I’ve never seen so much activity on a band in my life as I get with this antenna, and I’m coming in 59 to the west coast on 10 watts now! My second contact on the antenna was in Chile!

I found a design for a 20 meter “Compact Vertical Dipole” in this year’s (2008) ARRL Handbook, given to me for the holidays by my very understanding wife! (update: Read the construction notes here)

This dipole is suspended about 6 feet above ground, has two 10 foot steel conduits for radiators and is fed through the pvc separator in the middle. The relatively short height is made up for by capacitance wires which you can see on the top and several more along the bottom. It took me about 6 hours to construct including trips to the store and hopefully it will last the winter at least. If you want to build one, steel conduit is cheap but not likely to last a long time due to its weakness, use aluminum instead if you can get it. Early testing shows an SWR of 1.5:1 or less across all of 20 meters, no tuning needed.

The biggest difference however is the noise level. I am living in a ham’s nightmare neighborhood with power lines above ground on both sides of my house and tons of noise. My other “HF Antenna” the rain gutters previously written about collect it in droves too.

This vertical dipole has such a great signal to noise ratio, it’s really something!

Here are a few pictures. The antenna almost fits entirely inside my tree, it would even be invisible had last year’s ice storm not demolished half of the tree.

Just a note to anybody who is interested, KD0BVK is now known as AI1P (alpha india one papa)

The old man signed off
For the last time

He laid down and took his last sip
Of the air he had filled with life

A sorcerer of the nighttime winds
Wizard of the invisible voices

His life was long and his mind acute
Until the end of good repute

His silent key rests now on my desk
That shining, powerful talisman of air

Waiting for another magician to tap it
To once more make _._. __._ heard from afar

The old man rests
But his key talks on

—
Poem originally published at darkpoetry.com
C 2007 Matthew Steven

It seems that the many people who have been looking for a php beautifier now have a very nicely done perltidy work-alike in Magnus Rosenbaum’s new phptidy program.

It does have a few user-friendliness issues- just make sure your PHP is compiled with the tokenizer built in or it will not work and it will not tell you why it doesn’t work. Also edit the phptidy.php script to change some default variables or the javadoc style comments it so nicely auto-generates may have the author name in them wrong. After that, if you like the default formatting you’re done.

http://cmr.cx/phptidy/

I also tried PHP Beautifier but it created code that was way too compact to read clearly by default and required the use of specific filters to alter these spacing choices. I found the default settings of phptidy to be just my style and I am sticking with that for now.

Try also:
http://beautifyphp.sourceforge.net/

Both of the projects could use a little documentation, but if you read the source you’ll figure it out pretty quick.

I almost forgot to post this considering how busy I have been since it happened.

For producing what most of our competing classmates considered the most impressive project in Software Development Methodologies our team was awarded the best project complete with a signed certificate from the Dean of the College, Dr. Carl Chang. My thanks to my teammates Joe Coleman, Adam Ryan Lee and Bader Al-Sabeh for all their work and dedication attending all those meetings and meeting the goals. Thanks also to Dr. Mitra and all the students in the class who gave us your support. It was great fun.

Other than the prize I take away a sense of the fun that developing software with a team can be, a lot of lessons about managing projects, and a nice batch of independent C++ classes that I will be able to use for other projects I have on my to-do list.

Original story here

Thanks to my friend Kevin Anderson, we can all download a nice jazz set from a recent performance at PSU. The recording quality is excellent, and the songs are pretty good too, with a few odd little additions you wouldn’t usually expect, but that’s Jazz for you. See for yourself.

http://www.jjcarlsen.com/PSU

Setlist:
01 On Green Dolphin St..m4a
02 Afternoon In Paris–Speak Low–Afternoon In Paris.m4a
03 Laura.m4a
04 Dont Get Around Much Anymore.m4a
05 Birks Works–Under Paris Skies–We Three Kings.m4a
06 Summer Samba–Bye Bye Blackbird–Summer Samba.m4a

Ok, this has been revised again because Amazon simply doesn’t have most of the things I actually want…

Here are some ideas based on how good I’ve been, and how rich Santa is this year. In truth this is sort of a “things I plan to buy eventually” list for myself too.

Cash is the best gift. No gift certificates or “cash cards” please!

GOOD BOY!
8-10′ lengths of strong telescoping fiberglass tubes, each one should fit into the other to make a total of 30-40′ (~$80)
100′ of RG-8U or RG-213 type coaxial cable. (~$70)
A set of very nice quality drill bits, carbide
A non-warlike president

VERY GOOD BOY!
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZAM-ALS-500MR
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZMF-989D

SUPER GOOD BOY!
http://www.gigaparts.com/store.php?action=profile&sku=ZIC-746PRO

UNBELIEVABLY GOOD BOY!
http://radio.tentec.com/Amateur/Transceivers/TT588

Otherwise…

Here’s a short Amazon wishlist.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3K5RKI5WA1TNY

73s and happy holidays.

With my recent ticket upgrade to Extra I decided to apply for a shorter vanity call sign. The criteria that I wanted was something very short.

Both short in length and short in Morse code so that I could spend a little less time on my cq’s and all transactions. A few dits/dahs will probably add up over a lifetime.

So I wrote a few scripts to parse out the callsign info published by the FCC. I wrote a weighting algorithm for calculating the total number of dits and dahs in the morse code version of each callsign and sorted them by that weight. Interestingly the shortest callsigns in morse code terms (10 binary characters) that are currently available are the 5 character types in the General/Technician class level. Though there are only 7 of them as I post this!

Also a surprising number of A*** signs are available, around 1500 4 letter Extra class callsigns in total.

I decided to make a job of it and I added filtering so that the rules published by the FCC for no-no callsigns were respected, further reducing the junk level, and made a nice web interface for people to download them with.

Since it took me some work to set up I am charging a small fee for the service which can be paid by Paypal, after which you can immediately download the information. The callsign lists will be updated automatically every week.

You can try it out here:
http://www.geniusweb.com/callsigns/order.php

After finishing the program I noticed that I had made a number of mistakes in my own vanity application since I used a primitive version of this for my own purposes before adding any of the filtering that’s necessary to toss out signs I’m not qualified for. Still it looks like I have enough good ones in there to get something useful. Anyone downloading the polished lists will get just the right stuff and avoid the mistakes I made!

I too salute those who are always ready to deal with disaster:

http://www.kptv.com/weatheralert/14776224/detail.html

Today I passed my General exam, missing one question and then my Extra class exam missing 2. So I’m now able to operate on all ham bands and modes, and will soon be certified to volunteer to administer tests to new operators.

A 10 foot yagi design that delivers an impressive 16dbi gain at 440mhz. Fits perfectly into a 10′ PVC pipe that you can buy dirt cheap at any building supply store.

Recipe:

$3.00: 1 10′ PVC pipe, 1″ diameter for best support.
$7.00: 7 aluminum welding rods, 1/16″ x 36″ Go to a welding supply shop they sell them by the lb.
$2.00: SO-239 Connector
$1.00: Silicone sealant in a tube
$1.00: Hot glue stick
$2.00: Paint
$0.10: A scrap of coax for your balun

$16.10 or so for mine.

Construction:

Measure out all elements very very carefully down to the mm according to the plan below. I used a chalk line to then make a straight line down the middle and followed up by drilling the element holes. Use the tightest fit you can manage, use the right size bit for your elements. The best way to do this is to use a drill with a level bubble on the top so you can make sure all your elements are in line. You can always re-drill if you get any odd ones though.

Cut each element very carefully to the exact length, and feed them through. You should use some sort of box or brick to keep it suspended above ground to avoid bending the fragile aluminum elements.

Once the elements measure up evenly (same amount of aluminum rod sticking out each side) fix them in place with a generous dollop of hot glue, all around and out across the rods to get a good surface area binding. Or use silicone if you want to wait.

The folded dipole requires a little special attention to bend it around and get it just right. An ASCII illustration is included. On my antenna I aligned the center of the oval with the elements so that it looks symmetrical and that seems to be the way most builders make them also.

You’ll also need to make a balun to get the impedance down to 50 ohms. I simply used a scrap of coax that I strapped to the antenna. Here is a good website to tell you about making one for yourself: http://www.n-lemma.com/calcs/dipole/balun.htm

The software used to calculate this is described in the following output that I have modified to include a little extra info, and can be freely downloaded from many places online. Google is your friend on that.

Strapped it to my mast and I’m hitting far away repeaters that I never even could hear before. Highly recommended and a nice cheap weekend project.

VK5DJ's YAGI CALCULATOR

Yagi design frequency =444.00 MHz
Wavelength =675 mm
Elements using a non-metallic or separated boom
Director/reflector diam =2.50 mm
Radiator diam =2.50 mm

ELEMENT LENGTHS AND SPACING
Reflector
330 mm long at boom position = 30 mm

Radiator
Single dipole 319 mm tip to tip at boom posn =165 mm
Folded dipole 325 mm tip to tip at boom posn =165 mm

Dir	Length	Spaced	Boom position	Gain	Gain
(no.)	( mm )	( mm )	( mm )		(dBd)	(dBi)
1	300	51	216		5.3	7.4
2	297	122	337		6.8	8.9
3	294	145	482		8.0	10.2
4	291	169	651		9.0	11.2
5	289	189	840		9.9	12.0
6	287	203	1043		10.6	12.8
7	285	213	1256		11.3	13.4
8	283	223	1478		11.8	14.0
9	281	233	1711		12.3	14.5
10	279	243	1954		12.8	14.9
11	278	253	2208		13.2	15.3
12	276	260	2467		13.5	15.7
13	275	263	2731		13.9	16.0
14	274	267	2998		14.2	16.4

Director spacings are measured from the previous element
Tolerance for element lengths is +/- 2 mm

Boom position is the mounting point for each element as measured
from the rear of the boom and includes the 30 mm overhang.The total boom length is 3028 mm including two overhangs  (9.93ft)

The beam's estimated 3dB beamwidth is 31 deg

A half wave 4:1 balun uses 0.80 velocity factor RG-8 (foam PE)  and is 270 mm long plus leads
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A half wave 4:1 balun uses 0.66 velocity factor RG-8U (foam PE)  and is 223 mm long plus leads

Here are some construction details for a folded dipole

Measurements are taken from the inside of bends
Folded dipole length measured tip to tip = 325mm
Total rod length =669mm
Centre of rod=335mm		   FOLDED DIPOLE
Distance HI=GF=145mm		B========C========D
Distance HA=GE=165mm	       A(		   )E
Distance HB=GD=185mm		I=======H G=======F
Distance HC=GC=335mm                   (gap)         
Gap at HG=10mm
Bend diameter BI=DF=25mm

If the dipole is considered as a flat plane (see ARRL Antenna Handbook) then its resonant frequency is 427.9MHz and K is 0.929

Today I discovered the FLdigi program which is a swiss army knife of digital modes. Formerly I was resigned to running ham software only on Windows which was a depressing prospect. Now I look forward to using this along with Klog or Xlog to do some digital contesting!

I have a RigBlaster Plug and Play for keying and ptt control on my Icom IC-735 rig as well as a simple looking USB rig control cable that works perfectly well with hamlib.

I have so far managed to tune CW and watch Fldigi decode it successfully, and Fldigi can activate PTT on my rig but it seems it is designed to send an audio signal directly to the sound input on the rig rather than through a keyer like the RigBlaster. What I need to get it to do is to activate RTS for PTT and use DTR for keying CW instead. While a few searches on the related Yahoo groups for this software indicated that such support may exist I have not been able to find out how to activate it as yet.

I posed this riddle to Joe, a classmate of mine: “Last night I built a full wave 40 meter antenna. It cost me about $2 to build, has a 1:1 SWR, pulls in signal like nothing else I’ve tried and is virtually invisible.”

Being a new ham he didn’t guess, but some of the more experienced hams knew. I had lit up my rain gutter system.

I got the crazy idea yesterday that three sections of the perimeter of my house actually added up to just under 40 meters in length, so I went out and measured and found that sure enough, it was. An hour later I had electrically joined my gutters into a ~41 meter long (including the downspouts) U shaped “random wire” antenna.

I found that others around the net had done similar things and here are a few pointers I gathered on this. Of course, if you try this at home your installation is your own responsibility/liability so do your own homework first!

1. Make sure all metal to metal connections are sound. Gutters are often missing screws and any gaps will allow arcing of the transmission and thus broadband interference. This includes gaps where two sections are joined on long runs, I just drove some small screws through every joint.
2. Use an antenna tuner with a very good ground.
3. Don’t use it to transmit when it’s raining. The water will disrupt the signal and additionally if you transmit while it is wet you may have some serious electrical hazards.
4. Did I mention a good ground? Both the radio and antenna tuner should be connected to the ground by the shortest length of ground strap possible. If you can’t do a good ground, do not try this antenna.
5. Take measures to ensure nobody can touch the metal parts of the gutters when you are transmitting or they may be burned. One easy way to do this is to replace the metal downspouts with vinyl ones.

Another idea I had along this line since my house has gutters only on the longest sides of the rectangle is to use one gutter as a driven element and the other as a reflector or director. A whole-house 80 meter yagi might be possible though I would likely not get a strong directionality since the height of the gutters are only 1/8 wave high on that band. The gutter setup already seems to have a certain amount of north-south directionality though due to the U shape as it is, I worked and heard mainly stations south (TX) and north (Canada) last night. If I try the yagi idea I will talk about it here so stay tuned.

Update Jan 2008- I have ditched the gutter setup and opted for a long wire sloper instead after modeling the gutter on 4nec2. The rain gutter was so-so for local contacts but it was a serious cloud burner- all the signal went straight up instead of out and there was at least 13dbi of attenuation at any reasonable elevation level. The sloper is quite a bit better at least on computer models, will post about it when I have tuned it up.

Update Mar 2008- The sloper as I designed it was nearly useless in practice, it really needs a yagi or some sort of “hat” to work when top fed evidently. The rain gutters were actually better. I’ve since reallocated the rain gutters to perform as part of my radial system for my MFJ-1793 20/40/80 vertical however which beats all previous attempts as expected.

In the last few weeks I have tried a number of new things in Ham Radio.

Let’s start with power. I have a good old 12v 12A ATX power supply that I have converted for use with the ham radios, see my previous article for the details. One weakness that I noticed with this setup was that there was not enough current being supplied to my 100 watt HF rig; the lights would dim whenever it was putting out more than 75 watts or so. So this week I checked it over with a multimeter to make sure all of the yellow wires were connected to the same circuit and all the blacks to the same, then I just joined all of them into one big wire per color. After a quick test with the HF rig it was clear that there was enough power after all, it now dims almost imperceptibly indicating it could maybe use a few more amps but I don’t think it is suffering any.

I had previously tried hooking everything up to a 12v marine battery which supplied plenty of amps to the radios. However I didn’t want to deal with two problems related to that. First is keeping the battery topped off. I could pretty easily make a relay circuit that would kick in whenever the voltage dropped below a certain threshold. But the second problem is that the battery charger is loud, really loud. And I can’t stand a lot of loud whirring and beeping. So I reverted to using the computer PSU and I think it will handle the job fine. Here are a few photos of my setup now.

I bought what turned out to be a necessary piece of equipment for HF, an antenna tuner. I also thought it would be worthwhile to buy a nice one that includes a dummy load, an antenna switcher, and a built in power/SWR meter. So I chose the MFJ Deluxe Versatuner II. I have also picked up a VHF SWR/Watt meter that is very handy for my antenna building. My HF rig is an old Icom IC-735 which works very nicely, and my 2 meter/440 dual band radio is a Yaesu FT7800.

Neither of these radios is well supported under Linux for rig control or memory management. I’m hoping to get some time to learn more about this and write some software to allow using these with the computer. In that interest I have bought a Rigblaster PNP which is a device that uses your computer sound card as a TNC to get you on the digital modes. I have used it for some CW work but nothing serious yet since I have to wait for the next testing date to get my General (or if I’m lucky, Extra) class license.

In the antenna department I have constructed a Bobtail Beam. This replaces my Slim Jim 2 meter antenna. It has substantial gain and very tight directionality. I have mounted it atop my antenna mast with another antenna I recently constructed, a 440mhz yagi. The rotator is an old Radio Shack Archerotor that I picked up on ebay wire and all for $41. It works great. The bobtail has a very low SWR curve along 2m which is just great for getting me into some of those fringe stations I had trouble with before.

The same can’t be said for the yagi-uda which has a wildly bouncy SWR curve all across the 440 band. Unfortunately some of the frequencies I like to use are in the higher SWR areas. I’ve picked up an older edition of the ARRL Antenna book on Amazon for $10 and I’m going to study antenna theory as time permits and see if I can’t design a “flatter” yagi. Perhaps I just need to add a half dozen more elements!

It turns out that the FBI has been data mining middle eastern food stores to discover terrorists with the alleged assistance of the major credit card lords.

I imagine they were sorely disappointed when they discovered that their list of terrorists was full of gourmets, expat Israelis, and vegetarians along with plenty of good flag waving Arab-Americans.

Hit em where they eat. Yep. I would hope that they both get sued for painful amounts of money by some of the importers of these foods if this proves to be true.

It’s true. I, Matthew Steven, have solved the abortion issue with a compromise that should suit all parties, and no law needs to be drawn up to implement it.

If a member of the Roman Catholic Church has an abortion, then by church rules they should suffer the consequences. They should have to go to prison for murder.

But the rest of the people who do not believe that it is murder should not have to pay for it.

Therefore the answer is to have churches exercise the power to imprison their own members, but with a few stipulations that already exist in law.

First, should the member publicly renounce their faith and agree to permanently be expelled from the church community, they will no longer be under the church jurisdiction and shall be free to leave whatever punishment has been imposed on them by their congregation.

Second, no permanent harm may be done- no executions, no torture, no repeat of the Spanish Inquisition. The churches are only imprisoning voluntary prisoners and are not allowed to break any laws, period. Nor do they have the authority of the state to execute people. The state will have the right to inspect these prisons at any time.

Finally of course the churches shall have to pay for their prisons on their own. Since their prisoners are only there for breaking church law but not national law, the rest of the nation who may not agree with the criminality of the act should not have to pay for it.

Today I fielded a phone call from who had what sounded like a loud video game blasting in the background over a modem speed Skype-quality phone line as he tried to explain his problem. Evidently, after several attempts to speak clearly, he managed to communicate that he had broken his video upload site software and wanted it fixed. No, wait, he said “some junior admin” had broken it. I bet I know who the junior admin was.

So to start out with he wanted to pay me with Paypal. Paypal charges the highest fees of any payment provider I have at my disposal, but I agree, and in comes an unverified, uncleared payment from him. I tell him I can’t accept the payment, and he will have to use a credit card or a cleared valid payment or have to wait 3-5 days for it to clear. After much grumbling and huffing he gets a card number to me and somewhat to my surprise it authorizes for the fee for one hour’s work. I never charge until after the job is finished to the customer’s satisfaction, so it was just authorized and it turns out never captured.

Next he sends me login details for about 6 sites and no root access to fix system problems, though the likely main issues with the sites were according to him related to unavailable system components or “bad config paths” So this inevitably leads to my spelling out unix commands to this guy over a crappy Skype phone line for over a half hour. He said he didn’t want to give me root without being able to “see what I was going to type first so I wouldn’t mess up his system” Isn’t it fun to work with new people who don’t know your abilities and say things that really make you cringe when you realize theirs?

Have you ever been to hell? I just have and it sounds like this: “yum -space- list -space- pipe -space- grep ….”

And of course imagine the typos introduced by this error prone communication method.

Finally I finished oh so painfully helping him get his system all straightened out and do an evaluation of all the external factors affecting his scripts to verify that it is correctly installed and I realize at that point that the best way to go would be to get the company who wrote the script involved as they may have seen the problem and have an easy fix for it.

Of course I probably should have done what he would have expected- been less than efficient and done the fixing myself, charging him for 4-6 hours of step by step debugging work on a very poorly written php code that could presumably easily been fixed in a half hour by its original author who has likely seen the problem 10 times already and probably had a patch laying around for it.

At this point he must have seen a way out of paying his bill, and demands his money back on the idea that I was declaring defeat. Because I tried to save him some time I must be incompetent. Of course, I had told him at least 3 times already that I never charged him anything in the first place, but he is very excited to get his nonexistent charge refunded and get some expert help which he sure valued while it was taking place- for free.

I think in the end it is fortunate that I got to sever my “relationship” with this clown with only wasting two hours on him. It’s fortunate that I only encounter one or so like him per year, but I would really like to cut down all the same.

I think next time junior admin calls me with America’s Army blasting in the background over a Skype line I’ll just suddenly have a very full schedule for about the next 10 months. After all, I honestly do.

Just recently I changed from a house-mount mast consisting of 3 telescoping galvanized steel tubes to using a $35 radio shack rooftop tripod with one 3/4″ 10′ heavy galvanized pipe for mounting the antennas on. This gives me much greater stability and about 10 feet of extra height over the old method. I can fairly easily just pop out the mast from the tripod to bring my 2m slim jim antenna and my 10/11m 1/4 wave down onto the roof for repairs.

After completing the move I discovered water in my 2 meter coax line. Fortunately it all dripped away from my radio rather than into my radio. To remedy that I got a lot of electrical tape and wrapped the connector on the slim jim which was formerly just covered with a layer of silicone, evidently it didn’t seal up very well.

To get the water out of the coax I am using a shop vac. Since the point at which my feedline enters the house is the lowest point of the line, all of the water will hopefully run out. I am running the vac every 1/2 hour or so to let any excess water wick down to the dry area at the bottom, and I’ll keep doing so until it vacuums dry. In the end this cable will have to be replaced, but if I can get it dry enough to operate it will get me by for a few weeks.

The SWR of the HF antenna jumped from 1.7:1 to 3 when I moved it. I suspect that the base of the Antron A-99 is electrically connected to the external braid of the coax and that previously it was using the metal mast as the lower resonating half of a dipole. The lower pole section however should have been well longer than the radiator so it would seem unlikely that this had any major resonance unless it added up to a particular fraction of 10 meters. I haven’t come up with any more satisfying explanation however and even after adding a few turns of coil as a sort of balun the SWR is no lower than 2.3:1. I think I may just measure the pole it used to be mounted on later today to determine if it was a likely resonator or not. In any case I have bought a somewhat cheap ZMF-949E antenna tuner to deal with this issue and an upcoming antenna project.

I grounded the tripod using some old 75 ohm coax that I didn’t have any other use for, but after talking to KB0MGQ I found out that that may be a bad idea since the 75 ohm coax will resist the AC components of a lightning strike due to the inductance even with the center connected to the braid, and it may possibly resist it more than the 50 ohm cable running to my radios. Well my radios are currently on an ungrounded circuit so there’s no quick way to ground via that path, but I realize what a bad situation that is and I have ordered 50″ of ground strap which I will soon use to properly ground both the antenna mast and my radios.

For hams who don’t want to actually weld ground straps as is often recommended, I came up with another idea of using hose clamps to attach them. The clamps can be had at your local hardware store for around $1 and will let you tightly bind the ground strap to both sides. I also use hose clamps to mount smaller antennas.

After swinging around the tripod a few times to see how much force it could handle I determined that I don’t yet need to run any guy wires to support the structure. I plan to add a good sized yagi or cubical quad to the mast in the future however so that may change. I positioned the tripod where I should have 3 solid points from which to anchor it when the time comes.

The terrorists won because we overreacted just like they knew we would.

In the United States, how many people have been killed per year by terrorism? Far fewer than have been killed by the rarest diseases which we spend comparatively nothing on. Far less than the suicides brought on by the stress of living under a constant invisible threat. Very few people. 911 was just Big and In Your Face because it was on TV and you could see the pain and distress of these poor souls right in your living room over and over and over and over again.

But think about this before you call me a cold old crotchet. If we didn’t react any more strongly to 911 than we do to all of these faceless suicides and other senseless fatalities what motivation would there be for these terrorists to proceed with planning more attacks? Simply none. By simply acknowledging the suffering of the victims and moving on we would shown the wisdom that would have stopped the onslaught.

Bin Laden said he would bankrupt us. We let him do that. Look at the state of the dollar, it’s on the toilet paper spiral due to our ballooning debts to fight a war that was never appropriate to begin in the first place.

Let’s dispel one big myth that seems to have set hold in the fear infested society of today’s America. Terrorists are not irrational people. Even suicide bombers have reasons. In Afghanistan at least the majority of them are afflicted by a terminal illness and they just want to make some money for their families before they die.

While the official pictures given out by the government of the suspected Infamous 911 19 seem to contain persons still living, it is pretty safe to say that those who participated did not feel they had much life left to live.

By continuing to feed the Hollywood style media that exploits this type of tragedy we have worked ourselves into a frenzy that has spiraled out of control. It’s time to wake up people.

Elect someone with some sense and some spine.

My personal choice is Kucinich as he is the person with more guts and sense that I have seen in politics for a long time.

They’re Radio Moscow.

My friend Kevin Anderson’s brother Zach is the bass player. But that doesn’t make them rock any less. Check it out if you like blues based rock and roll.

It’s a healthy obsession, tuning your system for maximum power savings. I have been doing that for about the last 5 years and I have never encountered anything like my current rig.

After doing some reading about the supposedly remarkable power/performance of the new Intel Core processors I recently offloaded a lot of power hungry AMD computers that generated a lot of heat if not noise and exchanged them all for a new Intel Core Duo system.

This means in my case about 3x the performance at only 60-75% of the power. Seriously these Core Duo systems with onboard video are amazing.

My old single cpu AMD system idled at 80 watts. The new dual core system does 57 watts.

I needed dual screens, and the Shuttle SG31 G2-BK provides two video out jacks. The onboard video controller permits extending your desktop across two monitors which is how I work- one IDE screen and one everything else. This is a huge power savings having such a video system built into the motherboard, and it isn’t that short on 3d capabilities either if you are into high end games which these days I’m not.

Performance on compiling code is incredibly good with my E6400 CPU with 4MB of L2 Cache. I never have seen a cache of that size on a CPU and that was the selling point, and it turns out to have been a great choice and a very fair price.

I just built a Slim Jim 2m / 70cm antenna that is looking like it will stay below 1.3:1 SWR on 2m and below 1.7 on 70cm. It took a propane/oxygen torch, some tin solder and flux, and one 10′ section of 1/2″ copper pipe along with elbows and a T for mounting. One SO-239 connector with 18 awg solid copper wire provide an adjustable tuner at least until I get the sweet spot when I will solder them down and add some waterproofing.

I have been working on setting up my ham shack, and one problem was dealing with the big deep cycle 12v battery that I have been using to power my radio. Mainly how to keep a charge on it.

I have since decided to ditch the battery as a main power source altogether after I got the idea that I should just use an old computer power supply that I have laying around here. It is a switching, regulated supply capable of delivering at least 12 amps at 12v which is perfect for my current radio setup.

Since it is an ATX supply, I had to join the green wire to its neighboring black wire on the motherboard interface to have it remain on full time. My supply also has an on-off switch on the back which I will use instead of the soft-on as there is some power drain otherwise.

I pulled the yellow (+12v) wire and black wire(gnd) out of the pentium 4 supplementary power connector and attached a 12v->12v computerized battery charger which will keep the backup battery topped up in the best way possible.

I can now simply attach my radio to a free black/yellow on the power supply directly. They detach easily from the hard drive connectors also by pulling them out of the plastic.

I am planning to add a dpdt switch or possibly a relay to permit easy switching of my radios to backup power later on.

Here is a nice overview of using an atx supply for your non computer power needs.

And a nice picture of my current setup:

4-5 months ago I was stumbling around the net aimlessly when I ran across an article about an herb called Bacopa that was supposed to increase cognitive function as well as suppress stress related anxiety. Though I am usually very skeptical about such claims as it is not known to have any negative effects I ordered a few bottles to give it a try.

In short it works very well for high brain activity tasks like computer programming. My level of focus is far higher than usual when I have taken a standard dose and I feel relaxed as I work as well. None of the shoulder cramps or nervous muscle contractions that I get when I consume a lot of caffeine. I never have liked caffeine much, but I have relied on it to keep my brain awake when sleep or stress have kept me from working at 100% in the past.

I haven’t had any caffeine for months now, instead taking a few bacopa tablets whenever I am feeling too tired or unfocused to do quality programming work, and I am back in the zone in no time.

I highly recommend this mild herbal brain booster! You can buy it from any reputable herb supplier online and possibly in some health food stores though I have yet to see any in my local store.

Lets start at the start- I was 12 years old and I was fascinated by the multifaceted dice and the wild imaginings of my friend’s Dungeons and Dragons game. Adding to the fun was the fact that my mother was convinced by the mid-80’s hysteria of satanism that the D&D Game would land me in hell. I ask you, what tastes so sweet as a pleasure denied!

So naturally I played it whenever I could get away with it. I never had my own dice until later on and it was a fugitive activity that gave me a little taste of freedom and rebellion from my stifling home environment.

After I grew up I had mostly abandoned such games for more “grown up” activities especially as D&D had lost its forbidden nature in the liberation of my adulthood. Until I saw Mark playing Everquest on his computer. “Wow, I said, this is just like D&D but it requires no imagination nor dice!”

I had to try it. I was hooked like a fish in a barrel. So two years later I converted this gambling addiction over to World of Warcraft which had an even more idiot-friendly interface and plenty of extra little min/max features that gave us all the “edge” against the virtual goblin.

So what about these games appealed to me? I think at first it was the easy rewards and cheesy advancements that gave me new abilities and a sense that I was achieving something. After I had achieved everything possible, I reached that “now what” funk and started achieving whatever I could with another type of character. Then when that was exhausted, at which point I was a complete expert in the game, I started playing against other players. When that happened I realized that I was a hamster on a wheel and that the cheese would always fill my nose but would never land in my mouth without making a full time job of this game.

I drew the line there. I have a job, and whenever something I do in my free time even approaches interfering with my work or family (which I had become married well into my WoW phase) I have to stop it. So I did.

What got me off it permanently was mainly the realization that it was no different from playing online poker. The rewards were randomized. The only way to increase your odds was to play a lot more. I was turning into one of those sad old women who sit all day at the nickel slots jerking the lever waiting for that big exciting $100 jackpot. And perhaps like her, I was often edgy and tense because of it.

But that’s not to say I have eliminated all games. I do still enjoy playing Pharaoh, the best city building game I have yet discovered. It’s also a game that demands no particular time investment and can be saved and shut off in seconds without consequences.

But since I quit my gambling games I have rediscovered huge tracts of time in my life that were formerly completely absorbed by the WoWie monster. I have read many books, learned some Arabic, reorganized my house, fixed the air leaks in the windows for the winter, become a licensed ham, made my wife happy, successfully raised a big garden, made my dog happier, learned more about electronics, learned new computer programming languages, developed new friendships, volunteered in the community, and done a lot of other useful things that make me feel far better than mindlessly jerking the machine could ever achieve.

In September I decided to enroll in another round of part-time university study as my schedule seemed to permit, and I placed myself in “Software Design Methodologies” or Coms 309. Pretty swiftly I ended up with a team and a mission: to design a software for tracking weather balloon flights done by Iowa State’s SSCL lab. The team consists of Joe who works at the lab and had the idea, Adam, Bader and myself.

The software needs to take information gathered over APRS (automatic position reporting system) from the high altitude balloon and present it to a flight manager as well as a recovery team who will be chasing it. It needs to handle prediction of where the balloon is likely to go next so that the recovery team doesn’t waste too much gas tracking it, store the data from the entire flight for later review, and a whole slew of other requirements.

The class is centered around model driven development. Being more of a natural at developing software off the cuff it has been a big adjustment for me to slow down and look at the problems involved and define them carefully. The main thing I want to get out of the class is to get a real understanding of how teams work together most effectively, and having a clear model using an SRS, DFD, formal use cases, etc are new to me and obviously very useful information. This will change the way I approach software development projects for clients and probably result in my being able to solicit more interesting jobs.

My former approach was simply to jump directly to use cases and feature lists, make an estimate and present that to the client. This works just fine for smaller projects. When you have a team however, or a client who is more risk averse, you can’t do that without creating potential areas of confusion and insecurity. Modeling ensures that your client has exactly the same understanding of the project that you do. Nothing is worse than wasting developer time.

I’ll post again about the specifics of the project and the end result closer to the end of the semester in December. There are a number of unexpected problems that I have to overcome in terms of management of the project and I will write about them in more detail when the job is done.

Just a recipe for dual head on Xorg/Linux with the GMA 3100 included with my G31 chipset in case I forget.

1) Obtain “intel” xorg driver version 2.1.1 or later. Build/install.
2) Configure i915 kernel driver, load
3) Configure xorg with the following unusual parts: Monitor Identifiers should match these options under the video card Device block.

Code:

One monitor should have an

Code:

Finally, under screens you should use a Virtual parameter to tell the driver to allocate the appropriate buffer size.

Code:

One caveat- If your “virtual” desktop extends past 2048x2048 you can’t use DRI yet. Research indicates that this is a hardware limitation of the older chipsets only and should be overcome soon, but still the driver should be able to map “top to left” in any case, though it doesn’t yet. So if you want DRI you have to have vertically stacked monitors for now which is just not intuitive.

See also Wikipedia on GMA and Intel / Linux Docs for these chips.

Today I passed my Technician class Amateur Radio exam, qualifying me for a license to transmit on a number of frequencies and get more involved in an area that has long interested me. I tried the General class exam too and came within a few points of passing it, but I will have to try again in a few months after some study.

I earned a few dollars when I was a kid installing antennas, fixing minor problems with radios, and helping people in the Citizen’s Band community.

I even tracked down a guy who enjoyed antagonizing other folks on the air once by putting my magnet mount antenna on the back bumper of my car to make it directional and driving the car around while he chattered away. My hunt took me out of town, and soon I verified that he was living in a little “suburb” area and I pulled up in front of his house, and asked him to look outside. He was very surprised, but invited me in to see his rig. I was a little hesitant, but this older gentleman turned out to be a pretty decent guy who was just lonely and living with his sick mother and we enjoyed talking about radios for awhile as he smoked an aromatic pipe of Captain Black. He said I would make a good ham someday in parting, since I was clever enough to use my car in this way.

It’s a great way to make new friends, radio, and I look forward to getting back on the air.

On the occasions that I am called upon to connect someone’s shopping cart to a payment provider I always have to go to the payment provider, download their API document, read pretty much the whole thing to learn how they pass information around, and then go into implementation.

I think it is high time that all of the “express checkout” providers as well as the “direct connect” merchant gateways get together and publish common standards for their checkout processes just as the w3c does for web pages.

After all, 90% of the calls include the same style of information, and the flow of payments is nearly always the same.

1- Encode cart info into XML or a query string
2- Feed to gateway
3- Get answer, parse for conditions
4- Process on cart

With the new “express checkout” types (Google Checkout and Paypal are all that I have worked on) the flow is similar though more information comes back in the responses.

Were they all using a common protocol this would save Visa / Mastercard / Discover etc merchants a lot of money paying for all of the extra code in their sites to handle the diverse protocols involved.

“But Matt, wouldn’t all of this efficiency cut into your bottom line?” you might ask. It might, but at least my customers would have some funds to spend on other more directly profitable features and enhancements. I’ve never been afraid of “solving my way out of a job” because there’s always a bigger and better problem out there waiting for a solution.

My days spent in those little streams of Story City are some of the fondest memories I have. But even in that little stretch of watery paradise the Great Dark Tunnel was always threatening with the gurgling calls of drowning children.

I started my maritime adventures catching crawdads with my little friend Aaron in his back yard section of the crick. I’m not sure who gave us the idea but I now suspect somebody in the nearby adult world wanted some free fishing bait. We spent many a muddy afternoon in those waters in our first few years of school.

After all, there was really nothing else. We had a crick or a fairly spartan playground at the elementary school by today’s standards, a swimming pool during the hottest days of the summer and bicycles. We all had many friends though. Ryan, Travis, and Donald were all in the neighborhood, along with Alicia whos parent’s eggplants I once used as short lived basketballs and the crazy kid who once threatened us with a stabbing if we didn’t get off his sidewalk.

The crick was a place of adventure for most of us. We all knew that it could sweep us up whenever God told it to and carry us off to the Skunk River to be drowned. What greater thrill could it be then to stand in the water and defy nature in those years where our little selves could deny no authority of any kind!

We would launch small armadas of paper boats down the gentle currents, following their progress and watching them sink on the slightest of rapids.

If we were really lucky we could follow our well made paper boats all the way to the end of the earth, at the Great Dark Tunnel. This monstrosity was a gaping mouth in the side of a wall of earth much taller than any of us at the time, into which we could peer and see only blackness and shadows. Nothing that entered it ever escaped. It was certain that if God did stir up the waters, this would be the last place we would ever see the light of day.

So we decided that the solution to the menace of the Great Dark Tunnel was to dam the crick and save any errant soul, or paper boat at least, from being sucked down into its serrated maw.

It was not a small project. We had practiced damming the crick in smaller areas many times before, with some temporary success. But this was big.

We came to the park every afternoon and worked the edges of the crick finding the largest stones, carrying them down to a shallower area by the Great Dark Tunnel, stacking them up in a U shape because somebody had seen a picture of the hoover dam and it looked like that. Of course, their memory was a little skewed and we had built the dam inverted. But that was no matter, it still began to grow and water started to run over and through the big rocks, silt filling them in as it went.

After many afternoons of rock hauling and careful engineering meetings, finally the reservoir we had created in the crick was deeper than we were tall. We had done it, we had stopped most of the flow of the crick into the Great Dark Tunnel. It seemed to sneer at us from its drying mouth, but we then sneered back as the conquerors that we were. Lords of the Elements.

We naturally slapped the dirt off our hands, hopped on our bikes and went home to our dinners most satisfied with our victory against the tides of God and nature.

The next morning it was in the paper. “City park becomes City Lake,” was the headline more or less.

Other than to a hopefully forgiving God in our prayers at night, we never mentioned it again.

When I was a long haired kid in 1994 or so, I had one run-in with the law that quickly adjusted my impression of “the land of the free” and landed me in a big room with a half dozen drunks in varying states eying me behind bars.

Two uniformed thugs from DPS accosted me while I was smoking a rare cigarette on the terrace of the Iowa State University Memorial Union. I was 19 years old but the officers demanded some ID. I told them I was not breaking any law and that I thought the police needed a warrant or probable cause to interfere with a citizen who was no danger to others. After some disagreement on that point, I acquiesced to get my ID from my nearby car and walked with the officers hands digging into each of my arms with an angry grip toward the staircase down to my car. As I turned to step down the first stair, one officer grabbed my hair and slammed my head down onto the concrete. The other jumped on me and I felt blows about my body for what seemed like a very long time. I was far too shocked to fight back but the officers kept after me.

Finally they must have burned up their fuel and they stuck cuffs on me and dragged me to their waiting patrol car. I shouted to my companions that I would be back in no time and that they should wait for me, not realizing what was in store for me.

I think I must have had my head hit fairly solidly because I remember feeling somewhat dizzy and everything around me seemed surreal. I was kept in the ISU Campus DPS office for awhile, and then I was transported to the Ames City Jail.

The next thing I knew I was having my fingerprints taken at the check-in of drunk and disorderly hotel, and thrown in with the drunks.

I remember very well that they had a camera pointed at the only urinal, which was just across the room from the series of green inch-thin mattresses on concrete that served as “sleep it off” beds. There were huge globs of spit all over the floor and the inhabitants all appeared to be extremely inebriated and rough looking.

By this time I was unable to keep my eyes open from all the stress of the event and I slept fitfully until morning.

I was then cuffed and dragged out with a number of drunks, drug users, and a few felons of various types to wait in line to plea to the judge.

“How do you plead to the offense of ‘Interfering with official acts’ Mr. Steven?” said the judge. “Not guilty, your honor”

So that must be what they charge people with that didn’t break the law I thought. How convenient.

Needless to say, I had my day in court and thanks to a good friend who was a witness to the whole affair out on the Memorial Union terrace it was a quick not-guilty result and the officers were scolded for their misbehavior and I was told that I should be more respectful to law enforcement.

I didn’t really understand the concept of respecting the armed thugs that had so mishandled me, but I did understand the fear that I learned from the experience.

So back to the present.

I related this experience to President Geofferey of ISU when he was taking public comments on the arming of campus security officers. He was sympathetic but my story didn’t dissuade him from going through with adding guns to the arse nal.

And when I watched the young man at the University of Florida getting electrocuted after he was already under the boots of 5-6 officers it did remind me of this experience in my life. I can only imagine the fun those two who assaulted me would have had with a Taser.

So last week I emailed two officers, one the head of the campus DPS and one the Chief of Police for Ames. I requested their “Use of Force” policy documents and asked that they be published on their respective websites. What I got surprised me.

The DPS head, Jerry Stewart, responded with a very professional use of force document that was very good in terms of thoroughness and clarity.

Chief Cychosz of Ames on the other hand was a bit defensive about answering this request, I think he may have been a little unsure of my motivations for asking so I summed up my history as recounted here and he then sent me a document on the APD’s policy for the use of the Taser. On follow-up when I requested a more general use of force document he provided it.

It is still my hope that these men of public responsibility will step up and commit to making their rules public on their web sites. I think that it is important for them to make a strong effort to show that they are serious about protecting the people from officers who misuse their power.

Especially young people who all too often are singled out as easy targets for aggressive police because of their naivety and usually their lack of financial resources to defend against legal action.