I’ve been a weather buff all of my life but haven’t had too much interest in hurricanes until recently when I found out a family member may be doing some work down in the area very soon. I’d found the tools on the internet to be somewhat lacking until today. Do you wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? What about the projected storm path after it makes landfall and is downgraded? Hurricane season gets lots of people glued to the Weather Channel or local news to get the latest updates on developing storms. I don’t put a lot of faith in what most of the metorologists say so I often seek out the information on the web so I can interpret the data myself. One of the best places I found to do this is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can modify their appearance and add or subtract additional layers of data.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

Base geographic imagery is provided by Nasa and Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, UK. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites which I’m looking into for a page here on RCS.

I logged in last night for the first time in about 40 days and cleared out all of my invites.  This is how many I’ve received in less than 24 hours and I only have 15 friends.  I used to think they were cool until I learned that people just send these invites to everyone which detracts from their value, at least for me.  When I learned that Scrabulous is a person to person game, I played.  Maybe social networks just aren’t for me.  Maybe I’m just not social enough.

Here’s the thing though, I feel guilty for not “accepting” the invites or not sending anything out in return.  Maybe I’m weird but the last people I want to bother are my friends (even though I don’t consider and invite a “bother” if that makes any sense).  I understand that Facebook just wants to make their site as sticky as possible but at some point, in become more of a hassle than a benefit when you have a bunch of friends.  When sending an invite to someone, the default should be to invite just a single person rather than your entire address book.  I want to use FB to keep tabs on what’s going on in my friends’ lives, not hassle them to death.

I had to write a very tight piece of code for work tonight and I remembered that trance keeps my ADHD at bay. So I loaded up a new directory of new tunes I’d recently downloaded and found an absolute gem that I’d forgotten about. My code got done, tested, and checked into SVN but I can’t get this track out of my head.

Check it out:

Burned with Desire by Armin Van Buuren

And don’t make fun of me

I was so exhausted tonight and had laid down but it was futile- this song gave me new life and I wanted to share.

Since 1995, I’ve been tracking every mile I rode on the bike in an Excel spreadsheet.  This has proven to be an excellent training tool and helped me notice trends and (sometimes) avoid over training.  Five years ago I set out to find an automated way to compute my average speed and embarrassingly, I couldn’t figure out how to do this in Excel so I wrote my first JavaScript application and published it over at : http://www.raincitystory.com/mph.htm.  Since that time, I’ve averaged almost 10,000 hits per month on that page (the other pages on my entire site get less than 1,000 hits per month COMBINED) and I often get e-mails from people asking for more help to automate the aggregation of their training data. 

Since I started 12 years ago, the log has gone through some serious evolution and I now think it’s ready from prime time.  Here are some major features:

1) All days including leap years for 2008 through 2012 are accounted for
2) Average speed automatically calculated and summed on a daily, monthly and annual basis
3) Space to record and average body weight, average heart rate, maximum heart rate, calories burned, temperature, elevation gain, cadence and time of day
4) Automatic monthly summary of number of rides, time spent on the bike, distance, and average speed
5) GRAPHS!
6) Much, much more

License:  GPL v2 (improvements appreciated!)
Available Formats:
Microsoft Excel 2000/2003/2007
Open Office Calc
Google Docs (recommended so you don’t have to worry about backing up! * Be sure to copy to your own Google account)

I’ve put a sample entry in the first row so please be sure to delete that when using.  Any columns and rows can be deleted so enjoy!

So I’m pretty screwed and I feel bad for Amy because DIA pretty much shuts down after midnight (it’s a pretty good airport to be stuck in when the stores are open.  There’s also good Wi-Fi but I doubt she brought her Mac Book Pro.

At least I have broadband here on the road courtesy of my Sprint EVDO Rev A service.  I’ve loved it so far but this is the first time I’ve really been able to use it.  Even this far out of Colorado Springs and Denver, I’m still able to get about 970k down and 310k up.   Ok, not much substance in this post but at least it will cover my ass :) 

[EDIT: A few seconds after I pressed "publish" a large crane moved one of the semis enough to allow one lane of traffic to pass and I'm now waiting at the DIA short term arriving flight wait lot for Amy to call. It all worked out and I got a real excuse to use my Sprint mobile broadband service. All is well tonight.]

(Via Wellingtongrey.net)

Yes, you can use that Sprint EVDO Rev A Pantech PX-500 card on Ubuntu!  Network credentials are stored on the card so all we need to do is make sure we have a couple of kernel modules loaded and write two simple scripts to get it all working.  The PX-card has an OHCI compatible USB bridge internally off of which hangs the CDC serial port so it’s pretty easy.

First make sure you’re running a recent kernel by running uname -r and a terminal prompt.

Then, insert the card and let’s make sure you have the necessary kernel modules loaded:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo lsmod | grep cdc

cdc_acm                    15904 0

usbcore                     134280 7 cdc_acm,ohci_hcd,xpad,usbhid,uhci_hcd,echi_hcd

If your output matches the above, you already have the cdc_acm and ohci_hcd kernel modules loaded automatically. 

1) Install the Sprint Connection software on Windows XP or Vista

2) Insert the card, choose yes to update the firmware and activate the card by calling Sprint and providing the necessary information.

3) Reboot into Linux and insert the card into a free PCMCIA slot.  This tutorial will be done on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn with kernel 2.6.20-16-generic.  If you use the the 2.6.20 kernel, you won’t have to compile in any additonal modules.

4) We’ve already confirmed that we have the correct kernel modules above so now you’ll need to create two extra files using these steps:

michael@feisty:~$ sudo vi /etc/ppp/peers/Sprint_EVDO

noauth
# Connection Script
connect “/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chatscripts/sprint-evdo” 
defaultroute
replacedefaultroute
usepeerdns
/dev/ttyACM0
230400
local
novj

michael@feisty:~$ sudo mkdir /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@feisty:~$ cd /etc/ppp/chatscripts

michael@fesity:~$ sudo vi sprint-evdo

TIMEOUT         5
ABORT           ’\nBUSY\r’
ABORT           ’\nERROR\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO ANSWER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO CARRIER\r’
ABORT           ’\nNO DIALTONE\r’
ABORT           ’\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r’
”              \rAT
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATE0V1&F&D2&C1S0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATS0=0
TIMEOUT         3
OK              ATDT#777
TIMEOUT         20 
CONNECT         ”"

5) run this command to start the connection:

michael@feisty:~$ /usr/sbin/pppd call Sprint_EVDO updetach

And you’re good to go.  Interestingly, I saw about 25% faster speeds consistently under Linux and XP compared to Vista.  I know the card hasn’t been officially certified under Vista, but it’s not certified on Linux either and 25% is a huge difference.  Test your speed over at Speedtest.net

P.S. You might get different results with another distribution (especially Suse) and kernel but if you are still having problems, drop me a line at mikebuckingham at gmail dot com and I’ll try and help.

I can’t remember the last time I saw something so revolutionary and cool.

Oh, just for full disclosure, Luke writing a pro Microsoft post is one of the seven signs of the apocalypse, just fyi…