Old Journal Entries

The backlog of my journal can be found here.

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I'm also part of the way through building a solid-state load bank. Yes, that's also for testing power supplies. I am, in fact, designing power supplies recently.

And in other news, I did my first aluminum melt recently. It didn't work very well, but it was inspiring enough that I'm going to build a proper blast furnace and try again.

The first of those projects is my new Old-World Light Bulb Load, which I have posted on Instructables. It's meant to be used for testing power supplies, either as a ballast resistor, or a load resistor.

The second of those is a little power supply. Specifically, a switch-mode supply, based on a flyback topology, which provides two 12V outputs and a 5V output, which all float relative to each other, from 120VAC. The prototype is now fully functional, and it really deserves its own page, which I may post shortly.

It seems that my plan to build a RepRap will be delayed for a while, but it's still on the table eventually.

JTex 2 is progressing nicely, and I'll probably post a demo version soon. I'm actually debating releasing the whole project under the GPL when it matures a bit. Still undecided on the matter, but it doesn't use any proprietary libraries, so at least it's a possibility this time around.

Oh, and I may be starting to build a RepRap soon!

Since my last posting, I moved, bought a house, got married, built a new computer. With any luck, I will be able to post a little bit about some of that. I have been working on a new content management system, which among other things, will allow comments and OpenID authentication, but it is not yet ready to be deployed.

Also, I have been tinkering on a new project: JTex 2. This is a modern take on my old procedural texturing system, and while it is not yet ready to be used, I am working on it frequently.

In the meantime, I am slowly converting old content to the new CMS. The "About Me" page was just rebuilt from scratch, and all the obsolete information updated. I have a bunch of software projects that I will be releasing here relatively soon as well.

Until then.

The fifth issue of Circuit Corner is up! Go check it out. Again, I update Circuit Corner with all the most useful tidbits from my electronics designs, so you may easily find something useful there. I'm almost through collecting my notes for issue six now too.

Oh, and the electronics geeks among you, have a look through the articles. With any luck, I will update Circuit Corner whenever I have an interesting circuit available.

Lots of new things on the OS front. Cy/VOS kernel 3 is moving fast. A screenshot is on the project page. The new kernel is internally multithreaded, and uses no busywaits. This makes it suitable for use as a realtime operating system.

Finally, check out the rendering on the jTex page.

Cy/VOS is working out quite nicely. It's now in V0.6.2, and hopefully I'll get a new snapshot of some sort up soonish.

I've also recently been thinking over the possibility of releasing the source to my in-house MP3 streaming jukebox software. The main reason that I haven't done so is that it requires a lot of really obscure dependancies to function. It's really unpleasant to set up. Other than that, it's very powerful.

Until next time.

I've been working on a new content management system for this page, which is both the reason updates have been so slow recently, and hope that updates will come quicker in the future.

When the new CMS is running, I'm planning to set up a section on printed circuit board tutorials. I've recently perfected the technique for myself, and it's working well. More on this later.

First, the person I'm dating is as geeky as I am, so we have a LOT of new projects coming. That, and I finally feel happy now, but if you wanted to hear angst you'd be at livejournal instead of here.

We are building a GPS-based NTP appliance, so I will soon have a strata 1 NTP server here. It looks like this will require a custom PCB, so I might finally get around to putting up a PCB tutorial soon.

I am in the process of writing an MP3 streaming jukebox as a backend for icecast. It works well, but is a little rough around the edges and has a HUGE list of dependancies. I might release it anyway (perhaps as an ebuild), but it'll be a while. I'm also looking at building a little MP3 component audio appliance out of an old laptop motherboard and some miscellaneous junk. More on that as it develops.

NBASE is maturing quite nicely, and a new release is imminent. The API has changed rather noticably in places though, unfortunately. Fortunately, it looks like most of these changes are essentially final.

My operating system, Cy/VOS, is about to be updated soon with the results of some recent coding sessions. I have most of a FORTH interpreter, which I plan to glue onto the boot kernel. This will give me a self-booting FORTH kernel, which is the bare minimum amount required to call it a full OS. When I add a few utilities for managing this webpage a little easier from here, then I will probably paste full sources for the FORTH kernel itself, since, unlike the boot kernel, it is decent code.

I'm considering posting a little bit of code I wrote as a frontend for the xosd library. It reads from a fifo, and an auxiliary program to write to the fifo makes it into a very useful notification daemon. It was a quick and dirty hack but it works quite well.

Oh, and the Write Me button now works again. I just realized that it's been broken ever since my move. If you didn't get any replies from me, feel free to try again. Enjoy!

Well, I just up and moved suddenly! A lot of things have changed, and when I get a chance to write up about some of them, I'll be able to post them.

I'm no longer employed, and a bit burned out. Time to take a break and mend my body and mind. I'm happily living with someone I care for dearly in a big city, with plenty of opportunity ahead of me. This part is good.

The bad is that I now, again, no longer have a workshop. However, all is not lost, and I fully expect to be doing interesting things in the place I'm in now. I'll make sure to write up some articles about my hacking.

This page is now being hosted on aurora, which is now a gentoo-based webserver. Yes, I had to leave my beloved aurora behind, colocated with family. At least it's not alone in a closet. Europa, my newish laptop, is now filling the role of my primary machine, and I may have a new LAN server here sometime soon as well.

More good news! I now have the time to build a proper content-management system for these pages, so they should start to improve in the near future. I also have the time to work on NBASE/Unity, and much work is already in progress in that department.

Things are looking up for me!

Anyway, now that I'm almost recovered from my little ordeal, things are just slipping into the same old boring routine. Work, rest, sleep, work, rest, sleep. I get a little bit of coding done on the weekends, so NBASE is actually progressing rather well (Elaan Technologies, go get NBASE and send me some bug reports!). I should actually have a new snapshot ready in a couple weeks.

The good news is that I'm recovering physically. The bad news is that I'm in bad financial shape. Oh well, it happens. Things will get better.

I have started doing a little tinkering with NBASE again, there are some good things coming. Stay tuned.

This is probably going to be my last update for a very long time. I am going in for major medical treatment in early December, and I will spend quite some time hospitalized. The good news is that it seems that I will live.

A heartfelt thanks goes out to all that have helped me in these difficult times. You have my deepest gratitude.

Alas, life is being really rough with me lately. Hopefully things will improve before too long though.

I also updated the PIC16F84 section with pictures of my LCD attached. There is even a picture of it displaying a message! Feel free to write if you want the C code for it.

I am planning to drastically reorganize my site lately, since some pages (especially the PIC page) are growing beyond all sanity. When that happens, I will probably add a little more detail to some of the subsections (like the code for my PIC stuff).

Oh, and Microchip sent me a bunch of samples of different types of PIC micros, so before too long I will have information on other chips up here. Maxim/Dallas did the same, so I should even be adding stuff about more serial interfacing and using iButtons. (yay for free samples)

I should have some more information about my new PIC setup soon, since I am in the process of adding an LCD display. I have a new circuit order coming soon as well, which includes 2 new types of PIC microcontroller, as well as some other good stuff.

Stay tuned!

The entire page has now been redone in PHP, making it a lot easier to maintain. So updates should be coming a lot quicker now.

Im now mostly moved into my new place, and have started building nifty things once more. I managed to finagle a digital camera now, so I can even take pictures with ease! Which is good, since I have a *LOT* to add to this page.

A new section has been added on a power supply I built over the past few weeks. I even had to learn a couple new skills for it!

Hopefully I'll manage a visual redesign before too long as well.

I've decided to try my hand at the ever-so-popular format of open letters. So in my open letters section, you will now find an open letter to Hilary Rosen, RIAA et al. It's a little scathing, so take your asbestos undies with you if you choose to read it.

Oh, and I'm DEFINATELY going to have to update my hardware page. I finally replaced the dead ZIP-CD... with a DVD+RW! Neat drive, this one!

Anyway, until next time.

On the flip side, I have some explaining to do. The build system downloadable from here (quickmake) is version 3.2.0, while the version with NBASE is 4.0.0. Why did I neglect to release it? Honestly, I just don't have time to document a makefile system that will soon be obsolete. Unimake 5.0.0, the sucessor to quickmake, is undergoing heavy development and some testing, and will be released as soon as it is stable enough to deploy in NBASE. Unimake also removes the requirement for a mkhead program, using standard GNU m4 instead.

In the meantime, feel free to pinch quickmakefile 4.0.0 from NBASE. While NBASE itself is GPL, quickmakefile is still released under the unrestrictive licence that it always has been.

I will try to keep this page live as long as I can afford, but without a job, this page may go dark. As if anyone ever actually reads it anyway.

If anybody happens to need someone with a solid base in technical areas, I am available immediately and can relocate or telecommute. I may post my resume sooner or later, just in case.

I should get a chance soon to get my new business webpage up, so maybe I will actually start releasing some real code. I am almost ready for a new snapshot of some Unity system sources, and I have to update the section on my build system. In fact, a replacement system, Unimake, will be replacing it soon, when I get a few bugs ironed out.

Oh, and for a second update in one post, I started working on those tutorials I've been wanting to add. So now you can look through the first tutorial in the series, "Thinking About Electricity", which should help you wrap your head around electricity.

I hopefully will get a chance to put up a new feature or two, since I really have been working myself silly and have quite a few things ready. I hope I have more time to update in the coming weeks.

Anyhow, in true random tradition, a new comic has been added to my comics page.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them. I'm starting to consider putting up a section of electronics tutorials, but I'm not sure if that would be redundant or not. Oh well, I'll decide by next time. My life is SOOO busy though.

Ok, that was obviously bitter, and yes, I really DID lose my harddrive and my burner. Luckily, my harddrive was still slightly functional, so I managed to get all my data off of it without a single byte out of place *WHEW*.

Anyhow... I now live in university residence, and my life is starting to get very strange... lol. I have had to update both the 'My Computer' page, as much of the hardware has just had a sudden upheival, and the 'My Comics' page, as Exploitation Now decided to exploit us, now.

I have many many neat new electronics designs, I'm getting an intuitive understanding for analog circuits and the problems likely to be faced in their design... As such, I've developed some interesting, novel circuits, and I now have a lot of neat new ideas.

The hardened control bus I was working on (multidrop, power-on-the-wires), primarily for home and light industrial automation, is now at least partially designed. I just wish I could build it, but then, I can always simulate and then get a prototype board made.

Well, hopefully I can start updating my webpage a little more often now. Until next time.

I really do miss my workshop. I have a few dozen ideas of things I want to build, and I can't. Oh well, I'll have a workshop again, just have to finish university.

Oh well, other than feeling sorry for myself, life has been very hectic. I'm working on a zillion projects all at once, I have some really fun things in the cooker. Especially since nTec is now basically defunked, I have a big mess of code that I can suddenly start cleaning up for release.

So there should be a new version of the build system upcoming. As well as the UNITY project, but I'll leave that one for wild speculation.

My website went down as my webserver machine was actually physially transported, and it stayed down while I got PPPoE running for my new DSL connection. Even then, there is still some tuning left to do in order to keep this webpage up.

Now, since I'm not about to abandon geekdom just because I had to move, I think I might be putting some software up here. I have some stuff that is almost ready for alpha-testing.

This should also ensure that I can actually play some games. I am quite anxious to try. Maybe I should try WineX or somesuch.

Now I need to figure out how to make the pictures autorearrange when I have galleries like that. And I should dig out my old thumbnailing scripts and put them to work here too. Actually, this page should have a few more scripts, although I'm not sure if they should be front or back-end.

Anyway, remember when I was griping about my QuickCam Pro 3000 being a Win-Cam? Well, it appears that this is no longer the case. The camera is now one of the best-supported cameras in Linux, with drivers included in the mainstream kernels (well, the LATEST mainstream kernel, anyway). You just set it up as a Philips camera, and you're set. I guess even though Logitech dropped the ball, Philips picked it up and ran with it (the driver is SLIGHTLY supported by Philips, if nothing else they released a LOT of specs for it, and donated a cam or two).

So now there's a new picture of Aurora's case on her page. The Linux drivers seem to have MUCH better control of exposures, allowing me to take some pictures in almost total darkness (which is really cool).

Anyway, having a cam that I can just plug into Aurora should help a bit with picture updates (although I've still got to figure out how to take pictures in my workshop). Anyway, till next time (tomorrow?).

Oh, and I realize how big my main page was getting, so I moved all my entries from 2001 into a seperate page. This should make it much less unweildy to view.

Oh well, in the mean time, my web-server is now handling the printer, but I'm going to need to replace ix for the X10. Luckily it's a pretty much standard Compaq DeskPro (486DX2-50), so I'll just swap the peripherals into another one (I've got a big stack of these things and only use one or two). The harddrive seems to init, so I suspect I won't even have to reinstall.

Oh, and I added a new section, the "D.I.Y. Equipment", which has a bunch of my designs for homemade test equipment. Currently, it just has an enhanced 555 circuit, but check it out, it's completely variable duty cycle.

I'm going to need to take some new pictures and spend a minute updating things... Besides my little refridgerator, I have been doing work with my new PIC programmer. Right now I've got an LCD hooked up. It's rather neat.

In other news, I started reading Sluggy Freelance (and thus flushed three days). It's now been added to my list of comics. I think Riff is hot ;)

It all started when I found a surplus peltier module in a bunch of old parts. After doing quick measurements, I ascertained that it's probably a 12V 30W peltier (it has a resistance just over 5 Ohms). Now, most people, upon finding themselves the proud owner of a 30W peltier, would quickly use it to cool their overclocked dual Celeron. But not me.

Instead, I got out some sheet-metal shears, some sheet aluminum, some mat-board, a bunch of foam, and a handful of components. I quickly whipped up a little adjustable temperature regulator circuit on a breadboard, dug out an adapter that could push the peltier at about 15W or so, and started hacking.

In the end I was left with a little refridgerator, just big enough for one can of pop. I'll actually set up a page about it (including pictures) when I actually get it working (there was a failed solder joint on the peltier, and I was out of thermal compound. That, and I haven't made up a proper clip to hold the old Pentium heatsink on the back yet).

That addition just happens to be MOSIX, which is some really neat clustering software. Currently I use it to connect my laptop, which is only a P90, to my main machine. The difference is certainly non-trivial, although 10BaseT is a little limited for the purpose. Just the same, the difference between the two machines certainly adds a lot of power to the laptop.

Personally, I'm thinking of adding a few of the other decent machines in this room to this cluster. Clustering rocks.

If anybody out there needs some custom PC-board work, just write me. I'd gladly pick up a couple custom jobs on the side.

There was a time when NN4 was my primary browser. In fact, if you look closely, you can even see some tags left-over from when I originally made this page with Composer (it's now an all-Vim show). There was a time, way back in history when this page didn't even display properly in Konqueror.

Times change. I've been designing a new page for a new online robotics store, and, for the life of me, I can't make it work in Netscape. Unlike this page, which is all relative tables and no graphics other than the one above, the counter, and the Vim banner, the new robotics page uses ROUNDED tables (ooh, aah ;). Netscape really doesn't appreciate having fixed and relative tables mixed together. I wasn't aware of the problem, since it worked fine in Konqueror, and IE doesn't really seem to mind it either.

Anyway, I got sick of web-design, so I came here to post this rant.

There is now a picture of my new PIC programmer board (prototype/demo model) under the 16F84 page. I have a few of these for sale, they are fully in-circuit functional and should work with the 16C84 as well. I haven't figured out the price yet, but I'll list them on eBay soon (as soon as they're finished building).

I just got a minor attack of Slashdot, receiving 3000 hits in two days (I feel popular all of a sudden). I have at least looked in all the boxes I got yesterday now (two major electronics deliveries in one day), although I have a lot of work left to do.

Finally, I've spent my morning hacking away on a homegrown charge-pumped RS232C interface to my PIC microcontroller. I'll try to put up an entry on my PIC page about it later, when I can coax my camera to work again. Yes, I really *DO* spend all my holidays hacking.

It looks like I've been Slashdotted, at least somewhat. My hit counter was more like 750 before this night started, although my server seems to be standing up to the onslaught. But that's not all!

This morning, I get, not one, but TWO major shipments of electronics. One of them was 150lbs of random stuff! There were packing peanuts everywhere! I've never seen a 0.45F capacitor before now... Gah! Now to try to SORT 15lbs of capacitors... (10lbs of resistors, etc.)

Find the information at this page or follow the link to aalib2 on the left.

Oh well, I got myself into this mess. I'll survive. And I'll try to update more often.

Obviously this solution is not acceptable for mission-critical applications, I may revamp the updater so that it uses several different IP address sources. Anyway, I should be back up soon now.

Page updates are slow, I just had exams, and now I've got to finish paperwork for next term. I've got a new algorithm to put up, a B-tree version of the fast-array, which achieves similar performance without the high memory overheads. I've also got a few other things to put up, but it'll take some time.

Just reading my guestbook, and I think I'm coming off a little too strong. Sorry people, I don't try to be indimidating... So don't be intimidated, or else ;)

I'll try to start posting pictures of my equipment, but I (rather foolishly) bought a Creative Labs Webcam Go a while back, and that's all I've got around here. It's an OK camera, but Windows only, meaning that my Linux system has some trouble with it, to say the least. Oh well, theres a Windows system around here somewhere, I think (digs through the stacks of old machines).

In other news, I recently picked up a signal generator to complement my oscilloscope. My scope is STILL not in, but it may arrive tomorrow. Anyway, the signal generator is an EICO 377, I'm not 100% sure of the manufacture date, but it was some time in the 1950's or so. It is 100% tubes, even using a tube rectifier. Wow, the thing still works (well, as well as my multimeter can detect anyway, I'll test it more thoroughly with my oscilloscope soon).

Well, it appears I'm starting to get traffic, mostly from Slashdot, of all things. Luckily I'm not the brunt of the Slashdot effect yet, I'm not sure my poor little server could handle it.

Well, it seems that UPS shipped my oscilloscope to Minneapolis by accident, so it might still be a while. Annoying, but at least it's not lost.

I'm in the process of digging up some EDA's that (I hope) should be useful enough to use. I should soon start putting electronics pages up, probably starting with a list of tools that I use (both hardware and software). Hopefully I'll be able to start adding electronics projects here too, once I'm set up for it.

Anyway, sign away, but keep in mind that I do retain the right to yank anything offensive. If you see anything offensive on the guestbook which you would like to see removed (and I didn't notice), then just write me a mail (the link is also on the left).

Do I have anything better to do? Not really, just this and wait for my new Oscilloscope to come in. I should be putting up an electronics page soon when I get my new lab area set up again.

This should work with both C and C++ at the moment, although it should really also work with any language that gcc supports on your system.