www.gisvold.co.uk - OsX

SoftRaid 4.0 releases

tor — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:47:28 +0000

After a (very long) wait SoftRaid 4.0 has been released into the wild :

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Sad to say - softraid seems to be delayed (again....and again)

tor — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 13:51:08 +0000

From the SoftRaid website today :

(Click for larger)

They seem to change the name of the month in some places on their website every time it is delayed (since last year sometime).

A pity as this is really a good piece of software I rely on.

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iPad sync speed

tor — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:12:28 +0000

One of the more positive improvements easily experienced with the iPad is iTunes syncing - I just timed a 1.3 Gb movie being transferred from my laptop to the iPad in 70 seconds - several times as fas as for the iPhone.

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Wattson power meter

tor — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 20:11:06 +0000

I've created a page for sample code for accessing data from the Wattson energy meter.

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Setting up status.net

tor — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:41:22 +0000

I am currently experimenting with setting up status.net - a twitter clone service on our servers, and so far I have learnt 2 major lessons :

- Does not work on osx server (fine on a bog standard osx machine)

- The standard setup needs you to execute a sql query to give any user admin rights

insert into profile_role (profile_id, role) VALUES (1, 'administrator');

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Electricity usage - from the Wattson

tor — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:04:27 +0000

Electricity usage as recorded by the Wattson

(Click for larger image)

and as recorded and graphed on pachube for a period of a month

This is our house electricity usage - read in realtime by Ruby software running on a Mac Mini (home grown software as such) through the Wattsons USB port.
Read more

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Status of our home monitoring

tor — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:50:40 +0000

Our home monitoring system is coming along with the addition of a set of jeenodes (see them as wireless and battery driven Arduinos)

The slave nodes look like this :

the green box houses the 3 AA batteries making this a truly wireless solution, enabling me to move this around to anywhere in the house.

At the server things look like this

My first Jeenode transmit

tor — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:55:41 +0000

How exiting is this - today my replacement radio for my blown Jeenode arrived, I soldered it in (correct way around this time) and a few seconds later this appeared on the console of my receiving Jeenode :

The OK/ack's shows that valid datapackets have arrived, and that they have been acknowledged back to the transmitter.

The second to last byte (225) is the current temperature multiplied by 10, so in other words 22.5 degrees celsius.

I'm happy!

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SoftRAID - the wait

tor — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:56:24 +0000

My favourite safety/disk utility - SoftRaid does not work with Snow Leopard OsX - and the new release has been "in the works" since early 2009.

But there is hope - as their website has the following new announcement :

The SoftRAID 4.0 official release is near. We expect sometime in late January to mid February 2010. Upgrades from SoftRAID 3.x will cost $69. All customers who purchased after January 1, 2009, are eligible for a free upgrade to SoftRAID 4.0.
Read more

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HFS+ compression

tor — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:49:20 +0000

I was not aware of the HFS+ file system compression feature until quite recently - this article is a good one :

now Leopard introduces a new feature that has been used on most of the system files: HFS+ compression. This compression is rather different than most other file compression options available in the sense that it is completely transparent; there isn't even a way to tell that the files are compressed using Snow Leopard's included command line tools (in fact, contrary to what some posts on this site have suggested, command line utilities like strings will see the same file regardless if it is compressed or not).
Read more

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Chumby as a monitoring display

tor — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 19:31:12 +0000

One of the main reasons for getting a Chumby was to use it as a display for the various sensors inside and outside the house.

Here are some pictures showing the Chumby displaying graphs from internal monitoring of external temperature and electricity usage (original data from a Wattson device)

(Click for larger)
Read more

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Accessing internal readings from a WS23xx weather center using LWC

tor — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 19:06:32 +0000

One of my original problems with LWC (Lightsoft Weather Center) was the lack of any ability to access the measurements done by the control panel - which has internal sensors for humidity and temperature.

The easiest way would be using their custom CGI access, but this is limited to a set number of variables in the call - none of the internal measurements are in this set.

The second way of getting hold of it was setting up a page using the LWC variables (a LWC process picks up all files in a specific directory, does substitutions on any LWC tags it finds in these files, and copies them to another directory with these substitutions done.

The problem was that there were no tags for internal readings, except as part of a graphic file.
Read more

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Weather station

tor — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:55:40 +0000

My main Christmas gift from the family was a Weather station - and decent Mac software for it.

So this is currently online from a few places on the Internet, and of course available from a webpage inside the house (and on my chumby)

The Lightsoft Weather Centre - or LWC as it's affectionately known is the key to getting this up and running on a Mac under OsX, and it looks like this :

(Click for larger image)
Read more

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Wattson power meter OsX Mac reading

tor — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:07:08 +0000

I have now had a Wattson power meter for more than a year - and although it now comes with software for the Mac this is IMHO not terribly useful for my purposes, so I wanted to read the Wattson in real time, and use a server to send the information to other programs around the house and outside it.

This fits into the house monitoring system I am building using Arduino microcontrollers both to collect data, and to display data. More about this in other posts.

But the necessary information is hard to come by, and the public API has been a long time coming.
Read more

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Entourage and Time Machine

tor — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:56:52 +0000

A excellent and interesting hint on how to make incremental backups and Entourage play nice - and it will of course work for lots of other applications as well..
Read more

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New version of Postbox

tor — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:40:55 +0000

Apparently there is a new version of my favourite email app for OsX:

Postbox: Postbox BETA 13 has been released! Now with add-ons support and more! Download the free beta at: http://postbox-inc.com. [From Postbox: Postbox BETA 13 has been released! Now with add-ons support and more! Download the free beta at: http://postbox-inc.com.]

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Google quick search for Mac

tor — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:05:53 +0000

Hm! Excellent.

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Varnish 2.04 - maybe this can help others to avoid problems

tor — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:59:26 +0000

I downloaded and compiled Varnish 2.04 and compiled it successfully on OsX today - so far so good.

But then I tried using some of my old VCL snippets and the code errored out with messages like this :

sh-3.2# ./varnish_test.csh

Expected action, 'if' or '}'

(active.vcl Line 54 Pos 9)

return (pass);

--------######--------

and so on.It turns out that a bug seems to have been introduced, and contrary to what is in the "default.vcl" file you can not use the "return (pass)" but just "pass", and things start working again...

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Wattson and Mac's

tor — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:14:12 +0000

This guy has written a set of Perl scripts to communicate with the Wattson - and the scripts can be downloaded from his site. The source code is also a excellent tutorial on how the Wattson works.

THE WATTSON POWER METER

One of the hot topics atm is about saving the environment, with our carbon footprint and the energy that we use. I deal with green computing at work and one of the pet projects that a few of the people from work have been working on is monitoring the power usage within their home. Eager to give this a try, it began.
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Virex for the Mac

tor — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:32:05 +0000

I installed McAfee Virex for OsX on my laptop yesterday - and it froze this morning, something that continued through 2 restarts. As a matter of fact it seemed to freeze totally for period of approximately 2 minutes, then I got access to menues for 5-10 seconds, before it froze up again - while it left the syslog full of messages like this.

May 8 09:31:17 edsa-portables-macbook com.mcafee.virusscan.ScanManager[88]: kextload: /usr/local/vscanx/Extensions/Virex.kext/ loaded successfully

May 8 09:31:23 edsa-portables-macbook kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "Loading Phoenix kernel extension"

May 8 09:31:23 edsa-portables-macbook kernel[0]: Virex Kext: "installShutdownCallback: installed shutdown callback"
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