Rants and Revelations

I had an appointment with my physiotherapist today. She’s pretty pleased with the progress on my wrist - I’m getting more range of motion back every day, and my grip strength is increasing as well.

I got my KVM switch working again, by unplugging the monitor cable from it and plugging it back again. Not sure if that’s a KVM problem or a monitor problem - next time I’ll try power cycling the monitor instead.

And the network connector arrived for the upstairs TiVo. That means I can do a daily call using the network, instead of the phone. That’s not a huge win, although there wasn’t a convenient phone jack near the TiVo and formerly I’d been using this device that puts the telephone signal through the power lines. But far more importantly, this enables multi-room viewing. I just tried it, and it works ok, but not great. On one Tivo, you can browse the “Now Playing List” (ie the list of recorded programs) from the other TiVo. You can choose a show and “transfer it”. It doesn’t quite transfer in real time, so you have to wait a bit before you start watching, although you can go back to the menu and watch something else, or even choose more shows to transfer, while it’s transferring. And when it’s done transferring, it’s on both TiVos.

If I had any wishes, I’d want the transfer to happen fast enough that instead of transferring, you could watch it directly from the other machine’s hard drive, and therefore when you finished, you could delete it or otherwise manage it on the originating TiVo’s drive. Oh well.

I came home to find that my USB KVM, which I’ve had for about a month, is dead. It switches, the screen shows the resolution as sort of a double image, but neither computer comes out of the screen saver. If I power off the KVM and power it on again, the Linux box at least shows messages indicating that it’s come alive again. But it doesn’t work.

Bugger it, doesn’t anybody make reliable equipment designed to work 24/7 for months at a time?

In my part of the big project I’m on, I have a class called a Playlist, and a corresponding database table. Based on my analysis of how many Playlists are likely to be used in the lifetime of a system, I decided that an int would be more than adequate storage space for the sequential internal id number. Actually, a short would probably be adequate, but there isn’t any compelling reason to use shorts on modern systems since they don’t save much storage and they’re slower to process (is that true in Java? I know it is in C/C++.) And so I happily used this id all over the code.
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It’s official - the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has decided to remove public access to the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File (DAFIF). For more information about what DAFIF is, why it’s important, and why it’s being taken away from us, see this page.

I don’t think my waypoint generators will die, but they sure won’t be as useful for people outside of the United States as their data gets staler and staler.

This is a sad day for me.

Preserve me from cow orkers (software developers, mind you) who install rpms with –force (without bothing to read and understand the message they got when they attempted to install without –force) and then wonder why apt-rpm isn’t upgrading things correctly.
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…because it still hasn’t found an exit strategy.

The regulations concerning flying are dense, confusing, impenetrable, and where they aren’t self-contradictory they leave terms undefined and open to wrong interpretation. So it’s not too surprising that most pilots (and instructors) rely on a collection of old wives tales and wrong impressions, and that arguments are frequent and bloody on rec.aviation.ifr.

Last week, our flying club sponsored an FAA Safety Seminar on how to fly the new GPS systems. Our “rival” club Artisan just installed Garmin 530s on all their aircraft, and we’re all jealous as hell. So we got the guy who trained all of them on how to use the Garmins to give us a seminar on the basics. Now, he’s probably spent a lot more time studying the regulations than I have, but something he said looked just plain wrong to me.

The FAA has certain requirements that specify when you have to file an alternate airport, in case you can’t complete the instrument approach at your destination. It’s a bit of a stupid regulation, because in actual fact there is no regulation saying you have to actually divert to that airport if you decide you can’t make your destination, but I guess it serves the purpose of getting you to look at and think about alternatives in the area. In the GPS naviation world, the FAA recognizes that the reason you might not be able to complete the approach at your destination might be a GPS failure, either in your plane or in the system, which would mean that you can’t do a GPS approach at your alternative. So if you are required to file an alternate, that alternate must have at least one non-GPS approach that meets the criteria for being used as an alternate. (Not a big deal for me, since I always look for airports with ILS approaches for alternates.)

So far, that makes a lot of sense. You can see the reasons, and it adds redundancy and safety and eliminates single point of failure errors. But here’s the bit that looked dead wrong to me: He said that if you go to the alternate, you’re allowed to use the GPS approach if your GPS is working, but you’re not allowed to use the GPS to navigate the missed approach procedure if you have to “go missed” (abort the approach) there. I suspect he’s misinterpreting a rule that says you have to be able to navigate the missed approach procedure without GPS if your GPS fails.

Came home and the TiVo had finished updating. I entered all the Season’s Passes from the other TiVo - or at least the ones I could: you can’t enter normal Season’s Passes (SPs) for shows that aren’t currently on the schedule, and many of our old SPs are no longer valid. But there were a few surprises - I couldn’t find either “Red Green” or “As Time Goes By” on the schedule, even though we recorded both of them a few days ago.

After I entered the Season’s Passes, I switched the cable input from the old TiVo to the new one, and the coax RF cable from the new TiVo goes into the RF modulator. It’s already recorded a show. Woo hoo!

Phase 3 will be when the new USB wireless network dongle I ordered from TiVo arrives, and I can start sharing TiVo shows between the two TiVos. I can hardly wait.

A few weeks ago, I bought a used Series 2 TiVo to replace the bedroom Series 1. The main impetus for this is to use the ability to watch programs recorded on the TiVo in one room on the TiVo in another room.

By coincidence, I also happened to have a 180Gb hard drive sitting on my shelf which I thought would be a good addition to the new TiVo. Unfortunately the Series 2 TiVos don’t have a second bracket, power connector, and ide connector so for simplicity I thought I’d replace the existing drive with the big one.

Unfortunately in order to do the drive replacement, you need a WinTel box that you can boot with a special Linux boot CD with mfstools 2.0 on it. I had the CD, but unfortunately until a few days ago my Windows box was out to lunch. Dropping an older and less capable video card brought the Windows box back, so it was time to get this thing done.

I stuck the 180Gb drive in the Windows box and booted it with the Ultimate Boot CD and tested the hell out of it using IBM’s DFT and Western Digital’s drive testers, and it passed everything. That’s a good start, because the reason it was on the shelf is that the Linux 2.6 kernel didn’t like something about the way it was partitioned (it was fine in 2.4).

Then I put the 40Gb drive from the TiVo in the Windows box and copied the image to the 180Gb drive using the mfstools. I put the 180Gb drive into the TiVo and confidently screwed the cover on, and tried to boot it.

Oh. Bad news. I don’t see anything. Dammit! I unscrew everything and put the original 40Gb disk back in the TiVo. And I don’t see anything! Panic time. Is there any chance that I mixed up the “from” and “to” in the copy? I don’t think so. But what else can it be? I conclude that the TiVo image on both drives are now screwed up.

After some frantic Googling, I find ptvupgrade.com has a “InstantCake” CD, which for $20 gives me a iso image that I can burn onto a CD, boot my WinTel box, and it will install a TiVo image on the hard disk with no sweat. Ok, $20 for a bit of instant gratification seems like an ok deal. I do it, slap it back in the drive (but this time nothing is screwed down) and find that I’m still not getting anything on the screen. But just for the hell of it, instead of plugging the RF-out of the TiVo directly into the coax going to the TV, I plug the composite-out of the TiVo into the RF modulator that the DVD normally plugs into. And lo and behold, I’ve got a signal. Makes me wonder if the original copy wouldn’t have worked. Also makes me think that the RF modulator is screwed.

So I do the guided setup and while it’s doing its first “daily call”, I screw the drive back to the drive bracket and put the top back on. And activate the service on-line. The daily call is taking forever, so I go to bed.

I woke up this morning to find that the daily call had completed, but evidently before the TiVo service had gotten the word that I’d activated the service. So it was upgraded from the software version 5.x which was on the InstantCake ISO to 7.2.x, it was still showing it as having no service, and still named “Family Room” (which I presume was the previous owner’s name for it). So I did another daily call, and before I left for work it was showing that now had an account in good standing, and it was named “Bedroom2″ like it was supposed to. But still no shows in the guide.

I’m hoping that when I get home tonight the guide will be updated and indexed so I can start the tedious process of entering all the Seasons Passes that were in the other TiVo.

BTW: If you ever need a money making idea, come up with a way to take Season’s Passes and thumbs and shows from your Series 1 TiVo and put them on your new Series 2 TiVo.

Update: I forgot to mention that at one point during the proceedings, I tried using the RF cable with the gold plated connectors that came with the TiVo instead of the crappy one that came with the TV, and suddenly the RF modulator works well too.

My Belkin router has needed rebooting twice in the last two weeks in order to restore wireless connectivity. I’ve experienced this before - I’ve had 4 or 5 routers before, and every one of them (except both Linksys, which were dead as soon as I got them) has, after a year or so, gotten to the point where it needs frequent rebooting. The rebooting gets more and more frequent, until eventually I give up and replace the damn thing.

For some strange reason, I decided to give Linksys another chance, but this time I decided to pay a few extra bucks and buy it from the local Staples. That way, if and when it craps out, I can take it back. Providing it behaves like every other Linksys I’ve bought, and is noticably faulty in the first 14 days.

I plugged it in, and set it up as a copy of the existing one. Even copied the MAC address. Unplugged the existing one, plugged this in, rebooted both the router and the cable modem, and the new router got the same IP as the old one had (thank goodness) and everything seemed to be working exactly the same. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Flight Patterns

Quicktime movies of plots of all the flights in US airspace over the course of a day. Surprisingly interesting even if you’re not an aviation fan.

I got a spam from Verisign. I thought they were a legitmate business, so I have no idea why they’re spamming. Anyway, here’s the bit that annoyed me:

At VeriSign, we respect your privacy and we are continuously updating our mailing lists to make sure that only the people that want to receive VeriSign information are on our list. This will be the last mailing to you unless you respond to this email at this time.

and then later on in the same message

To remove yourself from receiving future VeriSign promotional
mailings, please visit us at http://www.verisign.com/compref
and update your communication preferences and user profile.

Notice the contradiction there?

You know how you think of the best put down for somebody hours after you actually needed it? Well, I just had the exact opposite happen - I though of a put down that I don’t actually need right now. So I guess I should file it away. The put down in question:

Reality called. It says it misses you.

A member of my flying club can’t get to a web survey on my site because WebSense has classified the whole site as “Personal Network Storage and Backup”, whatever the hell that means.

Is there a way to get WebSense to stop misclassifying me?

(Yeah, I know I haven’t been posting much. Mostly because the sort of stuff that’s bugging me right now doesn’t need to be shared with the entire web.)

I did the Ultimate Boot CD diagnostics that I wrote about in this previous post. And DFT said nothing was wrong with the drive, several memory and CPU testers found nothing wrong with either of them. And of course, I still have that message about the video card. So I’m thinking it’s almost certainly the video card.

I have an old ATI of some form or another in my desk drawer at work (I tried to give it to somebody there but he decided he wanted something with a driver disk and a manual). I think I’ll bung that in and give it a try, see if the system manages to stay up. If it does, I’ll try the old disk as well, to see if the problems with it were just a matter of needing a chkdisk or scandisk after all those power cycles. If that’s the case, I need to buy a decent but cheap AGP video card. My only two criteria are that it must be cheap (I think I mentioned that already) and it must give a decent frame rate in Half Life 2.