FM4DD.COM

Nagios is a great success story of OpenSource software. A monitoring system build with a core set of features, a fast and responsive web interface and a simple API for custom plugins in whatever language prefered is blowing away the commercial competition. Already established in small and medium IT organisations, it is also making inroads to enterprise companies through the IT 'backdoor'. Engineers who need to get the job done fast and reliable could not wait for enterprise IT's slow response to cater their quickly changing and increasing needs for monitoring. With commercial support now available, even large companies move to Nagios as their main monitoring solution. Continue

WebCert is a simple and quick web application to generate, verify, re-package, or otherwise manage X509.3 certificates in cases where no "full" CA is needed. Based on the OpenSSL API and written in 'C', it is lightweight and fast. The source code is in github, and a free version is available online. It is useful for creating or testing encryption keys, CSR and certificates with various options, verifying a websites certification path, extracting PKCS12 content, and similar tasks. Continue

Originally coming from a electronics and industrial control systems background, maintaining an active interest in MCU, embedded systems design, sensor driver development, and FPGA programming. I am keeping most project records in github, and on this site. Continue. For FPGA, I am working with the OpenSource toolchain (IceStorm/NextPNR/Yosys), and with Intel/Altera under Quartus.

Have you ever heard 'RTFM'? Linux.fm4dd.com hosts several thousand pages of openSUSE Linux commands, daemons, libraries and format definitions. The web becomes the main source of information gathering, and online manpages provide user-friendly formatting and inclusion of referenced information through links for a quicker follow-up. Sure, hitting control-C and typing the man command again is fast too, but the system might not have all manpages installed, or there is just a single terminal ... - chances are you have the browser open anyways for googling your way through life. Continue

When starting to learn Japanese, mastering Hiragana and Katakana isn't easy, but Kanji soon become the biggest hurdle. As a European I grew up with a language so fundamentally different that it was hard to grasp the different meanings of pictograms. Several attempts at categorization of Kanji have been made, however none really helped me further besides sheer repetition. The Kanji trainer uses Jim Breen's Kanjidic compilation of 6,355 kanji, specified in the JIS X 0208-1990 standard. Timothy Eyre's Kanji stroke order font is used to provide the stroke information. Continue

A elementary school project meets a Raspberry Pi received as a gift, and is turned into a weather station. Recording temperature, humidity and barometric pressure over long periods of time leads to interesting insights into local weather patterns. A seemingly "small" topic offers plenty opportunities for staying busy with design refinement, sensor technology, data gathering and analysis. IOT at its best. weather data