1. April 28, 2008

      Picture of a Camera…

      The Waikato Times just came and went, an interview should be posted in a paper soonish. In the meantime, heres a picture (taken by Beverley) of the photographer taking a picture of us. Awesome eh!

      Picture of a camera

    2. April 25, 2008

      Team Waikato: Tips from Beverley

      The Dos and Don’ts of international skype meetings.

      Do:

      • Sign in to skype before the assigned meeting time.
      • Un-mute your laptop.
      • Switch off all background music before answering the call.
      • Have a laser pen or two handy for the inevitable laser war.
      • Sit in a swivelly chair if possible. If you have a diligent perch swiveller at the other end you can totally spin in two countries at the same time.
      • Eat something before hand. You don’t get any of the pizza or BK that is so callously flaunted infront of the camera.
      • Tell your flatmates in advance. You’ll get weird comments in the morning otherwise about the 4-5 guys you were talking to in your room last night.
      • Keep your laptop set to the host’s time. It’s not really 5am if the little time in the corner of your screen says 11pm.
      • Be prepared to look like a zombie the morning after. It’s ok though, you’ll totally blend in with the other CPSC students.

      Don’t

      • Wear dark eye-liner. The nature of webcams and uni-residence lighting can lead to scared Industry Mentors (not to mention endless emo comments).
      • Be upset when you’re left facing the wall for a good 10 mins.
      • Leave your volume on full after the meeting has finished. Full volume Vista start-up sounds are very very obvious in a large echoey lecture theatre half way through your morning lecture.
      • Sit your laptop on a soft fan clogging surface for the duration. Not only is this a fire hazard it is also laptop abuse of the highest degree. Sorry Gigi.
      • Turn the volume up to full, stick in head phones then not say anything for a while. Others with think you are asleep and very kindly make a lot of noise to wake you up.
      • Be tempted to pull faces. Remember that there is a ‘Prnt Scrn’ button on the computer at the other end too.

      Right. Back to rendering.

    3. April 22, 2008

      Team Waikato: Interview with Chakks

      Apart from a minor spelling mistake of our team name, an interview we did for Geekzone is now live here. Woohoo, first interview up!

      So, any feedback from you guys who just came here via the link would be awesome! If not, I’ll try to get more regular posts going.

    4. April 20, 2008

      Comments!

      Thats right, thanks to a good 3 hour effort, comments now work! You can now tell me directly how much dribble and crap my site is! All I have left to do now is a photo gallery and admin page (I’m currently doing most tasks via phpMyAdmin), and I can finally call this… ‘thing’ decent.

      Now, if only those bloody people in town would stop making so much noise, I could actually get to sleep…

    5. April 16, 2008

      Team Waikato: Insight from Paul

      Jed’s note: I forced the team to start coming up with posts. First up is Paul, the hardware engineer of the group, and his tips

      While working on the hardware/firmware of Gary’s e.point, I came across a few problems (Mostly in the early hours of the morning)

      1. Things generally do not work when they are not plugged in.
      2. PICs cannot be programmed telepathically.
      3. 555 timers cannot be programmed at all.
      4. Making a change in code does not automatically update the PIC’s firmware.
      5. Uploading firmware without first compiling is not useful.
      6. 230V destroys PICs and most other components.
      7. 8 bit integers cannot store the value 0xFFFF.
      8. ACKing ACKs is not a good idea.
    6. April 13, 2008

      Image Maps and Mootools Tooltips

      Oh, BTW, I learnt how to make XHTML-compliant Mootools Tooltip enabled image maps a post back. Its actually simpler than I thought;

      <img src="http://" mce_src="http://" usemap="#mapname" alt="My Image" />
<map name="mapname" id="mapname"><area alt="" title="Your text here"  	class="imgtip" shape="rect" coords="0,0,100,100" /></map>

      (You can browse the page source if you are still stuck)

    7. April 12, 2008

      Team Waikato: Two quick things….

      Here are two quick things before I go back to working through the night. First up is a picture of the team that I sneakily took of them busily working. I should say for clarification, Beverley is on an exchange in Canada (until 2 days before the NZ finals!!!), and joins in on meetings via webcam. My laptop often fills this purpose (on the days that I can remember to bring the power pack), and I have great fun spinning and swiveling her around the room.

      Second, heres a quick video showing the operation of our device. Paul increased reliability over power-line today, and to demonstrate he scripted toggling it quickly. Look at it go!

    8. Team Waikato: Security testing…

      So, Ryan wants us to write a blog based on our experiences. Check back often (yes, there is a RSS feed) for updates!

      So, we’re all busy working in the lab, re-writing a lot of code to bring it up to scratch. One of my major focuses is security testing, as they’ll undoubtedly be a few questions. Thankfully, we covered a lot of ground with the security of last year’s project, and apart from a few things that need re-factoring (like my nice array of structs…. testing shows that isn’t the least processor intensive) we should be alright.

      By the way, a big thanks to competing teams from Victoria and AUT for helping us test the security on our project wiki! Its good to know our trade secrets are safe!

    9. April 7, 2008

      Yeah!

      So, Team Waikato is going to the Imagine Cup NZ finals in Auckland!

      Having 4 teams instead of 3 will make it interesting though, more of a challenge.

      Once I get these damned tests out of the way… and practice the presentation all over again…. and finish these assignments…. It’ll be awesome!

    10. April 4, 2008

      Web Services, ArrayLists and Structs, oh my!

      4th post of the day… this is what happens when you’re anxiously waiting for news

      So, when writing code for the Imagine Cup entry, I hit a brick wall trying to serialise an ArrayList of Structs over a Web Service. Here is the way that I found works best:

      using System.Xml.Serialization;

public struct Device
{
	public int id;
	public string fname, room, type;
	public bool is_controllable, status;
}

[WebMethod]
[XmlInclude(typeof(Device))]
public ArrayList GetDevices()
{
	ArrayList devices = new ArrayList();

	//Logic here

	return devices;
}
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