[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes - 12/20/06
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:32:00 -0500
:: Holiday Schedules for Lab and Warehouse
The warehouse session this week is cancelled for the holiday.
John, Goose and I are going to meet briefly at the lab Thursday
evening and take accumulated donations from the lab to the warehouse.
Goose is returning several rack mount servers he tested and drive
wiped at home. We want to look for an AMD chip to replace the damaged
Athlon in the mobo Dale donated. Goose will announce the meeting time
on the list.
Lab will meet next Tuesday.
:: A+ Study Group
Albert, Janice and several others are considering cooperatively
purchasing a DVD study guide for A+ certification and organizing a
study group. If you are interested in joining the group, reply to the
list and let Albert know. He may advertise the group on South Bend
Craig's List.
:: Laptop Next Step
Dale screwed the LCD bezel in place. We opened and shut the lid
several times. The LCD didn't fall out, and the lid didn't fall off. Excellent!
The next step is determining whether the battery or the charging
circuit is dead. The battery won't charge. Goose looked at the
battery bay. There is a 4-pin connector to the internal power. I will
try to determine the pinout so we can test whether there is
sufficient power at the connector to charge a battery.
Dale also donated two motherboards and installed one of them in the
Systemax box with the fried mobo. Unfortunately, the Athlon cpu was
dead. We think the mobo itself is good.
:: Deman Hard Drives and Monitors
Dale is continuing to experiment with demanning hard drives and monitors.
His current concerns are:
(a) whether to purchase drills and drill bits to accelerate demanning
hard drives; and,
(b) how to safely discharge the stored high voltage energy in monitors.
The majority of the hard drives in our recycling inventory are cased
in aluminum. The disks inside the drives are also aluminum, although
newer drives may use ceramic or glass for the disks. The drive cases
and disks don't weigh much. To make a buck recycling them locally, we
need to take them apart rapidly. The best method is to employ
rechargeable hand drills with the proper screw bits. Dale reports all
the drives he's disassembled use just two screw sizes.
Dale has discovered the copper wire in monitors is worth four times
more if we extract the coils and sell them separately. Monitors hold
considerable high voltage energy. We must dissipate the energy before
sticking our hands or hand tools into the cases. Goose, Dale and I
shared what we know about the problem. We decided to talk to Big Bob
the Plummer about ground in the warehouse and to ask Mike to
investigate how to test the ground at the warehouse to ensure it will
safely handle discharging monitors. Goose knows how to fabricate a
discharging tool.
:: TCL / Sqlite Web App
The past few weeks, I have spent considerable time training myself to
use Tcl, Rivet/Apache and Sqlite to build dynamic, database driven
web apps. I am not an MIT engineer so my apps are puny. Still, they
are useful, if simple, models. I presented a quick demo of the ideas
and implementation techniques.
John asked an interesting question: Can the apps construct and run ad
hoc SQL queries? Goose and I believe Tcl and Sqlite would be good at
producing a web form to construct and run ad hoc queries. We may work
this up during several labs for fun and to teach.
Goose installed Sqlite on the lab server so we can experiment with
and teach web app programming at the lab. I plan to do an intro class
in html forms, Tcl and Sqlite in the near future.
:: Sally Web Apps
Now that Goose and I are getting experience writing web apps, I spoke
to Captain Nick re FGM creating a web app for the Sally to use in
their annual holiday food and toy basket drives. He thinks it would
be helpful and asked us to talk to the social services director, Liz
F., about it.
In fact, Goose and I met Liz several Tuesdays ago and briefly
discussed our offer to code a web app with her. Liz said there are
two potential applications: the holiday food drive and the "adopt" a
family program. Both could benefit from online application forms and
administrative reports. Her pick was the adopt-a-family application.
As much as possible, the web apps we do for the Sally will be written
during labs so everyone can be bored silly...erm...benefit from the experience.
###
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