Random tidbits Bdale thinks are worth documenting.

Bdale Garbee
bdale@gag.com

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Paperless no more!
Quite some time back, I wrote about my disappointment that Ampad had ceased manufacturing their Quad Ruled Steno Books, which I use to make notes to myself on just about everything.

Several of my friends in Europe responded that similar pads in A5 size were commonly available in retail stores, and I quite happily bought a few on a trip to Germany. Then, one of my colleagues at work had some nice notebooks made up for a customer event with grid paper and suitable logos on the cover that I grabbed a few of and have used quite happily.

Sometime in the intervening years, Ampad started producing these pads again, but with a different product number, 42036. I stumbled over some at a local office supply store and bought a big pile... others have noticed too, and sent me email about it, which is why I'm taking the time to write this...

Yes, I'm much happier now!

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sdcc and git
I've been using git for a while, like it a lot, and finally decided it's time to move all my Debian packaging work over from CVS. After a frustrating few hours trying, I gave up on trying to use git-cvsimport. It generates mangled repositories even for simple packages like sudo. The git-import-dsc tool in the git-buildpackage package works fine as far it goes, but I'd really like to preserve my history. So, after some consultation on IRC, I took a look at parsecvs. It didn't quite work out of the box, either, but looks promising, and the author showed an immediate interest in the problems I'm having and offered to help. So, perhaps I'll be able to use it before long...

In the meantime, a while back I offered to help Gudjon I. Gudjonsson restructure the sdcc packages so that a DFSG compliant version can return to main with a full version under a different package name going in non-free. This is all necessary because some of the assemblers provided in the package have a non-commercial use clause in the license, and there are also license issues with the HTML documentation. I care about this because sdcc is a build dependency for gnuradio, which I maintain for Debian (it uses the 8051 toolchain to build downloadable code for the USRP, etc). While waiting for parsecvs to get some love and attention, I sat down this evening to restructure sdcc and move it to git.

I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, though there's a bit left to do before uploads happen. Gudjon and I decided to use the collab-maint facilities on alioth.debian.org for collaboration, which took me a little head-scratching to figure out, but looks like a perfect fit for our needs. I updated the wiki page about Git on Alioth with a few of my learnings as I went through the process.

Using git branching to handle non-DFSG-compliant upstream sources is pretty obvious, the notes in the git-buildpackage documentation helped. Using pristine-tar to capture the deltas required to regenerate orig.tar.gz files from the git repo is amazingly cool. It's hard to believe how much friendlier the world seems when you don't have to drag a bunch of tarballs around with you to do useful work! And git-buildpackage has suitable options to make using it pretty automatic. Great stuff!

It's likely to be a few days before I can get back to this, finish up, and upload the results of this restructuring work. In the meantime, I'm writing this entry largely to offer my compliments to everyone involved in making git-buildpackage, alioth, and collab-maint work so well. Special thanks to Joey Hess, whose pristine-tar package is another in a long line of absolutely brilliant tools that contribute to making my life easier! I'm going to end up using it a lot.

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Debian Developer LWN Subscriptions
I just made time to catch up on processing requests for access to LWN.net under the Debian group subscription sponsored by HP.

If you think you were waiting for me, and didn't get some sort of email reply articulating what was wrong or saying you were added, please re-send your request.

If you're a DD and don't know what this is about, you can find details about LWN and how to get added to the Debian group subscription in this message in the Debian mailing list archives.

For what it's worth, there are now 494 DD's subscribed to LWN as part of this group subscription.

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Colorado Rockies in World Series!

I'm not a serious fan of professional sports, but over the years, I've enjoyed watching a wide variety of sporting events at different times and for different reasons. It can be fun when a relatively local team is doing well, and even more fun when they're doing well with style.

For the last week or so, I've been paying attention to Major League Baseball for the first time in several years. Last night, from a hotel room on my current business trip, I watched the Colorado Rockies baseball team take the National League championship, thereby winning the right to compete in this year's World Series.

It's pretty amazing that they've now won 21 of their last 22 games, including seven straight in the playoffs. But there are two other things that captured my attention last night prompting me to comment here. The first is that this really has been a team effort. With due respect to the various players on the team, none of them seem to be superstars... instead, they come across as a group of very good players who are just doing their jobs really well. And second, they really do seem to be having fun and aren't taking themselves too seriously.

I don't know what's going to happen next. They may win, they may lose. But those two observations last night cheered me up after a fairly stressful day, and left me encouraged that doing what you love as well as you can, and finding others to work together with who care as much about the cause at hand as you do can still lead to extraordinary results.

That's pretty cool.

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Conservation: It's in the Bag

I was just reading the latest issue of Home Power magazine, which is celebrating 20 years of publication with this issue. One of the articles, by Kathleen Jarschke-Schultze, talks about the value of reusable cotton bags for shopping instead of accepting the usual "paper or plastic". It caught my eye because my wife Karen is an avid cotton-bag user. Kathleen ends the article with an idea that I think is worth repeating:

So how about this new etiquette: Conservation in everything except courtesy and generosity. Seems like that would be a refreshing change. We all need to just put one foot in front of the other to keep moving forward on conserving global resources. Even if it is slow or small, take that first step.

I like that. Conservation, courtesy, and generosity should never go out of style...

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SPI Board Election
All contributing members of SPI should make time RIGHT NOW to go vote in the SPI Board Election currently underway. We have 13 candidates from a variety of SPI's associated projects running for 6 open seats this year. The election closes at 2007-07-28 23:59:59 UTC, so don't delay!

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Technical Committee Update
The Debian Technical Committee has recently decided three outstanding issues, and at least one question still before the committee is moot now that etch is released. So, I spent a little time this evening updating the committee's web page , and closing the bugs related to the issues decided so that we can better focus on the remaining open issues .

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Programmer Personality Test
A long-time friend pointed me to another "categorize yourself" site the other day, this time it's a Programmer Personality Test. He pointed out that it's only 12 questions, wouldn't take long, and he'd be interested in how I scored. I found the questions really irritating, but the results led to some interesting discussion that my friend suggested might be worth a blog entry.

I get either a DLSB or PLSB, depending on which arbitrary choices I make on several questions where neither option is at all representative of my world view. He found this interesting, since I'm the only other person he's talked to about this that also got a P. He also noted that LS seems to be very strong in all the "real programmers" he knows, and wondered if that might be why managing programmers is so much like herding cats.

One of the bits that I find so artificial about this is that the model that I personally find most effective in the loner/group continuum isn't reflected by the questions at all. It's neither a "do it all myself" nor a "engage with everyone before doing anything" approach. The free software community collaboration experience has proven to me that the most effective approach is a hybrid, where you "do something" followed by engaging collaborators, who may well help you decide to throw a lot away, which is ok if it was a learning experience, and/or it leads to a better result. In the end, you may not even be the center of attention or "owner" of the result.

In fact, often the way to get something done right is ensure that you get the right person to do it, which often isn't yourself... but the strategy for getting the right person to do it is almost never to engage in group-think before doing any work! It seems to me that in our community, leading usually starts with doing, while success is related to who else gets motivated to follow your lead and join in the doing...

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TAPR Open Hardware License
John Ackermann, N8UR, has authored two new licenses intended to foster collaborative hardware development projects. I've known John for many years through our mutual involvement in TAPR. He invited me to review several early drafts, and did a great job of integrating the feedback that I and his other early reviewers provided.

The latest drafts of these licenses are open to public review and comment until March 7th, 2007. I invite readers interested in hardware development and/or the nuances of license texts to review the TAPR Open Hardware License and associated non-commercial variant, and provide feedback through the mechanisms provided.

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Mis-Quote Fixed
In his article about the SPI decision to transfer domains to OSI, Bruce Byfield originally mis-attributed a quote typed by David Graham to me. I am pleased to report that he has now fixed the attributions.

Thanks, Bruce!

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Debian on HP ProLiant
Back in August, I noted here that HP announced support for Debian on ProLiant servers.

Recently, the first set of concrete deliverables resulting from that decision became available, in the form of freely downloadable hpasm and hprsm packages in Debian format. I've just learned that customers can now purchase support Care Packs for Debian 3.1 (Sarge) running on enabled ProLiant servers! This offering includes 9x5 and 24x7 Care Pack service for Debian available in 1 year and 3 year contract options. These service products are now available, as of December 1, 2006, on the HP Corporate Price List. Speak to your local HP sales rep for details.

The list of currently enabled server models, the downloads, and related documentation are available online at http://www.hp.com/go/debian.

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It Moved!
There's a particular analogy I've used from time to time to explain what it feels like to be someone like me, working in a very large corporation. I tell people that it's as if I'm standing next to a large rock with an eye dropper, carefully placing individual drops of water in hopes of eventually seeing the rock move.

Today, the rock moved!

Of course, it helps a lot that a growing number of HP customers have been pushing on this particular rock, including a few burly types who've really put their shoulders into the effort... ;-) But I guess I'd like to think all those little drops over several years helped soften the soil up a bit, making the rock a little easier to move today.

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New Tie-Dye Shirts!
After dropping my daughter off at camp today, we wandered over to In The Groove so that I could pick up some fresh tie-dyed shirts. My son found a few he liked in his size, too, and my wife bought a cute patchwork skirt.

Good thing everything in the store we cared about was 30% off today...

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Meeting over GPRS
Those of you who follow such things may have noticed that I became SPI President today.

The cool part, though, is how I managed to participate in the special board meeting to select officers today.

The meeting fell in the middle of the drive from our house up into the mountains to the Rocky Ridge Music Center near Estes Park, Colorado, where my daughter is attending a music camp. About 15 minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, we drove out of the edge of GSM phone coverage just beyond the town of Lyons... I turned the car around and drove back into town and parked adjacent to the surprisingly interesting Sandstone Park, which is part of a sculpture trail in the middle of town. My wife and kids wandered around the park while I fired up my new HP nc2400 notebook and established a GPRS connection through my aging Ericsson T39 phone using gprsec, which sadly is not yet packaged for Debian.

Two minor hacks due to my choice of phone. I needed the flag_time=0 option on the ppp_async module command line to work around a bug in the T39 as per the GPRS-HOWTO, and noauth in the ppp config emitted by gprsec.

Participating in the meeting was painless, other than delaying our lunch for a half hour or so... It's really nice when things work the way they're supposed to.

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Thanks for the Thanks
I don't know quite what's going on this week, but I like it.

I receive a fair number of emails every week asking me to do little things related to Debian. For some reason, over the last few days, the percentage of people who are taking the time to send a quick email saying "thank you" for whatever I've done in response to their reqeust has gone way up.

Thank you.

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SPI Board Election
All contributing members of SPI should make time to go vote in the SPI Board Election currently underway. We have 5 candidates for 3 open seats this year, and there has been some spirited discussion among candidates and others about the purpose and direction of the organization. The election closes on the 29th, so do it today!

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Flag Burning
It's rare that I find a letter to the editor of a newspaper profound enough to be worth tearing out and saving. Today was one of those days. I am pleased to discover that the full text is visible online, so I can share Ashley Frohwein's letter Insight on Fourth of July flag burning here. Sadly, I'm not always proud of my country... but some of the principles on which it was founded remain as noble and inspiring as ever!

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Debian LWN Subscriptions
I just discovered that at least some of the requests for access to LWN.net under the group subscription Debian paid for by HP have ended up in the wrong mailbox for a few weeks. Sorry about that, it's entirely my fault. I believe I've now caught up and given everyone access who asked for it and meets the requirements. If I missed any, please re-send the request.

If you're a DD and don't know what I'm talking about, you can find details about LWN and how to get added to the Debian group subscription in this message in the Debian mailing list archives.

For what it's worth, there are now 427 DD's subscribed to LWN as part of this group subscription.

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Gender Research
Back in mid-February, I was invited to participate in a review of EU government policy support research on gender issues in Free Software communities at the University of Cambridge. The meeting was fascinating to me not only because of my level of interest in the content, but also because the reviewers were a wonderfully diverse group of genuinely interesting people. I also must admit that being a guest of Kings College for two nights was quite an experience in and of itself...

As someone who has been a strong proponent of the idea that approaches and technologies adopted by Free Software developers are something other communities might want to borrow from or emulate, I found the results of this research both disturbing and enlightening. The disturbance centers around just how strongly male-biased our current behaviors seem to be in practice, particularly in the Debian project. My moment of enlightenment was the realization that many of the ideas we discussed about how to encourage and enable more female participation in our communities could simultaneously make our projects more appealing and rewarding to all of our contributors!

I've talked to various people about this research in my travels since the meeting in February, and many have followed up asking for pointers to the findings. I was pleased to learn this morning that the integrated report of findings and recommendations from this work are finally available online.

I hope at least some of you will read this report, and will then be as interested as I am in looking for ways to change the status quo. Perhaps a BOF at the upcoming Debian developer's conference to discuss these results and brainstorm specific actions we can take in the Debian project would be a good place to start? I expect to arrive late on the 15th, and must depart early on the morning of the 21st...

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Teac FD-55F
Every once in a while I feed a few "interesting" key words into the eBay search engine. Last night, I happened to find a pair of Teac FD-55F 720k 5.25" floppy disk drives for sale at a reasonable price. I think the pair I once had got sold along with an XT clone I used for my FIDO BBS back in the day. They were a neat thing to have in an XT, because they would put twice the backup data per floppy on cheap floppies (the kind sold for 360k drives, the floppies for 1.2M drives were significantly more expensive!), and with two of them you could do a full backup of a reasonable hard disk of the era quickly by loading floppies in alternating drives about as fast as you could handle them.

But the reason I've been looking for a pair is that before I put them in that XT clone, they were the drives I used on my original Ampro Z-80 Little Board running CP/M in the mid-80's. Shoveling through the stuff in the shed a while back, I discovered that I still have that board, a bunch of oddball accessories I bought or built for it, and a significant pile of floppies and documentation that all appear to be in reasonable condition.

I got a lot of use out of that system back in the day, and it would please me to have it in working order again. Fingers crossed that the drives I just bought on eBay actually work when they get here...

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A True Story
Flying home from Frankfurt yesterday via Chicago, as usual I randomly selected a shortish looking line in the immigration and customs hall. When it was my turn, the agent behind the counter saw the "business" box checked on my form and asked who I work for, which is pretty standard. He then asked me what I do for HP, but before I could answer, he said "No, wait. You've been through here before. I recognize your passport."

I managed to retain my composure just enough to agree that he certainly could have seen my passport before. He smiled, stamped my form, and waved me through.

My wife wonders why I was so surprised.

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Paperless?
For a couple years, I've routinely used Ampad Quad Ruled Steno Books to make notes to myself on just about everything. This morning I realized I'm using the last one from my most recently acquired package of 12... so, naturally, I tried to order some more.

They're gone. Apparently, nobody sells a quad-ruled steno pad any more.

I even called Ampad corporate customer service, where a very helpful woman poked around on her computer and confirmed that the product has been discontinued, and the last case in their inventory shipped out as part of an order to a university bookstore in early April. There aren't any more in stock, and they probably won't ever print any more.

Grumble. At least I can still buy quad-ruled engineering pads, even if they are clumsier to carry around...

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It's About Time..
In the fall of 1998, work on our house caused me to take down my roof-mounted GPS antenna. I finally got around to re-installing it today. It's hooked to an HP 58503A GPS Time and Frequency Reference Receiver. This mean my NTP stratum 1 will be back online soon. More importantly, it means I now have an excellent 10 Mhz reference source to lock my test equipment and software defined radio experiments to...

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First Annual Bangalore Debian Developer Conference
I just received word that there will be a Debian developer gathering in Bangalore, India, on the afternoon of Saturday, August 20th, at the International Institute of Information Technology. The target audience is current or aspiring Debian developers, and interested and sophisticated users of Debian in Bangalore. A registration page is available, and apparently there's an event mailing list.

While I won't be able to attend, I think this sort of low-key, techie-focused, regional Debian gathering is a great idea... and it would be wonderful to have more Debian developers in India!

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Grandmother
My maternal grandmother Estill Winfree Barksdale passed away on Saturday night. She was 101 years old.

I was fortunate to grow up near all of my grandparents and many other elder relatives. They each had some impact on my perception of the world, on what I think is important, and on how I try to lead my life.

But it's the little things about Grandmother that flood my mind today... from lemonade made pink with juice from the bottle of maraschino cherries always in her refridgerator when I was little, to the firmness of her grip several weeks ago when I last saw her.

She was extraordinary, and I will miss her.

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Server Woes
My main gag.com server has been down nearly as much as it has been up for the last week. My apologies to those this has inconvenienced.

Appears to be a RAID controller problem, but I won't know for sure until I get home next week, just before leaving for Helsinki.

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Done!
For the first time since early 2003, I'm actually caught-up on signing keys!

Even with good tools, getting caught up took time. Now that I've found caff, I hope to do a better job of staying caught up from now on.

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GUADEC
Yes, I'm at GUADEC! The fourth or fifth time someone said "cool, I didn't know you were going to be here", I started trying to figure out what the mystery was? After thinking about it a bit, my big revelation is that I've somehow gotten completely out of the habit of updating my talks page!

My bad! Maybe I'll sit up tonight and see if I can get it a little closer to current...

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Fear Not!
During the key signing at LCA 2005, I promised to sign all the keys from that event before I left Australia... and I actually got it done... at 05:30 on the morning of our departure! And since then, I've been doing a good job of signing keys as I trade credentials.

The problem is that I have several zip-loc bags full of key credentials covering the time period from the 2003 edition of LCA until the start of the 2005 edition. I'm not quite sure why, but tonight I got the itch to get on with signing them... so some of you are likely to already be surprised, or be surprised soon, to find signed keys in your inbox. Patience may still be required, though, as it's going to take a while to get completely caught up!

Enjoy... and if you have credentials for me that you haven't acted on, how about joining me in getting caught up! Thanks to nudging from Enrico Zini, my current favorite tool of choice for key signing is caff. Much easier for everyone involved than cabot, and accomplishes about the same objectives.

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Solo Baroque
I travel a lot. Someday, I may find time to write down all the things I've learned about how to do this with minimal pain, but one of the most important is that the less "stuff" I carry along, the happier I am. Particularly in my carry-on bag(s), "every gram counts"!

For that reason, I kept avoiding buying a portable audio player and noise-cancelling headphones, even though many of my uber-frequent-flyer friends claim this as something they can't live without. Well, I finally broke down, and bought an iPod mini and a pair of Sennheiser PXC300 headphones. Wow. Good stuff, and definitely helps reduce my stress level.

As for what I listen to... I've ripped my entire CD collection to flac using abcde, and transcode to mp3 anything I want to move to the iPod using gtkpod.

When I first bought the iPod, I loaded it up with a diverse collection of stuff. But after a few trips, I realized that what I enjoy most on airplanes is classical music. And in particular, I really enjoy listening to an album of solo violin performance by Rachel Barton Pine, called Solo Baroque.

My daughter and I met Rachel briefly after a concert she gave to benefit the Colorado Springs Philharmonic as it struggled to rise from the ashes of the bankrupt Colorado Springs Symphony two years ago. She autographed a CD we bought of Handel Sonatas for Elizabeth that night. Later, Rachel graciously donated several signed CDs to benefit the Young Concert Artists orchestra Elizabeth participates in... and I succeeded in buying enough raffle tickets to end up winning the Solo Baroque CD. But I hadn't listened to it much until I put it on the iPod. I particularly like track 9, the Passacaglia by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, who I'd never heard of before acquiring this CD. Rachel is scheduled to appear with the Philharmonic again next season, and I'm really looking forward to it!

If I'd know I'd have such a short playlist of stuff I actually care to listen to on airplanes, I might well have gone for an iPod shuffle instead of the mini, which would have had the huge benefit of being small enough to fit into the zippered Sennheiser case along with the headphones, and not needing a cable to plug into my notebook for updates. Oh well.

The iPod mini and headphones are now a permanent part of my travel kit.

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Broadcast Flag
Those who enjoyed my presentations at Linux Conf Australia 2005 on software defined radio are invited to join me in a loud cheer in support of the latest court action involving the now-infamous HDTV "broadcast flag"!

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Musings
Freshened the server hosting this Blosxom instance to current sarge late last night, but was too tired to deal with the restructuring of the Blosxom config files until this morning. Sorry if that bothered anyone.

In the process, I was reminded that it has been a while since I posted anything here. I guess this comes less naturally to me than to some folks... but as long as I'm typing...

My thanks to everyone in Australia who made my family feel so welcome on our recent trip surrounding LCA 2005. It was great fun!

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hppa d-i
After a burst of learning, hacking, and iteration, I have debian-installer working again on hppa... and it now uses 2.6.8 kernels by default.

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Another Autobuilder in My Basement
Andreas Barth approached me about providing resources to support his effort to build packages for experimental and debian-volatile. Seemed worthwhile, so I poked around and found enough working pieces to put an ia64 system online last night for him to use.

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USRP Ordered
Came home from visiting family over Christmas to find that Matt Ettus has the USRP boards available for sale. Placed my order...

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It Thinks It's a PDP 11/53 Now
Managed to find my old Xeltec SuperPro and some 27256 parts buried in the far corner of the basement, and so with the help of Jonathan Engdahl's KDJ11-D/S page, my CPU board now thinks it's part of an 11/53 instead of a Decserver 550. While I had the board out of the chassis, I changed the console serial port to 38k4, leaving the second serial port at 9k6 since that's what vtserver expects.

Telling the monitor to boot from SCSI disk flashes the drive activity LED, then tells me the media isn't bootable. That makes sense since I haven't put any suitable bits on the drive yet... and suggests I may be only another serial cable away from trying to install 2.11bsd.

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SSRP is Working!
After some iteration, I now have a full build of GNU Radio from CVS running on Debian with 2.6.8.1 kernel on my HP tc1100 tablet, including the SSRP firmware, utilities, and examples. And it all seems to work! Here's a window dump of my first FFT with a signal generator feeding an unmodulated 1 Mhz carrier into the board. And here's a picture of the test setup after I dialed the generator up to 2 Mhz.

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SSRP Assembled
I sat up tonight putting together a semi-kit of David Carr's Simple Software Radio Peripheral, which is more or less an "RF to USB 2.0" interface. I'm going to use this as a platform for learning more about GNU Radio.

I'm looking forward to getting a USRP board soon, which I intend to use in the EME station I'm building. In the meantime, the SSRP board looked like an easy way to get started, particularly since it uses essentially the same parts of GNU Radio as the USRP...

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It Fits
I found a suitable right-angle 50-pin header for the SCSI card while wandering around in the Fry's in Palo Alto earlier this week. This evening, I managed to extract the straight header without damaging the board, and installed the new connector. The board fits in the backplane just fine now... and with a power cable swiped from a dead ATX supply and a suitable SCSI cable and drive from the pile, the card still seems to work.

I need to find or make up another cable for the silly MMJ serial connectors, and then I'll be able to try loading ancient Unix...

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Another Year, Another Post?
Occasionally, the list of things I really should be working on gets a little overwhelming. Late last night was one of those times. So, I spent a couple hours playing with the pile of PDP-11 parts...

Took the BA-11N apart far enough to extract the backplane, and added the wires necessary to support 22-bit addressing. Put everything back together, and had a bit of a scare since I couldn't seem to get the console talking to me again. Found a problem in my serial cabling, after which all was well.

Dug the DELQA out of the stack, stuck it in the chassis below the KDJ11-D/S, and confirmed that the Decserver 550 firmware still in the CPU board was able to discover it.

Extracted the CQD-223/TM SCSI board from the s-box front panel it came in, and realized it's not going to fit into the slot spacing of the BA11-N as-is. The problem is that the 50-pin header for the drive cable is straight, so by the time you put a cable on it the stack is too thick for a backplane slot. So, either I need to scare up a Qbus continuity card or something to let me skip a slot and give the card double height, or alternatively I can replace the 50-pin header with a right-angle box header and the card should fit...

At that point, I decided I'd made enough progress, and called it a night.

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