Dave Noderer's Blog

Making progress, probably 60% completed, all tests look ok so far.

Also building  up my equipment. I purchased a used Tektronix 465 Oscilloscope on eBay for $100. For many years I used this in the  lab but have not really touched hardware for 18 years now. A 465 use to be my right hand when I spent time daily in the lab. As I remember when we purchased them new, they were a few thousand dollars in the mid 80's. It is definitely aging but will work  fine for the frequencies into 10's of megahertz I'm going to be using for now. There are a  number of oscilloscope "heads"  with USB interfaces and software that will run on  Windows but the cheap ones have no bandwidth and the good ones start at $1000 and go up, definitely not in line with my budget for this hobby!

One thing I'm a bit uncomfortable with is winding the coils and transformers. They are the  little copper colored items on the band pass filter you can see above.  You have to just make sure you wind exactly to specification because measuring inductance into the 10's of nano henries is basically impossible with the type of equipment I have.... Well not quite, there are meters for fairly cheap which go into the micro henry range and beyond that you really have to build a tuned circuit with a known capacitance and measure the frequency after doing the math.

The  state of "hobbyist" software defined radio seems to be stuck on pure C libraries and  Linux OS. Starting to look at some of the windows embedded as a possible driver for future endeavors.

Another discovery, and no surprise, is that working under 50 Mhz is one thing and I can do that fairly easily but to get up into the 2-100 ghz range, it is a whole different ball game. At that point I think the thing will be to purchase sub-assemblies and figure how to glue  them together with software. At that point you can't even have wires, everything is on carefully calculated PC boards and integrated circuits.

That's all for now.

I've started construction of a HF (High Frequency vs UHF/VHF ham bands) radio that will cover ~ 1.8 to 30 mhz. it is a kit put together by Tony Parks and supported by a very active community: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/softrock40

I tell you, either my eyes have gone downhill (for sure) or those surface mount components got much smaller in the 20 years since I last worked in a lab every day.

This would be especially hard without community driven detailed construction notes: http://golddredgervideo.com/wb5rvz/RXTX_V6_3/index.htm

I'll make comments here and post pictures as I go!

Pictures at: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/gallery/8589.aspx

I'm almost at a stage where I can point some software at this thing but a while before I will be able to do much with  it.

Thanks to Scott Klein for organizing a set of SQL focused meetings here in South Florida.

The first meeting was held in West Palm Beach at the Palm Beach County building on 8/7/08. I took a few pictures you can see at: http://cid-e8348157304bce63.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/FlaDotNet/20080807%7C_WestPalm%7C_SQLPass.zip

Eitght of us were there and as it was mostly an organizational meeting, we dicussed the location, topics and format of meeting that would be good. The topics were pretty straight forward:

• Reporting Services
• Basic SQL Server
  • Connection types
  • Management Studio

• Clustering / Mirroring
• Replication
• Integration Services
• Oracle
• Tools
  • Apex SQL
  • ANTS -
  • Toad for Oracle
  • SQL Navigator
  • Team System
  • SQL Programmer
  • Management Studio
  • Red Gate -
  • Data Conversion

Format wise, Terry Carrol suggested having 1/2 hour at the beginning of each meeting to have a round table technical discussion.

Scott already has a number of speakers lined up and is planning on a monthly meeting in West Palm and also in either Ft Lauderdale or Miramar.

He is making arrangements to put up a website. In the meantime, i've put up the announcments on the FlaDotNet website and am including the info in the weekly emails.

We discussed SQL Pass organization. Joe Homnick and the Gold Coast User Group has long been the SQL Pass Chapter but not 100% focused on SQL. As part of starting the new groups, Scott has been in contact with Joe Homnick who agreed to Scott starting up the new groups but no mechanics to link them together is in place yet.

Other plans are to host a SQL Saturday sometime in 2009.

We did spend some time discussing SQL 2008 which just went to RTM.

For more information and to help Scott in these efforts, send him an email at: ScottKlein@sqlxml.com

From N1DCN...

HAM = Amateur Radio Operator as defined by FCC part 97 rules.

There are currently three possible licensing levels, Technician, General and Extra. As of last night, I passed the General test. Starting a couple of years ago, you do not have to learn morse code to get licensed.

With the general license you have almost full access to all the frequencies which are split into 16 bands ranging from 160 meters starting at 1800 kilohertz up to 23 centimeters starting at 1240 Megahertz.

The Technician license provides priveliges on the UHF (Ultra High Frequency) and VHF (Very High Frequency)  bands of 50 MHz and up. On these bands there is a lot of local / regional traffic.

The lower frequencies, or HF (High Frequency) bands cover a much longer distance and depending on ionospheric conditions allow "skip" or bouncing of the radio waves potentially around the entire earth. It is possible to transmit and hear an echo comming around the world and back to you.

Another difference is antennas. Antenna size is related to the wavelength of the radio wave and typically are at least 1/4 wavelength and typically more. Wavelength in meters can be calculated by the simple formula 300 / frequency in megahertz. The higher UHF and VHF frequencies have much smaller antenna for example the poplular 2 meter band vs the 160 meter HF band. The 2 meter antenna fits on my small balcony, 160 meters, forget it!! Even a qubical antenna with 1/4 wavelengh sides would be over 128 feet on each side.

Lots of information on the ARRL website (http://www.arrl.org), the national association for Amateur radio, originally the American Radio Relay Legue.

Why the licensing??

The difference between amatuer radio and other radio services (CB and Family Radio) is that, in most cases it is not channelized, that is you can dial to any frequency. On top of that, subject to some restrictions to avoid conficts, you can use many modes that include voice using Single Side Band, Amplitude Modulation, Frequencey Modulation or Phase Modulation.. Data wise it might be RTTY, PSK, FSK, various packet protocals or even morse code which is considered a digital mode. There are also people bouncing signals off the moon, using amateur satellites and talking to the shuttle and space staion astronauts, many of whom are also hams.

Why me??

Starting a few months ago, Nelson Winters, one of the organizers of FlaDotNet in West Palm Beach, FL was telling me about his other volunteer life as an amateur radio operator, organizer of a radio club in Boca and partiicpant in supporting Palm Beach government and other agencies during emergencies. There are two emergency organizations ARES and RACES with RACES focused on government and civil defense agencies and ARES everything else like the Red Cross.

This got me remembering when I was an emerging geek of about 10 years old (~ 1962)I use to go to an electroncs store in West Hartford, CT while my mom went shopping. Just around the corner from the store was the headquarters of the ARRL that I visited and thought about getting licensed but never did.

What now?

One interesting activity  are "Nets". This is a time when people meet on the air and in time of emergency there is a formal format and messages can be passed all over the world potentially but most of the time is a chance for people to talk, announce meetings and activies and perhaps learn about some technical or other subject. Kind of an on-the-air user group meeting. I think the cell phone companies could make a killing with this. It does work however because there is a "Net Control Operator" who orchestrates "sign in" to the net and controls who is talking.

Another thing I have run accross is software defined radio. There is a company Flex Radio Systems (http://http://www.flex-radio.com) that sells a ham radio programmable with C#. Not sure i want to spend the few grand on it at this point but will take a look at the software.

I'm sure I'll get involved in one of the emergency services organization although my wife says if a hurricane comes I'll be with her on the way to Orlando!!

Ham radio groups, there are a number of clubs http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/club/ around the country. Just like the user  groups we are use to and a lot of nice people!!

N1DCN clear.

Sitting here watching Adrian Wible run the eXtreme Programming Lego game.

~ 40 people have been split into 6 groups, each with a number of cards describing customer wishes and a pile of legos.

Pictures at: http://geekswithblogs.net/dnoderer/gallery/8256.aspx

Video :

Process shortened for the 1.5 hr meeting. The goal is three iterations.

Step 1: Estimation: 10 min - Relative difficulty

Step 2: Prioritization: 5 min. - What is the most important

Step 3: Signup: 5 min - What to do for the 1st iteration (5 min)

Step 4: Development: 5 min - Implement the signup

Step 5: Testing / Totals: 10 Min - Measure actual against estimated effort and the signup / actual value

Step 6: Retrospective: 5 min - Have both customers and teams review work.

 Iteration #2 - 40 min - More requirements

 IPM Iteration Planning Meeting - 20 min
  - Estimation
  - Prioritization
  - Signup

Then steps 4,5,6 repeated.

Only got through 2 iterations by 8:45 pm so cut it off there. The 2nd iteration for all the teams was both more productive and generally much closer to the estimate.

This is giving us a lot of ideas for future meetings!

Does anyone else have interactive games like this??

 Updated: 2008-06-10

The first Teched Tweener weekend aka ]InBetween[ was put together by our Developer Evangilist, Joe Healy and the Florida community leaders. The event was two days held on June 7/8, 2008 between the Developer and ITPro weeks of Teched in Orlando.

We had nine rooms to utilize and Joe asked  a number of people to lead specific tracks which included .NET Code Camp, Day of Silverlight, Agile Camp, RoboCamp, ITPro Camp, SQL University, ToolShed, Office Communications Server University, DotNetNuke University and a large Open Space area. All this shifted and changed as we approached the actual event but is a good representation of what happened.

The whole weekend was a great experience and hopefully future tweener weekends will be even better.

Some lessons learned were:

• Open Space: Make people go to the open space, either have the registration there or force them to go visit in order to get coffee, schedules, etc.
• Open Space: Organize the open space (assuming a large area) with the vendors, information, user groups, and other organizations in the middle so that people can take a "tour" so it would be clear where to go.
• Open Space: Make sure there are specific tables for event information and user groups. Or more than one user group table even if someone wants to staff it.
• We had the corners setup with small seating areas and a large plasma screen for presentations. Make sure you get some things scheduled in advanced and publicized so that there will always be something going on while still leaving open slots for dynamic scheduling.
• Open Space: Create a dynamic scheduling tool so that when people sign up for it is all automatic (From Nikita who ran the open space).
• Location: Get all the rooms in the same area, same floor and ideally all together. I can attest to the issues and many miles of walking I had to do to keep track of four rooms on different floors and opposite  sides of the South end of the convention center in Orlando.
• Schedules: Put someone in charge specifically of the overall track schedules so that the room assignments and track titles are always up to date.
• Schedules: Make each track publish a more detailed session schedule, it was very confusing to attendees that many of the tracks did not have any detail ahead of time and in some cases the day of the event.
• Schedules: Maybe even put someone in charge of getting all the schedules printed. It is very useful but has to be done the morning of the event to have the best chance of being up to date. This means that the convention center kinko's that opens at 9am will not do. I submitted the job online the night before and picked up the printing at a nearby kinkos the next morning.
• Schedules: Have all sessions start at the same time. There was confusion as to when various things started. As much as possible, synchronize all sessions.
• Registrations: Make a central website for all the info, we used Joe Healy's Devfish.net blog site which was ok but he is busy too and updates took a long time in some cases.
• Registrations: Make a central scheduling tool that allows the attendees to click off the days and events. Allow the track chairs to monitor counts and get the name/emails afterwards. This was another point that was very confusing to attendees with every track having a different registration. From the event viewpoint only a master list of names was required. With this, registration could be left open until the night before the event when the badges could be printed, instead of collecting all the registrations days in advance.
• Web: Shawn Weisfield (I think) registered floridatweener.com, I registered techedtweener.com and .net which I'm happy to donate to future tweener events but I suspect the tweener name will not survive exposure to the Microsoft machine...
• Signage: We really did not have any signage, a few suggestions without going too crazy:
  • Directions at the entrances to the convention center where registration is located
  • Directions inside the convention center to the Open Space area. Open Space is where all the information, schedules and directions can be obtained.

• Party: Nothing more to add here, nobody will top the party that Jessica Sterner arranged at the Destiny night club. .net girls and a project runway competition will give you the flavor...
• Swag: There was a lot of confusion about swag, even for me. All of a sudden there were books in some of the rooms to be distributed. Some people got no books and others went from room to room collecting as much as possible. One idea would be to give a few books to each speaker to distribute at their session but then make everyone come to the open space room where we could setup a "free" bookstore.
• Swag: Giving away a few X-Box's at the event would be great. For the code camp tracks I had a couple but none of us had discussed in advance how the distribution would work and I did not have anything setup. In the end I took mine to the party where they got lots of public exposure.
• Evaluations: Don't try to use evals for giveaways, this gets too complicated and did not work at all this weekend. One problem is that there was not a space for the person's name or email, which makes sense as you probably get more accurate evals if anonymous but useless for drawings.
• Raffle: Just give each person a raffle ticket as they register or maybe better a raffle ticket for each session they attend. At the end have a raffle and give away the valuable swag plus any books or software that might be available.
• Rooms: Assign a host to each rooms or at least those that are next to each other. Make sure the speaker is hooked up and working. Point out / help with microphones / AV. Make announcements.
• Name: Kyle Baley suggests Twixter as sounding cooler than Tweener (and perhaps more acceptable to Microsoft) and some more punch than InBetween (my opinion).

I'll add more as I think about it or hear from others.

Sitting in the "bloggers" lounge near the stage.

Nice backpack with much heavier duty zippers than last year.

Out of XL staff shirts, only 2XL and M left...

INETA User Group Leader Summit will be in N330 AB at 2:30 PM.

The LCD display on my Nikon L11 (simple point and shoot) broke sometime during Steve Balmers talk at the MVP summit this year.

Having heard all the horror stories, i figured this camera was done for. I got a quote of ~ $150 to fix it from an online service but that is more than it is worth.

So... i disassembled the camera, i figured i had nothing to lose.

After a few very nasty shocks reminded me about the large capacitor used to fire the flash, i bought a 1k ohm, 1 watt resistor from Radio Shack and via volt meter verified the two obvious terminals were in fact the place to discharge the flash at.

I got it down to the LCD and could get the part number (which i did not really need).

I called Nikon and ordered the LCD for ~ $60. Not that it was necessairly worth fixing the camera and i had already bought a new one (a smaller, more expensive S210) but now it was a personal challenge!

I could not figure out right away how to release the circuit cable attaching the LCD to the board in the camera so i WISELY and carefully wrapped all the pices and screws untl the new LCD arrived.

It came today and the release of the cable became clear to me. I replaced the LCD and spent another 1/2 or so carefully putting all the pieces back together.

I put in some batteries and it actually worked!

Then i reailizedi had left the protective plastic on the LCD but was able to get it off from the outside.

Now i have a second working camera!!

Even if you don't listent to DotNetRocks on a regular basis (you should!), if you are a user group leader or interested in starting a user group you should listen to this show.

It is been quite a while since DotNetRocks has had a community focused show.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

This DotNetRocks session touchs on many of the most important points about running a user group.

A few things I can add...

- At one point INETA  (International .NET Association, www.ineta.org), when the .net community was being built, had large user group leader summits that got a wide variety leaders and potential leaders and everyone always walked away pumped up and excited about all the new ideas they heard about at the sessions. This in my mind was another very significant benefit that INETA delivered. Unfortunately funding dried up as it was hard to make a case for the Microsoft "numbers" system to understand the much deeper reach this had on the community and Microsoft. Everyone leaving one of those meetings had a wide and lasting effect in their respecitve communities. None of us were smart enough to figure out how to translate this comitment to the very large numbers Microsoft likes to see!

- Another benfit of INETA in the early days was to really mentor new user group leaders and potential leaders. This was dropped at some point and personal and ongoing communications between INETA and the user group leaders was stopped. Having helped mentor many hundreds around the world to start user groups this was crucial at one point. The .net community has maturred now and perhaps this type of mentoring is not as important.

- One social / community building thing I like to do is to go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves.

• Leaders, speakers and members can get to know who is in the room and what they might be interested in
• Many of the developers may not be use to speaking in front of a crowd. I know it is small but believe just this small exercise may help some people out of their shell
• It sets the tone for a more interactive meeting.

- I do agree that charging a small annual fee (I don't) is not necessairly bad and may be required if you have to pay for the venue (which usually is not necessary) but it does add a fairly significant additional set of tasks on a monthly basis for someone to collect money, keep track of the members, deposit money, write checks and do a bit of accounting at the very least. My thought is that all admin functions should be kept to a very small minimum, nobody really loves doing them and volunteer hours should be very carefully spent!

- We did a "Code Idol" meeting which was good but none of us could be mean like Simon! In the end, our judges were part of the vote but next time we will rely only on having all the participants face the front wall and have a silent vote by the rasing of hands. I think it is time to do another one!

- Thse days the Microsoft Developer Evangalists are very active in starting and supporting user groups, this was not always the case. So... if you are starting or want to start a user group, definitly find out who your most local DE is! Our DE's Joe Healy, Russ Fustino and Jeff Barnes are very active and Joe keeps the entire state of Florida influencers linked together. If you are having trouble finding out your local DE let me know, I can help you or direct you to someone who can.

- Finding committed volunteers for any organization is always a challenge. As Toy pointed out, you have to ask people to do things. Over time, some will respond and get interested, many will not. In all cases it has to be fun, even if it is a bit of work there has to be personal growth or reward or people will not do it over time.

Thats all for now!

http://www.bostonradiowatch.com/

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9085698&pageNumber=1

I was honored to be able to attend the first meeting of the Bahams .net (www.bahanet.org) user group in Nassau last week.

Kyle Baly (http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/) organized the meeting held at a local comany IPBS.

Fairly small group but that is ok! None of them knew what to expect and surprisingly none of them were there due to a direct contact with Kyle but because someone told them about it.

After getting them warmed up to what was possible in learning, business networking and socializing, they all left very enthused and ready for the next meeting which as already been scheduled.

It does not seem that .net is quite as far along on the island as it is here in the states but maybe this is a message to me that we should address basic .net topics at our user group meetings in Florida. We have tried a few times but it has not continued. This was also brought up to me when someone who is fairly new to .net happened to go to the www.fladotnet.com webstie and looked at our first video (see link at bottom of right column) where Jason Beres was talking about basic clr and framework concepts (this was in the fall of 2001).

Another interesting thing was that there really is no techincal netowking to speak of in the bahams. Everyone who grew up there attended "COB", College of the Bahamass (http://www.cob.edu.bs/) but apparently students don't have access to free Microsoft software there and there is no continuing contact among the alumni.

So, even if there are qualified people on the island to do technical work (.net ,rpg, php, etc...) the tendancy is to go elsehwere, the United States or Canada for example.

People did not know about DotNetNuke, Robotics Studio and a number of other appealing dot net based projects and technologies they  might be using.

It will be interesting to watch how this develops. The next meet scheduled for May 28th will cover basics of creating an asp.net website.

Thanks Kyle!!

The new site will be at: www.theguyfromboston.net

About 1 1/2 years ago I emailed a request to one of my senator's in Florida, Bill Nelson - D, for a pass to  watch a shuttle launch. I got a fairly quick response, they had received the request but that the next flight was already booked. I would be on the wait list...

Fast forward to Feb 2008 and I got a call to see if I was interested in the Mar 11 (planned) STS-123 launch... Yeah!!

The launch is scheduled at 2:30 am which may be why I bubbled to the top of the list.

I got a written inviation from NASA and eventually detailed information on what to do.

This invitation is for the Banana Creek VIP Viewing area, where the countdown clock is, near the launch center and 3.3 miles from the launch pad.

One bad thing is I cannot take my laptop there so no real time reporting!

Report:

It was really great, this veiwing area is adjacent to the Saturn V visitors center with bleachers for  a couple hundred.

There is a grassy area in front of the bleachers and that is where I sat/stood on the grass next to the 3' high fence. You could see the Vehicle Assembly Building to the right and the pad straight ahead. The launch was awesome, the only thing wrong was that there was a fairly low cloud ceiling, we figured about 10000 ft so the shuttle promptly dissapeared after laucnh.

This area is where the astronaut families watch from too (i'm 90% sure on this point) but they had a section of bleachers roped off at one end.

The visitors center was open for business and there were a number of conssessions.

I met a lot of really great people including a college engineering professor from New Orleans and his wife and college age son. As we were all professional nerds, the time went by fast talking about the shuttle, amps, robots and software. It turns out the son had done a summer internship a Michoud and worked on the pesky Engine Cutoff Sensors.

A big thanks to my Senator, Bill Nelson for making the trip possible!!

Photos: http://noderer.spaces.live.com/photos/cns!E8348157304BCE63!346/

The camera could just not deal with the initial launch brightness but there is a great picture of the plume after the shuttle has gone through the clouds.

In one of the most inventive moves I've ever witnessed, they had an annoucment before the launch that the solid rocket exhaust plume filled with Hydrocloric Acid would take 25 min to reach the viewing area so everyone should move quickly to the busses!