With the latest version of PrintRun you can now set the slice command. This allows two cool options.

You could set up Slic3r the new cool kid on the block but I want to try using pypy for running Skeinforge. Pypy is a python VM that a really fast JIT so should speed things up.

Setting it up is simple. First download the pypy binary and unpack it somewhere. Then change the 'slicecommand' setting so that, where it did have 'python', it now has '/usr/local/bin/pypy' ( or where you installed pypy ). Now your slicing should be twice as fast. Simple as that.

Seems to be working great for me.

Don't change anything else, still run the 'slicesettings' with standard python as pypy does not have the graphics support out the box and the speed is not reqiored for that part.

My new Seeeduino v3.0 arduino clone arrived today from Cool Components.

As a test I hooked up a DHT11 temp sensor and it all worked a treat. I like the colours too!

So now I know that the office got up to 22 deg C and 49% humidity.

I have added a Arduino page with some details of how I compiled the code without the GUI as at the moment running the GUI crashes my X server and logs me out.

I have been writing some test using cucumber to prepare for a system upgrade of one of our web servers. I am using capybara to do the actual test and have been building up a small set of tests.

Previously I used freshen because I know more python than ruby but there does seem to be a lot more support around cucumber than freshen. I did have a look at the python support in cucumber but everything I read about it seemed to point to it not being great.

Moving on to the point of this post. I was looking at using cucumber-nagios to run some of these tests more regularly on our nagios server. My theory was that I could run all the test regularly and report if any of the parts of the server fail. So testing further into the stack.

The cucumber-nagios website has some info and tutorials to get you started but I soon found that it lacks some of the test that I wanted for things like checking a 404 page etc.

My solution has been to use my existing tests, install cucumber-nagios and just use the output formatting to output to nagios.

cucumber --format Cucumber::Formatter::Nagios features/newserver/ 
CUCUMBER CRITICAL - Critical: 1, Warning: 2, 16 okay | passed=16; failed=1; nosteps=2; total=19; time=2

The last line above is the output of the command and is a format that Nagios can parse and act on. As you can see I still have one test failing. You can then either add the whole test suite into Nagios or pick and choose specific features. You may want to run all the tests occasionally but check some of the status and security features more regularly.

"Thanks Mr Betts". I spent some time putting together an email to my local MP, Clive Betts, a couple of weeks ago. It was prompted by the climate talks in Copenhagen next month. I wanted to voice my concerns that we where going to ignore the future and continue to set vague and distant targets that we can generally ignore. I also suggested that if we spent a little less on building roads and airports or propping up the car industry then we could invest more in real solutions for the worlds growing problems. Suggesting that Britain could once again lead in technology and this time to correct some of the problems we have caused with out previous technologies.

The letter that Mr Betts sent was well considered and seemed to respond to each of my points in turn it. It was not just a circular but a well thought out reply even to the point that he was suggesting local companies that where already doing research into alternative fuels. It is nice to see that he is thinking along the same lines as me and I hope that by adding one more voice he will continue to put the pressure on the government to make the right decisions.

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ is a great service that really allows you to dig into what your MP is doing for you in government. You can track the questions that they are asking and how they have voted on issues. Looking at Mr Betts' record of voting it looks like this ties in with the words in his letter which is nice to see.

I have been having some really good experiences with Bluetooth and my laptop recently. Fist off I connected my phone by just clicking "Add new Device" from the Bluetooth icon and then selected the "Use this as an Internet Connection" option and it was all setup. Clicked on the network Icon and told it it connect using my phone, it asked me for my network and then connected. No fuss. No driver disk and clunky software. Just connected.

Today I paired up my ?SonyEricsson Bluetooth headphones and again just connect the device from the Bluetooth icon. Clicked on my sound preferences and select the headset for my output and then pressed play in my music player and again it "Just Worked" (TM).

I think that this shows that all the hard work is paying off. All those people who have logged bugs and then those that have fixed them all working to create the correct solution to work across the board. Not just one manufacture bashing things with a hammer until their one piece of hardware works. All the hard work getting drivers fixed to work correctly with pulseaudio is really starting to pay off.

Every morning I travel on autopilot from the tram stop to the train on platform two. I make no check but just get on, find a seat, and boot up my laptop. One day they will park the wrong train there and I will take a small trip to Bristol, Reading or Birmingham. Might be a nice day out.

I propose two simple changes to the patent laws that I think are more than justified. The first is that if a company goes bankrupt then all the patents that it holds fall into the public domain. Why should we loose the ability to improve our lives just because of your bad business planning. The second is that if you are not selling a product that uses your patent within five years then it goes into the public domain. If you can't make something of it in five years then let somebody else try.

That's all.

I brought at efergy energy meter from Oxfam and have had it running for a couple of days and it is already starting to annoy Sarah. Next up is to try and grab some of that data and graph it.

I sent an email to efergy asking if they could let me have some more information about the specs of the signal. I got a really good reply from them saying that they could not really give me any more detail than is on the box which is what I expected but the guy there did seem interested in what I was doing and took the time to write out quite a detailed reply so I like the company already.

The spec says that every six seconds the transmitter spits out a signal on the 433Mhz band so my next step is to try to capture that. If I had more than a multimeter then this may be a lot simpler but hey lets give this a go. I am going to get a 433Mhz reciver for a garage remote so that I can get the baseband signal. Assuming they are sending very little data then the bandwidth should be pretty low so I think that if I can get the arduino to capture the output at say 20kb/s then I should be able to examine the signal if it is less than 10Kb/s. It may be simpler to just try and grab this direct from a parallel port.

I have been reading up about BTRFS, or butter-fs as it is pronounced, and having a little play with it on my laptop. It's looking good but is still a little new.

It has been touted as the Linux answer to ZFS which is probably true, it does share a lot of the same features but the implementation is quite different as far as I understand it. It is going to be the filesystem in Linux in a couple of years time and Linus is already using as root on one of his laptops. ( That Linus quote does not really mean that much, only that he wants to try it just like the rest of us and it's only one laptop not the box he develops the kernel on).

At a low level it uses b-trees and copy on write (COW) to store both the metadata about a file and the data in the files. It treats both types of data the same storing them both using the same functions and by doing so allows them to keep the code simpler and the data less fragmented. Reading large files with a lot of metadata on ext3 can be quite a disk seek intensive process but with btrfs this is reduced greatly.

Feature wise it is very interesting. Due to the different way it allocates metadata and file data on the disk it allows them to do some clever things. It supports Raid 0,1 and 10 for both the metatdata and the file data it checksums the data as it is written to disk allowing checks for corruption as data is read a written. Sub sectioning and snapshots. You can snapshot at the directory level allowing you to do things like take a quick snapshot before an upgrade or big set of changes and then roll back if things are not working the way you expect.

You can defrag a file or directory on the fly to keep important parts of the system ticking on nicely although if you have plenty of disk space then fragmentation should not be a problem.

There is a really neat function that allows you to convert a current ext3 filesystem to btrfs in place. It just converts all the metadata to the btrfs format on disk and makes it point to the file data that is already in place. Then it takes a snapshot so that you can go back at any time to the disk as it was before you converted. As this is just a normal snapshot you can also mount it up and examine it online just like any others.

BTRFS has only been in development for a few years so it is still taking shape and I am sure that the functionality will grow and stability improve as time goes on. Currently the website warns not to use it for any data that you want to keep and that is probably good advice.

The only other thing I found is that with 2.6.31-rc5 kernel the btrfs module dies when you try to suspend so it's not for me yet.