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January 25, 2010 Yes; I know, I know Five, almost six months with no update. Sad. But,woo hoo: a small update: the weather station software has been completely rewritten and the results are now on line - click the link above for the new pages. I started a major rewrite over the Christmas break, it's now (a month later) stable enough that I think it's good to go. I've still got a bit of work to do but it's presentable for now and it's going public. Technical details page will be updated in due course. Other than that, '2010'? Wow. Where does the time go? August 6, 2009 Old Technology Two things:
Couple years ago, I dumped a lot of the old (if you'll pardon the expresion) crap that was really, really, really useless. There was a lot that had deep sentimental value that I held on too, though. Maybe a year ago, I did another pruning and got rid of a lot more. Last week, I got rid of another bunch-o-crap, the process goes on. Problem is, there are a small number of things that I stubbornly hang on to. These will =>never<= be thrown out. Yet. So far the list of 'must-keep' things are (roughly in order of age):
The S/36 and the AS/400, not so much hope. I've seen some well done stained glass pieces that incorporate computer circuit boards, I could open them up and see if this has potential? Technology transformed into art. Maybe. We'll see what happens. If nothing else, the dust bunnies I pull out of these beasties is going to be an adventure in itself ... Jun 4, 2009 A Long Lost Update My
city has a habit of coming up with really, really great ideas and then
implementing them in the worst possible way. No, I'm not talking about
the blue 'box' program. Let's talk HOV lanes:An 'HOV' ('High Occupancy Vehicle') lane is reserved for cars carrying more than one person. Some places call them Diamond lanes. The idea is, you have less cars in the lane, it moves more quickly and everyone is happy. Except for the people in the LOV lanes but that's their own fault, right? For the last five years or so, we've had a couple of HOV lanes and the city has now decided to put them on pretty much every high traffic road into or out of downtown. The problem is, as I mentioned above, implementation. The existing HOV lanes are reserved for cars with more than one occupant; buses; and ... wait for it ... bicycles. Farking bicycles. Don't get me wrong, I respect those who bike to work but at the same time, they can cause traffic mayhem. I can share the road with them, I can drive around them as needed but in my humble opinion, they don't belong in the express lane. If clogging the lane with buses and bikes weren't enough, they made the freaking curb lane the HOV. The place where buses stop and pick up riders. The place you have to be if you're making a right turn. The place where the police pull you over if you're in the lane illegaly. Which you will be if you need to make a right turn. Accident? Everyone pull over to the curb lane; you can see where that one is going. Okay: how about if they pull you over from a slow lane and you go to the curb? Can they get you for soiling the HOV lane, too? So what happens if everyone actually obeys the rules? You cruise down the 'slow' lane passing everyone stuck in the 'express' lane until you have to make your right. Then, you have to force your way into the express lane and slow down everyone upstream from you (who are waiting for the bus or the bike anyway). I should probably expand on the importance of the right turn here - the HOV lane I can use in the morning is moving South on the east side of downtown with probably 90% of the office workers to the west of it. This means that roughly 90% of the traffic has to make a right. Of three possible places this can happen, only one is legal under the HOV rules. (Getting out of town at the end of the work day is a different but completely unrelated rant. Reversible lanes. It's actually frightening how many people just can't figure that one out.) The police wrote a bus-load of tickets to lone drivers in the first year or so. Then, they obviously gave up and decided to ignore the whole situation. I've driven through a radar trap on Centre street in the HOV lane (alone in the car) and they just moved the gun over to the car behind me. I'm afraid that when the lanes are everywhere, there will be some pressure to start enforcing the rules again. Anyway, the net effect of our HOV program is to: slow down traffic in the express lane; annoy everyone, especially the police who are expected to enforce stupid rules; make right turns if not impossible at least very dangerous; and get our city council points for being proactive. And now, we're getting more of them. Many more. Such is progress. Don't even get me started on the Deerfoot / Glenmore interchange. Mumbly millions of dollars for a redesign and renovation and it's moved from a bad design to a complete disaster. Sigh. Oh, yeah, and the blue 'box' program. We just got our 'Box' today. We've been paying for it for a couple months now but that's only the start of my complaints about that little civic adventure. Once I see how well it works in the real world, I'll update the site. Mar 3, 2009 A few random facts about southern Alberta weather: we're stuck between the Rocky Mountains to the west and pretty much endless open plains to the east. Open arctic air to the north and random Montana weather from the south. Weather can move in from any direction and it's really, really different depending on when and where it comes from. I have three rules of thumb (rule of thumbs?). One. We don't have climate here, we just have weather. There are general seasonal trends but you can't predict day to day what the actual conditions are going to be. Snow in July? Sure, been there, seen it. Plus 10 in January? Check. Heck, today was plus 10 and two days ago was minus 15. And this morning it was raining. And then snowing. And raining again. Sigh. Minus 30 in January? Yep, we get that too. Two. A long range forecast here is roughly four to eight hours. This is not a fault of the weather people or their ultra sophisticated models. Fact is, nobody really can tell what's going to happen here. Weather systems come at us from all four directions and it's usually impossible to tell how they're going to react with each other. Three. There is always at least one two week period in the winter when it's bitter, nasty, brutal cold. Highs in the minus 20 range for the full two weeks. I was explaining this to someone who had just moved here and she asked "Cool - when does that happen?" My answer, sadly, was "Could be anytime - you'll know when you're into the second week." You do get used to it. In the fall, minus 5 chills you to the bone, at minus 10 you break out the down parka and full winter survival gear. By March, minus 5 is t-shirt weather, beer and BBQ on the back deck. And then, summer comes and we forget last year. Then fall comes around; it gets below freezing again and we dig out the down parka and start the cycle all over. Weather in southern Alberta is always, always ... interesting. Feb 16, 2009 Dogs and Weather Stations We have a four month old puppy. Anyone who understands dogs also understands what that sentence means: we have a dog that chews on things. Things like any cables that are running unprotected outside. I've already lost the original camera and last Monday I was in the back yard and noticed that the cable coming from the anemometer (wind gauge) was a little chewed up. Went inside and, yep, the weather station was reporting a wind speed of "---" and the data collection program had crashed. Added some more error detection and the data collection program was back up and running. And reporting wind speed and direction of zero. The temperature was just below zero, there was a bit of snow on the ground and the cable break was in pretty deep shade. So, I decided that the repair was going to be a weekend job. Weekend came and it was: minus 10; much more snow on the ground; and overcast so no sun anyway. Regardless, I took on the job of cutting out the damaged bit of cable and splicing the new ends together. Had to run inside twice to let my hands warm up but the repair is done and appears to be working. "Appears." Haven't had any wind to speak of since I did the repair. I watched it for a while and was afraid that it wasn't picking up direction properly (the black wire did look too delicate for my taste). I'd see the actual vane pointing North; run inside and see South-South-East. Problem is, if I went back out, the vane would be back at SSE. I think it read SSE for the first entire day and I could never prove it would read anything else. We've had a few mild breezes since and the direction is actually changing. It might be working. I'll revist the splice if it ever warms up. Electrical tape doesn't cooperate too well at minus 10. The wires seemed really stiff, too. Yeah, wait for it to warm up. Anyway, along with the improved error detection, I've added a new sunrise/sunset calculation function; have moved the wind speed averaging logic into the collection program; and the collector now calculates wind chill based on the average wind instead. Ironically, the error that was killing the program before my changes was getting the wind chill, which I now throw away. Progress. Dec 27, 2008 Yard
Camera is Back!
There was a new outdoor camera under the tree on Christmas - a brand new Q-See QS2814C that comes with 60 feet of cable. There was an additional 50 foot extension cable, too. 420 lines of resolution, and night vision out to 50 feet. And 110 feet of cable so it could go in a better spot. It was actually above freezing this morning, so I pulled the old, broken camera out of service and ran a line out to the new camera in a better location. It's looking to the east, for anyone that cares. The old line was run inside plastic half inch conduit but the connectors on the new cable are just a little too big to fit that. So, the new line is temporarily strung along whatever I could find to string it on. Just because it's above freezing doesn't make it warm and a lot of where the cable is going to run is under several inches of snow at the moment. Digging through the snow is not fun regardless of the temperature but it should be gone in a couple months. I'll route the cable properly then. The old camera is apparently suffering from a faulty cable, almost certainly chew damage from one of the foster puppies. Not sure if I can even repair the cable, I'm also not sure if I can buy a replacement. Anyway, can't wait for dark to see how the night vision does. Now what I need is a better image capture program - this one's squashing the image a little vertically. Oh, and it's adding random nag messages over the image because I haven't registered it yet. I've paid for it but that email is long, long gone so I can't re-register. I either have to find a better program or pay for it again, I guess.
Gadgets - Part 2
Apple put out a new version of the iPhone and iPod touch recently. I personally have no interest in the iPhone but the improvements to the Touch looked very, very interesting. It now has a (crappy) internal speaker so headphones are highly recommended but kind-a-sort-a optional; it has an accelerometer (sp?) so it can automatically flip from portrait to landscape mode depending on the way you hold it; full WiFi access; and the Apple app store has a metric ton of quirky little apps and games that you can download directly to the thing. Time to get one. On the day after the official release, I went down to the local Best Buy and bought one. What I got, of course, was the first generation Touch (G1). Much to my surprise, I was able to return it later that same day with no hassles at all. Then, about a week later, Apple actually opened an Apple store in town. Took a lunch hour to drive up to it (Market Mall, for any Calgarians reading this) and bought one. Eight gig, G2, was in and out in probably 20 minutes. Painless except for the drive back to work - a freak wind storm blew over that took out power to all the traffic lights on Crowchild (major, major and maybe even more major street). Ever seen a fire truck stuck in 100% grid-lock traffic? Maybe 20 cars behind me, I could see the fire truck; lights and siren full on but unable to go anywhere. They could see me, I could see them, I could see the intersection ahead and what are you going to do?. The drive back to work took a while. But, I digress ... Now, if you know Apple, you understand that the ONLY way to get music on to or off of this beastie is to use iTunes. In fact, you can't even use it the first time without connecting to iTunes. No problem - I have it installed here somewhere. Oh, wait, I have version 7 installed and it won't let me continue unless I have version 8. Okay, so I update to 8, get the thing registered and move a few songs over to it. I paired it with my new WiFi access point (see previous entry) and I was able to play some tunes, surf the web, connect to the app store, check the TV listings, everything is gold. 'Gold': my music library is around 25gb, the new Touch is 8gb. So, I can fit around one in five songs on the Touch. iTunes on my main machine requires that you go through and individually control-click to highlight every song you want transferred. So to get music onto the Touch, I had to go through the list of somewhere around 2,700 songs and. Control-click to select a song. Page or scroll down to find the next one, control-click to select it, repeat. Until, of course, you make a typo. Then, it's start over from the beginning and so on ... My solution, for better or worse. Step one: copy the entire music collection over the Aspire One. Step two: make a new folder holding only the music that I want on the Touch. Step three: Copy individual tracks into the new Touch directory. Step four: tell the Touch that the Aspire is the mothership and copy all files no matter what. Step five: synch that folder with the Touch, let it pick up everything there. Having typed that out and reading it again - sigh, another clever and/or cheap hack. But consider: I now have yet another backup of my music collection. And I have a two or three click solution to synching as opposed to the previous eight hundred and forty seven click approach. I can live with that. At the end of the day, I actually find myself using the Touch less for listening to music than for all the other nifty things it can do. More in the next update. ** Okay, the yard cam is now really, really officially dead. Let's just turn that feature off and we've put a better camera on the Christmas wish list. Stay tuned, Nov 13, 2008 Gadgets - Part 1
There's a new class of computers on the market: the unfortunately named 'nettop' or 'interNET lapTOP'. These are small, light, low-horsepower and inexpensive laptops designed for ultra-portability and low cost. Asus started the game with their EEE PC; MSI followed with their Wind; Acer jumped in with the Aspire One; HP has a machine in this class; Leveno has one; Dell has one; expect many more leading up to the Christmas shopping season. A typical machine is good enough to surf the web, check email, do simple word processing or spreadsheets and has a price point of from maybe $350 up to $700. They're not intended to be a full general purpose computer; they're more for surfing the web while lying on the couch. And, of course, I wanted one. I'd been watching the market closely and had settled on either the Acer Aspire One or the MSI Wind. Either looked like good choices, in the end it came down to which one I could actually get. The Wind is still a little scarce; the Aspire One is in retail stores here as I write this. I ended up placing a mail order for the Aspire and I've had it in my hot little hands for a little over a month now; final price at my front door (shipping and taxes included) was around $390. Having played with it for a while, I can offer my personal review: love it. Love it a lot. My Aspire One came with a 160GB hard drive, 512mb of memory, a 1280x600 screen, an almost full sized keyboard, built-in WiFi (wireless networking), maybe 3 hours of battery life; pretty much everything you need for a basic internet utility computer. No DVD or even CD drive. Came with a customized Linux OS that let you do everything you'd normally do. I decommissioned my WiFi access point a long time ago so I had to buy a new one (*) - that's up and running and I can tummy surf the web from anywhere in the house or yard now. The bonus: around 2 pounds (under 1 kg). It's ultra-portable and gets carried around the house when I move from room to room. Much smaller and lighter than one of those big trade paperback books - this thing is built for portabilty instead of raw computing power. The included Linux worked well but it wasn't long before I ran into the numerous annoyances that have put me off Linux again and again. The final straw was I wanted to install iTunes on the thing (more in the next update) and that's completely impossible in Linux. As luck would have it, I have a legit Windows XP license that isn't doing anything - that's installed now and even that works very, very well (a new USB connected DVD drive helped here, for those of you who are reading closely). So. Do I regret buying this thing? Not at all - as a second limited utility computer; this thing is perfect. As a primary work machine it would suck. There's a trade off but it isn't horribly expensive and it does what I want it to do just fine. My next challenge is to get it to dual boot XP or the original Linux, this is still on the 'to-do' list. (*) I discovered that you can buy a WiFi router for cheap cheap, but a real WiFi access point is considered business class and costs a large amount more. Turns out that if you turn off pretty much all of the 'router' functions (DHCP, content filtering, etc.); and you plug your network into one of the switch ports instead of the WAN port, a router works just fine as an access point. Win! (**) The yard cam appears to have given up - I can't get an actual picture from it any more. Working ... May 7, 2008 One quick update before a full month has passed: Still using Vista daily, still very happy with it - I don't think I've booted into XP for at least three weeks, and that was only to check the ink levels in the printer (older printer that's not fully supported by Vista). The old printer is making this really disturbing week-week noise when it prints; I've decided it's at end of life anyway. I have a replacement ready to go and ... it's not only fully supported under Vista; it's also directly plugged into the network and any other computer in the house can print to it. Or, check the ink levels, actually. Or, scan documents in over the network; all with no assistance from my workstation at all. Heck, I can even plug it into a phone line and anyone can send faxes out of, say, Word directly. Unless you're running Linux, of course. It's a Canon and they're not providing any Linux support at all. Oh well. Once the old printer runs out of ink, it's going off to the big electronics farm in the sky. Along with the trunk load of other recyclables I have in the ... um ... trunk of the car. Apparently, the downtownish eCycle depot has been shut down due to "shady business practices". I've tried to figure out what that means and haven't been able to come up with any kind of rational explanation. How can you possibly scam electronic recycling? Beats me, all I know is I have to find a new place to dump all this stuff. Weather station - not much news; it limps along. I'm 3/5 of the way through an advanced Java programming course and of course I can see how I could make a really, really slick Java program to manage the station. Have to decide which is more useful to my career going forward - rewrite it in Java or C Sharp? Linux - I installed and brought up the latest, bestest Ubuntu distro. My dual followed by triple boot configuration turned into a triple/triple; point is, I can use durn near any OS ever released. Ubuntu version (insert bizzare animal name here*) is, as expected, very, very good; stable; usable from the first boot; etc. Having said that, I'm having BIG problems getting it recognize my dual monitors, two evenings of fighting with that was enough to put me off it. Again, I've got it available but I haven't started it for three weeks or so. What's the point? Please, someone - tell me what the point is? (*) For some reason known only to themselves, the Ubuntu Linux team have 'named' each of their updates with a (to me) stupid and alliterative animal name. Bouncy Badger is one I seem to recall. Maybe Smelly Skunk is coming; how about Rabid Racoon? Xenophobic xerus? April 9, 2008 (Yes, 2008) It's been a month and lot has happened. And, a lot has not happened. The questionable hack below is still in place, I've attempted to convert the polling program from VB.net over to C#. That is not going well, will complete that as time permits. My main workstation has been converted from Microsoft XP Pro to Vista Home Premium. So far, Vista is nowhere near as bad as the web people think it is. It's different. It doesn't do a couple things I want it to. It does everything else I want it to just fine. In fact, I'll back away from the "doesn't" comment - the things left to get running properly are the web cam (runs fine but I can't find the license to let the program run without the random nag messages; might have to give up and buy a new license) and the printer driver (not supported at all under Vista, but then again, it's making these really, really strange squeaking noises and I think I'm going the have to replace it soon anyway) - it prints just fine but it won't warn me about low ink levels. So ... Vista, yes. Can't see any compelling reason to do the upgrade if you don't have to but, as I said, it's nowhere near as bad as the web would lead you to think it is. Under XP, I was running the default ATI TV tuner software. That software would let you schedule recordings and then ... it would randomly: record the show you wanted; or maybe it would record something else entirely; or usually it would just smugly do nothing. Under Vista, Media Center (tm) works perfectly and does what I tell it every single time. Even if I tell it but don't actually intend it. Computers. Go figure. Again; Vista, yes. The only left over from this one is Media Center records in some proprietary "dvr-ms" format that is unreadble by anything but Media Center. Word on the 'net is that this is just a standard mpeg stream wrapped in a proprietary "xml" format. Looking at the files, I see nothing even close to xml but there may be some video data embedded there somewhere. I'm currently looking for a tool that can suck the video out of these files, once I find it I'll tell you about it here. There's much more to say about Vista but I'm hoping to have an Essay page up at some point (might be nice to have something to link there, right?). So far, the summary is: Not as bad as the world thinks
it is March 9, 2008 (Daylight Saving Time!) Well, that didn't work. Not one of my several automatic clocks switched to DST. Oh, wait - one did. The windows 2000 machine actually switched over properly (XP didn't, by the way). But, that's the machine that refused to switch back from it last year, so we'll call that even. Weather station. Yes. That. The VB6 code that talks to it was just not talking reliably any more, something odd has happened. On a whim, I tried out a VB .NET routine I'd found on the web and it actually did talk to the weather station consistently. Apparently, having proper exception handling is just the trick. I looked at converting the entire weather program to dot net some time ago and that was just not feasable; the languages are just two radically different. So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do. There is now a front end in dot net that pulls the data off the station and writes it out to (Og help me) a CSV file. Then, the main weather program wakes up, reads the csv file and continues on from there as if nothing had ever changed. I'm still trying to decide if this is a clever work-around or an ugly hack. Leaning toward the 'hack' opinion, will let you know. February 14, 2008 (Happy Valentine's Day!) Web cam appears to be back. The lights in the garden are on, this is a good thing. All of the outdoor lighting is solar, charging up ni-cad batteries during the day and charging them back down during the night. The outdoor lighting is around two years old now and has been exposed to a bunch of minus 20 kind of temperatures. I'm guessing that this will do bad things to a ni-cad battery. I'm also assuming I need to replace a lot of the batteries soon but according to my research, ni-cads are fairly expensive to source locally (it seems nickle-metal-hydrid is the standard these days (Bah! When I was a kid, yadda, yadda)). There are a few US sites that can get them for me cheap-cheap but the lights are on for the moment so there's no real rush any more. Requires more study. Other than that, not much to report. Oh, I added back in the Dec. 14th entry - that's something, too. It's a 'known'. The server is still throwing those ominous 'cannot create object' errors on the weather graph pages, but that's around number twenty-seven on the priority list. Weather monitor program is struggling to communicate with the weather station proper; I suspect a slightly broken weather station. Funding to replace that ... Magic 8-ball says 'not likely'. February 6, 2008 I was back. And, then ... I was not. And back. And not. Back; I think this time for a while. There are stories. Things you should do and things you should never, ever, do. Camera above; seperate topic entirely. Will be fixed December 14, 2007 Here's an interesting (to me, anyway) comparison to two great minds expressing themselves. Thank you to CBC Radio for pointing me to the Huxley quote: There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. - Aldous Huxley Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are "known knowns"; there are things we know we know. We also know there are "known unknowns"; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also "unknown unknowns" - the ones we don't know we don't know. - Donald Rumsfeld I'll leave it to you to decide if there's anything in common between the two quotes. I will say that it's interesting that Rumsfeld left out the entire "unknown known" class of, um ... "things". October 27, 2007 Okay. I think we're more or less back on the air. After a long sequence of technology sinkholes and a couple personal speedbumps, everything is repaired and back to as normal as it ever gets around here. In no particular order, we had:
The tech will arise from the ashes. I'm far too annoying to go away. Stay tuned ... |
