by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 30, 2007 | Front Page
I recently mentioned that one of our Corn snakes passed away due to an infection in her body so we had a bit of a hole to fill.
I am getting a new cat in a weeks time as my Pixel is a bit lonely I think and she can certainly do with being chased around the house a bit. We went to the pet shop to buy some disinfectant and to show my mother the Albino Burmese pythons the shop has and saw that they had baby Blood Pythons (Wikipedia).
Both Emma and I have been oogling Bloods for a while, they look a bit like normal Pythons but are swamp dwellers and so need more heat and higher humidity – usually they have a moss bed in the vivarium. They also get really fat which gives them a very distinct look.
This is our little one (more shots here), he’s very young still and had his first trip outside the vivarium yesterday, in the shop he was very feisty – hissing and striking at everything that moves – probably due to the guys there being pretty rough with them. Emma didn’t feel happy wearing the leather gloves they suggested we got so she was brave and picked it up and its a very happy and friendly snake.
He’ll grow to between 57″ and 78″ (144cm to 198cm) and will weigh between 40 and 45lbs (18 to 20kg). He might be too heavy for her to comfortably carry around but we’ll have to see how it goes I guess. Blood Pythons are endangered animals in the wild due to hunting for their skin,
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 19, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Recently one of our snakes died due to an abscess in her body, we tried everything to safe the poor snake but in the end – and almost ยฃ1200 later – it passed away one night.
While undergoing treatment we were given copies of the X-Ray data, at the time I tried to read the RAW data files but failed, finally writing it off as some proprietary format specific to the X-Ray machine vendor.
Today I came across an item on MacNN mentioning OsiriX which is basically an Open Source suite to drive all things medical. Turns out the data is encoded in a standard format known as DICOM which defines the data type and also a network protocol for these machines to communicate with each other and their image storage over a network.
The data I got was in RAW format so none of the DICOM headers were present, this led me to some other software and a FAQ for importing unsupported/unknown DICOM data. Using the information there I was able to work out based on file size that my data was 512 x 512 big with an Header offset of 6480.
Armed with this information I was able to do a pretty decent import into OsiriX, the output of the one X-Ray can be seen below (click for full size).
The infection is clearly visible on the left of the image, this was removed but a second formed. Anyway, so the point of this post isn’t to go on about the poor departed snake but to mention the fantastic medical imaging tool OsiriX which is a pure Mac application and while I doubt many of my Blog audience will care for it it might still be of some use to some Googlers.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 16, 2007 | Front Page
I’ve previously mentioned a major problem I had with Google Apps for Domains Calendar function:
GCal also has a feature that mails you a short daily agenda, much like
what you see if you hit the Agenda button. Problem is the agenda mail
function ONLY reads from your primary calendar, it does not include
events from any subscribed calendars etc. This means that one of the
biggest selling points of Google for Domains is crippled, if you share
calendars you can’t use them even in the rudimentary tools provided.
I am glad to report that this is now fixed, my Daily Agenda mails started arriving 2 or 3 days ago and they include entries from all my Calendars,
Brilliant.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 14, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
I have been looking for a good solid SOHO Network Attached Storage device for a while. I was all set on the Lacie 2big 1.5TB Network device, it is attractive does what I needed – not much more than share files – and supports multiple drives.
Problem is I have since discovered that Lacie UK are the most incompetent people on the planet. I placed the order with them after their site showed they had the unit in-stock on a 3 days delivery time, after placing my order site said the same so I was confident it was all in order. Needless to say the device never came. I emailed their sales lines, no response, I emailed their supports lines, no response. I called them (after spending about a hour tracking down phone numbers) they didn’t reply to voice mails.
After about 10 calls I eventually spoke to someone who was unhelpful to say the least, I was told next-week, next-week etc a few times, next week came and went and no drive unit so I eventually just canceled my order. No more Lacie devices in my future ever that is a certainty.
Some searching later I found a few excellent reviews over at SmallNetBuilder for this and other devices, they even have a very awesome tool for comparing different NAS devices for speed etc, I decided based on their review to get the QNAP TS-209 pro.
The TS-209 pro is an attractive yet very well built little system, all the screws and connectors are proper solid bits of kit like you’d expect on real hardware. It is a Linux box and you can ssh to it:
# uname -a
Linux vault 2.6.12.6-arm1 #2 Thu Nov 1 03:31:14 CST 2007 armv5tejl unknown
# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 0 (v5l)
BogoMIPS : 332.59
Features : swp half thumb fastmult
# cat /proc/mdstat
<snip>
md0 : active raid1 sdb3[2] sda3[0]
731423296 blocks [2/1] [U_]
[==>..................] recovery = 10.6% (78181504/731423296) finish=144.0min speed=75574K/sec
So a proper little box then, I put 2 x Seagate 750GB drives into it for the same amount of storage as I would have had in the Lacie, the total price ended being about GBP50 more or so.
That GBP50 is money really well spent in this case. The device has hot swap drives – I tested it by yanking one out live without any problems, a few beeps, a few emailed alerts and log entries:
The device has a ton of features, the usual SMB shares are there but also NFS, Appletalk, FTP, Web access. It has a MySQL server built in, a webserver with php so you can deploy whatever you want on it. An iTunes server for your MP3s and a typical UPNP media server that will work with your PS3 etc.
This is a really capable device built on solid technology, so far I am very happy with it and will recommend to anyone. If anything significant change on my experiences I’ll post more later but I suggest you read the review linked above and seriously consider this for your SOHO NAS needs.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 13, 2007 | Front Page, Usefull Things
Google released a neat new Blackberry app recently, it lets you sync your Google Calendars with your Blackberry native calendar.
I tried it and it’s awesome, previously I synced my Mac to Google one way using ical feeds and then used the Blackberry sync tools to push to my phone, again one way. It sucked a lot. Now, the BB goes direct to source, syncs up all my calendars even ones I subscribed to and it just works.
I have one tiny gripe, I’d like to be able to pick which of my calendars new entries go into, even if they all go into the same one as long as I can choose which one, other than that it’s great.
