Christchurch Day 2

Posted on 2012-07-07 by Jethro Carr

Early start today, Lisa’s family had made bookings for 08:15 (yes, the morning, wtf) at Drexels in Christchurch, so whilst I had to get up early, there was thankfully unlimited coffee and some pretty decent food as well.

I'm unsure of the purpose of this symbol, but yes rental car, it is a bit cold.

mmmmm french toast smothered in butter and maple syrup

After breakfast I ended up going for a trip through Christchurch suburbs with Lisa and her friend, picking up stuff for the wedding, including a stop into the cheese mongers shop, selling both amazing cheeses, but also baking and other tasty snacks.

Cheeeeeeese shop! :-D

Cheese! Delicious cheese!All sorts, including raw milk cheeses.

omgomgomgcheese!

Following our tiki tour around Christchurch suburbs, we headed to the container mall for a mini tweetup with a bunch of Christchurch tweeple.

I really love the container mall, in many ways it would be nice to expand out into other empty lots to get more shops up and running.

Snugglebunny!

Afterwards, we went on another larger wander through and right around the red zone, checking out the extent of the damage – it’s actually a lot worse than I thought yesterday, not just a core of the CBD, but almost the entire thing is being demolished or is already just a rough, empty lot.

This old complex surprisingly looks to have emerged somewhat undamaged from the quake.

The Novatel really stands out - looks like the buildings on both the left and right sides were interconnected and have since been pulled down, leaving this weirdly exposed tower.

A still standing brick buildings, with remnants of the torn off neighbouring building still hanging to it.

Still yet to find a surviving stone church

Love the cardboard cutout workman wearing the high viz vest up in the building.

The building that I saw yesterday sitting alone in an otherwise deserted block looks like it wont be there that much longer – workmen have pulled off the side of the building and are busy tearing out the insides and throwing them down a chute.

A lot of buildings that look OK from the outside are cordoned off or are getting pulled down, so there must be a lot of structural damage that isn’t visible from the street.

IRD's cordoned off building in the background - in front of it, the site of the infamous CTV building.

Arts are still going strong down here, even amongst the rubble.

The staircase to nowhere.

Of all the places that could have fallen down, why not this shithole? :'(

Redzone wasteland

Back of High St

It’s not all demolition though, on our wanders I managed to find some new construction just outside of the red zone – certainly not as much as I expected, but at least it’s starting to take shape.

Some new construction!

Suburban Christchurch is really weird to me, I’m so used to always having suburban places being hilly and varied, but Christchurch is flat blocks as far as you go – it’s kind of reminds me of a higher-population Hawkes Bay.

It’s actually kind of the shame that there’s so much car usage here, this city would be great for a cycling/tram combination – it’s all flat and fairly compact, isn’t totally fucked yet like Auckland and it’s the ideal time for doing major infrastructure changes seeing as most of the CBD is unusable anyway.

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Christchurch Day 1

Posted on 2012-07-07 by Jethro Carr

I’ve spent my first day in Christchurch catching up with Lisa’s friends and family, but also went for a short walk from Riccarton, through Hagley park and into what remains of the CBD.

The flight down was all smooth, great view of the southern alps, hopefully on the way back it will be a bit less cloudy so I can get a better view. Christchurch airport has been through a lot of renovations – it’s still ongoing, but it’s very nice, possibly the nicest domestic airports in New Zealand.

Modern Art!

Loving the chill weather down here, it’s about 4 degrees and a lovely fresh chill breeze – as a Wellingtonian who’s been suffering muggy Auckland weather for the past 11 months, it’s absolutely blissful – especially when walking as you don’t get too hot.

Only downside is that you definitely notice the dampness down here in winter, Hagley park was very chill, dark, damp and muddy – kind of like the stereotypical cold harsh park you’d find in a murder movie. :-/

There aren’t many signs of the earthquake damage in Riccarton, but as I walked into the CBD a few more signs of it started appearing – temporary offices that have popped up in prefab modules, the odd empty lot and corner stores holding up their awnings with wooden frames.

Building's OK, but don't trust the awning...

A number of buildings like this are around the city - look structurally OK from the outside, but cordoned off and abandoned.

The bridge of remembrance - looks like it's survived OK, but cordoned off.

Tower block under deconstruction.

As I started getting into the proper CBD, it’s amazing to see how almost all the visible tower blocks have cranes attacking away at them, pulling them down.

Not sure why NZ uses cranes and diggers so much, vs explosives, but I presume there’s some cost or safety reasoning behind it – or maybe for better material recycling?

The container mall is really cute, lots of neat colours, layouts and designs.

Double-layer!

Where did the rest of that building go? O_o

Once in the CBD, you start to realise how much of the city’s core has been taken out of service, it would be like closing all of Lambton Quay and the Terrace in Wellington as well as pockets of Cuba St and Courtney Place.

The deconstruction is still ongoing, when I left the area at 17:30 with the sun fading there were still diggers working away in the background, although not as many as I would have expected.

In many ways I’m surprised that there was so little visible demolition presence – there were the odd person and sign guarding off-limit areas and contractors coming and going, but I was expecting to see hordes of diggers and cranes pulling stuff down.

I guess the methods used tend not to showcase swarms of workers – I don’t think it’s a case of them not working quickly, since I can see the huge amount of the city that’s been cleared, something which would not have been an easy feat.

Anything in brick got totally fucked - I guess there's a reason why there aren't many brick buildings in Wellington...

Look carefully at the building on the right.... or more accurately, the 10% that remains of it.

A lone tower block, surrounded by blocks of cleared rubble

Resembles more of an industrial wasteland than a CBD

There’s a huge amount of empty of space around the CBD – each of these spaces was once a building, it’s hard to comprehend how much has actually collapsed, since most of the rubble has been removed by now, some of the scale is lost.

The CBD has a kind of dystopian feel to it with all the missing buildings, odd piles of rubble and the random boy racer cruising through a deserted street in a low riding car with booming stereo and exhaust, whilst army soldiers stand guard.

Another empty lot, another defacto carpark.

Whilst still standing, there are a number of buildings still pending a demolition.

Shiny tower blocks, with boarded up windows #juxtaposition

I can see why they're going to demolish the cathedral - no way it can simply be repaired with this much damage

After seeing how many brick buildings have collapsed and how badly, I can’t understand for any calls to save the cathedral or any of the other heritage buildings that came down – the earthquake shows that those materials are just too weak and dangerous for the geological conditions here in NZ.

Whilst it’s good to keep some amount of heritage buildings, the only way they’re going to be able to do it here is to build with modern materials and then replicate the look and feel of the heritage architecture, eg cladding a new church in the old one’s bricks, but not using it for load bearing walls.

At the end of the day, people come first – we shouldn’t keep old dangerous designs around just for heritage purposes, civilization is about constant evolution and improvement for the benefit of the living.

Guess the missing shape!

Some buildings are wrecked in some really weird ways - the demolition of the surrounding neighbors does offer a bit of a different view into the architecture of some of these older buildings, including weird additions.

Noooooo Little India is closed :'(

Most of the rubble lots have been cleared, the few that remain tend to have been compacted down

I’ll be getting more of a look around the city over the next few days, but it’s already pretty clear that Christchurch is going to have a massive amount of work cut out for it, to get the CBD back up and running.

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Sunflower Vegetarian Restaurant Auckland

Posted on 2012-07-06 by Jethro Carr

I found Sunflower one weeknight when on a quest to find something delicious to eat as a vegetarian that wasn’t some overpriced and unsatisfying yuppie Britomart food.

I ended up wandering up High Street and found the Sunflower Vegetarian Restaurant hidden back at 50 High St – the sign outside is easy to spot, but the restaurant is hidden down the back, sandwiched between two other asian-style takeaway joins, so don’t be surprised if it’s not immediately obvious to find.

Once you do spot the entrance, the asian-only menu writing outside is a little off-putting to an uncultured westerner like myself, however once inside the staff are very friendly and have english menus – even forks if you’re so inclined. ;-)

Sunflower is one of those gems with a real minimal aged decor.... but you don't come here for the decoration, you'll be way too busy chowing down the delicious food.

The food at Sunflower is primarily vegetarian mock-meat meals, making meat style meals including “chicken” and “pork” with tofu and other components to mimic the flavors and textures – this is actually one of my first encounters with this style of cuisine, and whilst it’s not something I’d eat every day, it’s a nice treat and generally well received.

Mmmm delicious fried "chicken".

Delicious noodles!

More noodles with "pork" strips

It’s  good find and the meals are filling without being unreasonably massive – I’ve found that the meals are best enjoyed by ordering a couple items to share – and the fried “chicken” is amazing IMHO.

Only real issue with Sunflower, is that it only opens weeknights – since I tend to mostly be in Auckland CBD on weekends, I don’t get a whole heap of opportunities to go there.

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Null Modem Trick

Posted on 2012-07-06 by Jethro Carr

I dug out my Soekris 4801 and needed to hookup a serial connection to figure out what the was actually running and to reconfigure as required.

After digging through my cables I found a DB-9 serial female to female cable and hooked it up, only to frustratingly find that the cable wasn’t infact a null modem cable, and actually a somewhat obscure female-to-female DCE-to-DTE.

Then I realized, that I don’t need to buy yet-another-cable to have to carry around, instead my USB-to-serial adapter already features a long cable – so just attach an adapter and solved!

As long as the adapter allows you to unscrew the screw thread sockets, you can then fit it directly between the serial device and the USB-to-serial adapter. :-)

The 80s called, it wants it's communications method back!

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Christchurch Meetups

Posted on 2012-07-06 by Jethro Carr

I’m in Christchurch for the next 4 days – if you’re down here and would like to catch up, please drop me an email, IM or SMS and I’ll make some time to catch you up.

My schedule isn’t fully under my control as I’m down here for some family things and a Lisa-friend’s wedding, but it looks like I have a lot of Saturday day free and some of Monday day, before I depart Monday evening.

At this stage there is going to be coffee 11:30 on Saturday July 7th at Crafted Coffee in the shipping container mall, so feel free to come along and say hi. :-)

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Midwinter Sale

Posted on 2012-07-05 by Jethro Carr

With plans to be moving shortly, I’ve decided I really need to make the effort to get rid of a lot of old bits of technology as well as other items I no longer want around the home.

Ideally, the less physical stuff I own, the better, so going to be pretty ruthless with this tidy up. I’ve already listed a large number of items on TradeMe and there will be a lot more over the next few weeks, so check back to see. :-)

There’s also a small data center worth of Ethernet cabling – Cat5e & Cat6 plus general PC cabling and power strips & cables that I’ll want to sell off at some point as well, so if you’re interested in a bulk lot of near new gear, email me what you’re after. :-)

 

I’ve also got some stuff to give away, or it’ll get dumped if nobody has any use for it – the sad bit about technology, is that due to it always getting faster, better and cheaper, the old stuff is often destined for landfill. :'(

First up, the following are free to a good home – you simply have to collect from me in Auckland or in Wellington. Or if it’s small and fits in a parcel post bag, donate me $6 via PayPal for postage costs and I’ll ship it to you anywhere in NZ.

Windows 95 - with newfangled USB technology!

Selection of software for Windows 98-XP era systems.

Visual basic book & CD

GSM black & white - should work on both Vodafone and 2degrees.

PCMCIA and PCI dialup modems

64MB + 128M of PC100 SDRAM

HP PCI sound card

Seagate 160GB IDE Hard Drive, 7200 RPM.

Book reading clip on light thingy

As usual, all this stuff is purely on a whatever-the-hell-rules-jethro-makes-up-today basis, if you want any of it, comment below or email me.

Remember, you must be able to pickup or donate me the shipping costs. :-)

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LDAP & RADIUS centralised authentication

Posted on 2012-06-27 by Jethro Carr

I recently did a presentation at the June AuckLUG meeting on configuring LDAP and RADIUS centralised authentication solutions.

It’s a little rough (first time I’ve done a presentation on the topic), but hopefully is of use to anyone interested in setting up an LDAP server. In my case I’m using an OpenLDAP server with my self-developed open source LDAPAuthManager tool.

You can watch the presentation (about 2 hours) on YouTube, it includes a lot of verbal and visual demonstrations, so conveys a lot more detail than the slides alone.

You can download a copy of the slides here if wanted (pdf).

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Soldering Adventures

Posted on 2012-06-24 by Jethro Carr

As part of my efforts to learn more about electronics, I recently obtained a power supply kit that breaks the standard 5V USB output into 3.3V and 5V bread-board connectable outputs from Mindkits (who resell Sparkfun kits in NZ, amongst other stuff).

I went for a USB-powered model rather than a typical round-pin DC supply, since I have an abundance of USB power sources with me all the time (both laptop and wall adaptors) and it’s much better than having yet another damn power brick hanging around.

I finally managed to get around to making the time to try it out this weekend and dug out the soldering iron to tackle the challenge – past soldering exploits have never fared particularly well, but I figure sooner or later I’ll learn something and make a working device. ;-)

How hard could this possibly be? :-P

One of the biggest challenges I found was actually holding such a small PCB still, whilst trying to align solder and the iron – think one of my next purchases will be some sort of clamp to hold the board in place.

I’m not convinced that my soldering iron is particularly good either, need to do some research on the best type of soldering head (round vs chisel?). I’d probably go better with more gun shaped soldering iron than the round pencil design, I just tend to find it easier to align.

Ready, set, solder!

I started off doing the small components like resisters and small caps, before moving on to the voltage regular, switch, USB port and pin headers.

Apologies to any electrical engineers or skilled hobbyist reading this blog, but my soldering is pretty terrible, as you can see. Take note that this is the first thing I’ve soldered that actually works :-P

Oh god, oh god my eyes!

I started with the resisters in the middle, as you can see my soldering was pretty terrible there – used too much solder and ended up making large messy blobs.

Later I got better at briefly heating the legs and then applying the solder in a way that allowed it to run down and bond with the PCB, so my later joins got a lot better, eg the USB socket with it’s 4 close small pins.

I got an impromptu lesson to using a multimeter as the circuit wouldn’t work initially – I had managed to make a PSU that was always on (ignoring the switch status) and provided no 3.3V output.

Thanks to the simplicity of this kit, it was pretty easy to test each component to figure out where my bad joins were and I re-soldered a few of the bad earlier joins.

The only real headache was the voltage regulator – for some reason I had real difficulty getting the solder to bond with the middle pin and the PCB and had to redo it several times – it’s still not perfect TBH :-(

Assembled :-D

Shiny shiny! (OMG, an artsy picture without using Instagram!)

So far the kit seems pretty good, it was really easy to assemble with the clear silkscreen markings – most work I had to do was lookup the resister code/colors, which is trivial thanks to Electrodroid on my phone. :-)

The one design issue I do have with the kit, is that the positioning of the breadboard connectors requires you to break the header pins into single units, but doing this really weakens the design, since it’s just one tiny solder joint holding the pin to the PCB – I do fear the force of inserting and removing from breadboards will wear it down a bit over time.

To counter this a bit, I’ve stuck a blob of hot glue around the headers, to give them a bit more integrity – although the 3.3V pin soldering joint is playing up and might need redoing anyway.

Hot glue solves all! (also stuck some around the voltage regulator as one of the solder joints isn't that great, but I can't fix it without risking ruining the PCB trace)

Looking at the round-DC connector version of the kit, the design instead has two pairs of 2x pin headers, which I suspect will make it a bit more sturdy.

Overall whilst it’s a painful learning curve trying to get the soldering right, I didn’t burn myself *too* badly and whilst not a shining example of art, the board works and powers up.

Next time, I’ll be tackling the RS232 shifter kit and then working to hook up an RS232 power to an Arduino’s digital pins using a software serial driver. And after that, I might have a go at making some temperature sensor 1-wire boards to install around my server case using the small square prototyping boards I brought.

Hopefully by then my soldering will be an acceptable level. :-)

Next kit to make - the RS232 shifter, with lots of lovely close resisters to solder.

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Lenovo & tp-fan fun

Posted on 2012-06-18 by Jethro Carr

I quite like my Lenovo X201i laptop, I’ve been using it for a couple years now and it’s turned out to be the ideal combination of size and usability – the 12″ form factor means I can carry it around easily enough, it has plenty of performance (particularly since I upgraded it to an SSD and 8GB of RAM) and I can see myself using it for the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately it does have a few issues… the crappy “Thinkpad Wireless” default card that comes in it caused me no end of headaches and the BIOS has always been a

Thankfully most of the major BIOS flaws have been resolved in part due to subsequent updates, but also thanks to the efforts of the Linux kernel developers to work around weird bits of the BIOS’s behavior.

Sadly not all issues have been resolved, in particular, the thermal management is still flawed and fails to adequately handle the maximum heat output of the laptop. I recently discovered that when you’re unfortunate enough to run some very CPU intensive single-threaded processes, by keeping 1/4 cores at 100% for an extended period of time the Lenovo laptop will overheat and issue an emergency thermal shutdown to the OS.

During this time the fan increases in speed, but still has quite a low noise level and airflow volume, which is very hot to the touch, it appears the issue is due to the Lenovo BIOS not ramping the fan speed up high enough to meet the heat being produced.

Thanks to the excellent Thinkwiki site, there’s detailed information on how you can force specific fan speeds using the thinkpad_acpi kernel module, as well as details on various scripts and fan control solutions people have written.

What’s interesting is that when running the fan on level 7 (the maximum speed), the fan still doesn’t spin particularly fast or loudly, no more than when the overheating occurs. But reading the wiki shows that there is a “disengaged” mode, where the fan will run at the true maximum system speed.

It appears to me that the BIOS has the 100% speed setting for the fan set at too low a threshold, the smart fix would be to correct the BIOS so that 100% is actually the true maximum speed of the fan and to scale up slowly to keep the CPU at a reasonable temperature.

In order to fix it for myself, I obtained the tp-fan program, which runs a python daemon to monitor and adjust the fan speeds in the system based on the configured options. Sadly it’s not able to scale between “100%” and “disengaged” speeds, meaning I have the choice of quiet running or loud running but no middle ground.

Thanks to tpfan’s UI, I was able to tweak the speed positions until I obtained the right balance, the fans will now run at up to 100% for all normal tasks, often sitting just under 50 degrees at 60% fan speed.

When running a highly CPU intensive task, the fan will jump up to the max speed and run at that until the temperature drops sufficiently.  In practice it’s worked pretty well, I don’t get too much jumping up and down of the fan speed and my system hasn’t had any thermal shutdowns since I started using it.

Whilst it’s clearly a fault with the Lenovo BIOS not handling the fans properly, it raised a few other questions for me:

  • Why does the OS lack logic to move CPU intensive tasks between cores? Shuffling high intensive loads between idle cores would reduce the heat and require less active cooling by the system fans – even on a working system that won’t overheat, this would be a good way to reduce power consumption.
  • Why doesn’t the OS have a feature to throttle the CPU clock speed down as the CPU temperature rises? It would be better than having the all or nothing approach that it currently enforces, better to have a slower computer than a fried computer.

Clearly I need some more free time to start writing kernel patches for my laptop, although I fear what new dangerous geeky paths this might lead me into. :-/

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MOTAT Visit

Posted on 2012-06-18 by Jethro Carr

Whilst I’ve been in Auckland for about 8 months now and driven past it a number of times, I had yet to visit the Auckland Museum Of Transport And Technology (MOTAT). However this month (June) there’s free entry for all visitors, which gave me a pretty compelling reason to head over there and check it out. :-)

Being a free weekend, it was pretty nuts with huge crowds there, but the staff did a great job and once we got in, as long as we avoided the major kids-focused attractions, the crowds weren’t an issue.

And wow, I’m glad I went. It’s actually one of the best things I’ve found in Auckland –  huge range of trams, from Wellington, Auckland and Melbourne, a massive aviation display and a solid number of trains, cars and other displays including Antarctic machines, Kiwiana display, old printing systems and a Victorian village.

Definitely the place to take geeky out-of-towners wanting something to see other than just traffic jams and the sky tower whilst in Auckland. ;-)

Motorised Auckland Fire Truck

Seeing how exposed drivers were on early cars are trucks is amazing, it must have been like driving whilst sitting on a park bench…. and no such thing as a seatbelt, or even doors to stop yourself from falling out sometimes :-/

I didn’t get many pictures of the other cars they have, although there’s a big selection of icon cars from the 20th century – quite surprising seeing how big some of the early models were, compared to the compact size of modern vehicles – some of their engines must have been at least 4 times the physical size of my modern 1.3l engine.

Mechanical printing press.

The mechanical printing press was pretty interesting to watch – the machine has an arm with various suction cups on it, which is used to pickup each sheet of paper and feed it into the print rollers.

The photo doesn’t really do it justice, so I’ve uploaded a youtube video of it in action here, you wouldn’t expect something that looks like such a crude mechanical machine to do such as accurate job of feeding and printing the pages.

Wonder how long until the news paper printing presses of the 2000s era end up in there as well, with the shift to digital it might not be that much longer…

Trams! And a Melbourne tram no less! :-D

Wellington Tram! (double <3)

Steam powered tram - it's effectively an engine only, designed to pull/push tram trailers.

Auckland Tram!

Double decker Wellington tram! I wonder how popular the upstairs was on a cold windy Wellington day. :-/

Map of Auckland's tram network - really wish they had kept it, Auckland needs all the public transport it can get. :-/

Trams on Queen Street.

It’s probably pretty clear that I love trams and MOTAT offers a great experience with a large number of them in excellent condition, as well as a number of ongoing restoration projects in the works, including an interesting sounding “freight tram”.

There’s at least a couple Melbourne trams and several trams from Wellington which are in good running condition, not sure about the Auckland ones, but they look pretty good so I presume they may also be in running condition,

What’s really cool is that since MOTAT is split into two sites, they run several trams regularly which you can ride between the two sites, with an in-between station at Auckland Zoo – you get a free return ticket with your MOTAT entrance fee.

Tram ride ticket :-D

Historical sandwich maker :-P (just kidding dear! don't hurt me!)

 

The mini from Goodbye Pork Pie

Retro buses!

Massive locomotives - would love to see that steam train when it was running!

Steam punk throne! m/

OMG OMG OMG steam train!!

I was fortunate in that I chose to come on the right weekend, as the steam train only runs on select Sundays. Whilst it’s not a long run of track, it’s always a treat to see steam locomotives when running – I took a video and uploaded to youtube of the train running. :-D

Standing on trams is great for holding cute females closely. Watch out Melbourne ladies! ;-)

Tank rides! I didn't get a chance to go on it myself, but looks quite fun. They move surprisingly quickly over the muddy field too

Quite neat seeing planes in various stages of assembly in the workshop.

Lots of planes outside in various conditions, many military options, some DC3s and some sea planes.

Massive sea plane - size becomes really noticeable when you see the people on the ground near it.... it amazes me that these things actually fly sometimes.

Avro Lancaster Bomber

Bombing bay... I wouldn't want to be anywhere near bombs that size when they drop....

The Avro Lancaster is one of the best pieces in the aviation hall – it’s got to be one of the most famous and well known aircraft of the war, but for all the pictures and videos, you don’t really realize how massive the aircraft really is until you get up close to it IRL.

Especially the massive tires, rather than modern designs with groups of numerous smaller tires, the Lancaster has two massive tractor-sized tires that retract up into the wing.

Apparently one of my great grandfathers was on these during WW2, although I’m unsure of his exact position/role onboard.

Ah, the NZ skyhawks.... the most action they ever got was firing a warning shot over the bow of an illegal fishing ship, then got to sit in plastic wrap for years until the government decided nobody wanted to buy them, so scrapped them.

Aerial Mapping Plane

Large number of interesting bombers like this around the hall.

Old NZ Air Force VIP transport.

NZ-build Gyrocopter :-D

"Flying Flea" kitset aircraft

Overall it was a pretty excellent trip – we spent about 3 hours there, but I could have spent maybe 5 or 6 even, if you stopped to do everything and took the time to watch more of the scheduled activities and events.

It’s actually one of the few touristy things that I’d be happy to pay the entrance fee for, at $14 per adult, it’s pretty cheap – especially when compared to other Auckland attractions like Kelly Tartons ($34 per adult, maybe 2hrs activity at most).

It’s easy to get to with a car, there’s an abundance of parking, and there’s also a bus stop right outside if you’re going to brave the Auckland public transport system. :-)

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