Initially, I wrote this script to give me frequent feedback on the signal strength. This is useful when adjusting antennas to that sweet spot that give stronger signals; especially if you’re testing some homemade tinfoil parabolic reflectors! 
If you have a portable wireless device, like a netbook, you can ssh into your (wireless) desktop and run wireless-strength to get realtime feedback on adjustments to the access point’s antenna… assuming the connection doesn’t break. 
And, of course, you can just walk around running it on your mobile device to create a kind of wireless heatmap.
If you have gnuplot, you can also generate graphs from the data with ws-plot. This is me walking around my house with my notebook:
I started in my room (40% 
), which is where the first peak is – near the window. Left my room, back to 40%, peak near window again, then bathroom… 40%. The climb from 40-80% is me walking towards the TV room (PS3 lives in a solid 80% zone, at least!). Walked upstairs, got 100% in most areas (that’s where the Access Point is) – tried a bedroom, dropped to 40%.
Download the scripts and get more details here: https://github.com/izm/wireless-strength
Nerdy Ramblings
This script originated years back, but I recently tried using it on my laptop and it didn’t work! Unacceptable! The original parsed the output of iwconfig. But what showed up as “Quality=30/70″ on my desktop, would show up as “Quality:4″ on my laptop. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Even the character after “Quality” was different! o.O The output of iwconfig is driver dependent, which is why I looked to network-manager. I figured there’s probably a nice dbus command I can send to network-manager for that purpose – but I got tired of looking and decided to just parse output again. :/ Luckily, network-manager includes nm-tool. It’s certainly not a clean solution, but it works for now.
I also used updating rewriting the script as an excuse to get better acquainted with git – which I’m really liking.
Every time I do a bash script, I vow to do the next script in Python. I like Python and I don’t like Bash… but there’s a certain… nativeness or dependency-free elegance to bash scripts. Still, I hate writing them, and the next script’s in Python!
Made some adjustments to my blog theme.
Old
New
- search box graphic and placeholder text
- added jetpack subscriptions module and some css to handle it
- gave page a max width so it doesn’t look ridiculous on wide screen monitors.
- sidebar: removed dotted borders added white space, toned down colours – reduced noise
- Removed grey post-meta-content (categories, tags) boxes. Put all post meta data in TOP, with comments repeated at bottom. (Similar to when I started this theme!)
- Added hover highlight to gallery images (now consistent with image links not in a gallery). Cleaned up some of the code (to not generate HTML comments) and random fixes here and there.
- Removed lots of black. Too harsh.
You might have to click refresh. And you might not even notice any changes.
Feel free to leave a comment or use Markup to make suggestions. Markup’s a pretty cool tool.
It’s interesting to compare the progression of my themes. Well, interesting for me, at least. 
I think the next time I decide to work on a theme, I will start from scratch. Clean slate. Make it more consistent with my root page.
On a related note, the latest version of WordPress, 3.3.2, is really nice.
It was Mother’s Day! I love cooking, so I made something special for my mom. Actually, me and 2 of my sisters were the kitchen workers today. I made a salad. So I know my mom likes this shrimp and avocado salad that is served at the restaurant where I went to culinary school. Fine. I’ll make that. Again. At home. For her.
This is how it turned out:
This was a sample plate I did. I changed the plating a bit… moved the tomatoes face-down on the cucumbers.. and added a full steamed prawn. But it looked something like this.
It was good! If I were to do it again, I’d play around with the plating some more… and I’d make the balsamic reduction thicker (when I tried to spell “Mom” in cursive on my mom’s plate, it gradually expanded until you couldn’t read it…. >.< ). But it turned out pretty good. But the chive oil… oh man… is it ever perdy. Put it in a custard cup in some good light: sexy.
That other thing in the photo is dry whole wheat pasta – another experiment. ^_^
Happy Mother’s Day!
After hurting my shoulder, I had to take a 2 month break from culinary school. Hopefully, I’m fit for the kitchen again, because I go back to school tomorrow. Better start doing more cooking!
Last night, I had company coming that I knew liked dessert. There wasn’t going to be many of us, so I decided to make crème brûlée, a classic French dessert.
Turned out good, but I guess I could have caramelized them a bit more.
Then I had the dilemma of what to do with the egg whites. I’ve seen a few Australian cooking shows recently, and pavlova is something that is always mentioned and held in high regard. So I decided to try it.
I guess it turned out okay. No weeping at the top, but the bottom had a bit of syrup weeping out. I’m thinking it may have been slightly undercooked. It deflated a bit as it was cooling, but that’s normal, apparently.
All pavlova recipes I found on the Internet called for an insane amount of sugar, so I found the most reasonable one and cut it back a bit. Even after cutting the sugar in the recipe, I still found it cloyingly sweet. So for a sauce, I made a tart raspberry and mango coulis. The combination was actually quite good. It should also be served with fresh fruit and some kind of creamy sauce… pastry cream or whipped cream or something. Since we were already having crème brûlé, making a creamy accompaniment wasn’t really appealing to me. Was thinking fried bananas might be nice. Next time.
Curiosity gets the best of me sometimes. Okay, most of the time. Did you know GNOME’s text editor, gedit, has a plethora of extensions which can basically transform it into an IDE? Something I’ve always wanted is intellisense-style autocompletion. The closest thing I’ve found for gedit is GDP Completions Plugin in the gedit-developer-plugins package in Ubuntu.
sudo aptitude install gedit-developer-plugins |
However, there’s a bug in that package and the popup menu doesn’t actually work. Ctrl + Space is supposed to bring it up. So you want to add the Gedit Developer Plugins PPA and upgrade to the more recent version.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:user/ppa-name
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade gedit-developer-plugins |
If you try to run gedit now, you’ll notice it won’t… run, that is. Great. I know, right? The problem is that the bzr plugin (also included in the gedit-developer-plugins package) is trying to use the gtk2 version of bzr-gtk, but that doesn’t work in the gtk3 gedit. Anyway, you can pull a copy of the gtk3 bazaar plugin into your local bzr plugins directory. (I found this info here). Create ~/.bazaar/plugins/ if it doesn’t exist.
mkdir ~/.bazaar/plugins
cd ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr branch lp:bzr-gtk/gtk3 gtk |
The gedit-developer-plugins package and gedit should work after that! An alternative to the above would be to add a PPA that includes bzr-gtk 3. Not sure if one exists at the moment, but that would be a cleaner solution. And you thought it would be simple. I know I did.
It’s not as polished or featured as other implementations, but it’s a good start. Here’s a screenshot after I type os. then hit Ctrl + Space:
Further reading
External tools plugin
Rolling your own gedit 3 plugin
Recently, I’ve been busy for a variety of reasons. The most significant reason? I’ve gone back to school! 
Shocking, I know. But it’s probably not what you expect. Since April 11th, I’ve been going to culinary school in downtown Vancouver. It’s an 11 block program (each block consists of 4 weeks, so… 44 weeks) – I should be done in February 2012. In addition, I just completed a 4-month stage (unpaid internship) at a hotel. I would go there after class (or before class, depending on the class) about 3 times a week. Lots of getting up early, and some getting home late. It can be tough work. I’ve been physically exhausted. Heck, I’m exhausted, right now. And you know what? I love it. There is something really satisfying about cooking. You produce something you can be proud of in relatively short period of time… and the kitchen can be an exhilarating place to be. I’ve always liked a bit of adrenaline in my life and I guess I didn’t find that in an office environment.
Anyway, I haven’t been taking photos at school. And I should be. So today I took some photos. I’m currently in block 7: baking and pastry. Here are some cheesecakes I decorated today. My partner and I had finished pretty much everything, so we had lots of time to play around.
whipped cream rosettes with orange segments and strawberry. Probably should have left the orange bits off the rosettes, but oh well.
rosettes on top of kiwi slices, with strawberry on top of orange segments.
The cheescakes turned out really well. No burning, no cracks (thanks to a sour cream topping), and quite level and smooth. Clean!
Spent way too much time on this, but had a lot of fun doing it. Marzipan pumpkin and chocolate "Booo" leaning on rosettes, Messy spider is 2 strawberries covered in chocolate with marzipan eyes and chocolate disc legs. All on chocolate webbing.
The cheesecakes go for $18. It’s a good deal considering how much cream cheese is in them… each about 750g? But whoever gets that halloween one will have a bunch of chocolate shrapnel when they attempt to cut it. Hah!
