Ness' Outpost

My Father replaced the router in his home network which caused this web/mail/file server to have a weekend of downtime. Luckily Lauren and I went for dinner in Niagara and I updated the network configuration to bring the system back online.

Doug bought a Linksys router (brought to you by Cisco) and he thinks it’s faster. Which it likely is since the router runs on a GNU/Linux core. I had to update the network config of the new server since Dlink uses a different subnet than the default Linksys install. Doug was pretty impressed that the Linksys was plug and play — DHCP kicked in and all the windows boxes found the new network, leaving my static IP linux machine off the network, and unexposed to the external IP.

Since you’re reading this — the problem is fixed.

I’m re-rung! This time with a size 7.

And just in time too because this weekend I’m off to the autoshow in Toronto to geek it up with some mechanically like minded people and then it’s off to Laruen’s for dinner.

A Lube, oil and filter with a tire rotation at my local GM Goodwrench service station and a remote encoding with a free top up of my washer fluid came to $75.

Does that seem expensive to anybody else? I know mechanics charge by the hour, and apprently I needed two guys. One for the work and one to push the buttons on the computer to encode the remote. I wonder if I could have encoded it myself. I’d like to pull one apart and see how it works, but now that I’ve paid to have it activated I don’t want to break it.

Anybody have the car lift wedges I can borrow to do my own oil changes? I’d appreciate it.

I had a ticking noise in my breaks when they were applied heavily. The tick frequency was linked to the rpm’s of the wheel so I figured it was the breaks or the suspension on the back. Ron – who has kindly taken me under his wing and is showing me things I could never learn on my own about cars – tossed it up in his garage and first we looked at the muffler. It is attached to the underbody with a bracket and rubber gasket which is supposed to allow for vibrations. Ron added a pin on the end to make sure the rubber gasket couldn’t vibrate off. It could have been making the noise, but wasn’t.

Next we pulled off the back wheels and looked inside the drum breaks. The wear patterns on the left rear wheel were even in the centre of the curved pads – about 1″ not making contact above and below the pads. The right rear drum was making contact at the very top of the pads and had about an inch and a half of untouched pads at the bottom. Ron suggested the drums might not be perfectly round so we swapped the left and right drums in the back and now the ticking is gone! I’ll have to see what the new wear patterns are in a few weeks if the ticking starts up again.

For Christmas my parents bought me an Easton composite one-piece hockey stick. This is one present that is going to get used well before December 25th since I broke my stick last week. The experiment now is to see if I am able to amortize the $80 investment over the life of four $20 hockey sticks. I’ll leave it to the reader to figure out depreciation and the cost of breaking in 4 new sticks instead of just one. Of course if it snaps within a year that was a bad investment. You can assume 2 hockey sticks per year.

If you are ever wondering how geeky you are just go to an IEEE meeting and you’ll meet the alpha of the flock. I went to the meeting tonight in Burlington at Gennum where the presentation focused on television technologies. The speaker mentioned that rear projection models give the best value over LED and Plasma TV’s currently.

Apparently as TV’s get larger the more noticeable the flaws in the signal become. These flaws are introduced by compression/decompression (up to 50%), signal errors, low bandwidth of HD signals (so providers can squeeze more channels into the signal) and the way film is digitized.

The chips that Gennum creates are able to autosense and correct these errors in the signal as well as having the ability to autodetect 60 of the common signal types (PAL, NTSC, etc.). The chip is able to decode and present at least two independent channels of data including resizing the signal on the fly and overlaying graphics and text on the signal for menus.

Overall the presentation was concise and to the point. I was a little irritated by one audience member who felt it his calling in life to distract the speaker and inturrupt whenever he felt the need. There’s always one in a croud.

At the end of the presentation pens with a blue LED lights in them were given out. Now I am able to write in the dark if the need ever arises.

I moved my repository from an ext3 partition on hda to a ReiserFS partition on hdb. This does three things for me.

1. Increases the speed and efficiency of my subversion server by using a file system optimized for many small files
2. Allows me to make backups within the same server in case of hard drive failure of either drive, but not both
3. Shift the load balance a little more towards the center between the two discs, although hda is much more loaded being the main disc.

I also had my interview at InterAutomation today and I think it went quite well. I hope to be called back in for a second interview. I would have liked to been able to present the interviewers with more technical knowledge of the lower level drivers and development but I just don’t have those skills yet. There are not many opportunities to write drivers for well specified hardware for average users like myself. A lot of the time, the process requires reverse engineering which multiplies the learning curve making it that much more out of reach to gain the required starting energy.

The company is a smaller engineering firm that provides a complete software solution for analytical testing of all types and configurations of motors. I think I would enjoy working at IA very much.