It's More Complicated Than That!

"At this point, since Ubuntu is beginning to look like a really viable alternative OS, the next big..."

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:04:00 -0500

“At this point, since Ubuntu is beginning to look like a really viable alternative OS, the next big issue is whether it will support the ham radio applications that we want to run. Fortunately, the answer to this question is — yes it will.”

- - Ubuntu Linux for Hams

My Ubuntu Hams badge. Some nerd bling just in time for hamfest.

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:45:20 -0500

My Ubuntu Hams badge. Some nerd bling just in time for hamfest.

ARRL Field Day

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:07:26 -0500

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 everything that’s going on, and non-hams can even talk on the air, under the supervision of a licensed operator.

While the on-air competitive portion of field day starts Saturday at 1:00 PM and ends Sunday at 1:00 PM, we’ll be starting work at 1:00 PM Today (Friday, June 25th) - putting up four 50’ antenna towers, a satellite ground station, and a VHF/UHF station.

Our location is 250 Business Park Blvd, Madison 35758, just south of I-565.

Here is a google map.

Ubuntu-Hams - great week, first on-air nets

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 14:24:16 -0500

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. Today we had our first echolink net. There were only two of us, and it was a chance for me to hear the voice of 9W2PJU in Malaysia. Due to his location, power and band limitations, it’s not likely that he and I will be able to make an actual rf contact for a long time.

If you’re an amateur radio operator or want to be, and you are interested in Linux in the ham shack, check out the team page and join us on IRC.

Ubuntu Hams - our first UDS session was great

Fri, 14 May 2010 04:27:36 -0500

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 number of upstream maintainers that we engage with.

We decided to begin having monthly meetings on IRC for Ubuntu-hams, as well as starting to have some HF nets. If you’re interested in following this, join the team and subscribe to the mailing list. We’ll be having followup discussions there.

Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM

Thu, 06 May 2010 08:37:25 -0500

Smartbooks have been delayed by Flash issues, says ARM:

This what you get when you have a product ecosystem dependent on a single proprietary piece.

Ubuntu Developer Summit keysigning

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:34:10 -0500

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.

Call for participation - creation of a specification for interoperability of amateur radio applications

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:17:00 -0500

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 web-based applications.

In the last week, the discussion gained enough momentum on the linux-ham mailing list that it was suggested that interested participants take the discussion to the arswd Yahoo group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arswd/

The informally stated purpose is to create an open cross-platform specification that will allow interoperability of applications. This is not aimed at any particular operating system or distribution.

This is still in the stage of having people gather for further discussion, so it’s wide open for contribution.

it would be great to have participation by the principal developers of various amateur radio applications, no matter which O.S. your applications run on. No one knows better than you what would help you make your app work better. No matter what your area of knowledge - logging, sound card modems, satellite comms, contesting … there are probably unique aspects of those applications that should be accounted for in the spec.

I personally see this as a step toward some amazing amateur radio applications, suites, and web-based applications.

Steve AI4QR

When open source is outlawed . . .

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:11:09 -0600

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 competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn’t state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).”

I agree. Open Source is free choice and open markets in action. The reason it’s getting this sort of policy level attention is that it breaks the game that the the big-dollar interests have been playing with the “free market” system.

Disclaimer: I earn a living working on free software, as do a lot of people I respect who work for companies that ostensibly compete with my employer (Canonical) and with each other. The majority of them work for companies who get paid by other companies to provide good and services, who then pay their employees to do the actual labor of producing those, and we in turn spend that money locally just the same as anyone working in any other field. That’s pretty traditional capitalism.

Noise Floor

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:52:12 -0600

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 see from earth when you are far away from light pollution. Adding to the clarity we had clear, cold air overhead from the front that had just passed through. The second thing I hadn’t thought about in a while was how much lower the rf noise floor is away from my house and urban areas. I had my Elecraft KX-1 along, and threw an antenna up into a tree. I ended up not trying to make any contacts because a) It hurt to take my hands out of my gloves and b) there was a CW contest on, and I was not very confident that I could copy well enough. So I spent several hours just practicing copying CW, and made some real improvements. I was amazed by what I could hear! Just like realizing that there are so many stars you normally can’t see, there were an incredible number of signals out there.

I need to get out more often.

My Excellent Book Day

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:26:17 -0600

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 begin?
When will man make his first trip to the moon?
What is the latest information on flying saucers?
Have the Russians perfected an intercontinental ballistic missile?
Can space bacteria cause epidemics on earth?
How can you prepare for a space career?
When will we have passenger rocket ships?

This looks like a great book. Susan was right - I’ll enjoy reading it. But the second book - it floored me. It’s a pristine copy of “Rocket Manual for Amateurs” by Bertrand R. Brinley. This is a book that I spent innumerable hours consuming as a teenager. It was later severely damaged by water, and lost.

RMFA is a book that couldn’t be published today. Not because the information in it isn’t applicable, but because it would be perceived to be too dangerous, or too useful to “evil doers”. It begins with a defense against the anticipated argument of danger, so that concern isn’t such a recent one. This is a book aimed at young people. Young ~men~ specifically, but such were the times - and I’m glad we’ve moved past them more or less. From the first chapter:

” … I would say that it (an average rocketry organization) consists of seven bright young men between the ages of 13 and 17, one sympathetic and understanding parent or high school teacher who acts as an adult advisor for the group, and one engineer or chemist who acts as a technical advisor”.

This was a book full of real information. Rocket design and stability. Information about different kinds of propulsion. Nozzle design. Fin attachment. How to build static test stands. How to design a safe range. How to build launch and loading bunkers. How to track your rocket. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations - it’s not perfect because I didn’t want to break the delicate spine to scan it:

While only encouraging the use of a couple of relatively safe solid propellants, the book has information about a lot more. It was pretty heady stuff to read about hypergolic fuels, Fuming Nitric acids, and attempt to follow the trigonometry of trajectory analysis.

This book is where I learned about centers of pressure and thrust, where I learned that there are different alloys of steel and aluminum, and that they have numbers i.e. “SAE 1020 steel tubing”. Combined with the general environment of the Apollo program, and having a father working on the program, this book is responsible for a lot of the knowledge that later took me down what was a very interesting and rewarding career path.

I didn’t end up as a rocket scientist. But the book is a stepping stone that led to a career in special effects and fireworks, where I did build rockets but also so much more. It’s not surprising that Susan knew it would be something I would like, she knows me very well. I’ve looked for this book before, and found it only at proces I didn’t want to pay. I’m so glad to have it back on my shelf. I went back to the book shop and paid the owner the difference between the song that Susan had paid and a fair market value. She’s a friend and a member of our tribe.

If you’re interested in the book, you can download a softcopy here.

Thank you Susan.

In a related anecdote - I also was a big fan of a book series titled “The Mad Scientists Club”. It was about the adventures of a bunch of boys who caused a lot of mostly harmless trouble, but all the technology in the book was plausible. I was a fan of both the RMFA and TMSC for years before it clicked one day that there was only one Bertrand R. Brinley and that he had authored both.

But wait, that’s not all! Arriving home, there was a package containing two copies of “Practical Arduino”, By Jon Oxer and Hugh Blemings. Hugh sent me a personal copy and one for the shelf at Antitronics. I can’t wait to read it. I’ll report back after I have. Hugh is my manager at Canonical. Well - sort of - as duties shift now and then. But this is the role I met him in. It didn’t take long to discover that we have a lot in common - microcontroller hacking, Arduino projects, Amateur Radio, and linux hacking. It’s been exciting to follow Hugh’s final stages in getting the book published, and I’m really happy for him that it’s out there.

Thank you Hugh.

OK, I have a bunch of reading to do now.

Our Ubuntu kernel sprint in London has been going very well. Our...

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:02:51 -0600

Our Ubuntu kernel sprint in London has been going very well. Our focus this week has been sharing information with each other about how we do our work, to spread around some critical knowledge. This morning we walked to work in a snowfall.

Antennas on hillsides - interesting stuff

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 13:29:06 -0600

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.

Litl makes an announcement

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:10:17 -0600

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 accommodating their distribution to litl’s unique needs.”

Here’s another link with some tech details.

development tools for Intel graphics drivers on Linux

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:26:00 -0600

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 card. This comes as part of the xserver-xorg-video-intel-dbg package.

On Ubuntu you can install that with this rune:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel-dbg

[UPDATE] this tool will be moving to the intel-gpu-tools package. Thanks to tormod on IRC for that info!

Note to self: See what other goodies are in that package

Why is this tool useful? I discovered the tool because I was following an email thread on a development list about high power consumption during suspend. By comparing register contents before and after the problem appeared, the troubleshooter was attempting to see whether there were associated register changes.

I can also see this being useful if you’re trying to debug problems with monitor capabilities - by examining the output you can tell a lot about the video timing that’s been selected - here’s an excerpt:

(II):             HTOTAL_B: 0x05a704ff (1280 active, 1448 total)
(II):             HBLANK_B: 0x05a704ff (1280 start, 1448 end)
(II):              HSYNC_B: 0x054f052f (1328 start, 1360 end)
(II):             VTOTAL_B: 0x0336031f (800 active, 823 total)
(II):             VBLANK_B: 0x0336031f (800 start, 823 end)
(II):              VSYNC_B: 0x03280322 (803 start, 809 end)

(there are over 200 registers dumped for my graphics card)

fldigi presentation at HARC meeting

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:35:18 -0500

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 similar presentation at the Huntsville Hamfest this year. Our demo was cross-platform between Windows and Ubuntu Linux.

There are some really interesting uses being made of fldigi and some companion applications - sending digital files error-free by amateur radio. This is useful for emergency communications in post-disaster situations, when information must be accurately transmitted. Some of these applications do not use point-to-point connections, and therefore allow a file to be received by multiple stations at once. That way, if any station fails to receive the file correctly, they can get a “fill” from any other station who did get it.

It’s possible to perform these file transfers simply by holding the microphone on an FM radio near the computer speaker, and to receive them with a computer microphone near the receiver!

This should be a worthwhile presentation for people with any level of interest or experience in digital sound card modes. For more information see Dave’s excellent web site. Don’t miss his sights and sounds of digital modes page, especially if you’ve been listening to the sounds on the ham bands and wondering what modes they are.

The presentation will be November 6th at 7:30 at the American Red Cross chapter house, 1101 Washington street, Huntsville, AL. This is the regular weekly meeting place and time of the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club.

Baghdad Burning - two years+

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:19:02 -0500

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.

reverting from PPA packages in Ubuntu

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:49:30 -0500

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 package called ppa-purge, which will revert the PPA settings and restore the packages to the distro versions. This makes it much easier to restore the system, or even to bounce between the distro and bleeding edge versions and see what changed.

Two new Linux/open source amateur radio projects

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:31:00 -0500

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.

HF Noise source found!

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:03:44 -0500

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.