What happens when a Google camera vehicle needs a fill-up?
Google Gets Gas

There's an old comic that appeared in Dragon Magazine, of the DM to the players:
"... and that passage leads to the unfinished part of the dungeon you feel strangely compelled to avoid."

Sometimes you find that on web sites too. And what's more fun than finding such a site on Google?

I backed into a way to find some street level data that evidently is NOT yet linked into the main data base. Here's how to see some of it:

Follow this link - it will set up a route from one of the repeaters I maintain, just outside of Hutchinson, KS, to KCK. The important bit here is that one endpoint of the journey ends where there is a street view available.

Next, make sure you have the "street view" enabled.

Then, re-calculate the route. You should now have a camera icon at the first turn of the route. If you click it, you will be right outside the gate of the site. That's a 1400' tower, by the by, and my antennas are up at 1200'. Also, that road is a muthaphucker of a washboard - I feel sorry for the poor Googlites going down it.

You cannot zoom into the Hutchinson area and keep the street view yet - I'm guessing they are in the process of loading the data and linking it in, and haven't finished yet.

I've found quite a few areas that are in this "Schroedinger's Cat" state - it looks like there is going to be a drop soon.

Looking at the area around my house (no, I'm not giving a link) I've been able to data this sometime last fall (i.e. September to October, 2008).

(Google folks: If you read this, take US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater, and take US166 from Arkansas City to Riverton. We actually DO have scenic roads in Kansas, they just aren't the major ones.)

This is a repost of a story I've put up on Technocrat:

As a variant of the old "tree falling in a forest" question, if a radio DJ blabs for an hour and nobody hears him because he forgot to hit the "Live" button, is he still annoying? Well, an intrepid DJ in the UK has tried to provide an answer.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and I'll address this to the (probably very small) set of DJs that might read Technocrat:

I don't listen to FM radio to hear you yap. I don't care what you think of the previous song, the next song, the weather, politics, the latest Hollyweird scandal, sports, the latest sports scandal, local events, or anything else. I don't care to hear you braying like a jackass over your not-funny "jokes" - no matter how much you horselaugh, you aren't going to make me think the joke's funny.

To put it bluntly: You suck. Every second you talk sucks. If you talk for more than a couple of seconds I will change the channel. If I wanted to listen to talk radio I'd be down on the AM dial. All I want to hear out of your gob is

• The artist and title of the previous "N" songs (where "N" should be larger than 3)
• The artist and title of the upcoming "N" songs
• Any news of critical importance: severe weather alerts, traffic alerts, and matters of world altering importance (hint: if kids won't be studying the event in history class fifty years from now, it isn't important.)
• Station ID *when required by the FCC* (as in, I don't need to hear that I am listening to "Bob FM" every five seconds - I am a man, not a goldfish.)

The only reason I am listening to radio rather than my MP3 player is that I've listened to my music collection until the edges are worn off the 1's. So have a nice frosty glass of shut up and play the next song.

Well, we are T-5 days and counting to Route 66 On the Air 2007, 8th Sept. 2007 to 16th Sept. 2007. I will be out in Riverton, Kansas, representing the fine state of Kansas and reminding everybody that, yes, Route 66 does go through Kansas.

I'll be operating as W6M, an official Route 66 On the Air station. Any Technocrat readers who want to make the trip to The Eilser Brothers General Store, please do!

Also, if anybody cares to head over to Wikipedia and state that you feel that this is at least as notable as every minor character in Yu-Gi-Oh, be my guest.

The frequencies this year are:

. 80 meters | 40 meters | 30 meters | 20 meters | 17 meters | 15 meters | 12 meters | 10 meters | 6 meters
CW 3533 kHz | 7033 kHz | 10110 kHz | 14033 kHz | 18080 kHz | 21033 kHz | 24900 kHz | 28033 kHz | 50033 kHz
SSB 3866 kHz } 7266 kHz } N/A | 14266 kHz | 18164 kHz | 21366 kHz | 24966 kHz | 28466 kHz | 50166 kHz

I'll be operating SSB mostly, probably in 20 meters, but it will depend upon the band conditions. Hopefully, this year I should have a G5RV up about 50 feet for the whole event, rather than operating most of the event on the screwdriver on my car like last year. I may have a few other operators show up as well (I sure HOPE so!), but I'll try to operate as much as I can.

Here's the sponsor's web page, as well as The Wichita Amateur Radio Club's page (my club's page).

I am a professional software engineer. I make my living THINKING - long, hard and deeply. Interruptions are very expensive, and I don't suffer them lightly. Magazines, email, and things like this journal entry aren't interrupts: they are tasks I run when I am blocked on my main tasks (e.g. during compiles and downloads to the target.)

Phone calls, on the other hand, are interrupts. And since I don't know who is calling me until I take the call, I cannot leave that particular interrupt masked most of the time.

As a professional, I can get a very large number of professional magazines free of charge - EDN, EE Times, and the like. They get their money by selling ads, and their revenues are based upon their circulation.

And I have no problem with that - I will look at the ads that relate to my current situation, and ignore those that don't. They don't cost me time.

Now, when a magazine wants me to renew, and sends the renewal form on the front of the magazine, and they pay for postage, then I will renew the magazine if I find it valuable. If I don't find it valuable, and they pay for postage, then I will do them the courtesy of sending them the renewal with a "No thanks".

If they think I am going to chase up a stamp to send the response back to them, they are stupid. I am not going to spend 39 cents to tell them I am not interested - they can infer that from my lack of response.

I *also* do NOT give out my fax number, telephone number, or email to magazines - if they wish to communicate with me, they can do so by the US postal service. Again, I don't want to be interrupted.

Long ago, I decided upon a very simple rule with respect to magazine that call me on the phone about renewals: I cancel them. Immediately. I waste no time on the phone - I say "I'm sorry, I don't take magazines that call me on the phone at work. Goodbye. <click>".

That's a pretty clear "NO", isn't it?

Evidently, not for EDN. They have been calling me about once a week for the past month. They called me yesterday. They got the standard response.

I also decided that the next time they called me I was going to be "smart lazy" rather than "dumb lazy": I would spend more time on the line to insure that I wasted no more time in future.

Guess what happened a few tens of minutes ago? If you guessed "they called me again" then you are paying attention, which is more than I can say for the phone monkeys employed by the company that EDN employs for "circulation retention".

So, I made it very plain that:

1. I had no interest in any magazine that called me on the phone.
2. EDN was such a magazine.
3. I was NOT going to renew.
4. I had so informed them on multiple previous calls.
5. I wanted my name removed from their calling list.
6. I wanted my name and number ADDED to their DO NOT CALL list.

Now, I know how these telemarketers (and that is who I am dealing with, telemarketers) operate. Anything less than a clear "FUCK OFF AND DIE NO I DON'T WANT YOUR CRAP STOP CALLING ME" is ignored - these guys are judged on their "retention rates", and paying heed to a NO that doesn't fit their narrowly defined parameters will hurt those rates.

I don't give a shit about their rates. I said NO. Honor it.

Of course, this being a business line, it is NOT eligible for the Do Not Call list.

So, instead, I will pass this on:

DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO EDN (Electronic Design News).
DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, GIVE ANY "FREE" MAGAZINE ANY CONTACT INFORMATION BEYOND YOUR ADDRESS.
SHOULD THEY GET YOUR EMAIL, FAX NUMBER, OR PHONE NUMBER, TELL THEM IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS TO REMOVE YOUR INFORMATION FROM THEIR DATABASE AND NOT CONTACT YOU AGAIN.

Well, where I work we just bought a new DSP development station, to evaluate a potential chip for our RF signal processing. Any chip that can spit out a 16 million point complex FFT in 43 milliseconds is well worth investigating.

And it was a steal at the price: most such platforms cost several thousand dollars, this one cost less than US$700.

It was really fun, calling our IT department and saying "I need a monitor and network drop for my PS3" and it really being work related.

Now, we just have to get a screen on it and install Linux.

Over a decade ago, I signed up with my phone company when they got into the ISP business. At first, they were clueless, but they rapidly became clueful. Then they passed cluefulness and became excellent.

Then they outsourced their residential ISP functions (although they now provide business ISP "solutions"), and service started slipping. You can get away with that when you are virtually a monopoly.

Then that changed. However, I wasn't thrilled with the way the competition handled a simple request for information, so I continued to wait.

Well, several of my cow-orkers have service with the competition, and are pleased with it. Since I can get about ten times the bandwidth for the same monthly price, it is hard to justify staying with the phone company. However, I felt that giving them one more chance to keep my business was in order - they are a small phone company, not a Baby Bell, and I like doing business with small companies where possible. Also, giving them feedback about how their pricing structure is hurting them might just help them change their ways.

So, I went in to see them today. I laid it out for them. I asked them if there was anything they could do.

"Yes, we can give you 512/256 for US$10 more a month."
"OK, but the competition can give me 3000/512 for the same amount a month. Can you see why I might be thinking of switching?"

No dice - they cannot, or rather WILL NOT, do anything for me.

OK, they just lost a DSL customer. And since I don't need the twisted pair for data, why do I need it for voice? I can get cell service for about the same amount I am paying a month for wireline service, AND have a phone I can carry with me. And with number portability, I don't even have to deal with changing my decades old telephone number.

It's sad - this is happening a lot to the smaller telcos. I know a guy who used to own a small telco - built it up from nothing. He's retired now, and other than having several notes in the company no longer has any official position with them. He laments that they are losing business left and right, but that the Money types in New York who bought out the company don't care - they see revenues rising in the short term, and they don't care about the long term.

These guys just don't recognize that the days of telephony service being a natural monopoly are gone - your competition doesn't have to plow cable to your customers, or even run off your cable. They put a stick in the air and go wireless.

Unfortunately it's the small companies that are making this mistake, and are going to be run out of business or assimilated by the big companies....

For those of my fans who are amateur radio operators, I'd like to remind you that the Route 66 On The Air Certificate Hunt starts this Saturday, 9th Sept 2006, and runs through Sunday, 17th Sept 2006.

The Route 66 On The Air certificate is available to any station that

1. Operates one of the special event stations W6A through W6
2. Operates from Route 66 signing "mobile 66"
   or
3. Operates any station on Route 66 signing "mobile 66"

(Certificates are US$3.00 from The Citrus Belt ARC).

I will be operating from Eisler Brothers in Riverton, Kansas (yes, Route 66 DOES run through Kansas, for about 17 miles) as W6E.

Suggested Frequencies (All Frequencies +/-QRM

Band CW Voice
80M 3533 3866
40M 7033 7266
30M 10110
20M 14033 14266
17M 18080 18166
15M 21033 21366
12M 24900 24966
10M 28033 28466
6M 50033 50166

(however, the odds that I will be working CW are next to nil - but I might work PSK31).

(NOTE: The various Citrus Belt ARC links are slooooooow - so give them time.)

I could have (still could, technically) submitted this to Techocrat, but really Techocrat doesn't have a "humor" section. So I submitted it to Slashdot.

Big surprise, it was rejected. So, I'll put it here in my journal, so that at least my fans will see it:

We've all seen Demotivators - well, how about Motivational posters for gamers?

S9+20dB - those of you in the hobby know that's either very good, or very bad.

In this case, it's very bad.

Since Christmas, I've bought an IC-7000, and strung up a longwire on an IC-AT4 from my tower, and it works very well, thank you.

Hamvention was last week, and I went, and bought a Mini-Tarheel screwdriver antenna, and a controller for it. I had hoped to do some HF on the drive back from Dayton. No such luck - I didn't get a good ground from the antenna to the trunk lid to the frame. "Oh well, an easily corrected problem when I get home" I thought.

So, some nice half-inch ground braid, some lugs drilled into the car, and that problem was solved.

Only to run into the next problem - S9+20dB of ignition noise. And of course, ignition noise is a pretty fair approximation of a series of Dirac impulses, so it clobbers most frequencies.

So I bought a bunch of split-core ferrites, and put two of them on each injector lead and each coil-on-plug assembly wire. I was hoping for 10 dB, dreaming of 30 dB of noise attenuation.

I got 0 dB. No reduction at all, at least as far as my radio's S meter indicates.

Now, the IC7000 has a pretty damn good impulse noise blanker - one of the advantages of being a software defined radio. But still, if you have too strong a signal coming into the ADC, there is no signal processing magic that will pull out a signal below the quantization noise + decimation gain. I know - I do this for a living.

So, I guess the upshot of it all is that my mobile HF work will be limited, and if I want to get serious, I had better pull over and shut down the engine. Which from a safety perspective isn't such a bad idea, I guess. (And no, I am NOT planning on operating anything other than voice while driving - I know there are folks who do CW driving. There are folks who watch TV while they drive, or read books, too - and I don't do that either.)

And once again, the idiocy begins - it is not yet 1 April 2006 here in the middle of the US, yet already we are seeing sites running hoaxes - some good, some not - and worse yet, people falling for the hoaxes.

ThinkGeek has several humorous items up for sale on their front page. These are actually funny.

Over on Digg, there's a link to This economist story about a company trying to breed mythical creatures by simulation directed evolution in a computer, where a cell, modeled at the lowest levels of biochemistry, can evolve from fertilized egg to adult in "minutes". Again, this one is fairly funny.

The sad thing, however, is the number of people falling for these hoaxes.

Of course, the real idiocy has yet to start on /. in earnest.

I just hope this won't spread to other sites (YES ZOGGER I AM LOOKING AT YOU!)

I've written a couple of times in my journal about the dearth of trip planning software for Linux or other Free software environments. At one time, I'd hoped that somebody like Delorme would port their code over, but I've long since come to the conclusion that is unlikely.

Well, there is a project that I stumbled across, and I'd like to see more attention given to - Roadnav.

It isn't perfect yet - but it is promising. It's using the Tiger database, so it will not always take the best route, and you have to tell it to download the maps (and that takes a while), but it does have an interesting Sat pic mode where they download sat pics and overlay them on the map a la Google Maps.

I'm not associated with the project (yet), but I thought I'd try to get it some attention.

Personally, I'm thinking I may try to port it to the Maemo environment on my Nokia 770.

What a great week! Microsoft delaying both Vista and Office, 60% of Vista needs a rewrite, massive unrest in Redmond, Forbes magazine saying Vista isn't ready, and we finally overrode Gov. Sebileus's veto and will have Shall Issue Carry in Kansas.

Damn, but it is a good week!

Per SOP - I've submitted this:

CGI interface for Procmail? [Software]
wowbagger writes "Procmail is great for pre-sorting your mail, especially when married to an IMAP server. However, the format of the .procmailrc file is somewhat fragile (IMHO) - one mistake can misdeliver mail so you never see it, and I wouldn't want J. Random User having to edit it. Yet Googling for 'procmail "cgi interface"' yields no meaningful hits. So how come nobody has created a CGI interface to allow creating .procmailrc files so that you could provide a Web-based front end to an IMAP to ordinary users?"

So, why ISN'T there a procmailrc creator in CGI?

(Yes, I know - "Write one yourself you lazy bastard!" Right after I add USB On-The-Go and native IPSEC to my Nokia, rebuild a ham radio repeater and deploy it, sod the bare patches on my lawn, ...)

ITAR, for those of you fortunate enough to not know, stands for International Traffic in Arms Regulation, and is the set of laws and regulations governing, surprisingly enough, the international trade of arms.

The bitchy part is what the government defines as "arms" - this includes not only nukes and guns, but encryption devices and communications equipment.

Guess what I design for a living?

So, in order to be "ITAR compliant", all my outbound work emails will have a paragraph of legalese added to them. You've probably seen the like - "this email only for its intended recipients, if you received it in error destroy all copies" yadda yadda yadda. Like a Bad Guy who gets a sensitive email will read the paragraph and say "Whups! I'd better delete these plans for a military radio descrambler 'cause I wasn't supposed to see them! Golly Darn!"

So rather than REALLY FIXING the problem - requiring people to use good, strong encryption on any email that contains anything remotely sensitive - we will get this 1K wart on all our email.

Great. So all my mailings to the LKML, RPM devel, binutils, and the other lists I am on as a consequence of my work will have this paragraph. I *know* how much it annoys me when I see other people's mail so decorated.

I know better than to complain to our IT group - they are just doing what Corporate told them to do, and Corporate is doing what Legal told them to do. There are ways to change Legal's mind - however most of them violate laws and so are not available to me.