Wheelgun Range Report

After letting it sit and gather dust in my gun cabinet for far too long, today I went to the range with Dad and shot my Euroarms 1858 Remington .44 cap and ball revolver. I also shot the S&W Model 640 (no dash) .38 snubbie I picked up last week, and Dad's new 50th Anniversary Ruger Blackhawk .357.

We put 5 cylinderfuls (30 shots) through the Euroarms piece and it shoots well. I loaded it with 28 grains of Goex FFFg black powder, Wonder Wads, and Hornaday .457 roundballs. I believe Euroarms suggests .454 balls but I also have a Ruger Old Army and only stock the larger size. The .457 balls give a slightly longer bearing surface and should hopefully shoot a bit more accurately anyway. Caps were CCI No. 10s.

In the past I've always used some kind of grease, e.g., Crisco, Bore Butter, or CVA Grease Patch, over the ball, but I really like using the wads. Much less messy and the gun still cleans up well.

I prepped the gun by coating the inside of the frame recess and bore with Crisco to keep fouling soft, cleaning out the nipples with a pipe cleaner, and putting a few drops of Ballistol on the cylinder pin. This was the first time I used Ballistol for this. I bought it based on a post by IIRC Mike Weber on THR, who recommended Ballistol for keeping Remingtons running. It works very well. After 18 shots I put a few more drops on to keep the gun running smoothly.

We shot at 7 yards and my groups were one ragged hole, when I didn't jerk the trigger. POI was about an inch to the left of POA. Close enough for government work, as they say.

I had one failure of a cap to ignite on the second cylinder. I'm pretty sure what happened was that it wasn't fully seated on the nipple; the CCI No.10 caps are a snug fit. It went off on the second strike. Some fell off after they were shot, while others stayed on and had to be picked off. I experienced no cap jams, which was a refreshing change from my past experience with Colt replicas.

I'm very pleased with my Euroarms 1858 Remington. It's a lot of fun to shoot and if it was all that was available, I'd feel pretty darn well armed with it, 19th Century design or not.

I forgot to bring my camera so I took the following pic with my camera phone, so please excuse the fuzziness:




{Click on the image for a larger version}

The Smith & Wesson Model 640 functioned perfectly, as expected. J-Frame .38s are no damn fun to shoot due to the recoil, so I limited myself to 12 rounds of WWB .38 Special 150 grain LRN and 10 rounds of Winchester .38 158 grain LSWCHP +P (my carry load). At 7 yards the gun shoots a little to the right of POA but all rounds hit in the "0" zone of an IDPA target. I got me a new pocket gun. :-)

Dad's new Flat Top Blackhawk is nice. It has a 4-5/8" barrel, and the grip frame and ejector rod housing are made of steel, unlike most New Model Blackhawks which have those parts made from aluminum. The grips are hard checkered black rubber.

The gun is a lot smoother than most fresh from the factory Ruger guns I've handled. It has a very nice trigger pull -- a little bit of creep, but a light let-off with no overtravel. Ruger's bluing job was also done better than most recent examples I've seen.

Dad was shooting rather small one-hole groups. I put 6 rounds through it pretty rapidly, and they landed in a nice small cluster.

One of these 4-5/8" Flat Tops in .44 Special or .45 Colt would be a really sweet woods walking gun, I'm thinkin'.

Selecting Cap and Ball Revolvers

Yesterday, I posted a revised version of my article Selecting, Shooting, & Caring for The Cap and Ball Revolver over on my website, here. I hope some readers find it useful.

The Wild West Alive and Well

If you've been following the news you've no doubt heard about the Senate's compromise on immigration "reform." (Amnesty for criminals is more like it.) While Congress and the Bush Administration sit around figuring out just how many illegals they'll let off the hook, the southern border continues to leak like a sieve. For example, this morning I read this post by "azredhawk44" on THR:

I've returned from the Minuteman patrol of the border.

Looking at that terrain really bothered me. There are discarded water bottles, makeshift tents from garbage bags, and discarded clothing all over the place. It looks like a troupe of absent-minded 3rd graders have been dropping garbage and walking in circles there for about 100 years.

Only, it's not 3rd graders. It's illegal aliens from Mexico and elsewhere.

...


The first watch I was on took place at night. I must have heard a hundred illegals in the desert around me, but they were obscured by the scattered mesquite trees, cholla and prickly pear cactus that provided cover for them. Visibility at night was perhaps 50 feet with the naked eye, and 100-200 yards with night optical systems, depending on quality. I had a Gen-I night vision monocular at my disposal which allowed me to spot my first two illegals at about 75 yards distant from me at about 8:00pm.

...

I had been using passive night vision with no infrared lamp for assistance. This guy was barely in range of my night equipment, so I hit him with my IR beam to help see him. He had night vision too, and saw my IR beam immediately. He froze for about 5 seconds. I got a good look at him via night vision. He had a quality backpack, with a large bail of something up high towards his shoulders. Very squared and boxy. He was bent over slightly to balance the weight.

When he saw my beam wasn't just scanning, but locked in on him, he bolted back southeast for cover. We followed him with a spotlight, the IR beam and night vision. He was lit up really good until he dived into some cover behind a bunch of cactus. We lost sight of him, but reported him to Border Patrol. He was sitting there behind cover only 100 yards away or so.

...

It's not just Juan and Jorge sneaking across the border to find a job making $2/hour picking lettuce. It's well-equipped, organized drug smugglers, "OTMs" (Other Than Mexicans), and G-d only knows who else. I'd be stunned to find out that radical Muslims haven't slipped across the Mexican border in the night packing AKs and explosives.

Completely sealing the border is impossible. But the first duty of any country is to maintain its integrity, which means having at least some control over the borders. Right now it's wide open. The Wild West is alive and well in 2006.

Unfortunately, neither of the two major American political parties wants to stem the tide. The Democrats want more lower income people who they can make state dependants for their own power base, while the Republicans (with the noticeable exception of Tom Tancredo) seem to want a steady stream of workers who they can employ on the cheap. This is a recipe for disaster.

Meanwhile, menial jobs that Americans would do if their wages weren't being undercut by illegals are squeezing lower income citizens. And on the other hand, American upper and middle classes are having their tax dollars eaten away by crimes committed by illegals and emergency room care being used for routine medical issues by illegals without health insurance.

Immigration when permitted in a controlled manner is a Good Thing. It may sound jingoistic but I realy do believe that the USA is the greatest country on Earth because of it was created by the best and brightest from all over the world, who immigrated here in search of freedom and the opportunity to make an honest living. That's threatened now by millions of illegals who come here in search of free health care, education, and the whole slew of "entitlements" (barf) which have been created with the rise of the American welfare state. This is not supportable in the long term. Yet the Federal Government fiddles while the foundations of the American Republic are burning beneath them.

I fear for the future of the country in which my children will grow up.

Armored suits next?

Somewhere, Robert Heinlein is smiling:

A Japanese quadriplegic plans to climb to the peak of a Swiss mountain by riding piggyback on a mountaineer who will get some extra muscle from a robot suit.

...

He would carry Uchida on his back with the aid of a robot known as HAL, Saigo said.

HAL, which stands for hybrid assistive limb, is a type of wearable robot or motorised exoskeleton.

Too cool!

Apple Boot Camp

Hell is continuing to freeze over. Apple is now officially supporting booting Windows XP on Intel-based Macs, via Boot Camp. In Apple's words:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

As elegant as it gets

Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.⁽¹⁾ Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Somebody get me a coat.

Mosin follow-up

As I mentioned on Sunday, I left the bore of my M-1938 Mosin-Nagant carbine soaking in Hoppe's No.9 in the hopes that it would dissolve some of the metal fouling. Boy, did it.

I took the rifle out of the closet tonight and when I removed the bolt I saw that it had a green streak of dissolved copper which had dripped down out of the bore. I've never had that happen before.

So, I ran several patches wet with Hoppe's through the bore, but it still looked like there was some fouling. I decided it was time to break out the JB Bore Cleaning Compound. This is a mildly abrasive paste, sort of like jeweler's rouge. It should not be used for regular cleaning, but only when a gun's bore is really fouled. The Mosin qualified.

I scrubbed the bore with a couple of JB-coated patches. Note that if you have JB on a patch and run it through even a clean bore, it will come out pitch black. Don't go overboard with it.

To get the JB out of the bore and for further cleaning, I followed up with several patches wet with Kano Kroil. This is a pentrating oil, not specifically intended for use as a gun cleaner, but is used as such by a lot of people, including very particular benchrest shooters. (It's good to have around the house even for non-shooters. It's a better penetrating oil than WD-40.) I ran enough Kroil patches through the barrel until they came out clean, then left the bore wet. I'll come back tomorrow or Thursday and see what else comes out.

URL Link Extension for Firefox and Thunderbird

This morning I installed the URL Link extension in both Firefox and Thunderbird. From the official description:

URL Link is a small Firefox and ThunderBird extension that allows you to select a non-URL in a mail/news message or web-page, and open it in a browser window.

For emails, it reconnects links in emails which have been broken across several lines, and also replaces spaces with the URL character code %20 so that you may follow emailed network 'file:' links (which it auto-detects from Windows X: or servdir references).

I frequently receive emails containing long URLs that get broken when either the sender's or my email client inserts a line break somewhere in the middle of it. This allows me to select the URL, right click, and open it in my browser. You can also use it to select any text and have it automatically inserted into your browser's address bar.

Since most people you send email to will not have the URL Link extension, it's best to enclose long URLs in greater-than and less-than signs, e.g., the "<" and ">" characters. (I've tried posting an example with them around a sample URL but Blogger reformats it.) With those characters around the URL, most mail clients will recognize the URL and make it a hotlink, even if a line break gets inserted inside it.

Day at the range

Today my brother Josh and I went up to Wicen's Farm Shooting Range. Josh brought the Rock River Arms Entry Tactical Carbine (AR-15) that he got a couple of weeks ago, along with his Glock 22 .40. I brought the H&R 158 .22 Hornet that I got a month or so ago, a Mosin-Nagant M1938 Carbine, and a Smith & Wesson M-640 (no dash) .38 Special snubbie that I picked up yesterday. Unfortunately we ran out of time and didn't get to shoot the pistols.

Josh's RRA functioned 100% with the GI mags and some PMC M-193 Ball and Winchester bulk pack .223. Accuracy was so-so, but the 1:9" twist of his rifle may shoot better with bullets heavier than 55 grains. It was also quite windy which didn't help matters.

The H&R .22 Hornet shot pretty well. It took me awhile to get it dialed in. Whoever had it before me had cranked the elevation on the Weaver K-4 all the way up, or nearly so. To get it shooting about an inch high at 100 yards, I had to bring it down at least 50 clicks. Once it was approximately zeroed, I was able to get about a 2" group. Without the wind and with a better trigger, I wouldn't be surprised to see the gun shoot MOA. My ammo was Winchester 45 grain JSP factory loads.

On the opposite extreme, my M1938 Mosin is quite probably the most inaccurate rifle I have ever shot. At 100 yards I was able to keep 15 shots within the "-1" zone of an IDPA target (similar to the "B" zone of an IPSC target). And this was with a 3" orange dot sticker stuck on the target as an aiming point. I would've been happy if the gun had put them within 6" but this is ridiculous.

The ammo I was using for the Mosin was 7.62x54R Hungarian light ball (147 grain bullet), a case of which I received last week from AIM Surplus. As with other surplus 7.62x54R, this stuff is dirty. We put 20 rounds through the gun today and the bore was filthy. Shooting it probably dislodged some old fouling as well. Since it's corrosively primed, I ran a few patches wet with Windex through it at the range to flush out the potassium chlorate residue, then followed up with Hoppe's No.9. I'm letting the bore soak overnight in Hoppe's, to get rid of more fouling.

It's too bad the rifle is so inaccurate, especially since this has the smoothest action of all of my four Mosins. The only time the extraction was sticky was when one case split vertically on firing.

It'll be interesting to see how the Hungarian ammo does in my Finn m/1891 or m/1939, or my Ishvesk M-1891/30.

Most of my recent rifle shooting has been with semiautos, but I found it very satisfying shooting a single shot and a bolt action. It's past time I took out a muzzleloader.

Best. Chinglish. Ever.

I just read the following in the README file accompanying a new firmware release for a router I'm testing:

(3) Change the messages, “A CPE (Ethernet) is attempting to hijack the MAC : address for IP Stack1! Thwarting the villian's malicious plot...”, to as follows: “An IP/MAC conflict has been detected. Please check the IP address of any connected device and make sure it is not using an IP address of another connected device.

LOL!!!!

A productive day

I took a flex day today so that I could drop off my truck at the service station around the corner to get the required PA state inspection, oil change, and tires rotated. Thankfully, it didn't need any work. It was nice having a day to myself and I was able to get a lot done that I kept getting distracted from, to wit:

• Cleaned out a large pile of papers and assorted junk from my office. Much got thrown out while some other stuff got shoved in the crawlspace.
  
• Stripped the bolt on my M1938 Mosin-Nagant and cleaned out whatever goop the Soviets put in it when they arsenal refurbished it. Hint: non-chlorinated brake cleaner works extremely well for this, but use it outside so you don't kill too many brain cells. I still need to shoot this gun.
  
• Replaced the stock cast firing pin on my CZ-52 with a machined aftermarket pin. (The original firing pins are notorious for breaking.)
  
• Removed the firing pin and extractor from my Springfield M1911A1 and gave their recesses in the slide a good cleaning. Hopefully the last-round ejection problems I had with the gun the last time I shot it were due to the gunk in the extractor channel.
• Ordered some Winchester .45 ACP 230 grain FMJ from MidwayUSA, along with a couple reloading items. WWB is my favorite .45 ACP practice load.
  
• Downloaded, installed, and ran Crap Cleaner on Bagend.
• Upgraded Thunderbird on Bagend to v1.5.
• Found my copy of Bad Company's 10 From 6 and ripped it to MP3 format. What a great disc!
  
• Ordered a Firefox t-shirt from the Mozilla Foundation to help support their development efforts. Who can't use another t-shirt?
  

One thing I looked for but didn't find was a GPLed or freeware program that runs on Windows and will allow me to rip just the audio from a DVD to MP3 format. I found several shareware programs but they all seem to be feature-disabled. The only DVD I have that I want to rip the audio from is Cream - Royal Albert Hall London -- May 2-3-5-6 05, and I don't want to pay $29 just for this, even if it's the best concert video I've seen. I did find one such program for Linux and OS X but I'd wanted to do this on Bagend. Any suggestions?

While Bush and Congress Play the Fiddle ...

... the US is being subverted from within. The picture below is from a March 27, 2006 student protest outside a California high school:

Nice, huh? Why do I feel like the Indians watching the wagon trains coming over the horizon?

{Tip of the hat to Michelle Malkin.}

The Kool-Aide is strong ...

Last night I was sitting in the living room surfing the net on my iBook, and decided to bring it back into work. It's just too damn nice working in OS X to leave it at home. OS X: as addictive as crack.

SonicWALL 2040

Over the past week I've had the chance to play around in my lab with a SonicWALL 2040 firewall. One of our customers has been experiencing problems establishing multiple IPSEC VPN connections from behind one of our cable modems to a SonicWALL firewall/VPN server which is connected to the Internet via a T1. Unfortunately, their unit is an older, discontinued box, so I wasn't able to truly reproduce their environment, and probably due to this, I could not replicate their problem.

This is the second SonicWALL box I've tested. The first one was last year, a TZ-170. I've been impressed with both units. SonicOS includes a very good HTTP user interface, and allows you to not only setup a solid firewall, but you can also use it to provide a VPN termination server, create a VPN tunnel between two SonicWALL boxes, filter out spam and viruses, and filter web content (with the proper extra-cost options, naturally). The 2040 that I have in my lab now can also be configured to provide connection redundancy and load balancing with two WAN ports.

If you're in the market for a firewall I reccommend taking a look at SonicWALL's line.

Slacktop

I'm still running Mac-less at work. However, I missed having a second PC on my desk connected to our development network, which doesn't go through the corporate Websense server, so I hooked up my old reliable Dell CPi P-II laptop. It has Slackware 10.2 on it, with the latest patches applied using slapt-get. Slack is my Linux distro of choice for old hardware, since it's the fastest in its out of the box configuration. The main app I run on Slacktop is Firefox, and to minimize overhead I'm using Fluxbox for my window manager.

Rallypoint.org After Action Report

Yesterday was the latest Rallypoint.org shoot, down at Doubleaction.org in Yeadon, PA, and it looks like we gained another shooter -- my wife.

When I met her, my wife was decidedly anti-gun. Over time I converted her to ambivalency. Yesterday, she came to the range with my dad, brother and myself. My brother has instructor experience and is a good teacher, so at her request I let him handle the instruction while I went to my own booth and shot.

He started off with the very basics -- stance, sight picture, breath control, and the manual of arms for the S&W Model 18. We set a target out at about 5 yards. At first she didn't hit the paper but by the time we left she was printing decent groups centered on the paper.

Afterwards she mentioned that now she wants to go again but next time try a Browning Buckmark, and to get a "nice little pink gun" to keep in our bedroom. :-D

While my wife was learning how to shoot, I ran 55 rounds through my Springfield M1911. On Saturday I'd swapped out the full length guide rod for a GI-style spring guide and plug, because the FLGR makes it a PITA to field strip. I'm not sure if it was the new spring guide or the UMC ammo I was shooting, but I constantly was experiencing last-round failures to eject. After shooting the last round in a mag, about half the time the case would fail to clear the ejection port, and get caught between the magazine feed lips and the front edge of the port. Heretofore, this pistol has been extremely reliable so I'm going to try it with Winchester USA ammo, which it is known to work well in it. If that doesn't fix it I'll try different magazines, and if it's still malfing after that, I'll put the FLGR back in.

I also shot my S&W Model 640 .38 Special snubbie. As expected, it worked perfectly.

Aside from that, a fellow shooter let me run 10 rounds through his Stevens Visible Loader .22 slide action rifle. This was made sometime in the late 19th/early20th Century, and is a neat old gun. In deference to the age of the piece we used CCI CB Caps. With these there was less noise and recoil than some spring piston air rifles I've shot.

Queen + Paul Rodgers Show

Tuesday night Judith and I saw Queen plus Paul Rodgers at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The last time Queen played Philly was during 1982.

Many fans no doubt look at Queen without the late Freddie Mercury as sacrilegious, or at best, a good cover band. But bands do change over time, for better or worse (witness Van Halen with Dave/Sam/Gary/Etc. or The Who with Keith Moon/Kenny Jones/Simon Phillips/Zack Starkey). Worse yet, too many people compare Paul Rodgers with Freddie Mercury, and complain that he’s no replacement.

Of course Rodgers is no replacement for Mercury. That’s fine and in fact, he isn’t trying to be one. However, Rodgers has one of the most distinctive voices in classic rock, and ironically according to Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor back in the 70s Freddie wanted to sound like Paul, who was already a star from his time with Free and Bad Company.

With that out of the way, the concert was excellent. Rodgers’ voice sounded great and unlike a lot of his contemporaries, he’s aged well. My one real complaint about the show is that for the first few songs the guys mixing the sound let his singing be overwhelmed by the music, especially Brian May’s guitar. For example, I could barely hear Rodgers during Tie Your Mother Down. Thankfully, the sound guys got their act together and his vocals came through well during Feel Like Making Love, Can’t Get Enough, and All Right Now.

Brian May is one amazing guitarist. I’ve always admired his studio work and now I know that he’s just as good on stage. His playing is technically adroit and just downright grabs you by the huevos and doesn’t let go.

As with May, Roger Taylor is technically adept and lays down a solid beat. He did a really good drum solo. His voice surprised me. He sang I’m In Love With My Car, These Are The Days of Our Lives, and Radio Ga-Ga. Especially during Days of Our Lives, I could’ve sworn I was listening to Rod Stewart. The similarity of their voices is uncanny.

Queen’s original bassist, John Deacon, declined to join Taylor and May in reforming Queen. So, they have a rather accomplished bass player filling in, plus a second guitarist and keyboardist (unfortunately I forget their names).

Here’s the complete set list, courtesy of queenpluspaulrodgers.com:

Intro - Beautiful Day
Reaching Out
Tie Your Mother Down
Fat Bottomed Girls
I Want To Break Free
Take Love
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Love Of My Life
Hammer To Fall
Feel Like Makin Love
Drum Solo
I'm In Love With My Car
Guitar Solo
Last Horizon
Bad Company
Can't Get Enough
Another One Bites The Dust
Dragon Attack
These Are The Days Of Our Lives
Radio Ga Ga
The Show Must Go On
Bohemian Rhapsody

Encore:

We Will Rock You
All Right Now
We Are The Champions

JAFT

Just a F. Test.

Apple out, Dell in

Reluctantly, I've gone back to my comapny-issued Dell D600 for work. I'd much prefer to be using OS X, but I decided that I didn't want to continue putting the wear and tear on my iBook. Also, I couldn't put my iBook on the main company network, so I had no way to print from it, which was a royal PITA. So, yesterday I moved all the work-related files on the Apple back over to the Dell.

The main applications I'm running are:

• Mozilla Firefox
• MS Outlook 2002 for work email and calendaring (we have an Exchange server, unfortunately)
• MS Word 2002
• MS Excel 2002
• Trillian for AIM and Yahoo Messenger
• MS Wordpad for small word processing docs
• Google Desktop for local search and the Todo plugin
• Irfanview

Some other apps I have include:

• MS Visio 2003 for diagramming
• Cygwin
• Mozilla Suite
• MS PowerPoint 2002 for the presentations which are an inevitable part of corporate life.

The Dell does have a larger screen that runs at higher resolution (144x1050) than the iBook's 12" 1024x768 screen, plus it allows me to run a second 1024x768 display. I have the second monitor placed to the right of the laptop with Outlook and Trillian on it. I keep the other apps on the main screen where the higher resolution is handy. I've found that this setup allows me to be more productive than I'd be with only the single screen.

My Apple won't be neglected. It'll remain my primary computer at home and when I do my independent consulting. By not schlepping to and from work and using it there, though, I hope to extend its lifespan.

Reminder: Rally Point Shoot March 19th

I'm posting about this again because we're coming up on the next Rally Point gathering, this coming Sunday March 19, 2006 at Doubleaction.org in Yeadon, PA.

Full details here.

Valley Forge Gun Show Report 3/12/06

Along with a friend I went to the Valley Forge gun show yesterday. Some observations:

1. 7.62x39MM ammo supply was almost nonexistent. One vendor had some Hungarian MFS 7.62x39, and another had some tracers, but other than that, there was none to be found.
2. The 5.56x45MM NATO ammo situation was similar. I saw several vendors with SAAMI-spec .223 but little 5.56MM NATO. One guy had a good supply of LC XM-193 while another vendor had some Guatemalan 5.56 surplus. I saw two sellers with the new Wolf Gold 5.56MM M-193. This is made in Serbia by Prvi Partisan, has brass cases, and is non-corrosive. I shot a lot of PP .303 British and 6.5 Swede when it was imported by Hansen in the 1980s and it was very nice ammo.
3. There was plenty of 8x57MM Mauser and 7.62x54R surplus.
4. There were plenty of surplus Mosin-Nagants of the M1891/30, M1938, and M1944 varieties. There were also a large number of No.4 Lee-Enfields, a few Turkish Mausers, many Yugo SKSes, and some Yugo Mausers.
5. My friend was on the lookout for a Makarov but we saw only two: a Bulgarian for which the seller was asking $220 firm, and an East German priced at over $300. He’ll shop around more. Maks aren’t as common as a few years ago but he should be able to find one for under $200 with some shopping around.
6. AR-15/M-16 magazines are plentiful and cheap. New USGI 30 rounders go for about $10, don’t spend any more on one. Unless you live in a state with its own assault weapons ban (e.g., NY) there’s no settle for used pre-bans selling for the price of a new magazine.
7. Plenty of 30 round AK mags for $15 - $20 each. Very few 20 rounders. One vendor had Romanian 75 round drums.
   

I bought no guns but did pick up a few items, i.e., parts to convert my Springfield M1911 from a full length guide rod to GI-type recoil spring guide; a couple Viet Nam-vintage Simmonds 20 round magazines for my AR-15; a .50 caliber ammo can, and 200 rounds of the aforementioned Wolf M-193.

My friend did buy a new toy: a hex receiver M91/30 Mosin-Nagant rifle with a 1929 dated Tula barrel and laminated stock. The vast majority of 91/30s have round receivers, so this is probably an earlier gun. It was arsenal refurbished after The War and then placed into storage until surplused, so it’s in very nice shape. We ran a few patches through the bore after getting it back home. The bore looks nice with minimal wear to the rifling, although there’s some metal fouling. We left it soaking in Ballistol and my friend will do a thorough cleaning job later.

May I take your order?

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a l o n g time. Warning: do NOT have anything in your mouth when you read it.

Been busy putting out fires

It's been a busy week. A number of our sites, each of which supports a large number of simultaneous users, have been repeatedly knocked offline. Naturally, this is pissing off customers and people in my company.

In some cases it looks like we've been the victim of several DDoS attacks. We've been looking at how to make our service more resilient and are reaching some conclusions, but you'll forgive me if I'm vague on the details.

On a more positive note, I've started using Microsoft Entourage on my iBook more frequently for work email. Two things made this possible: 1) getting the correct WebDAV server settings for our Exchange farm, and 2) a patch that MS put out last year which resolved an issue with Entourage mangling calendars on an Exchange server.

I've used Outlook in several successive incarnations for about seven years. Since Day One, I've thought it sucks donkey balls. It's a gigantic bloated slow pig. I'd rather not even have to use a groupware app at all but it's kinda necessary given my employer's corporate culture. I could restrict myself to Outlook Web Access but that's not nearly as convenient as a local client. My ideal solution would be to use Mail.app's Exchange connectivity and have Apple add WebDAV suppport for Exchange servers to iCal. That would be cool.

Emergency preparations on a budget

Rather than reposting it on this blog, please see my post on TRP about emergency preps on a budget here.

Thoughts on selecting .223/5.56MM ammo

My primary defensive carbine is a Colt AR-15A3 Tactical chambered for 5.56MM NATO. This rifle has a barrel length of 16 inches and a twist rate of one turn in nine inches (sometimes designated 1:9 or 1/9). I've done a fiar amount of online research into what sort of ammunition I should use. Two primary sources for info are the Ammo Oracle and the Arfcom AR-15 Ammo Forum.

Based on these sources it appears that the heavy bullet loads at 5.56MM pressures (see the Oracle for the difference between .223 and 5.56MM specs) are the most effective, because they fragment the most reliably. They are also the most expensive, and I like to practice with something more equivalent to my defense load.

Aside from wanting to practice with the same or similar load as to that which I'd rely on for defense, I have to take into account the 1:9 twist of my Colt. The heaviest loads require a 1:7 twist to stabilize. A 1:9 may be able to stabilize bullets up to about 69 grains but beyond that it's doubtful.

I'm avoiding M-855 spec ammo (62 grain with steel penetrator) because (a) it does not fragment as reliably as M-193, and (b) it's more expensive. If I thought that I'd need the extra penetration then I'd buy some, but absent a Hurrican Katrina type SHTF event, I don't.

So, my primary pick is Federal Lake City XM-193 of which I've laid in a stash. Future availability of this load appears to be questionable, however. So, for practice purposes I have Federal American Eagle .223. This is about 100 FPS slower than M-193 spec ammo but for practice out to 100 yards it's not significant, and my Colt runs good with it.

I'm not an ammo snob and if Wolf .223 ran well in the Colt I'd use it for practice. Many people have had good luck with Wolf in their ARs, however I am not one of them. When I tried it I got several bolt over base failures to feed. I do have about half a case left and it runs well in my Mini-14, so that's the gun in which I'll use it up. Note that I do not recommend Wolf for defensive use, because the bullet jackets are thick and the FMJs don't fragment, while JHP fragmentation is uncertain.

Winchester's Q3131 and Q3131A loads are essentially identical to Federal XM-193 and should be interchangeable from an end user's point of view. They may be more available than the Federal in the future.

Federal has posted the results of gelatin tests of several different .223/5.56MM loads on their website, here (PDF file). What I found interesting about the gelatin results is that although the 55 grain American Eagle load has a longer "neck" on the permanent cavity, overall disruption appears to be roughly equivalent to the fancier "tactical" loads. So, if true M-193 spec ammo availability dries up in the future, the AE .223 55 grain FMJBT loads look like a good substitute for civilian defensive use.

The good news with respect to M-193 spec ammo is that a batch of Guatemalan surplus M-193 just hit the US; AIM Surplus has it. Also, Wolf is now importing M-193 made by Prvi Partizan in Serbia. PP ammo was imported into the US under the Hansen name back in the 1980s before the whole Balkan shitstorm of the '90s, and was very good. I shot up a bunch of it in .303 British and 6.5x55 Swedish. So, I am optimistic that the Wolf Gold M-193 will be good as well. Along with a friend I'm planning to go to the Valley Forge Gun Show on March 12th, and hope to pick up a few boxes to try out. If it shoots as well as I hope, I plan to add more to my stash.

Switch pounding fun

I think that SMC fixed the issues I was having with the SMC 6752 switch in my lab, with a new version of the firmware and a new configuration to enable port-to-port isolation while still allowing remote management access. So, I'm running some traffic across it and periodically testing the console interface to verify it hasn't locked up (a bug I discovered in the last minor firmware version I had). So far, so good.

I'm looking forward to putting this project behind me, for sure!

Silly Internet Quiz: Which SciFi Crew?

My results:

>

You scored as Deep Space Nine (Star Trek). You have entered the dark side of the Star Trek universe. The paradise of Earth is far from you and you must survive despite having enemies on all fronts. But you wouldn�t have it any other way because you thrive in conflict and will know what needs to be done to take care of those around you. Now if only the Founders would quit trying to take over the galaxy. Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 88% Serenity (Firefly) 88% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 81% Moya (Farscape) 69% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 63% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 38% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 38% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 31% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

To boldy stay where noone has stayed before. Umm, no. Not unless I get to have my way with Major Kira (arf, arf).

Monday again?

Sheesh.

Saturday I spent an hour or so redoing the repair job I started a week ago yesterday on one of our toilets. It had been running constantly and I decided it was time to replace all the innards. So, after getting a refurb kit from Lowe's I took the thing apart and replaced everything. Unfortunately, after I was done I had a very small, slow leak. By the time I was finished I was pooped and didn't get to look at it again until this weekend, largely due to being under the weather for most of the week.

I'd intended to take the toilet apart and slather the threads on all the plumbing with pipe joint compound, until I read the can which said to not use it on plastic threads. So, instead of pipe dope I used some Teflon plumber's tape, and that seemed to work well. I also omitted a cardboard washer which went between the plastic nut for the pipe leading from the tank to the bowl, since it appeared to be a leaky point. That seemed to take care of it. Plumbing work sucks and I have the utmost respect for plumbers.

I didn't really do anything "productive" yesterday, although I was able to spend time with the girls, always a good thing.

Last night after some googling, I ordered an adapter which will allow me to mount the Hakko AR-15 carry handle mount scope directly to the flat top of my Colt AR-15A3. When mounted on the carry handle, the scope is too high to get a good cheek weld, unless you add a cheekpiece to the stock, which I don't want to do. The CH mount scope would work better on an A1 or A2 upper, without the detachable CH, since it's a bit lower.

Anyway, the flat top adapter is made the Leaper's MNT-996, not exactly top-shelf gear but we'll see how well it works. I figured for $19.99 plus S&H it was worth a try. I couldn't find a similar adapter made by anyone else. I ordered it from Cope's Distributing, and will post a follow up after I receive it and try it out.

Next Rally Point Shoot March 19th

As posted by Jamie Young on TRP:

PA-Rally Point CCW/Home Defense gathering - Sunday, March 19th
Place: Indoor pistol range DoubleAction.org
Date: Sunday March 19th
Time: 12pm-6pm

It will only cost you $10 if you are there between 12pm-3pm and $15 per hour from 3pm-6pm. I've made special arrangements for to bend the rules on bringing ammo. You are allowed to bring your own ammo as long as it is no reloads, no wolf and no blazers. No calibers above 44 Magnum and velocities must be below 2000fps. Ammo will be inspected when entering the range. I promised the owners that nobody would bring reloads or steel case ammo, so please don't attempt to sneak anything in. Double Action will have ammo, targets, glasses, ear plugs ect. but ammo costs are $11 on up from 9mm-44mag.

Event Theme:

I'll ask everyone to bring your CCW and HD gun and any cool things you have for them (as long as they don't violated shooting range rules).

These shoots are pretty darn close to being gun shows so you are more than welcome to show off. Please mark all of your gear and accessories so people do not get things confused. There will be snacks and drinks available and I'll work on getting some kind of lunch deal worked out.

Please from various gun boards will be coming. We have a pretty big following on :
www.thefiringline.com
www.Falfiles.com
www.AR15.com
www.AKfiles.com
www.ambackforum.com

Printing Digital Photos

RBT posted a query this morning regarding good options for printing digital photos. This was my reply on his message board:

Re: Printing of digital photos

I have been using http://www.kodakgallery.com/Welcome.jsp for a few years now. They used to be called ofoto.com. I've found their quality to very good, prices reasonable, and delivery quick.

You can upload your photos to them using a web browser or a local app, which is available for either Windows or Mac OS. Before I drank the Mac Kool Aid, I used Mozilla and Firefox on Linux on their site without any problems. Now I use "ofoto.app" on my iBook.

Accounts are free and you can use the serice to share pics online instead of emailing them to people. The online photo cropping/retouching tools seem to work OK.

I have no connection with Kodak Gallery except as a satisfied customer.

More on the port deal

Continuing our Bizzaro World discussion, it looks like there may be legal action to stop the sale of six US ports to a company based in Dubai. And, it looks like I'm in the same camp with Senators Clinton and Menendez -- two people who I normally despise as statists of the worst kind -- on this issue. No wonder I'm stuck at home today with misbehaving sinuses, I'm have an allergic reaction to this lunacy.

On top of all that, Jimmy "Peanut Farmer" Carter is on the side of Bush on this matter. Given Carter's foreign policy track record while in office, this is a clear sign that the Bush administration is doing the wrong thing.

We're in Bizzaro World

I think I woke up in the Bizzaro universe. WTF is the Bush administration thinking by approving a deal in which a company based in the Unite Arab Emirates will take over six major US ports? WTF is wrong when the leading federal opponent of this is Senator Charles Schumer, who it turns my stomach to note, I agree with?

Gah. I held my nose and voted for Bush -- with whom I hadn't been all that pleased -- because I thought he'd better than Kerry. Now I wonder. Sure, Kerry probably would've tried to ram through more gun control and other noxious policies, but ASSuming the Republicans retained control of Congress, they probably would've stalled it in the name of partisan politics.

Bush seems to be determined to turn his second term into a first class clusterfuck. Despite his protestations that Islam is a Religion of Peach, the clear evidence -- historical and currently -- is that it is a Religion of the Sword. It was spread by the sword and its most vocal adherents continue to espouse violent jihad against unbelievers. Islamic doctrine separates the world into two realms: "Dar al Islam" (realm of peace, i.e., Islamic rule) and "Dar al Harb" (realm of war, i.e., everywhere else). Unbelievers who fall into Dar al Islam get the choice of converting or being reduced to "dhimmitude," i.e., second-class citizenship subject to special taxation and reduced rights.

Don't forget that if you criticise Islam in any way you open yourself up to getting blown up or your head hacked off. Welcome to the 7th Century.

Now, a half dozen major US ports are supposed to come under the ownership of a company owned and run by Muslims from a country with a history of financially backing jihadis. As an aside, why the hell are any of our ports owned by any foreign entities? All US ports should be under US management, as a matter of national security.

Coupled with the Bush administration's flat out refusal to do anything about border security and we have a disaster in the making. While TSA goons cops a feel on grandmothers and hassles Congressional Medal of Honor winners at airports, we leave the back door open to anyone who can walk in.

Aside from "OTMs" -- Other Than Mexicans -- the border regions are seeing an increased influx of gangs like MS-13. We need to erect real barriers to unauthorized entry -- walls and fences where geography makes it feasible, patrols on foot and horseback, and UAVs where not. Legal immigration is good but illegal immigration needs to be brought under control. The federal government's first responsibility is national security and maintaining integrity of the borders is key to that. Even if it takes a few billion a year it's money well spent, certainly better spent than pissing it away on foreign aid to countries whose inhabitants hate us anyway. Our current situation is akin to Rome welcoming the barbarians, or the Indians watching the wagon train come over this hill, ultimately impotent to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, US energy policy is a fucking joke. The enviroweenies need to be told to go FOAD, we're building nuclear power plants, exploring for oil in more domestic areas, and figuring out realistic ways to partially sate our appetite for fossil fuels. Conservation is needed but as Jerry Pournelle has pointed out, you cannot conserve your way to prosperity. We need new energy sources. Domestic oil, coal, natural gas, biogas, biodiesel, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, whatever. Having multiple options makes the most sense. We shouldn't put all of our eggs in one basket, but whatever we do, we need to get them out of the Arab basket. Failure to do so will ensure that we never extract ourselves from the Middle Eastern quagmire. Eventually, failure to deal with these problems dooms the Republic to dissoultion and authoritarianism.

H&R Model 158 Topper .22 Hornet/20 Gauge

I've wanted a rifle in .22 Hornet for a long, long time, and finally picked one up today. It's an old H&R Model 158 Topper single shot. It came with an interchangeable 20 gauge shotgun barrel and a Weaver K-4, 4x scope in Weaver rings. I found it at Seneca Arms (116 Gravel Pike, Green Lane, PA 18054). Along with the rifle I bought two boxes of Winchester Super-X 45 grain JSP cartridges.

The Topper rifles were built on the same action design as the H&R single barrel shotguns, which were produced in the millions. If I remember correctly, though, receivers meant for rifles were made from steel instead of the cast iron used for shotguns. They were intended as simple, low cost working firearms, e.g. for whacking woodchucks tearing up your cow pasture. Harrington & Richardson went belly up in the late 80s/early 90s and was reincarnated as H&R 1871 and New England Firearms. Marlin currently owns both the H&R 1871 and NEF brands, and you can buy newly made guns from them as the "Handi Rifle."

This is my second Weaver scope. My Savage Mark IIGL .22 LR wears a Weaver 4x28mm rimfire scope. The K-4 is intended for centerfire rifles, and as an older one, is all steel. Weavers optics and mounts have never been fancy but they are good glass and hardware.

The .22 Hornet is a neat little cartridge. It was created in the 1920s by a few employees of the US Army's Springfield Armory, including Grosvenor Watkins and Townsend Whelen. They took the black powder .22 Winchester Centerfire round dating from 1885, loaded it with smokeless powder and jacketed bullets. In 1930 Winchester started offering the .22 Hornet as a factory cartridge.

The Hercules powder company developed a new powder to allow 45 grain bullets to reach 2400 feet per second from a Hornet's muzzle. The name of the powder: "2400," and it's still made today by Alliant. From what I've been reading lately, the powder to use for best accuracy in .22 Hornet rifles nowadays is Hogdon's L'il Gun.

Because early rifles used rechambered .22 LR barrels, they had .223" groove diameters instead of the .224" diameter used in most other .22 centerfires. Sometime in the 30s or 40s gunmakers changed to .224" barrels for Hornets.

.22 Hornet rifles are suitable for small game and varmints up to about coyote size. I plan to use it for some target shooting and maybe some varminting. With good loads and assuming the gun shoots well, it should be fine out to about 200 yards.

Shotguns have never been a big interest of mine. I've had a few but the only one I still had up until today was an H&R Topper 12 gauge I got while in high school, and I haven't shot it in years. Before H&R went bankrupt, their quality control went downhill and my 12 bore is an example. When shooting it one time, the barrel lug into which you screw the forearm retaining screw sheared off. So, the forearm is now held on with duct tape. Anyway, while the 20 gauge barrel is good to have on hand -- it has a 3" chamber and modified choke -- I don't expect to use it a lot. However, I am planning to see how well I can shoot Foster slugs out of it. If I can do "minute of deer" out to 50 yards, I may take use it for deer hunting on a friend's property out in Chester County.

Marlin Camp 45 Questions

I received the following email today about the Marlin Camp 45 carbine:

Dave:

My name is Mike H., and I ran across your site while looking for some
info on the Marlin Camp .45. There's one on Gunsamerica.com I'm very
interested, so I wanted to get your feedback on this unusual rifle.

First, what are you going to use it for, home defense, hunting, or just
simple target shooting? Also, what's the range? Finally, besides the sights,
what other mods would you do to it?

Thanks for your help,
Mike

To which I replied:

Hi Mike,

My primary use for my Marlin Camp .45 is plinking.  Secondary uses would  be home defense and teaching new shooters.  Semiautomatic rifles are not  legal for hunting in PA, where I live.  The furthest I've shot it is 50  yards.  It's basically a 100 yard gun.

The only modification I recommend is replacing the stock recoil spring  with a Wolff 21 lb. spring.  Combined with not-properly-tightened  actions crews, the original weak spring can result in a cracked stock.  The OEM spring is only 11 lbs., which may be OK for the Camp 9 but is  way undersprung for .45 ACP.  The Wolf 16 lb. spring works ok in .45,  but the 21 lb. spring almost eliminates recoil, and just about  eliminates lefthanders getting any "gun-schmutz" in their face from out  of the ejection port.

I also suggest picking up a spare bolt buffer from Blackjack Buffers or  Marlin, if they have any left in stock.  I got one from Blackjack.  If  the gun has been shot a lot the original buffer may need replacement.  So far mine hasn't.

My Marlin wears a Bushnell red dot sight using the rings that came with  the sight, mounted on a Weaver base.  The Camp Carbines use the same  scope bases as the Marlin 336 lever actions.

If you need a folding stock for compact storage, Choate Machine and Tool  makes a good one.

Hope this helps. 

Lab day with SMC

Yesterday I spent almost all day in the lab with an engineer from SMC so that he could get a handle on the situation I'm having with the 6752 and 8612 switches. Among other things, he ran Ethereal to capture what's actually going across the wire when we plug into a port on the 6752 and try to use the IP3's automatic room-to-port mapping feature. Hopefully, with the data gleaned from yesterday's session, we'll soon have firmware which will allow us to:

1. Have client isolation on each port of the 6752.
2. Have remote, in-band management of the 6752 and 8612.
3. Allow the IP3 to use SNMP to automatically map rooms to ports on the 6752.

The other thing we're hoping to get is support for increased numbers of VLANs on the 8612s, which are aggregation switches. They currently support a maximum of 256 VLANs per switch, which just isn't sufficient for an aggregation switch; 1000 VLANs would be more like it. Hopefully this can be implemented in software and won't require a beefier processor or more memory on the box.

Snow

We got about a foot of snow after it stopped falling yesterday afternoon. Not too bad but I am very glad I have a two stage snowblower. It's a Troy-Bilt 524, the smallest of their two-stage units.

When buying the snowblower, I could have saved a hundred bucks or so by getting a single-stage unit. But that's penny-wise and pound-foolish IMHO. You really need a snowblower when you've got a foot or more of snow, and the smaller blowers just don't work all that well with that much. They require a lot more effort to clear the accumulation, and since the whole point of buying expensive gas powered machinery is to save musclepower, it just doesn't make much sense to me, at least for SE PA and northwards. Not to sound too smug, but my neighbors with the single stage units had a lot more trouble yesterday than I did.

The roads in my neighborhood this morning were still a bit messy, but the main roads weren't too bad. Surprisingly, though, most area schools are closed today, including Philly, so Judith gets to stay home. I may bail out of work a little early so I can beat the freeze-up on the roads tonight.

Getting Started With Ethernet Cabling

My new article, Getting Started With Ethernet Cabling, is now live over at TechBuilder.org. Aside from GSWEC, check out the "Recipes" there for some good reading interesting to PC system integrators.

Gmail File Space

While looking through the latest issue of Macworld, I ran across a mention of a extension for Firefox called Gmail File Space, or Gspace. It allows you to use your Gmail account to store files through a very convenient, FTP-like interface from within Firefox. Since Gmail is a free service and how it works is subject to change at Google's whim, I don't think I'd use it for either email or file storage for mission critical stuff, but this could sure come in handy.

Here's a screenshot of it on my iBook (I didn't see anything about Gspace being Mac-only, so it should work on other platforms):


Click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture.

FDA Approves Rotavirus Vaccine

The FDA has approved a new vaccine from Merck to protect kids against the rotavirus. Amanda had this last March and it was just awful. The vomiting and diarhea required constant attention and giving her fluids to prevent her from getting dangerously dehydrated. Even then, she lost about 3 lbs. -- and she only weighed about 19 lbs. to start with.

If you have small kids talk to your pediatrician about the vaccine.

SMC Private VLAN Issue

Back in November I thought I had an issue with SMC's private VLAN feature on their 6752 switch licked. When using the feature I was losing in-band IP access to the box. Apparently the fix I thought I had isn't working in production.

I wish that our Ops people hadn't waited 3 months to let me know.

I'm in communication with them and SMC and I hope to have this resolved ASAP, but shit.

Mozilla Updates

I updated Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox today. I'd downloaded Thunderbird 1.5 a couple of weeks ago but had postponed upgrading until now. So far, it doesn't look like a major change from 1.0.5.

Firefox 1.5.0.1 was released yesterday. It's supposed to fix memory leaks and have speed improvements. I first upgraded FF on my iBook and noticed a significant improvement in page load times. I ran top in a terminal before and after the upgrade, and it looks like the new release uses a bit less memory on the iBook. Sometime later I was using FF on my Dell under XP, and it automatically prompted me to upgrade. That went without incident, as well.

DIY Motivational Posters

Go here and with an uploadable image, you can make your own poster in the style of "motivational" posters. For example:


:-)

Brian's new Mac Mini

Those of you who peruse the other Daynotes Gang sites may have seen that Brian Bilbrey got himself a Mac Mini. I sent the following to the Daynotes Backchannel this morning:

Welcome aboard the OS X train, Brian. A steward will be along with the Kool-Aid shortly. :-)

So did you add any options like more RAM or bigger HDD?

I think you'll like it. There are a large number of open source and free (as in beer) apps you can run on OS X. You can install many of these through the Darwin Ports system (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/) or Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/).

Your favorite, Emacs is already installed by default.

I like iTerm (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/) as a Terminal.app replacement. It's more configurable and supports tabs. However, sometimes if I want to SSH into a *NIX box and need use of the function keys (e.g., for Midnight Commander or YaST), I launch X11.app and an Xterm.

Fugu (http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/) is a nice GUI front end to SCP and SFTP.

I use RBrowser Lite (http://www.rbrowser.com/) for FTP. If you license it, it'll handle SCP and SFTP, too.

ZTerm (http://homepage.mac.com/dalverson/zterm/) is a good terminal emulator if you need to console into a router or switch.

Adium (http://www.adiumx.com/) is based on Gaim but uses an Aqua interface. If you don't need the IM protocols is supports, then iChatAV is a very good AIM and Jabber client. IChatAV's voice support is excellent, at least when talking Mac-to-Mac. IM me if you want to try it.

Flip4Mac (http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm) is a plugin that'll let you play .WMV files in Quicktime. MS dropped development of Windows Media Player for Mac (no great loss, it sucked anyway).

If you need a VNC viewer, check out Chicken of the VNC (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/).

OpenOffice.org works ok on a Mac with X11, or you can try NeoOffice/J. I find the latter even slower than regular OO.o. I confess I generally use MS Office 2004; Office is nicer on the Mac than on Windows IMO and gives me 100% document exchangeability with Windows users at work.

Well, I give up

For whatever reason the G3 in my lab didn't even like Panther, so I gave up. I now have it setup with the original drive running Jaguar as the master IDE disk, and the 20 GB drive scounged from an old Qube3 as a slave. At least now the box has a decent amount of storage.

Trying to get the G3 running BSD over the past few days hasn't been a complete waste. I at least got to learn about the OpenBSD installer and Open Firmware.

Update on the Mac

I decided to get the G3 running by using only the 20 GB drive, partitioned half for OS X and half for OpenBSD. After partitioning it using Disk Utility, I formatted the front half HFS+ and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the original drive to the new partition.

Unfortunately, the cloned partition wasn't usable. Finder kept crashing on me, so I said to hell with it and got ahold of a set of Panther install CDs. So, I should have a functional OS 10.3 box shortly. After that's running and updated I'll install OpenBSD in the second partition.

Update @ 15:25 -- Now I've got the spinning beatchball o'death. Im starting to wonder if this disk is hosed. Argh!

OpenBSD/macppc

A little while ago I added an old G3 PowerMac to my lab. It's 350MHz box with 768MB RAM, running OS 10.2.8. It's a nice machine, albeit a bit pokey by today's standards. Last week I came up with the idea of adding a second disk and installing FreeBSD on it, so I could run an internal FTP server and apps like Iperf without the overhead of OS X.

I added a 20 GB drive scrounged from an old Cobalt Qube3. It's seutp as a slave on the primary IDE connection.

Unfortunately, FreeBSD refused to install. Doing some googling indicated that the error I saw was someting that what supposed to be fixed in FreeBSD-6, but wasn't. So, I decided to try OpenBSD 3.8 for Mac PPC. I've been wanting to try OpenBSD for a long time anyway.

Setting up the disks in OpenBSD's installer runnign fdisk took me a few tries but I got it figured out. The install went OK after I found an FTP mirror that wasn't already maxed out (OpenBSD doesn't make full ISOs available for download).

At this point I can't get the box to boot into OpenBSD. Much googling has revealed instructions on how to configure Open Firmware to boot a Mac into OpenBSD when you've got only one disk in the machine, but I haven't found anything about booting from a second IDE drive.

I debating whether to wipe the main disk and make the box OpenBSD only, or to wipe the second disk, reformat it HFS+, and just use Iperf and the FTP server from OS X. Suggestions on how to get OpenBSD working in a dual-boot config are welcome.

TheRallyPoint.org

I am pleased to announce the opening of a new Second Amendment/shooting forum, TheRallyPoint.org. From the mission statement:

This forum was created to bring a new spirit to discussion forums. By agreeing to the forum rules when registering, we ask that all members acknowledge that they will become Ambassadors for the cause of advancing responsible firearms ownership, and engaged in debates that educate and add to a stronger and stable society. A part of the mission of this site is to foster, in a non partisan manner, the values of self determination and self reliance that have served America admirably throughout its history.

I'm one of the administrators/moderators. We hope you join us.

Deja Feces...

... or, I think I've seen this crap before.

In my prior position with the corporation that I work for, I survived at least four major reorganizations/layoffs unscathed. Now, my current division is doing the reorg thing and I'm aware of at least four or five people who are being "downsized," although they aren't in my department. We won't know how we're going to come out of the reorg for another couple of weeks. I don't think my job is in jeapordy, but you never know.

In the interim, I posted an ad on Craigslist.org for my sideline consulting work to try and drum up a little more business, and worked on my resume tonight.

Oh, the joys of working in corporate America.

A couple good preparedness deals

Yesterday I received some stuff I ordered from Campmor and Cheaper Than Dirt.

Looking through the Campmor catalog I received last week I saw they had 300 weight fleece throws on sale for $8.95 ea., regularly close to $20. So I ordered a couple of charcoal colored ones along with a Century propane conversion kit for my dual fuel Coleman camp stove. So now it's a tri-fuel stove. The throws are a little small to use as a blanket but would be good for keeping in the car.

CTD sent me a case of MREs, a GI-style poncho and liner (AKA "woobie"), both in MARPAT. Quality of the poncho and woobie seem pretty good. I used the liner for a blanket last night and it's like my GI liner -- not real warm, but better than nothing. I added one of the throws in the middle of the night and was able to sleep comfortably in a 60 degree room.

Alexandra thinks MARPAT is cool, really likes the woobie and wants one of her own. So it looks like I'll be able to wean her away from the girly foo-foo stuff. :-)

Revisiting Fink

This morning I installed Fink on my iBook with the aim of loading several open source apps. I've used Fink previously but ran into several difficulties, but it looks like the developers have greatly improved things.

After installing Fink and updating it, I installed Fink Commander, an easy to use GUI interface to Fink's underlying Debian-type system. Then I loaded nmap, my favorite port scanner and the Gimp open source image editing tool. I'd installed Gimp.app shortly after I got the iBook, but a subsequent OS-X update killed it. It seems to be running OK now. For the simple image editing I do (i.e., mainly resizing or removing red eye), the Gimp works great and runs a lot faster than Photoshop.

The final app I installed through Fink was the protocol analyzer Ethereal. Installation appeared to go OK but I'm getting errors when i try to run it. E.g., I'm seeing "Image not loaded." I did a little googling to find a fix but don't have it working yet. If I do find one I'll post it here.

Cross Platform Network Printing Woes

I've ranted in the past about the piss-poor state of printing setup in Linux. But that's not the only thing with printers that needs to be fixed. Specifically, printing to a printer connected to a Mac from a Windows box, and vice-versa.

Saturday morning I went over to a client's house to setup his new Mac Mini. Wonderful box, the Mac Mini. It's tiny, almost silent, and of course runs Mac OS-X. My client has an HP OfficeJet 6110xi connected to it that he'd like to be able to use from the two other computers on his LAN, both of which run XP Home.

Unfortunately, while I was easily able to setup file sharing so the Macs and PCs could share resources, I couldn't get remote printing to work. No matter what I tried, the print jobs would make it to the Mac's qeue from the XP box, but not actually print.

Yesterday, I tried to get Judith's new iBook to print to the Samsung ML-1710 hooked up to Bagend, which runs XP Professional. No dice. The Mac sees the printer but I don't get any output.

Several months ago I was discussing the sucktastic state of *NIX printing with a fellow Linux geek who's also the senior UNIX architect at a major stock exchange. His advice for *NIX printing is to use an HP JetDirect print server. I'd hoped things would be better with Macs, but apparently there are still issues.

So, I'm looking at getting a print server. In particular, Apple's AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme both include a USB port and print server for Windows and Mac clients. I'd replace the Netgear WAP I'm currently using with the AirPort. Some googling indicates that the Samsung should be compatible with the AirPorts.

So, I'd welcome feedback from any users who've use AirPorts as print servers, especially with (a) Windows clients since I have no doubt it'll work flawlessly with a Mac, and (b) with Samsung USB printers.

Another iBook

Yesterday the School District of Philadelphia issued Judith a spankin' new G4 iBook. It's a 12" model with the 1.33 GHz G4, 512 MB of RAM, and a 60 GB hard drive. I think it just has a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, not a SuperDrive. It does have Bluetooth, however.

I did the initial setup for her last night including creating her user account, associating the AirPort with my home WLAN, and running Software Update; it came with 10.4.3 and is now on 10.4.4. Although I had to go through the initial OS-X setup, it was obvious that the School District had imaged it. For example, it had a couple of Terminal.app shortcuts in the Dock, and MS Office 2004 was installed and registered. It also had Firefox installed but I upgraded it to 1.5, since the earlier version had some security issues resolved in the new release. McAfee Virex antivirus for Mac was installed, too. I'd generally regard that as being as useful as tits on a boar, but it'll protect her against Office macro viruses.

Along with the iBook they gave her an STM Sport Laptop Backpack, which seems pretty nice. I like the layout and pocket arrangement better than my REI Big Byte's, although my bag has better padded shoulder straps.

I think she'll enjoy using the iBook a lot more than my old Compaq, especially since that old box suffers from intermittent XP wireless schizophrenia.

More About Legislating GPS On Guns

The following email is reposted with the author's permission:

Hi, Dave.....

>Friday, January 13, 2006

>From the CLUELESS IDIOT Department

>This guy isn't just an antigunner, he is technologically clueless:
>
>Saying gun manufacturers should take steps to track guns, a Boston city
>councilor is proposing that global positioning technology be installed in
>firearms.
>
>Councilor Rob Consalvo wants to put a tracking device into newly
>manufactured guns and have legal gun owners retrofit their firearms so
>owners and police can locate and retrieve stolen guns the same way police
>use a computer chip to locate stolen cars.
>
>
>Just where does Consalvo think you'd be able to fit a GPS unit onto a gun?
>These things aren't the size of postage stamps, you know. Moreover, such
>devices require electricity. I suppose criminals are going to make sure
>that a stolen gun's GPS unit is fully powered.
>How much do you want to bet that if GPS trackers were added to guns, that
>the bad guys won't figure out a way to disable them in less than two minutes?

Assuming he's not a totally clueless idiot (which he may well be), this
would most likely fall under the "if you can't make them outright illegal,
make them so difficult and expensive as to be effectively illegal" train of
thought. 

Similar to what the insurance industry tried to do (somewhat successfully,
even) with "named" sportbikes 15/20 years ago.  The insurance rates on
easily identifiable sportbikes like the Honda Hurricane got so high as to
make the short answer "you can't get insurance for that bike".  If you
can't get insurance, you can't ride, and so....  Et Voila!  The insurance
industry has banned certain motorcycles.  Fortunately, that got fixed
later......

>[....]
>
>At 10:54 AM, Anonymous said…
>
>The technology is already available. It is a small chip that will soon be
>on everything from potato chips to cars. It should be on guns. Not optional
>and retrofitting required.

And this guy is totally overlooking the entire (*impossible*) logistical
problem of getting these thing put on *all* (including criminally-owned)
guns.  If you could find the criminals to put these things on their guns,
don't you think it would be simpler to just arrest the criminals right
there? 

(Reverse the logic -- Look at how Mark Twain used the soot-covered pig in
"The Prince and the Pauper" as a way to mark things....  It's not bad if it
*has* the mark, it's bad if it *doesn't* have the mark.)

And even if you could put these things on all guns, the bad guys would just
disable them immediately anyway.

Here's the best answer to people who want to put any kind of "technology"
on serious firearms:

 http://www.angelfire.com/comics/pinton/gun.html

Ok, I feel better now.   :-) 

Enjoy!

Mitch
--
Mitch Kutzko
Project: http://dast.nlanr.net  |  Personal: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu

An Operating System Ready for the Desktop

In the Windows vs. Linux debate we keep hearing that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Depending upon what you want to do with your PC, this may or may not be the case. For example, you may have applications that you must run, which do not run on Linux. Or, you may want to setup network printing, which remains a bitch and a half on Linux.

The implication of this is that Windows is ready for the desktop. Not necessarily. The main problem running Windows is that while it's generally easy to use, install applications, and setup peripherals -- including printers shared over the LAN -- keeping a Windows box running well and free of viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, and other assorted malware requires a saavy user. But, the vast majority of users are anything but.

This past Saturday I went over to client's house to help get two of the three PCs on his home network squared away. His older daughter's PC was unable to open MS Word or iTunes, and was having intermittent problems accessing his wireless network. It turned out that the box was infected with a Trojan horse which installed mIRC and was phoning home. (I forget which exact Trojan it was, unfortunately.)

After determining what malware was infecting the PC, I got rid of Norton Internet Security, which although up-to-date, hadn't detected it, and replaced it with AVG. AVG detected the infected files and allowed me to delete them. I also installed and ran full scans with Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware, after replacing the stock HOSTS file with the file from MVPS.org.

Another program I loaded was K9 Web Protection, from Blue Coat Systems. This is a content filtering application made freely available (free as in beer) for home use. By default, it has a fairly restrictive filter set which we modified to only block sites determined to be sources of malware or privacy risks. The logging function will enable my client to better monitor what his daughter is doing on the Internet.

Expecting your average, not-computer-saavy user to keep up with antivirus, antispyware, a hosts files, and content filtering, on top of Windows Update, just isn't realistic.

The second PC I had to look at turned out to have a bad video board. It's a Gateway that's about 4 or 5 years old. I've previously replaced the hard disk in the box and now it's had a second hardware failure. I told my client I could replace this video card, but explained to him in my opinion that sinking any more money into the box was more or less equivalent to putting money into a 1989 car.

With the experience of the other PCs on his LAN in mind, and the fact that his kids uses Macs at school, and my suggestion he consider the option, he ordered a loaded Mac Mini to replace the Gateway. His daughters will be able to do their schoolwork just as easily on the Mac as on a PC, yet he won't have to be concerned that the machine will need an endless stream of antivirus and antispyware updates.

Windows advocates are fond of pointing out that Linux is only free if your time isn't worth anything. The same is true of Windows, which is often perceived as free because it comes loaded on the majority of computers. The initial cost for a Mac is higher than for a Wintel box. But the long-term cost can be much less, especially if you have to pay someone like me to come into your house or office and fix the mess that Windows becomes after a short period of use. This level of support is not needed with Macs. The OS's design, based on BSD UNIX, is much more secure and robust. Right now, the operating system that is the most ready for the desktop is Mac OS-X.

Welcome, Langalist Readers

Fred Langa listed this blog in his "They Loaded The Code" section of his email newsletter yesterday and I can tell that my traffic is up. Thanks, Fred, and thanks to all of you who clicked on my URL. Please poke around a bit and I'm sure you'll find something of interest. My choice of topics is somewhat eclectic:

• Computing, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Networking.
• Shooting and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
• General politics and law.
  
• Some personal reflections.

From the CLUELESS IDIOT Department

This guy isn't just an antigunner, he is technologically clueless:

Saying gun manufacturers should take steps to track guns, a Boston city councilor is proposing that global positioning technology be installed in firearms.

Councilor Rob Consalvo wants to put a tracking device into newly manufactured guns and have legal gun owners retrofit their firearms so owners and police can locate and retrieve stolen guns the same way police use a computer chip to locate stolen cars.

Just where does Consalvo think you'd be able to fit a GPS unit onto a gun? These things aren't the size of postage stamps, you know. Moreover, such devices require electricity. I suppose criminals are going to make sure that a stolen gun's GPS unit is fully powered.

How much do you want to bet that if GPS trackers were added to guns, that the bad guys won't figure out a way to disable them in less than two minutes?

I'm surprised Consalvo remembers to breathe if he really thinks this is a good idea.

When The Devil Dances

Yesterday I finished When The Devil Dances, the third book in John Ringo's Posleen War series. (I'd thought that The Watch on The Rhine was next, but I was mistaken.)

Anway, WTDD takes place five years after the Posleen invasion of Earth which happened in Gust Front. All three books are fast moving and exhibit a good sense of humor. For example, there were a couple of references to Army of Darnkness in WTDD. The military aspects of the novels seem to be accurate, which only makes sense as Ringo is a vet of the 82nd Airborne. As a gunnut, I appreciate that for the most part the firearms-related content, of which there's a lot, is generally accurate. There's the occasional blooper, as when Ringo notes that one character's Walther PP is chambered for 7.62mm rounds, when it should say 7.65mm. Close enough for fiction. But one thing I really liked was this little missive from his character Wendy Cummings, given to some new shooters:

The most important thing is that; never, ever point a gun, even an "unloaded" gun, at anything you don't want destroyed. For the purposes of safety, every gun is loaded. Guns aren't evil magic; they're just tools for killing something at a distance. Treat them as useful, but dangerous tools, like a circular saw or a chainsaw, and you'll be fine.

That right there is the essence of firearms safety.

I'm enjoying the Human-Posleen War series a lot. Between it and Eric Flint's 1632, I've been devouring scifi like I haven't done since before I started my first term of law school. So, tonight I'll be ordering Hell's Faire, the next Ringo book, 1633, and The Watch on The Rhine.

Google Earth for Mac

w00t! Google Earth is now available for Mac. The system requirements, per Google, are:

Minimum System Configuration

• OS: Windows 2000, XP, or Mac OS X (10.4)
• CPU: 600MHz
• Free Hard Disk Space: 400 MB
• System RAM: 128 MB
• Video RAM: 16 MB
• Screen Resolution: 1024x768, 32-bit color
• Internet: 128 Kbps ("broadband")
• For better performance: Recommended Configuration

Which in this day and age aren't unreasonable, especially when you consider the heavy duty graphics Google Earth throws on your screen.

I previously installed Google Earth on Bagend, my Althon box at home, and this morning installed it on my 1.2 GHz G4 iBook with 768 MB of RAM, connected to a cable modem. It ran fine, with Thunderbird, Firefox, and Adium running in the background.

Aside from the general WOW! factor initial impression that Google Earth generates, it has some very practical uses. E.g., you can use it for getting directions. I plan to use it to work out routes and possible destinations in case I need to evacuate due to a disaster, man-made or natural.

New Macs

There were several interesting announcements at this morning's Macworld keynote speech by Steve Jobs, but the one of most interest to me is the new MacBook Pro (sounds rather Scottish, doesn't it?). The new professionally-oriented Mac laptop starts at $1999 with a 15.4" screen, 1.67 GHz Intel Core Duo CPU, 512 MB of RAM, a 128 MB ATI Radeon video adapter, and 80 GB 5400 RPM hard disk. Sounds pretty damn sweet to me. A 1.83 GHz version is also available with a 256 MB video adapter.

Too bad I can't afford one. Even if I did have the extra money for one, I'd wait awhile to let Apple work out the inevitable bugs resulting from switching to a new platform.

The new Intel based Macs, including the Intel iMacs, start shipping next month.

Another week gone by

Please pardon the lack of posting. I'll try to do more frequent updates.

As mentioned in my last post, I downloaded John Ringo's Gust Front from the Baen Free Library. Like A Hymn Before Battle, it's very good military scifi. The series clearly owes a great deal to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, mainly with the powered battle armor. This is not a bad thing.

Yesterday while out doing errands I checked out the local Borders and Barnes & Noble to see if I could pick up a hard copy of The Watch on the Rhine, but struck out. I think I'll place an order for it and one or two more books in the series from Amazon.

Friday I received an order of some new AR-15 magazines and some spare parts from DSG Arms, down in Texas. This is the second time I've ordered from DSG and both were good experiences. The magazines are the GI-type 30 rounders, but have a black Teflon coating, rather than the GI moly coat. The black color better matches the rest of my AR-15A3 than the GI gray, but more importantly, the Teflon finish is supposed to be more durable than the moly.

The spare parts kit is an ArmaLite M15 Field Repair Kit, which I augmented with a couple each extractor O-rings, firing pin retaining pins, and extractor pins. I.e., little parts that would be easy to lose and without which the rifle won't function.

Last week's eBlast from MidwayUSA pointed me to their sale on Rifle Basix sears, on sale for $15 off. I have two on order, one for my Savage Mark IIGL and 93GL. I like both rifles a lot, as they are accurate and well made. Unfortunately they ship with terrible triggers. The Rifle Basix replacement sears should allow me to lower the trigger pulls down into the 2 lb. range which will enahnce practical accuracy. Reports when I get 'em.

Baen Free Library

Many of my readers no doubt already know about Baen's Free Library, but I'll put in a plug for it anyway. Baen Books, publisher of many fine works of scifi, has seen fit to make available for free download many of their titles. You can choose HTML, RTF, or MS Reader formats. So far I'm favoring RTF and reading the books in Word 2004 on my iBook.

Last night I finished John Ringo's A Hymn Before Battle. It's military scifi based on the premises that an invasion by the alien Posleen is coming in about 5 years. Earth is warned by friendly aliens who are also under attack by the Posleen. The story is reminiscent of both Alan Dean Foster's "A Call To Arms" series, with a bit of RAH's Starship Troopers thrown in.

I downloaded the sequel, Gust Front, which I'll be starting later today. Once I finish that I plan to buy the next book in the series.

Hats off to Baen for doing this.