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

Progress on the Norcal 2N2/30 build

Jeremy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:24:05 +0000

I started building a Norcal 2N2/30 the other weekend. The last thing I can remember testing is the RX pre-amp and so far everything has worked well. I am trying to understand the circuit as I am building, but that is a challenge to say the least!

My first impressions of the kit and manual are that I am really impressed! Having the photos of each stage makes it much simpler to locate things on the board, and the stage by stage testing really is making me feel better as I go. I do wish there was a sentence or two at each section describing how that stage worked, but alas the manual is already 65 pages long!

Jeremy

Old Man Colpitts has been defeated; for now

Jeremy — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:15:30 +0000

Old Man Colpitts is happy from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

Some outtakes from my filming..

Jeremy — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:10:51 +0000

Here are some funnies.

Outtakes from N1JER’s videos from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

My attempt to build a Colpitts Oscillator

Jeremy — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:50:54 +0000

Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to build this out of junk parts..

N1JER Battles with Old Man Colpitts from Jeremy Chase on Vimeo.

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.

Failure to launch

Jeremy — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:03:37 +0000

My CW still leaves a lot to be desired so I like to hit the trainer for a few minutes before getting on the radio. I hit a high score on RufzXP and was doing well in Just Learn Morse Code. I figured I was going to kill it.

So I tune around 40m and did not hear much at all. There was a fairly long QSO happening on about 7.041mhz and I listened in for a bit, one signal was really strong, and the other was only copyable 1/3 of the time.

I went over to 7.0425 and sat for a few, then busted out my QRL? and with nothing heard fired off some CQ’s. Nothing. Ok, that is normal. So more CQs. Nothing. OK.. so lets tune around some more. Back to the QSO and I could tell they were getting ready to wrap it up. I had never tried to tail end a QSO before so after they said 73 and did their ‘dits’ I waited a few seconds then just did a 2×1 CQ call.

But, for some reason I was all off! Just didn’t feel right, and I rather than CQ I think I said “don’t call me because this will be a horror show”. Of course the stronger station came back (NM7B??) but I was so out of it I kind of threw my hands in the air.

I hear it happens to all the guys, but I never thought it would happen to me.