A chat with ben and pete - podcast episode 1

Together with the always interesting Ben, we've decided to join the weekly podcast gang, starting off with some discussion of our Leopard experiences. 

Click here to add it to iTunes.

I'll also be appearing on ABC Radio National Breakfast at around 8:05am tomorrow, (Thursday), discussing the Leopard vs. Vista vs. Linux operating system competition.

You can hear this chat here.

An AppleScript studio application

AppleScript studio is kind of the Visual Basic of MacOS X. (I'm sure some people will correct me firmly on that statement).

In order to try it out under Leopard I picked a simple project to give me something to shoot for.

I have a little Yaesu FT-817 that supports a remote control serial protocol they call CAT. It's 4800 baud, 8 bit, 2 stop bits. Each packet is 5 bytes, the last byte being the command and the other bytes are the data to go with it.

My objective is the program shown above, it periodically retrieves the current frequency and mode from the transceiver and shows it.

To interface with a common PL-2303 USB serial device, I installed the excellent (and free) Serialport X scripting addition. Thanks Art Coughlin!

To install you create a folder called ~/Library/Scripting Additions/ and stick it in there.

Prototyping was done in straight AppleScript until I was able to read and display the frequency. Next to XCode where I created an "Applescript Application". It reminds me a bit of HyperCard, you open the .nib file and in the Applescript properties tab you can set a handler for a button to call an "on clicked theObject" method in your script for example.

After some frustrating messing about, I've achieved my objective. Once you've chosen the serial device an idle handler refreshes the frequency. 

To make the built application run on a machine without the Serialport X applescript already installed you need to bundle it in the application. Thanks to the instructions here I was able to automate this. Note that I needed a -r after CpMac to copy recursively.

I find the AppleScript language frustrating for reasons I can't fully fathom, this "Applescript for python programmers" table was a great help to me as I'm very comfortable with python.

For what it's worth, I've put my xcode project here, hope it helps someone.

Leopard, great, but not totally without problems

Ben and I were first in line at MacCentric at Chatswood in Sydney to buy MacOS X10.5 Leopard today.

I rushed home and installed it as an upgrade on my Intel iMac. An upgrade takes quite a long time.

When done, Spotlight didn't seem to be doing anything. For some reason it had excluded my internal drive, a preferences change was required to fix this.

After removing my internal drive from the exclude list it seems to be taking hours to index. After an hour it's only 3% done.

So far, all my applications work just fine. Safari seems clearly faster than before, Mail is good. I showed my daughter some of the new features in iChat and she collapsed in laughter when seeing fish swimming behind Ben - this OS is going to be a hit for all the wrong reasons I think.

Tried to get started with Time Machine backups but I need a really big drive by the looks of things. Fair enough.

I ran in to some problems with .Mac syncing. I kind of got stuck in a loop resolving conflicts.

It's a pity that a new install these days involves indexing a large drive which takes time and kills the CPU for some time (hours). This gives an impression that things are going slowly - perhaps this phase should be deferred until the user has played with all the new toys for a while.

Anyhow, lots of new things to play with: Spaces looks great, I do like the new Dock, Mail seems more capable, and I can't wait to learn about Cocoa 2.0. A fun weekend lies ahead...

Updates

I've done a few installs now and here's my notes on an updated machine:

• Installs are much faster than an update
• I've had some minor problems with PPTP VPNs (for one thing the connect/disconnect menu item gets a bit confused) I've also had traffic stop and attempting to ping then gives me some error about being out of space.
  
• iTunes has hung on me
• Previously I built my own python but this causes problems for xcode
• I can't build python 2.5.1 at the moment - compile error
• All my apps just work

Due to the messing I've done under the hood, such as building my own python in the past, I'm now backing up and preparing to do a fresh install.

Dxpedition with OziPole at Sydney's North Head

Alan VK2ZAY and I went bush this morning in search of a low noise HF location where we could play with antennas, balans, tuners and annoying flies.

I recently built the excellent Ozipole kit and this was a good opportunity to try it out, primarily on 7Mhz.

I've been searching for a location close to Sydney but as far as possible from power lines and houses and Fairfax Walk at North Head seems perfect.


View Larger Map

As expected, this was a superbly low noise location, and as it was the Scout Jamboree of the Air today there were tons of stations about. Unfortunately VK2WI was on low power on 40m and pretty hard to hear.

We played with several antennas and generally had a pleasant time. Notes for the next outing:

• Take a table of some sort
• Shade if possible
• Find a way to carry the gear, (the battery is rather heavy)
• Something to repel flies
  

It was wonderful to hear stations perfectly clearly at less than S1, at my home they need to be overwhelmingly strong to be heard. I'll go back to this location - any other suggestions around Sydney would be most welcome.

Thanks Alan for the fine company. He has blogged about this outing here, which refers back to this post so I hope the internet doesn't get runaway feedback and explode.

Update: Turned on 80m this morning at home at 6am and there is no noise. Here's a sample. So the band noise at my QTH must be from an appliance or power supply or something. I need to go hunting for it and I'm also reading up on receiving loop antennas that might let me null out the signal.

Linux on a low end laptop

This weekend I've been playing with an old IBM ThinkPad 600X. It has 300Mb of ram, 12G hard disk, 450Mhz Pentium 3 processor, dead li-ion battery and no built-in ethernet or wireless.

My goal is a machine for use on ham radio, most likely running one of the psk31 software packages. I'd also like to be able to use a web browser and check imap email.

There are some very tiny linux distributions around but I figured I'd like something fairly rich so I've been playing with xubuntu which can run in 128Mb of ram. My approach was to use the Ubuntu 7.10 (release candidate) alternative install - as the live CD wouldn't install and then install xubuntu-desktop as explained here.

The normal Ubuntu desktop, Gnome, eats 250Mb before you start up any extra applications. Xfce, used in Xubuntu, eats 244Mb so I don't see much benefit in not running gnome. (I must be missing something here...)

The show stopper has been sound. Sound out works fine, sound in doesn't seem to function. I can see lots of other folks running old hardware with the same problem. I'm using a Lucent PCMCIA wireless card that Ralph kindly sent me. (It actually has an antenna socket on it!). This was detected just fine and works really well. Ubuntu seems to be lacking some user interface for seeing wireless networks though.

Bottom line: A 450Mhz legacy laptop is perfectly usable with Ubuntu. Firefox is everything I want (with a plugin it even plays YouTube videos reasonably), OpenOffice is great and just gets better every month, Evolution email is fantastic, and the overall desktop experience is really solid.

If I wasn't addicted to MacOS and hanging out for Leopard, I could use this desktop every day.

Oh, and I really hate that little IBM nipple mouse thing. Trackpads are much better.

Cleaned the very dusty case up with eucalyptus oil which can dissolve all the sticky gunk under the silly "made for windows 98" and "Intel inside" stickers.

Getting started with PSK-31 on Mac

PSK-31 is a recent digital mode that is very efficient in terms of bandwidth use and is excellent for keyboard to keyboard chatting on noisy HF.

I've been listening around for the distinctive warble sound on 80m and 40m for some time and hadn't found anything I could decode, then I read about 14.070Mhz (20m) and that seems to be where the action is. Several strong stations were heard without trouble.

A simple wire dipole for 20m was constructed and strung between two trees. I have a Yaesu FT-817 portable rig which has a mini-din 6 data jack on the back so an interface box (pictured above) was constructed. As I run a Mac the excellent cocoaModem software is in use. To key the transmitter, (as the FT-817 doesn't support VOX on the data port - a great pity) I first tried making a simple vox circuit but in the end used cocoaPTT which toggles the RTS line on a USB serial cable. One diode was used to save the radio from the +ve swing, so it just pulls PTT low to transmit, otherwise no electronics, just soldering, seems to work fine.

I called CQ, running just 5W into a very flaky antenna and was immediately called back by JA2LCN in Ogaki City, (this person seems very active).

If you run Windows there is lots of software about for PSK31, there's also some Linux software with a reasonable GUI.

In use, you leave the radio tuned to 14.070Mhz and watch the waterfall display. When you see a signal you click between the lines and start reading. It seems like a very nice way to chat, particularly if you can touch type. (A lot of receive errors I noticed now seem to be bad typing in retrospect).

I note there's some interesting kits around for minimal, low power transceivers designed for PSK31 use specifically. It's interesting to consider that a little board like this, a roll of wire, antenna tuner and a laptop and you can chat half way around the world pretty easily.

HF QRP pleasure with an FT-817

I've just spent a few very pleasant days south of Sydney at Gerroa.

We hired a house on a hill looking out over the beach and I took a Yaesu FT-817 and a slightly modified MFJ random wire tuner along for fun (all I did was add banana sockets for attaching a wire to it).

I strung out about 20m of wire from the balcony to a piece of wood in the yard and it tuned up nicely on 80m, 40m, and 20m. Had a few contacts running just 2.5W (on the in-built rechargeable batteries).

80m is blotted with interference at home. At this location it was magnificently quiet until about 5:30pm when bad televisions get turned on. I really want to find a location with no noisy power lines or TV sets to disturb by HF listening.

Only a few contacts, mostly listening. Just before we packed up I tuned around on 2m and found a very active local community.

Spent the time reading the ARRL Handbook, 2007 and a book by Melvyn Bragg, both really dense and fascinating.

On our last morning, went for a walk with my wife who slipped on a ramp and broke her leg. So quick, so easy. My thanks go out to the good folks of Gerroa who helped us to a car, a doctor and a hospital.

It's amazing how easily we can be injured. Such fragile creatures.

Degen DE1103 shortwave radio mini review

Can a low-cost digitally controlled radio have the same feel as an analog receiver?

The audio/touch combined feeling that you get while tuning across short wave in the evening on a true analog radio is much more usable than the chop/chop/chop effect experienced on low cost digital radios - until now.

The benefits of a digital radio, accurate frequency read out, full band coverage, and memories are great, but if it's painful to tune around it's just not worth it.

I picked up a Degen DE1103 for AU$159 from the very friendly AV-Comm here in Sydney. Significantly more expensive than I've seen them on eBay, but it came with a local power adapter and a smile on a Saturday morning.

The good:

• Very sensitive, in fact it overloads on the AM broadcast band (there's a switch for local which must be used).
• Comes with re-chargeable AA batteries which can be charged in the unit with the supplied power adapter. It has a timed charge system built in.
• Includes a generous long wire antenna and cloth pouch.
• Tuning up and down the dial is really smooth, you would think it was an analog system.
• Direct input of frequencies using the row of number buttons.
• Remarkably good on single side band.
• 0xFF memories (255)
• Short wave broadcast bands for easy finding of the big broadcasters.
  

The bad:

• Audio volume is adjusted by pushing a button and then using the tuning knob.
• Mine doesn't sit flat, there is a pop out stand, otherwise it rocks when laying flat
• The big digital simulation of a short wave band dial is pretty funny really, tuning is actually continuous.
• A little cryptic to operate, eg: memories are recalled by pushing a button and spinning the dial. I'd like to store frequencies in those buttons on the front but they just seem to do direct frequency input.
  

In summary, it's a good little radio. Perfect for travel, with decent sound and great sensitivity. I wish manufacturers would make appliances easy enough to use that you don't need a manual at all - you do with this one.

I wish we had an iPod short wave radio.

Ultra high quality headphone amplifier

I read Alastair's post about high quality headphones with great interest. 

After finding the excellent Headwize site, I rushed down to Jaycar this morning for bits, and built the cmoy headphone amplifier (in an Altoids tin, with space to spare, as shown above right).

What really got me was the data sheet for the OPA2134 operational amplifier from Burr-Brown which says, in part, "The distortion produced by OPA134 series op amps is below the measurement limit of all known commercially available equipment."

Further: "THD+Noise is below 0.0004% throughout the audio frequency range, 20Hz to 20kHhz".

My experience.. 

• This is easy to build. I did a hack job, as you can see above, and it worked perfectly first time.
• I'm driving Sennheiser HD 212Pros.
• Ripped some CDs at AAC 256kbps as sample content.
• iPod shuffle has noticeable hiss
• iPod 30Gb has less noise
• Switching the headphones between the iPod direct and via the amplifier makes the iPod sound relatively dull.

It's hard to explain, but this little amplifier gives a real sparkle to the sound. It's not artificial or boosted in any way, but things like cymbals sound quite different - better. Sometimes there is too much bass for my liking.

Other notes:

• Jaycar don't advertise the OPA2134, I went to buy the NE5534AN which is in their catalog and they gave me what I really wanted as a substitute - excellent! (AU$3.95)
• This chip is broadband, when I touch the input it picks up all sorts of hum, I expect that it will be susceptible to RF from things like mobile phones and will need to be in a well shielded box (Altoids tin for example) with filtering to avoid picking up hash.
• I used "ugly construction" which works well for RF projects so it's probably pretty stable as it's all ground plane.
• Didn't bother with gain control as I figure whatever is driving it has it's own volume control. Mine has a bit too much gain for my listening levels.

So, one more thing to carry on the train.. thanks Alastair.

Update

I've spent a very entertaining evening re-importing some of my old favourite CDs at 256Kbs/AAC and of course listening to tracks in different headphones. There is a story around about how your brain works harder listening to music which has been compressed for space (no, not level - that's another topic). Basically masked parts of the audio are removed to reduce the data rate, but in fact you miss those parts of the signal and have to imagine them yourself.

In my youth I was very interested in "hi fi" and well remember the arms race that would follow the upgrade of one component in the system: a new moving coil cartridge would show up the noisy amplifier, upgrading that would show up the speakers, and so on.

Recent years have seen my music move totally on to computers and mostly in to headphones. Loud speakers are always a compromise existing as they do in a room that resonates to some extent. Little computer speakers have advanced tremendously in recent years and work damn well at low level. Headphones can reveal detail and texture in an audio track that will be missed on even the most high end speaker system.

With the falling cost of storage it's now time to re-import my CD collection at a higher bit rate - or perhaps I should just bite the bullet and go loss-less at last.

Update 2

Hmm, not sure if the higher bit rate AAC is worth it for me. I created this test which chops back and forth between 128Kbps and 256Kbps every ten seconds and I can't tell the difference. Of course I'm getting old and probably not listening in the best equipment.

Video stores dead... again (Quickflix review)

I've long assumed that the days of the local video store are numbered, but the reason I thought was direct rental with download over the internet. It seems there's another competitor that is very compelling - the online DVD rental businesses.

When Ingmar Bergaman died (actually a week before, which is weird) I felt a desire to watch some of those beautifully lit black and white movies. A visit to the two local video stores proved fruitless. The nicer, more disorganised store couldn't even search their database for anything except titles!

I looked for an online DVD rental service and stumbled across Quickflix. They have a 14 day free trial with unlimited rentals during that time (with 3 out at a time). You can keep a DVD as long as you like with no penalty, (except your monthly fee), but of course they don't send you more until you return some. Sound too good to be true!

They have a catalog of 25,000 titles, you create a queue of what you want, in order, and they send them out with a pre-paid return post envelope and a nice stiff DVD holder. As a new member, I've been a very efficient viewer. When a disk arrives, I watch it and post it back the very next day.

Here's what I like about this vendor:

• Good web site, quick, good searching, queue management a bit clunky but functional.
• Reviews by David Strattan and Megan Spencer are a good thing, I'd like more lists to prompt me as well
• Email notification of what they've just posted and what they've just received back from me is great and clear.

Here's my pretty minor grumbles:

• The limiting factor is the postal turnaround time. I work in North Sydney and they are in North Sydney, even so it takes three (or mostly four) business days for the posting of one disk back before the next one is sent.
• They don't send items from the top of my queue. Perhaps they only have a few copies, but I generally get things from number four or more from my queue. It might be good to give some idea of the stock and demand.
• After your free trial, you go on to the $40/month plan "unlimited" with three DVDs out at a time. Given the turnaround time, this doesn't seem like the best value - I've dropped back to the $20 plan which is a maximum of 5 DVDs per month.

And why is the local DVD store dead? $4 per DVD with a post paid return envelope and a catalog probably 100 times larger beats $6 per DVD and the waste of time going to the store when they are open - hands down.

How about downloading? I hear that a DVD converted to H.264 video takes up about 700Mb. For most of us on current "unlimited" broadband plans (ha!), five movies would be 3.5Gb which is a fair proportion of "unlimited". For this to be really attractive, it would need to be unchargeable download of some sort. Pretty soon, we'll all be renting HD/DVD or BlueRay and these will be much bigger to download so I predict that delivering data by disk through the post will remain pretty attractive for some time, at least in this country...

Solution to Keychain update hang on MacOS X

MacOS X has fewer weird problems than Windows but it's not totally without issues. For the past month I've had a terrible problem where anything that needed to update the keychain would kill the machine to the point of needing a reboot.

Normally, I don't need to do much maintenance but I tried the following:

• Booted from my install DVD and ran disk utility (that did fix some problems including a file I couldn't previously delete)
• Running Utilities/Keychain Access and getting it to repair my keychain (it found nothing wrong)
• Deleted keys with Keychain Access that were used by apps that gave me trouble.

In the end I found a pointer on an Apple mailing list to this article. In the end all I did was:

• sudo mv /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase.old
  
• reboot

And all is well.

Reading around, it seems this is a rare but repeated problem.

iLife & iWork 08 in use

We're making a DVD at the moment and I've just purchased iLife and & iWork 08.

This DVD has a video component that is being edited together using iMovie and a slide show that we're preparing in Keynote.

Anyhow, iLife and iWork came out this week so I jumped in and bought them. Here's my rundown after giving them a hammering for a day.

The stand-out is iMovie, they seem to have massively re-designed the program around the concept of "event" organised film strips that show you the video as if a film strip that has been unravelled along a light table. You can "scrub" the mouse over the clip and see it animate as if you were spooling a tape over a tape head. It's incredibly fast and smooth to use and a great way to find the best bits in a sequence of video.

iMovie has a sort of all grey look and makes excellent use of the big wide screens we all have now. My impression is that iMovie is pretty much professional grade, with a simple to use user interface. It's rock solid and if it's possible the DV video looks better than it did before for some reason. Update: a feature I rely on, splitting the audio from the video, is actually missing. It turns out others have noticed missing features too. I had assumed it was there but I hadn't found it yet.

The actual video is now stored in Event folders inside your Movies folder in your home directory. The thumbnails for the fast video scrubbing are built and stored there too. I like the way the actual storage is now more transparent - I know what to back up and what to transport to another machine.

Keynote looks pretty much the same but has some features I was wanting such as the ability to crop images inside it. There's an amazing "magic alpha" feature that I have ended up using in this production - this lets you punch out an image from it's background by making the background transparent.

I'm disappointed at the quality of the exported movie from Keynote, given how fantastic it looks on screen. An 800x600 DV export shows jaggies on the text for some reason. I'll try exporting at higher resolution and letting iDVD do the downrendering. Update: I exported as full resolution H264 and it does look much better.

Pages just gets better all the time, advanced features like change logging, and a formatting tool bar make it more familiar. I really love it but it has always seemed a bit sluggish to use. At the office we've pretty much standardised on NeoOffice/OpenOffice, they do a particularly good job of exporting to PDF which is the standard way to publish now. In particular, OpenOffice's export to PDF generates the table of contents that is displayed down the side in PDF readers, Pages doesn't do that for some reason.

Only played with Numbers a bit. Looks good and they've taken a page layout view of a spreadsheet where bits of spreadsheet can float between images and superb charts. I'm a bit puzzled why they don't just merge it in to Pages and make it like Works used to be.

All up, these programs handle large graphics embedded in documents far better than Microsoft's products ever do, and that's increasingly the way we work today. Combined with OmniGraffle for drawing (there's no need for Apple to compete with such a great product), this is all I need to work.

Stop printing phone books!

I haven't used a printed phone book in years. They turn up on the doorstep each year and go straight into the recycling.

Happily it turns out that you can opt out here in Australia by ringing Sensis. I did this and while it's not one of the options they offer on the menu they did mark us to not receive printed books.

The call centre person obviously didn't get many opt out calls, it's pretty hard to find how to do it.

Personally I think printed books should be opt in and probably paid for.

The irony to me is all the environmental chatter on their site, saying that doing searches help save the environment. Surely the best thing they could do right now is to drastically slash the number of books printed by asking exactly who requires them. My guess is that it would be under 20% of the households.

Efficient news reading and manipulation by Dvorak

I'm a news junky. Radio, including short wave radio, used to be my primary source of world news. As the internet ramped up in the '90s I used to visit a bunch of sites each morning to get my update on what's important to me.

It took maybe 15 minutes, while eating breakfast, to read the sites. I also appreciated their design, sometimes clicked deeper in to their content and viewed their banner ads.

Now I use RSS readers, it used to be NetNewsWire but now that web apps are getting good, I use GoogleReader. I can skim all the headlines in seconds, view a bit more info a few more seconds and drill right to the site if I want more very quickly.

Content is king and it's a great deal but I do feel bad that the sites I read every day (actually many times a day) don't get the benefit of my ad impressions.

Some sites are smart, or manipulative - if you like. The king of traffic manipulation is John C Dvorak. I like his story sense - he's been around a long time reviewing technology, so he's a skeptic and tends to dismiss the hype around new product announcements which is actually a useful approach.

John has a rather broken RSS feed that gives you just the headline, which is often incomprehensible without the image. If you click through, you get the comments about the story, but not the story. So you are forced to go and visit the home page. He's getting several page views through this strategy.

Dvorak and his (new) team of hhopper, Eideard, Uncle Dave, SN, and Gasparrini don't seem to publish any original content on the blog (presumably that's saved for commercial journalism outlets that pay a bit better). The value they are adding is mostly editorial - they find interesting stories and re-publish a bit, often embedding video segments. They always give attribution and links - so that's good for the original content creators.

The big secret in the news business used to be how much of the news (90%?) was simply copied or slightly edited from the wire services: AP, Reuters, etc. It's no longer a secret to anyone who views GoogleNews and sees how the same story appears, word for word, in all the world's news papers.

The news business is changing, I'm amazed to still see the giant pile of newspaper we recycle every week, full of stuff that was old news before it was printed. I think there are the following distinct points in news production where value is added:

• News gathering - reporters on the ground
• Editing and researching
• Editorial selection - choosing stories of interest to different consumer groups
• Editorial ordering - sorting the stories, choosing the top story
• Linking relevant stories
• Packaging into periodic wrapups - news of the day, news of the week, news of the year
• Opinion - interpreting a bunch of stories to deliver some insight about "what's really going on"
• Presenting - reading aloud, rendering on paper or HTML or whatever
• Delivering - to browsers, TVs, phones 

The scary thing is how much of these are able to be done pretty well by automated computer programs.

I love news, but right now the only people being paid by me is my internet provider. This doesn't seem quite fair.

Free stepper motors

Another entertaining meeting of the Amateur Radio New South Wales Homebrew Group on Sunday at Dural. Peter O'Connell VK2EMU presented an introduction to the use of stepper motors.

He explained how they work, (by stepping normally 200 little steps per revolution), how they are wired (4 wire, 5 wire, 6 wire arrangements), and how to drive them with a few darlington transistors and a PC parallel port.

It will be a great loss when no computers are available with parallel ports any more but I guess the wide availability of USB chipsets will help here.

A few interesting projects were discussed such as a plotter that can directly cut the copper on a circuit board to make printed circuit boards without etching, and home built milling machines for manufacturing.

The great thing about stepper motors is that they are one piece of precision equipment that can be obtained free. All of those ink jet and laser printers that get left out on the curb during council junk collections contain one.

Show and Tell was great too, Graham VK2GRA showed how he was using electric fence insulators for dipole construction, Stephen showed off his excellent 80m AM challenge transmitter, and Alan VK2ZAY had built a 2M AM transceiver in an Altoids tin plus a fantastic tiny short wave receiver.

OpenWRT router fun

Recently we've been debugging some network issues with clients that connect through broadband routers to remote servers. The best way to solve this type of thing is to capture the traffic right on the broadband interface with tcpdump -w filename.cap (plus some suitable filters) and then decode the capture with the fabulous WireShark.

The only "hard" router I've used that can do these network captures is the Netgear FVS338, it's a great feature. I wanted this at home, where I normally run an Apple Airport so I decided to fork out $95 and get a Linksys WRT54GL so I could flash the firmware with OpenWRT.

Flashing firmware was very smooth. What you get is a very basic web interface for configuration, enough to get up, and the ability to ssh in and do very powerful stuff with iptables.

The things I needed were:

# forward port 999 to 22 on the home linux box at 172.16.1.100
iptables -t nat -A prerouting_wan -p tcp --dport 999 -j DNAT --to 172.16.1.100:22
iptables        -A forwarding_wan -p tcp --dport 22 -d 172.16.1.100 -j ACCEPT

Also, to allow for PPTP passthrough I had to:

# ipkg install kmod-ipt-nat-extra

and reboot. See here.

The hardware and software seems totally reliable so far. I hope there is more in the web interface in future. For me, what is great is that I can get a command line for pings, traceroutes and tcpdumps (there is 7Mb available in /tmp for saving the captures).

For $95 you get a very powerful router, similar to devices costing an order of magnitude more. Recommended for network geeks.

To infinity... and beyond, internet plans

Our house has four active internet users. Wifi everywhere, desktops, laptops, Wii, DSlite, etc. We're already on the "unlimited" plan but for the second time in recent months, this turned out to not be enough.

Silly me, I thought that "unlimited" was as high as you can go, but no, it turns out we can upgrade to "unlimited pro"!

You've got to agree that this sort of naming is dishonest, or at least short sited.

Secondly, when you look around and see other countries getting 100Mbs (symetrical) fibre connections for $50, while we in Australia pay $95 for 1.5Mbs/.235Mbs, you've got to wonder if we're paying too much.

Antenna hoist installed

It's great to be back home after a few weeks away. Apart from cleaning up the pool (which had gone green), doing my washing, and trying to sync up with local time, I've been trying as always to improve my HF antennas.

Hanging an 80m dipole on a suburban house is no easy task, my goal is an inverted V from the tree at the front of the house to the tree at the back of the block with the feed point above the roof of the (two story) house. 

Shown here is a vertical pole with a pulley at the top that raises up the balun feed point. This arrangement is still not idea, it doesn't clear the peak of the roof and those palm trees you can see in the image are a real problem on our block - they invariably grow and catch on wires I string up.

Just before I went away, "Experimental Methods in RF Design" by Wes Hayward and others, arrived. What a fantastic book! For anyone interested in designing and building RF projects, this is a must get book, clearly it has influenced many other designers.

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.