Ten-Tec has some decent radio kits. For $24 you can get the 1054 which is a stripped-down regen shortwave receiver. For $69 you can get the 1253 which is a complete regen receiver. Either will provide decent listening to both ham and shortwave broadcast stations.
Ramsey kits are ok, but you need to read carefully. For example, they advertise kits like the SR2 with a photo of it in a case. The case is a $14.95 option and you still don't get a speaker.
As for building ease, I can't really comment. The only recent kit I've built is the Ramsey SR2. It was easy but time-consuming and a bit boring, as I've soldered thousands of components in my time.
I'm not sure how much you can learn from one of these kits. They tend to not have much in the way of experimentation. You build the kit, play with it for an hour or two, then stash it on a shelf. If you're going to go the kit route, I would start with a simple blinking LED kit or something to learn soldering, then maybe a decent radio kit that you'll actually be able to use.
If you want to get the kids interested, I would go to Radio Shack and dig around in the back. There you will find some dusty books from the Engineer's Mini-Notebook line ($1.99). They have easy explanations, circuit diagrams, and lots of experiments to try. They don't make it trivial to find the parts and you'll be spending quite a bit of time prowling Radio Shack parts racks, but it's worth it. The kids will get to do some of the design work themselves.
90% of the developers won't be able to get anything done. The 10% that can hack around it will be the only ones able to code.
I've had a similar fight everywhere I've worked except my own company. I even had one IT director running around, asking everyone who I worked for, so he could complain about me running Windows 2000 when they weren't ready to migrate everyone yet. (Someone finally told him I worked for the CTO and he gave up.) These paper f-ing MCSE's get taught how to run a Windows network full of secretaries, phone droids, and marketing weasels. None of their classes or cram sessions talk about administering a network for developers. Maybe they should have a special cert for that.
Personally, I welcome the challenge of any paper MCSE that wants to try to lock down my machine. I use a laptop running a tightened Win2000, never leave it unlocked, and don't log onto the domain. They have to force my boss to make me let them change my box. Not gonna happen. Even worse, I tunnel my web browsing over SSH2 to my OpenBSD box at home. They'd really hate that if they noticed.
Anyone remember an old game (c. 1989) from Business Week that used to come in boxes of 5.25" floppies? You would run Microsoft for 5 years and see how well you did. The best I could do was to practically give away the software for 3 years, then once I had market share crank up the prices 1000%. Maybe Gates & ape-boy Ballme[r] have been playing that game.
Microsoft's developer tools have always been an afterthought. They would spend a couple months polishing what they were using internally and release it..Net is the first big step away from that. What's that saying? It always takes Microsoft 3 tries to get things right.
If they're disposing of them, load them into your car. It'll save them money on their waste disposal.
The problem I'm facing is that my company has piles of computers they're not using, but are less than 5 years old. They're hanging on to them for the depreciation on their taxes. They won't even sell them for less than the depreciated value (I don't blame them). I imagine plenty of other companies do the same thing. There's some talk about letting companies deduct the expense of PCs all in the first year. If that changes, it should be easier to find donations of 3-5 year old boxes.
Shouldn't that be Debian GNU/HURD, just to be fair?
HURD/CMU or HURD/Mach?
I can remember way back in 1991 or so, I was excited about the prospect of running a GNU/Mach system. Now 10 years later I can't even bring myself to read about it, much less download it and fiddle with it.
We used to play Quake II a lot. We even managed to play Diablo I together for about 14 hours.
We did get a networked Super Nintendo emulator (ZSNES) running and had some fun playing 2-player stuff on there.
But now that we've got a kid running around, we can't both get 4-10 hours of uninterrupted gaming at the same time. So we primarily we play crap from Yahoo! Games like Pool, Blackjack and Hearts.
Others pointed out that it is tuned for 5 connections, but there don't appear to be any license limits on the number of connections. There is a hard 2 gig limit on the size of a single database though. Here's a link to their info:
Of course, none of this should take anything away from MySQL, which I've also used on NT/2000 and works quite well. What it should do is kill the idea of using Access MDB files as a workgroup database.
windows has no embedded scripting language as for example OS/2 with REXX...would have to learn several different programming and scripting languages, pay for compilers (VB)...
FUD. Most modern versions of Windows, especially on the server, have the VBScript engine included at no extra cost. No compiler required.
We couldn't get a license for Microsoft SQL server from Management...
Not to take anything away from your use of MySQL, but Microsoft does have a free (as in beer) alternative to SQL Server: the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). It's free for Visual Studio users and I believe some versions of Office. It's essentially an untuned/mistuned version of SQL Server stripped of the admin tools. The license is actually amazingly useful. I think you can even redistribute it, use it for commercial production use, etc. It should take away anyone's excuses for treating Microsoft Access as if it were an actual database.
It might be interesting for them to also push this up to the state level. I know there are about 4 comm trailers / go-packs available throughout Florida, maybe through the Division of Forestry, though I'm pretty sure that they are only voice. It might be worthwile to push the issue of adding some data/internet capability to them or as a separate set of go-packs.
I would take a serious look at the idea of using Nettech's (or someone else's) stuff to do TCP/IP over the EDACS system. I know the radio shop guys (and probably Ericsson, Racom, or whoever is maintaining the system now) will resist it, especially given all the problems they've had with the system, but the impact on the system shouldn't be any different than the other data on the system. You take a normal EDACS data radio and the PC runs software that proxies/tunnels TCP/IP over the system. On the dispatch/server side, you just have another radio & PC to complete the other end of the tunnel. The expensive part is the software (I'm guessing $3k-5k for just the server and one client).
Maybe it's worth somebody throwing that to the radio shop and having them determine if it's feasable.
Actually, I've never seen the vehicle we're talking about. Maybe it's a new thing. Every big scene I've worked has been run out of the back of a Battalion Chief's SUV. Maybe each of those should have a laptop and with a cell phone dialup / CDPD connection.
Do what I do. I'm too f-ing lazy to keep up with the weekly patches. So I spent a couple hours a year ago and properly configured my IIS servers, following the published checklists. Now I review bug after bug and say "ok, that one can't impact me so I'll patch it later."
There is no reason a properly configured but completely unpatched IIS 4 or IIS 5 server could not have survived both the Nimda and Code Red worms.
Nimda made use of the Unicode directory traversal bug, which only lets you move around on the drive where the web documents are stored. Move the wwwroot to another drive, set file permissions as tight as possible, remove the sample applications, and you would have been safe. Every one of those is on any decent IIS admin's checklist.
Code Red made use of a bug in the Index Server. Removing unused mappings is near the top of every decent IIS admin's list. In fact, one IIS server I have didn't have the patch applied when Code Red hit. I didn't bother to apply it until almost a month later.
Hillsborough is a tough area for wireless. CDPD would be fine in the built-up areas, but when you're out at a gasoline tanker spill in south county you're lucky to get a cell phone to work at all.
I know others mentioned ham radio. It's just not a realistic option for what you need. Yes, I know all about APRS, but look at the APRS map for west central Florida. There's a big gaping hole where Hillsborough is, except for the NWS in Ruskin.
Honestly, HCFR's best bet is probably to pack a standard consumer dish and other equipment. Pack spares of everything important. They won't have time to set it up right away, but if they're there for days, they'll have time.
Another option could be to do data over their existing EDACS radio system (which is an 800MHz system, not a 900MHz). I know HCSO does data on the system, but I don't think anyone is doing IP or web browsing over it. Companies like Nettech sell systems to tunnel IP data over radio systems. Nettech calls theirs Smart IP. Their website also appears to be dead (http://www.nettechrf.com/) but their phone number is 609-734-0300. Here's a link to an old press release about Smart IP.
There are companies that sell systems that you're looking for (a self-contained, vehicle-mounted, auto-aligning satellite transceiver).
NorcomNetworks sells a unit that is physically what you are looking for. It's a crock-pot sized unit that mounts on the truck. Inside, the dish automatically rotates and aligns with the satellite. Many utility companies use them. The problems are that I don't know if they provide a decent IP layer over that to browse the web and the cost can be a bit high. Their web site is down (http://www.norcomnetworks.com) but their phone number is 703-262-0500.
I'm considering retargeting myself to web development in order to open up more job possibilities.
I would start by checking current job listings for your area. In my area I don't see a single Perl or PHP job, but there are several jobs requiring ASP and SQL Server/Oracle. It's my rough feeling that the open source technologies (Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL) still is not being used at most established companies. They're focusing on the Microsoft stuff (ASP, IIS, SQL Server) or the Solaris/Java route (JSP, Servlets, Oracle). There are a few doing IBM Websphere and DB2 with Java.
Personally, I have a broad range of skills. My server-side skills are the strongest and I mainly do integration with middleware. But I also know HTML/Javascript really well and have gotten pretty good at Photoshop. Being able to do both the client and server side can be a good selling point. In a small company you can replace 2 people. In a larger company you can bridge the server and client teams.
If you want to learn the client-side stuff, I'd start with the free trial downloads of Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. Those are the most marketable skills. You probably want to learn Photoshop as well, but there's a lot of overlap with Fireworks. I would stay away from Microsoft Frontpage since there are about a billion people with Frontpage skills on the market.
On the server side, I think it's a tossup between the most marketable skills. In part it depends on what language experience you have. If you know Visual Basic, go Microsoft and learn ASP with Access and SQL Server (or the MS Data Engine). On the top end, learn MTS and MSMQ. If you know C or Java, definately look at the Java side. Get Tomcat (apache.org) and do Java Servlets and Java Server Pages with Oracle. If you can get Solaris (even the free download of Solaris for Intel) working and use that, even better.
You could also enhance your skillset with some things like streaming audio/video, search engine optimization, cross-language, or middleware integration.
Two companies ago I travelled up to 25% for a while. I think I got two comp days, one for staying on-site and working over a 3-day holiday weekend, and another after working from 10pm to 4am at one customer, flying to another customer site, and working there until 9pm that night and 11 hour days next 2 days. I just couldn't stay awake when I got home from that one.
The only direct benefit I can think of to a job requiring 100% travel is that you have a job. I imagine others would trade positions with you. With a young child, there's no way I could do it unless I was making about 50% more than I could otherwise. Without the kid though, I'd probably do it.
Make some deals with the company. One of my coworkers regularly got the company to fly his family out to a customer site if he stayed there over the weekend. Instead of paying his airfare to come home, they'd send his wife out there. They'd also get reduced ticket and hotel rates for staying over the weekend if they planned ahead.
On the other hand, you could start to live a double life. I worked one place where there were rumors about someone working sales for two companies at once. Also, most of those heavy travel guys I've worked with are always looking for their next ex-wife.
Make sure you have a laptop with a DVD or get an external. Sure beats staring at the wall when you're snowed in at Newark for two days. You can use one of those rent-by-mail DVD websites.
Take up some interesting hobby. Maybe ham radio (I regularly hear visiting hams chatting with locals from their hotels). Visit every Hooters in the region. Go see a home baseball game in every stadium. Learn more about airplanes and airports. Take up photography. Start writing letters/postcards to friends and family.
Wizards of the Coast (aka TSR) has their d20 Open Gaming system, covered by the Open Gaming License. It looks like it is turning out better than a lot of critics thought it would.
Of course, not 3 minutes after I post that, the station starts playing Metallica's Fade to Black. Right after a Clear Channel annoucement that they were donating the $100,000 from their latest amateur pornstar contest to a relief fund.
I'm not sure if it is related, but apparently 98 Rock (Tampa) DJ Bubba the Love Sponge walked out during his morning show. He quits about every two months though.
Watch until either interviews with victims' families or Bobby Batista's crossed eyes gross me out.
Flip to Fox News.
Scan Slashdot.
Stare at my huge backlog of work.
Close all the browsers and the tv tuner and try to work for 30 minutes.
Goto 1.
Why do I do it? Honestly, I was halfway expecting to hear news of a special forces raid on bin Laden. It still wouldn't suprise me if that story broke, hopefully after the fact, in the next week.
Slashdot Mirror
Ten-Tec has some decent radio kits. For $24 you can get the 1054 which is a stripped-down regen shortwave receiver. For $69 you can get the 1253 which is a complete regen receiver. Either will provide decent listening to both ham and shortwave broadcast stations.
Ramsey kits are ok, but you need to read carefully. For example, they advertise kits like the SR2 with a photo of it in a case. The case is a $14.95 option and you still don't get a speaker.
As for building ease, I can't really comment. The only recent kit I've built is the Ramsey SR2. It was easy but time-consuming and a bit boring, as I've soldered thousands of components in my time.
Nuts & Volts magazine is a good source of ads for kits.
I'm not sure how much you can learn from one of these kits. They tend to not have much in the way of experimentation. You build the kit, play with it for an hour or two, then stash it on a shelf. If you're going to go the kit route, I would start with a simple blinking LED kit or something to learn soldering, then maybe a decent radio kit that you'll actually be able to use.
If you want to get the kids interested, I would go to Radio Shack and dig around in the back. There you will find some dusty books from the Engineer's Mini-Notebook line ($1.99). They have easy explanations, circuit diagrams, and lots of experiments to try. They don't make it trivial to find the parts and you'll be spending quite a bit of time prowling Radio Shack parts racks, but it's worth it. The kids will get to do some of the design work themselves.
vi /usr/mail/ratbert
90% of the developers won't be able to get anything done. The 10% that can hack around it will be the only ones able to code.
I've had a similar fight everywhere I've worked except my own company. I even had one IT director running around, asking everyone who I worked for, so he could complain about me running Windows 2000 when they weren't ready to migrate everyone yet. (Someone finally told him I worked for the CTO and he gave up.) These paper f-ing MCSE's get taught how to run a Windows network full of secretaries, phone droids, and marketing weasels. None of their classes or cram sessions talk about administering a network for developers. Maybe they should have a special cert for that.
Personally, I welcome the challenge of any paper MCSE that wants to try to lock down my machine. I use a laptop running a tightened Win2000, never leave it unlocked, and don't log onto the domain. They have to force my boss to make me let them change my box. Not gonna happen. Even worse, I tunnel my web browsing over SSH2 to my OpenBSD box at home. They'd really hate that if they noticed.
Anyone remember an old game (c. 1989) from Business Week that used to come in boxes of 5.25" floppies? You would run Microsoft for 5 years and see how well you did. The best I could do was to practically give away the software for 3 years, then once I had market share crank up the prices 1000%. Maybe Gates & ape-boy Ballme[r] have been playing that game.
This site is one of my favorites.
Microsoft's developer tools have always been an afterthought. They would spend a couple months polishing what they were using internally and release it. .Net is the first big step away from that. What's that saying? It always takes Microsoft 3 tries to get things right.
If they're disposing of them, load them into your car. It'll save them money on their waste disposal.
The problem I'm facing is that my company has piles of computers they're not using, but are less than 5 years old. They're hanging on to them for the depreciation on their taxes. They won't even sell them for less than the depreciated value (I don't blame them). I imagine plenty of other companies do the same thing. There's some talk about letting companies deduct the expense of PCs all in the first year. If that changes, it should be easier to find donations of 3-5 year old boxes.
Shouldn't that be Debian GNU/HURD, just to be fair?
HURD/CMU or HURD/Mach?
I can remember way back in 1991 or so, I was excited about the prospect of running a GNU/Mach system. Now 10 years later I can't even bring myself to read about it, much less download it and fiddle with it.
We used to play Quake II a lot. We even managed to play Diablo I together for about 14 hours. We did get a networked Super Nintendo emulator (ZSNES) running and had some fun playing 2-player stuff on there. But now that we've got a kid running around, we can't both get 4-10 hours of uninterrupted gaming at the same time. So we primarily we play crap from Yahoo! Games like Pool, Blackjack and Hearts.
Others pointed out that it is tuned for 5 connections, but there don't appear to be any license limits on the number of connections. There is a hard 2 gig limit on the size of a single database though. Here's a link to their info:
Of course, none of this should take anything away from MySQL, which I've also used on NT/2000 and works quite well. What it should do is kill the idea of using Access MDB files as a workgroup database.
windows has no embedded scripting language as for example OS/2 with REXX...would have to learn several different programming and scripting languages, pay for compilers (VB)...
FUD. Most modern versions of Windows, especially on the server, have the VBScript engine included at no extra cost. No compiler required.
The downside of course, is that it's VB.
We couldn't get a license for Microsoft SQL server from Management...
Not to take anything away from your use of MySQL, but Microsoft does have a free (as in beer) alternative to SQL Server: the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). It's free for Visual Studio users and I believe some versions of Office. It's essentially an untuned/mistuned version of SQL Server stripped of the admin tools. The license is actually amazingly useful. I think you can even redistribute it, use it for commercial production use, etc. It should take away anyone's excuses for treating Microsoft Access as if it were an actual database.
I don't have online resources, but especially in Philly, try checking with some professional musicians. They network pretty well about this topic.
Or buy a laptop/palmtop and don't leave home without it.
Out of the roughly 120 people I know that have been laid off at my company, I can count the number that were worth keeping on my middle finger.
It might be interesting for them to also push this up to the state level. I know there are about 4 comm trailers / go-packs available throughout Florida, maybe through the Division of Forestry, though I'm pretty sure that they are only voice. It might be worthwile to push the issue of adding some data/internet capability to them or as a separate set of go-packs.
I would take a serious look at the idea of using Nettech's (or someone else's) stuff to do TCP/IP over the EDACS system. I know the radio shop guys (and probably Ericsson, Racom, or whoever is maintaining the system now) will resist it, especially given all the problems they've had with the system, but the impact on the system shouldn't be any different than the other data on the system. You take a normal EDACS data radio and the PC runs software that proxies/tunnels TCP/IP over the system. On the dispatch/server side, you just have another radio & PC to complete the other end of the tunnel. The expensive part is the software (I'm guessing $3k-5k for just the server and one client). Maybe it's worth somebody throwing that to the radio shop and having them determine if it's feasable.
Actually, I've never seen the vehicle we're talking about. Maybe it's a new thing. Every big scene I've worked has been run out of the back of a Battalion Chief's SUV. Maybe each of those should have a laptop and with a cell phone dialup / CDPD connection.
Do what I do. I'm too f-ing lazy to keep up with the weekly patches. So I spent a couple hours a year ago and properly configured my IIS servers, following the published checklists. Now I review bug after bug and say "ok, that one can't impact me so I'll patch it later."
There is no reason a properly configured but completely unpatched IIS 4 or IIS 5 server could not have survived both the Nimda and Code Red worms.
Nimda made use of the Unicode directory traversal bug, which only lets you move around on the drive where the web documents are stored. Move the wwwroot to another drive, set file permissions as tight as possible, remove the sample applications, and you would have been safe. Every one of those is on any decent IIS admin's checklist.
Code Red made use of a bug in the Index Server. Removing unused mappings is near the top of every decent IIS admin's list. In fact, one IIS server I have didn't have the patch applied when Code Red hit. I didn't bother to apply it until almost a month later.
Hillsborough is a tough area for wireless. CDPD would be fine in the built-up areas, but when you're out at a gasoline tanker spill in south county you're lucky to get a cell phone to work at all.
I know others mentioned ham radio. It's just not a realistic option for what you need. Yes, I know all about APRS, but look at the APRS map for west central Florida. There's a big gaping hole where Hillsborough is, except for the NWS in Ruskin.
Honestly, HCFR's best bet is probably to pack a standard consumer dish and other equipment. Pack spares of everything important. They won't have time to set it up right away, but if they're there for days, they'll have time.
Another option could be to do data over their existing EDACS radio system (which is an 800MHz system, not a 900MHz). I know HCSO does data on the system, but I don't think anyone is doing IP or web browsing over it. Companies like Nettech sell systems to tunnel IP data over radio systems. Nettech calls theirs Smart IP. Their website also appears to be dead (http://www.nettechrf.com/) but their phone number is 609-734-0300. Here's a link to an old press release about Smart IP.
There are companies that sell systems that you're looking for (a self-contained, vehicle-mounted, auto-aligning satellite transceiver). NorcomNetworks sells a unit that is physically what you are looking for. It's a crock-pot sized unit that mounts on the truck. Inside, the dish automatically rotates and aligns with the satellite. Many utility companies use them. The problems are that I don't know if they provide a decent IP layer over that to browse the web and the cost can be a bit high. Their web site is down (http://www.norcomnetworks.com) but their phone number is 703-262-0500.
I'm considering retargeting myself to web development in order to open up more job possibilities.
I would start by checking current job listings for your area. In my area I don't see a single Perl or PHP job, but there are several jobs requiring ASP and SQL Server/Oracle. It's my rough feeling that the open source technologies (Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL) still is not being used at most established companies. They're focusing on the Microsoft stuff (ASP, IIS, SQL Server) or the Solaris/Java route (JSP, Servlets, Oracle). There are a few doing IBM Websphere and DB2 with Java.
Personally, I have a broad range of skills. My server-side skills are the strongest and I mainly do integration with middleware. But I also know HTML/Javascript really well and have gotten pretty good at Photoshop. Being able to do both the client and server side can be a good selling point. In a small company you can replace 2 people. In a larger company you can bridge the server and client teams.
If you want to learn the client-side stuff, I'd start with the free trial downloads of Macromedia Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash. Those are the most marketable skills. You probably want to learn Photoshop as well, but there's a lot of overlap with Fireworks. I would stay away from Microsoft Frontpage since there are about a billion people with Frontpage skills on the market.
On the server side, I think it's a tossup between the most marketable skills. In part it depends on what language experience you have. If you know Visual Basic, go Microsoft and learn ASP with Access and SQL Server (or the MS Data Engine). On the top end, learn MTS and MSMQ. If you know C or Java, definately look at the Java side. Get Tomcat (apache.org) and do Java Servlets and Java Server Pages with Oracle. If you can get Solaris (even the free download of Solaris for Intel) working and use that, even better.
You could also enhance your skillset with some things like streaming audio/video, search engine optimization, cross-language, or middleware integration.
I wish my company had a tiny loss so I didn't have to pay taxes...
Two companies ago I travelled up to 25% for a while. I think I got two comp days, one for staying on-site and working over a 3-day holiday weekend, and another after working from 10pm to 4am at one customer, flying to another customer site, and working there until 9pm that night and 11 hour days next 2 days. I just couldn't stay awake when I got home from that one.
The only direct benefit I can think of to a job requiring 100% travel is that you have a job. I imagine others would trade positions with you. With a young child, there's no way I could do it unless I was making about 50% more than I could otherwise. Without the kid though, I'd probably do it.
Make some deals with the company. One of my coworkers regularly got the company to fly his family out to a customer site if he stayed there over the weekend. Instead of paying his airfare to come home, they'd send his wife out there. They'd also get reduced ticket and hotel rates for staying over the weekend if they planned ahead.
On the other hand, you could start to live a double life. I worked one place where there were rumors about someone working sales for two companies at once. Also, most of those heavy travel guys I've worked with are always looking for their next ex-wife.
Make sure you have a laptop with a DVD or get an external. Sure beats staring at the wall when you're snowed in at Newark for two days. You can use one of those rent-by-mail DVD websites.
Take up some interesting hobby. Maybe ham radio (I regularly hear visiting hams chatting with locals from their hotels). Visit every Hooters in the region. Go see a home baseball game in every stadium. Learn more about airplanes and airports. Take up photography. Start writing letters/postcards to friends and family.
Of course, there's always porn.
Wizards of the Coast (aka TSR) has their d20 Open Gaming system, covered by the Open Gaming License. It looks like it is turning out better than a lot of critics thought it would.
Of course, not 3 minutes after I post that, the station starts playing Metallica's Fade to Black. Right after a Clear Channel annoucement that they were donating the $100,000 from their latest amateur pornstar contest to a relief fund.
I'm not sure if it is related, but apparently 98 Rock (Tampa) DJ Bubba the Love Sponge walked out during his morning show. He quits about every two months though.
Why do I do it? Honestly, I was halfway expecting to hear news of a special forces raid on bin Laden. It still wouldn't suprise me if that story broke, hopefully after the fact, in the next week.