It’s nice when a shop project comes together…   Today we printed some test objects on the Reprap Mendel, our new 3D Printer, which we printed on our Makerbots.    Things still need some fine tuning before we can make it start self-replicating, but we should be announcing mendel parts kits shortly so you can jump into the recursive robot revolution.

If you’re keeping score,  this is the 4th bot in Seattle that’s gone live (that we know of) this week.   Shouts out to Humblefactory, LearnMakeCupcake, and the UW Mechanical Engineering’s Open3DP!

Just spent all afternoon cutting two dozen of furniture tags for Cody of Modgrain Custom Furniture. If you’re curious, his furniture looks just as cool as these tags :)

The fine UW students behind LearnMakeCupcake are back at Metrix again tonight to make final adjustments and their very first print on their newly completed Cupcake CNC. Let’s watch their progress:

Kevin delivers the LearnMakeCupcake MakerBot.

Kate takes a snack break. (Do not try to eat plastic teapots at home)

It takes a village to build a MakerBot.

Bre teaches the Paduan Bot Builders.

The First Print Doodle! Progress is being made!!

LearnMakeCupcake Class Portrait

BASK IN THE GLORY!

Just wanted to mention that Bre Pettis (geek’s love him, crafters want to be him) is down at Metrix tonight for a visit. Even though it’s not officially MakerBot night, Bre’s got his totally pimped out Cupcake CNC out (both can be seen above) and is test-driving his prototype heated build platform. Our newly complete Mendel is also making an appearance looking totally badass and technically functional.

Sometimes, we see projects go from start to finish in a day,  mostly we see our shop projects take longer than we’d like, and other times, we get to see just a slice of something that can change the world.

I’ve mentioned before that in our first week, someone came in and made a “DNA cloning machine”.   I still don’t really understand what PCR really means, I’m not a wetware guy.  I do understand the massive changes that happen in the world when you take a technology that costs several thousand dollars and bring it down to near-zero.  I also understand how awesome it is when people get together and build things.   It totally helps when there is a video to explain it all.

LavaAmp is the result of the collaboration of Rob Carlson and his engineering partner, Rik Wehbring, founders of Biodesic, a Bioengineering firm, Jim Hardy, bioentrepreneur founder of Gahaga Biosciences, Joseph Jackson, a philosopher interested in Open Science and DIY Biology and Guido David Nunez-Mujica, a Computational Biologist.

They all met at Science Foo Camp, and decided to develop, manufacture and market a simple, inexpensive device to perform PCR, which is the backbone of molecular biology.

They are at the prototype stage, and gathering funds to go to production.  If you want to help change the world, please sponsor their project!

I knew they were on to something when they wanted me to cut those polycarbonate donuts…

For a while now I've been wanting a small metal-working lathe for doing some work associated with the MakerBot and RepRap. There are a few parts on those machines that you need a lathe to make. A new-found friend I met through a few connections has a really nice old lathe and was generous enough to turn the parts we needed so I'm no longer in need.

That didn't stop me from keeping an eye on craigslist though. I managed to score a gently used rebranded Sieg 7 x 12 with a bit of tooling. I have since learned that this is the same lathe sold by harbor freight and grizzly as well as a few other companies. They're all made in the same factory and are of surprisingly good quality for the price. One definite upside to all of this is that both replacement parts and upgrades are readily available. Of course this means that I had to go and buy some of them. :)

Here it is in the back of the car:

I'm in Mountain View, CA this week for work and for a variety of reasons ended up taking a ridiculously early flight down today. In the end it was probably worth it since I got to finally visit Weird Stuff and the Computer History Museum. Weird Stuff was something of a let-down as it's mostly just full of old PC hardware and while the prices are good, I wanted more... well... weird.

On the way back from that I remembered that the Computer history museum was nearby and since I'd never managed to get in while it was open I thought I'd try again. It was my lucky day. Just as I walked in and caught sight of The Difference Engine a docent was starting a talk about it. It's an awesome machine. That made getting up early worth it.

There was a bunch of other old hardware, but after The Difference Engine it all seemed somehow a let down. Though the Cray 1 was pretty cool, and you could stand inside of that!

Pics here.

It seems people aren’t satisfied with just two different workshops. Our intro and transistors workshops have been filling up like mad, but you’re still clamoring for more. We’re finally listening to you, and we’ve got a new soldering workshop debuting next month.

Not only that, we’ve got a few new things in the works. Rumor has it we may even start teaching Arduino workshops. Stay tuned to find out more. For now, you’ll have to be content with these three. As always, our workshops require pre-registration in person at the shop.

Introduction to Electronics
We’ll be having three of these throughout March. These are one day workshops, so don’t register for more than one.
Sunday, March 7 from 2 to 4:30
Sunday, March 14 from 2 to 4:30
Saturday, March 27 from 6:30 to 9
Cost: $40

This workshop covers everything you need to know to get started in electronics. We’ll start from the basics of electricity and work our way up to using integrated circuits. You’ll leave the class with some simple components and the knowledge to use them.

Using Transistors
Sunday, March 21 2010
2-4:30
Cost: $40

We’ll explore transistors, what they’re used for, and how to use them. After an overview of the function of transistors, we’ll spend the class making some simple switches, logic gates, and an amplifier.

Required Equipment:
Breadboard, Multimeter

Intro to Soldering
Sunday, March 28 from 2 to 4:30
Cost: $40

This workshop will go over soldering through hole components. We’ll give you an electronics kit and walk you through putting it together, giving you all the tips and soldering techniques you need to make it work. We’ll also give you a soldering station along with the class.

Processing at 911 Media

If all of that workshop-y goodness isn’t enough for you, you may want to check out the Processing workshop given by our friends at 911 media.

http://www.911media.org/education/classes/processing-beginning.html

4 Tuesdays: March 16 - April 6; 6:30 - 9:30 PM

Members Price: $275
Non Members Price: $335
This course is designed for creative thinkers who are interested in expressing their ideas through code or creating custom software tools.  The course focuses on Processing, a coding language developed specifically for artistic applications. It is easy to learn for non-programmers yet powerful enough for seasoned programmers to rapidly develop concepts.  Processing has the added benefit of being a free and open source tool that is used by a large and very active community of creative minds internationally.  Learning Processing begins with very simple ideas like drawing basic geometry and colors on screen, but can expand in many directions ranging from physical interfaces to complex networked applications.

Are you bored and want to make good use of your unlimited SMS plan? Why not play a multiplayer proof of concept mud I wrote that uses SMS.

This game makes use of Twilio’s new SMS API and is somewhat fun to play, even in its current preview state.

Text the newly dedicated long code ‘hello’ to play: (202) 559-4772

it’s free.

In less than obvious fashion, Amazon EC2 Windows Server AMIs reset their hostname on startup due to the Ec2ConfigService. To disable this feature, select ‘EC2ConfigService Settings’ from the start menu, and uncheck the first checkbox under ‘Set Computer Name’

It’s a fact: makers love homemade gifts. Valentine’s Day is no exception to this rule, so when you’re thinking about what to give that special person, think about making it yourself. A homemade gift takes more thought and effort than something you just buy at a store, so it means more.

We here at Metrix Create:Space understand that and we want to help you make Valentine’s Day special. We’ve been whipping up some new romantic things that you can make here. You can laser cut your own design into acrylic for edge lighting or print out a heartfelt keepsake. We can even help you sew something for your valentine.

There’s only five days until Valentine’s Day, so you better start your gifts soon.

The battery in the R50 is giving up. On my ride home last week the headlight would go out if I let the revs drop. So today while I was out I picked up another. This is the box that it came in:

Imagine you are a cellular company that wants to shed some customers because your network is being driven into the ground by iPhone users.  Here's a plan that should get you some breathing room:

1. Announce that you are going to require data plans on 'Smart Phones.'


2. Without warning 'upgrade' all your customers to a $30/month data plan.


3. Refuse to revert the change claiming that 'The System' will only change it back.

Sometimes you wonder about things.   Strange things.  I’ve been watching the stepper motor row in the vending machine, and seeing motors quickly disappear. I wonder where they go.  It seemed like yesterday we had a huge box of them.  Mostly, I don’t know what happens to them.  They go to live a second or maybe third life somewhere, in some project.  The machine is just a temporal stop in their exciting life of spin and step.   

Sometimes though, people bring their projects in, and we get a peek at their new function and snap a blurry picture.   A few weeks ago, Michael came by to show us his propeller powered etch-a-sketch.   We were all amazed.    We boggled at the speed, accuracy and awesomeness of this project, then we wondered how he did it.

Now we know.  He’s detailed every gory detail (including source) of the propetcher here.   It’s also up on Hackaday, which has some less blurry pictures than our Flickr stream, as well as the normal flurry of helpful suggestions from the peanut gallery.

If you’ve been curious how to drive our 3 wire steppers, Michael has also produced this very helpful diagram.

Last night, Dominic Muren, Willow Brughe and I presented a night of “Fab Lab” to the Dorkbot Seattle crowd.    I saw later on twitter that some 120+ people showed up,  which is not only uncommon for dorkbot, but it shows that whole physical computing and home fabrication thing is generating lots of interest.

Dominic’s talk was awesome, and it covered pretty much every way to digitally fabricate things.  He’s annotating the whole thing with links and should be uploading it to Humblefacture shortly, so if you didn’t make it to the talk, you should dig through the slides.  Probably the best list of fabbing technologies and software for modeling I’ve seen in a while.   Makes me want to rethink my current toolchains.

Willow Brugh, director of Jigsaw Renaissance, talked about their space in SODO, admittedly hard to find and hard to type, it sounds like a fun place to hang out.  They’re a non-profit,  under the umbrella of Milwaukee-based Bucketworks, and they have some access to Artillery’s tools.  This is the second time we’ve met.  Last was at KUOW.   Hopefully I can get down to Jigsaw one of these days and check it out.   Sounds interesting.   Too bad it’s not within my ridiculously short live/work radius.

Milo the makerbot hummed away for a while on a print, but ultimately it’s extruder failed.  The makerbot portion of my presentation didn’t get to have a live maple syrup smelling robot giving birth to a Mendel extruder.   Suck.

We adorned him with flashy LEDs and magnets, but the demo gods were not amused.  More robot maintenance in my future.  Unsurprising.

I had a presentation, but I tried to keep it informal,  I talked about the history of .\C:_ (most people ask), how it came together so quickly (i have the most awesome friends ever), and about some of the things that happen in our strange basement on Broadway.   Dorkbot threatened to put the video up on their website soon, and I’ve shared my slides on Google Docs.    I’m sure neither will make sense without the context of being there.

The star of the night for me was Professor Mark Ganter, who wasn’t on the schedule, but who has voided the warranty on his departments 5 zcorp printers by printing ceramic and glass.   Apparently you can print different materials than $1000 per oz zcorp plastics, all of which are dirt cheap.   The glass dust he uses is a byproduct of glass recycling, and is next to free.   Printing in wood is easy if you have micron scale wood dust, which is something laser cutting produces.   The binders are as simple as cheap vodka and maltodextrin, both easily available at local stores.   He has dropped the costs on printing to nothing.

This is huge stuff.   Commercial 3D printing is a racket, and the costs ($600 for a gallon of comercial binder) of something so potentially world-changing is ridiculous.

Ganter is putting all of this up on Open3DP, another amazing move for a professor at a University that lives on patents

What happens if you dont have a zCorp printer?

There is a guy in Brazil who has made a Homemade 3D Powder Printer out of an old Lexmark printer.   Once we figure out the logistics of where to put something like this, and how we can make it relatively safe (glass dust is probably off the table),  I think we’ve got a new shop project.   And with that, more maintenance.  Awesome.

Nike+iPod sensors are small, flat wireless motion detectors that chirp a unique serial number (among other data), to tell your iPod how many steps you have taken, and at what pace. Its a great way to stay in shape.

However, they also make great presence detectors. They all transmit on a single channel, unencrypted, for about 60 feet in the 2.4GHz band. List price? $19.99, or $29.99 for shoe sensor and radio. It also looks kinda trendy too.

One really annoying thing about Foursquare or any other venue check-in application, is having to remember to actually check-in when you arrive. Wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if it worked automatically?

My system could eventually plug into something like stumble.to. If you are not familiar with “stumble.to”, it is a way of providing your MAC addresses for your WiFi laptop and phone to check in for you at the venue when you are present. Currently, it is limited to just a few venues now. But instead of having to lug around your laptop, or connect to the local wifi, you could also have your Nike shoes (or sensor in generic shoes) check in for you.

The backend device would need to be located in the venue, but it is internet-independent, low power, and can be located anywhere in the world.

Currently, its on an electronics bread board and rather bulky, and it talks to Foursquare directly…but it (mostly) works.

Here are some screen shots of my first check-in using this system:

We're big on CHS Blog:

What ho? We were featured on CHS Blog again? Goodness!

First, a bit of social commentary.

Sometimes we refer to the way something ought to be accomplished as the RightWay[tm], sarcastically noting that every best practice contains a certain degree of opinion. As we dedicate more time to doing something our way, we become invested in it being the RightWay, and risk becoming defensive about our choices. Adam Jacob calls this “survivorship-bias,” and I’ve spent some time listening to him think about what he feels the risks are, and considering them myself. When we make significant personal investment in a choice, it becomes a personal challenge to remain impartial about the merits of that choice over time.

I’ve previously said that Configuration Management is the act of programatically configuring your systems. Cloud computing says that building servers is undifferentiated heavy lifting; unless your service is building servers, you should really let someone else do it and focus on the product or service you’re actually trying to sell. Configuration Management is the first step in bringing this same ideology to configuring systems. We are not in the business of selling configured servers any more than we are in the business of providing coffee to our employees, we happen to do both. We build our systems to enable our business to conduct business. In my case, operations is enabling our customers to use the web product that we develop.

We are all members of the Configuration Management community, because we believe it is ultimately a better process for building systems. We naturally have different ideas about how that process should execute, which among other differentiating factors is often that “goals are different but are left unstated” in the community. The level of preference here and resulting fragmentation is not any different than holding an opinion over what open source operating system one should use for a specific task. The merits of our choices are worth discussing, but the implication that tools and libraries should all come to the same conclusions about design is like implying that the world only needs one type of hammer.

So, defining the meatcloud as the established notion that having your internet presence grow forms a direct relationship with hiring more people to rack servers, install software, and update configuration files; I asked around a little, why do we think Configuration Management is better?

• Abstractation

You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car, should you need to be a subject matter expert on Apache to run a webserver? Infrastructure as code shows us how and the resulting communities are starting to implement this. When we spend less time getting the parts working, we can spend more time innovating better solutions with the parts.

• Self-documenting

Ever rebuild a server that someone built long ago and is no longer with the organization, and find many small parts necessary to make it work that nobody bothered to write down? Placing those small changes and required files in configuration management ensures that even if the code doesn’t run flawlessly on an upgraded operating system, you know everything that went in to making it work. Since you’re configuring the system through configuration management, a lot less falls through the cracks because documentation is often an afterthought to getting the system working.

• Consistency and Repeatability

What is on that system? Everything you told CM to put there. ‘Golden image‘ disk images often leave you in the aforementioned situation where you don’t know how to recreate them, but often you don’t know what else ended up there. Configuration Management allows you to build many copies of the same system easily, from scratch every time.

• Agility

Did sales tell you they had fifty customers and it turned out to be five hundred? How long will it take you to build the extra servers by hand? How many extra people do you have to put into the meatcloud to get that done in time? Business requirements always change, and slow moving businesses are at a disadvantage to dealing with this. The inability to build and deploy servers fast enough should never be a reason your business fails.

• Flexibility, or Don’t Repeat Yourself

Three applications on one server? Or one application on three servers? Apache doing different jobs on multiple servers? Moving applications between servers and leveraging existing infrastructure code for new projects is easy. We automate tasks that are repeatable, but often scripts are written to accomplish one repeatable task. Here we say, how can we treat configuration as sets of modular tasks that we can mix and match?

Darivanh Vlachos, Alexis Hope and Kate MacCorkle (from left to right above) came down to Metrix this evening to learn about MakerBots. This is not in itself noteworthy, especially since we’re pretty much the only shop in the neighborhood with any. What was different about this visit was that Darivanh, Alexis and Kate are all part of the Human Centered Design and Engineering at UW. They’re going to be making a MakerBot and documenting how they learn how to make and use it as their class project on how everyday, non-technical folks learn how to use technology.

This is possibly the most meta and intellectual use of Metrix I have yet to write about. It’s especially meta when I consider the fact that I am now documenting the documentation of their project…woo, recursion vertigo. Anyway, one more example of just how interesting and creative things can get when you put a bunch of tools in a basement open to the general public.

Here at Metrix Create:Space, we don’t really sell coffee. We provide it as an amenity to our members and customers and we drink a lot of it ourselves. It does cost a dollar, but that dollar doesn’t go into paying staff, or rent, or even paying back the upfront cost of the robot (eventually we’ll pay for that thing somehow). It goes towards Vivace beans, our nifty poker draw cups, milk, and tasty tasty Oregon Chai. We’re not a coffee shop. We’re a workshop. We like coffee, it keeps us moving, so we have the good stuff.

We do understand how coffee shops work , and how you and many of the laptop carrying, working-from-home mobile workforce out there live within their rules. You see, at one time, we worked on software, and we were laptop hobos.

Working from home, or working ‘out of the office’ is a hard thing (well, it’s not hard like a salt mine or working at a desk or anything, but it can be inconvenient). For the most part, coffee shops have become the haven of the hobo. There are lots of social rules to setting up camp in a coffee shop. Mostly they involve picking up a coffee or a pastry every now and then, trying not to tie a table up every single day at the same place, tipping the barista kind of heavy so they don’t glare at you (too hard), not bringing in packed lunches and outside drinks. There’s a fine line you tread to not wear out your welcome, or run the place out of business. That’s why you’re buying the scones even though you don’t really like them. That’s why you don’t sleep much. It’s not the stress of the workplace, it’s the 4 latte a day habit.

Coffee shops, have become the third place for workers, some by design, some by accident. For the most part though, coffee shops focus on their coffee, not their Internet. And for coffee shops, the Internet is an amenity that they have to have, rarely understand and don’t like paying for. Lots of coffee shops don’t even have a computer in them other than a cash register. Which is why their Internet is slow and laggy.

Here at our workshop, we spend a lot of time working on our robots, building shop projects, buying tools and supplies and going about the things we need to do to make your projects go smoother. For that we need the Internet, and we like the Internet, so we make sure our Internet is awesome.

Some of you may have noticed that there is effectively no lag at Metrix Create:Space. That’s because we have fast tubes (50mbps/10mpbs). We have a managed Cisco switch rather than a linksys hub. Our WiFi gear is from our ‘other store’, which primarily sells WiFi gear to people building WiFi businesses. We give you a publicly routeable IPV6 address. If the wireless is too slow for you (because 802.11g is only 20mbps), we even have a couple of wall jacks that you can plug in to, and get the full 50. Remember we mentioned that we like the Internet here? That may have been an understatement.

Unfortunately, this makes us both appealing to the laptop hobo , and confusing. The rules are different here. It’s a new thing. We don’t have scones. The coffee doesn’t really pay for anything. How can you hobo without running us out of business? We know a lot of you are concerned about how we survive, because you ask us, and sometimes we wonder ourselves.  We have thought about your concerns, and are offering you an option.

Today we are introducing Hobo Tokens and an actual tip jar. Hobo Tokens are a totally optional currency of goodwill. They let us know that you care about us, and remind us to keep that awesome Internet connection around. There are no rules, you can buy them and lock them up in a curio cabinet, give them away as gifts, or put them in the tip jar. They have no monetary value and are worth nothing in the store. Rest assured though, if you hobo hard, and you tip us in tokens, we know you care about the shop.

Like the rest of the shop, this is kind of a weird experiment.

They’re available online (we will mail them wherever you want) or at the counter for $5. 5 for $20

We’ll also put them on Thingiverse.   They take 3 minutes each to cut, so if you cut them yourselves, they’re $4.80 each.  If you have your own laser and material, they’re free goodwill.

With AT&T saying that “with each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”) and plain-old telephone service (“POTS”) as relics of a by-gone era,” I thought it would be a good time to get a snapshot of the North American telephone network as it exists now. In the early 1970s, phone phreaks like Evan Doorbell and Mark Bernay started recording what they saw as the demise of the electromechanical telephone network. The switches then were crossbars and panels and steps and the like, with early computerized switches like the 1ESS just starting to appear. Now, the 1ESS is nearly gone from the network, and the North American network consists mostly of the Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent/Alcatel 5ESS (the 1ESS’s successor), the Nortel DMS-10 and DMS-100, the GTE Automatic Electric GTD-5 EAX, and the Stromberg-Carlson/Siemens DCO. A few other switches in the network, like the Siemens EWSD and the Ericsson AXE 10 have found more popularity in North America as cellular switches (and as wireline switches in other countries).

The oddball switches are the ones that really interest me, and they’ll be the first ones to disappear from the network. I’ve been told that the TRW Vidar ITS-5 and the Mitel GX5000 switches may be gone from the North American network. To see what might be left, I decided to do some digging, and I’ve come up with a list of the telephone switches (minus remotes) still in use in the North American network. There’s undoubtedly some stale data in this database, and so for rare switches, I think the numbers listed are the upper boundary — the lower boundary may be as low as 0. The list also contains the mystery “Digital Switching System”. There seems to be an awfully large number of them for it to be the North Electric DSS-1, which became the ITT 1210 — maybe it just means “unknown digital switch”?

The picture above of the GTD-5 EAX was shamelessly stolen from the site of a GTD-5 consultant, the only place I could find a picture.

.even { background-color: #FFC } .odd { background-color: #EEA } table#table_results { border-spacing: 0; } table#table_results td { padding: 5px; }

Top 10 Switches

Manufacturer	Switch	Count
NORTEL	DMS 100	2513
LUCENT	5 ESS	2236
NORTEL	DMS 10	1968
AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC	GTD-5 EAX	668
SIEMENS	DCO	522
	DIGITAL SWITCHING SYSTEM	247
REDCOM	MDX 384	155
ERICSSON	AXE 10	102
SIEMENS	EWSD	91
LUCENT	1A ESS	66

The Whole List

Manufacturer	Switch	Count
NORTEL	DMS 100	2513
LUCENT	5 ESS	2236
NORTEL	DMS 10	1968
AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC	GTD-5 EAX	668
SIEMENS	DCO	522
	DIGITAL SWITCHING SYSTEM	247
REDCOM	MDX 384	155
ERICSSON	AXE 10	102
SIEMENS	EWSD	91
LUCENT	1A ESS	66
MITEL CORP LTD	GX5000 DIGITAL SWITCH	64
	PACKET END OFFICE	54
METASWITCH, INC.	METASWITCH VP3510	28
NORTEL	SA1	24
LUCENT	5ESS-2000 SWITCH	22
NORTEL	DMS 200	21
SIEMENS	DCO  21	18
METASWITCH, INC.	METASWITCH VP3500	17
TEKELEC INC	IX7000 (TM) NEXT GENERATION CLASS 5 SWITCH	16
REDCOM LABORATORIES	MDX 10K (MODULAR DIGITAL EXCHANGE)	15
VIDAR	ITS 5	14
METASWITCH, INC.	METASWITCH VP2510	12
NORTEL	CS 1500	12
TEKELEC INC	OPEN COMPACT EXCHANGE (OCX)	12
	COMMUNITY DIAL OFFICE	12
CIT-ALCATEL INC	E10 – FIVE SWITCHING SYSTEM	11
NORTEL	DMS 500	11
SIEMENS	CENTURY DCO6000	10
AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC	STEP BY STEP	8
LUCENT	5ESS-2000 SWITCH VCDX	8
NEC CORPORATION OF AMERICA	NEAX – 61	8
	9A ANNOUNCEMENT-WEATHER	8
	ANNOUNCEMENT SYSTEM	8
SIEMENS	EMD55	7
LUCENT	4 ESS	6
SIEMENS	XY	6
HARRIS CORPORATION	RURAL ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE	5
NORTH ELECTRIC	DSS 1	5
ALCATEL	1210	4
ALCATEL	CRX	4
NEC	NEAX – 61E	4
NORTH ELECTRIC	DSS	4
SIEMENS	DTM	4
TEKELEC INC	7000 CLASS 5 PACKET SWITCH (T7000)	4
ALCATEL	12 (HOST)	3
LUCENT	5ESS-2000 CDX (COMPACT DIGITAL EXCHANGE)	3
METASWITCH, INC.	MG3510	3
SIEMENS	DCOSE SMALL EXCHANGE	3
	4A ANNOUNCEMENT TIME	3
	CALL AGENT	3
VIDAR	IMA2	3
ALCATEL	A1 – SPC	2
METASWITCH, INC.	METASWITCH VP3000	2
NORTH ELECTRIC	CX 200	2
NORTH ELECTRIC	NX2A	2
REDCOM LABORATORIES	IGX-MT END OFFICE SWITCH	2
SANTERA SYSTEMS INC.	SANTERAONE (BOX) BROADBAND OFFICE EXCHANGE	2
SIEMENS	DCO  80	2
SIEMENS	DCO 200	2
SIEMENS	ESC(1)	2
	AUTOMATIC CALL DISTRIBUTOR	2
ALCATEL	RELAYMATIC	1
AUTOMATIC ELECTRIC	375A	1
GLUON NETWORKS INC.	CLX(TM) CONVERGED LOCAL EXCHANGE	1
ITEC INC	EMS-1	1
LUCENT	1 ESS – 2WIRE	1
LUCENT	1 ESS – 4WIRE	1
LUCENT	1 ESS – HILO	1
LUCENT	2B ESS	1
LUCENT	NO 5 CROSSBAR-4WIRE	1
LUCENT	NO 5 CROSSBAR-ETS	1
LUCENT	PLEXUS 9000	1
LUCENT	STEP BY STEP	1
NORTEL	CS 100	1
NORTEL	DMS-10 AP	1
NORTEL	DMS10 SIGNALLING RELAY POINT	1
NORTEL	NO 5 CROSSBAR	1
NORTEL	STEP BY STEP	1
NORTH ELECTRIC	CX  30	1
ROCKWELL INTERNATIONAL	ISS 3000	1
SIEMENS	MAINSTREETXPRESS 36170	1
TEKELEC INC	9000 DISTRIBUTED SWITCHING SYSTEM (DDS)	1
	ANALOG SWITCHING SYSTEM	1
	CONCENTRATOR	1
	CROSSBAR SWITCHING SYSTEM	1
	PACKET SWITCH	1
	SWITCHED DIGITAL DATA SYSTEM	1
	LXP – 4	1

Our first Using Transistors workshop went well today. We managed to
continue the tradition of blowing up at least one component per class.
This time it was a transistor that shattered due to excessive current.
As usual, the exploding component served to highlight the facts
covered in the class. The workshop attendees got to play with logic
gates, switches, sensors, and motors.

Interest in both of our electronics workshops has remained strong. The
Intro to Electronics workshop on Thursday has been full for a few
weeks, and we already have people on the waiting list for our next
classes. Next month we’ll be having another set of electronics
workshops, so register early to reserve your spot.

We haven’t forgotten about those of you who want a soldering workshop.
We’re hard at work designing a workshop that’s worthy of you. As soon
as we’ve got a curriculum we’re satisfied with, we’ll start scheduling
the soldering workshops. 

Introduction to Electronics
Sunday, February 7 2010
2-4:30
Cost: $40

This workshop covers everything you need to know to get started in
electronics. We’ll start from the basics of electricity and work our
way up to using integrated circuits. You’ll leave the class with some
simple components and the knowledge to use them.

Using Transistors
Sunday, February 21 2010
2-4:30
Cost: $40

We’ll explore transistors, what they’re used for, and how to use them.
After an overview of the function of transistors, we’ll spend the
class making some simple switches, logic gates, and an amplifier.

Required Equipment:
Breadboard, Multimeter

Morgan’s tasty transistors workshop - transistors are like delicious grilled cheese sandwiches, except that if you eat them you will get sick. Also, transistors can do a lot more neat things than a sandwich can.

~ Jen

Jesse and Angela (pic 2, right) were down here tonight make some nifty LED light boards (pics 1 & 4) - when those things are on it’s like Christmas all over again. You can’t see it in the still shots, but they can be programmed to oscillate and generally look even more spectacular. They’re from a kit for LED light bricks, but Angela and Jesse are going to put them in a translucent acrylic case rather than setting them in an acrylic brick so they can access the board to reprogram it later if they want.

Their friends Kevin and Jaime (pic 2, left) were also down here putting together bliplaces (pic 3), sound-reactive LED button kits they got from the vending machine of wonder. That’s a pretty impressive night’s work for some first-time solderers, and they got to walk away with a badass homemade piece of shiny.

~ Jen

He did it! At approximately 3am this morning, Matt finally finished the 2-axis laser writer he’s been working for the past week. Congratulations Matt :)

~ Jen

Well a couple people used the 0.7.16wt1 release, including Thom May who had issues with that version number. Consequently I took out the ‘wt’ from the version, but this is still an unofficial, unsupported release.

I pulled in the changes on Thom’s internal branch and grabbed some more low hanging fruit. Don’t ask what methodology I used. It’s magic.

Grab the github branch, or the debs in my launchpad ppa. I’ve only tested this on Ubuntu Karmic, as it goes.

** Bug
* [CHEF-454] - Centos4 yum provider failure
* [CHEF-616] - rake install in chef-repo breaks if there is no git origin
* [CHEF-637] - duplicate copies of FileEdit: file_edit.rb & fileedit.rb
* [CHEF-639] - git resource fails on subsequent checkouts of the same repostiry
* [CHEF-642] - Services will always issue a WARN when status is not present
* [CHEF-684] - Should be possible for roles to be created without anything in the run_list
* [CHEF-704] - Ruby block device does not have a default action
* [CHEF-722] - Link provider doesn’t understand paths requiring expansion
* [CHEF-843] - FileEdit permission issues

** Improvement
* [CHEF-598] - Upstart service provider
* [CHEF-617] - Install to chef repository on a remote machine
* [CHEF-709] - Support for backup up files in another directory than the original file
* [CHEF-752] - No way to pass parameters to useradd provider

I’ve periodically been having DNS lookup issues with internal domains and isolated them to remote SSL VPN clients connecting to a Cisco ASA 5520 using the Anyconnect SSL VPN client. I eventually got frustrated and troubleshooted the issue by using the command line ‘vpn’ client to initiate a connection on a remote Ubuntu Linux machine while here in the office. nslookup would produce the error “Got recursion not available from x.x.x.x, trying next server” and dig would respond with “status: REFUSED” and “;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available”. I noticed traffic was not making it to the Windows Server 2008 DNS server by watching wireshark and enabling DNS debugging.

Having been acquired six months ago our list of internal domains increased quite a bit. I found the ’split-dns’ setting in the default group access policy set to the old list of internal domains and set this to ’split-dns none’. This resolved the issue. Apparently the client was comparing the query to its list of split-dns domains, and the match was failing so it was sending the resolver (operating system) an error message so it would go through the list of DNS servers until it tried the local server. Rather than trying to make a list of all the possible domain names in the company, I’m going to leave this off since the internal DNS servers have recursion enabled and can handle DNS lookups just fine for the remote clients.

Wow, Kraft Nite is doing wonders for my productivity…I made seven wooden cog pins, I’m on my way to finishing a couple more little hip-pockets, and I’ve got pictures of everything I made. It’s amazing what you can pull of if you just have the right tools. If I can do all that in a few hours, just think of all the progress you could make on your own crafty goodness :D

There’s also a fractal quilt in progress - if you stop by in a few Kraft Nites from now, you might even get to see the finished product.

Jen Power is a nerdy crafter, Cap Hill resident, and writer of Life on the Hill and Other Stories

Yay, Kraft Nite! If you want to join the fun, just stop by any Tuesday night after 6pm and get your craft on :)

I recently purchased a Kodak Easyshare Wireless Digital Picture Frame off woot for an amazing price of $49.99. Infact, I bought two. The model number is W820, which is an 8″ frame, but there is also a 10 inch version as well. These picture frames have built in WiFi and can grab content off the internet.

The most exciting part about this picture frame has nothing to do with putting an SD card full of baby pictures, and everything to do with adding fun widgets to your photo roll! Facebook status updates, facebook photos, tweets, news, weather, live sports scores, flickr accounts, and the ability to have it make use nearly any RSS feed. Oh, and it shows baby pictures too I guess in the mix, if thats what you want.

The widgets are powered by FrameChannel, which is a sort of third party service that provides this functionality to Kodak picture frames everywhere. You setup an account with a special secret code that is shown on your picture frame (which nobody is supposed to have access to, otherwise they could load content on your frame before you even take it out of the box), and then you are off to widget building land where you can construct a slideshow based on time of day and frequency of display.

However, deep on the website i noticed this little innocent piece of information:

What’s this at the bottom? Some strange little RSS URL?

Well, lets just plug it in and see what happens:

http://rss.framechannel.com//productId=KD9371/frameId=00:23:4D:B8:07:6D

Look, its an RSS feed of what my picture frame is showing now! I can send this nice URL to everyone I know so they can look at all my private content I have configured for this device. Now, under no circumstances would I recommend changing the last digits of this MAC address frame ID to another number….because you would get someone else’s picture frame content. Why would you want to do that?

UPDATE: 1/6/2010 It is quite apparent that FrameChannel is no longer interested in providing the public RSS feature to its customers. As other people have indicated, the RSS URL has been removed from the user interface. In addition, they are filtering by User-Agent. I am sure that will put an end to sharing of my RSS feed of my frame because User-Agents are impossible to fake. No word if they intend to update firmware for the “AVOS/1.1″-based device.

Slashdot has coined this feature documented on the web interface a “major privacy/security issue” and some discussion has ensued on the forum: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/05/0413228/Kodak-Wireless-Picture-Frames-Open-To-Public.

The member badges have been cut.   If you signed up for a membership in 2009, your very own, uniquely identifiable badge is now ready for you to pick up.

Yes, there is a secret contest.    I’ve probably said too much.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and what am I doing? Hanging out in the best basement EVER.  And getting lured into blogging for Metrix cuz, well, I hang out here too much anyway, and I might as well write about it. So while everyone else is getting drunk waaay too early in order to be obnoxious well before midnight, I’ll be here watching Helen Cook make laser-cut puzzle boxes and while I create tiny adorable purses out of upholstery fabric samples. And blogging about it.

Jen Power is your friendly neighborhood geekcraft blogger, as well as the author/pontificator of Life on the Hill and Other Stories

I sent an email out to the chef list today about releasing an unofficial Chef 0.7.16 fork to tide some of us over until 0.8 ships as Opscode does not plan any more 0.7.x releases. I use this internally at $job and pushed it out to github by request. I have no plans to push another release but will if there is demand internally or externally. This includes the security patches in 0.7.16 and a couple bug fixes:

* [CHEF-706] - mount provider fails to mount samba/cifs devices (Device does not exist)
* [CHEF-634] - UI fails silently when unable to save node
* [CHEF-659] - UI expands some escaped characters from JSON, then fails to encode them again

You can grab this tree from github, or use the debs built in my launchpad PPA.

Rather than making additional blog posts as the build for Chef 0.8 alpha has progressed, I’ve been updating this gist each time I test another build cycle. My original instructions are here. There is another blog posts here and some instructions for running under screen as well.

The Chef site starts out with, “Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure.” There is an important point hidden in that description; Chef is not a CM tool. Of course it can be used as one, and many do, but from its beginning it has been leveraged by others such as Engine Yard inside of their own infrastructure. You can safely bet it will be an integral part of the Opscode platform when released as well.

While I was off dealing with my startup’s acquisition this fall, a chef user wrote knife. It was a command line client for interacting with a chef server. An impressively simple prototype, made possible and powered by the chef libraries and API. This has happened before with chef; for instance a while ago in the 0.6 era, an OS X GUI client called Casserole was written by another chef user with an itch to scratch. However, something has happened with knife that is interesting enough I’d like to specifically point out; it got mainlined and heavily expanded.

This happened for a handful of reasons. For one, it was simply a great idea. The kind of user who would be attracted to chef as a tool is very likely to be a power user who would rather not spend their time clicking around a graphical interface. It’s much easier to script a command line tool where needed, passing data in and out for quick hacks to your infrastructure. The folks at Opscode saw this, agreed, and set out to add full functionality to it for the upcoming 0.8 release.

What I think is most important is the planning a full API from the start. From hearing Adam talk about other tools being “first-class citizens” in chef-land, and knowing his experience writing iClassify as an early open source external node tool for puppet, I know this design was intentional. Using iClassify to tell puppet about your nodes was great, but puppet assumed that you only wanted this tool to classify nodes in the way puppet thought about nodes. Consequentially, when you wanted to to use data in iClassify about your nodes to make decisions about your infrastructure on the fly, you were forced to do it in templates. This created the expected repetition of loading the iClassify library and accessing iClassify in many templates, but also required you at times to do some fancy footwork to get data between templates when you really wanted puppet to know about the data itself.

Reductive Labs recently announced a dashboard for puppet. I was hoping this meant those barriers had been removed. It certainly creates really nice graphs from your puppet report data. However from the README it looks like you’re still pushing limited data into puppet using the external node interface. Reductive is going to have to expand this interface greatly if dashboard is to have any meaningful node integration benefits that we didn’t already have two years ago with iClassify.

Just as you can see some concepts from other configuration management tools in chef, you can see parts of iClassify. It was a great start and it was disappointing that the puppet community didn’t engage it further. Perhaps it was simply before its time, but I believe it was that there were too few doors into puppet-land to let you really take advantage of and grow external tools.

I think this was the lesson that Opscode learned, and consequently chef was born with an API. With it we can accomplish nearly anything we dream up. What is most exciting about this is that we can do whatever everyone else dreams up. I can’t wait to see what that is.

If you’ve been around the shop lately, you’ve probably heard us mention that we’re going to build Johnathan Wards’ MTM PCB Mill.   We’ve been making good progress.

We don’t have a shopbot, and our first attempt at getting some parts made on a neighbor’s CNC didn’t work out, so we lasercut our assembly out of 6mm plywood and did a bit of glue work to get a nice solid frame.  This not only looks nice, it gives us a lot more control over how we can build the thing.  Turns out the first failure was a good thing because other than the initial body,  our mill isn’t going to be very much like the original at all.   Which is of course the point of Open Source Hardware.   It’s not really a blueprint, it’s a starting point.

We’ve been really interested in is seeing if we could build the mill without going through the MTM BOM.   Sure, it’s reasonable pricing if you’re looking at CNC mills, but buying 108 bucks worth of Frelon lined linear bearings when we already have a bunch of tools that make tools seems silly. We can make linear bearings. We have a makerbot and a spool of HDPE (slippery plastic for the uninitiated).  Add to that we have printer rods in the Junk Box, extra threaded rod from our second makerbot build, stepper motors, drivers, arduinos, DC motors, and pounds upon pounds of screws and nuts.  We started looking around the shop and figured out we can make this thing with stuff we have laying around.  Once it’s built, we can use it to make itself better too!

Tonight was all about hacksaws and printing with HDPE for the first time.  It was a bit of effort, but we got all our rods cut and built an X axis that slides pretty smooth. We also got some ideas for the next round of cuts, which we should be able to fit in the scrap from the first round.   We’ll keep you updated on our progress, and publish our plans so you can make what we do, and change what you want.

Once it’s done, we’re going to put this robot to work.  Come in and make surface mount PCBs in a little under an hour.

If you’re wondering how to make boards (we sure are), we’ve started up a wiki page on the toolchain that the Center for Bits and Atoms uses.   It’s pretty cool stuff.

Here at Metrix, we like being crafty- and not just in the clever sense.

Come join us on Tuesday evenings for crafting of all varieties.  Take advantage of the laser cutter and makerbot for the base structure for multi-media projects (see decorated tree: laser cut tree, knit decoration, makerbot star).  And remember, the bottomless toolbox can include a sewing machine or surger. You can even use the laser cutter to cut felt, fabric, paper, and more!

So, bring your knitting, crocheting, quilting, sewing, painting, origami, jewelry making, … and join us for an evening of awesome creation.

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BA785E28-3D7B-47AE-A4F9-4784F61B598A} failed due to the following error: 80070005. (Microsoft.SqlServer.ManagedDTS)

Trying to access SSIS (DTS) on Microsoft SQL 2008 with SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 gave the above error. Trying to create a maintenance plan provided the same error, since it uses SSIS. There were indications online that I should try running SSMS with elevated permissions using the ‘Run as administrator’ option on the context (right-click) menu, however that provided a “The parameter is incorrect” error on startup. Eventually I discovered that the disk that the SQL tools were installed on did not have default (R+X) permissions to the local users group. Once I added this group, I was able to connect to SSIS and create a maintenance plan without issue.

Metrix Create:Space is about building, learning and discovery.   What have we discovered? People love Workshops.

The Introduction to Electronics workshop this Sunday filled up last week, and even before we finished writing this blog post, we got a signup for January.

We know you have a thirst for knowledge, and flashing LEDs are just the beginning, so we’ve added Using Transistors to our lineup. A quick google search shows that an Intel Pentium D has 230 million transistors, but do you even know what that means?  Come to Using Transistors and find out just what all the fuss is about.   We wont come close to building a CPU, but we’ll show you how to build switches, logic gates, and even a simple amplifier circuit.

For those of you that want something a bit more permanent than breadboard buildouts, we’ve got soldering and advanced soldering in the pipeline, but are still scheduling times.   Watch the blog and twitter for updates.

Using Transistors

Sunday, January 10 2010
2-4:30
Cost: $40

We’ll explore transistors, what they’re used for, and how to use them. After an overview of the function of transistors, we’ll spend the class making some simple switches, logic gates, and an amplifier.

Required Equipment: Everything we gave you in the Intro to Electronics class. (You can buy this stuff here if you don’t have it already).
Breadboard
Multimeter
LEDs and resistors
9 V battery and connector

Introduction to Electronics

Thursday, January 14 2010
6:30 - 9
Cost: $40

This workshop covers everything you need to know to get started in electronics. We’ll start from the basics of electricity and work our way up to using integrated circuits. You’ll leave the class with some simple components and the knowledge to use them.

Christmas is here, and there’s no better time to make one of a kind objects for yourself or the ones you love.

We’ve been thinking about the pricing on the Makerbot, and now that we have two, we’ve decided to slash it in half.

Makerbot 3D Prints are now $0.50/minute, material included at the walk-in rate.

All previous thingiverse and member discounts apply, and we’ve added a fun bonus.   If you’re the FourSquare mayor of Metrix Create:Space, you get half off on 3D Printing, and we count that AFTER the other discounts.   You can make a virtual object a physical one for $0.15/min!

What does this mean?

If you print a large version of Dominic’s Skull (yes, we know it’s not very christmas-ey, but if you’ve been to the counter, you’ve seen it.), it takes 44 minutes.   That’s $17.60 (20% discount because it’s on thingiverse)

If you are a member, it’s $13.20 (20% discount for members).   If you’re the mayor, it’s $6.60

What if you can’t find something on Thingiverse?

Make something and upload it!

If you need help with creating something, you can always ask for help too.   We love making things and want to help you make your creations happen.   That’s why we’re here.

On Ubuntu 9.04 (jaunty) I had been generating and setting the root password in a bootstrapping script using:

# Generated MD5 encrypted password
/usr/bin/openssl passwd -1
# Set the password
/bin/echo 'root:ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD' | /usr/sbin/chpasswd -e

With shadow 4.1.4, chpasswd now uses PAM, and has dropped the -e option used above, as well as the -c option that I’d used to generate sha512 encrypted passwords. You’ll want to use mkpasswd from the whois package (yeah, weird) for that now, such as:

mkpasswd -m sha-512 -s

The password can be presented to useradd / usermod in encrypted format, such as:

/usr/sbin/useradd -m -p 'ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD' -G admin -s /bin/bash toor

This weekend I spent some time assembling a little project that I've been working on:



It's fun living in the future.

One of the most satisfying uses of tools is making new ones.

Welcome to the world Milo.  Now you get to make things.

Normally the vending machine is a random grab, but since it’s the holiday season and we’re big fans of both awesome and cheap,  it’s probably worth noting these two new $10 additions.

The Bliplace Kit and the sack-o-duino.

You may have seen the Bliplace on hackaday a while back, it’s Tanjent’s awesome wearable sound activated toy, but the sack-o-duino is something we cooked up here.  We couldn’t find any breadboard compatible arduinos for $10, so we came up with this. A bag of parts, ready to drop into a bread/proto board that will give you pre-flashed arduino on the cheap.

Included in the bag is:

• ATMEGA 168 with arduino bootloader
• 10K resistor
• 16Mhz ceramic resonator
• 5V voltage regulator
• Green high intensity LED w/resistor
• 6 pin Header and 100 nF capacitor for your FTDI cable

The Create:Space will be closed for Thanksgiving. We’ll be back for all your maker needs on Friday.

When we open again on Friday, we’ll have a new feature for you: the junk box. Most great tinkerers and artists that I’ve met have a junk box. The junk in that box isn’t useless stuff, though. This junk is there for inspiration and for random materials. I see people looking in their junk box when they need something, but don’t know what it is. I see them using the junk box when they don’t know what there next project will be. It’s a great place to get ideas and to see old things in a new way.

With this in mind, Black Friday is the the debut of the Create:Space’s new Junk Box. This is a ratty old card board box filled with magical treasures that are yours for the taking. Here are the rules:

1) If you bring something for the box, you can take something for free.
2) If you want something without trading, it costs a dollar.
3) If you want to leave something without trading, it costs a dollar.
4) No hazardous materials.

The box already has lots of cool things. Come see if there’s anything to inspire your next great project.

Theres push to get Chef 0.8 out the door because we’re all anxious for its awesome list of features and fixes, so we’re all hunkering down on fixing bugs. Scott Likens has similar notes and theres some more to be found in Dan Deleo’s 08boot bootstrap recipe. This should help get you going.

On a fresh Ubuntu Karmic install (a VM makes this easy of course):
# Add the Canonical Ubuntu ‘multiverse’ repository for Java.
sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list # add multiverse to your ‘deb’ lines if it is not there
sudo apt-get update

# Start Chef Gem bootstrap with some notes
# note that I don’t like to install rubygems from source and use the packages instead. this adds a step or two.
sudo apt-get install ruby ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby1.8 rdoc ri irb build-essential wget ssl-cert rubygems git-core -y
sudo gem sources -a http://gems.opscode.com
sudo gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org # for nanite
sudo gem install ohai chef json –no-ri –no-rdoc

We now have enough chef to bootstrap ourselves
# Create ~/chef.json:

{
  "bootstrap": {
    "chef": {
      "url_type": "http",
      "init_style": "runit",
      "path": "/srv/chef",
      "serve_path": "/srv/chef",
      "server_fqdn": "localhost"
    }
  },
  "recipes": "bootstrap::server"
}
# End of file

# Create ~/solo.rb:

file_cache_path "/tmp/chef-solo"
cookbook_path "/tmp/chef-solo/cookbooks"
# End of file

mkdir /tmp/chef-solo
cd /tmp/chef-solo
# Get kallistec’s 08boot bootstrap cookbook
git clone git://github.com/danielsdeleo/cookbooks.git
cd cookbooks
git checkout 08boot
# Bootstrap chef
sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/chef-solo -j ~/chef.json -c ~/solo.rb
# If the bootstrap hangs for more than a minute after “Installing package[couchdb] version 0.10.0-0ubuntu3″ then hit ctrl+c and run again

Now prepare to install the development versions
# install some development tools
sudo apt-get install rake librspec-ruby -y
sudo gem install cucumber merb-core nanite jeweler uuidtools
# install missing dependencies
sudo apt-get install libxml-ruby thin -y
# get chef from the repository
mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
git clone git://github.com/opscode/chef.git
cd chef
rake install
# remove the old version of chef
sudo gem uninstall chef -v0.7.14
# patch up some runit paths
sudo sed -i s_chef-_/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/chef-solr-0.8.0/bin/chef-_ /etc/sv/chef-solr*/run
# allow access to futon for development purposes (http://IPADDRESS:5984/_utils)
sudo sed -i ’s/;bind_address = 127.0.0.1/bind_address = 0.0.0.0/’ /etc/couchdb/local.ini
sudo apt-get install psmisc # for killall
sudo /etc/init.d/couchdb stop
sudo killall -15 couchdb # stubborn
sudo killall -15 beam.smp # yup
# shut it all down
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-solr stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-solr-indexer stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-solr-client stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-client stop
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-server stop
sudo killall -15 chef-server

Build some data and start up Chef
# start up the integration environment
cd ~/src/chef
sudo rake dev:features
# this will create a database
# now hit ctrl+c
sudo mv /var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/chef_integration.couch /var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/chef.couch
sudo chown couchdb:couchdb /var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/chef.couch
# start it all up
sudo /etc/init.d/couchdb start
sudo /etc/init.d/rabbitmq-server start
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-solr start
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-solr-indexer start
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-server start

Start the web server
# the web server is now a separate application and uses the API to reach the server
sudo cp /tmp/chef_integration/webui.pem /etc/chef
cd ~/src/chef/chef-server-webui
sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/slice -p 4002

Using knife
From the user interface you can create a client keypair to use knife from the web interface. I recommend using ‘view source’ to copy the private key, and remember to save it without any leading whitespace and run knife like so:

OPSCODE_USER=’btm’ OPSCODE_KEY=’/home/btm/btm.key’ /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/knife

If you can’t get it to work, you can always use the webui’s key:

sudo OPSCODE_USER=’chef-webui’ OPSCODE_KEY=’/etc/chef/webui.pem’ /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/knife

Hopefully that is enough to get you going. Jump on #chef on irc.freenode.net or join the chef list if you have any problems. Tickets/bugs/features are tracked in JIRA, and all sorts of other useful information is in the wiki.

What: Introduction to Electronics
When: 2009, December 13 2-4:30
Where: Metrix Create:Space
Who: Morgan Redfield, you, other interesting people
Why: electronics is a shockingly good time
How: sign up at the counter

We’re scheduling another Introduction to Electronics for December 13. The last workshop was so great, we decided to make this one half an hour longer. The workshop is from 2 to 4:30, and will cover everything you need to know to get started in electronics. We’ll start from the basics of electricity and work our way up to using integrated circuits. Just like last time, the $40 fee covers the workshop and necessary materials.

For those of you who came to the last class (or already know this stuff from somewhere else), we’ll be having another class on transistor basics in January. Stay tuned for more information.

About the Instructor:

Morgan Redfield has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He’s been working with electronics for eight years, and has designed and built USB devices, an EEG detector, and a modem. He enjoys long walks on the beach, robots, and cyberpunk novels.

I recently had to install HP’s System Management Homepage (SMH) on Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) on hardware I had never touched for Hosted Operations to monitor. The hardware wasn’t my choice, but I’m indifferent to it. The operating system is my choice. Apparently they support Debian Lenny (5.0) and Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04), but ours was too new. However, while I commend them for building debs, they’re a little sketchy and broken. Granted, I wasn’t deploying to a supported release, but nonetheless. Here’s a link to download options for the DL360 G6, that may never work because the HP site isn’t meant to be linked to.

Downloading the provided Ubuntu Jaunty iso and mounting it produced a standard debian repository tree for both lenny and jaunty.
sudo mount -o loop HP_ProLiant_Value_Add_Software-8.25-19-12.iso /mnt

I added these packages to our local respository, but you can copy them to every server and install them by hand using ‘dpkg -i DEB’ instead of ‘apt-get install PACKAGE’. You’ll end up installing all of them really. The HP SMH package is mostly an apache fork and a ton of included/vendored libraries.

You’ll log in to HP SMH on port 2381 over HTTPS. As usual, if you get a data stream, you are likely connecting over HTTP by accident. By default a user must be in the ‘root’ group. You can use ‘vigr’ to add another user to the root group as you usually don’t have a root user on Ubuntu. You can edit ‘/opt/hp/hpsmh/conf/smhpd.xml’ and put another group in the ‘admin-group’ element. I put ‘domain-admins’ there because we use likewise to authenticate against a windows domain. I couldn’t figure out how to have groups added via the web interface to save, but that really was a hoop anyway since I wanted to push the configuration files out via configuration management.

I don’t know if HP SMH reads snmpd.conf to figure out how to connect back to snmp locally, but I had to initially run ‘/sbin/hpsnmpconfig’ to generate a few wizardy lines in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf’. I later pushed this out via configuration management, but if you check that script it does create an “answer file” which looked like a bunch of variables you could export before you run the script non-interactively.

HP SMH gets its information from the HP SNMP agents, so if you log in and don’t see any data, it can not contact the SNMP source. You should see a page like this. Because so many libraries are shipped in the debs rather than being required, libraries are the most common source of issues. I had to restart ‘hp-snmp-agents’ after installation, getting this error on the initial startup in ‘/var/log/hp-snmp-agents/cma.log’:

libcmacommon.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Another way to say all of this is via my chef recipe:

#
# Cookbook Name:: hpsmh
# Recipe:: default
#
# Copyright 2009, Webtrends
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
#
#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
#
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
#

# Restart hp-snmp-agents later. it is buggy and has issues with its own libraries when started on package installation
service "hp-snmp-agents" do
  action :nothing
end

package "hp-health"
package "hpacucli"
package "cpqacuxe"
package "hp-snmp-agents" do
  notifies :restart, resources(:service => "hp-snmp-agents")
end
package "hp-smh-templates"
package "hpsmh"

service "hpsmhd" do
  action [ :start, :enable ]
end

service "snmpd" do
  action [ :start, :enable ]
end

remote_file "/opt/hp/hpsmh/conf/smhpd.xml" do
  source "smhpd.xml"
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0644
  notifies :restart, resources(:service => "hpsmhd")
end

remote_file "/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf" do
  source "snmpd.conf"
  owner "root"
  group "root"
  mode 0644
  notifies :restart, resources(:service => "snmpd")
end

As I look back at growing up in a small town, there was a surprising lack of everyone wanting to move to the city as soon as they could. Perhaps that was because there is not a recognizible city anywhere near coastal eastern Maine. Despite, there still was a lingering belief that people were different elsewhere. Granted, they’re different, but in the same ways.

The majority of those I consider my colleagues have not worked for the same companies that I have. While our projects are of importance to our companies, it is usually our passion and not our employment that drive them. Some days I feel certain this is commonly understood, but it only takes a personal blog policy or a social media marketing drive to remind me that I’m actually isolated on an island of like-minded individuals hiding under the radar like stowaways. You can’t escape culture, but you can find different ones.

In Paul Graham’s recent essay about Apple, he markedly warns of mistreating the developers of your platform, lest they form a distaste for your brand altogether. Before I read the essay I was feeling quite sure that it was commonly understood today that developers are your greatest asset. Perhaps more valuable than even your big idea. Likely due to being mentioned by name in the essay, I was reminded of the great Google interview algorithm; commonly known for streamlining their processes at the cost of the interviewee. This seems to only alienate the prospect, unless they happen to enjoy passing tests over creating value. As the strengths of mass-collaboration become more accepted, it strikes me odd that on the whole we’re still missing that it is made up of individual human talent.

The product of our creativity is no longer hidden behind towering walls of corporations. We are global citizens innovating for the sake of it. You won’t see this on a college transcript, in ones knowledge of inodes, or in a six month product road map of release stability. The pieces are not exactly hidden either. I’m tempted to point out how slowly we’re changing by example with the United States’ difficulty transitioning from educating factory workers to innovators now that globalization has helped much of the the rest of the world catch up as industrial nations. However I can’t help but remember that we’ve gotten this far on our own.

Despite reminding us that we are living in a small town, the murmuring you’ve heard from pundits and rabble-rousers but could not make out sounds perfectly clear here. We are not going to wait for you to get it. The catch is that we no longer need to move to the city, because we’re building it every day. Coming?

Recently, Google Maps has started returning search results for townships (probably since Google’s change to being their own geodata provider). As I love tiny dots on the map and obscure entities, this got me excited. In some cases, the township name will even show up as a dot with a link to the township’s Wikipedia article. I think this only happens when the township also has a town with the same name inside it. Townships can be found by searching by whatever uniquely identifies them, e.g. Chilgren for Chilgren Township, Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, Laona, MN for Laona Township, Roseau County, MN, or Lincoln, Marshall, MN for Lincoln Township, Marshall County, Minnesota.

The data for these features is coming from the USGS’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. I’ve put up a unique interface that combines that database with a few others, including databases of Canadian locations, zip codes, railroad stations, and telephone switch locations, at afiler.com/dots/. Want to see the list of every named place in Washington State? Or every place in the US and Canada named Springfield? Or even every place named Springfield in Georgia? The GNIS database lists 9 Springfields in Georgia, though only one is an incorporated city. The rest are so small, most don’t even get their name on Google Maps at any zoom level.

Dots lets you dig into extremely obscure place names, and this lets me dig up other secretly searchable Google Maps place names. Townships are called minor civil divisions by the US Census and some form of MCDs exist in 28 states. MCDs have some sort of official government function (though often small) — they include urbanized areas (cities, towns, villages, boroughs), townships, New England towns, parish governing authority districts (Louisiana), magisterial districts (Virginia and West Virginia), election districts/precincts (parts of Illinois, Maryland, and Nebraska), supervisors’ districts (Mississippi), and “catch all” entities, when nothing else applies (assessment districts, gores, grants, plantations, purchases, road districts, and unorganized territories). I’m still exploring what MCDs, other than townships and cites/towns/villages are searchable in Google Maps.

The other 22 states are divided into census county divisions instead of MCDs. These were created with the cooperation of the census and the state governments and may only be used for census tabulation or may also be used by county governments, for example, as electoral districts. MCDs are also are searchable in Google Maps. That means that you can find the census division of Early Winters in Okanogan County, Washington by searching for Early Winters, Okanogan, WA (or just Early Winters, WA, or even just Early Winters).

In Canada, Google Maps uses the census division as the county is in the US. Census divisions correspond to a county or county-like entity in most provinces where those exist. This includes BC (regional districts and municipalities), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (counties), Ontario (upper-tier municipalities: counties, districts, regional municipalities, cities) and Quebec (municipalités régionales de comté). Elsewhere, census divisions do not correspond to local government. Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut, and the Northwest territories have named census divisions. Census divisions are simply numbered in Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan (even though Alberta has some entities named “County”, they’re municipal districts and are treated like the rural municipalities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan). (Early in its history, Manitoba also had counties, though the names only persist in land records and in the name of the Dennis County Planning District. I was able to find the names and locations of counties from the 1880s in Manitoba statute books on Google Books, and used that to write up a Wikipedia article, a list of historic counties in Manitoba.)

Searching for Springfield, Canada will get Google Maps to display its most-expanded name (other times they’re shortened to City, Province or City, County, Province). Results include “Springfield, Division No. 12, MB” (the RM of Springfield, a local government unit, inside a nongovernmental census division), but also “Springfield, Woodstock, Carleton County, NB”, (a named place inside Woodstock Parish in Carleton County), and “Springfield, Swift Current No. 137, Division No. 8, SK” (a named place inside a rural municipality, inside a nongovernmental census divisions). The results from Google Maps appear mostly consistent with a search for Springfield at Statistics Canada.

For even more obscure geodata info, check out the Census’s list of county subdivision types, or their maps of MCDs and CCDs, by state. There’s also an even more obscure geographic subdivision not used by the census, the hundred, in Delaware. The hundred once also existed in the UK (where some Local Government Districts took the name of a hundred), and Australia (where they’re still used in land descriptions as as one of the cadastral divisions of Australia).

I have a number of Windows Server 2008 hosts running under KVM in a remote datacenter and using virt-manager to access libvirt+kvm over SSH for a remote console was disappointly slow, so I set out to try libvirt+kvm over SSL/TLS for comparison. In the process of which I had to upgrade virt-manager to 0.8.0 on my workstation to remove a VNC lag issue in the viewer built into virt-manager on karmic. In the end, I’m quite happy with the end result.

Creating Certificates

The available documentation for configuring TLS authentication for libvirt is a little daunting. My chosen references were these documents for libvirtd and virt-manager.

First create two certificates, one with the hostname for your server (SERVER.EXAMPLE.ORG below) and one for your workstation (CLIENT.EXAMPLE.ORG below), setting the fully qualified domain name (FQDN, the hostname including the domain name) as the Common Name, or CN, when prompted.
openssl genrsa -des3 -out host.example.org.tmp
openssl rsa -in host.example.org.tmp -out host.example.org.key
rm host.example.org.tmp
openssl req -new -key host.example.org.key -out host.example.org.csr

Providing the CSR to your local CA should present you with a signed certificate (host.example.com.cer). Be sure it is in Base64 format (text) and not DER (binary) if interacting with a Microsoft CA. If you are unfamiliar with this process, you’ll want to go and read up a bit first, it’s a useful hoop to learn to jump through.

Installing Certificates

# Libvirt Server
mkdir -p /etc/pki/CA
mkdir -p /etc/pki/libvirt/private
mkdir -p /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc
cp CA.EXAMPLE.ORG /etc/pki/CA/cacert.pem
cp CA.EXAMPLE.ORG /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/ca-cert.pem
cp SERVER.EXAMPLE.ORG.key /etc/pki/libvirt/private/serverkey.pem
cp SERVER.EXAMPLE.ORG.key /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/server-key.pem
cp SERVER.EXAMPLE.ORG.cer /etc/pki/libvirt/servercert.pem
cp SERVER.EXAMPLE.ORG.cer /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/server-cert.pem

# Virt-manager client
# notice the lack of dashes in clientcert.pem
mkdir -p /etc/pki/CA
mkdir -p /etc/pki/libvirt/private
mkdir -p /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc
cp CA.EXAMPLE.ORG /etc/pki/CA/cacert.pem
cp CA.EXAMPLE.ORG /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/ca-cert.pem
cp CLIENT.EXAMPLE.ORG.key /etc/pki/libvirt/private/clientkey.pem
cp CLIENT.EXAMPLE.ORG.key /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/clientkey.pem
cp CLIENT.EXAMPLE.ORG.cer /etc/pki/libvirt/clientcert.pem
cp CLIENT.EXAMPLE.ORG.cer /etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/clientcert.pem

Apparmor Fixes

If libvirtd fails to start (which it likely will without these fixes) you’ll see errors in ‘/var/log/user.log’ such as:

Nov 17 17:08:09 lasvirt01 kernel: [69476.008895] type=1503 audit(1258506489.178:77): operation=”open” pid=17104 parent=1 profile=”libvirt-600d5dae-6373-107e-5f1b-5010aff3ffed” requested_mask=”r::” denied_mask=”r::” fsuid=0 ouid=0 name=”/etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/ca-cert.pem”

You’ll need to patch up the apparmor definitions a little:

• Due to Bug# 462000, upgrade to libvirt-bin=0.7.0-1ubuntu13.1 from karmic-proposed (unless it has made it to karmic-updates when you read this)
• Due to Bug #484562, Add “/etc/pki/libvirt-vnc/** r,” to “/etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu”
• run /etc/init.d/apparmor reload

Server Configuration

By default libvirt and VNC don’t allow remote connections and rely on unix sockets for connections. You’ll need to enable

• Add “–listen” to “libvirtd_opts” in /etc/default/libvirt-bin
• Uncomment “vnc_tls = 1″ and “vnc_tls_x509_verify = 1″ in “/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf”
• Edit your guests (virsh edit GUEST) and add “listen=’0.0.0.0′” to the graphics element
• run /etc/init.d/libvirt-bin restart
• cold boot any running guests (full stop, not a restart, to pick up guest xml definition changes)

Virt-manager Configuration

Add a new connection, choosing ‘QEMU/KVM’ as the Hypervisor and ‘Remote SSL/TLS with x509 certificate’ as the Connection, with the full hostname of the remote server and choose Connect. Otherwise operate like you used to.

VNC Lag Caveat

I had an issue where the display was lagging every view seconds on the VNC session via virt-manager, but when I connected directly using virt-viewer (virt-viewer –connect qemu://HOST.EXAMPLE.ORG/system GUEST_DOMAIN) there was no lag. Interestingly, when you kept both open at the same and ran a command like ‘ls -lR /’ you could easily see the difference. To correct this, I had to backport virt-manager=0.8.0-2 from debian sid, including ‘virtinst’ and ‘libvirt’, the latter requiring a change of ‘libxen3-dev’ to ‘libxen-dev’ in the Build-Depends. This is a somewhat complicated task for those unfamiliar with debian packaging.

Troubleshooting

I found most of my apparmor related errors by running ‘tail -f /var/log/user.log’. A lot of documentation recommended uncommenting ‘vnc_listen’ in ‘/etc/libvirt/qemu.conf’ but I found that the aforementioned listen xml attribute in the guest configuration overrode that by looking at the ‘-vnc’ options passed to kvm by libvirt by running ‘ps ax’. I’ve had libvirtd on the host segfault a couple times when connecting, perusing the Changelog in the version of libvirt I backported on my desktop noted some fixes that may be relevant to that.

Today’s Introduction to Electronics workshop was a blast. I was surprised by the turnout, since I hadn’t expected the class to fill up. Lots of people were interested, and we even had to ask some people to come to next month’s class.

The students spent the two hour class pushing electrons around and experimenting with different ways of lighting LEDs. There were lots of interesting questions and playful experimentation, at the low cost of a few burned out LEDs. I had a great time teaching the workshop. Judging from the requests for a follow up class, the students had a great time too.

Tomorrow is The Blitz Capitol Hill Art Walk, and we’ve got two great artists presenting. Jessie Heaven Lotz, who’s photographs you may have seen hanging over the past month, and Amy Johnston, with her teeny tiny army of robot jewelry.

More information is up on the wiki. Maps and fliers of the entire artwalk are available at Blitz.

Metrix Create:Space will be holding its first workshop on Sunday, November 15th, 2-4PM

Introduction to Electronics

Ever wondered how your T.V. or computer works? How about your cell phone. Come find out the basics behind these complicated devices at our Introduction to Electronics workshop. You’ll learn what current and voltage really are, how to read a circuit diagram, and how to put together your own small projects using discrete and integrated components.

$40 includes instructor and all parts and equipment.

Space is limited, sign up now!

The nonexistent Argleton in Lancashire, England

From the Telegraph in the UK: “Argleton, a ‘phantom town’ in Lancashire that appears on Google Maps and online directories but doesn’t actually exist, has puzzled internet experts.” The photo is from Picasa user Mister Roy, who walked and photographed the nonexistent place in February 2009.

I’ve seen hundreds of Argletons in North Dakota. Of course, the difference is that North Dakota’s Argletons usually had, at some point in the past, a bit more concrete existence — though not necessarily that much more. Some of the places I photographed were ever only a railroad siding or post office. If they were big enough to end up on USGS topological maps in the 1970s, they’ve now secured a permanent digital existence thanks to the place name database distributed by the US Board on Geographic Names.

Dundas, North Dakota

Happy Halloween!

We are part of the CHCC Halloween Walk, and will be passing out candy to costumed revelers between 6 and 8PM tomorrow.  

Trick or Treat!

It’s no secret that I think configuration management is epic. I spent yesterday hopping around the office in excitement due to Opscode’s alpha announcement of their new Cookbooks site. This is exactly the next step needed in the CM community. Shortly thereafter, while talking with another developer about how awesome Cookbooks is, he quipped about it being second in awesome to chef itself. I argue that chef exists for cookbooks, not the other way around. It was later said “Chef is the tool, cookbooks are the art”. Cookbooks is all about community.

Chef is a tool, and an open-source one, so it does have a community. A vibrant one at that; a recent ohloh factoid claims “This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh.” Cookbooks is the other way around, it is a community first and at tool second. Cookbooks has already been compared to github and launchpad (with PPAs), because like these sites it brings people with a common task together around a tool like git or ubuntu. It has been noted that every configuration management project needs something like Cookbooks, and I agree.

The community that builds around Cookbooks will be a vanguard of agile system administrators looking to reduce their undifferentiated heavy lifting. These include the people who recognized that it is their product that they are selling and no longer their infrastructure, and took up cloud computing as a result. They will soon find that the configuration management community will help them continue to spend less time reinventing the operations wheel, and more time innovating it. Cookbooks will make it easier to share infrastructure-code with like-minded individuals and is the next step beyond github and wikis for this material. These models still required concerted effort to share back with the community when you finished up your recipe, but the Cookbooks site  and it’s open API stands to change that. We are now poised to leverage the open source model to increase the rise of infrastructure as code.

Brandon had never touched a breadboard or played with electronics until two weeks ago. He got inspired by the vending machine and grabbed a Really Bare Bones Board, FTDI cable, Switched Reluctance Motor, prototyping breadboard and some snacks and started hacking away.

As of tonight (our two week anniversary of being open!) he has a working arduino-controlled single digit split-flap display.  He’s uploaded his laser design to the thingiverse, so you can have one too.

Rock on!

Had a great weekend up until tonight when the computers started fighting me. Mostly it's the BIOS on this new server, but aggravated by stupid installers. Enough about that, here's the fun I had:

Saturday I got up early (for a Saturday) and got to Ride West in time to be there when the parts and apparel swap opened. I just missed a rear seat for the R50, but I'm next in line if the buyer decides that he doesn't want it after all. It was in really rough shape, but priced at only $5 I could put some effort into it. I did manage to score some really nice Lee Parks gloves at about half price. I also met a few vintage bike people and chatted a whole bunch. I met up with Morgan and we chatted for a while. Just as I was about to take off cooncat and G showed up so we chatted a bit.

I took off from that and after doing a few things at home I headed to the brew store to pick up an apple crusher and ratchet press and hauled them over to ibexris and mimsy's house. It was a lot of work, but oddly enjoyable. After several hours of work we managed to turn 630 pounds of organic apples into about 34 gallons of cider. I took home 5 of that, 1 for drinking and 4 to turn into hard cider.

Sunday I returned the crusher and press and picked up a few oddments for brewing. I then visited my brother to help out with my nephew's halloween costume. He's going to be a lightning bug this year, and I'm in charge of illumination. I've got 100 yellow LEDs, I just need to figure out how to wire things up. I'll be making some little lens-like devices with the laser cutter that will hopefully diffuse the light better. It's all going to be powered by a mintyboost.

After looking over the costume and testing a few things Andrew, Jack and I went to Costco. Jack was pretty good and even let me hold him long enough that my arms got tired. He's a cute kid.

Now I'm home, waiting for this install to finally finish so I can copy a bunch of data off a failing array. It's not the way that I wanted it set up in the first place, but it's close enough that I can fix things later.