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You are here: Home / Archives for TED

House guest, Sysadmin day, and moving from flat files to MySQL

2009/08/01 By staze

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.

Filed Under: Coding, Sys Admin Tagged With: Fallout 3, MySQL, PS3 DLC, Sys Admin Day, TED

Back at work

2009/06/01 By staze

Friday I came back to work. It was fairly uneventful. The weekend proved to be hot, and resulted in a lot of indoor work on the laundry room, the garage, and the shed. Everything looks pretty darn good.

Today, I’ve been making more progress with Apple (AFP has been acting worse the last few days, but they’ve given me some things to try), and we’re starting to lay out plans for our summer work. It should be a fairly steady summer, I’m hoping.

This is a rather short post because I can’t really think of much to say. Oh! Comparing my TED to my Utility bill pretty much was dead on. Since I’m not tracking total KWH/day by the hour, and I don’t know when the utility meter reader was at the house, I can only assume that anything within about 1-2% between the bill and the TED is pretty darn close. Great to know! Now I just wish they had a “TED” for water usage.

Here’s hoping for some Thunderstorms this evening!

Have a good week. Hopefully I’ll post more.

Filed Under: Energy, Miscellany Tagged With: AFP, sick, TED

More yard/house care

2009/05/13 By staze

So, last week before leaving for Portland, I fertilized the blueberries again. They’re looking quite nice, though I’m still confused why only two are flowering. My hope is that with some judicious pruning this winter, we can get them all flowering (from reading, flowers are borne on 2 year old wood, so it could be that there’s just too much young wood on them. *shrugs*). Then yesterday, we went and picked up a yard of doug-fir sawdust. Turns out, this was way too much. So, we now have sawdust about 3-4″ thick under the berries, as well as all the way to the fence. =P Oh well, it should really keep the weeds down, and will certainly make the blueberries happy.

Now I’m reading up on lawn care. The front yard at our place looks the best it has, well, ever. It’s extremely healthy, very few weeds, and all and all very nice (bit of crab grass, but I hope to take care of that soon). The back, on the other hand, not as nice. TON of weeds on the north side, I’m guessing due to the lower light levels. So, I’ve been trying to weed-n-feed there. Hopefully that too will work.

We also finally got around to removing the very sick/dying rhododendron that had been planted next to the front door (in a built-in planter). It doesn’t get any rain in that location, and because of the make-up of the planter (mortar, bricks, etc), it was probably WAY too alkali for it anyway. I put it in a 25gal nursery container with a rough 70/30 mix of peat/perlite, some acid loving osmicote, and a good drench of Superthrive. Hopefully it’ll perk up. The one that was sick and dying elsewhere on the lot I did the same thing to last year, and it’s extremely healthy now.

Tonight I’m going to double the RAM in the web server/file server/energy monitor, etc. Hopefully everything will work. I tried turning on mod_deflate on the system yesterday, and was dismayed by the performance. I hope to just enable it on some of the stuff I’m working on that will be a lot of data (further using google visualizations for power use, which 3 days of data would amount to 700KB uncompressed).

Mac OS 10.5.7 came out yesterday while I was getting sawdust, and I’ve installed it at work. So far, so good. They said they fixed some error with Dvorak keyboards, but I never noticed anything. My hope against hope is that it will fix the longterm issue we’ve had with AFP crashing on the server. Somehow, I doubt it.

This month will be the first time I can check my utility bill against the TED. I’m hoping it’ll be close… I really don’t want to have to call the local utility company to check my meter, though a newer digital one would be sweet. PGE up in Portland has been going around replacing analog ones with digital ones. I’m somewhat jealous.

At work we’re writing up a proposal for what amounts to “grant” money to offset probably budget cuts this coming year. I’m really really hoping to get 1-2 servers out of the deal. 2 servers would let me switch all critical systems over to Intel Xserves, and jettison 5 original Xserve’s. 1 server would let me upgrade the mail server and implement CalDAV. I would still need to dual purpose a machine to take up the slack from not getting the 2nd server… so, I’m hoping for 2. Mind you, this should also lower our power usage.

That’s all for now, since I can’t think of anything else.

Links for future reference:
http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1957/19232/ec1521.pdf
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/details.php?sortnum=0616&name=Lawns

Filed Under: Energy, Gardening, Sys Admin, Work Tagged With: 10.5, AFP, blueberries, dvorak, fertilizer, lawn care, mod_deflate, PGE, rhododendron, sawdust, SUB, superthrive, TED, transplant, Utility Bill, Xserve

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