innismir.net

I’m often snarky in the morning before I take my LD50 of caffeine. This can lead to interesting exchanges:

LaRouche Supporter: “Sir, what would rather have, a sack full of cash or a clear conscience?”

Me: “I find sacks full of cash a very spiritual experience!”

Him: “Corporate Whore!”

Me: “You know it!”

Is it a bad sign that making a LaRouchie angry made me chuckle?

One of the Amateur Radio weblogs I read is Ars Telegraphia by Paul Evans, VP9KF. He recently made a post regarding the legality of identifiers after your call sign.

Now, I was confused, as I was pretty sure that this was legal in the US. Paul is in Bermuda, but he used American call signs, so I looked into the legality of having identifiers associated with calls. I donned the ceremonial robes and consulted the tomes of Part 97. After some searching, I came across the relevant text. Let us open our rulebook to Part 97, Section 119, Paragraph C

(c) One or more indicators may be included with the call sign. Each indicator must be separated from the call sign by the slant mark (/) or by any suitable word that denotes the slant mark. If an indicator is self-assigned, it must be included before, after, or both before and after, the call sign. No self-assigned indicator may conflict with any other indicator specified by the FCC Rules or with any prefix assigned to another country.

OK, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that as I do occasionally sign with “Mobile” or “Portable” and I do try to be a legal beagle. However, that’s not to say Paul’s statement is without merit. In pile ups, the less superfluous information the less of a chance of muffed exchange. I do think there are two distinct exceptions to this rule: If you are out of your call sign’s section you should sign with the area you are in. I’ve done this the few times I’ve operated outside of my own section, even in situations where it was obvious I was local. When I am working a satellite pass, I especially dislike to hear a call sign with a 6 (California, for you non-hams) in it, only to find out the station is in Ohio. As for QRP stations, I always yield to QRP and portable when I hear them on satellites. Of course, the only way I know they are QRP is if they sign with /QRP or /Portable.

Paul is entitled to his opinion, but I think that signing with certain identifiers is helpful for conveying information. I am more inclined to work a QRP then a non-QRP station, and I am more inclined to work a station in 6-land then 2-land (NY/NJ). Simple identifiers attached to the call sign allow stations to get a better feel for the pile up and more accurately pick the stations “they want.”

Note to Paul if he reads this: Turn on comments!

This floated across AMSAT-BB a few days ago:

From spaceweather.com:

The International Space Station (ISS) transited the Moon at 3:38 China Standard Time,” says Xin Li of the Beijing Planetarium. “We photographed the event using a Meade 8″ LX200 and a ToUCam video camera.” The flyby occurred not long after the space shuttle docked with the ISS, so there are actually two spacecraft in the picture.

ISS and Endeavour traversing the moon

Click for the article with a link to a larger photo.

Now that’s freaking awesome.

I take the magnificent MBTA Commuter Rail twice a day to get to and from my job in Boston. I pay $250/month for this privilege, plus, the MBTA makes me pay $2 a day to park in order to take the train. Recently the MBTA decided, partially because it can’t balance a checkbook, to up the parking rate to $4 a day, a 100% increase. You know, because people are swimming in money right now. Anyway, since I have no choice, myself and other riders have ince resigned myself to this fate, and just have thought of doing evil things to the giant banners that appeared at the parking lots at the start of November.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I saw this sign posted above the collection box this morning:

$3! I was in shock! I had heard nothing about this! Had the T had come to its senses and made a more reasonable increase? I was pleased, but my hopes were quickly dashed when I looked 3 feet to the right and saw this sign:

Uhhhh… What? How much will it be MBTA? You have conflicting signs not even 3 feet apart at this station. Which one is correct? I did some research, and after looking at the MBTA Parking Increase FAQ I see no mention of a $3 rate at commuter rail spots.

What say you, MBTA?

UPDATE (11/13): As of this morning, the “$3.00/day” sign is gone, proving that the MBTA was just playing a cruel joke on half-awake morning commuters. (I keed! I keed)

AO-51 is in a bit of a special mode these past couple of days. Instead of Voice, they’re encouraging people to do SSTV over the satellite. This was originally done back in October to prepare for Richard Garriott sending SSTV from the ISS, but it proved popular enough for the AO-51 command team to add it to their schedule for the month of November. This evening I monitored the passes and was rewarded with some great photos:

These were on the 1709EST Pass:

The 1848 pass was a little more crowded with a couple of dead carriers and people accidentally keying over each other. But, I was rewarded with two “DX” stations and I was able to grab some photos once things settled down:

I am absolutely BUMMED that I couldn’t contact VA7VW by voice. By my calculations, he was 2351 miles away from my QTH. That would have broke my existing “longest contact via satellite” record which was to K7WIN in Arizona, a distance of 2268 mies.

I am also disappointed that I was only able to monitor the fun. I do not have the correct adapter to transmit SSTV from my FT-60, so I am relegated to RX only. Perhaps if I sit down and experiment with some adapters, I will be able to jury rig a cable, but I’m thinking it’s more of an experiment for the next time the command team puts the satellite in this mode. I’m hoping I see it on the December schedule.

So, the web is all abuzz with Obama being elected to President. He has already set up Change.Gov for his transition, a first.

Personal politics and concerns about whether this is .gov worthy or why we need this when we have presidentialtransition.gov aside, this is an important lesson on why QA is important before putting your website/code/whatever into a production environment. People have release early/release fast/release often mentality when dealing with code. This can be fine when you are dealing with a project that no one expects to be 100% on the first pass. But when you are dealing with a site that should be a somewhat of a flagship for your “brand” it helps not to have embarassing SNAFUs like this:

Also, this SCREAMS possible XSS security hole to me (Note, this isn’t my screenshot, I didn’t test this, nor do I condone or endorse probing .gov sites for security holes without permission)

All of this annoys me to no end as a security guy, as QA is when we usually get called in (at the last minute) to “make sure we’re secure.” More often then not, when I tell them, in fact, they are not secure, I get “Well, we can’t fix that right now! We’ll fix it later in production!” from the developers and they try to move forward until someone from management smacks them with a rolled up newspaper. I’m thinking that this a shining example of what happens when the developers go ahead without being smacked. Quality Assurance is a necessary step when moving forward in website. Yes it’s tedious, yes it’s annoying, but it will save you pain and embarassment if you do it correctly.

(Hat Tips to Michelle Malkin for originally pointing out the site and dual_parallel for doing some in-depth research)