Simon Rumble’s blog

I've been watching the space of low-power wireless networking for some time, as it has some cool possibilities for sensor networks. ZigBee is one such standard that seems to be gaining support. It's a lot simpler and lower power than other protocols like Bluetooth.

Make magazine had a really interesting article recently about using ZigBee inertial sensors to track the crashes and hits taken by a roller derby team, and use it to trigger "zap", "pow", "boom" sound effects. Very cool, and it all seemed quite simple!

I'd like to use the ZigBee temperature sensors in my garden. The long-term plan is to monitor the weather and supply tank water through an irrigation system only when it's needed.

So has anyone used this ZigBee stuff and know any good resources to start out?

Already had a few responses about wireless sensors. Des suggests looking at SquidBee which is an open implementation. Quite interesting.

Rich recommends a book, Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, which I've ordered. Looks very interesting. He also suggested Little Bird Electronics' workshops on the Arduino. There's one next weekend and I'm very tempted...

Thanks for the tips guys!

On Saturday NSW local councils (or at least the ones that haven't been dissolved) had their elections. I was handing out material for The Greens in St Peters and one of the voters asked me how we were directing preferences. This got me thinking about how the votes are counted, and I'm still no wiser.

The ballot paper was arranged with parties or groups along the top and, beneath the line, the candidates for those groups. Voters were instructed to number either above the line or below the line, and I seem to remember to number as many boxes as they wished. Confusingly for those of us used to above-the-line voting in Federal Senate elections, the ALP how-to-vote suggested voting 1 in the ALP group and 2 in the "independent" group, above-the-line.

First step was to go into the polling place and ask the person in charge. She didn't know how it worked. When I got home, I tried looking it up on the Electoral Commission NSW site and didn't come out any the wiser, though it appeared to be a straight optional preferential system. Then on election night Antony Green's results included a quota column, which got me very confused, because that's something normally associated with our Senate elections, which are proportional representation (by state).

Digging a little deeper, I discover that Optional Preferential is used for popularly elected mayors (a la Sydney, Byron Bay etc) and council wards with two or fewer council positions. Wards with three or more council positions get Proportional Representation. Helpfully, the Electoral Commission site gives a good rundown on proportional representation systems, but doesn't mention which system is used for NSW local government elections!

So I have two things that confuse me here. First is how are preferences distributed for above-the-line voters? Since there was no list of preference flows at the polling place, as you get with Senate elections, I presume it's just numbered down the list of candidates in that group list.

Next is how are quotas transferred? For example in Central Ward of Marrickville Council we seem to have 1.44 quotas in the current count. What happens to the 0.44 quota in Group C if they don't make it over the line? If it's optional preferential, if the voter didn't continue from that group, are the votes thrown away? Wouldn't this lead to the full quota not being filled?

You would imagine this kind of information would be kinda essential for the Electoral Commission to disseminate. I'm sure the counting handbook tells the returning officers how this works, but it's not available online.

Anyone got any better information about how this works?

Update: Rich points out this page (which I'm sure wasn't on the site this morning, but perhaps I missed it) which answers my second question. It's a quota-based system, with a formula similar to the Senate in federal elections. Digging further I found this page which answers my first question. Above-the-line votes go down the list for the numbered groups, as I expected.

Geek resourcefulness at its best. This just got posted to the MythTV users list:

Subject: Cats and MythTV...
Recently my cat has decided that the top of my MyhTV box is a great place to have a nap... This is a situation I am not happy about, in spite of the positives (like noise reduction), I am concerned about fur shed and heat trapped. Moving the MythTV box to a place the cat wouldn't be able to climb/jump on top of isn't an option. I have tried putting a large plastic toy (a piggy bank) on top of the MythTV box, but the cat has found she can push that aside...

So, anything that hurts the cat is NOT an option, on the other hand, stopping the cat from napping on the top of that PC case is a a priority.

Suggestions?

Geeks being great problem solvers, the responses are well worth a read.

I can't remember who it was, but someone on the Planet Linux Australia was talking about using cheap USB flash drives to teach RAID. I thought it was Russell Coker but can't find it now.

Anyway, just wanted to point out that 1GB USB flash drives are $9 at Dick Smith. Insanity! I remember paying UK£80 for my 1GB flash drive. Not all that long ago.

Something is eating my garlic. Little black bugs. What's that all about then? From what I've been reading, garlic is something that repels garden pests, and that you can use to get rid of garden pests. Yet everything else in the garden is doing fine.

In other garden news, my potatoes have shot up and the fruit trees have started growing leaves.

Today's Crikey carries a letter that reminds us that Family First, currently causing problems for the ALP in the Senate, are a creation of... the ALP.

Andrew Burke writes: Every time Stephen Fielding casts his vote to defeat a government Bill, as he has with the luxury car tax, let's remember who's responsible for his election -- the Victorian ALP. If their preferences in 2004 had gone to the Greens rather than Fielding then there would have been one more Green vote and the Bill would have passed, with the Greens' sensible amendment to exempt efficient cars. Over the next couple of years it may prove to be a very painful mistake indeed.

For those wanting to follow Australian politics, it's critical to understand the factional structure of the Australian Labor Party and the influence this has on events. For example, the Left has traditionally been given the Deputy Premiership of NSW, while the Premier has always (until this afternoon) been from the Right.

The problem for outsiders like me, trying to understand the internal machinations of the ALP, is to know which MP is aligned to which faction, never mind all the myriad sub-factions. Factions inside the ALP often hate each other more than they even hate members of other parties, and political bastardry is common within the ALP.

So what I'd like to know is this: is there a resource somewhere that lists all the ALP's MPs and the factions to which they're aligned? Is this perhaps something that should be attached to WikiProject Australian politics or similar? A category attached to each MP's Wikipedia page would be a good place to start.

Oh, and bye Morris, bye Costa. You won't be missed.

So far this is my favourite little UI hack that I've found within Google Chrome. Kind of appropriate that a search engine company would get this right, I suppose.

If you're familiar with Firefox's search feature, Ctrl-F to enter a search term finds the results within the page progressively as you type in the little search box. Chrome moves the search box to the top-right and highlights the answers as you type. Even cooler, it highlights the location of matches in the current page along the side inside the scroll bar, so you can see the frequency of the search term.

That's so obvious now you wonder why nobody thought of it before, particularly given this is the same presentation used by graphical diff tools that developers use every day. Very cool.

Update: Julien Goodwin points out that this feature has been in Opera for over a year. I don't use Opera though, so I've never seen it.

I've been playing around with Google Chrome this morning on my work (Windows) machine. This is Google's browser software, and I have to say I'm impressed. I had expected something a fair bit less polished, but instead we've got a near-usable browser already! Something that still hasn't happened with Apple's Safari on Windows. What's more, this will (soon) be available on all platforms.

The new browser is fast, stable, slick and smooth. The chrome-less interface is very impressive, and makes perfect sense when you consider the browser the centre of your computer interface, as Google intends. Memory use is very modest, with each tab separated out into its own process. In total it's using 175 megs of memory, versus 152 megs for Firefox for similar activity. Importantly though, it doesn't seem to bloat out with repeated use.

JavaScript works fine with Google applications, less well with some other sites. It's certainly zippy though! Gmail and Google Analytics zoom along nicely.

Developer tools look interesting so far, with a DOM inspector hidden under the confusingly-named JavaScript console -- there's a console there, but a whole lot more too! It would be hard to have FireBug-level functionality in this first release, but there's a good chunk of it there. I've got some work to do making sure everything works in this new browser, so the development tools (or lack thereof) will either make life easier or (as with IE) very hard.

The only thing I can see preventing me from making this my main browser is the lack of an ad blocker, but I'm sure one will be along shortly. Once it's available for Linux, with an ad blocker, I suspect I'll be making the switch.