awa

At the speed of light?

The State of New York files a suit to stop DOGE from doing its job at 2100 on a Friday night. By 0100 Saturday, a judge has issued a TRO stopping the President from performing his duties as defined by the Constitution.

The DoJ files suit in New York to stop the state from tipping off illegal aliens when their DMV records are accessed. The court schedules the initial conference for May 14th, 90 days.

NY v. Trump

The state is now claiming that the state’s bank account numbers and other sensitive financial information was disclosed to members of DOGE in violation of numerous laws and regulations

Never mind that “members of DOGE” are employees of the United States of America. Just like any other government agency.

The state claims this these DOGE members are “unauthorized”.

There is no proof that they are “unauthorized.” They are just outsiders.

Why Do You Make It So Hard? Qt ORM

The current magic term for designing applications is Model/View/Control, or MVC. With an MVC design, you have three different aspects to any object. The model of the data. The view of the data. And how the data should be manipulated.

Consider an order for an item. The order has header information, line information, and meta information. The header information is in the “order” table. Each line is in the “order_line” table. The order_line table contains a unique id, the order_id, the product_id, the number of items, and the cost per item.

The View of the order would show the line number, the product name, the SKU for the product, the count, the cost per, and the extended cost.

The logic would make sure that we don’t attempt to send out more items than we have, and other things of that sort.

The control works on the data, it doesn’t worry about how to display it.

So what is an ORM? An ORM is an object relation model. It is how you describe the database, how you access the database, how you relate different parts of the database.

Qt doesn’t have an ORM. Instead, it has a database API. All table creation. All data access is done by constructing and executing SQL queries. Not difficult, but not an ORM.

And for goodness sake, please give me a method of defining tables such that when I alter that table definition, it alters the database to match. GRRR, I want my Django ORM.

Why do they make it so difficult? Link’s in views

I have a simple need. When the user clicks on a link in the text display, a signal is emitted with the href. What do I have now? I can’t even get the dang widget to size itself properly. And my events are limited to “Cell x, y was clicked.”

This frustration has existed for a bit.

Tick Tock, it keeps running

Pretty graphs aside, it is fun to see “accurate” times showing.

I have two issues. The first is that I do not know how accurate the PPS is, and the second is I don’t know what the fudge fact for the KPPS processing should be. I can get the delay from the chip to the GPIO pin. What I do not know is how long it takes from the pin being activated and the interrupt being processed.

This would require me to spend more time than I want to get the hardware specifications for interrupt processing. Then I would need to figure out the time it takes to process the interrupt. My mind keeps going in circles over this.

The biggest issue I have is that I want it to be more accurate. I’m not sure if I can do that with this equipment.

SCOTUS

The Court is still granting cert. Our cases have been silent. We aren’t going to have an opinion before 2026.

Question of the Week

What do you think the NPCs will pivot to after “constitutional crisis?” We had “destroying democracy” and now “constitutional crisis.” What is next?

Snow Blowers

I’ve moved away from having any 2-Stroke gas-oil mixtures in gas cans. I don’t use enough of it. I purchase it in one gallon tins. This means there is never a question as to the right gas can to use to feed a motor.

We have a few gas cans around. Unfortunately, the one with gas for the mower and snow blower lost its spout cap.

This means that dirt got into the spout. When we filled the mower and snow blower, the dirt got into the machines, which required a carburetor cleaning.

They also replaced a cable and such. In their nice warm workshop. Then the blower got wet. Water got into the cable housing. The temperature drops. Water in cable housing freezes.

Now I have a running blower, but I can’t engage the augers.

Thank goodness for propane torches. It only took a few moments to get it defrosted enough to move. I’ve poured oil into the cable housing in hopes of displacing the water. I’ll find out later.

Wicks Burn Too

The last time I went to use the kerosene heater, it wouldn’t work. I need to replace the wick. If you run the heater until it is out of fuel, it consumes almost no wick. But if you extinguish it by dropping the wick, it will smolder and consume the end of the wick.

I have spare wicks, but it is a messy, smelly task to replace. Fun for tomorrow.

Unelected

It is astonishing to me to hear Democrats screaming that Elon is unelected. Yes, he is unelected. And he is doing this president’s bidding.

Just like your unelected bureaucrats do your bidding.

He might not be on the government payroll, but he has just as much right to do the bidding of the President as any other unelected bureaucrat.

He’s looking at classified data!

So what? If that data is classified, then the people who are looking at it have the proper clearances and the need to know.

Tough.

The issues they keep raising, “we don’t know what he’s doing!”, and “He’s going to use YOUR sensitive data!” are non-starters.

Look, this guy is the wealthiest person in the world. If he were to “steal” every penny I have, it wouldn’t make a noticeable change in his wealth.

I trust him a hell of a lot more than I trust an unelected bureaucrat.

Clocks

You can’t make a stratum 1 NTP server for less than $75. The board, the GPS, the antenna, the case, and the power supply all add up.

I believe I can make and sell a clock for around $150.

Reporting On Trump

It really isn’t going to happen here. Something happens at noon. I write about it at 2100. It is published at 0630 the next day.

And there is an entirely new thing Trump has done.

SCOTUS Watch

The Court is still doing work. They are still issuing orders. An interesting set of Orders came out Thursday night.

The Acting Solicitor General (Trump person) asked for the briefing schedule in some cases to be held in abeyance. In all five cases, the Court said, “No.” This means the cases will proceed as originally scheduled.

We still have not heard anything on Snope or Ocean State Tactical.

I expect to have the cases denied with one or more statements. The other possibility is that the Court might decide to issue an opinion without briefings or oral arguments.

They do this when they GVR a case. Normally, they tell the inferior court to do the case over in light of some recent opinion.

What if, and this is just hopeful wishing, the Court decides they don’t need to hear the cases? What if they feel they can write an order?

We know that the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated. The two cases got here by the inferior courts twisting words to say that “assault weapons” and “magazines” are not arms under the protection of the Second Amendment.

The Court has the power to vacate the inferior opinions and order a new opinion.

We live in interesting times.

Question of the week

If you could afford it, would you book a state in Trump Tower, Gaza?

When people run into the evil that is the left, they find that the center has left them right of center. Welcome

Banana Pi, Stay Away

The board I purchased was a BPI-M2U or M2 Ultra. Nice little Pi-3 or pi-4 clone. It has BT, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 2 USB ports, onboard eMMC flash, microSD, SATA, audio, two power modes, serial header, HDMI (full size). Just a nice little board.

After a week, I finally managed to get ONE of a dozen images to boot. Raspbian doesn’t work. The best general version is Armbian. Regardless, only one would boot.

That one is running Ubuntu 16.04. I’m still trying to upgrade it to 18.04.

The board is unstable. It will run fine for a while, then power itself off. Or it will randomly reboot.

Unless you are willing to face significant headaches, buy the real thing.

Serial GPS NTP

I have one of my serial GPS’s hooked to the BPI-M2U. The PPS is getting to the GPIO. The serial data is arriving on UART 2. All wonderful.

Nice and stable. The jitter is way down.

But because it is a banana and not a raspberry, I can’t get the PPS driver installed. I’m still hoping.

Plane Crash and Trump 1.0

It appears that Trump stuck his foot in his mouth during a press conference about the crash over the Potomac.

It appears that he claimed that some air traffic controllers are DEI hires that are mentally challenged.

For a president who is attacked every day for being a liar and for being stupid, it is not a good look when he says things like this.

I listened to the ATC audio. My opinion is that the ATC messed up. He did not abort the landing clearance for the passenger jet. This is a no big issue event, if he had told the plane to go around.

SCOTUS

I am frustrated with SCOTUS. I’m afraid that we are going to get a denial of cert. We just have to keep waiting.

Question of the Week

What has been your favorite confirmation hearing moment?

SCOTUS watch

There are two important Second Amendment cases being discussed by the Supreme Court today. Snope and Ocean State Tactical

The questions presented are assault weapon bans and large capacity magazine bans. Both made up terms.

This is not the limit of what the opinion might cover.

This evening I’ll be checking for miscellaneous orders by the Supreme Court. I don’t expect anything. Later tonight or early tomorrow, I’ll see a video by Mark Smith telling me why I should panic.

Monday morning I’ll see the orders list issued by the Supreme Court. I expect to see the these cases granted cert. If not, I’ll find an update that evening on the dockets telling me they have been relisted.

My match suggests we have until about February 15 to have the grant in hand before I start to worry.

Trump is the President⁣

It is a joyous week. The wins keep happening. The left is melting down in so many ways.

The Games Democrats Play

The Democrats are delaying the confirmation of some of Trump’s cabinet picks. Just game playing. It means we are delayed a week before Pam Bondi(sp?) is confirmed.

They Want Us To Hurt

I come from a place of “leave me alone. Get off my Lawn”. The left seems to come from the place of “I’m in pain, you should hurt more.”

I’m sick of it. Ally is sick of it.

Given any opportunity, they will hurt you.

The big one is Elon’s “My heart goes out to you.” gesture. The left decided it was a NAZI salute. If you argue that it isn’t, then you are stupid.

In Ally’s case, when that didn’t work, they told her that a dead friend would be rolling over in his grave over her not believing that Elon is an evil NAZI.

AI For the win?

I’ve taken to reading the short AI results for many of my technical searches.

This works well. Occasionally, it is a little off, but the summary is often good. And the links to the articles that it is summarizing are right there.

The other night, I asked it, “how far is 1ms at the speed of light?” It gave me an answer that was off by 3 powers of 10.

Because I had come to “trust” most of its answers and the numbers felt right, I didn’t bother to verify the match.

This lead me to telling the story of the picosecond but calling it a nanosecond.

Trust, but verify.

Question of the week

What is the best thing you’ve seen since Trump took office, again?

Returning to Normal

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and new year. Here, we are slowly returning to normal. Once child has returned to school and the other is scheduled to head back on Sunday.

We haven’t gotten the tree down and put away, but it is on to-do list.

Almost all the junk food is gone. Which is good for me. Meals are back to normal.

You get what you pay for

I needed to solder a header onto a GPS board. No problem, I just dig out the Weller 921ZX. Oops, sometime in the past 10 years since I used it, it was dropped and the iron broke.

No problem, this is a serious brand, they will have replacement parts.

Except they don’t. This was a lower cost product when I purchased it. It has been discontinued. There are no replacement parts available.

So I bought a cheap version. And I got exactly what I paid for. The indicator light doesn’t indicate very well. When it was reporting 500F, it wouldn’t even tin the tip. I had to crank the thing to 800F before it started to perform reasonably.

It will do for now. I’ve put the project on hold until finances get a bit better.

Wow, this is spectacular, and bad

Years ago, my client was unhappy with the Wi-Fi in the office. He went to one of my co-workers, a programmer, not a system admin, not a network admin, a programmer, and asked if it was ok to buy a particular, expensive, router.

It arrived, he plugged it in, in place of the access point I had in place and the network died. They couldn’t get Wi-Fi to their MacBooks. The world was pretty bad.

Of course, this didn’t set off any alarms for me because I monitor the hardwired servers and such.

When I arrived the next day, they told me in a panic what was happening. I retrieved the login credentials for the new access point, discovered it was an “all in one” router, switch, access point. I got it mostly configured to work.

Boss complains about the Wi-Fi. I explain that they are in a building with multiple networks, all competing for the same frequencies. That I could fix it if he gave me the budget to do so. Having just spent all this money on a home gamer’s super router, he wasn’t interested.

He stumbles on somebody doing network mapping in the building. He pays this random dude to do network mapping for him.

Next time I’m in, he shows me the report that he paid for and explains that we are in a very crowded network area and that we had to fix it.

His answer was “more power”. I again offered to fix it.

He finally gave in, I installed Ubiquiti UFOs. These are their PoE Wi-Fi access points. Not routers, access points. They have a central management software. I installed 4 of them in the office. Told them to play nice with each other. Our Wi-Fi network issues went away.

These devices could overpower most routers, but they didn’t have to. They handled hand-offs seamlessly so they could use lower power and only cover the areas they were assigned to.

In other words, fantastic equipment at a reasonable cost.

I was also using their routers. Again, good quality at a good price.

Over the years, that love for Ubiquiti has faded. I still love their UFOs. It is their routers that are the issue.

The cost of their higher – end routers is a bit much for what you get. And their configuration method is based on VyOS.

It is time to replace those routers. I’ve done it twice with upgrading in the same product line. It is time to step away from their routers.

pfSense

pfSense is a firewall router that runs on FreeBSD on almost any equipment. The hardware requirements are trivial. Two network ports, that’s all.

This became viable because I found a dirt cheap “miniPC”. It uses an Intel n100, which is fast enough for what I need.

But what makes it truly remarkable is that it comes with 2 10G SFP+ ports, 2 2.5G Ethernet ports, 2 USB 3, 2 USB 2, 1 USB-C, another USB port, two HDMI ports, and more.

It has two comm ports on headers, and a large set of GPIO pins. It has an internal SATA port as well. 2 M.2 ports for SSD and 1 M.2 port for Wi-Fi. The entire thing comes in an extruded aluminum case with a fan. So far, I’ve been happy with it.

So what’s the issue? It’s made in China and there is no datasheet for the motherboard. This means I require a new skill, decoding pinouts.

Moreover, FreeBSD (the base OS of pfSense) doesn’t seem to expose the GPIO ports the same way as Linux would. This means I can’t use the GPIO for the PPS.

Convicted Felon

The saga continues. Trump has been certified as the winner of the 2024 election. A county judge out of New York wants to brand him a felon in an attempt to keep him from taking office.

To that end, he intends to sentence Trump before the inauguration.

What a crock.

The Excitement Builds

If you are reading this on Friday the 10th, the Supreme Court is or was in conference discussing cases they will accept. Three of those cases are Second Amendment Cases.

Orders will be released on Monday or Tuesday. As long as we do not see “denied”, we are looking good.

Question of the Week

Do you think that the Democrats are going to try anything on inauguration day? Either at the mob end of things or in the halls of Congress?

Happy New Years

Welcome to 2025. This is the time of year when I used to write the wrong year on my checks. I’ve not written a check by hand in over 5 years. That’s what computers are for.

And we are getting older. It used to be that we would sit around the TV for a few hours waiting for the ball to drop.

This year we were all doing our thing. Then at 2345 the alarms went off. We stumbled into the living room. Went to YouTube to find a ball drop channel.

We did the toast to the new year, then stumbled to bed.

Firewalls

I am bringing up a server in a new infrastructure. Instead of using the half arse load balancers and firewalls provided by the vendor, I decided to use a micro/nano instance and install pfSense.

pfSense is based on FreeBSD. Wonderful. The issue is that the vendor does not support FreeBSD nor do they support pfSense. This led to 24 hours of frustration.

The issue? The installation went smoothly, as expected. Everything is done on the serial device. When booting into the newly installed OS, the screen would lock up right after it said it was loading.

The issue? The installation media runs the console on the serial port AND the video console. The default for the installed OS is to only use the video console.

I received a message to my help request shortly before I wrote that I had turned on serial devices and everything just worked.

Why is this important? For testing, I had the firewall locked way down. Fine. Everything works fine for me. I try and install a LetsEncrypt certificate and it failed.

It told me it was a firewall issue.

It took me another day before I figured out that I had locked out web access to the firewall. I was only allowing my server to connect.

Small Steps

There have been a couple of cases out of the circuit courts in the last few weeks that are positive wins for the Second Amendment.

My guess is that we have a few more judges that believe in doing what the Supreme Court told them to do. And I believe that everybody is waiting for the Supreme Court to put the hammer down on another set of Second Amendment cases.

Everything Is Relative

I have been so immersed in getting our data center up that I lost sight of client needs. I was just about to write to one of my clients to see if they had noticed the improvement in performance.

I woke up to a message of frustration. Nope, it wasn’t better. Was it better than it was? Yes. Was it good enough? No.

Fixing it.

Of Course It Is Illegal

I have a friend who is currently living in one of those shit states. One of those states where you can assume it is illegal unless it is specifically made legal. And that could change tomorrow.

At the homestead, varmint are taken care of with the right caliber. Those squirrels ransacking the birdfeeders? They be varmint needing .22LR, subsonic.

The possum and raccoons getting into garbage cans or attacking the chickens? .357 Magnum varmints.

Deer eating the crops? 30-30 varmints.

Bears getting into the beehives? 45–70 varmints.

Where he lives, he has bear coming up on to the back porch. He can’t do anything about it because it isn’t legal to shoot them. And the neighbors would complain.

I offered him an air rifle for the squirrels. He was concerned it would make too much noise and the neighbors would complain.

I gave him a “Wrist Rocket” slingshot for Christmas.

He can legally possess it. I can legally give it to him. He cannot legally buy a slingshot nor can he legally make a slingshot in his state.

I wish he would move to my state, he would enjoy more freedoms.

Question of The Week (2)

1) Are the security posts of interest? The explainers about things computer?

2) Are you excited that the Supreme Court is prepared to hear another Second Amendment case?

May his time in Hell be tempered by the good he did after he was no longer in office.

In my opinion, this man started the decline of respect for the United States. His policies were so bad that we still have not recovered from them.

The Middle East is a cesspool of tribes. All of which hate each other, except maybe the Jewish people.

Middle Eastern tribes respect only one thing, power. If you have power, you are respected. If you do not have power, you are less than the dirt beneath their sandals.

The Peanut farmer let the US embassy in Iran be taken multiple times by “students”.

He was so afraid of “offending” the Iranians, that he ordered the Guards at the US Embassy to be disarmed. AFTER they were over run.

When the “students” took over and took hostages, he sat with his thumb up his arse playing footsy with Mrs. Peanut Farmer for 100s of days.

I know, personally, that there were troops in the air within hours of the hostages being taken. I know, personally, that there was a plan to retake the embassy within a few hours of it being taken.

That weakness led to the fall of Iran. Which turned it into the terrorist state of Iran.

The World Trade Center bombings? Jimmy’s fault.

The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole? Jimmy’s fault.

9/11? Jimmy’s fault.

The slight tinge of regret I have is for his Wife. I don’t think she is in Hell with him.

SCOTUS

We currently have one case scheduled for the January 10th conference. The other two cases have not been rescheduled yet. I do not know what we will see in the court filings before the 10th.

What does it mean to be conferenced?

When a party petitions the Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari, they are requesting that their case be heard by the court. If the petition is submitted through the standard channels, it is processed in the “standard” way.

If the request is submitted through the emergency docket, sometimes called the shadow docket, then a single Supreme Court Justice will evaluate the submission. They can then refer it to the court as a whole, or they can deny the request, or they can request more filings.

Regardless, emergency or regular, cases that are referred to the court will be examined. This happens in stages.

The first stage is the parties filing briefs on why the Court should grant cert or why they should deny cert. The parties can decline to file briefs, but they should file formal documents saying they are not filing.

When all the briefs have been filed, the case is “Fully briefed.”

Once the case is fully briefed, it is distributed for conference. This means that the briefs are provided to the justices for examination. The justices have their law clerks do law clerk things and provide reports. All of this is generally kept out of the public light. Nobody knows what the justices ask of their clerks, but former clerks have reported doing such things, in general terms.

After the case is distributed, it is scheduled for a conference. The conference happens on a Friday. During the conference, only the Justices are present. No clerks, no witnesses, no experts, just the justices.

They discuss the cases that were scheduled for conference. They can also discuss whatever else they want. They decide, not you, not I, not anybody else.

They can also talk to each other before the conference and make decisions outside the conference.

The conference is the formal event.

If the Justices want, they can reschedule a case, before they discuss the case in conference. This is what happened to Snope and Ocean State Tactical.

After the conference, the court will issue their orders. These orders will be “grant”, “deny”, or “relist”. If a petition is denied, it is over. If the petition is relisted, it means that the Justices will be discussing the petition again, in a future conference. If a petition is granted, then it is going down.

A case that has been relisted can be relisted for any reason. Some known reasons include having time to write a statement to attach to a denial of cert, sometimes it is because they need additional information. One of the common reasons in the Robert’s court is a “suitability” phase.

John Roberts likes to have a case relisted after the Justices have decided, internally, to grant cert. This is to give the law clerks time to thoroughly investigate the case to make sure there are no hidden issues or things that might moot the case.

We now have three Second Amendment cases that have been distributed for conference. One of which is currently scheduled for conference on the 10th.

Infrastructure

We have completed most of the network upgrade. There is still a server that requires a network interface upgrade. There is still a rack that requires a switch upgrade. Not to bad.

We need to finish running the redundant fiber network for backup purposes. Once we finish running the redundant fiber, we will upgrade the primary router and make sure everything understands multipath routing.

All the cluster entities have been placed on virtual networks. This means that they no longer need to worry about multipath nor the physical layout of the networks. A complete separation of tasks.

It turned out that I was having issues with my nodes having their clocks drift/skew relative to each other. This has been fixed, which leads me to want a Stratum-1 NTP server, again.

The last time around, I used a handheld GPS unit as my clock source. It worked wonderfully. This time I’m looking at something in an IoT idea.

I am currently researching NTP servers via Wi-Fi. If that gives good results, I might just do a Raspberry Pi Pico W and put the darn thing outside in a waterproof enclosure. I’m still investigating. I’m also attempting to avoid soldering as somebody broke my Weller soldering station.

Christmas

Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!

We hope you had a joyous Christmas.

Happy New Year!

And we wish you a happy new year! My your fortune be bright.

Question of the week?

Having had time to learn about what happened in western North Caroline after the hurricane, what changes in your prepping model have you made?

Continuing Resolution

DOGE has its first confirmed kill!

The continuing resolution is the legal device that the government has been using to avoid passing a budget. It has been nearly 30 years since Congress completed all its appropriation bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

The last time a budget was passed was in December 2020.

A continuing resolution is supposed to say, “We are going to keep going at the current rate.”

This was not a continuing resolution. This was a barge of pork barrels. Maybe three or four barges.

The last CR to be passed was around 29 pages. This thing was over 1500.

Elon posted a one sentence message to X with a picture of the printed CR. Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?

People decided to read the bill. And what they found was infuriating. In addition, people took to using Grok, X’s AI to look for pork in the bill.

This caused The People to light up the switchboard in Congress demanding that this monstrosity not be passed.

Not Budget Related

It appears there were items in the CR to limit the ability to investigate the J6 commission. To give Congress critters a $100,000/year raise.

It wasn’t just money pork, it was congress critters trying to save their asses.

Too Many Nerd Postings

I have an issue where I need to get packets from here to there securely. Not only must it be secure, it must be fast. Add to this that there is a network routing issue that needs to be solved for multiple systems, the obvious choice is to move to an overlay network.

The overlay network methodology I picked was OVN.

OVN is well documented, if you want to use a OpenStack or Kubernetes. If you don’t need or want the overhead of OpenStack, then things are more complex.

Why am I avoiding K8S? It is too expensive in the cloud. Using a container-based system just makes more sense, for me.

After spending 10 to 12 hours researching and testing, it is difficult to be interested in the stuff going down in politics or the courts.

I wrote my first article on OVN yesterday. It is published but not yet linked. There will be more.

Court Cases

In 2022, we were anticipating the Supreme Court taking the first Second Amendment challenge since the 2010 McDonald case. The first case we were hoping for was New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. New York City.

The city and state of New York worked overtime to moot the case, and succeeded.

The Supreme Court instead took the Bruen case, which resulted in a new landscape of Second Amendment litigation.

It felt much like the giddy times after Heller. You might recall that there was a time, shortly after the Heller decision, when Washington, D.C. was a constitutional carry city. They changed that in a hurry.

The same thing happened after Bruen. A boat load of new cases were opened. We waited to see what would happen when the rogue, inferior, courts got involved.

We found that it was the same shit in a different color. The Seventh Circuit court still thinks they are better than the Supreme Court. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth circuit are still playing games to keep unconstitutional laws on the books.

We were hoping that the Supreme Court was going to stomp on those nasty, evil, duplicitous, lying inferior courts. Instead, the Supreme Court kept sending cases back down because they weren’t ripe yet.

Today we are at the same point as we were in 2022. Waiting to see which cases the Supreme Court decides to hear. There are three big ones lined up. My expectation is that they will take all three and consolidate them.

The consolidation will allow them to create a single opinion. This will keep the rogue inferior courts and the state from picking and choosing language from the three different opinions to create confusion.

Question of the Week

When did you hear about the CR? When did you find out it was a pork barrel of non-essential and frankly terrible bills stuffed into a must pass bill?

What is your opinion of Elon’s method of addressing the CR?