jonhassall.com
The personal site of Jon Hassall
Photographs that I have taken A place to post interesting snippets and thoughts A place for me to show you some of the projects I am working on A brief summary of my skills, education, and experience Get in touch!

VirtualMin

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 1st July 2009 | Comments (0)

I installed a new Vir­tual Pri­vate Server, and tried out Vir­tualmin, the lat­est incar­na­tion of the Usermin/Webmin fam­ily. I’ve found it to be very sta­ble, and great for Linux admin­is­tra­tors that are used to con­fig­ur­ing servers via con­fig­u­ra­tion files and com­mand line, but wish to save time. It remains as flex­i­ble as man­ual con­fig­u­ra­tion, but offers many graph­i­cal inter­faces and time-saving fea­tures. So far, so good.

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Real-time web site hit map for Dreamhost

Posted in Web Technology on Saturday 13th June 2009 | Comments (0)

I’ve been work­ing on an appli­ca­tion for the Dreamhost API com­pe­ti­tion. My entry allows Dreamhost cus­tomers to view hits to their web site on a world map in real-time.

If you are a Dreamhost cus­tomer, you can use the Dreamhost Real-Time Hit World Map here.

Hitmap screenshot

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Campaignr to make a cellphone into a SenseCam

Posted in Sensecam, Web Technology on Tuesday 26th May 2009 | Comments (0)

I dis­cov­ered Cam­paignr, an open-source project for sam­pling data from the var­i­ous sen­sors on a cell­phone, includ­ing cam­era, micro­phone and GPS. I’m hav­ing some issues with it con­nect­ing to a wire­less net­work. If any­one has any ideas, please get in touch via the con­tact page. I’m also look­ing into manip­u­lat­ing the files it pro­duces man­u­ally. I could make my own Java applet, but I’d rather not rein­vent the wheel, and it would be more pro­duc­tive to spend time deal­ing with these sen­sor outputs.

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Homemade SenseCam

Posted in Sensecam, Web Technology on Friday 15th May 2009 | Comments (0)

Justin Lloyd got in touch with me via Twit­ter, and pointed me to this post about his home­made Sense­Cam software.

**Update**: Looks like Justin Lloyd has removed infor­ma­tion about Sense­cams so the link above has been removed.

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Skyfire — Flash on your mobile (and more)

Posted in Web Technology on Friday 8th May 2009 | Comments (0)

While inves­ti­gat­ing a way to dis­trib­ute Flash con­tent on a wider audi­ence of mobile tele­phone hand­sets, I dis­coverd Sky­fire. I was pleas­antly sur­prised that it allows using a full Flash client. I sus­pect that it works as a thin client/server solution.

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Homemade Microsoft Sensecam

Posted in Sensecam on Sunday 3rd May 2009 | Comments (0)

Microsoft Sense­Cam is a wear­able cam­era that takes pic­tures at var­i­ous inter­vals, and can record infra-red infor­ma­tion through a PIR (Pas­sive InfraRed sen­sor). Accom­pa­ny­ing soft­ware allows the events of a day to be indexed.

They are not for sale, and I would like to exper­i­ment with using some­thing like this. I believe that it would make sense to con­vert a mobile tele­phone into a sim­i­lar device, as they are easy to get hold of and gen­er­ally con­tain a dig­i­tal cam­era, Java/Symbian oper­at­ing sys­tem, mem­ory card and recharge­able bat­tery. If any­one knows of any down­load­able soft­ware that would per­form this task, please get in touch via the ‘Con­tact’ link. Thanks!

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Virtual Server Response Times

Posted in Web Technology on Saturday 4th April 2009 | Comments (0)

I used Ping­dom to test the response time of an Ama­zon EC2 (Elas­tic Com­pute Cloud) instance and a Dyn­DNS Spring Server. Both are vir­tual server offer­ings. DynDNS’s Spring Server was mar­gin­ally faster in terms of ping response time.

After using both for the past few months, I have found that the Dyn­DNS Spring Server is much eas­ier to get started with ini­tially, but Amazon’s EC2 is much more flexible.

Pingdom response times for Amazon EC2 server

Ping­dom response times for Ama­zon EC2 server

Pingdom response times for DynDNS Spring Server

Ping­dom response times for Dyn­DNS Spring Server

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New photographs — USA 2009 Trip

Posted in Photographs on Friday 27th March 2009 | Comments (0)

You can see new pho­tographs I took on my recent trip to the West Coast USA here:
Photo Gallery — USA 2009

And an exper­i­men­tal Flash vewier of the same pho­tographs here:
Photo Gallery — Flash Viewer — USA 2009

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Alexa Thumbnails Amazon Web Service closing down

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 18th March 2009 | Comments (0)

That’s a shame, the Alexa Site Thumb­nail ser­vice sup­plied through Alexa is clos­ing down on June 12th 2009. It was use­ful for some projects.

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Panoramas from v360r.com

Posted in 360 Photography on Monday 16th March 2009 | Comments (0)

As promised, here are the lat­est 360 panora­mas. For an inter­est­ing view, right-click while view­ing, and select ‘Lit­tle Planet view’:

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360 Panoramas

Posted in 360 Photography on Monday 9th March 2009 | Comments (0)

I used around 20GB of mem­ory cards for pho­tographs on vaca­tion. Right now I’m pro­cess­ing the 360 panora­mas, and should be post­ing them in the next day or two for your view­ing plea­sure. Sub­scribe to this blog to stay updated!

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360 Panorama, Santa Monica

Posted in 360 Photography on Sunday 1st March 2009 | Comments (0)

I have com­pleted another 360 Panorama. This is for a friend from South Korea study­ing in Santa Mon­ica, who wanted a way to show his par­ents back home what his life is like. I hope they enjoy the look into his life. Click here to view the panorama taken in Santa Monica.

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Updates to Various Open-Source Libraries

Posted in Web Technology on Wednesday 4th February 2009 | Comments (0)

It is always a pleas­ant sur­prise to find a new ver­sion of some of the open-source libraries I use. Recent ones include:

  • TCPDF — A PDF gen­er­a­tion library
  • FPDF — Another PDF gen­er­a­tion library
  • ADODB — A fan­tas­tic data­base abstrac­tion layer for PHP
  • PDFTK — A toolkit for per­form­ing PDF oper­a­tions such as split­ting, com­bin­ing and watermarking
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    Vacation — USA

    Posted in Random on Friday 9th January 2009 | Comments (0)

    I’m writ­ing this entry on an air­plane. I’m on vaca­tion going to the west coast of the USA for fun times. You may be able to see ran­dom videos sent from my phone on this Qik.com link.

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