Category: Technology

It’s been some time since I had anything to do with fiber optic cabling, and my experience years ago was with Gigabit Ethernet over good old fashioned OM1 with no run greater than a few hundred feet. Back when I started with that, companies were just getting settled on 100Base-T for their LAN drops and there wasn’t yet any Cat6. Gigabit was something new and exciting.

So here I find myself years later looking to wire up my gun club for cameras, property-wide WiFi, and an access card system.

I know I’ll get people who will say “microwaves!” but we have large berms separating parts of the property, and I’d have to trench a good bit of new cable and clear a good bit of brush to get a clean line of sight to the places I need to go. Plus, I like wires. You can’t jam wires. I don’t have to worry about clearing and maintaining brush with wires. I can also get full GigE speed with wires.

The convention wisdom has been, and if you search the Internet still seems to be: “Multimode for short distances, and single mode for long distances.” Why? Well, cost, and MM is easier to terminate and more tolerant of poor field terminations.

As best as I can tell, the cost difference between a good quality OM3 or OM4 multimode fiber and OS2 single-mode fiber is trivial. Additionally, the SFP transceivers for 1000Base-SX and 1000Base-LX are not terribly different from the vendor I’m looking at. I’m also not planning to do any field terminations: there are plenty of vendors who sell pre-terminated fiber, and I was careful to measure the obsolete or non-functioning copper cables I pulled out of all the runs.

My question to anyone out there who’s well-versed and current with fiber: why would anyone use multi-mode fiber for campus length runs when there’s little price difference? Keep in mind I have a few runs that push the limits of multi-mode fiber at 1Gb/sec (550m) and would be right on the very edge with OM4 multi-mode fiber for 10Gb/sec (400m). So why not use single-mode? I can go 10km with single-mode, and 10Gb/sec is no problem. Am I missing something? It seems that maybe multi-mode has advantages if you’re looking to do field terminations, but the price advantage it might have once had isn’t’ really there anymore.

Addendum question: There are a handful of vendors out there selling pre-terminated cables. Price differences seem to be substantial. Are there any vendors to prefer? To avoid?

If posting has been light, one reason is I’m spending nearly all my non-working hours trying to sort out a new membership management system for my club. I consider this part of the “local engagement” I was speaking about earlier.

We largely decided not to go with a cloud-based solution, which is fine with me. Maybe this will be my curmudgeon technology issue, because the young folks seem to love the cloud, and even I have to admit, having worked with Amazon Web Services professionally, and helped a few clients through migrations, Bezos has built one hell of a nice ecosystem. But I like the saying, “There is no cloud. There’s just someone else’s computer.” I don’t like the idea of trusting personal data to an entity I don’t really know or trust, and who only sees me as one of many income sources. Also, AWS is damned expensive. So are most other Cloud solutions.

We have an existing card access system for the gate and for the various doors around the property. The old system worked off an Access database. Recently we upgraded that software, and the new version is backed by SQL Server. The old card access system was a mess. There were people in the system who had been dead for some time and still had active cards. People were missing from the system who were members. I think some of them may be grandfathered lifers who just never bothered picking up an access card. It took another trustee helping me sort that out, and I’m still not sure all the cards are assigned correctly.

Originally I had chosen to put the member database in MySQL. Since I already have SQL Server running, why not just use that? Saves having to run a Linux machine and cuts down on the number of skill sets needed to maintain the system. As long as I’m cutting MySQL out of the picture, I might as well also cut OpenLDAP and set up Active Directory to use with Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS). I’m teaching myself a bit of PowerShell to make a script that will push out changes in the member database to the card access system, to QuickBooks (via qODBC), and to Active Directory.

After working with PowerShell scripting a bit, I’ve decided I hate it with a burning white hot passion. At this point I’ll probably stick to it because I’ve already invested the time, but the future of that function will probably be with Python if serious changes are ever required in the future. So in the end the system has ended up being far more Microsoft than I expected going in, because I had no idea what the new card system would look like. Our new card system will even work with an ID card printer to manage and print member badges, so we got one of those too.

I think what I’m coming up with will be a decent platform for the next decade or so. It will certainly make managing dues processing for our 1300 members easier than the old paper process.

I don’t often talk about my local gun club on these pages, but in this case I’m seeking some advice. You, dear readers, often have ideas I didn’t think of, or know of products I haven’t come across. I have been the club’s secretary since, I think 2009 at this point, and now I am tasked with rethinking some of the club’s processes. Let me give you some background:

• For years our club was run by a small handful of dedicated people who did most of the work, including handling dues processing every year. This was a very manual, paper process.
• Those people have either died, been voted out of office, or stepped aside. The people coming in don’t have that kind of time to dedicate, so we’re going to be much more dependent on process and automation than we have in the past.
• I am now helping to devise a system for invoicing members via e-mail, allowing them to pay online with a card, and only doing paper invoicing for people who prefer that.
• Whatever new system I come up with needs to be usable by people with average computer skills for baby boomers. It’s OK if it takes mad skill to set up, but beyond that it mostly has to just work.
• We need a secure way to back up data. I was thinking maybe using an encrypted S3 bucket at Amazon. Off site storage at my house is another option, and wouldn’t cost anything except the cost of a machine and disk, but we’re trying to move away from the club’s processes depending on single people.
• We’ve long wanted to use a “members only” forum. I like Google Groups, but I don’t want to have to manage accounts on Google and on club systems.

At the center of this, our new Financial Secretary has chosen to manage his role using QuickBooks. I have managed to enter our membership information into it, but I’m disappointed by how bad some of Intuit’s user interface is. For instance, I can’t sort the customer list by member number. It sorts it alphabetically, rather than numerically. There doesn’t seem to be any good way to change this.

QuickBooks may be a good accounting tool, but it sucks as a way to manage members. I’ve been looking at this product, to possibly sync certain fields in QuickBooks with a MySQL database, using Access as a front end to MySQL. This way membership information can be managed in two places, and it also would offer a means to set up MySQL-backed OpenLDAP for use with Google Cloud Directory Sync so we could set up “members only” Google Groups. I want a single place to manage membership information, and have it automatically update in QuickBooks, LDAP, etc, without someone having to manually update this information in multiple places.

I’m curious if anyone has any experience with this. I know another area club uses Wild Apricot, but our Financial Secretary was worried its QuickBook integration was tedious. I am also a bit wary about cloud applications, both because of security issues, and because if it goes under, or they make a major feature change that we’re not prepared for, we could be stuck up a creek without a paddle. I’m OK with using Google Groups, since that’s not a core function. We could live without it a while. But dues invoicing and managing membership information is critical.

If anyone has done anything like this, or something similar, I’d be curious to hear whether you think my idea is sound, or maybe there’s a better way.

David Burge on Social Media:

Twitter is bad, but FB is worse. Twitter tells you random strangers are obnoxious assholes, FB tells you your friends & family are. /27

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 1, 2017

The background of his multi-part Twitter rant is that someone gave him crap for posting hot rod pictures while the world burned. Yeah, that would set me off too. His entire rants speaks to me more than I wish it did. Go to his feed  and start at /1

I’ve been very intrigued by this supposed reactionless EM drive. When I first heard of it, I was very skeptical, since it violates every law of physics we think we know. Hell, I’m still skeptical. But the fact is that several teams have built one of these contraptions and have measured thrust being generated. Now in MIT Technology Review, we’re offered a theory by which this drive could legitimately be producing thrust. As much as I think there’s probably something else going on here, I really hope this is true. At the risk of people accusing me of being a Debbie Downer again, this late election season has convinced me the only long term hope for libertarian-minded people is getting the hell off this rock and leaving the world’s troubles behind. I’m becoming more convinced that free people need a frontier, because without one, eventually, the meddlers, swindlers, and sycophants of the world catch-up to us.