Adam Haeder

First Lego League volunteers needed

Adam Haeder — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:22:53 +0000

The First Lego League is a national program to get kids aged 9-14 interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) through interaction with the LEGO Mindstorms robotics platform. The program was started 10 years ago by Dean Kamen (the inventor of the Segway) in partnership with LEGO. The program culminates with a yearly robotics competition, that has teams of up to 10 kids designing LEGO Mindstorms robots to autonomously interact with a LEGO-based ‘environment’, competing against other teams for the highest score in a points-based mission environment.

The Nebraska competition was started 5 years ago by the Boys and Girls Club, and has grown steadily. The 2011 competition this last February at the SAC Museum saw 50+ teams from NE, IA, MO and KS compete against the clock (and each other) for the chance to go on to the national competition.

I have been involved with the project from the beginning, sometimes as a judge, and sometimes as a referee. In the last few years, many of my colleagues at the AIM Institute have volunteered as well as referees.

Because of the increase in the number of teams interested in competing, the need for volunteers continues to grow. Two important factors have increased the need for more volunteers this year:

Because of the large number of teams, there are now 3 qualifying tournaments leading up to the ‘final’ tournament in February: Omaha (Dec 3), Lincoln (Dec 10) and Kearney (Jan 7). So they need volunteers (referees, judges, support staff) for all 4 tournaments. The final tournament is Feb 18, 2012.
I will not be able to act as head referee this year, because my wife and I are coaching a team (the Bellevue-Offutt Homeschool Group First Lego Lunatics)

If this is something that interests you, your support would be greatly appreciated. Each tournament consists of a full Saturday. If you’re a referee, you’ll just need to understand the scoring of the different missions and score each round accordingly. If you’re a judge, you’ll be listening to presentations given by the teams and scoring them against a standard rubric. If you’re support staff, you’ll probably be doing a lot of directing of human traffic.

For more information and to sign up to volunteer, visit http://4hset.unl.edu/4hdrupal/node/638 . If you have questions, please contact me and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction. Thanks!

http://usfirst.org/

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/

http://www.youtube.com/user/FIRSTWorldTube

WordPress look and feel

Adam Haeder — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:43:19 +0000

Trying out a new theme here, went with a much more stripped-down, minimalist look. I’ve seen way too many websites lately that remind me too much of my 4 year olds (“Look at me! Look at meeeeeee!!”) and it’s getting …

Free Windows games for the long Thanksgiving Weekend

Adam Haeder — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 04:46:10 +0000

As you relax from your turkey dinner this weekend, forgetting the boring football games and hating that it’s too cold to go outside, your thoughts turn to computer games. Sure, you’ve got your 360 or your Wii and all that, but what about some good old PC gaming? Luckily, there are lots of options out there for gamers looking for something for nothing. And I’m not talking about flash game sites for 7 year olds. I’m talking about good old FPSes or MMOs. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of fun and free games for Windows.

http://www.ijji.com/ – Their game client “Reactor” is similar to Steam, except that it’s basically a frontend to download their free games. They are:

Genesis A.D – Scifi FPS
A.V.A – MMO Shooter, World War II look and feel
Soldier Front - another MMO Shooter
Karos Online – Fantasy MMORPG
Neo Steam – Steampunk MMORPG
Atlantica – Turn-based MMORPG
Splash Fighters – 3d Multiplayer fighting
GunZ – 3rd person shooter
Lunia – Arcade and RPG
S.U.N
Karma: Operation Barbarossa – MMO Shooter
HolyBeast Online – Fantasy MMORPG
Luminary
R.O.H.A.N. – Blood Fued – Fantasy MMORPG

http://perfectworld.com – Another great collection of online games, mostly MMORPGs. We’ve only tried one so far:

Battle of the Immortals – Reminds us a lot of Titan Quest, but in MMO form

They have many others too, so check them out.

http://nexon.net – Another great collection of games. Specifically Vindictus, which apparently a lot of people are leaving WoW for.

And finally, you can now play Lord of the Rings Online for free.

So check out the links, start downloading, and have fun!

Wifi radio on the cheap

Adam Haeder — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:40:16 +0000

This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time – how to turn a < $50 ASUS wifi router into a wifi radio

How to add a daily digest email to Kunena forums (Joomla)

Adam Haeder — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:04:14 +0000

Kunena is a common freely available add-on for the Joomla content management system that gives you the ability to add a message board or forum to your joomla website, with moderation, threads, document uploads, and many other features. The only main feature that seems to be missing is the ability to send all users a regular digest of postings made over a certain period of time. Daily digest functionality exists in other forum software, like Yahoo! Groups and others, and a number of people on the Kunena message boards have talked about wanting such a feature.

I recently helped a local user group migrate from a Yahoo! Groups page to their own website running Joomla for content management and Kunena for forum functionality. They really like the daily digest option Yahoo! offered, so I figured out a way to implement that in the Kunena forum software.

Disclaimer: I’m not a Joomla developer, and this solution has really nothing to do with Joomla. I’m a Linux systems administrator, so my preferred method of approaching this problem was to write a script that would query the database directly, finding the posts made in the last 24 hours, putting them in an html page, and then emailing that page to all the registered users. So this solution is not as simple as ‘install this joomla module’, or ‘check this configuration option’. But it does work very well.

First, I wanted to give the users the ability to opt-out of the email if they wished. Rather than modify one of the existing joomla tables to store this opt-out option, I created a new mysql table:

mysql> describe digest;

+---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field         | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| username      | varchar(100) | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       |
| receivedigest | char(5)      | NO   |     | NULL    |       |
+---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.25 sec)

Here is the sql used to create this table:

CREATE TABLE `digest` (
`username` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
`receivedigest` char(5) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`username`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

The thinking behind this is that everyone is going to get the digest by default. If they choose to opt-out, I will put their username in this table with a value of ‘no’ for the receivedigest field. If they change their mind and want it again, I can either erase them from the table, or change the value to ‘yes’.

Now, you need to create the page that people will use to manage their preferences. I created a directory called “custom” underneath the main directory of my Joomla install to store custom php scripts that are called within Joomla. Here is the first, digest.php:


username";
$dbusername="SQLUSER";
$password="SQLPASSWORD";
$database="SQLDATABASE";
$dbserver="SQLSERVER";
$dbtable="digest";

### / Initial mysql connection
mysql_connect($dbserver,$dbusername,$password) or die (" Can't connect");
@mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database");

$query = "SELECT * FROM $dbtable where username = '$username';";
$query_result=mysql_query($query);
$query_num=mysql_numrows($query_result);
$i=0;
$result="yes";
while ($i < $query_num)
{
 $result="";
 $result=mysql_result($query_result,$i,"receivedigest");
 $i++;
}

if ( $result == "yes" )
{
 $checked="checked";
}
else
{
 $checked="";
}

print "Hello $username!

";
?>


">
 name="receive_digest" TYPE="CHECKBOX" VALUE="yes">Check this to receive the daily digest via email

Once the user has made their decision, they submit the form which submits to this page:






Preferences Updated.";
?>

Now that you have a preference page, it’s time to actually write the program that find the daily posts and sends the email. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash
TMPDIR=/tmp/digest.$$
rm -Rf ${TMPDIR}
mkdir -p ${TMPDIR}
outfile="${TMPDIR}/digest.html"
outfile2="${TMPDIR}/digest2.html"
email_file="${TMPDIR}/email"
today=`date --date "yesterday" +%Y-%m-%d`
mysql_line="mysql -s -uSQLUSER -pSQLPASSWORD -hSQLSERVER SQLDATABASE"

echo "

Message Board Digest for ${today}
You are receiving this email because you are subscribed to the daily digest of the message board. To change your subscription, log into website and click \"Daily Digest Options\" from the User Menu.




" > ${outfile}

echo "select a.catid,a.thread,from_unixtime(a.time),a.name,a.subject,b.message from jos_fb_messages a,jos_fb_messages_text b where a.id = b.mesid;" | ${mysql_line} | tr "\t" "|" | sed s/"\\\t"/"\ "/g | sed s/"\\\n"/"
"/g | while read line;
do
 catid=`echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f1`
 msgid=`echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f2`
 msgdate=`echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f3`
 user=`echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f4`
 subject=$(echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f5 |  sed -r s/"\\\\"/""/g)
 message=$(echo ${line} | cut -d"|" -f6 |\
 sed -r s/"url\]"/"url]\n"/g |\
 sed -r s/"\[\/url\]"/"<\/a>"/g |\
 sed -r s/"\[url=(.+)\]"/""/g |\
 sed -r s/"img\]"/"img]\n"/g |\
 sed -r s/"\[\/img\]"/"\">"/g |\
 sed -r s/"\[img\]"/""/g |\
 sed -r s/"\[\/b\]"/"<\/b>"/g |\
 sed -r s/"\\\\"/""/g)
 if [[ "${msgdate}" =~ ${today}.+ ]]; then
  echo "" >> ${outfile}
  echo "${msgdate} from ${user}
${subject}
${message}

" >> ${outfile2}
 fi
done

echo "" >> ${outfile2}
echo "


Message Date


Posted By


Subject

${msgdate} ${user} ${subject}

" >> ${outfile}
cat ${outfile2} >> ${outfile}
echo "" >> ${outfile}

# figure out who to send the digest to
# for some reason, I stored the table that indicates whether or not a user wants to get the digest in a
# different database than the joomla site was stored in. The first database is "DB1", the joomla database is "DB2"
# modify accordingly for your setup
echo "select DB2.jos_users.email  from DB2.jos_users LEFT JOIN DB1.digest on DB2.jos_users.username = DB1.digest.username where (DB1.digest.receivedigest <> 'no' or DB1.digest.receivedigest IS NULL) and DB2.jos_users.username <> 'admin';" | ${mysql_line} > ${TMPDIR}/list_to_email

for item in `cat ${TMPDIR}/list_to_email`
do
 # append SMTP header
 # replace SENDTO with the appropriate To:
 echo "HELO myserverhostname.com
 MAIL FROM: admin@website
 RCPT TO: SENDTO
 DATA
 From: Daily Digest 
 To: SENDTO
 Subject: Daily Digest for $today
 MIME-Version: 1.0
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit" | sed "s/SENDTO/${item}/g" > ${email_file}
 # need an extra newline to conform to HTTP protocol
 # this separates the header from the content
 echo "" >> ${email_file}
 cat ${outfile} >> ${email_file}
 # Tell the mail server we are done
 echo ".
quit" >> ${email_file}
 echo "sending to ${item}"
 cat ${email_file} | /usr/bin/nc localhost 25 1> /dev/null
 sleep 1
done
rm -Rf ${TMPDIR}

This script gets every Joomla user (except those who have opted out) and emails them the html file created for the last day of messages. I run this out a user’s cron sometime after midnight (since it’s querying for yesterday). And it works and everyone is happy!
Still todo:

Handle the formatting in the body of the ‘psuedo-html’ that kunena uses (BBCode)
Make the opt-out form more AJAX-y
More direct links from the digest into individual threads and users

I know this isn’t the easiest thing to implement, but if you’re not that familiar with Linux, find someone who can help you set this up. Until Kunena comes out with a quicker way to do this, this is probably your best bet.

Lincoln Journal-Star article about cloud computing

Adam Haeder — Mon, 03 May 2010 20:46:45 +0000

I was quoted in an article in this Sunday’s Lincoln Journal-Star about a cloud computing company in Lincoln, NE called Cost Effective Technology. The complete article is here: http://journalstar.com/business/local/article_bda758a4-548b-11df-8c93-001cc4c03286.html

Quick notes from Stephan Balzac’s presentation at Infotec2010

Adam Haeder — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:04:04 +0000

No conflict is as bad as too much conflict

Create autonomy

If you’re not excited about the product, who else is?

make feedback easy and unobtrusive

A couple isn’t married until they’ve had their first fight

If they don’t argue, you don’t have a team, you have henchmen

You have to know what success and failure look like

Turn the team lose, and don’t care if you succeed or fail. The results will surprise you.

Never judge and punish. Always be willing to adjust resources

Experts are people that recognize their mistakes sooner, and get out of them quickly

The key to power is to find opportunities to share it

Become a role model to your team

Turn objections around. Invite brainstorming

Book recommendation: The one-minute manager

Good security advice from Ron Woerner

Adam Haeder — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:50:37 +0000

Ron Woerner (@RonW123) recently posted this message to the Secure0maha security mailing list. Good advice as always.

There's been a lot of talk lately around the Security Blogosphere on
getting into Security and being successful in your security career.
Here's few of note:

1. CSO Online:
http://www.csoonline.com/article/590096/Are_You_Making_a_Security_Career_or_Working_a_Job_

2. I Am InfoSec, and So Can You: http://bit.ly/a3I4mI

3. Bootstrapping the next generation
(http://layer8.itsecuritygeek.com/layer8/bootstrapping-the-next-generation/)

4. Who to Recruit for Security, How to Get Started, and Career Tracks
(http://securosis.com/blog/who-to-recruit-for-security-how-to-get-
started-and-career-tracks)

We're in a tough field. It's kinda like being a UN Nuclear Inspector:
no one really wants us around, but we're critical for keeping things
safe. I find these articles inspiring and reminding me of
what's important.

Ron W

My O’Reilly LPI book is available for pre-order

Adam Haeder — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 22:29:34 +0000

Should be available in bookstores sometime in June 2010.

Preorder from Amazon

Preorder from O’Reilly

Restaurants with discounted kids menus in Omaha, NE

Adam Haeder — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:06:51 +0000

DISCLAIMER: I found this list on a home school message board in 2009. If some of these are wrong, please let me know. Thanks

Some are ‘kids eat free’, some are just discounts.

EVERYDAY:
Denny’s – kids eat free – 4-10pm
IHop – free kids meal w/ adult entree – 4-10pm
Roja – Happy Hour in back room – 5-6:30 – $1.50 tacos
Hector’s – free kids meal w/ adult entree

MONDAY:
Upstream (170 & Center) – kids eat free w/ adult entree
Doc & Eddie’s (168 & Harrison) – kids eat free
Texas Roadhouse – Kids eat free – 1 per adult entree
Sam & Louie’s (downtown Elkhorn) – buy one pizza, get one free
Grandmothers – $.99 kids meals
Grisanti’s – Kids eat free w/ adult entree – 4-10pm
Julio’s West (123 rd & Center) – Kids eat free
Sizzler – For each adult salad bar you get 2 free kids salad bars
Spaghetti Works – Kids eat free – 2 children per 1 adult entree
Summer Kitchen – Kids eat free
Fuddrucker’s – 4-9 pm – kids 12 and under eat for $.99 – drink included
Buffalo Wild Wings – kids 12 and under eat for $.99 – 5-8pm

TUESDAY:
Applebee’s – Order 1 adult meal and get 2 kids meals for $.99 each
Doc & Eddie’s (168 & Harrison) – kids eat free
94/95 – $.99 kids’ meals
Paradise Bakery – Kids 12 and under eat free after 4pm (2 per adult entree)
Fazoli’s – Kids eat for $.99 with 1 adult entree from 5-8
Sizzler – For each adult salad bar you get 2 kids salad bars for free
Summer Kitchen – Kids eat free
China Buffet – Kids 10 and under eat free w/ adult entree
Fuddrucker’s – 4-9 pm – kids 12 and under eat for $.99 – drink included
Godfathers – kids 10 and under eat free buffet – 5-8pm
Lonestar – kids eat free with adult entree – drink included

WEDNESDAY:
Pepper Jax – Kids eat free – 4-9pm
Doc & Eddie’s (168 & Harrison) – kids eat free
Sizzler – for each adult salad bar you get 2 kids salad bars for free
Perkins – free kids meal with adult entree – kids 12 and under – 4-9pm

THURSDAY:
Applebee’s – for each adult entree get 2 kids meals for $.99 each
Paradise Bakery – Kids 12 and under eat free after 4pm (2 per adult entree)

SATURDAY:
Perkins – free kids meal with adult entree – 12 and under – 4 – 9pm

SUNDAY:
Red Zone BBQ – Kids eat free
Valentino’s Buffet (138th & P) – Kids eat free buffet all day
Hooters – Kids eat free all day
Planet Sub – free kids meal with adult entree