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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 19:57:49  A Political Link

If you can put aside your predispositions for a second, give this article a chance. It agrees with my view of a portion of the "mortgage crisis" - the view that news coverage is apt to preface with "the McCain campaign says" while it reports Obama's talking points as "news."

And the "editors note" doesn't do justice to the uniqueness of Orson Scott Card. This guy is a prolific SciFi writer - I'm reading the third book in his Ender series right now. He holds many positions that don't fit comfortably at all into our two party system.

Sunday, July 13th, 2008 17:01:14  IC failure

A year or so ago, I lost my BT878-based 4-port video capture card, apparently to lightning. The card was connected to a cheap black-and-white camera outside my house, intended for security monitoring purposes. When the card failed, it stopped showing up in 'lspci' and the box was otherwise fine, so I didn't bother taking out the card. That box was decommissioned about 6 months ago, and I finally took it apart this week, revealing this:

Sunday, July 13th, 2008 16:15:57  Oak Upgrade

Oak had an upgrade this week. It's been running for years with an AMD Athlon XP 2400 on an Asus A7V8X motherboard. With the new tasks of running a 5-disk software RAID5 array and H.264 video codecs added over the past few years, it has started lagging behind. The processor and motherboard have been upgraded to AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ Brisbane running at 2.8GHz and 65W, and a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 motherboard. That should provide something around 2.8x the processing power, more disk I/O capability since the motherboard provides 6 onboard SATA ports instead of the two PCI-to-SATA cards I had been using which would max out at 133MB/s, and I've also quadruped my RAM from 1GB to 4GB.

Instead of upgrading the OS in place, I opted to do a fresh install of Fedora 9 x86_64 onto a software RAID mirror, replacing the old 10-gig non-UDMA IDE system drive that I had been using. This was relatively painless. A fresh mythtv install combined with importing my old database resulted in a working system. I had to copy over my lirc customizations, of course. The on-board sound with the default PulseAudio configuration works fine for everything including the raw digital output for AC3. One quirk I may need to look into is that when skipping around in a AC3 video, there will be an absence of sound for a considerable portion of a second before it comes back. This quirk is better than the problems I've had recently with my (ancient) SoundBlaster Live which would cause the receiver to not switch back to PCM mode on its own after an AC3 stream stopped.

I also upgraded to a GeForce 7300GS-based PCIe graphics card which has allowed me to switch to 'gl' rendering for mplayer, which seems to fix most or all of my frame tearing issues that I would experience when using 1024x768 to drive the TV output.

Still some issues to resolve, and I haven't measured it's power draw yet, but the upgrade process has been a lot less painful than I had feared.

Sunday, April 20th, 2008 21:57:09  Spring is Here

The past few days were a pretty good start to the pleasant part of weather in PA. I've hiked more than 20 miles over the past few days - 11 with Doug on the Appalachian between Caledonia and Big Flat on Thursday, 5 with my sister around Snowy Mountain on Friday, and 7 with Chris around the Thousand Stairs on Saturday. And on top of that, I managed to get a few things done around the house, too.

Monday, April 7th, 2008 19:51:06  Two better reviews

After the tirade on Ark of Truth, I figured I should make up for it with some good reviews. The season premier for Battlestar Galactica was decent. And a Netflix suggestion that ended up being pretty good was The Island which was sortof a combination of Logan's Run updated with the look and feel of Minority Report. Not spectacular, but I'd watch it again.

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 22:30:34  Ark of Truth

I wasn't impressed with the SG1 franchise's first direct-to-DVD endeavor. I would say The Ark of Truth easily makes the bottom third of SG1 two-parters. Instead of ratcheting up quality or plot, everything became more extreme and intense. Mitchell's lines were more O'Neill-like than ever. Mitchell and the IOA guy were both acting way over-the-top, in a bad way. There was some of the good in SG1 as well, in that some of the issues they had on the ship were of the "let's rethink this" variety instead of the standard Trek plot of "our first idea is great and has no problems whatsoever." But really...

• Double-sided Asguard crystals? I'm pretty sure they'd come with a double-sided crystal reader.
• First Contact ripoff? Let's beam back to the ship because the Repliborg are here, but leave the away team unsupported on the surface because they have the important work to do. And let's have replicators assimilate people instead of just building them.
• Why did we spend minutes watching Teal'c walk across the Rockies? I mean, he doesn't have much else to do, but it still seems unnecessary.

The utter destruction of the Ori makes it worthwhile, provided they don't spend the next movie focusing on the political reconstruction of the ex-Ori universe like they did with the Jaffa. Seriously, I wouldn't put it past them.

Monday, March 24th, 2008 22:08:01  The names have been changed to protect the... innocent

So, at work today we received two boxes from Vendor C shipped via Vendor U that contained identical parts. It was immediately observed that the one box was far heavier than it should have been. Perhaps they shipped both of the items in the one box, and manuals and such in the other? Stranger things have happened. And, well, had. Both boxes contained what they were meant to. The heavier one had a plastic-wrapped white object in the bottom that looked like shrink-wrapped documentation - at least, until you tried to move it. It had a Vendor U shipping label indicating a weight of 37lbs and was about a foot square and an inch thick. Apparently this piece of solid steel encountered the Vendor C box and penetrated it during shipment (judging from the correctly sized hole in the side of the box, noticed afterwards). Vendor U is sending someone to pick up the stowaway package, and the Vendor C gear looks to be undamaged. Still. Weird.

Monday, December 17th, 2007 17:23:58  BSSD in the news

An altered detention letter brought my alma mater into the international spotlight (on the web, at least) today. An unnamed student posted this letter recently, and between Digg and Slashdot, it gained a considerable following. The letter indicates that the student was disciplined for using Firefox, an act which approaches holy war status in certain circles. The attention prompted the school to issue a response stating that the letter was altered and that the student was not disciplined for the use of Firefox. It does prompt one to question what was altered in the letter posted. I would hope they are talking about something more substantial than the blacked out names. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Firefox promotional ("...but he told me that it was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. ... he insisted that it was a better browser and that he wasn't doing anything wrong") was embellished. It seems to me that a teacher would call it insubordination and leave it at that. In any case, the kid caused a lot of attention, hoax or not. It'd be great to hear what the actual alterations were, and how the school handles the situation with the student, after having caused them a massive PR headache.

Thursday, November 1st, 2007 21:07:41  A Blog Entry

Apparently I haven't written anything for a long time. I haven't been doing anything amazing, but here are some events possibly worth mentioning.

I had my four wisdom teeth removed at the end of September. I chose to be Xanex'd instead of having general anesthesia. I'm not a big fan of the idea of being put under, but I liked the idea of not caring what was happening. It's hard to gauge how effective it was, though. I was fairly tense at the start of the operation, but was a bit happier than I maybe should have been for some time afterwards. One notable part of the operation was that I could smell the tooth being drilled apart. I recognized it as the scent of ground bone. I thought it was kind of unique that I recognized it, but I guess a lot of people know that smell. There was less pain and less bleeding afterwards than I was expecting. The 800mg motrin horsepills combined with ice were good for the first two days, and then more typical does of motrin for the next few days kept things mostly painless. I did get the hydrocodone-based prescription filled, but didn't end up using it. Eating was fairly constrained for the first few days but was back to normal shortly thereafter. But at least my dentist doesn't have anything to complain about now.

I bought a truck this past weekend. I had been looking since the beginning of September. A truck has been on the radar for awhile, but finally became actionable. The justification was to get up my driveway in the winter (even after my drive is plowed, it generally takes a few days before the car is able to traverse it) and to haul things (I'm tremendously annoyed that my bike has to be laboriously coaxed into my car even with its front wheel removed). I had been looking at used Ford Rangers and Chevy S10s. The other makes of small pickups seemed far less common. I really didn't like the interior of the S10s. I finally bought a white 2005 Ranger with a good many miles (93k) but at a decent price. Chris had the misfortune of volunteering to drive me to Ephrata to test drive and eventually buy one of two Rangers at a used car dealer. I had decided to keep my car for the time being, and of course during its inspection on Monday, it got new front brakes and needed new tires and is also due for a tune-up. Right now it looks like the truck will be in the garage, and the car will be available for squirrel target practice outside, until the snow comes and they switch places. My current annoyance is that the radio in the truck is almost but not quite 2 DINs in height. I'm not sure that amateur radios are DIN-able anyway, but it would have been nice, if I can ever justify buying a mobile rig.

Thursday, June 7th, 2007 22:46:23  Bear!

Chris and I took a hike on a dead-end road on Bower Mountain last evening. On the way back, I saw a bear crossing the road in front of us at the power line right-of-way. I brought this to Chris's attention and we both reached for our cell phone cameras too slowly - the bear picked up a bit of speed, perhaps in response to us. We were around 200 feet away. It wasn't totally unexpected to see a bear, but it was a first-time experience for me while on a random hike in the area.

Saturday, March 17th, 2007 10:12:23  Storage

Warning - long and boring. This is as much for my reference than anything else.

It started Friday - several weeks ago. In the evening, one of my drives, a 250GB SATA, threw some errors. The RAID5 wasn't terribly concerned, it corrected the reads and was happy. There were probably less than a dozen errors, and it didn't kick the drive from the array. I made a note of it, but didn't bother kicking it out manually.

Early Saturday, a 400GB drive dropped out of the array. This drive does this from time to time, going utterly unresponsive but fine upon reboot. I re-added it to the array, and it began to sync up. Chris and I went to the new Circuit City in Chambersburg, as he needed to get a power supply for debugging a box lockup issue. I decided to buy one of those new-fangled DVD burner thingies, as it was probably about time I had one. Upon getting home, my array was not happy. I had 3 active members on a 5 device RAID5. Rebuilding the 400GB had sent the ailing 250GB over the edge, kicking them both out of the array. It's a curious thing to see in /proc/mdstat. The metadevice stayed active, but degraded. Ext3 freaked out and dropped to read-only. I really would have expected the metadevice to deactivate under those conditions... or better yet, be very reluctant to kick a drive from an already degraded array. If only I had kicked the 250GB manually, this would have been a bit less stressful. So, then the contingency planning starts. Do I force the array back together, and try resyncing the 400 again? Will the 250 be so badly corrupted that it makes more sense to force the mostly-current 400 back in the array instead of the 250? Should I dd the 250 to another drive, since dd should at least keep going instead of giving up on the errored sectors? Not pleasant thoughts or options. SMART data was indicating that the temperature of the drive was over 60C--hotter than the box's CPU. I moved it to another machine for diagnostics, which didn't turn up anything. The Hardware_ECC_Recovered was varying rapidly (not that that necessarily means anything...), so I decided it was time to be replaced. I ordered a 500G (WD5000YS) and another Promise SATA-II TX4 PCI card from Newegg. Later that night, I put the 250G back in the box and tried the resync again. I watched the resync all night (something like 4am), waiting for it to either fail, or complete. I wanted to boot the 250G from the array at completion, so this wouldn't happen again. Yes, I could have and should have scripted it. I was worried about my data! The resync completed successfully with no errors. Seems the 250G was much happier after it had flagged its bad sectors.

On Sunday, I really couldn't do anything about the array, so I started down the second storage path of death for the week: the DVD-R drive. I installed it in my desktop, fired up k3b, burned a backup DVD of several years of photos, and it seemed fine. But I could mount it anywhere. Turns out that it (k3b and/or growisofs) wants to burn DVD+Rs as unclosed multi-session discs. Fine. Turned that off, and burned myself another one. It was fine. It was nice to have something work for once.

On Monday evening, feeling lucky from the day before, I tried burning some more photos to DVD, but it was not to be. IDE errors would start spewing into dmesg, growisofs (which had elevated itself to a nice of -20) began consuming the entire machine, making it unusable. I tried different speed settings, just about any option k3b had to offer. I moved the IDE cable to a different controller, tried changing cables, anything... DMA settings, I looked for firmware, but the thing is a no-name OEM drive probably originally from Lite-On, but their firmware won't load on it, and the site supposedly having the firmware genericizer was down. Of course, I gave up at some point and burned something in Windows which was fine... ARRGH!

Tuesday was supposed to be the day of productivity. The new drive and controller arrived, and I installed them. I spent a little time tooling the partition table and began the resync. The mirror resync'd very quickly at 30-40MB/s. The RAID5 resync stayed around 27MB/s when the system was idle, but dropped considerably otherwise. The old setup would only resync around 20MB/s, and was otherwise usable. But at 27MB/s, the system crawled, yet wasn't using up 100% CPU. I think this is the surreal PCI bus exhaustion experience... 27*5=135, and 133 is the maximum for a 33MHZ, 32-bit, PCI bus. But many of my PCI devices (including the northbridge), are 66MHz capable, and from what I've read, 33MHz devices shouldn't be holding back the 66MHz ones entirely, but I couldn't find out how to test/debug this further. Later I found out that the 66MHz-capable bit doesn't mean very much, and what you really need is a 66MHz-capable PCI bus â which mine isn't. Myth wasn't happy about this, as ivtv wasn't getting read from fast enough. The system otherwise felt very sluggish. I left the box up to resync overnight. I fought with the DVD drive some more, too.

Wednesday morning, I checked on the status of the resync. But the box had locked up. I rebooted it and checked the logs. The resync did complete, but sometime later, there was an unhandled interrupt on the IRQ shared between a SATA controller and the video card. Linux then disabled the IRQ, causing all of the drives to fall out incrementally. I brought the box back up, and had to force the array to be "clean" so that it would re-assemble (echo clean > /sys/block/md0/md/array_state ... there appears to be no mdadm equivalent of this action. And you have to write something to the device then for the superblocks to get updated.) I eventually and experimentally determined that running SMART commands on the new 500G drive is what causes the unhandled interrupt. It takes time for the problem to manifest though - maybe it's a race condition somewhere. I haven't found anything in the kernel mailing lists about this, so I will have to research further and maybe post about it.

As far as the DVD drive, I tried different media with equally mixed results. I eventually returned it to Circuit City and bought a better and cheaper Samsung from Newegg. It seems to work much better... no spewing of IDE messages. I almost made myself buy a SATA one, but I didn't want to buy yet another SATA controller and risk more problems with compatibility.

And the 250G seems fine now, so it didn't get tossed either. Sigh.

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 18:15:00  Congratuations!

Doug and Tiff have had their baby! After seeing Doug's away message left as "Stuff & Things" all day Monday, I was suspecting something was going on, and I was right :).

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 19:41:21  PVR-500 w/ Samsung tuners - FC5 to FC6

When I purchased and installed my PVR-500 this fall for MythTV stuff, it had very poor signal quality. I attributed this to my cable provider, and bought a ridiculous +24dB amplifier from WalMart to rectify the problem, which it did. After upgrading the box from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6, the reception on the box was awful. I confirmed that the change in kernel from 2.6.17 to 2.6.19, or the accompanying changes to the ivtv driver were the cause. After some research, it turns out that I have an "evil" Samsung tuner card, and that in 2.6.17 the internal amplifier on the tuner is not activated by the Video for Linux drivers. So, my original amplifier purchase was to compensate for a software problem. After removing the amplifier (not just turning it off as I had been foolishly trying as a test), the reception was mostly better. Some channels are better than before, but some are worse, and overall I think this was not a good change. However, there is no software setting for enabling/disabling the internal amp (apparently no good reason to turn it off), so I'm going to go with the internal amp instead of maintaining a custom kernel on the box, which is always a pain.

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 23:41:57  We favor unreasonably huge subsidies to the brain slug planet?

No, probably not. Congress will likely not be able to get much done in its newly elected configuration. And, really, there's nothing wrong with that at the moment. It's not as if either party is interested in what I would like anyway... term limits, bans on consecutive terms, balanced budget requirements, reduced size of government... I really just don't want to hear Nancy Pelosi's voice (or what she has to say), but at the same time, at least we won't have to see Dennis Hastert as often (ouch, sorry).

As far as local races, I would have preferred Casey to have gone against Specter instead of Santorum for one of PA's seats in the US senate. Casey isn't bad necessarily, but I did like Santorum far better. And of course our great governor was re-elected. Rendell does seem to be able to cut some fat in the budget (just not on himself... ouch, sorry, again), but I detest his vast expansion of gambling in the state, as well as his shady ties to our good fiend Comcast. Not that we needed a former football player running the state either...

Overall, it's not great, not good, but not terrible. I reject the maxim that "change is good" as there are clearly counterexamples. However, there's nothing wrong with variety. Two years of a Democrat-controlled Congress after several years of Republican control should make for a healthy competition in 2008.

Vote Libertarian!

End Political Rant.

Monday, October 16th, 2006 20:33:05  Cowan's Gap

This past weekend I went camping at Cowan's Gap with Doug and family. The somewhat colder than normal weather wasn't much of an issue, with the furnace in Doug's pop-up camper keeping temperatures comfortable throughout the nights. Activities included walking up to the overlook, past the remnants of a landslide. I had been up there some years ago, during an excursion from Rhodes Grove. We also walked the Three Mile Trail, which also had some nice views, but was somewhat of a misnomer at about a mile and a half in length ("round trip" excuses notwithstanding). And I would be remiss not to mention a few fire-related incidents that lead (separately) to an eighth inch hole in my jacket, and some molten boot tread for Doug's father-in-law.

Monday, September 25th, 2006 21:25:55  Ender's Game

Patrick had often spoke of how Ender's Game was one of his favorite books, and when Chris mentioned he had recently read it, I jumped at the opportunity to borrow it. It's a quick read and definitely worth it. It does make one wonder how much gifted young children are capable of in a suitable environment, especially in the context of how our society continues to extend childhood--pretty much through college. There's also enough moral ambiguity to keep one second-guessing the choices made by the characters. Although I know that a movie interpretation wouldn't be able to give the book justice (the kids will have to be too old to master the dialog, and the amount of full-action large-area zero-G sequences would be staggering), I still look forward to the possibility.

Sunday, September 24th, 2006 17:14:37  Chincoteague Trip

My sister and I went down to Chincoteague, VA for a few days last week, staying with our grandparents, since they had rented a condo for the week. The weather was decent (only raining Tuesday evening), but the mosquitoes were oppressive on Wednesday morning while we were biking the trails on southern Assateague. There was good food, and a brief break from pace of work.

Monday, September 4th, 2006 22:26:10  Labor Day Weekend 06

Although the remnants of hurricane Ernesto changed things a bit, this still wasn't a bad weekend. There was food and talk of HTPCs and home automation (instead of a camping) with Doug, Tiff, Dennis, and Michele (OK, yes, the geek talk was limited to the guys). There was birthday party for my sister on the beautiful day that was Sunday, and Chris and I found another coax hut west of Breezewood today (after failing a third or fourth time to find the one we were looking for). So, a good weekend. I wouldn't say it was relaxing though... need to work on that.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 19:28:09  Very Bad Monday for Shippensburg

The front page of the Shippensburg Sentinel can be summarized by four events from Monday: 3 accidents on the interstate, and one fire. Detouring 81 through Shippensburg is a mess under the best of circumstances, and on Monday, the side streets had to bear the load of an interstate as King Street was closed for the fire.

This morning, however, I found out that Mondays' events had less degrees of separation than I had assumed. Chris (who is in Maryland, at the moment), SMS'd me to say that the woman killed in the only fatal accident was Danielle Forney. Danielle's fiance was Bryan Bender, a good friend of Chris, and more than an acquaintance of mine. We were cabinmates at Rhodes Grove, and Chris occasionally tells me about what Bender is up to. I can't imagine the pain that he is going through. Please keep him in your prayers.

Sunday, July 30th, 2006 20:53:51  How hard is it to keep a thinkpad running?

I used to like thinkpads. They were black, IBM tried to be nice about Linux support, and the maintenance docs were readily available online. However, my 600e had 2 issues requiring return for repair, 2 more issues requiring parts replacement after warranty, and then had to be retired due to not working well anymore.

I had thought my R40 was doing better, but perhaps not. A month or so ago I had to replace the hard drive (not entirely blameless here... it was transported frequently with a running drive), and now it seems the video subsystem is beginning to collapse. This morning I noticed some "visual artifacts" that didn't get fixed with a reboot, and aren't a problem with the LCD, as the VGA port shows them as well. So, guess what that means? A new system board. Fun, fun. I'm seriously considering selling the thing as parts and moving to a Dell D410 or D420, or perhaps skipping a personal laptop and using a work laptop. The next laptop will be small and light, that much I know.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 23:21:08  Frustrating Day

Unfortunately, it seems that anything requiring cooperation and coordination is hard to do. I spent the day investigating a likely impossible solution to a problem that doesn't end up needing solved. While at the same time still not having the ability to work on the problem that really needs solved. And no documentation or plan has been given to me other than 3rd party verbal snippets to the overarching project responsible for the whole situation. Sigh.

Luckily, other than this blog, I've been pretty successful at not letting the day ruin my evening. I got to visit with Chris a bit, following his trip to Illinois.

And one more note... recent kernel upgrades for FC5 require a new firmware image for the ipw2200 wireless driver, so remember that.

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 20:47:18  4th

My great-grandfather's family typically has a reunion on the 4th of July, but for the last few years it has been held on a weekend near that day, and this year it was as well. So, on the 4th, my (less extended) family had a food at my place. We scheduled it for lunchtime, figuring we'd beat the storms predicted, but instead hit them directly. Oh well. I did get to see Discovery launch live on TV, something I've never before had the opportunity to witness. Pretty neat.

This past Saturday we visited with friends of the family over near Shade Gap. Their neighbors put on a professional fireworks show that would put most municipalities to shame (ok, so I'm comparing them to Shippensburg). But it was really quite impressive, and we had front row seats.

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 21:58:41  Unfreakin' Believable

There are good networking problems. These are the kind that something happens that you don't understand. You mull over it, eventually diagram out the different layers of the various protocol stacks, and discover that things are working exactly as designed, just not as you expected. Ian and I uncovered an example of this kind of problem a few years back at CTI. There was a periodic surge in broadcast traffic on our LAN destined for a specific box. After ruling out all of the various NAT rules and such going on, we eventually found the simple cause. The box was not sending any packets of its own. So, the switch had no forwarding entry for it. So it did what switches are supposed to do in that case: broadcast the packet. Coming to those kind of conclusions is fun.

There are at least three kinds of bad networking problems. The first is when something is evil by design. An infamous example of this would be the error measurements in the DS1-MIB. Absolutely useless when it comes to making time-series graphs, or setting event thresholds. The design seems to have been one of convenience, since the quantities represented date back to the first of the DS1 channel banks. Anachronistic design sucks.

Another type of evil networking problem is one that is seemingly random. Everyone knows that one of the first steps in troubleshooting is knowing what steps are needed to reproduce the problem. With random events, you're essentially screwed. Turn up the debugging until it gets painful and wait for the event to recur, and pray you captured something useful when and if it does. DDOS attacks and the like can fall into this category, especially for those of us without the ability to do meaningful flow logging. Tracking down random problems is evil.

The third category of networking problems I feel like discussing this evening is the unreasonable problem. This is the non sequitur, the problem that makes you yell futilely at your terminal or coworker, from the complete and utter ridiculousness of it. If you manage to solve one of these, you might end up with a good networking problem, as described above. Or you might want to take a sledge hammer to a piece of hardware. Let's explore some examples:

Near the end of my CTI experience, a certain Astrocom CSU/DSU was observed having a most unlikely problem. If I remember correctly, it somehow would drop packets over a certain size. A most improbable feat considering that your average CSU/DSU should not really have any concept of what a packet is, let alone be able to drop one. Patrick offered a bounty on the problem, but as far as I know, it was never solved.

The last example is the reason I am writing tonight. Last summer at Doug's LAN party, I had difficulties copying large files to my desktop machine. I eventually blamed it on my patch cord, but by that time we were packing things up, so this was never really tested. Even before this, I was having trouble sending large print jobs to my printer. I quickly blamed this on the network card in the printer, or some postscript oddities, but never came to a solution.

Later, when trying to use my desktop as a file server for a CentOS install, I realized that my network issue with my desktop was ongoing. Traffic analysis indicated that during a high speed transfer coming from my desktop to another machine, the connection would stop passing packets. Packets on other TCP connections between the same machines were unaffected, but subsequent retries of packets associated with the dead connection were getting dropped somewhere. Since this seemed to be connection related, firewall settings were verified and found to be fine. I let the problem fester, as it was not causing any day-to-day difficulties, since my desktop isn't ordinarily sending large amounts of data, just receiving.

So, this evening I was talking with Doug about printer stuff, and he made a connection that I had been missing. Was my printer problem related to my network problem? And what about all of those problems with NFS in the recent past? Yes, they all sound like candidates. With that late realization, I delved into the annoying network problem. I replaced the network card. The problem persisted. The cabling was ruled out. And the problem was narrowed down to a switch. A specific switch port, to be precise. Now, I'm not exactly sure how one of my NetGear GS506 gigabit switches is managing to drop packets belonging to a specific connection when that connection begins spouting lots of traffic in a certain direction, but that's exactly what it appears to be doing. And it's reproducible. So yes, a problem as insidious as this problem should be solved with the sledge, but some tape over port 1 of the switch should do. Thanks for the insight, Doug! And if you see a problem like this, check the switch, even though it doesn't make any sense.

Sunday, April 30th, 2006 7:25:10  Not Much

That's what's happening. Not Much. I've been moving pieces of dead trees around the house, and have a large stack of wood that needs burned as soon as the County, in its infinite wisdom, ends the burn ban. Also trying to get the shed into a usable condition (which will involve burning a large amount of cardboard at some point).

Other than that, I've been doing some irritating travel for my employer, and it seems that has not ended. And, as Doug mentioned, we won the CVARC fox hunt the other weekend.

Saturday, March 18th, 2006 23:00:30  Computer Stuff

The storage capacity upgrade and RAID5-ification has been completed, following a week of computers and their components strewn throughout the house. Having a RAID5 include a linear md as a component was a bit challenging... had to make the kernel not try to assemble the RAID5 automagically, but wait for the mdadm.conf to do it. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the computer fun this week. Chris had a drive fail in his firewall, and the machine employeed various means to make it impossible to install an OS on another drive. Still not sure what its problems are, having spent the afternoon in futile efforts to fix it.

[balleman@oak ~]$ df -h /storage
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/storage0-lstorage0
                      1.5T  739G  729G  51% /storage

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 23:09:10  Blazer

My beagle Blazer died last night. He was 14 years old, and had been slowing down over the last few years. We buried him just outside of our woods. It was harder than I thought... I've had him since he was a puppy. I have few friends I've known longer than that.

Blazer didn't move with me when I left home last spring. I knew he would be more comfortable and would get more attention if he stayed home.

My family had adopted a stray beagle mix last spring, naming him Buster. Buster probably kept Blazer better over the last few months, keeping him active. It was also comforting to have Buster to play with today.

Thursday, February 9th, 2006 20:34:35  The Future?

Internet connectivity in the US, particularly rural areas, is awful. And there is really no excuse for it. The Paradox of the Best Network provides some insight into this (thanks to Patrick for the link, via his blog). I also envision general office buildings in the future that provide telecommuters a way to get out of the house and have access to shared resources. And everyone working in the building might be working for a distinct company across the globe. In the mean time, my 1Mbit with extra evil shaping connection to Kuhn and my 11Mbit wireless link to Chris will have to suffice.

Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 22:52:03  Negativity

"CTI Negativity" had been a term used to describe frustration and irritation with our employer, as well as general foreboding about the future of the company. This condition is beginning to surface at my present place of employment now, too. Some, but not all, of the causes seem to be inverted from the CTI situation. In any case, time once again to start the usual preparatory cycle of discontentment... new job? back to school? try consulting? fix what's broke somehow?

Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 18:30:32  Funnies

The Democrats outburst of applause at a failure of proposed Bush policy, coupled with Bush's finger-wagging reaction was pretty darn funny last night.

Today, Bob Clay showed me a shirt that says "I see dumb people." That's honestly the funniest thing I've seen this year. I need one of those!

Thursday, January 26th, 2006 19:32:59  It's been busy... ish

The few weeks from the beginning of the year to the start of the semester were fairly trying, but things are starting to settle down again at work. It does look like I'm required to go for two weeks of Oracle training at some point, which I'm not really looking forward to. The several short training programs I've been through (Breezecom, Hitachi) would have been much better in book form - excepting that neither had good books.

Have you ever noticed that the more time you have available, the less you get done? The short days I think are really making me worthless at the moment. Not much coding on NetMRG and other stuff, with some exceptions. I should be done reading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy collection before long. Too bad I've been working on it for a year or more.

And it sounds like Chris is learning a bit about the prudence of self-censorship in blogging. The fun thing about the Internet is that anyone can be reading what you write... particularly those you write about! I often wish it were practical to have a blog where only certain people could see certain entries, but that does take some of the fun out of it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to check out this floppy disk I have here labeled 'Shady.'

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 20:36:18  Thoughts on Intelligent Design

In case you've missed it, there has been a bunch of fuss lately about a local school district requiring its biology teachers to read a statement on intelligent design to "balance" the teaching of evolution. This went to federal court which decided that such a statement was in violation of the separation of church and state.

This never made sense to me. Evolution describes a "how" of creation - a means by which life as we know it was brought into existence. Intelligent design describes a "why" of creation - meaning rather than means. They are orthogonal topics, without the ability to be contrasted or balanced as the school board allegedly attempted to do. The Dover School Board was nothing short of incompetent in trying to shove these things together. Intelligent design itself might not be a religious endorsement, but its forced usage in this context certainly would seem to be.

There are still things that should be included in a discussion of evolution, though. Irreducible complexity should at least get a footnote. Irreducible complexity is a concept that doesn't intend to disprove evolution, but rather to state that there are still things that cannot be explained completely with current theories. The most important concept that can be taught in science is that science changes, and that no theory is above some measure of criticism and doubt. Science isn't (or shouldn't be) concerned with facts or truths, but with best explanations and predictions of observations. There are probably cases where you should remind your science teachers of this.

In situations like this, extremes get the coverage. There are many that consider the term evolution to be sacrilege when used in any biological sense. There are others that have their hand on the speed dial for their lawyer every time they think God might be inferred in a classroom. Both are stupid. It might be unfortunate, but it's definitely a greyscale world, not black-and-white.

Saturday, December 10th, 2005 17:53:40  OpenSky here we come...

Several years ago, the PA state government began deploying a proprietary trunked communications system... and encouraged County governments to use it. Since it's proprietary, the governments are locked into the price structure of a single vendor (brilliant! bravo!) and radio enthusiasts like me won't be able to use our scanners to listen in (at least, not anytime soon). I'm a big fan of government transparency and openness... and this is moving in totally the wrong direction. All isn't immediately lost however. Even if fire and ambulance dispatch is handled with OpenSky staring on June 1st, 2006 as this article says, it sounds as if paging will still be simulcast on traditional FM frequencies so that voice pagers, sirens, and scanners can function without an upgrade. It seems that radio geeks aren't the only ones concerned... just listen to those fighting fires.

And while I'm ranting... Since this system is IP based, how long will it take before a laptop in a state cop's car contracts a virus because he installed an unauthorized Wifi card, and cripples communications state-wide? Consultants won't go hungry cleaning it up, that's for sure.

Sunday, December 4th, 2005 20:56:04  Updates

No structure here... just some random goings-on:

For the last several kernel updates for FC4, my DVD sharing using GNBD hasn't worked. I guess those special ioctl()s aren't getting translated over or something. And NFS or SMB sharing an encrypted DVD just doesn't do anything good at all (ignoring the fact that NFS seems really sucky with the latest FC4 updates). So, after months of not being able to watch DVDs, I gave up, and bought a USB drive cage to attach a DVD drive to Oak. Works perfectly. Despite performance issues and cabling evilness, I still can't completely rule out a stack of USB drives RAIDed as a bulk storage solution, especially with all of the device mapper coolness in Linux. Too early to be thinking of that, though, as the computer storage fund hasn't matured yet, despite the fact that Oak is at 99% capacity.

As Doug has mentioned, Asterisk and VoIP is still pretty neat. I've setup a teliax account, since they have pricing like nufone with a whole lot of rate centers worth of DIDs (they're essentially a Level3 reseller). So, we just need to get some VPN'ing set up. I'm in desperate need of some UT, and I think VPN might be a useful substitute for a LAN party this winter.

My grandfather (on my Dad's side) has been in the hospital on and off for more than a month now. Currently he has pneumonia, is very weak, and not entirely coherent. Your prayers would be appreciated for what could be a difficult Christmas season for the family.

Things at Ship are going fairly well. I did shoot myself in the foot with the "ip arp inspection" feature of the Sup720 this week though. Does 15 pps of ARP traffic seem like a good default threshold for shutting down trunk ports to you? Me neither. Of course, I asked that question after two ports had been err-disabled. Hopefully Tim and I will get to do a real test of some VMPS soon, too.

Monday, November 28th, 2005 21:48:23  Tweaked

I did some editing to my resume this evening ('Employment' pane on the right). Comments welcome. Or, you can try to hire me away from Ship ;-).

Monday, October 31st, 2005 19:02:33  Power Problems

Last evening there was a power outage on the Ship campus that left the Computer Center and other buildings without power for a few hours. This was the first time our new UPS had ran until it was dry, and overall we didn't fare too badly. Several major campus buildings, including FSC, Shippen, the Library, and Dauphin, were offline for most of the day. Fortunately power to the few affected residence halls was restored quickly after the initial incident. I fully expect no further class schedule changes as a result of this incident, but as always, this blog is by no means ever an official publication of Ship, so please consult their website or hotline :)

Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 13:36:39  Radio Stuff

This week I have been playing with my new PRO-2052 scanner. I bought this model because it has an RS-232 interface that can be used to control it. There is a free piece of software, sctl, that allows you to use it in Linux. I have had to tweak the code a bit for my purposes. I needed line buffering enabled to interface sctl with a PHP script, and also had to change the interfacing to make the 'sreport' function work with my model. I'll probably post a patch at some point. So far, I've written a few cheesy scripts to log radio transmissions into a database and play them back. It's not quite perfect, but it is doing what I want. It would be nice if this guy would release his source. I'd love to have the two-tone pager decoder that he has.

I've also been poking around various scanning sites. It looks like there still isn't any progress decoding the OpenSky system used by the state of PA. Apparently it's VoIP based. I also found a site with audio samples of various digital transmission modes. Many of the sounds are familiar from old movies and such. I think the PSK-31 sound is sortof like the bridge ambient sound from Star Trek TOS. Also found a great PDF with lots of communications tone tables, for Motorola Quick Call and others.

Saturday, September 17th, 2005 21:43:02  X10 Project

One of the things I wanted to take care of this summer was some type of outdoor lighting to be used when coming home at night. There just isn't enough ambient light to figure out how to insert the key into the lock. I was considering LED lighting built into the deck, outdoor lights around the deck, and automating the existing outdoor lighting. Seeing this as an opportunity to finally begin playing with X10, I dove in.

The first phase was to control the deck and garage outside lights with a wireless remote. I purchased some X10 light dimmer switches to replace the light switches, a wireless transceiver, and a remote control. Everything worked well except the remote range seems a bit short. Latency wasn't bad... probably a little less than a second.

Phase two involves the hall light, and a computer interface. I bought a PowerLinc USB and downloaded the WISH / x10dev software. The only "gotcha" for the software was that it assumes your hiddev0 is in /dev/usb whereas mine was in /dev. The error messages were not at all helpful in figuring that out, unfortunately. At this point the interface worked, but I had some phase issues: my two lights were on one phase, and the computer interface was on the other. Instead of building or buying a phase coupler, I went with Doug's suggestion of moving breakers around instead. They're really about the easiest plug-and-play devices in existance, but it was something that I had never done before, so I certainly turned off the mains. My current unresolved issue is that the latency between issuing a command on the computer, and the device receiving the command, is aboud three seconds... way too long, especially if you want to do about six commands for a single event. Still haven't figured out if this is as fast as the interface goes, or if there is a software bottleneck.

So, there's my X10 project summary. I'm pretty happy with the results so far. It's not incredibly cheap (I've spent about $100 to control three lights... albeit with a wireless remote and computer interface), but it has achieved the goal, and now I know a bit about X10 :)

Thursday, August 25th, 2005 19:13:56  Indoor Evening

The weather this week has been just great. And I've even had the opportunity to take advantage of it. Sunday, I had a family picnic which I used as an excuse for a rather long hike up and down a mountain.

On Tuesday evening, Chris and I walked a 2.5 mile stretch of the Tuscarora Trail that runs along the top of a mountain. Of course, it got dark, the flashlight wasn't where it was supposed to be, and the return trip was rather interesting. No broken limbs, but lots of scratches and such. This wasn't your nice dirt road kind of trail either - just rocks and the occasional blaze for much of the trail. The cell phone provided a good deal of light towards the end, despite accidentally calling Tim.

On Wednesday, Ian and I hiked (on a trail that was like a dirt road) almost 9 miles. It was pretty dark at the end, but a lot nicer than stumbling over rocks. It was one of the few times I was with Ian this summer, so we had the chance to catch up on all of the happenings since the Spring semester.

Now, Doug's turn should probably be next... but I haven't decided on the appropriate successor to last summer's infamous pipeline hike ;)

Sunday, August 21st, 2005 20:14:45  It's been a month

So, a month and no news. It's not that I've been particularly busy, just that nothing really interesting has happened.

I still haven't turned in all of my permanent employment paperwork... still trying to wrap my head around the insurance and retirement options. That needs to get done yet this week...

So, what have I been doing with all of my time? Well, for better or worse, a lot of it has gone towards working my way through the media from the LAN Party. It's fun, but not particularly productive.

Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 19:21:41  Employed with 802.11g

Well, Ship has finally offered me the position I had applied for back in May. I think I'll take some time off this fall now that I have time that can be taken off... I can't remember the last time I had a less-than-busy fall. The fact that I was at SAN training for four days last week was a pretty good indication that they were in the process of hiring me (not that I was doubting), but things tend to take a long time to make happen at Ship when it comes to real jobs.

I also recently purchased the GPS I had been wanting (It's about 25% bigger than I had imagined). Still learning it, but it's a GPS, and does what it does - better than my last one that no longer works.

There was also a good deal on intel IPW2200 mini-pci cards recently, so I bought one to upgrade my laptop to 802.11g capability. Unfortunately, my BIOS didn't like it (despite the fact that you can buy the same model from IBM!), so I had to use the hack to make it work. But, I have 54 Mbit (heh - well, that's what it says) now.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 20:51:36  Now I can play DVDs

Since Oak has never had a DVD drive, and likely never will, I haven't been able to play DVDs using MythTV. Unlike TV cards, MythTV has no means of sharing DVD drives between machines. Using GNBD (thanks to its inclusion in FC4) has given me the ability. GNBD works perfectly as advertised, however since the means of reading CSS keys from DVDs is apparently odd (ie, it generates errors), that part would not complete. For some reason, running mplayer on the machine with the DVD drive caches the data (apparently) allowing the remote mplayer to then play without difficulty. I demonstrated the process last night, and I scripted it tonight... ready to watch DVDs now! I had been going through Nemesis-decompression-scene withdrawal.

Sunday, June 19th, 2005 22:00:04  WAN

I've added the first WAN link to the thtech network: 802.11g to Chris's house. We used garden hose as conduit for about 250' of CAT5e from my shed to the WAP. The WAP was mounted on a pole inside of a tupperware container. Ethernet handled the distance fine, but a trivial POE implementation arrived at by splicing the power adapter that came with the WAP into the CAT5 didn't work. There was too much resistance on the line for the 5v power to overcome. So, we tried stepping up to 12v with a DC-DC converter on the other end. This would result in the WAP partially powering up, but continually rebooting. I figured that this was due to the WAP drawing too much power when it tried to power up the radio. I purchased a higher capacity DC-DC converter at WalMart, and all has been well. We're currently getting 600 KB/s, but earlier tests had us at about 1.1MB/s. We'll have to do some antenna tweaking to try to remedy that.

Monday, June 13th, 2005 22:19:25  Kuhn and Intel

UPSes are great things. During the storm today in the Shippensburg area, my house lost power. When I got home from work an hour later, the UPSes were still running fine, but the Internet connection was down. When power returned, all was well, so it would seem that Kuhn has either no or insufficient backup power for its equipment... great.

In other news, Intel seems to be pretty good about warranty returns. Despite the fact that they don't accept RMA requests online (only by fax or mail), they have acknowledged my RMA request by mail, and receipt of the broken NIC, almost instantly by e-mail. My replacement NIC is now on its way.

Sunday, June 12th, 2005 22:12:17  Lannic '05

Well, the LAN picnic was generally successful despite it being too hot, with periods of heavy rain, and one minor power outage. Stats show that about 975 GiB was transferred (443 in, 532 out), with Thor being the overall winner, followed by Stelmaria, Oak, Lindsay, and Pepper (in that order).

In other news, my diploma from Ship arrived on Saturday, so I'm now officially graduated, it would seem. About time! Now, back to South Park.

Sunday, June 5th, 2005 22:38:55  Misc

No overly interesting things, just a bunch of little stuff. The job situation is still pending, but I think there has been some positive movement in both areas.

I'm looking for a new GPS, currently leaning towards the Garmin GPSMAP 76S. My old GPS currently gets signal too weak to be useful (most of the time no satellites). It might be possible to fix that (maybe a broken antenna lead, or something), but that would involve breaking into the gasketed case, which might limit its portable use in the future. Things haven't changed substantially since my brief search last summer. I've had to keep my walks limited to less adventerous excursions, but the GPS might still have to wait behind an air conditioner and freezer in the purchase queue.

And Lannic '05 is this Saturday. I gave the firering a test by throwing a minor picnic for the family this evening, and all went well. Now I need to get the high-speed NetMRG configured, and get the rest of the logistics taken care of. Should be a blast though.

Thursday, May 19th, 2005 22:45:18  Jobs

As I had mentioned, I went to CTI last week to receive a job offer. The base salary they offered was 8% lower than the position I've applied for at Ship, and when I calculate many of the other variables (travel time, leave, insurance, etc) it came out to being 25% worse than the Ship job. So, I drafted a letter declining the position, to which I haven't yet received any response. I did try to leave it open-ended, as things aren't entirely certain, and I wouldn't mind working for CTI in various capacities. Unofficially, I'm told that the HR person was surprised that I didn't find the offer competitive. I hear that average Ship grads can negotiate around 50k from EDS at Letterkenny, and now that BRAC hasn't canned them, it might be an option. Sounds like a lot more travel and less interesting work than I would like though. Certainly more than Ship is willing to pay.

I'm not the only one looking for employment. Isaac and Mike both are, and I'm sure many of my other friends from high school are in the same boat.

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 19:10:42  AV stuff

Well, I didn't end up going the HD route. When I began thinking about the fact that <1 % of my existing media is HD, that HD-DVDs are aways off, and that I have no interest in paying for cable/satellite HD service, the option began to get far less appealing. I ended up going with a 27" flatscreen RCA from Walmart. It's got decent picture, but crappy sound, which didn't matter as that will be handled separately. Lot of TV for not much dough, which is pretty much what I needed.

In the sound department, I knew I wanted to do something that supported SPDIF, but was wary of the price of most home theater systems. However, as it turns out, I went to the Silver Springs Flea Market on Sunday, and there was a nice looking, complete, Kenwood home theatre set for $150. Obviously, buying anything like this at a flea market is a gamble. But, I estimated the stuff to be worth at least $250 or so, and offered the guy $125. Looking it up online, it turns out to be a Kenwood HTB-503 which retailed for $500ish. So, what was wrong with it, you ask? I wish I could say nothing, but the front left and right speakers were blown out (four speakers in two boxes are 'open', but the tweeters work). So, I moved the rear speakers to the front, used the rear speakers from my computer set, and I've got decent sound for not all that much.

The MythTV project is still a work in progress. I got an ATI RF remote control that is interfaced with a USB dongle that acts like a keyboard. It works alright, but not perfect. Some misses and repeats. I still need to get a capture card (gave my old one to Chris earlier this year), and need to do more hardware juggling. Still trying to get xv working right in tv-out mode on the Geforce 2 MX 400 I'm using, but it's livable in x11 mode for now. This project has been eating up way to much time, but its costs have stayed relatively low so far.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 20:31:05  The end has come

It sure looks like I'll be graduating on Saturday. I'm pretty sure my finals and papers haven't been a cause for failure, so things look good. No more finals at this point. I'll permit myself to go outside next week, I think. That will be nice. My critical time restrictions are gone now, so you have my permission to call and/or visit. I don't mind if you have to wait until the TV-warming party tho ;).

So... what am I doing following graduation? It looks like two options are immediately on the table: Ship and CTI. Ship has posted the full-time equivalent of the position I'm currently holding. CTI has asked that I come in so that we can discuss my plans. Overall, it might come down to how much green CTI is willing to offer, as Ship's position is likely fixed. Of course, to offset travel time and expenses, CTI won't be able to get away with $ship++, either. The other issue is that if CTI wins, I'm not sure how happy Ship would be with me. At one point I told them it wasn't likely, but that was before CTI lost several admins. Regardless of the winner, I'd like to think that consulting for the loser would be a possibility.

TV shopping is also now permitted to start. Toshiba's 26HF85 could be an interesting choice. It's HD, widescreen, and has HDMI input... and not expensive for having all of that. The manual has warnings on many pages saying that the TV is not meant to be connected to a PC. That would really shoot down a reason for getting it (as my PVR thingy will be a PC, surely). HDMI and DVI are quite compatible (it shows the adapter in the manual), so I don't see what is different between video DVI and PC DVI. More research needed. Either way, the thing is a lot more expensive than a regular TV, which might still win.

Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 21:39:42  Hardware Issues

A week or so ago, the power supply in Oak abruptly died (while the machine was up, no less). It was a Coolmax, and as it turns out, Doug had one die on him the next week. Both of us have now e-mailed Coolmax for return instructions, which has met with no response. I rushed a replacement PS from newegg and all was well (filesystems happy and all).

Tonight, one of my drives began having short reads. The fsck has put lots of really nasty looking things in my lost+found, but I don't think anything overly terrible happened. Either way, newegg will be shipping me a new drive tomorrow. Personally, I prefer replacing hardware when I think it's too old, slow, or small, not when it decides that it will be on the low end of the MTBF spectrum.

smartctl has been helpful in looking at drives carefully. However, as it doesn't yet work on SATA drives in Linux, who can I forward my donation to in order to get that bumped to the top of the queue? Seriously, I'd pay $20 or so for that to work, and I bet others would too.

Saturday, March 26th, 2005 22:04:09  WPA working on my R40's IPW2100... finally.

I've spent maybe 10 hours on this now (not all this week, mind you, but still). Getting WPA-PSK w/ TKIP certainly isn't as easy as it should be, but that is probably entirely due to driver issues. Seems you can't buy a great 802.11g card for Linux.

I had tried various versions of the Linux IPW2100 drivers, 1.1.0 most recently, and always ended up getting errors saying that the IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT ioctl was not available. This is a symptom of a driver that doesn't have the WPA support, but lsmod clearly showed the TKIP and other encryption-related modules loaded. Google suggested using the load and unload scripts provided with the driver, and to check the initrd for an old driver that might be overriding the freshly-compiled one. modinfo confirmed that the new drivers were getting loaded... still no luck. That's where I was for a long time, retrying every once in awhile to see if anything was happier.

As it turns out, there is a problem in the way the drivers are compiled as modules which can be fixed with this patch (local cache). Keep in mind that the post I'm referencing here is only two weeks old... so, I'm probably not the only one having this issue. I'm somewhat amazed (and very happy) that Google has indexed it that fast.

Now, technically, that was enough to fix my problems. However, I spent the next 45 minutes or so trying to figure out why my connection would reset several seconds after coming up... which turned out to be another instance of wpa_supplicant in the background screwing things up. Tip: run one wpa_supplicant at a time.

Thursday, March 24th, 2005 20:46:00  Mostly Moved

The "bedroom stuff" was moved this evening, which means I'll be spending the night :D. I still have a bunch of books and things at... erh, the parent's house, but those can move on at a much reduced pace. I can only hope that having this phase of the transition done will allow me to spend the time I need to on my classes, which I'm sorry to say, have been neglected substantially as of late. Don't rush over to visit just yet... the living room is full of boxes, and I'm not going to worry about the entertainment system until things calm down ;).

Sunday, March 20th, 2005 0:02:22  Half Moved

The office has moved! Thank's to Doug's help, all of my office/computer/network stuff has been moved in. We're up on Kuhn cable, and things are looking good. Not sure when the bedroom stuff will be moved, but probably no later than next weekend. Chris also stopped buy this evening (er, last evening at this point)and dropped off a couch, and helped out with other stuff. Thinks are starting to get wrapped up, which is good news for my classes, which I have definitely been neglecting.

Sunday, March 13th, 2005 21:03:31  Working at the House, Part III

Painting is essentially complete. Getting the inside of the exterior doors painted would be a bonus, but isn't required, I guess. The new flooring has been installed. The toilet innards have been replaced. All of the new light fixtures are up. So, it's essentially ready to be moved into. The todo list looks like... installing new faucets, tracing and terminating cable to the patch panel, having Kuhn install cable (Friday), and buying the final touches (new blinds, stocking the kitchen, etc). Chances are there will be some type of moving this coming weekend. But, at the moment, I need to try to finish any and all homework I should have been doing over break...

Sunday, March 6th, 2005 22:19:33  Painting CPLUG Party

Painting. I took off work Friday afternoon to begin painting things at the house. Priming had been going on for a bit, but this was the first day that saw 'real' paint going onto the walls. I got the hallway and living room walls done. My parents and sister got most of the rest of the first coat done on Saturday while I was at....

CPLUG's security conference. There was a good bit of info, most of it pretty high level. The trooper should have held questions to the end of his presentation, and the lightning talks could have been a minute or two longer in many cases, but that's about the extent of the gripes. The campus, building, and presentation room were very impressive, as was the amount and quality of food and the level of organization. CPLUG did a great job. I also got a chance to catch up a bit with Leland, which is always fun (not to mention educational). After the event was over, we left for the...

Party at Ian's. It was Ian's 21st birthday, and his dad had organized a party appropriate for the event. It was good getting to talk with Guy and Andy (and their SO's). I didn't get around to leaving until midnightish, which made for a long day considering we met to go to the CPLUG thing at 8:30ish. Certainly made for a good weekend, with Sunday providing a bit of rest to prepare for the upcoming spring break that isn't.

Sunday, February 27th, 2005 15:12:43  No news is no news.

My lack of entries recently maybe isn't representative of everything going great, but at least things moving slowly in the right direction. The beginning of this week I was swamped with school work... trying to catch up a few things I had let accumulate. Painting has now started, and hopefully there will be a lot of that this coming week. Spring break also begins this coming Thursday, so I need to figure out how that works into the master schedule. Oh, and it looks like I can graduate, too. :-)

In other news, I've been impressed with Battlestar Galactica thusfar. Unlike Star Trek or Stargate, where the premise is rather clear (we're the good guys, they're the bad guys, things happen by logic and physics), Galactica is incredibly ambiguous. With Galactica having an enemy with an unclear motivation, with a religion centered on cyclical determinism only half-believed by the characters, there is room for plenty of speculation and suspense. Whether this is brilliance on the part of the writers, or cheap plot tricks meant to keep the audience's attention, only more episodes will tell.

Wednesday, February 9th, 2005 20:01:28  Gripes

Tips of the Day

1. If you're a college professor, don't begin a lecture with a phrase such as "You all probably know more about this than me." No matter how true, saying something like this a) undermines your credibility and b) makes me wish I wasn't paying your salary. Saying it with jest, you say? Well, the lecture vindicates the literal interpretation, I'm afraid.

2. If you make an error while grading, refund points to those who had the correct answer, but don't subtract them from those that had an incorrect answer marked correct. I've almost never had that happen... but now I have.

Sigh. A vacation would be nice about now.

Monday, February 7th, 2005 20:53:49  Working at the House, Part II

Things are still moving along. I have the cables for the new wall jacks terminated, and the light in the data center (closet) is done. Tonight I began replacing tan electical outlets with more up-to-date white ones. Should neutral wires spark when the breaker is off? Seems that they do if you have CFLs on anywhere in the house. Interesting, but it was a bit unsettling.

In other news, I finally got around to cancelling my old cell, so if you need the number, feel free to ask.

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 21:46:51  DiffEq hurts

Yikes... methods for solving linear differential equations are still burning as they seep into my skull. I generally find calculus stuff fun, as it mostly doesn't involve any "creative" work like proofs do. DiffEq is challenging (i.e., throwing lots of paper away adorned with the charred remains of yet another failed solution). The professor is a harder to understand than the other Math profs I've had at Ship, but that is likely largely because of the accent and non-native English.

I put the RJ45 ends on the CAT5 in the house, in preparation of tucking them back in the wall for painting. Now I need to figure out how to terminate coax.

Monday, January 31st, 2005 21:54:33  House and My Naven

Things are still coming along with the house... filling nail holes in trim in preparation of varnishing, buying paint, and picking out new light fixtures. I hope to terminate the room-side of the new wiring this week.

Chris's computer, My Naven, is akin to the Bermuda Triangle. For instance, tonight I spent over an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn't output any sound in Linux. The driver was present, and seemed to be normal in all aspects, except for the fact that it produced no noise. I'm planning on trying another sound card in it... This isn't the first instance either. Things just tend to be unhappy, and My Naven has changed hardware a number of times.

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 21:45:50  Evening Off

I decided to take the evening off from working at the house. I'm trying to get a few other things done, like working on NetMRG, buying a new case for my Axim (the old one gave out), and maybe even homework, although that remains to be seen. For my R&D class, I am thinking about doing something related to connections-table synchronization in Linux. Doing a little more in-depth research shows that there is a ct_sync module in development. A big downside is that it is only for failover at this point, not for load sharing/clustering. I had originally been thinking about a userland program for the communication between nodes, but ct_sync is all kernel-level. Not sure how this will impact what I do exactly for my project.

Sunday, January 16th, 2005 18:01:56  Working at the House, Part I

I've spent my evenings (and Saturday) this past week working at my house. So far, I've been removing shelving, screws, and nails, patching holes, running wire, cleaning up, and the like. Chris and my dad have helped some, and Doug got to take a look at my progress today.

In other news, school has gotten off to a pretty smooth start. My class load is less than last semester and I have submitted my graduation application.

Saturday, January 8th, 2005 21:35:31  House Purchase Complete

After signing and initialing a bunch of papers, the house is now mine! Now it's time to run wires! It will likely be awhile until I move in, with work and school and the like slowing my progress on the pre-move tasks, but it is coming. I still can't really believe it, but I am starting to say "my house" instead of "the house."

Thursday, January 6th, 2005 22:17:59  thtech.net gets a partial facelift

I've spent most of my free time (that is, evenings) this week working on touching up the paint on the aging thtech.net site. I'm fairly pleased with the changes, not that IE handles them all gracefully. There's also an RSS Feed for news items from the site, which should be handy for those that care, since the site isn't updated often enough to warrant being in someone's daily or weekly (or even monthly) website check list.

Other than that, school starts on Monday, and I still need to schedule a class... fun.

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005 15:33:58  Good Christmas... and the new year is upon us

Well, I hope you and yours had a good Christmas as well. We just finished ours with my mother's family last night, in fact. One complaint: Mom didn't make egg nog this year.

Other than that, the settlement for the house is scheduled for this Friday. I was over there yesterday and the day before doing some sweeping, removing screws, and poking around. I'm building a firewall for the place, which is draining my stockpile of hardware (but that's a good thing, right?). I'm trying WBEL3 on it. And school will be starting again before you know it.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 21:37:35  New and Improved

It might not look too much different on the outside, but things are a bit cleaner on the inside. There's also an RSS feed now, so those running their own scripts or hosting rogue conversions can feel free to stop ;). Excellent. Two items can be deleted from the Axim's tasklist.

Merry Christmas!

Thursday, December 23rd, 2004 18:17:18  Phases Phasing Me Less

I had an electrical model contradiction recently... Houses are supplied often with single-phase power... the poles in your neighborhood typically have a hot and a grounded neutral. Coming from your local transformer, you get three wires. I had assumed that you would get a 240, 120, and neutral. However, in my recent dealings with three-phase power, I came to realize that each row of breakers is fed by a different phase, rotating through them. As a result, your three phase breakers use three consecutive rows, obtaining all three phases. Household 240 breakers use two rows... so how does that work? That contradicts the transformer providing 240-to-neutral. Answer: split-phase. Since it's not phases, but two transformed currents from the same phase, they can be added via series to get your 240. Wow.

Monday, December 20th, 2004 22:24:30  *HTML is of the Devil

HTML, and its derivatives, hate me more as time goes by. I could understand tables, mostly. These new-fangled CSS things drive me crazy with their multitude of implementations, and lack of apparent usefulness. Web site design isn't programming... it's alchemy. So, maybe I'll get a better site up over break, and maybe I won't.

General update: the car is fixed, closing on the house will be sooner rather than later, and grades will be ready to look at well before I'm ready to look at them. Fun.

Monday, December 13th, 2004 18:55:50  Fighting with the Axim, a bit

Today the Axim refused to connect via Wifi. Thinking about it, I realized that this hadn't been tried since I had attempted to connect with a Bluetooth WAP a few days earlier. Trying everything in the configuration, and reading over sites didn't help at all. So, I looked into firmware updates and found that I could upgrade from A02 to A05. I did so, and wireless worked in the "clean" install, but didn't again when I restored my backup. Then I dug through the Windows folder and ran the WirelessPower executable, which fixed things right up. I should have tried that earlier... the Dell WLAN Utility was showing that the wireless card was not present, but I would have never thought this executable would have been the only way to power it up. Oh well. I have new firmware now :).

Monday, December 6th, 2004 21:39:32  Um, yeah.

Absence of blogs doesn't mean absence of activity. I still have 1.2 papers to write, and I should be doing that now. This evening, I've wasted some time trying to catch up on modern media technologies, trying to figure out how much of which kind of wiring I'll need to install in my house. Mortgage stuff still pending. Car repair scheduled for next week. Finals next week. So, busy, busy, busy. As a result, I've been playing a good bit of UT recently.

Sunday, November 28th, 2004 21:05:00  Busy Thanksgiving

Ship was kind enough to allow us three days off for Thanksgiving. Wednesday, I went to Ship to work all day. Thursday, I wrote the majority of my Arch AI paper before going to the Turkey-day festivities in the evening at my grandparents. Friday, I went to CTI to get some work in there, getting Chinese w/ Doug (first time in awhile). Unfortunately, my car had a little incident while at work. So, Saturday I called H+H, they said the collision center was open 10-2, I show up at 10:30 and they're not open. So I go home, finish my AI paper, get some mortgage papers together, but not in time to mail them. Today, I wrote up my paper for eXtreme Programming, played some UT, took a walk, and am updating my blog. The school year just can't end soon enough.

Friday, November 19th, 2004 22:19:44  Crud

The AI test went well, the abstract algebra not as well. And now for the paper writing... by now and the end of the semester I have at least 22 pages of stuff to write. Should have started that a long time ago? You betcha. Talking with Ian about this over lunch was disturbing... looks like I need to get things moving tomorrow.

Wednesday, November 17th, 2004 21:42:32  House Stuff

I've been trying to avoid talking about, and thinking about, house stuff due to the tentative nature of the situation. However, it's getting less tentative and more certain :). My loan application has gotten the initial approval, and I have some of the standard paperwork signed. I was at the place today, cleaning out the gutters and looking around, trying to get a feel for what goes where. I love planning that out... especially when it comes to running more wiring. But, I don't have a real timeline for acquisition, much less transition, so things like that still feel distant.

Other than that, I helped Chris get a blog-app set up on his new domain, podpolia.com. Ship had a power outage in the MCT this morning to install a 150-amp 480-volt breaker in preparation for the massive 80kW Symmetra PX, which is now sitting on the steel plate on the floor (that is, it hasn't yet fallen through ;).

Sunday, November 14th, 2004 21:04:39  ACMs & Evolution 2.0

The Mid-Atlantic ACM Regionals are now over. Looks like our team isn't going on this year (you can see the whole results here). My teammates were complaining that problem ambiguity was partially to blame, but I'm not sure how that would be, given that all teams had the same set of problems.

I have Oak and Cedar upgraded to FC3 as well, now. NFSv4 is feeling happier regarding permissions mappings, however the particular reason I avoided NFSv4 in the past seems to still be present... Gnumeric locks up on saving a file to an NFSv4 share. I've worked around this by mounting that particular share with NFSv3 and everthing else with v4. Evolution also is a lot faster in FC3, however it is also uglier. I'm not a big fan of the Mac-like folder interface that leaves out the lines between folders that I'm so fond of.

Wednesday, November 10th, 2004 22:04:53  Life and such

Well, seems that Isaac and Ange are engaged! To my knowledge, Isaac is the first of my high school friends to have had that happen. Of course, they'll probably start dropping like flies at some point. I'll agree with Kevin as I steal his term... more "girl time" wouldn't be a bad thing.

FC3 is on Pine after some media/file issues (maybe thanks to Thor's bad memory... time for a new clone, methinks). Also had issues with Nvidia's drivers. Had to add a "modprobe nvidia" to my rc.local... certainly not ideal.

AI Tic-Tac-Toe due tomorrow... I've got that done (hopefully). ICPC Regionals are on Saturday. Two tests are next week. And need to work house stuff in there somewhere as well.

Sunday, November 7th, 2004 20:30:58  From the what-planet-have-you-been-on department

Looks like Kevin has a blog now. I didn't know that.

Sunday, November 7th, 2004 20:26:46  Up-to-date

I've finally caught up with the media backlog... up to the present on Star Trek, Star Gate, and Home Star Runner. Now I can move on to more important things... like a bunch of school projects and such. The NetMRG meeting with Doug and Kevin went pretty well on Saturday. Hopefully a minor release on Monday followed by "major" development. House stuff is moving forward and looking more certain as well.

Apparently the Google thing was the result of an employee referral (whoever you are, thanks!). Chances are it won't work out though, even if I was able to get through the multi-stage interview process, it would mean city life... don't think I'm cut out for that.

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2004 20:11:41  Auctions & Elections

The public sale of the possessions of my late great uncle was held last night. The working TV for sale, and on display, was tuned in to NBC watching the election returns throughout the evening. I bought a few things... a small, good refrigerator for cheap, a crate of various electrical things, old PA county maps, and the various boxes of stuff coming with them ;). All in all, pretty good, but a tiring evening. The auction was over around 11, but I was up until 0200 waiting for ABC to call any state other than Ohio, but that wasn't to happen. I voted Tuesday morning (#66 in Upper Mifflin Twp), and it was kindof neat to think that one of those large numbers on TV was influenced by me. And Google has called for me again... really need to get back to them.

Monday, November 1st, 2004 21:45:14  Possible Future

I'm contemplating making an offer on the house of my late great uncle. It's a small place, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to consider it a "cottage." Nothing definite, but I do have a cautious optimism for the situation (sortof like tomorrow's election...). It does have the potential for one essential feature... cable Internet via Kuhn. It might not be Comcast, but it's got to be better than ISDN... and cheaper too, if you can believe that. Having my own place, and some more room to spread out is appealing, albeit at the cost of immediate access to the peace of the gamelands. Chris would be very nearby (perhaps some wireless?), and Ship (and therefore Doug) would be somewhat closer as well. So, I've been playing with mortgage calculators an