Ready to rumble

A couple of pictures of Ben and Joe wrestling in the Hutchinson open.

Interesting note about end-fed 1/2 wave tuners

I was doing some searches on Polyvaricons and ran into this article.

http://www.nt7s.com/index.php5?page=efhw

I thought that his schematic was interesting.

Something like this might be interesting for camping trips of Field Day. I will have
to model some wire antennas to see what the possibilities are.




Here is a link to a photo that shows the inside of his tuner:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nt7s/2455973702/sizes/m/

Memory Upgrade

I decided to spend $40 and add 4 GB more ram to my Linux server that acts as my VMWare
host on my home network. The machine now has 8gb of RAM and is running Ubuntu 8.10
64bit server.



Top stats before the upgrade with just 4gb:

Top stats after the upgrade with 8gb:

Here is what the Guests look like memory wise
about 20 minutes after the reboot:

It appears that Linux is really building up the cached memory after adding the extra
sticks to the motherboard. It will be interesting to watch this over time.

VMWare server 2 thinks that it is only consuming about 1gb of RAM but the stats from
TOP look misleading at the first glance. It looks like about 1gb of App
space + about 4gb of Cache for a total of 5gb in use.

XP, Windows, and Mac

My remaining reasons for maintaining some XP machines at home is diminishing very
quickly. Video Editing, Photo/Image Editing and a couple of HAM radio programs are
the last items that I have not been able to move/port over to Linux. My kids have
a couple of games that they like but I could move them to the Mac as those titles
are available there as well.

2009 might be the year that we phase out the last of the Windows world here at our
home.

I would like to move to the Mac but the price tag is frankly too much for me to make
the jump at this point given that it is really just commodity Intel hardware.




I like Linux but the Video and Photo/Image Editing software is not at the same level
as the Windows or Mac platforms.



I am so close...  but I need to bridge these last couple of gaps.

Doppler .NET Error

I have a Windows XP VM that I use to download all of my podcasts to a network share.
I was using Juice but recently moved back to Doppler. Every time I start Doppler it
throws a .NET Framework error.

I think that I need to look for a new podcast aggregator as it appears that Doppler
development has slowed or stopped. I am seeing notes in the Spring and Fall of 2007
that indicate that it is still alive.... but when I got out to CodePlex to look for
the latest and info and version there are no releases.



http://www.dopplerradio.net/

http://www.codeplex.com/doppler

This looks like another set of tools that will be moving to Linux for me and removing
another reason to continue using a Windows XP machine.

Ubuntu 8.10 + VMWare server - Patch Scare

I decided to patch my Ubuntu server this morning. This server also is my VMWare host
for about 7 virtual machines running on my network. Running the upgrade was not a
big deal as the Ubuntu updater is pretty solid. My fear started when it asked to reboot
the system which made me a bit nervous as it could mean a kernel update.



I rebooted only to discover that my VMWare host was no longer starting the VMWare
server bit.


(Insert horror music here.)



Initially I thought that maybe it the VMWare bits were not set to auto-boot... but
I found several hits while searching that pointed here:



http://www.novell.com/communities/node/6798/allow-vmware-server-correctly-load-after-reboot-without-having-run-vmware-configpl-every-t

So I updated /etc/init.d/vmware with the notes. No luck. 






I then started hunting thru the logs without any obvious errors showing up.



Next I figured out the commands to manually start/restart the VMWare bits and final
got an error that I could use: Module vmnet is not loaded.  

After some unsuccessful searching I decide to rerun the config script. I was suspecting
that I probably got a minor kernel upgrade and that was the root of the problem.



sudo ./usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

That was the magic. Rerun the wizard and all is well. I then rebooted the system again
to validate that the guests would restart shortly after the host restarted.

Enabling an FTP server on Ubuntu 8.10

I am working on setting up a system so that I can create backup images of all of my
PCs to my Linux server. (I will eventually off-site all of my data on a USB drive
that I will store at the Bank in safety deposit box)

Install:

sudo apt-get install vsftpd

Backup the config file to your homedir

sudo cp /etc/vsftpd.conf ~




Edit the config file:

sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf

Change the config to:

anonymous_enable=NO


local_enable=YES

restart the service:

sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Geocaching 2009-02-17 GC159YK

While Cristy was doing piano lessons with the students Ben, Joe, and I escaped for
about 90 minutes of geocaching.

The second attempt at this location was much better. Thanks to our friend Kelly
for helping us on this one. The last time we were here it was frozen so the location
did not appear to hold a cache.

N 45° 07.156 W 094° 29.369  

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=6eb14980-2efa-420c-a023-64494e9b1039

ISP Blues

I have been struggling with my ISP for the past couple of weeks

590k down / 216k up sucks.  I was seeing 80k down earlier today. 9-10% packet
loss.



This is not exactly the 2m connection that I am expecting. They are really nice folks...
but I need help as this is like sucking a watermelon thru a straw. It sounds like
one of the radio links upstream of me is having a problem... they are telling me that
they will get to it... but today is the third time in a week that I have heard that
message.

Normally I am a fan of Rural America... today I am missing living in the metro a fat
cable modem connection or a DSL... arggghhhh... I really miss the uber-bandwidth.

Geocaching 2009-02-15 GC1HDNG

Ben and I were out running errands (picking up some supplies for his brother's project)
and decided to pick up a random cache while out and about. Random meaning that we
go to one of flashing POI (point of interest) in the GPS and look for the cache
without any info or hints.

After coming home it appears that several other people have not been able to find
it as recently as last weekend.

The dark color and how it was hidden make it easy to overlook while staring right
at it. Ben was really impressed with the size of the cache. It is the second smallest
that he has found. It is a fun cache because you drive right by it on the highway
but it is kind of out of the way to find a local road to get you back to the location.

It was slightly frozen in the snow/ice but we were able to free it in a couple
of minutes.

N 45° 31.077 W 094° 13.551

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GC1HDNG