Work for the past few months has been pretty hectic, hence the lack of updates here. I’ve done a ton of cool stuff, including redoing the E-Learning system at work with my own full stack MVC framework. Learned a lot, learned some things not to do, but it has eaten up a ton of my life. Hopefully as the summer gets here things will slow down enough for me to redesign the site a bit.

I’ve known Perl had libraries like Net::SSH2 and (my preferred, but abandoned) Net::SSH::Perl for a while, but I never used them before a few weeks ago. We needed a script to check the disk use on our Zimbra server. Since I have a thing about running non-standard scripts on what’s essentially an appliance, I chose to have my script shell in to get the df. Since then, and since playing around with it some, I’ve just been kind of gobsmacked at the potential this opens up for script writing.

It feels a bit silly being this gobsmacked, because I’ve coded libraries that use PHP to FTP, written Perl scripts that talk to SMTP servers, and written countless lines of code that generate and consume web services. Making one computer talking to another is what I do. It’s nothing new.

Something about this just feels I’ve stumbled onto Excalibur.

Much to my surprise, it turns out the triangular (technically hexagonal) power base for Laser Pegs will pretty much fit within 16×16 LEGO plate.

Armed with this knowledge, I constructed the above holder so that I could better embed Laser Peg constructs within LEGO (or other brick) structures.  You can download the instructions for building the base by clicking here.

Work and side work has been keeping me pretty busy these days, so there’s not much new on the personal project front. Thanks to these I’ve learned a bit more about the WordPress Plug-In API, which is always interesting.

I’m hoping to get some time off this summer so I can get back to seriously learning Scala and Go. I’ve got a VPS with both of them installed, and just waiting to have time to tinker.

If you’re going to program in C++, I highly recommend Code::Blocks. I’m normally a Komodo (Perl, Python, etc.) or Visual Studio (VB.NET and C#) guy, but Code::Blocks totally blows away every other C++ IDE I’ve used. That includes Visual Studio, Borland C++, and vi. I’ve been using it as I refresh and expand my C++ skills, and it actually makes C++ fun.

Pages for Toylantis and Developolis have been posted. These are two of my largest builds using just about every building toy line I collected at the time. In the future, I should remember to include more Construx in my creations.

thumphper.php is the first version of the half of my attempt at replicating the basic functionality of Photobucket:

1. Storing image files
2. Thumbnailing them automatically after upload
3. Displaying them in directory-based galleries
4. Generate chronological RSS feeds of the directories

This script generates PNG images and thumbnails from files uploaded to my home directory and stores them in a separate, web accessible directory. It’s run from crontab every few minutes, it’s not event based.

I just added a page for my K’Nex contraption the Carousel of Blondes, which is a small gadget that spins a pair of collector cards around.

There are pictures of my builds, and they will be added as soon as I can piece together a little WP plug-in to display them properly.

A new section for Builds has been added. This will display my projects using construction toys. A good chunk of these will be LEGO, K’Nex, and Fisher-Price TRIO, as these are my favorite types, but other systems will show up from time to time.

Right now there are only two entries on the page, but more will be added soon, as I collect up pictures from my home computers and sort them out.

For future reference, the gear on the bottom of GeoTrax trains that drives it on the tracks fits K’Nex gears but not LEGO gears.