Mariajose & Virantha

This is Virantha's tech play-ground, just to jot down some cool things I come across.
Screen scraping with python

Testing

HDD Backplanes

I really need to factor in the cost of adding a hot-swappable hard disk drive backplane.  These basically take up 3 of your 5.25 slots and provide a set of 4 or 5 trays for hot-swapping SATA hard drives.

Here’s a review

Picking a power supply

This is a great post here .  I’ll update the list here when I get a chance to evaluate everything. Some of my key evaluation axes:

1. Price!
2. Efficiency (since a home server will be idle most of the time)
3. Number of SATA power connectors

I suppose the number of SATA connectors is not that important, when I could use one of these connectors to convert from standard 4-pin molex to sata power.

Name	Cost	Where	Notes
FSP Group ATX300-PA	$25+tax+ship	Newegg	Only 1 SATA

Starting animation programming with Python

So, I decided to take a look at animation programming in python, because I got really tired of doing token/bubble animations for my work in Powerpoint.  I finally came across some good libraries:

1. Pyglet
2. Cocos2d

Pyglet is a pretty basic library with direct wrappers to opengl.  I wanted something with a bit more functionality in terms of Sprites and Animation, so I decided to go with cocos, which is built on top of pyglet.   Another alternative I considered was Rabbyt

Using maps in wordpress

I just started using Motionbased to view the GPS track-log from the Garmin Forerunner, and I’ve been looking for an easy way to record all my runs in this blog. It would be ideal to be able to somehow get a google map with all the waypoints shown.

Some of the alternatives that I’ve found are:

• Geopress
• XML Google Maps

I’m leaning towards the latter option because it lets you use a KML (Keyhole-Markup-Language) file, provided by MotionBased through it’s Google Earth export feature. I just upload the .kml file, and then add a tag to point to it, and a map should just pop up.

Here’s an example:

Wow, that was easy!

GeoPress also seems to have a nice feature: it lets you pull up a google map and annotate with your locations. Presumably, you could add some photos to different parts of the map, all within your blog post! This sounds pretty cool, and I’m going to have to do some more investigation of this tomorrow.