[16/01/2003] You really do have to despair when you're trying to talk techinal with a guy from the drawing office, and he looks at something you've written on a diagram, and says "200um, what's that? What units are they?" [23/12/2002] ".plan" 275 lines, 12397 characters really need to do that archive thing. Try this: Get a really hot cup of coffee, or better, hot chocolate, and a cadbury chocolate finger, or other chocolate covered, chocolatey biscuit (mmm, penguin). Bit off a small chunk at each end, or at opposite corners if it is an oblong biscuit. Dip one corner into the drink (specifically one corner where you bit a bit off), and put the other bitten corner into your mouth. Suck. Beware of scalding your mouth with some biscuits (cadbury fingers are fine due to their long, thin shape). One you feel that the liquid has found its way through the biscuit into your mouth, remove the biscuit from the drink, and (quickly now) dump the entire biscuit into your mouth. Repeat ad nauseam. And the other thing... Green vegetables with foreign sounding names, and which irritate the mouth and throat are no good addition to a perfectly good pizza. Nuff said. [28/11/2002] No news from BBC folks (pun intended). considering backup things at the mo: A backup scheme that takes a full backup daily, then deletes old backups in such a way that there are less old backups... not very lucid... the idea at the moment is that today's backup, and yesterday's should always exist. There will be one backup from one of the two days preceeding, and another backup from one of the four days preceeding that. Better? I've just got to write some code to automate that. It sounds like it'll do what I want. 4 Month's worth of backups stored in 7 files with a logarithmic history distrubution thing. Need to check for prior art... [19/11/2002] Letter to BBC news peeps: News at six 19/11/2002 Iraq situation. The news reporter questioned some Iraqi citizens about their attitudes relating to a possible war against America. All the interviews seem to indicate that the Iraqi people are ready and willing to fight against America in a war. We have heard much in recent documentaries, and in the uk governments' dossier about Saddam's methods of controlling the Iraqi people. From http://www.pm.gov.uk/files/pdf/iraqdossier.pdf "Anyone found guilty of slandering the President has their tongue removed." So far as I am aware, none of the reporters have made comment that the statements given by the Iraqis may be affected by fear or opression. I feel that the news services are doing us a disservice, almost to the point of misinformation. I think this is serverely and adversely affecting the general opinion within the population of the UK against any possible military action. I'd like you to respond to this allegation. regards, Paul Norton [07/11/2002] I reckon I ought to start achiving .plan soon. Its getting pretty long. How would you feel if you found that a company had put a picture of your signature on the web? I don't know if its just me being funny, but I don't like it at all. In my view my signature is *my* mark. Nobody else could easily draw it like I do, and I'd like to think that the law on copyright would offer it some protection (I think I'd have to say it was a work of calligraphy for that to work). Ah well, the world seems to consist of ParcelFarce, Shitty-Link, and Scant regard for customers. (Do you see what I did there?) [04/11/2002] Iraq. I was beginning to wonder about all that. 2nd August 1990 was when thing really kicked off, in my mind. That was when Kuwait was invaded, and the international community really got involved. Since then, the United Nations Security Committee has passed resolutions regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Iraq has done much more than drag its heels over these *for over a decade!* I was beginning to wonder about the US and the UK's role in this area of international politics. Recently the US has seemed pretty heavy handed over this. I don't know how things are over in the US, but here in the UK, somebody is doing a pretty good PR job on Iraq's behalf, as you begin to wonder if we're not being a bit too uptight about all this. Documentaries and TV news shows have video of Iraqi citizens praising their president. Iraq seems to have grand pictures and statues of Saddam adorning the country, in the style of a ruler whom the people love. "Anyone found guilty of slandering the President has their tongue removed." http://www.pm.gov.uk/files/pdf/iraqdossier.pdf It makes interesting lunchtime reading. I'd highly reccommend anyone with half a brain take at least 30mins to have a look over that document. There are at least half a dozen conclusions I reached that I'd love to share with you. I don't feel that would be a good idea. The reason I read this document was to try to provide myself with a reasonably unbiassed (in so far as I can trust my government) view of what's going on, and what has gone on in Iraq. I feel the mulch that I am provided with from the News community is sufficiently coloured by the mood of the moment, and taylored to the intellect of Joe public that it really cannot be taken as a very good representation of the situation. So, without trying to colour your opinion any more, read the document. Its probably a good idea to consider by whom the document was created and for what reason. Evaluate its colour, and take a pinch of salt as necessary. [30/10/2002] Need to learn some basic database stuff. Might see if work will buy me a book on access or something. Maybe a jolly... I mean 'training course' is in order. Life feels sucky at the moment. Can't seem to put my finger on why though. Job satisfaction is mediocre, and I never seem to get anything acheived in the evenings, not even tidying up convincingly. p'raps I'm seasonally affected. [25/10/2002] Linux print services are a f'n mess. Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate! There's a whole lot of things I don't like about windows, but you have to give some credit, installing and using printers under windows is a breeze. I've been workign on it for about a week on and off with linux, and feel that I've neither learnt nor acheived much. Viewing webpages with phrases like "UNIX printing is so damn hard! Oh well.. Sorry!" doesn't exactly inspire me. [23/10/2002] kernel: lp0 on fire. [22/10/2002] TV still broken. Replaced MOSFET, replaced fuse, powered up. Fuse became a very bright lightbulb for a few milliseconds. Replaced power supply 'clever IC' (pwm controller for switch-mode stuff), checked MOSFET just in case it had been damaged by previous attempt, still fine. Replaced fuse. Power up. Repeat of fuse/lightbulb effect. puzzled. Unsoldered the rediculously big transistor with 2mm of plastic all around it. You know, the one that switches the few kilovolts that exist in tv sets. It was ok. I am now lost for ideas. Looking at new tv's... I've already got gucci(adjective) Sony gear that gives me a nice Dolby digital effect on 5 speakers when I'm watching DVD's, and does curious 'virtualisation' of dolby stereo (from TV reception) onto 5 speakers. I use a VCR as my tuner, and my sony AV gear switches video and audio for me. So, in summary all my tv needs to do is to take a composite video signal and display it. I don't need *any* audio out of it, and I don't need any channel selection. So why is it that if I want a nice hunk of glass to do that (read BIG hunk of glass, flat screen, maybe 100Hz field rate) that I have to buy a TV that incorporates Dolby surround (which is incidentally not as good as my Dolby digital gear), and all manner of other things that I don't want. I think its logical to assume that someone who wants to part with more than a couple of hundreds of pounds for a nice piece of glass is going to be entirely dissatisfied with the feeble little speakers that someone decided to cram in somewhere around the CRT, and will have gone off and done their own sound thing, probably with at least two nice speakers which together are about the same size as the TV. Still, should give me an opportunity to rip some salesmen apart. Don't try to sell me things unless you know more about those things than I do. ;-) [16/10/2002] Broken TV. Blown internal fuse. Look at power supply, find big heatsink. Unsolder MOSFET from big heatsink. Test with multimeter (connect gate and source to ground, apply a positive bias to drain, monitor current). It is no longer a transistor, rather a piece of silicon which has melted, flowed, and hardened again. Electrically it appears to be a three terminal resisitor. Which is nice. [09/10/2002] Two synths locked up, and wlan card is squerbling at 2.4GHz, and not a laptop in sight. With these Microcontrollers I shall take over the world! Slight web page overhaul today. Prettied up the "how my php works", put descriptions instead of filenames in the sidebar. Probably still ought to sort out colours / contrast and stuff. I don't think red on green is good. Anyhow, ought to do some work, I've done not a lot today. [mon 07/10/2002] Grr. It doesn't work... job satisfaction is minimal at present. Family crisis ongoing too. Still, my car's nice. I went for a drive at about midnight last night, when the roads were nice and quiet. So long as you know how to drive it, my car moves fairly well. Its just a pity that some of the other island residents think that there's a blanket 40mph speed limit for the whole island. [wed 18/09/2002] I'm confusing the purpose of system() with backticks(``) [tuesday 10/09/2002] Aren't I getting good at regular writing? have to sort out an achive soon... just like Chunky. Well, updated ~luap/cisco/ shows what's under the shields on the wlan cards. php is fairly trivial so far, framework for my new site is at ~luap/main.php I ought to make a cgi or something that lets you see what the code is. Anyhow, that there is a template for including a standard header, sidebar, and footer into my pages. At the mo the header is echoing a variable called $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] which is useful, since with that, having identified which page the header is about to be included in, I can do conditional stuff there, or in the sidebar or whatever. Like a 'you are here ->' kind of thing. [monday 09/09/2002] late for work today. Slept in. Good plan, Batman. Started looking at php, I think I've got what I need... I've mirrored (I love wget) my old NTLWorld pages into ~luap (that's right, not webbily available atm), then I can crucnh through them make them do php, be up to date, have a bit of a facelift, and stuff. I built a bit of furniture on Saturday. I had some shelves left over from a modular shelving system thing I got from ikea. I decided to make something useful from them. Something realy satisfying about woodwork. I've always liked it. P'raps I ought to be a joiner. [thu 05/09/2002] Created http://www.icculus.org/~luap/cisco/ A little bit of info on the insides of the cisco aironet 340. [wed 04/09/2002] Updated the Scan/hard drive rant at http://www.icculus.org/~luap/scan/ included a link to Seagate's proper handling pages. I got a seagate drive recently btw, mighty well packaged, I'm impressed. work: I've got a PIC interfaced to a wlan BBP now, updating and reading back the control registers. Next step is the TX and RX serial links, which I'm probably going to simplify by using shift registers outside the PIC. That means an FPGA design at some point... or maybe a PLD, I never could remember the difference. home: couldn't sleep last night. Got up again at 2am, and listened to Sisters of Mercy far too loud over headphones while drinking gin and lemonade till about 3.30. Got up at about 7.30 for work, and felt remarkably perky considering. [wed 28/08/2002] supposed to be working... Just uploaded one of the first batch of pictures taken through Kathryn's telescope with my digital camera. See it at http://www.icculus.org/~luap/ For those who are interested, it was taken with a fuji finepix 4900, through a 3.5" refractor (see the chromatic abberation?). 400mm focal length, 2x Barlow and 25mm eyepiece gives 32x magnification...I think. On an unrelated note, I saw Sum of all Fears at the cinema... the book was way better, not least because it was long enough to include much more detail. The other thing of course was that the book was a bit chilling, and made you wonder about a lot of things: the american system of government, the politics within intelligence agencies, and just how easy it is to make a nuke. But Hollywood couldn't do that could they... so they butchered the story, and left all the americans with a nice warm fuzzy feeling at the end of the film. Here endeth the rant. [tues 20/08/2002] 6pm still at work. I'm not sure why. Now fiddling with microcontrollers that have priorities associated with interrupts. Me like. [monday morning] allworkandnoplaymakesjackadullboy ho-hum. Had a look at Mars through the telescope I bought for Kathryn on Saturday. It was kind of like the moon, but looked smaller, and was reddish. I'll take some piccies once I get some way of attaching one of my cameras to the tescilope. Elsethings... need to find my old 10mps hub that does bnc->utp conversion... either that or find a reliable bnc network card, and stick it in a pc. My webpages in shtml form are all on my HP PA-risc workstation, which is good enough that it has on-board network, but old enough that its a choice of AUI or BNC