Happy Birthday
I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)
Syndicated 2012-01-06 12:28:00 (Updated 2012-01-06 12:28:32) from Elwell
Happy Birthday
I finally got round to assembling my birthday present. Shiny toys FTW :-)
Syndicated 2012-01-06 12:28:00 (Updated 2012-01-06 12:28:32) from Elwell
The Perils of CDNs
So CERN have just held a popular webcast event to announce the latest results in the search for the Higgs. Many of the webcast viewers (no I don't have usage stats) were complaining that the stream was choppy. What I did notice on my laptop (couldn't get near the auditorium) was that the main libflashplayer traffic was inbound from 93.174.99.0/24 VELOCIX-EU - could this be the CDN used by Groovy Gecko?
Not having an onsite mirror though then meant that each member of staff watching was then pulling data *in* to site as the traffic graph shows:
Syndicated 2011-12-13 15:19:00 (Updated 2011-12-13 15:19:06) from Elwell
Another year of LHC Secrecy
So, another year of LHC running comes to a successful close, Once again we've managed to keep the real facts hidden from everyone - Not the Higgs (as thats's being discussed next week) but more importantlt that the whole of the LHC is actually a spinoff from one of the major Data Centre companies who had outgrown their shed. The Proof? why - of course...Syndicated 2011-12-08 14:44:00 (Updated 2011-12-08 14:57:51) from Elwell
Sniff...
Syndicated 2011-11-25 13:12:00 (Updated 2012-01-27 10:48:46) from Elwell
FTTH update
So, I'm still (till I move flat) with k-net at the flat, and have a monitoring whitebox hanging off my router.
Syndicated 2011-11-24 10:55:00 (Updated 2011-11-24 13:47:25) from Elwell
PoE Network controlled signage
I may have a requirement for several 'remote controlled' illuminated signs. (where remote could be network driven) - These aren't Scrolling LED 'calls in queue' type ones, but more the warning 'Laser on', 'Mic Live', 'Conveyor Running' type ones.
Normally these things seem to be driven directly from some local switchgear or output, but what if you want to gather status centrally , or illuminate the sign depending on some remote sensor (be it a web tsunami alert or the boss' car being picked up on the ANPR at the gate)
Cue a quick hacky prototype: Take one nanode and use the digital outputs to drive a mosfet to switch some cheap LED strips from IKEA. So far so good, but that requires a 12v (since thats what the strips use) supply. The nanode can take that on the screw inputs if you add a heatsink to the reguator, but I'd rather get rid of the PSU alltogether: cue a cheapo 802.3af PoE splitter from TP-Link, and I have the whole lot driveable off one RJ45 cable.
Onwards to software, and it looks like bitlash / restuino look useful (esp if I get the whole lot working with DHCP too).
Anyway, with a range of lighting areas possible (thanks to addressable outputs on the nanode) per display, the option to have a nice facia with multiple 'zones' illuminated is possible. Now to find a nice case...
Syndicated 2011-09-28 21:00:00 (Updated 2011-09-28 21:00:26) from Elwell
puppet /. facter / v12n
As I'm starting to get into puppet, especially when used with the foreman for dashboard display, I've started noticing a few (fixable) oddities
1st up ios that not all RHEL clones are treated equally -- some patches are just adding detection and flaggin, others go the full hog and make sure its in all the "constrain:" sections in facter too. I guess I need to do a code review and pull in the extras. Cue lots of different VMs
(the joys of a weeks home leave from work..)
secondly, virtualisation detection is 'flakey' -- some (vmware) are really well detected, but new kernels give false positives (see issue #7723) so I'm going to set about tidying these up and adding hyper-V detection properly
Syndicated 2011-09-01 08:53:00 (Updated 2011-09-01 08:53:36) from Elwell
FTTH / Reso-LIAIN / K-Net
Executive Summary:
Shuttle bus tracker
Not that I tend to err, leave things till last possible minute or anything, but I'd really like to have a tracking system on the CERN shuttle busses, so that I can stay in the office until I know the bus is coming. (or, armed with a mobile device waiting at the stop, see where it is)
So - I was thinking something embedded ish that contained a cheapo GPS chipset (probably good enough signal on the dasboard, a 2 line LCD and a keypad
something UI ish for driver along the lines of 'select route:'
and then it'd show the route, upcoming timetabled stops
backhaul to site would be GSM (should be able to transmit a small UDP packet of transponder#,Route#,Position,timestamp) to a central server.
The folks over at rpi.edu (yes, they started concerto too) already have some code that looks interesting at https://github.com/wtg/shuttle_tracking/
Question is, would it be cost effective to roll our own, and if not, who's offering the best / cheapest (open) system out there?
Syndicated 2011-08-03 07:54:00 (Updated 2011-08-03 07:54:06) from Elwell
nanode built!
One successful evening of soldering, and lo, I have a working nanode. Started off nice n basic with the resistors, but overall a pretty simple pcb to assemble:
Syndicated 2011-07-11 22:47:00 (Updated 2011-07-11 22:47:29) from Elwell
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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