The art of Christmas lights

I haven’t been able to get much work done at the Ground Zero Labs; what free time I’ve had has gone into finishing up some video games and cleaning up the Christmas decoration. And just like the art of war there are rules of engagement: If the neighbors have more lights; then avoid lights and use inflated snowmen. If the neighbors have the same amount; use multi-color. If the neighbors have nothing; buy everything that Target has in stock.

We only blew the GFI once.

But the VFD clock hardware is complete. Now I just have to house it. Got a couple of ideas how to do that; but I’ll post some pictures and you can see the tube mounting came out bigger than I would have liked.

I did pick up a new project: a scope clock. I’m not really sure where I’m going with this project. But the control board was way to easy not to do it. I was able to get a scope from my Dad; who I recalled has several spares ‘just in case’. And the Bill-Of-Material isn’t all that expensive. One interesting thing about the design; I’ve settled on using a transformer. I’ll post some pictures after I order a few more things for it.

In the absents of light.

I’m happy to to report I acquired a new toy to work on. I’ve made some Nixie clocks, but now there is something else coming out of Russia; Vacuum Florescent Displays (VFD). At some point I’m sure these were going to go into some sort of calculator.

But now; we’re subverting them for other nefarious purposes: Clocks. I’m planning on a art-deco kind case; with some stone, steel wood Frank Lloyd Wright feeling. But we’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you posted.

Speaking of keeping up to date; I made some more progress on my mini-Nixie clock. The mounting is all finished; I have to move the AC adaptor to the back of the board; add some silicon to keep things in place and it’s done. The final touch is drilling three holes in a ¼ thick piece of glass; but if that proves too hard; I’ll just switch over to Plexiglas.

Huston, we have a problem.

Once again life snuck up on me and I’ve been very busy here at Ground Zero Labs. Sure we added to the clan; but that was back in January. That shouldn’t have stopped me from posting for two months.

Let’s see if I can get the order correct: Hurt my back (crack); 9 year anniversary, got laid off, take Management 339 Mid-term, interviewed for new job (repeat as necessary), start new job (hurray!), Thanksgiving (drive to AZ and back), put up Christmas lights, put up Christmas tree and take Management 339 final.

But with all that behind me; it’s clear sailing from now on…

Thought I’d help out.

I like Intel; really I do. But they have dropped the ball so badly the last couple of years I really don’t have any computers using their stuff anymore. Why pay for a premium that isn’t really there? AMD had much better products.

Key word there ‘had’. The new Intel Core 2 Duo is a great product; and surprisingly Intel didn’t price it out of the ballpark. So its all clear sailing now; Intel will finally crush AMD and take over the world.

Not so fast. Intel’s biggest problem is they tend to rest on their laurels. They get ahead, and then start believing their own press releases. And here is why AMD is going to kick Intel around again in a couple of months. As good as the Core 2 design is; its duel and quad designs are hacks. They just glue two (or four) CPU together across the L2 cache. While this allows you put multiple CPUs together they aren’t independently processing. And independently processing is where you get your multiple CPU speed from.

Does Intel know this; yes. Do they care? I guess not; here are two quotes from Intel’s CEO

"This is a multichip package, but so what? I think you'd be misreading the market if you think people care about the packaging,"
- Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO

“Intel's first quad-core processor, the Core2 Extreme, will be shipped in November, targeted at gamers and content creators.”
- Paul Otellini

Let me be the first to just throw this out there: Gamers are the only people on the face of the planet who care about the packaging.

AMD’s quad processor with have 4 independent 4way SMP, and quite obviously kick the heck out of the Intel version in performance. Just stay cool.

Just playing games.

I was reading another Blog, when I realized not everybody knows about MAME. (M)ulti (A)rcade (M)achine (E)mulator. And the wonders of being able to play just about any arcade game ever invented. And these are the authentic games, not a conversion. Some very dedicated people create emulators for the CPU’s and the video systems of the classic arcade machines. Then they ‘get’ the game ROMs.

Sometime the company that owns the game will allow the ROM’s to be copied; sometime not so much. Its best not ask too many questions. My collection of games is in the 100’s and about 9Gigs of storage. It’s a wonderful way to preserve these classics; and it’s free.

http://www.mame.net/

Now go play PacMan!

And the winner is

I have a new cell phone. As you might recall I was looking for a new one a couple of months ago. Well T-Mobile finally carried the model I wanted.

Pretty isn’t it? The keyboard slides in, and the screen changes orientation. Really slick. I don’t really need the built in camera; but I have found it makes taking notes really fast. Nothing says geek like taking pictures of white boards after meetings; makes me feel like and agent of C.H.O.A.S.

It also has voice recognition for calling people; you just say their name (after you’ve programmed them in) and the phone does the rest. Really is cool, as long as you don’t ask to ‘call googly-bear’ while in a sports shop.

Be smart and “Don’t Cell and Drive”

One Ring to rule them All

I don’t like wearing jewelry. That said I have to date purchased four rings: High School graduation, my wedding ring (version I and version II) and my new replacement ring as shown here:

I will provide a little history to indicate just how big this is. The only reason I purchased my high school graduation was because my sister Kathleen filled out the form. My parents were not going to attend my graduation; therefore I wasn’t. I swung around during summer to pick up my diploma.

The wedding ring is self explanatory; if anyone can figure out how to get married without a ring it would have been me; so trust me when I say you can’t. I will in the interest of full disclosure admit that I did loose my first wedding ring (to a Hyatt in Kern) and am on ring number 2. (The hotel called to tell my wife they couldn't find it before I had a chance to tell her it was lost.)

Four years ago, my wife gave me a truly wonderful wedding anniversary present ‘I didn’t have to wear my ring anymore’. So why would I go out and buy a new ring?

One word: Titanium!

Ah yeah baby! This sweet sucker will out last me, and most of the northern hemisphere.

With the zoom-zoom and the honk-honk

I recently saw two films (hey I have two baby daughters; this is a big thing), the first ‘An inconvenient truth’ and ‘Who killed the electric car?’ Both were excellent and if you find yourself with some time I would recommend trying to find a showing.

For the record I’m not a tree hugger and tend to think with my wallet.

Both movies got me thinking about electric cars. Or, more to the point; making one! I’ve always been fascinated by the idea; even as a kid I wanted my go-cart to be electric I had rebuilt a starter motor and had my eye on the car battery at the local J&J auto-supply. But my dad explained that I would only burn the motor out after a couple of minutes, so I never made my electric go-cart (but I’ve already got everything I need, in-case one of my daughters wants one…..)

So here’s the list;
Donor car $1200 (Porsche 914-1973)
DC motor $2000
DC/DC control system $2500
Mounting hardware $1500
Wiring harness $750

So for about $10K I can have a electric Porsche; 135 mile range between charges and a top speed of about 80mph.

Now here’s the rub; I know an AC system would be better.

What to do, what to do...

I've been to the mountain top

I’ve been meaning to cover a new processor for a couple of months now; and have found reason after reason for putting it off; sure some of you might point out my new daughter or that fact that my job sucks out loud. But I’ll mark it up to a predisposition for procrastination. I can be honest here, right?

Anyway it is now time at last, to give this chip some of the credit it’s due.

One of the links I have is to a company names Parallax Inc. These are the folks who’ve been building a market for their ‘Basic Stamp’ processor line. For some time now, single chip computers (called PIC’s) have been making life in our modern age possible. But they have been very problematic when it comes to programming. The ‘Basic Stamp’ removed that barrier by providing a simple language and a very intelligent compiler.

These bright folks have gone off; and designed there own processor, the ‘Propeller’ (complete with beanie cap and everything). It’s exceeding well designed and very creatively pulled off. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel and designing some power mad super chip; they instead bundled 8 very capable processors into one package.

The Propeller is built around a very straight forward Hub and Cog design. The Hub polls that Cogs (the 8 processors) to see if they require access to shared memory and then moves onto the next cog. It you’ve every played with marshalling or semaphore issues with multi-user/processor systems you can appreciate they simple beauty here.

I have an issue with the Phase Lock Loop system and the external crystal, and would have preferred a built in high resolution digital oscillator, but this is such a minor point I wouldn't even being it up in polite company.

Should you doubt the brilliance of this design, I would point you over to Intel’s web site and take a look at their future processor designs. They are almost identical.

Go speed racer!

In keeping with my declaration that I can foretell marketing geek cool, I have provided a link to Tesla Motors. In case you happen to have a spare $80K burning a hole in your pocket, feel free to pick up one of their roadsters. I want mine in the thunder cloud grey, thank you very much!

(I’m hoping that this post get picked up, much the way the Microsoft and Apple ones did)

I want what I want

Apart from the rampant miss-spellings that this site has to offer; I also provide a vast marketing focus group (of 1) as well. It’s nice to know that someone from Apple reads this Bog as well. How else can you explain Apple decision to offer the Mighty Mouse as wireless, and blue-tooth as well?

Sure, some might argue that it was just common sense (and geeky cool), but I prefer to take the high road, and just proclaim that they read my request here.

When-ever possible I recommend being self-delusional, it can provide hours of fun.

Who reading this mess?

I was surprised to find out that someone from Microsoft is obviously reading my blog. After my post about the great stuff MS is providing for free to write games with, they come up with this contest 'out-of-the-blue'.

http://www.upgradeyourgame.com/?LOC=MS8io6xq

Coincidence? I don't think so....

OK, there is the off chance that they might have planed this as part of a marketing ploy.

Fixed like a dog

I'm suppose to be this hot-shot computer nerd; so it bugged me that my blog didn't 'work'. As any geek will tell you, "it don't matter what it looks like; does it work?"

Well that true enough for the first six months; but at some point you have to fix the look. So now I have my blog looking right; and the bar at the right, really is at the right, and not floating somewhere down at the bottom. I could tell you what I had to do, but then I'd bore you to death, and we don't want that.

P.S. as bad of a speller as I am; I was shocked to find out that the built in spell checker doesn't know the word 'blog'.

Want to program?

I could go into a whole thing about DSL (Doman specific languages) and how they’ll take over the world; but first I want to talk another language; C# (pronounced see sharp). This nifty language takes its syntax’s from a language call C (see) and really develops it into an object based language.

The reason I mention this is because you might want to out and learn it. And everything about learning it is free. From Microsoft. Yes, you read that right; Microsoft is providing the entire development environment free (as in free air). You have to download it from their website, C# but other than your on-line time it's free. Use... enjoy... free...

But say you want help learning this language; what about that? Well here’s a real nice 11 part course that will walk you into developing with this tool:
MSDN

When you’re all done, you’ll have a completed video game. How cool it that? Free video game. Always a winner in my book.

Missed a whole month.

I have an excuse for slow posts; it's called two baby girls. Of course I could just post while at work (like I'm doing now (hush don't tell anyone)) but then I can't include pictures.

And I do have cool new posts to upload. Which I'll try to get to. One is the new phone I got (COOL+) and the second is a new processor thats out (cool).
I also have some news on some programming resources that are:
a) Free
b) Educational
c) Video Games (always a plus)

So, until I rename this blog to 'Getting my sleep on". BTW I hope you're all watching Dr. Who on the Scifi channel.

The big dog!

Now the proto-type is up and running I was able to work and finish the big version.

Ta-da! The two clocks are based around most of the same stuff, except I used a 1.04 version of the Nixieclock driver board. The technical reason has to do with how the power supply works between the two version. Nothing wrong with the newer version, just needed (I felt) more amps for the larger tubes. Fun fact about this clock, since I needed to wire up the P/S, I used and old joystick cable from an Atari 5200 for that. :)

To give you an idea of how much larger this clock is compared to the proto-type:


The glowing fading numbers look better than I could have hoped for.
BTW, the other different between the two clocks is the tube source. I picked up these 6 IN-18 tubes from E-Bay. So that was a big price saver.

Only one more Nixie clock to go. But I have to finish up the Binary clock first. It's got to go cross-country here real quick.

It lives!

The proto-type of the third generation of Nixie Clock is now running along.

This clock is built using a 1.08 version of Nixieclocks clock kit.

A wraped is a very nice K8 case provided by Klokworks.

IN 8-2 tubes provided (as always) by Jan of AskJan 1st.



Here's what it looks like glowing:
Bwah-hahah.

Taged at long last.

Tagged...
The Knitting Yogini tagged me…

4 Jobs you have had in your life:
Trained Monkey for HBUSD
Computer Tech for CompUSA
Software Developer for Interplay
Enterprise Architect for Option One

4 Movies you could watch over and over:
Full Metal Jacket
Underworld
The Matrix (1)
The Crow (1)

4 Places you have lived:
California

4 TV shows you love to watch:
My Name is Earl
Battlestar Galactica
Stargate SG-1
Stargate Atlantis

4 Places you have been on vacation:
Bern, Switzerland
London, England
Milan, Italy
Mt. Olympus, Greece

4 Websites you visit daily:
www.comics.com
www.msn.com
www.apple.com
www.tomshardware.com

4 of your favorite foods:
Cannelloni from Scarantino’s
Pork fried rice from Gong’s
Spaghetti with Browned Butter and Mizithra Cheese
In-and-Out double/double with grilled onions

4 Places you’d rather be right now:
Relaxing on a white sandy beach
Hiking in a forest
Reading in a Library
Drinking Newcastle in a Jacuzzi

4 Bloggers you are tagging:
I choose to tag no-one. This chain dies with me! Bring on the seven years of bad luck! Everyone I might Tag has been taged.

Recapturing my childhood.

Pardon me if I ramble a bit here.

Back in the day, my brothers and I would spend hour’s hand keying a program into our trusty TI-99/4, out of a magazine. Only to run it and find that we typed ‘0ff0ff0ff’ instead of ‘1ff0f0ff’; causing the attacking aliens to look like four-leaf clovers instead of the menacing killer robots they were. So we spend hours re-keying everything trying to find the error. Well after the invention of the tape recorder, and finally the 40K disk drive. We could save and edit, and trade of programs. But still the creation of those programs was most of the fun. And that’s the key; FUN! It’s why I got into computers.

Well, now I have multi-gigahertz, multi-gigabyte, million color, and flat-panel display computers; and what to I use them for? Writing high speed, transactional software; and as boring as that might sound; it really far more boring than even that.

So you can imagine how exciting it was to find Kids Programming Language! KPL First; everything is free. Second; there are tons of sample programs. Third; no one has any idea of how to do things right, so no one is telling you your doing something wrong!

Want to fly a ship across the screen? Five lines of code. Want a horde of attacking aliens to slowly descend onto your defended base? Maybe a 100 lines. This is what I really wanted to make computers do 25 years ago. I’m having far more fun trying to figure out why my KPL programs not scoring right; then why credit dispatch is failing… again.

Hint:

Trinity Site.

I've been warning about showing the workshop, and here it is. First the work table:
Soldering iron, old file server and bobble head dolls; what more do you need? A small update, with the addtion of three loads on plastic containers from CostCo, this pictue has greatly changed.

The large file server has been converted to a nice low-power NAS (doing my green thing), and the file server has been redeployed to a development system. Most of the clutter has been moved into project boxes.

Here's a break down of the projects in the picture.

The binary clock, which is complete. I just need to tap off 1.5 volts, and finish the case. Update: the case has been completed, but I had planed to have this as a wll clock. However after getting it all built and looking at it; the power cable really destroyed the look, so I'm converting it to a desk clock. Just that it will hand in mid-are from a small desk lamp converted to act as a base. This will allow the clock to kind-of hang in mid air and allow the pedulim to swing freely under the clock; and not take up the whole desk.

The reason I need the 1.5 volts is for this pendulim system that runs the clock. A little bit of old, and a bit of new. This should the most unique clock I've done to date. Update: 2 330 ohm resistors in series cut the 5 volts down to the ~1.5 I needed. They are really acting as current limitors, and as such will get a little warm, but since we're talking low DC voltage here, I'm not worried.

The worst that could happen is the the circut wil get over driven a bit and run a little fast. But since this is a cosmetic effect more than anything else that will have zero effect.

Next up is the retro-desk nixie clock. I've got some glass work to do before finishing this one up. But once I have a chance it should only take a day or so to finish (plus a trip to Sears for a dremmil bit to drill the glass).

I have no update in this other than to say that the glass has been removed from the back. I'm still not sure how I'm going to mount the internals, since I'm about 1/8" off; in width. I suspect I'll try to dremil out a mounting 'nock' on one side; then counter sink the other. Maybe back fill with sylicone.

This is a 1940's phone I'm restoring; and as long as the phone compnay has to support pluse dialing, I'm going to hold them to it. I may never have to explain where the Maltese Falcon is; but I'll look cool anyways. Update on this: I finished the internal reconstruction (the phone was from Australia) and will be re-wiring that handset. I think I'll use a straight line of cord instead of the current coiled. More authentic that way (I feel).

Upadate on the small nixie clock. It got done!