Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by seanie

Robot construction kits

seanie — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:39:44 +0800

I've been digging up an old project I did some years ago where I tested a neural-network-like (not very like) evolved-in-simulation controller on some simple robots. I used the LEGO Mindstorms RCX last time, programmed with BrickOS (successful evolved controllers are automatically converted to simple C code for simulation on the robot). I'm down to 1 of my original 2 (bricked one brick) and wondering if I should move on to another platform. I know about the LEGO NXT but I'm wondering if there's anything else out there that I should consider.

What I want is something really, really simple that allows me to *temporarily* construct very simple robots (a few sensors, a few motors) - so no soldering, no glue, no cutting, no welding and if possible no extraneous tooling needed. It must be easily programmable in-situ from the PC. It must be possible to program it with the assembler or C that implements the controller sim (essentially lots of lookup-tables and a bit of timing / signal conditioning), so it should come with an assembler or C compiler, or there should be a 3rd party one (like BrickOS) I can use.

One last requirement is that it should be a reasonably popular, readily-available, off-the-shelf product. This last requirement is to ensure repeatability if someone else should want to try it out for themselves. I guess that means it should also be in the same kind of price bracket as Mindstorms. There's always the option of scouring eBaY for old RCXes, but my bricked RCX was from eBaY and I suspect flakiness may have prompted its sale.

Any codemasters have recommendations of programmable robot construction kits to try?

Anybody can visualise residential 'solar roof'?

seanie — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:21:43 +0800

I keep kicking the idea around of a residential-area 'solar roof', a way of making a housing / commercial development into a solar power station, but I'm struggling to depict it. I wrote an article on my blog here:

http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/2011/03/15/sol...rea-solar-roof/

But as you can see the last photo, copy-and-pasted together in GIMP, just completely fails to do the idea justice. Does anybody fancy making some 3D models of a residential area, on the scale described in the article (about 50-100 houses, under 5-10 'sun roofs'), to give a better image of what such a project would look like? I have no commercial interest in this project, it just seems from my calculations that it's a plausible solution to the solar-power-needs-plan-area problem. I can give some technical input / do calcs, but my graphical design skills are shite.

What would be great for giving people an idea of whether the project is desirable (from a live-in-it perspective) would be some better renderings of what it would look like. What I'd like to see:
1. A view head-on of one house from the road showing the house, the gap, the solar roof, the absence of a rain-roof on top of the house (no need).
2. A view from the end of a road, showing link houses on either side of the road with a solar roof on each side.
3. A view of the residential development from a treetop just outside the development (I don't know how better to describe this viewpoint - it seems a common one for residential developments!)
4. A view from inside the house looking across the road to another house, showing deep shadows on both sides?
One of the main points to get across in the images would be (in my opinion) the depth of shade under the solar roof.

There's no money in this, just 'interesting' - and possibly a good idea for power gen in Malaysia. Who knows, if the idea takes off there might be some work (for you, not for me) in it? I'm sorry I didn't post this idea before - it might have made a decent FYP for someone.

Anybody interested? With skills and spare time?

HTTP Digest Authentication in mobile browsers

seanie — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:54:36 +0800

I just tried out a site where I'm expecting the owner will want to use the 'admin' parts from their handphone. The admin features are secured with HTTP Digest Authentication. All I have access to here today is an old HTC with Windows Mopile and IE6. It's not authenticating where all my desktop browsers have no problem. Anybody know how well digest auth is supported by mobile browsers? Any good mobile browser emulators to use to test?

Anybody use mapping data from JUPEM?

seanie — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:56:21 +0800

I've been looking at providing a placename -> map facility and I'd like to use gov.my maps, but as far as I can tell from JUPEM's site, they don't provide free access to their data. For example on the page http://www.jupem.gov.my/sppmg/dv/cadastralSearch.aspx there's a note starting "PURCHASE OF DIGITAL DATA...".

I can scrape SVG out of their map explorer, clean it up and create an index myself - that works quite well, but it's a bit ... messy and it has been nastily formatted for use with some proprietary mapping software. I'd rather have access to raw data. Has anybody used that kind of data from JUPEM?

I can use Google Maps or OpenStreetMap (I see one CodeMasters regular - or someone with the same nickname - is over openstreetmap like a rash!) or similar, but I have very simple requirements and I really only want Malaysian data. I have very skimpy reasons for wanting access to JUPEM's data over just using Google's service, but that's what I want. Can anybody give me the benefit of their experience with JUPEM's data?

Printing brochure / magazine from the Web?

seanie — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:58:55 +0800

I'm just starting a project that calls for a printable brochure / magazine constructed from user-contributed content. It doesn't make sense to make the website in that format, so it's not just a matter of printing webpages. I have to produce two formats: one a per-product brochure and the other a 'digest' of recent changes.

What is the current 'best' way of producing printable content from the Web? Should I be building a PDF/PostScript document, or is there something cunning I can do with HTML / CSS?

Anybody using shipping quotations from Pos?

seanie — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:36:35 +0800

I wrote some shipping quotation modules for osCommerce a while back; I see some Zen Cart people using them too. They worked by scraping Pos' website for shipping calculations in the e-commerce checkout. Pos Malaysia changed its URLs and markup a few days ago, so those modules are broken. The modules get plenty of downloads, I wonder how many people are actually using them? I guess nobody screaming that they're not working (I have heard screams on install!) means that either they're not being used, or nobody using them is doing much trade (they haven't noticed they're not working ).

Anybody know how common it is for e-commerce sites to use those modules, or to scrape Pos' website for quotes with code from elsewhere? I rushed out a replacement (was planning to do it later, but caught by surprise by Pos breaking the old modules) here, if anybody is interested:

http://blog.lolyco.com/sean/2011/01/17/osc...es-pre-release/

Anybody using Arora (WebKit browser)?

seanie — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:54:01 +0800

Just FYI:

I was just looking for something to test OpenSearch Suggestions and discovered Firefox was the only browser I had (I check my markup for cross-browser compatibility on IE8, Opera, Firefox, Chromium and Midori) that supported them properly! I found Arora:

http://code.google.com/p/arora/

Arora supports OpenSearch including Suggestions. It seems very lightweight and fast, maybe worth a look if you wanted a WebKit browser to test your designs against.

(edit) Hmmm, supports OpenSearch Suggestions but has been crashing with lots of tabs open for me.

Non-text characters in a word-based index?

seanie — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:17:42 +0800

I recently posted a link here to a project I've been working on - a search engine - and one of the first tests a visitor from LYN tried was to search for "C++ Boost". My search engine is keyword-based, and had no entry for 'c++' because it was stripping out '+' characters. I've just modified a few things to kludge a special case in for '+':

http://spider.my/search.xhtml?q=c%2B%2B

There are only a few results from the one page I re-indexed (the wikipedia article for the Boost libraries). I want to make sure I have a complete set of kludges before I re-index everything - it takes hours.

It seems like I need to do the same thing for '#' to cater for keywords like 'c#' (see hash) and '#1' (number 1 or 'first one'). I check this sort of stuff against Google, and it seems to have a similar hack for C++ and C sharp - but note that it doesn't work as a prefix (so '#1' is not a keyword at Google).

I wonder - I'm not a musician - whether I should add musical notation (sharp, flat, natural '♭♮♯') marks in there so I can handle searches for 'e♭' for example. I'd be grateful if any LYN musicians could tell me whether musical notation search would be useful, or how well Google's absent support works for them.

What other non-text indexes should I add?

Why JSON instead of bare javascript?

seanie — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:18:02 +0800

I'm working on a hobby project - a search engine - which requires a reasonable amount of back-end 'grunt'. What I'm currently doing is serving the domain from a small-ish VPS and using dynamic DNS to map a backend domain to some servers by my desk at home. The search page has some js in it with a function that formats the search results. When you submit the search form, it requests the page with the search terms as arguments (standard so far). The result page (from the little VPS) just has the site markup and a script element that requests a 'results.js' from my backend server here. What I send back is a call of the previously-loaded page formatter with some arrays of arrays as arguments, like

CODE

makeResults(("lowyat", "123ms"), (("lowyat.net/", "Insanely Addictive...", "... something ripped from lowyat's page ..."), ( ... result 2 ...)))

I occasionally read that I should be doing this with JSON instead of bare javascript because of 'security', but I must have missed part 2 of the explanation. Should I be using JSON instead of bare javascript?

Sorry if the explanation is not very clear, you can have a look at it at testDOTspiderDOTmy if that helps. It's not caching indexes (it does, but purges them after 10s) while it's in development, so searches are a bit slow while it rebuilds the page link graphs on demand

charset issue

seanie — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:11:42 +0800

Your server sends pages with Content-Type: ...; charset=UTF-8
Your pages have a meta http-equiv content-type saying ...; charset=iso-8859-1

ISO-8859-1 is for Latin Languages.

Save a page to disk with non-Latin characters on it, like this one (Arabic):

http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/1653624

Open the html file straight from where you saved it as a file (so the browser only has the meta http-equiv to go on) - mangled Arabic (in FF3, anyway).

Perhaps you should consider changing that http-equiv to utf-8? You can test the effect by editing the copy of the file you saved with a text editor.

The http-equiv attribute should have no effect on pages rendered online, because W3 says User-Agents should prefer the HTTP header for charset. The only people who might see this are those who save a LYN page to disk and then look at it later, and then only if the page contains non-Latin text.

Malaysian i18n standard names for buttons etc

seanie — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:30:36 +0800

I want to add i18n (internationalisation) to a website, and there are plenty of WWW elements that I know have 'standard' or common names in English, like buttons "OK, Cancel, Search, Delete, Save" etc, and tooltips (TITLE element) such as "Home". I'm currently just interested in the Bahasa Malaysia / Chinese equivalents for a site I'm working on. I can use google translate to guesstimate some of the words, but I wonder if anybody has collected together an i18n reference for Malaysian web developers - just to make sure I don't accidentally translate 'Back' as 'Liwat' or 'Test' as '放屁'.

Is there such a reference?

Do you charge shipping with orders?

seanie — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:22:37 +0800

I maintain some Malaysian shipping modules for osCommerce. They're a bit nasty to code - and to use - because of the way Pos Malaysia's online quote system works. I've just written a demo API for Pos' shipping quotations, so that it would be easier to get up to date, accurate shipping quotes into e-commerce sites.

Do you pass on shipping costs to your customers? Have instant order completion / payment? How do you currently get the cost of shipping?

I'd appreciate some feedback on whether it'd be of any use to you or not in your e-business. There's a XML single-shot quotation demo at:

http://spider.my/posmalaysia2.html

An XML shipping-rate-table download (for software that maintains its own internal tables) demo at:

http://spider.my/posmalaysia3.html

And a widget demo here:

http://spider.my/posmalaysia4.html

It might be a bit rough in places - it was just a few days from start to finish. The rates are Pos Malaysia's 'raw' rates, so don't include any of the random surcharges they add as comments on their website.

All I want to know is: would it help you do (or develop software for) e-business if Pos provided this API? It would help me a lot, but I'm wondering if I'm the only one in Malaysia who wants to use online shipping quotes!

ten percent

seanie — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:38:07 +0800

My daughter, who's 3 years old next month, loves to watch the movie "Wing Chun" with Michelle Yeoh and Kingdom Yuen (not sure about spelling - Na Za's mother in Gods of Honour). Kingdom Yuen makes me laugh out loud even before she says anything.

Aside from surprising me with aerial spinning kicks, she has also started holding up her fist with the index finger slightly raised, but bent like a hook and saying what sounds like "gao ji" - Kingdom Yuen does it at one point in the movie, and the subtitle says "ten percent". I guess it must be Cantonese, but if you were to write it down for English readers, how would you spell it?

Thanks for the help!

Dynamic DNS for mobile phone

seanie — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:23:10 +0800

Hello Lowyat.net! I can't ask a mobile phone company any more, the answers don't make sense

I want to run a webserver on my laptop and make it accessible to visitors. I can do this easily using Dynamic DNS and Streamyx (when it works) or TM1315 (more reliable than Streamyx recently, and some days higher bandwidth). How can I do this using a mobile phone? I can surf the Internet easily enough with my moby and Digi PrePaid GPRS, but I get only 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x IP addresses - not routable.

Is there a Malaysian mobile telephony provider that offers mobile DNS - so that someone surfing orly.example.com are served pages from my laptop, connected via mobile phone?

Digi says no, but I'm not sure the question was fully understood on their OCS

Confused - what's the message?

seanie — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:47:31 +0800

Maybe it's just me, this morning I thought m2u was taking security to the next level:

[attachmentid=482740]

TM Net on Wikipedia

seanie — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:36:10 +0800

The TM Net article on Wikipedia isn't very good. It's not even good enough to be bad. I want to change it so that it is a good Wikipedia article, which means that I'm going to delete a lot of things that people want very much to be said about TM Net. I'm a TM Net customer too, so I share your pain, on average about once a month. I use wikipedia a lot too, although I seldom edit. I started deleting inappropriate content from the TM Net articles, and now I feel obliged to continue until the one remaining article is right.

As far as I know:
There really isn't much trustworthy information in the public domain. To start with, I'll cut the article down to what seems factual, which isn't much.

What I want to know:
Someone recently added something about "M Net" - I see "M Net" on the Streamyx application form (http://mediamix.com.my/streamyx_v.pdf) - is there a separate company involved, or is it a typo?

What is the role of MCMC in broadband provision? I see their website says "[MCMC] conducts the Consumer Satisfaction Survey two times a year", and lists results for 2001-2003, but then they only seem to be able to manage it once every two years.

I had a look at the last survey (http://www.mcmc.gov.my/consumer/Summary%20Report%20CSS2006.pdf) and ...it...left...me...full...of...doubts...

First, I'm no KPI expert, but the rating scheme seems ... skewed. "1=poor, 2=fair, 3=good, 4=very good, 5=excellent" seems like 4 out of 5 choices are positive. When I'd expect the 'average Joe' to give 50/50 to be neutral, under this scheme, that's a "good". Any KPI experts to comment? Apparently in 2006 TM Net Broadband was 3.26 "Good".

The results seem very consistent, I would have expected the occasional low or high among them. I guess it might be difficult, in the absence of competition, to assess the performance of your selected (from a choice of 1) ISP. Did any Lowyat user take part?

I couldn't find a conclusion in the survey. Given that the Internet Access surveys indicate that the Providers had failed to hit their FID KPI targets, I would have expected a 'regulator' to have concluded a penalty or incentive was needed. Does anybody know if the survey was used by the government in that way?

OK, that's enough for now. I'm after facts for inclusion on the wikipedia TM Net article, which was why I was looking at the MCMC survey. I've got sufficient reservations about the survey to not include it, but if anybody has some credible sources for TM Net info, I'd be grateful.

I've got to apologise if I'm not using the full range of typical hyperbole when referring to Malaysian public services. It's not an endorsement, it's self-censorship.