A collection of ramblings from Tim.
Written by on Feb. 22, 2010 .
Had a great weekend. Mowed and cleaned up a bit on Saturday and went to Mum and Dads on Sunday for a BBQ where the kids tore up the veggie patch with tonka toys.
You may notice this site is now DAMN FAST... This is because it is nolonger hosted on ADSL. It's now camping out on a dedicated dual CPU box in a data centre in Sydney.
Written by on Jan. 3, 2010 .
I mostly camped out in the shed today. It was too wet for the kids to play outside. Got lots done - Finished bits and pieces on my router table. Built a push block and box joint jig for the router.
Written on Jan. 1, 2010 .
We all had a great day today at Mum and Dads. We saw a lot of Family that we hadn't seen in a long while.
Dad and I also nutted out a way to retain the bolt in my router table.
Written by on Dec. 30, 2009 .
Christmas was good. We went over to Mum and Dad's for Lunch.
Today was great. Kel cooked a nice lunch for us with ham and potato salad and green salad.
I passed a big milestone today in getting organised in the shed. I finished my drill press bench. I can now go back to using the table that the drill press was on...
Written by on Dec. 20, 2009 .
A very productive weekend!
Written by on Dec. 17, 2009 .
I just tore outside and moved the timber for the Kid's sand pit under cover after seeing the storm approaching. It needs to be dry if I'm going to cut it and work it.
Written by on Dec. 17, 2009 .
I got lots done this weekend.
I bought a lot of 6 used power tools, two extension cords and an RCD (earth leakage safety switch) for $130. I'm pretty happy with that. It's not crap either. A mixture of Bosch, Makita and Ryobi with a GMC plunge router too. I vacuumed them all out and tested them. They are all good.
Sunday I went with my Dad to pick up 4 lengths of 50 x 200 x 2400 treated pine for the kids sandpit. Dad gave me some black PVC to put down. We also picked up the galvanised screws and washers that we'd need. While at Bunnings I also bought some supplies for the new tools, some sanding belts and sanding discs as well as a few jigsaw blades and quick-clamps.
So far it's just tooling up for woodwork. Sunday I also built a sawhorse and 3/7 of a saw horse. I had to make a tricky jig to cut the angle on the feet because I couldn't use the saw to directly cut the angle on the legs (70mm x 20mm) sideways. The max cut depth is about 50mm. I clamped each leg to my saw extension table at 14 degrees and cut it tat way. There are photos in my gallery under woodwork.
Written by on Oct. 4, 2009 .
Baby Ryan is doing great - he's gaining weight and looking a lot healthier. His Jaundice has gone right away too. If only he'd sleep more than 2 hours! He's also starting to look around a lot more and follow us as we walk around - he has a strong neck already, much stronger than you'd expect.
Yesterday I scored 100 long neck beer bottles with crown seals for $20 which is awesome. I blasted half of them out yesterday and they're now sitting submerged in Napisan to kill anything that's living in them and to loosen any crud that's in them. I'm curious to see how they come up, I haven't tried Napisan before.
Written on Sept. 14, 2009 .
Baby Ryan. 2.54kg. Happy and healthy.
Written on Sept. 14, 2009 .
Labor has started at last! We may have a baby Ryan soon!
Written on Sept. 10, 2009 .
Still waiting for baby Ryan to come. He's stubborn!
Written by on Aug. 30, 2009 .
I did end up brewing today. I moved my APA into a clean fermenter to condition - hopefully this will reduce the sediment a bit. I put down a batch of Blackrock Miners Stout with some steeped grains and extra hops. I'm also trying out the Nottingham yeast for the first time.
The kids had a great time zooming up and down the drive while I brewed and Liam sampled the different ingredients, he liked the light malt extract, but pulled all sorts of faces for the hops and spent grain (I don't know why he wanted some of that but anyway - I bet he doesn't any more!).
Written by on Aug. 29, 2009 .
The kids had a great time today out in the yard playing with their sandpit. Liam terrorised Emmy a bit and tried to seal her in the sandpit (it's a clamshell design) - she wasn't impressed and lots of screaming ensued.
I put a tap in the hot water system today so I can get hot water outside for brewing. My first attempt failed as I was using a T piece as a joiner with a plug in one inlet. I thread taped it and removed it all and then re-thread taped it, it still leaked - on closer inspection I found there was a fracture on one inlet... I replaced it for an elbow, which looks a bit odd - but it doesn't leak!
brewbox keeps crashing for some reason. Today I pulled it down off the fridge and booted it with a screen. I disabled all the unused stuff in BIOS and also removed a lot of useless crap like IRDA and Bluetooth. The system is now running an even more minimal set of services. Hopefully this nails it and it will be reliable - otherwise I will have to junk it and use the other NEC 1U server which isn't as suitable for the task (no DB9 serial, no parallel, more power usage)
My plan for tomorrow is to throw the APA that's in the fridge into a second fermenter to condition. I've read a lot about this method - hopefully it will help reduce the sediment in the bottle for me. As I'm bottle conditioning the beer I can't run it through a filter before bottling, otherwise there won't be any little yeasties in there to carbonate the beer for me...
To brew or not to brew as well... hrm... It's nearly as much work, I've got to wash the gear anyway to do the transfer!
Written by on Aug. 28, 2009 .
Yesterday was good, I now have my sync program crawling the FIFO table and doing inserts and updates. Once the delete facility is wrapped in the ORM I can work on deletes as well. Then it's testing. Hopefully today is as productive!
I scored a lift home and got some of my crap from work home. Scored a PC and a monitor as well as some other miscellany like DL580 hotswap PSUs. I also scored a nice Gigabyte AM2 mainboard with 2 x pci-e 16s.
I need to do a serious cleanup and eBay session so I can buy the compound saw that I want!
Written on Aug. 25, 2009 .
A pretty uneventful day. Got called on-site to a customer pretty far from work so I left for home from there.
We set up Liam's Thomas the Tank Engine track thing that we'd stashed ages ago when it was on sale. He loves it.
Written by on Aug. 24, 2009 .
What a crapper of an evening. I got caught up on-site until 9PM
The day was good though - I did some pair programming and we managed to nail down some ORM problems we were having. So now, my sync script actually runs and writes stuff to the database!
Written by on Aug. 24, 2009 .
Off to work as usual. Hope I get a seat. I'm keen to do some more work on my invoice parser/query tool.
It's a tool used to parse ACCPAC for DOS invoices and stick their contents in a database in a sensible schema that I can report on. Once I can reproduce an invoice, the most basic function - I can move to phase 2, integrating parsing of the payments report and collating that with the invoices in several management reports. This involves porting one of my previous scripts from PHP/MySQL to Python/Postgres. Phase 3 is integration of internet orders data into the bargain. (Python, PHP, Javascript)
Once at work, I'm on a customer job. Writing a database synchronisation script thats designed to replicate a MySQL database into Postgres based around a FIFO table in the MySQL DB. FIFO Records are created by triggers in the MySQL database. The script needs some smarts because of the convoluted way that the developers of the software based around this database do updates. Apparently they didn't know about update - or weren't prepared to plumb in the necessary mechanics to allow the software to decided that it's updating. Their solution: DELETE the record and INSERT every time... Joy.
brewbox (fridge control server) seems to be working away happily - although I haven't connected the controller yet. I need to test the compressor lag routine in the control script. I want to make sure it works before I plug the fridge into it, in case I damage the fridges compressor by turning it on straight after it's been turned off.
Written by on Aug. 24, 2009 .
It's a nice warm day today. The kids are out terrorising each other in the yard. I cut some pine earlier for another project and Liam is riding around on his bike (his truck) with the pine and a selection of tools in the back. I'm in the shed resurrecting an old 1U server for my fermentation controller project.
I've chosen this old dual P3 server because it pulls under 100 Watts - but still has enterprise server goodies, SCSI hot-swap, ECC RAM (because you need that in a fridge controller). The other reason I chose this server (an NEC 8500 120ra-1) is because it has serial and parallel facilities. The parallel was actually a nice find - I was going to use a USB converter, but I found an entry in the BIOS for parallel configuration. So I took a closer look and found a weird header on the mainboard - I plugged in a DB-25 ribbon cable and tested it with a live CD. Good news! The parallel header-ribbon to DB-25 actually came as surplus electronics in my electronics class in highschool! I was lucky that I still had it.
I replaced the CD with a DVD drive and attempted to install CentOS 5.2. Unfortunately the DVD drive is bad, so I downloaded the net install cd image for Centos 5.3 and re-installed the original CD-ROM drive. Looks like the net install is going to take a few hours.
Written on Aug. 22, 2009 .
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/08/21/1155217/Nokia-Leaks-Phone-With-Full-GNULinux-Distribution
This will be awesome - pitty it uses apt though...
Written on Oct. 5, 2008 .
I've managed to score a 4 day weekend!
We worked til 4:30 AM on Friday morning on a cabling job. So I took the rest of Friday off.
On Saturday we put up Liam and Emily's new swing set. We had some issues to start with. Toys R Us sold us a box that had been opened. One of the seats was missing. They supplied us with a new one when we went into the shop though. Still, I could have done without a trip in there. Next Liam ran off with a few screws, so it was a trip to the hardware! I eventually got it all set up on Sunday morning (in the rain). Liam loves it though!
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