Installing Structured Wiring Center

It always kind of bugged me that my basic infrastructure was ... not very infrastructury.

For the new house I decidced I do this right. First off, get a wiring panel for the network wiring. At Home Depot I found a nice metal case from Leviton (SMC="structured media center"). Leviton is selling various plugin pieces that use the specially spaced holes in the case, and allow to pack the various parts (phone, switch, dsl splitter, cat5 jacks, etc.) very tightly. However, their stuff is ridiculously expensive (e.g. a no-name 10/100 hub with the special mounting bracket for the SMC, was $29 at Home Depot). No thanks.

Since most of my equipment doesn't have mounting braces or holes anyways, I mounted only the CAT5e patch panel for the home wiring directly into the case. The rest is mounted on a wodden half inch backing board using regular angle brackets and plenty of zip ties. Looks a little bit odd, but is very functional.

The case of course as a nice front cover as well. I mounted the wireless access point outside the case so that it doesn't inhibit reception. I have excellent connectivity throughout the house. As the various computer locations in the house become permanent, the number of wires running into the patch panel will go up...

Meinsingen in 4.5 sqm

Meinsingen is my third attempt at squeezing a halfway interesting HO layout in 4.5 square meters, and the first that made it far enough to post here.

It's an "along the wall", two-level layout with hidden staging with reversing loop under the top left corner (not visible in the PDF). Contrary to other layouts I made so far, the operator is located in an aisle and surrounded by the layout. A single track runs along all 4 walls of the room and crosses the entrance on a removable bridge.

The main station of the town of Meinsingen is located in the middle of the room, dual-connected to the run-around track (so that trains can change direction), and represents the terminus of a rural branch line. North of the station is the small town/residential area of Meinsingen. To the West is a light industrial area with a few sidings, industries, and loading dock/ramp. There are minimal engine maintenance facilities in Meinsingen. Just enough to maintain the yard engine stationed here.
Traffic destined for Meinsingen consists of passenger trains and short freight locals that need to spot cars to the various industries, pick up cars and then leave again.
The part of the run-around track in the Northwest corner could be hidden behind trees. A tunnel would look tacky here, unless I spend much more space on a proper hill.

The Southwest corner is hills and a valley, maybe a small river or creek.

In the Southeast corner is the small station of Teilingen in the middle of the woods, with the branch to hidden staging. There is also opportunity for train meets here.

The scenery remains forested along the East side and over some meadows or maybe fields in the northeast corner, we are back at the outskirts of Meinsingen.

Operationally, I'm not too happy with this layout. Every train that comes out of staging has to cross the bridge along the door.

In order to get back into staging, each train either has to change direction in Teilingen (including potentially moving the engine to the other end of the train, or enter the Meinsingen station. In Meinsingen either the engine runs around the cars, or the cars are taken over by another engine. In order to turn around, steam engines need to back out of Meinsingen to the West, take the main line to the North side, then back up again into the station.

Spotting cars and operations within the Meinsingen station is not too bad, though, as long as the trains consist only of 4-5 2 axle cars, or at most 2 D-Zug cars. The station tracks only allow for short trains < ~40-60 cm.

Overall, there are too many compromises here to make this worthwhile in HO.

Our next house ...

A nice oceanfront property for sale in Carmel.

US Customs scrutinizing laptops

While browsing I found this blog about an experience when crossing the border into the US.

I'm baffled. Those customs folks are not looking for terrorism files (which I would kind of understand), but illegal porn. Also, apparently customs as the right to seize and inspect your laptop at will.

Oh SJC, I love thou

I spent the last 1.5 hours on the observation platform at Terminal C of SJC reading the paper. It's the only spot in this airport that is both outside and not ripe with Diesel exhaust. After finding out that Alaska 477 is (yet again) delayed, I tried catching a standby on the (also yet again) delayed Alaska 89 to Seattle. Contrary to last time the strategy backfired this time. All seats were taken and I got to enjoy the airport a bit longer.

In my rush to get to the gate counter, I accidentally left my rolling bag at the security checkpoint. ... and only noticed it as I just went back out of the secure area on my way to the observation deck. Thankfully, security here is a bit slow and didn't notice the unattended baggage until I came back asking for it.
AlaskaAir has (almost) their own security checkpoint that is in that weird corner of Terminal C with little to no services. At least the one and only restaurant there (Togo's) stays open to 9pm now. They used to close at 7pm which was really annoying, when you are booked on the 9:35 flight and forgot to take something to eat, or were thirsty.

Oh well, 477 should start boarding in another 15-20 minutes, so I should get on my way through security now....

Emsingen is a goner

Arrgh! Remeasurement of the future train room revealed that I was working with 2 ft to much in length. The room is actually only 7.5 x 6ft. Also, the potential space in the garage turns out to be only 7.5 x 7ft unless I make access to the water heater really hard. Either one will make realization of the Emsingen layout impossible. I have to scale back and start over.

I really do want a loop, but it shouldn't look like a loop. I might not have the space to do a loop satisfactorily.

Bummer. I have to go back and review what I really want from this. Some ideas...

- Along the wall setup with a twisted, twice-around loop. Getting in and out of the room might be a challenge...

- A two level setup. The lower level, partially visible with continous traffic, and branch to a dead end station on the upper level with facilities. This way I don't need as many ramps that take up space and I could squeeze in some landscaping.

- A multi-level setup in out-and-back configuration. Dead-end main station with facilities on top level, a small way station with industry on middle level, a hidden turn-around loop with some staging on lower level. Neat. Possible? I have to try...

100!

Wow. 100 posts. When I started this, I didn't expect I would write about all the stuff I ended up writing about. Funny how things turn out sometimes.

More Living Room

Started with the accent wall in the living room and Christoph cleaned up the fireplace mantel.



The accent wall is kinda scary.



Mind you, the white beam in front of me is about 6 meters (~18 ft) up in the air, the ladder I'm standing on is wedged between that beam and the stairs to the upstairs bedrooms and quite wobbly. It's ok ... as long as I don't move.

I spent the afternoon at Home Depot getting more stuff, ranch-style shutters, kitchen faucet and the wiring center for the data cabling. That will be fun, too. Let's see if I get to that before I go to Seattle again next week.

Living Room & Spa

Today we painted the living room. Quite a big job. Primer and 2 layer of paint. Christoph did a very good job helping. Left to do are the fireplace mantel, base boards and the wall to the kitchen which will be in a different color than the rest of the room. However, it already looks awesome.

After a very good dinner courteously of Patricia we retired to the freshly cleaned spa (Sundance '97 Calypso) for the first time. Pascal was entertaining the neighborhood. Given how much fun he had, he was easily heard all over the place...

One thing to mention, however, is the power usage of that thing. When I turned on the heater the wheel on the power meter went crazy. I've never seen a meter rotate that fast. We turned on the solar power system (though we are not supposed to, since PG&E didn't come out yet), but it didn't help much, even with solar production of almost 3kW. Based on amperage ratings the spa consumed easily 8kW or more, just for heating...

I learned today that Pergo changed their program multiple times over the last 8 years and there is zero chance we will be able to match the installed Pergo laminate floor in the family room, where we currently have 30% Pergo and the rest carpet. The options are to replace all of the flooring and install new laminate that somewhat matches what we have in the kitchen, or replace just the carpet. We are likely going the "replace everything" route. Even though it's more expensive, the laminate area is just a tad too small when the table is pulled out for full size, and it gets annoying quickly. That's a project for in a few months.

Vacation ... sort of

I'm taking this week off from work to work on various projects in and around the house. Saturday morning was a lost cause, running errands and a 2 hour visit at the Home Depot, including getting carpet on order. Tuesday a guy will come out to measure it all out. I also picked up another set of shutters for the bedroom windows. Turns out that 68 inch (shutter width) is shorter than 70 inch (window opening). Gosh, where did I leave my glasses when measuring this? Sigh. I tried, and it does look a bit tacky if the blinds don't cover the full width of the window opening. I see another trip to Home Depot on the horizon.

At least I finished Patricia's workstation in the master bed room today, and organized all the moving boxes still stored in the garage (a lot of boxes). At least all the boxes are now accessible in case we need something.

The workstation is built into a closet. A small top shelf, a 1/2 inch laminated pine board accross the full width of the closet. I recycled the keyboard drawer from our IVAR shelving unit we had in the old place and mounted it under the new board. We don't have closet doors on most closet in the house anyways, and the Asbestos guys removed the rails from the ceiling as they scraped off the popcorn plaster before we moved in. With the new carpet the setup will look really nice. I've set up babybaer to connect via the wireless bridge for now until I run Ethernet throughout the house.

Finally, I removed lots of nails and screws from the walls downstairs and drained the spa, so we can clean it. Took only 3 hours, during which I moved the garden hose regularly, so all of the lawn gets some water.

This weekend

Mowed the lawn. Again. I still have to find the right setting on the mower, so that the grass is not too long or too short ...

Painted the master bedroom. All of it. I came to love these 6m high cathredal ceilings. I set the ladder height so that I can comfortably reach up into the edge where wall and ceiling meet. Starting in the right hand corner, and work to the left (I'm right-handed), I first painted the corner with the brush (make sure it has lots of paint), then use the roller to paint the remaining area above the top of the ladder, as well as the area to the right as far to the right and down as I can/need to reach. Move the ladder an arm's length to the left. Repeat until opposite wall is reached. This method worked quite well and with a little bit care left only minor scratch marks on the wall that are easily painted over. I could paint down far enough that I could reach the lower edge of the paint easily from the floor. We'll do this again this coming weekend when we paint the living and family rooms.

I also did some odds and ends, saw the solar system peak at 3kW generated power, and was impressed by our neighbor building an office in their garage by himself. Nice wood frame construction, he can even extend the heating ducts into the room, so has it nice and warm in the winter. There is some spave in our garage to do something similar (just no daylight) as a train room. It would be twice as big as the current train room. Tempting. Very tempting.
The servers could go in there as well (just need venting to the garage). It would be much easier space-wise, for the layout, the operator(s) and visitors. As an added benefit, the upstairs room could serve it's purpose as storage room. We could put all of our books there, put in the IVAR with lots and lots of storage space, instead of trying to wedge this into the garage, which is a questionable place to store books to start with...

Emsingen with K track

Recent reading material makes me wanting to go a tad more realistic on my layout. It's small enough that I won't be building on this thing forever. Maerklin offers the more prototypical K track which doesn't look as toyish as the C-track, or old-school like M track.
However, I do want to reuse as much of the existing material as possible, so I modified the layout to have the visible track use K track and the hidden staging area use M track. Here is the result (click the image for a PDF version).



The main difference between K and M tracks is that K track doesn't have switches with 30cm radius. It only has the 42.5cm radius switches that connect the parallel track between R1 and R2. I think, the layout looks a bit more elegant. The 30cm radius switches are a bit clumsy.
The other difference is that the switches are shorter than the regular raster of 18cm, so I need to use slightly different pieces when putting it all together.

The biggest difference caused by the lack of R30 switches is the Steintal station. I had to put the side track on the north side of the station and while at it extended it a bit. There was no way to keep it the way I had it on the south-side of the station since it would collide with trains entering and leaving the hidden staging area in the tunnel below.
North of Steintal the track now goes up on an embankment on it's way to cross over the main track, visually separating the Emsingen station from the Steintal village.

I also slightly adjusted the trackage in the Emsingen freight area and in the operations facility, and gained back a bit of space for landscaping.

Joe Fugate's Siskiyou Line

An amazing layout, lots of detailed comments about model railroading, and a scenery clinic that aims to build really realistic looking scenery with lots and lots of very useful tips and tricks.
http://siskiyou-railfan.net

After reading the scenery clinic I decided that is exactly how I'm going to build the scenery on my layout. When I get to that...

Solar Step 3: Cabling & Inverter

Today the solar system setup was completed.



The rails holding the solar panels got cut so they don't protude far out on the sides. If you look closely you can see the cable piping on the roof between the panels on the top row. The panels are connected to a Xantrex GT3.3 inverter.



The silver pipe on the right carries the cabling from the roof to the inverter. The inverter converts the generated DC power to 240V AC, which is then fed to the main electrical panel on the left. There is a disconnect switch in the inverter that takes the inverter offline from the panels if needed. Fuses in the panel connect the inverter to the power grid (right above to the big yellow "solar backfeed" sticker).



We are generating power. While the system is rated at 3.9kW DC (22 * 180W/panel), due to inefficiencies of the panels and inverter, as well cable resistance, we can expect ~3kW AC peak production on very sunny days. The picture was taken late in the early evening with the sun already pretty low. The system still generated over 900W which was enough to spin the electric meter wheel backwards.

The city building inspectors will come by in the next few days to review the work. Afterwards, PG&E will replace the old electric meter with a TOU meter (TOU="time of use") and switch us to tariff E7. With TOU, electricity used during high demand times is more expensive than during low demand times, e.g. day vs. night. However, we also get compensated at the higher daily rate when we feed power back into the grid. Conveniently, the sun shines the brightest during high-demand times ...

Solar Step 2: Install Panels

Today SolarCity delivered and installed the PV panels. They are actually bigger than I expected.



These are Evergreen ES-180 panels. That little black cable is where they will connect the power lines to the inverter. The panels went up on the roof, installed on the rails, ...



... and there we have it, the installation is almost complete.



Now all that is left is run the cables to the inverter and connect everything to the main service panel. They'll do that tomorrow.

Seagate hard drives error count

My brand-spanking new Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and 7200.10 hard-drives are giving me grief with smartmontools:

Jul 24 21:30:05 chef smartd[2627]: Device: /dev/hda, SMART Prefailure Attribute: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate changed from 107 to 106
Jul 24 21:30:05 chef smartd[2627]: Device: /dev/hda, SMART Usage Attribute: 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered changed from 58 to 59
Jul 24 21:30:06 chef smartd[2627]: Device: /dev/hdc, SMART Prefailure Attribute: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate changed from 111 to 106
Jul 24 21:30:06 chef smartd[2627]: Device: /dev/hdc, SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Unknown_Attribute changed from 66 to 67
Jul 24 21:30:06 chef smartd[2627]: Device: /dev/hdc, SMART Usage Attribute: 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered changed from 66 to 64

oooh, I don't like the sight of this. smartctl -a /dev/hda shows millions of sector errors and ECC recovered entries. However, these drives are brand-new and shouldn't be showing such problems. What is going on? After some searching, it turns out that apparently Seagate is exporting any weak reads in the SMART attribute that other manufacturers only report unrecoverable errors with.

Ars Technica has a fairly good explanation in the forums.

That makes me less jittery, but I'll add monitoring for the Unrecoverable_Sectors attribute...

Solar Step 1: Rails installed

SolarCity came out today and installed the support rails for the solar panels. They put them up much higher on the roof than I expected. That's ok, the higher they are, the more exposure they have, and therefore less possibility for unwanted shading by surrounding trees. Even though they are really up high, they rails are not visible from the street.



There will be 3 rows of solar panels, each supported by two rails. I'm very curious how this all will look tomorrow.

busy weekend

Mowed the lawn. That went faster than I expected. There might even be photos some time soon. One trip to OSH, one trip to Home Depot. Fixed doors: Main entrance door, so it actually latches when you close it, and the side-yard door so it swings fully open when you try to open it. Set up Tatjana's bed. Took much longer than expected. Hooked up dryer in the old house, so we can use it until we get a dryer installed in the new house.

Ran a RugDoctor across carpet downstairs. It looked great while the carpet was still wet. The carpet is excrutiatingly dirty, even after having it professionally cleaned. As the carpet dried, it became evident that the RugDoctor not only sucked dirt out of the carpet, but also spread it. I've never seen this before when we used these machines in other places. The carpet near the sliding door, at the kitchen entrance, and near the main entrance looks very crappy now. The rest is just barely acceptable. We decided to replace not only the carpet in the Master Bedroom, but all carpet downstairs. I didn't like that green carpet that much to start with, but given how dirty it is, it has to go soon. After this cleaning, at least the kids (and Franziska) no longer have dirty feet just from walking around downstairs...

Punctured Sprinkler Pipe

I had the most fun installing these solar powered lights in our front yard on Friday. Really easy. Use the holes left from a similar installation by the previous owner, hammer in the spikes, attach the light. Done.

So I thought.

Friday evening as the sprinklers came on around the house, when the program got to the front yard, instead of the usual "sweeeeeesh", it made "blub blub blub blub". Hmmmm, I look out the window and sure enough there's water bubbled out the front lawn and running down the driveway to the street.

In the morning I dug up the hole and found this:


The spike of the solar light had neatly punctured the piping for the sprinklers. I considered various repair options, from replacing the pipe to wrapping some duct tape around the pipe where the hole was. This incident was a good motivation for a trip to OSH where I picked up among other things a Snap-Fix repair clamp from KBI and some PVC cement (the blue kind for water piping, not the one for electrical conduit, which I'll need for one of the next projects). The clamp consists of two halves that snap together and, with the cement, form a tight seal.



Pascal was most impressed with my artful color arrangement.

Next...

The things that need to get done ...

Master Bedroom:
- paint all walls and baseboards
- oil wardrobe
- new carpet
- set up wardrobe
- build Patricia's computer corner
- 2x RJ45 100BaseT network drop

Living Room:
- reduce count of boxes to zero
- paint all walls and baseboards
- find and set up new closet for games
- 2x RJ45 100BaseT network drop


Hallway:
- paint all walls and baseboards
- set up book shelf


Family Room:
- paint all walls and baseboards


Kitchen:
- paint all walls
- paint cabinets and cabinet doors

Upstairs hallway:
- paint all walls and baseboards


Trainroom:
- remove existing shelfing
- paint all walls and baseboards


Garage:
- reduce count of boxes to minimum
- make washer operational with hot water
- install 240V/30A outlet for dryer
- buy and clothes dryer
- set up computer rack
- communications:
- DSL splitter in demarc box
- set up structured wiring center
- route phone/network lines through wiring center

Garden/Outside:
- make spa operational
- review outside lighting
- check sprinkler control panel
- solar PV system installation

Moved!

We moved to the new house. Finally. It was time. It's great. So much work to do. I see myself the next few months painting, cabling, redoing whatever I can come up with. And maybe, eventually, even start working in the train room.

What's on my mind these days? Changing my address all over the place. The DSL move from SpeakEasy to Sonic.net was surprisingly uneventful. I canceled the SpeakEasy contract on Monday, transferred the phone line on Thursday to the new address, Friday a tech came out because the line didn't work. When he was done he said there is a short in the internal wiring, and he disconnected that branch for now (fine by me). Turns out he was right. A stripped cable in one of the bedrooms at two wires touch each other. Easy fix. He also mentioned that DSL should already be active. I didn't get around to check this out until Sunday and indeed, the line was active, IPs and everything set up. Sold as 3-6MBit/s down, 768kBit/s up, I get 4.2/626 actual throughput. That's pretty darn good.

Moving cable service from my old place to the new one proved to be REALLY hard. Actually, it's still not moved. The first time I tried to schedule it 10 days ago. Comcast's Web site didn't work at the time. The next time I tried it last Tuesday, the Web site worked, I got through the order to a chat session where a "customer service representative" is supposed to confirm my order. Instead of a confirmation I got, "My systems don't work right now. Try again later. Goodbye." and he left the chat. Wow.
Friday I tried again (with the excellent help of "linksys" wireless access that a helpful neighbor installed and left wide open...). Got through the Web site, set up an installation date (3 days into the future for disconnection, 5 days into the future for connection at the new place. What? are you guys nuts? The frigging phone company can move a line in 3 hours...). Then I got to the chat session, chatted with a rep, he confirmed my order (yay!), but then, "for security purposes what are the last 4 digits of your Social Security Number?" (Say what? *sigh* ok, gave them) ... "that doesn't match what's in my database here" (well, thinking more about this, of course not, when Patricia ordered the cable setup she didn't know my number, and why does the cable company need my Social in order to deliver _TV_ programming to my house?) ok, just try 9999 I bet my Social is not in your database. "I'm sorry, you have to come to a local office" (WHAT???) Never mind, I'll call the 800 number. "They will say the same thing".
WHAT THE HELL??? I have to go to a local Comcast office to prove that I am who I am, so they can move TV programming from my old house to my new house? That is insane. And we are paying $50/month for this nonsense. Suddenly, DirecTV sounds like a good alternative.

The only reason why I want to stick with Comcast is for analog basic cable, so I can exercise the dual-tuner capability of my PVR500 tuner card.

I'm very, very annoyed about the incompentence of this company and its utter unwillingness to take customer service seriously. Bah. If only this idiots didn't had a monopoly on the market.

Just say No to Google

This is a so good I can't ignore it.

Just Say "No" to Google.

Form your own opinion.

Save Internet Radio

They day of silence is in full swing. Radio Paradise is playing a recording of jungle sounds. Neat. but I'd prefer music. SaveNetRadio.org has plenty of information and contact information for your member of congress.

N scale sites

A vast amount of information about N scale is at nscale.net. One forum post brought me to Aligator Lines which describes in vast detail the construction of a N scale layout.

Uncouplers in scale

In order to make the N layout a bit more interesting than just having a train run around in a circle, I want to allow for basic switching operations, and maybe even come up with switching games (hey, I have to spend my non-existing time somehow :-) For that I preferably need an engine that can uncouple remotely (doesn't seem to exist), or I need to place uncouplers in strategic places of the layout.

I'm used to Maerklin-style HO electro-mechanical uncoupler tracks. An electro-magnet pushes up a plastic bar that in turn pushes up an element of the coupler and reliably uncouples the cars, especially if the couplers have some slack. This is what I'm planning to use in the train room HO layout.

Things are different in N. First off there are multiple kinds of couplers accross manufacturers. The most popular ones are Microtrains style knuckle couplers (mostly US), and Arnold style square couplers (mostly Europe). The Microtrains style couplers come in several variations by various manufacturers, but are generally compatible with each other. They are elegant and look pretty similar to prototypical US style center couplers. The Arnold style couplers are big square brackets and don't look prototypical at all.

The N layout is going to be built with US material, so I'll use knuckle couplers. I was surprised to see no uncoupler tracks in the various track listings. Instead, people seem to rely on permanent magnets placed between the rails. There are many articles on the Internet describing how annoying that is, and how electromagnets are better. Well, duh. Who wants their trains to decouple as they are passing through a station, just because there happens to be a permanent magnet and a momentary slow-down of the train causes the couplers go slack enough, so that the perma-magent can uncouple half of the train? Bah. No permanent magnets for me.

This article describes how to modify cheap HOn3 electro-magnetic uncouplers and knuckle couplers on rolling stock to reliably uncouple on demand.

Changes in Emsingen 6

Some fine-tuning of the Emsingen layout.

Upper levels (PDF)

Lower levels (PDF)

(If you have trouble accessing these PDFs, right click the link, select Save as ... to download them to your computer. Or use a real browser, i.e. not Internet Explorer)

I re-arranged the switches in the main station starting with the east end where I added a cross-over from track 1 to track 3. Now I can reach all destination tracks (freight station loop & tracks 1-3) from either track of the incoming main line. At the west end of the station I replaced the switch with a double-slip crossing and extended track 3 to make up for the length lost at the other end of the station. Unfortunately this clashed with the street connection to the tank storage. Bummer. Might be able to model a stub road depending on space available

The freight station loop got re-aligned so that the tracks line up with the new switch situation. I'm not happy with how the freight tracks are now laid out. I did some experiments and switching cars now requires much more use of track 1, since there is no way for the engine to get to the other end of the set of cars to be switched without going through track 1.

The maintenance facility got realigned as well, and equipped with a water tower and coal facility. I squeezed in a maintenance shed, too. That might not stay. It's really tight.

Finally, the station on the hill got a passing/siding track. The idea is to allow for two way operation on this segment, and/or "Stueckgut" freight to the village. I might think of a small industry that fits in with the theme. I'd love to extend the inner track of the curve to the east, make it a real freight track, but the down ramp to the hidden staging yard is in the way. This is not a problem if I change the orientation of the switches and place the station on the northwest side of the hill. However, in that case it visually becomes part of the main station.

Speaking of which. I lowered all of staging to -14cm. That should leave ~3.5cm clearance for the underpass west of the station, if I squeeze a little bit with headroom in that area, as well as add a little bit headroom for the 5 finger crane in case of problems in the lower level.

Chrysolite

We had the popcorn ceiling in the new house tested for asbestos, and the report came back with 1-5% of Chrysotile. Interestingly, the opinions on the Internet differ substantially, whether this is a carcinogenic variant of asbestos or not.

"Chrysotile, a mineral used for asbestos, is not a human carcinogen and no etiology link has been found for chrysotile exposure[1]. Every human and animal study showing asbestos etiology is associated with amphibole fiber asbestos, and there is evidence showing pure chrysotile etiology. However, some chrysolite ore deposits do contain amphibole fiber asbestos such as tremolite, crocidolite and actinolite. Amphibole asbestos minerals have hard, needle-like fibers that penetrate into the lung tissue by piercing the walls of the alveoli. Since the body cannot dissolve or dispose of the amphibole fibers they cause a scarring of the lungs, called asbestosis, or cause a cancer of the lining (pleura) of the lung, called mesothelioma. Chrysotile fibers, on the other hand, are dissolved or otherwise expelled by the body."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysotile)

That's encouraging.

However, another site says:

"Intensive inhalation of long and thin asbestos fibers over a considerable time period can induce pulmonary deseases such as asbestosis and lung cancers, as well as pleural diseases such as plaques, fibrosis, and mesothelioma. Such health hazards have drastically reduced the use of chrysotile, which is strictly regulated by law in western countries. See also Respiratory system disorders." (http://www.answers.com/topic/chrysotile)

Here is a comment from the harmless faction of the spectrum:

"Chrysotile is the dominant form of asbestos by far, and in the home it is generally harmless although asbestos workers must beware of lung disease due to chronic overexposure to the fine airborne fibers of powdered asbestos."
(http://geology.about.com/library/bl/images/blchrysotile.htm)

I.e. unless you are a worker exposed to Chrysotile, you are ok.

Finally, I found the URL of the Mesothelioma & Asbestos Awareness Center. This article illustrates some of the background, politics, lobbying and industrial influence behind the scenes. Excellent article.

Removing ceilings with asbestos is seriously expensive.

Emsingen 2

This is an improvement on the alternative layout I posted a few days ago. I named this layout Emsingen (since the trains are so "emsig" busy running around).

Here are the plans:

Upper levels (PDF)

Lower level (PDF)

Changes from the previous incarnation:

I added landscaping. All green sections indicate graded grass (e.g. along the road bed, hills, separation between grades, etc.). I put those generally in areas where I have sufficient room to model a nice grass slope. All brown sections indicate rock formations (e.g. around some tunnel portals). I added rock walls in the north-east corner to provide an explanation for the tight curves, and in the south-east corner to hide the track inside the hill without having to resort to retaining walls. The landscaping also hopefully illustrates better how the northwest track is going to disappear down towards the hidden station.

Along the north side of the freight yard I added a brick retaining wall to support the upper level track.

I also added streets around the station and the freight yard. Note how the access road to the station crosses under the tracks. The village on the mountain is modelled out and has a small station.

To have more purpose for track 3, I added a small oil storage facility off track 3.

Trackwise, I eliminated the helix and replaced it with a generous loop. This was possible by moving the cross-over switch that was originally in the east tunnel to the west-end of the station. Not having the helix will make this much easier to build and actually substantially smoothes out the grades. Throughout the layout grades are <= 1:30, with exception of the upramp on the north side of the freight area which runs at a grade of 1:35. Still not too bad.

In order to keep enough room for the underpass, the tracks on the lower layer are sloping down from the hidden station to the front and then back up again. There is a short side track on the lower level that is accessible just above the controls to easily add cars and locomotives to the operation.

I also rearranged the tracks of the hidden station for maximum length.

Layout Design SIG

There actually exists a "Layout Design Special Interest Group". Some in-depth critique of one rather big layout, there are much more critiques of layouts in the Critiques category. Some of them with insane amount of detail.

They also have an excellent primer on how to plan, build, and run model train layouts. Nice.

The Original

I just noticed that I didn't include the actual layout when I was blabbering about how small the train room is going to be.

Here it is:

visible track: This includes the main station, the spur line into the mountains, freight and maintenance, some hidden ramps, as well as the double-track main line on the south side

hidden track: This is mostly the hidden station and ramps to get there.

The layout is dominated by the main station, it's freight yard and small maintenance facility. Tracks number 1 and 2 are the through tracks on the double-track main line. Track 3 is where trains to the rural mountain station arrive and leave. There are extension sides on either end of track 3 to allow for more interesting yard operation. The main line loops in the big curve on the west side of the station area around some short tracks for the maintenance facility on a 1:30 downgrade to tunnels under the hill in the south-east corner. Between the station and this main line track is light industry with a freight service track. A road bridges over the main line in the south and connects to the freight yard, too.

The spur line travels from track 3 on a step 1:50 grade across a bridge to another tunnel in the south-east mountain and makes its way along the eastern edge to a small rural station in the North.

The road leads under the spur line bridge and the main tracks to the station building. An interesting feature of this layout is the round pond that actually is a hidden hatch to access remote corners in the North-East.

The switch in the north-west corner leads to a loop track hidden in the northern mountain that connects to the western extension of track 2 (the loop track is shown on the page with hidden trackage).

In order to avoid steep grades on the ramps and allow clearances the tracks in the hidden station are set at a grade of 1:35 rising about 3 cm from north to south. The north-east corner of the hidden station is 17 cm below the main station. The curve in the west rises with the same grade as the respective visible curve of the main line.

An alternative layout

I can't sleep... so I spent more time with an alternative layout.

Here is the layout:

The visible parts: The main station, mountain track, freight and servicing area

The hidden parts: Mainly the ramps and the hidden station

The theme is a station at the end of a dual-track main line coming from East. At the south-west end of the station, the two single track lines split: One line takes a gentle slope down and escapes out of sight to the hidden station. The track is hidden behind the dam of the other line climbing a 1:40 grade along the north side (to get over the station tracks on the east side), swings around a mountain on a gentle 1:30 downgrade and disappears in a tunnel to reappear again as part of the two-track main line (I had to cheat somewhere to close the loop).

Note the track loop built into the freight area north of the station building. The freight area has a depot and loading ramp, as well as a judicious amount of uncouplers. Nearby is the main station building with platforms for travellers. There will be a few additional buildings, and a road that crosses under the tracks to the south. There might be enough clearance between the tracks on the north side to let the road continue, but there is a lot of track in the way, so I'd likely just let the road end at the station. The city that belongs to the station is not included in the layout and located to the south-west where we (sadly) need to leave space for the operator.

At the south-east side of the station a small locomotive maintainance and service area is ready to refuel engines with coal, sand, and whatever else is needed. This is also the home of the yard engine. In order to get from the maintenance area to the freight facility the yard engine needs to zig-zag accross the main line.

On the mountain in the south-east is the scene of a small village in southern Germany, complete with church and houses. In general, the landscaping and style of the buildings would be as found in the North Black Forest in southern Germany. The village has a small stop with station building on the mountain line that is served by the occasional "Schienenbus".

The inside of the mountain houses a helix that brings one track of the main line down to the hidden station. Because of clearance requirements and how the track ended up, the lower level is 19cm below the station level. In general I'm working with 11cm clearance between track levels. The track in the helix has a grade of 1:40, more than I wanted but there is just not enough space. Even though it's not consistently marked this way the lower level is of course completely invisible from the top.

The hidden station is accessed via the helix, as well as the single-track line mentioned earlier which gently slopes down mostly hidden from sight along the edge of the layout. The hidden station is built around another loop of track that works opposite from the surface one, so depending on the direction they are traveling, trains can change direction using the loops without the need to back up. The hidden station can hold 4 trains of moderate length.

The area in the lower left corner (south-east) is for the operator and guests. It measures roughly 120 by 60 centimeters. Just enough space for the controls and a stool.

The one thing I really like about this layout is that a lot of track is visible (contrary to my crazy digging action mentioned earlier), there's good opportunity for landscaping and watching trains as they go by. This is also a good play layout with the two reversing loops, the station, maintenance and freight facilities.

title company

We signed all the papers for the new house today. 90 minutes of initials, and signing your name. After 30 minutes, my signatures looked like a wild jungle of crooked lines.
The final stack of paperwork is 1 inch thick. All that's left to do is deposit a cashiers check with our down payment and out of pocket expenses by next Wednesday 3pm and escrow will close Friday.

Curiously, I'm not that excited. The whole morning has been quite anti-climactic. Loan docs arrived late and were revised again halfway through the sitting for clerical errors. I was a bit tired and annoyed.

I think it will be different by the time we move in. I'm really looking forward to taking over the house, painting (ok, not as much), moving in, unpacking, decorating, deciding what goes where, doing small repairs, ... and living there.

But first I'm taking off for a week in Seattle again. The next week the new roof will be installed. This will be fun. The HOA architecture committee conditionally approved the reroof, but I need to provide a sample of the material, and they are holding the approval until we legally own the house. Yay. More red tape...

Model train, IKEA coffee table and the best woman of them all

The best woman of them all suggested a while ago to build a small model train inside a coffee table in the living room, once we do have a living room that is big enough to do that. I am continously surprised by the ideas she comes up with.

I started considering how to do this. Magiker seems to be a good choice. Not too expensive, glass top, sufficient space between glass and shelf to do something interesting. 65x125cm useable space is too small for HO, even for a simple loop. But it's big enough for a small N scale layout. The sides need to be closed off, painted to match the rest of the table, to keep out hands of curious children. The best woman of them all requested I also properly landscape the inside of the table (well, duh of course). So far, so good.

Today, we talked about it again, and the best woman of them all was yearning for a desert setup instead. Sand, small stones, and cacti under glass. Similar to what we've seen a few years ago in a hotel lobby in Los Cabos. "How about doing both?", I blurted out. She looked at me. Smiled. And said, "... that's a great idea. Let's do that!"

I'm just happy to be married to the best woman of them all.

HO Layout in a small room

In our new house we have a small storage room that I'm planning to convert to my train room (and also run the server computers there). The room is 167x283cm. Enough space to set up a new layout of our Maerklin HO trains, but it's all very, very tight. I discovered a free track layout tool XTrkCad from sillub.com that works on Linux (and Windows, too). It's definitely dated by today's standards and compared to currnent tools available for Windows, but gets basic planning job done.

The theme I'd like to build is a small station at a double-track mainline with some side-tracks and engine maintenance facilities and a single track spur line that goes steep into the mountains. At the end of that line is a small rural station with a little freight and passenger traffic. I also definitely want a hidden storage area for trains. To make things a bit more interesting I figured I set the station at a 15% angle diagonally accross the available space.

The problems start with the fact that a 180 degree curve double-track is 105cm wide, so that leaves at most 55 cm on the side of the layout for the operator that does need to fit into the room as well.
In order to avoid too steep grades, I don't want to go above 1:40 on the main line (i.e.4 cm elevation gain on 1 m of track). That means my grades need to be at least 250cm long to get 10-11cm clearance. That is almost the full length of the room. Taken together it became clear very quickly that I need to pay very close attention to grades and clearances along the track, as well as use every centimeter of track I can get for elevation gain. This is going to be one heck of a mountainous layout.

The railroad builders of the railroads accross the Alps or the Sierra Nevada must have felt similarly...

Homeowners Association and Architectural Review

Oh the joy of Homeowners Associations (also know as "HOA"). They keep the appearance of the neighborhood uniform, no-one can endlessy repair cars on the sidewalk, deal with neighborhood complaints, enforce the rules and can do a good job of maintaining property values. They also maintain common facilities or landscaping. I really enjoy the pool, mature trees and landscaped grounds around our townhouse.
HOA's also can be a pain to work with if you are doing something a bit out of the ordinary. And you have to follow the architectural review process if you are making any changes to the outside appearance of the house that are visible either from the street, or from any of your neighbor's lots.

The association we are moving into seems to be particularly anal about enforcing their rules. On the other hand the neighborhood looks really good.

I will need to deal with the architectural review committee very soon, as we want to have the roof on the new house replaced before we move in, as well as install solar power as soon as is practical.

How much do you like YOUR realtor?

Talking to friends (and experiencing it ourselves), people are seldomly 100% happy with their agent. There is just too much at stake and you are obsessing over details that are important to you. Your agent might have slightly different priorities than you. In a perfect world, your agent is picking up on the vibe and delivers what you want.

Most full-time agents are probably sufficiently experienced and well-versed in the legal details involved with buying a house. Still, personal chemistry is really important, but how do you find the agent that is perfect for you?

Invite several agents and have them present their plan on how they would market your house, why you should choose them, and what they think are comparable homes to yours. The main objective here is not what they say, but how you feel about them as a person. Do they come across as slick or slimy? Honest or personable? Genuinely concerned about your priorities? You will work with those folks very closely for a few months, so listen to your gut. Listen closely. Clarify things that don't make sense to you.

There is a vast difference between an agent that says "I can sell your home!" and one that says "What is important to you?" Some agents are very aggressive how they market your home, some take a more laid-back approach. Some do an open house for you every weekend, others see them as a waste of time.

Bottom-line: Make sure you are compatible. If you are having a really good conversation over the proposal and the numbers end up in just about the right ball-park, you're in the right place.

What about commissions?

Clearly understand how the seller/buyer agent commissions work. Look at both the overall commission, but also the split between buying and selling agent. Apparently, it's customary to pay 3% to each agent, but I haven't met an agent here that actually proposed the full 6% of the sales price. The highest commission I ran accross while putting my house on the market was 5% (2% for selling agent, 3% for buying agent). This can vary dramatically from location to location. In some areas a 2.5% split is common. Sometimes selling agents take a very small commission for themselves, and pay 2.5-3% to a buying agent, resulting in a lower overall commission for you.

Jump Sky High!

Terrible picture quality, but this was fun!



Jump Sky High! is basically a warehouse filled with trampolines.




We also played Extreme Dodgeball on trampolines. My team lost. Lessons learned: Don't try to catch the ball unless you are sure you are going to hold it. It's not sufficient to dodge balls. You also need to hit players on the other team.

We are in contract!

Paying a little bit more than I expected, but we are in contract. Whee!
The transaction ended up with an agent doing dual-agency. A bit strange. I felt that, while the agent tried to be as impartial as possible, he did seem to favor the seller a bit. The warnings are true. Either way, I feel we paid a fair price for the house, even though, of course, I would have preferred to pay less.

I got bids from various roofing companies. Composite asphalt shingles are not as expensive as I feared (and we have a very simple roof, too). All bids came in clearly under $9000. But boy, so many new words to learn (gables, eves, ridge, valleys, ...), venting approaches to consider (eve venting, ridge venting, eye brow vents, and how that all compares to the pre-existing gable vents), material options to look at (do I care what color my roof is going to be? I never really thought about that. Grey, I guess...).

We'll get the new roof installed after close of escrow, probably in June.

The financing is making its way past the underwriters, I need to start looking for home insurance.

Meanwhile we are getting our house ready to go on the market. Richard is giving us good guidance and advice. New carpet will be installed next week downstairs. We're hoping we have everything ready, so we can go on the market by the end of next week. Hordes of unwashed buyers will run down the place, we will have multiple offers in the first 24 hours, ... oh wait, the boom times are over. Average time on the market these days is about 45 days. Houses either sell in the first 3-4 weeks, or it takes 3 months. There seem to be very few inbetween. I'm hoping we are in the first group. If everything looks good, the house is priced right, we should be. However, we'll know it only once we are on the market. Oh, the joy.

SpamAssassin not doing remote checks

I rebuilt chef a while ago, including a new version of SpamAssassin. The amount of spam I got immediately shot up to a level where less than 20% of spam was filtered. ok, I didn't train SA, and I'd like to implement per user training rules.

However, I did notice that spamd is not doing any remote checks. At all. zilch. The Wiki has the answer close to the bottom.

apt-get install libnet-dns-perl

For filtering by country see the country relay plugin.

fiber-cement tiles yield big surprise

We're moving ahead with our home buying adventure. Yesterday we had the house inspection in the new place. Three guys came out to look for termites, and do the property and roof inspections. Termite guy found minor infestation, no big deal. property inspector had some issues with how some of the electrical installation was done (the breaker box looked pretty chaotic to me), "this needs a complete relabeling job". Some circuit breakers where off, or only connected to one (!) wire. Very odd. Throughout the house he found little odd-jobs with the wiring, missing junction boxes in various places, cables that were just tied together with insulation tape, ...

However, the roofer dropped the bomb. "The roof is made of a material which is known to be defective. your tiles are warping, and I won't even give you an expected remaining life for the roof in my report." Ouch! Big surprise for all of us.

The roof is made from fiber-cement tile panels, which 15 years ago was advertised as a very high-quality roof. The shingles are made from a mixture of cement and cellulose fiber (i.e. paper), and are then coated to make them waterproof. Turns out this is a really bad idea, as the sun will burn off the coating over time. This became a huge issue ~10 years ago, lots of companies that made this material went out of business or even went bankrupt over this. Class Action lawsuits, settlements, you name it. There is one company left that apparently still pays out settlement money, ~25 cent on the dollar. Brand name is "Cemwood".

We're getting estimates for how much a new roof is going to cost. Those guys will be able to tell us which brand-name material was used and whether there is any hope to get settlement money. Of course we will use this in our price negotiations... We were contemplating whether a new roof is needed, before we install the solar power system. That question is now resolved.

And we are getting an inspection of the chimneys. The house has one gas- and one wood-burning fireplace, so I want to be sure there are no surprises in the chimneys, too.

We got a pony!

After many moons we did indeed get a pony!

Buying a house without an agent

Scary thought: Navigate the process of home buying without the help of an professional agent.

Turns out this isn't as scary as it sounds. Let's review what a buyer agent does for you to earn his (typical) 3 percent of the deal:

- Tour houses for sale with you

This seems to be by far the most time intensive, but also least skilled work in this set. When we bought our current home, our agent found homes we might like, arranged tours to show them, and accompanied Patricia (or me). We saw 40+ houses that way until we found the one we liked and eventually bought.

- Help write an offer and determine a fair price

The price question is probably the trickiest of the bunch. There is no regulation for home prices, aside from gut feeling, "what the market is doing", previous sales of comparable houses in the area, and some additional fudge factor. It's easy to spend too much, or not ask enough and leave money on the table. A good agent knows the neighborhood you want to buy in, knows of recent sales, and in what condition those houses where. A really good agent can find out how much horse trading happened during escrow and what concessions where made by the sellers during closing. The official sales price does not break out e.g. an allowance for old carpet.
A good agent helps write a compelling offer, with proper contingencies and makes sure the document is sound. In general, any conditions not in the offer can't be added to the sales contract later on.

- Negotiate with the selling agent

If an offer is accepted right away, you are probably paying too much. The offer/counter-offer game is common in real estate transactions. The agent helps getting the most for your money.

- Help with the closing and escrow process

The escrow process is full of stuff you need to take care of. Inspections, property records, dealing with the bank (well, that you have to do yourself, no matter what). And lots of signatures on closing day.


Pheww. That's a lot of stuff, and if you ask any agent they are going to tell you many more things an agent does for you.

Also, very often the agent doesn't actually get all of the money from their cut, they need to split with their brokerage firm. The difference between a $750,000 and $700,000 purchase in Silicon Valley translates to $200-$300 or less difference in take home pay for the agent on a commission north of $4,000. Assuming a sale value of $750,000, 1% real commission (after broker fees and expenses), and 40% taxes for the agent. 6% is over $40,000 for this transaction. Lots of money for me.


Here's my view:

- Tour houses for sale

Hmmm, I know my neighborhood. I want to upgrade within my neighborhood and don't want to move elsewhere. Patricia and I are going to pretty much every open house in the area, so we actually do know what's on the market, and in what condition the houses are.

- Knowing the right price to put into the offer

Houses are typically listed on the local MLS (mlslistings.com in the Bay Area). Some information is hard to get to if you are not a realtor. Additionally, most sites don't include history about previous purchases. For our area southsanjose.com has some good information. A bigger database, but not as up to date is the information at domania.com. They also offer an automated home valuation tool. From my experiments, that tools seems to come out a bit low. zillow.com has a cool UI, but tends to be a bit high with their prices.

Bottom-line, go with your gut and get as much information has you can. BTW, asking prices of homes currently for sale can be some guidance since in theory sellers would do the same research with their agents. But, in reality the exact asking price seems to be more the result of what the seller wants and their specific circumstances of the sale (sell fast, can wait, contingencies, etc.)

- Negotiate

I can do that. Some people feel uncomfortable with that.

- Closing and escrow process

A lot of that is boiler plate. You need to make sure all details are taken care of. Get a lawyer familiar with real estate transactions for the paper work, and make absolutely sure all inspections are done properly. The bank is going to ask for them as well in many cases.

Overall, not too scary if you are willing to do the leg work.

Update (2007/05/04):

Of course, I'm not the only one who came up with this idea. This blog entry gives some nice background and similar reasoning. fool.com has a nice section on home buying as well. Sponsored aptly by LendingTree. A quick overview of contract content is here.

transfering a domain from register.com

My main domain is up for renewal. 5 Years ago I spent 70 bucks or so with register.com for registration fees.

Since register.com still is charging a whopping $35 a year (down to ~$16/yr if you register for 7 or more years), I was looking for alternatives. My other domains are registered with GoDaddy.com, who are still not the cheapest but reasonable. I start the transfer process, get half a dozen emails to my domain contacts from GoDaddy, but don't hear anything from register.com. This morning I search through their site, and there is literally no mention of how to transfer a domain away from register.com (surprise). Eventually, I find the FAQ entry to obtain the "Auth Code". I need to call them. ok.

*ring*
*ring*
[cheery voice] "Hello, can I interest you in our content services?"
- No
"ok, how can I help you today"
- need auth code for domain transfer
[voice even cheerier] "ok, I put you right through"

*ring*
*ring*
[guy voice] "What is your domain name"
- I tell him. We go through the secrect question game.
[guy voice getting cheerier] "ok, how can I help you with your domain"
- auth code for transfer, please
"why are we talking about this?"
[I start to hate cheery guy]
- you guys charge $35, GoDaddy way less than $10. simple, no?
"we offer premium support, sure, there is a premium in price for that"
- I never called you guys for support
[Damn, how hard can it be to need support for a frigging domain?]
"I totally understand that. We don't want to loose you." [sure, I'm not costing them anything]
"I can offer you a substantial discount from our published prices. How about $35 for 5 years?"
[I'm speechless for a second. What are they thinking? I'm annoyed. This is a slightly better deal than what I'm getting at GoDaddy. However, I hate these bait tactics.]
- please just give me auth code
[so he does]
"but remember, you can always still accept this offer and GoDaddy will need to refund the money you already paid for the transfer, since they didn't actually provide the service." More heavy sales blurb follows.
- yeah, yeah, thank you

I hang up. I'm annoying and amazed at the same time. ... So, wait, I could call GoDaddy now and ask for the same price, otherwise I move all my domains to register.com. Now that would be fun, if that's how the game is played... hmmmmm...

Whee!

Interestingly, after NOT specifying Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE" the TV out on the new FX6200 card now works properly. TV out seems even a bit more crisp than with the old FX5200 card.

The channel switching problem when trying to record shows persists. I can watch live TV just fine, but all scheduled records fail with the error I posted yesterday.

I rerun myth-setup, delete all encoder cards and made sure that MPEG (PVR-500) is selected, then re-run mythfilldatabase --do-channel-upgrade. Now it works properly. I guess, 0.20 added a few fields to the capture cards that needed to be populated by mythtv-setup, even though it was all set up from 0.19 already.

No spontaneous shutdown for 24 hours. Replacing the video card really seemed to help. That's good enough for today. I'll worry about LIRC and ndiswrapper on the weekend.

grumpy powers down spontaneously

After I determined that the FX5200 in grumpy was bad, I swapped in an older Matrox card. I'm not sure if that's related, but Grumpy would not stay up for more than a few hours. It would just shutdown, similar to entering hibernate mode, particularly when I'm not doing anything on the system at that time. The problem is that I also can't wake it up, unless I hold the power button for 30 seconds or so. Only then I can power up again. and of course, I don't want it to shut down in the first place.

At first I suspected heat problems in the cpu. I tried cpuburn, within seconds got the cpu up to more than 90C until the kernel spew out temperature warning messages to the log and entered moduled frequency, i.e. ramps down the CPU frequency to reduce the heat. No such log entries exist from other shutdowns, so I don't think that's my problem.
When grumpy shut down again on me, I swapped in a new FX6200 card with TV out that I picked up today. So far it hasn't shut down on me. We'll see. If it's still up and running when I come home tomorrow I decalre victory and blame some interaction of the Matrox card with the motherboard. I'm not sold yet.

On a related note:
When I boot with the new card I get console output, so he physical connection to the TV works. However, as soon as X is enabled, the TV screen goes black. X is running because I can her the KDE login music, I just can't see anything. Frustrating.

grumpy very grumpy

The 300GB Maxtor drive now really had issues (heat?). On top of that the video card in grumpy died (heat?). At first it looked like the CPU was toast, since the box didn't even beep anymore. I got an Asus board with Celeron CPU. Should have gotten a P4, since the Celerons apparently don't support SpeedStep (though Linux seems to think otherwise). /proc/acpi is not terribly well populated on this board.

I had lots of trouble with getting 2.6.18-4 to cooperate. ndiswrapper is a no-go so far. nor is lirc. module-assistant is really cool.

I added www.debian-multimedia.org to my apt sources and spent most of last night watching apt getting dependencies, while at the same time copying the movie and media files from the old disk to the new 500GB disk I bought recently. No issues whatsoever with that disk yet, while the 300GB disk is was throwing CRC errors left and right. bad IDE cable? I'll test that later.

mythtv 0.20 now finally works with kernel 2.6.18-4-686 and ivtv 0.10.1. I cheated with the ivtv install and compiled straight from source, since the drivers are not available via m-a.

I fiddled with schema update issues a lot (basically reversing each failed update until the step no longer complained). After the update the channel line-up was a mess. I couldn't get recordings to work properly. They failed with

2007-03-20 22:45:51.701 TVRec(1): Changing from None to RecordingOnly
2007-03-20 22:45:51.718 TVRec(1): HW Tuner: 1->1
2007-03-20 22:45:51.798 Channel(/dev/video0): SetInputAndFormat() failed
2007-03-20 22:45:51.799 TVRec(1) Error: Failed to set channel to 3. Reverting to kState_None
2007-03-20 22:45:51.800 TVRec(1): Changing from RecordingOnly to None
2007-03-20 22:45:51.809 Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Scheherezade": channel 1001 on cardid 1, sourceid 1
2007-03-20 22:45:51.827 scheduler: Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Scheherezade": channel 1001 on cardid 1, sourceid 1

wiping out all channels, running mythfilldatabase --refresh-today --do-channel-updates seems to have helped. At least I got a recording going now. on channel 40. However, I still can't record from channel 2. Will try again tomorrow. I suspect the table wants the channel frequencies.

To prevent very nasty video distortion when watching or recording channels that air in HD, I switched the recording profile from 480x480 as originally recommended by mythtv to full-size 720x480. No more distortions when watching TV, I hope the same is true for recordings.

Sound was not a problem to my surprise.

The setup is a mess right now: No video card with Video-out support, so I have my computer screen in the living room. Bah.

I failed over the system to the 500GB disk using the find / cpio trick I mentioned earlier in this blog.

The End of Internet Radio? - Copyright Royalty Board is going nuts again

Bill Goldsmith from Radio Paradise my very favorite Internet Radio station
wrote about the latest attempts to put Internet Radio out of business. The royalty payments set by the Copyright Roalty Board are flat out ridiculous. Pay per performance (ie. for every single listener) is a flawed model. Internet stations get penalized twice compared to over-the-air stations, they not only pay for the additional bandwidth consumed, but also pay more royalties the more successful they are. Just because you can exactly measure how many people actually listen on the Internet shouldn't give anyone a blank check to cash in on that, especially not the greedy music companies represented by the RIAA and SoundExchange.

Successful stations like Radio Paradise with 1000's of concurrent listeners easily make it above the low bar of 159,140 "aggregate tuning hours" per month in less than a day even though they are a non-profit radio station. The CRB seems to be under the impression that "non-profit" is code for "not successful".

The analysis on the same page is even more chilling. While Radio Paradise is listener-supported and, I happily pay a contribution regularly, many other Internet radio stations are not. The analysis suggests that an ad supported radio station would have to pay royalties roughly equal to 100% of their revenues.

While I agree with Bill's gloom assessment of the situation I certainly hope there is a way for Internet Radio to survive, and be it by a crutch similar to the agreement negotiated in 2002 mentioned in Bill's post. Meanwhile, Congress needs to get their act together and reign in this craziness.

Success ... I think.

Phew. I spent a long time last night copying data off the old chef. One particularly annoying wrinkle was that after the parity rewrite, chef came up with unlean filesystems, and mounted them read-only. Including /. That meant, no logs could be written, and general unhappiness, which prevented remote logins. copying stuff out of chef via scp yielded a question every ~3.5 minutes, that the "host key of new-chef is unknown, is that ok"? In my 1am haze I dutifully typed yes every 3-4 minutes for an hour until the transfer was done.

This morning I thought about this more and figured that the only reason why it's asking repeatedly was that it couldn't write the host key to /root/.ssh/known_hosts and therefore when the ssh re-keys, it had to ask me again. Chef was still up this morning with read-only file systems and I still had to copy off 20GB of data, I didn't want to type yes all the time. I can't fsck the root filesystem while it's mounted read-only, and I was a bit concerned that chef might not come up again, when rebooting, so I mounted memory file systems over /root and /tmp:

mount_mfs swap /root
mount_mfs swap /tmp

The first parameter is just for the mount command to get some disk parameters, usually the special device of the swap partition on a local disk. Using "swap" forces mount_mfs to use a generic default. Useful for systems with no local disk.

I got all data transfered, decommissioned the old chef in the afternoon, and replaced the Athlon 900 motherboard and the two 160GB with a VIA M10000 board, 512MB of memory, and a 300GB disk. The disk is set up as one half of a raid1 mirror, so when I upgrade grumpy to use a 500GB disk as planned, I can use the 300GB in chef. Provided that disk passes a full-blown offline self-test via smartctl and a 8h stress test using multiple bonnie++ instances. The 500GB disk is going to get the same stress test before I put it in grumpy.

One immediately obvious benefit of the new chef is that it feels fast when using it with IMAP. A modern 1GHz CPU easily smokes a 5+ year old 900MHz Athlon. The memory is 4 times faster, too. And the whole system is quieter (mainly because the CPU fan on the Athlon was showing its age).

There's still lots of work left to do. I added features to Chef in small installments over 2+ years. But the basics (smtp, imap, web) are working reasonably well, so for now I'm happy enough with this that I'm going to watch some TV now.

chef bit the dust

While copying data off chef, OpenBSD panicked in the file system code and gave me a "map corrupted" error. That's not good I guess...

I got the family web site and my mail off in time, but I don't have high hopes for the rest of the data. Chef is currently undergoing another one of those wonderful 4 hourlong parity rewrite sessions.

In the meantime, I'm rebuilding all the needed functionality on the new chef.

Rebuilding Chef

Chef is old and needs a rebuild, and it's raid volume has issues. I chose to rebuild Chef with Debian stable. Chef is a server and as such I don't want much updates for it. Since it's no longer doubling as my firewall, I'm more comfortable with this as well. I trust Linux software raid more than RaidFrame.

tasks:
postfix - DONE
spamassassin (spamd.conf) - DONE, looks good
apache2 (tested, data transfered) - DONE
dovecot (installed, configured) - DONE
apcupsd (not started)
mrtg (installed, unconfigured)
nagios (not started)
snmpd (installe, configured, running) - DONE
smbd/nmbd - DONE
nfs exports - DONE
raid (one half of mirror installed until I migrate mythtv to 500GB)
webalizer (not started)
sensors (started, missing drivers)

Bad jpegs

In the last few months when we browse photos on babybaer which mounts a volume from chef over NFS, we occasionally get odd effects that appear to be errors in the jpeg encoding, as if a small piece of data is missing, resulting in a color offset in a part of the image and slightly offset image after the error. Like this:



chef has been logging an error "nfsd send error 55" for the longest time, with no apparent ill effects. Is this maybe related and we only noticed it now? Are things getting worse?

A Google search revealed no answers to where the error on chef is coming from in the first place. It means out of buffer space, but I couldn't find any hints *why* that might be happening.
All I could find are complaints from other people that run Linux clients against OpenBSD servers, about that error filling up the logs. It also appears to happen on NetBSD, which would make sense, given how much code is shared between NetBSD and OpenBSD. Increasing NMBCLUSTERS might help a bit, but no definitive solution. Turning off CBQ might help, but I don't run CBQ (or any firewalling) on chef anymore. Someone suggested bad interaction with cheapo RealTek cards (hey, look at that chef is using a RealTek card). I switched to another interface (dc0), let's see if it makes a difference. Of course, I have no way of knowing for sure any time soon, since the error happens only when browsing 100's of jpegs over NFS.

Update:
I took a look at the timestamps of the nfsd error 55 messages and noticed they don't line up with when we see bad images. Today there was only one error logged this morning, but Patricia got a couple bad images this afternoon. Lovely. This doesn't help.

Update:
At this time I'm not even sure how to quantify the problem. Let's see if this is an issue with Linux NFS to OpenBSD, or something else. Let's generate a md5sum list of a large body of data (my jpegs) straight from disk on chef and via NFS on babybaer.

Update:
This is really easy in Linux:
find . | grep -i jpg$ | xargs -iD md5sum "D" > md5-linux

And really weird in OpenBSD (mostly because the output of md5 is so convoluted):
find . | grep -i jpg$ | xargs -iD md5 "D" | awk -F '[)(=]' '{print $4 $3 $2}' > md5-openbsd

awk seems to be doing some fancy buffering (?) when piping output to another program (like sed) or just a file. I just don't get any output whatsoever. Hmmm.

...

oh great, while experimenting with that, chef decided to say Goodbye and hung itself. No reaction on console. Just hangs. That sucks.

Ctrl-Alt-Esc doesn't work. But Shift-PgUp/PgDn does. Surprise. The box is not on the network, not echoing characters. *sigh* Looks like another power cycle. Bah.

Update:
Rebooted chef last night. I reproduced the jpeg problem again this afternoon on two images, so it's not a RealTek nic driver issue. There are no logs on chef indicating an error, nor on babybaer. It looks like random data corruption, but that doesn't make sense. ... Wait. There is a smart raw read error on chef, followed by ecc_hardware corrected. Could this be related? Rebooting Babybaer to rule out impact of local file system cache.

Update:
Nope. The root of the problem is on chef. I reproduced bad jpeg copies by simply cp'ing a directory of jpegs and running md5sum on the files. One recent directory (02-25) seems to be particularly suspectible to this problem. Of 8 files I copied in several attempts up to 7 had different md5sums. I hexdumped a few files and the differences are always on 4kbyte page boundaries (4kByte, 12kByte).
That seems to indicate either a file system problem (but the filesystem checks clean), or a RAIDframe volume problem, maybe due to issues with the underlying disk sectors (possible), a memory problem (but then I would expect to see more random failures), or a CPU problem (ditto).
I'm still uncomfortable with the raw read error/ecc corrected counters reported by smartd.

Hillary Clinton

So, I just attended an event with Hillary Clinton. Interesting. When I walked over to the building, the motorcade was already parked outside. Police, large SUVs, quiet men in black jackets, just like in the movies. When I got inside it was *packed*. I actually got lucky and managed to get in before they closed the the doors due to overcrowding. The announcement of one of the VC technicians to keep the aisles clear and there is overflow room in one of the adjoining tech talk areas didn't convince many people to leave. We just squeezed togehther a bit more...
There were easily over a thousand people in the room.

I didn't expect Clinton to have the views she presented today on the environment and energy. As with so many polititians she's extremely convincing when in the same room and on stage. She doesn't sound fake, rather genuinely interested in making things happen.

Changing the energy policy to promote clean, green technologies, pulling all levels of government together, from federal to state down to the local level to move in the same direction: 10 years from now, she wants the country be well on the way to energy independence from fossil fuels without wrecking the economy along the way. Interestingly, she used California as the prime example what to do. While the per-capita use of energy has increased by 50% in other parts of the US, it has stayed flat in California. She attributes that to California's insistence on sticking with their state-wide incentive programs and pollution limits when the Reagan administration was dismantling whatever such programs existed on the federal level in the early 80's.

She told a nice story about how she vividly remembers after the Russians shot Sputnik into space, all Americans pulled together to create something amazing, the space program, which grew into DARPA, one of the sponsors of the Internet. Her teacher told the students, "kids the president wants you to study math and sience". She believed at the time Eisenhower actually called her teacher to tell them that. Kinda cute story. She used that as a starting point to talk about how she wants Americans to pull together and rid America from its dependence on fossil fuels, move to clean, green energy, bio-fuels, and fight global warming. She's crossing her fingers for Al Gore that he wins the Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth". This was a great section of the talk. She came accross very strong and believable.


When asked about the mess in Iraq, she called it "the height of irresponsibility" that President Bush might leave the Iraq war to his successor to sort out. "This is his war. He needs to clean it up. But if he continues to go the way he's going, I don't expect him to." She strongly advocates pulling troops out of the sectarian civil war that is now engulfing the country, and setting up a regional conference involving all neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to make sure they do their part to stabilize the country. She has a very active role in the senate to reign in Bush's war and "force him to do the right thing. To at least send in troops with all the supplies and material they need to be able to fight this war".
One interesting remark was about how silly it is not to talk to your enemies. Throughout the cold war, both republican and democratic presidents talked to the Russians, to learn, to get intelligence and to understand. "you don't make peace with your friends, you don't have to. In order to make peace you have to talk to the people with different views, with ideas that are the exact opposite of yours."

By the way, it will be interesting to see how she's going to pull people to her side who claim she is unelectable next year. She went through pains to paint herself as an inclusive person, that brings people together, using her home state New York (with a blue New York city, and a very red upstate New York) as example. I'd be curious to know how much of the 68% of New Yorkers that reelecred her last year, actually live in upstate New York.

Clinton made several remarks about universal health-care and how electronic record keeping can lower the costs substantially. I'm a little ambivalent about this, seeing how easy it is to abuse that kind of data and how often backup tapes get lost, laptops stolen, and knowing how many providers and companies allow confidential employee or patient data to travel around on standard laptops in the open. Extending electronic record keeping to local doctors who definitely don't have the resources locally to do a job right, that even banks screw up occasionally, makes me shiver. Her presentation on this topic was a bit ... thin.
The general idea of moving away from the company sponsored health plan system, towards something that many european countries have already developed, sounds like a good idea to me, though.

Finally, she was talking about how important education is. How education starts with the parents. In the family. Then extends out to schools. I'm a big believer in getting parents involved in school. If you know what's going on and are aware, it's much easier to help your children to be successful. Clinton's specific ideas on this topic (while it appears close to her heart) didn't excite me, though. "Make school hours more flexible, because they are inconvenient for working parents. Give kids online access to advanced courses, potentially not offered at their school."
Eh, I don't know, call me old-fashioned, but I think bringing excellent teachers into schools, recognize what they do every day, and paying them a decent salary would go a long way, along with giving them the tools and means to be the most effective. This won't happen overnight even in the most favorable environments, but you have to start somewhere.

Overall, a high-profile politician with charisma, and some decent ideas. Seeing Barack Obama next would be great. Maybe they pull this off some time this year.

more grumpy upgrade notes

issues:
- kernel 2.6.18-3 doesn't boot (neither 686 nor k7 variety) - FIXED
- ivtv not installed, no firmware - FIXED
- database schema upgrade fails - FIXED
- playback works, but no sound - FIXED
- mythvideo doesn't work (no mplayer?) - FIXED
- no scheduled recordings show up, but they are in the database - FIXED
- no automatic login for mythtv - FIXED
- lirc/remote control doesn't work (missing kernel modules)
- wireless doesn't work
- mythgames no games
- no nvidia-settings - FIXED
- no ntpd - FIXED
- no mouse in X
- no mrtg set up
- most myth recordings fail
- no sound in live tv and recordings



kernel issues:
2.6.18-3 only boots with acpi=off on grumpy. worked fine in 2.6.15. wth?


installing ivtv:
use 0.8.2, follow Debian instructions at http://ivtvdriver.org. Use pvr_1.18.21.22254_inf.zip from http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php?page=FirmwareVersions.
Later downloaded pvr_1.18.21.22302_inf.zip and tried that, in order to check out audio problems.


importing old database:
can't update schema version beyond 1156 because of duplicate column cmd_repeat in tabl diseqc_tree. alter table diseqc_tree drop column cmd_repeat
restart mythtv-backend.
FIXED


nvidia-settings:
apt-get install nvidia-settings
but it doesn't seem to do anything useful.


ntpd:
apt-get install ntp-server
FIXED


mythvideo:
apt-get install mplayer win32codecs
FIXED


sound:
plenty of comments in howto, nothing seems to help. probably some silly interaction somewhere.
go back to basics:
- turn off artsd in KDE, turn off all KDE sounds
- test with aplay - works fine
- test with mplayer - works
- mythvideo with mplayer - sound works
- myth playback still has no sound
- after a reboot, audio works properly in myth playback as well. huh, odd.
FIXED


scheduled recordings:
- after upgrade no channel lineups were bound to /dev/video0 and /dev/video1. ran mythtv-setup paged through all pages, corrected as needed. upcoming recordings is populated now, and also shows properly in mythwelcome.
FIXED

lirc:
- complains about missing kernel modules
- module-assistant complains the lirc-modules-source is not properly installed, but dpkg -l lirc-modules-source shows all is good, can't find any lirc modules in /lib/modules tree
still unresolved


automatic login:
I'm using gdm. gdmsetup doesn't get me to log in the mythtv user automatically. Annoying. Here's the config snippet in /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf that makes it all work properly:

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=mythtv

TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=mythtv
TimedLoginDelay=5
LocalNoPasswordUsers=mythtv

auto-login FIXED.


wireless:
rebuild ndiswrapper with module-assistant, add configs to /etc/network/interfaces.
manual verification using iwconfig. ifconfig wlan0 up. dhclient wlan0.

interface comes up, but throughput is unbearably slow.


myth recordings fail:
trying to record random shows fails with

2007-02-10 21:33:47.805 Reschedule requested for id 110.
2007-02-10 21:33:51.259 Scheduled 310 items in 3.5 = 0.10 match + 3.35 place
2007-02-10 21:33:51.287 scheduler: Scheduled items: Scheduled 310 items in 3.5 = 0.10 match + 3.35 place
2007-02-10 21:33:51.431 TVRec(2): Changing from None to RecordingOnly
2007-02-10 21:33:51.449 TVRec(2): HW Tuner: 2->2
2007-02-10 21:33:51.525 Channel(/dev/video1): SetInputAndFormat() failed
2007-02-10 21:33:51.526 TVRec(2) Error: Failed to set channel to 3. Reverting to kState_None
2007-02-10 21:33:51.527 TVRec(2): Changing from RecordingOnly to None
2007-02-10 21:33:51.554 Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Burned": channel 1002 on cardid 2, sourceid 1
2007-02-10 21:33:51.580 scheduler: Canceled recording (Recorder Failed): Law & Order: Special Victims Unit "Burned": channel 1002 on cardid 2, sourceid 1


some random shows are actually recording. *sigh*

[3 hours later]

ok. I give up. I can't solve the following right now:
- jittery video recording (suspect: ivtv 0.8)
- no sound when recording (suspect: ivtv? mixer?)
- intermittent inability to change channels for recording resulting in failed recordings (suspect: mythtv/ivtv api v2 interaction)

Looks like 2.6.18 with ivtv 0.8.2 is just not stable enough, but closed captioning works...
2.6.16/2.6.17 are actively discouraged since there is ongoing integration with ivtv at the time. Which brings me back to ivtv 0.4 and 2.6.15 and I'm running out of time.

To make matters worse, the Seagate replacement disk I bought, threw DMA errors multiple times tonight. I replaced the 300GB Maxtor disk back into Grumpy. At least I thoroughly removed dust from the case.

Bootstrapping Grumpy

The 300GB Maxtor disk in Grumpy is giving me grief. Has trouble booting, very slow performance. Most certainly a case for the warranty department.
I'm concerned Grumpy won't boot anymore when I cycle power, and I certainly don't feel like loosing my MythTV recordings...

I'm re-building Grumpy from the ground up on a new harddrive. I hope my notes from the last year in this blog will be useful.

I started out with the Debian netboot install. Sarge netboot.tar.gz unpacked into chef:/tftpboot, add new host entry in gw:/etc/dhcpd.conf with next-server 192.168.200.10. Works like a charm. In order to get a picture after booting on this VIA M10000 board, I need to pass the vga option to the kernel.

I want to leave the option open of adding another hard drive later and build a RAID1 from the video and movie files. In the Debian installer I manually reconfigured the partitions to use (ext3, swap, RAID), then configured RAID1 with only one member partition. I'm not using LVM here, this is a very straightforward setup. The large partition will be used for video and movie files, the root partition will hold everything else.

And again, I'm impressed by the ease of this network-based installation. Debian rocks.

First thing after the installation and completing base-config, I switch APT's sources to testing, so that I get a recent kernel (in this case I'm going to 2.6.18-3).

surprise: A base Debian install has no ssh...

On to rescuing media files... oha, I forgot how much data 300GB is. This will take a while.

Automatic wakeup for Grumpy

This had me puzzled for the longest time (see my musings from last summer).

Today I decided not only to finally run some backups of Chef, but also to make Grumpy (my MythTV box) shut down after it's done recording. I stumbled over mythwelcome a very slick new feature in MythTV 0.19. It's a welcome screen for mythfrontend (similar to what I wanted to write), and additionally has a few additional features (like automatically turn on the system during some specified period, e.g. in the evening when I'm most likely to watch TV).

A few months ago I collected all the necessary data for nvram-wakeup to set the NVRAM alaram in the BIOS. I got mythwelcome configured just fine following the instructions in the Wiki. It seems to work, but I still don't like messing with the nvram directly. Finally, I saw some notes in the ACPI_Wakeup section of the Wiki about how "some finicky BIOSes reset the RTC alarm when the time gets written". Guess what, every Linux distribution syncs the system time to the hardware clock on shutdown. I have a finicky BIOS!

As susggested in the Wiki, I modified /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh to on shutdown read out /proc/acpi/alarm, save the system time, then write back the alarm time. Lo and behold it worked on the first try.

Here are my final configuration settings for this:

I'm using mythwelcome and have it configured to call /usr/local/bin/myth-set-acpi-wakeup in the nvram-wakeup command line:

#!/bin/bash

# set wakeup time via ACPI alarm
#

logger "wakeup: got command line $0 $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6"

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
  echo "usage: $0 --settime "
  echo "must be in seconds since epoch"
  logger "no wakeup time given"
  exit 1
fi

# This is a crazy hack
# The problem is that mythwelcome is passing us the timestamp
# in localtime not adjusted for UTC, but date is using the
# base of UTC, so we need to adjust back to PST.
# TODO(bbeck): Daylight savings time is probably going to bite me on this, I should set 
# the BIOS clock to UTC.
seconds=$2
utctime=`date -d "1970-01-01 $seconds sec" +"%Y-%m-%d %T"`
time=`date -d "$utctime -0000" +"%Y-%m-%d %T"`
# end of hack

logger "setting wakeup time to $time."

echo "$time" > /proc/acpi/alarm

result=`cat /proc/acpi/alarm`

if [ "$time" == "$result" ]; then
  logger "wakeup time set properly"
else
  logger "wakeup time not set (got $result)"
fi

The nvram-wakeup command is set to myth-grub-poweroff:

#!/bin/sh

echo "savedefault --default=4 --once" | grub

which triggers grub config 4 in my menu.lst on the next boot:

title           PowerOff
savedefault     --default=0
cat             /boot/grub/default
halt

reboot and poweroff commands are set to

/sbin/reboot and /sbin/poweroff, respectively

Shutdown/Wakeup options in mythtv-setup are configured as follows:

Block shutdown before client is connected is checked.

Idle timeout: 60s

Max. wait for recording: 30m (I'm recording several shows that are 30 minutes apart. No point to shut down in between)

Startup before rec: 180s

Wakeup time format: yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ss

Set wakeuptime command: mythshutdown --setwakeup $time

Server halt command: sudo mythshutdown --shutdown

Pre-shutdown check command: mythshutdown --check