From time to time I hear people proudly boast that their data is safe because it is on RAID. They are WRONG and will unfortunately find out the hard way one day.

My goals for this project were simple:

• Spend less than $30.
• Spend less than 8 hours building it (even taking pictures, I spent only 4).
• Produce something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to use in front of clients.
• Produce something that EASILY folds flat for storage and transport.

Simple!

The finished soft-box.

Broken down and packaged for travel.

The falls at Iguazu’ are some of the world’s greatest waterfalls, up there with Victoria Falls and Niagara. A single pictures can’t capture it. 100s of pictures can’t capture it. But, I felt like posting this picture of one of the minor side falls. Hopefully everyone will forgive me posting a waterfall and a rainbow all at the same time.

While working on a project using google maps, I needed to control the mouse cursor to help indicate which of several tools was active (much like many popular applications such as the Adobe tools and various CAD packages do for example). Unfortunately Google does not provide a way (and certainly not a documented way) to control the cursor over the map aside from during drag and drop.

Lets say you need to setup 5, 10, or maybe 1000s of gumstix with the same root fs. None of the stock images have what you need and many have many items you don’t need. You could of course, start with one of the minimal images (say gumstix-minimal-image) and then, once it is installed, use ipkg to install all the packages you need and in a final step pull the image back out of flash (I’m not sure how you would do that, or if the gumstix would even allow it. You could do it using one of the boot from SD/MMC/CF images, and then take the tree and turn it into a JFFS2 images once it was setup). Of course, when you need to update the image, you have to repeat the process of starting from a stock binary, installing everything (hope you kept good notes and that nothing changed) and pulling the image.

This is a work in progress and it will be updated over the next week or so…

My father’s company has had a linux based server, firewall and router for a while. This server hosts this web site and others, a virtual mail hosting system and general file sharing for his company. It serves as a NAT router and firewall as well. Basically it is a linux network swiss army knife. After 5 years of faithful service to us (in addition to 5 years in a production cluster) the dual PIII-450 machine hosting the system is having hardware issues that cause freezes and so we figured it was a bout time for new hardware. My father’s company purchased a AMD64 based Dell T105. While this $700 system was more expensive than the free salvaged box, it comes with 4 year 24×5 support and warrantee.

Well after playing with my bug for a bit, I could not get the GPS module to work. I sent an email to the support folks at BugLabs and after a few posts back and forth on the forums to trouble shoot, they sent me a prepaid return label to RMA the unit. This has been a very positive experience and I want to give props to the BugLabs support and technical team for their help thus far. I pre-ordered a brand new system and probably have one of the early production units. Failures happen. It is how they dealt with it that is surprising.

My brand spanking new BugLabs Bug arrived today complete with very spiffy packaging. I haven’t done much with it yet. That is a job for tonight. For now, here are a few pictures: