- Published:
- September 29, 2009 – 5:00 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I was recently tasked with copying speaker’s presentations, files and handouts onto 100s of USB Drives (key drives) for a conference that work is hosting down in Washington, D.C. My first thought was that it was going to be a pain to have to copy/paste the files to each drive. I thought about creating a batch script to copy the files with a double click. But really, who wants to be doing all of that clicking and/or typing? Work smarter, not harder. Then I remembered a neat feature that SyncBackSE, a program I use at home for backups, has available. The backup program – which is basically a file copy process – can be triggered based on the insert of a drive, whether that be a USB Key Drive or an External Hard Drive. Using the program, the only action you need to do to trigger the copy process is….
Categories: Hardware,Other Code,Programs
Tagged: conference, key drive, tips, tricks, usb drive, usb key drive
- Published:
- September 10, 2009 – 10:12 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I wrote this paper during this past spring semester at West Chester University, for a class in the Computer Science department. My paper was accepted and published in the proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Networks which was held on July 13-16 in Las Vegas, NV. The title of the paper is “Sensor Graphing via Wireless Sensor Network to a Mobile Internet Device” – my demo device being the iPhone. The paper as presented is below: Sensor Graphing via Wireless Sensor Network to a Mobile Internet Device by David Drager
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Site Updates
Tagged: paper, presentation, published, sensor networks, wireless sensors
- Published:
- August 12, 2009 – 6:50 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Update 10/27/2009: Google Voice now supports adding voicemail to any old cell phone number without the “Do not disturb” trick. Simply go into ‘Settings’, Enter the ‘Phones’ tab and then click ‘Activate Google voicemail on this phone’. It will give you directions on call forwarding, which are the same as below, customized for your provider. Disable the “Do Not Disturb” setting to set your Google Voice account back to normal. Thank you Google! For those lucky enough to have a Google Voice account, you’ll know the advantages: forward calls to multiple phones, visual voicemail and audio to text transcriptions. But, since you are not yet able to transfer your current phone number to Google Voice, it is hard to give up your old phone number and start having family, friends and business associates use your new Google Voice number. Also, there is the whole confusion as to your outgoing caller….
Categories: Cell Phones,Other Technology,Software
Tagged: Cell Phones, Google Voice, Hack, Voicemail
- Published:
- August 5, 2009 – 9:16 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
You’ve flashed your old WRT54G or other vanilla router with the Tomato firmware. This itself turns your router into a lean, mean routing machine with QOS, SSH and more, but let’s say we want to take it a bit further. What it we want to get some more stats out of it? In order to do this, we first need to set up a way to pull this information from the router. The best way to do this is to install an SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) daemon on the system. The main roadblock we face here is that the system mainly runs in volatile system memory, meaning that every time the system is rebooted the filesystem is reset. Fortunately Tomato provides a way to get around this using CIFS shares. Follow the steps below (as modified from here) to install an SNMP server on a Tomato router. Create a….
Categories: Code Samples,Configurations,Hardware,Linux,Other Code,Other Technology,Programs,Shell,Software,System Administration
Tagged: cacti, firmware, network, router, SNMP, sysadmin
- Published:
- July 16, 2009 – 1:04 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I’ve been on vacation for the past few days, and prior to this trip I decided I wanted to stay connected wherever I was going – and the new broadband offerings from Cricket Wireless looked to be the perfect solution. I was looking for something that did not involve signing a contract, but Verizon, Sprint and AT&T’s offerings were pretty expensive. They typically have a “small” data plan, around 250 Megs of transfer for a smaller fee, or an “Unlimited” offering for a fairly expensive rate, around $60 a month for most providers. The Cricket plan I signed up for is an “Unlimited” – read 5GB – plan for $40 a month, with no contract. Cricket Wireless is relatively new in my area (Philadelphia), having only started providing service in March of 2009. They have been in other markets since 1999. Wireless Broadband has been an offering of their since….
Categories: Cell Phones,Hardware,Other Technology,Reviews
Tagged: broadband, connection, cricket, internet, wireless
- Published:
- April 14, 2009 – 10:56 am
- Author:
- By Dave
As previously written on this blog, I have set up a display in our lobby at work to display the day’s current events and meetings using Ubuntu and a tiny PC. Since this is a display which is on all day, the screensaver and monitor blanking (and other Energy Star features) are all turned off. Under the auspice of wanting to save energy and also extending the life of a new monitor, someone suggested that we turn off the monitor at night using an electrical timer. A lightbulb went off in my head, that there must be a better way to do this via command line and then run it in the cron. It turns out the solution is very simple. The xset command is the X server preferences command. It has a simple command to turn off the monitor: 1$ xset dpms force off and to turn the monitor….
Categories: Code Samples,Hardware,Linux,Shell,Software,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: display, energy, energystar, lobby, monitor, power, saving
- Published:
- September 29, 2008 – 9:49 am
- Author:
- By Dave
These images been around the web before, but I just rediscovered some examples of both good server room cabling, and bad datacenter cabling. Data center cabling is really an art. It takes some time to get the network, power,and other cabling organized but worth it in the end. The benefits are more than aesthetic, good cabling improves airflow, cooling, and reduces problems with plug dropouts. Not to mention that good labeling helps in troubleshooting when an issue does arrive. The Good More of The Best The Bad more of The Worst And The Ugly via Pingdom More examples of good/bad wiring: http://www.ixibo.com/index.php/2008/09/24/is-this-your-server-room/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/24/when-data-center-cabling-becomes-art/ http://www.ixibo.com/index.php/2008/09/29/this-is-how-your-server-room-should-be/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/01/09/the-worst-cable-mess-ever/ http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/03/really-bad-wiring-jobs_20.html http://www.vibrant.com/cable-messes.php Before/After Photos of Bad Cabling Fixing Datacenter Best Practices
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,System Administration
Tagged: cabling, datacenter, examples, wiring
