Chris Dalby Untangles Networks

Meet segway

By chris dalby | July 4, 2008

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A new @chinposin Wordpress Widget was released this afternoon. Many thanks to Abesh for writing this widget, much appreciated and it works great. You can see it working here on my blog, it is a random slideshow of your avatar timeline.

Since starting chinposin, I have never ceased to be amazed by the amount of people that have been submitting chinposin photos on flickr or twitter and some of them are group chinposin of 70+ people.

So when Abesh skyped me the other day and said he’d made a Wordpress widget, I was over the moon. When things like this happen, it makes all the time spent working on this project worthwhile.

Now we have RSS feeds for each user and a couple of widgets to choose from, I hope chinposin starts becoming a useful tool, allowing you to display your main ID in alot of places. If you have suggestions regarding features you would like, then please let me know by leaving a comment here.

We have further plans for new features in the near future. The next release will have a permalink url for your most recent avatar, meaning you will be able use a simple url like http://chinposin.com/a/yellowpark/avatar.jpg.

Thanks to everyone in the chinposin community, we hope you like the new features.

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I am electric man

By chris dalby | June 30, 2008

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Widget Widget Widget

By chris dalby | June 29, 2008

A big thanks must go out to abesh, who has submitted some great widgets for @chinposin. Thanks alot Abesh, now we got RSS, the widget possibilities that open up are endless.

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My New Dumping Ground

By chris dalby | June 29, 2008

In my last blog post, I spoke about this really cool web app called Indexhibit. I’ve kinda worked out what I will use this for, so you can now find my new dumping ground over at http://chinposin.com/drop/. I’m calling this drop, because I intend to use this area to share stuff I find interesting. Stuff I want to bookmark and share for later. Stuff that might be created by me or by others.

Expect to see “stuff” that meets the indexhibit agenda:

A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.

I love this format. I hear there are new releases and plugins due very soon for this. So we’ll see how it progresses.

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Poor Internet Applications

By chris dalby | June 26, 2008

I have been toying with the idea for ages of stripping back my wordpress template to sandbox and creating a minimal theme for my blog. I think my blog theme is pretty minimal at the moment, but there is something nice about plain black text and white background.

A classic example of this is Dave Winer’s blog. Minimal. Functional. And looks classically cool IMHO. But it is so difficult to make black text and white background look cool.

I have played with things like tumblr and soup, and have never really found a use for them. Not really. You can pump them full of weird photos and matching tweets and they look cool. But, I’ve never found a use for them.

Today I came across indexhibit after seeing a tweet from @obstructionist (also known as writer Seth Eagelfeld).

Indexhibit is:

A web application used to build and maintain an archetypal, invisible website format that combines text, image, movie and sound.

So I have setup a classic black text and white background poor internet application. Love it :) But I’m still working out what I can use it for, so I won’t link to it just yet. [update: you can check it out here] OK, so I got my minimal site with a CMS for the backend. But the king of apps nowadays generally link to a gazillian API’s and posts your content to all of your social networking sites.

So we’ll see how this goes. Hope I find a use for it.

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Create XML from SQL Server for Tiltviewer

By chris dalby | June 25, 2008

Last night I cobbled together a script so I could output data from a SQL Server 2005 database into an XML file. The reason I did this is because Tiltviewer uses an XML file formatted in a particular way to create an amazing visualisation. Check out an example of a chinposin flickr visualisation using tiltviewer. Very cool, I think you will agree. Especially considering it took me 2 minutes!

So, if .NET is your thing and you would like to export data from SQL Server to the correctly formatted XML file for tiltviewer, here is the script. This script simply runs whenever the page is loaded and creates the XML file in the file location specified. The data is output using a stored procedure. You can then follow tiltviewer instructions to visualise your new data from the xml file.

By the way, this is not a tutorial, I am simply sharing the code. Leave a comment if you have a question. I imagine that I will work this out for php also in the next few days.

You could also add caching to the xml script and automate the way the file is generated. It’s not a million miles from that. So if anyone works that out, it would be appreciated if you link to that here. otherwise, you are free to use as you see fit

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
Dim filename As String = “G:\websites\htdocs\xml\gallery.xml”
Dim mywriter As System.Xml.XmlTextWriter

‘declare the db connection stuff
‘ Create Instance of Connection and Command Object
Dim connection As SqlConnection = New SqlConnection(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings(”ConnectionString”))
Dim command As SqlCommand = New SqlCommand(”GetProductsInCategory”, connection)
command.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure
command.Parameters.AddWithValue(”@CategoryID”, “138″)

‘ extract details
connection.Open()
Dim customerReader As SqlDataReader = command.ExecuteReader()
‘declare the xml stuff
Dim writer As XmlTextWriter = Nothing

writer = New System.Xml.XmlTextWriter(filename, Nothing)
‘Use indenting for readability.
writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented

‘Write the XML delcaration.
writer.WriteStartDocument()

‘Write a root element.
writer.WriteStartElement(”tiltviewergallery”)
writer.WriteStartElement(”photos”)

‘loop thru the database and create the xml nodes

While customerReader.Read
writer.WriteStartElement(”ph
‘ Loop
writer.WriteAttributeString(”imageurl”, “../ProductImages/” + customerReader(”ImagePath”))

‘Write the title.
writer.WriteElementString(”title”, customerReader(”Name”))
writer.WriteElementString(”Description”, customerReader(”Code”))
‘Write the close tag for the root element.
writer.WriteEndElement()
End While

‘close db
connection.Close()

writer.WriteEndDocument()

‘Write the XML to file and close the writer.
writer.Flush()
writer.Close()

‘Load the file into an XmlDocument to ensure well formed XML.
Dim doc As New XmlDocument()
‘Preserve white space for readability.
doc.PreserveWhitespace = True

End Sub

Here is the Stored Procedure that I used. You can simply or change accordingly:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetProducts]

SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.[Name], Product.Price, Product.Code, Product.ImagePath, Product.CardSize, Product.WebDisplay
FROM Product
WHERE Product.WebDisplay = 1
ORDER BY Product.ProductID Desc
RETURN

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Meeting the Slug

By chris dalby | June 18, 2008

If you read this blog, you will realise from my previous couple of posts that I have been taken with the Current Cost craze that has hit town. That’s right folkes, I’ve put my house online and I’m monitoring energy usage in the name of saving money.

Today I received delivery of my Linksys NSLU2, also known as a SLUG. Advertised as network storage for less than £60, the specs are ok. But then with a relatively easy firmware flash, you have a linux server for only 4watts of electricity and a home automation hub or IP phone system on your hands or whatever you want to use a linux server for.

I have literally only played with this for a couple of hours and I am amazed how easy it has been to flash the firmware and setup Unslung, a linux distro developed specifically for this device.

The flash upgrade to the Unslung firmware is well documented and very easy. I also attached a 40GB external hard drive and changed the system into Unslung mode which was a breeze. Simply follow the readme file and all is explained.

I now have a 40gb mobile hdd attached via USB to the slug. More than enough for my needs. Next up, general config, the nanobroker, MySql and reporting. All I need now is a cable. Stay tuned.

Topics: Green, Video | 1 Comment »

Setting up my Current Cost Meter

By chris dalby | June 15, 2008

My long awaited current cost meter arrived this week . I have been looking forward to this arriving for the last month, especially after reading the blogs written by Dale Lane, Andy Piper, Roo Reynolds.

Background

I first found out about the Current Cost craze after reading a tweet from Matt Bidulph. His tweet linked to a graph showing his energy consumption. A quick google search, revealed alot of writing about the Current Cost craze that has hit IBM’s Hursley crowd. So I decided to ask on twitter how I could get a Current Cost meter and join the graph.

The magic of twitter gave me a reply by Andy Stanford-Clark, Master Inventor at IBM and specialist in automation and remote monitoring - hence the Current Cost. Andy has been hugely helpful with getting me up and running. He has also given me a huge interest in automation and remote monitoring. Especially after seeing how he has put his whole house online with the andy_house twitter stream and after listening to the podcast where Andy talks about how he automated the mousetraps in his home.

The Current Cost Meter

If you live in the UK, you can order a current cost from from ecogadgetshop.co.uk - beware they have a 28 day delivery time. The meter comes in two parts:

1. Transmitter that hooks over the electricity cable running between your meter and Circuit Box. This requires no wiring to connect and has easy to follow instructions for installing

2. The Current Cost meter is a small display that receives a wireless signal from the transmitter and outputs the energy consumption data, showing current energy usage and cost, historical usage and cost and temperature. This can be located anywhere you wish within the house. My meter is two floors above the transmitter and has a full strength signal.

The meter also has an RJ-45 socket on the bottom, allowing you to attach to a computer via a serial cable and grab xml data that is spat out the meter every 6 seconds.

Graphing the Results

At the moment, my Current Cost is sending data to a Broker at IBM, giving me an online graph in the form of a java applet. This works by using a perl script that monitors the serial connection to the current cost and uses MQTT to send the xml data to a broker at IBM.

This is great, but any geek worth their salt likes to have a play and see what else can be done :

What’s next?

All this has raised my interest in home automation and monitoring. So I have registered chris_house on twitter, in the dream that I will soon be outputting data and eventually be controlling the house via commands entered into twitter. I have also purchased a SLUG, which with a firmware flash becomes a linux server, and will be my home automation hub running a nano version of mqtt - all at the low power of 4 watts.

So in the first instance, I’ll start databasing all the current cost data and outputting the results using the Google Chart API so I can have a web dashboard of all this data available to mobile or desktop devices. Controlling the house using an iPod Touch, cool. I will then look to monitor my SIP phone system as it can’t be too hard to monitor a device on the same network, right? Who knows how far I will take this

It certainly is a great bit of fun at the moment. Seeing people getting their doorbell online also makes me want to go and buy a doorbell for a weekend project. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the future as things progress.

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New Toy: Saving energy with Current Cost

By chris dalby | June 12, 2008

So I had a new toy arrive today, a Current Cost meter that monitors your electricity use and gives a huge amount of readings out the box. They were on special at www.ecogadgetshop.co.uk. The really cool thing about this gadget is tht it also has an RJ-45 socket on the bottom, allowing you to link the system to the internet

I am looking forward to playing with this. Apart from the obvious cost savings in energy use that I will make, it will also be the start of automating the house and outputting data into twitter. I am also hoping I can build some commands into twitter allowing me to control the house form anywhere.

So here is a quick video that I put together where I show the meter.

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Phreadz Phriday Meme

By chris dalby | June 6, 2008

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The Weather And Travel

By chris dalby | May 26, 2008

I recorded this video live and unscripted using CamTwist following the drive home on a bank holiday weekend. Hence traffic and travel.

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Directions to the Live Meeting Training

By chris dalby | May 15, 2008

I am running a Live Meeting training course on Friday 16th June. I thought it would be a great thing to film the journey from the tube station to the training venue. So if you are attending the course, watch the journey to the training venue.

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