Australia and the doomed NBN

In Australia there are basically two camps in the government that promote (or make it seem like they do) very fast internet connection speeds. The Labor party started this off a couple of years ago with the introduction of the NBN (National Broadband Network). Its intention is (or rather was) to provide almost every household in the nation a piece of fibre-glass to the front-door to be able to hook up current and future transmission technologies to be able to provide a multitude of services over the internet. Continue reading

Calculator via CLI

As an engineer dealing with storage I do get a hell-of-alot of info in either binary, hex, octal or decimal format. It’s always a PITA to convert these to human readable format. So i cooked up some bc functions and use these as a function in bash to beat the time wasted firing up the calculator or some weird stuff in LibreOffice Calc. Add the below in the .bashrc file and restart your shell.

function h2d { echo “obase=10; ibase=16; $( echo “$*” | sed -e ‘s/0x//g’ -e ‘s/\([a-z]\)/\u\1/g’ )” | bc; }
function h2b { echo “obase=2; ibase=16; $( echo “$*” | sed -e ‘s/0x//g’ -e ‘s/\([a-z]\)/\u\1/g’ )” | bc; }
function b2d { echo “obase=10; ibase=2; “$*”” | bc; }
function b2h { echo “0x$(echo “obase=16; ibase=2;”$*”” | bc)”; }
function d2b { echo “obase=2; ibase=10; “$*”” | bc; }
function d2h { echo “0x$(echo “obase=16; ibase=10; “$*”” | bc)”; }

So on the bash prompt:

[1423][erwin@monster:~]$ h2d 0x16
22
[1423][erwin@monster:~]$

Very handy.

Cheers, Erwin

Australian Internet access. (with handcuffs and chains.)

It may come to no surprise that if you want to rewire a country the size of Australia it’ll take a while. This means that the majority of internet connections is still on ADSL or ADSL2+. The outback is in really bad shape and people over there are relying on satlinks or wireless. This in turn ramps up costs significantly and thats also the reason why telcos and ISP’s are putting caps on subscriptions. Continue reading