Notes For Me ( and You)

Things have been very busy, but I have finally got some time to write some stuff for this blog. The bad news is that I have this time while waiting in the reception area of Holy Cross Hospital. Behind me Alex is being preped for shoulder surgery to bolt his broken collar bone back into one piece.

A week ago he was playing pick up football when he flipped end over end after hitting someone who was kneeling on the ground. Jeremy, his roommat called us from the ambulance that was taking him to hospital. He saw a specialist on Tuesday, and the strong recommendion was for surgery. His clavical was actually broken in two places, with a small piece between.

Hopefully in a couple of hours he will be in better shape. He will be coming home with us for the weekend, but should be back at school on Monday.

On more conventional news, my fall garden is in good shape. Cauliflower, broccoli, and kohl rabi were planted as seedlings, and lettuce and rocket sown directly. The weather has turned gradually colder, but no frost as of yet.

Inside I have been playing around on the computer trying to get a weather simulation/model up and running. This is a real model, run nationally by “proper” weather folks. I expect it will be super slow on my own system, probably taking longer than real time – i.e. the model will take longer to run than the actual weather ! But it will still be kind of cool – and provide a reason to buy a faster system.

The model is the WRF
model has been developed by various agencies and all the code is freely available. Getting it all to compile correctly has been a challenge, but so far I am making progress. I have the pre-processor running, the actual forecast engine has been run once, and now I am working on the post processor stuff – to actually be able to get to see what has been calculated.

After a busy 4th of July – swim meet, pool picnic, and neighborhood cookout – it was nice to have a rather peaceful Sunday.  I just picked some beans, zucchini  and dug some potatoes, all for the first time.  The potatoes were on the small side, but very nice looking and tasty.

The zucchini plants were looking rather weak and pale, so I top dressed them with a little dried blood. I think over the winter I really need to get some serious manure and/or compost into these beds in preparation for next season.

I’ve been playing around a lot with the swim team web site
with the latest addition a little slide show as a preview for the photo gallery. However although the web site is running well, we are still having email issues – mostly because many companies are tagging our emails as spam, perhaps because some less than savory companies might be sharing my hosting company. So our next step is to explore using the Google Apps to handle our group email.

For the past four days we have been taken right to summer weather – temperatures into the mid 80s. And while the humidity is not at summer levels, the air is instead thick with tree pollen. Cars turn yellow overnight, and even those, like myself, who do not consider themselves to very allergic to things, are rubbing their eyes, coughing and wheezing. At least ( so far) it is not swine flu!

The picture gallery is back in operation. I don’t know what happened to it. One day it was working, and then the next time I checked it, it was completely screwed up. Some kind of deep rooted permission problem was all that Google could advise, along with the advice to restart things – which is what I have done. I will (re) upload many more pictures once I am sure things are stable.

Misterhouse is a home automation program that runs on one of my old computers in the basement. So far it functions as follows – logs weather data (collected from Weather Bug), logs phone calls (caller id), and controls lights (on, off, dim, brighten) at various times. The control functions are via the power line control system X10. Now I am trying to expand the input and output range using the 1-wire network. Misterhouse may be able to talk to the 1-wire network directly – but I had no luck getting it to work – my 1-wire interface is via a USB port which may be part of the problem. Therefore I opted to go an indirect route using the OWFS suite of programs.

What happens is the the owserver program runs in the background, talking to the 1-wire network. The misterhouse program ( essentially a perl script) then talks to the server to get the current values ( or to write values to the network).

So far I have only a couple of basic temperature sensors up and running – and it took quite a bit of trial and error to get this far. More to come!

Well, I am writing this using the latest “toy” from Google, the new Chrome browser. I had to implement a workaround ( search for –no-sandbox on , where else, Google to find out more) to get it to work, but otherwise it seems fine for simple tasks. However so far plug ins for Java, etc are certainly not automatic.

Tropical Storm Hanna continues to make it’s slow way north by west and thus our plans for the weekend are still questionable. Although unlikely to make a significant impact on us, I will still make sure we have full tanks of gas, know where the flashlight batteries are, and make some extra ice just in case.