July 2010
2 posts
3 tags
“At this point, since Ubuntu is beginning to look like a really viable...”
– - Ubuntu Linux for Hams
3 tags
June 2010
2 posts
2 tags
ARRL Field Day
For some amateur radio operators, the annual Field Day is a big deal. Here in Madison County, Al we put on a pretty big effort, and get to practice our rapid-response skills and be competitive at the same time.
If you are at all curious and want to see a lot of different aspects of Amateur Radio all in one place, come visit this weekend. There will be lots of hams there to talk to about...
2 tags
Ubuntu-Hams - great week, first on-air nets
It’s been a great week for the Ubuntu-Hams team. We’ve had a lot of activity on IRC for weeks, but we finally set up some scheduled nets, and had the first of those this week.
Of the four nets on the schedule, we managed to have two - the 80m net ended up moving to 20m because it just wasn’t working for us on 80, and we had a nice round-robin net until the band closed on us....
May 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Ubuntu Hams - our first UDS session was great
The Ubuntu Hams team was started a year ago, and has seen a lot of membership growth since then. We just finished the first BOF session we’ve ever had at an Ubuntu Developer’s Summit, and it was a lot of fun. As soon as I can I’ll email a summary to the team mailing list. The discussion was wide-ranging, from enabling translation of amateur radio packages, to increasing the...
1 tag
Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says... →
This what you get when you have a product ecosystem dependent on a single proprietary piece.
April 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Ubuntu Developer Summit keysigning
If you’re attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels May 10-14, you’re welcome to participate in the openPGP keysigning party on Wednesday evening.
3 tags
Call for participation - creation of a...
Calling all developers of amateur radio software …
Recently there has been discussion in several of the amateur radio development communities that I participate in about establishing standards for interoperability of amateur radio applications.
Discussion has been around protocols and data formats for amateur radio applications, to be used both on a local host and for interaction with...
February 2010
3 posts
1 tag
When open source is outlawed . . .
Bobby Johnson writes a nice piece here about pressure for U.S. trade representatives to consider countries using open source technology as enemies of capitalism. Here’s a great quote:
“I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it’s an example of the free market in action. When companies can’t compete with huge, crushing...
1 tag
Noise Floor
Last weekend I went on a two-night backpacking trip in the Sipsey Wilderness Area with ten scouts and a couple of other adults. We had a great time, with two nights with sub-freezing temps. For me this was a milestone, the first backpacking I’ve done in years since knee and shoulder surgeries.
I had forgotten a couple of things - The first was just how many stars (and other objects) you can...
My Excellent Book Day
There’s a great second hand book shop named “Beloved Community Book Store” at the Flying Monkey Arts Center. Today my wife Susan brought me a couple of books that she found that she just knew I would like. She had no idea …
One of them is “The Space Age” by Willy Ley. It is a first printing from 1958, and promises to answer the questions:
Where does space...
January 2010
2 posts
1 tag
2 tags
Antennas on hillsides - interesting stuff →
I’ve been thinking about how to optimize antennas for HF at my location, which is on a hillside. This provided me with some insight. I’m not sure what I’ll end up with for propagation to the East (over the hill), but to the West I can probably end up with very good results. Modeling will help. I’ll post more when I get to that.
November 2009
2 posts
Litl makes an announcement
Litl announced their product today. Since they mentioned their relationship with Canonical, I suppose it’s ok to say that I’ve had a litl bit (heh) of involvement with this. Wow, it sure does make me feel great to read
“… the Canonical folks have been great partners. It’s been a joy to get changes integrated upstream, and Canonical has done a lot of excellent work...
2 tags
development tools for Intel graphics drivers on...
I love discovering new tools.
Lately my work on Ubuntu Linux kernels has had me paying closer attention to the Intel open source graphics drivers.
I’ve come across a few tools that are handy to developers and people with more advanced troubleshooting skills. One of those is intel_reg_dumper, which (not surprisingly) dumps the values of a whole bunch of internal registers from the graphics...
October 2009
3 posts
4 tags
fldigi presentation at HARC meeting
On November 6th I’ll be helping Dave Freese, W1HKJ make a presentation about fldigi to the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club. Fldigi is an amazing open-source cross platform application for communicating using sound card digital modes on amateur radio.
Dave is really knowledgeable about the encoding and error correction used for the various modes, and I learned a lot by helping him with a...
Baghdad Burning - two years+ →
Two years and a day since we last heard from River. I wonder how many other people still think about her now and then like I do.
2 tags
reverting from PPA packages in Ubuntu
PPAs on Launchpad are an amazing way to get the latest crack builds, which is useful if you track or contribute to an upstream project, or test new code to see if it resolves a problem. That’s what I’ve been doing this week - I installed the latest Xorg crack on top of a karmic beta install.
If you visit that last link, you’ll find a description of how to install and use a...
September 2009
3 posts
2 tags
Two new Linux/open source amateur radio projects
I just noticed a couple of new Linux amateur radio projects. The first is a D-Star compatible repeater - More info Here and the project page is here . I see no mention of source code or a license for the repeater code, but it is apparently based on Centos. The second project is an APCO-25 decoder, and is clearly available under the GPL.
1 tag
HF Noise source found!
After months of suffering an intermittent HF noise problem, tonight I noticed it had settled into a cycle of 01:05 minutes off, 00:45 on. Hmmm. Streetlight? A walk around the neighborhood and I found it. Tomorrow, a call to Hsv Utilities.
1 tag
The Bob Jones project →
I’ve been working on this for about two years now - it’s finally real.
That detailed long range plan? I helped.
August 2009
4 posts
1 tag
Lessons from Katrina
The article linked below is pretty horrific, and describes what is known about the choices that were made at a hospital in New Orleans after Katrina, including the decision to euthanize patients. There’s a lot to think about in the article, but for people involved in disater relief, emergency management, or other aspects of disaster planning, It’s important to note how the situation...
4 tags
Open Source amateur radio apps at the Huntsville...
Dave Freese, W1HKJ will be presenting a forum at the Huntsville Hamfest titled “Emergency Communications using HF Digital Modes”. Dave and a core group of contributors have been working for the last few years on a suite of open source applications for amateur radio. The fldigi application is the flagship of these.
Fldigi is a digital modem application which generates and decodes a...
2 tags
Presenting at Atlanta Linux Fest
I’ll be presenting a session at Atlanta Linux Fest titled “Debugging the Kernel”. This presentation originated with Colin King, another member of the Ubuntu kernel team. Colin’s blog has a wealth of debugging information.
The presentation is an overview of various methods used, as applied to increasing difficulty. What can you do when you have no video, no console, no...
3 tags
Amateur Radio in School
I’m presenting a forum at the Huntsville Hamfest about the ARRL Teachers Institute on Wireless Technology, and specifically about the amateur radio program under way at Bob Jones High School in Madison, AL. The forum is in Salon 5 at 10:00 Saturday morning
Two years ago, I started talking with teachers at BJHS about an amateur radio program. Over this summer break, eight teachers from the...
July 2009
7 posts
Bad Dell!
I’m stunned by a spectacular failure in Dell’s management of my relationship with them.
I just got a call from them. They’re allowed to do this, as I am a customer and have an account with them. But - it was a robocall that mentioned a new “protection service” for my account, then shifted into an apology that there were no live operators available to transfer to....
Crippled wifi hardware →
Matt had some wifi problems, possibly due to a vendor-imposed limitation on the hardware. There’s some nice insight on ways to troubleshoot this sort of thing.
1 tag
Catching satellites on ham radio →
Here’s a great introduction by Diana Eng about to how to listen to (and work) amateur radio satellites.
Efficient String Concatenation in Python →
I stumbled across this while doing some midnight hacking last night. Interesting stuff.
Package management - Ubuntu/Fedora →
Linux Magazine compares Package management between Fedora and Ubuntu. Ubuntu looks pretty good. So good that the article uses the word “trounced”.
Nothing amazing to report
Sometimes linux kernel work is pretty rockin’ but a lot of the time it’s just janitorial stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of that sort of work off and on over the last few months, and am finally almost at a milestone - review of a large set of patches which were mostly backports from later kernels, into one of the Ubuntu variants.
The fear at the outset was that there were patches...
Great kernel information →
Colin’s been on a tear lately, posting some really excellent information about Linux - power savings, kernel debugging, and comments on some recent benchmarks.
June 2009
10 posts
1 tag
The (Siren) Song of the Laser →
Great post about the enabling power that tools can have.
Last week while visiting NYC Resistor, Bre (or Adam) told me that once you start making things with the laser cutter and 3d printer, it changes your whole outlook about what’s possible and how to make things. All I did was watch the printer operate and see the parts that had been cut with the laser, and it’s already having a...
5 tags
NYC Resistor Visit
As part of our week messing around in NYC, Susan and I decided to drop in at NYC Resistor to check it out and meet some fellow makers/hackers. There was some public event scheduled for Wednesday evening, so we dropped in early, and met a bunch of very busy and very friendly hackers, including Bre Pettis, Adam Mayer, Zach Smith, Rose White, and others that fell into my usual black hole for names.
...
The Linux Box
As promised, here’s the first article I’ve written for the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club (HARC) newsletter.
Welcome to the first article in a series about the Linux operating system and, more specifically, the amateur radio software applications available for Linux. I’m Steve Conklin, AI4QR, and I’ve been using Linux and developing applications on it for over ten years.
...
4 tags
Preparedness and amateur radio
We’re very lucky in Madison County and in the entire state of Alabama to have a capable group of radio amateurs who are involved with the emergency and disaster response planning at both state and county levels. We train and work with these agencies, and have a good working relationship with those agencies. Post-Katrina, radio amateurs from Alabama provided valuable service for months in the...
2 tags
Practical arts
I’m part of an artist’s cooperative - The Flying Monkey Arts Center. Susan and I share a space there - her stitch lounge and my fledgling electronics space, Antitronics, which my brother and I are starting. More on Antitronics in later posts.
We’re trying to get a handle on utility bills at the monkey. It’s safe to postulate that a large part of the consumption is air...
1 tag
Ubuntu and NGOs
Service to others is valuable. I’m not sure whether there’s more value to those served or to those performing the service. I’ve seen this in many settings - Service to the American Red Cross, Service providing emergency and disaster communications, and as a board member serving non-profit organizations.
A lot of people understand that part of the open source model is to help...
3 tags
New Monthly piece on Linux and Amateur Radio
I’ve committed to write a monthly article for our amateur radio club newsletter on Linux and amateur radio. I’ll be posting them here also. The first one is an introduction to how to run linux from a live CD or to install it.
I’d like to expand this so that I’m writing more often here, and then consolidating those pices for the newsletter, and also take the chance to get...
Ubuntu Amateur Radio Team
While in Barcelona for the Canonical all-hands, I met several fellow amateur radio operators. I know that there are a lot of amateurs who use Ubuntu, but there wasn’t a gathering place for us to discuss common issues. While at UDS I created a team on Launchpad, located here.
I was caught by surprise when membership grew to more than 20 in four days, but the massiveness of the Ubuntu...
Returning from Ubuntu Developer Summit
I’ve returned from UDS a good bit more motivated to try to keep up with this blog. After discovering gwibber at UDS and meeting a giant bunch of people in person, There’s a lot to talk about. I’m going to try to post it here in pieces, so it doesn’t all get lost in one or two big posts.
There were lots of great discussions about the the nuts and bolts of the upcoming...
April 2009
1 post
Heh, six months later . . .
So with the Jaunty release I’ve reached a milestone of sorts, since I started on the kernel team at Canonical during release week for Intrepid. In theory I’ve seen a little bit of every part of the process for everything although in reality you can only drink from a fire hose at a fixed, small rate.
For the last few months I’ve been immersed in some very specific kernels - the...
December 2008
2 posts
Apport →
Check this out - it’s a slick tools for grabbing troubleshooting information and sending it to support. It’s extensible, which means any package developer can add hooks to gather information specific to their package.
Ubuntu Developer Summit - Jaunty
After a great few weeks coming up to speed on the Ubuntu, Debian, and Canonical ways of doing things, This week I’m at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (USD), hosted at Google headquarters.
We’ll be planning and brainstorming for Jaunty. I know that for every Ubuntu developer who is here, there are thousands who would like to be, so I’ll try to post what I can about the kernel track...
November 2008
1 post
coming up to speed
Last week was packed with new things. It was incredible starting work at Canonical and dropping right into the Intrepid release. After watching the release from the Canonical offices, I had a beer at the London Release Party grabbed dinner with some other kernel engineers in London’s Chinatown, and headed back to the hotel for some jet lag passout sleep. Both during last week and since then...
October 2008
2 posts
Intrepid Prerelease Windup
As it turns out, I was able to contribute to some testing of the release. Now we’re winding up to release and it’s really interesting to follow both the internal and external chatter on irc. On the one side you have a well defined process that just moves along over many hours. On the other side, a party!
Speaking of party, There’s one here in London tonight and I expect to have...
Revival of the blog
Lately there’s a lot to write about, especially relating to my activity with some amateur radio packages and my recent employment by Canonical. I’m really excited about increasing my involvement with the Ubuntu and Debian communities, and I’ll try to keep updates coming.
This week I’m at the Intrepid release sprint in London, meeting people and watching the release...