Upgrade Hell

I was 'forced' into upgrading Ubuntu on the server last night; there was a brief outage between 0800 and 0900.

I grow weary of the Ubuntu frequent-upgrade game.  Every six months, upgrade or lose out on support.  In view of the Shellshock vulnerability currently out there, that carries new weight.

Generally, when I install Linux, I install Debian.  It's got an upgrade cycle of once every two or three years.  I made a mistake opting for Ubuntu for the server, one which I'm determined to correct before the next Ubuntu upgrade cycle.  Which is due in about a month.

Because things go wrong when you upgrade.  Case in point:  through two upgrades now, Ubuntu has insisted on installing lxdm window manager, even though I run with kdm.  Now, it's true that a simple apt-get install kdm made short work of it; but still.

Stop the Ubuntu, I wanna get off.

Data Glitch

The past few days, readings have been sparse. The OCR program was crashing out, and I didn't have time to see why.

I finally got a look a few moments ago and immediately noticed why: one of the elements of the OCR program is the ability to define 'validation mappings' for each character. In other words, this combination of elements lit up equals character X. I had originally allocated for 12 validation mappings per character; but recently I realized that the OCR program could actually do error-corrections: if a certain pixel is added to or removed from certain characters, a distinctive pattern appears. So why not harness that and make the OCR progra much more fault-tolerant. Well, it turned out that in adding the additional mappings, I overshot the limit of 12. Easy fix; five minutes.

The lesson to be learned here? Always allocate amply for your data needs.

A New Project

I've embarked on a new project, one that actually ties in very nicely with the weather system and keeps me marching in the right direction development-wise.

I'm working on a way to synchronize the hosts file amongst various machines on a network, as well as Google-Chrome bookmarks (and, in future, files to be backed up).  There are various kludges to make this happen; I just said screw it and have begun writing myself a couple of programs.

The first is the server.  It will respond to XML requests on the server's CGI-bin interface.  The server is (at least for now) designed only to run when queried.

The second is the client.  It will send XML queries to the CGI-bin interface, and listen to the results.

I've decided upon XML as the way to do this, simply because it's good at encapsulating string information, and just a bit more precise than the typical query of key1=value1&key2=value2&etc.

So, for now I'm working on the skeleton of the server and in particular the XML module.

In the meantime, I'm still also working on my weather system, plus on my Comedy Radio Show.

-Bill

Getting Ready to Open Source
2014-02-10

My weather system is starting to mature - it's at Version 3.10 now, and I frankly can't think of much to add to it, apart from an expanded environmental dataset - Snow-on-Ground, that sort of thing.  I recently added queries and a data-extant flag, which tidies things up a bit.

So, I'm getting ready to open-source the whole works.  It turns out that's taking some time.

First, I've got to document what I have.  It's no easy proposition, but it has to be done.  I've been at it for two days, now, and have some 22 pages complete.  It's gonna be one of those projects.

Next, I'll have to tidy things up a bit and include a sample dataset.  That'll take only a little work.

Thirdly, I've got to document the install procedure.  That's a little bit involved but, again, a necessary evil.

All that, not just for the weather system, but for all of the support programs as well.

Once I've got all that together, then I've got to upload the works to sourceforge.

Bleah.

-Bill