brainwagon

Well, i’ve had a couple of days to muck around with the ASUS WL-520G (hereafter revered to as “the ASUS” or “the router”) and OpenWRT. I have had a modicum of success, as well as a modicum of failure, so I thought I’d give an update.

For my beacon transmitter, it is important that the router maintain a fairly accurate clock, because WSPR beacon transmissions occur at the beginning of even number minutes. So, I thought the first thing that I should be do is to get ntp running on the router, to make sure that the clock timing was good. There is a minimal ntp client called, quite appropriately, ntpclient, which I added to the configuration. I also thought that it would be good to add a slightly more capable HTTP server, rather than the minimal one built into busybox. I recompiled and installed.

And immediately found out that ntpclient didn’t work. It set the clock initially, but the clock was immediately sliding away from synchronization. I killed ntpclient, and it was still slipping sharply, losing about 11 seconds every minute. I knew that there were limits to how big a drift that ntp could correct, so I did some careful googling.

It appears that there is some lingering problem with this particular device. Without getting too far into it, there is code in the sbmips.c file which claims that the clock rate for this box is 240Mhz, but in reality, it appears to be 200Mhz. Changing this number and recompiling results in a clock which is reasonably accurate, and which ntpclient can easily correct, but also appears to cause a problems with the flash memory “mtd” driver. I’m currently trying to work that out.

Addendum: Hmm. I shifted to the “trunk” instead of the stable 8.09 release, and this problem seems to have gone away. I still needed to patch sbmips.c, but it seems to work fine now.

One year ago today, we found out that Scrappy, our formerly feral cat had FIV, the feline immunodeficiency virus. The good news is, he’s alive and healthy!

Scrappy’s early years are shrouded in mystery. I’m not certain whether he really was a feral cat, or whether he might have been an escaped cat. When he first showed up in our back yard, he was essentially starving, and very, very timid. He wouldn’t even come inside our back patio door to get fed, and wouldn’t tolerate being picked up (although he would just squirm, he wouldn’t scratch). Over a period of weeks and months, I slowly gained his trust, and he would begin to tolerate brief, and finally increasing amounts of time inside. We took him to the vet and found that he was neutered. It’s not uncommon for strays to be captured, neutered, and have their ears notched and re-released (Scrappy has a notch in his right ear). But he remained an outdoor cat for the most time. He would very nearly hyperventilate when put into a cat carrier.

But he was a fighter (hence the name “Scrappy”). Once or twice a year he’d get in a squabble with some other cat, and end up with bites on his face or front legs, and scratches, and I’d have to give him antibiotics, and occasionally keep him inside (where he’d squawk incessantly, and climb walls and get very upset). After one of these episodes, he had a persistent skin infection, and I took him to a different vet, where he was tested for FIV. He came back positive.

I was very sad, since I’m very partial to Scrappy.

I was told that I shouldn’t allow him outside, both for his own protection and to prevent the spread of the disease. FIV leaves him susceptible to infections, and the best way was to isolate him from any of the dangers that he normally is exposed to.

Well, housebreaking him was a challenge. First was teaching him to use a litterbox. We placed one in the upstairs bathroom, and would periodically place his paws in it. He would immediately squirm and bolt. He cried at the door to be let out. No, strike that. He’d wail. He’d howl. He’d beg. He’d cry. That went on for three days.

Then, he figured it out.

His skin cleared up. He added about a pound. We tried to make sure he had lots of toys and physical contact to make sure that he remained stimulated and not bored. He went through a brief period of time where he would howl in the middle of the night, but I got a small squirt gun and a couple of nights of that, and he got the hint. Now, he wakes us up at around 7:30 every morning (not too bad).

He’s healthy and happy. Now that the weather is improving, I’m taking him out into our back yard for a bit of supervised grass sniffing. He isn’t actively trying to get out most of the time: we’ve left doors open accidently, only to find him sitting on his chair or on our staircase when we search for him.

I’m beginning to wonder if I should have him tested again: his health has been so remarkably good I’m wondering about the possibility of a false positive. But then again, we’ve been treating him as if he is, and there is nothing else we could do, so maybe it doesn’t matter. The only real change I would consider if he wasn’t FIV is maybe getting a second cat to serve as a companion for him. But my outdoor stray has become an indoor “lap fungus”. And we are very fond of our furball.

Hope the next year for Scrappy goes just as well.

I’ve now continued the long tradition of blogging about our pets.