micolous.id.au » TAFE

Things galore.

micolous — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 14:12:37 +0000

I’ve started TAFE again, and once again I go into the interesting mode where I blog not as often as I should, for various reasons, mainly coming down to my own laziness. I picked up a wireless access point on the weekend, and it’s already proved quite nice for being able to instantly setup a network link to my current, temporary place of residence. Being stuck on my laptop I’m not so hot on, though I think I finally have the wireless link setup in a way where I don’t have 70% packet loss.

Maybe I’ll actually get the rest of my “kit” together and not be stuck on my laptop anymore.

TAFE has been rather easy this week with my lecturer for both classes yesturday being off sick, and today the lesson not going in due to the lecturer not getting their laptop yet. Probably tomorrow will actually be the first real class for the semester. And it’s a Friday morning. I love Friday mornings like I enjoy being dragged along a main road at 100 km/h barefoot. Woohoo.

Presenting A.S.S.H.O.L.E. and g0t.planet?

micolous — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 23:55:53 +0000

The ASS proudly presents a
new era in Access-hating. The ASS is a society dedicated to expressing one’s mental anguish over the use and creation of databases in Microsoft Access as well as the general misuse of the software by using it for big company databases and such where an SQL server setup
would work more effectively.

In order to rally numbers better, I’m splitting the ASS into chapters (or “cracks”). The first of which is ASSHOLE. Application forms for ASSHOLE are availible from here to fill out and sumbit electronically. Mental instability will help your application, as well as mood swings, depression and a firearms license…

In other news, btmassgen is coming to a finalised state, which is my simplified yet still powerful UI to create .torrent files. I’m using a native BitTorrent .NET library to do it, with the whole thing written in Visual Basic .NET 2005. There’s still some issues with the BitTorrent library that are stalling a final release.

I thought I’d better also mention g0t.planet?, a random assortment of blogs I’m starting to syndicate from people I know at TAFE. This was formally known as “Planet Trough”, but that name sucked, so I thought I’d better ~~steal~~ borrow a Benji-ism.

Docbook on Win32

micolous — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 21:05:17 +0000

I’ve been writing all my TAFE documentation work using DocBook format, which is really really great. Combined with XXE (thanks Ycros!), I can easily write my CHM documentation
with the source files being nicely structured and templated. I’ve also built some installers for Win32 that install DocBook related stuff without the need for Cygwin. The xsltproc binaries are the semi-official Win32 ones, I just repackaged everything to make life easy. DocBook-xsl installs into a “standard” Program Files location now so that I can standardize my Win32 build scripts. Nothing overly special.

There’s also a great DocBook on Win32 howto that I found, however this applies to the Cygwin version.

My installers will be kept up-to-date “as I remember”. They are basically automatically generated NSIS installer scripts, with very little special about them. They have a pretty uninstaller included, and xsltproc’s installer has a nice colourful icon for you to stare at.

And now,
back to work…

Wireless goodies

micolous — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:06:19 +0000

Myself and “Ice_Cold” are setting up an AP at TAFE, so we have some decent wireless infrastructure for the growing group of people at TAFE with laptops and/or PDAs with WiFi who are fed up with the TAFE computers. Unfortunately at this time there’s not going to be any Internet, for a few reasons:

Student’s computers are banned from the TAFE and
the Student network now, due to some viruses going around the network. Of course if people don’t use virus-effected OSes…
If we did connect it to the internet, there would be a lot of l33ching, which is bad for the honest people on the network who just want to surf the net, get their email, etc.

The network should be up by sometime on Tuesday officially. It’ll have a DHCP server and a IRC server, so people can chat and stuff on the wireless, without using PopMessenger, which is a bit dodgey IMO. There’s not going to be any game servers (it’s TAFE, you’re here to study, and there’s no 4CoD subject) and no public-use fileserver, because we don’t have the money to pay for this stuff. All the hardware we’re using is spare recycled stuff, if you want more and better equipment, give us money and/or hardware. However if you want to give us hardware, consult us first.

The main ideas behind it is to help promote wireless networking (and as I call it, the “internet on the toilet” philosophy), wireless security, and maybe even get a better, externally funded wireless network going that spans the campus.