For one of my projects I’m testing an SMS gateway, and decided it would be fun to build a useful alarm clock out of it. For those of you who know Python, you may find this funny. /dev/ttyUSB0 is my Arduino with a temperature sensor. The gateway credentials and phone numbers below are fictional placeholders. import serial import urllib2 def check_temp(): ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600) t = ser.readline().strip() return float(t) t = check_temp() if int(t) < 8: message = "It+is+now+%f+degrees;+time+to+get+moving." % t f = …

Tonight, I’m proud to say, I’ve returned to childhood. Let me explain. OK, fun over, back to work. For the last year I’ve been wanting to purchase an Arduino, for no other reason than to play with. Like a kid. My Arduino arrived two days ago. This is a story of problems, but not the pull-your-hair-out type, more the… like when you run out of gas in the middle of Sydney. Going to your Christmas dinner. In your friend’s car. Long story.

I’ve been looking for a simple, no-hassles GPS display program for Linux, and I believe I finally found one: TangoGPS. My requirements were quite simple; I needed something that would talk to gpsd, and display a dot on OpenStreetMaps. I’ve been able to do this in other programs (even in 3d in WorldWind), but I wanted something to download the maps for me, and GTK+ would be a plus. TangoGPS was easy to install (apt-get install tangogps), and on my test ‘drive’ home tonight on the train, worked a treat. See related screenshots.

I’ve had this issue happen to me several times, and I’m finally writing myself a note to fix it in the future. There seems to be an issue with downloading VMWare Workstation (.bundle). I first tried it with Firefox, but it just died at loading it into /tmp. Next, I tried it with Lynx, but alas, it tried to download it as a text file. Ahah! The quickest solution I could find is to right click the link, save as, and save it as a zip. Rename it to .bundle when you’re done.

Update: I’ve written up a short tutorial on the method I used to install Debian 5.0 on this device. A few months ago I purchased the eBox-3300 from WDL Systems. The system was promptly shipped, and there were no “gotchas” from WDL. The little box fit my exact needs - it is small, and built very, very well. I flew back to Australia and, after some trial and error, installed Debian 5.0 on it. For quite some time I was just using the vmlinuz file provided by WDL, which was provided by ICOP (DMP). This worked well, but there were two issues:

After restoring databases from one server to another I sometimes get this error on Ubuntu or Debian: error: 'Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)' This makes a lot of sense, and the solution is pretty simple. If you look in: cat /etc/mysql/debian.cnf You’ll see the defaults for your system. Copy the password listed there, and open a connection to MySQL as root (or some other user). Next, enter this (lets say your password specified in debian.cnf was ‘abracadabra’:

Back in 2000 I managed to acquire several retired systems to bring to Uni: this included 4-5 cheap P120 machines. At the time, I thought this was great; I had an OpenBSD box as my gateway, a FreeBSD box, a few Linux boxes, and likely something else that doesn’t even exist now. The school has a superfast connection, unlimited bandwidth, and I was curious. Although I didn’t really have time, I still managed to install and have all these servers running from my room.

I realized a few of my log files were growing unusually large, and even worse, logrotate was skipping them. I took a look in logrotate.d and straight away realized why: I had created silly names for the log file. logrotate look for .log files, but I had specified mine as .log – e.g. kelvinism_access_log. I was as familiar with logrotate when I set up the domains, so set forth to get them in the rotation.

Amazon offers some pretty cool services: S3, EC2, Alexa Site Thumbnail, and others. A while back I wanted to use AST with Django, so ended up writing the Python bindings to the REST API (they didn’t previously exist. I even wrote up a quick tutorial. Update: Amazon no longer maintains AST. I’ve decided to archive a few of the old sites, so no longer need to take thumbnails. However, a few other thumbnail services seem to have crept up, including SnapCasa", and WebSnapr.

A normal internet connection gets attacked, a lot. The majority of attacks are of the form “hello, anybody there?” – where most people just don’t answer. But sometimes, just sometimes, the question gets an answer. Depending on the answer, the attacker will start to explore. A few weeks back I was a little bored and started fiddling. I wanted to play with my Cisco, but also wanted to play with OSSEC, but also has a GIS craving. In the end I decided to create a map of the people who ask, “hello”.