my TV. This geekery combined with my affinity for Linux leads me to running XBMC on Linux on my little home theater machine. It’s been a pretty smooth experience with the exception of getting my remote work with it. If you’re struggling with it too, hopefully my tales will help you get it going.

So, here’s my setup. I’ve got an Antec Fusion 430 (a silver one with the VFD), a Logitech Harmony remote, and Ubuntu 10.04. The Antec case is pretty cool since it looks like it belongs in my home theater setup, and it even includes an IR receiver built right into the case! Cool! It should accept signals from any IR remote, right?

Wrong.

In the hardware developer’s infinite wisdom, they made it only work with Windows Media Center remotes instead of just making it a dumb device that passes data along. They actually put more effort into designing the thing just to make my life harder. Augh! Luckily, when I got this case my then-roommate had an Xbox 360 remote which magically worked! So I eventually got a Logitech Harmony remote and told it that my HTPC was actually an Xbox 360. Step one complete.

The next step was to get LIRC to accept the remote. This is a bit tricky, but luckily I had backed up my configs. If you’re starting out from scratch, here’s how to do it in an Ubuntu system.

First of all, you need to install LIRC:

sudo aptitude install lirc

During the configuration phase of the install, it’ll ask you for what kind of device you have. I selected Soundgraph iMON PAD IR/VFD, which uses the lirc_imon driver. Unfortunately, since I have the silver Antec Fusion 430 I have the VFD and not the LCD display, which has a slightly different IR receiver. You have to specify the display_type=1 when the module is loaded. You can do this by adding a file called lirc-imon.conf to /etc/modprobe.d/ with these contents. If you don’t want to restart, you’ll have to throw commands at the system to reload the module with the correct options.

sudo service lirc stop
sudo rmmod lirc_imon
sudo modprobe lirc_imon display_type=1

While you have LIRC stopped, you might as well double-check that the IR receiver is actually receiving data with the following command (hit Ctrl-C to stop):

sudo cat /dev/lirc0

You should see a bunch of garbage get printed to the terminal when you press buttons on your remote. If you don’t, then either you have the wrong type of remote or you don’t need the display_type argument to modprobe.

Next, you need to setup the button config for your remote. Since I’m using a Logitech Harmony remote to emulate an Xbox 360 remote, I used the irrecord command to generate my config. Luckily there’s plenty of people out there who have already done this for you for a large amount of remotes (here’s a good list, for example). Once you have the remote config file downloaded or created, add an include to your lircd.conf for it, fire up LIRC, and test it out with the irw command.

sudo service lirc start
irw

When you press buttons, you should see the button commands scroll by in the terminal.

*whew* Almost there. Still with me? Good, because we only have one thing left, the XBMC Lircmap.xml file! I’ll spare you the nitty-girtty of it and just give you mine (right-click and save it). If you feel like making your own or need to tweak mine a bit, the XBMC wiki has some good information on how to do it.

For the impatient, here’s all of my files associated with getting this to work:

I needed 4.5 ounces of corn sugar but I don’t have a kitchen scale, only measuring cups and spoons. So what do I do?

Assume that corn sugar can be approximated as water so that 1 ounce = 1 fluid ounce = 0.5625 cups.

Correction: It turns out that the relative density of corn sugar is about 1/3 (source), so to properly prime my bottles I need about 1.5 cups.

It was the Friday before my Spring Break and quite possibly the worst thing in the world happened to me: I got rear-ended while at a stop. Well, okay, it’s not the worst thing in the world but to a college student who loves his car, it was pretty bad. The lady who hit me did quite a number on my back end, and then pushed me into the car in front of me. Despite my airbags not going off, my car was totaled. The damage to the bumper, right rear quarter panel, and unibody frame were just too much.

The damage done to the Jetta

With the Jetta totaled I had three options: Buy it back and spend the $1000 left over on repairs/hookers, give it away to the insurance company and spend <$2400 on a beater from Craigslist, or do the financially irresponsible thing and buy the new car I’ve been dreaming of, going into debt even further than I already was.

Guess which option I chose…

2010 VW GTI

Yes, that’s right. I bought myself a new MkVI GTI. Since I had some money saved up from my recent internship, will be starting work in a couple of months, and was planning on buying one within a year I decided to go for it. I ended up paying $22,500 for it, which is a few hundred below dealer invoice for the options that I wanted on it. I won’t go into any car buying tips here, I’ll save that for another post.

Overall, I’m very pleased with my purchase. Here’s why:

Performance: It’s got the VW 2.0L TSI turbocharged engine in it which puts out 200 hp. That’s only a little more than my old VR6 Jetta, but the lighter engine makes a difference. I’m still breaking the engine in, but from what I can tell from accidentally giving too much gas, it can put down some power.

Handling: With the sport-tuned suspension, this thing handles like a beast. With simply taking corners quickly and turning smoothly, I have yet to break the tires loose from the road. There’s also a roundabout here in Rolla which I took at speeds that I’m not at liberty to discuss publicly since I’m sure that the city police would frown upon that.

The car also has a pseudo-locking differential called XDS. This is part of the electronic stability control system. What XDS does is when it senses that one wheel is getting too much power compared to the other, it applies the brakes to that first wheel to slow it down, giving more power to the second wheel. I haven’t noticed this kick in yet, but probably because I’m not giving it full throttle due to the break-in period

Electronics: Included standard on the car is a touchscreen radio with Volkswagen’s MDI interface. The MDI interface provides a port in the arm rest where different devices can be plugged in, such as an iPod or USB drive. With the addition of an SD card slot right in the radio, with support up to 32 GB, I no longer need a car computer. The software can be a little flaky at times and could use certain features (like creating an on-the-go playlist), but it suits my needs fine.

Also included is the MFI, which is essentially a trip computer. It tells you trip time, distance, fuel consumption, range left on the tank of gas, etc. The cool part about this is that in the settings menu, you can adjust some convenience settings which normally could only be done using a VAG-COM, such as which doors unlock when you use the keyfob, rolling windows down with the key, etc.

Practicality: The folks on Top Gear always talk about the practicality of a car whenever they review something the average person could buy. Since I’m not going through a mid-life crisis, something practical is what I need. The GTI fits this bill nicely.

There’s plenty of room for passengers in the back (a change VW made starting with the MkV) along with all of the creature comforts you would expect from sitting in the front. There’s also a good amount of space in the hatch area, and the back seats fold down in case I need to haul anything big. I was able to fit a whole recliner in the back with room to spare, for example.

All in all, I really love this car. It’s quick, fun to drive, can get good gas mileage, and it’s still useful for when I need it.

I’ve been having an insane time trying to squash a weird unicode bug in Beertraq. This was one of the first bugs that was found after starting the beta and it’s taken me this long to get it worked out. It all started with a cryptic-seeming error upon viewing the add-a-beer page:

UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode characters in position 0-9: ordinal not in range(128)

Real descriptive, right? Looking through the stack trace wasn’t much help either. It was a bunch of stuff pertaining to trying to render the template. One thing I did notice is that a brewer with a unicode name had recently gotten added and this error was only happening on the new beer form (which includes a ChoiceField of brewers), but the brewer was being displayed just fine on its own page.

After asking my friend and fellow Django-user Dan-o what he thought, he asked if I had __str__() and __unicode__() defined in my models. I had __str__() defined (generally a good idea) but not __unicode__(). I popped it in to my Brewer model as so:

class Brewer(models.Model):
  TYPE_CHOICES = (
    ('Macrobrewer', 'Macrobrewer'),
    ('Microbrewer', 'Microbrewer/Craft brewer'),
    ('Homebrewer', 'Homebrewer'),
    ('Unknown', 'Unknown'),
  )

  name = models.CharField("Brewer name", max_length=255)
  brewer_type = models.CharField("Type of brewer", max_length=25, choices=TYPE_CHOICES)
  city = models.CharField("Brewer's city", max_length=255, blank=True)
  approved = models.BooleanField(default=False)

  def __str__(self):
    return self.name

  def __unicode__(self):
    return self.name

  class Meta:
    ordering = ['name']

And guess what? My problems went away. I feel like an idiot for being foiled by something so simple that I overlooked. It makes sense too because __str__() is used quite a bit in forms where the model instance’s name needs to be magically generated. Without __unicode__() it would cause Django to barf on unicode names, just like it did on me.

Let this be a lesson to you. If you might EVER have ANY unicode text in your model instance’s names, for crap’s sake define __unicode__()!!

If you know me personally, you know that I can be pretty scatterbrained from time to time. I’ve desperately needed a whiteboard to keep my thoughts organized, and I’ve finally gotten one. I know, it’s not the most exciting thing in the world to talk about, but it should be a change in the right direction for me.

But, wait. What’s this? “Beertraq Road to Stable”?

(click for full-sized version)

Part of why I want to get my thoughts organized is because I want a good view of what all is left before I fully release Beertraq to the public. With this list looming over my head (literally) it will hopefully get my butt in gear to reach a stable release.

Upon moving back to Rolla, I’ve discovered that the local cable company has upped their top tier of internet service from 5 Mbit to 15 Mbit. This excites my greatly because I often find myself downloading large files such as Linux ISOs and streaming high-quality media. Being the curious person I am, I had to figure out how much I could squeeze out of it.

After doing a bit of math, I figured that I could get approximately 158 GB of transfer per day, which is not taking any overhead into account. In order to reach this as a final number, I figured that I needed to saturate my connection with as fast of a download as possible. What better way to do this than with Usenet? Armed with my trusty usenet downloader and a collection of a bunch of Linux ISO NZBs (gotta keep it legit), I set it off on a downloading spree.

Here are the results:

All in all I ended up downloading 110.31 GB in a 24-hour period. As you can see with the above graph, I probably could have gotten closer to the theoretical maximum if not for the various slowdowns that were experienced. I would chalk this up to either my cable company overselling their lines or something causing my usenet connection to slow down.

Given the fact that some of the larger ISPs like to cut you off at a certain point, making their “unlimited” internet connection not so unlimited, this makes me worry a bit. I’ve seen limits under 100 GB, which I would surely blast through within a day or two if I had this speed on that ISP. This makes me feel sorry for all the people who have to suffer with that kind of service provider.

I don’t cook/bake all that often, but when I do I like to have some fun with it. I came up with a ham recipe that turned out well, so I figured I’d share it with everyone.

First, put your ham in a baking pan and cut the diamond pattern into it. Trust Alton Brown when he says that utility knives work well for this. Then, mix the following in a bowl

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mustard
• 4 ounces of fine bourbon. My preference is Maker’s Mark.

Once you have that all mixed up, pack it gently onto the ham. Uniformity is nice, but not required. Then cook the ham at 325 degrees Fahrenheit until the inside meat temperature reaches 150 degrees (about 3 hours with a 20 pound ham). I guarantee that it’ll be tasty when it’s done.

I figured I’d post the latest graph magic from my work at Nucor-Yamato Steel. This is a graph of the entire network, switches AND hosts!

(click for full-sized version, warning: LARGE image)

Here, the yellow boxes are center switches/routers, the green boxes are switches, and the peach-colored nodes are hosts. Also, red lines are switch-to-switch connections and blue lines are switch-to-host connections.

Another somewhat off-topic thing about these graphs is that the manager of IT at Nucor-Yamato is interested in open-sourcing the code that manages all of the data and generates these graphs, AND let me use company time to work on and manage the project. If anyone knows of any open-source project (or software that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg) that already does network discovery, data collection, and automated mapping then please let me know! If I’m not going to be re-inventing the wheel, then I’ll probably be kicking the project off shortly after I start working full-time in June 2010.

I’m glad to announce that my recent pet project, Beertraq, is now in a (somewhat closed) beta stage! The basic idea is there and functioning, but the extra functionality isn’t done and it’s far from polished. Nonetheless, it’s time to take her for a test drive!

So what is Beertraq, you ask? It’s a way for you to keep track of which beers you’ve tasted, compare those with others, read beer reviews, and most importantly discover new beers to try. I originally got the idea from The Flying Saucer’s UFO Club, where members work toward a goal of drinking 200 different beers. Once they complete the task, they get their name on a plate which gets put on the wall of the bar. The cool part about the UFO Club is that it’s all computerized, using a magstripe card to login at a kiosk in the bar. You can also log in to their website to check your progress and read reviews on there. I figured that if The Flying Saucer can have that system for their bar, I could do the same for the world.

If you’re interested in becoming a BeerTraq beta user, send an email to beertraq (at) beertraq (dot) com with the email address you want to use for your account. All I ask is that you give feedback by filling out issue requests with bugs you find or suggestions you might have.