The Treehouse Blog

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.

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.

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 :).

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.

On Saturday, Chris and I visited and photographed the coax hut I found last week. Driving around afterward, trying to cover the area indicated by plotting an area between three and four miles from the last hut, we found another one near Fannettsburg. There’s still a gap in the area though, but it could be one or two huts, depending on the actual cable path. So far, no luck, but perhaps more expeditions later this week or next.