by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2008 | Usefull Things
I just noticed that the folks over at Newsgator has set pretty much their whole product suite free today, free is Newsgator for Windows, NetNewsWire for the Mac, the online version of NewsGator and so is NewGator Go! for your phone.
This is pretty huge news as all the products I just mentioned syncs with each other seamlessly and have great UI’s, NewNewsWire has been my reader of choice for ages.
For the paranoids out there though there’s this little tid bit in the new features list:
Sort by attention: NetNewsWire now tracks more information about what you do and can tell which feeds are most important to you.
So you probably want to find out exactly what that’s all about first.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 7, 2008 | Usefull Things
For some time the default clock rate on RedHat machines (and probably others) have been 1000HZ, this is great to keep your mouse moving smooth while something big is happening in the background, but not so great for hosting 10 virtual machines on one poor physical machine as it will have to try and satisfy 10000 ticks per second.
I’ve been using a guest kernel repository by one of the VMWare users that rebuilds the std CentOS/RedHat kernels with HZ=100 and it’s been great, chopped massive amounts off my CPU usage on the host.
Now with RedHat 5.1 this is not needed anymore see this post for a bit of a graph on the impact and the background. The short of it is, simply append divider=10 to your guest kernel boot parameters and enjoy a much happier host. I found that time keeping also becomes more predictable in the guest.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 19, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Recently one of our snakes died due to an abscess in her body, we tried everything to safe the poor snake but in the end – and almost ยฃ1200 later – it passed away one night.
While undergoing treatment we were given copies of the X-Ray data, at the time I tried to read the RAW data files but failed, finally writing it off as some proprietary format specific to the X-Ray machine vendor.
Today I came across an item on MacNN mentioning OsiriX which is basically an Open Source suite to drive all things medical. Turns out the data is encoded in a standard format known as DICOM which defines the data type and also a network protocol for these machines to communicate with each other and their image storage over a network.
The data I got was in RAW format so none of the DICOM headers were present, this led me to some other software and a FAQ for importing unsupported/unknown DICOM data. Using the information there I was able to work out based on file size that my data was 512 x 512 big with an Header offset of 6480.
Armed with this information I was able to do a pretty decent import into OsiriX, the output of the one X-Ray can be seen below (click for full size).
The infection is clearly visible on the left of the image, this was removed but a second formed. Anyway, so the point of this post isn’t to go on about the poor departed snake but to mention the fantastic medical imaging tool OsiriX which is a pure Mac application and while I doubt many of my Blog audience will care for it it might still be of some use to some Googlers.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 14, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
I have been looking for a good solid SOHO Network Attached Storage device for a while. I was all set on the Lacie 2big 1.5TB Network device, it is attractive does what I needed – not much more than share files – and supports multiple drives.
Problem is I have since discovered that Lacie UK are the most incompetent people on the planet. I placed the order with them after their site showed they had the unit in-stock on a 3 days delivery time, after placing my order site said the same so I was confident it was all in order. Needless to say the device never came. I emailed their sales lines, no response, I emailed their supports lines, no response. I called them (after spending about a hour tracking down phone numbers) they didn’t reply to voice mails.
After about 10 calls I eventually spoke to someone who was unhelpful to say the least, I was told next-week, next-week etc a few times, next week came and went and no drive unit so I eventually just canceled my order. No more Lacie devices in my future ever that is a certainty.
Some searching later I found a few excellent reviews over at SmallNetBuilder for this and other devices, they even have a very awesome tool for comparing different NAS devices for speed etc, I decided based on their review to get the QNAP TS-209 pro.
The TS-209 pro is an attractive yet very well built little system, all the screws and connectors are proper solid bits of kit like you’d expect on real hardware. It is a Linux box and you can ssh to it:
# uname -a
Linux vault 2.6.12.6-arm1 #2 Thu Nov 1 03:31:14 CST 2007 armv5tejl unknown
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 0 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 332.59
Features : swp half thumb fastmult
# cat /proc/mdstat
<snip>
md0 : active raid1 sdb3[2] sda3[0]
731423296 blocks [2/1] [U_]
[==>..................] recovery = 10.6% (78181504/731423296) finish=144.0min speed=75574K/sec
So a proper little box then, I put 2 x Seagate 750GB drives into it for the same amount of storage as I would have had in the Lacie, the total price ended being about GBP50 more or so.
That GBP50 is money really well spent in this case. The device has hot swap drives – I tested it by yanking one out live without any problems, a few beeps, a few emailed alerts and log entries:
The device has a ton of features, the usual SMB shares are there but also NFS, Appletalk, FTP, Web access. It has a MySQL server built in, a webserver with php so you can deploy whatever you want on it. An iTunes server for your MP3s and a typical UPNP media server that will work with your PS3 etc.
This is a really capable device built on solid technology, so far I am very happy with it and will recommend to anyone. If anything significant change on my experiences I’ll post more later but I suggest you read the review linked above and seriously consider this for your SOHO NAS needs.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 13, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Google released a neat new Blackberry app recently, it lets you sync your Google Calendars with your Blackberry native calendar.
I tried it and it’s awesome, previously I synced my Mac to Google one way using ical feeds and then used the Blackberry sync tools to push to my phone, again one way. It sucked a lot. Now, the BB goes direct to source, syncs up all my calendars even ones I subscribed to and it just works.
I have one tiny gripe, I’d like to be able to pick which of my calendars new entries go into, even if they all go into the same one as long as I can choose which one, other than that it’s great.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 7, 2007 | Usefull Things
I’ve heard a lot about Zoho before, essentially they provide Web 2.0 style office applications – many of them completely free of charge.
I didn’t pay them too much attention really, being a mostly happy Google hostage. Today I read again about their CRM which led me to look at their other offerings. Boy was I impressed.
Initially I am just trying out Zoho Creator, it is your basic RAD database application development system, fully hosted, fully free and fully on the web and mobile.
I ofcourse had an itch to scratch, the itch being that I keep a list of my billable hours, sales, recurring bills etc all in a big old nasty VI file using VIM Outliner. This approach works but its hardly high tech or cross platform.
So I created a small Creator app that lists my clients, hours billed, sales items, recurring invoice items and some reports for listing invoiced and un-invoiced of each. Some screenshots of my app:
Adding a client
Adding an invoice line
Report of unbilled time
Bulk mark items as invoiced
You can click on the images for larger versions.
This is pretty impressive, you can really imagine coding a standalone version of this for some would be fun, for me it wouldn’t be a challenge and so it would be dead boring and probably take many hours that is better spent on billable work. I’d also be stuck with something else to maintain in code rather than a snazy point-and-click UI.
So how long did this app take me? Not more than 2 hours end to end, free hosting, and it’s available online via my blackberry for adding items etc while on the road.
Creator also has an API like all good Web 2.0 stuff and so it is really easy for you to integrate something into this, but you could also just embed a specific report or specific input field into any page of your choice via a simple iframe.
This is a great solution for small little web apps like this, soon in Q1 2008 they will also integrate the database from Creator into the Reports app then you can do some really nice multi dimensional reports, graphs and such.
I’d recommend checking out Zoho apps. As always be sure to read the T’s and C’s though before handing over too much overly sensitive data.
