Archives for August 2009

The last week Tara’s sister has been staying with us. It’s actually been pretty fun having an extra person in the house. I wouldn’t have thought the house too big for 2 people, but it does seem more homey with another (except maybe the kitchen that’s a bit crowded). She heads back home tomorrow, but it has indeed been fun. We’re attempting to make it a routine thing for her to come down during the summers, as she gets to do whatever she wants (within reason) here, on her own time. It’s a “vacation” of sorts.

Yesterday was Systems Administrator day (http://www.sysadminday.com/), so I decided to take the day off and hang out at home. Aside from driving Tara and her sister around (which was fine), I finally picked Fallout 3 back up (can’t wait for the PS3 DLC). Finished off a mission, and realized that at level 20, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of “threats” in the wasteland. Once Broken Steel drops for the PS3, it’ll just make me that much more burly.

On the “work” side, I finally moved my power monitoring system over to mysql from flat files. I’m still working on updating all the scripts that interact with that data, but the front page “widget” works. I have an interface nearly ready for looking at past days data. Currently, at just over 4 months of data (about 175k rows), the DB is sitting at 12MB. So, a year’s worth of data should be about 36MB, or about half a million rows. That’s with 3 keys, for row id, house code (incase I ever add another panel monitor), and datetime. I think reading a single flat file might be a bit faster, but MySQL gives some much more powerful abilities, like showing all the data for a month, or seeing high and low temps for a given day, easily. It’s certainly teaching me SQL select statements.

I’ll post again when I have everything working again, and have added some new features to the data. I hope, shortly after that, I’ll be able to post the code in my “code” section. But that requires I do some commenting within the code first. I’m pretty bad at commenting code (I never got in the habit), so going back to previous code always takes a few minutes of trying to figure out what I was doing.

Have a great weekend, and next week. I’m hoping for some T-Storms.