The temperature sensors that I use to drive the freezer graph are in my garage, which doesn’t have an easy way to run wires to the server room. I have a WRT54GL running DD-WRT configured as a bridge to the rest of my network. The problem with this is that the connection isn’t always reliable. I used to have a simple script that read the temps and fed them to my main mysql server, but the connection would frequently drop and it would lose the temperature data.

The NASCAR Countdown app displays a countdown to the next NASCAR race, the name of the race and the television network carrying the race. On the flip side all of the races for the season are listed, and tapping on one of them will go to the nascar.com website for that track. The application now includes all of the Sprint Cup, Nationwide Series and Camping World Truck races. Requirements iPhone or iPod Release Notes v1.

I have been using BackupPC to automatically back up the systems on my LAN for years now. It started out with a 3x250GB RAID5 as the storage pool and when I ran out of space on that I added another disk to bring it up to about 700GB. BackupPC does an excellent job of pooling common files together so that they don’t take up extra space. This is especially useful if you are backing up system files on multiple systems running the same OS release.

Movie Landmarks is back online. I think this is the 5th iteration of the project that I originally started back in 2006. It started out as a PHP app, morphed into a python wsgi application. It was always backed by a mysql db with lots of interactive features. For this redesign I've dropped all of that extra stuff and simplified things. I threw out the database and replaced it with a couple of python dictionaries holding the landmark information and another with the movie data.

I use mutt as my email client. Something that has recently been bugging me is that when reading a message it displays the original Date: header with the sender's timezone. Since I work with people in several different zones I am constantly having to do timezone math when looking at these. So I decided to fix that with a bit of python. One of mutt's features is that you can feed every email you view through a filter by using the display_filter setting.

As you may have noticed my webpages have changed a bit today. After about 6 years I decided it was time to revamp things a bit. The old site was all written in plain html with an attempt at reference link usage. I decided to rewrite in Restructured Text using Python and some kind of template language. I decided to do some searching before writing my own and found the Pelican project which fit what I wanted to do perfectly.

I have decided to discontinue sales of my AIS Parser SDK and have released the code under the BSD License on GitHub. UPDATE 12/2018 - Note that I no longer own the aisparser.com domain, the code is only available on GitHub.

When updating a rpm package it is nice to include a summary of the changes made since the last time. anaconda does this with a nifty script written by dcantrell called makebumpver which also enforces some RHEL rules and handles changing the version. I only needed the changelog part of this so I modified the script a bit to remove the extras: #!/usr/bin/python # # git-changelog - Output a rpm changelog # # Copyright (C) 2009-2010 Red Hat, Inc.

A few weeks back my ancient Compaq laptop stopped booting (two LOUD beeps, no display, no drive noises). This system has been used in the garage to act as a serial to WiFi bridge for my AIS receiver, and to log temperatures for the garage and freezer temps you see at digitemp.com. The AIS data feeds the Live AIS view of Puget Sound. The laptop was exiled to the garage after its power connector broke for the 3rd time and I had to hard-wire it by soldering it directly to the motherboard.

Failed hard drives are inevitable. Especially when the drive in question was manufactured on November 27, 2001. You know the time has come to replace it when your log files start filling up with errors like this: Oct 28 03:53:05 cat kernel: res 51/40:00:fc:33:4e/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error) Oct 29 16:06:46 cat smartd[24427]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW! Failure is inescapable. Everything fails eventually, computers, people, electronics.