Another
08:06 PM,
1 Comments
Here is my first stab at techno.
Garage Band
05:30 PM,
0 Comments
Wow. GarageBand is soo cool. It rocks. I tossed this together in just a few minutes. It is meant to loop forever, as the end leads to the start. So fun to play with. Amazing.
Installing a new version of Perl
01:33 PM,
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When one installs a new version of Perl, all of the modules that were installed using the old version stay with the old version, and so you're stuck with a raw install of Perl without your beloved modules. This is because each module is binary compatible with that version of perl it was installed for. Manually going through and trying to install each module is a pain, to say the least.
This is where CPAN's autobundle comes in handy. Before compiling and installing your new version of Perl, use autobundle to make a CPAN bundle of your currently installed packages. Run the CPAN shell and run:
cpan> autobundle
It'll then make a bundle and tell you where it is. If you're using BSD, you'll have to get out of the CPAN shell to install the new version of Perl via ports. You can have concurrent installs of Perl. If this is on BSD, you they provide a "use.perl" command which allows you to switch the system's perl distro. You don't want to do that quite yet, as you can run the new Perl binary (i.e. /usr/local/bin/perl) without touching the currently installed Perl (i.e. /usr/bin/perl). So, you want to run CPAN as the new Perl and install your recently created Bundle, using Bundle::bundle_name (nuking the .pm at the end) and away it will go:
cpan> install Bundle::<bundle name>
Follow it through its progress, as it may ask you for something because of a module with an interactive Makefile.PL. After it's done, you can run use.perl to switch to the new binary.
Weather Goodness
01:58 AM,
0 Comments
Well, it's all installed, and I've written the scripting that gets OWW to update an RRD here on this machine. I've also created the RRD that it updates, and created a script which dynamically makes an RRD graph for the width of your browser and the range of time specified. I even did this without Cricket. It was interesting to learn more innards of RRD, and to get the One-Wire network working. Amazing technology. Lotsa fun. And it'd never be worth it if it weren't all automatic. I don't know how people would have the patience to run a weather station manually.
Personal Weather Station
12:46 PM,
0 Comments
There are so many things in technology that I want to play with. A few days ago, we had a wind storm that was quite ferocious in our area. Weather stations like at the airport and such didn't show as much wind as it felt like it was where I live. It got me thinking as to whether I could find a relatively affordable wind/temp meter that interfaces with a computer, preferably running linux or other non-microsoft OSes.
I found a neat Open Source piece of software called OWW for one wire weather. After looking at what this person did, I was more interested in finding equipment. My first look turned up a pricey piece of equipment, just for wind. After looking a bit more, I found a mexican company makes a more economical version. So, I couldn't resist. I ordered one of these. After all, I need another excuse to having a pole on my roof :) It will be neat to graph the output of this thing over time, like this guy does.
