A few (ahum) years ago I wrote an article for Linux Journal on building a RAID system. While that exact system no longer exists, I do still have a RAID5 setup that I use with BackupPC to backup all the systems on my LAN. As I wrote about in my KVM article, I have updated my main Linux box to Fedora11. It had been out of backup rotation for about a year, since I have mostly been using my Mac Mini and everything on the Linux box was checked out of a remote Subversion repository. I wanted to archive the old system's backup and add it to the backup rotation again.

I've been a VMWare Workstation user for years and have generally been pretty happy with it; but it is significantly slower than bare metal, especially when it comes to disk i/o. One of my responsibilities for work is creating and maintaining a custom Fedora distribution. This requires building new rpm packages and then creating a livecd iso for the install of the system. Lots of disk i/o involved in reading and creating the disk image meant that I was running Fedora9 as my native desktop.

Today is the Seattle iPhone developer talk event. I'm headed for the ferry in a few minutes and figured I would give the Wordpress iPhone app a try. I'll update this post as I have time today.

Well, it was a long day! I used twitter a bit, but didn't have a chance for any longer updates here. Here are my impressions and short notes from the sessions

I attended. I attended 4 presentations: UI Design Essentials, Adding In App Purchase, Core Data, Testing and debugging and Networking.

Replace Yourself With Python

• ais_download.py - setup passwords for product download website
• mail-grep.py - Use IMAP and python to grep mail for specific strings
• mail_customers.py - Use smtplib and python to announce new releases to customers
• release.txt - Template file used by mail_customers.py
• ssh_thread.py - Threaded skeleton to run a ssh command on multiple servers in parallel with randomized start time.

System Health Monitor for Linux is a handy Python program that will setup your system to generate RRD Graphs of network interface traffic, system load, memory usage, disk space and inode usage and graphs of the number of running processes. It features a user-friendly interactive configuration mode and auto-generated html pages. Just point your web server to the health_html directory to get an overview of the status of your machine. You can see examples of it in operation here on my machine

http://www.safaribooksonline.com/

Full disclosure: I was give a 60 day 10 slot bookshelf account on Safari Books for the purposes of reviewing it, with the understanding that I would receive a full year free when I posted a review to the KPLUG webpage. No other strings were attached.

The Safari Tech Books project is an amazing undertaking. The online catalog includes 2013 (at the time of this writing) books from O'Reilly, SAMS, QUE, Cisco Press, and several other publishers. The full text and diagrams of all of these books are online and fully searchable.

MSP430 Programming with Linux

This is a presentation that I gave at Linux Fest Northwest 2005. It covers PC Board layout in Linux and programming the TI MSP430 microprocessor.

• Slide images are here
• Magic Point source is here

This presentation was also the basis for an article published in Linux Journal Issue #142

PICprg is programmer software for Microchip PIC programmers. It is designed to work with any of the PC parallel port types of programers for the PIC16C84 processors. It features a very flexible configuration menu where you can set the parallel port pin for each function, and test them. Setup is easy and only requires a voltmeter. It includes a user friendly setup menu, memory dump screen with hex display.

You should also read my Linux Journal article article describing how picprg works.

PhotoAlbum is a Perl program that creates a nice web friendly photo album of your pictures. It creates top level index files and individual image pages with optional captions, image statistics and file names using plain html for easy uploading to any web host. Navigation buttons make moving between pictures easy.

The Album generated it suitable for posting to a webpage, or burning to cdrom. One of the things I like to do is to take tons of pictures at family events and then burn cds for everyone. Having a nice HTML based photo album cdrom of an event is a big plus!

This is a simple PalmOS application that contains all of the information that I could find on the serial number ranges for various AR-15 manufacturers indicating whether or not the rifle is a 'pre-ban' rifle or not.

Select the manufacturer from the popup menu and all of the information that I have found for that manufacturer will be displayed in the main screen, if it is too large to fit on one screen the scroll bar will be enabled, use it or the up/down buttons to scroll the information.