August 2011
0 posts
Let's Build a Little UFB ISP
For an NZTelco post on the economics of Ultrafast Broadband CIRs, I put together a straw-man ISP. I pulled together what I thought was the minimum an ISP could spend to satisfy a thousand 50mbps full-duplex UFB customers with a 2.5mbps CIR.
In this ISP, we don’t have any real provisioning, OSS, or active traffic management systems. Those things are expensive, and we’re a low-cost...
June 2011
1 post
Calculating An Accidental Passive Reflector
Every once in a while, radio folk come up with strange, seemingly inexplicable problems. This week I was asked by a colleague how one of his ultra low-power general user licensed radios could be interfering with a 5.6GHz licensed service around 25 kilometers away. A quick look at the problem yielded a real mystery.
There’s a mountain between his antennas and the victim service
His link...
May 2011
1 post
Wellington Panorama, 3 May 2011 09:00 NZST
I woke up this morning to a stunning view of Wellington and quickly grabbed the camera. I couldn’t be bothered getting dressed and heading to the roof, and my brain was too fuzzy to remember the tripod in the closet, so I stuck the camera out the living room and bedroom windows to snap a few shots.
My first go at a panorama was using Photoshop Elements 9 for the Mac. I let Photomerge fly...
April 2011
1 post
ESRI Shapefile (Points) to Google Fusion Tables
Task of the day is to open an ESRI shapefile containing point data, clean the data, and upload it to a Google Fusion Table. I’ll be doing this in MacOS, but the tools in use are also available on Windows and Linux.
First step is to convert the data to a format that can be read by Google Refine. Open the ESRI .dbf file (from your shapefile folder) in OpenOffice 3, and then save as CSV.
Open...
