Monthly Archives: November 2012

Engineering Mall

Visited Purdue ECE. I was a guest lecturer at EE400 and EE694A

Jack's Travel, , ,

Centennial MarkerWas a guest lecturer at the Purdue ECE senior seminar class, ECE400 and the graduate student seminar, ECE694A. I gave a presentation on the problems engineers were solving to build the 4G-LTE mobile network.  I surveyed issues of spectrum, user experience, macro-cells, metro cells, mobile application design and some examples of engineering issues meeting public ethics.

I had two very lively classes.  I got lots of questions and was very impressed with the students.  Further I was delighted with the ECE department team who hosted me along with two student ambassadors.

Tips for travelers.  The Purdue  EE building is located on Northwestern Ave.  The Purdue Visitor Information Center is across the street.  Park there.  My hosts reserved an “A” parking sticker for me; for past visits, I was able to buy a parking pass for $5.  Next to the EE building is the MSEE building; it has a nice snack shop area; it’s a good place for visitors who are early, to hang-out.  I visited the HKN lounge in the basement of the EE building; it was hopping!  Good to visit but maybe not the place for an out of town visitor.

 

I attach to this posting some photos from the nice campus.

Racespace Cloud Instance Stuck, Tips for rebooting using console

Weather Station, Web Programming, ,

My self hosted website, running in a Rackspace Cloud instance, got stuck and I figured out how to unstuck it.

NapervilleWeather.net

My weather website, NapervilleWeather.net, is hosted on Rackspace Cloud.  Last night it went down.  I couldn’t ping, ssh, or retrieve the website.  I really had no idea what was going on, so I did what I would have done if the server was in my basement, I rebooted.

Rackspace Cloud Instance — console.

The Rackspace Cloud portal has a reboot button.  I tried first the soft reboot (that didn’t work), then I did a hard reboot.  It still didn’t work.  So I went to the Rackspace chat line.  A couple of nice people told me about the console.   Since I hadn’t ever had a problem before, I didn’t know about it.

Rackspace Console

The console told me that my instance was stuck in single user mode because of file system check errors.  I called up a couple of my friends and they recommended I exit and let the reboot continue. The most likely source of fsck errors were from me doing a hard reboot.  /tmp and /var/log might have been hosed up.

That I did and now everything is ok.  But, I had trouble figuring this out because I was running the portal from my work.  The console works through VNC and apparently uses ports that are blocked by my company firewall.  I had to go home and access the console from my VNC friendly NAT / Router .  At work, the console was just a blank screen.

 

#IVotedToday About 20 minutes at 5th Ave Station in #Naperville. #Election2012 #Vote

Photography,

#IVotedToday About 20 minutes at 5th Ave Station in #Naperville. #Election2012 #Vote, a photo by jkozik on Flickr.

#Naperville #Election2012

 Naperville Election 2012.

Here’s the sticker I got after I voted today. The polling place, 5th Ave Station in Naperville Election 2012 , was crowded, but not too bad. About a 20 minute wait.. Even though it’s a train station, there was a big block of parking spots.

The ballots was a large legal sized page of paper.  I was given a black felt tip marker.  When done, a slid the ballot into a xerox machine sized vote reader.  I was delighted to get the “I voted today” sticker.