alan

Alan Porter is a mobile application developer, a nerd, a father, and a friend. He is really into gadgets and open source software, and he has spent most of his career making these two things work -- sometimes together. These days, you'll usually find him tinkering with his iPhone. He lives in NC with his lovely Malaysian wife and his two daughters.

Home page: http://alanporter.com

Posts by alan

Fit PC

0
16 years
by in gadgets on 2008-12-18

Earlier this year, my old faithful home server, “buster”, died. Buster was a hand-me-down 500 MHz Pentium III, and his role in my house was file server, print server, DHCP/DNS server, web server, router/firewall, VPN server and for a couple of years, a mail server. He also performed some odds and ends: turning on/off my Christmas tree lights via X10, emailing me every morning with birthday reminders, fetching RSS feeds, and processing updated geocache information into Palm and Lowrance GPS formats. In his last days, buster also filled a unique roll as a squid proxy, serving up an “upside down internet” on an open wireless network. It might have been this final task that drove him mad. His RAM was fried.

I hastily replaced buster with a WRT54g router, on which I tried both the Tomato and dd-wrt alternative firmwares. Both of them did a terrific job.

My modest Linux server

My modest Linux server

However, I still wanted a file server that could remain on 24 hours per day, one that I could store files on, and one that would share my printer. I also missed having a VPN. In short, I wanted a replacement for buster. However, what I did not want was a power-hungry box that made a lot of noise.

I finally settled on a Fit PC 1.0 (not to be confused with their newer model, the Fit PC slim. The Fit PC 1.0 has about the same specs that buster had: 500 MHz Geode, 256 MB of RAM, USB 2.0 ports. But what it does not have is a hungry power appetite. It uses only 3-5 watts of power! And it is fanless and silent.

I call this new Fit PC mini-server “bender”, and I look forward to working together with him.

Segway

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16 years
by in geeky stuff on 2008-11-29

I finally got a chance to ride a Segway.

We spent most of Saturday at the SciWorks museum in Winston-Salem. It’s a pretty cool museum, complete with a planetarium, animal exhibits, and lots of hands-on science exhibits.

While we were milling around, I ran into a guy who looked a little familiar… it was Carl Weston, who used to live down the street from me when I was a kid. He was working at SciWorks, and he was showing people how to ride the Segway. It was a little awkward and slow to get started, but not too hard. I even convinced Foong to take a spin.

By the way, I remember visiting this place about 30 years ago, back when it was called the “Nature Science Center”. Some of the original exhibits are still there, including the Foucault pendulum.

A culture of deception

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16 years
by in madness on 2008-11-25

This morning, I got some yogurt from the cafeteria at work. All of the containers were in an ice bucket, so all I could see were the top foil wrappers. Clearly, all of them were strawberry flavor.

Dannon Yogurt - Top

However, after opening the container, I was surprised to find that it was, in fact, blueberry flavor!

Dannon Yogurt - Front

I’m sure some accountant at the Dannon factory suggested that they save a penny by using the same lid for all flavors.

I’m a CSS n00b

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16 years
by in web on 2008-11-20

I’ve had a web page for over a decade, starting with a single static HTML page, and growing into a fairly feature-rich CGI script written in Perl. But CSS is a new beast for me. So this blog is currently a chameleon, changing skins as I learn what makes it tick.

Space shuttle fly-by

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16 years
by in family, geeky stuff on 2008-11-20

Tonight, we were treated to a visible pass of Space Shuttle Endeavour while it was docked to the International Space Station. On Friday, the girls and I watched the shuttle launch on NASA TV (via internet). So it was pretty cool to see it again, this time live, and in orbit.

So proud of her…

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16 years
by in family on 2008-11-15

This week, I have been slowly exposing Audrey (age 7) to computer programming. This morning, I showed her a short shell script that blinks the LED’s on our router.

while true ; do
   led white on
   sleep 2
   led white off
   sleep 1
done

I explained to her how the loop works: LED on, sleep, LED off, sleep, repeat forever. Then I pointed out that I had started it blinking last night, but that it was not blinking this morning.

She told me “you might have a bug”.

I am so proud of her.

Trying out WordPress

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16 years
by in web on 2008-11-15

As part of my on-going job of maintaining the web page for the Triangle Amateur Robotics Club, I am playing with WordPress. Right now, I am not sure whether I am going to try to maintain a personal blog or not. But I think the club definitely needs one.

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