Nose on your face

Pretty sure the kids are gonna be staying home from school tomorrow due to an incoming snow storm – so I wanted to bring up the closing notices from NHPR.  I was pretty sure I had bookmarked it, but all I had was a link the WMUR closings page.

So I went to the NHPR page and started looking for anything having to do with “snow” or “school closing” etc.  Spent a while – even found page with a dead link on it – so I was just about to classify myself as frustrated and send a complaint email kinda thing, when I noticed that the 2nd link on the page (literally the only thing above it was NHPR News) was a link to “Weather Delays”

At this point I felt pretty stupid – but that condition was down graded to ignorant when I clicked the link and it brought me to the WMUR closing page I had already viewed about 10min earlier.

Cannot find dnssd.dll

Trying to get an airport express back up and running after mucking around with the house wifi network (got a new router etc.)

I installed the apputil program from Apple that let’s a windows machine manage the airport express devices – and it installed fine, but when I launched it I get an error message reading “cannot start – cannot find dnssd.dll”

Called apple support – and the promptly discovered I was not longer eligible for phone support – so I played the transfer game and got some software support guy named Paul who was very nice, but said they’d had a big meeting just that day about not giving out free support (he phrased it much better) – we joked about Mr. Jobs, to which he replied, “Yes, he is in Sick Bay.”  And I hung up with my problem unsolved, but not unhappy.

Much more web surfing later (I did some googling before resorting to the dreaded real support people) I discover that dnssd.dll is something that gets installed with iTunes.  So I installed iTunes on the Wife’s computer without asking her… and… (it’s installing now, I’ll update this if there’s an update)

Success!  If you are installing the airport express util app and get the dnssd.dll error – you need to install iTunes.  I suppose the apple devs didn’t imagine someone would want to manage an airport device without iTunes installed.  Go figure.

gal/HDD

Stumbled on a very kewl web site called degreedays.net – it allows you to pull up a spreadsheet of heating degree days for locations all over the world.  I was able to quickly generate a spreadsheet for a weather station not too far from my house – and use it to calculate the heating degree days in a specific time frame. 

I’ve been keeping track of how much oil we use to heat the house – but it’s pretty difficult to use that information to predict things because of the constantly changing temperature.  For example: I had calculated gal/day based on the data I had – and realized that this number is going to fluctuate wildly throughout the year and it isn’t a really useful number because it doesn’t take into account the outside temperature.

Enter heating degree days (HDD) – which allow me to calculate how many gallons of oil I use based on the outside temperature.  There’s a very good explanation of HDD on this website.

I’ve only had 3 oil deliveries, so I only have 2 periods to measure.  Right now I’m averaging 0.14 Gallons of Heating oil Per Heating Degree Day. 

The real goal is to know that 0.14 number today, and work on lowering it for tomorrow. 

Router DHCP renew not working – Charter Cable System

Was working on a system this morning and doing things by the book – but the router (Linksys with Cisco hardware) wouldn’t acquire an IP address from the cable modem.

I apologize that I don’t know the model number of either device – but a call to Charter Cable diagnosed the problem as an DHCP address request throttle violation – meaning the router had asked for an IP address to many times in a row, so the cable modem’s MAC address got put on a list that made the DHCP failed.

Luckily the solution was to just wait 5 min and the MAC address was removed from the list and everything came up fine.  (Unplugged the router for over 5 min, plugged it back in – all was fine)

Dunno if this’ll help anyone with out model numbers in the post – but I’m hoping it might.  Looking at the stats for my blog – the most viewed and commented on posts are the ones like this describing solutions I’ve found to problems.

Things you really should have tried by now…

#1 Google Earth

#2 Open Office

#3 Skype

#4 Anna’s Math Quiz

Putty Default Settings

I can’t see the blue in Putty , and every time I started it had to go find that setting.  I asked a couple people about how to make this the default and the didn’t know.  So – I finally figured it out today.  When you start putty, it comes up with a list of “sessions” – and the key thing to understand is that there’s a “Default Session” on the first window that pops up.  Dunno how I missed this for so long.

So make the changes you want in properties – then come to this tab and save with the “Default Settings” session selected.

My Bailout Option == Go To Mars

My vote is to spend the $700 billion to put an American on the surface of Mars.  I think Nasa’s budget right now is about $17 billion.  They probably couldn’t just scale their current programs up.  But with good management they should be able to select currently unfunded programs and unexplored technologies and make the achievement possible.  $700 billion might not establish a permanent colony on Mars – but probably could get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon as a stage in the program to land people on Mars.

• It creates jobs (I understand that, economically, creating jobs isn’t a good goal on it’s own)
• It creates investment in US companies
• It would generate a great deal of pride in our country
• We could earmark investment in the energy technologies necessary to the program- possibly solving a whole slew of problems we currently face

I believe that right now the earth is in great danger from several extinction level events, the most obvious a large asteroid and the most popular a global climate meltdown. 

If we, as a species, don’t make the investment to colonize another planet we are putting all of our eggs in one basket.  I can think of nothing more tragic then humans being the only intelligent life form in the universe (I don’t believe this, but it’s still a possibility) and being destroyed when we had the knowledge and power to survive and decided not to pursue it.

Constant ToDo List

I bought a SideShow device last week, and in the back of my mind I knew what I wanted it to do for me, and today I accomplished it. 

SideShow is a technology to display information on an auxiliary device, kind of like a small monitor for your computer.  picoLCD recently released a device that got below the $50 range and I pulled the trigger.  The device’s are typically used to show the weather, or your inBox status, or stock prices. 

What sparked my interested is that it can also show RSS feeds (blogs).  My current project is using Trac to maintain a list of work to be done, bugs to be fixed, tasks to accomplish – and Trac makes it easy to customize reports and (ding!) display them in RSS format.  So I customized a report to show my top “to do” items and used it as a feed to the sideshow device – so I constantly have a list of what I “should” be working on.

The hardest part was learning Microsofts RSS Platform – which you have to use to get feeds to the RSS gadget that supplies the device it’s information.

I’m not crazy about the RSS gadget and am considering writing my own – it doesn’t update as often as I want and it doesn’t allow me to format the output so the list is a little more compressed.  You can see the “#:” text in the image, I’d like that gone – just a simple list of the RSS info.  Some scrolling on that list would be nice too.

One of my First Computers

Circa 1984, visible is my second color computer, the CoCo2 the expansion connector with the floppy drive adapter, a plotter and a Sony Color TV used as a really crappy monitor that I just took to the dump 3 months ago.  I think the white thing in the expansion pack was a voice simulator… and I can guarentee it said, “Would you like to play a game?“

Long lost friend: Found on FaceBook

Found one of my first best friends on FaceBook today.  I haven’t talked to him in about 25 years, since his family moved back to France.  By itself that’s a kewl story – but the interesting (i.e. bloggable) part is that his job is very similar to mine right now.  He’s working at a start-up, mostly at home, building a Flex based UI on a non-Microsoft platform and his team is using Scrum, and they are deploying some of it to the Amazon cloud – all things I’ve been doing.  25 years go by and we both end up doing a very similar thing – whatever made that happen must have been a factor in us becoming friends – or was us becoming friends the factor?

I very much regret that we weren’t in touch when I visited Paris in 1998, as it would have been awesome to have a local to show us around.