Unattended Upgrades

2012/01/16 by Leave a comment

We are managing a number of Debian servers in the office, for various internal applications. Initially, it was a simple matter of upgrading the servers manually. However, as the number of servers grew, the amount of repetitive apt-get upgrade commands that need to be entered became tedious.

Unattended-upgrades to the rescue!

Fortunately for Debian Squeeze, it is already packaged in the repository and installation is a simple matter of:

# apt-get install unattended-upgrades

However, what most guides do not tell you is that there is an additional step that is required to be done before it will automagically work. We need to configure apt to actually trigger the unattended upgrades. It is not triggered by default.

To do this, just issue a:

# dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades

Answer yes when prompted whether to “Automatically download and install stable updates” as in the screen below:

That does it!

PS: To make it even friendlier, I have also configured each server to send an email to the system administrator whenever a system is updated.

Filed under Introversion Tagged with ,

FIRST LEGO League 2012

2012/01/15 by 4 Comments

As in previous years, I participated in the Malaysia Open Championship of FLL as a judge. This year, I was promoted to head judge for the project judging and had to manage 8 judges judging 48 teams for the competition. As I have done several rounds of judging before, I was looking forward to enjoying the show this year.

The presentation judging proceeded without a hitch. All the teams proceeded with their presentations on time and the judges were fully cooperative. In the end, we came up with the list of winners with little argument. Some other judging teams spent several hours deliberating over their winners.

I tried a different system of judging this time around, which I had learned from participating in the F1 in Schools World Finals last year. The system was designed to adjust for skews in judging and to make it easier for judges to come to a decision on the winners.

All in all it was pretty smooth.

I was also involved as a judge for the performance category of the competition – the most exciting part. I judged the final round of competitions on the final day. It was either do-or-die for some of the teams competing for titles.

This part of the competition never fails to disappoint. It is always full of energy, with teams fighting to drown out each other when cheering for their team mates. The missions this year were the most difficult I had seen for the last few years. I’m surprised that some of the teams actually did as well as they did.

Actually, I should rephrase that last sentence. These students never fail to surprise me with their creativity and innovative ideas.

I would seriously like to get more involved in FLL in the future. I think that it might be a good opportunity for AESTE to sponsor and mentor a team to win the competition in the future. We might also get involved in terms of providing some software for the competition.

Some things to consider.

Filed under Extroversion Tagged with ,

Happy Holidays!

2011/12/23 by Leave a comment


We would like to wish everyone, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Filed under Announcement

Taylor’s Engineering Fair 2011

2011/12/17 by Leave a comment

I was invited to be a guest judge for the Engineering Fair 2011 at Taylor’s University today. The fair is a showcase for the first year and third year projects of the various engineering students at Taylor’s. After finishing with the judging work, I went around to have a look at the projects personally.

It was a smart thing for them to coincide the Engineering Fair with the Open Day this weekend. As a result, parents and students who are shopping around for a university would get the opportunity to look at some of the student projects on display.

Some of the projects were quite interesting and the students’ enthusiasm for their project was quite evident. Some of the students caught me and I spent some time giving them advice on how to best exploit their time in engineering school. Too bad that they were a bunch of chemical engineering students.

Generally, I get the impression that the students who go to the university seem to be pretty decent. Some of them are actually downright impressive in terms of their personality and character. I would peg them squarely as achievers based on my limited dealing with them.

Unfortunately, I’d learned that the number of electronics engineering students that they have is a rather small one as it is the smallest engineering programme that they have. Thankfully, I have also heard that their numbers are on the increase and this is good news for me as I hope to be able to increase the pool of electronics engineers in Malaysia as a whole.

I do hope to establish more links between AESTE and various local engineering schools. I have close research and student links with two GLC universities and I’m hoping to diversify my pool of universities to include private and public universities next year.

This whole fair actually reminded me of the days when I was the EDX (Engineering Design Exhibition) director at my old alma-mater. It used to be a massive affair for us as we would invite high school students from across the state to come and visit the university.

Those were the carefree days of fun.

Filed under Extroversion

LwIP on AVR32

2011/12/12 by Leave a comment

Since the basic function for HAL is able to run without serious problem. I have to put HAL on hold and start to do net layer for AVR32. However, I will come back to HAL when bugs ‘fly’ out or when the time I want to increase the performance of HAL.

The net layer for the AVR32 is based on LwIP (Light Weight Internet Protocol). The LwIP is a open-source networking library and API. It can support the basic networking protocol such as IP, ICMP, DHCP, DNS, UDP and TCP. It is widely used in embedded system since the resource usage is much lesser than normal TCP/IP protocol that used by PC. Besides that, it is able to run in multithread (RTOS) or single thread system.

The Atmel Software Framework provides several examples that using LwIP for network application. In these example, The LwIP has been ported into FreeRTOS. The ASF has done the low level jobs so programmers can go to design the application layer directly.

The LwIP provides three different types of API for programmers to write the web application, the APIs are:

  • Raw / native API – LwIP only API. This API uses a callback mechanism, which will increase the complexity of readability when the program become bigger.
  • Netconn API – LwIP only API. This API simplify the API with ‘sequential’ style.
  • Socket API – ‘Sequential’ API, targeted at compatibility to posix- / BSD-sockets

My job is to pack all the netconn API into three types of function and hides all LwIP function. The three types of function are follow the basic TCP/IP connection, which are:

  • Connection establishment – Create a task to handle the user defined application (eg. web server).
  • Data transfer – Capture input and send data, hide the LwIP detail from web application.
  • Connection termination – Close the connection and suspend the task.

The goal of the net layer is to simplify the design of web application. The programmer provides the basic information (port numbers and IP address) and lets the net layer handles all the trivial jobs for him. It will save their time and let them focus on the manipulation of information.

Filed under Experiential Tagged with , , ,

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