blog.world3.net

On the state of society and welfare

25/07/2009 – 18:16

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.

By mojo | Posted in politics | Comments (0)

Weycrest really suck, kNET are really good

15/07/2009 – 21:40

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.

By mojo | Posted in idiots, networking | Comments (96)

Saleae Logic review

10/07/2009 – 22:01

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.

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

Retro Adapter re-design

09/07/2009 – 23:47

I changed the design again >_<

The main reasons for the change are not wanting to have to drill lots of holes in the cases and wanting to reduce the amount of external components required to support certain controllers. You can now plug Neo Geo pads in directly thanks to having both 9 pin and 15 pin connectors. Having a 15 pin connector makes supporting things like PC Gameport devices easier too.

The AVR has been upgraded to an ATmega168. 16k flash ROM and room for a boot loader, so firmware updates are possible over USB. There are also more I/O pins available.

Finally, the USB port has been done away with in favour of a captured cable. The USB spec says you must have a captured cable for USB 1 devices anyway, and now a USB port won’t easily fit. Since the cable is flexible it also means drilling holes is a lot easier as they don’t have to be exact. The only potential issue I can foresee is strain relief.

Seeed Studio is doing a special offer with 30% off, so I’m getting prototypes made up.

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

Firefox 3.5 tweaks

30/06/2009 – 18:34

Firefox 3.5 is out, and there are some new tweaks I like to have for it.

Disable add-on version checking to enable add-ons which are not compatible with Firefox 3.5:

1. Go to about:config
2. Right click, select New > Boolean and enter extensions.checkCompatibility as the name.
3. Set value to False

This allows you to carry on using extensions while the authors update them. Things may go wrong so be careful using this setting. You can still see which extensions have not been updated in the Add-ons Manager as they have an exclamation mark on their icon.

To disable the tab drop-down and the new tab button, add this to userChrome.css:

.tabs-container .tabs-newtab-button, .tabs-alltabs-button {display: none !important;}

By mojo | Posted in software | Comments (1)

iGo 8/Amigo voice commands.csv format

21/06/2009 – 23:53

Having recently acquired a sat nav I have been experimenting with iGo 8 and Amigo. Both have their particular charms, iGo 8 is highly configurable while Amigo has a clearer display but few customisation options.

One thing that bothers me about both of them is the way they announce every turning three times. Once at 800m (“after 800m prepare to turn left”), then again at 300m (“after 300m prepare to turn left”) and again at 100m (“after 100m turn left”). That seems a bit excessive to me – the 800m and 100m announcements would be fine. The solution is to take the Voice_eng-uk-f3.zip and modify it.

Inside the zip file there is commands.csv, which dictates how iGo speaks to you. I couldn’t find much info on the format, just some outdated stuff for iGo 2006 scattered over some forum posts, so I decided to try and figure it out myself. Luckily, it was not too hard!

iGo uses subroutines for building up the speech. For example, near the top you have:

"code","distance","vocal/iconid","text" "slight_left","call bear BEAR_LEFT-M BEAR_LEFT-E",3, "slight_right","call bear BEAR_RIGHT-M BEAR_RIGHT-E",4, "straight","call c_straight CONTINUE_STRAIGHT-M CONTINUE_STRAIGHT-E",0, "exit_left","call exit EXIT_LEFT-M EXIT_LEFT-E",24,

Then later on you have all the templates for “bear”, “c_straight”, “exit” etc. The two uppercase words after the “call ” bit are the two voice files, one for when the command is the last one and one for when there is more to follow (her voice goes up a bit so it sounds natural).

Then later on we have:

"template c_straight",,,"01_Continue straight situations" ,"100[then]*03_c_straight","THEN %2","01-5 Then continue straight." ,"300[then3]","*03_c_straight","01-5 Then continue straight."

First number is the distance. The item in square brackets is the conditions which iGo uses to pick the right thing to say. For example, [then] is for situations where iGo says “do something and THEN CONTINUE STRAIGHT”. These are built in to iGo. The first one is “then” and the second one is “then3″.

After that comes the optional ID. For the 100 line, the ID is “*03_c_straight”. The 300 line does not have an ID.

The third item is what to actually say. The words in capitals are the names of the .ogg sound files to say. The %2 refers to a parameter passed by iGo, which in this case is presumably “CONTINUE_STRAIGHT” (i.e. the name of the .ogg file, less the -e/-m which iGo adds automatically).

Now looking at the 300 line, we can see that the third item is “*03_c_straight”. That refers to the ID of the 100 line, in other words it’s just saying “use the line with ID ‘*03_c_straight’ for ’300[then3]‘ as well”.

The forth line is just a comment, it has no effect on what is spoken.

,"100[then2,X>1]*06_turn_2","THEN TAKE %X %2","02-47-52 Then take the %X %*. (X>1)" ,"100[then2,!X]*05_turn_2","THEN TURN-SH %2","02-77-81 Then turn %*. (!X)" ,"100[then1,X=1]*07_turn_2","THEN TAKE_THE_NEXT-SH %2","02-65-70 Then take the next %*. (X=1)" ,"100[then1,X>1]","*06_turn_2","02-47-52 Then take the %X %*. (X>1)"

Here is another good example. The first line defines “*06_turn_2″. From the comment we can see that X is the turn number, e.g. the 3rd turn on the left/right. It is used twice, once in the definition (“[then2,X>1]” – i.e. then2 and more than the 1st turn) and again in the speech part where %X produces “the second”/”the third”/”the forth” etc. Finally %2 is “left”/”right”, but from the comments it is also implied that it can be “sharp left”/”sharp right”.

So, it’s quite a complicated system to work with, because everything is referencing other stuff. The good news is you can just remove lines you don’t want, but of course you do have to be careful when removing a line with an ID to either remove all other lines which reference it or to change their references to something else.

My guess is that iGo probably have some software which displays all this stuff in a big tree on screen to make editing it easier. Still, we can do it by hand :)

By mojo | Posted in software | Comments (2)

eBay no-brand media centre remote control review

01/06/2009 – 10:11

I have been looking for a suitable remote control for my media centre for a while now, and decided to take a chance on a £25 2.4GHz remote control with built in optical track ball from eBay:

I was worried that it might be a bit cheap and perform poorly, but was pleasantly surprised by how well made it is. It fits nicely in my hand and the trackball is accurate. The mouse button placement could be a little better. Many of the media keys just work in Media Player Classic Home Cinema, and I set up mapping for a few others like skip forwards/backwards.

One slight disappointment is that the remote does not seem to be able to power my PC on. It may be due to the PC itself – the BIOS only supports power on by keyboard. Some systems support power on by USB device or mouse, which might do the trick.

On the subject of the desktop, I increased the font size setting in Vista to 120dpi and them manually increased a few here and there. I also selected the largest possible mouse cursor. On a 106cm screen I can read everything from two or three meters away.

Overall I’m very happy with this remote. It seems to be reliable, robust and very usable.

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

Another delay starting apps fixed

31/05/2009 – 20:53

I found the source of another delay when starting apps. I have both English and Japanese keyboard layouts installed, and the English one was modified to put the apostrophe next to the ’1′ key (like an Amiga keyboard).

For some reason, this started to cause apps to take a moment or two to start. I removed the modified English keyboard, logged out, logged back in again and re-installed it. The delay dissipated.

I investigated the problem a little further and some people report that running “sfc /scannow” fixes it too. The sfc program checks all system files are the original versions, and if they are not it replaces them. It looks like the non-standard keyboard file is causing some kind of delay as Windows checks it over. I read somewhere that Windows will check certain files and programs for compatibility issues by loading them into a special process and seeing if they crash before deciding whether to allow it to be used as-is or with some compatibility hacks. It’s only a guess but I have a feeling it must be something like that.

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

Remove application start delay caused by Application Experience Lookup Service

29/05/2009 – 21:17

I noticed that apps seemed to take longer to load than they used to. When opening a program, there would be a slight pause (maybe 1 or two seconds) and then it would seem to start normally. I eventually tracked this down to the Application Experience Lookup Service service.

This service checks programs for compatibility when they are started using a database. This check is what creates the delay. By simply disabling the service, it cam be removed. Disabling it does not cause any problems generally, although may in theory case certain applications not to work as Windows cam no longer introduce hacks to make them compatible. The service was first introduced for Server 2003 SP1, then XP x64 and finally Vista and Windows 7.

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

Retro Adapter V2 PCBs arrived!

19/05/2009 – 19:41

The first batch of PCBs is here, and looking good!

Spot the deliberate mistake :) It’s not a problem though, you can easily read the backwards text.