Rants and Revelations

…the Airport Utility (AU) that comes with the Airport Express (AE) base station.

First annoyance is that the damn AE reboots every damn time you change the slightest little parameter. You want to add a new printer? Reboot. Add Windows networking to the shared disk drives? Reboot.

Second annoyance is that the router has to have the .1 address. Too bad I was using 192.168.1.1 for my Linux box, and 192.168.1.254 for the router before. So I had to renumber every reference to my Linux box everywhere on the LAN.

So I got around that crap. The shared printers and disk were working great. But then Vicki noticed that the TiVos weren’t connecting to the network any more. Oh yeah, new SSID. I guess I’d better reconfigure them. That’s when the real fun began.

Real fun number 1: TiVo wouldn’t connect to the new network, because the new network uses WPA instead of WEP. Ok, fine, I thought, I’d convert the AE to WEP.

Real fun number 2: AU will only accept WEP passwords as 13 alphanumeric characters. The usual Apple way of entering a hex string WEP password, by putting a $ at the front, doesn’t work.

Real fun number 3: After rebooting, the Airport Utility says the AE is using WEP, but everything that attempts to connect to it (my laptop and the Tivo) says that it’s still using WPA.

Real fun number 4: Every couple of reboots, the AU says it can’t connect to the AE, and you have to exit it and re-enter.

Real fun number 5: I tried turning off the security entirely. After yet another reboot, the AE refuses to come back up. I power cycled it, and it has a continuously flashing yellow light on the front, which normally indicates an error of some sort. AU confirms that the “error” is the lack of security. That’s fucking annoying.

Real fun number 6: With security turned off, the TiVo says that it can’t find a DHCP server. Since it had no trouble finding the DHCP server before, I assume that’s the AE’s fault.

At this point, I said “fuck it, this sucks”, and switched off the AE and put the Linksys back. The AE is going to go off to the Genius Bar to see if there is some secret way to get it to do WEP as well as a router that costs 1/5th as much does.

If that doesn’t work, I have a plan B: put the AE in pass through mode, and put it, the printers and the disk in the library. That might even improve the reception in the kitchen.

I’ve started ordering the parts to build my new computer. So far, after a long struggle with Newegg’s refusal to accept either Paypal or the credit card they have on file for me, I’ve ordered the following:

• 2 Maxtor Diamond 500Gb 15Mb Cache SATA-II drives
• A Rosewill R5604-TBK mid-tower case with lots and lots of drive bays
• A Cooler Master eXtreme RP-500-PCAR 500W power supply

Next step is to buy a motherboard/cpu/memory bundle from JNCS. I’ve bought at least three bundles from them in the past, and it’s one way to make sure the components all work together. They’ve got one bundle that I’m leaning towards right now - it has an Intel Core 2 Duo, and 6 SATA II ports on the motherboard. It also has built in video and audio as well as a PCI-E slot, which means I can save some money and then upgrade the video if I need to.

The 2007 Tour de France is over, and what a strange and exciting one it’s been. There are those out there who want to stress the negative - both the overwhelming pre-race favourite Vinokourov and the guy who probably would have won it kicked out of the race. But to me there is much to be positive about.
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I got new glasses on Tuesday. I had reading glasses before, but I hardly ever wore them because until recently I didn’t need them unless the light wasn’t very bright. There were only two times I really felt the need - when I was reading in bed, and when I was trying to plug something into the back of a computer. Plus they gave me horrible eye strain if I looked through them at distant things. My eye doctor recommended that I get those no-line multi-focus lenses, because then I could keep them on all the time and they’d be there when I needed them, plus there would be one part of the lens that was good for up close stuff and another part that would be good for computer screens.

Ok, two days on, here are my impressions:

1. They do fulfil the promise of something I could keep on all the time, so they’re handy when I need them.
2. There are some things that don’t fit the multi-focal glasses paradigm of “close things are down low, far things are up high” - the one I notice most is the wing mirror on my car.
3. I’ve got to learn to ignore them, because I think I stare when I’m looking through them. A few hours and my eyes get really dry.

Also, I was walking into work yesterday and I thought something was wrong with my iPod - there was a large dark area on the screen. A little while later, sitting at my desk I looked and was releived to see it was no longer there. And then l saw it again on the way out to the parking lot. That’s when I realized that the clip-on sunglasses that came with the glasses are polarized. D’oh!

Phew! It’s not Alberto Contador, it’s their TV show “Man vs. Wild”: Discovery’s ‘Wild’ storm: Authenticity questioned

I woke up this morning at was shocked to find it was raining. This was a total surprise to me, as I thought the forecast was for more sun. This was a huge disappointment, because I’d decided that I’d prevent New York controllers from giving me a half hour ground hold or re-routing me all over hell’s half acre by flying VFR.

Fortunately, while it was raining all over most of southern and eastern New York and New Jersey, it was all layered stratus clouds so no thunderstorms. So it would be IFR, but flyable IFR. That’s good.
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…how much I hate flying near New York City?

Yesterday, we flew down to a friend’s birthday party. She lives in New Jersey, which places the nearest airport to her Monmouth Executive (KBLM) in the slot between New York’s Class B airspace and Philadelphia’s Class B. Because of that complexity, I decided to take the club’s Dakota, figuring the Garmin 530 GPS would be a big help. And it was.
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Vicki complains that sometimes she can’t ssh into my Linux box (foo.xcski.com) from her MacBookPro. This morning she said it was happening again, and when I looked on her system “host” and “dig” couldn’t get an address for it, while at the exact same time, my Powerbook got the right address just about instantaneously. A few minutes of poking around and not doing much, it suddenly started getting results again, and she was able to ssh in.

We have exactly the same DNS settings - two DNS servers, 192.168.1.1 is the local one that knows how to find *.xcski.com servers, and 192.168.1.254 is the DNS server on the wireless router which probably just redirects to the ISPs DNS servers.

I’ve never had any problems with DNS lookups on my Powerbook. So why is she getting these problems?

David Megginson has put together a really nifty little AJAX/Google Maps application to allow people to record what airports they’ve been to, and record comments about those airports. He’s put me to shame, since I’ve been intending to do something with AJAX and Google Maps for over a year now and haven’t even started.

But in spite of my jealousy, you can click the above link and see the 30 airports that I’ve landed at so far. The page doesn’t work 100% correctly in Safari, but it works great in Firefox.

Disclaimer: I was reluctant to report on this, because I’m absolutely awful with people’s names, and not much better with faces (sorry David). Plus there is the problem that as well as names, there are people’s blog names, and the fact that some of these people don’t want their names appearing in public in anyway associated with their blog names, and keeping track of what details of their real lives shouldn’t be associated with their blog names, and you can see why I was hoping somebody else would write this up. But nobody has, so here I am.
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I nearly didn’t make the flight up to Toronto for the Pilot Blogger weekend. There wasn’t anything on the radar, and the TAF (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts) were talking about a 40 percent probability of isolated thunderstorms, which is pretty normal for this time of the year. But at decision time, the METAR (current conditions) at Rochester were:

KROC 131554Z 25011G17KT 10SM BKN037TCU BKN070 22/12 A2993 RMK AO2 SLP132 TCU SE CB DSNT N T02110111

Now, I’m not great at reading all the “RMK” (remark) part of the METAR, and that’s where the scary stuff was. All I know is that “TCU” means “Towering Cumulus” and “CB” means “thunderstorms”. And I went to the decoded report on DUATs, and it said that the “TCU”s were in all quadrants. So I thought I’d be flying IFR, dealing with the extreme turbulence of TCUs while out over the lake, and thought that wasn’t a good situation to be in. So I told people I’d be driving instead.

And then I walked outside. One odd thing about Rochester is that the airport is south of the I490 highway, and there is frequently a real difference in the lake-affected weather up north of I490 and the mainland-affected weather south of it. So I walked outside and looked up and north to see scattered clouds and bright sunshine, and then looked south towards to airport to see some of the TCUs the forecast was talking about, but mostly to the south of the airport. And suddenly realized that if I were to depart VFR, I could dodge the TCUs until I was in the lake-effected weather, and have no problems following the lakeshore around to Toronto.

I haven’t done a VFR flight into Canada in a while, so I had to dust off those old memories. But I managed to get all the appropriate paperwork all done, and didn’t cause any international incidents. (Not so on the flight home - as I type this I realize I forgot to close my flight plan, so I’m calling right now. Can I just mention for the record that I wish US controllers would open and close flight plans the way Canadian ones do?)

When I took off, as soon as I got turned over to departure control, there was a gigantic rain shaft about 5 miles in front of me, and I was about to tell him I was going to turn north because of it when he pointed it out to me and gave me a vector. But 5 miles later I was at 3,000 feet in sunshine, mostly smooth air, and I could see across the lake.

The lakeshore is a lovely flight, and Toronto gives me flight following around, but requires me to stay out of their airspace, which means descending into mild turbulence and staying lower than I’d really like to. But the flight was fun and I’m really glad I got to fly.

I had a cleaning appointment today at 9am. I went in, sat down, the hygenist opened the usual plastic pounch of various instruments of torture, and then decided she needed something out of the cupboard. She took what she wanted and turned away and the door fell off the cupboard and onto my knee, slid off, and evidently landed on her toe. She said “I just need to sit you up” and then left. Seconds later I hear her sobbing and a crowd of other hygenists around her acting all solicitous. I guess her toe was hurt worse than my knee.

They have rescheduled me for 10:30am with a different hygenist.

I thought I had no problems with distractions. After all, I’m a highly trained and experienced pilot, and when I was a student pilot my instructor had spent a fair amount of time making me deal with distractions. But today I was taking some friends out flying, and just as we were leaving the class C airspace I noticed a bit of a strange noise - and I looked over and realized the door wasn’t latched at the top. I unlatched the bottom to try and get it re-shut, but it wasn’t possible to get it closed. I slowed the plane to 80 knots and tried to get the passenger to close the door, but he couldn’t do it. Unlike the club’s other aircraft, the Lance doesn’t have a strap you can yank on to pull the top of the door closed, so neither of us could get it properly latched.

Now you and I both know there is nothing wrong with having the door open except for the breeze and noise, and the potential for having your charts whisked out of your hand at a bad time. But I didn’t want to do a two hour scenic flight with all that noise and wind, especially not with people who’d never flown before.

Fortunately, Ledgedale Airpark was about a mile off my right wingtip. So I told Rochester departure that I’d be making a landing there, and did a 180 degree turn to enter the pattern. But I was having a terrible time in the pattern. The winds at Ledgedale down low were gusty as hell. But I can’t blame the horrible pattern I flew entirely on the gusts - my speed and glide slope control was ridiculous. I heard the stall horn a few times, I got the “Landing Gear Unsafe” light a few times before I put the gear down as I horsed the throttle around overcorrecting altitude and speed excursions. I was so low on final I had to put in full throttle so I wouldn’t touch down a dozen feet short. And then my landing was, to put not too fine a point on it, a bit firm. I must have let the door distract me. And that’s not good.

I guess it’s time to spend some time with an instructor re-learning how to deal with distractions.

My home Linux box is acting decidedly weird. This time, when it froze up and wouldn’t reboot I opened the side to clean out some dust. I noticed two strange things:

1. One of the case fans wouldn’t spin when I pushed it, like all the others
2. Even after I removed that fan, when I booted the CPU fans would spin for a second or two and then stop.

I left it to cool for a few minutes, and now it’s booting. But that business about the fans spinning and then stopping is worrying me. Could it be overheating, or a sign that this motherboard is nearly dead? I was bzip2-ing a large file when it happened, and the hard drives were making ugly noises.