This is my new bonsai throbber prototype. It uses an AT-Tiny26 from Atmel to provide control of an LED, which pulses every 30 seconds or so when the two supercaps are charged up enough (3 volts or so).

I am using a high intensity white LED, but you will get better life out of a red LED since they will use about 1/4 of the current. When fully charged, I get around 6-8 hours of throbbing.

Also note: this is a THROBBER, not a PUMMER, and the led smoothly ramps on and off over about a half second.

Also also note: Code and makefile for GCC is included below, and is a pretty good example of how to build a power saving idle sleep mode app with avr-gcc.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, but in great eons, even Enki can get off his fat ass and reboot a server :)

Yes, folks, it's true. Cthuugle is BACK! Bigger, stronger and better than ever! Please feel free to Digg it.

UPDATE: I did some upgrades to the search grouping and paging algorithms to get more (4x) efficiency.

When I originally created the HP Lovecraft themed Cthuugle search engine, there was a library of Lovecraft's work which allowed users to read his stories online. Shortly after I launched the engine, legal threats took this library offline. Years went by, and I kinda forgot about Cthuugle except for whenever my renewals came up. Everybody else still remembered it though, to the tune of 3000 unique visitors per day or so.

When this year's renewal came up, I decided to read some Lovecraft stories, and was shocked to discover that the copyrights on all of his stories had expired THIS YEAR! Clearly celebration, and some hacking, was in order.

The old ht://dig search engine is pretty stale at this point, so that was a non starter. I have been looking for an excuse to install Lucene on one of my servers, so I created a vhost on one of my virtual machines and got things started. The new Cthuugle uses Nutch with Lucene and Tomcat. I wrote some custom crawl and merge scripts, and set things to autostart, and now we have a working search engine. After a little tweaking of the JSP, the original look and feel were easy enough to duplicate as well. The added bonus of more granular results and the ability to view explanations for search results were also really nice. One NginX proxy was added for flavor. Done.

I quickly added The Temple of Dagon to my index, where Aleister had so nicely collected all of Lovecraft's work. Now Cthuugle can find all of Lovecraft's stories, poems, and essays.

If I missed your Cthulhu themed site, let me know at derek squiggle armyofevilrobots dott com

I have been getting a little tired of temperature surfing on my Rancilio Silvia coffee machine, so I decided to purchase a PID controller for it. Auber instruments had a pretty good deal going, so I ordered it. What follows is a post showing the installation and results...

Woah! It has been FOREVER since I last blogged! I figured I would continue this little stream of consciousness experiment now that I am taking a sabbatical for the summer. I had some great plans to build robots and other devices over my break, but I find myself gravitating back towards Python development over and over again. Does this mean that I am doing for a living the thing that I enjoy most, or is it just that familiarity brings out habits I cannot break? Perhaps it is just that shipping robot parts leads to multiple week long delays...

Anyhow, my current playlist consists of (updated Sep 6/09):
- Learning erlang (say it 10 times fast)(Done. Cool, but not always the right tool)
- Learning Pylons, in great detail. Meh. Django won. FapWS in other cases.
- Experimenting with distributed document oriented DBs like CouchDB
- Arduino CANbus library development
- Linux EMCDone! Converted over 100% This is awesome software.

Whoo. Lots of ground to cover there, huh? I'll be using this blog as a pastebin to store my results.

Is tomorrow going to be the big implosion of the stock market that drags us into a global recession, or what?

I am terrified, but I just put a limit order in for SZK ;)

Guess we'll see tomorrow. Hang on tight folks.

After testing elasticdrive all week (painful and repetitive, but necessary), I stumbled upon an idea to radically improve throughput.

The original ED implementation was not a good performer for RAID5, due to it's multithreaded architecture, but the new version supports an ordered read/write model, and has a much lower cpu and memory footprint...

Turns out that when you are interfacing something to the kernel, it is a REALLY bad idea to log to stderr, ESPECIALLY if it is exceedingly rare, and only in your debug logging code. Grrr.

Just got back from the future shop (evil). While I generally loath them, I have a hard time getting angry at a $99 500G hard drive. They have literally thousands of these things lining the entire store. I cannot imagine how they even manufacture these so cheap.

It used to be (in the old days) that after moving out, the worst a nerdy young sprog had to worry about was . the occasional computer maintenance request from their parents. Times however, are changing. Nowadays parental units are far more likely to have a need for personal webmail, chat, picture management, and even a CMS.

More after the break...

So, the rant server is slowly getting moved over to my new Xen/Enomalism based, s00per chr00ted nginx/fastcgi installation. Everything is going rather well. Safe mode didn't break anything (so far), and smf forum was a breeze to set up again.

One neat thing I started working on was wildcard DNS based subdomains. Rant has a LOAD of different domains, all living in subdomains of the main vhost. The old method was a bunch of different vhost definitions, but since I didn't feel like re-entering them in the new nginx method, I figured I would come up with a better way.

More after the break...