Author Archives: Dan

August 12, 2008
13:05
by: Dan

D-RATS in QST

The September issue of QST arrived in my mailbox yesterday, complete with my D-RATS article on page 34! The idea to write an article about D-RATS came much earlier in the year (way back in February), once we had used … Continue reading →

Posted in Radio Tagged ,

July 15, 2008
08:49
by: Dan

Show UTC as a location in Gnome International Clock

I love the new international clock applet in Gnome.  It makes it easy to see a list of alternate time zones for coordinating with colleagues.  However, it seems to be missing the ability to add UTC as a timezone.  UTC, … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux

July 1, 2008
08:49
by: Dan

ARRL Field Day 2008

On Saturday, I participated in the ARRL Field Day for the first time.  For those who don’t know, Field Day is a annual event where Amateur Radio operators head out to fields, forests, and mountain tops to make as many … Continue reading →

Posted in Radio

May 20, 2008
11:13
by: Dan

Dayton Hamvention 2008

I was lucky enough to travel to the Dayton Hamvention this year.  I was demoing D-RATS in the dstarusers.org booth with the K5TIT folks.  I received a lot of good feedback both about the current and future uses of D-RATS, … Continue reading →

Posted in Radio

May 11, 2008
16:57
by: Dan

Ubuntu from a USB key on a Samsung Q1 Ultra

Man I love Linux.  Uh-lot. I am setting up these extremely sweet Samsung Q1 Ultra machines for a D-RATS demo.  These uber-slick ultra-portable tablet PCs are pretty amazingly small.  The biggest problem is that they run Vista.  I’ve read all … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux

March 31, 2008
15:23
by: Dan

D-RATS gets map support

Last week, I released D-RATS 0.1.11 with preliminary GPS support.  This meant parsing the NMEA GPS strings that are broadcasted by ICOM radios, calculating the distance and direction from current, as well as a temporary way to plot known stations … Continue reading →

Posted in Radio Tagged ,

March 5, 2008
16:37
by: Dan

Making a KVM-bootable image

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to re-learn how to create a bootable image from a filesystem tree (such as a tarball of a root filesystem, or a Xen partition image).  If for no other reason than … Continue reading →

Posted in Codemonkeying, Linux Tagged ,

March 3, 2008
08:14
by: Dan

2008 ARRL International DX Contest

This past weekend was the 2008 ARRL International DX Contest.  I participated with the help of some borrowed equipment graciously loaned to me by John, KX7YT.  This weekend marked several “firsts” for me.  I made my first contact on HF, … Continue reading →

Posted in Radio

February 8, 2008
15:37
by: Dan

When is foo == &foo?

The answer is “in the CMPI interface specification”. So, CMPI defines this massive union of every possible data type, called CMPIValue.  It looks something like this (but with many more types): union {    uint32_t uint32;    uint64_t uint64;    char *chars;    CMPIString … Continue reading →

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged

January 22, 2008
19:51
by: Dan

Python programs for Windows with py2exe

If you know me, you know that I don’t often acknowledge the existence of Windows as an OS worth my attention.  However, I’m working on some code for a group of people who are predominantly Windows users that, aside from … Continue reading →

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged ,