Another minor update to the Server Monitor gadget.

• I have now made the font size and Type configurable.
• There are a few miscellaneous adjustments mostly around the options page to make that nicer to use.

Check out the Server Monitor page for more information.

DOWNLOAD: ServerMonitor 2.0.4.1

I have released the new version of the Server Monitor gadget.

The new features include:

• Configurable url refresh time
• Customisable colours , background, labels and URL result
• Auto update notification

Check out the Server Monitor page for more information.

DOWNLOAD: ServerMonitor 2.0.1.0

Note: There have been a few people leaving comments asking how to get their camera working, I’m sorry but I don’t have any answers for you as I only have the one Logitech camera and I haven’t played with any new drivers since i got it to work! I hope you can find the solution.

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When I attempted to attach my “Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks Pro” (older version see pic) webcam to by Vista laptop, I was unable to find a driver for it. Logitech have decided to only release Vista drivers for webcams released in the last 3 years. I call that a real poor move. In fact it stinks of profiteering. When you look for Vista drivers they actually try to sell you one of their new and apparently Vista compatible models. “This Camera will not work with Windows Vista. Please see our list of newer Vista compatible cameras”.

My webcam works perfectly and has done since I bought it, it’s a great product, as with most of Logitechs gear, but the decision to not release Vista drivers will certainly cause me to shop around a little more next time.
Never fear: I got my Webcam to work using XP drivers in Vista in a couple of very easy steps!
(the ease of this makes Logitechs decision even harder to swallow)

1. First download and Install the latest Vista QuickCam software from Logitech currently “QuickCam 11.0″, you can get it by choosing the current model notebooks pro. When it sits there asking you to plug in your webcam, just close it down, it won’t find the old one.
2. Also Download the old XP software, currently version 8.4.8 build 1034A, we only want the drivers from this package so…
3. Run the install but cancel it when it gives you the first screen of the install, It should leave the decompressed package for you to pick the drivers out of. It will decompress the driver files to “C:\Program Files\Logitech\QuickCamWebInstall”
4. So now you can plug in your webcam and Windows should prompt you to locate a driver. If you have already plugged it in and dismissed that driver wizard, go to the device manager, find the “Unknown Device” ( hopefully you only have 1!), and choose to “Update the Driver”
5. When it asks where the driver is, tell it to look in the folder where the decompressed XP package. It should be at “C:\Program Files\Logitech\QuickCamWebInstall\Drivers\WinNew”
6. That’s it!, Vista should install you webcam successfully and the latest Quickcam software should work perfectly with the Webcam.

Good Luck with it, while I can’t be sure I bet this works for almost all their cameras.

This is my first google gadget I have created a simple gadget which simply polls a URL every 5mins and displays the result.

It is designed to work with a server side script that will return a small text string that will be useful to display. You can actually set up a number of URLs to monitor.

Download a copy here: ServerMonitor2

For my purposes it displays, the hostname and server load of 2 applications, these applications are in a server cluster, so the hostname tells me which node the application is running on, and the system load is a good indicator of usage.

Server Side Code

The server side code can be as simple as this:
< ? php
$host = trim(`hostname`);
$fiveMinAvg = trim(`uptime | cut -f 5 -d ,`);
echo $host . ' (' . $fiveMinAvg .')';
?>

Let me know if you like it!

More Information including new development, Feature wishlists.

The Temperature at my place now is: °C full graphs here

Using a couple of Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors, a simple circuit and 2 simple pieces of software I have been able to track and graph the temperature of my home, indoors and out using my PC. I started this project in the hope of measuring the benefit of Insulation batts in my roof.

I got the Dallas/Maxim DS18S20 temperature sensors as free samples ordering over maxim-co.com website.

The circuit and software to read the sensors I found on martybugs.net http://martybugs.net/electronics/tempsensor/hardware.cgi

The Software that reads the sensors is called digitemp and can be found at : http://www.digitemp.com/software.shtml

The graphs are provided by the excellent but often misunderstood rrdtool http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

The rrdtool scripts I use and the scripts I use to read the temperature every 5 mins can be found here

If you want to do this yourself I really recommend following the steps on martybugs.net as it is rather complete.

It’s great to have this information, In the end I didn’t get a good idea on the insulation effect as I only had the sensors running for 3 days before the installers turned up.

This website will publish the pieces of software that I have written and or developed to get my work done, it could be mostly scripts [ Perl, Shell, PHP, Javascript ], but there will probably be some other stuff too, Google gadgets, Yahoo widgets, load testing scripts. The aim is to be useful for me, perhaps it will be useful for you?