planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

Search engines make webmasters lazy. Why take the time to index all the groups, organizations, and programs at the university, when you can just throw them all up there. I think the liberal use of subdomains makes it a lot harder to find stuff. In a folder hierarchy you can see what’s below. With subdomains it’s all over your head - literally. Just how many are up there?

As Christine is in Graduate School here at UCI, we often need to look up a service, site, number, notice or document pertaining to the: shuttle, class, administrator, help desk, parking. I’ll spend hours trying to figure out if I need to call Housing, ResNet, NACS, or ICS when the cable goes out. Tons of silly acronyms and even more websites on silly subdomains.

The UCI network group [at one time] published sixty or so of them - turns out there are more then 400 uci.edu subdomains. This was one of those side projects that started out like “hmm - I wonder…” and rapidly evolved into several hours of throttling my connection just enough so that every web server on campus wouldn’t report my IP. “shit… That’s a lot more then 60…“

My list:
hidden.uci.edu.subdomains

They apparently hand them out like candy. There are no rules for wildcards or leading with www. Sometimes they have both, sometimes only one. How frustrating is it that you have to remember the www on some and not others? Some sites are updated daily, some sites have seen more work in the late 90’s. I’ll bet that a lot of this is unavailable to those outside of the uci.edu domain. A lot of services and hidden extras to be found I’m sure. Enjoy this fascinating list of hidden uci.edu.subdomain goodness. Just finding out that we had a passport office on campus was worth the time.

UPDATE: There was at one time no approval process, but one is in place. It is up to the approved group to setup the DNS to respond to www or not.

Check out the APRS tracker box I just built. This box hooks to 12 volts, an antenna, and a GPS puck. It transmits it’s location on programmed intervals through the radio to digipeaters in my area. These digis then transmit my location information to the internet. Check out findu.com.

I wanted the box to be as small as possible, so I ordered two sizes. The smallest one they had and the next size up. I used the tiny 9″ x 8″ x 4″ box. A bit of a squeeze, but it’s all in there. It’s a good thing you can take off the HTX-202’s battery. The idea is: I can throw this unit in any vehicle (car, truck, rally car, etc.) and track it from space.

The Byonics TinyTrak TNC with GPS receiver is around $120 with cables. The radio was $55 used on eBay and the connectors were found at the local electronics store and a swap meet. The powerpole chassis mount is wired up in series so that other hardware can be powered and either connection can be used.

I started with AO-51 at 9:23, but I didn’t hear it at all. I am following the ‘if you can’t hear it, don’t transmit’ rule, but I think no one was on it. (over the ocean / day after field day) Next time I will try at least once to transmit. At 9:30 I gave up on the low AO-51 pass and moved on to the prime 53 degree SO-50 pass.

Now there is a bit of a trick to the SO-50 and that is its 10 minute timer. You need to turn the transmitter on by sending a tone for 2 seconds to the satellite. I expected that to have been done by many other hams working the bird as it passed. I didn’t hear much on the downlink until another station keyed up on the uplink frequency with the PL of 74.4. This turns the timer on. You can clearly hear it in my recording as it goes just about full quiet and XE2BHL calls out.

Needless to say, I’m stoked! There is a lot of things that go into tracking and contacting a satellite and any one of a number of issues can prevent you from hearing anything. I had an un-tuned antenna, a time problem (UTC -8 instead of -7), and a polarity issue (holding the antenna flat instead of upright). Finally hearing both SO-50 and AO-51 at Field Day made me a lot more confident in what I was doing.

Things I learned:
Don’t assume a ton of people will be on the satellite you’re working.
Listen first THEN transmit
AND when nothing is heard at all transmit at least once
Callsign in phonetics! Kilo India Six India Uniform Charlie
Delta Mike One Three (see grid squares)
Keep at it!

I had to get clever and figure out a way to use my mp3 player / voice recorder (with no mic input) to record sounds off my hand held FT-60 transceiver. As you can see on the right, I still play with legos. It’s my lego mp3 holder thingy. That’s an earbud strapped to the small mic hole on my Creative mp3 player. It’s surprisingly not that bad! I was able to place it on the front seat of the car while I was outside yeilding my antenna around. This kept a lot of the ambient noise down and I was able to record my very first satellite QSO!

SO-50 6/25/2007 9:37PM PST - XE2BHL - DM12 - Jose in Tijuana, Mexico
KI6IUC first satellite contact - MP3

Yeah, I know - about time. My used Series 2 has been pretty good to me for about a year now. Just before Christmas we lost power in the middle of some heavy Tivo usage and she didn’t boot right back up. I was sitting at the ‘just a few minutes’ screen for more then a few minutes. I tried hitting the enter key on the remote. I’m still not 100% sure what that’s supposed to do. After some time and a reboot - it came back up.

It was a three days before our New Years WRC Party and Christine calls me from home. “The TV is black and the Tivo guy won’t come up.” I have her pull the plug and ‘reboot’ it. Tivo comes back up, but not for long. The morning of the party it takes a black screen nap again. Now I’m worried. I can’t stand just pulling the plug to turn it off, so I reach down and power cycle the UPS.

I know the Tivo is a Linux PC and I know it could be giving me WAY more information then: “Almost there! Just a few minutes…” I think the drive is probably beat, and it’s about time to crack the case anyway. I print out the Hinsdale Guide and download the MFS Tools Boot CD. As long as you can master / slave drives and type - you too can handle this.

The first task was to get the Tivo apart and get an image backup. It took some time to prepare a fat32 drive for where the image would transfer to. I forgot how long it takes a 40GB drive to format in DOS. Once the image was transferred, I copied it onto my new Western Digital 160GB. Unfortunately the max drive size the ’stock’ Tivo can see is 137GB, but at $1.75 a gigabyte it’s not too much of a loss. Plus no drive really formats out to it’s ‘listed’ size, as I have several 112GB “120’s” kicking around.

So now I’m rocking a 136 hour Tivo! I removed the /tvbin/modemtest file so it shouldn’t hang at boot anymore, plus I don’t use the modem to connect to the Tivo service. Having a fresh drive to store 5.6 days of programming should make me stop worrying when either Christine or myself decide to grab 2 seasons of something. The next step is to load telnet and some other utilities so that I can monitor drive space and get into some other fun Tivo hacks.

Oh, and one final note: The Speed Channel can suck it. They have no plans to carry WRC this year. This is THE main reason I pay $28 a month for digital cable. I hope OLN can pick up the pace - but I’m not paying $300 a year to watch one week of Dakar…

Back in the days when modems ruled and your parents long distance bill would be one more month away.
ATZ
OK
ATDT5551212
CONNECT 300

I started my career as a field service tech. Besides the hours of McDonalds behind the wheel of a 1984 Ford LTD - I was mobile; Climbing stairs, lugging monitors, and other physical activity. I then worked in a computer repair shop. On my feet all day - at the workbench. Even at my last few jobs with corporate America, I tried to stay mobile. Taking stairs, working calls, etc. My current job requires no such ambulatory motion. I connect to remote servers and call customers from my fat cushy desk chair. Inside my boring cubicle.

This morning I dropped my leather sofa sized office chair off at the empty cube beside me. I plunked down about 10 pounds of scrap wood, and began lifting my monitors 18″ off the surface of the desk. “What the hell are you doing?” asked some. “Kook!” scoffed others. I had at least mentioned this to management in the past - how it would be nice to pull the monitors up and be able to stand at my desk. “Are you going to stand up all day?” - “Yes,” I replied. “All day… Get it out of your system.”

I built an 18″ stand out of 2 pieces of scrap plywood and some leftover poplar. It took me like an hour to design and build over the weekend. Pictures to follow…

It has certainly been a string of ‘office space’ moments all morning.

My top 5 reasons to stand up while you work:
#1. Health.
Keeps the blood flowing to the feet and legs - heart gets more of a workout.
#2. Productivity
I usually want to snooze at 2:30 in the sofa chair.
#3. Originality
My office mates mock me - because they want to BE me. My personality can’t sleep in a chair. I think that if everyone was able to customize their cube, we’d see more out of the box thinking.
#4. Mobility
When the 9.0 quake hits Irvine or the brush fire spreads - I’m out the door!
#5. Stamina
Being on your feet all day isn’t as bad as slouching to death in a sleepy leather chair.

Break conformity!

I also want to give props to the guys at Pixar for giving me the ‘Eureka’ moment:
Check out this behind the scenes look at Pixar - by “Ain’t It Cool News”

I’m not 100% happy with it - but the site needed a splash of color. I fixed some issues I had with the side menu. It took me about an hour after that to get it working in IE. I know that I may get inspired and re-design it in a month. Or it could stay like this for a year. I was frustrating Christine last night with the creative process. I get some techno, photoshop, cheez-it’s and about 50 text windows going; and I’m unstoppable until around 2:00am. Sorry girl.

The background is a technique I’ve used before. I like the little anomalies that show up when you create a zero jpeg. Base color; Add noise; More color; Pixelate; Save for web - jpg quality set to zero.

Take one oversized truck, add in a 27″ lift and knobby tires. Now go get a latte.
I feel bad that 98% of these trucks will never be used off road. Sure, sometimes my cooky rallycar gets spotted running errands. But she’s seen more dirts roads then this baby will ever see.

Why not buy more gas, make more road noise, shop with the kids, and only drive to work.
Le’sigh…

I finished moving Tine’s site to WordPress last night. I moved the data over from MT a while ago, and only now had a chance to sit down and whip up a template. The first one I did was for planetkris and the second was for rallynotes. As far as page complexity, rallynotes is a repeating background and two nested tables in HTML. I made Christine’s site a little more colorful and tweaked some other things.

Unlike MT, I have some idea of what WP is doing in the background. I can at any point, open up the PHP hood and tweak a few settings. All of the templates use the same CSS tags, so if I see something on a forum or another site I like, I can grab it and tweak it into my home.

I found a sweet as in free GNU CSS editor called JustStyle CSS Editor over at ucware.com. It shows all the CSS tags possible in a list, so you can quickly hunt down what you want to change, or remember the more obscure tags like ‘background-attachment’.

Side note - some of you may have seen that Matt from WordPress.org recently got pWn3d by Google for hosting hundreds of hidden indexed pages off of wordpress.org’s site. I still love WP and I’m still loyal - but I removed the default WP link off the bottom of all of my pages.