Basic instructions are here: http://kuffner-sternwarte.at/hms/wiki/index.php5?title=Lightmeter-Driver#Linux
# apt-get install make gcc wget libhid-dev # wget http://kuffner-sternwarte.at/hms/wiki/uploads/LightmeterLinuxMark2.3.zip # unzip LightmeterLinuxMark2.3.zip # make
Just got this email from the EFF:
Written Declaration 12 asks EU negotiators to ensure that ACTA respects European citizens’ fundamental rights to freedom of expression and privacy, and opposes provisions that would encourage Internet intermediaries to engage in surveillance or filtering of all Internet users’ communications for potential copyright-infringing material. If 369 members of the European Parliament sign this declaration before July 8, it will become the official opinion of the European Parliament, and send a strong message to the EU ACTA negotiators. Around 253 MEPs have signed, but 116 MEP signatures are still needed — particularly from MEPs in Germany, the U.K., Italy and Poland.
With the latest round of ACTA negotiations having just wrapped up in Switzerland, and only one more round likely to take place, now is the time to ask your MEPs to sign Written Declaration 12 and ensure that ACTA protects the fundamental rights of all citizens and the open Internet. Please write and call the Strasbourg offices of Members of Parliament who have not yet signed before July 8. The list of Members who have not yet signed and require particular attention is here.
There is a narrow window of opportunity for MEPs to take a stand against ACTA — it is only during the Strasbourg plenary session of July 5-8 that MEPs will have an opportunity to sign Written Declaration 12 at the declarations table. It is crucial that MEPs understand the importance of signing Written Declaration 12 before moving on to the plenary session.
—
Here are the Irish MEPS that have not, at the time of writing, signed the declaration. Please read the above links and write to them, the links below link to detailed contact information. In a week when Finland has made broadband a legal right for every citizen its important to not to let these talks limit Internet freedoms.
Brian CROWLEY ALDE (FF) brian.crowley(at)europarl.europa.eu
Jim HIGGINS PPE (FG) jim.higgins(at)europarl.europa.eu
Joe HIGGINS GUE/NGL (Socialist) joe.higgins(at)europarl.europa.eu
Seán KELLY PPE (FG) sean.kelly(at)europarl.europa.eu
Mairead McGUINNESS PPE (FG) mairead.mcguinness(at)europarl.europa.eu
Gay MITCHELL PPE (FG) gay.mitchell(at)europarl.europa.eu
And here are the names of those who have:
Liam AYLWARD, Nessa CHILDERS, Proinsias DE ROSSA, Pat the Cope GALLAGHER, Marian HARKIN & Alan KELLY.
It’s interesting that none of the FG MEP’s have signed this letter.
Today eircom implemented their three strike rule. Here is a letter I sent to my local TD recently on the subject.
Dear Ciaran,
Thanks for your tweet regarding the judicial decision regarding the so called ’3 strike rule’ being implemented by eircom at the request of the music and movie industries. I hope you have the time to read this reply.
You mentioned that ‘false accusations are problematic’. That is true, but there are many other issues.
The success of the Irish economy has largely been driven by our well educated workforce, and that’s whats going to help us going forward. Many Irish businesses innovated and major multinationals set up in the country (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SUN Microsystems, etc.) in part thanks to the experience of the Irish workforce with information technology. We are now some 20 years on from when the internet first appeared in Ireland. And while we still have embarrassingly bad infrastructure compared to other European countries the internet is a vital part of our lives. Access to government information and banking are now predominantly done online, much educational content is internet dependent, and it is not even possible to fly with some airlines now without internet access. The Irish government needs to recognise the importance of the internet and establish rights for citizens to have unrestricted and unfiltered access to it.
The three strikes rule is fundamentally flawed for several reasons.
The music and movie industries claim that they can identify the IP address of an offending computer. This raises an important privacy concern, in order to do this they need to monitor the activity of millions of law abiding citizens, and this monitoring is done by private companies not by an accountable public law enforcement agency. Furthermore this activity may take place outside of Ireland and as such may be illegal. The company that the music industry has previously used, MediaSentry, has a track record of false accusations and has been found to be operating illegally in several US states.
Assuming that the industry can identify an IP address, this does not identify a specific computer or individual. For home users the IP address actually identifies the broadband modem and so can identify the account holder. However may computers may use this single IP address, all members of a family may have their own phones and computers connected, as well as visitors. And that’s before we consider the kid next door hacking into your network! It is also possible to fake IP addresses which would also make reliable identification impossible.
But lets assume the unlikely, that the industry has correctly identified the IP address of an offender. They would then be in a position to begin the process to cut the users internet connection. The user identified would be the billpayer, but the culprit could potentially be anyone else. For example a child who despite being told its wrong, continues to download songs. In this case the child could cause the household internet connection to be cut; no one in the house would be able to do online banking, access government websites, shop online, or fly with certain airlines; furthermore a parent may be forced out of work if any part of their job involves working remotely – even though they have done nothing wrong.
So while copyright infringement is a crime, principles of law are being violated here. The punishment is disproportionate, infringing copyright should not result in the user and those they live with being punished as outlined above – a roughly equivalent crime to downloading illegally, stealing a CD or DVD, would result in a minor shoplifting offense – not the banning of the accused and their entire family from using shops! When accused of a crime the accuser must be able to prove guilt and the accused must be given an opportunity to defend themselves; no such mechanism exists with the music and movie industry deal with eircom since it is a private deal that acts outside and above the law.
In short, the 3 strikes rule should be made illegal in Ireland and the EU because: its unreliable, it’s disproportionate, and it affects innocent 3rd parties.
The government needs to follow the example of other nations in recognising the rights of citizens to uncensored and unmonitored internet access. Ireland’s future as a digital economy needs this. By doing so it would bring this deal within the law – since no citizen could be disconnected without a court ordering it.
The music and movie industries have failed for 15 years to deal with the internet. Only in the last couple of years have they embraced digital downloads, and that push has come from from companies like apple (a computer manufacturer), amazon (a online bookstore) and last.fm (started as a project in the University of Southampton) – NOT from the music industry. If copyright is so important to them then they should simply work within the law – bring the evidence to the gardai and have the offender prosecuted in court.
Best Wishes,
~Albert White
Dear Councilors & TD’s,
It was with incredulity that I read reports in the Irish Times of the destruction of parts of Dalkey Quarry.
The first recorded climbs by the Irish Mountaineering Council were undertaken in the 1940′s. Today the quarry is used almost daily by climbers and the routes range from the very beginner level up to some of the hardest climbs in the country. It is the only quarry that I know of in Ireland with a guidebook of its routes, and a popular crag with foreign climbers due to its easy access from the city. As someone who grew up a few minutes from the Quarry, I regularly climbed the lower grade climbs and my dog even managed to make it up an easy route on one occasion!
Climbers and residents are rightly annoyed that the council therefore decided to destroy parts of these established climbs. An area that is used for climbing is very unlikely to have been unsafe, if it was the climbers would not be using it, so the actions of the council can only be interpreted as a willful act of destruction. John Duignan of the Irish Mountaineering Club was right to call this ‘vandalising the sport’, a sport which DLRCC should be very proud to have in its county. Then again the councils recent record of preserving important sites in the county is dismal – Carlisle Pier for example…
All such destruction must cease, and any further destruction must take place only following a full public consultation with the public and mountaineering groups. I welcome the reports that talks have taken place today between the MCI and council but that should have taken place last week.
The council should publish any correspondence relating to this decision including any complaints received and any internal letters/emails between council employees relating to the plans. The council employee responsible for taking the decision to destroy parts of the quarry must be immediately removed from employment with the council.
Best Wishes,
~Albert White
The start of 2010 has been an interesting time in the EU. Where, in stark contrast to most places, we seem to be coming up with good legislation and ideas.
February 22nd:
The EU Commission proposes a ban on all commercial fishing of Atlantic bluefin tuna by 2011. Predictably the Japanese are the ones who are protesting most. But you would expect that from a nation that seems to have a policy of making marine wildlife extinct. Release Here.
February 25th:
Since 2000 Israel has enjoyed a special relationship with the EU resulting in exemption of import duties. However the German water filtering company Brita imports good from the occupied west bank, and German customs, seeing the goods were manufactured in illegal settlements denied the company the preferential treatment they expected. This went to the German courts who asked the European Court of Justice for a decision. That decision, came on February 25th and clarified that since settlements in Palestinian territory are illegal under international law that goods from these areas cannot be classified as ‘Made in Israel’ and therefore cannot avail of preferential trade agreements with Israel.
March 10th:
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a treaty that is being negotiated in secret outside of any established framework. No portions of the discussions have been made officially public and from the leaks it is clear that this is treaty is a very bad one. The Lisbon treaty that is now in force contained a provision intended to make the workings of the EU more transparent and to give the Parliament (the elected bit of the EU) more power, that provision required that the Parliament must have full and immediate access to information at all stages of international negotiations. They clearly didn’t have that with the ACTA so the Parliament voted, by 663 to 13, to demand that this information be made available to them. Not only that but they threaten to go to the Court of Justice if that doesn’t happen.
But the MEP’s didn’t stop there. They scupperd any plans of a so called three strike policy being automatically implemented also. And they also have called for investigations into the issue of warrant-less searches of data while crossing EU borders.
The full press release from the Parliament is here.
Recently out broadband usage seems to have gone up quite significantly. This, naturally, has been blamed on me. And the Mac. As Min put it “this only became an issue since the mac came into the house!”.
Now you can log into the web interface of the Voyager and get the bytes since it connected. You can also reset some network traffic counters in Status -> Traffic Stats, but none of these really give you a feel for whats happening over time. Enter MRTG. I’ve been using MRTG to monitor traffic on interfaces since college and it’s very good at it. By default it will communicate with a device by SNMP, however the Voyager does not appear to have an SNMP daemon.
Thankfully MRTG can also execute a command to get its data.
You can log into the Voyager using ssh with the admin user and your admin password. This gets you to a very basic shell but one thing you can run is ifconfig which will report on the network interfaces in the box including their TX and TX byte counts.
There doesnt appear to be an easy way to set up public key authentication with the voyager so I fell back on some old school tricks for automating logins – perl & expect.
This expect script will log into the Voyager and get your ifconfig output:
#!/usr/bin/expect -f spawn ssh admin@IP.OF.YOUR.ROUTER expect "password:" sleep 1 send "YOUR-PASSWORD\n" expect "> " sleep 1 send "ifconfig\n" expect "> " send "logout\n"
Next we need to grab the counters from there in a way that MRTG will understand. That is the recieved count on the first line, the transmitted count on the second, uptime is the third and the name is the fourth (mrtg docs). I just use the first and second. ppp_8_35_1 is the interface I need on my router, yours may be different. This perl script calls the expect script above to get the data.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $flag=0;
@op=`/rusr/local/bin/bt.expect`;
foreach $_ (@op) {
if ($_ =~ /ppp_8_35_1/ ){
$flag=1;
next;
}
if ($flag == 1 && $_ =~ /RX bytes:(\d+).*TX bytes:(\d+)/){
print $1."\n";
print $2."\n";
print "0\n";
print "0\n";
last;
}
}
Next we need a configuration file for MRTG. Mine is below. The various options are explained in the mrtg docs
EnableIPv6: no WorkDir: /var/www/mrtg Interval: 5 Title[ppp]: Network traffic (ppp) PageTop[ppp]: <h1>Network traffic (ppp)</h1> Target[ppp]: `/usr/local/bin/gettraffic.pl` Unscaled[ppp]: n WithPeak[ppp]: ymw
It’s the just a matter of setting up a cron job for MRTG to get the data every 5 minutes:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/mrtg /usr/local/etc/bt.cfg > /dev/null 2>&1
Over the course of a few hours you’ll see the patterns in your usage:
It started with a question: How can we inspire people to take action on climate change?
The answer: Ask the people of Sydney to turn off their lights for one hour.
On
31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off
their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. This massive collective effort
reduced Sydney’s energy consumption by 10.2% for one hour, which is the
equivalent effect of taking 48,000 cars off the road for one hour.
On
29th March 2008 we’re doing it again WorldWide! Friends of the Irish
Environment and the Irsh Light Pollution Awareness Campaign are asking
everyone to do their bit for the environment and turn their lights off
for one hour on March 29th.
In Ireland te event will take place from 9pm to 10pm
rather than from 8-9pm. This is because at Ireland’s latitude it won’t
really be dark by 8pm so in order to see the difference in the night
sky the event will start at 9. Astronomical Societies around the country will be holding events so please be sure to check for details at www.irishastronomy.org/boards.
We need all of you, across the world, not just Ireland, to turn non essential lights off for this hour. Do you really need your porch light on? Does your building really need to be floodlit? And longer term you can think about whether your security lighting is really efficient. Does it allow light to spill above the horizon causing light pollution? Is the bulb too bright for the purpose? Are you using a motion sensor to ensure the light only goes on when needed? Have a look at the Institution of Lighting Engineers document on Domestic Security Lighting to see how best to use security lighting.
Heres what the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Councillor Paddy Bourke, had to say about Earth Hour when he announced Dublin’s participation:
"Earth Hour is an international campaign and Dublin
is one of the latest cities to get behind this important event where on
March 29th all non-essential lights will be switched off for an hour. This
campaign is important and everyone from citizens up to Government has a
duty to do what they can against global warming. It is up to us all to
do what we can to reduce our CO2 emissions. Through one simple action,
turning off our lights for an hour, we can deliver a powerful message
about the need for action. I am thrilled that as
Dublin Lord Mayor I will be leading our capital city in its
participation in this international event. It was estimated during the
Sydney Earth Hour last night demand for electricity dropped by 10 per
cent. It would be fantastic if we could do the same in Dublin. I would urge businesses and homes to join in and take part in the campaign."
Earth Hour in Ireland is fully supported by the Irish Light Pollution Awareness Campaign. For further information on the project in Ireland please contact the Friends of the Irish Environment. For global information please visit www.earthhour.org.
Finally here is the promotional video for Earth Hour. Enjoy!
Something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while is to carve a spoon. After coming back from Matty’s wedding on Friday I noticed that a bough had broken off a sycamore tree in a nearby park. I took that as a sign to get on with it. So today I went up with a pocket saw and cut off a few sections of branches. Sycamore is a fairly soft wood and when its green its especially easy to work with.
I peeled off the bark with my trusty knife (ok a €15 Mora knife). Next made a rough sketch of where I wanted to carve out and with my trusty axe (ok the cheapest axe in Woodies (official sponsors to Shamrock Rovers F.C. btw!)). The knife and especially the axe needed a good sharpening but seem to be holding well. Anyway, lots of chopping and carving later I got something that resembled a spoon. The next step was to carve out the depression for the spoon bit. This was my first try with a spoon knife that I bought from Andrew at OutdoorCode, it cost about €35 euro but its one of those tools that you need for this kind of carving. An alternative to using the spoon knife would be to use embers to slowly burn the depression. After a couple of hours and a blistered thumb I ended up with a spoon.
I didn’t bother reading much about what bits of wood to select and how exactly to carve before trying this. Sometimes you learn more by trying first, and Sunday afternoons are a good time to make mistakes anyway. One thing to change next time will be to use a bigger piece of wood. This was carved from a piece about 4cm in diameter – which doesn’t give you much of a spoon! A branch at least 8cm thick is probably needed to get a decent sized spoon. Knots. I think I saw a Ray Mears program where he mentioned that using a fork in a branch made carving the spoon easier – having knots in the middle makes it harder that’s for sure! I’ll have to split a branch and see exactly how a branch is formed – ‘open it and see how it works’ is an approach that has yet to fail me!
That’s the spoon, and the tools used.
 |
On Thursday my cousin Matty got married in Terrath Co. Wexford. I’ve uploaded the pics; most are only visible to friends and family. |
0 | Unique Visitors |
