Posted by Benjamin Close on March 12, 2009 under Money | 
Hello and welcome to the first article in a continuing series about trying to earn money online.
First a little background. My name is Benjamin Close, I have a good day job working as a Research Associate in the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia and a secondary job working as an System Admin for SecureEhosting with hobbies working on FreeBSD and Freedesktop. I earn a middle income 5 figure salary, am married to my beautiful wife Carly. We have no kids at present though we think of our pets (2 Golden retrievers, 2 cats and 2 fish) as our kids, and are in the process of building our dream home on a 16 acre block of land at Gould Creek, South Australia.
So why try and make money online? Well there’s an old saying:
“A wealthy man is one who doesn’t have to work for their living”
Or in other words, one is only truely wealthy when they don’t have to go to work to pay the bills, put food on the table, etc. Many call this retirement. Though the truth is we would all love to be in the position to not have to work. At present we have a mortgage, bills etc. We are content/happy people. Though there is always the worry (especially with the current global recession happening) that things could be much more unfriendly.
Whilst we both have income protection, it’s limited to injury not loss of a job. Losing our current jobs would be very hard to deal with. With the aim to have children in the not too distant future, this is something that we are going to have to deal with regardless.
Hence the reason for trying to make money online is two fold:
- To supplicant the current income stream
- To eventually replace the current income stream
I don’t expect this path to be smooth sailing, certainly nothing like the get rich schemes. Though I do believe with some hard work it is very possible. So feel free to read this category of my blog and track my progress if you want as I’ll be writing about everything I learn along the way. I don’t intend to be an expert at this (my previous tinkerings with Google Adsense has earnt me $100 in about 2 years – more on this later) and there will lots learnt along the way.
Posted by Benjamin Close on March 6, 2009 under Projects, UniSA |
One project I’ve been working on with fellow members of the Wearable Computer Lab (WCL) has been a project we’ve called ‘Snappy’. Snappy is simply an old Canon IXUS camera that is connected to an old Dell Laptop. It was setup to monitor the construction of a new building here at the University of South Australia. The building will be used for a number of things but in particular it will host the Visualisation Lab used by the WCL.
Snappy was something setup so the lab could see how construction was going and also so we could have some time lapse photography about the building being built.
Ironically, it appears that Snappy has grown. The VC of the Uni checks it, the architechs in Canberra are using it to monitor progress and a lot of the people involved are using it!
You see snappy consist of the camera and a web frontend to the photos snappy has taken. The frontend is a bunch of PHP scripts created by myself (Benjamin Close), Aaron Stafford, Ross Smith and Micheal Marner. Each one of us has worked on a part of either the scripts, the hardware or getting things working. Robert Speedie has been a big help in making this work as well. He has the contacts and funding to help it happen.
So if your interested in seeing Snappy, visit the url:
and have a look. One of the photos he’s taken is below – a great sunrise.
Posted by Benjamin Close on March 4, 2009 under FreeDesktop |
Hi Folks, a few changes have now been put in place to try and fix a few issues that people have been experiencing with the caching used by cgit on the freedesktop.org repos.
First off a little background. Git web was replaced by cgit as cgit is both faster and the caching allowed annarchy to have some room to breath. This left a few issues which were only discovered later on. These were:
- Cgit’s main page idle field only used the ‘master’ branch for timestamp
Now fixed, though the cache is only updated every 11 minutes (the main page NEEDS caching).
This was fixed by using: http://hjemli.net/git/cgit/commit/?id=57f6a8bf0de6c112cabc1d8e20ade2698bd886b7&h=wip
- The summary pages for each repo would often appear locked due to caching bugs
Temporary Fix in Place – Repo summaries are currently not cached. The real fix is still in progress – fixing cgit bug.
With these to items fixed, things should now be back to normal. If not, let me know.
Posted by Benjamin Close on under FreeBSD |
Recently I’ve been trying to instal Trolltech’s Qt 4 toolkit on my FreeBSD 7.0 server. FreeBSD supports qt4 via ports (qt4-gui, qt4-moc, qmake4, etc), hence I’ve been using the ports system to try and install it. However it kept failing with the error:
===> Configuring for qt4-rcc-4.4.3
/bin/cp /data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/../../devel/qt4/files/configure /data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/src/tools/rcc/../../../
/usr/bin/sed -i.bak -e 's|target.path.*|target.path=/usr/local/bin|g' /data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/src/tools/rcc/rcc.pro
/bin/mkdir -p /data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/src/tools/rcc/../../../mkspecs
/bin/ln -sf /usr/local/bin/qmake-qt4 /data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/src/tools/rcc/../../../bin/qmake
This is the Qt/X11 Open Source Edition.
The specified system/compiler is not supported:
/data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/mkspecs/freebsd-g++
Please see the README file for a complete list.
===> Script "configure" failed unexpectedly.
Please report the problem to kde@FreeBSD.org [maintainer] and attach the
"/data/usr/ports/devel/qt4-rcc/work/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.4.3/src/tools/rcc/../../..//config.log"
including the output of the failure of your make command. Also, it might be
a good idea to provide an overview of all packages installed on your system
(e.g. an `ls /var/db/pkg`).
*** Error code 1
After some brief Google searching, I found the issue. It turns out that a long time ago I had been using qt4 with another project I had been working on. With this project I’d defined:
setenv QMAKESPEC freebsd-g++
setenv QTDIR /usr/X11R6/
This was causing the build system to break. The post at: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-freebsd/2008-August/003360.html gave the hint about this.
Once I undefined QMAKESPEC everything worked as expected!
Posted by Benjamin Close on March 3, 2009 under Country Living |
Today we received council approval to put in a septic tank… we think. You see we lodged plans for a sepage based septic tank with Tea Tree Gully Council, however our approval letter indicates an Aerobic septic tank.
We’re currently working out what approval we have via way of contacting council.
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