blog.world3.net

Retro Adapter on sale soon and Retro Adapter Wii

06/09/2009 – 17:45

I will be opening the online shop for sales of the Retro Adapter soon (just waiting for the final parts to come in). Both finished adapters and kits will be available, as well as a selection of connectors.

It occurred to me that I can use the same PCB for a Wii/Gamecube version, so I am now working on the Retro Adapter Wii. It will support all the same controllers as the Retro Adapter, and will in fact use the same code where possible. One thing I’m not sure about is firmware updates, I need to look into the options.

By mojo | Posted in avr, electronics, hardware | Comments (0)

On the (ab)use of DNA evidence

22/08/2009 – 19:20

An interesting thread started up on a /. article about how handwriting style “fingerprinting” is easily fooled. Since I made some of the posts, I’m mirroring it here:

amimojo:

This should not really come as a surprise to anyone. Like all evidence that has to be interpreted, the interpretation can be flawed.

Shows like CSI have computers getting an exact match on fingerprints and DNA, but the real world is not like that. Fingerprint matching is entirely subjective and the print recovered from a crime scene is rarely a nice clean one like they show on TV. DNA often has to be manipulated before a match can be made (due to the sample found at the scene being too small or of poor quality) and even then it often matches more than one person.

Even when you do get a match, it’s not proof that someone was at a specific place because DNA and fingerprints can easily be transferred. Someone broke in to my car a few years ago and despite there being fingerprints the police decided not to prosecute because they were on the outside of the car and the accused could just claim he lent on it on his way home from the pub.

There have been a few cases where fingerprint and DNA evidence have been challenged in the UK courts and shown to be unreliable, with innocent people spending years in jail before being cleared. Yet, the police seem to have started asking for everyone in the area of a crime to “volunteer” their DNA. Presumably if you don’t “volunteer” you become a suspect.

The idea that handwriting is any more unique than those two and at all reliable is laughable.

abigsmurf:

There was a good article here (or possibly some other social news type site) about the inherent flaw in DNA databases and the weight given to DNA evidence.

The theory goes like this: the chances of getting a false positive on a part sample are something like 1/50million. You have 50 million people on the database. This means You’d expect a false positive on every search. If you’re unlucky enough to live close enough to a crime to have committed it, you could easily find yourself in court.

You’ll then have to defend yourself based on a 1 in 50 million probability to a jury who won’t understand the statistics. If you haven’t got a solid alibi, it would be a tough thing to do.

There’s probably a good Terry Pratchett quote about 1 in a million chances to be used here.

amimojo:

An excellent point well made.

There is also danger of a match being made on another member of your family, but you being the one somehow tied to the case (in the same city or something) and so you get arrested. Siblings have close enough DNA that such matches can apparently be made.

I question the “1 in 50 million” statistic too. It’s far too simplistic, as there are different ways of collecting and matching DNA. Also, so-called experts have been wrong about this sort of thing in the past. Remember that poor woman who spent years in jail because some idiot said that there was a “1 in a million” chance of having three children all die of cot-death?

By mojo | Posted in law | Tagged law | Comments (0)

Virgin Media hijacking DNS!

22/08/2009 – 19:16

Looks like VM are getting in to the data-rape game by hijacking failed DNS lookups. Perhaps this “upgrade” is the reason their DNS servers have been rubbish of late.

Luckily, you can opt out here and it seems to be based on modem MAC address so it should stay off, unlike Phorm which uses a cookie.

By mojo | Posted in Internet, privacy | Comments (0)

Update on kNET hosting

20/08/2009 – 23:15

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.

By mojo | Posted in Internet, networking | Comments (0)

Final Retro Adapter PCBs arrived!

16/08/2009 – 23:36

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 :-)

By mojo | Posted in avr, electronics, hardware | Comments (0)

FileTypesMan, a useful little tool

16/08/2009 – 23:17

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:

By mojo | Posted in software, windows | Comments (0)

Tabs Open Relative (modified) Firefox add-on

14/08/2009 – 23:55

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

By mojo | Posted in software | Comments (0)

More BNP nonsense on BBC Have Your Say

03/08/2009 – 18:59

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.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, politics | Comments (0)

In search of the perfect text editor

02/08/2009 – 14:21

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:

White text on black background
Syntax highlighting
Tabs
Spell checker (preferably a smart one which ignores HTML tags, keywords etc)
Small and fast
Hard word wrapping
Preferably open source / free

Surprisingly, I could only find one program that met those requirements, namely Crimson Editor. Before settling on CE though, I also tried:

JuffEd (no white on black)
Metapad (no syntax highlighting)
Notepad++ *
Notetab Free (pro might be okay)
Programmers File Editor (pretty basic)
Programmers Notepad (no spell checker)
PSPad *
RJ TextEd (good but slow)
ConTEXT (no spell checker)
gEdit (pretty good, a bit large due to being a Unix port, most plug-ins don’t work on Windows)
jEdit (Java based, need I say more?)
Others I forgot about

* 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.

By mojo | Posted in software, windows | Comments (0)

New Retro Adapter prototype PCBs arrived

29/07/2009 – 00:41

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.

By mojo | Posted in avr, electronics, hardware | Comments (0)

たとえ溺れても梦はゆめでしかない

blog.world3.net

Retro Adapter on sale soon and Retro Adapter Wii

On the (ab)use of DNA evidence

Virgin Media hijacking DNS!

Update on kNET hosting

Final Retro Adapter PCBs arrived!

FileTypesMan, a useful little tool

Tabs Open Relative (modified) Firefox add-on

More BNP nonsense on BBC Have Your Say

In search of the perfect text editor

New Retro Adapter prototype PCBs arrived

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