10 Feb 2009
Here’s the problem — the firehouse receives a dispatch report from the county for all emergency calls. Information in those dispatches wasn’t getting out all the time.
In the beginning the firehouse had a dot-matrix printer connected to a dedicated phone line. The printer had a built-in modem and answered the dispatches from the county. It worked but wasn’t too flexible and it dispatches were lost when the printer messed up.
A pretty slick macro that ran in Procomm replaced the printer. Procomm ran on a PC and captured the text of the dispatches with the modem. The macro printed a copy of the dispatch to the firehouse’s networked laser printer. The macro also emailed some of the dispatch to the phones of firemen and EMTs. The Procomm macro was a big improvement but the text that it was emailing was sometimes too much for the limited mobile email of the phones.
I developed the IronPython script to take advantage of the text dispatches created by the Procomm macro. The Python language is better suited to parse out fields of data from the dispatch. Once the script parsed the fields it creates a number of customized messages for the chiefs, EMTs and firemen’s specific need. The script routes the custom messages to members of each group. The script also inserts the parsed information into a database.
We have plans to improve the IronPython script but for now it is meeting the needs.
05 Jan 2009
Prompted by the deal at DreamHost
During the holidays DreamHost had a great deal for web hosting. For a flat fee you got hosting for a couple of years without the monthly charge. The only catch is you have to register a domain. Plus I think with each day that flat fee went up a little. That was the incentive I needed.
What to move
The first thing was to put up a simple html page on the new domain. Just a five-minute thing with Vim.
Next was to move my Redmine app from the server in the basement to DreamHost. DreamHost with Phusion Passenger supports a Ruby on Rails app called Redmine. It took a few visits to DreamHosts wiki and a couple of forums to get things running. It was worth it.
It only made sense to host my handful of Subversion repositories there also. They are more accessible which helps since I’m working more from the laptop. Hosting the repositories on a basement server over a DSL line has some disadvantages. It was workable but when the dynamic ip address changed it took anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours to update.
The email system cannot be moved. It doesn’t look like this hosting plan has the level of access needed to get my email server components running.
Concerns
I worried about hosting mainly because of experience with another web host. DreamHost didn’t have those problems. (the names are left out to protect the guilty)
It only makes sense to back up everything on the host. I read where DreamHost does regular backups. That’s great but having another backup is even better. The BASH scripts I used for backup on my Linux servers only needed a few changes.
31 Dec 2008
Happy Holidays from Dropbox…
Happy holidays Dave,
You know it’s that time of year when even San Francisco starts getting too cold for t-shirts and shorts. The Dropbox team is gearing up for the new year, and we’re rolling out some snazzy new improvements for you as we celebrate 2009.
What’s New with the ‘Box?
Dropbox has a brand new
web interface, complete with features designed specifically to make your life easier. Our FAQ has been rebuilt into a more comprehensive and easy to navigate
help center, and we’ve cleaned up the navigation around the site a bit to give you more information with less headache. Also new is the ability to drag and drop files and folders on the web interface.</p>
Spread the Joy
Now is also the perfect time for you to share your photos with family and friends using our linkable galleries in your
Photos section. You can even send non-Dropbox users links to the album folders you place in your Photos folder. Sharing your holiday moments with family and buddies has never been so easy! Hooray!
21 Oct 2008
The company’s network is growing. The number of PCs and servers is growing. Keeping track of the various systems and installed software is becoming difficult. Not to mention what versions of the software is on what computers.
The cost for the company’s business software is expensive. Most of the business software we use also requires a maintenance contract. The business software is pretty easy to the value to the company. While the network and PCs are obviously valuable, a lot of the I.T. support software is hard to explain to the business managers. Saying that we need expensive I.T. support software is a difficult sell.
WSUS, Windows Server Update Services, is Microsoft’s product for managing Windows Updates on company networks. WSUS doesn’t cost anything after the first server license. It does the job of making the Windows Updates manageable for the PCs, servers and laptops I’m responsible for.
Spiceworks is a package that Jacob found while doing research. Advertising supports Spiceworks. It is free. It is not a perfect solution but it seems to do what we need. To be honest I have only looked at it for tracking versions of software. There’s still a lot more to Spiceworks we haven’t explored.
04 Aug 2008
The email invitation came today. It looks similar to Groove — only easier.
Welcome aboard
We’re excited to let you know you’ve been selected for the Dropbox Beta. Thanks for your patience (it’s been a long wait!)
We’d love for you to try it out —
Your beta signup code is:
What is Dropbox?
Dropbox is a desktop application (for Windows and Mac OS X) and storage service that just works. It’s the easiest way to share and store files online and keep files in sync across your computers (
quick video demo here).
The beta is still invite-only, but we’re no longer keeping the details under wraps — and you’re welcome to invite up to 10 friends to shared folders (they’ll be able to download Dropbox too.)