I always liked monitoring the weather though it wasn't something I obsessed about much. I had been looking around for a while for a weather station that I could setup at home and hook into a computer to transmit data to the Internet.
I decided upon the Lacrosse WS-2315 which I got from Amazon for, at the time, $179. I even had some credit with Amazon so it came to less.
I had to wait for the snow to melt off the roof before I was going to climb up and put the wind sensor up, so I had the temp/humidity sensor running for a while. When I could get up on the roof I mounted a pole and the wind sensor. Ran the telephone wire down to where I wanted to keep all the other components, hooked it up to the temp sensor and then hooked up the rain sensor. It works wireless to the base station which connects via a RS-232 cable to a spare notebook I had which captures the data. It comes with a basic program that you can use to monitor the activity and even upload a graphic to a web site. The updates weren't as frequent as I liked, so I ran the supplied cable from the temp unit to the location I was going to keep the base station and connected notebook.
After some work, I have a few pages of current weather info up at http://www.levinecentral.com/weather. The data from VWS also updates Weather Underground which can be accessed much like WeatherBug using Weather Exchange where you can point to a local station.
For the best software, I looked around, and for what I wanted, it appears that Ambient's Virtual Weather Station (Internet Edition) (aka VWS) is the product I'll go with. I'm still running off the 30 day trial version I downloaded. It has a lot of features and creates graphics that get generated and uploaded to your web site. It's not cheap, with the software costing $99, but unless I run into issues with it or find an alternative software product that does the same thing (my own site as well as Weather Underground and works with my Lacrosse WS-2315) I'll go with Ambient's solution.
It's been a lot of fun so far. The only issue I've noticed is my humidity has bottomed out 3 times and I've had to breathe on the sensor to get it working again. I might have Lacrosse send me a replacement sensor. Otherwise, it's been working very well. I've also gotten Weather for Dummies which I just started reading to learn a bit more about weather in general. It's been easy reading and I've already picked up a lot. Once I get through this, if I want to read some more, I have the Weather Forecasting Handbook saved to my Amazon Wish List.
So far it's been a nice little hobby that hasn't cost me a fortune :-)
My first web hosting was way back with my dial-up ISP. It was included. Not a lot of features, but it hosted static pages fine.
When broadband became available to me, web hosting wasn't included. I needed to find a good hosting provider with ASP support as I like developing in ASP. I bounced around with a couple, each seeming fine at the start but having terrible problems in the end. It was if they just didn't care. Technical problems will occur, but customer support is key. None of these providers had that.
When I needed to switch hosting providers again, I found http://www.hostek.net. I don't even remember now how I initially found them. I probably asked them 20+ questions on various topics before I signed up with them. They responded to every question, and not in days, but typically in minutes. Every answer told me they understood the question and not only had a quick answer, but details and suggestions on alternatives. They were truly tremendous in the pre-sales portion - now to see if they handled the implementation and on-going hosting.
Switching was a breeze (my old provider was down and out I think at this time) and they got everything up and running within minutes. Once the DNS changes propagated, I was back in business. A+ on implementation.
I just looked to see when I signed up and it's 1 week short of two years I've been with them. I'm not aware of any outage. My site seemed never to be down, but I imagine they rebooted a couple of times in that time though. I've emailed support a few times asking various questions or with different requests such as permissions or creating a mySQL database, etc and just like before I signed up, it seemed they always responded in minutes that it was completed.
Since I've moved providers to Hostek, I moved my parent's company site to them as well as recommended them countless times to others. I've not heard of one person that took my advice and was disappointed. They aren't the cheapest provider, but I truly feel with web hosting, you get what you pay for. I'd rather pay a little extra knowing their service has been solid and there's always someone there to support you if necessary. Having had other web hosting providers in that past that would never respond is enough for me to appreciate what I have with Hostek!
Last night I noticed things were slow when FTPing some data. The site was responded quick but FTPing didn't seem right. I filled out an online support ticket and within a couple mins I got a response that there was a networking issue and they were working on it. Today I received a follow-up response stating that there was a networking HW failure, that the faulty HW was replaced and from their testing everything appeared back to normal. I checked and FTPs are lightning fast again.
I don't think I could ask for a better hosting provider in terms of service, support and outstanding communications. Hostek, you are A+ !!
My wife love's music and so do my kids. She has a lot of CDs and listens to music all the time. (I listen to news back and forth to work). She's been using iTunes for a while and making her own CDs. She gets lost in iTunes listening to music for hours.
So for Valentine's Day, I got her a 20GB iPod and the Belkin Tunecast II FM Transmitter and Car Adapter for it. She LOVED it!!
I had to get a firewire card too since the Dell she uses didn't have one. I got a $19.95 one from CompUSA and it works fine. XP recognized it and it worked on the 1st reboot.
Setup was easy and everything I bought allows the iPod to charge in the dock or in the car. The 1st time it recognizes the iPod there's some initialization and registration and then it syncs her iTunes right to the iPod. Every time she makes a change, it syncs it up. It's done very, very well. Nce job Apple!! The only comment is the touchpad is sensitive and though I'm used to a touchpad on my notebook, my wife isn't so it took some getting used to.
All in all, a VERY successful Valentine's Day!
Decided to see what all the hype is around VOIP. Though I've played with it a bit I never felt like it was ready for prime time. But on Monday I ordered Vonage and it arrived on Thursday. Hooked it up through the Linksys and it's working fine.
Made a few inbound and outbound calls and things seem fine. I certainly can't tell it's any different then a plain POTS line. Of course with OOL cable modem service I get 8500 down and 900 up so what's a little 90k for a VOIP call.
I'll probably keep it for 2 months and then decide if it's worth keep and dropping the unlimited Verizon long distance plan and using Vonage for outbound LD calls. I'm still not comfortable eliminating Verizon completely for home phone service. Being dependent on OOL, Vonage and the general Internet for calls seems a tad to risky to me.
Here goes the trial...
Someone at DSL Reports asked about a PHP / mySQL solution for having someone login and then gain access to other pages. If not logged in, they wouldn't gain access. The DSLR thread is here.
I played a (very little) bit with mySQL but I'm very comfortable with SQL. Created a basic User/Password/Name table to contain the logon info. Found some sample code at a couple of sites with Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL being a terrific reference. The actual hardest part was (remember this is my 1st PHP page) getting the session variables working properly in PHP to store the fact that someone had successfully logged in and also their name to display on a second page. I found all the info I needed at a tutorial on sessions.
To see the page, go to the login page at http://www.levinecentral.com/php/logon.php where you can enter userid: test password:abc123. You will be redirected to http://www.levinecentral.com/php/logged_in.php where you can logoff. After clicking logoff, you are returned to the logon page. Going directly to http://www.levinecentral.com/php/logged_in.php you will see that you can't get to it since you're not logged on and it redirects you back to the logon page.
If you want the source code, just ask.
Edit: Well many people have asked, so if you want the source code, you can download it from http://www.levinecentral.com/php/PHP_Login.zip
For myself and various people both at work and when helping others in general, analyzing mail headers to determine what occurred, where delays might have been, etc comes up from time to time. What I looked for is a site or program that I can use to paste in mail headers and for it to analyze them and let me know how long it took to go from server to server. I can't find anything like that.
So, maybe I'll write it. Need to parse the headers for the Received lines, get the from/to servers and times, normalize the times and display some results. I started looking for some ASP or PHP routines that might help me along quicker, especially with the parsing, but I haven't come across anything yet. There's a PERL routine that might do it, but I don't really want to work with PERL. I'll see how things go on my own and then fall back to PERL if it gets too hairy.
We'll see how it goes.
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Well, the first release of the page that does what I wanted is available at http://www.levinecentral.com/mail_parse/
Displayed as output of the mail header parsing analysis are the source and destination mail servers that are passed along the way. IP addresses of the mail servers, where provided, are listed along with a lookup of the IP address to determine the owning party. In additional, if an IP address is provided, a look-up against known spam black lists is provided.
Let me know what you think.
Hostek, my ISP, has mySQL available. I had always used Access just because it was easy enough. I asked them to create a mySQL database for me, which they did in minutes, and I decided to test it out with my 404 page which logs 404 errors.
My 404 page displays the home page and logs errors to Access. It also emails me an error. I decided to create the 1st mySQL table as a duplicate of the 404 Access table and write the same record to it.
Connecting to the table from ASP was easy since my ISP gave me the sample connection string. Getting the SQL valid was the next hurdle.
Seems you need to us the ` character and not the ' character when referencing table names and column names. Once that was done, the SQL was syntactically correct, but not doing exactly what I wanted. The date wasn't properly populating. Seems the date needs to be in the format: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
So, using ASP code I got the date in the proper mySQL date format and viola - success.
Here's the code snippet to format the current date/time properly, in ASP, for a mySQL datetime field:
mysql_date = DatePart("yyyy", now()) & "-" & DatePart("m", now()) & "-" & DatePart("d", now())
mysql_date = mysql_date & " " & DatePart("h", now()) & ":" & DatePart("n", now()) & ":" & DatePart("s", now())
Well, it seemed the Dell desktop we have was starting to boot very slow. Took around 2 mins for XP to start. It would just sit at a dark screen after the Windows XP Home banner screen was displayed and prior to the desktop being displayed.
I did searching and found about BootVis which is a MS program that monitors the boot process and shows some pretty graphical details of how long various components took. I found where to download it - http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/12/2/12-2-1.shtml - and installed it (default was to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Bootvis) and instructed the program to run and log the boot-up process including drivers.
The program rebooted, it took the 2 mins or so to boot and after it booted it launched and loaded the BootVis results. I could see 2 things that weren't right. One was the Registry showed as taking a long time and usbstor.sys took the same amount of time.
Now, a few days ago, I noticed the printer light that is normally on wasn't on. I asked my wife and she thought it wasn't ever on except when it was printing. Since it's the only USB device connected, I powered it off. I rebooted and the computer was up in 30 secs. Viola!! I powered the printer back on and the green light I thought was always there returned. Rebooted just to double check and it still boots in 30 secs.
Whew!!!
Figured I'd check out the hype over Moveable Type. I previously had been entering some entries in an ASP based journal called Web Wiz Journal
Let's see how this works!
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The following was added on 2/29/04 after I helped yet another person with this same issue I encountered when I installed Moveable Type:
There's a glitch in the Moveable Type (MT) Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that prevents some browsers from properly displaying some of the pages.
Seems that some pages, in particular the Individual Entry Archive page, requires you to move your mouse over the page to display the missing text. It's a bit like a scratch off game ;-)
I did some searching when I first got my blog up and running and I found the following solution which I know has helped others. Hopefully you find this page through some search engine and it solves your issue too.
Edit the Moveable Type Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) template for your blog. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the template and at the very end, add the following lines of code:
/* begin hide from IE5-Mac \*/
* html .comments-body { height: 1%; }
/* end hide */
Rebuild your blog and you should be good to go with the missing text now properly being displayed when you go to a page.
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The following was also added on 2/29/04. I started to receive spam comments in my blog. I can't imagine someone was typing them in manually, but you never know. The spam was for an "enlargement" site.
I did some searching and came upon a solution - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse. Downloaded it, installed it, added the url of the site that was spamming my blog and tested it out by trying to add that URL. It was rejected. Seems to work as advertised.