Useful Utility: DialupRouteMaster
If you've ever tried to setup static routing on Windows, you may know that the 'interface index' can change on you breaking your route. This utility will detect a broken route, remove the defunct persistent route, then recreate it with the correct interface parameter.
Note: I haven't had a chance to test it on a live network (I will 12-22-09), but it may prove interesting for the rare need to route using Windows.
UPDATE: Tested, debugged, and 100% working. This is now managing the static routes for a dialup connection between two power plants in Alaska!
*Released under the MIT license.
Initial Brew Rig Planning
Arighty, I said I would post this, but life got in the way. Heres the run down of my current plans.
Containers:
I'm going to have three 10 gallon stainless steel containers fabricated. These will serve as the sparg tank, the mash tun, and the boil kettle. I could really get away with two, but then I couldn't run two batches at once.
Fermenters will be 10 gallon glass carboys, or stainless tanks. I'm hoping I will be able to get some air tight stainless tanks, but as far as cost and speed I can buy the glass carboys locally minus the cost of materials, fabrication, and design time.
Chiller will be a stainless tank holding approximately 12 gallons capacity to compensate for copper cooling plumbing and a pelter cooler.
All inter-container plumbing will use copper pipe.
Heating:
I will heating the sparg tank, mash tun, and boil kettle using propane heat. I'm planning on using a 21 or 32 tip propane heating element beneath each unit. Propane makes things simple as I won't need to run a natural gas line because I can reuse propane canisters from the grill.
Controls:
Right now I'm planning on using an Allen-Bradley SLC-500 PLC for all the grunt work. The SLC-500 is an industrial grade programmable logic controller. Allen-Bradley says they had 1.6 million of these little dandies installed worldwide, but they are now considered obsolete. Obsolete is relative. You can pick these units up for a song on ebay and they have more than enough capability to control my approximately 40 I/O points.
For controlling my SLC-500 I'm going to write some nifty code for an Arduino. The Arduino is going to provide a 'supervisor' mode to the SLC-500. Basically I want to abstract an web-based interface on top of the SLC-500 that can be used to program recipes and monitor the rig.
Probably going to start homebrewing with an arduino
After attending a GE Fanuc workshop today and designing a rough an automated brewing system on the way home, I figure I can put the arduino I'm receiving on Friday to good use. I'll post my overview and notes tomorrow.
Levitation of small animals achieved
From the article:
Scientists working on behalf of NASA built a device to simulate variable levels of gravity. It consists of a superconducting magnet that generates a field powerful enough to levitate the water inside living animals, with a space inside warm enough at room temperature and large enough at 2.6 inches wide (6.6 cm) for tiny creatures to float comfortably in during experiments.
The researchers first levitated a young mouse, just three-week-old and weighing 10 grams. It appeared agitated and disoriented, seemingly trying to hold on to something.
"It actually kicked around and started to spin, and without friction, it could spin faster and faster, and we think that made it even more disoriented," said researcher Yuanming Liu, a physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. They decided to mildly sedate the next mouse they levitated, which seemed content with floating.
More at http://www.livescience.com/animals/090909-mouse-levitation.html
Host your own bittorrent tracker complements of Google
You can let Google host your very own bittorrent tracker! Atrack is a new project that implements the Google App Engine and Google's complementary hosting. As far as privacy and confideniality, you'll only have to worry about Google releasing the access log file to your entire App Engine account it seems.
“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,”
This has got to be the bane of any association pursuing the take down of hosted bittorrent trackers.
more info at atrack | freshmeat.net
CodePlex Foundation
Microsoft in inheriently against open source movements in their own self preservation... so why did they make their own 501c foundation dedicated to open source?
More at Microsoft's new CodePlex Foundation