I;ve had a few speed issues with my MacNook after I changed/upgraded the internal hard disk, but not done anything about it until now, as it was getting ridiculous.

Xbench to the rescue :

As you can see it's appallingly slow …..(scores should ideally be around 100)

I use Prowl to send notifications from our home monitoring system to my iPhone and iPad etc.

But I have been using the gem "ruby-growl" to do this for quite a while.

Growl was just updated to version 1.3 - and this broke "ruby=-growl".

But to help others with the same problem - drop in "growl_notify" - make a few simple changes, and all is good again.

The high level software in the house monitoring system works on a simple principle

(Click for a larger pic)

All the data collected from the various sensors is sent to a memcached instance running on one (or more) of the servers, and stored together with a timestamp.

A small library makes it easily accessible for all the other software in the system.

In a simple display it looks like this :

As I was feeling rather under the weather on Friday and Saturday I spent some quiet time rewriting parts of the home monitoring software, but before I write up something about the details I;d better describe some of the high level details

(Click for larger image)

On the right hand side are a large number of jeenodes and other nodes with a variety of sensors.

After upgrading one of our Mac's to Lion Server I had a problem where the webserver refused to start up correctly - and as most server management uses the webserver it makes life a bit difficult.

But the solution was simple - the httpd.conf file was missing for some reason.

Fix : go to /etc/apache2 ("cd /etc/apache2 ")

copy "httpd.conf.default" to "httpd.conf", and restart the webserver.