News archive August 2007 - Koos van den Hout

Ik had weer eens tijd/zin om met Asterisk te spelen. Sinds een tijdje is de fritz!box een 5012 en die wilde weer geen dtmf doorgeven via xs4all-voip naar Asterisk. Toen maar even telnet aangezet met #96*7* en daarna in /var/flash/voip.cfg voor de xs4all instellingen de regel infodtmfnotsupported = no; gewijzigd in infodtmfnotsupported = yes;. Nu kon ik weer wel in m'n eigen menus kiezen!

A company in the US, Solis Energy, is producing solar-panel power systems especially geared towards running wireless networking in hard-to-reach places. Sounds like a turn-key version of some of the functionality in my project sundial for a self-powered weather station. Sources: Computerworld Australia: Power Wi-Fi using the sun, says startup Slashdot: Solar Powered Wifi.

Weird tidbit in the home server: disk /dev/hdc, a WDC WD3200AAJB will not go to standby mode on the timer. With hdparm -S 59 /dev/hdc no standby mode happens, while I am sure nothing accesses the drive (unmounting all partitions and stopping smartmontools). When I force it to standby with hdparm -y /dev/hdc it will stay in standby mode until the partition is accessed again.

Wardriving results 20 - 28 August: 4231 new networks with GPS locations. A visit to Amersfoort by bike set a new record for new networks found in one trip: 2495 new networks in one go.

After hearing the very catchy Country Boy (City Boy Remix) on the Alaska Podshow 163 and on Adam Curry's Daily Source Code 631 I had to find that mix. Party Ben has this and other funny mixes available on the Party Ben - Stuff to have page.

In browsing the transmission gallery UK broadcast transmission sites I remembered a tv tower we saw in our UK holiday in 2004 (Dutch report). After a lot of searching and pondering what the correct name was I found out that the transmission site we camped near in Dartmoor is named North Hessary Tor which is near the town of Princetown. The site has radio transmitters to serve a large area in the southwest of England and .. a 12.5W TV relay only serving Princetown and the Dartmoor prison.

I really enjoy The Alaska PodShow Podcast. I visited Alaska myself in 2002 and really enjoyed it over there, which makes the alaska podshow a joy to listen to. Recognizable stuff, and things I would like to see on a next visit to Alaska (although I already saw both highways..). I'd like to go back some day (preferably when the US treats visiting tourists less like suspects) because Alaska is beautiful to visit.

Ik verzamel locatiegegevens van zoveel mogelijk draadloze netwerken, anderen verzamelen locatiegegevens en foto's van zoveel mogelijk ADSL centrales in Nederland. Erg leuke site.

Wardriving results 9 - 19 August: 2803 new networks with GPS locations. Some detours through the city with scores both from the new setup and from visiting areas I haven't visited in a while.

I have taken over as maintainer of the perl Geo::METAR module for parsing METAR (Aviation routine weather report) data. Although METAR is supposed to be a strict format I find lots and lots of regional variations, newer versions, things that should not be used anymore and other things making parsing hard. I'm now using the 24-hour metar files from the National Weather Service Internet Weather Source and I use those to stresstest the METAR-parser, looking up things that make it fail completely and fixing those.

I watched the Perseid meteor shower and tried to take pictures. Not much luck on the picture taking, I set up the camera wrong and the lens fogged up. One picture has a meteor trail: one version of the picture (crop/scale) second version of the picture (scale). The meteor trail is in the bottom right.

Gezien in de kismet logs: Found new network "martin en margo" gevolgd door Found new network "naast martin en margo".

Wardriving results 5 July - 8 August: 4623 new networks with gps locations. Before our holiday I did some tours to up my scores and test the new antenna, including a visit to Lunetten and Leidsche Rijn (parts of Utrecht).

Windows XP update sees Windows Explorer as a security risk with a screenshot of the actual error message. To help protect you computer, Windows has closed this program. Name: Windows Explorer Publisher: Microsoft Corporation.

At home, in the garden, with barbecue weather I notice an ad-hoc network in the wireless networks lists with ssid AMD_IBSS and regularly changing channel and mac address. Anybody got any idea what this is? In other wireless at home news: the neighbourhood has no unsecured wireless networks left, and WEP is a minority.

Back from vacation! We rented recumbent bikes and biked around the Netherlands for three weeks, camping and visiting some friends. The weather cooperated mostly, just some minor rainy days and a few rainshowers.