Amateur Radio! Hobby, Adventure, Nerd Fun at it's Finest.

Hi!
I've had a lot of hobbies in my day. I mean that these are things that I enjoy doing just for the enjoyment of doing them. Two stand out in my mind especially, bird watching and ham radio.
Yeah I know, birdwatching makes me a nerd, and ham radio makes me a geek, but what can I say, I yam what I yam!
I want to talk some about amateur radio, especially in light of the current tsunami/earthquake/nuclear meltdown situation in Japan.
First watch this video:
About a contact hours after the tsunami. Here, you hear two radio operators talking about stuff, one in Japan, the other in America. The Japanese operator is glad to talk to someone. My point? When all other communication infrastructure degrades, amateur radio can get through! One of the reasons I became an amateur radio operator is because it can play such a vital communications role in times of emergency. It's also a lot of fun to build antennas, fix radios, build radios from scratch, talk to people all over the world, and just generally explore science.

So what is amateur ('ham') radio? Technically, it's a government mandated service regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Here's the purpose as outlined in Part 97 of the FCC's rules and regulations:

§97.1 Basis and purpose.-

The rules and regulations in this Part are designed to provide an amateur radio service having a fundamental purpose as expressed in the following principles:

(a) Recognition and enhancement of the value of the amateur service to the public as a voluntary noncommercial communication service, particularly with respect to providing emergency communications.

(b) Continuation and extension of the amateur's proven ability to contribute to the advancement of the radio art.

(c) Encouragement and improvement of the amateur service through rules which provide for advancing skills in both the communications and technical phases of the art.

(d) Expansion of the existing reservoir within the amateur radio service of trained operators, technicians, and electronics experts.

(e) Continuation and extension of the amateur's unique ability to enhance international goodwill.

Practically, it's a group of hobbyists dedicated to having fun building, fixing, and using radios to communicate with people both near and far. We stand ready to help establish communications with cut off groups of people, stand ready to accept and pass along messages of hope when disaster strikes close to us, and we like having a good time. A soldiers life is filled with long periods of boredom, followed by brief moments of terror. Hams find a way to not be bored while waiting for the terror.

Many amateur radio operators have become electrical engineers, computer scientists, and other 'nerd' skills. Many of us have done other things with our lives, we are janitors, preachers, broadcast journalists, doctors, policemen, firemen, soldiers, (shudder) lawyers, politicians. Hams come from all walks of life. Even Ted Nugent is a licensed amateur radio operator.

In today's world, it's hard to understand how something like amateur radio can still serve a purpose. Communication infrastructure is everywhere! We all have cellphones, internet access, text messaging, smart phones, satellite phones, anything! Much of this communication infrastructure is interdependent and fragile. With one hurricane/In 2004, my wife and I endured 3 hurricanes while living in Orlando. She was impressed with the fact that while our cellphones only worked every once and a while, I could communicate and get news via my hand-held ham radio. Or consider the case of Gary. I Guarantee you ham radio made a difference to Gary that day.

Ham radio makes a difference in the world today. It's present, whether you see it or not, in every natural, or man made disaster. If you would like to know more about how ham radio helps in emergencies, and find out what it takes to become a ham, visit The ARES page. If ham radio has helped you, or you have a story to share, post a comment! Tell it!

73, (how hams say 'best regards')
DE KG4GVL (DE means "this is", and KG4GVL is my ham radio call sign)

for... The Gastronome...

So it's late brunch time in my house. My middle daughter is wanting an 'egg on a blanket' basically a fried egg (well) on toast, with cheese between them. She loves that stuff. Recent controversy at my house has forbid the use of teflon covered pans, they are starting to peel, and so we don't cook on them anymore. It's ok, I got a cast iron skillet I can use for eggs. Apply butter, and voila! I don't need no stinkin' teflon!

looking at this hot skillet, I think to myself, 'I got a hot skillet, I should do something with it.' And immediately begin thinking about fried eggs. Then I paused....
I like spinach, and we recently bought some for a after church dinner salad. We didn't have all the leaves gone yet, so I've secretly been munching them instead of potato chips late night after I get home from work. Nomnomnomnomnom.. I really like raw spinach! I looked at that hot skillet and thought to myself 'Skillet needs some spinach.... and garlic'
hmmmmm, I crisped up some garlic, and spinach in the skillet, whipped the eggs together, poured them into the skillet, applied cheese, ham, more spinach, tri-folded it, garnished with a lil' rubbed sage(secret thing about me, I didn't make it if it don't got no sage), and plated it all up into the delicious looking thing on top of this blog post. I like giving away surprises, and let me tell you, you go do this at your house, you'll get a tasty surprise.

RSpec Book is Out!

Yays!
I bought this book like forever ago, and it's finally in print!
I want to say that so far I like the paper version as much as the electronic, and now that I basically only have one computer it makes following the examples in the book so much easier.

If you are looking to learn behaviour driven development, and the tools behind it, pick it up!
enjoy!
ok,
I'll go back in my hole...

Using Ruby for Something Not Rails.

Hello!
So, I fell in love with ruby before I knew what ruby on rails was about. I started using ruby because I remembered the thrill of using my computer to actually write the software I needed to get a particular job done. I especially was excited because with ruby, I could run something across many platforms with little modification, in theory. In the old school world of line numbered BASIC, one had to tailor tune the BASIC to his or her platform. I used the Commodore 64, perhaps the creme de la creme, but still, different than AT&T, Tandy, or IBM. Often, the differences were subtle, and I hated going to school, and using the TRS-80's or Apple IIe's because I felt they changed the BASIC only because they wanted me use their software. Incidentally, this became the seeds to my use of Open Software, before I knew about Richard Stallman.
Back to the Ruby.
Chris Pine is my hero. If you've never read Learning to Program you should, even if you are the most amazing 1337 h4xx0r there is. I discovered it while trying to find a language I could love as deeply as I loved my Commodore. Ruby is it.
I worked my way through the book, and began using ruby for various things in my computer, the most coolest of which is updating itself.
That's right, I use ruby to update itself.
Every whenever I want to, I build ruby from source using a little script I hacked together on a whim. In the process of writing it, I learned how ruby does things like change directory in a linux environment, and how adding a puts in there can make things more verbose.
Here's the gist of it: upruby I know it's not much, but it's powerful, and can be improved, and I am interested in hearing how you would improve it. I've been thinking of parameterizing certain elements, and having the file run off of a configuration file. I keep everything invisible to non admin users for obvious reasons, so I don't have to worry about maliciously destroying my /dev/sda. I've also thought about making it a general script to update a lot of different things, and making it so it will run as a cron job, or perhaps only run when I am expressly logged in as the root user, and not merely sudo runnable, just because I don't want to have an issue with something taking a while (like updating all the gems) and have to enter my sudo password multiple times.

I am interested in hearing about how you would handle this situation. How would you adapt this script to run your updates?
That is all!
Next post is going to be all about amateur radio! I hope you are as excited as I am about that!
l8rz,
gb hoyt

New Ubuntu, or My Meerkat be Maverick!

So I took some time Monday and installed the latest and greatest Ubuntu, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.
Let me say this,
I am getting tired of installing a new OS every Six months, lol.
That being said, Maverick Meerkat is pretty slick. I did a fresh install, completely wiping out my old system, although I did do quite a bit of copying my files from a backup once the installation was complete. Everything seems to run a little better now, I am using the "Proprietary" video driver, I haven't installed apache or Drupal. The machine is running smoothly, and cooler. The fans definately are not working as hard. Maybe they finally got flash right! I have installed ruby, from source, following the instructions I previously gave for Ubuntu 10.04. I didn't doubt they would still be valid, having done this long enough to understand when I stand a chance of changing something that will break everything else. Everything is in a different font than before. I don't understand how that makes things better, but I think it does. Somehow, I have convinced myself that the rounder looking font has made the electrons move faster, and therefore, boosted computer performance.

In a nutshell, I like it, but I'm tired of liking something every six months.
l8rz.

Live From The Heart of Possum Hollow: Life in the fast lane means you have to duck the pigs in flight.

Live From The Heart of Possum Hollow: Life in the fast lane means you have to duck the pigs in flight. A hilarious take on the Irish shower my dad wrote just over a month ago. I can't believe i didn't read this sooner. There are no wasted words in his description, and even the size of the text is an indication that there is a deep, hidden genius in central Louisiana.

FLPR vs LAMP

Ok,
I have about a dozen grand projects tumbling about my cranium at any given moment. The most important involve taking my love of computers and programming, and turning it into profit so that one day, when I am rich, I can feed homeless people all the time. One idea that has been bubbling on the biggest back burner has been to make myself marketable as a website designer/online application developer. To do this, I have studied several approaches, and am near making something useful. First, you must have a system to develop upon, and a system to receive the code. I am of the opinion that the two should match, if not the exact hardware, then most certainly OS/application versions, file versions, etc. I see the wisdom in this approach because at work we have two systems running basically the same thing. One is MS SQL Server 2000, the other is MS SQL Server 2005. Both machines have a 'dev', 'test', and 'production' instance, and the process we use for promoting changes in the system is different for each machine. People, this is a product made by the same company! It's kinda scary to me to think that there are vastly different ways of doing thing just in the different versions of the same software.

Granted, FOSS *nix operating systems and software is a little different, grep is grep and vim is vim (and awexome, suck that EMACS boys!) no matter the *nix, but there are some differences. Take for instance the Ubuntu version of shutdown and the FreeBSD version of shutdown, they both can shutdown the computer, but in Ubuntu it's `shutdown -h now`, and in FreeBSD it's `shutdown -p now`. The difference is huge! in FreeBSD `shutdown -h now` will only halt the system, in ubuntu it powers down. So what's a boy to do? remember two different shutdown commands? maybe, so what if I do?

Personally, as I get older, I am finding it easier to just use one system for developing, and one system to deploy. It's hard for me to invest in learning a gobjillion ways of doing something, so TIMTOWDI is great when gettin' my hack on, but horrible when actually deploying an application.

sigh.
I am rambling to say this, php is not for me I think. I am sure I will be learning more of it, and will be using it from time to time, but I will not find it enjoyable. I love ruby too much. It's exactly what I want and expect in a scripting/programming language. My LAMP cannot be a LAMP, I need something else, another acronym:
FLPR
FLPR stands for FreeBSD, Lighttpd, PostgreSQL, Ruby(or Rails), and it is going to be my deployment platform. I am not sure exactly what I will be deploying yet, Antlers perhaps? but one day, I will be deploying something. I have two obstacles to overcome,
1. Ubuntu has made me OS lazy. I don't know as much as I should about Linux. I've been using it almost exclusively for the past four years, and I used it for two year (way back in the day!) in highschool. Ubuntu does a lot of things for me, so I have been focusing on developing my skills as a generic programmer instead of a competent sys admin. It's only natural right? I abhor specialization though. sigh, that's a different matter.
2. I don't know a thing about lighttpd. It's going to have a learning curve. It's going to be a while before I have to worry about it as I develop my first application, but that brings up another problem. I want to use it because I keep asking myself Can rails scale? and figure even if it does happen to scale very nicely, I still want a fast webserver, the hardware on my deployment machine ain't exactly state o' the art.

the hard target here is the FreeBSD way of doing things. Currently, I utilize the most recent ruby, the most recent rails, and I use rubygems to manage my gems. That is not the FreeBSD way. I am not even sure how to do things my way on a FreeBSD platform. Should that be a clue? Why not just use Linux? Simplest answer to that is "because I don't want to" :P It is honestly, a little more complicated than that, but that would be a political discussion, and it would also be an adventure in missing the point. here are some issues I have had with FreeBSD recently (6 months to a year ago)
1. FreeBSD uses ports to install gems, and perhaps my google-fu needs practice, but I haven't been able to discover a good way to use rubygems to install gems in FreeBSD instead of the ports. Gems need to be installed via gems, not via ports. I cannot compromise there.
2. Related to item 1: ruby on FreeBSD is old. I think I can fix that, at least I will be able to, or maybe I can get a friend to look at it for me, and guide us on the way.
Once these two issues are sorted out, i will begin developing an awesome application. until then, I languish along.

l8rz.