Kritikal

Well it was all good fun that started off with a chilly morning but turned into a gorgeous day!

Video Streaming
This did and did not work as well as planned. I wound up using a service called Ustream.tv. Apparently I set it up too late to get a developers key so I could embed it directly into my site. Rather, people went to a page on their domain and got to see me streaming live through my EVDO connection. The killer here, most of rural Ohio is only capable of EDGE (2.5G) speeds so constant upload was difficult or downright not possible. I did also set up the image capture for every 15 seconds which was plenty fine.

I also did have an Ajax chat application, from Mibbit, that connected to the IRC channel most were hanging out for the WA5KUD livecast. That worked extremely well and I’ll be looking to use it again for other events.

What’d I get?!
As I didn’t have any specific needs, not much.

I did, or rather, my father did for me, pick up an OpenTracker+ and the associated GPS receiver along with a datacable for my RS HTX-420. Now I can start hacking away at APRS!

I also picked up a Serial (DB-9) USB adapter so I can use my anemometer with the Mac and new laptop. This also let’s me use my GPS unit if I ever need to when I’m out storm chasing.

I of course got the always nice on a hot day Heffeweisen from the beer trailer. Never disappointed.

I was, and still am, on the prowl for a Kenwood TH-F6A but the two that we saw were in well used condition and didn’t warrant the asking price.

I also spotted a Toshiba Libretto 100ct which tugged at my heart and pocket book pretty hard. The unit was completely stock and did not have a power adapter. Wanting $85 and not budging I opted to not get it.

Not for myself I picked up a Uniden scanner for $5 that needs a power adapter and good cleanup.

Till next year!
It was really great to just go this year, if even for just 1 day. When all was said and done we managed to cover the entire flea market and made quick rounds through the indoor vendors.

Stopped at a Cracker Barrel for dinner on the way home and arrived back in town just after 11:00PM. Tired and sore I came home to a 112 lbs. box to get up 27 steps; I’ll be putting the crib together this weekend.

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We’re on the road now!

I got about 2 hours of good sleep and a good shot of coffee.

For the streaming video initiative, I’ll be using the free service at UStream (http://www.ustream.tv). For right now you’ll have to go to the page separately since they don’t immediately give out developer API keys. You can go there now but you’ll get nothing till later. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/dayton-hamvention-2008

Liveblogging will be done through BrightKite which you can watch at http://www.brightkite.com/people/kritikal and will be mirrored to my Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kritikal

You can also track us via APRS at http://aprs.fi/?call=ka8spw-15&mt=m&z=11&timerange=3600

And lastly I’m setting up an AJAX chat that will connect to an IRC server so we can chat it up while en route.

The final page will be at http://www.kritikal.com/dayton

More later as I finish the development.

The Skinny
Well it looks like this year I’ll again be going with my father, Shanon, KA8SPW, to Dayton, OH to pay my yearly homage to the greatest hobby ever. From what’s coming down the pipeline we’ll also be bringing along Tom, N8LBT. Because of constraints, the baby shower for Alex, and a bachelor party for another Ham, we’ll only be going down for the one day on Friday.

We’ll be shipping off at around 3:30am and arriving back around 10:00pm. As always, my primary focus will be the flea market, while my father will be aiming hard for his Extra class ticket.

Mother Nature
The models are not cooperating very well for Friday. Right now for Thursday there is a nice swath of Gulf moisture that is going to surge up and hopefully be out of the area by the time we make it down. If it does then we’ll be set for a wet start but dry day with highs closing in on 70F. So far it’s looking like a picture perfect day for this year.

For those interested, the longer range models are showing nice weather again for Saturday with a chance of rain showing its ugly head on Sunday. I’ll post again with an update as the models get closer to Friday.

Dayton-Cam
This year as promised I’ll have my EVDO connection and I will be able to stream live during the trip. Due to time constraints this will again be a hodge-podge of technologies and an effort to see just how much I can get setup before we go. The Red Wing playoffs are certainly putting a damper on my efforts but I’ll certainly not sell them out short when we’re this close to the Finals.

At the very least I’ll again be putting up pictures every 30 seconds and at the very most have streaming audio and video. I’m also going to work on setting up an APRS module on this site you can track and watch at the same time. I’ll have IM set up along with IRC so there will be many ways to communicate.

Last year we only transmitted while we were in the truck but this year I’ll have a computer capable of being on for more than 2 hours so we’ll see if I can stand lugging it around while I go out in the flea market.

Hamvention 2.0
And because if I didn’t those at my work would probably harp on me, not that posting pictures and comments about uber-geek things wouldn’t bring that on anyway, I’ll be live-blogging the entire event.

I’ll be using a combination of Twitter, Tumblr, and the new BrightKite service to try and give you all a good view of just what it’s like out there. I’ll post more details and links as I set them up and get them ready this Wednesday and Thursday.

Need Something?
We’ll be going down with a big empty truck this year so if there’s anything that you might need, be it geeky LEDs or other electronic bits, to vintage radio gear, to computer parts, to just about anything you think you might find in a basement of some old hack, just let me know and I’ll keep my eyes out.

Because I’ll also be taking pictures of things I think are cool, if you do see something you like please feel free to let me know and if I have the means I’ll pick it up for you. If it’s small, then no big deal, just pay me back. If it’s large, and I mean large enough to drag the van on the way home, then I might tack on a little for the gas it’d use to haul it… though I don’t think anyone who reads this is going to ask for anything that big.

w00t!
So there it is, despite the tight schedule leading up to and following the trip, we’ll be going and waaay more connected than we have ever been. Feel free to post about it and link to the Hamvention 2008 page that I’ve created to help collect the information.

If you have any questions or comments, just post them here or hit me up through the various channels of communication that I use.

I will be at the Wayne County RACES meeting tomorrow and should be monitoring the 147.160 repeater for most of the week after work hours.

A quick look at the maps and model data this morning are showing in increasing chance for severe weather on primarily Saturday. Unfortunately the NAM model just barely misses 00Z Sunday (that’s 8PM EDT Saturday) so we’ll have to wait till later today to get a glimpse. If this does come through on Saturday I’ll be able to give it my full on chase and not worry about interrupting work.

I’ll edit this post as I find out more.

Update 2008-04-30 9:41PM
Looks like timing is all off on this one and we’re only due some mild thunderstorms. I’ve yet to have the time to really look at them, hopefully I can spend a half hour tonight before bed and do that. There are those talking about Friday but I’ve yet to see the models confirm any of this; both the GFS and NAM have the main leg of the system moving through before the max daytime heating period but that by no means rules out any major weather.

Time to update all the strings of this rope…

Phusion Passenger (mod_rails)
I installed the gem and went ahead to install the apache module but their setup script will not find my Apache2 installation. This is on Ubuntu 7.10 and my binary is called apache2 rather than httpd, though I’m not sure if this is the direct issue. I tried various things to get it to go but to no avail and after fiddling with it for about 20 minutes I had other, more important, things to do. I plan on posting a support request to them this evening if I’ve the time.

One initial thing I don’t like is the automated script. It would be much more valuable to people like me to simply have instructions on how to install everything manually. This would be particularly true for hosting providers who wish to testbed Passenger before they roll it out live. Perhaps this is going to be part of their ‘Ruby Enterprise’ that Phusion will soon be offering.

I’ll post more as I move along on this.

Aptana Jaxer
Since it’s release I’ve not had a chance to really develop with it. After this weekend things should slow down just a wee bit so I can really start working on a weather application that will utilize what it can do. I’d like to develop it wholly in Jaxer but I can make no guarantees. The initial idea for the weather site/app/whatever you want to call it, was to allow for a distributable version to be run locally when needed. This of course might pose a problem if it’s built solely on Jaxer, but we’ll see how that goes next week.

Storm Chasing - 2008/04/11
So I went out on my first storm chase of the year. What seemed like a promising day kind of fell apart. Dry air quickly killed off the severe potential in many areas though there were a few tornado warned counties up in the thumb area of Michigan.

In the end I wound up in the parking lot of Cabella’s to see the updraft of a cell and a perfect, end to end, rainbow as it passed to the northwest.

It was good to get in motion and figure out what I can further streamline… and maintain a checklist so I do not forget really useful things, like powercords and USB cables.

MacBook Pro
I have far fewer complaints with OS X than with Windows, that’s for sure. Do I still miss my Xubuntu box? You bet!

The sleekness and cool gestures with the mutli-touchpad is great but quickly lose their novelty. The best used feature so far is the scrolling with two fingers; the forward/backward of the triple finger touch is only good in Safari, which I rarely use these days.

I’m still very weary of using certain features since this is the only Mac I have and I do not see myself owning one in the near future. It’s just really hard to justify the cost for a new MacBook Pro when I can get way more power and freedom (OS-wise that is) on a Lenovo Thinkpad.

Overall I’m really impressed with the OS and I’m glad to have it.

So I just got my new work computer, a 15″ MacBook Pro. This is my very first experience with a Mac, at least one that I can play with and use on a daily basis.

Aside from getting used to the interface changes and the Apple key, things are going well.

So far I’ve installed Adium and have started to customize the look and feel.

Since this is a work computer I’m sure I’ll be doing things a lot more online, since I’ll not want to put any personal things on here.

This weekend as I venture deeper into the Mac world I’ll make posts and comments, not only for other newbs, but for myself again should I ever decide to get one of my own.

Head over to modrails.com and you’ll be greeted with a screencast of how fast and easily you can set up mod_rails. I’ve always hated the idea of having to run a cluster of mongrels for each rails application I want to deploy. It’s also prohibited on most hosts due to a need to manage the mongrel processes and the memory consumption of each process.

With this we can now load up only what we need when we need it, using the same Apache for all deployments. (Unlike with mod_ruby.)

Now, this is only for Rails and Hongli Lai talks about why this is in his blog post, Passenger and other Ruby Frameworks.

It’s not yet available, which I’m still failing to understand why, but when it is I’ll be quick to install and play around with it.

The Wall Street Journal’s Buzzwatch has profiled my friend Gabe Ortiz and his Stupid Filter project.

Check it out here.

Tim Morrow made a post outlining how to fix the problem here.

I’ll outline a more comprehensive way to do it and for my own archive here.

This apparently only affects dual core Intel procs, if that’s not the case please let me know so I can make the correction.

First we need to make sure we have cpufrequtils installed:

This line will run the cpufreq-info command and pull out just what we need:

And this is what I got back on my system:

Now we’ll open the vmware config file with our favorite editor. Do note that we’ll have to do this as sudo or we can’t edit the file:

To get the value we’ll add to the config file just take your GHz and convert to Hz: multiply by 1,000,000.
Add the following lines to the end:

Restart your VMWare if it’s already running and you should be all set! Thanks again to Tom for first posting the howto!

That’s right folks! I was busily looking for some contact info of a top executive, or at least someone who would properly handle a good idea, to explain my new ad campaign idea for the latest Ubuntu, Hardy Heron.

One of the places I look is a the jobs list, or employment page. Then.. get what I see…

3 new jobs for mobile development!

See for yourself!

Ubuntu Job Listings

This sort of thing would be fantastic as we wouldn’t be bound by the clunky feel of Android. I know it’s still early for Android and there’s a lot of promise, but the anti-Google in me is shouting that this will be the way.

Trolltech was also recently acquired by Nokia which is fantastic news. The lead time for a new device is about 2 years but Symbian is already a great and stable OS that’s very easy to develop for. It’s neigh time we saw the mobile platform opened up!