Dual Bay NAS Test Run
If there is one thing to learn from working in IT, it is that technology doesn’t always work the way you plan. I recently upgraded a single drive 2TB Iomega NAS (network attached storage) with a dual bay Buffalo Linkstation NAS because I was concerned about the safety of the data being stored on it. When I first started [...]
Server Virtualization with Proxmox on an Intel Atom
Let’s be honest, no one is going to promote doing this. But I wanted to run a development server in my bedroom — I want something silent and something that run 24/7 without being noticeable on my electric bill. It is only going to be used in development so it doesn’t need too much processing power, just the [...]
Arduino LCD DHT11 Temperature – Humidity Sensor
As a first useful project on Arduino, a DHT11 sensor is a great place to start. The DHT11 is a simple digital temperature/humidity sensor that easily connects to any Arduino. Most sample programs just take the reading and output it to the serial port. This example code will let you connect a LCD screen and track the min and max [...]
Watch out for Splunk 6 Update
To be honest, I’ve been really impressed with splunk until now. So when version 6 came out I thought it would be a home run. But then I installed it. WHAT TO EXPECT Be ready for it to reindex all of your old data, double its hard drive space usage, bring your computer to its knees in performance as it reindexes and it has [...]
Mobile App Fonts
Mobile app fonts are a great way to make any app look more professional. Though using custom fonts can be a licensing nightmare, so what are your native options for fonts? Are there any native fonts that work on both iOS and Android? Short answer, no. Their are system default fonts but the spacing and sizes won’t line up perfectly. [...]
Getting VisualVM to Connect to Railo 4
VisualVM is a great Java VM debugging tool that can show you VM performance as it runs your code. Since Railo runs on Java VM, this is a great tool to see if your code is leaking memory. NOTE: This setup is on a debian linux box running railo installed via the script with an apt-get install apache frontend. This should behave similarly [...]
Building Smarter Forms to Block Spam
I personally hate captchas. Sure they are a great way to stop spam but they are an even better way to stop real users from using your site. And once you understand how they work, they aren’t even that great. Most take a word that it knows, and then takes a word that it doesn’t know. If you want to have some fun, the easier of [...]