MacGyvering a sonar with a car battery

Did the power supply for your Simrad 710 sonar die? No problem, simply hook it up to a car battery. Apparently this is what happened during leg 1 of the cruise I am on. I boarded the R/V Pelican yesterday for a week long research cruise off the Florida panhandle, and the Simrad EM710 sonar's power supply was a simple car battery. We surveyed with this all day today, but are now back in port waiting for a FedEx delivery containing the new, proper, power supply. I must say, that was some impressive MacGyvering!

Once again, Sprint Customer Service proves they suck

I just received my Sprint bill and noticed an erroneous charge. There was a 90 cent fee for trying to check my voicemail on January 27. Their bill code claims that not only was I over my minutes, but that I was also out of network. I looked at the bill and realized I was actually 50 minutes under my limit still at the time of the call and I also had free roaming included in my plan. Of course, I should also mention that I have not traveled in the last month, so that is a moot point anyway. I decided to call them, because even though the charge was only about a buck, I was curious about how they got it wrong. I spent nearly 20 minutes on the phone and the guy helping me kept saying I was over my minutes. I asked him that if that were the case, why my other calls that day and the next were not charged. I also pointed out that the according the bill, I did not actually reach my maximum minutes until a couple days later. He just kept saying nights and weekends are free. Nights start at 7 pm, and Tuesday is not a weekend day. I tried explaining this to him, but he kept repeating that the reason my other calls were fine was due to nights and weekends. Nevermind the fact the other calls were before 7 pm and were mid-week (Tuesday through Thursday). I ended up completely frustrated, and just told him that I did not waste any more time with him explaining the order of the days of the week, not to mention simple math.

Honestly, Sprint is the worst phone company I have ever dealt with. When I first got the phone it came with a 50 dollar service credit (even said so on my receipt). It took three months and three phone calls for them to honor it, and one guy actually accused me of making it up because he could not find the promotional code in his computer. When I told him I still had the receipt and that my next call would be to the better business bureau if he did not fix the issue immediately, he finally transferred me to someone who issued the credit.

I was warned Sprint had the worst customer service and I believe it to be true. Unfortunately, where I live, only Sprint gets service. Everywhere else in NH seems fine, but Newmarket seems to be a black hole. I cannot wait to get rid of my Sprint phone for good!

The Arctic, Healy, and Larry Mayer featured on NYT blog

Today's New York Times Dot Earth blog features a post about the current battle over the Arctic. The video not only shows the Healy, but also interview snippets with Larry Mayer, co-director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at UNH and one of the chairs of my PhD committee.

Read the post and see the video here.

Converting Arc/Info 5 and 6 to e00 for use with ArcMap

Tonight I was helping Kurt convert some of his old Arc/Info version 5 and 6 files into .e00 files so that he could actually read them. It took some hunting around, but I finally found a handy little open-source tool that did it for me. AVCE00 is written in C, and the website has a pre-compiled version that will run on a Windows command line. I think Kurt may have plans to add it to fink so it can easily be used on a Mac as well. Remember, if you want to be able to view the data in ArcMAP 9.x, you can use the import71 tool located in C:Program Files/ArcGIS/Bin to convert the .e00 files into compatible coverages.

Website, anyone?

UNH provides free website hosting for UNH students, faculty, and staff. There are no formatting constraints and you have 256 MB of space. I followed the directions provided by CIS for setting up my public_html directory (if they mention telnet or ftp however, use shh and sftp instead so your password stays encrypted). From my home directory, I then ran the command:

$ umask 022

which will automatically apply world readable permissions to all files that I add to my public_html directory. If you chose to use umask as well, be careful and double-check the results. You do not want to inadvertently open up secure documents to the world.

I decided to cheat on making my webpage (at least until I have more time), so I used the free iWeb program that came with my Mac. It is pretty simply to use, and while not truly WYSIWYG, it seems to work well enough. This webpage effort has also led me to finally start playing around with Photoshop, and as a result I was able to do some pretty nifty things with the images behind the text on my C.V. page. *Sigh* I think my dork factor just went up another notch.

Anyway, the webpage is still a work in progress, but you can check it out here.

Looking at data in open-source QGIS

I decided to play around a bit with the free, open-source GIS software Quantam GIS (QGIS). QGIS is able to display many different types of raster and vector data, including some ArcGIS formats. It also integrates with the open-source Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS) to provide a lot of the data analysis and modeling tools you would find in the Arc Toolbox. QGIS is pretty easy to use, though somethings are certainly harder to do than in Arc. In order to add any polygons, lines, text annotation, etc., they must be digitized on a separate vector layer. The graticule plug-in also creates a new vector layer, which I found somewhat difficult to work with. So far it seems that QGIS might be great for initial visualizing and working with data, but not for final map/chart production. I have not tested out any of the GRASS features yet.

Here is what QGIS looks like up and running on Mac, with NOAA chart 13283 and some multibeam data displayed:

Excessive CPU usage with Thunderbird

Recently I noticed that even when Thunderbird is idle, it seems to be eating up a lot of my CPU. When I first start up the program it is fine, but within an hour or two it would be using up ~10.2% of my CPU, and would remain that way until I quit the program. I started hunting around on the internet, and found the issue on a Unix/Linux forum here. It turns out that if you set your new mail notification sound to be something other than the default system sound, Thunderbird cannot handle it. Whatever subroutine handles the notification plays the sound just fine, but then it hangs and does not close. I tested this out myself, by first setting the notification sound to the default sound and restarting Thunderbird (the CPU usage was already high). I then sent a test message to one of my email accounts. The CPU usage went up slightly as the message came through, the system sound went off, and then Thunderbird went back to idle, using 0.0% of my CPU. I then set the notification sound to a non-system default ("Use the following sound file:") and sent another test message. The CPU usage shot up when the sound played and stayed around 10.2%. I waited for a few minutes and it never dropped back down. I had definitely found the culprit. Apparently Thunderbird is aware of the issue, and the fix will be included in the next version of Thunderbird (version 3).