obstinate.org

A few weeks ago I came across a problem with MySQL and Mediawiki that nobody on the internet seemed to be able to solve. I was able to figure it out and posted a little article on what I did. I have a number of other unique tricks up my sleeve i’ll post when I can.

http://obstinate.org/computing/making-mediawiki-urls-non-case-sensitive/

Over time, my little 3 gallon pico tank became overgrown. The Ritola Green was seriously taking up ALL of the space in the tank. I trimmed back about half of the growth in the tank and filled up 2 dixie cups worth of clippings. Revealing the substrate revealed an interesting suprise, there was film of detrius all over the bottom of the tank.

I wanted to get rid of this, so I took a little air-powered filter and stirred up the tank, after a few hours the tank was cleared of the detrius and had a good dosing of fresh carbon. Not having a filter in the tank for 6 months I can’t say that I am surprised at all of the detrius settling. I am going to leave the little filter on for a day, and stir everything up a few more times to get as much detritus out of the tank as possible.

So, for the first time ever with my reef tank, I have measured some of the chemical parameters. I was at a local LFS and they had a Reef testing kits by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals that tests the following:

• Calcium
• Phosphates
• Nitrite
• KH

So I tested each of them and ended up with the following paramaters:

• Calcium: 400ppm
• dKH: 9
• Phosphates: 0
• Nitrites: 0

I wanted to raise the Calcium a little so I dosed some Kalkwasser top off and ended up with 460ppm calcium without effecting the dKH (still at 9).

These are very healthy parameters. I am quite pleased, I should really check the PH, though.