Capitalism or Faith

I got a mail yesterday, it may feel a bit like hate-speech at first, but before I share it I would like to put my take on things forward too.
The Western world and most democracies have happily pushed capitalism on the world (oh sorry, I meant to say push democracy), and mix it all in with Christianity. We use large corporations to establish bases in heathen countries employ the natives to work in factiries there and build things for us all to buy and sell, pay the natives a pitance and ship the profits back home. BUT WE DO NOT KILL ANYONE.

If I go live in another country, (which I did do 3 years ago) I first study that countries culture, I mean for pete's aske, I could have emigrated to the Netherlands, but did not on account the language barrier my family would face, I'm in the UK now, its not my intention at all to change this country, but rather enjoy it to the fullest. And it's hard not to disagree with the content of this disgree, in fact I think Kevin is one of the few gutsy citizens of civilised Earth.

Ok the email I got:

'IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT. Take It Or Leave It. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali , we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians. '

'This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom'

'We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society . Learn the language!'

'Most Australians believe in God. This is not some Christian, right wing, political push, but a fact, because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture.'

'We will accept your beliefs, and will not question why. All we ask is that you accept ours, and live in harmony and peaceful enjoyment with us.'

'This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this. But once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our Christian beliefs, or Our Way of Life, I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, 'THE RIGHT TO LEAVE'.'


'If you aren't happy here then LEAVE. We didn't force you to come here. You asked to be here. So accept the country YOU accepted.'

see : radio and article.

How to change Scalextric Drifter braids

Google search is not your friend in this case, so here is my how-to. For some reason the Scalextric homepage has got no instructions on how to do this, and 5 minutes of googling (my limit) yielded no results. So to save you breaking things, or wasting any more time, just click play on the video.


I am still puzzled about the lack of an instruction published by anyone, hence my contribution. (also on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZbcU3Ruvfs) / A better video is available here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvfvRmbrS_o but missing the explanation:
The big thing to help figure it out is the little arrows on the underside, visible only to anyone with good eyes. A bit of firm downward pressure is needed, I found it easier when the blade is rotated 90-degrees to either side before slipping it off.

I finally spotted a small slip of paper latter in the packaging, which shows the little arrows more clearly. Duh!

I've not made a blog post for a long time now, and was loosing courage until now. It's at times when I feel frustrated by everyone just going around and expecting to find the answer and then greedily consuming without ever giving in return, that I get "rilled". I probably have a healthy net-esteem that let's me do this kind of contributing while knowing that if my work is junk, nobody will link it, if it's great, then someone will link it. It's like the law of averages.

Anyway, so if you have kids who love scalextric and you have discovered the joy of drifting, share it. It's the best scalextric fun ever, and you can use your existing set, but beware, the cars take a beating, and so do the braids and tires.

God bless.

Microcontroller projects

My first ever project, is hosted on avrfreaks.net http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?module=Freaks%20Academy&func=viewItem&item_type=project&item_id=1555
There is not a lot to say besides what you can see in the video. To get the source code login to avrfreaks.net - (you will have to. If you are programming an Atmel micro already that's a given) and to find a schematic.... Hmm maybe I will paste it up here too.


(diagram drawn 'ona' copy of the spec-sheet for the AVR microcontroller)


See also this digital solar powered clock done in basic on 2 CPUs:

http://www.cbaird.net

Cycling

Check out this cycle route, about 25 miles which is a nice circular route: the bits
http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Cottenham-Longstanton-Swavesey-and-Aldreth Cottenham-Histon is road, as was Rampton to Longstanton mainly, but the good bits are above Swavesey. I completed it using a hybrid with only a piston in the seat although more suspension was needed for the bits over broken up concrete encountered around Swavesy/Earith. I also have road tyres with no knoblies. Since I do not go to a gym or anything equally defeatest as running to nowhere particular and then right back again, and hate looking at people - some sightseeing which is really great in the area is good. If only one could get a robust camera or camcorder to take a long to capture more of it.
My next bit of bike-work will involve getting knoblies and securing my water-bottle better. actually I loaned my eldest son's Power-rangers bottle. It is cheaper than one from the bike-shop to do it this way; although you do need to drink a lot if you are going quite so far.
A month odd ago we followed a really nice route that have a tea-break in the middle, something we missed out on this time. Once again this rode was fun, and no major problems - I believe that something for the stinging-nettles is probably in order esp. if you cannot jump into a bath afterwards, since the stingers will not just fall off it seems, but maybe that's because I am a hairy bugger.
Kudos to nick for arranging the mapping and finding the route. Right now I try to cycle a few days a week to the office which is only 5 miles away. But since you cannot cycle more than 2 miles without starting to sweat, it's best done as a 'run' with a shower afterwards. I will have to map it out sometime.

This time it will not take 4 weeks

... to count the vote in the Zimbabwean elections. I can only wonder why that is. But I suppose the answer is a dirty white-lie. Is that an oxymoron, or deos it take one to create this situation. I am not sure that the MDC are a party that is really it is baked up to be sometimes. If I had a vote, I would rather have stayed away or spoiled my vote, because neither party is fit to rule, least the MDC at this point. So what can we do? nothing Zanu hold the peoples best interests in mind and their priority to feed the masses of loyal citizens who are leaving in a steady stream as we read this. Can MDC actually run a country, I doubt they have the guts.

Why do we even bother sometimes? is the world a fair place? It's at times like this where going home to RSA is just so senseless.

Comedy of errors

One is never too sure whether you get your moneys worth, but for a laugh, it's got to be a string of things going wrogn . It starts with

1. Register new game online, registration screen wants my street-address, so I fill in the normal -number "1234" -street "icicle lane" -state "south pole". Never ask me for my address unless it really is your business or you are a cop.
   
2. Next, the form crashes telling me I made a SQL error, normally users are not interested in: see dictionary (sql = school, shortcut to a word school)
3. ...I send off a mail to their support, the auto-response has a subject-line "2K Games USA Techncial Support", this is only getting sweeter. so I am at least laughing now.
4. The support login screen has been designed for visual impaired computer-gamers, see where I filled in my e-mail address in some kind of yellow. (browser = IE, with the form auto-fill on).

I log in, and get to manage my support query no problem, one more happy user.

Please do not get me wrong, I think they are a great crowd, and I want to do business, just not on the comedy-circuit. If you had a good chuckle recently why not decipher the little yellow box above and drop me a line.

Amazon.com is land-filling

I am inclined to think they have shares in a disposal company. Why do we need such a big box for some solid-state electronics like a USB wifi dongle? The original Belkin box (contents and inner-box shown) can surely fit into the 'container' about 10 times over. My biggest worry is how does the postie deliver these? By van of course, its not safe to carry huge junk like this around on a bike.
It's not all evil mind you, I just ordered some more stuff of Amazon today, lets see if they are going to add a 'save-the-planet' delivery option next to 'super-saver' and 'express'. I really would like it if other mail-order stores could take up this challenge too.

Last day at work

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

Some thoughts on my last day at work. It's a strange feeling to be 'unemployed' for a few days. I must say it is not the same as a bank-holiday at all. I have 2 boys to look after every bank-holiday, it's no party I tell you. Deja vu? not-really I only ever did this twice before, the first time was packing all my stuff into a 2L ford station-wagon and driving from Cape Town to Johannesburg. I battled a bit in Johannesburg, but at least I had a job to go to, and I must admit there are always things I would have changed. But one thing I would not, I was not glad to be rid of the old place at all. You always think to yourself, at last I am getting out of this wretched place, and away from all the work that I hate. Hey, for some of us, work is fun, challenging, learning or stretching and something I generally want to enjoy 50% of the time. The other 50% is pure hard work (normally mental effort for most of us).

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

When the fun things get less, or you see something where you can do more - that's when you need to move out of the comfort-zone. At heart I am a comfort-zone man. I like to tune my environment to suite me. I have learned lately that it really is more and more 'who you know, not what', and this pushes the work-focus onto working with people more often, and doing it better. Strangely most engineers are right-brain thinkers, not left-brainers getting all creative on you, as a right thinker, emotions in the workplace is not my forte'.

Leaving my Job in RSA at Adroit was hard (doubly because I was leaving the country too), and as always the last day still feels funny - it's not something I want to do again and again, so last Thursday was hard, luckily my login is supposed to lock me out after 4:30, so I had a hard deadline (well I assumed that even if my network account is still working, that it's a bad time to be working hard). So I was lucky to have some code to prototype and hack together and keep me busy on my last Symbian day. I would have been disappointed if I got pushed to do extra work-things in a hurry, I mean what motivation is there to build something of quality?
Bad things in my experience at Symbian were the total flood of people to deal with, the difficulty in getting help and documentation, and then the huge open office. Day 1 was overwhelming to be honest. I mean working at Adroit was not easy either, we did not have as much easy access to training - but we had a lot of code-ownership responsibility over time. Chance to grow was less, but the tools all worked without complaint - something I never experienced while working with the arm tool-chain script was a feeling of peace when hitting that compile->link->rom button. Sure, App-level development on Windows is no cakewalk either, but the support is so much more accessible.

(image: copyright zaphodikus)

I like to keep the work door open if possible, I have met lots of very clever people (I am told I'm also clever, but I'm actually lazy so it cancels out) at Symbian. It's quite scary when you have all the clever guys in one room, and Clear Com will be no different I imagine. Next posting is all about how great Amazon.com sometimes is.

New Timed Posting Test

OK so this is simply a test-post, it should not count, but it will. Now does that count? Hmmm anyone got good guidance on creating help-files that can squash into a small file?

Going just a tad Batty

Yesterday we took the boys off to the Donarbon waste management site open-day. Getting a bit of info into my skull about 'friends of the earth' , Cambridge county etc., and generally technical detail on how things work - they have an annual open-day, it was pretty good display with lots of agencies putting up demos, and a site-tour, which seemed a strange thing, but the site is right next to our village, and hey, it's batty really, I will be working in the office-park right next door in a fortnight. Managed to get a replacement green box! Yay. Must go again next year, the site-tour sounded like great fun.

We have a bat-box, I have a bat-book by Phil Richardson, and well that and trying to build a basic bat-detector is turning into a bit of a mission of fun and learning. I have a lot to learn about the maligned creatures that inspired the vampire legend. UK bats munch mainly insects, not fruit, and there is really a lot that we have been misinformed over these tiny night-time clean-up squads.

Weekend project - nightlight

It's a simple project, build a night-light because the bathroom lights are blown out and I am renting so not included to climb into the ceiling and DIY. The boys need a night-light to get to the bathroom with, so I normally leave just 1 globe on in there. I broke-up a 'power-saver' downlighter with about 50 leds in it, not a bad price for superbright leds which can cost 80p each; if you do not count all the time and fussing with broken glass, splinters, serious desoldering etc.

(above picture looks blue on account the camera, and the leds being on very dim)

OK Drilled holes 5mm into the enclosure, wire them up with 1KOhm dropper, but in a series parallel network - all connected to a dumped phone-charger wall-wart i found as the supply.
Next we drill a hole in the back of the enclosure to allow the ~12Vdc cable in, and epoxy the enclosure to the top of the wall-wart. Normally this would create a heating problem, but I'm in a cold country.Since it's proved the PSU is good enough for the light-output need (tested on Saturday night as a burn-in), we move to the automatic light sensor - all prototyped on the project-board. You can see how I decided on a double-decker circuit arrangement. I only did this because I have a mental disease, no other reason at all. Besides the easy way was too easy.

Finished assembly with transfer of components to the veroboard. Because the LDR is a very flimsy model, I soldered a paperclip into the board on one side, covered it in heatshrink, and bent it to make a kind of stand-off before soldering the other leg of the paperclip into the far side. It made a very strong handle to which I epoxied the LDR - you can just see the 'window' on the right at the bottom of the enclosure. Lastly to stop junk and anything poking into the enclosure I stuck a clear window into the box to cover the hole from inside.

One assembly trick I also like to use when moving stuff from project to vero is to use a IN4007 diode clamp or similar across everything - I find that the 1 in 10 times that you work on the circuit while live and inadvertently cross power wires it will save your (I assume you do not use a 10Amp PSU. LOL) semiconductors.

The prototyping; you can see the flimsy LDR sticking up on the left. Apart from junkbox, recycled and bulk-bought resistors the onlybits I paid for are the LDR, LM741 and the enclosure.
Want a diagram?

Search plugin update

My idiots-guide search plug-in how-to-add-search-engine-to-ff in 15 minutes was great, but missing an icon. THe problem was FF stores the icon in a base64 text tag - needed to convert my bmp to a base64 text - if you have a codeproject login, go here image-base-64-converter - download the sample app, run it, paste the output (there's even a nice button in the demo that pastes the text to your clipboard).

Paste it into the XML file in the right place, (the IMG tag) and viola!

Goodest job news

I will be starting at www.clearcom.com in a few weeks. I am really looking forward to contributing in a small company again. No more falling asleep waiting for the perforce server to check out a single file. Sometimes I look at the network perforce request Q, and think that it looks like a stock-indicator, will it go up, will it go down - either way, your request is going to take 8 minutes. I suppose that's where you get a minute to read that chapter about code-refactoring. It's a plot I tell you!
Jokes aside now, Symbian Ltd has been a great learning curve. I suspect everything can look like lemons when you get swamped by 1000 developers, almost as many tools and twice as many processes; but I have worked with a really neat team. I doubt that all the teams are as much fun in reality, so I will miss a few friends, but some I hope to hang onto from the Cambridge office as well. The kind of quality needed in Open Source, and how one gets there has been most interesting to me and it's no walk in the park. I believe I am now a better reviewer and able to balance the bigger picture better, well time will tell. It has been good.

Holiday pics

OK, so this is where I sit and upload pictures of inane things we saw. Well I promised.




Rhys has started to take pics of his own, most of them are of favourite objects. But here is a pretty well composed one or two:


OK enough about my lack of image positioning control/ it's not like I have time on my hands is it? Oh, and here is another good one.

Aunt Claire baked this number. Count the candles Greg.

Still need to get the happy youngster to get into a learning gear :-).

There is no 'away'

Next time you throw something out, try to work out where it goes. It's actually not possible to throw things away, because away is actually somewhere else in the end.
BBC News: Food waste on 'staggering' scale

It's out of mind, but only for you - the planet still has to live with it. So how are we supposed to live in the age of away? It's not easy to pollute less; I had to drive 50 miles to work for 6 months (the alternative was 1.5 hours one way and 2 hours back) and now I drive only 5 miles Travelling 500 miles a week is no healthy, so being closer to the office is welcomed, but now I live closeby, I still cannot go by bus (alternative to driving 15 mins, is about 50 minutes on 2 buses) just to cover 5 miles direct. It is increasingly difficult to access effective bulk-transport, especially if all buses are one size: huge and half-empty half-of-the-time. Do the world a favour, go somewhere by bus tomorrow, it's really not a problem most of the time; and you will probably enjoy the view from the upper deck too.

Finally, those photies, we did not take any (lesson, it takes 3 adults to run a party for 16), but I will post a few recent ones anyway.

Arggggh! Laptop recovery

I have only had 1 successful virus attack against me after near on 20 years of computing, where it actually took me 2 days to get rid of a rootkit. So I consider myself pretty savvi when it comes to keeping a PC going.. Last week my Toshiba laptop finally lost some kernel drivers and would not boot, so before I slaved the drive (which is difficult to do since it's not normal SATA) to my Man desktop and rescue it, I let the manufacturer rescue-disk run. Arghhhh, the rescue-disk is an automated formatter, which right-away ghosts your machine without even prompting. Unfortunately I had no way of knowing until the Norton-ghost on the boot-CD started to run already. IMHO, this is better than a virus, because 30 minutes latter with no intervention at all I had a brand new Laptop setup. Toshiba need a lesson (so do I) - anyway - nothing much lost in that 'upgrade' so it's birthdays as usual tomorrow.

Rhys and Greg both have a party over the weekend. Cake photies to follow.

LAMP or Socket?

Been playing with an Ubuntu distro lately to start setting up a LAMP to host the www.plcsimulator.org domain where I keep my modbus protocol simulator program. My current gripe is that Linux is not overly difficult to learn, is nice and cheap, but just takes time. This is just much more fun than work at the moment, so I am rushing home in the evening to find all the FAQ and a HOW-TOs that all the apache dummies like me can follow. Once I can write some PHP to talk to the SQL-DB, I will effectively have some live website content to publish and maybe have a live "TODO" page that shows people what bugs are being reported, fixed and what features are being added.

A great fan of the self-learnt-man, this exercise generally takes time.
Now all I need to work out is how to get this thing to print out edible choc eclaires.

Peak District Holiday over

So what is it like going away for 6 nights on £350 self-catering? If you are not in the peak-season, you can (pun-intended) because everything opens at end of march, and although the weather is well, 'English'; you can see most everything. The boys had a good time, we say Chatsworth house, some ruins above Castleton, the 'Blue-John' caves nearby. A cable-car ride up Heights of Abraham, and a visit to the lead-mine on top of that hill.
The cable-car is not huge by Cape-Town standards, even the trip up lions-head in the new proposed cable-car is longer, but the green countryside is awesome, and you get slung over a river, complete with canoists doing a slalom. If only it was not sleeting.

If only? well, if only it did no pay to lie and manipulate. I enjoy a bit of manipulate and lie myself, but twisting the truth is all good, while subverting a national election for Zimbabwean president is another matter altogether. I tire of this problem now, and am amazed how it fills the english media at the moment - probably just unlucky to be at a time when the most interresting things for papers to publish is about one of the royals catching a serious bout of flu. I actually tire of the media and the total lack of depth that comes about when you get stuck in 'PC' land and are too lazy to publish more than one side of the story. I mean what happened to opinion? New rules mean we cannot publish 'opinions' just-so anymore and have no idea how to interpret what goes on around us. I am not saying please tel me how to read, on the contrary, please tell me how I could read this story, and for Pete's sake come back 2 weeks latter and finnish the job. I am too often left wondering what hapenned to that fellow who was on the front-page last week, did he become nobody, or is the contents of someones gut suddenly more important?

Is there life? or is it only intelligent life?

Civilization "ona stick"

Just think about the way we go about getting what we want for a moment. Centuries ago, you banged the bloke who had something you wanted around the head with a club until unconscious. A few centuries later, we devise a way to randomly hack bits off of the guy who gets in our way, I think they call it a sword. Today we can do this all remotely not get involved and obliterate a town in a matter of minutes using an air-born device.

...I am not so sure going from 'unconscious' via 'dismembered' to 'detached' is a civilized achievement.

Man Cold

Why is it that guys get it sooo bad? I mean, it's not just a cold, it's the blocked ears, sinus and general need for sympathy. I remember getting ill when I was still single - man those were suicide days. But it is great to have the missus look after you now. I would say it speeds up the recovery, but in reality, it's getting some rest, vitamins, some pain medication and keeping warm that does the job.

I am trying to formulate a theory on how stress leeches vital minerals and electrolytes until you feel bad, and actually become susceptible to the bug. I am just curious, because I am not in the habit of getting ill just as winter pulls in, I am a late-winter or spring catcher. And strangely (this is why I ask), it seems to always have a few days warning. Whatever the code says, man-colds suck!

Why Big Sux

I get a whole lot of e-mails telling me how big is better (if only e-mails were like texting)... anyway, bit only if there is any money in it, but when it comes to real service, big SUX.
Hotmail have done it again, not only is the vie to kill yahoo making miocrosoft punch-drunk, they now let advertisers put pop-ups into their sponsor adds! This sux and is really dragging the whole ecosystem down into the drain. I know it's free, but does it have to be 'ugly-betty' too?
/rant

How to add Search engine to FF

I wanted to do Google searches for a keyword + list of sites. Simple? Not really, so I will save myself the trouble of all the typing of something like:
DATASHEET NE555 site:datasheetcatalog.com
When all you want is NE555. Adding a new engine to the FF bar is simple, or you could spend 30 minutes to try finding a plug-in that does not do what you want.






Not scared of editing a bit of XML? Read on.

Find your firefox install folder, the default is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins - you want the searchplugins sub-folder. Next make a copy of your fave engine file, I copied my google.xml file, and called the new one data.xml.
Open in a text-editor, and find the line:
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
Give your 'engine' a name, (keep it short-ish) next go to the line:
<Description>Google Search</Description>
You can add a description, which I think gets used only in the properties to manage (add/remove) your engine. Next find the line:
<param name="q" value="{searchTerms}">
This is where the magic starts, and depends on which engine you copied, since other engines will not have a 'q' parameter for instance.

If you are lost now, use your engine to do a proper search, and then inspect the resulting location or URL to see which is the parameter is you actually want to modify.
To search only for datasheets I used this line
<Param name="q" value="DATASHEET {searchTerms}"/>
You could add a site or list of sites by adding the site:datasheetcatalog.com strings to your query.
The search-parameter tag might look a little strange to some of us who are new to XML, but you will notice the / slash in the closing, this is a space-saver telling an XML parser, that there is no 'closing' of this tag. If restarting FF does not give you a new engine, try double-click on your new file to open it in your browser, which should reveal what you broke.


Viola! (Fluit-fluit, my storie is uit.)

For those care-workers

Christmas 2007

Pretty good holiday 3 weeks, starting out just loafing (actually playing at being Santa's elves) and I must admit, this year, the Kid K-NEX was a bit overkill, too many small parts to go missing all over again; I would have done better getting the LEGO with a boat that goes in the bath or something similar. Unwrapping pressies was great, Rhys wants to help, and wants to play with whatever Gregory gets, like his kitchen-set. Greg wants to be a Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsey fan because he is always happy playing with the pots, pans and playing at making tea-parties. Then came Xmas down at Ross& Carron, we played Jenga for hours, I enjoyed videoing the towers collapsing. (Click below for pics)

Santa2007

Lastly some fun over at Alex and Mirek, along with little Sophie, whom Rhys actually enjoyed entertaining, which was unusual, since Rhys like to just control the play, and he kept her happy chatting and tickling away nicely. Just goes to show, the little people are sensitive and go through phases all the time.

Scotland : Last leg of the holiday, we extended this one a little over, since it is 600+ kilometers, and 7 hours of driving and stopping along the way so 2 days away was warranted. Left on new-years, but our return on 4-Jan was not nice on account the snow in Scotland. We stayed in Perth, at a little B&B, photo of the contact-card is in the web-album linked above. Caroline and Alistair run Albert Villa, it is one of about 8 B&Bs all packed closely a few blocks from the high street.

Satnav : Crashed again 3 times in total over the holiday, and I am beginning to get a idea that it is related to the bluetooth pod, or to navigating away from the intended route or something. Have to write a support mail to navman. Still the device saved the holiday, with at least 3 long trips into the no-where, and relying on it pretty much to save me the 30 minutes preparation-time normally needed for every journey, just long enough for me to write this posting up I suppose.

Electronics: Ordered some parts from RSH electronics, prototyped the amplifier circuit with a TBA820M amplifier, and the boys played with it like a mini PA. As usual, Rhys Giving the orders.

Merry Xmas

Just wanted to say that for £199 this baby was worth it.

92 km to Kent and then back again in terrible weather one day and bad jam the next definitely saved the arguing about who is driving or holding the map in the right way. Off to oxford to visit Alex and Mirek and little Sophie. Stuart and Liz are comming up, and they are leaving their woofits at home for the day this time.

Navman/satnav works!

Happy Birthday Rowan

Right day, wrong photo :-) Loves you lots Rhys Gregory and Conrad.

Foolery, sir.

"Foolery. sir, Does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere" Shakespeare Twelfth Night.

Well, we had the Plumtrees' around for curry yesterday evening. Their charge Daniel, managed to stay awake till around 10pm, which was a the latest our critters have ever been up, and so you can imagine we were happy that Gregory was the first to rise at 7.30 this morning. Since Claire was visitingand it was Rowan's birthday, I made most of the brekkie, which did not depart in the slightest from the curry in the evening in terms of calorie-count. Too much supper, and too much birthday-cake by lunch-time is a recipe for a midday nap.

The shutdown week

Been burning my way to this week for some time now - wheeee last week of work for the year!

Henk and Christa poste a pic of their little Hunno, and once again I get google mail addbars for things back home. This one was really good (requires venacular) http://www.onsdorp.com/joe.html I mean sometimes all you want to do is escape, really escape from a life that seems like a prison with all the modcons, visiting rights, TV, time out for good behaviour. but still prison. They say being paranois can keep you alive; but the stress leeches things from your chemistry over time, and it becomes hard toappreciate the gems like this one photo, which is not of an alien, but is Gregory, really close - something we spend a lot of time doing in fact. It is upside down,

but he does not care. Am I wanting too much, am I missing some pieces of this map? I want the best I can for them, anything so long as I am sane at the end of it all. Perhaps to fall in love is the answer; and I must say there are many distractions that one can follow - but which one will immerse the seeker? I think 2008 will be a good year to find out, until then we will enjoy the winter and all the good things that a holiday season brings.

Sex sells the box

Why do people put a sexy elf on the cover? To sell the box, but even if the game inside sux! ...will it still sell? Apparently it does. I tried out the demos for Spellforce and Spellforce2 (2006), it was easy enough to find and download, and immediately you discover that they come out with a swathe of expansions for extra play, the review ratings averaged around 6 and 7, which meant it was "worth a look, but do not expect anything". The graphics are good, and sound+voices are up to par, and if you had the patience to play through totally linear storylines and non-interactive combat, it would be fine. But I do not. I give it a 4. Basically because it suffers from something a lot of RPG types do, the magic-users are powerful, and die easily, but because it is impossible to pause the game, it is not feasible to swap spells an target properly. (See: Dungeon-Siege 2 from a recent post, which does this very well).

Whoohoo Photoshopping, well in this case picture-publisher.

I am ill this weekend. Having fun with the web cam taking photos of the room, and then giving them an electric effect. Not great, throat is sore - and I am lacking sleep as a result, (from playing spellforce demos more likely) my inbox is starting to flood over a little with Christmas cheer, and the Christmas cards are starting to come and go.

Rhys got very inventive, and has decorated the plain generic cards we sent out to friend in the village-school with some hand-drawn on-the-fly art. It looks more like noughts and crosses, but on closer inspection, the x's are kisses, and the noughts are hugs. I am astounded by the creativity displayed here. I am always wondering, what was I going at that age? The toys of today are so much advanced, the boys have slippers that flash at you when you walk or jump. I never had that, the world has so many more things that go roar, blink, giggle and squeak. I mean a laughing-toy for red-nose day is a disposable SIC with a simple motion-detector based on a loose spring inside a copper tube so it touches the tube when shook. When the battery dies, you turf it out (It costs £4 for batteries, and the toy is only £1). Oh back to the boys, Rhys made hand-prints the other day. All on his own - all prompted when he discovered a old foot-print made by Gregory at daycare back in Johannesburg. Rhys colored in his chalk-board, then wet the board with some paper-towel to make a blue wash. Next step, is two hands on board, then 2 hands on paper. Pretty good results actually. Clean-up was not a mission either, although mom had to mop the floor latter on because they carried on playing with the chalk.

Greg is very chatty when he wants to be, and can make up stories about how and why things are quite quickly. I have a few black T-shirts, with logos on them of course, so I ask Greg, what the TShirt says, and his answer? "Black shirt with letters" of course, how silly of me to not translate the Microsoft Logo like that. Rowan is working a day-shift at the local care-home, which works pretty well for us. It is not far, pays the minimum wage, but flexible. Rowan fits in night shifts normally Tuesday night, so I take the boys to school the next morning, and Greg spends a little longer the next day at the playgroup (called the rosary) Rhys only finishes school after 3:00, so it is a long enough day for mom to get some sleep in. I need sleep too.

I still feel a bit out of things in general. I think that's the winter depression, living with short daylight, the happy vitamins in your blood stop coming from the sun.

Transistor is 60

Article : http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9829403-7.html. Wow, and I thought I was getting old. Technology does move a-pace. And to think that a semiconductor used to have at least 5 pins before. Today so much is easier though the cleverness of those who went before, although their "invent" is not really lost and covered over by everyone who appreciates the detail.
Go on, have you hugged a tranie today?
Hey, bring that sheep back!

How to wrap your presents when you own a Cat.

This applies to having children of <>
1) Clear large space on table for wrapping present.
2) Go to wardrobe and collect bag in which present is contained, and close door.
3) Open door and remove cat from wardrobe.
4) Go to cupboard and retrieve rolls of wrapping paper.
5) Go back and remove cat from cupboard.
6) Go to drawer and collect transparent sticky tape, ribbon, scissors, labels, ect.
7) Lay out present and wrapping materials on the table to enable wrapping strategy to be formed.
8) Go back to drawer to get string, remove cat that has been in the drawer since the last visit and collect string.
9) Remove present from bag.
10) Remove cat from bag.
11) Open box and check present.
12) Remove cat from box, replace present.
13) Cut paper to size, trying to keep a straight cutting line.
14) Throw away first sheet as cat tried to chase scissors and tore the paper.
15) Place present on cut-to-size paper.
16) Lift up the edges of the paper to seal the present, wondering why edges now don't reach.
17) Find cat between present and paper. Remove cat and retry.
18) Place object on paper, to hold in place while cutting transparent sticky tape.
19) Spend next 20 mins carefully trying to remove transparent tape from cat with pair of nail scissors.
20) Look for ribbon. Chase cat down hall and retrieve ribbon.
21) Try to wrap present with ribbon in a two directional turn.
22) Re roll up ribbon and remove paper that is now torn, due to cat chasing ribbon.
23) Repeat steps 13 to 22 until down to last sheet of paper.
24) Retrieve old cardboard box you know is right size for last sheet of paper.
25) Put in present and tie down with string.
26) Remove string, open box, remove cat.
27) Retrieve discarded sheets of wrapping paper, feed cat and retire to lockable room for last attempt, making certain you are ALONE and the door is locked.
28) At the time of handing over the present, smile sweetly at the receiver's face, as they try and hide their contempt at being handed such a badly wrapped present.
29) Swear to yourself that next year you will get the store to wrap the darn thing for you.

Next time you get a badly wrapped present, remember it could be from a cat owner !!!

Retro gaming again

Unfortunately nothing out at the moment seems to come up to the standard of BG and IWD forRPG gamers wanting a system closely alligned to 3rd edition classes and skills. And amongst others I am replaying my selection of games I managed to keep after the relocation; to numb the brain.

Picked up on a guide to playing System Shock, which I missed out on in my youth, if this works, I will be hunting for a box-set to put on my shelf.

On the serious side I am also having some continued requests for my modbus simulator, and it is about time I found a minute or 2 of time to turn this program into a money-spinner or even a job-spinner? Anyways it needs a serious re-coding/re-fractoring. And it just sounds like hours of work with no reward? Well how do you set a goal and reward for a project with no real reward? Make up a reward of course, and this reward to myself will be a domain-name. Still got to think what it will be, either to host this 'orrible blog or to host my programming+code? Well, the best planned ventures with achievable goals are most likely to succeed are they not!

Next I need some coffee!

Little Girl Lost

It is easy to point fingers at a parent who looses a child, well if you do not have your own that is. When a little girl well known by now went missing, I just shrank inside of myself thinking, that could be me, what if my boys crossed a street and were killed, the grief would be the same, but the self-recrimination would still surpass the publics' ire.
My very first question when the news broke was, "Who leaves a child alone in a foreign country? "The answer is probably lots of people who are not like you and me, and I suspect lots of the people at that fateful dinner party amongst them. I really feel they have paid for their mistake now, and only wonder how long does the pain go on, for the rest of your life? The future for Madelaine is very grim and dark, but there is no more chance of redress now than of getting struck by lightening at this point. Can we just bury this child now, I think we have all learned our lesson.
Conrad is not a happy person right now over all this news, if I pick up a paper I need to take an anti-depressant too.
I am wondering if the government (nanny-state) know how to look after their children anymore. They tell parents that you may not strike your child, should teach British values to them, and skip out the bit about going and getting married in a church. We are event told what kind of light-bulbs to put in with a real display of having lost grip when 25 million children's details are leaked through the mail.

The last one to be in a position to criticize UK government, I was surprised by the resignation of the HMRC chief. Similar to the Northern Rock CEO resignation case, the captain should never be allowed off the ship before the water covers her decks totally. I believe the UK govt it-self is not at fault, but rather the mentality on the ground needs bolstering. The child-benefit data (our boys birthdays are out there now too) is like a customer database, most companies guard theirs with their lives, since it's their revenue stream. The silly paranoid stuff about bank details being given, come on gentlemen, do we know how valuable this data is on the street? Even encrypted this data is usable regardless of it taking 5 years to decrypt, because that is when it will be most valuable to fraudsters who want to pose as our sons and daughters and phish and defraud them just as they start out in new jobs. To then spam and attack them through all manner of means when they are gullible and have money of their own to be robbed of. At least re-issue the NI numbers at no cost? Staff at child-benefit unfortunately have been lulled into thinking that children are not customers, but rather a burden on the taxpayer, so scarring off future claimants is not necessarily an evil thing if it lightens the load on the war-chest. Rubbish!, Lets all pull our fingers from our arses, smell the aroma, and then get back to the work at hand instead of staying stuck on a missing girl who, even though we still cry for her, is really lost to us all.

Thanks mom

I suppose I need a thanks-dad post, he also deserves one, and why it is important to spel wel is another. My mom, Julia Beatrice Kretchmer ('nee Walton) was born in the UK, that's important, because it currently makes me immediately eligible for citizenship. Something that was not "fully" the situation when I came to the UK almost 2 years ago. To apply involves proving model citizenship, something that will probably take a while, but untill the time is right, we will move forwards; things like buying a home are next in line if possible. My mum was born in Shropshire, I've been there once, it's probably a bit prettier than Cambridge, but memory tends to do that to anything when you are on holiday bouncing around. So, thanks mum, because according to immigration law, applicants probably need to be Here, for about 3 years to take up the option, and be able to provide references. It's not a simple or cheap process, but much faster than staying and working for 8 years. And in reality, buying a home is probably out of the question until then.

My help-meet (doormat) tells me I write about grumpy things, but it's my diary. And years from now I will say it's my diary, so chew on that! I cannot understand how destructive the boys are lately, not a week goes by and something is damaged. They get spoken to, and they spread flour about next week. The week after it will be crayoning the floor, the future destruction is unpredictable. My mum was patient, very patient; but she never lost her hair. Thanks mum.

Electronics
Still hacking about, I am amazed that I remember so much, and am building small IC circuits, using trannies again, and now am hungry for more parts to project/bread-board. I've got quite a bit of vero, but have not "committed" much to it yet. The nice thing is the old parts are still very much available, and new things like the CIC (circuit in chip) make to possible to build sound-effect generators for toys for instance, with pretty much 1 semiconductor only. Right now I am building a traffic-light toy. It's not exactly 1/32 scale at all, since this one is a prototype, and I am still working out a way to make it robust enough for kids to play with.
TODO: attach photies :-)

Cyclometer resolved

It seems to have taken hours, in fact I think it's more like 800ms. That's the reaction time on the cyclometer CPU. Definitely no good for timing the green robot (traffic-light!) with. So that's working properly now. Downside it I have to install it on the front wheel of a kid's bike, on account the wheel gap is too great, so I am changing my mounting-strategy a bit to compensate. I would really have loved to have seen some installed photos. I work better with real pictures.

First Ice
First frosty windshield morning, it dropped to 2 degrees last night, so I guess the shade and wind off the fens was just enough to ice it lightly :-). The clocks roll forward soon, at lease that will stay the darkness in the mornings, and give us one 'slow' monday morning. I love the fact that most mornings I can sit in bed for 15 minutes and chat with my lover, or if the boys are 'arisen', talk and play-fight a bit.

Am I unlucky or what?

Sent on tokens for my free cyclometer from Kelloggs. It arrived (even amid the postal strike) but is the most pathetic freebie I have ever seen.
step 1: mount it (simple enough), having fun... measure wheel
step 2: enter setup menu by holding down all 3 buttons for 2 seconds.
$%^&^%$

that is as far as I can get. Are 50% of these things broken? So far I can get the diameter setup screen if I am super-patient, after that it wants to set miles/km. but it never ever goes out of that screen. I figure the buttons are either just crappy build, or my home is built over an ancestral burial ground, and some ghosties are mucking with the cyclometer. I believe Kelloggs dropped the ball. Have to call them on monday to see if is is returnable/swappable or what.

Snoekie (.pl Snoekie Pookie)

'n troetelnaam. (trans. afr. "Term of endearment"), much like sweetie pie, are totally orthogonal to things like babe or hottie, which are plain and simply not in the same class of describing 'who wears the pants?'
Why have a love-name? Primarily as a way to say, hey we are a 'item' or more correctly a team. My helper Rowan is a lot more than just the one who provides the big and little-men with hot supper, and the ironed shirts. The woman in your life is a very important connection to the goings on of the real world if you find yourself in the artificial environment of an office. Special white-noise is pumped in, the air gets dried out so your respiratory problems act-up, some idiot forces you to 'sit' in front of a machine with a million tiny lights in it. All blinking away demanding your attention. this is not natural, but I digress. "Love dove" means, I loves you. It is not something to call someone when frustrated at not finding anything, or when the mood is low.

Love-dove will be around for a long time (I hope) and although sometimes it looks like I do not care enough, I do worry enough, trust-me.

Social bookmarking #2

I might just be giving it all away, but this morning I had a brainwave. which means that a one-in-a-million event (brainwave happens to travel the universe, happens to have flightpath near to the conrad, brainwave actually strikes me in the cranium - makes it through my thick skull... at this point it all becomes quite futile really. It's probably been thought of already

So here is my idea.
Map-books with a built-in compass; to make them work in a car, it uses a gyro-compass to defeat the electric and magnetic fields in your car's faraday-cage. Well there you have it, if you like some details, just leave a note below :-)

Satnav Bliss

There are few things in this lifetime that cause more conflict than map-reading. I believe it has something to do with caveman mentality. Caveman is out hunting, now this is usually something non-stressful, like fishing could be. But now we are fishing not all alone, but competing; so you get the picture - all these wild drivers on the road, competing for position. some of them are there fishing for fun- on a sunday afternoon drive. But I'm competing! I've got someplace to be, and my navigator is continuously twisting the tatty pages of the map-book about like you do when you are testing to see if a compass still points true-north if you spin around quickly.

Now that gives me an idea for a quick invention, but more on that latter... so we got a satnav. It makes the peace, because when you go wrong, or it goes wrong,you blame the digital box, not your best friend. It is possible to laugh at the funny voice, and even turn the volume down so that the annoying litany can be safely ignored until you decide you really are lost. Overall I was not impressed with the NAVMAN F50. It came with bluetooth, which paired with my phone on the second attempt (The first time I was still fussing with my phone), and just worked, doing all bluetooth/handsfree things without fuss. But the satnav still has bugs, and you discover these on day 1 as well.
After setting up the 5-mile drive home,I followed the prompts, until it showed a quick left-right turn that did not exist in real life. Strange, the road was planned, but the folk who build the new housing estate 10 years ago never put that road in. They were supposed to, and that was not the only issue. On day 2 I typed in a postcode, the unit simply responded with 'no reachable route' and refused to give any directions at all, even though I was 80 miles away, and the navigation error was to the order of a mile or less. Notwithstanding the monument I wanted to reach was a popular POI on a main road... Let's see what happens.

LUA lightweight embeddable script engine

My compilled release DLL 248K (un-optimised) tells it all, compiler, and runtime all there.
Getting started was not easy, if not frustrating, for such a simple task. in the end, the main resource is www.lua.org, and the LUA wiki, and LUA forums. Amongst the best intro articles I could find: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1932.asp - and http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/264, and of course the LUA Wiki. Lua is surprising in 2 aspects. Its' free, and easy to get going once you have the background filled in for you. I suggest digging into the problem, and then just trolling through the reference manual and the LUA online book edition. A pitty ordering a paper copy of the book does not help in a big way, because you only need help getting LUA going for about the first 3 days, pretty much the same time as it takes to deliver if the book was local.
LUA is extensible, and if you have not gotten to this bit in just a day or so, you missed something along the way, other engines take far longer to get extending working in, without any blow-by-blow or click-by-click instructions! something you will not get with LUA.

Why LUA? Well I have decided to get cracking on writting a game, and the biggest issue we could face is not just user-content (modding), but game-desighn. I think keeping the desighn viscosity a bit in-the-air with scripting as glue might allow a direction/desighn change to just 'happen' when needed. The game is to be based on a top-down isometric real-time strategy, with wide unit-upgrade characteristics, which create multiple strategic possibilities. Micromanagement, expansion or defence? which will it be? What part will LUA play, well it's too early to tell, although I can see tonnes of oppourtunity: configuration, AI, 'bulding automation' amongst others.

Electronic kit building

2 things have re-awakened in my fancy world this holiday. One of them is electronics.

Some pics of the little creepy simple light-attracted bug. It took only half an hour to build. This circuit is nice in only 2 ways, cheap, shows how a motor can drive the bug without any gearing, and thirdly simple, having a very low transistor count.

I was dissapointed on 2 counts with velleman. the website is wrongly silkscreened onto the board as http://www.vellleman.be/ . It should be www.velleman.be ,they also have a USA office and site. Why on earth screw up something that important. Secondly (but not last) is they give you 2 diodes, but neither of them have a place on the PCB... well actually I used one as a rear-axle.. and that is where the puzzle lay, because the horrid diagram they provided on the box shows a diode to prevent damage if the battery is the wrong way about (would actually heat the diode a bit IMHO, since it is drawn as going across the supply of 2 AAA batteries.) but it is not on the PCB, unless you solder it onto the underside! UGLY.

Overall a nice simple kit. Next is a microcontroller project He He!.

How to be del.icio.us

I figured out how to tag things with delicious yesterday, it's one of those social-bookmarking things, you start out by tagging sites that you would have bookmarked, to tag a site, you type in 1 romore keywords that may help you find it back. inityiallyI though, this is going to be totally huge effort, but it seems to work better than bookmarking for 2 reasons, it collects by date, so has cronology, and it graphically presents, so it has size. You can also add tags to a mark so that it sends the link to your buddies (or network), that is where the social angle comes in. delicious is also web-based, so your bookmarks are available anywhere.

So it's not evil, will probably not damage my karma, and I can probably drop my del.icio.us 'cloud' onto my blog page right here. (click on it to find my del.icio.us name)

Oh here is one awesome/hilarious Youtube series, primarily about vegetables to get you started - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYhuT5ksL4A&feature=dir .

Why youtube is evil
Ok not evil, just all consuming. I know Google own it now, and this blog-site. But this is a world of free speech, and youtube does that very well. Youtube is even better than TV, and TV is BAD, in a too-much-of-a-good-thing kind of way. It can eat away at your social life, and productivity. /RANT

More camping pics

I took lots of pics of the sky, I imagine it will still look like this 100 years from now, so maybe it was a bit pointless.

This one was not

Here are one of those helicopters I was chatting about...

This strange fellow is not directing traffic at all.

Caister castle, In this castle reflection.

It is not well preserved, I suppose that is the problem with all history, people deface it in the present by scrawling their names, pretty much in the same way as they did when if first probably fell into diss-use. I suppose it just started to fall down one day, so everyone ducked. Maybe they were taken prisoner, or worse, it was just too damn cold. Looking around inside the single standing tower was a bit spooky. I mean it is only one tower, the spiral star built into the stairwell is very steep (the original stairs would have been steep and heavier, hence going up or down would have to be done slightly stooped).

The nice part of the castle visit is the vingtage transport collection, with cars and bikes lovingly collected by the owner. The displays are light-hearted, alsmot whistfull, and packed in between is a lot of nostalgia. This was a worthwhile stop for £22 to get us all in.

I think the 'reflection' photo shots were not too bad, seing there is not much left of the castle, but the main wall ruin, and one opposite it. The inner courtward (it appears was divided in two) is well kept, and is a great picnic area. As you can see from the photo, the moat has been dredged, and actually works.

Our tent pitch

World gone mad

Or just a little cheap.

I spotted the fellow above taking these fake chimneys (obviously fibreglass) up north on day 1 of our little camping holiday. I wonder what the world is comming too. I imagine the chimneys are low-maintanance, and the brickwork looks real anything up to 4 yards away, as I drovepast I took a glance (my navigator was aiming the lense) and could see the fake brick-pattern.

We went to Caister-on-sea on the first day after pitching the tent, here is the lifeguard boathouse. The Sea-rescue thing is a big noise on the popular beaches, and there are large helicopters (clearly resue or transport opperations) flying over every few hours.

This statement (see detail below) was also a little too blatantly sexist, I mean what does the lady pilot do?

Your mind could turn in other directions as well, but the signage is just unfair to 60% of the population of the island.