yaleman.org

I’m fairly sure I could respond to 80% of my incident reports with a summarised version of this, and it’s what I waste most of my time on.

The main problem with most people’s troubleshooting is that they don’t start by actually clarifying what’s wrong. Who, What, Where and When generally gives you a lot of information on how to find the Why.

Well that’s a pity. I had ordered a MAX31855 SPI thermocouple interface to capture temperatures on the coffee machine, and after waiting a month the sender’s just given me a refund because it didn’t get delivered. 🙁

Back to the drawing board - on a high note this means I might be able to get a MAX31865, which handles four wire PT100(0) sensors, which I have been told are much more reliable.

I’ve had a Rancilio Silvia for a bit over a year now, and it’s been great to make coffee while also saving money and reducing the amount of plastic I was dumping into the bin. One of the popular modifications to them is to install a PID controller to make the heater control more even, and because I’m always up for a challenge I wanted to make my own.

That, and I leave it on often enough that I’m grumpy with myself, as repeated most eloquently by a friend:

Money trickles in, which I have already spent. It flies away now.

A quick one, since there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to nuke this software…

1. Find the Razer processes: yaleman$ ps aux | grep -i rz yaleman           689   0.7  0.4  2828488  70516   ??  S     9:40am   0:00.96 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzUpdater.app/Contents/MacOS/RzUpdater yaleman           469   0.0  0.3  2778036  58432   ??  S     9:39am   0:00.81 /Library/Application Support/Razer/RzDeviceEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/RzDeviceEngine

2. Because it’s pesky software that won’t die, first remove the software: yaleman$ sudo rm -rf /Library/Application\ Support/Razer

   [Read More]

A great concept, Taco Bell Programming. Take simple, known elements and mix to get what you need.

Here’s a concrete example: suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ.

[Read More]

It’s Santa Claus, come to deliver presents!

Santa-3PO, here to deliver presents to everyone!

A cute little space shuttle

Santa’s speeder sleigh!