AustinTek homepage

Austintek provides wifi connectivity and networking for conferences, meetings and outdoor events, and installs permanent wifi setups for businesses.

Austintek does sysadmin for unix computers (and clusters of computers).

Austintek can do contract programming, benchmarking and data analysis. We can program in -

The Linux Virtual Server (LVS) Project is a GPL'ed layer 4 router for Linux, which allows you to combine low cost servers (e.g. web, database) into a single highly available, high throughput server. Here's the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) HOWTOs. For my write-ups on LVS (performance, meeting note, trivia quiz, iron-on labels, presentations, configure script), please see my LVS page.

Gnucash is a GPL double entry accounting package. Here's my Gnucash tutorial. This tutorial is referenced from the Gnucash website documentation page. This tutorial was delivered, on 9 Jul 2001, to the North Carolina Sysadministrator's Association (NCSA), an organisation based in RTP, NC, USA. I was the treasurer of NCSA from Dec 2000 to Dec 2003.

dual booting Linux and WinXP from a flash drive

I maintain (and co-authored along with Michael NV3Z) the AZ_PROJ azimuthal equidistant projection website. This projection produces maps of the world in which you are at the center. Great circles through your location are straight lines enabling you to determine bearings to anywhere in the world. The code for the map generator is freely available under GPL.

A 50yr plan for ham radio in response to the ARRL's plan for restructing for ham radio.

Aurora Opening of 15-16 Jul 2000: Analysis of Amateur Radio VHF and UHF logs

Analysis of the 1999 Spring Sprints (the sprints are a VHF/UHF contest on the US east coast).

A talk (http://www.austintek.com/outsourcing/outsourcing.html) given to the North Carolina Systems Administrators (http://www.ncsysadmin.org/) 12 Jul 2004. Outsourcing is the replacement of American workers by cheaper labor from overseas. The labor can be imported into the country, e.g. by giving the worker an H1-B visa, or by contracting the job to workers overseas.

How I recovered a disk with the undocumented Critical 19 error.

Hiking Trip to area near the Mt. of the Holy Cross, Colorado, 8-15 Jun 2002 with an old friend Steve. Steve, not to be outdone, has written his version the trip (also available doc format).

Canoeing in Algonquin National Park, Ontario, Canada, Jul 2003.

Canoeing in Algonquin National Park, Ontario, Canada, Jul 2004.

The Larapinta Trail, McDonnell Ranges, Northern Territory, Australia, Aug 2002.

Leaving Earth (the Russian manned space program) and Genesis (the Apollo 8 trip to the Moon) by Robert Zimmerman.

Use of historical cloud data to select a date for a star party in North Carolina.

Wifi in the Wilderness: Setting up internet connectivity for observers at the Mid-Atlantic Star Party using wifi.

Yet another home analemma project: the Mack family driveway analemma .

Computer Programming for Middle School students: An introductory course with Python as the high level language.

Class lessons for a group of 7th graders with no previous exposure to programming (as of Aug 2008, now 8th graders - in the US 7th, 8th grade are called Middle School). The students are doing this after school, one day a week for about 90min, on their own time and not for credit. My son's school didn't want me to teach the class using any of the school facilities, as they thought it would compete with a class in Java given to advance placement math 12th graders. However I could use the school facilities, if I didn't teach anything which would fullfil a requirement (which I assume meant anything practical). So the class is at my home and is free. Since this is a hobby activity for the kids, I don't ask them to do homework.

The course is finished (Oct 2009) and the kids are now learning C. I thought I would cover more material than I did in this course. I can see on reading my notes that the material isn't as clear as it could be. I guess it's as good as it gets on the first iteration. The kids didn't get to do any projects in their own time.

Note

Google stopped indexing the programming class page about Aug 2008, when the class notes reached 1M (the other indexing services seem to have no trouble with it). There is no mention of size limits on google's guide to author's page e.g. googles addurl and associated pages. I've divided the sensible single page into teensy-weensy pages in the hopes that google can now handle the material. I haven't changed the internal links to external links (so many of the links don't work); I'll wait till I know that google has indexed these small files first. If you want the material I'm using in class, go to the link immediately above. Here is the same material divided into what I hope are google sized pages. Introduction, Primitive Data Types (http://www.austintek.com/python_class/python_class.sect_1.html) Variables, Conditionals, Iteration, Functions, Modules, Stru ctured Programming (http://www.austintek.com/python_class/python_class.sect_2.html) Real Numbers, Square Roots, Numerical Integration (http://www.austintek.com/python_class/python_class.sect_3.html) Reference Material, Future Classes (http://www.austintek.com/python_class/python_class.sect_4.html)

Material the wasn't used in the Introductory Course. Presumably some of it will go into the C course.

Complex Numbers.

Computer Programming for High School students: C as the high level language.

Class lessons for a group of 9th graders who have taken my introductory programming course.

Computer Programming for High School students: Electricity.

This short course was added in the middle of the C class, when the students found that their lack of knowledge of computer hardware was making it difficult to learn C.

Computer Programming for High School students: Mechanics.

This short course was added in the middle of the electricity course, so that students would know about forces and energy.