Bruce Momjian

General Presentations


Software Control of Home Automation Systems

Duration: 45 minutes, 1 hour with questions
This is a followup talk to my Practical Computerized Home Automation talk, with focus on the software used to control devices and give them smarts. Practical applications include turning off all the lights at night, summoning everyone for mealtime, and broadcasting caller-id information to all computers. The talk will cover the use of the 'heyu' open source home automation program. Examples will include the creation of 'bash'-based stand-alone scripts, background daemons, and cron additions.

Practical Computerized Home Automation

Duration: 45 minutes, 1 hour with questions
You can control devices in your home from your computer with no new wiring. This session covers controlling lights, bells, and motors using open source software. Wireless remotes can also control devices. Sensors can provide information about motion, sunset, temperature. Capturing caller id and auto-dialing is also covered. X10 is an ideal system for home automation, and there are methods to improve reliability. Computers can easily send X10 signals across your electrical network. The session concludes with a live demo showing a home with 38 computer-controlled devices and sensors.

Preventing Data Loss Through Prudent Archiving

Duration: 45 minutes, 1 hour with questions
No one likes the sinking feeling of having lost data - pictures, documents, source code, or video that is gone and can never be fully recreated. Though prudent archiving and risk analysis, it is possible to avoid data loss in all but the most extreme circumstances. Data longevity is also an important aspect of archiving, including the use of open data formats.

Increasing Website Bandwidth With Cloud Services

Duration: 30 minutes, 45 minutes with questions
Most websites haves several frequently-accessed or slow-downloading files. They might also have content that could be very popular one day. This talk shows how you can use cloud storage for these files to greatly increase your website's bandwidth and responsiveness. This requires minimal website changes. The demonstration includes Amazon S3 bucket configuration, mapping DNS subdomains to S3 buckets, and using Linux's s3cmd tool to upload files. Also included is configuration of CloudFront to increase the responsiveness of your website globally.

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