Fnord.

A great game, especially in SoCal were the weather suits it so well.

It’s also a good place to test sport and outdoor watches:

Casio PAG240

This is a scan (remember those?) from a networking magazine, found while I was doing a brief industry stint as a network admin.

Too good not to share.

I have a friend in Illinois who likes Sun hardware, preferably running OpenBSD. We used to hack a lot together, but since I moved he’s gone rather hog-wild on Sun gear. Thanks to Midwestern house sizes, he has a large-ish closet full of gear that I am very impressed to see. I had to share; the following are his pictures and text.

Main stack, first picture

Main stack, second picture

Other tower 1

Other tower 2

The photography leaves a lot to be desired, but I think you get the
idea. The pics labelled tower1a and tower1b are the “main stack,” if
you will. Starting from the top down: little black box is cable modem
from Comcast. Under that is a sparcstation 5 which is the firewall/router.
Under that are two sparcstation LXs. Next, two sparcstation 4s (one of
which is my home ftp server), two sparcstation 5s, two sparcstation 10s,
two sparcstation 20s, two ultra 5s (of of which is the main fileserver
connected to the 711 6 disc external array in the foreground of the
second pic), two ultra 1s, and a beastly ultra 2 complete with
two 400Mhz processors and a whopping 2G of RAM. Considering when
this thing was first on the market, it’s a true godbox! On the floor
are two APC smart ups, monitored by the two ultra 5s (and whence by all
the others). To the right you’ll see a couple 16 port network switches
which may be replaced shortly by one 24 port switch. Under them are two
Lightwave ServerSwitches, cascaded together with 8 ports each. Using these,
all 16 of the sparcstations/ultras are connected to a single keyboard, mouse
and monitor up in the library. And ’cause they’re Suns (the cool older kind),
they can be remotely powered on and off via the keyboard. Cool, eh?

Of less interest are the HP laserprinter and a couple generic boxen
running Windows 2k pro (for Jodie) and Ubuntu (pour moi). These are
connected via kvm extenders to our keyboards, mice and monitors in the
library.

The second pair of pics (tower2a and 2b) are of the other tower located
in the closet with
the furnace, water heater and water softener. From the top down are:
sparcstation IPX and IPC, sparcstation 1, sparcstation 2, an LX and
a Classic, sparcstation 4, two ultra 5s, a 24 port network switch,
another pair of Lightwave ServerSwitches, an Ultra 1, another fully
loaded ultra 2, a sparcstation 10, a sparcstation 5, and a sparcstation 20.
One of the ultra 5s is a backup for the main fileserver. The sparcstation
5 is connected to the 711 box on the floor and also monitors the APC smartups
1500 you see (it’s the black box on the floor). The IPC and sparcstation 2
netboot via the sparcstation 5. All of these are operated via a keyboard,
mouse and monitor in the next room (this is in the basement). The older
suns (anything before the classic) can’t be powered on/off via the
keyboard. One project is to wire some remote power switches for those.

Waiting in the wings, so to speak are three more IPCs, three more IPXs
(one of which is new – never used), a couple classics and LXs,
a sparcstation 2, 5, 10, 20 and
an ultra 5. Several of them are fully operational and updated with the
latest version of OpenBSD. The ultra 5 actually has Solaris 8 loaded.
Oh, and guess who just scored a sparcstation 1+ and another ss2 off
ebay? If you were counting, you’ll have noticed two empty ports on
the Lightwaves in the second “tower.” I’ll put the ss1+ there and
maybe one of the extra IPXs.

All of the boxes in the towers are fully operational running OpenBSD 4.7.
Dmesgs available upon request. Many of them are fully loaded with RAM.

I’ve had some stacks in my time, but damn! Mad props and extreme jealousy, even though my current server probably is faster than all of those combined.

I got a Cat Cam for Christmas, and recently tried it out on Rasputin. Here’s the result (11MB, quicktime):

Note that this is mostly blurred and often dark images – I had a few hundred images off of the camera, and just dropped them into iMovie HD to create this.

Looks like she definitely cruises the hillside and hangs out on the front roof – cool!

Not from Richardson this time:

One does not simply walk into Mordor. It’s a gradual slide. Life choices mount up and then one day you look around and realize, “Huh. Orcs.”

- Jason Sweeney (@sween) on Twitter

This one resonated with me. Character is the accretion of decisions, after all.

And who knows? Twitter might cause a resurgence in aphorisms. Enforced conciseness leading to distilled wisdom, perhaps?

The problem:

At work, I plug my laptop into a 30″ display. So far, so good, so spoiled. However, sitting unused in the corner is a forlorn 24″ display. This cannot stand!

The solution is $43 from Amazon:

Kensington display driver, with silicon by DisplayLink. Unlike the IOGear version, this one can drive widescreen and has no problem driving 1920×1200.

A quick action shot:

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 4480 pixels wide!

So far, speed is decent, I’m going to use it mainly to display web pages and terminal windows, so performance is good enough for that. If I can find another monitor, you can have more of ‘em attached to the same machine…

Supposed to also work with Windows, haven’t tested that.

Recommended.

After reading about using an Arduino and a traffic light, I was inspired to do a smaller-and-cheaper version at work for our Buildbot setup.

Lights: 10,000 mcd LEDs from Sparkfun in blue, green and red. $1.50 each, get two of each in case I toast a few. (I also bought a BlinkM RGB light, which at 8,000 mcd is almost as bright and easier to drive.)

Driver circuit: The LEDs are 80mA, 3.0V drop so I needed a current amplifier. It’s been a while, and my EE was nearly gone, but this excellent post walked me through the design. Simple emitter-follower circuit based on the PN2222 transistor does the job nicely:

Assuming a beta of 100, the base resistor works out to 4.7k, and the current limiter to 25 ohms. (I used 33 as being the closest).

Three circuits in a row on the breadboard, driven by digital I/O pins 6-8:

Yep, it works! The LEDs, slightly current-limited by the USB power, are still too bright to look at directly. Quite noticeable.

Next up, the ethernet shield is on order, and I have Python code to poll the buildbot for last-build-status. Fun stuff!

I’m always curious about how, why and wherefore when it comes to getting code written. We had a software engineering undergrad course, I’ve read some of the classic books (Brooks, DeMarco/Lister, etc) with various metrics, and I’ve always kept an eye out for ways to measure my own productivity. For your and my amusement, here’s a work project, in Python / Twisted, with Git repository metrics from a commercial product called FishEye:

Code was from October 2009 through April 2010

Bursts of productivity on the week view

The weekly view makes sense – we run an agile process here, so those correspond to ‘iterations’ of development.

Here you can see the code accumulate:

Top graph is total lines of code.

Last, and most interesting in my opinion, is the commits by day:

Thursday is my best day??

I would never have guessed that Thurs was my best day in terms of commits.

(Note the time graph is broken, as FishEye is converting timezones incorrectly. I’m not really pushing code at midnight.)

This is a small-to-medium-sized project, less than 5KLOC, with basically one developer, so the usual caveats about anecdotes apply. Still interesting to me. I’ll repost here in a few months, we’re now collaborating on a larger, shared project and it’ll be interesting to see what that does to the stats.

Update 5/26: The code is fairly complex, a set of a dozen or so modules communicating over AMQP to implement an OpenDAP cache accessed via HTTP proxy and/or web interface, and also includes a decent set of unit and integration tests.

JR once again:

482.

Much of what you learn from a book or a job
or a love you understand only when you have
left it.

I’ve been meaning to post the Arduino and Python code for the weather station for some time now, so today when our group decided to migrate code hosting to github, I figured I’d use my project as a test case to explore github.

Anyway, it was a total toddle. Github is astoundingly well polished: Little details, like a customized how-to page for a new project, really help, as do the wiki and automatic inclusion of the README as a front page.

Check it out here!