It’s been a while…

I’ve tried to blog again about four or five times since my last post, but never been arsed to finish it. To be honest, my need to post things about my life online has been overtaken by my Twitter feed. I just haven’t been bothered to sit down and write another blog post. However, now I’ve got a whole lot of time on my hands, so I thought I’d give it another go.

Last time I blogged, I had just finished my third semester of PSD at Swinburne. Now, I’ve finished my fourth semester of PSD at Swinburne, and have just settled into my Industry Based Learning work placement.

The fourth semester of PSD was very long, arduous, but in many ways rewarding. Languages in Software Development was a very interesting subject, although some overly-complex concepts weren’t explained enough to see how it’s relevant (like Lambda Calculus), but we still did some very interesting things (like write our own parsers in JavaCC). Database Programming had some very useful concepts which were overshadowed by the amount of time I spent bashing my head against the wall trying to get JDBC+Hibernate+Derby+JSP to work nicely. Advanced .NET Programming was very rewarding, particularly the portfolio work, though I’m still not sure why it’s called Advanced .NET Programming. It should really be called Concurrent Programming. If it had been called Concurrent Programming, I would have chosen it as my elective without hesitation. (Previously I had chosen Games Programming, then IT Security, then in the second week changed to Advanced .NET). Software Project Practices and Management was rather dry but necessary.

One fun part of the last semester was the portfolio piece I built for Advanced .NET Programming. We had to build an application to show our knowledge of concurrent programming and .NET-specific concepts. So, I built a multithreaded streaming radio server. As far as I know, it’s the only C# implementation of the Nullsoft Shoutcast protocol. I used P/Invoke to read from Wave and FLAC audio files using libsndfile, and encode them using LAME. They were then distributed to other clients via a number of worker threads. I also decided to code it so the audio streaming was very extensible, using standard IO streams to pass raw PCM audio around the app. This led to some interesting pieces of code, including a generated text-to-speech audio stream, and a playlist stream which encapsulated other streams and iterated through them, completely transparently to the code reading from the stream. From this I was able to create a sentient automatic DJ: one that would go through a collection of FLAC music files, play one, and then generate text-to-speech to introduce the next song, and occasionally go to a commercial break. Fun stuff.

This year is going to be an interesting year. I’m on my Industry Based Learning placement this year. Instead of studying, I’m going to be working; gaining real-world experience and earning money. This will be very useful when I go for a graduate position, as a year of real experience will put me ahead of others.

My IBL work placement is at the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, part of the Department of Defence. For obvious security reasons, I don’t want to talk about it on my blog. But, it’s very interesting so far. I think I definitely made the right choice.

The only downside of my work placement is I’ve had to relocate to Adelaide. It’s not actually as bad as many people in other states say it is. Most of them are just ignorant trolls who have never actually been to Adelaide, but yet continue to deride it. (Sorry my Melbourne friends, but the jokes are really getting old…)

My only gripe with living in Adelaide is the fact that I inadvertently chose to live in THE broadband blackspot of Adelaide, Mawson Lakes. It’s a very nice area to live… close to a whole lot of amenities, close to a train station, good people, nice architecture, etc. The only problem is, during the development of Mawson Lakes (which was only about yen years ago), Delfin put out a tender for the telecommunications infrastructure for the area. Telstra won the contract as they could do it for a whole lot cheaper than any other company. However, there was a problem with their approach. Mawson Lakes is about 7KM from the nearest phone exchange, Gepps Cross. Instead of building a new phone exchange (that would cost too much money), Telstra wired the whole area with RIMs, which are essentially green boxes which compress a large number of phone lines down into a fibre line that goes back to an exchange. This works fine for voice, but breaks ADSL. These were upgraded to CMUXes about five years ago, which are ADSL1-capable, but with only a very limited number of ports. Each CMUX may have as many as a few hundred phone lines connected to it, but it may only have a maximum of 96 ADSL1 ports available. This of course makes it close-to-fucking impossible to get a port. Even if you do get a port, given the fibre lines from the CMUXes aren’t necessarily very big ones, you’ll end up with less-than-optimal ADSL1 speeds anyway.

The fact is, I’m living in a town that’s adjacent to Adelaide’s Technology Park, but I can’t get a wired broadband service. ADSL1 is out of the question, and so is ADSL2+. It’s partly my fault for not investigating before signing the lease, but our real-estate agent did promise me repeatedly that ADSL was available. So did Telstra when I paid $59 for them to connect my phone line, only to be rejected for an ADSL service a week later. Now I’m stuck with this useless phone line for the next three months. Gaddamnit, Telstra. <_<

For a while, my only option looked like 3G. Eugh. So I found another company called NuSkope. NuSkope provide line-of-sight “wireless DSL” (which is essentially 802.11a, and soon to be WiMax) by installing a receiver at your premises that points to one of their radio towers. I was skeptical, because after all … it’s a wireless service. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their service. While 10GB at 512Kbit for $49.95/month isn’t quite ADSL1 prices, it’s still the best value wireless internet around AFAIK. And surprisingly, the connection quality is good. It’s very usable for VoIP and even gaming, given the low pings. It’s also a very stable speed, and has only dropped out a small number of times in the month or so I’ve had it. Given I can’t have a wired internet connection, this is definitely the next best thing.

I thought that, now I’m working 9-5, I’d have a bit more free time. Especially given there isn’t anything to do in Adelaide. But, alas, now I find myself spending quite a lot of the weekend doing mundane things like vacuuming and cooking and ironing. But, I guess that’s life. I’m still finding time to do other projects, for example I’m making a conscious effort to switch to Linux. I’ve also been working on a number of little projects that I might release soon. One of them is a usage meter for NuSkope wireless (coding out of necessity ). I’ll reveal the other one later, it needs a lot more testing and possibly some refactoring before it’s stable enough for release.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all that’s happening in my life right now. If you’ve read this far, post a comment or something so I know people actually read this crap. Otherwise, I’ll just go back to Twitter.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Life. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.