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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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 specific new emails.

I run Ubuntu and Evolution mail on a wireless laptop which has a filter configured to pipe all incoming mail to a bash script. The bash script then passes the email content over to PHP (where I’m most familiar) and parses it for support@ and other references. The PHP script upon triggering a ruleset visits the network connected Arduino using curl, sounds the buzzer for one second and phases the PWM LED through Red and Purple to provide a visual alert before reverting back to buzzer off and blue state. It’s pretty basic but it means I don’t need to be anywhere near the laptop to be able to jump on a support ticket.


CentOS 5.3 Smokeping 2.4.2 Install (quick)
Mon, 29/06/09 – 17:20 | No Comment

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 | 2 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.
*/

Cool electric arc
Mon, 24/11/08 – 4:41 | One Comment
Cool electric arc

An electric arc is an electrical breakdown of a gas which produces an ongoing plasma discharge, resulting from a current flowing through normally non-conductive media such as air.
As far as I can tell there’s an …

Lest we forget
Wed, 12/11/08 – 0:01 | No Comment
Lest we forget

We will remember them
If you’re feeling sorry for yourself, then see how you feel after watching what happened a few generations ago in ww1 (not forgetting the other wars, invasions and defenses and ages)…

How Business Works
Wed, 24/09/08 – 21:53 | No Comment
How Business Works

From Toothpaste For Dinner

Arduino and HD44780 LCD
Sat, 20/09/08 – 23:06 | 2 Comments
Arduino and HD44780 LCD

I’ve just been playing with a new HD44780 4×20 LCD from ebay on the Arduino. As I’m still ‘playing’ I’ve tried to document a kind of breadboard interface for the Arduino to LCD. It should …