• Category Archives Opto22

  • The brand of automation hardware and software that Ben uses at work.

  • The power of the internet.

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    Going to be hard to stay on topic with this one, but lets have a go……….
    (Warning, mild geek content…. (Its all your fault Dan ;-))
    Had a conference call with a few key players in the current project. Up shot was that they needed our gear to do some interfacing with some of their existing equipment and the software system of a third party.
    The brief was pretty straight forward; hit a URL, get the CSV response, parse the data, put all of it it into a mysql database but also put some of it in a text file in a specific file format and ftp that file to the third party. Last thing was to set up a way for the third party to trigger an action and send a tweet via Twitter when that trigger is sent.
    Got a day and 1/2 to get it going in time for an important demo.
    Do 99% of this using PHP.

    Easy? Well, sort of. I have never learned PHP, well, not really. We touched it at night school in the Uni course I did on web site design, but nothing in depth, and nothing like DOING things with it, we just talked about using it in web pages. 
    Its the usual case of ‘its not what you know, its who you know’.
    I happen to know a thing called Google.
    Enter the power of the internet.
    I simply Googled each of the tasks one by one and found PHP code snippets for each step.
    Testing each step as I went, I was able to build up the whole program over the space of a few hours.
    I was pretty blown away with the power of the internet. Thanks to people smarter than me that took the time to put their knowledge on the web, Google then indexing it for me, I was able to do something that was way past my ability and knowledge to do.
    In the old days, it would have been off to the library to get the books to have a go at this.
    Perhaps I might have been able to contact someone what was willing to help, or paid a contract programmer to come in and do the do.
    Both options would have been expensive and time consuming.
    Sure, there was some Googling skills required, and some php hacking skills, but that’s another topic for another blog in the next few days.

    Till then, I am just asking you to take a moment and reflect on how the power of the internet really has changed the world and given people new abilities.


    Computers Opto22

  • The reader has spoken.

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Ok, well, my three.5 readers have spoken.
    No photos of the day in the blog. I will how ever still put the odd little photo in as I used to, when its part of the blog.
    The main point that you all made was that the photos will drown out the normal (normal?) blog posts and detract from the point…….

    Thanks for getting back to me and I have to say I am happy with the answer. It makes sense.

    Gota run, preparing for a web based training session on Pac Display hints and tips….. AKA things I learned while in a basement in Ballarat and wish I could have learned them the easy way…. Here’s my chance to give the Ben’s of the world a leg up!

    Chow.


    Life in the USA Opto22 Photography

  • How much electrickery?

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    In the old days, you had to cut wood to keep warm. The years went by, and shoving coal was the way to keep warm. Either way, you had a pretty good feel of how much work/material/effort/cost it was taking to keep you warm.
    Now days, you just flick a switch and this invisible force keeps you nice and warm (or cool if you are reading this in Australia). You have no feel at all for what the cost is….. That is until some 30 or more days latter when you get your power bill, and by that time, you cant take it back, or change it, you just have to pay for it and try to remember to take it easy next time.

    Thus is the situation we all (with the exception of my Dad, he’s living on fire wood and alternate energy (solar and wind for the most part)) are in. We just don’t how much electricity, or as my mate Matt calls it, electrickery (he does not do it, leaving it to me for the most part, which is good thing, I have seen him (and Gary) solder…scary….) we are using when we flick that switch.

    The past three and a bit months of my working life here at Opto 22 have been spent doing something about this little dilemma….. The results have been past my wildest expectations.
    Its all a bit of blur to fill you in, but it’s been gathering steam and does not appear to be slowing down any time soon with both Verizon (America’s largest cell phone company (that’s enough out of you Gary)) and Google looking at what we are doing.

    To give a feel for what we are doing (public web site coming soon, but not just yet) we have two videos that were taken by some guys at a seminar that Opto 22 was at last week.
    Now, unfortunately, the first is really long, but very interesting, and the latter is very short, but hopelessly out of focus….. Anyway, here is the link to both and a little blog entry about it.

    If you are bandwidth challenged and just want to read a little, here is one guys blog entry about the seminar.

    Its pretty exciting and some what bizarre that two blokes in/from Ballarat are in the thick of it.
    Two? Yeah, my mate Nick had a bit to do with it as well. He got the snowball rolling with some code that he wrote and I have just been kicking it down hill ever since. At the moment I think I am part of it and am getting bounced around a far bit. I get the feeling that Nick is safely at the top of the hill having a little laugh at me, but that’s ok, we are a pretty good team, sort of an Opto strike force.
    Between that and Bob and Bensons contacts, sales and marketing skills, things look interesting ahead, very interesting indeed…..

    Anyway, its all very cool and I never guessed that I would be doing stuff like it when I came over, but then again, this is one of the main reasons I came over, in the hope that I could do stuff like this.

    Watch this space.


    Life in the USA Opto22

  • Thank-you.

    Posted on by beno 3 Comments

    I have been thinking about this post for too long… Time to stop thinking and start typing!

    The past month and a half at work have been pretty amazing. While we have not really got anything to show for it yet, there is a LOT of cool stuff happening behind the scenes. I look forward to the day when I can show you all what we have been working on, but, in the mean time, this blog post has been brewing…

    <Warning, light geek content to follow>

    A lot of what I have been doing lately has involved Linux, the web, and networking.
    We have taken our dual Ethernet controllers, used both ports, and put one port on the Internet via a router and the other on the Opto 22 intranet via a switch. We do this so we can access the cotnroller from within Opto 22 and also from externally via the Internet.
    Both have separate sub-nets, the Internet one goes via a Linksys router. Of course that needed configuring as well with all the required port forward rules.
    We also have been working with IP video cameras, and they needed setting up on the network as well.
    We then turned to Linux, I had to install it with Apache, PHP and MySQL running. Then we had to tweak a few things to get it to run with both the IP cameras and an 8 port video camera card. Once that was done, we had to install the main camera software package.
    From there, we had to install an FTP server with a nice GUI so it could be administered. The usual remote desk top (VNC) had to be set up as well.
    Once that was done, we needed to add the web pages. There were some tweaks required to get the php stuff to run, so there was a bit of editing config files and the like going on.
    There also was some nice email server work that I had configure up, and much assorted networking tweaking (the main PC has two network cards that had to be configured very differently). Along with the email stuff, there were some pretty neat tweaks that we had to nut out with dynamic IP addresses as well.
    We had to draw out a network diagram, it was complicated enough to warrant that, we had to keep track of the many IP addresses and ports as well.
    Once this was all done at work, I ended up reproducing a lot of this for the VP of marketing as well so he could get some experience in it.
    Throw into the mix some iphone and itouch web stuff and it all ends up being a pretty cool and mildly complicated network configuration.

    The system is in and has been stable now for some months, and in a quiet moment looking back over it all, it occurred to me that while I used a lot of different skills, 90% of what we did here came down to the knowledge passed on to me by one person. I owe that one person a great deal of thanks for my skills that allowed me to do all of this….. That one person pretty much taught me every thing I know about Linux and one person taught me all I know about networking, firewalls and routers and other very cool and some what obscure stuff…..
    When I stopped and thought about it, that’s a pretty fair effort. Its not the sort of knowledge that can be passed on in a hurry either, I would think that it was about a four year process of me leaning over the poor guys shoulder asking all sorts of questions. I really admire his patience as I bumbled around and messed up many an install that he then repaired for me.

    So, here we are, half a planet away, and the skill set passed on to me has empowered me to do things for my employer that will (hopefully) result in possibly 100’s of people reaping the benefits.
    So, if you can teach some one something, please do, you never know where it’s going to lead…..

    Lastly, I know he is going to squirm a little, but I just wanted to publicly say Thank-you Dan!


    Computers Life in the USA Opto22