Saleh Blog

So in part 1 we talked about the devices I have purchased, now let’s dive-in and talk more about the implementation.

So I need the network to cover two and a half floors (roof is a half floor because it has two rooms). Each floor has around ten Ethernet wall plug and two/three access points. There’s also few cameras around the house, nine on the ground floor and four for the other floors.

To have a good network and wireless speed I have to pay careful attention to the backbone implementation of the network. So while I’m upgrading my home network infrastructure I’ve decided to also upgrade my current in-wall cables from Cat 6 to Cat 6A for future proofing. I have plans for purchasing a server and a separate SAN in the near future to expand and upgrade my home lab and media servers.

So next how many core switches do I need? With the number of required ports and because of having small size in-wall cable pipes, I have settled with two 24 ports switches (US-24-250W) for each floor except the roof. I would’ve preferred the US-48-500W with 10 gaigabit SPF+ ports for a backbone network switches but those 48 ports are more than twice what can be fitted through the cable pipes.

All cable pipes end up on the stairwell and they’re distributed in a such a way that each floor pipes ends up on the stairwell of the floor above. So ground floor cable pipes end up on the first floor stairwell. Therefore, core-switches are placed on the stairwell for each floor.

I couldn’t replace all Cat 6 cables because cable pipes are too small so for some points we couldn’t fit in another Cat 6A cables. Also I’ve decided to connect two cables between each core switches and home lab for Link Aggregation and faster speed.

A month later I’ve decided to add UPS to my home switches and gateway which in turn provides power to all my PoE devices (small Unifi switches, AP, and cameras). Should provide at least 40mins of backup power with my latest test. I bought also another bigger UPS for my NVR/Media server to keep everything running and recording when there’s a power outage. I’m planning to increase the UPS run-time in the future when I can budget for it.

First floor core switch

Ground floor core-switch

UPS for first floor core-switch

As you can see on the pictures above I’m using patch panel for two reasons; to keep the cables tidy and minimize touching any core cables to increase longevity. Maybe it’s an overkill for a home network but at least it feels more professional and I’m proud of it.

• China says Tiangong-1 space station to enter Earth’s atmosphere on Monday | Link
• Cloudflare launches consumer DNS service to speed up the internet | Link
• UberRush Is No More As Uber Kills Its On-demand Delivery Service – Digital Trends | Link
• China’s Tiangong-1 space lab breaks up over Pacific Ocean – CNN | Link
• DARPA is Open to Ideas For New Types of Drone Swarm Technology | Link
• Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs From 2020, Replacing Intel | Link
• Watch a Russian postal drone crash on it first flight — Quartz | Link
• YouTube HQ shooting: ‘Not terrorism at this point’ authorities tell NBC News – Euronews | Link
• Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week – Ars Technica | Link
• Google Now Matches 100% Of Its Power With Clean Energy – Fortune | Link
• Google Employees “Outraged” Their Tech Is Being Used to Build Better Killing Machines – Vanity Fair | Link
• SpaceX cut its latest Falcon 9 stream because it didn’t get a license | Link
• Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space company launches first rocket since fatal 2014 crash – ABC News | Link
• Best Buy says it was hit by same data breach as Sears and Delta | Link

April Fools’

• Google Maps needs your help finding Waldo – TechCrunch | Link
• Carriage introduces voice controlled device to order foods online | Link
• Google Introducing Bad Joke Detector | Link
• Google Gboard Physical Handwriting | Link
• Genetic Select by Lexus | Link
• Switch from British to U.S. dialogue at the touch of a button – Introducing Interp-Brit on BritBox | Link
• Introducing Roku Happy Streaming™ Socks | Link
• Introducing the New T-Mobile Sidekicks: The World’s First Smartshoephone | T-Mobile | Link
• Netflix Buys Seth Rogen’s Personal Autonomy in April 1 Announcement – Variety | Link
• Nvidia – Geforce Academy of Gaming | Link
• Razer’s Project Venom v2 | Link

So I decided to upgrade my home network for several reasons:

• Dodgy Wi-Fi connection
• Wi-Fi dead spots around the house
• Monitoring network activity and who’s using downloading a lot and impacting other’s experience

So after exploring and searching I’ve settled with the Ubiquiti Unifi ecosystem. I’ve been following the company for many years now and I’ve been a very fond of it for long time now, and the family are complaining about the dodgy Wi-Fi connection gave me a good excuse to upgrade my network infrastructure. And by choosing Unifi I get the added benefits of

• PoE built into the switches rather than relying on PoE injector for each camera around the house
• PoE end-point switches and AP so less cluttering and centralizing power feed for the home network so I can add a UPS in the future for powering my network and cameras in the event of power outage
• Unify experience across devices with a single dash board

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no cons on changing my network infrastructure. In fact, because I’m using pfsense, I’m going to lose some flexibility when moving to a fully Ubiquiti Unifi solution like load balancing dual-WAN that Unifi for some reason doesn’t seem to be able to provide a workable solution for that.

So I bite the bullet and went ahead and ordered the following devices:

• Unifi AC-Pro UAP-AC-Pro x3
• Unifi AC Lite UAP-AC-Lite x3
• Unifi Switch 24 Port US-24-250W x2
• Unifi Cloud Key UC-CK
• Unifi Mesh UAP-AC-M-US
• Unifi Switch 8 Port US-8 x3
• Unifi Security Gateway USG

But unfortunately we didn’t have a dealer for Ubiquiti here in Kuwait so I had to purchase those devices online.

Some might be wondering why a lot of devices. The reason is that I need to cover 2 floors and a half (the gym room), and the garden. So ground floor will get two Wi-Fi AP and the first floor will get three Wi-Fi AP because one half of the floor has many walls that one AP will not be enough to cover that half.

And because I’m upgrading the network I decided to also upgrade the network cables around the house to Cat6A for extra reliability and future compatibility for 10G speed. I bought a 100 meters roll (300 FT) and at the end only 70% of house cables were upgraded to Cat6A because 100 meters wasn’t enough. That’s an additional $300 for the cable and $500 for the handyman.

Most of my purchase came from Amazon and bhphotovideo.com. I couldn’t find everything on Amazon (out of stock) so I got USG, UAP-AC-Lite, and UAP-AC-M-US from BHPhotoVideo. All shipped to New York Shop&Ship office then forwarded to Kuwait. That’s around $700 just shipping the item from NY to Kuwait. If you’re wondering, there’s no Ubiquiti dealer/shop in Kuwait.

Note: This project was completed back in January 2018.

to be continued on Part 2…

• Apple’s Tim Cook Calls for More Regulations on Data Privacy | Link
• The FTC Is Officially Investigating Facebook’s Data Practices | Link
• Elon Musk’s next Boring Co. merch will be big Lego bricks made from tunnel rock | Link
• Philips lighting rebrands as Signify – News – Smart Home Geeks | Link
• Foxconn is buying Belkin and Linksys – SlashGear | Link
• NASA Delays Launch of James Webb Space Telescope to 2020 | Link
• Zuckerberg will reportedly appear before Congress on data privacy | Link
• Nvidia suspends all autonomous vehicle testing – TechCrunch | Link
• Nvidia launches self-driving simulation system, Kubernetes support – Seeking Alpha | Link
• FCC approves SpaceX plan for 4,425-satellite broadband network – TechCrunch | Link
• ‘PUBG’ will start testing its tiny ‘Savage’ map next week | Link
• Google to Shut goo.gl URL Shortener in Favour of Dynamic Links – Technology News | Link

In yesterday’s Samsung 2018 First Look Event, new lineup of 2018 TVs were unveiled and I’m very exited of some its features including Ambient Mode, Bixy and SmartThings integration – though I would prefer Google Assistant, and One Invisible Connection which feeds the TV with A/V and power but this time it’s even thinner.

Unfortunately their TVs don’t support Dolby Vision.

Ambient Mode is one of the features coming with 2018 TVs from Samsung

More info at Techradar.com

A problem I was facing recently, that the JSON was being receive properly on Firefox 3.6 my work development machine. Finished the project and deployed it. I haven’t tested it on other machines, how clever am I?! I opened my laptop to see how it would appear on other browsers, and shockingly, it wasn’t working at all!

After spending hours trying to locate the line where the error occurs and find out what’s the problem it turned out that I have to decode the JSON output before sending it. I wasn’t using any PHP built-in functionality for JSON, that’s because at work, we are still using PHP4 which has none. I was basically writing the JSON output explicitly. The text output can contain some special characters that need to be encoded and escaped before sending it. After digging around a bit I found out a solution from this post. Everything is pretty much explained there.

In a nutshell, you’ll have to use json_encode() to encode the data from an array and then output it. A JSON library is provided along with that post. There is also a decoding function, but I haven’t use it since I’m receiving my data on a javascript.

A security enhancement was added to Flash Player sometime ago that disables getURL to function properly in Actionscript 2.0 of Adobe Flash. This could be an issue for some as in my situation when I created a banner for MET to celebrate the independence & liberation day of Kuwait.

The issue occurs if you are targeting a different domain than the current domain where the SWF/HTML file is hosted. I’ve also heard reports that it can occur if the SWF and HTML file are located at different location even if at the same domain host. I haven’t tested the latter so I can’t confirm or deny it.

Anyhow, to resolve this issue, all you have to do is change the allowScriptAccess attribute on the <object> tag to have the value “always”. You also have to add <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /> or edit it to match it if it’s already there.

So at the end, your code has to look like this:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=10,0,0,0" width="955" height="88" id="SWFID" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" />
<param name="movie" value="FILE.SWF" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <embed src="FILE.SWF" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="955" height="88" name="SWFID" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

This issue is explained in more detail at the official knowledge base of Adobe here and here.

My first WordPress plugin goes public. I’ve developed it for a research group in Kuwait University. Check out the WP Academic People List page for more information about this plugin. This plugin was built in a way that you can customize it for school alumni website.

The first ever BarCamp in Kuwait.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees, usually centered around design & technology topics.

For registration and more information check out the official BarCamp Kuwait 2010 website.

 
It’s been a nightmare for Microsoft in the last few years with their mobile operating system, Windows Mobile. The real battle began back in 2007 when iPhone was released to public and despite the popularity of Windows Mobile, Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple) has outwitted Steve Ballmer (CEO, Microsoft) and Windows Mobile has started to lose ground quickly. iPhone was taking the lead and outselled Windows Mobile almost immediately.

Just a year later (2008 A.D.) another bomb shell was dropped on the smartphone arena with the release of Google’s Android operating system and the intensity of the battle begun to rise. Google was working hard on improving Android as updates were being released more frequent on Android than iPhone. By the first quarter of 2010, the tide of war has shifted towards Android and for the first time it managed to outsell iPhone. By June of the same year, iPhone 4 went public but it failed to gain popularity like its predecessor.

But wait! Microsoft was holding ground under radio-silence and planning to counter-attack with the latest technologies their engineers have managed to develop. The preemptive strike has begun when Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 7 in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and technologist around the globe got excited about this upcoming revolutionary mobile operating system. Some went as far as saying that that’s a deal breaker!

The mobile OS battle is not a fight between evil and good, like republic and separatist, Jedi and the Sith Lord, Batman and Joker. People will not go and choose sides; it’s more like a survival of the fittest were people will pick up the best smartphone out there, and the one that sell the most is the winner. So I’m quite convinced that all three companies have worked hard and squeezed their juicy expertise at best, although I’m having my doubts about Apple as they tend to release new iPhones and other products but not with the latest technologies – yes, the press exaggerates all the time with “latest technology”!

Without further ado, let’s compare the three mobile operating systems:

Okay, so that’s a raw  comparison between the three players. We could dive deeper and see how Windows Phone 7 can be integrated to your Xbox set or your PC, and how with some upcoming games you can play it in your Xbox 360 and then go out and continue the game in your Windows Phone 7 device from the same point where you left the game on the Xbox 360.  And the list of features goes on…

But hey! Windows Phone 7 is still not out there yet, and if you’ve seen the developer framework capabilities you’d be amazed with what you can do with it. Microsoft is releasing an OS with amazing capabilities and an awesome developer tools for the developers’ community to make great applications and shine as a rock star.

There are still some issues remaining, as iPhone and Android has already gained solid ground, Microsoft will have to convince consumers to ditch their current technologies and immigrate to Windows Phone 7.

“Microsoft has a challenge in getting phone vendors to support Windows Phone 7,” said Jack Gold, the principal of J. Gold Associates, to the IT Business Edge. “Motorola is not going to do it. HP just bought Palm and the webOS, and it is very unlikely they will do it. HTC probably will make a few, but they are going down the Android path very quickly. Samsung may do Windows Phone 7, but how much effort will they put into it?”

Microsoft has managed to create a revolutionary simple “hub” centric interface and will definitely change the way people use smartphones as various technologies integration was achieved to some degree. Whether it will succeed or not we do not know. Only few days left until the release of the first Windows Phone 7 based device, and the decision is all up to the consumers to go for iPhone’s boring interface, Android’s openness, or the easiness of WP7. But of course, Microsoft wouldn’t want Captain Jack Sparrow (1) to repeat his own words to Windows Phone 7 “Up is down. That’s just maddingly unhelpful. Why are these things never clear?!”

This article will be published on next the issue of Al-Islamia Magazine.

– The writing style is intentional, to make it funny and inviting for youth readers.