Now I just need a radio so I can do something with the license.

I’m still primarily interested in doing APRS and other packet applications, so I’ve been looking at radios with built in TNCs. At the moment I’m mainly drooling over the Kenwood TM-D710A, which can do everything I want, and more, but runs about $600 new. Looks like an ideal mobile unit for what I want to do.

I’ve also been pointed toward the upcoming Yaesu VX8-R, which also appears to have a built-in TNC, but is a handheld, rather than a mobile. From what I’ve heard, it should be considerably cheaper than the TM-D710A, but is overall less functional.

Either way I end up going, I’ve got some ideas for integrating a radio in my automobile with a PC. I’m thinking the car PC could pull in APRS data from the radio, OBD2 data from the car, GPS data, and perhaps video from a forward mounted camera. It should be pretty easy to rig up something to read the locations of other stations from the radio and insert them into a database for GPSDrive to read waypoints from, displaying them on a map along with my current position.

I’ve also been tossing around the idea of correlating position to fuel economy, creating a sort of fuel consumption heat map which could then be used to adjust my repetitive drives to more efficient routes. I don’t think this will be all that hard, just need to figure out how to get the current MPG number from the Prius, record it along with the current GPS coordinates, and then perhaps hack up Kismet’s gpsmap to plot that data instead of wireless access points (or in addition to.)

As far as hardware for the mobile PC, I’ve recently been looking at the IEI IBX-500A, which has enough serial ports for all the inputs I want, along with built-in 802.11 wireless. Not sure if the CPU would be fast enough for everything I want to do, but I think it’d work. I’ve also been looking at the VIA Artigo, which is a bit smaller, and a little faster, but has a fan and no built-in wireless.

Not that I can afford to do any of this just yet, but it’s fun to think about…

Was playing around with my Canon SD870 last night, using the CHDK firmware to do long exposure images of the fireworks. Some of them turned out nicely, I think.

Not bad for having no idea what I’m doing anyway. See the rest of them in my gallery.

My birthday is coming up next week. Delia already got me my big present, a few months back, an Amazon Kindle e-reader, which I’ve been using almost continuously for my nightly reading. There’s nothing else I really want at the moment, but I’ve tagged a few things on my want list for good measure. Thinking about picking up Soul Calibur IV if I don’t get it otherwise.

I was also thinking of dragging Delia down to Easthampton, to go wandering around on Mount Tom. Haven’t been down there since I lived there with my mom when I was like 7. We’ll see how the weather goes.

Oh, and I finally got my home storage server/gateway up and running. Seems to be doing pretty well, though with 512MB it’s a little under powered in memory, but otherwise it’s doing the job nicely. Also picked up a Netflix Player, which is a pretty slick device. The movie selection on Netflix’s streaming service still isn’t that great, but they do have a pretty good selection of TV shows and documentaries, which is nice.

That’s about it for now, I guess. I’ll try and think of something interesting to write.

And so it went till today. The audio issue just resurfaced. I’m sitting here watching History HD off my TiVo, with no audio. First it was quick cut outs, now it’s just totally silent.

I suspect it’s something with the HDMI audio decoder. My suspicion is that it overheated and did some permanent damage to itself. I should probably contact the repair guy again and find out if the replacement parts were also under warranty, as it’s probably going to take another set of replacements to make this thing work again.

At this point though, I’m tempted to chuck this one off the balcony and go buy a Sharp AQUOS. We’ve got three of those at work and they’re running great. I suppose this is what I get for trying to save a buck and going with the cheap brand.

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>     http://weblog.2bithacker.net/
GCM/IT d+(-) s+:++ a26>? C++ UB++++$ P+++$ L- E--- W++ N@ o K- w O M+
V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP++ t+@ R@ tv@ b++@ DI++++ D+(-) G++ e>++ h>++ r-- y?

That jumbled mess is a Geek Code, a somewhat out of date, condensed representation of me. Given that the guidelines of the Code haven’t been updated since 1996, I’ve started looking into alternatives.

The first one I came across was OmniCode, which offers a similar syntax and a greater flexibility. However, the actual guidelines don’t seem to be well thought-out and the resulting code takes up too much space.

My second finding was the Hacker Key, which is again inspired by the Geek Code, and provides a further condensced format with updated parameters. I created a key pretty quickly, and tried the following on for size:

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>        http://weblog.2bithacker.net/
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM

It’s a little wider, but only two lines overall, and conveys approx the same amount of information to someone who knows what they’re looking at. I thought it looked kindof odd though, so I shuffled the components around and added in my PGP key ID, resulting in:

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E

It’s still a little wider than I’d like, but I could trim out a parameter or two to bring it back down. Haven’t decided if I really like it overall though yet.

Maybe I just spend too much time on these sorts of things…

PS: Oooh, what if I put the Hacker Key under the URL/PGP key line?

Chip Marshall <chip@2bithacker.net>
http://weblog.2bithacker.net/                        PGP key ID 43C4819E
v4sw5PUhw4/5ln5pr5FOPck4ma4u6FLOw5Xm5l5Ui2e4t4/5ARWb7HKOen6a2Xs5IMr2g6CM

Hmm…

Some of you may have noticed that I switched to the CLI theme for a bit. I liked it, but decided to go back to Connections Reloaded. One of these days I’ll get around to writing my own theme…

Also, I added an Amazon box to the sidebar, the top item is what Amazon thinks you want to buy based on your purchase history and the content of my site supposedly. The bottom item is a link to the Kindle e-reader. If you want to buy a Kindle, please use the link over there, they give associates a huge cut of the purchase price on those.

So, I’m starting to think I need to start selling some services on the box in order to get a regular flow of money coming in. Cheap virtual web hosting seems to be the easiest to do, if I can find buyers who would rather go for my little locally hosted box over one of the larger services. $10/mo seems fair to me, and at that rate I only need to get 9 customers to cover the hosting costs. If I could even get 3 or 4 it would be a big help.

If anyone has ideas for other services, or would be interesting in hosting, let me know. I suppose I should do this in some sort of official fashion via 2 Bit Hacker Consulting.

Also, my eee PC is cool. Using it in the terminal to write this.

1. Home Server: For a while now I’ve been wanting to build a NAS box for the apartment. A place to backup all my important files from other systems so I don’t have to worry about what I’m losing when I randomly decided to format and reinstall my OS. I was originally thinking of reusing an older Mini-ITX board I have kicking around, giving it a SATA controller and a few large hard drives. I’ve also wanted to do my own router for the apartment. I’m currently using a Linksys WRT54g running dd-wrt, which works fine, but I’d like more control. I think the most economical solution is to combine the two projects into a single Home Server, probably running FreeBSD. It’ll need at least 2 network interfaces, and preferably 4 or more SATA channels. I could easily reuse one of the 5 or so motherboard I have kicking around the apartment, as I don’t need a ton of CPU power or memory. Software wise, just the normal file sharing stuff, NFS, Samba, a web server, maybe look into WebDAV.

2. HTPC: I’d still like to get a Home Theater PC hooked up. I tried this a few years ago without much luck, but now that I have a TV with HDMI inputs, it should be nice and easy. I originally wanted to do this with MythTV, but I think I’ve cooled on that. I think it’ll actually run Windows, primarily for the ability to play streaming Netflix.

3. Replace Desktop: Now that a couple of guys at work have eee PCs I’ve been reconsidering my own systems. I rarely use my desktop at home anymore (perhaps repurpose it to HTPC?) so I’ve been tossing around the idea of replacing the desktop and my ThinkPad T43 with a heftier laptop, like a T61 or an ASUS G1S. Basically, a laptop decent enough to game on if I feel like it. Then pick up an eee to use for portability and quick things like checking e-mail or fixing stuff for work. The Nokia n800 works pretty well for the latter things currently, but the lack of keyboard hurts a bit. And the eee PC is a plain x86 CPU, so I could run XP on it and be able to use Slingbox, which would be nice.

4. Car PC: Yeah, still keeping this dream alive. Some day I’ll build it. It seems to be getting easier though. Bluetooth GPS, Bluetooth serial adapter on the OBD2. Maybe someone will figure out how to hack into the Prius MFD by then.

The specific RFCs in question are 821 and it’s proposed successor, 2821. The section in question in both of these documents is 4.3, which specifies what responses can be returned for various commands. 821 specifies that the initial client connection can be answered with a 220, which is normal, or a 421, meaning the service is not available, and the connection will be closed. The 421 can be issued at any time during the conversation, and usually indicates that the server is shutting down and can’t complete what it’s doing. RFC 2821 changed this, allowing the 220 or a 554. AT&T’s response code of 550 is not a valid response in either RFC, so AT&T isn’t following the RFC at all with their reply. Comcast’s reply is technically valid, but I feel it’s being used incorrectly.

The was an interesting thread on the exim-users mailing list on the topic, beginning with Exim’s handling of 554 on connect and expanding into the meaning of the return code. Some people think it means that you are being told you will never be able to deliver the message you are trying to send and should discard it, which is how Exim handles it. Others (including myself) think it’s intended meaning is to indicate that the server in question cannot take the mail, but the delivery should be attempted at other MX records for the domain, or other A records for the current MX. Keep in mind that the server doesn’t know anything about the message at this point, the client hasn’t had a chance to say EHLO, let alone give sender and recipient information. RFC 2821 states the meaning for 554 on connect to mean “No SMTP service here”, which is fairly vague. My opinion is that this indicates that this particular server will not except mail for any reason, not that the message is undeliverable (unless this is the only A record for the recipient domain’s MX record.) In this case, using 554 on connect to reject mail from a particular server isn’t really helpful. The generally accepted method of rejecting after RCPT commands is probably a better route, since the server may be trying to send to your postmaster address, which you’re obligated to take mail for.

Regardless of the meaning of 554 and the appropriateness of it’s use as a rejection mechanism against spammers, Comcast and AT&T are also ignoring the RFCs by dropping the connection after issuing their error codes. Here’s the relevant part of RFC 2821:

The SMTP protocol allows a server to formally reject a transaction while still allowing the initial connection as follows: a 554 response MAY be given in the initial connection opening message instead of the 220. A server taking this approach MUST still wait for the client to send a QUIT (see section 4.1.1.10) before closing the connection and SHOULD respond to any intervening commands with “503 bad sequence of commands”. Since an attempt to make an SMTP connection to such a system is probably in error, a server returning a 554 response on connection opening SHOULD provide enough information in the reply text to facilitate debugging of the sending system.

See that “MUST still wait for the client to send a QUIT”? Both Comcast and AT&T don’t follow that. It would be permissible to timeout after that, but the RFC doesn’t allow for simply dropping the connection.

So what to do about this people? I’m not really sure. It would be nice if large e-mail providers respected the rules put forth by the Internet community, but how do you penalize them if they don’t? The only idea I currently have is to form something similar to the existing rfc-ignorant.org listings, but for general RFC breakers, as opposed to their specific lists. This could then be used to block mail from sites that don’t follow the rules, which if you’re big enough would get their attention, but hurts users by rejecting their e-mail.

As a mixed blessing, the Internet is designed to allow people to do pretty much whatever they want to do with the servers they run, and there’s just no good way to get some sites, especially large company sites, to follow the rules if they don’t want to, unless you deny them access to things they want.