Inspirated

A few weeks back I was renewing this blog’s domain name when I was given a coupon code which would grant me a 20%+ discount for orders >75 USD. Now my order was only touching 70, so grabbing a calculator and dutifully acting like a white-collar citizen made me realize that if I ordered another domain my total order would actually cost me lesser than what I already had. Classic case of “more is less” — I ended up with another domain and a total lack of ideas about what to do with it.

Until, I remembered about this picture from 2 years ago:

“Say hello to my little friend!”
(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

The ineffectual Eee PC finally found some practical use. Using Dynamic DNS to point expirated.com towards it, I configured lighttpd to serve the website. As for the content I wrote a few Python scripts to monitor the status of the Tor relay and internet connection at my home. Still not terribly useful, but at least the plots for latter give me a nice idea about how my internet is doing when I’m not at home.

The internet router (Netgear DG834) did not support SSH/SCP so I used Python’s telnetlib module to log in to the router and bring back the modem stats. The results are then fed to a maze of regexes, generating values which are finally plotted via matplotlib.

How I wish I had better things to do with a domain name.