Mark Embling

This time last year I posted my hardware line-up for 2011. Now we're here again at the start of 2012 I thought I'd do the same thing again. In many respects, things are not very different. However there are some changes and additions which are worth mentioning.

My network at home up until recently has centred entirely around a cheap ADSL router from O2. This is fine, but I decided to move the DHCP duty over to my little home server. As part of this, I thought it would be nice for it to also handle DNS, and dynamically assign DNS names to the machines it learns about through DHCP requests.

Recently I've been talking on Twitter about adding websockets support to my energy monitoring web interface. However, before I went too far down this route, I thought it was best that I revisit the current set-up and re-engineer it a bit. Otherwise I could be queuing up pain for later.

Lately I've noticed that JSON and dates/times do not go together well. JSON allows integers, fractional numbers, strings, arrays and so on, but no way to natively specify a point in time. It turns out this relatively minor-sounding point can cause a fair bit more pain than it probably should.

Yesterday I was puzzling over how to deal with the situation in Rails 3 where a resource name is an uncountable noun. It turns out Rails actually deals with this quite elegantly, but it seems not to be widely known - certainly I had an hour of headaches until I stumbled upon the answer. Hopefully this post will stop anyone else having that same headache.

The first three parts of this series talk about the hardware and software I have set up in order to capture my energy usage. Of course, it's a good fun (and somewhat geeky) project but ultimately the aim is to help me save energy. So now it's been up and running a little while, it has yielded results which have taken a slightly unexpected turn.