Personal Projects
Sun Path Graph Spreadsheet

This Excel spreadsheet creates a graph of the sun's position for a given time of day and month of the year for a point on the earth's surface. This type of sunchart or sun path plot is commonly used for designing solar energy installations, but I use it for location and aerial photography. Any cinematographic supply house can sell you a slide-rule calculator or proprietary software to do the same thing for $50-150, but this one's free.

Web Site Monitor

This Perl program will monitor a web page you specify and send you a page or email if the site goes down. It also keeps two log files: one containing times the site or your network connection is down, and one containing response times (how long the web page takes to load) for the site. You need a copy of Perl for your computer (I use ActiveState Perl on a Win2000 PC) and an always-on network connection.

Testing Email Servers Is your hosting company provide reliable email service, or is their server running on the edge and bouncing your mail? Here's a simple test to estimate the loading of your host's email servers and how to check out other hosts to see if they are better.

Browser Clock/Timer This is a programmable timer that runs in a web browser - useful for timing presentations or lectures as it can display a big-font time. It is written in JavaScript and has multiple alarms, count up/down, auto restart. Press the "Set" button to see the options. Tested in Firefox, IE, Safari.

 

 

 

 


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