Zagadka's Site

Did well today - major cleanup in the yard. All this rain and sunshine has made the grass go wild. It's now under control.

Today after lots of collecting and eBaying I have 3 systems ready to go for a VMWare Lab. I've got two ESXi nodes and an NFS/iSCSI server.

I've started with openfiler, but it does not seem to like a partition > 2TB. It keeps shitting it's self for some reason. I'm on my 3rd reinstall so far, it refuses to make a PV out of the remaining 2T of unpartitioned space on the disk, even after I manually partitioned the disk during install.

It's pulling about 700W idle at the moment, so with the power consumption and the noise, they are not staying on!

Had a great day out in the shed today. Wrote a bit of code, played with a bit of electronics =)

I started working on a solar charger which will charge a(n) SLA battery(ies). I have 4 small panels which I can make use of for this. The idea is that it logs the incoming voltage and current off the panels. It will allow me to play with the ADCs a bit and also learn a bit about opamps - I plan on using a shunt resistor on the high side with an op amp configured in differential mode to determine the voltage drop and therefore the current.

I may eventually use this to run a small 60W server if it has the guts.

It's been a while...

I decided to finally spend the time and fix the data in the main RRD for the temperature logger. At one point digitemp config was re-written and the order of the sensors was skewed.

Before:	After:
Before	After

Python to the rescue. A quick script to load the dump up and transpose the sensor readings after the datestamp of the glitch. It looks a lot better now. I may just rip out that fermenter column all together, it has maybe a handfull of sensor readings over the 3 years.

I have been messing around with the home server. A disk has died.

Handy summary of all the mdraid devices in your machine:

driveinfo.sh:
#!/bin/bash
for q in `find /dev/ -name md\* | sort`; do echo $q:; mdadm --detail $q | grep -E "/dev/s|Array Size|Raid Level"; echo; done > driveinfo.txt;
grep "/dev/sd" driveinfo.txt | awk '{print $7}' | xargs hdparm -i | grep -E 'dev|Model' | awk '{print $1" "$6}' >> driveinfo.txt;
mail -s "mdraid info" [your email] < driveinfo.txt

This machine is a modifed intel server. Because it does not have the hotswap chassis installed with nice numbering and fixed IDs, its hard to keep track of the drives (there are 10). The idea of this is to send the info across via email so that I can look at it on my mobile or other computer while the server is down.

The mint has gone bannanas. It's already rooted in 2-3 more places where the branch touched the ground.

Veggie patch weeded. It looks like a veggie patch again now, not more grass...

I swear my 2YO is housing some sort of fission reactor. Up several times during the night, then up at 6 full of energy. I am stuffed =)

Hrm... facepalm... "default=datetime.now()" != "default=datetime.now" #python

I have the date in the title of my blog entries, recently  I added some code to do this automatically. When defining the model originally I had default=datetime.now(). This set the default title of my blog to the date and time when the model was evaluated. So when I came back the next day to add an entry the date was for the day I added the code and touched the .wsgi file. By passing the function, not the result it means that the function is evaluated when a record is made.

First week at the new job went well. So many new toys! Lots of new stuff to learn.

Watched Unstoppable last night. Good movie. They take use of the Battlestar Galactica handycam-with-zoom-to-draw-attention to a new level.

Well that was quite a lot of rain. At least the new veggie patch didn't wash away! Will post some pics later.

I really should stop adding features to my new website and put it live. It will never be done!

I found a great site demonstrating how to add reCaptcha to the existing comments app from django.contrib.

http://www.betterprogramming.com/recaptcha-for-djangos-comments-framework.html

So, there is blog, wiki and gallery, thats all the old featured covered. Time for a new feature. Today I wrote an app which pulls my tweets from the twitter API and stores them in the database and also display the last few in the side bar. The app has one new comonent which I don't normally use - a management interface.This allows an external call using manage.py running on crontab to go and fetch the last few messages.

I also ran through a lot of old blogs and tagged them - the tag cloud is looking a lot healthier now.

I have been working on this site on and off for a week now and having great fun hacking some python.

As a base for the blog I am using Django. Django is a framwork which is python based and tends to be very modular. The main modules are called applications or apps. There are millions of apps to do different jobs. As a starting point I used Zinnia. Zinnia looks after blogging and includes tagging and CRM type stuff. It was as simple matter of concocting some sqlfu and pulling the data out of mysql and sticking it in postgres. Blog entries are very simple.

Being a bit rusty on Django, I opted to start with stockphoto, a simple gallery app. The ultimate aim is to replicate all of the overall functionality that my current PHP based site has. The original gallery was gallery2 based with over 4000 images in it. There was no way that I was going to upload those again! I ended up doing a lot of hacking on the stockphoto model. They used a number of field names that match postgres keywords like "date" for the creation date field and "desc" for the description field.

The existing gallery2 instance has about 200 galleries with nesting up to 4 levels deep from the root. I was willing to cut this down to just 2 levels. To facilitate this I created the "group" model, which is really just another "gallery" model which lists galleries. That way there are groups in the root, then galleries, then photos. I also customised the admin areas a bit with extra list columns. I wrote two templatetags for stockphoto, first the index page, which shows the list of groups in the sidebar, the second is the random image block. Next on the agenda is to add in tagging.

On a roll now, I decided to tackle the wiki. The existing site had a mediawiki instance with lots of stuff on it which I didn't particulary want to rewrite. Once I worked out how to get the latest revisions of each pages out of the DB, I dumped them all. Next I replicated the schema in postgres and imported the wiki entries. I was then able to create wiki records from the mediawiki data. There was a lot of messing around required, because the wiki module is designed to be used with markdown. I modified the wiki app to incude the wikimarkup python library. I then wrote a new filter which used that instead of the markdown filter.

The mediawiki has a feature currently which allows me to include code and have it syntax hilighted. To replicate this feature I made another filter based on python-pygments. There was all sorts of messing around required because the two filters werent' playing nice together. I found in the end that I needed to run the field through the pygments filter first, then the wikimarkup filter. It's still not perfect. I'm also having trouble with something eating newlines on blog entries code tags.

I also wrote a template tag for the wiki which dumps out a link to the index, as well as a list of featured pages. This involved another model change to include the models.BooleanField() for featuring it.

All of this happend over a week with lots of back and forward and adjustments and tearout-and-reinstall of apps. It's been good fun!

Kids and speakers are a bad combination. One of the two sub boxes has now laid down it's life for the kids enterainment for 5 minutes. The surrounds are torn and one dome is off. The second sub was rescuable with a bit of vacuum treatment.

I have landed a job in internet land! I will be looking after office pcs and their users doing desktop support as well as looking after a few linux boxes serving VPS.

De-Triffidizer has no spark. Obviously they sabotaged the fuel.

This afternoon it poured. Di-Hydrogen Monoxide is clogging my drain...

DHMO Blockage

Went on a fixing mission this weekend. Rehung doors, fixed broken kids stuff (new wood leg for their little chair), re-mounted sunken light switches and all sorts of stuff. I removed the Roman rings from the kids swing set and added a new swing – so the wood working gear got a workout – poor little router hasn't had a good run for months. I used some cable pull rope to hold up the swing with eye splices at each end – although I had to go and look up the eye splice again because I messed it up initially... On Friday I borrowed a bench top LCR meter to measure the resistance and inductance of the armature and field windings of the VW generator which is going to be converted to a traction motor. Only problem was I didn't go and get the generator! Here is a screen dump of the motor control circuit graph:

motorcontroller2011-11-28

I came across a very interesting prompt while trying to scan a hard drive... I'm still not sure what it's asking me...