Nicholas Booth Dot Com

• An evening spent swapping video cards & bits between various old PCs so I can end up with something that works well enough for my desk. #
• "A disk may be failing: disk has many bad sectors". Time to stop now. #
• At last, a combination of parts which might be reliable enough to run my new Fedora 12 desktop. #
• Got a call from a Market Research co. who said they were my wife's bank (but would not say which one). 01233648505 Kay Smith who are you? #
• Hundreds of alarms on a major site seems to be a scary false alert! #
• Reading this helps decide what's for supper tonight: http://tinyurl.com/ygd4y5t #
• Well, that's all the stuff for supper prepared and ready to go. Now I deserve a beer from the homebrew calling me from the shed. #

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• Chasing paperwork for things people want me to do for them. #
• Looks like more regex fun coming up – this time for estatesgazette.com #
• Minor MySQL panic as replication stopped after a slave restart. Fixed now, so I can go home! #
• I must learn to find out if a problem is actually a genuine problem before trying to fix it especially when reported as such by end users. #
• Just back from spending a very fascinating 45 mins wandering in a chinese supermarket. Wonderful stuff everywhere. Quite hungry now. #
• Bought jasmine tea, lychees and Fortune Cookies (and some for the nursery). Tea and cookies delicious, not tried the lychees yet! #
• IT Architects asking how many of our blogs are brochureware but their definition was a bit wooly. More than I would have guessed. #
• Arduino kit has arrived from oomlout. Very nicely presented indeed. Surprised how small the Arduino itself is. #
• LED attached to Arduino: It blinks (just the way I tell it to!) #
• An opportinity just arose to rescue a damsel in distress. Of course, I took it. #
• Bloke in front of me earlier this evening in Tesco bought £500 of Euro lottery tickets. I hope I win. #

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Today saw the long awaited arrival of an Arduino starter kit. Ordered from oomlout a couple of days ago it’s arrived in good time, and made a great impression.
The kit itself is neat, tidy and very well presented in a plastic compartment box – so no cause for untidiness or losing anything – together with a great little guide to getting started. The guide, as well as some handy introductory material about the kit, programming and electronic components. After that each page takes you through constructing a small experiment – working up in complexity and using all the components in the kit.
I chose to install the IDE on my eee 1000H netbook rather than my desktop as it had a much more up to date Ubuntu installation which met the requirements without any further hassle.

I started with the first example – to make a LED blink – and discovered how case sensitive the sketch seems to be – but it was easy to work out where I was wrong from the way it debugged during the compile and highlighted the offending line.
A very quick upload later and the LED was blinking merrily away. So easy to change the mark/space ratio by altering the delays in the loop and uploading again. How easy is that?
I see much time to be spent playing and learning how to get the best from this. Very satsifying indeed.

• Have ordered an arduino starter kit from oomlout. Too many ideas. #
• Received second time around wedding invite from an old pal. Have suitable gap in diary. That's Good. #
• is getting confused trying to load up and work a dispenser for brown pacel tape. #
• Struggling with win s/ware Typing Instructor for Kids 4 which has no sound (and should) & won't register DLLs properly at install. Grrrr. #

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I’ve finally broken, and splashed out in a Starter Kit for the Arduino.  I’ve ordered the kit from Oomlout.co.uk as it seems to have lots of bits along with a decent size breadboard and natty holder to fix the board and the Arduino unit itself together which should make it more stable.  It also has a servo motor which I’ve never used before, although the rest of the components are pretty familiar, and which I’m looking forward to getting to grips with.  The only problem is there are just too  many possible projects I’d like to construct!

In other news it seems Paul and Clare are to marry in the Summer.  Invite arived today so that day’s already been set aside in our diary.  We’re very much looking forward to the event, and finally meeting the lady herself – all previous attempts have failed through severe diary congestion.

This is really just a short note to file away for the future.  Having recently discovered the Arduino, and seem many of the things it’s been made to do, I wanted to jot down a few ideas I might follow up myself one day.  Real Work seems to get in the  way most of the time, but with a long history of dabbling in radio and electronics and having built many gadgets, radios, remote controls and so forth, the Arduino looks like a fab  way to interface with mechanicals.

So the first idea is a way to play some little bells to make tunes.  I have a couple of sets of mini bells from B&Q some years ago which play a fixed set of Christmas tunes, controlled from a small box and a 12v supply.  If I can interface each bell line to the Arduino using a (reed) relay [or even directly, perhaps?] I’d have an eight note one octave player.  A quick look on the ‘net shows someone has made a similar bell tower from hand bells, however I’d like to be able to play more than one note at a time.  Input from a text file of some sort – I’ve seen a form of music notation that might do the trick, but this needs more investigation.  Ultimately I could build a multi-octave machine like a player piano or adapt a harmonium.

Second Idea: Temperature sensors on the heating system to measure use and efficiency – and combine with a gas meter reader to complete the energy consumption records  via Pachube (i.e. to add the the electric consumption data).

Third idea: Talking parrot, an adaptation of an ambient orb.  I have a USB parrot which only works on Win and has no recent drivers or apparent way to use in Linux/OSX – so I’m going to keep it for possible hacking in the future.  Flap wings or nod head , open beak etc to relay data values of some sort.  The higher the home energy use, the more the little bird will fidget.

• Doing weird things with Movable Type imports. Might be very successful. #
• Early start today at 7:45. Canteen breakfast at desk. Multiple perl and wget site scrapes. Hope editor decides how many pages he really has. #
• This Movable Type import work really feels like voodo magic. It may even work! #
• Hooray: Site now running on Movable Type. Only slightly frayed (the site, that is). Me: happy. http://tinyurl.com/c5lo5q #
• more regex magic for microscope. #
• Finally upgrd firmware for my Grandstream BT200 VOIP phone by getting intermediate versions. GS Support didn't know it had to be this way. #
• It must have been the rasberry jam on my toast this morning that's put me in such a good mood today. Even my PDP work was almost fun! #
• School office messed up passing music bag to Grace so she missed piano lesson. Grrrr. #
• Home brewed beer still in good condition, if a little cooler than I'd prefer as it lives in the shed. It's jolly cold out there. #
• Client happy with new web site livery. Joy. What a way to spend a Saturday! #
• It is about 40 years since I was last here in Bentalls and it has changed a bit #
• Heinz Tomato soup, a swirl of fresh cream and some home made croutons = peace and calm. #

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I’m just drinking a very pleasant, if somewhat cool, glass of home made beer.  When we decided to do up the garden this year, one objective was to start brewing beer in the shed – something I’ve not dine for about fifteen years or so.  Once the shed was in place, out came the fermenting bucket and barrel, and the result is a pressure barrel (courtesy of some gaffer tape to keep the safety valve shut!!)  of beer for me to sip when I like.  Forty pints will last a while  – I seem only to manage a pint or so a week at most.

Nice day at work today – plenty accomplished, and although I had to refuse some business to tune a web site, I was able to make a few useful tweaks to the Apache configuration for performance.  Stats still suggesting Movable Type rendering 500,000 page impressions a day – that’s pretty good.

Finished my performance review at the office this morning as well.  Glad that’s out  of the way.

I also managed to get my BT200 voip phone to ring with a converted bell sound.  Not really very spectacular, but just rather neat to accomplish!

Much hassle trying to upgrade my fairly ancient voip phone which I use in the study connected to the Asterisk PBX.  It seemed to have a very early firmware and boot loader version, which no matter how much I tried would not upgrade to Grandstream’s latest and greatest.  I troubled their support ticket system for advice, and the persistent reply was that it would work in one go without intermediate versions.  Not so.  FAIL to Grandstream, I’m afraid.

After much searching I found a site called GrandstreamSucks.com and there were a series of earlier firmwares.  I downloaded all I could, then set about seeing what could be done with these;  the phone was set to use a local HTTP server for the firmware upgrades, and by this means I could follow the Apache log and see the evidence of the files being sucked up.

From the very early software versions (on my phone it was 1.1.0.5 software / 1.1.0.88 bootloader) you do seem to have to upgrade in stages.  From GrandstreamSucks  I used firmware 1.1.2.25 which upgraded just fine.  I then chose 1.1.4.14 which also upgraded fine. THEN I used the 1.2.2.26 from the real Grandstream site, and that seems to have worked fine as well.

Now all that’s left is to test it all out properly and check the configuration is still right.

Very random.

Climate change:  the IPCC seems to have shot itself in the foot having predicted a few years ago that all the Himalayan glaciers would be melted in less than thirty years from now.  I really don’t understand how they can have come to such a dramatic conclusion without realising thy must have been so amazingly wrong unless they were simply joining the global warming bandwagon and giving politicians what they wanted to hear in exchange for funds.  It’s bad enough that the Pro GW enthusiasts can’t accept that they might be wrong.  Drives me mad – and somewhat irritated by some journals fanning the flames, it seems to me.  Gah!

— UPDATE, 27/01/2010: The Times has an article on this very subject and which strikes me as a far more balanced attitude to how scientists should think about this subject.—

The office canteen produced Haggis yesterday.  It was great.

Spent much of today looking at the conversion of www.microscope.co.uk to an MT based site.  Hopefully I can sort out the problems this poses me, and discover just hpw many pages there actually are.  Wget is now being run to try and get an  “independent” idea of what’s there.  Editor says 3500 pages, Script from SixApart finds just 980.  Nice bit of feedback from the publisher, though.

We went to Grace’s school this evening to hear about the proposed trip to Little Canada (IOW) when she gets into year six.  Got to find some cash, now!

Waitig for Grandstream to reply to my question about upgrading the BT200 phone firmware.  24 hours so far and no reply yet.  Hopefully they’ll comeup with the goods, because random crash and reboot only with a power cycle is a bit frustrating.

Time for bed.  Early shift for me tomorrow.