Long story short, KNetworkManager overrides static assignments. What a piece of crap. So I had to uninstall that and once again tackle the delights of manually setting up a PSK secured network. Settings that work for me are below. Note that they may not work for you depending on your type of encryption.

Also, its not perfect. If the access point is not fully operational at the point where it runs these scripts, it will not connect, and will not be able to connect without a restart. I don’t know why but another iwlist scan will not list any networks. Something to do with a networking restart kills the wifi card.

/etc/networking/interfaces file looks like:
—————————————-file—————————————-
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up sudo wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
post-down sudo killall -q wpa_supplicant

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1
—————————————-end—————————————-
And /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf looks like:
—————————————-file—————————————-
ap_scan=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid=”[the ssid]”
psk=”[the pass]”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=RSN WPA
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
}
—————————————-end—————————————-

I’ve now moved back to Kubuntu, and I am sure that I am going to stay.

Nearly top of the list is to get my XBox streaming back up and running. This post details my Fuppes installation process and thoughts. Initial thoughts is that this doesn’t look very mature. There is no GUI and it was a pain to install. I still haven’t tested with the XBox yet.

Installation:

I used this tutorial from the ubuntu forum to install fuppes.

The largest problems came from 1) the program is shockingly designed and 2) the config files need to be spot on or they don’t work at all. Here are my (mostly) working config files.

fuppes Configuration file

fuppes vfolder configuration file

The only thing left to do now is to get it to automatically start, but there are lots of posts about that, and its not a priority.

The solution (so far) is to use an older ATI Catalyst driver. I have tested up to 9.12 to be working. Download, sudo sh -i ***.run, sudo aticonfig –initial -f, restart, sudo amdcccle, to setup. Done.

Turns out that all I had to do was disable the SSDP discovery service and the Upnp service that comes with it.  That

Setup:
xBee ZNet 2.5 in API mode using sleep’s.

Problem:
Periodically (aren’t they always the worst!) the xBee would not perform some of the functions that I asked it to. For example, it did not like sending AT commands after a reset, sometimes it would miss vital transmit requests.

Solution:
When using sleep mode, some nasty characters are left in the xBee’s buffer when coming in/out of sleep mode. This would cause the next command to not function properly. To fix, always transmit a “\n” (I.e. line feed) before you transmit a command. Eg. somewhere just before you transmit your data from the UART, stick a your_tx_routine(”\n”) in.

So my power supply on the old PC blew, zapped and caused a noise, and I decided that it was about time I got a new one.  It had lasted me 7 years, overclocked for all of that and had about 14000 hours on it.  She had a good innings.

So, on to the juicy stuff!

Photo notes:

• Look at the image of the RAM. They came together in a mess, squished together. I was worried that they wouldnt work.  Although, I haven’t properly Memtested them yet.
• Look at the last image of Win 7. 8 Cores of yummyness. (I didn’t get it either, but 4 cores, 2 hyperthreads per core, windows sees it as 8 cores.
• Took ages to get windows installed, because Win 7 wouldn’t install the graphics card properly and always BSOD’ed. Had to install vista then install Win 7 over the top.
• First time I turned it on, I hadn’t seated the heatsink correctly. CPU temp was 84C! Ouch!

After a period of about 3-4 months which was spent on the bubble forcing idea, it was decided that it wasn’t going anywhere and it was cancelled.  This meant that I had lost a great deal of time and needed to make it up.  So, whats been going on recently:

• Euronoise paper on entrainment mitigation
• End of Year Report 2
• Draft thesis chapters
• Presentation for the EOYR2 and euronoise
• Impact filtering
• Amplifier redesign
• Total Sound field inversion

I think I have accomplished more in the last month or so than I have in the whole of last year!

Phil

First off, I have started the impact detection routines and suprisingly, they are going very well.  What I have to do is attempt to distinguish between impacts and bubbles and I thought I would have real problems, but initial results are promising with an 80-90% success rate.  There are only a few more things to do then I should have a working prototype to test.

Impact Interpretation Algorithm Example

Secondly I am still playing with the anechoic.  Specifically, altering the shape of the rubber to make triangles which in theory should help absorption and scattering, however the results are inconclusive.  They seem to be showing that the unaltered flat rubber is infact better than any sculpted one!  Whether this is because of a lack of aborbive material (because the triangles go all the way through) or just a fluke, I dont know so I am repeating the tests with double thickness materials to find out why!

Also I have performed more stairs tests with the flat rubber-foam lining but this time with different size drops produced from different sized needles.  4 hydrophones were used to capture the data so when I come to the position decoding (shouldn’t be long now!) I have something to play with.  This also helps with the size estimation routines.

Phil

I now have two tanks, the small box that was used for the stairway experiments and the new 0.8m diameter circular tank, on the roof collecting data.  The small box is still lined in the anechoic, but the large is not.  Because of this, we get lots of nasty reflections.

What I have been able to do is start processing the total sound field, much like the many acoustic disdrometers of Nystuen et. al. but in a more sophisticated statistical way.  He fits a distribution around the spectrum of the sound via various fudge factors, as its know in the electronics world.  What we have done is used Principal Component Analysis to find the parts of the signal that really are changing with different disdributions and rain rates.  This way we get the optimal conversion between a sound spectrum and a DSD.

Up to now I have only processed it on second-by-second data due to a lack of it.  But in time I aim to try minute-long datasets in order to properly correlate against the optical disdrometer and the extrapolate back down to one second.

Below are some images of the process; they are self explanatory:

To do this, I imported the raw drop data into Matlab and manually set all of the areas that had any bubble noise to zero.  Then I went back to my software and averaged the pulses like before.  Back in matlab I filtered the average (because there was a VLF frequency that would mess up the power measurements) and calculated the mean power.

The results gave an average absorption coefficient of 0.49.  A slightly better, but similar result that from yesterday.  This helps to conclude the anechoic nature of the lining.

Phil