I got my ham license and radio about 4 years ago because I am a volunteer in a sport (stage rally) that use ham radio to make sure that the road is safe to run on. The rallies are run on forest and desert roads in areas with few other communications options.
I am also an emergency communications volunteer with the county. In case of an actual emergency, I would report to city hall, set-up the radio and relay messages between the city and the county. On the plus side, I get to participate in drills (two natural disaster and two terrorist attack drills do far). On the minus side, I had to do FEMA training.
We had a storm last year where we didn't have any power, landline phone/DSL or cellular coverage for days. And I don't even live in the sticks; I am about 10 miles from downtown Seattle. Our normal communications infrastructure isn't as reliable as I thought it was.
For radio use practice, I also volunteer for local community events like charity walks (monitor for injuries and tired walkers) and bicycle rides (SAG wagon duties).
I did Field Day for the first time this year. Talking directly to someone across the country was pretty cool.
As noted, it is only news because the mfg is supplying it directly to customers for them to do the installation.
Introducing big changes in how a shipping car works has been done before. New features (such as being able to switch between full automatic and manual gear change modes through the paddle shifters on the steering wheel as well as the shifter on the floor) were introduced in software upgrade to the transmission on my smart car a couple of years ago.
For some time, I have been able to buy third-party modules that plug into my VW's OBD port and recode controllers to enable new features.
This is probably less costly for Ford since they don't need to reimburse the dealer's service dept. to plug in a USB stick and verify that the installation worked. But I bet that the dealers won't be happy about the missed opportunity to look at the car and find something else that "needs" to be looked at (and repaired back to Ford).
My primary desktop is Mac. I run XP as a virtual machine. Why?
- I handle the membership database for a club and it is in Access. I inherited it from the previous membership guy. The Access database has lots of scripts for slicing and dicing the membership data and I don't have the time (or Access knowledge) to migrate to MySQL.
- A lot of the automotive applications that I use are only available on Windows. This includes VAG-COM for reading and setting codes in VW car components and the Bentley Publishing application for viewing their manuals.
- Some of the IDEs for working with embedded controllers that I work with are only available on Windows.
Having poor interviewing and resume-writing skills is not a lifetime curse; like all skills, one gets better with practice, and the practice is free.
As long as software engineering interviews involve writing code on a white board, I won't be moving on to another job.
I don't code like that. Changing the way that I code to do better in job interviews* is not something that I am willing to do. I have plenty of code that has been open sourced that I could be queried about, but coding artificial examples on the fly seems to be how software engineering interviews are done now.
* Don't feed me the line that the purpose is to see how a candidate approaches a problem. When you don't approach the problem in the way that the interviewer thinks you should, you are steered into approaching the problem that way, which puts you at a disadvantage if you disagree with that approach.
I switched to Mac OS X for my "desktop" use about about 3.5 years go. My experience since switching has been remarkably trouble-free, particularly compared to when I used Windows for the same stuff. I still have to run Windows (through a VM) for some apps and even my limited use of Windows is more prone to problems than my regular use of Mac OS.
In my day job, I am a Unix kernel developer (RIP Dennis Ritchie) and the Unix-iness of Mac OS X makes it easier to do the programming part of my job on the same system that also natively supports most of the apps needed for the business processes at work.
Incidentally, Apple seems to have resolved its update server issue because my update is now working.
It downloaded the 774M file, backed up the phone, extracted the software, phoned home to verify, then BANG, internal error, unable to restore. Tried this several times.
On this most recent attempt, it was able to phone home to verify and started to restore, then it had to phone home again for some reason, then BANG again. However, on that attempt, it bricked my phone. I was able to put it in recovery mode, reconnect it to iTunes and do a restore. Got to the end of the restore and, I think, tried to phone to verify and, you guessed it, BANG.
Now the update server isn't even responding and my phone is still a brick. Oh, well.
In 1994, when our daughter was around a year old, we took her out to a salad bar restaurant (Fresh Choice, I think). She was playing with her food as one-year-olds do and it was very funny, so we decided to record it for posterity on the camcorder. When we did this, we were approached by a restaurant employee who told us that no photography was allowed inside the restaurant and asked me to stop videotaping my daughter. I did. I also pointed out that, given where we were sitting and the layout of the restaurant, it wasn't possible for me to shoot video of much more than my wife and daughter and the people sitting behind them. I also pointed out that not allowing us to shoot videos of our kid seems like a family-unfriendly policy and we would be passing the word on to our friends with young children.
Later, on the same visit, we got a big apology from the manager, explaining that while it was company policy, we could go ahead and shoot video of our daughter. He also gave up free meal coupons for our next visit.
My 3GS slipped out of my pocket as I got in and out of my car to confirm it would fit in the space that I was backing into. After I ran it over (in a smart car), the touch screen looked like the one that fell from the skydiver's pocket. I hooked it up to iTunes and it sync'ed fine. I am an app developer and was able to hook it up to the dev tools and check out the console (not as many errors from the broken parts of the phone as I expected) and I still experiment with it.
Unfortunately, the touch screen and digitizer unit cost about $90 and a new 3GS (with contract) was $49, so it wasn't worth repairing. But it was a great opportunity to open up a phone and see how it is put together. Even though the touch screen glass, being glass, is fragile, the rest of the phone seems pretty robust. But I imagine that other smart phones are just as robust.
The headline is "25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use", but that is a high figure from another study (from the National Safety Council). The study quoted here also mentions another study (Flanagan and Sayer) that says it is more like 3-4%.
Most of the studies that I have seen seems to be approaching the situation "knowing" that cell phones are the problem. Other distractions are downplayed and/or ignored. Changes in society that impact individual's approach to driving and the amount of time spent in the car are ignored. It looks like more politics than science to me.
>> Also, I know of people who's car will turn off when they transmit using their amateur radio.
>The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it
>was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as
> an RF shield.
A few instances of this have been documented in the smart car forums. A 2m radio at 50W (high power for a lot of mobile 2m radios) using a thru-the-glass mounted antenna on the windscreen will shut down the car's electronics while transmitting. The same radio on 70cm at 35W (high power) does not shut down the electronics.
In the manual, smart says don't transmit with the antenna inside the passenger compartment. However, transmitting on my hand-held (5W) inside the passenger compartment (near the ECU) does not shutdown the electronics.
By current guesses, Apple had about 25k developers sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and only let 5k in. I am sure that the 20k developers who are (still) locked out are pleased as punch that the 5k got first opportunity to get their apps into the App Store.
Apple has been giving away the SDK, but you need to be in the developer program to run your code on an actual device (or to get your app into the App Store). They say that the Simulator in the SDK should be good enough even if it can't simulate one of the more interesting features of the iPhone/iPod touch, the accelerometer.
The iPhone and iPod touch are so cool that we just put up with everything that Apple does and be happy little developers until Apple thinks we deserve to be let in, right?
There has been speculation about a higher-resolution camera, possible support for digital video recording, a slightly bulkier and more curved case, and the addition of a global positioning system receiver that would allow new Web services tied to a person's location.
These are all standard features on many Nokia and Windows Mobile phones.
Apple is still just trying to catch up. The only reason for strong US sales is that US carriers have been pushing such feature-poor phones that even the iPhone seems like an improvement. I have had a Nokia N95-3 (in the US) since the end of last year. I also have an iPod Touch.
Overall, I think the N95 is a great phone, however, I am so sick of the crappy browser and the buggy IMAP e-mail client that if the iPhone had 3G and GPS, I would get an iPhone.
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I got my ham license and radio about 4 years ago because I am a volunteer in a sport (stage rally) that use ham radio to make sure that the road is safe to run on. The rallies are run on forest and desert roads in areas with few other communications options.
I am also an emergency communications volunteer with the county. In case of an actual emergency, I would report to city hall, set-up the radio and relay messages between the city and the county. On the plus side, I get to participate in drills (two natural disaster and two terrorist attack drills do far). On the minus side, I had to do FEMA training.
We had a storm last year where we didn't have any power, landline phone/DSL or cellular coverage for days. And I don't even live in the sticks; I am about 10 miles from downtown Seattle. Our normal communications infrastructure isn't as reliable as I thought it was.
For radio use practice, I also volunteer for local community events like charity walks (monitor for injuries and tired walkers) and bicycle rides (SAG wagon duties).
I did Field Day for the first time this year. Talking directly to someone across the country was pretty cool.
Introducing big changes in how a shipping car works has been done before. New features (such as being able to switch between full automatic and manual gear change modes through the paddle shifters on the steering wheel as well as the shifter on the floor) were introduced in software upgrade to the transmission on my smart car a couple of years ago.
For some time, I have been able to buy third-party modules that plug into my VW's OBD port and recode controllers to enable new features.
This is probably less costly for Ford since they don't need to reimburse the dealer's service dept. to plug in a USB stick and verify that the installation worked. But I bet that the dealers won't be happy about the missed opportunity to look at the car and find something else that "needs" to be looked at (and repaired back to Ford).
- I handle the membership database for a club and it is in Access. I inherited it from the previous membership guy. The Access database has lots of scripts for slicing and dicing the membership data and I don't have the time (or Access knowledge) to migrate to MySQL.
- A lot of the automotive applications that I use are only available on Windows. This includes VAG-COM for reading and setting codes in VW car components and the Bentley Publishing application for viewing their manuals.
- Some of the IDEs for working with embedded controllers that I work with are only available on Windows.
Having poor interviewing and resume-writing skills is not a lifetime curse; like all skills, one gets better with practice, and the practice is free.
As long as software engineering interviews involve writing code on a white board, I won't be moving on to another job.
I don't code like that. Changing the way that I code to do better in job interviews* is not something that I am willing to do. I have plenty of code that has been open sourced that I could be queried about, but coding artificial examples on the fly seems to be how software engineering interviews are done now.
* Don't feed me the line that the purpose is to see how a candidate approaches a problem. When you don't approach the problem in the way that the interviewer thinks you should, you are steered into approaching the problem that way, which puts you at a disadvantage if you disagree with that approach.
I switched to Mac OS X for my "desktop" use about about 3.5 years go. My experience since switching has been remarkably trouble-free, particularly compared to when I used Windows for the same stuff. I still have to run Windows (through a VM) for some apps and even my limited use of Windows is more prone to problems than my regular use of Mac OS.
In my day job, I am a Unix kernel developer (RIP Dennis Ritchie) and the Unix-iness of Mac OS X makes it easier to do the programming part of my job on the same system that also natively supports most of the apps needed for the business processes at work.
Incidentally, Apple seems to have resolved its update server issue because my update is now working.
My update on my iPhone 4 fails.
It downloaded the 774M file, backed up the phone, extracted the software, phoned home to verify, then BANG, internal error, unable to restore. Tried this several times.
On this most recent attempt, it was able to phone home to verify and started to restore, then it had to phone home again for some reason, then BANG again. However, on that attempt, it bricked my phone. I was able to put it in recovery mode, reconnect it to iTunes and do a restore. Got to the end of the restore and, I think, tried to phone to verify and, you guessed it, BANG.
Now the update server isn't even responding and my phone is still a brick. Oh, well.
In 1994, when our daughter was around a year old, we took her out to a salad bar restaurant (Fresh Choice, I think). She was playing with her food as one-year-olds do and it was very funny, so we decided to record it for posterity on the camcorder. When we did this, we were approached by a restaurant employee who told us that no photography was allowed inside the restaurant and asked me to stop videotaping my daughter. I did. I also pointed out that, given where we were sitting and the layout of the restaurant, it wasn't possible for me to shoot video of much more than my wife and daughter and the people sitting behind them. I also pointed out that not allowing us to shoot videos of our kid seems like a family-unfriendly policy and we would be passing the word on to our friends with young children. Later, on the same visit, we got a big apology from the manager, explaining that while it was company policy, we could go ahead and shoot video of our daughter. He also gave up free meal coupons for our next visit.
My 3GS slipped out of my pocket as I got in and out of my car to confirm it would fit in the space that I was backing into. After I ran it over (in a smart car), the touch screen looked like the one that fell from the skydiver's pocket. I hooked it up to iTunes and it sync'ed fine. I am an app developer and was able to hook it up to the dev tools and check out the console (not as many errors from the broken parts of the phone as I expected) and I still experiment with it. Unfortunately, the touch screen and digitizer unit cost about $90 and a new 3GS (with contract) was $49, so it wasn't worth repairing. But it was a great opportunity to open up a phone and see how it is put together. Even though the touch screen glass, being glass, is fragile, the rest of the phone seems pretty robust. But I imagine that other smart phones are just as robust.
The headline is "25% of Car Accidents Linked to Gadget Use", but that is a high figure from another study (from the National Safety Council). The study quoted here also mentions another study (Flanagan and Sayer) that says it is more like 3-4%. Most of the studies that I have seen seems to be approaching the situation "knowing" that cell phones are the problem. Other distractions are downplayed and/or ignored. Changes in society that impact individual's approach to driving and the amount of time spent in the car are ignored. It looks like more politics than science to me.
>The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it
>was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as
> an RF shield.
A few instances of this have been documented in the smart car forums. A 2m radio at 50W (high power for a lot of mobile 2m radios) using a thru-the-glass mounted antenna on the windscreen will shut down the car's electronics while transmitting. The same radio on 70cm at 35W (high power) does not shut down the electronics.
In the manual, smart says don't transmit with the antenna inside the passenger compartment. However, transmitting on my hand-held (5W) inside the passenger compartment (near the ECU) does not shutdown the electronics.
By current guesses, Apple had about 25k developers sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and only let 5k in. I am sure that the 20k developers who are (still) locked out are pleased as punch that the 5k got first opportunity to get their apps into the App Store.
Apple has been giving away the SDK, but you need to be in the developer program to run your code on an actual device (or to get your app into the App Store). They say that the Simulator in the SDK should be good enough even if it can't simulate one of the more interesting features of the iPhone/iPod touch, the accelerometer.
The iPhone and iPod touch are so cool that we just put up with everything that Apple does and be happy little developers until Apple thinks we deserve to be let in, right?
These are all standard features on many Nokia and Windows Mobile phones. Apple is still just trying to catch up. The only reason for strong US sales is that US carriers have been pushing such feature-poor phones that even the iPhone seems like an improvement. I have had a Nokia N95-3 (in the US) since the end of last year. I also have an iPod Touch. Overall, I think the N95 is a great phone, however, I am so sick of the crappy browser and the buggy IMAP e-mail client that if the iPhone had 3G and GPS, I would get an iPhone.