I’m well aware that I’ve been neglecting this a bit since I got over here, but I haven’t had much time to sit and write near a usable wireless network.
I made it over to Melbourne with a fairly small amount of hassle. A delay in Aberdeen turned a leisurely stroll across Heathrow into a mad dash to get clear of Terminal 5! I made the Sydney flight with about 10 minutes to spare, worried that like the last time I travelled to Australia, my checked bag would be left on the ground in London. Thankfully, when I arrived in Sydney my big red holdall was already waiting on the luggage belt. Immigration and Quarantine wasn’t so easy though. It seemed like five flights had arrived at once, and taking into account the 2 -hour delay in Bangkok, my connection to Melbourne took off before I even cleared passport control! A few frantic phone calls later, and after another run through an airport I boarded my final flight and met Meg in Melbourne airport just about an hour behind schedule.
So much has changed since I was last in Geelong, but so much still seems the same. It was good to arrive to something vaguely familiar before heading off to Sydney to start something completely unknown.
Yesterday, the OzIntro group travelled to the Blue Mountains (about an hour away from Sydney) and spent the day walking through the bush.
I arrived safely in Sydney on Sunday afternoon. Just to prove it, I’ll post some photos from around the city.
My bag is packed. I’ve got my tickets and passport. I’m off to the airport to begin a 31 hour journey passing though Heathrow, Bangkok and Sydney, arriving in Melbourne on Saturday morning. I think I’m losing a day somewhere along the route!
This time next week (Give or take a few hours) I’ll be leaving Aberdeen and flying off to Australia. I’m staying in Melbourne for a week then heading up to Sydney for a while. I visited Melbourne in August a few years ago, so I have a rough idea of what to expect weather-wise there, but Sydney is completely unknown to me.
After a searching for a while, I found the Sydney Webcam site. It shows four cameras with different views of the city, updated every minute. At the end of each day, all of the still photos captured from the harbour camera are compiled into a time-lapse video and uploaded onto the site. The technical information behind it all is pretty cool too! Well I thought so anyway.
I picked up an Asus Eee 701 a couple of weeks ago to take with me when I’m travelling. After a few days I started to get a bit frustrated with the some of the more simplistic aspects of the default Xandros “desktop”. I found the wireless configuration tool particularly unintuitive so after a bit of research I decided to install Ubuntu 8.04.
The hardware support is pretty good “out of the box”, but there are still a number of issues with the initial installation. Thankfully eee.ricey.co.uk have made a shell script available to take care of almost everything automatically. After running the script most of the hotkeys (Volume, screen brightness, sleep) work correctly, but the WiFi one does not.
To enable the WiFi hotkey functionality (Fn + F2) add the following line to /etc/modules
pciehp pciehp_debug=1 pciehp_force=1
Then create the file /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh containing the following
#!/bin/sh
wlan_control=/proc/acpi/asus/wlan
WLANSTATE=$(cat $wlan_control)
case $WLANSTATE in
1)
ifconfig ath0 down
modprobe -r ath_pci
echo 0 > $wlan_control
modprobe -r pciehp
;;
0)
modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1 pciehp_debug=1
echo 1 > $wlan_control
modprobe ath_pci
echo 0 > $wlan_control
echo 1 > $wlan_control
;;
esac
Make the file executable chmod a+x /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh
After a reboot you should be able to toggle the internal wireless card by using the hotkey.
In a little under 2 weeks I’m heading off to Australia for the next nine months or so on a Working Holiday Visa. It’s not my first time travelling down there. A few years ago I spent a couple of weeks with friends around the Melbourne area, and took another week to see Uluru and travel to Alice Springs. This time, after a brief stay with the friends in Melbourne, I’m spending a week in Sydney with a group organised by OzIntro.
Basically, OzIntro help with getting visas, accommodation, health care, and all the rest sorted before you leave home. Organised tours aren’t really my thing, and companies like OzIntro aren’t really doing anything that I couldn’t do myself, but after spending most of my first month in Dublin trying to fix tax benefits and open bank accounts the opportunity to get as much as possible up and running before I leave proved too good to pass up! Another reason is that you’re part of a group of people who all arrive at the same time, and are in much the same position. I’ve been in touch with a few of them already and they seem like a good lot. I have no plans at all after my first week in Sydney (This seems to be a common theme throughout the group!), but I’m sure that before the week is over something will come together!
Published on
Friday, August 1, 2008 in
General.
I’m not a great fan of “blogging”. The whole process of writing down your thoughts, throwing them onto a web server and hoping that someone else reads it seems a bit odd to me. But anyway, I’ve published my thoughts on “blogging”, and I suppose someone is reading them. Even though “blogging” itself doesn’t really appeal to me, I thought I’d give it a go. I tried keeping a diary of my computing science honours project, which actually worked quite well. Especially when I was trying to remember what happened during 18-hour long bug-fixing sessions!
I registered this domain a few weeks ago to use as an email address and to give me some permanently accessible storage while I’m away in Australia. Well, I’m not leaving for a couple of weeks yet, so I thought I’d play around with WordPress for a bit and come up with an alternative to writing email updates to everyone when I’m away. I’ll try to keep this as up-to-date as possible, but don’t be too surprised to find that weeks have gone past without me posting anything!
