So, I was speaking today with a revenue duty specialist about the definition of products and something came up which disturbed me and it was the EC definition of a modem:

Modems modulate and demodulate outgoing as well as incoming data signals. 
This enables bidirectional communication for the purposes of gaining access 
to the Internet. Examples of such modems are: V.34-, V.90-, V.92-, DSL- or 
cable modems. An indication of the presence of such a modem is an RJ-11 
connector.
Devices performing a similar function to that of a modem but which do not
modulate and demodulate signals are not considered to be modems. 
Examples of such apparatus are ISDN-, WLAN- or Ethernet devices. 
An indication of the presence of such a device is an RJ 45 connector.

It seems to me that the definition of a modem is rather messed up and this paragraph is trying to achieve something else than the wording says. If any technology student saw this they would be very confused because WLAN (Wifi) is clearly modulated and so are ISDN and Ethernet to some extent.

 

This is a proposal I am working on with some people, I have put it here because it might protect me a little to have it published online:

 

Continue reading “Virtualised broadcast infrastructure”

We have a new Canon Multi Function Device (printer, copier, scanner) in the office and it is network ready. So I have configured it to upload scans to the office server for easy access. The problem is that I want to purge these files after some time so as not to clog anything up. The solution was to archive them all off periodically using a CRON job and to use a shell script to manage that process. Here is the file I created:


#!/bin/sh

tar –no-recursion -cjf ~/canon/.archive/scan_archive_`date ‘+%Y-%m-%d.%s’`.tar.bz2 ~/canon/*
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
        then
                find ~/canon/ -name ‘*.jpg’ -mtime +6 -delete
                find ~/canon/ -name ‘*.tif’ -mtime +6 -delete
                find ~/canon/ -name ‘*.pdf’ -mtime +6 -delete
                find ~/canon/ -name ‘*.tar.bz2’ -mtime +180 -delete
        fi

This creates an archive which has a unique time-stamp in its name and then if that goes ahead successfully then it deletes any images older than 6 days from the directory. It also removes any archives older than 180 days just to stop this going on forever and I am contemplating getting it to delete any very small archives because when there is nothing to archive it still creates a fragment of an archive. I must thank this site for inspiring these commands and give them full credit.