Jeremy Chase » jeremy chase

Uptime is overrated

Jeremy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:04:56 +0000

A long uptime is often spoken of as if it is a badge of honor, and many of us parade this number as if it means something. I’ll grant you that it feels cool to have a machine up for 383 days, but you give something up by allowing things to go so long. You lose the knowledge that your machine is going to boot in a state that you are happy with.

This frequent rebooting hypothesis has been kicking around in my head for a couple years, and tonight I finally had an experience that cemented it for me; I rebooted my server and one of my web sites was simply all messed up. The site was supposed to be a simple graphic design portfolio, but instead I was seeing network statistics generated by ntop; ntop?? What?? Why??

Here is what happened; this website is a Rails site using Mongrel running on the default port of 3000. In previous reboots there was no problem and the site came up fine. However, I installed ntop a few months ago and hadn’t rebooted since. Well, it turns out that by default ntop runs some kind of informational webserver on the same port. Since ntop is started before Mongrel the nice design site was replaced with network usage graphs.

Fortunately the timing of this reboot was at a time when it isn’t critical that the site is up, but had the machine had an unscheduled reboot during business hours I would have had to fumble around with this then.

Long story short; reboots aren’t so bad.

Weather app!

Jeremy — Tue, 19 May 2009 00:07:37 +0000

Hello all,

I wrote a weather app using Ruby on Rails, and just recently put it up. Take a look: http://weatherfinder.info/

Jeremy

What happens when N1JER happens on an Oscilloscope

Jeremy — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 07:52:08 +0000

Here is a simple relative RF Ammeter. The design came out of the Jan 2009 QST.

N1JER makes an RF Ammeter from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo

Cats, Frenchies, and you

Jeremy — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:55:43 +0000

For you Old School Readers (OSR) of my blog I’m sure you are sick of the Ham Stuff. I am not sure what to do about that, as I already have two blogs!!!

I haven’t been posting Frenchie Pictures because I don’t have a supply anymore!! Since we moved to Brooklyn, we never go to the dog park and I never really seem them. So.. for that, I am sad.

But, here is a picture of one of our kitties. Well, it isn’t our kitty, but we are cat sitting. Her name is Mocossa

Streaming live from my little rig!

Jeremy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:29:47 +0000

I got the compulsion to setup a live stream from my radio. It is sitting at 7.040 right now, and you can hear it at N1JER’s live stream

This radio is located at the top of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, NY. It is a superhet with about a 400hz wide filter, into an inverted V about 30 feet up at the peak.

This link will almost certainly be dead in a few days, so if this post is more than a week old don’t be surprised if nothing works.

EDIT: I changed the server for this to conserve upstream bandwidth, and to make it so that my dynamic IP was no longer an issue. The stream may stay up for some time as it is fun.

QRP-L, Ham fun, and Videos are making the rounds

Jeremy — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:23:25 +0000

I have been talking with Jason Milldrum, NT7S, about a potential group project for QRP-L. It looks like we are going to be building a 6M Transceiver or 6M Transverter. A past QRP-L group project was an HF CW DC transceiver using a ceramic resonator.

My videos got a shout out on Jason’s Ham Radio blog.

Jeremy makes an L Network Antenna Tuner

Jeremy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 03:34:34 +0000

N1JER makes an L Network Antenna Tuner from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

View From Sunset Park

Jeremy — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:32:18 +0000

This is the amazing view from Sunset Park; just a couple blocks from where I live….

First HF contact on 40m CW!

Jeremy — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:35:36 +0000

N1JER makes contact with the club station K8MAD

N1JER makes contact with K8MAD from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

Fail Whale gives way to Fail Robot

Jeremy — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:19:59 +0000

Twitter isn’t letting me tweet. Well, I tried to use the Facebook application and instead of giving me a fail whale I get a fail robot.