www.gisvold.co.uk - this server

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.

Wireless displays for Arduino/Jeenode

tor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:12:01 +0000

As part of my home monitoring system I needed a display that I can use at different places in the house, preferably without a full computer attached.

And ideally I should not need Ethernet cables run around the whole house, so I decided to use a Jeenode to supply the intelligence, with a LCD display attached using one of the Jeenode LCD-adapters.

So I knocked up some code on one of my Jeenodes to do the display part, and some code (in Ruby) on one of the Mac's - and this is the end result :

(Click for larger)
Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array electronics Jeenode this server

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

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

Technorati Tags: Apple Array OsX this server This website

Our weather station online

tor — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 10:24:56 +0000

Our weather station is now online at http://www.gisvold.co.uk:81/weather/LWCWeb/ - as a experiment until I get all the data gathered in one place.

Technorati Tags: Array electronics green this server This website

It's raining

tor — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:42:16 +0000

At least it means that I get to test the rain measuring part of my new weather station (-;

Technorati Tags: Array this server

Slight problem with LWC

tor — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 16:19:22 +0000

The top set of graphs seem correct (All served by the webserver)

(Click for larger images)

But the second set seem to show quite different figures - such as the external temperature is +4 in the gauges, but -4 in the lower set of graphs.

The same graph shown directly on the server is correct
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website

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

Technorati Tags: Array OsX Ruby this server This website Web

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

Technorati Tags: Array green OsX this server This website

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

Technorati Tags: Apple Array garden Godalming OsX this server This website UK

Wattson and Pachube plus Twitter

tor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:52:02 +0000

I've now got the first cut of my software to pull data from our Wattson electricity monitor, and display it on Twitter, Pachube and a Ardunio with a LCD display.

This first screendump is from a Pachube graphic on our house website.

(Click for larger)

And here is the house Twitter page :

Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array electronics Godalming this server This website UK Web

Our house online

tor — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:37:48 +0000

I have now added a new site to display all our house sensors online. All data is collected and stored on the excellent Pachube site, and all the graphs on the site are automatically generated from the collected data.

(Click for larger)

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array development electronics this server This website UK Web

Our house is twittering

tor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:36:06 +0000

As with all modern houses ours has at long last started twittering

(Click for larger)

it's of course called "gisvoldhouse" and so far tells you the temperature and humidity level in our garage, and the outside temperature.

More to come - courtesy of a Arduino connected through a Ethernet shield, and a piece of Ruby software running on our webserver.

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array development electronics Ruby this server

My new(ish) O2 router is worrying me

tor — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:40:52 +0000

It's seems to have been rebooting a lot today :

Update :

Ah-ha - it looks like O2 are making updates!

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website Web

Drupal Apture module

tor — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:33:21 +0000

This posting (please - follow the previous link to see the example) is a pretty good example of one of the features of the Apture module for Drupal.

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website

Speeding up this site

tor — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:29:13 +0000

I have tried to add the "Boost" Drupal module to speed up the site by doing additional static page caching.

So some anomalies may be expected - as this includes changing quite a few rewrite rules.....

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website

And further upgrades

tor — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:29:42 +0000

I've now upgraded most of the Drupal modules used to run this web site as well - so I hope that not too many things have broken...

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website

Drupal CMS for this site upgraded

tor — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:56:45 +0000

Just upgraded to Drupal 6.12 - so any sideeffects, you know what to do..

Technorati Tags: Array this server This website

Spam on this server

tor — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:47:02 +0000

I should obviously stop writing about the amount of spam our little mailserver receives, as the amount as gone up by approx. 300% since last time I wrote about it :

This is just mindblowingly stupid - 98.3% spam!!! and 2350 emails per day!

Technorati Tags: Array spam this server

The growth of spam on a small server

tor — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:04:03 +0000

It's really quite staggering how much spam we receive on our home server - see the following screenshot from our Spam filter (ASSP) :

So at the moment it amounts to around 1000 emails received per day - and in excess of 98% of these were Spam so far today - over a much longer period 96.5% of all emails received since September 2008 have been classified as spam!

Technorati Tags: Array spam this server