Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

My Experience with a Hit and Run in Texas

My wife was recently the victim of a hit and run. It was a traumatizing experience for her, but luckily she's fine. The car she was driving at the time, my 2002 Pontiac Bonneville, didn't fare as well. My insurance declared it a total loss. I learned a lot about accidents and insurance that I think you should know too.

life-lessons | 2017.08.20 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Solutions to Common Altium Problems

Typically I enjoy using Altium at work for schematic capture and PCB layout, but occaisionally it'll give me some problems when I try to synchronize my PCB file with my schematic. When syncing, I'll get a lot of error messages about unmatched nets and failures when matching unique identifiers. In the past I'd try my best to backtrack what I'd changed in the schematic until I could get an error-free sync. Recently I found there are a couple things that I can do to quickly and easily fix these problems in 99% of cases.

electrical-engineering | 2017.07.09 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

React and Ruby on Rails Lessons Learned

I recently started using React in my web apps to make them more interactive. React is great for the view layer of an application, but it needs to be paired with a backend of some sort. In my web apps, I use Ruby on Rails to generate a JSON API that is consumed by my React views. In getting started with React and Ruby on Rails, I learned a few things. I'd like to share those with you today.

coding | 2017.06.25 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Ruby on Rails Status Page

I like knowing what's going on on my servers, but I haven't had time to set up a real monitoring system. Usually when I want to check on my servers, I just remote in with SSH and fire up top and a couple other utilities. After I realized I tend to always check the same things again and again (CPU usage, RAM usage, free disk space), I decided to dump all those things into a page that my server would then serve up. This way I can check my server's health with from anywhere with an internet connection, and the time it took to set up was just a couple minutes.

coding | 2017.06.18 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Disk Usage and How to Find Big Files on Ubuntu Server

If you find your server seems to be running out of disk space, the first thing you should do is figure out how full your disk really is. After that, you'll need a way to quickly zero in on which files and folders are using up the most disk space unnecessarily.

coding | 2017.06.11 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson