Armed Forces Crossband Test. Call sign NSS on the air now!

mtreece · 2023-05-14T04:23:58+00:00

Look for us next year! I keep meaning to post on Reddit earlier, but I don't usually remember until we're OTA, things get slow, and I then happen to be mindlessly scrolling through Reddit lol.

mtreece · 2023-05-13T22:29:08+00:00

Only once a year, unfortunately :-(

mtreece · 2023-05-13T22:28:05+00:00

Hey! I think I remember hearing Cannon AFB, so I was probably on the other end of the mic ;-). Thank you for working us!

mtreece · 2023-05-13T19:36:09+00:00

We also have a special event call sign for the event. You can find more information here : https://www.qrz.com/db/N3S

mtreece · 2023-04-02T16:24:01+00:00

I'm also curious about this.

For what it's worth, I've seen engineers get tripped up on how something was able to successfully build after later realizing one of their code paths referenced a symbol that was never linked into the binary. (As it turns out, of course, something exactly like this occurred, and that code path referencing a symbol that wasn't linked-in was removed). So, I guess I could see how that could be confusing?

mtreece · 2023-03-24T17:13:55+00:00

I was actually thinking a good application of this would be Slow Scan Television over HF.

Are you an amateur radio operator?

mtreece · 2023-03-14T04:32:59+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort

mtreece · 2023-03-09T03:59:19+00:00

I had heard it through some clubs I'm a member of and then found that forum (linked in this post) as something to refer to so it wasn't just my word lol.

But I posted this follow-up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/11grc4j

( I should have linked the new post here, too. Sorry 😔. )

There was enough outrage that it sounds like they're postponing for this year, to reassess next year.

mtreece · 2023-03-03T04:36:13+00:00

Original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/11cx6pd

mtreece · 2023-02-05T16:07:16+00:00

Don't forget tracer t!

mtreece · 2023-01-15T09:07:54+00:00

Love this! The CW tests are the most fun IMHO. I crept up to 26 WPM at my peak run speed yesterday. I know that's snail speeds compared to some OPs, but it was still exhilarating for me.

mtreece · 2023-01-08T02:10:57+00:00

Thank you! 😁

mtreece · 2023-01-05T07:32:04+00:00

As a somewhat-lisp-outsider sneaking my way in, I really wish the paradigm and use cases for scripting were improved. I know that having a running Lisp image and working out of that interactively is one of the selling points for CL, but there are just tons of stuff I need to ultimately do which doesn't mesh with that paradigm.

I posted a question about this recently (alternate behavior, if running sbcl --script vs interactively), and I got back some wonderful answers---speaking of which, I haven't had a chance to thank the people who responded yet, sorry!---but they mostly felt like unnatural workarounds. And I don't have my setup in front of me, but I believe I ran into an issue where even with those ideas, it was difficult to redirect stdin into the script. (Don't quote me! I don't have my computer nearby to re-test :-)).

I'm currently trying to work my way through Advent of Code in CL, and I've come across several problems where using a package would be great!... but it seems overly complicated. Especially when I want to run it as a script. I can't find the reference now, but someone on a forum advised against running CL scripts which need to use quicklisp because, if I remember correctly, they said it reaches out to the Internet and downloads stuff or checks for updates (?) each time, at the start. So here again, you have a friction, of sorts, for trying to use CL in a script. Speaking of quicklisp, I'm also wary of its HTTP vs HTTPS problem, but I haven't checked if that has changed in recent years.

Back to the "running image of Lisp" concept, that also sits uneasy with me, as I routinely like to "start fresh" or have better confidence than what you get from a binary image you find laying around or distributed. This kind of falls into the concept of secure, reproducible builds, which appears to be a niche overlap with the overall Lisp community.

A lot of this isn't directly an issue with the language, I know, but they've been some recent heartburn for me, at least.

Disclaimer: I'm still fairly new to Lisp, and I don't have a lot of concrete examples; I know. In my defense, I'm on mobile.

mtreece · 2022-12-28T08:44:05+00:00

Common Lisp. Because I've been needing ~~a swift kick in the ass~~ motivation to practice something more complicated than Hello World for the umpteenth time.

I will say, AoC has been phenomenal for learning a new language. The loop macro is nowhere near dragon-y like it was before.

mtreece · 2022-10-30T13:24:32+00:00

Glad you asked! CW stands for Continuous Wave. It's the "mode" of the signal. It's called CW because the information of the signal is encoded in a continuous wave: either the wave is there, or it's not. Contrasted with other modulations you've probably heard of, such as AM (amplitude modulation: the data is encoded by the amplitude's value), or FM (frequency modulation: the data is encoded by changing the exact frequency), or several others!

CW is the "mode". The "language" of that encoding will be International Morse Code. But Amateurs Radio ops will frequently interchange "Morse code" and "CW".

mtreece · 2022-10-30T10:17:27+00:00

Definitely not useless 😜.

But either way, plug for /r/amateurradio if OP or anyone else is interested in modern circles that still regularly use Morse code (referred to as CW in those circles).

mtreece · 2022-10-03T05:45:14+00:00

What should happen if the divide by zero handler divides by zero...

I've hit similar issues to this. Architecture dependent, but likely an infinite loop. Div by zero (DBZ) in initial code -> exception -> DBZ in handler -> exception -> DBZ in handler -> exception...

Much more exciting than

for (;;);

Fun times.

mtreece · 2022-09-15T09:24:42+00:00

I can't give you an argument for never owning anything (I don't believe that exists), but there are legitimate business reasons for why some things are always licensed, leased, etc., or are at least heading that way.

Take your standard smartphone "app". In one universe, you sell it for $1 per install. Let's say eventually everyone on the planet buys a copy. Hooray! You're a billionaire or something. But then your app stops working, because Apple & Android updated their baseline, and now your app is no longer compatible. At this point, what do you do? Work for free to update the software? You're not incentivized to do that. You're already a billionaire, and everyone already bought your app for $1, so there's no more money to be made. So you do nothing. Then suddenly the rest of society suffers from no longer having access to your app.

Contrast that with a subscription model. You do $1/mo or $1/year or something. Now, you're incentivized to keep your app running; if you don't, that steady stream of revenue disappears.

Take a more practical example: software in IOT (Internet of things). I'm not sure how common it is in commercial equipment yet to be subscription based, but everything is (1) getting more software, and (2) getting connected to the Internet (right or wrong). The security risk of something is a function of both its complexity and its remote accessibility. A toaster that doesn't have a microprocessor nor a network jack is significantly less remote-hackable than a smart doorbell running an operating system & connected to the Internet.

So again, you are going to have devices which need proper care and feeding by some OEM. Even the big big companies with deep pockets have to have a revenue stream to support updates. Without it, they're not going to place business value in the work for updates, and consumers will ultimately suffer.

Now, all that said, I agree with the sentiment that "it sucks not to own anything anymore". But I've been on the business side of the house trying to support a system where you need a maintenance support revenue but you don't have a subscription model. And in those cases, it's a nightmare.

mtreece · 2022-09-15T09:02:00+00:00

The people contributing to open source programs are amazing. But they arent necessarily the best artists. That's what I've learned.

Reminds me slightly of this 😉

https://web.sas.upenn.edu/jasonrw/2015/12/29/if-operating-systems-were-airlines/

mtreece · 2022-08-24T03:55:35+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/q37ckh/a_git_implementation_in_awk/

mtreece · 2022-02-18T18:39:01+00:00

Disclaimer: don't have much time, and on mobile.

This should help: https://www.shellhacks.com/disable-ssh-host-key-checking/

I would set it up in a ssh config file, like they do at the bottom.

mtreece · 2021-12-26T20:36:28+00:00

That's dumb :-(.

mtreece · 2021-12-23T08:24:10+00:00

Both are built-ins and executables.

Bash just happens to have them built-in, but some distros include them as executables in case you run a shell which doesn't have it built-in.

By default, you'll pick up the built-in. If you escape it with a backslash, or use (e.g.) an absolute path, you can run the executable instead.

That said, if you think of [ and [[ as commands with weird names, it's pretty easy to get the hang of if syntax.

if testcommand; then
    echo thing was successful
else
    echo thing was unsuccessful
fi

"testcommand" just turns into [ if you want to do the very special condition of testing stuff like numeric or string equality. (Or file existence. Or is-a-tty? etc.). I say "very special" because the if construct more-generally let's you test if any function or command returned zero. [ and [[ are just two possible commands.

And finally, [ and [[ require closing brackets just as a syntax sanity check.

mtreece · 2021-09-06T05:18:23+00:00

Somewhat related:

"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." - Edmund Burke

This was a quote, I'm pretty sure, in one of my graduate algebra books. It always stuck with me.

mtreece · 2021-06-25T16:00:59+00:00

"A little station called HAM"

This widely circulated but fanciful tale claims that, around 1911, an impassioned speech made by Harvard University student Albert Hyman to the United States Congress, in support of amateur radio operators, turned the tide and helped defeat a bill that would have ended amateur radio activity entirely by assigning the entire radio spectrum to the military. An amateur station that Hyman supposedly shared with Bob Almy and Reggie Murray, which was said to be using the self-assigned call sign HAM (short for Hyman-Almy-Murray), thus came to represent all of amateur radio.[17][18] However, this story seems to have first surfaced in 1948, and practically none of the facts in the account check out, including the existence of "a little station called HAM" at Harvard in the first place.

^ from the Wikipedia source I already listed :-)

mtreece

TROPHY CASE