out of context

11:37 pm - Office space

I really have too many computers in my office at home.



7 at last count, not including the all the embedded computers in the various gadgets and gizmos.

At least this doesn't look like the 1990s.

08:12 am - New computer?

I ordered stuff for a new file server yesterday.

Don't worry. My current obsolete server isn't getting retired - it's going to be doing repurposed into a backup role along the lines of a Time Capsule. ( But it might get upgraded along the way... )

Current Mood: tired

08:13 am - Life imitates anime

Doing the Japanese life-size Gundam one better, some guy from Alaska (Sarah Palin's hometown!) built himself an operational robot power suit.

I know you all want one.

from metafilter.

09:14 am - Three years later...

A small portion of the mountain of text I wrote for my dissertation is actually getting published.

I still need to reformat it into a "final" form, and resubmit it. And pay; the open access charges are huge, but hopefully the University is paying for it. But at the least I've convinced a small jury of my peers that some small portion of the work I did for all that time back in school is worth something.

It's a start.

12:50 pm - Lunchtime

After lunch I walk back into my office.
It smells bad. Burnt-electronics bad.

I start poking at my assorted circuit board mess.
Nothing wrong, nothing hot, nothing burning.

Pop.

I realize a monitor isn't working.

A quick search of the office to find a replacement,
some lugging and relocation,
and much fishing for cables ensues.

Our contractor---the only guy with LCDs---wonders if it is time to replace these beasts.
"They suck power and give you a hernia."

Maybe he has a point.

And my office still smells.

08:21 pm - Trash day

It's trash day in Elmhurst today, and the vultures are out in force.

I put out a half-broken dehumidifer; it was gone minutes later.
I put out a stripped computer and a broken AV receiver, and they too disappeared quickly.

While I was dragging a batch of stuff out, I saw two sets of trucks drive by.
One stopped and grabbed a big plank of some kind.

One of my neighbors put out a big play set. It got snapped up.

They pawed through my crap box and pulled out a lamp.
They pawed through the neighbor's garbage tote and pulled out his garbage!

His garbage!

It's a jungle out there.

06:22 pm - Fixing crappy consumer electronics

One of my favorite tricks for fixing cheap consumer electronics is for remotes and other such things with button pads that aren't working right, and uses aluminum foil and scotch tape.

Most of them use little graphite pads and a PCB with bare traces to detect button presses. Eventually the little graphite pads become insufficiently conductive and can't be detected as shorting the traces. When this happens, the buttons become flaky or stop working entirely. To fix this, I just put a little bit of tape over the plastic spacer between the PCB and the keypad, and then cut some small pieces of aluminum foil and drop them in the holes.

Usually that's all you need to do, and the buttons will work perfectly again (better than new!) Depending on the exact layout, it might be necessary to put a bit of tape on the other side of the plastic spacer to keep things from touching when the button's not being pushed, and prevent the button from being registered all the time. But once everything's just so, it's an effective repair and I've never had buttons fixed this way go bad again. If I have to take the device apart again, it's because another button died.

I just had to do this to one of the new cordless phones we got last year. Usually it takes more than a year for this to happen. And I thought that these were slightly less cheap crap as opposed to the usual bargain-basement crap. Oh well.

*stares at the leftover screw still sitting on his desk*

04:41 pm - My office

Yes, I have too many computers.
And a chair.

04:37 pm - Happy St. Patrick's day

Let's celebrate...



... by dying the salt green?

Current Mood: confused

06:08 pm - Wrong answer

Your boss drops a couple of untested prototype boards on your desk, and some other parts that are partially stripped bits from another product, with instructions to make them work together.

do you:

(a) Carefully test each of the boards before taking out the wire spools and soldering iron?

or

(b) Assume things work and that when put together as documented nothing will catch on fire?

Yeah, I thought so.

And when you're trying to build the software for these mysterious beasts and it doesn't work, do you to poke at things with a debugger to try figure out what's going wrong or just upgrade your compiler in blind hope that it fixes it?

Current Mood: annoyed

06:02 pm - Writer's Block: AKA

gucky

07:13 pm - Accidental pico de gallo

1. Decide you're going make to pasta in marinara sauce with fresh vegetables for dinner.
2. Pull two tomatoes, one onion, two-thirds of a jar of marinated red and yellow peppers, and a big bag of cilantro out of the refrigerator.
3. Dice tomatos and onion. Cut up a good hunk of cilantro. Dump in pot.
4. Look at pot and realize this looks more like pico de gallo than pasta sauce.
5. Add marinated peppers anyway.
6. Get one lime from refrigerator. Cut in half, juice it into pot. Put rind in a glass of water.
7. Add cumin to taste. Drink the water.
8. Mix and serve!

I made quesadillas. They came out great.

09:37 am - forgetful

Last night, I dreamed about trying to do things but forgetting about them, or thinking they were done but actually not, because I was half-asleep.

Actually, there was more than that, but I forgot what it was because I was half asleep.

Go figure.

05:17 pm - Email security

I got the the following in an email from Chase:

    Dear Valued Customer-

    Chase sent you an e-mail earlier this week, informing you that your Year
    End Tax Statement is now available on Chase Online. Unfortunately, the
    information in the
    'E-mail Security Section' at the bottom of the email may not have
    reflected your name or the last four digits of your account number. We
    apologize for this technical error.

    We want to assure you:

      * The e-mail was a valid communication from Chase.
      * No one else can access your Chase Online account because this is
        only accessible via your secure User ID and Password.

09:17 pm - I don't get it

I spent this afternoon fighting with a widget that didn't seem to work.

It's a modem, and it modulates, and it demodulates.
The status LEDs all light up at the right times.
The signals going in look right.
The signals going out look right.
Everything looks right.

But no matter which of several gadgets I plug it into, the gadget it's attached to fails.
If I swap in another widget, though, the gadget works fine.

Current Mood: confused

11:41 pm - Let's play Season Bingo

The snow all melted.

As usual, some of the resulting water made it into the basement. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, because a dehumidifier can pull the water out and put it in the sump faster than it seeps in. But the dehumidifier broke last fall, and I hadn't gotten to replacing it yet.

Because I wouldn't need it until the spring, when all the snow melts and it starts raining. In other words, until today's weather.

Didn't winter just start a few days ago?

Current Mood: confused

11:17 pm - Broken, broken, and not broken

I bought a pair of 1.5TB Seagate drives for the file server in newegg's Black Friday sale, along with a crappy SATA controller. These drives are famous for a stupid firmware bug that causes them to randomly freeze.

Yup, mine have the buggy firmware.

Conveniently, Newegg posted the firmware update, which solves the problem. At least, that's the theory. So I try to find a working floppy and write out the update to a floppy, and discover the server's floppy doesn't seem to work anymore. Several CD-R coasters later, I manage to get the upgrade to run on the server, but it just spit out a cryptic "error 2." After doing some more digging (and making some more CD coasters) I eventually come to the conclusion that this means that my crappy SATA controller isn't recognized by the firmware updater.

So I think about trying to trigger the bug, and run iozone in a loop for a few hours. No problems. Hmm. I dig a bit further, and discover that a workaround for the bug has been added to the Linux kernel. The workaround? Disable native command queuing. Wait a minute... the crappy VIA SATA card doesn't support queuing. So I don't need to upgrade them after all!

I guess sometimes two wrongs really does make everything right.

Current Mood: amused

06:46 pm - Things that do not work as they should

The people who designed my latest favorite microcontroller decided that an ordinary baud rate divisor on the serial transceiver wasn't good enough, and designed a fancy fractional divider/pll gizmo for it.

Which actually works, And it means you can run it at 24 MHz and not 22.11 MHz or other such nonsense without losing the 115200 bps rate.

But the people who designed my not-so-favorite module for that microcontroller only connected one of the two serial ports to pins on the module. (They also didn't connect some other lines you need to reflash the microcontroller sans-JTAG. Or reset. But I digress.)

Clearly, nobody thought you might want to change the bit rate on the fly. Because if you do, and then immediately start transmitting characters at the new baud rate, it transmits garbage for a little while. Not too long, just a few character's worth, but enough to get the incoming receiver confused about exactly where characters start and end.

Which makes muxing the functionality that should be split across the two UARTs onto the one I can actually access ...

Somewhat exciting.

Current Mood: tired

12:13 am - Grounds? Who needs grounds?!

I finally got rid of the 60 Hz hum coming from the receiver in the basement.

I thought an optical connection from the computer to the receiver would do it -- after all, the computer was the only grounded thing.

Nope.

Ground the cable TV line to the receiver? That's where the bad ground is coming from, no doubt.

No dice.

Oh well, time for the big guns. Electrical tape on the AC ground to the computer and its monitor. No grounds, no problem!

Yeah, that worked.

Blissful silence.

Safety? Totally not worth it.

10:39 pm - home at least

this last trip was so horrible I don't even know where to begin.
at least it is over now.

Current Mood: tired