Ben Shephard

Today I was just sitting doing some random surfing when I came across something really smart. I happened on a site called Pingdom which offers web site monitoring services. They offer free and paid services but the free one checks one server which is enough for me. They also offer alerts by SMS for a small fee but since I have push email with Gmail on my G1 that’s not something I really need. Not only do I get update emails when there is a problem but the data is recorded and can be viewed as a pretty graphs to show trends in downtime and performance. They offer several different test methods for different services such as web, email, dns etc. If you host something then Pingdom is well worth signing up for. It’s nice to know that my stuff is still working when I can’t be around to check it myself.

Ben

= 5.8

I’ve just spent the last few hours reading through the Ubuntu forums and community documentation looking for a way to check the CPU temperature on my Acer Aspire one so I thought I’d make it easier to find for myself and anyone else who happens to find this

Run the following command in a terminal

$ cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

Lm-sensors doesn’t work on my Aspire One  110 AB and this is the only way I’ve found that I can check the CPU temperature.

Ben

I sat in my computer room today watching the highlights of this years Glastonbury festival on my PC and I thought it would be nice to be able to sit im my comfy arm chair in the front room and watch it on the big screen. I’d got a reasonably quiet PC just sitting around that I use for experimenting with bits of things on. I had a quick look at the back and it had an old Nvidia graphics card in it with an S-video output. I brought it downstairs and hooked it up to my now old fashioned Samsung Plano 32 inch TV.

I installed Ubuntu on it and along with a MythTV front and after some faffing around with screen resolutions and aspect ratios I managed to get a picture that filled the screen. It would probably be much easier if I had a nice modern TV instead of my bulky old CRT because then the screen resolution would be detected automatically. Wide screen only tends to confuse things more because there are two ways to do it, 16×9 letterbox (with black bars at the top and bottom) or 16×9 anamorphic (stretched when viewed on a 4×3 screen). I tried watching one of the Boune films in Totem movie player and the picture was squashed into a two inch strip down the middle of my TV with massive black bars above and below.

I’m really enjoying having a PC hooked up to the TV and surround sound. It puts my entire video and music collection in front of me at the touch of a button. There’s no mess and faff of trying to find CDs in the cupboard. I think I’ll try and get a new TV soon and build myself a proper HTPC. I’m sat here now watching Tom Jones and Status Quo. I missed this on the day because when this was on I was sat in Philadelphia airport waiting for a connecting flight to St Louis. On reflection I wish I’d been been covered in mud with the rest of them at Glasto.

So I’ve not really done much today but then I did spend yesterday painting the living room. Looking at it today now it’s dry I think it needs another coat. The textured paper I’ve used is  pretty hard to cover properly I’ll try and get that done on the week if I can.

Time to go get some kip now so I’m ready for another week of help desk fun

Ben

= 5.9

Today I found out that two out of our team of four are on holiday for most of next week leaving me on the help desk for another week. It doesn’t really bother me but it will be another dull week. I sat thinking how I could do with a proper holiday since my trip to the USA turned out to be about as pleasurable as a kick in the teeth. I looked at the calendar and the 31st is a bank holiday and no one had booked the four days following that so I filled in a holiday form and got it signed off quick before someone else grabbed the last of the summer. I don’t know what to do yet but I think I’ll throw the tent in the car and have a few nights camping somewhere. I thought about Scotland but I think the fuel costs would be too much. Driving time doesn’t really bother me but Aberdeen and back is almost a thousand miles. My dad has said I can borrow his folding boat and outboard motor if I want and I’d like to take him up on the offer so I need somewhere where there is lots of water but preferably calm as I’ve not been out on it before and I want to get used to it. I think this leaves me with two options. Norfolk or the Lake District. The scenery is better in the Lakes but it rains more than it does in Norfolk. I’ll probably end up in the lakes just because it’s a bit more to look at and there are some really nice pubs up there. It might be a bit wet but in the words of Billy Connolly “Get yourself a sexy raincoat and live a little“. I need a bit of fresh air and relaxation and there should be plenty of that up there. I’m expecting it to be hard to find a camp site it being bank holiday week but it’s also the week the kids go back to school so it might also be starting to quiet down by the end of the week. I’m going to have a phone round and see if I can book a few nights somewhere. I might even walk up a hill or two but I’m not into hiking miles and miles. A couple of hours does me just grand.

I’m planning on going on my own and doing what I want to do. I’ve never been anywhere on my own except for my own house. I enjoy being on my own most of the time and I think I’d have had a great time in the USA if I’d have gone it alone. Time to give it a shot but I’ll start out a little closer to home. I’ve been thinking about going to Germany for a few years and if this goes well I might give it some serious thought for next year.

I’ll be off out to buy myself a life jacket tomorrow then

Ben

= 5.9

At long last I’ve managed to come up with a proper live video page. I’ve been meaning to do this project for a while. before I went to the states I managed to knock up a quick and dirty live video page but it only really worked in FireFox and on Linux. It managed to crash a few browsers from what I heard but it was fine on my system and the code marked up properly according to the W3C markup validation service.

I decided it was time I looked for a proper solution. I wanted something I could host that would be similar to YouTube for the end user. First off I found Cortado which is a streaming java applet for ogg formats. My stream is already encoded in Ogg Theora so this seemed ideal. I wasn’t really sure how to implement this but that’s where I managed to fined ITheora linked to from the bottom of Cortado’s Wikipedia page. I read through the features of ITheora and it appeared to be just what I was looking for. There was a nice simple installation guide. I downloaded it and installed it but then things started to get a bit difficult. The first thing I did was to accidentally browse to it in FireFox before I’d set it up properly. I was presented with a page full of 404 errors. This wouldn’t have been a problem but I installed Fail2ban the other day and set it up to ban people who try to access random URLs on my site. I’d not configured it to not lock me out because I intended to test it at some point to make sure it was all working as advertised but I found this out a little sooner than I anticipated and managed to lock myself out of my own web site but only from the IP address I happened to be on at the time. I have to admit I did panic for a brief moment thinking I’d some how managed to wipe out my entire server but pretty soon the penny dropped and I realized my schoolboy error. I got myself unlocked and decided to call it a day.

Today I continued to mess around with ITheora. I had to make a few changes to my stream to get it to work but nothing major. Eventually I managed to get my video playing in a web page and I started to tinker with the code to improve things a little. I also made a custom stop slide so there is something pretty when there is no video playing. I edited a few of the PHP files as it seemed the English translation was a bit rough. It looks like the app is actually French as the English was broken with the odd French word like “en” here and there. I cleaned that up to my liking and started work embedding the player into my blog and making sure the code marked up properly. There were a couple of errors but I managed to correct them without breaking anything.

The resulting player and video should look a bit like this

I’d be really happy if anyone wants to test this for me and give me some feedback. I’ve only seen it work in FireFox on Ubuntu so far and I don’t know how well this works on Windows / IE and all the others out there. If click on the Live Video link at the top of this page it should open up and start playing immediately. If you hover your mouse over the buttons it tells you what each one does. There isn’t a great deal to see except cars going past my house but I did it more for the challenge than anything else.

Please let me know how you get on.

Ben

= 6.1    (and that’s the first six in a long time)