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Archive for the ‘Interesting’ Category

Merlin

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

I’ve always had an interest in home automation, a dream of having a house that can filter out the noise and give me the signal for life.

Part of that is having news, TV guides, everything being indexed and filtered, with some basic smarts to give me “just the news I want, plus a little bit of fun” and warnings that TV shows I might be interested in are coming up.

You know, the usual geek fantasy.

I use alot of scripts to do many little tasks for me, I use Python on my media center to display the caller ID of incoming calls (I borrowed the outline from CallerID script and then made heavy modifications to let my VoIP system send the data, I made a database for MyDNS with phone numbers, allowing a recursive lookup to tell me everything from country to “exchange” for a phone number then give me a Name if they’re known.Â I use RSS feeds and filters to give me news I’m interested in, and some that i’m not, I wrote some basic pattern matching to group news stories about the same thing, then attempt to put them chronologically so I can read through them in order when I get time.

But I want to start centralizing this, I wanted a project that would encapsulate all my previous scripts into a system, I wanted a trusted messaging network, so I could have client machines sending information to their nearest/parent server that would cache and route the information around the “network”.

So Merlin was born, merlin is eventually going to be a mix of UDP broadcasts for my home LAN and unicast for my co-located servers, with bi-directional messaging and a form of routing so that any machine in the groups can send messages by content type or by server to anything in the network.

So say I receive a incoming call, Caller ID content type with a “instant” priority level will go out and be passed out through the network to any machines that handle callerid, or “system status” containing hard drive free space might heartbeat out with low priority, so it will make its way around the network to the server/servers that store and catalog that data.Â Eventually I want my car to have its own segment, but sine GPRS charges in australia are evil, it could get low bandwidth updates and receive instant updates of certain classes (eg “Instant/High” priority server down messages)

It’s alot of work and I’ve only started coding small parts of it (hell, I just started one of the XML handlers the other night thanks to my previous article about not playing WoW )

Posted in Interesting, Programming, Technology | No Comments »

Google won’t search for Chuck Norris

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

Chuck Norris

Remember: Google won’t search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don’t find Chuck Norris, he finds you.

The goal is to get high enough that if people search for “Chuck Norris” and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky” they get that page.

Posted in General, Interesting | No Comments »

Final Fantasy on Xbox 360 – A Possibility ?

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

I was floored when I read this article on the creator of the Final Fantasy series stating “I feel that the Final Fantasy series should come to Xbox 360 as well. This is wise. It makes so much sense to me…it has so much potential in North America and in Europe. So there’s a great chance for the series to succeed on 360 as well.”

w000t, I need to verify this.

Posted in Games, Interesting | No Comments »

LG 37LC2D – LCD TV Problems – Follow Up

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I am completely floored.

The LG Support system is great. I used their website and called the local support representatives (who wasn’t that good, they have a “Straight to voicemail”, probably from all the calls) who prompted me to “if your LG stb, lcd or plasma has locked while watching channel 9. Call 1800 643 156″.

Upon calling the 1800 number I got a “if your LG device has been locking up while watching channel 9 over the weekend press 1″, then a set of instructions on how to get around it and a “we are currently working on this with the station”.

I know it’s just a phone message, but the fact they have jumped on the issue, setup automated responses so I don’t have to wait in a queue just to get an operator who has answered the same question all day state “known issue, go away”.

Kudos to LG on that one.

UPDATE: LG’s phones have switched to AH service, so they don’t have the message anymore, I recorded the local representatives message here (Local LG Support Representative).

UPDATE2: Fixed Link

Posted in Interesting, News, Technology | 2 Comments »

LG 37LC2D – LCD TV Problems

Monday, March 19th, 2007

Tonight while watching that “20 to 01″ on channel nine in HD, I got a frozen frame, the picture froze but the sound kept going, after a few minutes I turned it off and tried turning it back on, now it was just blank, still had “90 Nine High Definition” in the top corner, but the screen was blank otherwise.

I tried changing to other inputs, changing volume, even changing channels, the LED on the front was blinking showing the TV was receiving the commands but it wasn’t responding, same blank screen with the “90 Nine High Definition” in the top corner (it wasn’t going away either) after turning it off and waiting about 30 minutes it I got a frozen frame with sound upon turning it back on.

I’ve been sourcing my warranty information and left it unplugged from the wall, and decided to try it again now that it’s later and cooler.

and Viola, it works.

I’m probably going to call LG tomorrow if I get time just to see what the deal-i-o is with that.

Posted in Interesting, Technology | 2 Comments »

USB 2.0 hubs are really slow

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I’ve had a problem with my iPod syncing to my computer lately, it has been REALLY SLOW, I mean in the range of kb/sec in transfer.

Anyway, I’m posting this here hoping that others will find it through google, the problem I had was a Bluetooth dongle attached to the Hub, I’ve bought a few new hubs and tested them all, and I still had the problem, but after removing the bluetooth dongle the speeds just ramped right up.

So my solution was removing another device that probably had a fair bit of chatter with the desktop, and therefore chewed up the resources of the hub.

Posted in Interesting, Operating Systems, Technology | No Comments »

Spam and Exchange

Friday, October 13th, 2006

I’ve been having a spam problem for a LONG time, considering I use catch-alls on my domains doesn’t help much, but I usually get in excess of 1500 spam messages a day.Â Since I only get around 10-15 legitimate mail, that makes me go insane.

TMDA stops most of the spam messages, but alot of spammers now use email addresses at your domain or your own email address to get through spam blockers, I’ve had spamassassin running with TMDA, but it just hasn’t cut the muster yet.

The other day I was stumbling along looking for ways to mount an sftp host on a drive in windows (as I have yet to write an article about my fun with curlftpfs and sshfs on linux) and stumbled across POPfile, which is a basic bayesian filter for mail.

POPfile looks nice, but I use exchange for my email, and things that work with exchange can usually be counted on one hand …

Here is where Outclass appears, Outclass uses POPfile as a plugin for outlook, and I have to agree, after going through 2000+ messages last night, it can even tell the difference between Yahoo Groups posts and spam, it does have difficulty with those stock spam messages, but hey, it’s so far cut down the 100-200 or so spam I get in my inbox to 2-3.

If I had one complaint, it was that processing can stall on LONG lists of emails, when I first loaded it, Outclass tried to parse every message in my inbox (4000+) which froze outlook, and it never came back (I gave it about an hour to try), after I logged back in and moved the messages out, I classified them manually then moved them to Deleted Items or Inbox as appropriate, worked like a charm. (Also good fodder for training POPfile’s filters)

Posted in Interesting, Windows | No Comments »