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Finished for the year
November 17, 2006
Yes, as of Wednesday at about 11:15am, I was officially finished all my classes & exams for the year!
The holidays shall be great, maybe even involve "evil".
Enough from me,
signing out -
STK-500 and USB to Serial Adapters
October 24, 2006
Just a note, most USB to Serial adapters do not work with the latest STK-500 firmware (the one that comes with AVR Studio 4.12 SP3). All tested PC serial ports do work however. None of the tested USB to serial adapters work including the brands Belkin and Toshiba.
If you need to use a laptop computer with an STK-500, make sure to buy one with a serial port, buy a USB programmer, use a Parallel programmer (if you are lucky to have a laptop with parallel), or fork out for a PCMCIA serial card, like this one which at the time of writing was $69 from Computer Alliance.
(Unofficial) phpBB Podcast
September 26, 2006
As one of the team members featuring on the first episode of the (unofficial) phpBB Podcast, I would like to tell you all to have a listen to me being nub, or possibly knowing a thing or two.
Anyway, check it out, and send us an e-mail if you like it.
http://www.phpbb-podcast.com/
New Lego Magazine
September 19, 2006
The fact that I just got a new Lego® World Club mazagine today means one thing, it's been three months since my last blog post, anyway here is a picture for those who want to see one.
Unfortunately this time it came with no free Lego, but it did come with the second half of 2006 catalogue in which the NXT is listed on the last page.
In other sad news they have once again murdered their Train Set range. All the trains are new and now are battery powered. For something you don't need batteries for, the battery poweredness is the spawn of evil. It is obviously a conspiracy set out against young children by the battery companies, ohh look it's sponsored by Duracell, how convienient [1]. By the looks of it they have also screwed over anybody with existing sets once again by removing the little metal in the rails.
quote:
Tracks do not conduct electricity and therefore are not compatible with LEGO 9v Trains. [2]
All it not as grim as I have made it sound, you can still get the metal tracks from Lego Shop at home, for double the price per track piece as you would pay for the new battery powered ones. I fail to see how what must be 10g of metal is worth $12.50AUD. And you can still buy the 9V track powered train motors. But, they do not list the 9V transformer and speed regulator.
Such a sad turn of events. I should also add that I don't own any 9V train sets, I have the even older 12V sets, so I've been in a situation much more grim than this for the past 15 years with no compatible sets being avaliable. Not that I can afford Lego, but hum ho.
And I shouldn't be so hard on the Lego company, I like their products, I really do, but IMO they keep short changing those who like trains. And they should be congratuated for spelling catalogue correctly, as it was meant to be spelt.
The Lego® Company has still got it.
June 25, 2006
After reading about the NXT in SHS`' blog back in January and reading about it's great features such as having an AVR microcontroller embedded in it, I couldn't think the Lego® Company could get much better. This all changed a few days ago when my subscription to Lego World Club came in the mail.
To my surprise, for the first time ever it actually came with a small Lego set. This is quite peculiar as firstly it has never come with one before, and secondly I have only ever paid renewal once, and every other time they have renewed for free, so this must be costing them quite a bit of money.
I open the packet, and there is a good selection of pieces, quite a few more then you would have received in a McDonalds Happy Meal back in the early 90s.
Surprisingly enough it also came with a Lego man, if you have ever bought a pack of 5 Lego men before, you will know that in the late 90s they equated to about $2 each retail (to be honest, I once recieved a Darth Vador keyring Lego man as part of this, but never a set).
DSC00452.JPG
It only took a few minutes to construct the set as it was quite a small one, and the instructions were easy to follow.
Thats about it, sorry I have no idea what the set is supposed to be, but hey, free Lego is free Lego :D.
Acceptance, a two way street
May 24, 2006
I originally wrote the following today to be posted as a blog entry, but it got disorganised and messy towards the end. I'm going to post it anyway as a raw unpolished work because I think it still captures the essence of what I was trying to say. That is, we all have to accept eachother for who we are.
quote:
I was at uni today (like I am everyday, *pays out lazy arse arts students who complain they have to come in two days a week*), and saw a banner on a table which said "Islamic Awareness day". To be honest I'm aware that there are Islamic people, but I wasn't aware it was "Islamic Awareness day".
Then I thought, why would I need to be aware of this, isn't a good multicultural mix being unaware of our differences in socity. Then it hit me, it's their religion, it doesn't accept us. Now this brings me onto the topic of this blog post acceptance.
Where does acceptance start? In the western world we are fairly accepting, but if you take a closer look we're shockingly rejudice, this still sadly includes sexism, racism, homophobia, etc... So what's the point? Acceptance goes both ways! Thats right, I have to accept you have your views, and you have to accept I have mine. Unfortunately we are terrible at being able to do that, look at bullying in school yards.
Of course I accept you don't have to accept anything, but it would be easier if people would just accept that. So therein lies a problem, we have to accept acceptance, or accept to accept to accept.
The other problem is drawing a line of how far we go with our ability to accept, what kind of behaviour is tollerable. A good gauge is behaviour that doesn't cause due grief to other people. This would allow us to not accept anti-social behaviours such as violence and manslaughter. But if people aren't accepting, natural behaviour may cause due grief to other people. For example, if we aren't accepting of women in the workplace, because of our inability to accept this it may cause due grief to us like people used to faint when people used profanity in public.
This brings us to a new gauge, behaviour that doesn't cause due grief if the behaviour is accepted. For example, if we just accept women in the workplace, it won't cause anyone or anything grief. This is a situation where everyone is happy.
This works, because manslaughter creates grievous bodily harm. The only issue left now is violence towards animals. But if we have the model of causing grief, we can also apply it to animals. But where do we draw the line, animals for food? do we kill the cockroaches (go the maroons!), or get that can of sly spray out? These are entirely different issues, but they are something to think about nonetheless.
So in conclusion we should be more accepting of people peoples cultures and beliefs, even if they impede on our own traditions because at the core of it, we know it's the right thing to do, which when you think about it is the core belief we all have in common.
MODX pilot started
April 13, 2006
Yes, we have finally decided to go ahead and pilot the XMLised MOD Template format.
There were a number of difficulties in preparing this format ready for a public pilot.
- Backwards compatibility
- Looking forward to the future
- Public consumption
- Developer perspective
- and many more
I will have a lot more to say on it in the future, until now, try it out for yourself, and feel the love 8).
Infinity and Version Numbers
March 18, 2006
Infinity has some interesting properties, one of those is it's use in version numbers.
The most interesting use in a version number would have to be the 2nd digit in the phpBB Version (Linux based) system. If you don't know, the 2nd digit is odd for development versions, and even for stable versions. The interesting things happen with the development version numbers.
It seems that no-one knows how to represent a number before 3.0.0 without it being a 2.0 version. The closest estimate I could conjure is 2.?.0.
This has some important properties. It's still a 2.0 version, therefore it's impossible to reach by the property ? + 1 = ?, (which also means whoever says infinity first wins, and the person who says infinity + 1 is a sore loser, but that's not important). The reason it's interesting comes from this property, which according to DavidMJ also means it's even and odd at the same time! This has an important consequence, it means it's both stable, and in development at the same time. Because this number is impossible to reach, it means it's impossible for software to be stable and in development at the same time (take that clueless Beta testers).
There is another property, if you want to install a version infinity versions old when you are using version ?, this means mathematically ? - ? which is again equal to ?. Which means once you use an infinite version of a software, there is no way to downgrade, nor would it be possible to upgrade.
So as version numbers are period separated numbers, its probably a good thing their not like decimal numbers where you have to overflow the maximum value that can be taken in order to increment the number to the left of the period. Otherwise as version numbers are unbounded, we might have to wait forever for phpBB3.0.0 to be released, but I suppose that notion varies depending on who you talk to.