Tag Archives: tech

KHECC

This week I’m at the Kentucky Higher Education Computing Conference.

For the most part, it’s been a good conference. It’s been a good team experience (5 of us from Asbury here) and there have been some good presentations.

I went to a really good presentation yesterday about using “social tools” on campus – in particular, in libraries. He talked about using IM and SMS for tech support. That was interesting. And using Wikis as a collaborative tool for team classwork. I liked that.

It was interesting that almost every technology that he mentioned, he’d ask the audience who was aware of, or using, those technologies. I raised my hand. There were a *few* exceptions, but not many.

One thing that he mentioned that’s worth remembering was Library Thing, which allows readers to categorize books, rather than librarians. I imagine this will make the librarians cringe, but it’s a fantastic idea. There was a thing on the NPR tech podcast a few weeks ago where they talked about tagging and folksonomies. The example that he gave was very useful, but I’ve forgotten what it was. But it went something like: “When you look at a website about seaweed, you think it’s about alternate food sources. I think it’s about sea life. My strange friend Bob thinks that it reminds him of a hat he saw, so he thinks it’s about funny hats.” By allowing the users to recategorize stuff, you increase the value of that resource to them. Maybe. Perhaps it remains to be seen.

X-10

Every 4 or 5 years, I discover X-10, and I think, gee, wouldn’t that be SO AMAZINGLY COOL. And then I decide that the pricetag is way too high, and I get over it.

I have crossed the invisible line.

This started when, at OSCon, I saw a book. Smart Home Hacks. Now, none of the stuff that they talk about in there is really a surprise to me, but it sparked some ideas about what *I* want to do. More details on that to follow, I’m sure. And, I was somewhat surprised at how the prices had dropped since the last time I looked at it.

Then, today on the way home, I stopped into Radio Shack, and discovered that I could get a “Home Automation Starter Kit” there for just a few bucks. And … I did.

I’ve started small. I got one of the X-10 timer units. It will turn the fish tank light on and off on schedule, for the moment. And it will also be my alarm clock, buzzing at a particular time in the morning, and turning on my room lights 15 minutes later, in case I fail to get up fast enough.

I’ve also ordered the serial-port based X-10 thingy, which will allow me to do X-10 stuff from Linux, automating stuff via cron, or perhaps (and here’s where some cooler stuff happens) via my website. That’s right, I’m doing the ultra-cheesy thing where you can turn my christmas tree on and off from my website. But I’m going to be slightly more creative than that. I hope. Time will tell. More details as they appear.

But there are a boatload of more practical things that I really want to do, and X-10 seems to be the way to do them. The big problem is the large (but smaller than it used to be) per-switch price tag. But I’ll do this gradually.

Location awareness

Bergie has posted more stuff about location awareness, and it’s very cool stuff. Plazes.com has a desktop app that lets you register locations where you usually hang out, and then it knows where you are based on what address(es) you are connecting from.

There are still some problems with it, such as, predictably, that our proxy/firewall at work seems to block it, and I don’t know what port(s) it wants open. It does cool stuff like, no only “where am I”, but also “where have I been” which is a flash application that draws a time/position map of where you’ve been. It would have been very cool to have had this running since January, since I’ve been more places this year than any year ever.

The grunt work involved is that I have to register all the “plazes” that I am likely to visit. But, presumably, if there’s critical mass achieved, we’d end up with any place I visit (open wireless locations, for example) already being registered, and it would Just Work.

Now, I need to go read more of the documentation.

But the very coolest thing I’ve discovered so far is exactly what we were talking about that night in Moscow – the ability to integrate Plazes with Flickr, so that photos are tagged with a location, and you can search for photos of a particular place, by coordinates. Obviously, this is still very basic, but I hope that as the data set grows, you’ll be able to search for “photos near Lexington” and the like. It’s a pretty exciting new piece of metadata for us geo-geeks.

Parked in the garage

Since coming back from San Diego, I’ve been working like a mule, and this evening – about 5 minutes ago, actually – I was finally able to pull my Jeep into the garage. This is a major milestone, but it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m all settled in. It does mean, however, that all the heavy furniture is moved.

Well, except for the washer and dryer. And I’m really unsure what I’m going to do with them. Probably hang on to the dryer, and get rid of the washer. Anyone need an almost-new washer?

I’m discovering some things.

First, just in case I didn’t know this already, I’m finding that I have a LOT of books. Yeah, I already knew I had somewhere around 500 or so, but apparently that was only a partial inventory. I’m not quite sure where I’m going to put all these bookcases. I think maybe the couch was a poor investment, in that it consumed wall space where I could have put two book shelves.

Also, I’m discovering that I have a lot more computers than I had any idea of. So far, I have located 10 working computers, as well as the 5 or so not-working ones. Why do I keep the not-working ones, you ask? Well, one of them is an end-table, and another is a stool. Really. No kidding. I’ll post pictures later. The others, well, I keep them because, you never know, I might need them some day.

And I’ve found 9 monitors. Yes, that’s nine. And I honestly have no idea where they all came from. They all work, so no duds in there. And they are all reasonably nice. A couple 17″ ones in there, that I’m actually using. The rest are 15″s.

I might put one computer downstairs, in which case I’d have a use for, total, 5 computers (*maybe* 6) and 4 monitors (the stuff on the server rack is on a KVM). I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of the stuff, but I don’t think I’m going to hang onto it for much longer. (No, please don’t bother asking for it. I’ll let you know when I’ve decided to let folks pick over it.)

Oh, and did I mention I have a lot of books? Sheesh.

WRT54G flash upgrade

After much waffling about whether I should or not, I finally installed the WRT54G flash OS upgrade. The thing that really sold me on it was that one of the features is that if it doesn’t detect any connections in n seconds, it will reboot. This will, hopefully, permanently solve the problem where it just goes offlline periodically.

Another wonderful new feature with the upgrade is that there’s useful data from SNMP, and I can actually get per-interface bandwidth utilization stats. This required a little poking around with mrtg to get the configuration right, and I discovered (yeah, I should have already known this) that you can generate a full configuration by just doing:

cfgmaker communityname@hostname

So, with roughly 20 seconds worth of work, I had stats on every interface on the device.

The nice thing about rediscovering this is that now, for every device at work that supports SNMP, we can generate graphs of bandwidth usage with almost no time investment at all.

Yes, I know, I should be using Cacti. Everybody tells me that. You don’t need to. I just already have MRTG installed, and I haven’t had the tuits to look into Cacti. So you don’t need to respond with “you should really be using Cacti.”

But I know you will anyway.

Smart alecs.

Server rack

ServersAfter several years of languishing in the garage, I finally have my server rack in my office. Isn’t it pretty? The one at the lower right is www.drbacchus.com. aka buglet. aka wooga. The one right next to it is my DNS server, and also where Fajita lives (for those of you who know her.)

Happiness is a full server rack. 🙂

The Whirlwind

OSCon is over, and I’m back home. I’ve hardly stopped moving since I arrived.

I got back to Lexington about 10, and went straight to work moving stuff from the apartment to my house. Some time around 9pm, I sat down on the couch with some pizza, and promptly fell asleep. Bob called about 10:30 to find out where his truck was. I mumbled something and went straight back to sleep, not waking up until 10:15am.

I had told Bob I’d get the truck back to him first thing in the morning, I believe, so I went to do that. But, I figured, I’d stop by and pick up the 2 or 3 things in the garage. Would be a quick trip. There was a bike and a fridge and a few boxes.

Well, as it turned out, I filled the entire truck. Sheesh. Who knew I had that much stuff? It seems that I’ve got way way way too much stuff. I hope that I can get rid of some of this stuff.

By 7pm Sunday, the garage at the house was COMPLETELY full, and the apartment was, finally, all the way empty. Way too much stuff.

I should note, for posterity, that I have the coolest friends in the world. While I wasn’t even here, they moved almost all of my furniture and a bunch of my books. And then Bill and Bert showed up on Sunday to help with the last stretch, including the desk and a few other things.

At some point in there, I moved the servers, and called QX to get my DSL moved over to the house. That’s when it became apparent that Alltel hadn’t done what they said they’d do. (Surprise!) So I didn’t actually have DSL until this morning some time. And, also, my IP address changed somewhere in there, so all my DNS servers were wrong until some time this evening.

Hopefully I didn’t loose any important email in there. Will I ever know?

I’m sincerely hoping to be able to park in my garage some time in the next month, and perhaps get all the boxes put away by the end of the next month. I hope that’s not too ambitious.

DrupalCon, Mudai, Canby

After some geocaching yesterday, and a couple hours writing, I ran into Steve Mallet. Steve always seems to know what’s going on. Yesterday, for example, he knew that Drupal was having a conference here in Portland at the same time as OSCon. We treked across town, and spent a very enjoyable few hours with the Drupal folks.

When I got back to the hotel, Clint picked me up, and we went down to Canby to visit Del and Lynn, who seem to be doing really well, and are anxious to get home as soon as possible and get back to their lives.

Then, we headed back to Portland, and went to Mudai, where we hung out until about 11. Wonderful, wonderful food.

Although I missed the Extravaganza, about which I’m a little disappointed, I really come to these things primarily for the chance to spend time with certain people, and meet new people. So, in all, it was a day very well spent, even though almost none of it was actually at the conference that I came all this way to attend.

But I’m a little disappointed to have missed the State of the Onion, which is always a high point of the week. I wonder if someone recorded it.

Slashdot comments

I don’t know why I read the comments on Slashdot. It just depresses me. How can people *be* so stupid?

Yes, most of the time I read slashdot at +5, so that I only get the top-level idiocy. But when the article is about me, I want to see what people had to say. I really should save myself the trouble.

Something like 75% of the comments were complaints about the fact that it was in PDF, or misinformed remarks about the font that I used. It’s not Comic Sans, by the way, but I fail to see why it makes so much difference even if it was. Folks need to get over themselves a little bit. Your font preferences are preferences. They are not scripture.

Of the few comments that actually had to do with the presentation itself, probably 2/3 of them completely missed the point. This was a lightning talk. That means that I had 5 minutes to convey a point. The fact that I left out technical details, glossed over some points, made tongue-in-cheek remarks, and told a few half-truths are a side-effect of the presentation medium. The more detailed version of the presentation will come over the next few weeks.

And for the morons who felt the need to make the “then go fix it” remark, if you had paid attention you would have noticed that I have fixed several of the things, and other folks are working on some of the others. And of course if you had been there, you would have heard that as part of the presentation itself.

You are not obliged to make comments on things that you don’t understand. It’s best to keep your ignorance to yourself.