Geeky Stuff

This weekend I was in the Orlando/Kissimmee area, and decided to stop by Warbird Adventures. I flew a T-6 Texan with them last November, and it was awesome, so I wanted to take them up on their other offer, a 30 minute flight in a Bell 47 helicopter, the same kind that appeared in that old TV series M.A.S.H!

One thing for sure, flying a helicopter is NOT easy. There are three major controls: The collective, which controls motion straight up and down, the cyclic (or control stick), which controls motion forward, reverse, and side-to-side, and the foot pedals (tail rotor), which control rotation from left to right.

This sounds simple, but a helicopter is far from stable when it's hovering; you have to constantly apply control input on the collective, tail rotor, and stick just to stay in one place! In fact, there were a few times the instructor had to take over for me because otherwise I would have crashed the helicopter.

What's interesting is, in forward flight, a helicopter behaves a lot like an airplane; the control stick becomes your primary control, and the wind blowing past the chopper keeps it stable. But when you slow down to a hover, the torque from the main rotor takes over and you start to turn to the right; if you don't apply left force on the tail rotor, you crash, pure and simple.

It's such a nice rush to accelerate from hovering close to the ground to a nice brisk forward pace; the wind starts rushing past and the ground creeps away and suddenly you're cruising at a nice 80-90MPH. Such incredibly smooth control from a machine designed in the 1940s!

I made a few mistakes, but more or less managed to figure it out by the end. The instructor said I did better than most first-timers, but he probably tells everyone that to make them feel better. }:)

A fun experience, and well worth it. Feel free to check out photos a friend of mine took while I was flying!

So lately I've been playing with SuSE 9.2, a linux distribution recently acquired by Novell. I must say, it's pretty spiffy. It's the first distribution I've used where nearly everything seems to work right out of the box on installation, and which handles things like removeable media properly, which Linux has historically been bad at.

I tried installing it at home, but then remembered how many local customizations I have, and have decided to revert until I have a large uninterrupted block of time to play with it. I did save the install-in-progress in a big tarball so I can quickly resume where I left off.

Meanwhile I got submount, the spiffy removeable media system SuSE uses, working on Fedora Core 2. Now you just put the media in, cd to the mount point, and there it is. You can also eject the media any time you're not using it without having to umount it manually. Fun fun fun!

Links:

Submount
SuSE Linux Distribution

I like this guy. He has a technical problem, but at least he admits that it's his fault. I wonder why he has an affair with the caps-lock key, though...

Reason for Request:
I NEED TO DOWNLOAD THIS AGAIN BECAUSE I DIDNT FOLLOW THE STEP BY STEP
DOWNLOADING INSTRUCTIONS AND I DIDNT GET THE SOFTWARE TO INSTAL ON MY COMPUTER
AT HOME. ALL I HAVE ON THE CD IS THE DOWNLOADER ICON, NOT THE ACTUAL SOFTWARE.

So, in a technical discussion, I just randomly typed:

"You can kill off Apache children without hurting the master server, usually."

Of course, this refers to child processes of the Apache HTTP server daemon, not native Americans.

But I nearly cracked up laughing when I noticed how offensive that sentence could be out of context. };)

-Z

[inline:1] Ancient Hard Drive [inline:2] Ancient B/W porn! [inline:3] Old 486 and disk

Well, I just got back from the hamfest. It seems the hamfest gets smaller every year; I wonder if it's due to the economy, or if people are just selling on eBay instead, where they will likely get more money anyhow. I don't know what the deal is, but I still found something spiffy. An ancient hard drive! This circa 1990 44MB Western Digital drive uses a stepper motor (instead of the common voice coil actuator these days) and is a true IDE drive! While looking at it, the guy said "You can have it free, I don't want it anymore." So of course I took it home, just to solve the mystery... what the hell is on it? I dragged out my old 486 and plugged it in. Upon startup, it started making a disturbing chunk chunk chunk sound. Uhoh, the drive is dead. I guess it was a waste of time to take it home. But then I remembered that you had to set the drive parameters in the BIOS on these old machines, so I went into the BIOS and set them. Saved the settings, and WHAM! It booted! It had DOS 5.0 installed, which is about right for the early 90s. There were several old applications installed, including something called "MAC", which allows you to view ancient black and white porn! There was also APRS, a ham radio packet application, and Crossword Creator, which allows you to create and solve crossword puzzles. A barebones Windows 3.1 install was also present; nothing interesting was installed there. It was worth the fun of plugging this old sucker in and seeing what was on it, though. I'm probably going to hang onto it; working hard drives from the ancient era of 1990 are usually hard to come by! So if you ever see old IDE drives at a flea market or hamfest, pick'em up! You never know what sort of weird stuff may be hanging out on them. }:)

Well, the Hamboree is this weekend. This is basically an amateur radio and computer show, where people come to sell a huge variety of stuff, some of it new, some of it used, some of it ancient. You can sometimes find fascinating things there, like 1930s radios, ancient computers (here's hoping for some old Apple II stuff!), and so on.

I haven't missed a hamfest since 1994 or so; it's become a yearly tradition for me. It's just so much fun to see all the weird stuff for sale, even though many years I've gone home without buying a thing!

Random tidbit: The mini LED keychain flashlight I bought there three years ago still works!

Anyway, a full report after the show!

I came across this hilarious old error message I saved while cleaning out some directories on my work machine:

You know a system is screwed up when a successfully completed operation is considered an error. }:)

Wow, this is awesome. Click here for a video of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh back in 1984. Even back then he seemed to have a reality distortion field in full effect.

Gotta love how that little 9" black and white screen was adequate back then, and how everyone was cheering. Long live Macintosh! (and Linux too)

Oh, and it's only Monday. And 9:19AM:

User:

It doesn't work. What's going on? Please help me.
Thank you.

Staff:

Hello,
What are you having trouble with? Can be a little more specific so we can assist.

User:

Im trying to finish this report I have to turn into my class tonight, 
I am unsure how to mount the CPU? Can someone please come help me? 
I am told that John in 258 is the person to see about this.
Thank you.

What scares me the most is these are computer science students. Shouldn't people who major in computer science be fellow geeks? You'd think they'd be able to compose a well-written, descriptive E-mail which mentions an error message and what they were doing at the time. But noooo. "It doesn't work." Well, neither do our support services, with information like that. Please hang up and try your call again. }:)

Of course, later in the day, this came in:

Good afternoon,

Can someone please check the fountain printer? It seems to be 
giving us some sort of error message.

Okay, so at least this person told us that they're getting an error message. Is it really that hard to include the error message so we don't have to waste time answering "Uhh, could you please tell us what the error is?" Oh wait, of course it is!

So I got home, and noticed that it was eerily silent in my office. Hushpad was off, and so was everything else computer related. It turns out that, after nine years, my TrippLite 450 "BC Internet" has decided to die with honor.

I quickly grabbed the crappy APC SmartUPS 420 that's powering my entertainment center and re-allocated it to the computer equipment, and finally got things powered on, after much annoyance re-routing and cleaning up cable clutter amidst dust bunnies that would probably scare my cat.

I acquired this TrippLite UPS back in 1996, back when frequent power outages were annoying the hell out of me. I'm not sure why the model number has "Internet" in the name, as it has absolutely nothing to do with networking in any way. It was my first UPS ever.

In 1999, its internal battery died, so I went to Batteries Plus and purchased the monstrosity pictured on the left. I connected this sucker to the UPS through a hole in the side, and this extended my run-time from around 15 minutes to nearly two hours.

Unfortunately, this failure doesn't seem battery-related. The UPS doesn't notice it's plugged in, and only seems able to run off of battery. No fuses seem to be blown and the circuit breaker is fine, so I'm not sure why or how it failed. I was tempted to repair it, but after giving me nine years of good service, I'm a bit worried any repairs may increase the likelyhood of fire. Given that this thing runs unattended for over 10 hours of every day, that's not a good thing.

Oh well, maybe it saved my equipment from a hideous power surge. If it did, thank you Tripplite!

I must now replace it, as this APC SmartUPS 420 is inadequate for the load and I don't really trust APC. The only UPS I've ever seen catch fire was an APC, and they also have a tendancy to do strange things to loads when the batteries are near the end of their life, such as randomly power-cycle them instead of just reporting the low battery condition as they should. "SmartUPS" is definitely a misnomer; I would actually prefer their cheaper "BackUPS" line if I HAD to buy APC.