The continuing UPS saga

I've been continuing to monitor the behavior of my UPS using the UPSwatch tool I wrote.  It is quite consistently, every 48 hours, going into a mode in which, although still on line power, its output vopltage drops from 125V to 115V and it begins suddenly discharging its battery pack.  The battery charge plummets at first, then gradually levels out, dropping to just over 40% over a period of about five hours before leveling out. It did it again at about 1900 yesterday, had almost completely leveled out at somewhere around 44% by midnight, and now seems to be holding steady at 43.1% charge.  It will apparently remain at this charge level indefinitely until I interrupt line power for a few seconds, forcing it to switch over to battery.  Then, when I reconnect the power, it will switch back to line and say, "Oh, gee, I guess I should recharge this battery, huh?" and charge the battery back to 100% charge, typically within 20 to 30 minutes.  Then, 48 hours later, it'll go through the whole rigmarole again.  You can see an example here.

This time, I'm just going to let it sit for a couple of days before I bump the power, just to see what happens.  Needless to say, this is getting pretty old.  It's looking fairly clear that the UPS has a fault somewhere in its firmware.

Granted, it does have old firmware. I need to see if I can get it reflashed to the latest firmware (which can be done only from Windows) and see if that solves the problem.

(Update:  The gap in the data is where I had upsd stopped while I hunted for the correct-type-and-polarity serial cable I could have SWORN I had in order to reflash the UPS with new firmware ... no such luck.)

Why mandating backdoors is bad

Bruce Schneier discusses exactly how bad an idea wiretapping the Internet is.

State o'de Ronin

The state o'de Ronin.  Well.  "Jitters" would seem to be a good start.

You see ... well, I've been sitting on this a little for the last couple of weeks in an effort not to enumerate potential avians with uncollapsed wave functions.  But, I start a new job tomorrow, as an open-source database administrator for Datapipe Corp., 100% telecommute.

After so long, it's still a little hard to believe it's really going to happen.  It comes just in the nick of time, as with cymrullewes's unemployment benefits finally exhausted for good, we were looking the oncoming freight train squarely in the headlight.  Then this came up, well, out of nowhere, really.  An old friend put my resume into the hands of a technical manager, not a HR droid; the technical manager looked at my resume and said, "Wow, we want this guy."

One of the things I'd been very nervous about, looking for work, was that I absolutely could not risk any short term contracts or contract-to-hire, because of how disability works.  Or, as it turned out, worked ... it turns out that since I last looked into it, they changed the return-to-work portion of the SSI disability program significantly.  Without delving into too much detail, the most important part is that instead of three months to accomplish a "successful return to work" before losing disability, I get nine months to make it work.  That makes it a much safer bet.

Work finally started showing up for cymrullewes too.  So between one thing and another, it looks like far from eating a freight train, we're going to find ourselves back on our feet in double-quick time.  (Not to mention being able to afford to heat the house properly this winter, which is not to be underestimated.)