To hell with the #groundhog! Meteorological spring begins on March 1!! (Only 27 days away!)

For years, I have been a big fan of the usenet newsgroups. I think it’s one of the best little niches left on the internet, and it has one of the best ranges in content…  On usenet, you can have civilized, academic conversation, or unruly flame-wars between fanatics. You can also find some of the coolest binaries available on the net…hard-to-find music, out of print books in e-text, and pictures ranging from serene wallpapers to…well just about anything.

When Ubuntu’s newest version, Karmic Koala, came out, I was very dismayed to find that the distribution of the Pan newsreader available via the Synaptic package manager was broken.  Basically, any image that was posted as multi-part refused to load in the default window.

With some help from the folks on the pan-users mailing list, I was finally able to compile the code from a source repository being kept up by K.Haley, pan’s volunteer coder.  But I thought it might be nice to provide a step-by-step guide for newer linux users, as the whole process of downloading source from a github repository, the tracking down of the necessary development libraries, and the entire compilation process can be daunting.  Therefore, I came up with the following list of commands to run to get a patched version of Pan running from a normal install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Read the rest of this entry »

Go Blue – CRUSH OSU this weekend!

And then there’s my daughter’s take on The Victors:

Apparently, President Obama is surpised at the uproar over his comments made regarding the arrest of Louis Gates, Jr., an African-American academian from the Boston area.

Gates was arrested after getting belligerent with a police officer who responded to a report of an attempted break-in at his Cambridge home.  As it turns out, Gates was returning from a trip and found his front door stuck shut.  He gained access to the home using a rear door, then attempted to force or jimmy the front door open with the assistance of his driver.  A passer-by witnessed this and, not knowing that it was Gates trying to gain access to his own home, made the report to the police.

Firstly, if Mr. Gates had responded coolly and shown his ID to the police officer when asked, the incident would have been over.  However I, like many homeowners, have been in Gates’s position…swearing over an inanimate object that’s giving me problems, and having a chip on my shoulder when some unfortunate soul comes along and undeservedly gets  the brunt of my frustration.  So, that being said, I have some measure of compassion for Gates.

However, when a police officer requests that you show ID, and he has a valid reason for that request, you must comply!  A report of an attempted burglary is certainly reason enough, in my opinion, to make that request.  In getting belligerent with the responding officer, screaming, becoming a nuisance, and whatever else Gates did…well, I’m surprised he didn’t get tased!

But this article isn’t about Gates – it’s about the President.   So let me take a moment to talk directly to Mr. Obama.

President Obama, you are the chief executive of this country.  You ultimately decide what laws are going to be on the books.  You’re the TOP COP.  Although I give you kudos for not (further) dragging race into the situation, in making the comment about the Gates’s arrest, you publically condemned the officer’s actions.  What you’ve done is to cause every police officer in these United States to have to take pause when acting.  That could cost officers’ lives.

Let me put it this way – if I made a decision at my job, then the Surgeon General (I work at a hospital, so he’s the closest analogue that I have)  made public comment denouncing my action without taking the time to talk to me or my superior about it, I’d be furious, and most of my department would be as well.  If you had a problem with the officer, you should at least have spoken directly to him – or to his superiors!  Otherwise, a simple, “I don’t know the specifics of the case; I wasn’t there, so it’s very difficult to hold an opinion either way” would have sufficed.

As a State-level politician, you used to know how to abstain (maybe you’ll remember your 129 “present” votes filed while you were an Illinois State Senator)…maybe you should learn to do so on the biggest political stage in the world.

I’m starting to design a Amateur Radio Contest Logging program for Mac OS X.

So, in essence, this is a shout-out to any Amateur Radio Operators out there who use OS X…what features are important in a contest logger.  What features would be on your “nice to have” list?

I definitely will be working on features important for Field Day usage, but what other contests do Mac users participate in?

My intent is for this to be a no-cost, open-source program. Please keep in mind that I will be starting out slowly, then building in more complex features later.

So I bought a very inexpensive GPS off the Woot! website late last year.  It’s worked very well for me, and I was quite happy with the purchase…until last Saturday.  On Saturday the 13th of June, the GPS just quit syncing with the GPS constellation!  At first, I wrote it off to a cheap device, and figured that I’d had my fun.  But then I started poking around…and what I saw didn’t make sense.

I looked at the GPS signal screen, trying to see if the internal antenna wire had somehow come undone.  Maybe this was something I could fix myself!  No, I was seeing good signals from 8 to 11 satellites…and still no location sync!

Ok, so that points to software.  I started poking around the web, and found that I wasn’t alone…and that Navsupport was already hard at work on a fix.

Here’s the link

You’ll need a blank SD card, an SD reader, and about 10 minutes to perform the fix.  I did it, and it works great!  So what are you waiting for?  More GPS adventures await!