Topic: GENERAL INTEREST

Saturday, 10 November, 2007, 15:31 PST

As many of you know, ALWGW BBS links with the rest of the inland pacific northwest region via the ALW node stack near Tollgate, Oregon, atop the Blue Mountains.  This crucial site overlooks a huge chunk of territory, and provides reliable communications over much of northeast Oregon, southeast Washington, and across Hell's Canyon into Idaho.

The ALW stack enjoys its vantage point thanks to the Spout Springs Repeater Association's willingness to share their facility and promote other aspects of amateur radio besides just 2M voice operations.  The 146.800- repeater has fantastic coverage, with some mobile "hot spots" even reaching into locations across the Cascade Range over 200 miles away.  It is routinely used by passing motorists because of its large footprint, and many of the region's residents use it to talk to their neighbors in adjoining valleys or across the mountains.

Now the SSRA needs our help.  While the ALW node stack that I maintain does not incur any significant costs unless I am replacing or upgrading equipment, the repeater association DOES have recurring costs.  These include electricity, a lease fee to the US Forest Service, liability insurance, and a corporate fee.  There also needs to be sufficient funds to handle repairs to the building, tower, antenna, backup batteries, and other equipment.  The severe weather (particularly wind and ice) takes its toll on outdoor items so that they need periodic replacement.

Despite the bargain of SSRA dues, membership is at record lows.  There are not enough paid-up members to even cover recurring costs, let alone handle unforeseen failures.  I'd encourage users of this system to join the SSRA to help keep the system afloat.  It would be a tragedy if the repeater site were no longer available to local radio amateurs.

For more information on the Spout Springs Repeater Association, visit their web site at http://www.ssra.net/.  To join, click on the "Contact Us" link, which is located here.

Please do what you can.  If not membership, perhaps you'll consider making a small donation to help them out.

73 es tnx,

de WA7V 

Thursday, 13 September, 2007, 18:11 PST

Since the "Chat" and "Contact Us" modules have not been working for quite some time, I have removed them from the main menu.  Apparently they are not compatible with the current version of PostNuke.  I will eventually come up with something to replace their functionality, particularly the "contact us" form.

For now, if you need to reach me, you may try to send an email to [contact] at [wa7v] dot [com].   There's no guarantee that your message will make it past the spam filtering, but if it is rejected, you should receive a failure notice from your own mail server.  We do *not* dump messages into a special spam folder; they are either rejected or accepted -- nothing else.

Hope you're having a great autumn (or spring, depending upon which side of the equator you're on) so far!

73,

WA7V

Wednesday, 29 August, 2007, 21:43 PST

Awhile back, Walla Walla College announced that they will be changing their official name to Walla Walla University.  This change will be taking effect on 01 September, 2007, which is just a few days from when I write this.

A side effect of this is the changing of domain names, from wwc.edu to wallawalla.edu.   It is my understanding that support of the wwc.edu domain will be going away.  If you are accustomed to accessing services here based on one of ALW's wwc.edu hostnames, you should be prepared for that access to stop working at some date in the future unless you make the change to wallawalla.edu.  Of course you may also use services based on the wa7v.com domain (e.g. gw.wa7v.com for ALWGW).

73 de WA7V

Saturday, 24 February, 2007, 20:07 PST

A number of governments around the world will be changing the beginning and ending dates for the timezone shift known as daylight savings time.  In the United States, DST will begin on the second Sunday in March at 0200, and end on the first Sunday in November at 0200.  If you reside in an affected country and timekeeping is important on your computer equipment, then you may need to manually intervene, depending upon your system.  Amateur radio operators in particular (who are frequently known for their thriftiness and resourcefulness) may be affected by this more than the general population of computer users, as hams are more likely to have some very old hardware and software still in operation.

Below are a few resources that might interest you if you are running Linux, Solaris, or an older version of Windows.

Read full article: 'Daylight Savings Time Resources'

Wednesday, 07 February, 2007, 23:04 PST

A month or so ago, members of the Pendleton (Oregon) Amateur Radio Club were exploring the possibility of registering their own Internet domain, and moving their web hosting to another location.  A quick whois of the desired domain name (based on their US FCC-registered amateur radio callsign) revealed that their name was available in pretty much all TLDs.  On the day prior to the club officers' regularly scheduled meeting, in which they were to publicly consider the merits of this proposal, the .COM form of their domain was suddenly registered to a company in Nassau, Bahamas!  This seemed so incredibly unlikely, and yet, there it was.  The officers were advised of this, and encouraged to use the .ORG form, since they are a not-for-profit organization anyway.  The officers approved of the proposal, and determined that they would need to go before the general membership to get the final approval they needed to proceed.

A few days later, I noticed that the [Nassau company's] .COM registration was no longer showing up in whois queries!  I was completely baffled by this, as the expiration date had been one full year out.  But, there it was and I couldn't explain it.  I shrugged my shoulders and awaited the general membership meeting results to see what we were going to do.  Fast-forward to 06 February, and read on for what was to be a truly educational experience for me.

Note: Sure enough, as of February 10, 2007, whois queries indicate that the .ORG version of their domain is once again available.

Read full article: 'Domain Tasting?'

Tuesday, 23 January, 2007, 21:34 PST

I just had an interesting experience on my Slackware 11.0 workstation at the office.  I installed Nvu Web Authoring System to help facilitate some HTML editing, and it ended up creating more work for me!  I cheated and grabbed a precompiled Slackware package to speed up the process, and it installed without incident.  I then ran it once as root to ensure everything would work properly, and it did.  However when I went back to my own (mere mortal user) shell prompt, I couldn't get Nvu to launch a window no matter how hard I tried.  I tried tweaking on the Mozilla scripts, looking over various files and environment variables, searching the Internet, but found nothing that helped my situation.  The program would go through a few steps and always hang, falling short of actually launching an application window.

Read full article: 'Running Nvu in Linux as an Unprivileged User'

Tuesday, 23 November, 2004, 21:07 PST

I had a URL fowarded to me for an interesting site that has a new spin on portraying the U.S. electorate in the wake of the 2004 elections.  Have a look at them here.

It has long been my contention that the nation's political divides exist primarily between urban and rural areas, rather than states or larger geographical areas. Regardless of your position on candidates and parties in the United States, these maps are quite enlightening.

73,

Brett, WA7V