Tag Archives: tech

iStumbler tech support

A few days ago, I wrote something mentioning iStumbler, and a problem that I had with it. Actually, to be honest, I really didn’t consider it a problem. It was crashing when there were too many APs. But the thing is, I’ve had lots of network sniffer software crap out when there was too much network traffic. To me, it seemed like the way things work.

Less than 3 hours later, the lead developer of iStumbler posted a response, asking for crash logs.

3 hours after that, I got another email from him letting me know that the bug had been identified and fixed, and the new version of iStumbler will contain the fix.

I’ve seldom been quote so impressed with the tech support cycle of a project – with a bug fixed within 6 hours of reporting it, and I didn’t even actually have to report it. This software rocks, and the dev team, and Alf in particular, is simply amazing. We’ll be sending in our subscription soon. You should too.

Internet History Archive

Sure, the website isn’t much yet, but the Internet History Archive project seems like a very important thing. Focusing first on the period between 1980 and 1994, this is a serious history project focused on preserving the history of the development of the internet in actual historical documents. This includes oral history – interviewing the folks who were actually involved – and obtaining and preserving the documents from those days. Eventually, it will expand to other time periods.

I know that some of you folks who read this were there, and were important in the decisions that were made – if not in that period, at least in the “early web” period that immediately followed it. I encourage you to contact the folks there and offer your services. Every little bit counts.

The internet and the web are among the most significant scientific developments of the 20th century, and it is important to preserve the history of it for posterity.

Too much wireless


There are so many wireless networks here that I can’t join any of them, and it’s repeatedly crashing iStumbler. Of course, this is education, so it’s not a big surprise that people can’t cooperate and communicate, is it?

CALEA

I’m at Educause ’05 which is the technology in higher education conference. I’m in a session where CALEA is being discussed. Seems that I was completely unaware of this. The notion is that “communications carriers” (whatever that means) need to make it easy for “law enforcement” (whatever that means) to intercept communication (whatever that means) for law enforcement purposes (whatever that means).

By the way, nobody seems ot know what that means. You have 18 months to become compliant, but nobody is willing to define what contsitutes being compliant. So hurry up and comply.

It might be worth your time to read the bill and tell your Congress Critter what you think about it.

Redundant Array of Independent Coffee Machines (RAICM)

After long, arduous hours of research:”(Which is to say, I came in a half-hour early on Friday)”: the crack:”(Or, possibly, on crack)”: research team at the Asbury College office of Information Services has assembled a fully funcioning Redundant Array of Independent Coffee Machines (RAICM).

[Complete photo gallery here]

Constructed of 6 coffee machines, and one emergency backup unit, the RAICM array is able to churn out more than 50 gallons of coffee an hour. The machines are interconnected via CAT5 (CAT stands for Columbia, Antigua, Tanzania), through a 10/100 MBPS switch, communicating by RCP (Remote Coffee Protocol). Each coffee machine was retrofited with one PCI (Percolation Control Interface) slot into which we could wedge an ethernet card for this purpose. The smallest coffee maker was too small to get the PCI card into it, so it was forced to communicate over PCP (Parallel Coffee Protocol).

On the cluster there is also a wireless access point, so that coffee may be obtained wirelessly. We recommend the use of SCP (Secure Coffee Protocol) for this type of access, to prevent injection attacks, which the FDA may well consider illegal.

Controlling the entire array is the CPU (Central Percolation Unit) which was constructed from a very elderly Toshiba Satellite laptop, sporting a 386 processor and a whopping 4MB of RAM. From this unit, the coffee pots can be monitored, coordinated, and scheduled. Alas, for our demo, we had a hard drive failure, and the CPU wouldn’t boot. We suspect that it had consumed Juan cup of coffee too many. After all, it was, by then, pretty latte in the morning.

However, we can let you in on a few little secrets about the CPU and how it works. All of the controlling software is, of course, written in Java. The scheduling engine, rather than using cron, is done via a Java Script. And communication between the CPU and the various members of the array is done exclusively via Net Beans. The user interface that was designed relies heavily on the CSS standard (Cream, Sugar, Stir).

Several of the units, as you can see in the pictures, had updated processors installed for this experiment. And we even installed two hard drives on the array, so that it can store preferences for each coffee maker. These drives are, of course, IDE drives (If Decaf, Eject). We did experiment briefly with a CD drive (Caffienated/Decaffienated) but found that most of our engineers were so hopped up that they were spinning faster than the disks. Note also that several of our colleagues experimented with DASD (Decaf And Semi-Decaf) but we think that’s just silly.

Several of the coffee makers are directly interconnected to provide full failover in the event that someone discovers one of the coffee makers to have run out before they get their third cup.

The conclusions of our experiments are as follows:

1) Geeks with too much time on their hands are likely to spend it doing very silly things.
2) Certain persons should not be entrusted with delicate equipment
3) When something stops working, you probably should go ahead and throw it away, even though, to quote one of our esteemed colleagues, “We might could fix it some day!”
4) No matter how fine the equipment is that you give people, some folks will still insist on drinking bad coffee.

Other gratuitous remarks

* It is important that you have good filters in place.
* Notice that the CPU has a cereal interface
* This picture illustrates the cafe press
* Always choose the right tools when performing case modifications
* This series of pictures illustrates the well-known “blinking 12” problem
* Always wear appropriate safety gear
* This picture shows two of the non-volatile off-site backup storage units.

Home automation

On the home automation front, I now have the following working.

When I walk into my bathroom, it turns on the light. However, if it is earlier than 6:30am, or later than 9:30 pm, the lights turn on at half intensity. Kinda nifty.

The laundry room and walk-in closet have cheaper Lowes-variety motion sensor lights, since in there I always either want the light on or off, and I want it to go off as soon as I leave.

The living room light turns on and off (and dims and brightens) by buttons on the television remote control.

And my halloween lights (orange christmas lights) turn on and off every time someone visits this website, or directly accesses http://wooga.drbacchus.com/x.cgi. Sure, this last isn’t very practical, but it makes me giggle.

Oh, yeah, and I have a little key-fob-style remote control by my bed that lets me turn on or off any of the lights in the room.

Next, I’m saving up for the x10 thermostat – slightly more practical, and very high geek factor. However, I think I’ve probably spent enough on this particular geeky hobby, at least until I get another royalty check. 😉

eBags Router Wheeled Laptop Backpack

After much indecision, I just orderred the eBags Router Wheeled Laptop Backpack. No. I didn’t get it in Pink.

Last year at ApacheCon US, speakers got a wheeled laptop backback. It was *very* nice, but very quickly started to fall apart, and has recently reached the point where I’m always certain that something is going to fall out and get lost.

Yes, it is pricey, but as much as I have been travelling this year, and anticipate travelling next year, I need something that will stand up to all the abuse I dish out, and not fall apart. And it needs wheels. The reviews of this one were very positive, so I have high hopes that I haven’t made a mistake.

I fully expect to be very hard on it, and we’ll see how well it holds up. The last one lasted not quite a year. I hope this one lasts two or three years at least.

The week in review

It’s been a whirlwind of a week in the last 4 days. Two conferences and about 600 miles.

On Wednesday evening, we (Paul, Bert, Brett, Rick and me) drove up to Cincy for the Kentucky Higher Education Computing Conference. Good stuff there, as recorded on the KHECC blog.

On Friday afternoon, we drove back home. I got home, unpacked, packed, and left for Ohio LinuxFest. It’s the third year they’ve done it, and it was twice the size of last year. There were just over 700 people there, and some fantastic presentations. My talk on mod_rewrite was very well attended and well received. I was pleased with how it went, and now have yet more incentive to finally finish writing my book.

I stayed with Skippy, which was in itself a great experience. His kids are delightful, his house charming, and his wife wonderful and hospitable. Thank you so much for opening your home to me. I especially enjoyed jumping on the trampoline with the girls, and Skippy has promised to post photos somewhere. 🙂

On Saturday morning, we loaded up some PCs and monitors, and took them to the conference facility. These were from FreeGeek Columbus, which recycles used PCs and other hardware.

Novell had a big presence, giving a significant number of the talks, and were also a major sponsor. Thanks, Novell.

At lunch, we went to Bucco di Beppo. I’ll post photos later today or tomorrow, once I get some other stuff dune. There were perhaps 16 people there, and it was a lot of fun, although not as rowdy as last year. We had the pope room, which is quite an experience.

I stayed another night at Skippy’s house and had breakfast with the family in the morning at a area restaurant, which was positively wonderful, although their pancakes were the size of garbage can lids, and I wasn’t able to finish the second one.

We just arrived back home a little while ago, and I haven’t yet unpacked. I have a lot of writing I need to catch up on, but I’d really much rather take a nap.

OLF 2005

I’m at Ohio LinuxFest. Although the word was that there would be no intarweb here, never underestimate the resourcefulness of geeks in large groups. Geeks perceive lack of internet access as damage, and route around it. I think the 1000 of us are using the internet across one person’s cell phone. Amazing.