Just wanted to say that it’s been a month or two and kNET are still going strong. Their server is always fast and so far has had no downtime (I use Montastic to check).
In contrast, Weycrest had weekly periods of downtime and ignored support requests.
I can’t recommend kNET enough. Usually it’s a case of “cheap, fast, reliable – pick any two” but thus far they are managing to deliver on all three.
The final production Retro Adapter PCBs arrived yesterday. I made one up and it works perfectly. I am very happy with the world Seeed Studio did on them, especially considering they are cheap and accept files in Eagle format (so they do all the conversion or Gerber and any panelization etc).
I will put together a complete assembly guide with photos at some point in the next week or two, as well as releasing V1.0 of the firmware complete with USB update facility. I am still considering options for the update facility as it needs to be triggered somehow. At the moment the best option looks like holding a fire button on the controller, but the problem is that due to very limited space in the bootloader section it will have to be a simple controller like an Atari/Amiga joystick, Neo Geo joystick/pad or maybe a Sega Saturn pad. In case you don’t have one, a very simple update “plug” made from a DB9 and 1 wire to simulate the fire button being held could be used.
With a bit of luck the Retro Adapter will be on sale soon in time for xmas :-)
I discovered FileTypesMan from Nirsoft today. It’s a handy little bit of freeware that gives you more control over file types than the built in Windows configuration tool. In particular, you can exclude certain types of file from the “Recent Files” list.
Simply open FileTypesMan and select the type of file you want to change:
Double click to open the configuration window and tick the box highlighted below:
I put together a modified version of the TabsOpenRelative add-on which combines the features of that add-on with a fix for the removal of separate preferences for external links in Firefox 3.5. See the links below for more details.
It is also the first thing to be posted to soft.world3.net, where I will be putting all my little bits of code once they are fit for release.
TabsOpenRelative (modified) is available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13626 and http://soft.world3.net/tabsopenrelative.html
It seems that the BNP has been making a big effort lately to push their views via the BBC Have Your Say forums. It’s not surprising really, as the forums get millions of page views but you only need ~150 votes for your comment to rise to the top, something any interested group with more than a few hundred members could organise. Come to that, it could just be a single person with lots of accounts and an automated script.
Anyway, time to refute some of the bullshit:
We don’t need “tougher” citizenship tests, we need tougher border control…
We have over 2 million unemployed, why on earth would we need ANY immigrants??
We should :-
1) Remove all illegal immigrants without hesitation.2) Change the definition of Asylum to mean providing a place or safety for as long as it is deemed to be required – NO right to citizenship, ever..
3) If we have a skills shortage, train our own people first…
We are a small island, we need to limit our population..
Slightly Right Of Ghenghis Khan
Why should we need more people when we have unemployed? This is the often touted “we should have 100% employment” argument. It ignores the fact that you are never going to match every person to a suitable job, based on the skills required and a reasonable salary for them to live and look after their family on. It also ignores the fact that if you force people to do shitty, demeaning jobs with no prospects it tends to lead to things like depression (and time of work), as well as driving them to a life of crime. You can’t really have the media, particularly adverts, telling people that they need stuff and should aspire to things on the one hand, and on the other hand tell them they are worthless and should accept their lowly lot in life and bloody well like it.
So, on to point (1). If we knew where illegal immigrants where, we could remove them. Unfortunately, we don’t, and it’s not exactly easy to find out. Plus, it takes years, even in the simplest cases, to decide asylum cases. If you think it’s easy to figure out who is genuine and who isn’t, you need to give Asylum and Immigration a call immediately.
As for (2), you are pretty much guaranteeing that asylum seekers spend their life on benefits, scrounging off the rest of us hard-working Brits if you don’t allow them citizenship. After all, non-citizens cannot easily get a job (in fact, by default there is not even a right to work for asylum seekers). It wouldn’t stop them using public services either, such as being housed (for free, since they can’t work) or getting treatment on the NHS. I suppose we could just kick them into the gutter and let them die quietly, but that goes against my liberal wishy-washy-politically-correct-namby-pamby feelings of compassion towards my fellow human beings.
So, back to the first point again with item (3). Unfortunately, it takes many years to train people to do complicated jobs. Also, people don’t tend to do too well at leaning things they have absolutely no interest in. You can’t just mould people like clay into any shape you want.
I was just saying today how the popularity of Harry Potter gives me some hope that children are still interested in reading, but now I realise that Harry Potter may just be a gateway text for the Daily Mail. Maybe we should ban reading.
I mainly use Notepad2 as my text editor, but it lacks a couple of useful features. In particular, there is no support for tabs and no spell checker. As with most Scintilla based editors, there is no “hard” word wrapping either (where text is wrapped to, say, column 78 with line breaks).
In my quest for the perfect text editor, I was looking for the following features:
Surprisingly, I could only find one program that met those requirements, namely Crimson Editor. Before settling on CE though, I also tried:
* Notepad++ and PSPad were very close, but the spell checker is not check-as-you-type, which is a real pain because it picks up non-dictionary words like “USB”, “NEC”, “Atari” etc where as with check-as-you-type you can just ignore the red underline.
Crimson Editor is the only one which met my requirement. I had to download the latest beta from the forums though, because the last release version has a bug where the mouse wheel only scrolls two lines at a time regardless of the system setting. I like fast scrolling. Also, there is no global hard word wrapping option, but you can manually invoke a command to reformat the current paragraph to an arbitrary margin.
Syntax highlighting in CE is different to most editors, and I’m still trying to decide if it’s better or not. The program allows you set colours for several general categories of language elements such as keywords, strings, and variables. The highlighter for a given language then uses these categories to colour the text. It’s a nice way of doing things because it means you only have to set colours once and all highlighters use them, in contrast to most editors where each highlighter has to be configured independently. On the other hand, it does limit the control you have over the highlighters a bit, as for example you can’t have separate colours for numbers and text because there is no numbers option.
The status of Crimson Editor is a bit ambiguous, but the developer is still working on it and accepting patches. A replacement called Emerald Editor is in the works, which should be good if it improves on CE.
Just been updating the <a href=”test”>main site</a> with details of the prototype PCBs that arrived yesterday. The good news is that apart from a couple of minor issues, all is well.
I just need to finish a few things off with the code before doing the first small run of boards,
One issue I have found is that it takes a little while to assemble these things. I think it should get quicker if I do them in batches. A good PCB holder is going to be essential I think – the “helping hands” thing with crocodile clips I have now is not really up to the task. Heat-proof soldering gloves make things a lot easier too, as you can hold components in place with a finger while soldering them.
Spotted this in interesting post over at [dis]connect.
Here is my response:
The “American Dream” (TM) is basically the biggest lie we have ever been sold. For us in the UK, it was Thatcher who promised it and Thatcher who ruined everything for us. Our society has literally disintegrated thanks to her “I’m all-right, screw you” philosophy.
The lie is making people think that they can get rich, when the reality is most people will just spend their entire working lives working for other people on a fairly average salary. It’s gone a step further here, with everyone now thinking they are middle class. I know factory workers and part time school dinner ladies who think they are middle class, and thus will never support anything which is (often wrongly) perceived as making the middle class less well off.
You have covered most of the arguments already. The idea that the rich will simply leave is nonsense. They already have off-shore accounts in tax havens and have roots here (family, friends etc). Well, a few do live overseas for tax purposes, but we are better off without them anyway. Lewis Hamilton springs to mind – he could have been a hero here but was unable to celebrate his victories in the UK because he was living as a tax exile. Not exactly an ideal role model.
Maybe I’m just some sort of Communist, but I honestly think the rich have a duty to pay more tax. No-one is rich independently, their fortunes are built off the back of the people who work for them, and society in general. If that doesn’t convince you, let me make a more pragmatic argument. If the rich don’t pay more tax to support the majority of the rest of society (in terms of services and lower tax rates for the middle and poorer classes) then society is going to fall apart, as it has done here. I’m pretty sure most people, poor and rich alike, are not particularly happy with the way things are now.
The situation with health care in the US really shocks me. As a human being, I feel that if I can contribute via some reasonable taxation of my income to making sure that no-one is left to suffer unnecessarily, then I’m happy with that. And yes, I thought that even before I myself became ill, and even now I pay more in to the system than I get out. Personally, I prefer to live in a world where human beings pull together to make things better, not one where everyone looks out for themselves at the expense of others.
For about a year now my site, including this blog, has been hosted with Weycrest. During that time, their service has really, really sucked.
First, there is the down-time. For months my site would randomly go offline for a few hours and then come back. Messages to tech support via the ticketing system or direct email were always ignored. Things got really bad when I tried to set up automatic backups in Wordpress, which would take the site down at the time of the backup for about an hour. Even with backups disabled, a few hours of downtime a week was not uncommon, and it was often during peek times.
Even when the site was up, speeds were pretty poor, especially PHP stuff like the blog.
I have already mentioned that the support staff just tend to ignore you. Eventually I did get a reply, when a misconfiguration caused my mailbox to grow to over 900MB. I don’t actually use the Weycrest mailbox, I just have a re-direct, but it turns out that if you don’t specifically disable the inbox then copies of all re-directed messages end up in it. Eventually they finally responded to an email about this and I was able to fix it. Their response was by no means quick though.
On the subject of configuration, the Plesk control panel they picked is crap. It’s slow, it takes ages to navigate and the layout is far from helpful or logical.
The final straw came when my email was down for a day, as near as I can tell. I send repeated messages to Weycrest, but got no response, so decided to move to kNET Hosting. More on them in a moment. While I was moving all my stuff over, Weycrest finally responded. The email was a bit surprising:
Paul
We will no longer provide support for email forwarding. If it works, fine, it doesn’t well its hard luck I’m afraid.
From now its case of “your mileage will vary” and “use at your own risk” as we cannot guarantee mail delivery to every provider in the world.
This madness has gone on long enough, and its getting kind of ridiculous what we are expected support for £14.99 per year and provide the web hosting as well! We spend more time resolving mail issues than anything else.
It also highly likely that by the time your account comes up for renewal, email will require an additional support package costing at least £15.00 per annum.
Sorry, but as it stands, its just not commercially viable.
Easiest solution for the time being is for you to switch all your email hosting over to Gmail (ie Google apps for your domain) rather than forwarding to it and use your domain with Google. This can be done by adjusting the the DNS settings in Plesk.
Failing that we are happy to cancel on a pro-rata basis, however you have only another month or so left to run.
Best Regards
Paul Lee
Weycrest.Com Limited
So, they basically gave up. What worries me is that the usual way this works is you provide an expensive but reliable service for businesses. You then sell off some excess capacity as cheaper hosting plans, with limits to prevent them ever interfering with your business customer’s service. The cheaper accounts benefit from using the same high reliability services are the business guys, and you get the benefit of extra income and maybe even some early warning of any potential problems (since you have a more diverse set of users, more people looking at things etc). We do something similar with tech support systems where I work, and it’s a good system.
Needless to say I have cancelled my account and am waiting for a refund.
Now, on to kNET. I paid by PayPal (should have used card, PayPal fees are ridiculous, sorry guys, next time) and a human being verified and set up my account within half an hour. I moved everything over, changed the DNS settings and waiting. Small panic when the MX records changed but I was still not getting test emails. kNET responded within 5 minutes, at around 21:30 in the evening. That’s what I call tech support.
The move has gone smoothly. kNET use cPanel, which is a lot better than Plesk. Their server seems fast and reliable. It’s early days, but fingers crossed I have found a good hosting company.
After a lot of consideration, I decided to get a Saleae Logic logic analyser to help debug my AVR code. There are a few reviews already floating around but little detail on people’s experiences of actually using the thing, so here are mine.
The package is quite nice. You get the Logic, which is tiny, probes and carry case. The probes are in the forum of a header with 9 wires (8 data + GND, so you have to have a common ground) and individual “E-Z-Hook” clips. The wires are very flexible and easy to work with, and the clips are the best I have come across. They have little pincers which fit nicely on to component legs, breadboard, DIP IC pins etc. They even clip on to trimmed component leads which have been soldered to a PCB, such as the underside of pin headers.
The pincers retract into the clip’s plastic body so they do not short with each other, even on neighbouring pins of a DIP IC. Saleae also sell replacements at reasonable prices, although so far they seem very robust.
The software provided (simply called Logic) is a bit of a mixed bag, but overall not bad. One attractive feature is that it includes decoders for RS232, SPI, I2C and 1 wire protocols at no additional cost. Future updates and new protocols will be free too, and there is an SDK which I have yet to experiment with. You can download the software from the Saleae web site to try out with some demo data.
Logic is written in .NET so takes about 10 seconds to load on my XP x64 system with 6GB RAM and a 3.1GHz Core 2 Quad CPU. Once it’s loaded though it is very quick and responsive. Not all companies bother to support XP x64 (Vista x64 is mandatory for all signed Vista drivers), so it’s nice that Saleae made the effort.
The Logic interface is non-standard, being skinned. Normally that’s a Very Bad Thing as it can break all the familiar UI elements, but fortunately the developers have stuck to the standards here. Navigation via the mouse is pretty fast, with the mouse wheel used for zooming and simple dragging used to scroll. Hovering the mouse over the recorded data gives you various bits of useful information, such as width of bit, period, binary decoding and more via configurable options.
On my system I can reliably run the Logic at 24MHz without issue. In fact, there is little reason to go any lower since 24MHz, the maximum, gives the most accurate timings. Using a lower frequency allows for longer sampling periods, although even at 24MHz several seconds of recording are possible. I was able to capture complete hardware detection, handshake and polling cycles of various games consoles without any problems. The software handles massive amounts of data with little effort.
Triggering is configurable for each data line individually, and sampling starts when any line is triggered. The Logic also gives you up to a few ms before the trigger which is handy. Trigger can be set on either a logic 1 or logic 0, but not on transitions (e.g. low to high, high to low) explicitly. In practice since most buses are held in one state until communication is started it’s not a major issue, and the Logic does not sync it’s clock to the transition edge anyway.
There are a few things missing that would be helpful, such as being able to compare two data sets side by side. You can take screenshots but it’s not quite the same. You are also limited to only two markers which you can place anywhere, but more would be helpful. The view parameters are reset every time you take a reading, so you have to re-position the display and zoom every time. Luckily the defaults are not that bad.
Saleae are quite helpful and were happy to receive my comments. A new version of the software is in the works which promises to address these issues.
Overall I am very impressed. At $150 the price is pretty good. There are seemingly higher spec’ed and cheaper USB logic analysers available from Chinese companies, but when you look closely at them they tend to have either poor software or arbitrary limitations such as the protocols you can decode (with more available at a price). The openness of the Logic via the SDK is quite attractive too.
The usefulness of the device more than justifies the expense if you do much protocol based work. The ability to see exactly what is going on is invaluable, and makes it easy to get all the timing perfect. It’s also very helpful for debugging, since you can use unused pins on your microcontroller as debug outputs that take only one instruction cycle to access. I have found that some protocols I had working already could be made much more compatible just by checking the timings instead of trying to estimate them based on instruction cycle counts.
I hope Saleae are successful with this project, as they deserve to be.