On a recent night in HacDC headquarters, Tim C. touched the probes of a volt-ohm-meter to a set of pins on the end of a tube projecting from the back of a worn-looking metal panel which stood about two feet tall, a foot wide, and several inches deep. The pins connected to a lighted, yellow, circular, push switch about a quarter of an inch in diameter, which poked out of the front of the panel. It joined a crowd of dozens.
“I’m reanimating it,” Tim said, nodding to the Univac 1180 tape-drive front panel. But no response from the light. Nothing’s simple. Next step, “reverse engineering,” Tim said. Going to have to peer deep into the wiring that extrudes from the back of the panel like skeins of yarn. Also fun — checking every bulb to see if it’s working.
On another front, Nick B., John P., and Martin R. were wrangling with the payload of one of the Spaceblimp 4 containers — an ordinary, insulated, zippered, six-pack bag. They manipulated padded cameras, sensors, circuit boards, radio beacons, and other highly valuable junk, trying them on for size and fit, like pieces in a puzzle. Most were encased in cut pieces of insulation, taped together to form boxes. Launch date is coming up fast — Saturday April 2, 2011. For a full list of payload components and details of the balloon and communications provisions, see https://wiki.hacdc.org/index.php/HacDC_Spaceblimp.
A small solar panel was proving vexing. How to protect its surface with a cover that would allow sunlight in, and at the same time protect the bottom with a substrate that could be affixed to the floppy, plastic, six-pack bag — and keep it all lightweight? The ziplock bag under consideration as a carrier for the panel was producing frowns all around. And whatever the carrier, how to attach it to the bucket? Epoxy? Double-sided tape? Silicone sealant, someone suggested. Just as quickly, another voice wondered if that would hold up at minus 40°C. It can get that cold when you’re reaching for 100,000 feet.
Over in the classroom area, Elliot W. was teaching Microcontroller Monday. “I’m developing a new microcontroller class,” he said. “This is the beta version.” They’re working with AVR’s AT Mega 88 Atmel chip. In this night’s class, he was showing students how to make the microcontroller do analog input and output. For example, how to read voltages between 0 and 5, and “make something happen at a particular value,” he said. Say, maybe, turn on an indoor light when the outdoor light is fading. There was also a lot of interest in smooth motor control. Were the students impressed? Yeah, Elliot said, adding he heard a lot of people saying, “You can do that?”
IRSYNC & SSH Keys
Ryan M (@fak3r) just posted a great writeup on a new product he’s written called “IRSYNC” (https://www.rfxn.com/projects/irsync-incremental-rsync/). It’s a totally dope looking project and I look forward to implementing it. In his latest blog post (https://www.rfxn.com/irsync-limiting-passwordless-ssh-keys/), he advocates for limiting password less SSH keys. I’ll take that one step further and say that they should be avoided completely. For anyone who hasn’t attended one of my “Advanced SSH” sessions here at HacDC, there are a lot of great utilities shipped with OpenSSH that are designed to make your life as easy as possible. I’ll cover a few of them quickly….
ssh-copy-id
This utility exists to propagate your public keys in a secure way (potentially even setting up the infrastructure for you). This is a quick hit blog post, so read the man page and start using this utility you probably didn’t know existed.
ssh-agent
This utility keeps your (unlocked) private key in resident memory so that I can be automagically used for accessing remote machines. Best part? You still have to enter a password to initially unlock the key, but after that you can set an expiration (4 hours? 8 hours? lifetime for daemons?). Think of it like a password on your x509 certs (you DON’T remove those just so Apache will load properly… right?). You have something similar to mod_nss which secures the whole system and raises the bar a little bit. Lazy and STILL don’t want to enter a password? Use GNOME on linux & set the password on your key to the same as your system password. GNOME will contact SeaHorse and attempt to unlock your key and load it into ssh-agent all in one go.
Some of this not making sense? Join us in IRC: #hacdc on freenode and ask away!
Google quietly releases hardware VP8 encoder/decoder
Monday of this week the WebM team quietly released information about the hardware encoder/decoder for the VP8 codec. This is, according to them, “the worlds first VP8 hardware encoder”. What does this really mean? Google is going to have an edge in the consumer devices market due to the low power, low cost, and multi-bus interface they’re offering.
Low cost you say? That’s correct. They’re licensing the VHDL/Verilog sources at no cost. If you’re more of the multi-codec kindof company, there is even a commercial vendor offering RTL based sources to vendors looking to produce their own silicon.
The part that really blows my mind is that to deliver 1080p video at 30fps, it requires “less than 100MHz clock frequency”. At that point, it’s well within a lot of commodity ARM processors. If the bus interfaces were there, i’d challenge someone to take that 2010 ninja badge and do some dirty with it.
Want to read more? Check it out.
Overview: https://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/introducing-anthill-first-vp8-hardware.html
Hardware Details: https://www.webmproject.org/hardware/
Congrats to the new board!
At last week’s Annual Meeting, HacDC members elected a new slate of board members. Congratulations to President Brian Harrington, Vice President Elliot Williams, Secretary Ben the Pyrate, Treasurer Tim Collins, and Directors-at-Large Bradford Barr and William Gibb!