Last Result:
Download Speed: 2684 kbps (335.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 711 kbps (88.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
It may be the local telco monopoly.. but damn that’s nice to see. I’ll post more tomorrow probably – much catching up to do. Right now, much sleeping to do.
Unfortunately, I don’t mean the kind you play with dice, fake money and fighting over who gets to be the car. No, I’m referring to the local phone company (denoted by a large red check mark).
Our new phone service gets hooked up today. That’s good news. The bad news is that if you Google the number, you find a local business. Which may or may not have gone out of business recently, meaning we’ll likely get phone calls for the company. Guess at least it won’t be creditors, like we get with our current number (which we’ve had for almost three years, but the previous owner kept using it on important things – like her kid’s emergency contact forms).
The worse news is that Speakeasy keeps telling me they can’t give me DSL in that area. If you look up the local CO, it says that Covad has a cage in there, so Speakeasy should have no problems. But, it gets more interesting! One of my co-workers lives two blocks farther from the CO than I do, and he has DSL through the local telco. The same local telco that says I can’t get business class DSL (only way they’ll do a static IP), nor can I get home DSL. Uh, hello?
So, that’s part of the reason all this stuff moved to Dreamhost – who knows if I’ll be able to serve my own webpages in another couple weeks. Might have to resort to either dial-up, or just pairing my phone to the laptop to get on teh Intarweb. Goodie. I’d hoped that since today is the day for the installation, maybe the local telco would’ve updated their database and I could see that I can get DSL at least through them (that’s a start, anyway). Guess I’ll have to wait until next week.
Well, that’s all finished now. Got an email from Easyspace confirming the transfer away, which I could ignore and it would happen on Sunday, or go to a webpage and it would happen right away. Sure enough, shortly after saying “Yes, I want to do this” on their page I got an email from Dreamhost that the transfer was complete. Excellent! Added a few DNS entries to my domain through Dreamhost so the home network would continue to function as normal (Please, if you’re a DNS admin.. don’t dig the SOA and bitch about what I did. I know it’s wrong, but if someone else routes those packets it’s their problem).
Have to get in the habit that I only need to hit enter once, ’cause I keep hitting it twice to get a line break. Oh well, new things to deal with. Speaking of which, our Polycom MGC was setup and tested today, so we can now host up to 12 videoconference sites at once through it. Very slick system – easy to understand for the end user, powerful, and expensive. Not my moolah.
Stephanie hurt her back recently (we’re not sure when) and ended up staying home today, the last day for staff at school. We’re hoping she doesn’t catch any crap for it, but we’ve got two prescriptions to prove we went to the doctor today. I got off the phone with her a little while ago, and she’s feeling better. She’s not going to the house tonight, and maybe not tomorrow either, though we’re thinking of swinging by there tonight to use the grill :>
Since we’re moving soon (more later), I’m moving my web services off to a dedicated hosting company. Not sure what kind of broadband we’ll get, and if it will be a static IP, plus there’s other things I can do with this that I just don’t feel like doing at home anymore. When you spend a number of hours each day administering machines, you don’t want to do it when you get home – especially when that machine also serves as your firewall and gateway, so taking it down for an upgrade means you’ve got no Intarweb.
Also upgrading to WordPress at the same time, and I’ve imported all the old articles. Will have to go back and edit a few to fix up the links, so bear with me for a bit.
EDIT 2006/06/20 1240: I’ve fixed all the links I think – if you find a broken one then let me know.
Went to the Great Big Food Show this weekend, and saw lots of neat stuff. Sampled some wares and a good time was had by all. One of the gadgets that Steph had seen before (from Soda Club) I got to see in action, and we ended up getting one. What the hell, with the amount of soda we both drink, this could be better for us and cheaper in the long run – plus it just looks neat. Picked up Alton Brown‘s new book “I’m Just Here For More Food”, saw a live show that he did there (which was on how different methods can make the same ingredients into two completely different things, in this case egg nog vs. ice cream, and how both are all about bubbles), and then met him in person. Got our book autographed and a picture too! Okay, you want proof?
Here is Steph and I with Alton.
And here’s one of Keith.
I’ve a feeling that the last shot is a little off because when Alton turned around for the photo, he smiled for a second and then exclaimed, “Wait a minute… that’s the same camera as the last two! What, are you all in some kind of commune or something?” Definitely neat, he was good natured about the whole thing, and one of the most approachable people I’ve met. While some of the celebs there were sitting happily behind a desk and signing books away, Alton refused to get “behind” the desk, instead shaking everyone’s hand, signing whatever they wanted (one girl I saw had brought a picture of the two of them from another event, and he signed that for her), and happy to get a photo with everyone. Definitely the kind of person that, if you met him in a bar somewhere and offered to buy him a drink, he’d not only say thanks but would actually talk with you instead of run in the other direction.
[Note – there’s a lot of other stuff I’d been meaning to put here before now, mostly a rehash of things of late. But this particular item pissed me off enough to just put this here instead.]
So we recently had a physics lesson about inertia, and how a moving vehicle cannot stop within 30 feet just because you stepped out in front of it into a crosswalk. Now, it’s time for another one.
We’ll start with the basics. A standard vehicle, manufactured since 1988, is likely capable of speeds up to around 80-90 miles per hour (MPH). Now, some vehicles are more “performance oriented” and capable of speeds higher than that, and others still have been tweaked and tuned to get upwards of 150MPH and more for specialized operations such as racing. That’s pretty fast. 150MPH means you could traverse from the northern tip of New Jersey to the southern tip in about two hours (not accounting for our lovely traffic and highway systems, of course). You could get from Philadelphia to Atlantic City in about 25 minutes. Not bad at all, if you ask me.
Now, for the next part. The speed of light in a vacuum is 670.76 MILLION miles per hour. So it would take the aforementioned car one hour to travel 150 miles, while light could make the trip in about .0008 seconds. That’s 800 microseconds. It took me longer to type this period from the time my brain told my finger to do it: . That’s really fast, and even better than the previous 150MPH.
Now, what is the point of this lesson? Very simple. Light is basically electromagnetic waves. Now waves can be slowed down by other factors, such as the medium through which they travel (note the speed above is light “in a vacuum” – through the atmosphere is slightly slower, and through things like glass and water is slower yet). Radio waves are also in the electromagnetic spectrum, and follow similar rules. This means that, if you try to cut someone off by lagging behind them at a traffic light, and as the light turns green swerve around them into the left-turn-only lane, and fail to pass them, and then proceed to tailgate, swerve, narrowly avoid hitting them, try two times on a winding road to pass in a no-passing zone, and finally pass them anyway on another stretch of road where you continue on to pass 4 other cars (all in a no-passing zone) and almost cause 3 accidents in doing so, your car’s speed still won’t match the speed at which I can relay to the local 911 dispatch that you’re driving like a #&^(ING MORON, tell them your license plate, and watch the kind officer pulling you over about a mile down the road as I stop behind you to relay my witness account to him.
In short, you may be able to outrun me and my car, but you can’t outrun radio waves. Dipshit.
So… it’s been awhile. Partly because I’m lazy, and partly because I’ve been busy at work and by the time I get home, I don’t have much playtime. So what’s new in the world?
Been playing with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System (Some links: here, here and here). It’s basically a packet radio system, but instead of normal packet radio which is point-to-point, this is more of a broadcast type system. Packets can be destined for a specific radio, so you can send messages from one system to another, or they can be broadcast for all (all amateurs, that is, not really for the general public and therefore not “broadcasting” in the FCC’s eyes). Since I don’t have a TNC (Terminal Node Controller, basically a modem that connects to a radio) to receive APRS packets in my area, I have it setup with an internet link (the last link above is to APRS-IS, the APRS internet service, which links digipeaters over the internet) on my laptop and at work, the latter runs pretty much constantly now as W2SRH-1. Oh, and just for completeness, a digipeater is for digital packets what a repeater is for analog voice – basically, it takes the packet you send, and re-sends it for all to hear. This way, if you’re running a very low-power radio in your vehicle, your packets still have a chance of getting over a large area if a digipeater picks them up and rebroadcasts them. Now why would you run a packet system in a car? Because you can hook a GPS receiver up to it, and as you move about the planet the little TNC and associated systems will send out your coordinates as a packet, which is picked up by these digipeaters and I-Gates (internet gateways), and someone else with APRS will see a little vehicle icon move across their screen as you travel. Pretty neat! I can watch as people who live in my area, or around the world since I read an unfiltered feed at work (ie, the packets I get are not limited to a specific area), move from one point to another. While that may not sound too interesting to everyone, it is kinda neat to see, and has other uses as well. For search-and-rescue work, an area can be setup where the operation will take place, and if everyone is carrying APRS transmitters then someone can monitor their progress and see what areas they’ve covered. Or in the case of an emergency, someone can pinpoint the location on the map, and others can see it. You could even use it to mark off an event of some sort, or something that others might find important: an accident location on a highway that should be avoided (or where help is needed), or the current and predicted location of a hurricane (which I saw just yesterday). While using this system with a radio is how it was originally intended, it’s still neat to be able to use it with an internet connection.
What else is new lately… we got a new machine at work, which is supposed to hold all the data that people want to keep on spinning platters but not backed up. 15 SATA drives, 200GB each, 3U enclosure. Only one problem: No floppy or CD-ROM drives. No problem, we’ll install Fedora with a USB key! Bought two keys, threw a boot disk on one of them, plugged it in, and… oh, another problem, the damned motherboard doesn’t boot from a USB device. Great. Oh, wanna go three for three? Okay, Fedora doesn’t have drivers for the motherboard’s SATA ports. Hell, RedHat in its entirety, as well as the Linux kernel, doesn’t support them – the company that sold it to us compiled a patch from who-knows-where into the kernel to get it to work. Well this just makes things interesting, doesn’t it? One good thing lately, we got rid of 10 of the old Sun Ultra5 workstations, and there’s only two of them left in the building. Those two will be leaving soon, like as soon as I get my hands on them (one’s in a pile in the server room, and one’s in a pile on someone’s desk). We should have enough computers from the decommissioned Beowulf cluster to replace a couple of the Ultra1 workstations too, and it’ll be good to get rid of them as well. That will still leave us with a few Suns in the building, not as many as when I started but getting close to a manageable number since the one machine that is serving their filesystems is no longer under hardware contract, and starting to show its age.
Along those lines, we also have to move faster on deploying LDAP to replace NIS, since our NIS server is getting overloaded (same Sun that serves ‘/’ to the other Suns). At least I’m guessing that’s what is happening, all I know is that every now and then I get error messages from various machines in the building that they can’t contact Newton for NIS information, but when I login to them things are working fine. NIS isn’t really well equipped for this kind of setup anyway, while LDAP is a bit more robust. I tested some LDAP server stuff today, including replication (where one or more ‘slave’ servers get their information from the LDAP master; the slaves are read-only, the master allows writes also) and auto-failover, and it all worked wonderfully. I setup a client machine to listen to the master and slave, logged in, did some things, killed the master and tried logging in again… and it worked just as fast as when the master was up, only it was talking to the slave now. Tried a write operation, and it failed with “Unable to process request”, quite a fine answer when I try writing to a read-only database. Brought the master back up, tried it again… and it tried to write to the slave, got an error, and bumped right over to the master where it worked fine. Perfect! End result is that I can setup a few slaves, and if the master gets overloaded or goes down, the slaves will continue to serve data, but nobody can change their password (nor can any new accounts be created) until the master returns. Sounds good to me!
Stephanie’s graduation is in a couple weeks, that should be fun. At least one of us graduated from college, and she’s now got more letters after her name than I will unless I get some certifications (but she’ll always have more degrees, I don’t think I’ll ever be going back to school). Before that, however, is … RUSH, Live at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey … ahh, this should be good. I have heard a couple songs from their latest album, it’s a tribute album with all cover songs from bands that inspired Rush (Geddy Lee singing “…sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do, ’cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues…”).
Okay, on that note, I just went and looked up the tabs to Broon’s Bane again, and wish I had a room where I could practice and not wake anyone up. ‘Cause now I want to try to play it again. Like I wouldn’t get frustrated since I haven’t touched either my 6-string or my 12-string in ages, but I still want to play. Grr. Off to bed with me.
Okay, so I’m going to sink slightly and post a rant. Not that me ranting is sinking from my normal self, but because I’m doing it here and most personal websites like this seem to only be an endless torrent of worthless verbiage, a diatribe that seeks to prove how everyone else in the world but the author is incorrect… okay, I feel better. Now the real rant :>
Crosswalks. Not so much the crosswalk itself, but the people in them. Now, the law states that vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians in the crosswalk. I’m fine with that. See how it’s written? “yield the right-of-way to pedestrians IN the crosswalk”. That’s wonderful. If someone is in the process of crossing the street, you should let them. Sure! No problem.
This does NOT mean that if someone walks up to a crosswalk you should slam on your brakes to let them go by. They’re not in the crosswalk, they’re approaching it. Maybe they’re just stopping to get their bearings and going to turn the other way, you don’t know. Either way, there’s no freakin’ reason on this planet to stop for someone standing at a freakin’ curb. When the traffic is clear, they will step out into the crosswalk, assuming that’s where they actually want to go, and they’ll cross the street. At that point, oncoming traffic should stop to let them cross. Not just because they’re standing at the curb. Or for that matter stepped off the curb and standing right next to it.
Okay, next point. This one isn’t necessarily a state or federal law, more of a law of freakin’ physics. A vehicle travelling at 40MPH, and weighing approximately 2500 pounds CAN NOT STOP just because you stepped out in front of it. No point in giving dirty looks to the driver because you walked in front of him when he’s only 30 feet away from said crosswalk, ’cause the brakes are only going to do so much before the front fender gets to do its own dirty work. Is there a crosswalk there? You bet there is. Does that crosswalk mean you can jump out into it and expect the freakin’ world to stop because you’re crossing the street and too damned busy, important or just plan STUPID to look both ways and make sure there’s no oncoming traffic first? Survey says… NO!
Last one, and then I’m done for this rant. When approaching an intersection on foot, and said intersection has a Walk/Don’t Walk sign (for the stupidity enhanced, many are now a walking dude vs a red hand held up in a “STOP!” like way), don’t just look at how the cars are going currently and cross the street if it says Don’t Walk. Why? Because unless you’ve taken the moment or two to see what the traffic signal situation is, and especially unless you know what the signal pattern is, you don’t know when the next light is going to turn green. Ya know, they make those little buttons that say “Push here to cross street” for a reason, it’s so you can push the button and the little hand will turn into a little walkin’ dude when it’s safe to go. How many times does it happen that I’m about to move forward in my truck, because my light is now green, only to see that someone is now standing directly in front of it because they’re not paying attention to the traffic signals, or they just stepped out into the intersection as it’s turning green? Too many to count, though I’d definitely use more fingers to count those incidents than I usually use to wave to the idiot pedestrians.
Okay, I lied, one more. When you do cross the street, and you do see that traffic is coming (it happens sometimes even when you’re paying attention, I’ll give you that)… or some kind soul has stopped to let you cross in front of them… HUSTLE! No, not the dance, move your damned ass across that street. Don’t mosey, meander, saunter, swagger or shuffle. MOVE IT! If you’ve got two good legs that can get you from point A to point B without needing a car, then they’re good enough to put a little spring into your step as you cross the street, so the kind soul who is currently refraining from leaving a “raeydooG” tattoo on your backside doesn’t have to wait so long that he needs another shave just to continue on his way. This should especially be the case if you are the freakin’ idiot that walked into the intersection without first looking carefully at what’s going on and now have a 1.25 ton vehicle bearing down on your current position.
That’s it, I need a brush guard for the Sport Trac.
Goodbye huston the Demigod…
You went to your reward with 5153550 points,
The Eye of the Aethiopica (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
1 diamond (worth 4000 zorkmids)
1 amulet of reflection (worth 150 zorkmids)
and 19718 pieces of gold, after 73277 moves.
You were level 30 with a maximum of 408 hit points when you ascended.
So Stephanie was down at the shore yesterday for a bachelorette party for a friend of hers from college, and I had the day to figure out something to do. Went to the DVRA Foxhunt in the morning, which is an event where one person hides a transmitter somewhere, and we all start at a location within 10km of the hiding spot and try to find it. My team got there last partially because we got stuck behind a footrace in Pennington – when we pulled into the parking lot we weren’t far behind the rest of the people (many were just getting out of their cars). After that I went home for a couple minutes and then up to the club shack, thinking others would be there for a VHF/UHF contest going on this weekend. Apparently they’d all left just before I arrived, but no big deal. I stayed there for a little while listening, and apparently the contest hadn’t yet started, so I was going to head home when the cell phone started buzzing that the server room was too hot.
Sometime last week I moved the vents on the new A/C unit to try to redirect the cold air where it was more needed, and apparently created a hot zone right in front of one of the racks. So a little more moving around and it was fixed. Back to home I went with nothing to do, and watched a little TV. When I realized I was falling asleep on the couch, I thought I’d go for a bike ride to wake up and do something. Before I knew it, I was 3/4 of the way to the club shack (maybe 5 miles away from my apartment) so I went there and hung out for about an hour. Around 1800 I headed back home on the bike, and this time I timed it – with the couple rest stops I made, which weren’t very long (maybe a minute here and there) it only took 45 minutes to get home. Not too bad, and probably a 10 mile trip all around. Stephanie was a little floored that I rode that far with not having been on the bike much at all before that, but if there’s one part of my body that’s in good shape it’s my legs. I felt a little wobbly going up and down the stairs both when I got home and shortly after that, but by the time I went to bed I was just fine. So I guess I didn’t over-do it at all :>
We planned on having people over tonight, but most of them weren’t able to make it (and the one person who was, we haven’t heard from since the invite, so we don’t know for sure if he’s coming). Other than that there’s no real plans for the day, so we’ll see what the afternoon brings. Next week at work I have to swap out some bad drives in one of the large filesystem servers, and then bring it down for a filesystem check to see if there’s any damage to the data (probably is, but we’ll see). Also need to come up with a decent way of updating the Yum repositories for automatic updates at work, so that if there’s a package I don’t want to bother updating I can exclude it. A little shell scripting will do the trick, just need to sit down and figure it out.
Guess that’s good for now, off to take a shower.