Interesting Tech Projects
Archive for March, 2011
Graphing Ping Times
Mar 29th
I recently had the need to generate a graph of ping times between my PC and a British Telecom server. After a quick web search the only options I found were commercial programs or free software that was incredibly bloated, complex to configure and with lots of dependencies. There must be a simpler way, and there is. Perl.
Here is my script:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Converts ping output into a CSV file for graphing
# andy at british ideas dot com - March 29th 2011
# Public Domain
# Run using:
# ping -D 100.101.102.103 | ./pingtocsv.pl > output.csv
# or:
# cat pingdump.txt | ./pingtocsv.pl > output.csv
print "Measurement Time,Ping Time\n";
while (<STDIN>) {
if ($_ =~ m/^\[([0-9\.]+)\].*time\=([0-9\.]+).*/i) {
print "$1,$2\n";
}
}
close(STDIN);
The Progress of Linux
Mar 4th
Back in 1998 I tried installing RedHat 6 on a spare PC. When the desktop loaded it was, ummm, wobbly. I then spent the best part of the next two weeks fighing with X configuration files setting obscure items such as front and back porches in a futile attempt to stabilize the display so it would be usable. I gave up.
Fast forward to March 2011 and Ubuntu 10.10. I’ve used lots of different versions of Ubuntu since 2006 on a variety of machines including for CNC control, but the last time I installed in a dual boot system was two years ago. Ubuntu 10.10 works fine in a virtual machine inside Windows 7 but I wanted to run it at full speed. More >
Why Adobe Has Lost the Plot
Mar 4th
Flash and PDFs are staples of the internet and have been for many years now. I used to develop some flash applications but not anymore as Adobe really has lost their way.
Adobe Reader
Sadly it appears no longer possible to directly download this application and install it. Now you have to get the “Adobe Download Manager” first which then forces you to get a McAfee security program at the same time as Adobe Reader. There are no options to cancel the download or installation of this program and it doesn’t matter that I already have security software on my PC. When will Adobe realize that people want to be able to choose what to download and install? No thanks.
Adobe Flash Player
Back when I bothered to write applications for flash (note – not adverts but client-side file processors and mapping tools) I installed the debug version of Flash Player so I could use FlashBug for debugging. Ever since then Flash Player continually crashes on me when visiting most websites with flash (such as CNN). This is despite uninstalling the debug version and installing the regular version. Sometimes I can dismiss the crash errors and it keeps working and other times it freezes Firefox for several minutes before crashing that too.
On setting up my new Windows 7 installation Flash Player forced me to close Firefox before it would continue – rather than closing and restarting via the add-ons window like all other plugins. After installation FireFox now will only start in “Safe Mode” with many features disabled. Wonderful.
Thanks Adobe for a really great user experience! Or should I say software engineering failure.
50,000 Point GPS Track in Silverlight
Mar 1st
About six months ago I posted a video showing a GPS track with 7,000 points in a slippy map control called DeepEarth. If you watch the video you can see that the track lags behind the map a little and I think I was at the limit of what was usable.
Yesterday I wrote about my new C# based slippy map control for Silverlight and Moonlight that can display 50,000 map markers and I wanted to see what it’s performance was like for a GPS track. I created a random track with 50,000 points in it to simulate a track from a GPS unit. Here is the result. More >
