Bonjour/Zeroconf fun on Linux

I have a headless Fedora linux box that plugs in to my home network and gets an IP address from DHCP.

To find it I've been pinging the broadcast address, in my case 172.16.1.255, and then trying to ssh to each of the IPs that answer until I find it. Very agricultural. Seems like a great reason to use Zeroconf.

To advertise the sshd service, put this in /etc/avahi/services/ssh.service:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" standalone=\'no\'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM \"avahi-service.dtd\">
<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->

<service-group>

<name replace-wildcards=\"yes\">ssh on %h</name>

<service>
<type>_ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>

</service-group>

Here's another example showing how to include the path in the http url:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" standalone=\'no\'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM \"avahi-service.dtd\">
<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=\"yes\">myservice on %h</name>
<service>
<type>_http._tcp</type>
<port>80</port>
<txt-record>path=/0/1/</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

It's a good idea to set the hostname to something reasonable in /etc/sysconfig/network and reboot.

As root:

# chkconfig --level 35 avahi-daemon on
# service avahi-daemon start

Now you can Command-Shift-K in the MacOS Terminal to browse for the sshd service.

Even better, you can use Chicken of the VNC client to browse for a VNC desktop by putting this in /etc/rc.local

# start vnc for my username at boot
su -l username -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1200x900"

(Replace username with YOUR username).

As you, run vncpasswd and set a password. You probably want to edit ~/.vnc/xstartup to uncomment the two lines that give you the full gnome desktop. Reboot.

Now run Chicken of the VNC, do an "Open Connection..." and you'll see the host in the list. Mine comes up as Display 1, your's might be different.

I wish this stuff was just on by default.

Winning the war on tourists

My 14 hour flight arrived at 6:20am on Monday morning at Sydney International airport.

I got to a taxi at 8am. It's not the time that bothers me, it's all the other little things that added up to make it a stressful, confusing, and frustrating experience for me; and I dread to think how it was for the poor folks who don't speak English.

Running the gauntlet of customs, baggage and quarantine is a horrific experience.

Here's my suggestions for how to make it a better experience for the newly arrived:

* Have "fair queues" (where there is a single queue entrance and at the end people fan out to be served) everywhere.
* At the entrance to each queue station a person who checks that people are joining the right queue and have the documents and forms required when they are served.
* If the baggage conveyer fills up (because of the backlog at immigration) have someone take bags off rather than stopping the conveyer and holding up those who are waiting.
* Put a "stand behind this line" around the baggage conveyer so people stand back until they see their bag. This works really well in Japan.
* Have one person who's job is to enhance the experience for travelers through the whole process. If there is such a role, have them contact me or sack them. (Yesterday, in the US where they are on threat level orange, we had a fairly rigorous security process but it was clearly explained, fair and queue time was being actively measured).
* Signs in more languages are required.
* Make sure the TV monitors above queues are working (one was out this morning and people were being sent away for being in that wrong queue)

I felt bad for non-english speaking travelers who waited a long time to get to the end of the wrong queue and didn't have the form filled in. They were sent away with a wave. I also felt bad for me, who is cursed with always joining the slowest queue. Other's jump from line to line, trying to judge the complexity of processing the people or the slowness of the agent by appearance.

Clearly several flights arrive at once at this time, but it's no surprise. It didn't appear to be a staffing level problem, more an organisational problem. Individual staff seemed efficient and friendly, I have no complaint there.

The ultimate irony is just how fantastically efficient the duty free store is on the way in and the taxi rank on the way out.

iPhones on sale in Bellevue, WA

It was a friendly crowd, friendly staff, and friendly security guards.

Other shoppers stood on the level above watching the queue wait patiently as the big iPhone demo screens in the window counted down second by second.

Two minutes out the black paper was ripped from the windows.

As the final seconds counted down the staff formed an honour guard and clapped the eager shoppers as they filed in to plunk down their $500 (plus a two year contract).

This all went really smoothly, but I think the real genius, from a telco perspective, is that these folks just bought the box and then headed home to do all the churning and provisioning via iTunes.

Safari on a big touch screen might be great but having your customers do their contract sign up at home, rather than holding up staff in your store is brilliant. I'll buy one, but not until it does 3G. 

iPhone news story predictions

It's Wednesday, two days before launch, and I thought I'd predict the stories that we'll see over the coming weeks and months in advance.

iPhone dissassembled - yes, someone will pull one apart, within hours, and publish photos of the interior.

iPhone screen cracked - someone will sit on their phone and, yes, the glass screen will crack, duh.

iPhone screen scratched - despite the glass surface, folks will carry iPhones in a pocket full of keys or diamonds or something and it will scratch.

Complaints about AT&T's data network - this has started even before release by the reviewers. The iPhone makes people even more aware of how bad mobile carrier data services are.

How to unlock the iPhone's SIM lock - so you can use it with other carriers and take it abroad. I'm sure it's well secured but someone will figure this out. Will it be weeks or months?

Build and install your own software on iPhone - it's running MacOS X, it has a CPU with available tool-chains, people will figure out how to add software or turn on sshd. Hopefully Apple will release some decent tools at least for creating widgets.

Linux booting on iPhone - like on iPods, there's not much real point except to show that if you release hardware, someone will reverse engineer it enough to boot something else on it.

Replace the iPhone battery - it sounds like it worked great when new, but after a year of daily charge/discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity and folks will want to replace it. Just like iPods, third parties will step up and offer kits or services.

New iPhone features in software alone - but not as much as we might hope. Like the iPods, this is a blank canvas for software to run on, but while there will be a few updates, I think we'll find that we are buying a new model to get the new compelling features every two years.

iPhone versions with more memory - hardly worth mentioning, but yes, within a year there will be iPhones with 16Mb and 32Mb. Here is a platform for showing movies, there needs to be a device with 100Gb.

iTunes on iPhone - you want that song, and you want it now right? You have a billing account with your carrier and an iTunes account. You can buy the tune and download it on the spot. The download will be unbilled by the carrier.

Multi-touch iPod range - all the larger iPods will come out in multi-touch models with large screens. Perhaps the nano will remain as it's such a good form factor and is so physically strong. The big question is will these new iPods have wireless and will they therefore include Safari and email.

iPhone inspired phones from others - already Nokia has re-considered their objection to touch screen phones. Apple claimed to own "multi-touch" but then Microsoft showed their table top interface which seems to work the same way. Yes, we'll see phones that are all touch screen from the others as well.

Stories we won't see

I'm going out on a limb here...

Skype for iPhone - Not in the short term (two years) this would harm the carriers potentially fatally. Imagine if there was an iPhone with a VOIP client and a WiMax modem. You wouldn't need a phone carrier at all.

MMS for iPhone - People are saying it's a missed feature, but really do we need old broken MMS on modern devices. If Safari on the iPhone is the real internet, then email is real MMS. It's time MMS died. 

An apology.

Sorry to anyone who was searching for one of these predictions and came across this posting, thinking that their dream had come true.

Let me know what I've missed. I'll put dates next to the items as they come true. Should be fun.

Things I've learned in America

Obesity: It must be hard to not get huge here. A lot of people carry a lot of weight. The meal servings are enormous. I had a salad for lunch one day and it was so big I ate half and had the other half for dinner.

TV: Not much on. I feel we get the best of it in Australia anyhow. At night it's all ads for junk food and diet pills. Thank goodness for the Discovery and History channels.

Radio: Mostly "golden oldie" stations. Thank goodness for NPR (National Public Radio), it took me a while to find the local one as the bedside clock radio couldn't separate it from the stronger station next to it. Shops are full of satellite radio receivers which look cute. Analog radios in stores have a note on them saying that analog radio will be replaced with digital within a few years. I couldn't see any digital terrestrial receivers on sale.

It's a great pleasure to hear "A Prairie Home Companion" live on air instead of just the monolog excerpt we get via the podcast.

Walking: For my first few days here, I just tried to walk everywhere. It's really hard, the place is built for cars. In the end I hired the smallest car I could, a Ford Focus.

Driving: It's easier to drive here than in Sydney. The traffic is slower and the lanes are wider. There are excellent left turn lanes, clearly marked. You can turn right though a red light, which saves a lot of time. Even though I'm driving on the other side what what I'm used to I got used to it very quickly. Saw some great arrow traffic lights that change colour. I guess aside from the visual cue of the three lights we could just have one big LED light.

The pedestrian crossings are smart too, if the traffic lights are green your way and you push the crossing button the pedestrian light will go to walk if there is enough time to cross. Even better you often get a count down showing how many more seconds until the lights change so you can judge if it's safe to run.

Cars: are huge, as my colleague Ben pointed out recently. I don't think it's just because some people are big. Folks don't realise that all those big bars on the front of the vehicles don't save lives, quite the reverse. Having said all this, I've seen a lot of hybrid vehicles, not just Toyota but also Honda.

Navigating: While I don't find numbered streets very memorable, the system is starting to become clear. Here in Bellevue, roads running North/South are Avenues, roads running East/West are streets. The huge house numbers are actually a coding that includes the leading digits of the cross road. So 12345 would likely be close to a cross road called 123. I guess there's an assumption of no more than 99 houses on a block.

Shops: Home Depot has totally copied Australia's "Bunnings". Shopping malls are just huge. I even felt like driving to other parts of one, and I like walking! The staff are often rather robotic with a small collection of phrases ending with "have a nice day". If you talk to someone they are really nice. I think the training in customer service must value form over function in some dreadful way.

The local supermarket is Safeway and there is a club you have to join or you pay a much higher price on many items. (The amount varies a lot between products). I looked at the form and it seems you need a local address and you will give up your contact information for this money.

Seems like a very large proportion of shops have signs up saying they are looking for staff. Is there high turnover or something?

People: Really nice when you get to talk to someone. Quite different to the government from what I can tell. The folks I shared an airport shuttle with apologised for their leader. I chastised them for voting for him.

Coffee: Well Starbucks anyway. Unbelievably weak compared to what I'm used to. All bad milk froth. I asked for a double strength tall (which is really small and even then pretty big) to which they said it was already a double, so I got a quad strength, and that was weak. In the end I bought and "french press" (plunger) and find that the local coffee tastes pretty good.

Cheap wifi at coffee shops is a really good idea. Tons of people use it. In the morning there is a queue for the coffee and all the tables have people with laptops doing work on the internet. I don't know why we don't have more of this in Australia. It seems like the whole city is bathed in WiMax for $30 per month for 768Kbps or $37 per month for 1.5Mbs.

Anyhow, I've had a great time but miss the family. I hope I haven't put on too much weight...

Giant iPhone demo screens at Apple stores

These giant iPhones are in the window of the local Apple store here. They play a full demo movie that looks great. 

I commented to the guy watching that the phones are much bigger than I'd hoped. 

He laughed and said he was trying to figure out how to get out of his existing contract. 

Interestingly he said he was keen to see what third party applications would be available for the device.

The Cingular (AT&T) outlet in the same shopping centre just had a small board saying iPhone coming June 29. Interesting that the Apple store gets the flashy display but you have to go around the corner to actually get one.

Bonjour (zeroconf) fun at an airport hotspot

I attended a great session on Bonjour at the WWDC presented by my hero Stuart Cheshire. The dream of zeroconf is that you can simply plug a device in to your laptop, with no other network infrastructure (such as DHCP servers, or DNS), and simply browse for it and start using it.

Stuart demonstrated a shared disk product from LaCie that did just that. Plugged it in and it came up as a file share, a web page for admin, and even a streaming music server in iTunes. Great stuff.

Another great technology is wide area zeroconf where you can grab a Bonjour control panel and add extra, non local, domains to it that will be searched as well. This multicast DNS stuff works on a local subnet, but I was wondering if it would also work within a hotspot at an airport... it does, I'm on a T-Mobile hotspot at Seattle airport and above is the visible shares I can see via the bonjour browser in Interarchy.

Clearly there's a potential security problem here and Mac users should be aware that their name and machine is visible. I had a look at the web pages that showed up and they were just the Apache welcome page in both cases.

WWDC over for 2007

The Apple conference was huge this year. A record of more than 5,000 attendees. Fantastically organised but it's so big that there were queues for everything. 

When Leopard ships later this year it's going to be great. I can't wait to see what developers build on top of it.

As always with conferences, I got snippets of valuable information from the sessions, but the greatest insights came from conversations with other developers during breaks. Met a bloke today who builds highly scaleable apps in python which are deployed on Linux for telcos - he explained to me how they manipulate the global interpreter lock so that their heavy lifting threads make use of additional cores.

People came from all over the world, such as Mr Xin above, who assured me that his organisation looked fine on the web form. (From a distance I first thought it was that famous AACS key again).

I've had a hard time with jet lag this year. I seem to be in some unknown third time zone, not San Francisco, and not Sydney. Wide awake at 4am local time.

Incidentally, this is being created using the Safari 3 public beta which seems excellent to me.

Traveller's tip #12, video conference the kids

Perhaps I'm naive, but it does seem amazing to me that when travelling these days it's perfectly practical to video conference the kids from my hotel room in high quality audio and decent video.

To me, the quality of the internet connection in my room is probably the most critical factor in choosing a hotel.

Skype seems to be working pretty well these days, except for some stability issues. Even waved at the cat.

I'd prefer to use iChat more but so often I have trouble getting the connection no doubt due to double NAT.

Interesting that the internet connection here includes separate pricing for routable or non-routable IP addresses. This time I went for the cheaper non-routable IP for US$12 per day.

Contributed an item to SolderSmoke

I've been going to the NSW Home Brew group recently and last meeting I took a digital recorder along and spoke to some of the members about what they were up to. I thought it might be of interest to the SolderSmoke podcast and, indeed, it was.

Bill was very encouraging and has run the item in podcast number 62. His intro starts at 19mins 45 seconds in to the program (but listen to the whole thing).

Thanks to Bill for including the item, sorry about the roudy background noise, and thanks of course for the members who agreed to be interviewed. It was tough chopping down to ten minutes, I have enough good material for two more spots still in the can.

In San Francisco for Apple WWDC

It's always great to visit San Francisco. It's such a cosmopolitan place. The streets are full of interesting people. Oddly a few people asked me for directions.

I'm here primarily for the Apple World Wide Developer's conference which is always a blast.

Qantas flight 73 is to be recommended. A direct flight from Sydney so it's just 13 hours. The in-flight entertainment system is excellent with a great choice of current and "art-house" movies. I watched: "Pan's Labyrinth", which was great but not for the kids (explicit violence including portrails of torture); "The History Boys", strangely overacted by the "boy" characters but enjoyable; "For your consideration", deeply funny exposé of hollywood and the Acadamy awards by the guy that made "Spinal Tap"; and most of "Zodiac", which looks really great and I can't wait to see it all.

Liked the food and had an empty seat next to me, so I can't complain. Didn't get much more than a couple of hours of fitful sleep so, right now, I'm going for lots of walks trying to stay up until a reasonable bed-time so that I'll be in sync for the week ahead. Sitting in a dim room watching a presentation, even about an interesting operating system, is very sleep inducing if you are jet-lagged.

Shared a mini-bus with some locals who apologised for their president almost immediately.

Had a couple of Skype calls over the $12 / day hotel internet. Excellent quality. One time during a video conference my computer screen went to sleep and Skype crashed, it's still rather unstable on the mac for some reason.

Had a look at some products not seen in the flesh before. A Microsoft Zune, that I couldn't turn on, it just displayed a mysterious power plug icon. I guess it was flat. A Sony Reader. Lovely eInk display, readable in direct sunlight. Annoying page turn reverse flashing effect, but for reading long texts I can see a role for it.

Don't expect much detail from me on the WWDC on this blog. I honour the non-disclosure agreement that everything except the keynote will be under.

Enjoying MIT physics lectures

Ben put me on to a gem in the new iTunes U area. There are freely available university lectures available and I've been watching the wonderful Prof. Walter Lewin going through the basics (to him) of electromagnetism.

The series is available either through the iTunes store or directly from MIT.

The good professor has a wonderful sense of humour and jokes about the dangers of working with 300KV gear, "if something goes wrong you'll get a replacement lecturer on Monday". I found the basic concepts of charge and how dialectics work utterly fascinating and the maths isn't terribly complex.

It's amazing how much basic physics is not common sense. His mix of lecture style with simple experiments to show the principles works really well and is highly accessible.

Seems to me that publicly funded educational institutions should put all of their course material up in the public domain, after all we've all paid for it. If MIT and Stamford can do it, what about TAFE?

Fedora 7 final review

Here are my initial impressions of Fedora 7 final on a modern Intel motherboard with built in video, ethernet and sound. I grabbed the torrent today.

Install was smooth. After that you create a user account and configure sound, then for some reason you need to reboot.

I set the machine to get an IP address via DHCP so the first thing I wanted to know was the IP address. Usually I run terminal and do a /sbin/ifconfig but terminal has moved to the "System Tools" menu. Fair enough I guess. I tried to find the IP address in System/Administration/Network but I couldn't find it there.

It might be good to make the IP address easy to find. The Places menu has a bunch of new locations, not just Documents but Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads. Seems like a good idea, but these are all folders that already exist in the home directory which does rather clutter things up. I'm unlikely to be doing much video on my linux box.

The updater killed the machine for a little while and then told me there were a number of updates. When I asked for them it said "Unable to retrieve software information" presumably the fedora updates site is being hammered right now. Still, the message wasn't informative.

First launch of OpenOffice was a bit slow, but after that it was really great. If someone wants a computer to to web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets and simple presentations then this Linux distro would do the trick. For everything else, get a Mac.

Under look and feel, there is something called "Desktop Effects" that can make windows wobble and do the Apple cube effect when switching desktops. This is surely a waste of time and just a pointer to what's to come in the future. I tried it but quickly turned it off.

Now that we have Firefox, one computer operating system is pretty much as good as another. I went to cnn.com, it said I needed Flash, I agreed and it was installed smoothly without re-launching the browser. Great stuff.

At work we deploy on Fedora 6, 7 comes with Python 2.5 so I'm pretty confident everything will just work (but I'll let you know).

My IDE of choice Komodo 4.1 seems to work just fine (actually a bit better than on MacOS).

So far, so good.

Mini field day at Dural

Attended the mini field day at the WIA NSW Dural site today. Beautiful weather for it, a good turn out, got some useful bits and pieces though nothing major. Quite a few car boot sellers oddly selling complete HF setups with older style rigs.

The home brew team got together with a bit of "show and tell", I brought along my MMR-40 and compared notes with John, another builder. Stephen, VK2BLQ, showed an experimental 80m short vertical which we tried to tune up by using the "pin through the insulation" technique of finding the right spot in the coil.

Alan, VK2ZAY, told me he'd built a tiny 2m AM transmitter Fredbox last night and when we got home I could hear it at my place, which is about 5Km away. Not bad for an estimated 30mW!

Gosh, during the writing of this story Blogger appears to be down for several minutes. Could Google be fallible?? It's giving 502 Server Errors.

Alan wrote up the day here, he scored some excellent bits and pieces I should have been more alert.

Built a 40m SSB transceiver kit: MMR-40

Since having a wisdom tooth out on Tuesday I've been laying low this week and took the opportunity to construct a kit.

Shown at right during construction, the MMR-40 from Hendricks QRP kits is a great little kit transceiver. Mine was missing a couple of diodes but was otherwise complete. I had a few problems getting the receiver going due to the fact that I hadn't read the errata and mistook the different zener diode for one of the missing diodes and experienced some very strange voltages that affected the transmit/receive switching circuit.

After a long night of hair pulling I joined the Yahoo MMR40 owners group and posted a question about my symptoms. Very quickly Tom replied from a Blackberry with a pointer to the problem. Great stuff.

I find building kits is a great way to get familiar with components and in particular diagnosing problems helps me greatly in understanding the circuit. I never dreamed that I could build an SSB transmitter. Still some work to do to get it all lined up but it seems to be putting out a few watts.

An interesting part of this design is the permeability tuned oscillator where part of the inductance is varied by screwing a brass bolt in and out of the coil. You can see it at the bottom right of the image above. Counter-intuitively, to me, is that frequency goes down as you wind the bolt in. The good thing is that you get slow change over turns of the knob and it seems remarkably unaffected by hand capacitance.

Update: After swapping out the mis-placed zener the receiver was still a little disappointing. Turned out that like others I had followed the layout diagram and installed a 22pF capacitor at C18 which caused T1 not to tune up. The only other oddity is that if I turn my variable supply up much above 12V the receiver mutes, not a big deal.

Anyhow, the receiver is working really nicely and is sensitive enough to hear all that bad band noise on 40m, which is all you need really. I'm not confident that my transmitted SSB is right yet, it puts out power when I talk but doesn't look like real SSB just yet.

A simple modification has been to install a stereo headphone jack that cuts off the speaker. Builders should note that the speaker really comes to life when you put it in the box and close it, very soft on the bench on its own.

I'm enjoying this but I think the kit errata needs an update. The design is very clever in that it re-uses lots of components for both receive and transmit but it lacks a block diagram so I've tried to create my own here.



(Click for a larger version). Please send me corrections!

Incidentally, wisdom tooth removal went very well - the wonders of modern dentistry.

Built a roll-up 2m j-pole antenna

I saw Dom Bragge's posting about a 2m J-Pole antenna made out of 300 ohm TV ribbon and thought I'd give it a go.

Although the design specifies 51 inches in length, Dom notes that other builders have found this resonates too high in frequency and they suggest you start at 52 inches. I did that but found that the lowest SWR was at 148Mhz so even that's too short.

Perhaps 300 ohm twinlead material is different to the original designer.

I do have one contribution to make on this topic, it's really hard to strip the insulation from this twinlead. The insulation seems very strongly bonded to the conductors and they always rip out for me. The solution is to melt your way through with a soldering iron.

Some toxic vapour comes off but it seems pretty easy to tin the wires after the plastic melts away. Shown above is the bottom of the antenna where the co-ax connects and the shorting bar at the base. The melting works quite nicely as you can see.

Thanks to Dom for the pointer to this simple and highly portable VHF antenna design.

The Nature of Photographs - mini book review

Spotted this wonderful book this morning. "The Nature of Photographs" by Stephen Shore, subtitled "A Primer".

The reproductions of photographs is fantastic in this high quality publication from Phaidon. Works are by the author and many others including Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander, André Kertész, William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Bernice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Eugene Atget, and even the great John Szarkowski is in there.

Well structured and simply stated, this book has given me a good structure for appreciating photographs. Packed with insights that in retrospect seem obvious. For example, the artist starts with a blank page and must fill it, the photographer starts with the clutter of the world and must simplify it.

Progress on the 80m challenge transmitter

Finally making progress on the NSW Home Brew group's 80m challenge project to build a 20W 80m AM transmitter.

I'm a bit daunted as I have never made anything that puts out more than about 500mW and have very little RF experience, but progress is finally being made.

A design has been cobbled together based on the Hendricks QRP TwoFer design, built for 80m.

So far I have the oscillator and a buffer stage running nicely and I'm looking for an RF power transistor to get to 2W. I can't seem to source a 2N2553 or 2SC799 so I've ordered from the U.S. but disappointingly they say it won't ship for up to 3 weeks.

The smoke from an MPF102 was released along the way due to wiring it in reverse.

In other news, I picked up 20m of RG213U co-ax from the MWRS at a great price. I've run this through a hole, up between the double brick walls, through the ceiling and to my newly stretched out 40/80m dipole upstairs.

Reception is great but when I transmit all hell breaks loose from RF getting into audio amplifiers. Once again, my long wire antenna looks like being the most practical transmitting system here.

MacMorseTutor version 0.00001

As part of my elaborate procrastination about learning morse code I've started writing my own tutor program for MacOS X. So far it sounds out the text you type in a field, displaying the character it just played after the audio.

It is available for your evaluation pleasure here.

This is just the start, planned features are:

• Drill characters by playing and then displaying them.
• Test by playing and then having me type the letter.
• Give positive and negative feedback after typing the letter.
• Controls for speed and spacing.

I know almost nothing of Cocoa programming but I find it a very easy environment to work in. Can't wait for WWDC.

Python decorators a simple example

Python decorators are a wonderful syntax for wrapping one function in another. I had a bit of trouble understanding the documentation, which often seems to involve talking about the history of how the syntax evolved rather than cutting to the chase and giving a simple example.

Specifically, I wanted to know how to get access to the arguments to the function I'm decorating in the decorator. Here's my example, at the top is the output:

"""
Example decorator that gets function arguments.

>>> decotest.py

>in mydecorator
>Function decorateme has been wrapped
> args = hello this is request
> kwargs = {}
>request = hello this is request
decorateme got request = hello this is request
>finished wrapped function
"""

def mydecorator(f):
   print ">in mydecorator"
   def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
       print ">Function %s has been wrapped" % f.__name__
       print "> args = %s" % args
       print "> kwargs = %s" % kwargs
       request = args[0]
       print ">request = %s" % request
       f(*args, **kwargs)
       print ">finished wrapped function"
   return wrapper
     

def test():
   request = "hello this is request"
   decorateme(request)
 
@mydecorator
def decorateme(request):
   print "decorateme got request = %s" % request
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
   test()

Teac DV-B420 receiver creates bad RFI

Ever since I started hanging up antennas here, I've been plagued with a terrible, pulsing, interference across 40m.

Walking around with a short wave radio seemed to show that it was coming from somewhere near my house. It seemed to come from the mains, it was very strong near our meter box which has some suspiciously new meters in it. I could hear it at the next power pole down the street but not at my neighbor's meter box.

I decided to turn off the power to the house and while walking around looking for things that should be shut down before turning off the power I noticed the signal got very strong near a TEAC DVB receiver, model DV-B420.

When I unplugged it, the broadband, pulsing signal vanished.

What's worse is that this box makes the interference even when turned "off". As with many modern appliances, there is no true "off", it just stops putting out video. My guess is that it's a little switching power supply that just keeps going. Thankfully, this device isn't required at our place any more.

Some searching reveals that I am not alone in noticing interference from these devices.

Antenna activity

To maximise my procrastination on the morse code front, I've spent the weekend improving the antenna situation here. There are two HF antennas, a 40/80m trap dipole, and a recently improved (by lifting it high into a tree with a squid pole) long wire.

The long wire was used with an excellent Emtron matcher but with just a wire counterpoise in place of a real earth. I had a lot of RF in the room so I've now run that wire down to an attachment on a copper water pipe in the yard pretty close to the house. See picture above.

The dipole was in a sharp V shape from the middle of the house to two trees in the back yard, but with the help of the squid pole and a daughter, I've swung one arm right around, over the house and hung it from a tree in front of the house. So now the dipole is nicely in line and up pretty high.

The feed point is on a TV gutter mount on the second floor, the arm that goes over the roof just grazes the peak of the roof and the ends are both about 3m up. Pretty much as good as I can manage without a tower.

Disappointingly, a comparison with the long wire shows that the long wire antenna performs much better. The coax feed line to the dipole is RG58 but it's crummy stuff with aluminium foil mixed with only a few strands of copper in the shield. Next step is to upgrade that coax.

Morse code at Manly Warringah Radio Society

Attended a Wednesday meeting of the MWRS. Great fun, a lovely group of blokes. I asked about learning Morse code and was treated to a live demo which included a contact with someone in Texas.

Pictured here is (if I've got this right) Russel Clarke VK2BYN and, on the iambic keyer, Yves Bernier VK2AUJ.

Russel confirmed that there's no easy way to learn Morse, I was so hoping for a pointer to the tape I could play under my pillow while asleep that would have me wake up with the knowledge.

On another topic, my thanks to Mike Bell from the home brew group for very kindly posting me some 3.6884Mhz crystals so I'd have no excuse not to build the 80M challenge.

Learning Morse Code, MorseBlog anyone?

I'm learning Morse Code. It's hard getting started.

Amazingly, given that it's no longer required for Amateur radio, there is a lot of morse to be heard on the HF bands.

Last week I bought a key (pictured) on eBay. There is a ton of software around to help and that seems to be a good way to go. For now, I'm using Koch Method CW Trainer from G4FON along with the companion program KochRx.

In these programs it sends from a given number of letters and you type in what you hear. When you start going mad, you stop and it compares what you typed with what was sent and tells you how far you got before an error.

I'm keen to learn the code at high speed (but with big gaps for now) so I can scale up in the future.

What I'm looking for is software that:

• Teaches a character by playing the sound and showing (or speaking) the character
• Plays the sound and I type the character
• Rewards me if I get it right
• Corrects me when I get it wrong
• Reviews characters already learnt
• Repeat, adding more characters
  

So far I haven't found this, any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

When I learned to touch type, I did a course. It was tedious but the group helped me get through it. There's lots of on-air practice, but I'm no where near that stage yet.

This post was brought to you by the letters K, M and R. -.-, --, ._. (which is all I have so far).

Organizing electronic components

I had a plastic box full of resistors collected over the years. When building some project, one of the hardest things for me is finding the right components in that jumbled mass. In the past I've tried tackle boxes with lots of drawers, but there's never enough for all the different resistors and they often need their leads bent to fit.

Found a great thread on slashdot on this topic where someone suggests this method.

I bought a bunch of 15cm x 9cm snaplock bags and a box that fits them nicely. Spent some time sorting out the collection (only resistors done so far, capacitors are next).

The plastic bags have a nice place to write the values on them and all. This system is very compact and if you get a value to file that fits between two others it can be simply inserted without the need to move all the drawers.

The point has been made that this probably isn't a good idea for static-sensitive components, but I just thought I'd put them in the bag inside their anti-static bag or foam pad.

No doubt this whole exercise is really just elaborate procrastination.

New longwire hoisted by squid pole

The yard is filling with antennas. I think they look great. There is a very tall tree at the back of the block that I've been trying to run a long wire up to. Today I spent AU$39 on a 6m squid pole at a fishing shop.

Squid poles are great devices, it telescopes out from about 1.5m to 6m. Standing on top of a 2m ladder, holding the end of the 6m squid pole, I managed to feed two sinkers attached to a string over a branch. Yay! Not easy.

A 20m line goes to the bedroom on the second floor into an Emtron antenna match. There is a counterpoise of about 3m running down to the ground.

I'm able to tune this up nicely on 80m, 40m and 20m. I came up on 40m just now and had three quick contacts: Blue Mountains, Victoria and a guy down the road! Apparently you can get 18m squid poles, but they are significantly more expensive.

Ha, just noticed that if you google for squid pole, the first link relates to antennas, it seems they are also used sometimes for fishing.

Home work space

This is a response to Alastair's excellent workspace post. My little home office is a mess. I have three main hobbies: photography, computers and ham radio. They all compete for space at home.

Regrettably I don't have a nice window to look out of at a calming garden so I've added a second screen to give me a wider panorama.

From left to right: A monitor supported by books I try to keep in my unconscious. Above, on the wall, a print from the master (well from his 8x10 negative). An Intel iMac. Altoids I'm munching to make way for electronics projects. iPod loading up with too many podcasts to get through. (I've recently ditched Scoble and Calacanis as they make too much).

On the right, below puzzled daughter Catherine, is my radio hobby. An MFJ-902 travel tuner (excellent), an FT-817 I had a great time with while camping, an old Emtron tuner that I only learned how to use from the instructions that came with the MFJ tuner, a receive only tuner just being used to hold things up, and finally my boxed DRM receiver.

The transceiver is tuned to 80m via a long co-ax run through the wall, then ceiling and out to the top floor to a very narrow trap 40m and 80m dipole. Lots of activity these days on HF.

DRM Dream.exe on linux works nicely

I'm sitting in front of a shiny new install of Ubuntu 7.04 listening to the Radio New Zealand International digital broadcast on 7145kHz in perfect clarity.

This Ubuntu version is very slick as we've come to expect. For some time I battled to build the Dream receiver source code on this system without joy. Lots of roadblocks for me, mostly to do with Qt. Almost as an afterthought I installed the Wine windows emulator and tried the pre-built windows binary, after adding only a few DLLs (MSVCP60.DLL and qt-mt230nc.dll), it was up and running.

Sound in and out all just works out of the box and it runs indefinitely. Playing with the UI, for example, changing sound settings, causes it to exit, but it's perfectly usable.

Regrettably, Darwine isn't quite up to supporting this application just yet, seems to be missing some functions in the 3d graphics area which I think are used in those fancy spectrum displays. Can't wait for the day I can run this on my Mac.

HF portable radio propagation while camping

Just returned from a couple of nights camping at Coolendel near Nowra in NSW. I took along some battery operated ham radio gear and constructed two antennas. The "good" antenna was a center fed half wave dipole for the 40m band fed with TV twin lead carefully suspended between two trees, the other was simply a long wire, perhaps 25m long, thrown into a tree with sinkers on the end.

As seems to be the way for me at the moment, the simple long wire worked much much better than the carefully made dipole. My guess is that using TV twin lead is a really bad idea even though my antenna tuner has balanced antenna connections.

With just 2.5W I easily had a contact in Melbourne and could hear very strong stations in Hawaii, New Zealand and every Australian state except WA.

The most striking thing, aside from the low power needed to communicate 1,000km, is just how quiet the band is out of the city. There is so much RF interference at my home QTH that it's difficult to hear many stations.

The random/long wire tuned up really well on 40m and 20m using an Emtron tuner I picked up on eBay, I've constructed a tiny tuner of my own, in an Altoids tin, but currently it doesn't work as well as the "bought one".

Built a tiny 80m AM transmitter

I've been attending the Amateur Radio New South Wales Homebrew Group meetings recently, both on air and in the flesh.

Most entertaining. This year they have a "challenge" (not a competition!) to build an 80m AM 20W transmitter. I haven't done any electronic construction for years and haven't really attempted RF projects.

To warm up for this challenge, I've just completed a tiny 80m AM transmitter based on a circuit found here.

This is my second attempt, the first time around, I tried to build it from the limited parts I had around. If the circuit said 5k1, I'd use 4k7, and so on. Anyhow, it didn't work so I went and bought the right bits and now it does work. The only substitution is that I used 2N2222a transistors in place of 2N4401s.

This is also my second project using the "Manhattan Pad" technique which I'm very comfortable with now.

FatBlog 75.1

Yeah, I know, not statistically significant.

Fairwell DRM, hello fingerprinting?

I'm as happy as everyone to see that it's going to be possible to buy music without DRM. I've only purchased a few tracks as I regard buying with DRM as being like renting rather than buying.

This move will surely stimulate more content sales, and perhaps better, will open up the market to iPod alternatives that will play your purchased content.

The purpose of DRM is to make it hard to pass on the content, the downside is so bad (honest customers losing the ability to play stuff they paid for because they upgraded or something) that it could be that less intrusive alternatives are being sought.

The obvious one to me is content fingerprinting. Add a unique customer code to the data in the content that doesn't affect the play but can be used to trace where the copy came from. Sure, there'll be ways to strip them out in the end, but for most consumers, if they know their purchased tracks can be traced back to them it will dissuade them from "sharing".

I'm making this up, it might not be on the agenda at all, but it is possible.

Apple TV arrived in Sydney

My Apple TV just arrived here in Sydney.

Not much I can say so far except the box is pretty nice. It shipped on the 20th and just arrived now, a bit longer than expected.

Later: Now that I've got it going, here's my impressions:

• Very easy to set up, booted, on the network, shows a number that you key into the iTunes you want to pair it with.
• By default it started syncing all my Music. I didn't buy this thing to play music on the TV so I've changed that default.
• iTunes immediately tried to sell me music videos, which is about all there is in Australia at the moment, I fell for it and bought a few clips.
• The TV trailers are tantalising, Lost, Grey's Anatomy, etc etc. Of course we can't buy any of these in Australia. Grrr...
• The interface lags a little but probably because it was madly trying to sync my music library.
• Visually, looks lovely.
  

We don't have cable TV and I'm prepared, keen in fact, to spend the money that would have gone on cable, on purchasing shows I really want to see.

Issues:

• It doesn't play everything I can play in iTunes. Not sure why, I've got a quicktime movie in my library that won't sync over.
• Some videos, including movie trailers from Apple lose their Video/Audio sync pretty badly.
• iTunes kind of forgot about my iPod for a while. Had to re-boot the iPod, seems ok now.
• They need a black version, after all, most flat screen TVs come in black.
• Why doesn't the volume control work? The nifty remote control only has 6 buttons and two of the don't do anything.

I'm happy with the product and very much enjoyed watching video podcasts in bed last night. Can't wait to buy a TV show or movie.

Home brew meeting at Dural

On Sunday I attended a technical meeting of the NSW home brew radio group. Steven, pictured gave an excellent demo of some of the the metal work skills needed to make chassis to hold projects. So many things I don't know. Some more pictures.

The meeting was held at the WIA Dural site, where they do the NSW Sunday broadcast. I've listened for many years on Sunday mornings so it was great to have a look around.

I got my amateur license back in 1978 with a group of friends, after moving to Sydney and finding that the internet has become my main form of communication, radio faded for a while but since the dropping of the Morse code means I can use HF I've come back and feel more interested than ever, in particular I'm keen to learn to make HF circuits.

FatBlog 75.4

A few years ago I returned from living in Hong Kong to find that my weight had crept up to 82Kg. Amazing how this can happen without noticing. I did feel bad and bloated.

My workplace had a few people in the same boat as me and kindly they organised a weight loss program that worked very well for me. I lost 10Kgs, mostly by replacing snack food with carrots.

Once again, my weight is creeping up so about ten weeks ago I started trying to lose some weight again. I record my daily weight in the morning. Above is a graph of my weight once a week on Fridays. (I'm being kind to my self as I always go up over the weekends).

Things I've learned about losing weight:

• Can't do it by starving, hunger is a very strong drive, you might beat it for a while but it will win.
• Can do it by replacing one filling food with another with less energy in it. I lost 10Kg by eating lots of carrots.
• Can do it by stopping eating when you are satisfied. (It's a real trap that you'll finish the whole plate just because it's there).
• Exercise makes me hungry and may not result in weight loss.
• Exercise needs to be sustainable, I know if I join the gym I won't keep going in the long term. Walking on the way home, however, seems sustainable.
• Don't worry about daily fluctuations. Actual weight is mostly water and that goes up and down often by 1 or 2 kilos. Track weekly results and don't panic if one day goes the wrong way.
  

I'm not going to blog on my weight very much but hopefully this post will shame me into staying focussed.

Apple TV shipped!

Got an email over night that my Apple TV has shipped. I ordered at 5am local time, on the morning they were announced so I guess I'm at the front of the queue.

What's the best way to convert DivX to H.264....

Improving construction and the nature of blogs

It goes without saying that blogs are a diary and the writer moves on as they write. For some reason I'm interested in learning how to make things. 

Tonight I re-made a crystal oscillator built a few days ago, as you see it's more compact and professional looking. (They both work by the way).

I'm on a learning path and happily there are wonderful folks out there who have selflessly shared their knowledge. I'd like to pay tribute to a few generous people I've come across:

• Alan
• James
• Ralph
• Peter
• The SolderSmoke folks
• This QRP page (don't worry about the broken images at the top)
• Frank

And many others.

There's a few things that mystify me in constructing electronics:

• Capacitor markings
• Winding inductors
• Complex numbers (although my daughter seems to understand them)

I'll get there...

Manhattan pad construction

I've been trying to find a way to make one-off electronic construction projects. After a few false starts this looks like one I can get good at. It's known as "Manhattan Pad" construction method.

The circuit is built on top of copper board, unlike "ugly construction" components are joined by soldering them to little pads of copper board, cut up and super glued on to the base board. This makes it much easier to solder component by component for those of us who don't have three hands.

Here is my first go, a simple VFO that covers 3-4Mhz. Once in a nice box with connectors on the outside you'd never know it wasn't a professional job. Having the components close to a ground plane helps with RF stability too.

Apologies for my tiny steps, hopefully I will get on to more interesting projects soon.

Radio New Zealand (RNZI) back on DRM

Just noticed that Radio New Zealand has started transmitting digital radio using the DRM system again. It's the best DRM signal I can get here. So far very patchy decoding for me, the picture to the right is about the best signal I've got so far.

My receiver is a DRT1 controlled via serial from the Dream software.

As I write (approaching 6pm AEST) the signal is improving and I'm getting a signal to noise radio of 20dB sometimes which gives perfect decoding.

Update: It's 9pm AEST and I'm getting perfect decoding with 28dB SNR. Changing "Time Sync Tracking" to "First Peak" seems to improve things for me.

Ham radio Sydney to Melbourne

I've had a ham radio license since 1988. Never managed to learn morse code. I'm vk2tpm.

Now that morse code has been dropped I have an advanced licence and can use HF for the first time, very exciting. 

New to all this but basically it means you can talk to people about 1,000 km away. I'm from Melbourne and moved to Sydney about 20 years ago so I'd like to talk to my friends there. 

Dave, vk3ase, has a regular test transmission on 3.670Mhz AM on Saturday night. 

It's very strong here, a solid S9, but there's a lot of band noise tonight. We had a bit of a chat of SSB but it wasn't easy going, mostly as I was switching between SSB and AM and messing things up along the way.

By the way the IC-7000 is the best radio I've ever used.

A week without the internet, at home

Last weekend we had an electical storm. I unplugged all the radios but forgot about the cable modem. It died.

It took Optus 5 days to send someone out. They gave me 12:00 - 5:00pm as a time range, couldn't ring first or anything, so I had to stay home waiting for the guy to come. He turned up at 11:30.

We had five days without internet at home. Amazing the impact. I read the newspaper, it's not as good as reading RSS feeds, but not bad. Over priced if you ask me.

The kids were distraught. They basically said that they couldn't do their homework without the internet. 

We also lost an ethernet switch and the ethernet port on a Mac Mini.

Software defined radio (SDR) is totally cool

I got into this via my interest in digital radio. Computers are now fast enough to do the processing required to demodulate radio intermediate frequency in real time. 

You can therefore have a very simple bit of hardware radio frequency down conversion that feeds into the audio port of your computer and the rest is done in software.

SDR gives you an incredibly full featured radio, with more dials and displays (all virtual), than you could want. I've been aware of GNURadio for some time, but it's pretty hard to get started with.

There is even software for the Mac from the incredibly friendly Kok Chen (with source!). I notice that hamlib builds just fine on the mac and the command line tools work. This means you can control many "hard" receivers via a serial port (works with USB adapters). So far I haven't found a nice cocoa client that uses hamlib so I'm working on one myself.

I paid rather too much money for the nifty DRT1 from Sat-Schnider and have spent the weekend playing with software and mounting it in an external box. This thing is controlled by commands over a serial port (it has no display at all - I've added a power LED). It converts a slab of radio down to audio which you feed into your computer for demodulation.

There are several software radios around, the one shown above is from Peter Carnegie, but there's also the Dream software for DRM decoding.

Seems to me that this kind of thing might be built at very low cost using an NE602 balanced mixer and synthesized oscillator controlled by a PIC microprocessor or something.

I heard today on the WIA Sunday broadcast that the BBC is to begin trials of DRM (Digital Radio Modiale) on medium wave. Perhaps radio is set for another revolution, AM -> FM -> DRM.

If it doesn't work in Safari, get a newer build!

I like Safari on the Mac but there's some things it doesn't have so I use FireFox to plug those holes. A good example is that right now Safari doesn't have the rich text editor that Blogger uses to edit posts in wysiwyg format.

The underlying rendering code in Safari is based on KHTML which is open source. It turns out that new builds are available here and what you get is a version of Safari that has new features. The app is called WebKit and it can co-exist on your Tiger system along side current Safari. It picks up all of your settings and bookmarks so it's an easy transition.

They seem to build very frequently, often several times a day. I'm posting this with the Friday 23rd Feb build and it seems solid so far.

You get a nice gold rimmed icon too.

Backing up is so hard to do.. but necessary

My MacBook wouldn't boot up on Monday.

It also wouldn't boot off a Tiger install DVD. I figured it was dead. Luckily I have been backing up my Documents folder with rsync to an external drive on a daily basis, so I wasn't devastated.

I found my proof of purchase and rang Apple Australia to get a case number for the inevitable return to a service centre. To my surprise they helped me out.

I had upgraded the hard drive (as well as RAM). When it stopped booting, I put back the original drive but it still didn't boot off a Tiger DVD so I figured it wasn't the disk. On the phone to Apple I learned some new things:

• The original DVD that comes with your mac has extra diagnostic stuff on it that update DVDs don't.
  
• Hold down the D key while booting to get to hardware diagnostics on that original disk.

It takes some time to re-install everything and find all the application serial numbers I have so I'm looking at doing some sort of full disk backup in the future. For now I'm using the Apple Backup utility that you get with a .Mac subscription. It seems good so far for backing up my whole home directory.

Greg Winn is so wrong - we need a new phone OS

It's been reported in The Age that Telstra's Greg Winn thinks that Apple should not enter the mobile phone business. He's so wrong.

I've experienced a series of mainstream expensive phones from Sony Ericsson, Motorolla, and Nokia. Aside from the basic functionality of making and taking calls, the extra "smart" stuff tends to be confusing to use, buggy and often slow.

My current phone, a Nokia 6233, can be routinely crashed simply by forwarding an MMS. I'm no basic user, I want internet, bluetooth, MMS and email. Some of the things shown in the Apple iPhone launch, like easy conference calling are probably possible but I dare not attempt them.

Current phone operating systems from Symbian, and Palm haven't scaled well up to the requirements of multi-threaded networking applications. Microsoft's Windows Mobile is looking pretty good these days (used to crash in earlier versions) but I hear the battery life is terrible on some devices.

We desperately need operating systems on phones that are built for the internet, you can't go past unix in that department. Where are the Linux phones? Apple takes great care with user interface, iPods have amazing depth of functionality in them yet they seem so simple to use, the competition has transformed the portable digital player marketplace over the past few years, I hope the iPhone does the same for the phone business.

I wonder what phone Greg Winn uses, and can he figure out how to set the APN for his MMS without going mad?

Getting in to Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM)

I'm really interested in the next step for broadcast radio, called DRM. (Yes another DRM). Digital Radio Mondiale sends audio as a low bit rate AAC stream. At this stage there aren't many radio sets out there, and they're pretty expensive.

An alternative for technical folks, like you and me, is to modify a radio to get the 455Khz intermediate frequency out and mix it down to a low (audio) frequency that can be decoded on a computer with software. (Find DREAM).

I've ordered, and quickly received, a tiny mixer board that should do the trick. While it came with a circuit, they skipped the pinouts and I figured this might be handy for other too, so it's shown above. Note that I may well have this wrong at this point, I'll update this post if I find an error while getting it going. (1 update so far).

Now, to start pulling my nice radio apart...

Update: I pulled my FRG-100 apart, tapped the 455kHz IF, and have started to receive DRM transmissions. It's pretty bad at this stage as you can hear but I'm sure I can improve things with tweaking.

The dream software is amazing and if you understand it I'm sure let's you really see what's going on. Here's a screenshot.

Having just returned from this year's Wyong field day I'm all fired up to look at GNURadio.

Notes on DRM with the Yaesu FRG-100: I took the suggestions from here and tapped VR1002 to get 455kHz. I didn't change out the filter and perhaps that's why I'm not having much luck. The waveform looks 10kHz wide though.

My antenna is a 20m long wire across the back yard and in the evening it overloads the receiver, I now have an attenuator that I hope will help in that regard.

NSW Rail queues

Catching public transport is an important part of keeping up with my Podcast subscriptions. Normally it's pretty tolerable, but this morning, a Monday, the queues were crazy.

This is Chatswood station. It's being upgraded at the moment so that explains some of the chaos. You can't see it clearly in the picture but there are two queues of perhaps a hundred people each, one at the window and the other at the automated ticket machine.

Here's my humble suggestions to improve things:

• Introduce contactless pre-paid cards, like the Hong Kong Octopus cards (from Western Australia I understand anyway).
• Of course, make the ticket gates take those contactless cards.
• Replace the bad ticket machines with ones that are easier to use and faster to operate. The current ones are terrible and also unreliable.
• Ban marketing people distributing their brochures at the narrowest part of the exit during peak hours.
• Consider having some all standing carriages for peak hours.

I'm no expert but I do catch public transport and have experienced it in several countries.

Home brew electronics

When I was young I used to build simple electronics circuits. Then I got a job as a technician, wielding a soldering iron every day. That killed the hobby for a long time.

The fabulous Wyong Field day draws closer and each year at this time I get interested in radio and electronics again. While reading all the wireless news I stumbled across a local home brew group who have a contest to build an 80m AM transmitter. Great idea, pity it has to be at least 20W, that's a bit much for me.

To see if I am capable of building something that makes RF, I thought I'd start really small and build a 4MHz crystal oscillator from a circuit here. Spent the $7 to get the bits, but how to construct the thing?

My old mate Ralph builds lots of RF gear and he showed me a technique where you take printed circuit board and use a Dremel or similar electric grinding tool to cut insulating tracks in the copper. Then you solder the components across the tracks on the copper side. Did that, it worked!

Update: It turns out this technique is one variant of Ugly Construction.

Impressive job titles

I once corresponded with a person about some software I'd written. His signature labeled him as working on the "room temperature superconductor project". After we'd written back and forth a few times I asked him how that project was going.

He laughed and revealed that it was their internal name for an SAP migration project.

Anyhow, I thought I'd follow suit and have been adding little interesting titles to my email .signature, it's rare that anyone notices or at least comments. Here's a few ideas, please suggest more.

My colleague Ben is an "Anti-matter containment" specialist.

• Black hole maker
• Faster than light networking specialist
• Reality engineer
• Discombobulator
• Metron measurer
• Photon decelerator
  
• Astral travel agent
• Ball lightning capturer
• Dark matter counter
• Five dimensional computation specialist