Very techie here… For a few months I’ve been operating a packet radio station on a 2-meter radio frequency here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I explored what it would take to make this a full “BBS” (like an online “forum”), and then backed off and let it just hang around n this frequency listening to the other (mostly BBS) stations. A few days ago, I got interested in graphing the data to better understand what stations were using the frequency and when.

The chart is made by this process:

• JNOS (the software that runs the packet radio station) logs all data it hears on the radio;
• A Python script analyzes this log file, keeping track of what stations were heard in each hour;
• The Python creates javascript data in a form acceptable to Google Charts;
• The javascript is transferred to a web server;
• PHP code reads the javascript and inserts it in an HTML page;
• Google Charts javascript fashions the data into the interactive chart.

A “cron” job carries out this process once each hour to keep the chart data current. Because each data bucket spans a whole hour, there’s no need to update more than once an hour.

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Why am I bothering to write about this? Well, I’d like to encourage you to walk, or run, or whatever, until you also wear out your shoes. I put in about 10k (mostly in the city) every Saturday and the same on Sunday. It keeps me energetic. Clears the head. Musses up the hair. Makes me thirsty. Is actually relaxing. Feels really great.

Red7 home page

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295 is just over 183mph, for those who don’t work in metric. I have hit 185mph/300kph on previous trips. Some small airplanes fly slower than this.

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You know, in programming (which I do a lot of), there are often little gotchas that require hours or days to figure out. And once you’ve figured them out, it’s easy to forget them if you immediately move on to the next challenge. Working at the level I do, which often requires typing command-line stuff, I’d never remember this stuff character by character unless I used it every day.

For instance, I was exporting a French blog database today (from MySQL), which has lots of é and ï and ç and ô characters in it. These have always given me trouble, because when you’re migrating a MySQL database from one server to another, and you don’t export and import them properly, they just don’t come through as the proper accented characters.

To do it right I’d have to remember this line:

mysqldump  –user=mylogin -p –opt mydbname -r myfile.sql

Now, given the hundreds of different things I do every day, week after week, how would I remember that one?

Jerry’s Brain

Jerry Michalski uses a notable tool —theBrain— to hold links to info and organize it for exploration. He may have the most extensive theBrain in the world, having used the software for more than 15 years. He has a quick introduction to his brain on his Rexpedition site. You can also watch Jerry talk about his brain (30-minute video … breaks all attention span rules).

An (External Memory) Podcast

One of my favorite podcasts is Big Picture Science from Team SETI. On January 20th, 2014, they did a nice cast on how human and computer memory is progressing. The Forget to Remember episode is worth listening to.  And this is a podcast you might like to subscribe to!

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Of course the question will be quick. But, if it’s a question worth answering, the answer will take an hour.

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Geek

Fanboy: one who is unreasonably geeky, proud of and proseletyzing about a discipline, study or physical objects. {“Apple fanboy”} Flamewars frequently arise between fanboys and their opponents because of the depth (and unreasonability) of their beliefs surrounding their love-object. A fanboy participates in fanboy activities “as needed” which might be each day, or sometimes only once a month. The word fan is a shortening of the word fanatic.

Ham: one who is showoffingly self-involved in participation in a discipline, study or physical objects. {“Ham” on the stage; “Ham” radio} On the stage, a “ham” usually overdoes it, going beyond what is necessary — and usually because he just loves doing it and gets a charge from his love-object. A ham usually participates in ham activities “when they feel like it” and sometimes in ways that indicate they feel they are invisible, such as ham radio operators talking on the radio when walking down the street. (Umm…that begs the question of whether cellphone street-walker-talkers are ham radio operators.) The word is a shortening of the word amateur.

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Steve Jobs knew about these cycles, and said during his famous Stanford University commencement address of 2005 [7:22 into the video, which you can find on NPR]

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”

These cycles have nothing to do with whether you get rich or become a bum. They have to do with how you decide to use your precious years. He put the exclamation point on it [12:40 into the same video] by adding

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

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I ran into this passage a week ago, written over 10 years ago (but timeless), and the clarity and insight was so right on that I laughed out loud:

“The programmer, who needs clarity, who must talk all day to a machine that demands declarations, hunkers down into a low-grade annoyance. It is here that the stereotype of the programmer, sitting in a dim room, growling from behind Coke cans, has its origins. The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer.

Ullman, Ellen (2012-02-28). Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents (Kindle Locations 352-356). Picador. Kindle Edition.

So when the client says, “Make that headline a little more greenish,” I now have something I can point them at so they’ll understand the difficulty of that seemingly simple task. I love it!

The post Do what I want, not what I (don’t) say appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Jeff Goldsmith, who has made many of these trips with me and the group, was the only one with a full week to spare this summer, so he and I made this journey, which we called “27.1” because it’s the first hike of the 27th year that I’ve been doing this.

The photo gallery shows some photos taken along the way. My Yosemite page contains most of the trips taken in the last 10 years.

This year’s trip was highlighted by the following events and observations:

• We attempted to cover 10+ miles per day. We could actually only cover  8 miles on average due to the excess weight (“hobbies”) we were carrying. It is important to recognize these limitations early on and adapt the schedule!
• The amateur radio hobby was a bust this time for two reasons. Although I had a five-watt transceiver and a nice antenna, I wasn’t able to make a single contact on any band because conditions were pretty bad. I’ll have to check further into whether it was an antenna issue or an output-power issue. The second problem was that this hobby accounted for over eight lbs in my pack, which really slowed me down.
• The photography hobby needs to be scaled back. My Nikon D7000 camera works great, but it’s a heavy beast, weighing in at something over two lbs, and it’s hard to carry on the trail, since it really has to be fastened to the chest strap on the pack and it still bounces around significantly. A camera weighing a few ounces would be much better. In all I was probably carrying upwards of 10 lbs of such hobby gear that was not necessary for this trip. My pack weight was 44 lbs and could have been 34 if I hadn’t carried the extra gear. (This included 11 lbs of food, which was also excessive.)
• The Pacific Crest Trail hikers were friendly and are in general an outgoing group. Ran into more than a half dozen every day, and most were hiking from the Mexico border to the Canadian border. Many had been on the trail since April or May this year, with a few down-days (they say “zero days”) along the way. Most of them were covering 20 miles or more each day. We were on the PCT every day except for the time in Matterhorn Canyon.
• Matterhorn itself is a long ways in. I figured about 35 miles from Tuolumne Meadow. That’s just too much for slow and heavy-pack hikers to cover in three days, especially given the 3000+ to 4000+ ft elevation change on the last day going toward Matterhorn. So we just relaxed once we realized we wouldn’t make it either to Matterhorn or around the loop I had charted out in advance. We adapted and enjoyed the area.
• There are great lakes along the trail. Miller Lake, where we spent the 2nd and the 4th nights (see top photo), is a wonderful little lake and is warm enough to comfortably swim in with few mosquitoes. McCabe Lake, which I’ve visited before, is more than two miles off the PCT and thus not on the itinerary for most PCT’ers, but we spent a night there and it was a great place.
• After accounting for limitations and changing the plans, it was a memorable week-long trek.

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During the interview he talked about his approach to dance as he got older (play the whole thing or go to 15 minutes into the interview to hear what he says about dancing as he got older). This led me to think in terms of setting goals just a few years out – 3 to 5 years – rather than planning tasks that would take 10 to 20 years. Sure, you should think about the long-term strategy, but in planning your more immediate work, you should only plan a few years out.

[Photo: from PBS “A Lifetime of Dance” 2001]

I have adopted two primary working rules that guide my participation in projects:

• Even while thinking ahead 10 or 20 years, plan only those things you can accomplish in 3 to 5 years;
• Only participate in events and organizations where you can make an actual and immediate contribution. Go ahead and attend events where you can learn, but be sure they are aligned with the contribution you wish to make during your 3-year-plan.

The first goal makes it possible for me to accomplish things that I can quantify and see. The second goal helps me “not waste my time.”

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Well, actually, some tasks for these small clients had been hanging around for as long as several months. Clean cups, clean cups![1. “I want a clean cup,” interrupted the Hatter: “let’s all move one place on.” from the chapter A Mad Tea-Party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland] It feels wonderful to have these out of the way, finally. If you have a pile-up of things waiting to be done, doesn’t it feel better finally get them completed?

In most of these cases I didn’t charge anything for the work because these clients were already struggling with their budgets. And with some I have ongoing pro-bono arrangements, but I couldn’t get to their projects earlier because I’ve been overly busy for months now.

So a few days days of rationed time for the big clients, and some focused time each day on the smaller jobs, none of which took more than 4 hours, and they are now just completely out of the way! Did I short-change the paying clients? Nah, because this weekend I’ll “pay the piper” and get lots of work done on the big projects, but I will feel great that all those little nagging jobs are out of the way.

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Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

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[2] gov2.0Summit (Government 2.0 summit) September 9-10, 2009

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Susan Bratton, JD Lasica, Renee Blodgett and Robert Scoble discuss these aspects of marketing and customer relations in this roundtable in Cambridge as a part of Traveling Geeks 2009.

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In US cities, the license to install and operate cable television networks is a city-granted monopoly. When cable TV was first being installed, each city opened a bidding process, and cable operators bid to be granted the franchise to install and operate the cable system in that particular city. If they won it, they then had exclusive rights. So in San Francisco, we have telephones provided by AT&T (which originally was Pacific Bell Telephone Company) and we have cable TV provided by ComCast (only – no other provider). Satellite TV lies outside this structure and is available everywhere on a competitive basis, but that’s a different issue.

Comcast also delivers Internet connectivity (and telephone service) via their cables. And that’s the rub.

Comcast suggests they can deliver broadband speeds of up to 12mbs (megabits per second). This kind of speed is pretty good, actually, and is lots higher than I can get on shared office connections at my client sites. It’s also faster than wi-fi can provide, so if you’re using wi-fi on your computer, the Comcast speed is kind of a moot point…it only affects me if I’m plugged into an Ethernet connection in the wall.

The thing I wanted to point out is the graph above showing (left to right) that Comcast give you huge speed when you first connect and start downloading a file (for example) and then it slacks off to a slower speed. It gives you the impression of quick download by starting the transfer really quickly – and if the file is small, you‘ll get it quickly, but the rest of the file comes in at a more leisurely rate, although it is in fact pretty close to the advertised rate. In my case the rate was just under 8mbits/second.

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