Laen Aggregated

For dorkbotpdx last night, I made this little toy:

It’s an 8×8 red+green LED Matrix, driven by three shift registers driven by a Bare Bones Board Freeduino by Modern Device Company.

Before the meeting I just had it flashing fun patterns based on odd bit-math equations. During the meeting, I was urged to add some code to make it controllable by the Wii Nunchuk. So, I wrote a simple program that takes the X and Y of accelerometer and plots it on the matrix.

I drove the LED Matrix with three shift registers: One 74HC595 8-bit register gave power to the rows of the display, and one Maxim-IC MAX6969 sank current for the columns to the display. To turn on row 1, column one, you shift “B10000000” into the row register, and “B10000000” into the column register:

  1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0  
1 x o o o o o o o
0 o o o o o o o o
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 
0 o o o o o o o o 

Altogether, it was about 30 lines of code to drive the matrix with some fun patterns.

I just received this set of prototyping boards from ucHobby and their sponsor Wright Hobbies!! Hooray!

I’m psyched. I have some projects I want to do that these boards will be perfect for.

In order to encourage us to play with electronics more, JWA and I have begun doing monthly challenges. For our inaugural challenge, we decided upon an LED Birthday Candle. This is my entry to that challenge.

You blow the center pole towards one side, and the LED shuts off. To turn it back on again, blow it the other direction. It’s a circuit known as a bistable multivibrator, or “flip-flop”.

I do like that it’s so simple and cheap, though.

My parts list is simply:

2 – 10k ohm resistors
1 – 1k ohm resistor
1 – 220 ohm resistor
2 – 2n3904 NPN Transistors
1 – LED
3 – AAA batteries (this thing’ll last forever!)

Not including the batteries, this thing costs less than 15 cents in parts. If I could work out the “blow” mechanism a little better, I think this would be a marketable product.

Okay, now for some photos:

On the breadboard:

Before being shoved in the pill bottle:

I had originally wanted to be able to shove this thing into a fat straw, like you get with a bubble tea, so I made it as small as possible, and soldered the pieces together straight rather than using protoboard:

Next: Brighter LEDs!

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 The electronic man holds his joy aloft.  He loves it, because he was built to love it.  It shines with the energy that courses through his body.  He wants to share his Light with the world, but fears that if he lets it go, he’ll never know it’s glow again. 

I’ve recently become enraptured with a little microcontroller development board called the Arduino (pronounced “Arr-dwee-no”).

This little thing is a great way to get started with electronics. You hook some electronic component to it, write a little bit of C, upload it to the board, and “tada!”, you’ve invented some new Gizmo.

1 box double cheese hamburger helper
2 cups nonfat milk
1 1/2 cups hot water
6.5 ounces whole wheat rotini
1 pound frozen chopped spinach
1/2 pound ground turkey

Prepare as per box instructions. Yum!

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol
..An open protocol for messaging systems.

Some implementations of AMQP:

• Apache QPID
• RabbitMQ

• OpenAMQ

  And some more information about it:

• http://www.amqp.org/

0142 – Workgroups
This is for sending messages to roles. Several entities may join a Workgroup queue, and other entities may request chats with the workgroup (which then routes to the different entities when the chat is accepted by one of them). So, for alerting, we can send to the “alerting” workgroup, which will route to an appropriate AlertAgentBot.

0095 – Stream Initiation
For setting up a binary stream between two entities. This is cool because it could let us push all system checks to the nodes over the JabberNet. So we have a core stub ManagementAgent on each managed node, and it just logs on, and bootstraps itself.

0137 – Publishing SI Requests
For publishing available binary streams (using pubsub). So now our binary distribution nodes can publish available code, and our ManagementAgent stub can see what’s available for pulling.

0135 – File Sharing
Provides a way for entities to publish files to other entities. This looks kinda like what 0137 does, except farther evolved.

Combined, a bootstrap would be something like:

• Agent starts
• Agent checks local cache for code, loading what’s necessary.
• Agent receives pubsub list of available code

• Agent downloads (and caches) what it needs.

  0136 – Message Archiving
  For using the Jabber server as a persistent message store. Provides a method of adding, updating , and removing items from the store. This could be used as an audit log for the Agents.

Solaris patching is, frankly, a pain.

Patch Check Advanced makes it less painful—even pleasant.

It’ll automatically download the patch list from Sun, correlate it against what you have on your system, and present you with a list of what needs to happen. You can tell it to install all recommended patches, all security patches, or all the patches that don’t require a reboot (saving those for special occasions).

Extremely cool tool.

Two new photos, both taken from my living room window.

Not photoshopped. Just a fortunate reflection:

At dusk today, the fog rolled in.

X4100s have a pretty cool integrated lights-out management card, but it doesn’t have an easily integrate with Conserver.

To fix, I created an expect script named “ilom-connect” like this:

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
expect { 
"(yes/no)?"    {exp_send "yesr"; exp_continue; }
"password: " {exp_send "r"; }
}
expect "\-> "
send "cd /SP/consoler"
send "startr"
expect "(y/n)?"
exp_send "yr"

console x4100 {
include sun-ilom;
exec ssh -l admin x4100-m;
type exec;
initcmd "/usr/local/sbin/ilom-connect";
}

Slashfood is a delicious food blog, full of delicious looking food porn.

Yum.

I spent the weekend loading Nexenta on my two home PCs.

Nexenta is basically Ubuntu on an OpenSolaris kernel.  This gives you all the awesomenes of Ubuntu (apt-get, gnome, kde, GNU tools), with all the awesomeness of OpenSolaris (zones, ZFS, DTrace).

Some cool things:

• The opensolaris packages are available via apt-get.  I wanted to set up some zones, so I did an “apt-get install sunwzoner sunwzoneu”.


• “zoneadm -z zone1 install” fires off debootstrap and creates a Nexenta Zone.


• The install is super-easy.  Just boot off the CD and answer a few questions.

I really hate Linux Software RAID.  I hate it so much that I don’t use it.  This meant that my home storage was more or less unprotected, which sucks.  I don’t have anything irreplacable on these servers, but still, it’s good form to RAID.

Creating a mirror is as easy as:

1. zpool create -m /storage zstorage mirror c1d0p0 c2d0p0

   Adding another mirrorset to this pool is as easy as:

2. zpool add zstorage mirror c3d0p0 c4d0p0

   ..Which gives me 560GB of RAID10 storage with two commands.   Now I have room for a complete nightly backup of my laptop, including incrementals (thanks, ZFS snapshots!), plus a backup of my “every photo I’ve ever taken” directory.

I was having a problem with Solaris’s Basic Security Module. I’d make changes to the audit_control and run “audit -s”, but it didn’t look like it was having an effect. Or at least it wasn’t taking effect for every process.

It turns out that each process’s audit flags are set at process create time, and that each process it forks off inherit the parent’s audit id.

You can see the audit details of a process by using auditconfig:

1. auditconfig -getpinfo 23161

   audit id = rold(25038)
   process preselection mask = lo(0×1000,0×1000)
   terminal id (maj,min,host) = 0,41352,gto(192.168.1.98)
   audit session id = 23161
   ..And you can change the mask using auditconfig:

   $ auditconfig -setumask 25038 ex,lo,fw,fc,fd

   Which enables auditing of execs, login/logouts,file writes, file creates, and file deletes.

I’m jetlagged. It’s not what I expected.

I thought jetlag was primarily a sleep disorder. I thought I’d just have a tough time getting to sleep because of the time difference. This I can understand. You were going to bed at 2300 GMT, now you’re going to bed at 1400 GMT. It’s understandable that the body would go “huh? It’s the middle of the afternoon!”. I thought that I’d just be tired today.

Instead, it’s just bizarre. It’s not that I’m tired, because then I think I could deal with it better. I feel well rested, but fatigued and disoriented. I feel slow, like the rest of the world is travelling very fast. My thoughts aren’t well organized, and my coordination is…. off. It’s has all the symptoms of being sleepy, without actually being tired.

Dear Endocrine System,
I feel I owe you some of you an apology. While you’ve been working so hard to keep my body in balance, I’ve been undercutting your efforts. To those of you I’ve inconvenienced tonight, I’d like to apologize individually.

Pineal Gland. You may be wondering why it is that it’s 6 in the morning and we haven’t gotten a wink of sleep. You may be wondering what the hell is happening to all the melatonin you’ve been pumping into blood all night. You may even see this all-nighter as a personal failure. Don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault. While you’ve been squirting the melatonin, I’ve been chugging the coffee drinks.

That’s also the reason you’ve been working so hard, Pancreas. For all the caffeine those drinks have, they have a lot more raw, adulterated sugar. You’ve been a real champ, pushing out all that insulin. I appreciate it. You’re my favorite gland. Now could you please, PLEASE cut it out with the stomach acid? Isn’t 7 hours of heartburn enough?

Adrenal Glands. No apology for you. You guys freak out at every little thing, and frankly, I’m sick of it. The sudden drop in blood sugar is just the pancreas doing their job. It’s really, REALLY, nothing to worry about. The adrenaline you’re releasing is doing nothing more than wigging me out, and breaking down into more sugar, making the poor pancreas work even harder. Shame on you. Whoa! Whoa! Calm down! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not attacking you. Just calm the hell down, and cut it out with the fight-or-flight.

Pituitary? Hypothalamus? I don’t know what you guys are doing up there, but I have a sneaking suspicion you guys are the only ones keeping this boat together. Good work guys. Oh, and pituitary? Keep them endorphins coming. They’re awesome.

Finally, Kidneys. Although you’re not always seen as a member of the Endocrine team, I want you to know I appreciate your work the most. You’ve been pulling double duty, removing all this crap from my blood, while doing your very best to keep my blood pressure down. How have I repaid you? By not drinking enough water. My apologies, friend. Have a drink on me.

Your Boss,
-Laen

Okay, just upgraded from Wordpress 1.2.2 to 1.5-cvs.

Gotchas:

• upgrade.php/upgrade-functions.php bug
• Links no longer show up on the sidebar. I hacked together a get_links_sidebar function that spits out a block in the right format. Usage: < ?php get_links_sidebar(); ? >

• Styles are now themes. Get yer themes at WP-Themes.info.

Version Skip

Wordpress is doing Fibonacci sequenced version numbers! I do the same thing for UMLazi.