Category Archives: General

JeeNode is an Inexpensive Wireless Sensor and Controller Node

Leave a reply

I’d like to hook up some sensors to monitor temperature, and energy consumption in my home and I’ve been looking for the cheap options.  One possibility is the JeeNode kits, which are available in the US from Modern Devices for $22.50.

The US JeeNode combines an 8-bit Atmega328 microcontroller, with a ISM-band 915 Mhz, or 433 MHz radio along with 4 analog or digital I/O ports and misc supporting circuitry.  There are a variety of I/O modules available as well.  If I understand correctly, the JeeNode is compatible with the Arduino ecosystem, so there is a lot of code and hardware expertise to be tapped.

Assembled JeeNode

Assembled JeeNode

The JeeNode seems like a great option if you want your sensor nodes to have a bit of intelligence.  It is cheaper than the combination of some other Arduino plus an XBee wireless shield.  For my purposes though, an XBee alone may be good enough, since it has enough “intelligence” to be programmed to send readings from its sensor pins back to home-base on a regular interval, or when an interrupt is generated.

copssh, an sshd installer for windows, is a nice idea, didn’t work for me

1 Reply

C:\Program Files\ICW\bin\sshd.exe: *** fatal error – could not load user32, Win32 error 1114I’m using rsnapshot to do efficient file-based backups of disparate on & off-site servers to a big disk on a backup server here in the office.  Up until this point all the machines involved have been running some form of Linux, but I spent today roping a Windows server we have hosted at The Planet into the mix.  The files I’m concerned with are backup dumps produced by MS-SQL.  In the past I used a Windows-friendly file-sync service to move the files, but I’d be happier if I could do everything from my Linux backup server.

The solution seemed obvious, get an ssh server and an rsync client working on windows so I could treat it like any other machine.  I tried using copssh, which starts with openssh and adds just enough cygwin to get it running on Windows, and wraps it all up with some utility scripts in an easy-to-use installer.  I ran into a few little hitches with passwordless public-key authentication, but after uninstalling and reinstalling, everything seemed to be working well.  I was able to ssh in to the server without entering a password and run commands.  Next step was to install rsync, I went with cwrsync, another cygwin-based port of the unix standard software.

Then the problem began, I tried running rsync from a Linux machine against the windows machine and it failed with the following error when I used a non-administrator account:

C:\Program Files\ICW\bin\sshd.exe: *** fatal error - could not load user32, Win32 error 1114

A little searching suggested I wasn’t the only one.  If I sshed in to a shell and ran ‘whoami’ I saw that I was actually using the service account that had been created for sshd, rather than the account of the user I’d tried logging in as.  More digging didn’t give me much hope.  I found some tweaks to the cygwin environment used when starting the service, but that didn’t help.

So, I ended up giving up on copssh, uninstalled it and cwrsync and just installed cygwin, and used it to install openssh and rsync.  Cygwin packages openssh with some scripts that take care of installing it as a service.  I didn’t use these instructions, but they seem to give a good overview.

So, my advice, just use cygwin it was faster than the “shortcut” I tried.

Surprise, there really is a Google Phone, Maybe.

Leave a reply

Rumors of a Google-branded phone based on their Android OS have kicked up again after a Wall Street Journal article, cited unnamed “people familiar with the matter” confirming the existence of the project.  Latest rumors have the device arriving as early as next year.

What’s most notable is that the rumored Google-phone will launched without a carrier partner, and sold unlocked, which is an unusual approach in the US.   That means no carrier subsidies, which typically knock a couple hundred dollars or so off the price of smartphones.  Many are taking that to mean that the Google phone will be priced like unlocked smartphones are now, which is just ridiculous.

Just as carriers subsidize phones because they plan to make a lot of money locking people into a two-year contract, Google has other revenue streams it can tap if people are using one of its phones.  For a start, its a good bet that they are already paying money out to mobile carriers and device makers in order to make Google the default search and map provider on the iPhone, and other devices.  For a Google-branded phone, that money could instead go to subsidizing the cost of the phone.  That’s just the start, they could also include more-intrusive mobile advertising, though I suspect that isn’t going to be necessary as the mobile ad market grows.

I’m interested to see where this all leads.  Apple managed to pry control away from mobile carriers when it launched the iPhone.  It certainly seems like it will be another step towards loosening the hold mobile carriers, have on users in the US at least.  Of course, this just assumes that there really is going to be a “Google phone,” and that this latest frenzy isn’t just a big hoo-hah over T-Mobile’s next android phone, which is entirely plausible.

Will Google’s New Storage Prices Put Pressure on Amazon S3?

Leave a reply

Google  just cut the cost of additional storage for Picasa & Gmail from $20/year for 10GB to $5/year for 20GB, and now you can buy up to 16TB of storage.

This service is targeted at end-users, and it is limited to Photo storage on Picasa, and mail storage for GMail, but people suspect that it will be expanded at some point to provide more general purpose storage, which seems like a no-brainer once ChromeOS is released.

It doesn’t compete directly with Amazon’s S3 cloud-storage, which is mostly targeted at developers, and can store any file, but I have to wonder if Google’s move isn’t going to force Amazon’s hand on storage pricing.  Amazon may not compete directly with Google in this regard, but a lot of Amazon’s customers are, in one way or another.  Google’s old pricing was somewhat higher than Amazon’s, which left developers with room to use Amazon’s storage to compete with Google.  The new Google pricing totally inverts that.

Amazon’s pricing is due for revision anyway.  Cost of raw storage have declined significantly since S3 debuted, and I’m sure Amazon has been able to lower their operating costs significantly as well, but these savings haven’t really been passed along.  They cut their prices somewhat a year or so ago, and instigated a tiered pricing scheme that rewards large customers for growth with declining marginal costs for storing more data, but the new Google pricing takes things to a “whole nother level.”

It’ll be interesting to see whether S3 and other “cloud” storage providers, and the applications that build on them are about to follow suit.

.

Drupal Takes the Whitehouse!

1 Reply

Shortly after Obama took office, his administration launched the “Recovery.gov” website.  I found it notable that it was built on Drupal, an open source community content management system, on a short schedule and small budget.

When I posted about it, quoted a Reddit commentator who claimed to have been involved in its implementation.  In addition to providing information about the schedule and budget for the site, he said they were currently engaged in trying to move the Whitehouse.gov website from a microsoft-based system that was developed under a $20M outside contract, over to Drupal or some other open-source framework, like Django, or Rails.  Well, this week we learned how that turned out.

A new version of Whitehouse.gov was launched last week.  It was built on Drupal.  Selection of the platform and development and operation was contracted to General Dynamics Information Technology, so you can be sure it wasn’t done on the cheap.  Still, it is a great change, and it looks like some of the work was subcontracted out to Drupal creator, Dries Buytaert’s firm, Acquia.

Drupal was started in 2000 as a discussion board and news site for Dreis Buytaert’s dorm.  The Howard Dean campaign commissioned improvements to underpin their strong social media strategy.  That work lead to Drupal’s use by a lot of political and social organizers, including the Obama campaign.

I continue to think that the story of how Drupal went from a college dorm to the Whitehouse in less than a decade is an interesting thread connecting a much lager story:

It should provide a great lens for examining the rise of OpenSource software post the dotcom crash, the blossoming of social software, the evolution of political organizing and fundraising in the Internet-era, the role of agile development in government IT, and the role of the Internet in reshaping and opening government. Plus, it started in a dorm, so I’m sure there is some sex, drugs, and rock and roll in there too.

If those things don’t fascinate you, what the hell are you doing reading Geekfun?

(Tim O’Reilly adds and interesting perspective)

Mobilizing Geekfun With WPTouch

1 Reply

When WordPress.com launched themes targeted at small screens like the iPhone earlier this week, I was reminded that I was going to figure out how to improve the way Geekfun and our other blogs like Pet Project look on mobile devices.   Long ago I tried an early iPhone theme for WordPress, but gave up on it, I think because it created problems with the caching solution I was trying to use at the time.

Geekfun Mobile Geekfun Mobile Article

This time out, the solution was simple.  I installed the sweet WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code.  I’m quite happy with it.  It loads quickly and it is very readable and easy to use.  It only displays for mobile users, everyone else still sees your blog’s original theme, and its easy for Mobile users to switch to your regular theme if that is what they prefer.  It is also allows for a healthy amount of customization, which I’ll have to dive into deeper before rolling it out on our other sites.

If you host your own WordPress blog, I suggest you check out WPTouch, or one of the other mobile themes that are available, like Carrington Mobile, or WordPress Mobile Pack.