A quick test of my SWR meter that I have been working on for the past few weeks told me that something was awry. It is a slight modification of that circuit, adding a couple of capacitors and replacing the two ammeters with an Atmega8 microcontroller's ADC unit. I figured if I could stabilize the voltages sufficiently, the ADC could read them and directly calculate the SWR. So I am sure that at least half the problem is that I made some assumption in SPICE that does not account for or some newbie error like that.

I looked at the DC levels and all the connections. I double checked the schematic. I don't have a low-frequency (<150MHz) signal source, so I just went whole hog and plugged in my radio. Pretty much no matter what I used for the load (short, open, 50 ohms, etc.) I could not get anything other than the full reflection voltage. But my silly multimeter doesn't do 150MHz. I need an oscilloscope. Or whatever they used before oscilloscopes. An RF probe. So I built one.

After poking around on the internet, I found N5ESE's classic RF probe, which seems to have been duplicated in many places, even as as kit from Hendricks QRP Kits. I rounded up the parts and put it together. I had the bright idea of stuffing it into a small bit of 1/4" copper tubing to shield it. I ground down the end of a small allen wrench to be the tip of the probe. I put it all together, added a bit of epoxy and some heat-shrink tubing.

Disappointment must be my lot in life because the RF probe was not working right either. Measuring the voltage across a 50-ohm dummy load (three 3-watt 150-ohm resistors in parallel), yielded 30+ volts when my radio was set to 1/2 watt. Just for reference, 1/2 watt over 50 ohms is 5 volts. If I bumped my radio up to 5 watts, the probe said 250+ volts. My multimeter was not happy about that.

I built another one on a spare breadboard. It worked like a champ. Even with the extra capacitance of the breadboard (or maybe because of it???). And when I say it worked fine, I mean it worked fine at 150MHz. I tore the first probe apart and tested the components. If it really was putting out 250 volts, the diode and capacitor should be dead. The multimeter says they are both fine. I test the probe out of its container. It is fine. I build a new container, this time fitting the copper tubing into a pen tube. No epoxy. I test it again and this time it works. Hooray!!! The picture above is my final product.

Now I need to put it to work debugging my broken SWR meter. Maybe if I can assemble these simple circuits, I can graduate to a real project like the MMR40 transceiver.

At work, I deal with a lot of mail. Not as much as some people, but still, it is a non-trivial amount. I don't have to respond to all of it, nor is it all of the same importance. For example, I get emailed by various cron jobs, some of which are critical to read and others are more informational. All in all, it averages out to 60-80 emails a day, depending on how crazy things are. This adds up fast, with the last two years each landing about 14,000 emails. Since I need to keep my email, I am getting quite a stash -- about 51,000 messages totalling 1.2GB. How in the world do you keep that organized? More importantly, what mail client can present all those without choking?

When I first started my current job, I chose Evolution, since that was about the best thing at the time. But somehow, it got dumber. Each new release took away features that I had come to love and depend on. When it started changing the key bindings without allowing me to have a say in the matter, I finally gave up and went with Kontact and Kmail. There are some things about KDE that I really like. One of the things is how customizable things are. I set all my key bindings so things worked for me. By this time, I had accumulated a fair amount of email and I noticed that it took a second or two to change folders. Annoying, but I just dealt with it. But on one of my upgrades, I noticed that Kmail was constantly crashing. That is beyond annoying. I moved to Thunderbird. I installed the Lightning extension to allow me to integrate my calendar with my email client like Evo and Kontact. Another year or two goes by and I notice a sufficient number of things about Thunderbird that drive me nuts. Time to move again. I look through the options. I test some out. But they all are SO SLOW.

I start looking at some of the second-tier mail clients, you know, the ones that only have a small following, like Sup, and Notmuch. I like a lot of things about both of those, but neither one is really ready to handle my abusive behavior. They both have powerful searching using the Xapian engine. They both deal very well in threads. Sup even has a UI. Notmuch doesn't have a UI. I wrote the beginnings of one and decided that there was still way to far to go before I could really use it. I threw my hands up and adopted a Mutt.

Mutt is really a full featured MUA. It doesn't speak SMTP, it only knows how to speak with a local process such as the venerable Unix Sendmail program. This is perfectly okay, since there are any number of ways to get around this. I chose MSMTP, which runs like sendmail and then makes an SMTP connection to your configured MTA to actually get your mail out there. So my entire mail stack looks something like this:

We have any number of IMAP servers to collect incoming mail. Fetchmail contacts the servers and delivers the mail to my local machine, filtering and tagging the messages on the way. Mutt notices the newly delivered mail and I read it. I reply or send mail and Mutt passes it off to MSMTP, which looks at the envelope from address and chooses the appropriate SMTP server to contact and pass the message off to. The entire stack suits me quite nicely. Each piece does its thing well and does not depend on the other pieces being of any particular brand. I am now free!

But let me tell you, taming your first Mutt is a non-trivial process. I still have not read the entire 12,000 line manual, but I have read much of it, some parts many times. I have spent many hours learning how Mutt does things, what I can change (almost anything) and what I can't change (very little), customizing key bindings, writing macros, etc. I finally feel like my Mutt and I are getting along. One of the things I really LOVE about my Mutt is that I get to use a *real* editor to compose my mail. Not some clunky built-in, unconfigurable, piece of junk. I use VIM to compose my mail. With a few key settings, it even does syntax highlighting (mail headers, quoted text, etc.), spellchecking and automatic line wrapping for my typed text. It also allows me to paste verbatim text in without messing up its format. I can paste a patch in without whitespace mangling. Hooray. How many other email composers allow this? None that I know of. You don't like VIM? You can use any editor you like.

When I first switched to Mutt, I was considering writing up a patch that would work with labels, giving me virtual folders for my labels. But after exploring the current label support that Mutt has, I found that to be uneccessary. All my incoming mail get passed through fetchmail, which does filtering and delivery. Part of my filtering process is to remove the junkmail and tag all the rest of the mail with labels according to some regular expressions. I have a little script I wrote that will read the headers of a message and spit out the 'X-Label:' header to add to the message. Once delivered, Mutt caches this in its header cache, making for some VERY speedy searches by label. Not only can it search by labels, but it has a very powerful search pattern language. For example, I can limit my view of my messages to '~(~d 6m-8m*2w ~f ("telly"|"cookie") ~Z >1M ~s recipe)' which means "all messages from threads containing messages from 'telly' or 'cookie' with dates from 6 to 8 months ago, plus or minus 2 weeks, that were larger than one megabyte and had recipe in the subject". Tell me this is not a powerful search engine. All of those things it can do without actually re-reading the messages because of the header cache. Some of the modifiers do force Mutt to actually read the messages (like ~b or ~B, which end up searching the body of the message). The header cache does not save all the headers, only the ones that Mutt deems important. Personally, I think this should be configurable.

Besides the Mutt manual (available online at http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/ or included with your Mutt installation (Debian/Ubuntu users can press F1)), there are loads of online resources to help configure and train your Mutt. I found this site to be very helpful: My First Mutt.

If you are curious what I have done, drop me a note, leave a comment or something and I will share configs or whatever with you. In the mean time, I have some mail to read.

[Edited 27 Jan 2010] Fabio wanted to see my config and my label script, so here goes... A little insight to the twisted mind of Vernon.

Recently I had the opportunity to work with a customer that needed some help with traffic shaping and policing on their network. I had poked around in the past with this, trying to get guaranteed bandwidth for my VoIP phone, but the last time I checked, that setup no longer worked, so it was shelved until further notice. I just had to take care that when I was on the phone, I could not do any large downloads that would rob the bandwidth from my voice packets.

The customer gave me impetus to re-learn Linux Traffic Control. The main tool offered to us is called tc, meaning traffic control. You can learn all about tc at the Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control website. I spent several hours there trying to remember all I had forgotten. I also looked around at several other websites with howtos on the matter, but it seemed that they were all pointing back to lartc.org anyway. I poked around long enough to understand the recipes in their cookbook and then wrote up a script of my own.

I wanted to have about 90kb/s of guaranteed bandwidth for VoIP and then some other high priority bandwidth for things like ICMP packets, TCP ACK packets, and other low-latency stuff (things that mark the TOS field in the IP header.) In other words, I wanted to be able to:

1. Make sure my VoIP traffic gets through so I don't have choppy phone calls
2. Perform uploads without killing my downloads (let the ACK packets through)
3. Be able to type in an SSH session while doing a large download
4. Not starve my VPN to work when the network is busy (no more 3-12 second latencies, please.)
5. Have fast ping times so I can brag to all my friends

Sounds like I am hoping for a miracle, right? Well, not really. Simply dividing the traffic into several classes and then giving each one a slice of the pie will do a lot on my quest for the Well Tempered Network. I know the VoIP bandwidth, so that is easy. Then the rest, I decided to split into quarters -- high priority gets at least 1/4 of the remaining bandwidth, medium priority gets the same, while bulk transfers and the rest of the stuff get anything that is left over (a little less than 1/2 the pipe).

Without this QoS script, I am unable to do a large download (or upload) without killing my VoIP call, uploads kill downloads, ssh is very non-interactive, and pings range in the 400-1100ms range. With this QoS script, I can do simultaneous large downloads and large uploads without hurting my VoIP call quality AND at the same time, ssh interactivity goes up (to the same as with no other traffic) and ping times range in the 80-200ms range. VPN traffic seems to be better too, though sometimes it suffers from latencies beyond my control. I think this means I reached all my goals. I was very happy with it and thought it might be nice to share.

Over this past year, I have been testing recipes for Peter Reinhart's new book, artisan breads every day. The goal of this book was to find a way to get the full flavor that delayed fermentation offers, but to make the preparation time shorter. Or something. I don't know, because with the delayed fermentation plan, you mix the dough and then bake the next day. Not a lot of involvement in the middle.

But one thing that this book did offer was something along the lines of the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day style of making a bulk pre-ferment and then using a part of it each day for up to five days and baking a fresh loaf from that. This actually makes some really good French bread. One of my favorite recipes was the "same day french bread", which uses a pre-ferment to pull in extra flavor. It is called same-day because you don't count making the pre-ferment for some reason (maybe because you can also use it for the next 4 days). But that was some of the best French bread I have ever made. And in the process of testing these recipes, I learned the importance of the "stretch and fold" technique. This is the best way to strengthen the gluten in a very wet dough. Even a dough that has 70% or more hydration can become smooth and workable with the stretch and fold. After doing this, I found that my freestanding loaves gained 50% in height, rather than being so flat.

Part of the reason I though I would write this was that I chose to make some sourdough pizza dough from this book for our Friday night pizza night yesterday. Mmmmm. I do love good sourdough. The dough turned out to be very tasty, though I think next time I will leave out the honey since I think it made the crust brown too quickly. Our old oven died about three weeks ago and our new oven can bake at up to 550°F, which is about where you should be cooking pizza, but not having experience with those extra 50 degrees is making pizza baking interesting. As far as the rest of the family goes, they say they prefer the original Pizza Napoletana recipe from Peter's Bread Baker's Apprentice book. That is a darn good pizza dough recipe, so it is hard to beat it. But I have to mix it up every now and then or we wouldn't ever know if something better came along.

I will likely write more about Artisan Breads Every Day another time, as I find time to work through the recipes. Can anyone say Chocolate Croissants?

Today I got a love note from Verizon. FiOS is big! So darn big they need more of my money. Maybe they are too big to fail. All in the same letter, they announced changes regarding my service AND new bundle options available. First the good news: they will be upgrading my service to 10/2 Mbps in the next few months. Just because I am so loyal. Or is is because I am on such an old grandfathered plan that they haven't offered for the last 2 years that they couldn't justify me paying so little? Comcast did -- I had to beg them to let me cancel my $7/month basic cable package a few months ago. I told them it was just too much money for the value. Anyway, Verizon wants be be my friend and boost my speed. Right after that, they also tell me that they will also be boosting my billing rate from $39.99 to $49.99 per month. And here is the best part, a direct quote from the letter: "No action is required to maintain your service at the new rate — you'll continue to enjoy all the benefits your current Verizon FiOS Internet service has to offer. This rate increase is unrelated to the speed increase we will be implementing for your FiOS Internet service plan." Uh huh. Of course you won't make me do anything to start charging me more. We operate on an opt-out basis here in America; it is better for The Man. And not related, huh? I just don't buy that. You said it in the same letter and you put it in the 'bad news' section, right after the 'good news.'

Is it just me or does a 25% increase in price sound a little bit wrong when this year we have been seeing a -1.3% rate of inflation. So they are effectively raising my rates even more. I hate you Verizon and all your money grubbing managers. I started out very happily, paying $29.99 per month and have seen a steady increase in price over the past 4 1/2 years. Yet my service has stayed the same. If I wanted 10/2 speeds, I would have upgraded on my own. I just looked and saw that the current price for the lowest FiOS package is now $54.99 (for no phone service, which is me) and that is for the 15/3 speed. I feel like I am getting the short end of the stick here... I wonder if it is time to jump ship to Comcast again. You know, jumping ship every few years to keep the competition going. Verizon, you had a nice long run, but you are pushing my patience to its limit.

I just looked... Comcast does have a better deal going on right now...

Recently I read an article about flu shots that was recommended by a friend. It is a bit of a long read, but very interesting. You see, I think I am contributing to the healthy-users bias. I lead a fairly healthy life: I don't drink or smoke; I am not overweight; I eat lots of vegetables and a fairly balanced diet in general; I am in a monogamous relationship; I have an enjoyable family life. I probably do eat too many cookies and I could certainly exercise more, but I am mostly healthy. I am vaccinated against the big contagious killers like mumps, measles, pertussis, diphtheria, tetanus, etc. And because I have an aversion to nausea, I get my seasonal flu shot each year. I am not worried that I will die from influenza. I just hate barfing. I see no harm in getting a flu shot. The influenza virus seems to mutate every year and there are so many strains we can't even count them, but I like knowing that every year, I am gaining immunity to three more strains. Four if the CDC guessed wrong and I get the flu anyway.

I found the article fascinating because they are looking at the flu and vaccinations from a different angle. They want to find out the efficacy of vaccinations over the entire population. In other words, could we stop flu-related death in its tracks with the vaccination if *everybody* got vaccinated? They think not. You see, over the years since vaccines were available for influenza, there have been precious few studies that were done that accounted for the healthy-users bias. In other words, the generally healthy population is less likely to die from the flu because we are healthy to start with. Now if I had a compromised immune system to start with, I am easy pickings for the influenza virus and will likely die. This is the most interesting case: does the vaccine really help on immuno-compromised people? This is the sick, the old, and the young (the SOY). Since they have a weak immune system to start with, it is much less likely to respond to a vaccine and generate the antibodies that will protect them from the virus. So my guess is that vaccines really aren't as effective against death on the people who need it most.

Another question to consider is whether or not anti-virals, such as Tamiflu, are effective. The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to stockpile these anti-virals, and there is a very good chance that 1) they don't really work, and 2) they used to work but the viruses are now tolerant of them because they have been ill-prescribed. We need to consider the healthy-users bias again, because a healthy person will likely get over the flu much faster and with fewer complications than the SOY. Don't forget to take into account the placebo effect as well. When people know they are taking a $10/pill medication, they fully expect it to help them get better. Many times they do get better regardless what the pill contains. So many inter-linked factors make it very difficult to produce a study that will give us statistics that we can really trust. (Don't even get me started on statistics...)

The final question I pose is whether or not these trials to test the medications are ethical. To test the placebo effect, you are giving these sick patients absolutely nothing, when they fully believe they are getting a real drug. What if these patients die when the real drug could have helped them? This is a really tricky situation because unless you really test for the placebo effect, you can't tell for sure if your new miracle drug works better than chewing on tongue of newt. (Well, in reality, it would work better, even if it were a placebo because you would be hard pressed to find a person that believed mind and soul that tongue of newt was an efficacious treatment.) So is it ethical to sentence a few people to death to test new drugs that *might* save millions of lives? As long as it is not me is the common answer.

To wrap things up, I say go ahead and get your flu shot because those who do get flu shots have a 50% better chance of not dying from any cause in the next year than those who don't. I believe that the flu shot is good because building immune systems is always a good thing. And as a bonus, they might help you make it through another year without the uncontrollable urge to pray to the porcelain god. But if you really want to stay healthy this year, we should do what really works: stay away from sick people when you are healthy; stay away from healthy people when you are sick; wash your hands regularly; avoid crowded public places; and use your brain. My favorite quote from the article is this:

"There’s no worse place to go than the hospital during flu season," says Majumdar. Those who don’t have the flu are more likely to catch it there, and those who do will spread it around, he says. "But we don’t tell people this."

Ummm. Too late. You just told us. Now that you know, stay home unless you really are dying.

In 2008 and 2009, we purchased seeds from Seed Savers and have been saving them. Last year, we saved some pea seeds (Green Arrow), some tomato seeds (Bloody Butcher) and some sweet pepper seeds (Tequila Sunrise). This year, we expanded the varieties and also saved some green bean seeds (Empress), and more tomato seeds (Siberian and Stupice). The King of the North sweet pepper seeds were not quite fully developed, but there are still some left in the package from this year's planting. The mini sunflower seeds were some volunteers in our garden, likely planted by our neighbor's trained squirrels. The sunflowers may or may not germinate next year, but I think the rest of the seeds will.

This year's growing season in Portland was longer than last year and much more productive. We ended up at the end of the season with a tub of tomatoes and peppers. We had several meals with fresh picked green beans. Since it was good for everything else, the peas were not happy. They died out a little too fast in the warm weather. I think it was the week of 100+°F that did them in. But we saved plenty of seed for next year. I think the King of the North peppers would have done better, but they were hit hard by a slug infestation early on. The slugs ate half the leaves on the plants, forcing them to spend energy on growing new leaves instead of peppers. But we did get some small ones by the end of the season. I think this year may have me giving up on leaf crops for a while. After two years of failure on the lettuce front, we tried swiss chard this year. It grew, but never got very big, so we didn't pick any. By the time we did pick it, it was very tough and a little bitter. Next year, I think we will focus more on the beans, peas, tomatoes and peppers. Oh. And the basil. That failed miserably too. I finally gave in and picked up some starts from the farmer's market.

Next year, I think we will start the tomatoes and peppers outside in a makeshift greenhouse so they can get more sunlight and yet not freeze at night. I learned that peppers need warm nights to grow and tomatoes need some chilly nights in order to not get too 'leggy' like ours did this year, growing in our house. We will see. I had quite a green thumb as a child, but I also had parents that knew their way around a garden to make sure I didn't kill things. On my own, the garden is much trickier. :)

A man in Nova Scotia has determined that radiation coming from the proposed nearby high-speed internet tower will mutate his organic garlic crops. Wow. I guess he heard that they were using microwave technology and decided to shut them down. Microwaves are the most deadly kind of radiation, right? 'Cause we use them in our kitchens to cook things. Oooh! I had better instill the proper amount of F.U.D. in all my neighbors so this tower will get shut down before it starts.

Being an engineer, I like to look at things skeptically. There are numbers and calculations to support everything. Do the numbers work out? Do the equations make sense? Is this man a fool? This is one of the beauties of learning more about amateur radio; I got to learn a lot more about electro-magnetic radiation than I ever did before. More specifically, what are the limits of what might hurt people. Now there are still debates going on about whether or not cell phones cause brain cancer and the like, but once again, it all comes down to simple physics. This is the same question as Lenny's garlic: will the radiation cause a "change [in] the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules" or not?

Last year, I noticed that the ceiling over our kitchen sink was cracked and a little bit soggy. After some house math, we figured out that the leak was directly below the faucet/drain end of the tub in the kid's bathroom. A quick look through some of the reviews of plumbers in our area from a google search found Kennedy Plumbing. I gave them a call and they sent a man out. He was fast and professional. He replaced the shoe or cracked strainer or something. I don't recall exactly, and even if I did, I am not that intimately familiar with the anatomy of a tub to carry on a conversation about such things. Something was cracked and very broken and he replaced it. The soggy section of ceiling dried up, but still had a little bit of a cracked area in the texture which has been bothering me ever since. But obviously not that much, since I never got around to fixing it.

Yesterday morning, that shower was used for the first time in at least a year. The kids still take baths. I heard a drip, drip, drip in the kitchen and was surprised to see it coming from the ceiling. Grrrrr. I made a quick call to Kennedy Plumbing to have them come out to check to see if the first guy screwed up. It turned out that after an hour of trying to diagnose the problem, he finally found it. When the tub faucet runs, it doesn't leak, but when the shower starts, it drips lots. He took the faucet assembly apart to find a disintegrated O-ring. Ooops. So the first guy did right, and the second guy did too. The only problem is that now, enough water had leaked into our ceiling that I really did have to fix it. The plumber was kind enough to saw out a very rough hole to help him diagnose the problem. Now I get to fix it. Ho hum. I really hate dry-wall work. Maybe it will get done before next year. :)

I am not a licensed financial advisor, nor do I have a degree in economics, but I do have a brain. It seems that The Man does not.

The current view is that we have officially been in a recession for a year and a half now. How did we get here? Well, my view is that the country on a whole (The Man is waving the banner at the front of the parade) is living on a non-sustainable budget. Spending more money than one makes can only last for so long before you run out of credit. Oh look, Ma, a credit crisis! So how does The Man propose to get us out? Ooh, ooh! let's throw money we don't have at it. Fill the hole, loosen the credit markets and get the economy running again. My prediction: it won't work. Well, not for long.

My view is that the economy was fundamentally broken long before a year and a half ago. We have been in a slow death spiral for quite a while. At first, we didn't even know that we had a large tumor growing in our liver. We put on a few pounds but we chalk that up to eating out a little too much. Really, that few pounds is a malignant tumor that is taking up more space every day. One day, while out shopping for a new shiny gadget, we collapse, knocking over the salesman, who falls and grabs the store manager for stabilization. The manager tips over some manikins which conk the box-boy on the noggin, giving him a concussion. But he gets up and rambles through the store, knocking things over and leaving a trail of mayhem wherever he goes. The manager tries to keep the box-boy from wandering out of the store, but in a freak accident, the fluorescent light display near the door crashes down and sets the display on fire, blocking the exit behind box-boy. The store is consumed by fire, as are the neighboring businesses. Box boy leaves the area and shares his anti-Midas touch, which quickly infects every city on earth, which ends up as a smoldering rock orbiting the sun.