FInally moved the blog

Alrighty folks, I finally moved to a wordpress blog. Which itself made me learn alot.

You can find it here
www.nomadiccodemonkey.com

While the content have been migrated to the new blog, I will just leave all the content here. Hopefully someone can find the information here useful

On the other hand, just glad I finally have a place for me to post source code in a blog properly

Long Lost Musical Instrument

Not quite tech related, but this is stone age technology, believed to be used in hunting and herding during that time. Which later evolved into a musical instrument.

This is Xun, though this I bought from souvenir shop in China long time ago. Still I think it is pretty cool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xun_(instrument) 

RFID On Arduino

So I got myself an Arduino powered Android Accessory Development Kit, not long ago. The kit have quite a lot of sensor, one of them, an 125kHz RFID reader. Which is cool except, the kit doesn't comes with the tag necessary. 

So I finally got the tag(s) which is compatible. The reader from seeestudio have 2 ways to interface with the arduino, one is via Wiegand Mode, the other via UART, i.e Serial. 

I just use UART, because one the board is actually a Arduino Mega, so I got enough hardware serial to use. And I am using the extension board, so It make it way easy to use the extra hardware serial. But if you are just using an arduino, the Reader is actually pretty easy to use via Software Serial using NewSoftSerial library. Easier if you are using the UART version of this

Originally I thought of just forwarding the ID from the tag into a serial without any translation. From the docs, there is a checksum that we can use. It do make using an arduino as a middleman not so wasteful. It also define an header and ends, which can also be used to track error etc. 

From the docs, I have create a reader, the code is in https://gist.github.com/1626692

This is just a very early version, hacked within 15 minutes. So it don't check the checksum, etc. 

You can check the result using the serial monitor, it just output the code as I swipe it on the reader itself, 

This reader can read one tag at a time unlike the commercial one, where the tag have random delay to make reading multiple tag possible. This is a pretty cheap, like 13USD, cannot really compare with the really big commercial one. And the distance is short too, like 8 cm. 

Despite that, it can be a fun toy to play with, not quite sure what I am going to do with this though. More to come(?)

Bill Watcher Update

Just a little update, since the last post. The project is pretty much finalized, just sorting out the infrastructure, we got a server, but need a little setup. Since last post, have switch from 960gs to twitter bootstrap. A few extra page. Many UI stuff is done, though need to add social media button and disqus. 

One more thing to think of now is Localization, which this project have a fork for Malay version, still thinking of ways to make things easier...

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2011 in review: The Year It Get Too Close For Comfort

For a long time geeks like me tend to hide behind the scene when it comes to politics, unlike the US there is no law like the DMCA in Malaysia. We Malaysian don't see often see a law pass that directly affect IT industry here. Until this year, suddenly we have Computing Professional Board bill.

Which you can find a lot more online, but in short it is about regulate programmers that involve in Critical National Information Infrastructure. Which the list provided is too vague for comfort.

So what I hope to do next year, involve more somehow. What this year have shown us, ignorance and apathy can bite. Not all law have an open day that we all know, like the CPB. So law can be passed under our nose, and it will bite, and bite hard.

p.s Not including my own post on the Computing Bill, because it have quite a lot of inaccuracy