Mon Jun 28 19:49:58 PDT 2004

Finally got around to moving the 555 timer from the old KAP camera to the new Kodak EasyShare CX6200. Turned out to be incredibly easy to do. There was plenty of space in the Kodak, and while I needed to cut the plastic a little, it went fairly cleanly and smoothly using a pair of diagonal wire cutters.

I ended up mounting it on a small 2in x 2ft board with a 5/16 in hole cut at each end. On the one end I used a bolt with wings to hold the camera to the board via the tripod screw mount. The other end I pulled the kite line through and wrapped it over the end of the board to hold it tight. This may have been a bad plan, since on the 2nd flight when the wind really picked up, the line snapped right a the point where it was looped around the board, so either rubbing on the board or something caused it to break under the heightened stress.

On the plus side there were lots of good photos. The camera was only minorly damaged. The plastic where the screw mount on the bottem is broke, but some glue should help put it back together. The really bad news is that I lost the kite. I seem to have trouble keeping a kite and a camera together and working for any length of time.

So, lessons learned – it gets windy around here in the evening and I really should have switched to the 200lb line before continuing to fly. Fortunately, the latter is a mistake I can’t make again since I lost over half of my line and no longer really have enough of the small line on the reel to fly a significant single-line kite.

Tue Jun 15 22:32:44 PDT 2004

Been quite a while since I’ve dumped some info into one of these plan files. Anyway. Some notes:

Verizon Business ADSL a 1.5/364 can be had for about $40 a month if you can work through the hassles of getting it set up (3 weeks!). Compared to Comcast which Michael got up and running in about 3 hours, including a tech support call. I’m pretty amazed that Verizon gets away with this. Anyway – it all appears to work, performance is very close to the max rates according to the little applet thingie on www.dslreports.com. Also, the "Terms of Service" have no restrictions on running your own servers. Yea!

Learned a few things along the way of note:

1. My little linksys access point doesn’t really like pushing data all the way across the street, which was a little surprising. We had it over at Michael’s house upstairs and could only get poor reception in our upstairs front room, and slightly worse reception downstairs at the front of the house to the point where I couldn’t quite keep a VNC tunnel open.
2. To do cascading NAT, you need to not reuse the NATed address ranges. In other words, if you have a 192.164.0.0 network behind a NAT, don’t put another 192.164.0.0 network behind it, use a 10.0.1.0 network or something like that.
3. Dynamic DNS from dyndns is a great deal at $40 a year, and it works seamlessly so far. I’m really impressed with how easy it was to get working and the little updater script had great install instructions and worked first time I tried it.
4. Getting a Xbox to dual boot with a modchip is much harder than it sounds, but that’s a story for another time.

Mon Oct 6 19:48:47 PDT 2003

Bible Study Notes for 1st John 3:19-4:6

v19-20 We know our thoughts and motives, our hearts are often impure. And God, who can see our hearts is great enough to forgive us when our hearts do indeed condemn us.

v21-22 When we are in a right relationship with God and in alignment with his will, we can ask things of Him that are in his will and he will give them to us. John 9:31, 15:7

v23-24 By "name" he doesn’t just mean the word, he means the nature and character of the person, Jesus. Look at Psalm124:8 "Our help is in the name of the Lord".

"We cannot begin the Christian life until we accept Jesus Christ for what he is; and we have not accepted him in any real sense of the term until our attitude to men is the same as his own attitude of love." – William Barclay

In v.24 he once again admonishes us to keep abiding in Christ and keep his commandments. He reminds us we know God loves us and cares for us and shows us this by giving us the Holy Spirit. As a comforter, to guide us, teaching us, and interceding for us.

Chapter 4:1-6

John is addressing a 1st century problem that we aren’t as familiar with here in the 21st century. There were many spiritual manifestations taking place at this time. Deuteronomy 13:1-5 points out that there are signs and wonders that aren’t from God. But there’s some clear guidance that I think we can use to keep our hearts and minds right with God.

In v.1 he tells us to be careful, and not trust every spirit or prophet who comes to them. In v.2 and 3, John tells us how to test who is from God and who is not.

If they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. This is important because if Jesus didn’t become a human, then he couldn’t be our example, he couldn’t be our high priest, interceding for us, and understanding our problems (Hebrews 4:14-15), to save us (without his incarnation we have no evidence that our bodies can become the temple of the Holy Spirit), and is our salvation and bridge to God.

In v4-6 John lays out the good news that Christians don’t need to fear heretics. Christ has victory over all the powers of evil. But the problem is that false teachers will neither listen to or accept the truth that Christ offers in his word. They will remain opposed to the truth.

Mon Aug 25 19:50:16 PDT 2003

Notes for Tuesday Bible Study 1 John 2:12-14 Encouragement and Warning:

The three groups that he addresses could be interperted several ways, but the most plausible is simply the level of spiritual maturity. One of the commentaries points out also that this is looking like a fairly poetic piece of writing, so we might be well advised to not take these classifications completely literally, and it also helps explains his interesting use of repetition. Another suggestion is that these are actually part of an creed or song used in the early church.

Fathers – possibly refering to those who actually were with Jesus during his

earthly ministry, or merely those more spiritually mature. Note his
reference to Christ as "Him who has been from the beginning", similar to
John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the
Word was God". Young men – possibly more mature christians, but not with Jesus during his
earthly ministry. Children – new christians who have yet to prove themselves in their walk or
without much experience. He uses the same phrases in 2:1, 2:28, 3:7, 4:4
and 5:21. It is also possible that he is refering to all christians as
"little children" much in the same way that older people refer to their
"boys" or "girls" despite the fact that they are adults with children of
their own. Recall that John is around 100 years old at this point, so just
about everybody on the planet at that time is substantially younger than
him.

Why this encouragement at this time? He’s been hitting them pretty hard with the "if you aren’t walking in the light" bit, and since this letter is going to a lot of people with different maturity levels, he wants to make it clear that he recgonizes that some of them are doing what they should be doing and that he’s not just being negative.

The "young men" have overcome the evil one, and he commends them for it. How have they defeated him? Through strength and having the word of God in them. This is a frequent theme throughout the entire Bible.

God commands the Israelites to take his words to heart in Deuteronomy 11:18, "You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul…". David speaks of God’s word as protection against sin in Psalm 119:11, "Your word I have have treasured in my heard that I might not sin against you.". Jesus rebukes satan when he was tempted in the wilderness using the word of God from the OT in Matthew 4:1-11 (read). Paul also encourages the church in Ephesus to put on the whole armor of God which includes "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God", Ephesians 6:17b. The author of Hebrews has great words for us in Hebrews 4:12 where he states:

And the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged
sword, and piercing as far as to the division of soul and spirit, of both
joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the
heart And in Revelation 1:16, John is describing his vision of Jesus and states "out of his mouth came a sharp two edged sword". But the real kicker is Paul writing to Timothy, teaching and training him to be a minister of the church in 2 Timothy 3:16-17:
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof,
for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may
be adequate, equipped for every good work.

Clearly we need to have the word of God in us to be sucessful, effective christians. That comes from studying the Bible like we do here once a week, but it also comes (much more easily) from actively spending time reading and studying the Bible on a daily basis. That’s something that I really haven’t been doing recently. But when looking at this scripture, and all the other scriptures that clearly show that I need to really to take the time to know and understand what is in the Bible so that I can be an effective christian. And unless I start doing it on a daily basis again, I’m not going to get there, I’ll just be treading water.

So, reality check. I need to read the Bible on a daily basis. A couple of years ago, I ran across an interesting suggestion on how to read through the Bible in a year. Read three chapters a day, one starting in Genesis, one starting at Psalms and one starting at Matthew. The breaks work out about right for finishing all of them about the same time and in right about a year of reading. It also helps you get through the dry books like Leviticus because you have Psalms and the gospels to get you through. Unfortunately, I only got to midway through Deuteronomy. I need to finish this and get back into the habit of reading the Word every day. And I’d like you all to hold me accountable to that. I need your help to keep me honest about this, so I’m asking you as fellow christians to ask me about if I’m keeping up with my daily reading.

So, now let’s take another angle on these three verses. What do these verses tell us about what we should see in ourselves as we grow as christians: First, forgivness from sins through Christ and his atoning sacrifice as described in v. 12. Second, as we become more mature, we grow to know God better (the fathers). And as we grow in Christ we gain victory over the evil one in our day-to-day lives through having the word of God and the Spirit of God in us.

———- A minor aside. Disagreements on people issues do happen within the church. Paul and Barnabas got into "sharp disagrement" over whether or not to take John-Mark on a second missionary journey. Mark had turned back partway through the first missionary journey, so Paul didn’t want to take him along on the second. Paul and Barnabas disagreed so much they went in different directions (see Acts 15:36-41). And while Barnabas and John-Mark are not mentioned again in Acts, Paul commends Barnabas in 1 Corinthians 6:6 for working to support himself, and for standing with him in going to the Gentiles in Galationas 2:9. Mark appearently worked with Peter after working with Barnabas, as he is mentioned in 1 Peter 5:13. He was also with Paul again during Paul’s first Roman imprisonment Colossians 3.10 and Paul asks for John-Mark to come be with him in his final days 2 Timothy 4:11 "Pick up Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for service.".

So what can we learn from this story? Disagreements about how, or who should do things in the church aren’t anything new. Issues that aren’t about theology that matter, may not really be solveable by us humans. There isn’t any blame laid out here in the Bible, it just states that they had a sharp disagreement on an issue that they separated. Both men are commended repeatedly for their work and their beliefs, and it appears that either over time, or due to some events, Paul is reconciled to Mark, and there isn’t much evidence one way or the other on his relationship with Barnabas after this other than references that Paul makes in which he refers to Barnabas like a partner in the work of the church.

Wed Aug 6 13:51:39 PDT 2003

So two weekends ago we got out to Cannon Beach with my 7ft Delta-Coyne kite and after a little messing with the bridle, got it up. The we attached the camera, and really couldn’t quite get the camera up where we were flying (up on the beach), We then moved the camera up the line and in the process forgot to turn the camera back on, so even though by moving down the beach and having a great flight due to the higher winds closer to the water we didn’t get any pictures!

But the real issue is that I was moving up the beach to keep it flying high, and that was in a 15-20mph wind. Clearly for inland use we need a lower weight camera payload, or a bigger kite. Visiting a local kite shop, I managed to talk them out of a pair of fairly thick (5/8in?) 4ft fiberglass spars for a reasonable price, and they had a really nice "double french military" kite, which is like a double-box Delta-Coyne, but without the delta. I was really tempted to buy it since it was under $70 for an 8ftx4ft kite (http://www.mrkites.com/), and they even claimed that you could lift a video camera with it. But I enjoy building the kites, so I looked at theirs and I’m seriously planning on building my own double-box but integrating with Delta wings.

The new kite will be roughly 4×11, which is much larger than the 3×7 that I originally built. I’ve got most of the parts already, and only need an additional yard of fabric to build it. I’m going to go with mostly red and black with some yellow highlites.

I started work on the new kite and it is a lot more work than the previous one. Part of it is that I’m piecing most of the panels from two or more pieces of fabric for design/asthetic reasons. I’m having some difficulities with the piecing, but the end results should be worth it.

I’ve also been working on the prismiq. After getting the linux server working I started tinkering with the xml configuration files. I wrote a quick perl script/hack that created a well ordered list that is artist-based instead of album based. But bottom line, the client code on the prismiq doesn’t support hierarchy, and slowness between pages makes navigation unacceptably slow, even worse than the rio’s interface.

The other thing I tried was modifying a bookmark to point at the TVGuide site. For some reason the bookmarks have the funky ids but the id values don’t show up anywhere else in the config files. So I modified one of the entries and now when I try and access the bookmarks page on the prismiq it just displays a grey screen so the bookmarks.xml file must have some other relationship or interactions.

The two things that are bothering me are: the prismiq user interface isn’t at the level of quality that I expected and while they aren’t releasing developer docs, which makes any simple changes like adding a bookmark an exercise in reverse engineering.

Tue Jul 22 22:24:43 PDT 2003

So Prismiq released a "preview release" of their Linux media server, so I purchased one of their machines. The machine is OK, but after an awful lot of debugging on the linux server I discovered that their server detection mechanism basically consists of the server dumping UDP packets to a seemingly meaningless address 239.251.255.255 at a fairly good rate (At least 1 a second). Apparently these packets are detected by the prismiq client which can then identify the sender from the header.

This mechanism seems like a bad idea for several reasons.

1. Constantly dropping packets on your network seems like a inefficient waste

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of resources. 2. These packets are routable to someplace, currently mine are headed for the
WAN. This is really bad for me since they go out the wrong ethernet
interface, so the client never sees them. 3. Some poor network out there is getting a lot of UDP packets.

Anyway, hopefully the prismiq developers will respond with a simpler solution than the current idea that I have which is to add a routing rule to dump the UDP packets onto my local interface instead of going out to the WAN. But I’m a bit hesitant to add another rule, as I’m not that good at writing these rules and I’m concerned that it might have some strange side effects…

We also tried flying the kite again yesterday, but the wind was still too variable. We are going to have to go to the coast to get any steady wind.

Tue Jul 29 23:18:27 PDT 2003

UPDATE: Turns out that the UDP packets are multicast packets. So adding a rule to support multicast routing to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local to route them:

sbin/ip route add 224.0.0.0/4 dev eth0

Was the necessary trick :-)

Tue Jul 15 09:30:36 PDT 2003

Interesting weekend. I built a Delta-Conye (box/delta hybrid) kite this weekend. Building it wasn’t really that hard. Got some great instructions on KiteMongers

http://www.kitemonger.com/kiteplan/sbd/index.html

It actually was pretty fun and easy to put together. I had a lot of "help" from the cats while trying to work. I even got out the camera to try and dissuade them from helping me quite so much, but thye just kept on playing and making a mess of things. But I got some fun photos of them as well as some good photos of the kite in various stages of construction:

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/kite_building

Ran into a couple of problems when flying it:

First, the 1/4 inch wooden dowels aren’t sufficient for the cross spar in moderate wind. My first flight in the field by our house was going great, the kite was about 400ft and when I stopped it from going out further the high wind snapped the backspar. It then dropped moderatly quickly. I pulled it in as quickly as possible which probably kept it out of the powerlines, but I ended up with the kiteline over a corner of brush, trees and blackberry bushes. After finally retreiveing the kite and spending a lot of time that evening rewinding the kiteline. I found that we do have one kite store in Portland,

Paint The Sky Kites
828 NW 23rd Ave
Portland, OR 97210
503 222 5096

Unfortunately they don’t seem to be much of a kite-building shop, but they do have spars and such to repair the stunt kites they sell, so I got 3 0.20×48 fiberglass rods (all they had) for $1.85 a piece, so I bought all 3 that they had, which turned out to be a good thing.

Upon returning the sewing machine we cut the fiberglass rod to 36′ and got the kite up again, but crashed it into a lightpost and snapped the delta wing spar. So we pulled the wing spars out and replaced them both with the two remaining fiberglass spars.

Next flight we landed it on it’s side and shoved the spar through the pocket since I just used the ripstop nylon for the spar pockets instead of cordua or something stronger. So after sewing denim flaps to reenforce them and sanding the corners of the spar edges, back up it went again, and while it landed on the roof, it worked fine, but the wind just wasn’t consistent enough to keep it up enough for KAP.

In other news, Prismiq has released a "preview release" of their Linux server, so I’ve ordered one with a keyboard to start playing around with it. Laurie isn’t happy with the user interface on the Rio, so at a minimum it should be a decent Rio replacement. If things go well and I can get it working as a full DVR solution with either MythTV or freevo, I’ll buy one for upstairs (I even have a spare wireless card that should work).

I’ve really been enjoying the SciFi Stargate reruns on Mondays. There’s some really great comedy in some of them.

Thu Jul 10 18:54:29 PDT 2003

I may get to sell off Laurie’s old college fridge. Needed the dimentions for the potential buyer:

Internal Dimensions

side view:

14 deep on top
+————-+
| |
| |
| | 15 1/2 tall
| |
+—-+ |
| |
| |
+——–+
9 deep on bottom

Front view:

16 1/4 across
+————–+
| | | &gt;—- freezer part is 6 1/4 tall by 8 in
| | |
| +—-| 15 1/2 tall
| |
| |
| |
| |
+————–+
A

The model seems to be a Kenmore 564.9931704

Update: the potential buyer found one at Lowe’s for $58. I guess ours isn’t acutally worth that much then…

Sat Jul 5 16:03:32 PDT 2003

Laurie and I went out the coast on Wednesday as we both had the day off. We tried flying her dad’s kite with the camera attached at Oceanside, but to say the least, it didn’t go well since the wind was strong, but gusting in multiple directions. We got it up for a few seconds at a time, but between the dual lines, gusty wind, long tail on the kite and the extra load of the camera it just wasn’t working. So we packed it up and went to get lunch in Tillamook.

We did learn a few useful things:

• Oceanside isn’t the best place to do it due to the cliffs causing swirling

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and unpredictable wind.
– A two-line stunt kite probably isn’t the best choice for a kite
– Recommendations to get the kite up, then attach the camera to the line now
sounds like a vastly superior way of doing things.
– The EZ Mega Cam by Ezonics has photo quality about like a inexpensive
disposable film camera. http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/KAP_1
– Ditching the camera into the sand probably isn’t very good for it and
cleaning it isn’t very easy.

Anyway, we had a fairly nice time the rest of the day. After lunch we went to Cape Lookout, walked along the beach, took some photos and after getting ice cream at the Tillamook Dairy we stopped at a couple of places along the Wilson river on our way back home and got some interesting photos.

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/July_3_2003_coast

On the evening of the 4th we hung out in the neighborhood. At the end our street there’s a bit of a field, which will get developed in a year or so I’m sure. But a number of our neighbors were out with their kids setting off fireworks and from the field we could just see the Hillsboro fireworks show over the tops of the trees. I tried playing with the manual exposure to photograph the fireworks and it turned out to be fairly easy. I got some good shots of the little ones. Unfortunately the big ones that were being set off at the Washington County Fairgrounds were a little too far away to get good photos of, but I got a couple of them as well.

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/2003-4th-fireworks

Mon Jun 30 17:10:21 PDT 2003

This weekend I managed to actually get the camera timer circuitry built and into the cheep $30 EZ Cam that I intend to use for some aerial kite photography. The design that James Gentles had up on his website over at:

http://www.gentles.milestonenet.co.uk/KAP/Pencam/pencam.htm

Was very helpful, except I couldn’t get it working with the diode in place. Fortuantely it works fine without it. I’ve got some photos from part of the construction and I’ll do a nice writeup on it sometime in the near future along with (hopefully) some really cool photos from the camera.

We got Laurie’s dad’s kite out and managed to get it into the air once or twice in a small field by the house on Sunday, but we couldn’t keep it in the air because of unreliable wind. But we did learn basically how to control it and how it sits in the air, so I’m fairly confident that we can attach the camera and give it a lift sometime when we can get some decent wind.

Another side effect of upgrading gallery to 1.3.4 was loosing a previous hack I had created that worked around a "Apache/PHP" bug that caused multiple copies of photos to be uploaded when doing the bulk uploads from a local directory. Fortunately with a little thinking I was able to put together a bit of code to work around the problem. Basically I create a hash of the filenames that have been processed and if an identically named file shows up, I skip processing it. Here’s the section of code that I modified slightly in save_photos.php to make it happy.

&gt;?php $didFileHash = Array(); while (sizeof($userfile)) {

$name = array_shift($userfile_name);
$file = array_shift($userfile);
if (!empty($usercaption) && is_array($usercaption)) {
$caption = removeTags(array_shift($usercaption));
}

$tag = ereg_replace(".*.([^.]*)$", "1", $name);
$tag = strtolower($tag);

if (($name) && ($didFileHash[$name] != 1)) {
processNewImage($file, $tag, $name, $caption, $setCaption);
}
$didFileHash[$name] = 1; }