by srhuston

Hamming It Up

So I’ll be taking my Technician Class exam two weeks from this Saturday, and at this point it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll pass it. Then once the FCC grants my license, I can start transmitting (though I’m probably going to file for a vanity callsign, and might wait to make contacts until that goes through; we’ll see :> )

These last few days I’ve been doing a lot of research on radios, trying to find the most bang for my buck. Since I live in an apartment and don’t want to go all-out on the more expensive HF gear yet, I’m planning on sticking to VHF/UHF to get started. In that vein, the ICOM IC-T7H looks like a good deal. The folks over at eHam have rated it pretty high, and it will do the 2m and 70cm bands just nicely. I was originally looking at the IC-T90A, but it’s about $100 more, gives access to another band which is nice, but it also wasn’t rated as well on eHam, so I’m not sure that I want to get one. I think I’d rather spend the $170 on the well-rated dual HT than $270 on a moderately-rated tri-bander.

So that covers the hand-held radio, but what about something more powerful? Well, I was looking at a model from ICOM (the IC-2720H) but it wasn’t very well received by the folks at eHam at all. A lot of people complaining about the radio, and for my first rig I thought it better to go with something about which people raved (or at least they didn’t pan the thing). It was then that I found a model from Yaesu, called the FT-7800R which seems to be just what I’m seeking. 1000 memory channels (wow), easy access to WiRES repeaters, decent power output (50W on 2m, 40W on 70cm) and a pretty wide receiver coverage. Sounds good to me. Best part? The price from HRO (the local amateur radio store, with a convenient branch in sales-tax-free Delaware) is only $279. Add to that about $40 for a glass-mount dual-band antenna, and maybe a little more to get the remote head mounting kit (where the radio sits in the back of the truck somewhere, and only the faceplate and mic are up on the dashboard) and I’ve got a lot of gear for around $500. Schweet.

Posted in Ham /
by srhuston

CQ CQ CQ DE …

So I’ve been studying for my amateur license again, and this time going to another guy’s house once a week to help with getting the concepts down. Not sure how much I need the help right now, every test I’ve taken on QRZ so far I’ve passed just fine, but the extra information that I get from him that isn’t on the exam makes it worthwhile.

Also found out that ‘W2SRH’ is an available callsign. So once I get my license (next month I take the exam, so probably will be in the FCC’s database around the end of March) I might just file for a vanity call. Why not? :>

Posted in Ham /
by srhuston

Ticking Away The Moments That Make Up A Dull Day

So Steph got her new computer last night, as it was shipped to my office so I brought it home with me. A Dimension 4600, 2.8GHz machine with an 80GB disk, DVD-ROM and separate CD-RW, 512MB RAM… it’s pretty. Even if it does run Windows XP 😛 (At least it’s XP Pro, somewhat respectible.)

We’ve installed a bunch of stuff on it between the two of us, and still have more things to do. One very good thing is that once we get Quicken on there and move our data from the VMware install on my desktop to the new machine, I can get rid of VMware entirely. I love the program, don’t get me wrong, but more often than not it’s been the only reason I’ve been unable to upgrade the OS for one thing or another (and even now I’m running an older kernel than I want to because of it).

Now, I can finally stop whining when I can’t find a copy of a game for the Mac… Ugh, what’s wrong with me? First I got an Apple, and now I’m actually not unhappy about a Windows machine in my house? I must be coming down with something…

by srhuston

Well I’ll Be…

Just noticed that there was a comment on one of the older postings. I thought that was interesting, since I never told anyone about this site, so I wondered how someone found it and found it interesting enough to comment.

Then I read the comment.

“I can answer your questions about any of these topics”

Interesting since the topic was about a movie I’d just gone to see (obligatory link).

The poster? Something about online casinos or some such junk.

Gaaaah! Spam! Make it go ‘way!

by srhuston

Ping!

Just something to type. Need to kill time while waiting for the RAID to finish rebuilding on the Beowulf cluster’s fileserver. It’s been giving me some headaches the last two days, dying at 0400 every night for no apparent reason. So I forced a reiserfsck (which came up with two errors that it corrected), and then forced a reindex.

Now I’m contemplating yanking one of the drives when it’s done, and twiddling it a bit since only that one drive has ever given any errors. Probably a loose cable. That’ll really make my day.

by srhuston

Schema-ing

So I’ve been getting back into the long-term project I’m working on at work, namely setting up an LDAP server to replace our NIS system. And of course I found that there’s some objects and attributes that I’d like to associate with entries in the directory, so I’m writing a schema to cover those things. And I quickly found that there isn’t quite as much documentation as I’d like to see. Granted, the one book that I have (“Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)“) covers a *lot* of the information that one needs to know before setting up a LDAP directory, but it does lack a little bit in the information for creating your own schemas. Oh well, nothing like the tried and true trial-and-error method :>

by srhuston

There Went the Slashdot Crowd

So I got a couple interesting emails on the morning of the 13th. Seems a story was posted on Slashdot that had a link to our website at work (original story here). Okay, so I’m wondering how many pieces my poor webserver will be in when I get to work. But, it survived intact, and handled it quite well.

For those who like that sort of thing (I’m certainly one of them), here’s a graph of the traffic through our firewall during that time period. No wonder sites that have dynamic content tend to get flogged when a story goes on the front page:HP_OV Traffic Graph

by srhuston

You’re So Vain…

…you probably think this story’s about you. Okay, so I had to come up with a title, and couldn’t think of something. Sue me. No, wait, don’t do that. I don’t have anything to give up anyway.

So, it’s been an interesting week. My father-in-law had back surgery on Friday, and it took awhile before they got back to us to let us know the outcome. Finally heard on Friday afternoon that he came through just fine; there were a couple complications, however even with that he was in and out in 3.5 hours (they’d estimated 4 total). He was due to be released today, but on Saturday afternoon he was already home and enjoying the effects of the final shot of morphine they gave him. Next is 3 weeks of being stuck in the house (can’t go up and down stairs, and there’s stairs to every doorway). He should make a full recovery, and from the people who have had the surgery done before, he’ll be feeling better than he has in quite some time.

What else? Saw Big Fish on Sunday. It was most excellent. I was looking forward to hearing either I’ve Seen All Good People by Yes, or Solisbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, but the soundtrack was quite good even without their presence (both songs were used in the trailers I’ve seen). Very touching story, and also quite amusing to see the main character’s storytelling skills at work.

Well, I guess I should be off to bed. Stephanie is taking my Yes DVD’s down to her father’s tomorrow and spending the afternoon there so he’s not alone in the house. I wonder if he’s going to make her sit through all of them in a row…

by srhuston

Whoopee

Man am I bummed. Things have been so-so at work lately, and I keep having the feeling the Sword of Damocles is somewhere above me. I really like the people I work with, and the work that I do, just more often than not feel unappreciated from the higher-up types. It’s pretty bad when someone asks for your expert opinion on something, and then disregards it. *sigh*

Had a pretty good Holiday (and Birthday) Season. Got a ton of new movies (all said and done, seasons 2-4 of Stargate SG-1, there’s 15 DVDs right there, plus more), the latest release from Gary Larson which weighs a ton, and best of all the watch I’d been eyeing up since around Thanksgiving. Here is the webpage for the watch, and man is it neat.

by srhuston

Tongue-Tied and Twisted

So I’m working on deploying LDAP at work… we’re using NIS currently, and it’s a mess and ugly and doesn’t let me play with things I’d like to do (read: web-based account maintenance) without a lot of even uglier work… so LDAP is the way to go, for that and more reasons. Only problem is, I’m going cross-eyed reading all the information about how to go about doing it. Yeah, I could just forge ahead and make something, but then a year from now when I realize I’ve doomed myself to having to recreate the entire database just to add a certain bit of functionality, I jump off a bridge. Nah, books it is.

Just ordered two, “Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)” and “LDAP System Administration” from Amazon. We’ll see I guess. They should be here around the 15th.

Mean time, I’ve got no pending issues going on at work, and only this as a long-term project that had been put off many times in the past and is now finally in the forefront. In other words, I’m spending a lot of time catching up on websites and magazine articles in between learning the internals of LDAP. Ugh. Oh well, back to something resembling work…