My part-owned wind turbine in Vänern has now been on line since the middle of August and is reaching 2 GWh produced so far. The power generated this year will be sold on the market, but next year I will get around 1000 kWh for each of my three shares delivered to my new apartment for free, just paying tax at 0.03 EUR per kWh. The income this year from the sales and damages received from the delayed construction will be divided among the owners, I dont know yet what the amount will be.
Erik windpower
The belgian Java conference Devoxx (formerly Javapolis) is a few weeks earlier this year. I visited in 2006 and 2007, and will visit this year as well. It is a big event with lots of good speakers, but still not organized by Sun, so the views given are more complete. It takes place in Antwerp in a gigantic cinema complex with huge screens and comfy chairs. Looking forward to some good Scala sessions and technical info about the JVM and concurrency.
Instead of flying back on the Friday I have booked the Thalys train from Brussels to Paris, and 2 nights at a hotel there before going home late on Sunday. I have not visited Paris in over 15 years, so I am hoping for good weather and should have no problems finding interesting places to visit.
Erik code
I have received all the parts listed in the earlier post, and also bought a WD Green Edition 1.5TB SATA drive and a silent 80mm fan. The final piece of the puzzle was an Atheros 802.11g PCI card taken out of an older box. All this fit nicely in the small black case, and is silent enough for me.
I installed Gentoo 64 bit edition on the drive, and was happily surprised by the performance of the hyperthreaded dualcore Atom 330 chip. A kernel compile with 5 threads completed in around 10 minutes, which surely is acceptable for me. I configured the firewall to do NAT, and installed hostapd to run the wireless card in master mode as an access point. Everything is humming along nicely for now, next step is to set up automatic backup.
Erik gadgets, linux
Right now I use a normal Linux PC (Athlon X2, 1GB ram, Nvidia 7600 graphics, 320GB disk) as the primary router and always-on desktop in the house, and then a simple Belkin 11g router as WLAN access point. This works fine but uses quite a lot of power. When I move to the new apartment a desktop PC will not be needed, so I will have to get a new setup. I have been investigating the market and looked at WiFi gateways that can be flashed with custom Linux firmware and handle external USB disks, Atom-based NAS kits with dual ethernet as well as Atom-based 1U rackmounted servers, but I ended up choosing a Mini-ITX based solution.
I have ordered:
- MSI IM-945GC Mini-ITX Mainboard with dual core Atom 330 1.6GHz CPU, dual gigabit ethernet, 1 DDR2 memory slot, 1 PCI slot, 4 SATA ports and loads of serial ports.
- Kingston KVR 2GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
- Emko EM-153 Mini-ITX shoebox-sized case, with 90W fanless PSU and a riser card for the PCI slot
This little box will be very silent and manage NAT routing far above any speed I can get on my broadband, as well as be a WLAN access point using my old Atheros-based D-Link DWL-G520, which I may update to a 802.11n based card once my laptop supports it. It will also work as a NAS with a terabyte or so of storage, coordinating automated backups to my main server placed offsite and managing round-the-clock (legal) bittorrent activity. All this in around 20 Watts!
Erik gadgets, linux
After a summer/autumn of looking at apartments, I have now finally signed a contract for one. It is a 2 room flat of 58 square meters, within a kilometer where I live now. I will have access to it from late December or early January. Yay!
I will do some work with the floors and then change the wall colors in the two rooms, but this should go quickly.
Erik Uncategorized
After a break last year, this year I participated in the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest again. It was fun as always, and we completed 4 problems this time (new record for us!) but only placed 10th in Lund. The contest runs over 5 hours and your three person team try to solve 8-10 problems with only one computer. You get a description along with sample input/output, write your code and submit it, and hope that it passes the unknown input verifying it. The code has to give the right answer, as well as stay within limits for cpu time and ram. The problems are available on the website, give them a try!
Erik Uncategorized school
During the summer I have been working on a new feature for the iodine DNS tunnel. Sometime the firewalls allow traffic to any server on UDP/port 53, and then traffic can be sent more efficiently than through the DNS relay.
So now the iodine client asks the server for its public IP address, and tries to communicate to it directly. It logs in using the same password and a new challenge based on the original one, and if the server responds all traffic is then sent directly. This means the traffic can be sent in larger chunks, and that the server doesn’t have to wait for a query to send data back. So this means a big step forward in performance, without having to run additional server software (like OpenVPN in a port 53 configuration or similar). If you know a firewall will not let this traffic through, there is a switch to turn it off.
To get the latest code, do a check out from the SVN repository:
svn co http://svn.kryo.se/iodine iodine
or download the automatically built Windows binaries.
Please let me know if you have any problems.
Erik code iodine
My current bike was bought back in 1995 and has not always received the care it deserved. It has worked well for me many years (including two week-long trips in Sweden long ago) but is starting to fall apart. The brakes need constant adjustment (and you need four hands to do it), the kickstand rotates 360 degrees, the front gear changer is stuck and broken, the rear sprocket is worn down so the chain jumps over it, and so on.
I might as well buy a new one, and these are my current requirements:
- Disc brakes on both wheels
- No foot brake
- 7-8 or more gears
- Mud guards included or installable
- Good looking
I have visited a few shops so far but not found a perfect one yet. I am mostly looking at Nishiki and Crescent bikes for now, like the Othala (why a chain tensioner?), Shadow (too white, expensive) or maybe the Pro SLD (am I that sporty?). I have not yet tried an 8 speed hub gear bike but they seem to be very low maintenance, which is what I am aiming for.
Erik Uncategorized bike
I had three weeks of vacation this summer, since I used up one week on a spring trip to Seattle, and want to keep some days for the autumn and winter. The first week (6-12 July) I went with my younger brother to Belgium, visiting Antwerp, Bruges, Gent, Wallonia and Brussels. We traveled mostly by train and sampled a few beers. In Gent we picked up a rental car and drove past Tournai (where I ate andouillette, something I will not try again 
) down to Dinant. We spent the day after visiting the Chimay brewery and restaurant, driving past the Leffe brewery without seeing it, and rushing back to Brussels to spend some time to find the rental office. Then we had a few days to explore Brussels’ sights such as Atomium and the Cantillon Brewery and museum, before heading back home.
The week after that (13-19 July) I spent at home, being visited by my cousin. We went on a photo walk in the city, had lazy days, and went on a small road trip with the family. The weather was nice and it was very relaxing. After that I worked a full week at the office, which was less than half full. The following Monday (27th of july) I took the train up north to visit my sister-in-laws old home. We stayed there two nights and picked blueberries, hiked the local mountain and swam in the lake.
We then took the train to Stockholm and boarded the ferry to Helsinki, via Mariehamn. It took 17 hours to pass the sea. We had four days in Helsinki, and visited Kiasma (modern art museum), the design museum, some design stores, Suomenlinna, and a few churches. The Finnish language is very interesting, and is also convenient to be able to use Swedish abroad. We flew home the second of August late in the evening, and then it was back to work the next morning.
Erik Uncategorized photography, travel
For my iodine project I have used Google Groups providing a mailing list for users to discuss different things. I was surprised to see that suddenly the list was closed down and now just showing a short message that is was removed due to rule violations. No explanation seem to be available and there is no support for the free service, but it was probably related to spamming.
My server that hosts this page, the iodine page and other stuff is at a site where I dont pay anything for uplink or power, but it has port 25 blocked. This makes it harder for me to host email for a domain. I have my email now at Google Apps and is very happy with that service.
After some looking around for suitable mailing list applications I found jmlm, which is designed to just use a POP3 account. It is written in Python and does the basic stuff. I am thinking about expanding it with a very simple webpage, and maybe an online archive, and use it for the iodine-users list piggybacking off of a Google Apps account. It feels like an interesting project, lets see if I get started in the following weeks.
Erik code iodine, python
