First up, not a whole lot of change going on with the nerd stuff. The wife is having a harder time with this pregnancy, so I’m trying to pick up everything around the house that I can. Doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for being a giant dork, so pretty much all of the geek goodies are still on paper. I did get a new toy this weekend though to replace my broken phone, a Sprint HTC Hero. I love this phone. It integrates with all of the google services, has nice build quality, a great selection of software and is very hacker friendly. The google voice integration is great, but it does struggle a bit when it comes to notifications that come from google voice. You get the alert twice, once in the voice app and once in the phones SMS app. The app marketplace is very neat and I love the multitasking this thing does. I haven’t had any real slow down issues yet, but I have loaded taskkill just in case. The camera is one of the better cameras for a cell phone and the GPS receiver gets a signal in around 4 seconds. My only real beef with the Hero is that it could use about 500mah more battery. I haven’t run it dead yet, and I’ve been banging on it much harder then I will in real life, but that extra 30% would be nice. The SenseUI stuff that HTC has grafted onto Android is really slick, I can’t wait to buy one of these for my wife!
Updated for ESXi 4
If you have a linux box and a 1 gig thumb drive, here is how to install VMWare ESXi onto that drive in 2 commands. Download the ESXi ISO and then mount it in linux like so
mount -t iso9660 -o loop VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.0.0-171294.x86_64.iso /mnt/esx
Now we’re going to write the installer file to the thumbdrive. I’m assuming the thumbdrive is /dev/sdb
tar xvzf /mnt/esx/image.tgz usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-171294-x86_64.dd.bz2 -O | bzip2 -d -c | dd of=/dev/sdb
This will take a little bit, but once it’s done you’re good to go. pop that drive into a USB boot capable board, configure your storage and away you go!
First off, WHIA v1 code is in the WHIA FAQ. It sucks, I know. that’s why I’m doing v2. Here is an outline of what I’m doing for v2.
- Communication is now query/response based instead of the arduino constantly chattering.
- Individual sensors can be queried or all sensors.
- No more pressure sensors. Too variable, instead my safety gear focuses on the number of registers open and inlet/outlet temperature. I’m considering a hot wire anemometer.
- I went back and forth on it, but I’m using two Arduinos talking I2C. One controls the inputs, one controls the outputs.
- Thanks to I2C, we have lots and lots of blinky lights this go around. Two for each sensor and one for each servo.
- I’ve stubbed in support for controlling the mini-blinds in each room via xbee or cheap 900mhz radio.
- I actually control registers instead of dampers in some of the rooms, chiefly the basement.
- Water sensors have been added in the basement and under the washing machine (long story).
- The big one, a web based gui for feedback and control this time.
It’ll be well into winter before this one is done and a few more weeks before I’m even at a stage where I can post code, but I’m going to stand up the v2 page anyways and just start putting everything out there. I did a really poor job of getting my code and schematics in shape and online for v1, so I figure the best way to remedy that is just to hang it all out for v2.
Thanks again all of you google ads clickers, you bought me servos and micros and are funding the work on v2!
VirtualBox 3 will allow you to have up to 8 virtual interfaces per VM. 4 of those you can create and control via the GUI, the other 4 you will need to use the command line for. No fear, Virtualbox makes this a very simple operation.
Here I’m adding virtual interface number 5 to a VM named pfsense. I’m setting that interface to be bridged to eth5 and making sure that the virtual cable is plugged in.
VBoxManage modifyvm pfsense –nic5 bridged
VBoxManage modifyvm pfsense –bridgeadapter5 eth5
VBoxManage modifyvm pfsense –cableconnected5 on
It’s that simple. You can use all of the connection types (nat, etc) and even change the type of nic hardware. It’s all fully documented on page 110 of the user manual.
I manage a lot of websites and I tend to lose track of when their various SSL certs expire. Here is a quick onliner that I use to connect to each site and grab the expiration date off its cert.
echo “” | openssl s_client -connect www.cyborgworkshop.org:443 2>/dev/null | sed -ne ‘/-BEGIN CERTIFICATE-/,/-END CERTIFICATE-/p’ |openssl x509 -text|grep ” After : ”