Coffeehouse.co.nz

You might have noticed that we’ve been away off line for a few days now. In fact, a couple of weeks at least! It’s been a bit of a mission, but we’re back!

Most of the delay can probably be blamed on the last tenants of this place deciding for some strange reason not to get their old internet cut off for a week and a bit after they’d left, and some on the strange way this all seems to work here in that we were able to get a new phone number here, but that still doesn’t automatically cut their old net off.. Sigh.

And then another few delays of a day or so here and there as things bounce around the system, and then, whoopie!, net access again!

The good news is (and this almost makes it worth the wait) is that the signs all point to this being a much, much, much, much faster connection. Over 4 times as fast as the last one. Yipppee! Just have to wait to see if it settles down at that speed over the next week or so.

The bad news is now we have to try to remember all the interesting stuff (to us, at least) that we need to write up! We’ll see what we can do…

I was reading a random entry on Slashdot which was talking about a new submarine cable between SE Asia and the US and one of the posts there mentioned a Wired story/article on the topic of cabling by Neal Stephenson who’s written a whole heap of books that I really, really liked. So I just had to have a look.

The article is here (print version, which I find a lot easier to read), and it’s suberb! You’d think that this could/should be a really dry kind of topic, but the way he tells it all is great. So much history and politics that I haven’t really thought of before. It is quite a long piece, and a little old (not that it dates, I think), but I just had to keep reading. Must have been a fantastic fact finding trip!

If you do read it, let me know what you thought. Or maybe it’s just an interesting to a geek type of thing….

For all of you that keep asking me “have you still got that old phone”, no I haven’t.  Finally. Got a new whizzy one that does far too much to take in at once.
But getting it has made me even more confused about the stupidity cell phone companies.  The only way I could get a new phone before November was to change networks and get my number transferred across.  If I’d wanted to stay with the same company and get a new phone I’d have had to have got a new number.

Dumb.  Really dumb.

One less customer for them, not that they’d notice or care.

You might have noticed that this blog has been off the air (or wires, or pipes, or however you want the think of it) for a little while. Seems like the day after we left to go on hols the server decided that it had had enough and threw a bit of a wobbly. Actully, I think the hard drive died. Bugger. It would happen then, wouldn’t it!

I’d kind of been expecting it for a while really, as that disk was an old one before I put it in that box, and it’s been on pretty much 24/7 for a long, long time. So I had been doing a few random backups of various bits and pieces on in, including the blog. The last one I did was on the 15th of March, so I think we only lost one entry, and a few of the books I took on holiday. But if you registered after that date, you’ll need to do that again. Sorry!

But hopefully we’re back up and running now… I hope!
And I’ll be taking more regular backups now!

For those (few) of you who may be interested in some more techy stuff, I’ve ditched the Gentoo install on this server, and done with the latest Debian distro. I just couldn’t face another 4 weeks of compliing everything again if I’d reinstalled Gentoo. I’m sure there are still lots of things missing on the box, but at least the webserver is up and running again…

Moving on from the Hello World stage, I now have 2 way comms between the PC and the mess of bits below! Now as well as saying Hello World, the little chip will listen for me to press keys on the PC and, um, turn lights on based on what key is pressed!

Amazing, riveting stuff, aye?!

But keeps me amused, entertained, and certainly taxes my brain a bit in problem solving. Just what I need after another day at the office…

Right, enough of cutesy animals! Back to the geeky stuff for a minute!

Today I finally stopped reading electronic component datasheets etc. all the time and actually got around to putting together a bit of hardware to see if I’d actully learnt anything practical. I thought I’d see if I could get the little Microchip Pic microcontrollers to talk to the PC through a serial connection.

And it worked! When it’s turned on it prints out This is bought to you by a MIcrochip Pic and then Hello World! every 2 seconds in a terminal on the PC until I get sick of it and turn it off. Then turn it back on again to make sure it still works!

Oh, and of course it’s got a couple of flashing lights, just to show it’s actually working…

Bec wasn’t that impressed. She tried. But I was a lot more enthusiastic about her toys, I think. I’ll have to do something much more impressive, I suspect, before I’ll get more than a “that’s nice dear”. Oh well. We’ll see.

I’m just relieved it actaully worked!  Now to work out something useful for it to do.

I’m having a real problem with time at the moment. Playing around learning to programme PIC microcontrollers to do really interesting things like flash little lights has made me have to think about time in a different way, and it’s one that my brain is struggling with a bit!

These little chips chug along at about 1 million operations a second (can be a lot more or less, but that’s what I’m using at the moment), and the programs you write are made up of an instruction generally taking just one of those operating cycles. And you have to program to account for each individual cycle. A bit different to the normal PC coding I do!

The trouble comes from trying to deal with just how many things that the chips can and do do in the time that it takes for anything to be useful in the human world, like flashing a light at a speed that we can see, and what to do with that extra chip time.

So a lot of time is spent just doing nothing, at least when trying to work in human reference time frames. Seems like a real waste of time, but just a reminder how our view of the world is based on our perception of time.

Well, instead of doing all the things I should have been doing, like writing overdue emails and hanging out the washing, I’ve added a new feature to this blog thing.

If you look down the bottom of the right hand side bar you’ll see a summary of the books I’m reading or have stacked up on the shelf waiting to read.

I haven’t got all the related pages looking quite as I’d like them to yet, but it’s good enough for now. Changing other people’s code is always fun. It’s all done with a nifty plug-in to the blog software I found on the net called now-reading, which means I can stop work on doing the same thing!

The plug-in even runs off to get images and information from Amazon based on the ISBN code, so I don’t have to do any digging around. All good.

I finally gave in and upgraded my main Windows XP box to a bigger, faster system disk. When I first put that box together I thought that I was going to have heaps of space on a 15 odd Gig drive, and so I made the main system partition only 6 Gig big, and made another couple of partitions for data and other programmes.

Mistake. BIG mistake! HUGE!

I have no idea what fills up all the space, as I make sure I clean it out of all the stuff I can, but it’s always getting close to the limit now, and I think that disk is getting a bit old anyway, so both to be safe and to give me more room I thought I’d upgrade to something a bit bigger. Like another 250Gig drive. Just a small difference in space!

I thought that this could be a bit of a pain in the butt to do, as Windows seems to be a bit fussy about where things are etc, but in the end it was a breeze! I used a “live-cd” (a whole operating system that boots and runs off a cd) of gparted, which is a small Linux system soley geared towards disk partitioning actions. This meant I just had to copy the partitions across to the new drive, resize them, change the disks over in the box, removing the old one, reboot a couple of times, and hey-presto! New disk works fine!

And for a bonus, a fun bit of this was using a small business card CD for the first time. I’d been left a few but never really found a use for them, but the whole gparted image fits easily on one. I don’t think I’ll start carrying it around with me in my wallet, but it’s definitely part of my PC toolbox now.

A bit of a relief that it went fine, but also a bit of a bugger on a long weekend! How to fill in the rest of it!? I guess I’ll just have to break something just to fix it…. or spend the time pampering the other half – now that sounds like a plan! (Hmmmm. I think someone added something during the proof reading process….)

Sometimes it’s nice to get your handy dirty, without getting them actually dirty. Tonight was “put new bits in a PC” night. Always a fun and rewarding time. As long as I’m home alone when I’m doing stuff like that! Being interrupted when things aren’t going well, and I’m trying to remember where 4 different cables are meant to go does not go down well!

I’d finally got sick of running out of space on my Linux desktop box, as I’d re-used an older small drive in there while I was “just playing” with Linux a while ago when I built that box. Now that that machine gets turned on far more often than the windows box, I thought I’d better add some more space. (By shifting the home directory to a new drive, for anyone geeky enoughto understand that!) But I thought I’d add it in a removable drawer so I can rip it out easily and…. Do something with it, I guess! Not that much harder than adding a normal drive, but a bit more fiddly.

And while I was planning to do all that I thought I’d fix the case fan that used to start up so loudly that you could hear it from downstairs. As sure sign that something is really not right! But I think that I could be on the start of a big long slippery slope because of that. The only fan that size that my usual supplier (i.e. the one that generally has enough is stock that I can get things delivered the next day and just get on with it) was one that had cute blue lights in it that make a nice glow up the wall now.

I know there is really no need for all sorts of lights in a PC, but I reckon they have to go faster if they have lights. A bit like a racing stripe on a car!

Luckily today everything went fine, the patient lived, and the box ended up better, faster (I wish), and more prurdy than before!

And, like usual when delving into the belly of a beast, I came away with a sense of satisfaction. And relief!