Camping

So last weekend we went camping (if you can really call it that). “Camping” as in 750 people from the DLRG in our state (german lifeguard association). Since our group was only about 15 people this time, we only needed 2 tents (one to sleep in, one to cook in) and a pavilion for about 20 people. was lots of fun as always. There was a river about 2 meters from our tents, so we used that as a fridge for the crates of beer (yeah, I know they float, fixed that by sinking the bottom into the mud in the riverbed)

I managed NOT to get sunburned, which is pretty impressive considering the weather 😉 We were really in the middle of nowhere this time. Taking a shower required a 20 min. walk into town where there was a outdoor swimming pool/area that we had free entrance to.

The official summary can be found here …

gaming & great weather

Weather is great for a change, we planted some corn last weekend. Instead of indoor climbing we went biking this week. was fun, but my butt was kinda sore after a few hours.

And what’s new with gaming here? Well I started dual-boxing World of Warcraft (playing two characters simultaneously).  I must say, playing two different clients at the same time is something you have to get your head wrapped around. Right now I’m trying to get a warlock and a paladin up to max level. Then I can use my paladin for normal instances, and dual box two warlocks at the same time (2xsame class is defiantly less of a mind twister). Other than that I started plaing Final Fantasy: Core Crisis on my PSP. It gets a 10/10 rating on my “cool games” scale.

PS. Did I mention that my wordpress is strange? Every time I write something, a red box pops up that says “You do not have permission to do that.”. While that is probably true, I have no Idea WHAT it wants to do. Thus making it a bit difficult to fix the problem …

dialog

Yeah, every time I write a oneliner that could use a nice curses gui I go and forget what the prog is called to easily make them. DIALOG, god I must be getting old, couldn’t remember that if my life depended on it.
Anyway, anyone who wants to spiff up a nice little command line thingy should have a look at it, makes life tons easier.

rrdtool magic

I upgraded some rrdtool graphs today (in the examples below, I was using weekly graphs). First I smoothed out some of the data with TREND. That was pretty easy, you just specify which data and the timeframe it should use to smooth out: CDEF:trend_data=data,21600,TREND smooths out data by 6 hours (21600 seconds). trend_data can be used afterwards (for LINE, AREA, ….) The DEF will have to be expanded a bit so that enough data is available for the TREND, I just added a days woth of data to begining and end by adding the following to the end of my DEF statement :start=now-8d:end=now+1d

The whole trend would look kinda like this:
rrdtool graph image.png \
–width 500 –height 200 \
–end now –start now-7d \
–vertical-label “data” \
DEF:data=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-8d:end=now+1d \
CDEF:trend_data=data,21600,TREND \
LINE1:trend_data#000000:”smoothed out data”

The next thing I played around with, was extrapolating the data and drawing a projection. Fist thing to do, is open up the graph to end a few days in the future, easy to do with the –start and –end options: –end now+3d –start now-7d Now lets make DEF over the time range we want to use for the projection, this example will use the data of the last two weeks: DEF:data=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-2w:end=now+3d All we need now is a little rrd magic I found in the depths of the internet:
VDEF:D=data,LSLSLOPE \
VDEF:H=data,LSLINT \
CDEF:projection=data,POP,D,COUNT,*,H,+ \
LINE1:projection#BB2030:”2 week projection”

Ok, if we throw both trend and projection together we end up with a cute little rrd mess that looks something like this:
rrdtool graph image.png \
–width 500 –height 200 \
–end now –start now-7d \
–vertical-label “data” \
DEF:data1=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-8d:end=now+1d \
DEF:data2=some.rrd:data:AVERAGE:start=now-2w:end=now+3d \
CDEF:trend_data=data1,21600,TREND \
LINE1:trend_data#000000:”smoothed out data” \
VDEF:D=data2,LSLSLOPE \
VDEF:H=data2,LSLINT \
CDEF:projection=data2,POP,D,COUNT,*,H,+ \
LINE1:projection#BB2030:”2 week projection”