After much soul searching I've decided to move my little "home on teh intarwebs" over to del.rudforce.com. Most of the stuff I've been thinking/working on lately has been under the new name of Rudforce Intragalactic, and I've not done hardly anything with downinit.com for years anyway. I'm not sure just what I'll do with downinit.com, but I'm sure I'll come up with something. I'm not going to let the domain go.

I've also finally succumbed to WordPress. I still don't know just how I feel about this, but I think I'll survive. It is going to be pretty hard moving from my own small code (38k) to a new 31 megabyte monster. WordPress has a helluva lot to offer though and should be okay. It'll be nice letting someone else add features :)

I don't think I get much traffic here, in fact I'm sure I don't. I will, however, leave some kind of forward to the new site, probably forever. So if anyone actually reads this and has it bookmarked, please update them to visit del.rudforce.com instead.

"I'd rather we spend the time worrying about human rights, or even animal rights, at a time when they seem so under protected: at least we know for sure animals feel pain. For another, if the civil liberties of humans (never mind animals) continue to be violated as flagrantly and often as they seem to be now, what chance is there that robot rights, whether legislated for or not, will be in any way respected?"

From: Brains and Machines: Feeling robots' pain

"I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."
-- Sidney Greenstreet, _The Maltese Falcon_

So, yeah, my main computer (PRG) took a dump yesterday. Not totally sure why, but apparently it thought the processor was overheated (which it may have been) so it cranked the cooling fan way (way way) up (like a small jet taking off). I thought maybe the fan had died, but swapping that out didn't help, the whole machine just doesn't come back anymore. An autopsy showed at least one bulging capacitor on the mobo, and semi-dry, chunky thermal paste under the heatsink. Don't know if either of those is the actual problem, doesn't matter much anyway, dead is dead.

So for now I'm going to have to use Zephraim (the little 999MHz Epia in the closet) and/or borrow J's laptop until I can figure out how to get a new one. Since J's lappy is XP I'm trying out Portable Apps to keep firefox profiles manageable. We'll see how that goes. I'll probably end up acquiring a bigger flash drive and installing some Linux or another on that. What really stinks is that was the only computer I had capable of using the SATA drive. In other words, I currently have no way of recovering the stuff off that drive. Notes, bookmarks, some coding, datasheets, drawings, photos, all likely safe, just untouchable without buying more freakin parts.

On a positive note, now I have an LCD for my workbench PC, thus clearing up some precious desk space. Too bad I had to lose the "smart" machine to do it...

A test.

c Code

array[1] = 'a';

Edit = Ya, it worked. Took me long enough to get around to fixing it, but it no longer tries to link the 1 in the above code sample. As long as code is wrapped in a [ code ] block.

Oh, and I fixed the background-color of the code block too. Now it's readable.

Just a quick test of the syntax highlighter. Seems to be working, but it's ugly. This post also serves as a note to self to fix the bleeding stylesheet and make some readable colors.

perl Code

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use integer;

# the nth element of the fibonacci series
# param n - an int >= 0
# return an int >= 0
sub fib($) {
  my $n = shift, $a = 1, $b = 1;
  ($a, $b) = ($a + $b, $a) until (--$n < 0);
  return $a;
}

print fib(10);

Trying this; the Quit Smoking While Still Smoking Plan. The book is pretty much the first time I've ever felt like there was hope for even cutting back on my smoking.

Starting right now (although officially starting tomorrow morning) I'll no longer smoke while using the phone. Any amount of using the phone. No talking on the phone (the easy part), no sending text messages, no reading text messages, while smoking. No browsing the mini-browser-web, no looking up or saving notes to self, no address book, while smoking. Easy, eh?

I can do this.

Figured out why I couldn't upload via the usb-serial cable. Seems I was forgetting to poke the reset button. Duh. Now that I've realized that, things seem to be working pretty well. A quick sample sketch verified that serial communication from the "arduino" to the PC worked.

So then I hooked up my Ping))) sensor using this example. Lo and behold, things worked just dandy. I grabbed a ruler and it seemed to be reasonably accurate too. Cool beans.

I think it's time now to start dismembering the RSMedia to get serial access to its brains. I'm also toying with the idea of doing a bit of PHP work and adding a couple missing functions to the ol' homepage here. Decisions decisions...

Trying this version of adaboot with the new pile o parts. So far this one seems to be working okay, if I poke the reset button at the right time. I can't just upload from the Arduino IDE though, which I thought I could do. Getting tired of it for today. Gonna play more tomorrow.

Also, Note To Self; When things appear strange, make sure the testing LED isn't a blinky LED...

Got an AVR programmer for christmas, and just got done assembling it today. Now it's time to whip up a breadboarduinothing to see if I actually soldered it up right :)

USBtinyISP