John’s Home Page

WARNING: All of this is severely outdated and you will have a bad time if you follow these directions

Django includes a useful geographic services system called GeoDjango. Getting it up and running on CentOS can be a chore, particularly if you need packages newer than CentOS 6 provides. In this post, I'm going to list the steps I took install GeoDjango with PostgreSQL's PostGIS system. If you're reading this, then I'm going to assume you have at least a passing familiarity with Linux and Django.

A recent work project involved remote, unmanned computers set up to record weather data.  Every so often, we want to log in to the computers and download the data for processing.  The question is, if you are using off-the-shelf parts, can you make the remote computer reliably available?

Apple's Boot Camp does not officially support Windows XP on computers shipped with OS X 10.7 ("Lion"). Keep reading for instructions on installing Windows XP on a late 2011 MacBook Pro.

UPDATED: Read Steve's comment for more info on getting XP running on a 2011 13 inch MacBook Pro.

I have a full-time job, so this week I decided to spend a little of it on supporting the people who develop the programs I use regularly. Here's a list of the developers I donated to:

Updated with Chest Protection Info

Rules and Notes:

1. Use common sense.
2. Try your best to use speak goodly.
3. No griefing.
4. Problem players will be perma-banned.
5. No skybridges. Try nether portals, subways, or wait until plugins work for teleportation.

Protecting Your Chests:

Earlier this week, TB bought me a gift pass for a popular indie game called Minecraft. I kind of wish he hadn't, because I can't. stop. playing. it.

On November 12th, I aged a year, as I often do. I don't know what it is about November twelfths that age me so, but Jen was there to cheer me up. How did she do this? She combined two of my favorite things - zombies and cupcakes.

We had a free day in Washington, so CW and I drove east toward Lake Wenatchee State Park. We hiked up a mountain, and mostly hiked back down again. Pictures were taken and posted here for your amusement.

As you can see, I've got a new theme! "Not another one," I hear you say? Allow me to explain why it's great...

Last Tuesday we were in Seattle for some work, and we took time to visit Seattle's Pike Place Market - a haven for hippies, bakers, and crab-chucking fishmongers.

The Problem: I need to backup remote websites that have lots of files. I want to have incremental snapshots, so that I can have multiple backups of the same site without wasting lots of disk space. In other words, I want Apple's Time Machine for websites.

The Solution: I knew that the familiar rsync program could copy files from a server to my home computer. So I Googled and came across Michael Jakl's excellent Time Machine for every Unix out there. I've expanded his script and provided my results here, so that you can use it too. Read on for more info, and to download the script.

After messing around with lots of fun configuration, I think my email system is working properly. I'm using a combination of Postfix, Dovecot, MySQL, RoundCube, and OpenLDAP to provide email services for johnwoltman.com. This lets me use a better webmail client than 1and1's craptastic "WebMail 2.0," and I can do do away with quotas because there's so few actual mailboxes.

On October 4th, EB and I flew to Salt Lake City, UT. We took pictures!

Dan found a spider and gave it some food. Hope you like bugs!