Speedlinking – 11/03/08

March 11, 2008 |   |  2 Comments  |  speedlinking

Turn the radio on!

February 18, 2008 |   |  1 Comment  |  IT, networking, Wireless

(apologies to Randy Travis for lifting a title)

On Friday, our vendor came out to replace the radio on the Southcreek end of our wireless link. (More on that at Clif’s Blog). Long story short, we improved the income side of the link budget by about 16dB.

Got this done just in time for a big rainstorm on Saturday, followed by sloppy wet driving snow on Sunday (attendance was way down, partly due to the weather. Some churches even canceled service. Well, sort of.) Even Kansas City International Airport had its longest closure in history because they couldn’t keep the runways clear long enough. We Canadians are amused by this notion.

Since we had just gotten a shiny new radio and antenna on the Southcreek end, I was curious to see how the link was performing in the snow. I fired up WhatsUp and checked my wireless status page. Both bridges showed more or less the same thing:


(Time of day is along the X-axis, and the Y-axis is received signal level (RSL) in hundredths of a dB, so -3100 is -31dB – due to a firmware update, it only reports in whole dB now, probably because the fractional numbers weren’t nearly as accurate as they were precise )

The pattern struck me as intriguing, because precipitation generally looks a little different, as demonstrated by Saturday’s rainstorm (you can also see the beginning of the snow on the far right):

After checking a few weather sites, I discovered that the downward slope at 6:00 correlated to the beginning of the snow. I was beginning to suspect that at least one of the radomes was plastered in snow. We’d just gotten back from church, where the wind was blowing pretty hard from the northwest, and the Central Campus end was facing almost directly into the wind at the top of the building. I asked my wife if I could run back and do a little weekend science. After realizing that this sort of thing was part of what she signed up for when she married a geek, she sent me on my way with the camera (thank you honey, I love you! *smooch*)

I stopped by the Southcreek office first, and realized that the blue Bridgewave logo on the radomes was going to be very helpful at determining accumulation. This is what Southcreek looked like:

(apologies for the grainy picture, it was taken from about 100 feet away at max digital zoom and then cropped):

Unsurprisingly, there was no significant accumulation on the Southcreek radio, as the radome was facing downwind. This is what the weather looked like towards the other end of the link:

I drove over to the church, where the conditions looked like this:

Notice that the snow is plastered on one side of the trees. The CC radio is facing that direction.

I found a radio and got a hold of George (on the facilities team, also does desktop support for us one day a week) to let me onto the roof. George looked at me funny and wondered why I wanted up on the roof in this craptacular weather. After a brief explanation, he joined me (and wanted to see for himself, too – George is a geek at heart). I get up on the roof, and do a little skating (roofing membrane is nice and slick when wet, never mind when covered in a few inches of sloppy wet snow!)

Sure enough, here’s what the radome looked like:

It was pretty clear what was causing our 30dB signal loss (the link was still up, with about 10dB to go). George went off to find something to clean off the snow (it’s about 15′ from where we were standing, and we didn’t have a ladder). While George was off playing MacGyver, I got to thinking that the snow probably wasn’t stuck on very well, and that some sort of jarring impact might knock it off. If only I had something to throw at it… Like, say, a snowball. My concern was that the snowball would stick to the radome and REALLY attenuate the signal, but I figured this stuff was wet and slushy enough to form into a ball, but was too wet to actually stick to anything (it was above freezing the whole time). So I started chucking snowballs at a piece of gear that costs about the same as a decent new car (I love my job!). On the third try, I made solid contact just below the logo, and the sheet of snow came sliding right off (look below the right loop of the logo for the point of impact):


(by the time I actually got the picture taken, some more snow had accumulated on the radome. Did I mention it was snowing hard?)

I went down to a computer to check on the signal level. Sure enough, the link improved a bunch. (I’ll repost the image here so you don’t have to scroll all the way to the start of the post.) The snowball caused the sharp vertical spike on the right side of the graph. The picture was taken about the spot where it dropped back down a few DB:

I headed back for the roof and found George had MacGyvered a pole from an extendable dusting wand and a wooden broom handle, held together with packing tape. I climbed back up onto the roof and was able to reach the radome with George MacGyver’s snow brush. Cleaning it off gained me a few more dB (second, smaller vertical spike on the graph):

As you can see on the graph, some more snow started accumulating, and then the snow stopped and started melting off. By mid-afternoon, the sun had come out we were back up to our normal signal levels, and there was little evidence left around town that we’d even had a snowstorm. We went from this, where it’s snowing sideways…

…to a beautiful sunny day in a matter of hours. I’m glad I didn’t bother shoveling my driveway, as it had melted clear by the time my wife and I got back from the movies (we went to see Jumper. Good flick, but left a lot of unanswered questions — sequel, anyone? — as well as leaving me with lingering nausea from the jumpy camera work)

I haven’t heard what the attendance was like at the 5:00 service. Morning services were sparse due to weather, but Rev. Junius Dotson from Saint Mark UMC in Wichita was our guest preacher this week and preached a great sermon (Adam is off in Colorado enjoying the real snow with the high schoolers). I hope a bunch of folks got to experience Rev. Dotson at the evening service. The man just has style.

And now, for the ADD folks that lost me about 6 paragraphs ago, here’s a nice little summary:

Ian And His Amazing Electric Penguins!

December 16, 2007 |   |  2 Comments  |  nerd

Today, we put up our Christmas tree, which the girls enjoyed immensely. I took on the task of polishing the Wallace silver bells, which have been a family tradition since I was a wee lad. We have the annual bell from 1981 through 1991.

While I was on the subject of polishing silver, my thoughts turned to my penguins, a set that I got from Restoration Hardware about 10 years ago. I have 2 of them that hold a small dish, and another 2 that hold a pair of candles each. They’re cast brass with silver plate, and the silver is badly tarnished. A few years ago, I tried to polish them using silver polish, but that required enough elbow grease to lube a semi, so I gave up on that idea.

So, I googled for a way to do it by soaking them in something. I found a tip that involved lining a container with aluminum foil and making a solution of hot water, salt, and banking soda. After about 5 minutes, I pulled the first penguin out of the soup, and wiped off a swath of tarnish with a light pass of my thumb. “Whoa,” I say, and start attacking the bird with a cloth. I replenish the salt and baking soda and put it in for a while longer. By the time I got done wiping it the second time, it was back to its original shiny glory. I am excited.

<nerd>

Since I’m a big ol’ geek, I start to wonder what the chemistry of this is, and how damaging it is to the silver, as the page where I found it recommended not going overboard with it on silverplated items.

Luckily, my dad shows up on IM and I ask him. I’m not even as big a geek as my parents are, if you can believe that. Both my parents have graduate degrees in scientific fields, and my mom has a PhD as well. My grandfather on my dad’s side was a metallurgist, so my dad more than likely knew about this particular trick.

Sure enough, he tells me that this was a trick his dad used all the time. I figure if a metallurgist used this, it can’t be all bad. As it turns out, unlike using silver polish, which removes the tarnished silver altogether, this process retains all the original silver.

Science Content

Tarnished metals are usually sulfides. In this case, the tarnish is silver sulfide (Ag2S). The solution described above sets up a cathodic battery reaction, wherein the alkaline water (due to the baking soda) is the electrolyte. The salt isn’t strictly necessary, but it may help the electrolytic process.

Here’s where the magic happens. In a alkaline solution, the aluminum is electrochemically more aggressive than the silver, and actually goes in and displaces the silver in the tarnish and replaces it with aluminum atoms, forming aluminum sulfide (Al2S3). The silver atoms then return back to the plating on the object and the aluminum sulfide wipes off quite easily.

When I dumped the water out, it stunk of sulfur, with an odor that was very similar to methyl mercaptan, which is what they use to make natural gas smell bad. Given that we have a natgas stove, furnace, water heater, and dryer, I have a strong suspicion where the sulfur that tarnished the penguins came from 🙂 Removing the foil showed a lot of pitting where the metal had been removed to go join its sulfur buddies.

For grins, I stuck a voltmeter with the anode probe on the aluminum and the cathode probe in the water, and it started out at about .3V, and it steadily kept climbing. After about half an hour, the meter was reading about half a volt.

So, I got to have science fun, AND get my penguins shiny.

On Copyright Compliance

November 27, 2007 |   |  1 Comment  |  editorial

John Tehranian is an intellectual property attorney in SoCal, and recently plublished an article titled “Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap”. It’s a little lengthy and filled with legal jargon, but right in the middle is the meat of the article, and it’s definitely an eye-opener:

To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment, we assume the worst-case scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email—represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

After spending some time catching up on the latest news, John attends his Constitutional Law class, where he distributes copies of three just-published Internet articles presenting analyses of a Supreme Court decision handed down only hours ago. Unfortunately, despite his concern for his students’ edification, John has just engaged in the unauthorized reproduction of three literary works in violation of the Copyright Act.

Professor John then attends a faculty meeting that fails to capture his full attention. Doodling on his notepad provides an ideal escape. A fan of post-modern architecture, he finds himself thinking of Frank Gehry’s early sketches for the Bilbao Guggenheim as he draws a series of swirling lines that roughly approximate the design of the building. He has created an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted architectural rendering.

Later that afternoon, John attends his Law and Literature class, where the focus of the day is on morality and duty. He has assigned e.e. cumming’s 1931 poem I sing of Olaf glad and big to the students. As a prelude to class discussion, he reads the poem in its entirety, thereby engaging in an unauthorized public performance of the copyrighted literary work.

Before leaving work, he remembers to email his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday. His friend had taken the photographs. And while she had given him the prints, ownership of the physical work and its underlying intellectual property are not tied together. Quite simply, the copyright to the photograph subsists in and remains with its author, John’s friend. As such, by copying, distributing, and publicly displaying the copyrighted photographs, John is once again piling up the infringements.

[Interestingly enough, Tehranian fails to point out here that the photographs themselves are likely in violation of the team’s intellectual property. Check your game ticket sometime regarding photography of the event –IB]

In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the
“impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”

That evening, John attends a restaurant dinner celebrating a friend’s birthday. At the end of the evening, he joins the other guests in singing “Happy Birthday.” The moment is captured on his cellphone camera. He has consequently infringed on the copyrighted musical composition by publicly performing the song and reproducing the song in the video recording without authorization. Additionally,his video footage captures not only his friend but clearly documents the art work hanging on the wall behind his friend—Wives with Knives, a print by renowned retro-themed painter Shag. John’s incidental and even accidental use of Wives with
Knives in the video nevertheless constitutes an unauthorized reproduction of Shag’s work.

At the end of the day, John checks his mailbox, where he finds the latest issue of an artsy hipster rag to which he subscribes. The ’zine, named Found, is a nationally distributed quarterly that collects and catalogues curious notes, drawings, and other items of interest that readers find lying in city streets, public transportation, and other random places. In short, John has purchased a magazine containing the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public display of fifty copyrighted notes and drawings. His knowing, material contribution to Found’s fifty acts of infringement subjects John to secondary liability in the amount of
$7.5 million.

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair
use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

I’m probably infringing on Tehranian’s copyright merely by quoting all that. I did attribute and link to the original, though, so I hope I’m covered. (John, if by some random chance you happen across this, I don’t mean it in any sort of infringing way. Please don’t sue. )

A few months back, we had someone come in and present a session on church copyright compliance. I was unable to attend, but it’s enough of an issue that those of us in churches need to be acutely aware of the legal implications of everything we do.

In a sense, it’s like compliance with the tax code, or Microsoft licensing. At the end of the day, you still don’t know if you did it right, and your “best guess” may still land you in hot water. And don’t ask an expert, each one will give you a different opinion.

The most immediate issue we face as church IT people is software licensing. A recent NetworkWorld article mentions that the Business Software Alliance most frequently targets organizations with 10 to 100 employees (this sound familiar to any of you guys?) – They get most of their tips from unhappy former IT workers who will happily turn in their former employer for a cash reward. In many cases, the recently departed employee was himself (or herself!) the person responsible for license compliance.

A company I used to work for (and was the IT guy) was grossly out of compliance, and my efforts to bring them into compliance were met with pushback from my own boss, who was the comptroller for the company. She refused to spend the money required to get us licensed properly. She didn’t even budge when I pointed out the huge liability that they faced. For some time after my departure, I was sorely tempted to turn them into the BSA, but I ended up not doing that, figureing it would some day come back to bite me.

Following the spam…

October 29, 2007 |   |  Comment  |  IT

Mark Wade at CA recently posted a neat article about what happens when you respond to a spam message. Check out some of Mark’s other posts as well. Lots of good stuff there for our users, but in a forum where your typical end-user is not likely to be found.

I will occasionally chase down phishing messages (and populate with bogus data) just to see how elaborate the phish is, so I can warn our users. There have been a few recently that have been particularly well crafted, and thus pose a higher threat, as the deception is far more effective.

Just a reminder for your users, unless your bank is run by a bunch of idiots, they won’t e-mail you out of the blue. If they do, it’s time to change banks.

Microsoft: Grrrrr. You Suck.

October 25, 2007 |   |  Comment  |  Grrr!

Yesterday, for reasons unknown, our entire network dragged to a crawl around midday. Those reasons became quite clear this morning when word hit the blogosphere (here, here, and here, among others) that Microsoft had pulled another fast one on us network admins and rammed a patch down our throats, bypassing the normal WSUS approval process. Apparently, the Windows Installer update pushed out a few weeks ago makes this possible

The patch in question was a major version relese to Windows Desktop Search, which is categorized in WSUS as an “Update”. Our WSUS machine is configured to auto-approve critical patches, but not routine updates. Imagine my surprise when I find that it is already in the “approved” category and has installed itself on all of our machines. Between the time it synced and the time it pushed out to the machines, I hadn’t gone near the WSUS machine to approve it…

And Microsoft’s PR flacks are telling us that those of us who did get the patch had already approved it. Nice try, Microsoft. I and hundreds of other admins have a far different story to tell.

The least they could do is warn us this was coming, so that we could test it. Instead, we had 200 machines sitting there, reindexing themselves while people were trying to get things done.

I like WSUS, generally, it makes my job a lot easier when it comes to managing the patches that Microsoft constantly needs to issue – but it really ticks me off when they abuse the system for their own self-serving goals.

I’d be willing to bet a donut that this somehow breaks Google Desktop. Micrsoft has a long track record of dirty tricks when they feel squeezed by the competition… anyone remember Win32 v1.32? the patch from 1.31 did very little, except for one key thing… it completely broke OS/2 compatibility with 32-bit Windows applications. Any 32-bit app written with 1.32 or later was unable to function with the 1.31 libraries that you could install on OS/2.

Plane!

October 23, 2007 |   |  Comment  |  Flying

Our receptionist at work and her hubby own a 1983 Beechcraft Bonanza (B36TC for you AvGeeks), and I asked her a while back if they’d mind taking Faith up for a ride sometime (this was around her birthday) and she said they should be able to do that at some point (although at the time the plane was undergoing its annual inspection). Yesterday, she pinged me and said that her hubby needed to go make a gas run down to K81 (Paola) from OJC. K81 is about 20nm from OJC, and is well worth the trip, as 100LL at K81 is about $1.25/gallon cheaper than it is at OJC. Big difference when you’re buying 80 gallons. Besides, there’s a great little BBQ joint in the terminal building at K81.

The flight was contingent on “Optimal VFR Conditions”, and today’s conditions were about as optimal as they get – crystal blue sky, mid 60s, and winds around 5 knots. The sort of day you’d want to play hooky so you can get up in the sky.

When I went to pick up the girls at school today, Faith was running around the room with her arms out, wanting to “take another fly around the room”… And I hadn’t ever told her (nor had her mother) that we were going flying. I think we’ve got a born aviator in the house.

We went out to OJC around 4:00 and waited for Dave and watched some planes come and go (bonus: there was another girl there who just turned 4, watching planes with her grandpa, and our girls made fast friends.)

We got up in the air, and Dave let me drive for a bit, which was fun. I’d almost forgotten what a thrill it is to ride shotgun, hadn’t done so in about 10 years, when I was on the company Cessna 414 for a previous employer. On the way back, he passed the controls back over to me and let me fly most of the way home (all of about 5 minutes, 20nm goes by fast at 160kts!). Sadly, Dave isn’t licensed as an instructor, so I wasn’t able to log the time 🙁

I really need to figure out how to pay for flight school. Paypal contributions happily accepted!


Looking east In flight, N819DK K81-OJC on approach to OJC RWY 36. The body of water is located just east of Quivira Rd between 191st and 199th streets.

Wi-Spying at Leadership Institute…

October 5, 2007 |   |  1 Comment  |  networking, Wireless

I’ve been keeping an eye on our new wireless (SonicPoints!), and noticed something interesting… This 60-minute image was captured at 10:17. Can you guess what time people started coming into the sanctuary?

I’m guessing that it’s probably a combination of bluetooth from all the cell phones in the room along with different RF dispersion patterns because the room filled up with a lot of very wet objects (humans) which absorbs 2.4GHz quite readily.

 

 

Recovering from CITRT…

October 5, 2007 |   |  1 Comment  |  Personal

Wow. What an experience that was. I want to make my own take on Clif’s commentary.

I’ve been at Resurrection for a hair shy of a year and a half (I started just after Easter 2006). Before, I was working for a company that installed voice and data cabling for all kinds of different IT departments. It was on one of our projects that I met Jason Wilson at Indian Creek Community Church, where I got to set up my temporary project office in his space at the church. The ICCC job was a nice relief from the usual work environment, since I got to get paid to do church work (there’s a whole saga that ended up happening with that job, but that’s another story for another time). What’s funny is that Jason and I had a number of conversations about a local roundtable gathering he had on a semi-regular basis for church geeks and geeks in the church (Little did I know what was going to transpire two years later…)

God works in strange and amusing ways, and about 6 months later, I found myself working with Clif and the gang getting my feet wet in IT again (and it was a relief to be doing geeky stuff). While I found that I was really good at data cabling, it was still little more than specialized construction work that was frequently hot, dirty, and underappreciated. By early 2006, I was looking to bail after 3 years on the job. I was burned out, my family was starting to wonder who I was after the long hours I was pulling, and it was taking its toll on me.

I’m currently studying Ortberg’s If you want to walk on water, you need to get out of the boat as part of our Tuesday morning Men’s Fellowship (added bonus: it’s down the hall from my office!) One of the first things we’re asked to look at is the boats in our lives that we need to step out of. While I was fed up with my current job, it was pretty much a sure thing. There was no shortage of work. And along comes this opportunity at Resurrection. More or less out of the blue, the result of some seemingly random and tenuous connections that I’d made. I needed to get out of my boat and start walking on the water. The money Resurrection was offering me was not really much more than I was making as a cable monkey, and we were already running pretty lean on the budget, since my wife was at home with a toddler and an infant. I felt God calling me to take that leap into the water and to trust him, that things would be OK. It was utterly terrifying. I told my wife that we could try it for a few months and if it didn’t work, it was time to look at other options.

Adam mentioned something in his brief Q&A talk that he called “discernment by nausea” which he said has served him very well over the years. When presented with two options, the one that makes you queasy and want to throw up is almost invariably the choice God wants you to make. It certainly was for Peter when Jesus called him out of the boat (and he was probably already contemplating syndicated reruns of dinner by that point). Making the leap to Resurrection was terrifying, and made both of us queasy. Every budget calculation we came up with was about 10% over what we had available. “We could make it if only we could skip the tithing! Doesn’t working for a church count instead?”. Spiritual warfare was afoot, and it was making me ill.

I got out of the boat. We continued to tithe what little income we had. And it worked out. My wife saw my work stress evaporate practically overnight. It’s taken me the last 18 months to get into a groove, when my track record usually finds me looking for the lifeboat so I can jump ship by now. That’s not to say that I didn’t contemplate it – early this year, our financial straits were still tight (although my wife had just gotten a part-time contract gig at Resurrection), and I was looking for options back in the for-profit world. I ended up with a hot lead at a large advertising and search company (starts with a G and ends with an oogle!), and they were interested enough to fly me down to Phoenix for a day of interviews (for a position in Denver, close to my wife’s family).

It was very good for my ego to have such a superstar seriously interested in hiring me. But as the time following the interview went on, I found myself on one hand excited about a potential offer in the works, but on the other, knowing that if I did get an offer, I was actually going to have to make the decision on whether or not to leave. And the more it went, the more I realized that I didn’t want to have to make that decision. At the time, we had a number of cool projects in the works and coming up, and I’d already told them that if an offer was forthcoming, I was going to need a fair bit of lead time to wrap things up before leaving (I haven’t told Clif about this until now because at the time, I didn’t want him to start panicking that he might lose his shiny new server/network admin in the middle of crunch time, and afterwards, it was moot anyway… Guess this just turned into Blogboard Confessional time!)

I spent a lot of time asking God to make the decision and His will for me blindingly clear, because I’m a geek and I Don’t Do Subtle. I needed God to use the clue-by-four on me. While working for “The Big G” would have been incredibly cool on many, many levels, I was tremendously relieved when they told me a few weeks later that they appreciated my time, but that it wasn’t going to be a good fit for their current needs (but to please apply again in the future, so the door wasn’t slammed shut on my nose!)

Looking back, it’s become quite clear that the process was God’s way of telling me “yes, you can hang with the superstars, but I’ve got a team of superstars right here that I need you working for.” The Round Table event that we just concluded drove that home even harder – we’ve got a great bunch of geeks right here in our own church IT community. Sure, we don’t have a semi full of cash like G does, but we do pretty well, and we’re doing it for the Kingdom (no, not yours, JP!) The benefits of working with you guys more than make up for the difference in pay. As long as my family is fed (they are), I’m happy as a clam, right here.

Wow, this ended up being way longer than I expected.

The whole wrangling with tithing that I went through reminds me of this video, which was shown at one of the pre-Institute workshops today (which reminds me of something Watson would have made for RezLife, but it actually comes from the folks at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas):