Monday Jan 19, 2009

Our cat has a problem. When we free-fed her, she would eat until she was obese- even when we swapped to a "diet" cat food. As easy as it is to fill a food bowl once and just let her at it, it was threatening her long-term health. So we swapped to a 1-cup breakfast and a 1-cup dinner. This worked well in bringing her weight back to normal, but at the cost of our sleep- she resorted to meowing, opening our shutters to let the sun in, and generally making as much sound as possible in order to wake us up early so she could have her breakfast.

So after enduring this far too long, I began searching for automatic feeders. It didn't occur to me that this is a common problem, but after reading the overwhelmingly positive feedback for the Super Feeder on Amazon, including one review suggesting I would once again be able to sleep to my own schedule, I bought one from their site.

I opted for "blemished" versions of both the feeder and base to keep the cost down- and when it arrived I was pleasantly shocked that I couldn't detect any sort of defect in either product to qualify it as blemished. Of to a good start. I was also impressed by the build quality, and that it was it was flexible enough to include auxiliary inputs and outputs to allow for things like tying into home automation systems (who doesn't want to brag they can feed their pet by sending a text message to their house?) And in about three weeks, our cat realized the feeder dispensed the food at a set time that didn't involve us- and STOPPED waking us in the morning! An added bonus is that we're now able to leave the house for periods spanning more than one meal, and not have to worry about our cat eating all of the food right away and starving the rest of the time.

The only downside has been that our cat has since figured out how to "pick" the dispenser and get it to drop a few kibble each throw. The Iam's diet food is particularly small, so apparently even when adjusted to its tightest setting, a tenacious cat can manage to work some free:



Besides negating the benefit of a fixed calorie intake, she tended to do this late at night and the sound was annoying. Luckily this problem has already been solved via the optional chute cover, which I ordered tonight, and have little doubt it will solve the problem.

These facts alone would be enough for me to overwhelmingly recommend this product to anyone else with a similar issue- however the email exchanges with Gerard (owner?) may very well make this the best customer experience I've had in recent memory. When I described the problem prior to ordering the chute cover, he took the time to write a long and detailed replies suggesting other approached before we concluded the food pellet size was the issue.

The Super Feeder may very well been my best purchase of 2008. Highly recommended if you have a pond, or demanding cat or dog.

UPDATE: I've installed the chute cover and it's 100% effective! UPDATE #2: The cat's managed to break off two chute covers. No idea how. So I've fabricated a metal shield to keep her from picking the roller and getting kibble to drop out. It's been over a week, so it seems effective.

Thursday Dec 11, 2008

I just replaced my Nikon D70 with a Nikon D90, and it no longer seemed right to house it in a hand-me-down camera bag (courtesy of @lowbit) that wasn't quite big enough, or in the neoprene wrapper thrown in my Timbuk2. So I picked up a Domke F-803 (the makers of the awesome Gripper strap @lowbit turned me on to), along with a Domke FA-210 insert, which is wide enough to house the camera body and mounted lens, a Nikon 18-200mm VR with a B+W 010 UV filter. In the insert that comes with the bag, there's just enough room for my Nikon 35mm F/2 with a B+W 010 UV filter and Nikon SB-600 flash. There are also some small pockets for the iR remote, circular polarizer, extra memory cards, etc. Here's how it all fits together (but the 35mm now sits below the flash so its more secure):





It'd be great if there were room for my Nikon 50mm F/1.8 also, but in reality I rarely swap lens in the field, so I can always pack the 50mm rather than the 35mm if the need arises. The latching hardware has its pros and cons- it's quite difficult to unlatch, which could deter pickpockets I suppose, but also does quite well at keeping me out. I am glad there's no velcro though. Whenever I go to reach for my camera in the Timbuk2, the loud velcro "sssscritch!" often thwarts my attempts to preserve candid moments. So far I'm digging the bag- perfect size, great build quality.

Monday Nov 10, 2008

We've launched a really really cool product line today, albeit with a mouthful of a name: the Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems. If you catch this in time, you can check out the live webcast at 3:30pm (November 10 2008).

In the meantime, here's a few teaser screengrabs from a loaner unit our team got early access to. The specs on a single 7210 "Fugu":




Some of the data available via the dashboard:




An example of the analytics available, courtesy of DTrace probes. This is real time visualization of NFS traffic:




Sunday Oct 12, 2008



We've recently completed a home addition, and the electrician didn't run the new phone lines through the DSL splitter I've mentioned before- its the gray box to the right of the main phone junction in the left of this photo. When we tried to connect a phone to the new lines, the DSL promptly cut out. While we had him come out to correct this (yes its a simple fix, but the job was a fixed bid, so I might as well have him do it), I asked him to install a new dedicated 15 amp circuit under the house. I could have easily tied into one of the numerous knob and tube circuits, but I'd have to run another line to the nearby gas meter to get ground. The new 200 amp power panel was just a few feet further away, and the electrician was out anyway, so... new circuit time!

I wanted to run ethernet to the Mac Mini in the living room and one of the bedrooms, and was tired of listening to the ReadyNAS, so the DSL modem, wireless router, NAS, and a new UPS (to safely shut down the NAS in case of a power outage) were all relocated under the house adjacent to the DSL splitter. The router only has four hardwired jacks, so it may eventually be replaced by an 8 port gig hub, but surprisingly the wireless signal is stronger under the house than in the house. The DSL modem is located on the side so I can more easily see the status lights from the under house access door. The router and NAS both have web interfaces (and the NAS even reports some limited info the UPS), so I'm hoping having limited physical access won't be an important factor. And added benefit is easy access to a hardwired net connection for my Stoker based BBQ, which has been somewhat flaky running over a wireless adapter- problematic when you're trying to collect cooking stats over a 12+ hour period. So far so good.

Friday Aug 29, 2008

I've got a sweet Ultra 24 workstation (thanks Will!) in the office, running the latest OpenSolaris bits (the easiest OS install I've ever done, no kidding.) Its got 2 x 1TB drives that I want completely mirrored and bootable, so should one completely fail, I just boot off the other. Unfortunately the installer doesn't yet offer this setup, so you need to do it yourself. These are crude notes I've thrown together after several questions to Joe and Matthew. These steps assume you've got a machine with 2 disks running OpenSolaris (and the acceptance you may fubar your OS if you screw up.)

First off, if this is a fresh install, do a
pkg image-update
This will grab the latest and greatest bits, which will likely require a reboot. Now determine which disk is currently used by the ZFS pool, and the device name for the currently unused disk, via "zpool status" and "format". You'll want to attach the unused disk to the existing ZFS pool. The syntax looks like so
zpool attach rpool existing_disk second_disk
On my system, this translated to:
zpool attach rpool c3d1s0 c4d0s0
"zpool status" should then show the new mirror, and the progress of the resilvering. For some reason I didn't dig into, the mirror reported a non fatal error on my box. a
zpool clear rpool ; zpool upgrade rpool
took care of it. *shrug* So now your disks are mirrored, but the 2nd disk is still not bootable (should your primary drive fail). You can fix this via the installgrub command. For my system, the syntax looked like:
installgrub /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c4d0s0 
Where the disk specified is your newly mirrored second disk. Now you should be good to go, so reboot the box, go into the BIOS settings and toggle the second disk as your boot device, and verify it works as planned.

Friday Jun 06, 2008

Eye-Fi is bragging about one of their cards "phoning home", when in reality, the thieves just "happened to have left their network with the same default Linksys name". Hey Eye-Fi, if you just allowed the cards to connect to any AP, rather than the ones you call out by name, you'd probably have a lot more happy customers and wouldn't have to resort to bragging about coincidences. Care to explain why you don't allow this?

Sunday May 25, 2008

I setup a wireless video camera over the weekend (a Panasonic BL-C131A) to keep an eye on the baby without being in the room. The idea being to teach her to work things out herself since she'll feel like she's alone, but still be able to watch her progress (and know when a cry means "I'm overtired and don't want to be here" versus "my leg is caught in the rails again!")

Curiously there are no affordable networked video cameras that do better than 640x480- and this one is pretty laggy when you try to do over 320x240. But even with the horrible pixel count and poor low-light performance, its satisfactory as a baby monitor. These snaps were taken showing the phases our kid goes through before finally falling asleep:

Trying to crawl to freedom:


Flailing about wildly:


Mooning the camera:


Dropping the pacifier onto the floor the wailing, knowing one of us will come to retrieve it (now that we've caught her red-handed in this manipulation, we've gotta work on nipping this):


Then finally collapsing:

Tuesday May 20, 2008

After 7 years of having an indoor cat, I've finally found the grooming dream team: a FURminator for the undercoat and a Zoom Groom for the outer coat. Combined, they remove an insane amount of fur in short order-- well worth their prices (although the FURminator seems awfully price gouge-y. If you've got a defunct hair clipper and are handy, you can probably turn one of the blades into your own comb. They look like the same part to me.)

Sunday Mar 30, 2008



While looking for a suitable 'project box', I eyed the above toolbox in the corner of the garage thinking it'd be a perfect fit. Unfortunately, it belongs to my wife who says it has sentimental value-- apparently passed down from a long line of handymen. ;) (Instead, I repurposed one of my homebrewing boxes to contain my Stoker system.) This red box contains one or two useful items- but the rest look like something that should be stamped Playskool. The most humorous of items are not one but two tiny little hammers. It brings a smile (and a bit of a cringe) to my face thinking of my then-future wife trying to drive a nail trough our impervious plaster walls with one of these toy hammers.

I'm glad we're hanging on to it. It'll come in handy whenever I need to remind myself I can be occasionally useful...

Friday Mar 21, 2008



Continuing the the tradition of flaunting my hardware, I thought I'd share specs on the latest rig: an Ultra 24 workstation. This one sports an Intel quad core, 8G ram, 500G x 2 disks, and an Nvidia 8800 GTS (not standard). The layout (design, cable routing, cooling, etc) is so slick its unlikely I'll ever build out another rig from components myself. Haven't done anything with it yet, but I hope to change that in the next 48 hours...

Thursday Feb 21, 2008

Since upgrading my laptop to the latest Mac hardware (MBP 3.1) and software (Leopard 10.5.2), the latency in system suspension and wake up has driven me nuts. Watt did some asking around, and was pointed at this snippet on how to disable 'safe sleep', in short:

$ sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
$ sudo nvram "use-nvramrc?"=false

then reboot. I don't have much of a sample size, but this seems to have fixed it for me. An added benefit is that sensitive information isn't written to disk in the clear (as suggested in the article comments.)

UPDATE: this seems to have fixed the slow-to-sleep problem, but I still have the slow to wake problem. :-/

Friday Feb 01, 2008

Since I was due for a Leopard upgrade, and the opportunity presented itself for a hardware refresh as well- I've upgraded from my first MBP Pro (2.33GHz core 2 duo, 2GB ram) to this 2.6GHz core 2 duo, 4GB ram). [Yes, its good to have a boss that loves hardware even more than I do. :)] The transition has- thus far- turned me into an ever bigger Apple fan.

When first powering on new Mac, it asks you if you want to transfer data from another Mac. Matthew reminded me of this option before I made the jump, so I borrowed Igor's firewire-to-firewire cable (which apparently is the only supported mode of data transfer) and gave it a shot. Worst case, I'd just blow it all away with another fresh install and I'd be none the worse.

About two hours later, all of my user data and applications were migrated to the new machine. Easiest. Upgrade. EVAR. It looks like just my old box, only running fanshy smanshy Leopard now, and on snappier hardware. Lightroom photos looked brighter than before (I really need to get my displays calibrated...), the Cisco VPN didn't work (but I found a fix on a Sun blog. Nice!), and the annoying "BONG!" startup sound returned, even though I confirmed Startup Sound was still enabled and supposedly muting it (reinstalling the app fixed it. too bad apps can't include version dependencies like Firefox extensions.)

So far so good. I'm leaving the obnoxious Leopard background image in place for now until I had over my old laptop- thats how much they look a like! Time will show if I made the jump to Leopard too soon-- but the OSX upgrade option was a total cakewalk!


UPDATE: It seems Parallels is totally fubared by the upgrade. I'll be curious to see if reinstalling the Parallels app resurrects my XP instance, or that needs to be reinstalled as well. Also, the new MBP and/or Leopard means it takes a significantly longer time for the laptop to suspend when I close it. No idea why, but its kinda annoying.

Tuesday Jan 22, 2008




After receiving another thermometer this Christmas, it seemed time to take inventory. In rough order of most to least used:
  • The latest to join the collection is the Super-Fast Thermapen 5. Spendy, but really worth it. Its the closest thing to instant read for a probe style thermometer I've ever seen. I'll never use another meter when grilling.
  • Stoker (really a PID with a NIC). I've blogged about it lots before.
  • Craftsman 82327 Infrared. My first infrared and still my favorite. (I've got a 2nd one not pictured- a ThermoHAWK 400- but I just don't like it, as cute as it it.)
  • Pyrex remote probe. It saw some use when BBQ'ing before I got the Stoker, but most of its time it sits in the kettle when brewing beer.
  • Fischer Scientific (NIST calibrated). Roy gave me this I'm guessing 8 years ago. At the time, I was using a dial thermometer that took a good couple minutes to reach temp. I used it for grilling, brewing, and just about everything before I got the infrared (for surface temps only), then even longer until I got the Thermapen. Now I can't believe I waited so long before getting the Thermapen-- this thing will be relegated to the drawer graveyard from now on. Besides taking maybe 10-12 seconds to finalize the temp, the probe is so thick that whatever piece of meat you wedge it into is sure to release copious fluids.
  • Not pictured, a KitchenAid oven thermometer-- to keep the oven thermostat honest. Remarkably both the oven and the KitchenAid report the same temps, so this doesn't see much action-- but highly recommended if you've never checked out your oven.
There were a few others that didn't make the list, but they've long been donated away to the less well equipped. The only outstanding "thermometer" on my wishlist now is a PID controller for my espresso machine-- but I keep holding out for that Silvia upgrade first. Someday...

Friday Dec 14, 2007


No need for a HOWTO, because its very simple, but I still feel like a kid in a candy store when you can ssh into something. The commands available however are much more extensive that the SLUG, without the need to install additional packages- see below. This did make me think to enable JFFS2, hang a thumbdrive off the router, and use that as a DMZ for remote file transfer rather than NATing my NAS and the associate risk of it being exposed on the raw interwebs.


$ ssh -l root *******.ath.cx
DD-WRT v24 mini (c) 2007 NewMedia-NET GmbH
Release: 10/10/07 (SVN revision: 8151)
root@*******.ath.cx's password: 
==========================================================
 
 ____  ___    __        ______ _____         ____  _  _ 
 | _ \| _ \   \ \      / /  _ \_   _| __   _|___ \| || | 
 || | || ||____\ \ /\ / /| |_) || |   \ \ / / __) | || |_ 
 ||_| ||_||_____\ V  V / |  _ < | |    \ V / / __/|__   _| 
 |___/|___/      \_/\_/  |_| \_\|_|     \_/ |_____|  |_| 
 
                       DD-WRT v24
                   http://www.dd-wrt.com
 
==========================================================


BusyBox v1.4.2 (2007-10-10 00:47:21 CEST) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

~ # uptime
 17:43:11 up 22 days, 20:52, load average: 0.01, 0.00, 0.00
~ # ls /usr/bin
[           du          id          nohup       tail        uniq
[[          env         install     nslookup    tee         uptime
awk         expr        killall     printf      telnet      uudecode
basename    find        less        reset       test        uuencode
clear       free        logger      rx          time        wget
cmp         ftpget      md5sum      scp         top         which
cut         ftpput      mesg        sort        tr          whoami
dc          head        mkfifo      ssh         traceroute  xargs
dirname     hexdump     nc          strings     tty         yes
~ # ls /usr/sbin
bcrelay           dropbearkey       mtd               svqos
bird              dropbearmulti     nas               svqos2
bpalogin          dumpleases        nas4not           tc
brctl             ebtables          nas4wds           telnetd
chroot            epi_ttcp          ntpclient         udhcpc
cron              httpd             nvram             udhcpd
dbclient          igmprt            pppd              upnp
dhcp_lease_time   inadyn            pptp              wiviz
dhcp_release      ip                pptpctrl          wl
dhcpfwd           iptables          pptpd             wlconf
dnsmasq           iptables-restore  radius-client     wol
dropbear          l2tp-control      radiusallow       wrt-radauth
dropbearconvert   l2tpd             radiusdisallow
~ # top
Mem: 15220K used, 15096K free, 0K shrd, 1684K buff, 5432K cached
Load average: 0.00 0.01 0.00
  PID USER     STATUS   RSS  PPID %CPU %MEM COMMAND
18362 root     R        340 18356  0.9  1.1 top
 2222 root     S        872     1  0.0  2.8 httpd
18354 root     S        596 17669  0.0  1.9 dropbear
    1 root     S        472     0  0.0  1.5 init
18356 root     S        436 18354  0.0  1.4 sh
17572 root     S        408     1  0.0  1.3 wland
17669 root     S        372     1  0.0  1.2 dropbear
17569 root     S        368     1  0.0  1.2 dnsmasq
17900 root     S        360     1  0.0  1.1 upnp
17802 root     S        332     1  0.0  1.0 igmprt
17804 root     S        316     1  0.0  1.0 process_monitor
   11 root     S        304     1  0.0  1.0 watchdog
17539 root     S        304     1  0.0  1.0 resetbutton
17807 root     S        296     1  0.0  0.9 inadyn
17662 root     S        276     1  0.0  0.9 cron
17993 root     S        252     1  0.0  0.8 udhcpc
    3 root     SWN        0     1  0.0  0.0 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    8 root     SW         0     1  0.0  0.0 mtdblockd
    2 root     SW         0     1  0.0  0.0 keventd
    6 root     SW         0     1  0.0  0.0 kupdated
    4 root     SW         0     1  0.0  0.0 kswapd


Friday Dec 07, 2007


Between my evangelizing Macs as replacements for Windows laptop users- and later getting the "what should I install?" question, and wanting to finally pull the trigger on an OS 10.5.1 upgrade and fearing I'll have to do a fresh re-install should it go wrong, I thought now would be a good time to document the applications I feel are worth going with from the start, in no particular order. Perhaps my Mac guru friends can do the same and I'll realize I'm going about it all wrong...
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Adium
  • Chicken of the VNC
  • Netbeans 6 with Glassfish v2
  • Lightroom
  • Twitterific
  • LittleSnitch
  • MenuMeters
  • Xcode
  • N
  • SkeyCalc
  • iTerm (Leopard belatedly brings tabs to the stock Terminal app, so I may end up punting this)
  • DarwinPorts
  • Cisco VPN
  • Parallels
  • QuickSilver (installed but never became a power user)
  • Flip4Mac
  • Flickr Uploadr
  • Gallery Remote
  • Startup Sound to disable that annoying BONG!




Looking for older entries?


Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, this site is
licensed under a Creative Commons License
Who is Rama Roberts?