The Ek’s Files

I’m Dave Ek, and this is where I write about stuff. Most of my posts are about computers or ham radio (I’m NKØE), but sometimes I also risk playing the fool by ranting about politics or society–you know, serious stuff.

Or sometimes I write just because I need the practice.

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Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a mapaholic.

Being an occasional backpacker, I use topographic maps both for planning hikes and camping trips, and for navigating on the trail. My map of choice, just like practically everyone else, is the 7.5-minute USGS quad. I obtained my first one of these back in the late 80’s, before the internet, and before it was feasible to store much map data electronically (can you say “40 MB hard drive”?). I think I ended up ordering it from someplace, and it came in the mail rolled up in a cardboard tube. I think I just about wet my pants when I first unrolled it. It was soooo cool! The level of detail on that map (1 inch = 2000 ft) was more than I’d ever experienced, and I could determine the latitude and longitude of anything on the map. It wasn’t long before I could smugly recite the coordinates of my house down to the arc second or so.

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I’ve been working over the past several weeks to update my ASCOM driver for my Digital Setting Circles project. My initial impetus for doing so was to make my existing driver fully compliant with the ASCOM standards, and also to add a “sync” capability that so many folks have requested. I also wanted to implement a “slewing” capability (basically just feedback as you push your telescope tube toward a target, like what you can do with my stand-alone DSC software) and make it easier to execute the alignment process. Finally, I’d like to make the driver compatible with other devices that use the BBox protocol, include the Orion Intelliscope.

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No, not me. My boy. He’s just about finished with college and ready to enter the working world as an English teacher. I still haven’t quite figured out how I, being an engineer-type, managed to father a teacher of English. Perhaps it was his mother’s genes. Whatever. He’s done well for himself, and I’m proud of him.

The boy’s a poet, too. Here is some of his work.

I decided to give the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta a whirl today, but really didn’t have much luck with it. First, I was having a hard time integrating it into my existing multiboot scheme on my computer (I use a separate GRUB partition for managing booting between Gutsy Gibbon and WinXP), but I ignored that for the moment. The real difficulty came when I tried to get my Linksys WUSB54G (ver. 4) wireless adapter working. I figured that I could simply follow the instructions that I wrote for doing so with Gutsy Gibbon, but alas, there was no joy. When I tried to manually configure the network settings, I found that I could not select the wireless network settings to modify them. Perhaps this will be fixed before it goes final, or someone else will solve this problem…

In the mean time, my experiment with the Hardy Heron beta has ended. I’ll pick it up again at a later time, perhaps when it’s released in final form.

I’m about to set up a new computer for myself, and it’s going to run both Windows XP Pro and one or more flavors of Linux. Obviously, it’s going to be a multi-boot system. So I’ve been boning up on a lot of the issues associated with setting up such a system, such as:

• What’s the best way to partition the system?
• Can I use a single /home partition and just share it with every Linux distro I install?
• How can I easily share files between WinXP and Linux?

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It’s makin’ me wait…

Sorry–couldn’t resist.

I’m anticipating a lot of things right now. Mostly, I’m longing for warmer temperatures and longer days. For a lot of reasons. Many things are on the workbench, waiting for meteorological conditions to be more favorable.

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For quite a while I’ve been keeping my eye out for some kind of case for my Garmin eTrex GPS. Most of the cases I’d seen thus far would attach to your belt just fine, but I wanted one that I could hook onto my backpack so that it would be exposed to the sky while I hiked (so it could make a track of my hiking route). I finally found this one, made by Gilsson Technologies. It’s a black neoprene zip-up case with clear plastic windows for the display and the buttons on either side. In addition, it has a loop for slipping it onto your belt, but it also has a plastic clip for fastening it to just about anything on your pack. I actually bought one on Ebay from FIS4HER COM GPS Gear (their price and shipping time were fantastic), and mine has a metal ring an a carabiner instead of the plastic clip. This case looks like a great little case that’ll work perfectly for backpacking, and the price is right.

I’m shocked and amazed. The liberal media (well, one person, anyway) has spoken out against gun control.

John Stossel, an ABC News correspondent and co-anchor of ABC’s 20/20, wrote in the Appeal-Democrat that people still die in a ‘gunless utopia’, and that we shouldn’t confuse gun control for crime control. Stossel cites studies that show that various gun laws around the country have completely failed to dent the gun crime rate, and points out that violent crime has actually risen since Washington, DC completely banned handgun ownership. To John Stossel I say, “Bravo!”

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I’m an Ubuntu user. I made the switch a few months ago. I like it, and I won’t be switching back to Windows. Ubuntu is great, but I’ve never been able to understand the near-religious fervor adopted by aficionados of linux (or Mac, for that matter) when they talk about their beloved operating systems.

Ubuntu isn’t that much better than Windows XP. My installation of Windows XP was always extremely stable, and I haven’t found Ubuntu to be superior in that regard. I made the switch more for philosophical reasons than anything. I was having a big problem envisioning myself running Windows Vista in the future. Vista contains nothing that I find compels me to want to upgrade, and seems to have been created mainly as a vehicle to generate sales for Microsoft. Not that there’s anything wrong with MS trying to make money, but in my opinion there’s little added value. Was I running an operating system or a marketing tool? So I decided to make the switch to Ubuntu.

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