I forced a brief hiatus of my server whilst I upgraded it to a new server distro. Can you guess which one? Ubuntu Server, of course. I ended up learning a lot about debian distros and am now almost 100% running again. What fun!!!
I plan on posting a few items here that need some documenting shortly.
It is now Thursday and nearing the end of my three weeks of freedom from work. A rather cloudy day and I plan on getting my garage to a point where I can at least park a car in it. Hurricane Ike is stirring up the Gulf, creating some cloudiness, and some giving us some wind so that makes working in the garage all the more bearable.
It has been a good three weeks. I managed to get a fair amount done. Completed a number of projects, managed to clean up a lot of the overgrown yard, researched some new ideas, and did some relaxing with some PS3 games.
Off to get the garage out of disarray and into a better state of affairs.
With all of my power monitoring research I have moved back to an interest in 1-wire application. I found a cool lightening detector project that I want to save for future reference. 1-wire is so cool.
And I found a online store for 1-wire stuff.
Found a one wire power management device. Interesting.
Wow. I finally found it. This guy built what is just a simple Circuit Monitoring system that allows him to gain statistics on his power consumption!
I have not gone through it all, but I plan on trying to do this and will definitely document it!
Update - 31 July 2008 - 1639 ET
It did not take long to find a lot more information regarding power consumption. Amazing what using the right term in your search yields. I was chasing down the wrong path in my searches earlier this week. I have found a ton more information.
Nice tool for gathering stats
I recently moved into a new home. The reason for the move was to get closer to my wife’s work location as well as get into a house that was flat and had more “space” overall. We increased our space by ~800 sq ft, but we added a nice sized back yard and a nice sized lanai. That helps all around. That’s great, but with the increase in energy prices (and my increased mortgage) I want to find ways to save some money. I manage my money well by monitoring spending. I want to MONITOR my energy spend. How can I do that?
I have been doing some research on home energy management. So far, I have found a number of organizations that have “energy management”, however, most of these organizations do not cater to residential. Why is that? Are consumers that cheap? Do they really not care? I don’t think so. I think it is the utility companies at fault.
Yea, yea. I can blame many, but hear me out. A residential energy management system requires telemetry. Currently the best place to put the end point of telemetry is at the meter. However, I do not own the meter. My utility company owns the meter, I own everything behind the meter. Ok great. So I can either install my own meter (can I do that?) or I can put my own meter inside? Here is where that breaks down. Right now the companies that product telemetry software and hardware are doing it to make money. They make money by enabling the utility company to provide energy management as a service to customers. This allows the energy company to give the most expensive power to those that pay the highest rates and let the residential customers use the cheap energy when they need it (we usually never need to use expensive energy!).
This begs the question of why then would the telemetry device producers want to go outside - in? Why wouldn’t they want to penetrate all of the residential/commercial customers and have demand force the utility company to follow suite? Currently they approach a utility and the utility says - eh, too expensive to implement. With a inside-out approach, the telemetry device maker sells the devices and software to the consumer at a decent price point and then the consumer drives the demand to the utility? Sound familiar? Disrupt the cycle.
I want to monitor my residential energy. I want to see how much power each device is using. I can then decide to enroll in a energy management program through my utility or manage my energy myself. With all of the part-time residents in Florida, that seems like a NO BRAINER!!!
Time to do a bit of brainstorming and see what I can muster up. Sounds like an interesting niche. Especially at the start of the baby-boomer era where they want to save money and they have money to spend in saving money!!!
On the Datamation blog our friend, Adrian has a dilemma. He wonders how “Will a $19.99 Ubuntu Succeed Where the Free Version Hasn’t?” But really who says it would?
Let’s get a short lesson in routes to market. You see Ubuntu is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). It just so happens that Canonical has added to the FOSS model by never charging for anything Ubuntu. Canonical is a for-profit venture, however. What Canonical is doing is finding other routes to market where it can build a revenue stream. I will say that $20 will probably not cover much since the box, printing of manuals, pressing of DVDs and shipping probably eats up most of that, but that is not the point here. The idea behind this route is more of a marketing ploy than one of profit. You see if people see it in Best Buy then, by golly, it must be worthy of $20.
For some reason Adrian digresses a bit from his headline. Not sure why, but he feels like Ubuntu (or maybe all Linux distributions) cannot be operated by the normal human being. But really can anyone operate or fix Windows? All they ever do is…reboot…uh oh that didn’t fix it….re-install. So what is different in any other OS?
I did not look at the date, but Adrian seems to be stuck in the 1990’s with his argument. Instead of bashing Canonical for trying to get Ubuntu further out into the masses, let’s bash someone else for charging too much for trash! Nah. Let’s just all go out and contribute to Canonical by buying the $20 copies of Ubuntu from Best Buy. They are doing a bang up job at promoting Open Source, communities in general, and living life as a good corporate citizen.
Yeow. Awoke Saturday to some intense pain in my abdomen. I toughed it out until my wife had enough and forced me to go to the ER. I ended up in the OR by 1030p with an appendectomy on the schedule.
I am back at home now (out of the hospital less than 24 hours after I walked into the ER) minus my appendix with 3 laparoscopy scars to show for it and more great pain meds.
Just what I need at the end of a terrible quarter.
I realized after looking through my posts that I rarely post anything about what is going on in and around me personally. Not that anyone really wants to know, but hey tough shit.
Work has been dogging me lately. I have been pounding the streets (well the airlines) killing myself and not making any money. This begs the useless question of why? Let me see if I can provide some color. The company I work for has been going through a transformation ever since I have been working for them and I am about to start my ELEVENTH year. Yes. Eleven years. It is a great company, they just spin wheels really hard and make a lot of smoke burning the tires only to never take off the brake lock to shoot down the speedway.
I have worked with some great minds and we have put together some great projects that were way ahead of their time, but no one would ever stick with the projects. The quest for shareholder value kills the projects after a quarter of no revenue. Very frustrating because competition starts a similar project and stick with it - they make money hand over fist. AAAAARRRRRGGGH.
Case in point, we have a great ISV team that is working on certifying apps on SLES and SLED. All is good there, but one thing - that is OLD school. In today’s world we really need to think ahead. The model is very different and I cannot convince anyone (besides the fact that I am struggling to keep MY head above water) to look at anything different.
So that is leading me on my quest. My quest to find 3-5 companies that are up and coming so that I can flex my knowledge and desire to drive the future and quit dwelling in the past! It is working. I am finding all kinds of interesting things.
That brings me back to the reason for this post - I NEED TO GET TO REGULAR POSTINGS! I am so haphazard on things like this that are not in my face regularly. With that being said, I am challenging myself to write 3 posts a week on various topics. Let’s see how well I can manage that!
Coming soon - views about cloud computing. What is it? Who are players? and why do we care?
Go here and drag 5 trees to a state (preferably FLORIDA). Odwalla will plant a tree in a state park for you.
Nice.
Yea - even surge protection cannot stop transient power anomalies. It seems that my video card on my primary server was bitten by a power outage/surge. Wouldn’t you know it…happened the evening prior to my traveling out of town for the week! Thank goodness for good friends like Scott Lemon. Scott sent me a new AP that had all kinds of good functionality in it. I switched over until just now when I finally was able to get my server up again.
So…sorry for the downtime. Glad no one noticed!
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