Blogs

While there was some interest in my service for short, available vanity callsigns, the reaction from a minority of hams was suprisingly hostile.  A few people felt very strongly that it's not appropriate to collect even a miniscule fee for the work I did to produce the service and were fairly vile and pernicious about it!

Drupal's Taxonomy Menu is very useful for organizing your site, but its developers have added a real nuisance in the form of the title attribute to the "a" tags it generates when paired with a suckerfish menu in a theme or "nice menus" module.

Here's a patch to dismiss that problem, run it from the "modules" folder in your Drupal installation.

I've lived in France, and seen first hand the efficiencies of their single-payer system.

Socialist? Hardly. They have more competition between providers, medical labs, and pharmacies than we have had for years.

Want a higher quality of service in France? Just buy a supplemental policy.  Yes, rich folks and hypochondriacs, you too can do better than the rest of us by virtue of your cash in a single payer system.

I started with the very nice ping script from the consttype blog, but I didn't like that the graph was so hard to read with multiple ping hosts that had similar latencies, and it would time out with more than three IP addresses, and that it took the best ping rather than the average.   So I have changed it to use a faster ping, report a ping of 1000 when it fails to connect (so you get a spike rather than a gap) and be linkable with ping_ipaddress format.

I wanted to dump Qwest.  That's the root of it, I really don't dig their way of handling customers.  I wanted to take advantage of my really nice internet connection, and use VoIP.  The only major hurdle seemed to be the use of my credit card terminal, and the occasional fax.  After a few evenings of struggling, I achieved success.

Copying a Logical Volume or Partition over SSH

This should only be attempted on either a snapshot lvm volume, or an unmounted hard drive partition!

Using ssh and dd you can copy any LVM or (unmounted) hard drive partition over the internet to a new machine easily.  You can do a "push" or "pull" copy.  Here's a "push" copy:

dd if=/dev/vg0/partition-snapshot bs=1k |
   ssh remotehost dd of=/dev/vg0/partition-destination bs=1k

This review gives the story of my initial experience with the Flex 3000, followed by the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking.  I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day!  Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important.  This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

In the last few months I've been building a new site for Sirova, a group selling Raw Food.  Raw foodists believe that food that hasn't been treated with chemicals and excessive heat is more nutritious than foods that have not been subjected to such treatment.

Admittedly I've been a little bad about writing ham radio posts lately.  Leave it to the ARRL to shock me out of my complacency.

Last year, on a lark, I sent in my log from my participation in the IARU International DX contest.  And I thought no more about it until today.  Turns out you can win a certificate even if you're the best in your state in a certain category.

I think I'll be posting my logs more regularly, and definitely contesting more this year.  Bring the sunspots!