Archive for November, 2012

13 results.

Tablets

Nov27
by kim hay on November 27, 2012 at 08:45 and modified on December 3, 2012. at 10:39
Posted In: tech

Well Happy Birthday to me ! Kevin bought me a tablet “Nexus 7”. I must say that it is quite amazing though I have to get used to typing with two fingers, since I am used too typing with all fingers. So far I have read Email,typed in the blog, checked out some features on the unit, oh I hope that I can get the 3d Sun app. Getting ready too check out the google Calendar. Just got a call from Dad(Walter) too wish me Happy BD. They live in snow lane this year, lots of snow in Saskatchewan. Will check in later with more news on the tablet. Oh Kevin, found the manual…its online in the tablet.

Updated: 2012 Dec 03
After a weeks worth of work, it really appears that this is a winner.
Once programmed into our house wifi, we have had no reconnect issues whatsoever. Response time is very good. Viewing of PDFs is much much better than the Kobo 1st model reader. We tried skype and while not as good as a desktop, it still worked.

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summer growing days revisited

Nov26
by kevin on November 26, 2012 at 15:45 and modified on December 3, 2012. at 10:56
Posted In: gardening, weather

We looked at the weather station data again and decided to go with the heavy frost (-3c) instead of the light frost (-1C) definition for a few reasons.
1) In the fall, a light frost really does not affect anything as all of the above ground veg have already been harvested. Only root veg like carrots, beets, turnips, etc are still in the ground. We generally harvest those shortly after the 1st heavy frost.
2) In the spring, you have to predict when the last frost will be, but that in conjunction with time off work to plant means we usually don’t even plant in the ground (or transplant out of the greenhouse) until the end of May.

The original definition of light frost growing days:

Actual Growing days between light frost (-1C) dates
Year #weeks #days
2003 25 176
2004 22 156
2005 22 156
2006 no data no data
2007 21 147
2008 22 154
2009 18 129
2010 17 119
2011 21 149
2012 23 162

The new definition of growing days using heavy frost:

Actual Growing days between heavy frost(-3C) dates
Year #weeks #days
2003 28 198
2004 29 201
2005 32 222
2006 no data no data
2007 22 153
2008 23 160
2009 26 179
2010 20 143
2011 24 167
2012 24 165

some simple statistics:

stat

light frost days

weeks

heavy frost days

weeks

min

119

17

143

20

average

150

21

176

25

max

176

25

222

32

stddev

17

2

26

4
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seti@home update

Nov26
by kevin on November 26, 2012 at 15:16 and modified on December 3, 2012. at 10:41
Posted In: astronomy


An update on our seti@home progress.
Yay! After first joining the effort on
April 12, 1999, 1:58 pm
Over 13 years now dedicated to signal processing radio telescope data.

We have now cracked the top 200 in Canada:
#199 out of 48,069
and cracked the top 4000 in all of SETI
#3,935 out of 1,342,720
As an added side effect, all of the computer systems help heat the home in the winter, offseting baseboard electric heaters 🙂

It will be slow going from here on out, as the top crunchers tend to have faster machines.
Not sure where this is going in the future.. the novelty has long since worn off, there appear to be no hard successful results. Already there have been times when the increase in home computing has outstripped the servers ability to serve data and they run out! This will only get worse in the future. I haven’t even really gotten add on Graphic Processing Units up and running yet!

UPdated: 2012 Dec 03 – and of course, after a post such as this, SETI@HOME went down on Nov 30th due to an unplanned power outage and now the database is corrupted, needs to be rebuilt and may not be back until Dec 4th.

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Napanee’s Garden Club meets tonight

Nov21
by kevin on November 21, 2012 at 12:57 and modified on November 21, 2012. at 12:57
Posted In: gardening


Lennox & Addington Horticultural Society meeting

The next meeting of the Lennox and Addington Horticultural Society is Wednesday evening November 21st, 2012. We meet at 7pm at the Napanee Firehall Training Room for a 2 hour session of looking back and looking ahead in gardening.

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Dr. Who 2012 Christmas special

Nov21
by kevin on November 21, 2012 at 12:20 and modified on November 21, 2012. at 12:43
Posted In: Science Fiction

We’ve become big Doctor Who fans and are happy to share this link with you for the 2012 Christmas Special trailers

watch?v=L3KVpvEUTns&feature=player_embedded

and look! There is a 2nd trailer as well!

watch?v=G17_B4uACgg&feature=player_embedded

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Tamworth Grass Roots Growers meeting tonight

Nov20
by kevin on November 20, 2012 at 10:00 and modified on November 20, 2012. at 10:01
Posted In: gardening

Tamworth is 22km north of Camden East on County Road #4, about 20-25 minutes north.

http://te-grassrootsgrowers.weebly.com/events.html

Weighing the Costs
Building a Case for a Local Food Economy

Tuesday November 20, 2012
7 p.m.
Tamworth Public Library

Local food advocate Karen Holmes will compare a local food system with the global food system.

Cost, availability and convenience are the most common reasons consumers rely on the global food system. However, the hidden costs of this are not readily apparent. This interactive workshop will deal with the real costs of our food and the sustainability of a local food system.

Karen has been involved in local food issues for over ten years. She has published articles in The Scoop, Food Down the Road, The Hamilton Spectator and LILIPOH. At their home in Bellrock, Karen and her husband raise chickens and Russian bees and operate a small-scale market.

Admission: Free
Refreshments will be served

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apache log analysis

Nov19
by kevin on November 19, 2012 at 09:55 and modified on November 20, 2012. at 10:50
Posted In: tech

Once in awhile one wonders just how many search engines are out there.
I wrote up a linux bash script found on the net to analyze the apache web server logs for starlightcascade.ca
The script looks like this.

>cat listip
#!/bin/bash
d=$1
OUT=/tmp/spam.ip.$$
HTTPDLOG=”/var/log/httpd/starlightcascade-access.log”
[ $# -eq 0 ] && { echo “Usage: $0 domain-name”; exit 999; }
if [ -f $HTTPDLOG ];
then
awk ‘{print}’ $HTTPDLOG >$OUT
awk ‘{ print $1}’ $OUT | sort -n | uniq -c | sort -n
else
echo “$HTTPDLOG not found. Make sure domain exists and setup correctly.”
fi
/bin/rm -f $OUT

When we run the script and then from those results pull out the web search engine crawlers we get a listing of the number of visits by unique IP addresses

[] ./listip starlightcascade.ca | grep -i crawl
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-100.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-101.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-109.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-113.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-114.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-26.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-43.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-58.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-71.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-72.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-75.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-76.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-77.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-81.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-85.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-89.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-91.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-92.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-123-125-71-95.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-103.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-110.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-136.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-138.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-147.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-148.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-153.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-157.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-158.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-159.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-164.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-169.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-182.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-183.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-184.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-186.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-189.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-190.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-191.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-193.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-50.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-53.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-87.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-91.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-180-76-5-93.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-101.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-102.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-109.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-123.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-140.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-151.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-153.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-165.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-168.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-169.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-170.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-171.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-176.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-180.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-182.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-183.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-79.crawl.baidu.com
1 baiduspider-220-181-108-82.crawl.baidu.com
1 crawl-66-249-66-41.googlebot.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-100.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-137.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-149.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-150.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-151.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-155.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-160.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-161.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-162.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-166.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-171.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-172.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-180.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-181.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-188.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-192.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-197.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-48.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-51.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-52.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-56.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-59.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-67.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-92.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-98.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-180-76-5-99.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-220-181-108-149.crawl.baidu.com
2 baiduspider-220-181-108-162.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-111.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-142.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-154.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-165.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-167.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-173.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-177.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-178.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-185.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-54.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-55.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-57.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-60.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-61.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-62.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-66.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-89.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-94.crawl.baidu.com
3 baiduspider-180-76-5-95.crawl.baidu.com
4 baiduspider-180-76-5-156.crawl.baidu.com
4 baiduspider-180-76-5-168.crawl.baidu.com
4 baiduspider-180-76-5-88.crawl.baidu.com
4 baiduspider-180-76-5-90.crawl.baidu.com
4 baiduspider-180-76-5-97.crawl.baidu.com
5 baiduspider-180-76-5-107.crawl.baidu.com
5 baiduspider-180-76-5-144.crawl.baidu.com
5 baiduspider-180-76-5-146.crawl.baidu.com
5 baiduspider-180-76-5-65.crawl.baidu.com
6 baiduspider-180-76-5-63.crawl.baidu.com
7 baiduspider-180-76-5-101.crawl.baidu.com
72 crawler.kalooga.com
367 crawl-66-249-73-143.googlebot.com
587 crawl-66-249-73-85.googlebot.com

baiduspider is from China.

In addition there are dozens > hundreds of breakin attempts via ssh and ftp every single day to my servers. Funny how when I trace back those IP addresses, most end up in China.
And I think back to the Chinese Ambassador in the news this past week

Beijing’s representative in Ottawa says Chinese firms are not involved in foreign espionage and he challenges anyone who says otherwise to produce evidence or keep quiet, in a rare interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio’s The House.

In a word.. Bullshit buddy.

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Leonids 0 Clouds 1

Nov17
by kevin on November 17, 2012 at 14:00 and modified on November 17, 2012. at 14:48
Posted In: astronomy

This morning was the peak of the Leonid Meteor Shower… only the clouds won.

We were using the clear sky clock last night to see when it would clear and chose 4am.
4am rolled around and it was cloudy.
so was 4:30
around 5am it looked a little clear so we went outand within 5 minutes it was cloudy again. We managed to get this one image.


Two nights ago we did come across this very new moon
(2012 november 15th at 17:10 est), which came out as 6% illuminated, magnitude -10 and 2.3 days old.

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site updates

Nov16
by kevin on November 16, 2012 at 11:59
Posted In: astronomy

Some of the automated data gathering routines and systems have failed in the times since the last time change from daylight savings to standard time.
Let me tell you how much of a pain in the ass that is.
The entire daylight savings time system is moving on inertia. Not since World War 2 has it been needed, nor does it provide any benefits to society anymore.

So back to particulars.
The allsky1 cameras system should be back up and running automatically. Some of the automated routines were a little out of sync.
I am looking at changing these series of jobs from a static start time to something more dynamic with semaphores from one process to the next.
The biggest issue is still the automatic start of CCDsoft… ever since the time change it is not starting automatically, but needs to be manually started. That is a big pain, every evening, mostly to remember to do it, tweak the code a bit in the hopes that it is now fixed.

The Sudden Ionospheric Detector 1 (SID1) got stuck a few days back but has been reset for data recording starting daily at 00:00 UT (or 19:00 EST).
One of its problems is a creeping data collection start time. Setting it to take a data reading every 240 seconds gives us a full one day chart in the end.
That is every 4 minutes, 15 times/hour, or 360 times/day. The problem is there is a discrete time interval to stop and start the data collection and the time tends to creep later and later into the day. Ie by day 30 of the data run it may be starting 5 sec*30=150 seconds later than it should.. or 3 minutes.
We tried setting it to 239 seconds instead of 240 but that leads to a 360 second deficit each and every day, or 6 minutes, far more than the other direction.
So it will be reset back to 240 seconds between data points.

The Sudden Ionospheric Detector 2 (SID2) still is not responding correctly to what we think it should be. The data automation routines have also broken and will need repair.

The FMMeteor detector has been down for a few months, mainly because the CPU of the box running Windows NT2000 could not handle the extra job of running SID2, so we shut down the Meteor detector temproraily.

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Aurora 2012 Nov 13/14

Nov14
by kevin on November 14, 2012 at 11:59 and modified on November 14, 2012. at 12:01
Posted In: astronomy


Aurora 2012 Nov 13/14

There was another aurora event overnight that was not too bad. Kim went out and got a few images on the Canon camera but those have not yet been processed.
The image above comes from our allsky1 camera around local midnight.

An animated 30mb .GIF of the entire night is available here
http://starlightcascade.ca/allsky1/gif/today20121114.gif

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Summer growing season summary

Nov10
by kevin on November 10, 2012 at 17:17 and modified on November 10, 2012. at 17:47
Posted In: gardening, weather

Weather station at the Kingston Pumping station

Data mining our weather station data shows the number of growing days in each summer here at the StarlightCascade Gardens over the years.

We use the last day of -1 C frost in the spring to the first day of -1 C frost in the fall.

 

Actual Growing days between light frost dates
           Year   #weeks    #days
2003   25 172 Apr30-Oct23
2004   22 156 May08-Oct11
2005   22 156 May17-Oct20
2006 no data
2007   21 147 May18-Oct12
2008   22 154 May05-Oct06
2009   18 129 May13-Sep19
2010   17 119 Jun13-Oct10
2011   21 149 Apr22-Sep17
2012   23 162 Apr30-Oct08
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Napanee Food Bank Garden 2012 Summary

Nov10
by kevin on November 10, 2012 at 16:42 and modified on November 10, 2012. at 16:44
Posted In: gardening, napanee food bank garden

Napanee Food Bank Garden 2012 Summary
We kept a logbook of harvest this year and today I went through and transcribed it into a 2012foodbankgardensummary spreadsheet(11kb .pdf).

Basically the 2012 summary goes like this: 100 cabbages, 93 squash, 30 broccoli  and 75  bushels of beets, carrots, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, onions, peas, peppers, potatos, tomatos and yellow beans.

Comparing to 2011: 88 cabbages, 63 squash and 70 bushels of  beets, carrots, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, onions, peas, peppers, potatos, tomatos and yellow beans.  2011foodbankgardensummary spreadsheet(11kb .pdf).

Thanks to all the volunteers, especially Susan Withers who made the logbook happen.

Kim & I spent approx 1 hr/week for 25 odd weeks tending our four rows. It was fun!

This year’s harvest ran two more weeks than last year (19 instead of 17 weeks).

Yield was up as well, even with the summer drought.

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root veg come out

Nov05
by kevin on November 5, 2012 at 10:48 and modified on November 8, 2012. at 09:23
Posted In: gardening

It’s the start of a stretch of cold overnights, so the root vegetables came out of the garden beds yesterday (Sunday November 4th,2012).  Carrots, beets, parsnip and one more… whose name escapes me at the moment

This almost marks the end of gardening year… we still have lettuce in cold frames that should be ok for a few more weeks.

 

Updated: 2012 November 07

Wow.. it got cold last night… like -10 C

The ground out back was very frozen and I imagine the raised vegetable beds  were a little frozen as well.

 

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