Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Getting anxious

My oldest is in the Navy, and he'll be moving with his boat to Hawaii soon. I wish I knew what to do for him. I know full well he's in a world of busy right now; everything is going to pile up at the last minute. It always does. Big Navy, local Navy. Gotta get going on some ideas for stuff to accompany him.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

BSG finale was disappointing

It seemed quite a lot like Ron Moore and the cast had a big party, wore body armour and fired heavy weapons, then said good bye to each other, turned out the lights and oh, by the bye here's a not at all disguised morality lesson on the dangers of technology for technology's sake.

Or something.

He certainly didn't work on any resolution of the major tensions of the series, the season or even the final episode arc.

I might feel differently given some time.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Missing 'Safely remove hardware' icon

I was playing with my USB portable hard drive and found to my horror that the icon in the Windows task bar that allows me to safely remove hardware was gone. I didn't want to unplug the cable before choosing that option because I wanted to make sure my data were intact.

I did a bunch of searching, but the proper keywords eluded me. A bunch of people suggested using File Explorer and choosing 'Eject' as though it were a CD/DVD but I didn't have an eject option.

Finally, I came across the answer here: http://blog.monkeyless.com/2006/03/12/safely-removing-hardware-when-the-icon-is-gone/ The secret keyword is hotplug, and so I can find it again, here is the DLL to invoke from Start->Run %windir%\System32\RUNDLL32.EXE shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll Alternately, make a shortcut by right clicking on the desktop.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

WDSC on a portable drive

Well I loaded WDSC 7.0.0.6 on my USB portable drive. I stupidly could not locate the Code/400 CDs, so I didn't get that loaded :-( I was able to get Eclipse Monkey installed, which made me very happy. WDSC is sort of Eclipse 3.2 (Ganymede) and Monkey is in the Europa distro (sort of 3.3) but it did go in via the normal Help->Software updates->Install new software.

Hurrah!

Friday, December 26, 2008

The box is the best part!

In the style of the Mythbusters, I set out to determine if the myth that children prefer the box to the present contained therein. I'm pleased to report that with a sample size of one, the myth is plausible.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator

The Wikipedia entry has more information on MBTI than I could give here, except to say that it's intended as a measure of your personality. It isn't a test, or a good-bad determiner, it's a quantified assessment of how you're put together. One of the more interesting parts about getting an MBTI done isn't to find out what you are like; presumably you have a reasonable idea already - it's to find out how other's percieve you, and more practically, how to communicate better with them.

For instance, I personally assess as an INTJ or INTP depending on who's giving the test. However, a fellow blogger mentioned a website called Typealizer which will analyse your blog and run an assessment based on your posts. It assesses this blog as an ESTP; just about the opposite of the assessments I've had elsewhere. One of the main character traits of an INTJ is an almost rigid adherence to logical correctness. Trying to have a conversation with an ESTP by use of logic is almost guaranteed to be a waste of time - the ESTP is a realist almost completely uninterested in the theoretical. Examples work best, and therefore it isn't surprising that this blog, laden with examples, seems like it was written by an ESTP.

Monday, September 01, 2008

Leland reads to Sebastian

My brother was here from Japan and this is a short video of him reading a book to Sebastian before bed.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A visitor from Japan

It's my brother, Lee! He surprised me by just dropping by on a whirlwind tour of the family here in the 'states. His daughter is on her way to university in Hawaii. How exotic is that?

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

More car repair

Not only do I drive, but so does She Who Must Be Obeyed. Her 1998 Chevy Venture has a passenger side power sliding door. That door (hereafter known as the PSD) stopped sliding. I vaguely recalled something about the radio fuse, and when I called the mechanic he told me it would cost more to have him look it up than it was worth to get it sliding again.

Can't say I disagree with that.

But my time is cheap, and with a little research, I came up with this:

Perform this procedure in order to re-initialize the PSD:

1. Set the PSD on/off switch in the overhead console to the OFF position
2. Manually open the PSD completely
3. Manually close and latch the PSD
4. Remove the radio fuse - this is the fuse under the hood, in the Fuse Relay Panel on the passenger side of the engine. I tried the one just inside the passenger front door - no joy there.
5. Wait 30 seconds
6. Reinstall the radio fuse
7. Wait 10 seconds
8. Set the PSD on/off switch in the overhead console to the ON position
9. Press, then release either PSD open/close switch (on the overhead console or the one on the 'B' pillar) in order to completely open the PSD
10. Wait 5 seconds
11. Press, then release either PSD open/close switch (on the overhead console or the one on the 'B' pillar) to allow the PSD to close completely
12. Wait 5 seconds
13. Repeat steps 8 through 11 and re-check for proper PSD operation


That worked! If someone else is reading this, do like I did and put some white lithium grease on the door tracks (not too much; just a thin layer is plenty! Too much and you'll attract dirt which will clog it up.)

Saturday, July 05, 2008

2004 Lumina APV rear wiper

So my 1994 Chevy Lumina APV minivan's rear wiper has been... stiff for some time. If I pull it away from the window, it stays pulled away. It will do one wipe from bottom to top, but on the return stroke it stays clear of the glass. Not an optimum situation to say the least!

It's definitely corroded. Looking at the hinge, where the rivet passes through from top to bottom (as installed) I can clearly see the oxidation built up. I tried penetrating spray, but it only got a teeny bit freer, nothing like it is supposed to act.

I looked at it for a bit but could not figure out how to pull the wiper arm off the shaft. After looking at WikiAnswers for a bit, I came across a post that made the Aha! light come on. There's a clip that's part of the arm (it does NOT come off) that you can slide out of the way.


This is a photo from the bottom (as installed) of the wiper arm. See that little tab sticking down? That's part of the clip that you can use to pull the clip out of the was, but wait a second!

Get a large, flat screwdriver. Pull the wiper arm as far away from the window as it will go. This is important - there is an intentional 'lock' that holds the clip in when the wiper blade is pressed against the window.

Now that the arm is pulled away from the glass, pry the tab against the bottom of the wiper arm and pull the clip down as far as it will go. It isn't much; maybe a quarter of an inch. A pair of needle nose pliers might help, but I didn't need them.

This is what it looks like with the clip all the way down. The wiper arm is ready to remove from the wiper motor shaft.

Once that clip is down, the arm should pull straight off the shaft. It's splined, and not attached in any way other than a friction fit on the matching splines on the shaft. Mine came off with some gentle rocking ans a teeny bit of prying with the large screwdriver backed with some wood scraps against the rear door. If you squeeze the arm against the shaft (like with a pair of vise grips) you'll probably never get it off. If you become desperate, get a Dremel-style tool and cut a slit in the base of the wiper arm opposite the arm. You'll need a new wiper arm, but the motor shaft will be intact.

This is what the arm looks like once it's been removed. Note the way the clip slides behind the motor shaft. As for the obvious damage (all the gouges and scratches) those came from me trying to wiggle the frozen, corroded joint by holding the end with pliers and wiggling the arm.

Not a good plan.

In order to loosen that up, I used a wire brush to remove a bunch of corrosion, a soak in penetrating oil and then held the end (this time with some paper towel to protect the remaining splines) and wiggled some more. No good.

I used a small flat screwdriver to scrape away all the corrosion I could from the area with the arm in it's 'away from the glass' position, and also by moving the clip back and scraping when the arm is in it's 'against the glass' position. That helped some, as did squirting some graphite powder all round the area.

Ultimately, I decided I had nothing to lose, and so with the hole facing down, I drove a tiny screwdriver into the hinge area to open up the space between the arm and the 'socket.' That worked! I don't know for how long, but I dumped more graphite into the area, worked it back and forth and was satisfied enough to put it back. Before replacing it, I put some general purpose machine oil on the motor splines. Hopefully, if I have to get it off again, it'll come easy!

Thursday, June 19, 2008

I am Sharon Agathon?

...from the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica series. I took the 'Which character are you' quiz.

Join the Fight and take the Battlestar Galactica Personality Quiz! jointhefight.scifi.com

Thursday, June 05, 2008

A good commute

On my way to work this morning on NY route 7 which is 2 lanes eastbound, 2 lanes westbound and a turning lane in the centre paved edge to edge. No median strip, no divider, just macadam. Noodling along on the ZRX when all traffic stops. In both directions. Craning my neck, I can see momma duck and six babies picking their way across the highway toward the Mohawk River.

Everyone stopped to let them cross. No beeping horns, no gesticulations. Just politely letting them across.

What a great way to start the day!

Saturday, February 09, 2008

Eclipse Monkey

Want to learn about scripting Eclipse with Monkey so I downloaded Europa at home. Figured the source would be useful but couldn't figure out why Buckminster was throwing an error so I used CVS instead.

For editing the Javascript, I downloaded JSEclipse via the Eclipse updater using http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall

More after I've played a bit.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Upgrade A7N8X Deluxe

Opened a can of worms. The PSU died, and after fixing that I decided to make the Mitsumi 'all in one' floppy/media card reader work. No dice. Gave up on that after fiddling with the connector & motherboard. Then I had the bright idea to reinstall that Seagate 120GB SATA drive. Grrr. Stupid, stupid. I should have left the thing alone after fixing the PSU because I reset the BIOS and wasn't completely sure of the settings and so...

I was getting the intermittent blue screen of death.

Frack. Well I fiddled and farted with it until I figured out how to upgrade the SATA BIOS. Grabbed BIOS 1008-D.bin from the ASUS web page, along with the AWDFLASH.ZIP utility and CBROM. I have the A7N8X Deluxe motherboard, Socket A, rev 2.0. Went to the Silicon Image web page and fetched the latest SATA BIOS image, BIO-003112-xxx-4284.zip

Go find a floppy and do a format a: from the command line just to make sure the thing is OK. Then use Windows Explorer to format it and make it bootable.

Now to make the BIOS. Created a directory sata_bios and unpacked the zipped files there. Then used cbrom215 1008-D.bin /pci 4284.bin from the command line to compile in the new SATA BIOS into the ASUS BIOS. Use cbrom215 1008-D.bin /D to verify that PCI ROM[A] now has the latest SATA version. Copy 1008-D.bin and awdflash.exe to the floppy. Close everything, insert the floppy and reboot.

Once the A: drive is booted up, flash the motherboard: awdflash 1008-d.bin /py/sn My BIOS flashed in a few minutes and I removed the floppy, pressed F1 and Windows XP Pro SP2 fired right up. Was able to read and write to the SATA drive. Am now running Prime95 and Motherboard Monitor 5. The Prime95 is running in torture test mode, seems fine. MBM reports the CPU is at 41C which seems fine to me.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Links o' the day, 22 Dec 2007

Spent the morning trying to catch up on my email. I have a lot of stuff hanging in the breeze. Gotta finish reading EMRFD and start building! :-) Whilst searching for the link to the book, I found a Yahoo! group which I promptly joined. A discussion on eHam, and of course, W7ZOI's web page. Distractions, distractions.

Interesting problem on a mailing ist I frequent. The list is crawled by Google, so emails sent there are available by searching. There was a humourous thread about strange and unusual user IDs -- the sort of thing that comes up from time to time. One poster shared a user ID composed of an initial and last name; the combination making a rude word, We all laughed and thought that was the end of it.

Not so. Apparently, said user learnt about Googling own name, and Googled for said rude word and was extremely upset to find self mentioned in a casual thread in a mailing list on the Internet. Apparently so upset that self is reporting poster to HR for disciplinary action. Now, one hopes that HR will tell self to stop searching for rude words on the Internet, but the poster is highly concerned about it.

There's a possibility that the list archive software will honour x-noarchive: yes; I'll have to check that out.

Some people are doing last minute Christmas shopping. Me too. Need vinegar powder for the sushi rice to go with Vietnamese pho :-) Better get some Thai basil, too. Xie xie, Rong for telling me about Lee's Market.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Links o' the day

Daily links

There are some links I try to read every day:

What happened at today's sites:

Navy photos Has the story of a girl rescued from a cruise ship with a burst appendix. Operated on USS Reagan. Bravo Zulu!

Sub Report I didn't win the contest but I came in 2nd! The winner deserved it :-) The welding scandal seems to be calming down.

Navy Times Fmr Marine wants his marijuana plants back. He's an injured Iraq '91 vet, licensed to grow.

COMSUBLANT is still under construction.

COMSUBPAC has nothing new.

Tocqueville reports a TGV derailment!



Some links I hit today:
Loaded CoolIris Previews at work on Firefox. I like it.

Also loaded GBookmarks. I had it before but don't know what I did.

I didn't load SaveURI. I was looking for a way to simply and easily track all the places I visit in a day. This doesn;t look like it.

Foxmarks not working? Servers super slow.



How to bury a mainframe, from an email sent by Todd.



Searched for a 360 blog add-on but couldn't find one. I want to post to 360 like I can Blogger.



From my RSS blog ticker:
Beautiful canoe, political message about Polynesian life disappearing.

From StumbleUpon:
Clever adverts

A test of what gender your brain is. I'm female, but the tests are mainly visual, and I am not.

Some cool early music (ancient) from Jon Sayles and John Willbye. Downloadable MP3s. Very nice stuff.

Open Flash Chart looks great. I haven't downloaded it, but I think I will.



From researching problems:
System i WDSC custom compile command



Went prowling for noise figure info because of the ongoing discussion of receiving Selene (the lunar orbiter) with amateur equipment on the Microwave mailing list

Kerry QualComm noise source

Didier Home brew noise source

Maxim Tutorial on how to calculate noise figure.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Linux on old laptops

So they tossed out an IBM ThinkPad 600E at work and I scarfed it on the way to the dumpster. It was stripped: no floppy, no hard drive, the CMOS battery was dead and the main battery was missing. This model doesn't have any USB ports, but it does have a pair of PCMCIA slots. It did have a CD-ROM drive...

I wonder if this thing will run Linux? So I hie me over to the Puppy Linux web page and start downloading Live-CD images. Using Nero on my Windows XP Pro machine, I burn several CD-ROMs to try them out. In particular, I look at 2.14 and 2.15CE.

I boot the thing up using a power supply I use with my ThinkPad 380ED and it boots but man is it ugly. The resolution that Puppy chose is clearly wrong. It also takes forever and I soon see why: the thing has been stripped of it's RAM, leaving only 32MB installed! I do a quick re-think and decide to try Puppy on the 380ED first - it has 80+MB of RAM!

The 380ED is a Pentium MMX 166. It has an integrated floppy and CD-ROM drive as well as PCMCIA. No USB. I use this particular machine as a logging computer for my amateur radio contesting. It runs a legal version of Windows 98 and I'm quite happy with it for this use. The 9 pin serial port is very valuable for hooking up to a GPS receiver.

So through various trial and errors, I figure out that the resolution is 800 x 600 x 16. 35.1562KHz with a 56.25Hz refresh. It takes quite a few probes to work out the one I can read, but it's not so bad. Once Puppy 2.14 loads, I see that there's 35M of RAM free. That doesn't bode well for a machine that only has 32MB of RAM! The next step was to try to get the PCMCIA Ethernet card working. It turns out that I loaded 2 modules: pcsnet_cs and axnet_cs and that was the combination that finally did the trick. Since that machine has a hard drive, I let Puppy store its configuration file there for future use.

Then, back to the 600E. The 800 x 600 x 16 worked and so did the drivers, but man is it ever slow. The monitor window shows 11.6M free, but the CD drive just keeps trundling and it takes a long, long time to load the browser (Seamonkey.) It's a 2645-4AU, dated 09/1999. Pentium II 366MHz. It's taking so long to load Seamonkey that I'm going to post this and see if it comes up by tomorrow...

There's an excellent ThinkPad specifications web page here. IBM has a PDF describing the details of their discontinued 'numbered' models here.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

FireGPG

I use Firefox and I have used PGP in the past. A recent mailing list discussion (no, really!) made me reconsider integrating Gmail and PGP. I started looking around and found FireGPG. It has a few quirks, but it's integrated into Gmail (a bit.)

As a prerequisite, you'll need some form of OpenPGP. At home I use Windows XP Pro, so I chose to try GnuPG. In particular, it loads in the Windows Privacy Tray (WinPT) which is a quick way to generate keys, import them from friends, etc.

Once you have OpenPGP of your choice installed, generate your keys. Be very aware that your private key is critical and you ought not lose it!. Back it up. Publish your public key on a key server if you like. I used Veridis. Uning WinPT, choose Keyserver from the menu. Right click in the window that has the existing keyservers and choose Add. Then in the key manager window, right click your key and choose 'Send to keyserver.'

An alternate mechanism is to post your public key on your web page. Using WinPT, click your key, then click the icon on the top right 'Copy key to keyboard.' Here's mine:

pub 1024D/47BA6B91 10/21/2007 Buck Calabro
Primary key fingerprint: DA31 A4AD 9BCE 420E C400 9C41 DECA 71C9 47BA 6B91

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
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=7hcK
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----


All that is well and good, but it doesn't do much as far as actual encryption goes. There are two sorts of things one can do with encryption. Encryption will actually convert your text into something only the recipient can understand, while signing will append a digital signature to your text. That digital signature will prove that the message was sent by you and not tinkered wit, between the sender and recipient. You might be asking what the heck is the purpose of signing text. What if the recipient is a mailing list? You might want to send cleartext, but still prove who you are. Listers can verify who you are by looking you up on a keyserver.

Another consideration is that you might not have the recipient's public key. Again, a mailing list is one of those instances. A public key is mated with a single private key, so unless everyone on a mailing list shares a private key, it would be impossible for all of them to read a message.

OK, so to use FireGPG to sign a message, type your message, edit the spelling :-) and when ready to send it, select all the text in the message and then click the 'Sign & send' button. Encrypting the message works exactly the same way, only after choosing to encrypt, you are asked for the public key of the recipient.

One additional thing that FireGPG gives you is a right click context menu that will let you encrypt/decrypt text on any web page. Highlight/select that right click.

You can do all that work using only WinPT, but you have to bring up the clipboard editor and work with it that way, then you copy/paste to your application - which might be an OS application like vi :-)

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Venture blower switch replacement

NAPA part number HC138 AC HEATER SWITCH $22.49

Replaced it in the dark. 2 screws to pull off the console cover (under the ash tray and power socket covers. 2 screws to remove the panel the switch is mounted on and 2 more to remove the switch itself.

15 minutes, tops. All 5 positions work again, Yeah!

Sunday, September 16, 2007

98 Chevy Venture HVAC blower adventure

My wife's car. The blower stopped blowing on setting 5 last year. Then it lost 3 a few months ago. Then 1. Then 2. Then 4 finally died. No blower. No front defrost. This is the Northeast. Autumn in the Northeast. Not recommended.

So I dove into it today. Without a manual... As Chris would say, I nuked it out. The blower is located at the front passenger's feet. It's easy to get to; there's a carpeted cardboard cover with several of those plastic 'pop' fasteners. A quick tug at the front ad it comes off. The courtesy light comes out after a quarter turn.

The normal cause of failure for these things is the resistor block. So I started looking for the resistor block. Of course, it's behind the motor, next to the firewall. Lovely. It turns out to be pretty easy to remove the blower. There's a two-wire connector. Push the top (it's one of thos prong types) and pull it out. Remove the 2 screws and the blower motor and squirrel cage comes out. It took a bit of twisting.

Now I can clearly see the resistor block. It has 3 screws, one of which is almost impossible to get out. Loosen the two nearest the firewall about 1-2 turns, then remove the one closest to the passenger's feet. Pull it down, toward the floor and then it should tip enough to pull it off the two screws toward you. Pull the black connector off and you're good to go.

So now I have in my hand one 12v squirrel cage and one resistor block. It occurs to me that I have a cellar full of 12v power supplies, so I go down to the lab to check it out. I hook up a 12v current limited supply and turn it on. It works! Very nice... the fan turn and churns. Well at least that's one thing that I don't have to buy.

I spent about a half hour trying to figure the pinout for the resistor block, but it remains a mystery. I couldn't tell if it was bad or good. So I turned my attention to the connector in the car. I tested every combination of voltage and continuity vs switch position and got nothing.

Nothing?

Is the switch bad? Feh. Time to burrow into the dash.

This turned out to be simple! Pull the ash tray out and you'll see a screw on the right side. There's a mate on the left under the power socket cover. Remove them and the console frame pulls out from the bottom. It becomes obvious what to remove next. All the switches are mounted to a single carrier. Two more screws and it comes out, revealing the blower switch.

Pulled the connector off of that and I see a burnt socket, with a burnt pin matching it in the switch. Hm. Turn on the key so the system is energised. I test the socket and find 12v in the middle of the 3 side. Short that to the socket opposite it on the 4 side and probe the other end - voltage! Crap, the switch is looking bad.

Lay the blower on the floor, hook up the resistor block (on the floor) and connect it. Short out the two sockets and the fan spins. Yep. Bad switch. So I put the resistor block back, put the blower back, put the courtesy light back, put the cardboard back. Short together the 12v side of the connector with the pin for speed 3, turn on the key and voila! Always on, but it won't leave the wife stranded without a blower. Electrical tape for safety and put the console back together sans switch.

Tomorrow I'll get a new switch. It should take less than 15 minutes to install.