Ton Kersten

Contest is over

Last weekend we participated in the IARU HF championship and we where active for the full 24 hours. We used my own call pa1ton.

Being a very small gun (1 transmitter, two antennas and only 100 watts) we decided that we could have a lot of fun not racing for the points, but trying to work stations we never worked before.

In the end we had 384 QSO's, which is'nt that much. But we had a QSO with China b7hq (which was pronounced as blavo seven hotel queen), Bangladesh, Vietnam, the IARU-R1 and IARU-R1 headquarters and a couple of vk and zl.

All in all a very successful weekend.

We will be back next year.

We are ready for it

Next weekend it's IARU contest time again.

With pa1pat and Coen we will setup a portable station again, as we have always done.

Using an Icom IC746 and a FD5 longwire of about 80 meters long we try to have lots of fun during the contest. Our goal is to reach over 500 QSO's in the 24 hour long contest using the single TX and only 100W.

The contest starts on 2011-07-09 1200UTC and runs for 24 hours. That's 14:00 localtime.

The running call sign is unknown at the moment, can be mine (pa1ton), Patricks (pa1pat) or the Nijmegen club call (pi4nym). Changes are rather big that it the prefix will be with pa1.

The place where it all happens is JO21xs.

Hope to hear you in the contest.

Those funny technicians

I hope the work is done more serious as the reporting.

Switching to a static blog

I have been running WordPress for some time now, and I rather liked it. The only thing I didn't like was the fact that I had to use PHP and a lot of strange software that was almost impossible to keep up to date.

Before I started using WordPress I used NanoBlogger and I liked that because it generates static websites. And I am a big fan of that. But: NanoBlogger is very, very slow and I didn't like that, as you can imagine.

But I want my static pages back and I want to use my patched version of MarkDown and I want to create my posts with vim.

I also want to be able to change the blog system the way I want it to work and with Nanoblogger that is really out of the question. The source code of NB is (mildly said) a mess. If you change a little thing everything else breaks.

As you can see, I have a lot of wishes and no answers..... Until I ran into BlazeBlogger, which is lightning fast and generates static html. And the very nice thing is that the source code is in Perl and everyone with little knowledge of Perl can read and adapt it. And that is what I did, I changed some things to make it more the way I like it. And, as OpenSource should be, I mailed the changes to Jaromir.

So, what you see now is generated with BlazeBlogger and some extra stuff.

Comments are enabled as well, through Disqus.

Yeah, I found it

A very long time ago, when I was still studying computer science I had a HP15C calculator. And I realy loved it. Unfortunately it was stolen and I couldn't afford to buy a new one. I ended up using a Casio FX602p. A very, very good calculator, but it's not a HP15C.

Last Friday I was discussing old times with a nerd like me and we ended up discussing calculators and what the heck, he had used the HP15C as well and hated HP for stopping to sell it, as wel as I do.

So I started digging the internet and this is what I found:

A HP15C emulator for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. I use this one now at a very regular basis and I really love it.

If you want to give it a try, look at Torstens site and, please, give Torsten a heads up.

FreeBSD PXE boot Part 2

Some posts ago I wrote that I was busy to find out how a FreeBSD machine can be PXE-ed from a Linux server. Well, I found that some time ago, but I didn't have the time to type it here, yet. Well, as always, once you know how it's done, it's quite simple. But because a lot of the FreeBSD documentation is very old (talking about FreeBSD 4, 5 and 6) it takes some time to find it all.

Read more »

Why does Puppet keep breaking?????

In my previous post I stipulated that I was PXE booting FreeBSD. Well this works and I will come back on that. But for the configuration I want to run Puppet. Nice and easy config management.

On my server I run Puppet from source. This because the server is a CentOS box with a very old Ruby and Puppet. So I decided to run the Puppet client from source as well. Getting the git repo is easy enough and installing Puppet should not be to hard.

Well, well, how wrong have I been. Every time I update the Puppet client or server something breaks. And I do mean every time.

First it started with not parsing templates correctly. A couple of hours of debugging solved that, but then Puppet started crying with " Error 400 on SERVER: No support for http method POST". W.T.F. does it mean. This somehow got solved, but then the templates broke again. The Puppetlabs site stated (as always) to update to the newest version. So I did. And the template error was back again, but now it was a different one: "Failed to parse template issue/issue.erb: undefined method 'first' for "/etc/puppet/modules/issue/templates/issue.erb:19:in". Tinkering around for 4 (yes four!) hours solved this one (I can hardly remember what I tried, but I can assure you that I have seen all sites about Puppet that exist on the Inernet. Including the ones about handpuppets). And then I got the 400 error again. Running in debug mode doesn't help either, so I'm rather stuck. Man, do I hate this type of behaviour. Be stable or go away! I now completely had it with diving into Puppet sources to find the culpritt. If they are still seeking for a miracle for Pope John Paul II, maybe a stable Puppet client would be a good idea.

I'm getting rather fed up with this stuff. Ths way I'll never be able to update a server and be sure it will work. Maybe CFEngine3 is a better option!

FreeBSD PXE Boot

At the moment I'm busy PXE booting a FreeBSD server of a Linux (Ubuntu) machine. I've got that running and now I only need to autoinstall Puppet to perform the configuration.

I'll keep you posted.

Yes!!! I was there!!!

Last night the time finally arrived. The tickets where in 'da house' for almost a year now and waiting was over.

We went to 'Roger Waters, the Wall' live at the Gelredome in Arnhem.

A little clip of this concert:

I can't tell you how it was, because all words I write will not be enough to share this experience. Absolutely fantastic.

Update download page

I've added some more downloads to the download page and now I'm running into tiny troubles. When I change a script or configfile, this is placed in this blogs download directory. But the blogs database isn't updated, so the file size, date/time and revision numbers are not the same on the download page as they are on disk. Of course it's possible to update all this by hand, every time something changes, but being lazy I created a little script that does this all for me.

This is it:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62

#!/bin/bash

DIRS="git.vi header makebackup mysqlbackup"

# Top of the development tree
cd ~/develop

# Process all the download directories
for dir in ${DIRS}
do
    cd ${dir}

    # First install everything
    # The Make file also installs in the blogs download dir
    echo "Processing ${dir}"
    make install
    git push

    # Process all files
    for f in *
    do
    # Get the revision number, date and size
    rev="$(grep '^# $Revision::' $f | awk '{print $3 }')"
    dt="$(stat -c '%y' $f | cut -d '.' -f1)"
    sz="$(stat -c '%s' $f)"

    # Create a MySQL update string
    cat <<- @EOF
        #
        # Update the revision
        #
        update wp_download_monitor_files
        set dlversion='${rev}'
        where filename='/var/www/blog/downloads/${dir}/${f}';

        #
        # Update the file date
        #
        update wp_download_monitor_files
        set postDate='${dt}'
        where filename='/var/www/blog/downloads/${dir}/${f}';

        #
        # Update the file size
        #
        update
            wp_download_monitor_file_meta  m,
            wp_download_monitor_files      f
            set m.meta_value = '${sz}'
            where (
                m.download_id = f.id
            )
                and (
                m.meta_name = 'filesize'
            )
            and (
                f.filename = '/var/www/blog/downloads/${dir}/${f}'
            );
    @EOF
    done
    cd ..
done | mysql -u root -p blogdb