Poor Jean :-( (by alaric)

Jean's been quite snuffly after her last round of jabs, so we were feeling sorry for her anyway, but this morning when I changed her she had really nasty nappy rash, and the elastic edge of her nappy was folded inwards rather than out - which happened to go right through the sore area and irritate it, causing it to bleed slightly 🙁

This, combined with her snuffliness, worried the nursery too much, so they rung us up to take her home again today, and I've been rubbing antiseptic ointment into her sores whenever I've changed her since, to help it heal cleanly, and washing them with cotton wool and water rather than baby wipes (because I bet they'd sting on a sore...)

Still, as usual, she is in good sprits, laughing and smiling and playing! She wails when I change her and clean the sores, but soon cheers up when she's back in a fresh nappy 🙂

Kitten Technologies (by alaric)

For some time now, I've been sitting on the domain kitten-technologies.co.uk, intended as an outlet for my "intellectual property" - whereas Snell Systems is me for hire to do bespoke stuff, Kitten Technologies is meant to be my more generic packaged outputs; all open source stuff for now, although I have plans for some more commercial things later.

Anyway, I've slowly been working towards a fairly decent automatic release management site, based around all the projects being in Subversion repository and having standardised filenames at the top level of each project root (LICENCE.txt, README.txt, VERSION.txt, etc).

But with the successful upgrading of my server infrastructure to Apache 2, I can run Subversion over HTTP, meaning I can finally allow public Subversion access (with the option to give other people commit access to individual projects in future), so I've now got the project management page up to a state where I'm not ashamed of it any more.

So, for example, I've recently been messing around with a server status monitoring package, a bit like Nagios but done in a way I prefer, which I've called The Eye Of Horus.

There is a main project information page, and a download page which links to the latest official release, and to a nightly dev snapshot tarball; and gives the public read-only Subversion URL (http://svn.kitten-technologies.co.uk/horus/trunk/), and links to a subversion browser to look at the revision histories of everything.

Right now there's only me working on any of the projects, but if others collaborate (I have a few potential takers for Horus, since it seems there's a lot of minor dissatisfaction with Nagios), I can give them Subversion commit access, and set up project mailing lists as required; but I may integrate issue tracking into the Kitten Tech site itself, if it seems useful to let others submit bug reports and the like.

Yeti Hunt (by alaric)

Well, today, we had all three sections tramping around hunting a Yeti.

I was the Yeti. Dressed in a rather fine costume Sarah's mother produced, I was covered head to foot in white fur.

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One Size Fits All (by alaric)

On Monday, I happened to be discussing some ARGON stuff with a friend, and he pointed out that what I'm trying to do, in many ways, is to find a one-size-fits-all solution for a lot of problems, and that this is often dangerous since you can end up making a nasty compromise.

He's right - part of the challenge in designing ARGON has been to find ways to avoid nasty compromises. So I thought I'd describe a few techniques I've been using.

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Residual Current Blues (by alaric)

Bah. Yesterday the RCD tripped, shutting off the electricity supply to the house, while I was standing in the kitchen.

This means that, somewhere, something's leaking electricity. An RCD measures the current that goes out to appliances on the Live wire, and measures the current that comes back via the Neutral wire, and if they differ by more than about 100mA (in the case of our unit), then it knows that coulombs of charge are going awry somewhere - which is usually a dangerous situation, since it means either a short to ground of some kind (which can start fires due to electricity flowing through things it shouldn't and making them hot) or a short to ground via a human being, which is usually rather unhealthy.

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