Monthly Archives: December 2008

Merry Christmas All…

Best wishes to all on this Christmas holiday. After a bunch of waiting around in the Portland Airport, I’m back with the wife. We just made our traditional meal of Christmas Pasta (quite yummy) and will have a slice of cheesecake in a while. Hope you all have a great holiday.

On the three year anniversary of…

Well, it’s the three year anniversary of my last trip into Portland during a freezing rain storm. You can read about my previous trip here, but today I’m flying into PDX and it looks like we won’t have a repeat of my previous experience: the temperature is above freezing, and I’m coming in during the morning, rather than the afternoon. I don’t mind driving in snow, it’s the insidious black ice that Portland gets that really scares the crap out of me. There is only one mistake that you can make in such conditions: getting in a car at all. Witness the chaos (from a previous storm):


httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G7xdY_ggM0

I’m not anticipating any such excitement on this trip, but once again I’ve pressed my friend Jeff into picking me up at the airport, and then I’ll go pick up a rental when I’m closer to home.

It’s an odd Christmas for me. It’ll be nice to visit Mom and my brother, but I already miss Carmen, and it will be the first Christmas that we’ll have without seeing our son. Still, a few days, and I’ll be back cooking and cleaning and otherwise making myself useful for the holiday. Haven’t got my Christmas menu planned out yet, but I’ll figure out something.

Re-animating the PDP-11/70

A few years ago, Tom Duff and I each wrote an emulator for the PDP-1 so we could play the original version of Space Wars! I learned a lot about old computers in the week or so it took me to do, and I must admit that I’ve retained a fascination for old computers ever since. Tom mentioned that he has a front panel from an old PDP-11, and has talked about doing a project where he wires the front panel to a more modern machine running a PDP-11 emulator, which seemed like a cool idea. After all, modern computers just don’t have enough blinking lights. Here’s a link to a project which does precisely that using an inexpensive Zilog microcontroller over ethenet. It also includes some links to other similar and interesting projects. Check it out.

Re-animating the PDP-11/70

The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes | Lambda the Ultimate

A while ago, I got interested in reimplementing various versions of the Sieve of Eratosthenes. I eventually tacked together a threaded version that could calculate all the primes up to a trillion in about 20 minutes, and then kind of got bored. Today, however, there’s an interesting link to an article on Lambda the Ultimate about sieves. In particular, it makes the claim that the normal “sieve” code that people use to illustrate the effectiveness of functional programming languages isn’t actually a sieve at all. Interesting!

The Genuine Sieve of Eratosthenes | Lambda the Ultimate.

KB2HSH talks about High Speed Meteor Scatter, the Geminid Shower, and FSK441

John, KB2HSH, whom I chatted with a few times on the #amsat IRC channel has been writing up his experiences working satellites and the like. This morning, he was taking advantage of the Geminid meteor shower, and doing some listening for high speed meteor contacts. Very interesting, and even inspiring. I’ll have to do some of this soon myself.

The KB2HSH Radio Experimentation Page: High Speed Meteor Scatter, the Geminid Shower, and FSK441.

Addendum: John also has a very nice video on how he constructs eggbeater antennas. These are omnidirectional antennas that many use for satellite contacts. Since they are omnidirectional, they don’t need any pointing.


httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u7aoHDc-gw

Short Movie Review: Twilight

Okay, it was Carmen’s turn to pick. I wanted to go see The Day The Earth Stood Still, but I usually pick movies, and Carmen has been wanting to see Twilight since it opened, and I can (usually) deny her nothing, so Twilight is what we saw.

It’s complete drek.

It’s not that it’s badly made. Technically, it displays a certain competence. The performances are reasonable. The problem is that the plot is basically what you would get if you let a fourteen year old virgin write a love story about vampires. It’s just hideous. Painful. Even the sixteen year old girls in the front row broke out laughing at some of the “dramatic” moments.

It’s trying to be all psychological. Loner girl meets loner guy who acts like he hates her. But he likes her. But he can’t be with her. Because he can’t resist her (she’s just too darned snackable). Gee, do you think they are trying to draw a parallel between the vampire’s thirst and the teen desire to have sex? Betcha nobody caught on amidst all the clever innuendo.

Watching this movie was like watching fifteen year old pop stars sing about love and relationships. I suppose if your teen daughters wanted to go see it, you could do worse: it’s only rated PG-13, and frankly is about the most tepid movie I’ve seen. There is barely any kissing, much less any violence. They won’t learn much bad by watching this.

Congratulations to Adam and Becca

On December 8, 2008, my son Adam Rogers took Rebecca Hand to be his wife. After all the excitement, I’m just now getting around to getting all the footage and photographs that we took organized, but here’s a still from the video footage that I snapped with my little Canon camera from my front row seat.

Today, they should be arriving at Macdill AFB at Adam’s first assignment for the Air Force. Their honeymoon consisted of a grueling cross country trek, and I hope they are well.

Gutenberg Gem: Astronomical Instruments and Accessories, by Wm. Gaertner & Co.

It’s been quite some time since I posted a “Gutenberg Gem”, a book from Project Gutenberg that might deserve some special attention. Today’s example contains a bunch of nice illustrations about telescopes and their associated astronomical instruments. Very nice. Not just traditional refracting telescopes, but also instruments like spectrum comparators and filar micrometers.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Astronomical Instruments and Accessories, by Wm. Gaertner & Co..


K1EL remounted in a better box…

This morning, I decided to take the new box that I had acquired and remount my K1EL keyer into it. The new box is somewhat larger, so it actually has space for all five of the possible dedicated buttons that the K1EL supports, instead of the mere three that I had haphazardly bored into the previous incarnation. I was a bit more careful to make sure that there was sufficient internal clearance. As it was, I still had a single minor issue: the input jack can actually make glancing contact with the button cell. A quick fix was found however, I simply stick a piece of post-it note to the jack, and that was enough to break the contact.

I didn’t have time to wire up all the additional switches, but they are at least all mounted, and maybe next week I’ll get them all wired in. I’m quite pleased with the overall result this time: I don’t think I’ll need a third try. 🙂

Addendum: I realized yesterday that I didn’t have a complete drill set anymore. I was in the neighborhood of Harbor Freight, and picked up one of their cheap 29 piece sets. I was going to drill a 1/4″ hole, so fetched out the 1/4″ from my new set, chucked it in the drill press, and…

It was bent.

I have gotten smaller diameter drill bits that were bent before, but not 1/4″. Annoying.

Low NOAA 17 Pass

I woke up this morning, and wanted to relax a bit before the day’s exciting activities (more on this later), so I noted that NOAA17 was coming up. I got out after the pass (which had a maximum elevation of under 15 degrees) was under way, but the audio sounded pretty clear, so I recorded the audio and got the following picture:

Because it was so short, I wasn’t 100% sure what I was staring at. The water at the lower right was (I suspected) the Gulf of Mexico, but I wasn’t 100% sure. So I got out my mapping software and plotted the path of NOAA17 along the ground. Sure enough, that seems plausible.

I should figure out how to plot the visible region for NOAA passes, so I can do this more routinely. In fact, I could probably merge this with my satellite prediction code to give the ground tracks of satellites more routinely. More stuff for the future!

K1EL mounted in a case…

Well, this morning I decided I wanted to get the K1EL keyer that I put together mounted in a proper aluminum case. The sad thing was, I didn’t really pay enough attention to internal clearances, with the net result that I did a pretty crappy job. I’ll probably try again sometime soon, but in the mean time, it’s at least functional, and is no longer at risk of being yanked apart.