Open Source Computer Hardware

A couple of recent episodes of podcasts that I regularly listen to [the Linux Link Tech Show #165 and LUG Radio Season 4 Episode 5] both had discussions on the need for openness in computer hardware like is starting to mature in free and open source software. All of these guys need to check out MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms' "Fab Lab" outreach program, and probably interview Neil Gershenfeld.

This ties into my previous posts on Open Source Electronics and Fab Labs.

Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks working

My Distributed Family / Home Backup Network is settling into regular use, albeit with some minimal manual interaction, i.e. running a few bash scripts and entering passwords. After setting up the bash scripts and getting through the initial transfers, the periodic (almost daily) rsync sessions are going well and finish in a reasonable amount of time, normally within 3 to 10 minutes.

The next steps in the development are to setup some dedicated user accounts with SSH keys and run the rsync-bak scripts automagically. To do this I need to figure out: how to let these dedicated user accounts access all the files that I want to get backed-up; and how to setup chron-tabs to run the rsync-bak scripts automatically.

I'm also going to try to put the commands for this set-up in one or two bash scripts too so that I can add additional "target" computers easily. I also need to fix a problem with the dyndns updates from my parents condo.

Past posts on this subject are here, here and here.

Evangelical Christian leader paid for gay hooker and took drugs!

hyp·o·crite -- a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion

AP Story
read more | digg story

Is it sad or just fitting when reality smashes into fundamentalist religious zealots?

Incorrect Route Shield, SR-202 @ 292nd Ave NE

The resent signal project on SR-202 west of Fall City at 292nd Ave NE placed a confirmation sign with a US-202 route shield along the eastbound departure from the intersection. [US-202 runs from from Delaware to Maine.] The correct sign should have a George Washington silhouette.

Day Against DRM

DefectiveByDesign.org is sponsoring a "Day Against DRM" today in an effort to spread the word about the trials, tribulations, and general badness of digital rights management schemes.

"Defeating DRM is all about awareness. The direct actions that we have taken are all about this. Whether it means protesting outside Apple Stores in Hazmat suits or getting HUGE press coverage for announcing the Bono petition. Action gets attention, and creates space for debate. And as our friends at Disney recognize, if there is a debate, we will have won." -- DefectiveByDesign.org

Digital Rights Management is a myth. Any content or intellectual property that can be used, weather it be audio, video, software, or even designs of physical devices, can and will be copied or functionally replicated by anyone anywhere at an ever decreasing cost. This is a direct and irrepressible result of the cost of communication approaching zero. There is no technology that has ever existed or will ever exist that can prevent this in a free and open society.

Passing legislation and regulations in an attempt to keep the Earth at the center of the Universe did not change reality and it seriously impeded the progress of human culture and society. Likewise our current system of intellectual property has out lived its usefulness and is causing more harm to our society and culture then benefit.

It's time for those that normally sit on the sidelines of political debates to stand up, speak out, and take back our culture, our communities and our nation.

read more | digg story

Ancient Rome's 9/11 - and what happened after

Extremely interesting read! Could this be a prediction of what is to come in America?

read more | digg story

AVA Forum Feedback

Jan --

    I think your efforts launching the new AVA forums are well intentioned, I wish you the best of luck and will do what I can to help.

    But, based on my thirty plus years of experience with on-line communities, I think that there is not yet enough organic critical mass on-line in the AVA to support phpBB forums. 

    Over the past five years the AVAMembers@yahoogroups.com list has averaged less then 15 posts a month.  This means that, even if all the AVAMembers@yahoogroups.com traffic was on the AVA forums instead, on most days members who bother to check the forums will find that there are no new messages and they will feel that they wasted their time checking.  Other AVA Yahoo lists get even less traffic.

    IMHO, mailing lists really are the best solution for communities, like the AVA, that tend to have less then one posting a day.  The AVA might do better with some other forum package that has better e-mail integration and support for RSS [or similar] subscriptions, much like Yahoo Groups does.  The down side to running a mailing is that many ISPs are blocking independent mailing to prevent spam and charging thousands of dollars to unblock them. Thus service providers like Yahoo Groups, MSN and Google are the current best options for low traffic groups.

    Another way to kick start the forums, is to make sure there is something new and relevant posted at least once a day.  For content to entice people into the forums, you might want to dig through the message archives on the yahoo lists [here & here] and post some summaries on various topics to the forum, then announce your posting on the various yahoo mailing lists. 

    When you mail your announcements about the forums, be sure to include a direct link to your forum post.  To get from your e-mail to the AVARegionIII list to your post in the AVA forums I had to:

1. type the URL of the AVA Members site [AmericanVaulting.org/members] from memory;
   
2. if I hadn't already been logged in I would have had to also type my username and password;
   
3. then click on the "Forums" button on the side bar (or the featured item button);
4. then refer back to your message and click on the "General Information" subject link,
5. then click on the "ARMBANDS and Vaulter numbers" subject link.

    From a members perspective, that was a lot of effort to discover that your post only had questions in it and not any information relevant to me or my club. 

    Other content ideas to kick start the forum might include e-mail interviews with AVA notables, like WEG participants, Judges, respected horse trainers, "A" Team coaches, etc.

    I hope this is at least a little helpful.

    BTW -- I've been kicking around the idea of starting a monthly vaulting podcast with some of the content ideas that I'm giving you above. I've even got the "VaultingCast.com" domain name registered.  At this point I'm looking for a co-host that's willing to commit to an hour a month of prep time and an hour a month on the phone recording.

TTFN
    Tom Sayles
    Region III, Mover & Shaker

Wanted: Star Map

A couple of recent news articles reminded me that I never learned the constellations of the night sky. Over the years I've looked for a sky map in a particular form but have never found it. What I'd like is a map of the night sky in a Mercator projection with the celestial equator across the middle and the celestial poles at the top and bottom. I'd also like to have the Ecliptic shown (as the appropriate sign wave) and marked with the sun's position on each day. Of course, I'd also like the star names and constellations shown.

If you have access to the tools to make such a map and can produce a 11"x17" or bigger plot for under $20 I'd be very interested in getting a copy.

I got mentioned on Slashdot Review!

My recent blog post about "Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks" was featured on the August 14th edition of Slashdot Review, which is one of the many podcasts I listen to.

I only found this out today. While trying to catch up on older podcasts I haven't yet listened to, I heard a head line that sounded very familiar. It took a moment or two to realize that it was familiar because I had written it. Needless to say I was excited that

Follow-up: Fab Lab & Open Source Electronics

The world is several steps closer to the kind of open source innovation in electronics that I predicted back in February. I recently heard a podcast interview with MIT's Neil Gershenfeld about their Center for Bits and Atoms' "Fab Lab" outreach program that brings prototyping capabilities to under-served communities that have been beyond the reach of conventional technology development and deployment. The abilities of these "Fab Labs" is almost exactly what I was describing as "custom electronics manufacturers".

The availability of this kind of rapid and personal fabrication will greatly accelerate the pace of innovation, especially of open design that allow others to freely create derivative designs that build on earlier work of others. One of the strongest assets of open source development techniques is accelerated design progress through the rapid application of small individually applied design tweaks.

Quote: Eleanor Roosevelt

While looking for tip on baking bacon in the oven,I ran across the following quote on Discuss Cooking.

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission. -Eleanor Roosevelt-"

Random Dream: Composite Team

As my alarm went off this morning, I was dreaming about coaching a high level Region III composite vaulting team. The along with the other coaches and parents I was just informing the vaulters that we had secured a large, centrally located, living space and that we would be able to begin training more or less full time. This was being made possible by a sponsorship by or a grant from National Geographic, who would be filming a documentary about our training and competition.

Update: Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks

While I was down visiting my parents, and attending the National Vaulting Championships at the end of July, I reconfigured one of their old computers, PopsHP, as a LAMP server similar my LampCat.

PopsHP started out as an HP Pavilion 6545c. A couple of years ago we replaced the internal hard drive with a new one (approximately 110 GB). On my recent trip I resized the Windows 98 2nd edition partition (hda1) and installed the LAMP server version of Ubuntu 6.06 [Dapper Drake]. I also installed a new USB-2 card and a 500GB external hard drive.

Next I got PopsHP and my parent's home network configured to allow me to connect to PopsHP via SSH from my home computers, LampCat and LinCat64 [my AMD 64 desktop]. The I then installed, setup and configured Samba to allow my parents to access PopsHP like a windows file server. I even setup drive mappings from their desktop and laptop computers to their /home/ directories located on PopsHP's new external HD, while instructing them to save anything they wanted to keep safe onto PopsHP using these mappings. I also booted their main desktop machine off a Live Ubuntu CD and rsync-ed a complete backup to shared directory in PopsHP's /home/ directory. The final task before I returned home was to make sure that whenever PopsHP reboots (like after a rolling blackout) it boots into linux and starts up the various services / daemons.

Since returning home from my parents condo, I've been using rsync to push copies of my main /home/ directory from from LinCat64 to LampCat and then to PopsHP. I'm using an exclude list on the first transfer to only back-up worth while files, but on the second [off-site] transfer I am doing a full mirror of the primary backup. To keep our [Comcast] cable modem usable for basic web browsing, e-mail, etc., and keep my housemates from complaining, I've had to limit the upstream bandwidth that rsync uses to only 35k/s, so the initial 31GB transfer is taking a long time. [67.7% in a little over a week so far with various stops and restarts.]

This afternoon, I've started the first rsync backup going the other way, from PopsHP to LampCat. My parents [SBC] ADLS line seems to have much better upstream bandwidth and as a result the initial 9.4GB transfer is going much faster, over 7% in just a few hours.

The next steps in the development of my Distributed Family / Home Backup Network will be to install passwordless certificates for the underlying ssh connections and setup chron jobs to automate the transfers. I also want to setup access to my Dad's home folder via shttp so that he can access his files while on his consulting assignments.

Longer term, I'll be looking to add a web based configuration and management application. I'd also like to get a server box set up for my brother and his family, to get offsite backups going for them too.

At Christmas time we might also set my Dad up with a MythTV backend in my parents condo and a portable front end that he can take with him on his assignments.

BTW -- If anyone wants me to set up a "Distributed Family / Home Backup Network" like this for their own private use, my normal consulting rate is $50USD/hr plus expenses and my time is subject to limited availability.

Expanding the Patriot Act would mean the Terrorists win.

I found the following quote in the comments on Chris Prillo's blog.

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. -- Benjamin Franklin

This bring to mind another quote from that same era.

... "all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government" ... -- The Declaration of Independence

We must stand up, speak out, take political action and if necessary fight and die, to protect our freedoms and liberties from the attacks of religious fundamentalists both inside and outside our governments.

How I got from roads to robots

I recently got reconnected with one of my fiends from college through LinkedIn, and he asked:

"How did you move from Civil engineering to IT and robotics? The Civil Engineering has continuous needs while other fields are more unsettled."

Well, back in 1996 I got somewhat disillusioned with the impacts of political decisions on public safety and decided to take the first reasonable opportunity to get out of state government. That first reasonable opportunity ended up being a job as a network admin for a small multi-media start-up in Bethesda, MD.

After eight months in what turned out to be a very different job from what was described in the interview process, I got on with a small minority owned government contractor as a database admin / software developer. Both of these jobs built on the inter-networking and software skills I acquired at Virginia Tech and at VDOT. Aside from a boss who was an idiot that managed to loose the contract we were working on, the government contractor gig was a good one. It payed well and the work was very interesting.

In the same time frame, Jen Williams got me really hooked on the sport of equestrian vaulting. Throughout the years I lived in the Baltimore / Washington area I helped out with her team first as longeur / groom and later as an assistant coach.

After a stint as an independent consultant through the dot-com crash, I moved to the Seattle area and got on with a company that had been recently acquired by {Employer’s Name Removed} building high end electronic toothbrushes. However, I was making less the half what I was before the bust, but the work was interesting and the pay was enough to live on.

I also hooked up with a vaulting club, the Redwing Vaulters in Redmond Wa., and continued as an assistant coach. While volunteering with the Redwing I traveled to the national vaulting championships in 2002, 2003 & 2004. When Redwing 's head coach decided to scaled back her club after nationals in 2004, I started up a new club with some of its former members.

In the past 18 to 24 months the work at the toothbrush factory has gotten less interesting and the overall compensation has diminished significantly as our benefits got harmonized with the global conglomerate. However in that same time frame my volunteer work, as Head Coach of the Cascade Vaulters, has intensified in an incredibly satisfying way and I find that I don't really have time or energy to look for a better job.

In what spare time I do have I've been messing around with open source software, especially Linux, and both blogging and podcasting and may try to spin these into a better paying and more flexible gig.

BitTorrent Tips and Tricks ~ Chris Pirillo

There isn't enough emphasis on rhyming these days.

Check out this apparent abuse of a Seuss. (Well maybe it's just a chat with the Cat.)

BitTorrent Tips and Tricks ~ Chris Pirillo

Nationals 2006 -- Wednesday

Industry Expo Center, City of Industry, CA -- Every thing is settling in for this year's AVA/USEF National Vaulting Championships. Today the main vaulting competition rings and the two warm up rings were in place by mid day in the Expo Center's Grand arena. Following the required vet checks the competitors began practicing on their horses. Many of the vaulters showed significant improvements during the afternoon practice sessions as they and their horses became accustomed to the surroundings. Several of the team freestyle routines look like they will be very impressive this year.
Setup was also completed of the "white arena" [barrel area] in the west end of the Expo Center's Grand arena. At a few minutes past two in the afternoon the Para-Nationals competition began in the "white arena". Performing in this pre-nationals event were vaulters from Valley View, Flying Stars, Elkhorn Equestrian, Half Moon Bay, Oak Hills, Starlite, Flying Stars, Flying B clubs. Many of these vaulters performed for the crowd of about 60 spectators despite significant disabilities.
As the afternoon advanced, the overhead misters and an afternoon breeze brought temperatures in the stands down to comfortable temperatures. The moderating temperatures in the Los Angles area should only make things better as the weekend's events unfold.
It looks like every thing is ready for the AVA & USEF recognized events to kick off tomorrow morning.
Watch these pages for more reports and in the near future VaultingCast.com interviews with competitors, coaches, trainers and [hopefully] a judge or two.

Progress: Distributed Family / Home Backup Networks

I've made some significant progress toward setting up a Distributed Family / Home Backup Network. Over the past few weeks I've been squeezing in some time hacking on my Linux server. I successfully got the Server version of Ubuntu Linux installed on my <$100 used IBM Personal Computer 300GL, aptly named LampCat. LampCat is a 400MHz PII with 376 MB RAM, an 8GB internal hard drive and a 100GB external USB 2.0 hard disk. Using just SSH connections I installed and configured Apache and a few other apps. I've also been backing-up the home directory off my AMD64 desktop machine, LinCat64, (running the AMD64 version of Ubuntu Linux) to LampCat using rsync.

The big acomplishment came this past weekend when I finially configured the various NAT routers in our house to allow access to LampCat from the outside Internet. For some reasion my SpeedStream 2604 won't forward port 80 properly, but forwards HTTP fine on another arbitrary port. I also was able do a rsync back-up after to opening the SSH port and using the fully qualified domain name.

On LampCat I still need to configure some file permissions so the backup process can be done as some user other then root and configure secure access to the backed-up filed via the HTTP server. I might also install wordpress.

Horse Show

I entered my first horse show in at least twenty five years this past Sunday. [I may have been in one near my grandparents farm when I was a kid.] The show at Farrel McWhirter Park in Redmond was just a local schooling show, so it wasn't too serious an affair, and thus I didn't spend as much time practicing as I might have.

It took us about forty minutes to ride down to the park with a couple of other horses from our barn. Cali and I entered two classes, finishing fourth in the English, Walk-Trot Equitation class and third in the Open Halter class. Our friends from Mecca finished their entries before the lunch break so after the show Cali and I rode back up the hill to Mecca by ourselves.

This and more photos are on my Flickr account.

Re: Christian Humor

I was skeptical when I read the subject. But it's a good one.

Carol Sayles <teacher_carol@ya...> wrote:

This came from Dave Pritcherd of Iowa State Days.

I LOL so thought you might too.

 

SOME CHRISTIAN HUMOR

 

 Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer.  They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

 

 Finally fed up, God said, "THAT'S IT! I have had enough.  I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job."

 

 So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

 

 They moused.

 

 They faxed.

 

 They e-mailed.

 

 They e-mailed with attachments.

 

  They downloaded.

 

 They did spreadsheets.

 

 They wrote reports.

 

 They created labels and cards.

 

 They created charts and graphs.

 

 They did some genealogy reports

 

 They did every job known to man.

 

 Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.

 

 Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

 

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

 

Jesus just sighed.

 

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers.  Satan started searching frantically, screaming:

 

 "It's gone! It's all GONE!

 

 "I lost everything when the power went out!"

 

 Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

 

 Satan observed this and became irate.

 

 "Wait!" he screamed.

 

 "That's not fair! He cheated!

 

How come he has all his work and I don't have any?"

 

 God just shrugged and said, JESUS SAVES.

 

---

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