Under African Skies!

I recently had to create a list of about 200 usernames. Doing that by hand/manually will have taken me some time. I searched on the net and the help files of both excel and openoffice calc.

Here are the fomula’s I used,

=LOWER(CONCATENATE(MID(A3;1;5);MID(B3;1;2)))

and

=LEFT(A3,5)&LEFT(B3,2)

The first is rather difficult and took me some time to figure out,
the “lower” is used to change the text to all lower case characters,
then comes “CONCATENATE” with the specified fields, A3 and B3,
after that I used the “MID” function to specify the beginning character ‘;1″ and the amount of characters to follow “;5″

That formula took the first 5 characters from field A3 and the first 2 characters from field B3. Joining them together with no spaces in between.

This formula worked for me in OpenOffice 2.3

The second formula worked both in Excel 2002 and OpenOffice 2.3

To explain the second formula,
the “left function was used to start reading the field from the left,
using field A3 and using the first 5 charaters,
the ampersand (&) is used to join the two fields A3 and B3,
the goes for the second field B3, using the first 2 characters.

I then used the followign formula to create the users home directories,

=”/home/”&C3&”",

this prefixed the current text in field C3 with the value “/home/”

Then I used this data sheet to import into webmin to bulk create new users. There are some more data needed to do the bulk users creation from webmin, which I didn’t mention here. Check the webmin documention for more info on that.

I have no idea why I spent 400 N$ on an Omni Antenna.

Last night I decided to finally build an Cantenna from cans lying around inmy office, which I have collected over the past few months. Mind you that is like only 4 different size cans.

Some time ago i spent 50 N$ on the N-type connector. It was just lying around till last night. Following a guide that I got off the net a couple of months ago. Well according to the measurements, my tin was was to short as in height. But the diameter as almost there, just 1-2 millimeters out. Looking at an image of guide, I just estimated where to punch the whole to insert the N-type connector. This being a temp experiment I only used double sided tape to fasten the connector to the tin. For the copper wire the gets attached to the connector on the inside of the tin, I remained with the 3cm length. I just attached the pictail I got with the other antenna, and test the signal reception using Netstumbler.

Behold it worked. I was able to get the same signal quality, more or less, with the cantenna than I get with the omni-antenna. Accessing an AP a good 300-400m away Having line of sight offcourse. Tonight I will actually point the cantenna at the other AP, to check if the signal improves. At the moment it is pointing in a 90 degree angle away from the AP.

Here is some images of the cantenna and the omni-antenna.

So this project cost me no more than the tin and the 50N$ for the N-type connector. Much better option that the commercial antenna, money wise.

May I make an assumption, hell it is my site after all

Surely you must be using some kind of open source software right? How otherwise will you stumble upon my blog. Or perhaps your one of the lucky folks searching for an African Safari, getting to my site. Doesn’t really matter to me, I am pretty sure you make use of a computer. So the question is still relevant.

Do you like/use Firefox, GAIM, Pidgin, Open Office or any other kind of open software on your personal or work computer?

Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear what everyone uses.

Just a note, if your comment isn’t displayed immediately, don’t be alarmed, Akismet will be keeping it until I have approved it. Just keeping spam away

Having just moved over to a windows XP box to check out a site in IE. I was reminded why I moved to linux and firefox combination.

Running about 4 windows of IE6, they just suddenly vanish into thin air. No error, no pop-up “send to Microsoft”, nothing just gone.

Note that I don’t claim that firefox doesn’t crash, or my linux installation don’t go a might crazy now and then. But at least when firefox crashes, it helps me to “recover session”, no need to go in the history to find the last accessed URL’s. Just makes life a little easier, that is why we use computers in the first place isn’t it.

What a lovely way to end the working week, with a rant

What a way to start the morning…

First Google requires the image verification to continue and it happens about 3 times before I actually get to the results. Then when I switch over to Yahoo, it was temporarily unavailable Great Stuff !!!!

Searching the web has just become a pain.

The Yahoo error should clear up shortly I am sure. However the Google problem has been persistent for some time now. The problem seem to be with a provider upstream.

Hopefully they sort it all out pronto.

Ah I missed the opening…

Luckily the Australian Open website is looking great this with all the content. Good place to keep up to date on what’s happening.

I am sure not going to be downloading that almost 2G to get Feisty Fawn, just to be able to do a upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon. It will take me 2 days to download that on my 128k line

A fresh install, I reckon will be much faster.

A new year has arrived. After a 3 month absence from posting on the blog, I sure hope this year will be more productive

All is well after the holidays, now it is time to check what can be mended or broken and then mended…lol

Got this from a friend. I just love it…

This is just for reference as per usual. I got my hands on a Netgear ADSL router DG834 that was configured for SA. I tried it here with normal settings PPP over ethernet.
But it just did not want to work. When I had a look in the router status, it was connected but no data was transfered, or atleast non that I could use

After a phone call to SA, I was informed that I must check the VPI, VCI setting and the Multiplexing method. Now the VPI was set to 8 and the VCI 35. I changd the VPI to 0 and left hte VCI at 35. The multiplexing remained LLC-Based. Settings gotten from another Huawei router.

That enabled me to get to use the ADSL router on our lines.