The killer idea, death by invention
Sun, 31/08/08 – 2:59 | No Comment

1944AC: Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr. accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.
Turns out Thomas Midgley, Jr. also invented CFCs but didn’t live long enough to …

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Modifications to www.carlheaton.co.uk
Wed, 13/01/10 – 4:02 | No Comment

I’ve been making a few modifications to *.carlheaton.co.uk like re-introducing the core Carl Heaton index page with a list of projects and other on-going ideas.

I will still post tutorials/dumps here where appropriate for code, server and electronics related things, but I’ll be posting no further ‘random links’ on this Slog because it’s too much of a pain to format and publish them vs. tweeting.

Converting 32bit RRD to 64bit RRD (moving cacti between architectures)
Sat, 3/10/09 – 15:25 | One Comment

While migrating cacti over to a new virtual machine I got “ERROR: This RRD was created on another architecture” in /var/log/httpd/error_log when the crontab ran resulting in blank graphs.

Management
Mon, 17/08/09 – 14:59 | No Comment

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you …

Mexican Fisherman
Mon, 10/08/09 – 12:08 | No Comment

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked.  Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna.  The American complimented …

Arduino network support sounder
Tue, 30/06/09 – 17:15 | No Comment

This project needs properly documenting, but in short it’s a Diecimila with a network module a 6V buzzer and tri-colour LED connected to PWM which provides an audible and visible alert upon the receipt of …

CentOS 5.3 Smokeping 2.4.2 Install (quick)
Mon, 29/06/09 – 17:20 | 9 Comments

Install the latest smokeping (without distributed polling) on a virgin Centos 5.3 minimal box… It’s probably the best (free) tool for monitoring network latency at a glance.
Examples: Pipe Ten Derby and Pipe Ten Sheffield.

CentOS 5.3 Zabbix 1.6.5 Install (quick)
Fri, 19/06/09 – 13:08 | 4 Comments

A quick reference for a from-scratch Zabbix install on CentOS 5.3. We’ve used Zabbix for the past 3 or 4 years and just implementing 1.6.5 across multiple Xen nodes for funky distributed monitoring.

http.sh
Sat, 31/01/09 – 2:15 | No Comment
http.sh

I’ve faffed with this one and poorly hacked some jquery and facebook connect examples along with trusty ol’ PHP on the front-end, on the back-end is a nice c scheduler engine which seems to be …

Just Feckin/Friggin/Fucking Google It
Sun, 7/12/08 – 2:30 | No Comment
Just Feckin/Friggin/Fucking Google It

JFGIT.com was just a quick domain registration, modification of the google home page and a bit of mod_rewrite. It’s intended for the ‘education’ of people too lazy to use the wonderful search tool called Google.
How …

Where do petrol price sites get their data?
Thu, 27/11/08 – 0:07 | No Comment
Where do petrol price sites get their data?

After an IRC conversation about GPS, we randomly got onto a discussion about finding the cheapest petrol prices and where those services get the data.
There were a few ideas:

Ardunio Visible Distance Detector v1.0 snippet
Mon, 24/11/08 – 23:09 | No Comment

/*
This code receives input from the SRF02 ultrasonic and maps the values to RGB outputs to a tri-colour LED.
*/