It’s that time of year again — when Jack and I write another open-source text adventure together!

Every time we do a project like this, we try to push our own boundaries and try something new. Rover’s Day Out was our first full-length work and was our first foray into taking advantage of the deeper features of the Inform7 programming language. Our second work, Hoosegow, was an attempt to create humorous and relevant non-player characters in a constrained environment. Our third work was a quickie challenge — we wrote 95% of Lobsters on a Plane in a single day for a ‘speed’ competition.

Our fourth and latest work, Narrow Your Eyes, was written as part of a ‘tribute’ collection for the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 18 album by They Might Be Giants. There’s a short interactive fiction game written for each album track, and I suggest you go play them all!

In this game, we decided to push the boundaries of the Glulx interpreter a bit by creating a puzzle that requires graphics and utilizes sound. It sounds a bit heretical, but we assure you that there is still important textual accompaniment to the graphics portion. For this reason, the game isn’t yet playable in a web browser. You’ll need to download a suitable interpreter for your operating system: either Spatterlight for Mac, Glulxe for Windows, or Gargoyle for Linux. You can grab the game itself from our downloads page and open it with the interpreter. Once you start, don’t forget to turn on your speakers!

Another challenge this game was an attempt to write some basic artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in the Inform 7 language. If you’ve already played the game, you can read about that in the spoiler below.

I grabbed the Buddistick, and in 5 minutes clamped it to the deck railing. It’s really no more than the HF mobile antennas you see attached to car bumpers: a balun, a coil, and twelve feet of collapsible whip. I leaned it tightly against the pergola to brace against the 30mph wind, ran a single 13′ wire radial along the ground, and poof — my analyzer showed a 1.2 SWR across the whole 17m band. No tuner needed!

I originally brought up my 100 watt base tranceiver out of the basement shack up onto the roof. Unfortunately, I discoved that the AC outlet up there was totally dead. The garage opener works, the lights work, but the outlets were dead; time to call the contractor and ask what’s up.

So I fell back on my usual QRP travel radio, the Yaesu 817ND, running on a battery. It only does 5 watts, but heck, that’s fine for CW.

My brother (an astronomer) told me that a huge huge CME hit the earth last Friday. Sure enough, I was getting an S8 noise floor across the band. Yikes. I heard a couple strong SSB conversations, but after a while I just ‘flipped’ the VFO to the local VHF repeater. I think I gave both Tom KB9AJM and Bob KB9SAR heart attacks — they never hear me on 440mhz. Bob told me that HF is expected to be ‘down’ for the next few days because of the awful space weather.

Well heck with it. The solar flux was 140, so I called CQ anyway on 18.085 at a measely 10wpm. Somebody almost immediately came back to me at 5wpm! But holy cow, I could barely hear them buried in the noise — I’d estimate an S3 within an S7 noise floor.

I suddenly remembered to make use of the ‘magic upgrade’ I put on my 817 radio: the DSP circuit. Friends, let me tell you, this product sold by W4RT is astounding. It’s just a tiny pushbutton drilled into the top of the tiny radio, but it activates DSP noise reduction as good as anything I’ve heard on a huge base-station radio. It’s FAR more effective than the 500hz Collins mechanical CW filter I had installed. I turned up DSP to the maximum, and it sounded like I was floating underwater with nothing but pure CW tone coming from my responder. I simply couldn’t have copied him without it!

In any case, it turns out to be Frank WB7NZI from Washington State. We give each other 539 signal reports, but the QSB is rough, and conversations take a long time at 8wpm. But heck, 1750 miles on 5 watts? That’s 350 miles per watt — not too shabby!

Field QRP still gives me a thrill, for sure. I really need to give a demo presentation of the Buddipole kit at a monthly meeting sometime.

17m Buddistick and Yaesu 817ND

The Problem: ham folks use morse code ‘keyer’ devices to aid them. It’s basically a tiny computer that plays a morse code message in a loop. You program messages into a few memories on the device, then tell the device to play “CQ CQ CQ DE NN9S” in a loop while waiting for someone to hear your hail. Or maybe you program the device to give standard canned responses when you’re participating in a radio contest. Either way, I had this realization that the smartphone in my pocket was essentially a supercomputer; why on earth was I bothering to assemble little IC devices with 5 or 10 flash memories to do this job? My phone was infinitely more powerful.

So really, the question boils down to this: assuming we can write a phone app that plays any morse code we want, how do we convert a ‘beep’ sound into a signal that my radio thinks is equivalent to “pressing the straight key”?

The radio’s connector is quite simple: it sends a small current out of a jack. If the current comes back to it, it thinks you’re pressing down on the straight key (closing the circuit). The straight key is just a physical switch.

So Jack AI4SV (my mentor/elmer) designed a circuit below which uses a common NPN bipolar transistor as the switch; we simply need to tickle the transistor’s base with a bit of current from the phone’s audio, and poof, the transistor closes the radio’s circuit and the radio sends a ‘beep’ out the antenna.

As you can see in the circuit, we take the ~.5V signal from the phone’s audio output jack and transform it into about ~5V. From there, we use a full-wave rectifier to convert the AC into DC, then eventually send that current into the transistor. The capacitor is there to smooth things out.

The other half of the project, of course, was writing an Android app to act as a versatile memory keyer. The open source code is available on Google Code, and the application is freely downloadable from Android Market.

In the video below, you can see a live demo of the prototype hardware & software in action:

I then built a ‘permanent’ version of the hardware using a perma-proto board from adafruit.com, which you can see here sitting inside an old dice box:

And here’s a screenshot of the final Android app. I can confirm that the hardware/software combo successfully drives my Yaesu 817-ND portable radio!

A very popular blog post has been going around lately called Apache Considered Harmful, which criticizes the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) for being impossible to work with. On the surface, it looks a bit like a culture war between older and younger generations of open source hackers: the older generation is portrayed as stodgy and skeptical of distributed version control systems, making the ASF inhospitable to a younger generation used to the fast-and-freewheeling world of git and Github.

One of the ASF’s leaders, Jim Jagielski, then wrote a blog response which seems to say, “We’re not irrelevant; we just have high integrity. We care about long-term health of open source projects, not passing fads or hip popularity contests.”

But I think Jim is truly missing the main complaint.

Backing up a bit: what is the mission of the ASF? Why does it exist? My understanding is simple:

1. to be a legal umbrella of protection
2. to foster long-term, healthy open-source communities

The first goal is achieved by putting all of a project’s code under the Apache license, and getting all code contributors to grant nonexclusive IP rights to the ASF. This guarantees that the ASF “owns” the code, and thus can legally defend it.

The second goal is about encouraging and preserving healthy culture. The ASF has a famous saying: “community over code”. In other words, the ASF doesn’t accept donations of code (or code thrown over walls), it only accepts communities that happen to work on a common codebase. The community is the main asset, not the source code.

The ASF has a great set of cultural norms that it pushes on its communities via political means and lightweight processes. For example, the ASF requires that each community have a set of stewards (“committers”), which they call a “project management committee”; that communities use consensus-based discussions to resolve disputes; that they use a standardized voting system to resolve questions when discussion fails; that certain standards of humility and respect are used between members of a project, and so on. These cultural traditions are fantastic, and are the reason the ASF provides true long-term sustainability to open source projects. It’s the reason I pushed so hard to get the Subversion project into ASF.

Let’s go back to the original “Apache Considered Harmful” post again. Yes, the blog post rambled a bit about the ASF becoming “irrelevant”, but I think that’s just random grumbling around the actual issue at stake: the ASF’s insistence on forcing their hosting infrastructure onto projects. We have repeated examples of mature open source communities trying to join the ASF, which already use git as their version control system — and the ASF is insisting that they convert to Subversion and store their code in the ASF’s One Big Subversion Repository.

I fear what’s happening here is that the ASF elders have tragically confused “be part of our community” with “you must use our infrastructure”. There is no reason for these things to be entangled.

The ASF has teams of people dedicated to running servers for Subversion, SSH, QA testing, email lists, and so on. Ten years ago, infrastructure hosting was a Hard Thing. Getting to use the ASF’s hosting services was considered an attractive perk. These days, project hosting is utterly commoditized: we have Sourceforge, Google Code, Github, and other sites. In a matter of minutes, any two people can conjure up a hosted source repository, bugtracker, wiki, etc. So is it really a surprise that newer communities, ready to join the ASF, already have functional (and possibly superior) tools and infrastructure?

So why oh why does the ASF demand everyone use their Subversion service? They don’t force every project to use the same bugtracker; I wonder if source code is different because it’s the “special” asset being protected. Perhaps the ASF elders think it has to all be in one place in order for it to be protectable and controlled? A simple solution here is to simply require that at least one canonical copy of source code be stored on ASF servers. If that means doing an “hg pull” or “git pull” via cron job every hour, so be it. Who cares where the real coding is happening, or in how many repositories it’s happening in? Irrelevant. As long as a community has blessed a central repository as Official, and the ASF is keeping a synced copy of that somewhere, we should be all set. The ASF’s job is to shepherd communities, not force everyone to use the same software tools.

Ironically, years ago I too was suspicious of distributed version control, and wrote an article about how it tended to discourage ASF-style project cohesion. But in this case, we have examples of communities that are already cohesive and high-functioning, despite using git. They don’t need ASF’s tools; they just need a nice place to park their community. If they ain’t broke, stay out of their development processes.

(Note the ASF isn’t alone in this insanity. Others have told me that FSF projects are forced to use the Savannah collaborative platform, whether they want to or not. Crazy! Repeat after me, folks: your community is not your tools.)

The Yaesu FT817-ND is a really popular radio for this kind of thing. It’s tiny, battery-powered, only weighs a couple of pounds, and puts out 5 watts of power. Backpackers and hikers love it. That said, there’s still a huge aftermarket of “mods” you can add-on to make it more pleasureable to use. I thought I’d share some of these mods here with other aspiring low-power hams.

Here’s a guide to the different additions:

• A: Bulldog morse code paddles. These tiny paddles are made from sewing notions (buttons) and a tiny binder clip but work great and have a magnetic base that sticks to the radio. They’re no longer made, but a newer version screws to the side of the radio.
• B: DSP noise filter. This is an internal module installed for me by the fine folks at W4RT, who specialize in 817 upgrades. It almost completely destroys the static noise floor, just like the noise reduction in my big radio. The change is dramatic and invaluable.
• C: 300hz CW filter Just a standard mechanical Collins filter for making morse-code much more intelligible; offered as an accessory directly from Yaesu.
• D: Speech compressor. Another W4RT mod installed within the hand microphone, it supposedly emphasizes the mids and trebles of the human voice, making my voice much more intelligible to others when using SSB over 5 watts. Others have told me that I sound really clear with it!
• E: Kranker knob. Another W4RT mod which makes the main dial much more usable — both for fine and rapid coarse-tuning.
• F: Peg legs. Cute little foldable feet from Palm Radio, which tip the radio upwards towards your eyes. It’s amazing what an ergonomic difference this makes.

Of course, once I’m actually in the field, I use an Elecraft T1 tuner (about the size of a deck of cards!), and an A123 nanophosphate 4.6AH battery for up to 8 hours of operation in the field.

That said, when I search Gmail for such replies, it makes it easy for me to see every wrongly-addressed mail I’ve ever received. The email contents — coupled with the complete lack of context — provide a surreal look on the chatter that goes on between humans. In the spirit of textual surrealism, I picked out individual statements from these emails and composed them into a poem.



I've been thinking about you. How are you? Everything ok?

We will however have recording equipment there and will record the
event.



During a lovely family vacation to Dubuque, Iowa, I had a chance to sneak out of the hotel after dark with the antenna and Yaesu-817ND bag. I walked down to the west bank of the Mississippi river, and managed to set up a 40m horizontal dipole about 10′ high just before the sun set. Luckily, the bank sloped down 20 feet diagonally to the water, and I think the entire surface of the river acted as a gigantic reflector for my horizontally-polarized signal. Using only 5 watts, I had a lovely ragchew with a gentleman in North Carolina. Only one quick smartphone-picture was made of the antenna’s base before it got too dark:

Last week I was at a conference in Portland, Oregon (very close to the Buddipole makers!) and did a quick Google Earth inspection of the terrain. I located the highest hill in town — Council Crest is over 1000 feet high — and then took a bus up there at dawn. Here’s the equipment just before I left the hotel room, the Buddipole bag and the radiostation bag (containing radio, tuner, analyzer, and 4.8Ah nanophosphate lithium ion battery.)

Once up there, the bus informed me it wouldn’t be back till 4pm, ugh. Oh well. So I took in the great view of the whole city and valley; it was easy to see Mt. Hood on the horizon.

Setup was fairly straightforward. I spent 30 minutes building a no-compromise 20m quarter-wave vertical, with two wire radials hanging down onto the stone walls. After fooling with lengths, I could get the SWR down to about 2:1 to 2.5:1 across the whole band.

The total height was close to 10m tall.

And then I quickly set up the radio station.

During my three hours of activity, I spent an equal amount of time trying to make contacts and explaining myself to all the passers-by. Most people thought I was trying to “sample” the atmosphere or something. Another person who was an EE engineer (but not a radio ham) seemed to think that 5 watts was a ‘huge’ amount of radiation, and I couldn’t seem to talk him out of it.

I did manage to make three contacts on low power — two via voice to Alberta and B.C., and one morse-code contact to Oregon. When the other guy said my morse tone was “drifting around”, that’s when I knew the battery was dying and time to pack up!

Since I was alone up there, I had to spend an hour hiking downward through thick forest trails. My favorite part was the four-way intersection.

…but eventually I made it to the zoo, and from there was able to hop on the light rail back to the convention center!

Why? Well, I work for Google and want to see Google+ succeed — the best way to do that is to actually become a daily user. Also, I want simplicity. I can’t deal with three separate social networks; I want just one, and Google+ is a superset of the other two.

A lot of friends have been asking me how Google+ works. “What’s the sharing model?” Here’s my explanation, to the best of my understanding:

• The basic unit of reading and writing is a circle. You need to spend some upfront time defining these circles, but the UI makes it easy to do and the payback is well worth the effort. (And due to Google’s Data Liberation Front, you can take your circles with you if you decide to leave!)
• Reading: You only see posts from people in your circles — nobody else. You can either look at all the circles at once (“your stream”), or you can look at posts coming from just a single circle.
• Writing: Any post you create can be published to 1 or more circles. This provides nuanced sharing — something that’s really hard to do in Facebook. For example, in real life, you wouldn’t necessarily share the same stories with your parents, your co-workers, or your drinking buddies. Remember, however, that the people you post to won’t actually see your post unless you happen to exist in at least one of their circles!
• Being public: Circles can be totally circumvented by publishing to the “public”; in which case, everyone in the world could conceivably see your post when they read “incoming” messages rather than their stream.

This model is nice, since it captures both the Facebook model and the Twitter model.

It captures the Facebook model of sharing via reciprocal friendship, but without explicit friendship requests in either direction. If two people happen to have either other in each other’s circles, then they see each other’s posts. Very simple. No more hurt feelings from unanswered friend requests; no more posts from people you don’t care about.

It also captures the Twitter model. You can do a public post to the world. You can also “follow” the posts any famous person you want (without bothering them) by simply adding them to a “people I wanna follow” circle.

If you haven’t signed up at http://plus.google.com yet, you really should. The Android app is awesome. Any photos I take with my phone are instantly available for posting; no need to explicitly upload them. It’s amazing how big a barrier to entry this used to be!

In any case, today I made my first breakthrough — a voice contact from Chicago to Italy. Finally!

I thought it would be fun to participate in a low-power “backyard” contest today, so I set up my Buddipole in the center of my backyard, using the same 20 meter vertical configuration that I used on the Silicon Valley hilltop a couple of months ago. I’m still surrounded by other houses and buildings, but heck, a vertical antenna is known to hit the horizon easier than a horizontal one. Worth a shot!

If you look at the photo, you can see the antenna is about 25 feet high. It’s not easy to see that there are also two wire radials sloping down to the side-fences, as well as three guy-lines. The winds were gusting to 20mph today, but the guys held the thing securely, despite the antenna swaying in the breeze just like the tall trees.

At first I used low-power (5 watt) morse code using my tiny radio and a lead-acid battery, and made a nice contact with Salt Lake City, Utah (a new state for me!). I then made a basic voice contact with a guy in South Dakota; there was a busy contest going in that state this weekend. After that, just for kicks, I decided to drag out the BIG radio from the shack and run an extension cord for AC power. I turned up to 100 watts of transmission, and discovered a guy in Italy taking calls. After 20 minutes of hoping he’d hear my callsign, he finally acknowledged me and gave me a 5 & 7 report –not bad for 100 watts! The ionosphere was good for 20 meters today, and you can tell the sunspots are really picking up compared to a year ago when I first started out. In any case, this was a new distance record for me: about 4800 miles.

In the picture below, you can see both my radios, with the tuner in the middle.

Thesis: I seem to get crushes not just on hobbies, but on the bizarre skills required for them.

Take a look at banjo: is there anything more bewildering than listening to Earl Scruggs play a solo at top speed? To a bystander, it’s an astounding blur of continuous arpeggiation, with accents in just the right places. It’s a bit like watching a tap-dancer go nuts with his fingers instead of feet. When I started listening to bluegrass, I fell in love: I must learn to do that crazy thing.

And so I practiced. And took lessons. And practiced. And practiced. Arpgeggios everyday. I would listen to clips of Earl’s recordings slowed down to half speed, analyzing — note by note — each little trick and lick. After a few months, I noticed one day that Earl was starting to slow down whenever I listened to his albums. Was something broken in iTunes? Wait, no… Suddenly my brain was starting to decompose the stream of notes in real time. The blur was actually a bunch of distinct phrases, some which I knew how to play already. And the more I practiced, the slower his recordings became. It’s fascinating to watch your own brain adapt!

And now ham radio. Morse code is clearly a useful tool — it cuts through static like a katana through whipped cream. It propagates much farther than voice and requires almost no power. But ugh — listen to those folks on the air doing it! It’s a cacophony of irritating high-speed beeps. It’s like my kids banging windows with their little toy wooden hammers. Make the noise stop!

But hey, let’s jump in anyway. Listen to a tutorial CD, learn one letter at a time. Practice hearing each character at slow speeds. Practice, practice, practice, for several months. At some point, I gain the courage to reach out and have a slow speed conversation with a stranger over the air. Never mind that I’m shaking and sweating and so nervous that I’m only able to copy half of the characters coming back to me. Over time, the more I do this, the less nervous I get, and the fewer characters I miss.

Then the same revelation comes back this week: “Man, why is it so hard to find people doing high speed morse on the airwaves these days?” Is everyone slowing down? Oh wait. It’s me. My brain is changing again! Morse code doesn’t sound irritating anymore. The beeps are obviously broken into clear section, clear characters. The tones are haunting… almost relaxing. The whole experience is a bit like a calming vacation.

I turn on the radio, and in voice (sideband) mode, the filter is quite wide. I hear endless grating hiss.

I narrow my filter to 1/6th the width, which is best for picking up code. Suddenly the hiss turns into a whispering valley of calm. It’s a bit like being in an indoor swimming pool: endless harsh echoes of screaming families reverberating around you — and then dunking your whole head underwater. A beautiful solitude. A sound of deep watery solace.

Then turn the dial till a code conversation appears. Listen to the letters float by! Like tiny drumbeats of beautiful tone, perfectly spaced. It almost puts you in a trance.

I know my brain has changed, because I can no longer read emails while listening to morse code. It used to be background noise, but now it’s actively messing with my language centers, competing with my ability to read text.

My job at Google requires that I do about 8-10 short trips per year (to other offices or conferences). Back when I was in my banjo phase, I obsessed about carrying a banjo on every plane so that I might seek out local bluegrass jams (I even had a folding banjo!). In my photography phase, I carried a giant DSLR and heavy lenses in my carry-on bag, and would taking photographic walking tours of each city. And now, in the era of Ham Radio, I obsess about how to carry an entire portable radio station with me in a gymbag.

And so that’s exactly what I did last week when I visited Mountain View (Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.) Into my gymbag went the same stuff from my trip to North Carolina:

• A wee Yaesu 817ND radio. Only does 5 watts of output, but can operate on any amateur band
• A tiny auto-tuner, the LDG Z-11Pro2
• A Heil traveler headset
• My homemade touch-paddle/keyer combo for doing morse code.
• A 5 amp-hour 12V battery, to power the radio and tuner via powerpole connectors.
• An MFJ 259B antenna analyzer
• My brand-new, supremely flexible Buddipole Deluxe antenna construction kit.

The final gymbag was ~20 pounds, and was thoroughly swabbed and inspected by the TSA in both directions of travel. I guess they’re ok with sealed lead-acid batteries, because, well… they’re sealed.

The real star of this writeup is the Buddipole. After my own homebrewed antenna experiments failed to pan out in hotel rooms last autumn, I discovered this product. It’s not so much an antenna, but an erector set for improvising any sort of antenna you wish. It comes with a fantastic cookbook (written by fan NE1RD) that shows a zillion different tested configurations. Within a tiny little 2-foot long bag, you get a tripod, 10 foot mast, multiple radiator elements, counterpoise wires, guy lines, and changeable coils.

(This is not me, but the creator of Buddipole, holding the bag:)

The idea is that you can build a straight horizontal dipole (up to 26 feet long!), and “tap’ the coils to change the electric length. Or you can build a vertical antenna, with either rigid or wire counterpoises at random angles. Or you can make up your own Y or L shaped designs — whatever works for you! With an antenna analyzer at hand to adjust your invention, you can get it tuned perfectly. Or if not tuned perfectly, the autotuner helps span that last little bit of impedance mismatch.

Hams love to see how far they can reach with their signals — what they call ‘DXing’. They also love to take trips to remote islands or jungles and set up portable stations, what they call a “DXpedition”. My own DXpedition started when I got up at dawn and headed over to a tiny salt-water lake in the public park just north of the Google campus. Some folks at Ham Radio Outlet had recommended it to me, since an antenna over salt water gives nearly perfect ground reflection.

View Larger Map

I showed up and started by building a 10 meter vertical antenna, with two 30 degree counterpoises.

And here you can see me holding the tiny radio, hooked up to the antenna.

Alas, the 10m band was mostly inactive, and I had to start my workday. So after 7 hours of meetings, I teamed up with another ham co-worker (N1VF) and we scaled the hill just between the campus and the lake. Quite a view up there! We then built a full-sized half-wave 20m vertical antenna, since vertical antennas tend to have low takeoff angle and hit the horizon better than horizontals. Of course, on the hilltop we already had a 360 degree view of the horizon. In the photo below, you can see my buddy next to the antenna. We have 3 guy lines coming off of it, and 2 wire counterpoises (about 17′ long each) drooping down to the ground.

We then sat on the hilltop for an hour, as the sun slowly set over the ocean. Nobody replied to our CQ hails on morse code, but we did hear a guy in Colorado talking to a guy in Australia, both with directional beam-antennas. Pretty neat. Eventually we made voice contact with a guy in Wisconsin; apparently he was able to pick up our tiny 5 watt signal because he too had a beam-antenna pointed towards his friend in Hawaii. The highlight of the hour, however, was when we made voice contact with a ham just outside Fairbanks, Alaska — that’s about 2500 miles away. For 5 watts, not too shabby!

After packing everything away, I managed to grab a snapshot of the setting sun as we went down the hill.

Overall, I consider the expedition a success. Alaska is a hard state to “achieve” in the game of ham radio, and I’m proud to have it in my logbook. The Buddipole really impressed me to no end. I will heartily recommend it to anyone who ever travels, camps, whatever. I plan to use it quite a bit for Field Day next June.

Meanwhile, a much simpler project arrived at my door: a tiny circuit board that turns any two pieces of metal into morse code paddles. By simply making touch-contact with the metal, the resistance triggers the ‘dits’ and ‘dahs’. My goal was to combine this with my existing keyer (a device that creates perfectly-timed morse code, which sits between your paddles and your radio.)

Here’s a short video showing the two circuit boards hooked up by temporary wires:

I first tried fitting the keyer board, paddle board, and a 9V battery all into an altoids tin, but alas — the keyer board’s controls were too tall for the tin, and I didn’t feel like disconnecting them and mounting them directly to the walls of the tin. But then I had a great idea! If the paddle board only needed 6V to operate, I could stack two coin-cells together. And then the coin cells and paddle board could be stuffed into the keyer’s existing black plastic enclosure!

Notice how the two coin cells are tucked into a slitted styrofoam peanut. To change the batteries, I just yank the electrodes out of the peanut, drop new batteries in, then re-stuff the elecrodes back in. Meanwhile, I hooked up the batteries to a toggle switch added to the back of the device. I had to drill an extra hole for the paddle wires to come out as well. Here’s the finished product:

And finally, a short video where I demonstrate how it works:

A huge thanks to Dale N0XAS for the picokeyer circuit and to Sumner WA1JOS for his touch keyer board. Great fun to combine them!

Subversion has reached the realm of Mature software — it’s yesterday’s technology, not cool or hip to work on anymore. It moves slowly. It is developed almost entirely by engineers working for corporations that need it or sell support for it. Alpha-geeks consider software like this “dead”, but the fact is that something like half of all corporate programmers use Subversion as their SCM (depending on which surveys you read.) This is a huge userbase; it may not be sexy, but it’s entrenched and here for the long haul.

Subversion isn’t unique in this position. It sits alongside other mature software such as Apache HTTPD or the GCC toolchain, which are famous projects that are similarly developed by corporate interests. There’s a tricky line to walk: none of these corporations “own” these projects. They understand that they’re acting as part of a consortium. Each interest sends representatives to the open source project, contributes code, and allows their engineers to participate in the full consensus-based evolution of the software. IBM, Apple, Google, and numerous other companies have figured out how to do this correctly:

1. Let your engineers know what’s important to work on.
2. Let them participate individually in the community process as usual.
3. Profit. 98% of the time the corporations eventually get the features they want.

Today, however, we have a great counterexample of how not to participate in an open source project. Subversion was initially funded and developed by CollabNet; today at least two other companies — Elego and WANdisco — are employing numerous engineers to improve Subversion, and are just as vested in selling support and derivative products. CollabNet and Elego continue to function normally in the community, but WANdisco recently seems to have lost its marbles. Last week, they put out a press release and a CEO blogpost making some crazy statements.

It’s clear that the WANdisco CEO — David Richards — is frustrated at the slow pace at which Subversion is improving. But the two posts are simply making outrageous claims, either directly or via insinuation. David seems to believe that a cabal is preventing Subversion from advancing, and that “debate” is the evil instrument being used to block progress. He believes users are crying for the product to be improved, that the Subversion developers are ignoring them, and his company is now going to ride in on a white horse to save the project. By commanding engineers to Just Fix things, he’ll “protect the future”of Subversion, “overhauling” Subversion into a “radical new” product.

Is this guy for real? It sounds like someone read my friend Karl’s book and created a farce of “everything you’re not supposed to do” when participating in corporate open source.

Even weirder, he’s accusing developers of trying game statistics by creating lots of trivial commits. This is staggering proof that he has no knowledge of the svn developer community or its culture. If he did, he would know that nobody counts stats at all or even cares about them. David appears so desperate to prove that his company is the “leader” that he accuses a community of behaviors that he’s doing himself. (”We have the most active developers of any other company on staff” — who’s counting stats here? The svn developers, or David?)

OK, fine. So Dave Richards is a salesperson, and perhaps what he wrote is generic PR sales junk in order to get his customers excited. Unfortunately, in attempting to woo customers, he’s had the side-effect of making his company appear both clueless and antagonistic to the project:

• Clueless: It’s obvious he has no technical knowledge of Subversion’s design, has no idea why certain features have or haven’t been written yet, and hasn’t actually brought any new technical proposals or insights to the table. All he’s done is repeat descriptions of features that everybody wants. And he actually seems to believe that all one needs to do is throw more developers at the problems. Suuuuuure.
• Antagonistic: He’s insulted two-thirds of the active developers (and embarrassed his own employees) by declaring them to be incompetant stewards. There’s no simpler way to garner hate and come off like an ass than to say “everyone move aside and let me fix this” — it’s the opposite of consensus-driven development. It’s a juvenile, conceited behavior that completely disrespects the people and the process.

The Subversion developer community (and ASF) are known for their cool, calm-headed responses to provocations like this, which they’ve just posted. They know not to feed trolls. But speaking as a private developer, I just had to point out WANdisco’s insanity and hold it up as a textbook example of how to Fail in the open source community process.

There seem to be three main types of amateur radio “setups”. The most important is the base station: this is your home base, with your Big Antenna attached to your Big Radio, running into your main “ham shack”. Just as popular, however, seems to be the mobile rig: the radio and antenna you build into your car. Most folks set up UHF/VHF antennas with a range of a few miles, and thus chew the rag with local hams while stuck in slow commutes. Sometimes folks will install much larger 6-8′ antennas on the backs of their cars, so they can do long-distance communication (hundreds of miles) using longer wavelengths… at the expense, of course, of making their car look ridiculous.

Finally, there’s the portable rig. This setup combines with MacGyver fantasy with the Wilderness Explorer fantasy. Put on the hiking boots, sling a tiny pack over your shoulder, then scale a mountain and see how many far-away folks you can reach. Because such tiny radios have tiny batteries, the amount of power they produce is tiny as well. But heck, the lack of power is an attraction — it’s another engineering challenge to overcome, right? When you’re running at very low power (5 watts or less), you’re very much at the mercy of the ionosphere. You transmit and hope radio-wave propagation is on your side. This is also why morse code still thrives as a strong subculture within the hobby — despite the fact that it’s no longer required for any license. Morse code propagates extremely efficiently; it’s goes the most distance per watt, and is so much easier to pick out of noise than a human voice.

So where do I stand now, six months into this hobby?

My base rig is great. I have a nice mid-level radio attached to a basic 100 watt end-fed half-wave dipole. It only speaks on a single ham band (40 meters), but this is more than enough for me to make great contacts and practice my skills.

Mobile rig? No way. Not only would my wife kill me if I put a big ugly antenna on the car, it’s probably not safe. If talking on mobile phones while driving is dangerous, it stands to reason that talking to hams is just as bad.

But portable rig, aha! Yes. I go camping a couple times a year (as does my radio mentor), so I’ve been steadily building up a “go pack” for my outdoor adventure reverie. I finally got to test it out when visiting eastern North Carolina this week. Here it is, all unpacked:

The thing is attached to a 40′ wire antenna whose far end I strung up in the air (onto the a 40′ branch of a pine tree):

For indoor use, I can attach a 15″ VHF antenna and a 6′ whip for long wavelengths:

And best of all, everything fits into a tiny little REI mini-pack (except the big battery):

At last, I have a kit that not only works for camping, but can be carried on a plane for my many business trips.

Here are the essential components:

1. The radio: a Yaesu 817ND. This amazing little unit can do all amateur HF frequencies, as well as VHF/UHF. So tiny!
2. Antennas: for FM UHF/VHF, a Diamond SRH320A whip, or alternately, a 6′ roll-up 2m J-pole from MFJ; for indoor HF, a WonderWand whip; for outdoor HF, a PAR Endfedz 40/20/10m dipole (in a separate grocery bag.)
3. For input/output: a Heil Dual-Sided Traveler headset, and Kent TP-1 morse code paddles. If I don’t want the weight of the heavy brass paddles, I have tiny Bulldog BD-1 paddles that magnetically stick to the radio and weigh only an ounce.
4. For power: the radio comes with a rechargeable NiMH battery, but it barely lasts an hour or two. Also, the radio has a dirty secret: it claims to do 5W of transmit power, but this only happens when attached to a power supply. When running on internal battery, it only transmits 2.5W. So when indoors, I use a MFJ portable switching power supply (a glorified wallwart) designed just for the 817. When outside, I use a Werker 12V 9AH lead-acid deep-cycle battery, purchased from a Batteries Plus chain store; the battery and the end-fed dipole wire are the only things that don’t fit in the travel bag.

I suppose the result here is that I now also have an “go” bag for emergencies. When the zombie apocalypse comes, I just grab the pack and run!

It was such a big deal, in fact, that a whole tradition of exchanging business cards rose up around it. Except it’s not exactly a business card, but more like “I’m a radio geek” postcard. After chatting with a stranger, you send him a card with your callsign, a picture of your city, and a bunch of details confirming the contact (date, time, frequency, signal strength, etc.). He sends the same thing back to you. Then you both hang the cards on your walls next to the dozens of others, a virtual trophy case of how l33t your radio communication skills are. They’re also often the proof required to win certain communication contests.

They’re called QSL cards, and you can read all about them on wikipedia (and see even more examples of them if you do a Google image search. It can be a real art form.

Well, after making a couple dozen contacts, somebody finally sent me a QSL card from Mississippi. So I was forced to design and print a bunch of my own. I’ll be sending my new design back to the guy tomorrow. Here’s what the front and back look like:

(I did the whole thing in Inkscape on Linux, and I’m crazy impressed… it’s just as powerful as Illustrator!)