Jeremiah Oeltjen

The Next Step

I submitted my application to Winona State University today. I'm crossing my fingers because all of this is happening at the last minute. I wasn't thinking about it when I was planning spring semester and filled up my schedule with classes for RCTC. After this current semester, however, I will be finished with the Computer Science core classes and according to WSU: students are encouraged to begin taking taking WSU Computer Science courses concurrently after completing [the] core requirements. That means, next semester I'm supposed to start taking WSU classes even though I'm not finished with the A.S.

In case this is confusing, I am enrolled at RCTC with a Computer Science major which is basically a Liberal Arts major with some Computer Science stuff added in. Because of an agreement between RCTC and WSU this degree transfers directly as the first two years of WSU's Computer Science B.S. major. In fact, RCTC designed this major (and some of the the required classes) specifically for this purpose. All classes are taken on the UCR campus. This arrangment is called a 2+2 because one, in theory, spends two years taking classes from each school.

So, I must now wait to see if I actually get accepted. If I do, I then have to worry about the class I need having seats available. Plus, I still have a number of classes from RCTC to complete. Like I said. This is all at the last minute. To make matters worse, the college will be closed from December 24 until January 5. If there is anything I need to do, I will have to do it on January 6 while the semester begins on January 12.

This is crunch time and I'm really feeling the crunch. Either way, I will have a busy semester. College is fun.

A Mind Full of Gobbly-Gook

It is half past midnight and my mind is completely exhausted. I simply can't think anymore. I have homework I can do, but it's just too difficult to even try to think about what I'm doing.

Thank goodness Thursday is here. Two things are good about Thursday. First, it is the last day of the week that I have classes scheduled. In all the time that I've been in school, this is the first time I've been able to arrange my schedule so I don't have any Friday classes. Second, on Thursday I have a two hour recess between Precalc and Discrete Math. I usually get something to eat and then spend the rest of the time (about an hour and a half) in the classroom working on homework while listening to the local talk radio station.

By four o'clock, however, I start to feel a bit drowsy and I have a hard time concentrating. Half way through the class my mind goes off into la-la-land and I miss half of what the professor says. It's not as if I'm not accustomed to daydreaming or anything like that. I've done it all my life and I do it all day long. This is simply a much longer, more intense daydream that occurs about the same time every Tuesday and Thursday.

In the meantime, I currently have several sections of Precalc homework, several sections of Discrete Math homework, a special Discrete Math assignment that is due this afternoon, and a programming assignment that needs to be submitted in less than 24 hours to be considered on-time.

I am not, howver, going to do it now. I am going to bed. In the morning I will get a haircut and run some errands before going to school. Once there, I will complete the urgent homework tasks and work on the rest of it over the weekend.

If I work hard enough, I will be caught up by Monday.

Strings as Objects

Here's an interesting excercise regarding references in Java.

This prints:
true
true
to the screen. Now try:

This prints
false
true
to the screen. Java recognizes that the contents of the two string literals are identical and reuses the object by referencing both s and t to it. The "new" operator in the second listing, however forces Java to create two distinct objects.

Who Wants to be a Taikonaut?

According to Reuters, China has now rocketed a man into space. This attempt has been more successful than the first:

China invented gunpowder and legend holds that a Ming dynasty (1368-1644) official named Wan Hu attempted the world's first space launch. He strapped himself to a chair with kites in each hand as 47 servants lit 47 gunpowder-packed bamboo tubes tied to the seat.

When the smoke had cleared, Wan was found to have been obliterated. But the dream was not.

User Mode Virtual Host

For the past few days, Jesse and I started experimenting with User Mode Linux and exploring the possibilities of using it as a web hosting solution. Here's what he told me the other day:

Jesse: oh. when you make your image for the uml.. make it.. 5 gig enough?
Me: Sure.
Jesse: then. no more bugging me when you want something

I guess I can take a hint.

Your Own Segway

Do you want a Segway HT but can't quite afford one? Try building one at a fraction of the cost. One caveat:

There is no redundancy or backup system. It is not even robustly made. Loose wires literally dangle out the bottom. In the fairly likely event of the software crashing, a wire coming loose, a component failing, or the batteries running low, the wheels will lock and the entire kinetic energy of the system will be used to accelerate my head toward the ground.

If that turns out to be the only tradeoff, I'd be suprised.

Happy Birthday

For lack of anything better to write, I turn 0x1A years old today.

Other things that happened on this day (September 29) according to The History Channel:

• 1547 Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is born near Madrid.
• 1888 William Steinway, a car enthusiast, concluded licensing negotiations with Gottlieb Daimler gaining permission to manufacture Daimler cars in the U.S. long before any other import.
• 1907 Actor and singer Gene Autry is born in Tioga, Texas, to a horse trader who also worked as a Baptist minister.
• 1913 Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the diesel engine, jumped overboard while crossing the English Channel on a cruiser - committing suicide at age fifty-five.
• 1941 The Babi Yar massacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women, and children begins on the outskirts of Kiev in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
• 1988 Stacy Allison of Portland, Oregon, becomes the first American woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Faking Yourself Out

Relating to my previous post Joe Soucheray's column in today's Pioneer Press has an interesting take on the change of seasons.

It is an interesting way to look at it. People do start to pout because the days are getting shorter after the summer solstice. They also get quite grumpy around the time of the winter one as well. Why don't we start spring on December 22? It seems to me that sprint is all about the days getting longer and the weather (eventually) warming up.

It certainly would be nice to have those summer days in May and April as well.

Autumn is here

It is autumn once again. The days have begun getting shorter and cooler. I even thought I saw some leaves changing color the other day. Although I don't mind winter I am not ready for the bitter cold and snowfall. I am, however, sick of the summer heat and welcome the cooler temperatures as we progress through the final months before that white stuff overwhelms us.

P.S. I did not do the egg balancing trick.

Be Sure to Proofread

This article contains an interesting typographical error. If a reader saw only the ticker symbols that follow the corporations' names in the article, they may conclude all of these companies are owned by Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT). Is this foreshadowing things to come?

Fun With Numbers

I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but using the hexadecimal system I am 19 years old. It's a good thing I don't use octal, I'd be 31, or 41 in base 3. Reminds me of something one of my CS profs said: "There are 10 types of people in this world: those who can use the binary system and those who cannot."

New Toy

I first saw the SanDisk Cruzer in a computer magazine last winter. I was captivated by the idea of having one device that could carry all the data I needed without the inconvenience and unreliability of floppy disks. So, when I saw one on sale at Staples I decided now was the time to get one.

I'm so excited right now. I can't wait to get to school on Monday and try it out. All of the lab computers there have USB ports on the front to make connecting devices convenient.

The best part about this whole thing is that the Cruzer is upgradeable. Flip the little button that extends the USB connector backwards and the SD card pops out and you can slip another one in. Now I'll be on the lookout for sales on SD cards.

Piecewise Functions on the HP48

I had to graph this piecewise-defined function using a graphing utility (read graphing calculator) this evening:

       { -X-5 for -4 <= X < 0
f(X) = {
       { 0.2X^2 for 0 <= X <= 5

Of course I knew the HP48G should be able to do this, but I had never done this in the past. According to the user's manual this can be accomplished by entering a program using if-then-else statements. It worked, except I wasn't sure what do do for those parts of the graph that are not in the domain of this function as the calculator still tries to plot them. In the end I used a catchall branch to return 0 if the independent variable was not within the intervals defined in the function. This was not ideal, but I was able to work with it.

Plotting a function this way proved to be quite time consuming to say the least. I think I spend 15 - 20 minutes on getting it right. Once I completed my homework I went on the Internet and found this FAQ and more specifically this entry regarding this very issue. Restrict the domain of an expression by dividing the expression by the domain.

-X-5 for -4 <= X < 0 becomes (-X-5)/(-4\<=X AND X<0)

To do more than one equation at the same time, put them in a list (curly braces). Don't forget to surround each expression in single quotes:

{ '(-X-5)/(-4\<=X AND X<0)' '(0.2*X^2)/(0<X AND X\<=5)' }

Note: The "<=" "\<=" should be replaced with the "less than or equal to" symbols from the character map or alpha-left shift-3 ("less than" signs are alpha-left shift-2).

Classes Finished

As promised, I'm blogging from the CyberCaf� at school. I'm done with my classes for the day and I'm happy I don't have much homework to do. It is not a nice day. Last night it rained along with some thunder and lightning and it has been raining off and on throughout the day as well.

School Starts Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning I go back to school to begin classes. I was on campus a month ago and blogged from the CyberCaf� on the fourth floor mezzanine that overlooks the cafeteria.

I'm really looking forward to being busy with schoolwork again. I also enjoy using the library facilities and free access to several newspapers including The Saint Paul Pioneer Press. (Yes, I know it is not expensive to purchase a newspaper, but it is more convenient to read somebody else's.)

This year's goals: pay closer attention in class and work on organizational skills.

E-mail Virus

Imagine this. Someone's e-mail system receives a message that is infected with a virus such as SoBig or Klez. By its very nature, since the "From" header is usually forged to hide the true origin of the infected message, it most likely did not come from you, but you get a notification about it anyway. This happened to Chiqui:

It's one thing to send back a message saying "hey! you might be infected with a virus".

It's another to send a message saying "Hey! someone is infected with a virus, we KNOW it's not you, but we're sending you a message anyway for no good reason, because you won't be able to find the infected machine, either".

The real problem I see with e-mail virii and worms is the human factor. People send out notification messages of this sort and effectively multiply the damage caused by the virus/worm by wasting even more precious bandwidth across the Internet.

I have seen it on mailing lists before. Somebody gets an e-mail virus to which their anti-virus software alerts them. The message appears to have come from another member of the list or the list itself. Trying to be helpful, person sends a messages with a subject like "VIRUS ALERT" back to the list accusing someone else for sending them a virus and informing everybody to ensure their anti-virus software is up to date and to avoid opening any messages from so-and-so, blah, blah, blah...

This of course is followed by a rather heated thread regarding the issue of worms and virii which is probably ten to twenty messages long before the moderator steps in to declare it off topic. Of course, those ten or twenty messages got sent to a couple of hundred people. Now we're talking about perhaps 2000 messages bearing down on mail servers worldwide. All of this because one person recieved one message conaining a virus that his anti-virus caught for him anyway?

Conflict in SSH Installations

I've used SSH for years. I used to use SSH Communications SSH client and server. As with all software I install that I don't want to re-install every time I upgrade to a newer Linux distribution I put it in /usr/local. Once OpenSSH became a standard feature in Slackware, I completely forgot about the old SSH stuff and it never seemed to have caused any problems.

Until now.

I have been using SCP a lot lately to transfer files between my home computer and the server on which my website is hosted. This has worked well except when copying a file from the server to home computer by executing scp at the server's command line. I was getting this error:

I scratched my head about this for a while. The mention of "SCP1" pointed me to that old installation of the commercial SSH in /usr/local which, I thought, should not have been used by OpenSSH's SSH daemon. Just to be safe, however, I deleted the old binaries, and voil�, the problem was solved.

It appears that OpenSSH was, in fact, attempting to use the old SSH binaries to perform SCP operations. This was possibly caused by /usr/local/bin being listed before /usr/bin in the PATH.

As usual, this was a fun exercise. Not only was I happy to get SCP working properly in both directions, but I also realized how much junk I really have in /usr/local. Perhaps now would be a good time to re-format that partition and re-install the latest versions of the stuff in there I actually still use.

Time Travel

I don't think I will ever use a time travel device.

I remember thinking to myself years ago that if I ever could, I would come back and visit myself when I was young. Since I haven't met myself from the future, I have come to the conclusion that I will never be a time traveler.

On second thought, there is the possibility that I WILL travel back in time, but to will decide to avoid making contact with myself to prevent the occurance of a paradox. Therefore, I cannot conclude that I will never travel through time.

These things keep me awake at night.

Yuck

I have a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans sitting on my desk and just ate one. One could only hope for a cherry or a lemon drop. No such luck. It was sardine.

It's a small box of jelly beans, but they certainly last a long time.

According to Google...

Using the new Google Calculator the number one hundred twenty-three to the fourth is two hundred twenty-eight million eight hundred eighty-six thousand six hundred forty-one.

Google News Alerts

I am trying out Google News Alerts. It is quite simple. Enter a topic keyword, choose "once a day" or "as it happens," and enter your e-mail address. Your inbox will be blessed with e-mails full of headlines that relate to the keywords you chose. This is great for tracking news on things in which you are interested. For example, I set up three: Linux, open source, and Minnesota.

rsync Rocks

Others have said it, why shouldn't I?

Today I backed up the files from my website to my local hard drive using rsync. I never used rsync before today, and now I am sorry I waited this long. The simple fact that it can transparently use SSH as its network transport it great. This way the data can be encrypted too.

Fall Semester 2003

I registered for classes this evening. I'm taking two math classes and a programming class. that's 16 12 credits in all. I was considering adding a health class to the roster, but I think this will be enough of a load. I have every morning unil noon off and all day Friday for the whole semester.

Update: 09-Aug-2003 It took me this long to realize 4 * 3 != 16

Back on Google

Searching for the terms jeremiah oeltjen now yields my blog rather than my homepage as I mentioned in a previous post. I am certainly not going to complain about that. The blog is where everything happens anyway.

P.S. Today, searching for jeremiah finds my blog as listing number 783.

HP48 Morse Code Program

Arlen, AA0SG, wrote this wonderful Morse Code generator for the HP48 series of graphing calculators. It is based on the Farnsorth method with three general speeds and configurable audio frequency.

1. Download and transfer the program to you HP48 calculator. This will create a directory call MORSE.
2. In that directory, pressing the CST key will bring up the custom menu.
3. The MESS vafiable stores the string to be sent. Enter a string on the stack and left shift the MESS variable key to store it. Right shifting the MESS key recalls the message. Only uppercase letters are valid.
4. Press the RUN key to play it back.
5. Entering a number and pressing the HZ on the custom menu sets the audio frequency (in Hertz).
6. SLOW, MED, and FAST set the speed.
7. AR, SK, comma, and question mark insert the approriate characters tnto the string.

Download Now

Disposable Digital Cameras for $11

An article in New York Times states that Ritz Camera is selling single use digital cameras for $10.99. My first reaction was that this would be good to use for kite aerial photography, but someone at Stanford using a balloon found one for's $37, which would be a better deal if this is something you do a lot.

Gone From Google?

For the past week or two I've been querying Google with just my first name about once a day to see how much its ranking in the search results fluctuated from day to day. I wasn't keeping track, which would be an interesting exeriment using the Google API, but the index page was holding position anywhere approximately between 405 and 440. Obviously, not as ideal as Jeremy, Kasia, or Chris.

Yesterday I couldn't find it at all. Not in the first 700 anyway. Finally I searched for my first and last name [screenshot]which has had the index page on top for a couple of years now. Instead of my main website I have a couple of TrackBack listings. Clicking on more results from kb0off.sheddwellers.org results in a listing of every TrackBack page on my site, foaf.rdf my resume and a link to my main blog page without a title, trailing slash in the URL. Coincidentally I recently added "/mt" to my robots.txt file because I didn't think that it was necessary to have spiders crawling those pages. Now, thinking back on it, I feel that was unnecessary because those pages contain links back to people that have sent TrackBack pings to my blog which would (should), in turn, help their PageRank. There's also the strange coincidence that this happened at the same time that I began using the new URL's.

There must be a reason for all of this. Restricting robot access from one directory and setting up a few redirects isn't going to get your page unlisted. I'm actually quite suprised that it was unlisted at all. The only other explanation I can conceive is that I am at the receiving end of some foul play.

Back On Campus

I'm writing this from the CyberCafé at UCR. I haven't been here since May, but it seems like only yesterday that I was here.

Less than four weeks to go. I'm still not exactly certain which classes I'll be taking, but everything is in order and on schedule. I'm excited.

SCO/Nigerian Spam Parody

All I can say is, "This is funny."

New URL's

In reading Elizabeth Lawley's post about URL redirection that she is now using to redirect the archive links using MovableType's default six-digit numbered style (/archives/000022.html) to the date/dirified title just like Mark Pilgrim. This is a really neat idea and makes sense for her to do now that she has moved to a new server.

I like this idea. Now the URL takes on some meaning. Sometimes it even seems to help in search engine rankings if a keyword is part of the URL. It also conveniently organizes the archives into subdirectories instead of having one directory loaded with thousands of files (once my blog grows to that size).

Here is how I did it

1. I added an htaccess template (the same as the forementioned site) to the Index Templates. I named the file htaccess (without the dot) because I didn't want MT generating a real .htaccess file whose contents I had not yet verified. This provided permanent redirects (HTTP code 301) from the old archives to the new ones.
2. In the "Weblog Config" section I changed the naming scheme of the individual archives to <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php. For some reason this didn't entirely work by copy/paste. The date formatting and dirify attributes weren't applied so I was getting URL's like http://kb0off.sheddwellers.org/blog/archives/July 24, 2003 08:08 AM/Paper Folding.php . I typed it in by hand and it worked like a charm.
3. Rebuilt all files
4. Checked out the newly generated htaccess file and moved it to .htaccess in the archives directory.
5. Deleted the htaccess template since I should never need it again.

My weblog now has fancy new URL's and I have Liz and Mark to thank.

Update: Mark has his templates available for public viewing. This page also includes the archive naming instructions.

Paper Folding

I came across this post about folding paper:

Today I am reminded of the episode of Mr. Wizard's World where he explains that a piece of paper (regardless of size) can not be folded more than 8 times...I just conducted my own unscientific scientific experiment and I could only fold the piece of paper 6 times.

I had the same result as well.

This is an interesting problem. It turns out that there is no hard and fast rule that paper cannot be folded in half more than eight times, but it is in that ballpark. Think about it for a moment. By the time you fold the paper in half six times it is as thick as 64 individual sheets of paper. Not easy to fold all together.

More information about this is available from Dr. Math

Hidden Thumbnails

Some digital cameras store information in the images they create in the form of EXIF headers. This metadata may also include a thumbnail. This is great, but not all image editing programs use this. Some, in fact, seem to keep the original information (including the thumbnail) even after the photo has been edited.

This is why I put together the JPEG Thumbnail Checker. It is based around a small utility called jhead and displays the embedded thumbnail (if one exists) from an image the user uploads via the web form.

Your First Linux Distro

Catching up on a major backlog of e-mail reading I came across the headline in the Slashdot daily mailing about Slackware's tenth anniversary. It was fun to read all of the comments and see how many people had used Slackware as their first distribution.

When I first started college in 1997 I was given an account on a FreeBSD machine. Of course I just had to know more about how to use it, so I bought the book and CD set from Walnut Creek CD-ROM.

Not very long after, a friend of mine purchased RedHat 5.1 from BestBuy and we played around with that for a while. I was taking a UNIX class in school at the time and was able to use what I learned in class on my FreeBSD system or his RedHat Linux system.

That summer (1998) I took an advanced UNIX class in which we set up our own machines with copies of Slackware (3.0, I think). From there I was hooked.

I have occasionally tried other distributions, but have always come back to Slackware.

Finally, a Cool Animated GIF

I don't really like animated GIF's, but this one is just too cool.

Webalizer SearchEngine Update

I just spent the last hour (or more, I wasn't paying attention to the clock when I started) updating the SearchEngine lines in my webalizer.conf.

To make a long story short, here they are:

SearchEngine    abcsearch.com     terms=
SearchEngine    alltheweb.com     q=
SearchEngine    altavista.com     q=
SearchEngine    aolsearch         query=
SearchEngine    ask.com           ask=
SearchEngine    ask.co.uk         ask=
SearchEngine    buscador.ya.com   q=
SearchEngine    dmoz.org          search=
SearchEngine    dogpile.com       q=
SearchEngine    dpxml             qkw=
SearchEngine    eureka.com        q=
SearchEngine    feedster.com      q=
SearchEngine    google            q=
SearchEngine    hotbot.com        query=
SearchEngine    infoseek.com      qt=
SearchEngine    ixquick.com       query=
SearchEngine    lycos.com         query=
SearchEngine    mamma.com         query=
SearchEngine    metacrawler       q=
SearchEngine    msn.com           q=
SearchEngine    msxml             qkw=
SearchEngine    mysearch.com      serachfor=
SearchEngine    netscape.com      query=
SearchEngine    northernlight.com qr=
SearchEngine    ntlworld.com      q=
SearchEngine    overture.com      Keywords=
SearchEngine    search.com        qt=
SearchEngine    search.earthlink  q=
SearchEngine    teoma.com         q=
SearchEngine    teradex.com       q=
SearchEngine    wisenut.com       q=
SearchEngine    yahoo             p=

This is primarily from the search engines I find in my referrer list. It is by no means complete. I also made an attempt to verify that all of the URL variables were current as they do change from time to time. Any additions or corrections are certainly welcome.

Happy (One Month) Anniversary

It's been one month since my First Post.

Hooray!

DSL Sharing

I've been switching the DSL manually for about a week now. I finally got a Linksys EtherFast� Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port Switch. I was planning on setting up a Linux box to do this, but this is all we really need. It can do port forwarding and filtering. It serves as a DHCP server for the local network. The installation is completely web driven so there is no platform depencence (there is a CD that comes with it that helps you set up your computer's IP settings, but I opted to use the Quick Start Guide instead).

Now, my dad and I can both be online at the same time. Someday, I may install Samba on my system and we will be able to share files and printers.

Next order of business: webcam.

More Space

I was running low on disk space on my computer so I started looking through all of the stuff I had in my home directory. Some of it was stuff that I saved as a backup a year or two ago and haven't looked at it since. There was some other stuff of which I had multiple copies. One directory I had was the data I kept from the laptop I used when I worked for Riverland Community College. I rearranged some of the data, deleted some useless stuff and moved some of it to other parts of the drive. I then made a tarball of the directory so I could keep all of the data that was left, but not take up so much space. While it was running I thought to myself, "It would be good if this actually compresses down to half the original size." Here is the result:

jeremiah@fluffy:~$ du -sh laptop*
370M    laptop
50M     laptop.tgz

About all I can say is, "Wow!"

Now if I get really ambitious, I can come up with an elaborate scheme to archive data to CD in an organized fashon. That way, I can keep the data that I don't use often on CD-ROM and not on the hard disk drive and keep my space available for downloading Linux install ISO's and stuff.

A Whole Bunch of Movies

The other evening I was at my friend Roger's store working on his computer when the neighbor came in and asked me "Who threw all of the movies in the dumpster?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went outside to see. Lo and behold. there were a few hundred VHS movies in the dumpster. Apparently, someone got a whole bunch of used movies from a local video store chain and decided to throw them away. Of course they couldn't use their own refuse collection service to do so. When we started to dig through I found a few good ones that I kept for myself. The neighbor and his ladyfriend took a couple of boxes worth home to sort through them.

While I was working on the computer I watched a couple of the movies. Of course this means that it took me until about four o'clock in the morning to get the work finished that I was doing. However, one of the movies I watched was The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest. A nice computer comedy. I don't want to give the story away, but there is one particular spot that still tickles my funny bone:

Two of the guys are arguing and one insults the other by saying, "Your mother uses Macintosh."

"What?!"

"System Seven"

If you don't get it, don't feel bad.

Post Field Day Report

The RARC Field Day was a great success. I sat down and collected my thoughts about the last two days and here is what I have concluded:

• GOTA station is definitely worthwhile. It gives the newcomers a chance to get the feel of operating without the pressure to run high rates/pileups.
• Propagation was a huge factor. The 20 meter band dried up on me instantly sometime around 0600 GMT Sunday and didn't come back up until much later. That means our overnight operation didn't run up into the 1000's like we did a few years ago.
• Remember to put on sunblock.
• Working satellites close to the horizon with a handheld beam doesn't work well when you are surrounded by metal buildings.
• Having snacks available throughout the night was a practically a life saver.
• We really should do it at the same location next year

I know I had a great time. I'm certain everyone else did as well.

Jesse has a blog

Jesse just informed me that he has just set up a blog. He even has the ubiquitous First Entry.

Field Day 2003

It's almost here. I'm just so excited I cannot sleep. Just two more days until Field Day. I plan on operating from the RARC club station, W0MXW.

This is the one event out of the entire year that I look forward to. I am so enthusiastic about it as soon as it is over I start looking forward to next year.

MSNBOT

Jeremy Zawodny asked about the new MSNBOT that has been reportedly crawling the web:

According to Feedster there aren't many bloggers talking about it yet. Anyone seen this thing hit their site yet?

It hasn't here, yet. I wonder how long it will be.

HP48 Programs for Hams

Here are some programs written to run on the HP48 graphing calculator that are useful for some Amateur Radio applications. I originally had these posted on my web site when it was running on PHP Nuke. I recovered the text out of the database and did some editing to make it a little more complete. They are described in no particular order.

The first of these programs, SWR, was written by Arlen, AA0SG, to compute the SWR of an antenna system from measured forward and reflected power. Enter the forward power then reflected power onto the stack and run the program. The result should be SWR.

The book Reflections II by M. Walter Maxwell, W2DU, has a couple of programs that claim to be written for HP calculators. The language, however, does not correspond to anything that I know, at least not the HP48. As a consequence, Arlen and I rewrote them using the original program text and formulas from the book as a guide.

RjX is the first of these programs which replaces the listing in Appendix 4. It calculates exact SWR from R+jX. Enter R, X, feedline Z_c on the stack in that order. The program take these numbers off and output SWR.

Appendix 7A has a program in it to determine the increase in forward power on a line that is with conjugate matching at the input. The program to do this is called C. Enter transmitter output power, line loss, and ratio of feedline to antenna impedance (hint: 3 then 1 for 3:1 SWR). The program returns the total forward power. Amazingly, it's often greater than what you started with.

The third of these is the SWRloss program used to calculate the additional power lost due to SWR on a transmission line (Appendix 8A). First enter the loss in dB followed by the SWR . The result will be something like dB LOSS: -.288 meaning 0.288 dB of additional loss on the feedline due to SWR.

ERP calculates ERP given input power and gain in dB (in that order).

Here is the text of the programs. Copy it and paste it into a plain text file called HAM (or something like that). Transferring it to your HP will create a directory of that name and all of those programs will be in there.

%%HP: T(3)A(D)F(.);
DIR
  C
    << DUP2 - 3
ROLLD + / SWAP NEG
10 / ALOG DUP 3
ROLLD * SQ 1 1 ROT
- / * *
    >>
  ERP
    << 10 / ALOG *
    >>
  RjX
    << DUP 3 ROLLD /
ROT ROT / SWAP SQ 1
+ SWAP DUP 3 ROLLD
/ + DUP SQ 4 - v/ +
2 / "SWR" ->TAG
    >>
  SWRLoss
    << DUP 1 - SWAP
1 + / SWAP NEG 10 /
ALOG DUP2 DROP * SQ
1 SWAP - SWAP SQ 1
SWAP - SWAP / LOG
10 * 3 RND
"dB LOSS" ->TAG
    >>
  SWR
    << v/ SWAP v/ DUP
3 PICK - 3 ROLLD +
SWAP / 2 RND "SWR"
->TAG
    >>
END

What Will it Take?

TechTV's Tech Live ran this poll this evening relating to a story about UCE.

What will it take to stop spam forever?

• Action by ISPs and businesses
• An act of Congress
• An act of God

When I voted, I was suprised to see that it was almost a tie between Action by ISP's and businesses and An act of God. Of course I didn't pay much attention to the numbers, not that they matter because a minute later when I refreshed the poll result page An act of God was now higher than the first two put together.

UPDATE: I previously linked to the shownotes, however, it is much easier to go directly to the archived version of the poll. I would have done this before, but that page was broken at that time.

Gallery Installed

I have added a picture gallery feature to my web site. At the moment the only pictures I have are some of my dog, but that will change soon.

Everyone is After the Same Thing

Since most of the visitors to my site have been coming here to see my HF Discone page, I should probably make this small disclaimer:

I never found the time to build this antenna. I have no idea if it will work at all (although, I am sure it will resonate at some freqeuncy). I have not an ounce of confidence in the accuracy in the SWR chart or the radiation pattern as I had practically no experience using any kind of NEC antenna simulation software. Furthermore, I don't even have my original notes that contained the dimensions.

Someday, I will get a bunch of Copperweld™ wire and build this thing, but the project has been put on the back burner.

Webalizer Search Engine Strings

To analyze the web traffic statistics for my web site I use The Webalizer. One of its features is the ability to create a list of search strings that have been used to find your site. Here is the list I am currently using in my webalizer.conf file:

SearchEngine    yahoo              p=
SearchEngine    altavista.com      q=
SearchEngine    google             q=
SearchEngine    eureka.com         q=
SearchEngine    lycos.com          query=
SearchEngine    hotbot.com         MT=
SearchEngine    msn.com            MT=
SearchEngine    infoseek.com       qt=
SearchEngine    webcrawler         searchText=
SearchEngine    excite             search=
SearchEngine    netscape.com       search=
SearchEngine    mamma.com          query=
SearchEngine    alltheweb.com      query=
SearchEngine    northernlight.com  qr=
SearchEngine    search.com         q=
SearchEngine    teoma.com          q=
SearchEngine    abcsearch.com      Terms=
SearchEngine    dmoz.org           search=
SearchEngine    overture.com       Keywords=
SearchEngine    teradex.com        q=
SearchEngine    ask.com            q=
SearchEngine    aolsearch          query=

Getting Better

I've been playing with the CSS for a while now and I think I've got it down. Here's something I did that made my life for layout a whole lot easier:

1. Got rid of the 15px margin in #content
2. Made #content 68% and #links 28% wide
3. Made both float left

This does a couple of things. Setting the widths makes sure there is an extra 2% of the browser canvas available for "wiggle room." Making both layers float left allows the links be longer than the content without expanding to the entire browser width at the bottom. Also, if there isn't enough room to have both side by side the links layer wraps to the bottom and both are left justified.

I'll be making more adjustments to my blog over the next couple of days for certain.

First Post

This is my first post using MovableType. I wasn't really sure that I would like it at first, but I decided I had better try it since most of the people that whose blogs I read use it too. I started out writing my own which I quickly gave up on since I would have literally wasted the entire summer away hacking away at it. I almost used BBlog which was very easy to set up and really nice, but just isn't mature enough for me. I decided that I could live without threadded comments, which was the final factor in making the move with MT.

To begin with, I installed a copy on my computer at home to play with things like the stylesheet and learn how to configure a blog. Then I copied everything over to the web server. Funny thing is on my home computer I could get BerkeleyDB to work, but didn't have the MySQL Perl module. The server had no BerkeleyDB, but MySQL works fine.