my anus is godot » geek http://pst.org "Nobody pooped, twice." The life and times of Paul Traina Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:09:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 software engineers shouldn’t use soldiering irons… http://pst.org/2009/01/software-engineers-shouldnt-use-soldiering-irons/ http://pst.org/2009/01/software-engineers-shouldnt-use-soldiering-irons/#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:16:57 +0000 Paul Traina http://pst.org/2009/01/05/software-engineers-shouldnt-use-soldiering-irons/ Continue reading →]]> After a brief hiatus of 15 years, I picked up a new soldiering iron and I am actually building hardware again. I’m slowly rebuilding my lab from scratch.  The new house is going to come in handy because I actually want space for a workbench and some decent magnifying glasses, and the usual crap.

As a reflexive problem, I figured out my first new project, because I need a lab, because of the new house, oh whatever…

I’m going to try my hand at building a wireless internet thermostat for the SF house.
As it turns out, good thermostats are more complicated than one would expect.  We want hysteresis in the system so it isn’t firing and shutting down the heating/cooling units, plus, with multi-stage equipment (small and large furnace burners and small and large air conditioning) we want to intelligently maximize the use of the small (eco-friendly) stage, but kick on the big stage when the energy differential between the desired and current temperatures is high.

I just want to be able to turn off the damn heat when I’m out of the house for a few days.. or turn it on when I’m driving up from the Peninsula so it’s not freezing when I get there.

Once I’m done with that one, I’m thinking radio controlled helicopter with a .38 caliber handgun.

]]> http://pst.org/2009/01/software-engineers-shouldnt-use-soldiering-irons/feed/ 2 as the turn burned http://pst.org/2006/09/as-the-turn-burned/ http://pst.org/2006/09/as-the-turn-burned/#comments Wed, 06 Sep 2006 05:16:17 +0000 Paul Traina http://pst.org/2006/09/05/as-the-turn-burned/ Continue reading →]]> WiFi deployment at Burning Man was a total success! The network consisted of a 2.4ghz long haul link back to Gerlach and then a 5.8ghz backbone for the playa which was then rebroadcasted at 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00. We used my gear for the 3:00 and 9:00 nodes and they fit in perfectly. Everyone loved Brad Templeton’s “Playa Phone” and the Internet Cafe was in constant use despite no advertising.

Lessons learned and/or confirmed:

  1. Take your time aiming antennas, find the hottest spots in the lobe, they really DO matter.
  2. Guy stuff down really well, the smallest shift can ruin the work done in point #1.
  3. 5.8ghz is practical for medium haul links if you’ve got too much noise down on 2.4ghz.
  4. Hot stage everything, the last 5% of the work for the Internet Cafe took the longest time.
  5. Put up a splash page and take a bow! Nobody knew who did all the work to give folks Internet.
  6. Ralf and Cliff are awesome folks, give them each a big wet sloppy kiss.
  7. The phone was the single most important user service.
  8. More power is always better. We should have had 100mw, not 12mw for the 5.8 backbone.
]]> http://pst.org/2006/09/as-the-turn-burned/feed/ 0 as the burn turns http://pst.org/2006/08/as-the-burn-turns/ http://pst.org/2006/08/as-the-burn-turns/#comments Mon, 14 Aug 2006 11:54:51 +0000 Paul Traina http://pst.org/2006/08/14/as-the-burn-turns/ Continue reading →]]> I’m doing my first burning man. I came up with two art projects, but vetoed them because it’s my first burn and I figured it would be better to assist another ongoing project.

Somehow I got the bright idea to assist BMorg in doing some of the wireless distribution for the camp network. I’m busy building LEAF boxes and I’m reminded of exactly how much I completely hate their broken development environment. Somehow over the years, they managed to build a cross compilation environment that doesn’t work on anything other than an X86 running linux and gcc-3.4. Absolutely brilliant. Somebody clearly did not understand the first principle of cross compilation environments and I’ve been too lazy for the past two years to fix it until it broke when I upgraded to gcc-4. All I can say is thank god for Parallels Desktop. I brought up a Debian VM running on my Macbook Pro and whacked B-U enough to at least cross build under recent Linux distributions.

The other LEAF developers don’t feel that having a clean and reproducible cross compilation environment is a priority (being able to reproduce binaries? being able to support branched development? seems pretty basic to me). We’re so totally behind the times in distribution design, that it’s probably time for me to hook up with folks more in tune with my own goals (despite the fact that the LEAF guys are really great people). I think I’m going to go with porting OpenWRT and MADWIF-NG to a PC Engines WRAP target as soon as their buildroot-ng stuff is stable.

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