Category Archives: General

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.

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.

Santa Mark and Elf Scrappy

Carmen got a cute little elf hat for Scrappy. He didn’t scratch or fuss too much, but neither was he especially happy. We decided to get a quick picture of him, and then gave him a little cat treat and let him get rid of his elf hat.

On Serving Web Pages…

I must admit, I’ve been running WordPress for quite some time, and for the most part, I’m pretty happy with it as weblogs go. But there are a couple of things that bug me about it. For one thing, it isn’t really very simple. In fact, it’s not just that it isn’t simple, it’s that it’s complexity seems far outpaced by its utility. Allow me to explain: WordPress requires the installation of a bunch of fairly complicated software. It needs Apache (I have heard of it running with other webservers, but such a configuration isn’t well supported in my experience), PHP and MySQL. While the default installation is okay for modest blog installations like my own, to be able to support a decent load, there is the need to use caching plugins, perhaps offloading static content onto a different webserver, and generally a lot of performance tuning.

For instance, here is the output for running “siege”, which simulates a 15 simultaneous users trying to access my blog:


Transactions: 54 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 10.86 secs
Data transferred: 2.06 MB
Response time: 2.15 secs
Transaction rate: 4.97 trans/sec
Throughput: 0.19 MB/sec
Concurrency: 10.68
Successful transactions: 54
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 5.36
Shortest transaction: 1.53

10.68 transactions per second seem like it might be okay, but it’s no where near saturating the link speed. On the other hand, if you are serving mostly static content, you can use a server like thttpd. Here’s the output of a similar siege session simulating 200 simulatenous users:


Transactions: 4249 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 10.62 secs
Data transferred: 13.21 MB
Response time: 0.01 secs
Transaction rate: 400.09 trans/sec
Throughput: 1.24 MB/sec
Concurrency: 2.41
Successful transactions: 4249
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 0.27
Shortest transaction: 0.00

It’s running flat out: each page actually loads two files, so we get 400 transactions per second. The thttpd server haul’s major ass.

Okay, yes. The WordPress blog is running all sorts of dynamic code, but 99% of the time, it’s producing precisely the same static content. We aren’t really getting a huge payoff for our huge decrease in available throughput. We could serve literally hundreds of simultaneous users with even modest hardware if we made better use of static content.

It seems to me that there could be a nice weblogging system based upon this rather simple observation.

The Challenge of Amateur Radio

Jeff KE9V, over at KE9V.net is once again falling victim to pessimism about amateur radio. I can’t help but shake my head at the effort that we as hams seem to put into lamenting the impending death of our hobby.

It’s very strange. I can’t think of another hobby that spends as much time as we seem to in the following three activities:

  1. Lamenting the impending doom of amateur radio, principally because so few newcomers enter the hobby, while simultaneously…
  2. Grouching that all the newcomers in the hobby are wrecking the hobby because of their lack of desire to do things the way what we all learned, and yet
  3. Spending all sorts of time trying to lure people into believing that our hobby is fun.

I prefer a different tactic.

If our hobby really was fun, we wouldn’t need to work at recruiting people: they would just happen naturally. We couldn’t keep them out of our hobby. If they don’t think amateur radio is fun, it’s probably best to assume that it’s not fun, at least for them. Something about the way we present ham radio to them makes them believe it isn’t fun. Many would argue that the man on the street just doesn’t understand what fun amateur radio is, but I would submit that the average ham doesn’t understand what fun is, or what the average young person would consider is fun.

Me? I just try to talk about the things which I think are fun, particularly things that can be done with minimal amounts of money and modest investment of time. I’ll leave the anxiety of the future of the hobby to others. I’d rather just keep plodding along, doing what I like, and trying to engage targets of opportunity who read about what I like as often as I can.

Changing my theme…

My WordPress “theme” seems to need a little maintenence. Don’t be alarmed if the look of my website changes a bit over the next couple of days. I haven’t upgraded it in a long time, and I’m trying to make sure it works with all the upgraded versions of WordPress that I’ve installed recently.

NOAA 17 this morning…

My blog indicates that I was decoding my first NOAA weather sat images about a year ago. I have made some progress on improving the images that I get out, but not alot. Witness this morning’s image, recorded beginning around 10:05 PST of NOAA 17 on 137.62 Mhz:

It seems pretty good, except for one thing: it is pretty hard to see what we are staring at underneath all the cloud cover. The bulk of the west coast should appear to the right of the midline of each image, and I suspect the visible portion covers roughly 45 degrees north to 20 or so degrees north at the bottom, but other than that, it’s pretty hard to see any real detail. I have begun to plan my next revision of this program, which will record timing information as well, which will allow me to draw continent outlines over the map, which definitely will be helpful, particularly on the night time passes which use primarily IR imaging.

Addendum: With a bit of work, I can see the Great Salt Lake and Lake Tahoe. That, combined with my knowledge of the satellite orbit means that I can approximate the view with Google Earth:

It’s only a rough approximation, but it should be reasonably close.