Ralford.net

  [Ralford.net]

For numerous reasons, I've decided to transition to Wordpress. Mainly, it already does what I want, and it will let me write without having to mess with code... I enjoy dabbling with PHP, but I just don't seem to make time for it these days.

For now, my Wordpress blog will sit at a different URL than the homebrewed Ralford.net blog. At some point, I may move the Wordpress blog to the root, and merge the Ralford.net posts into the Wordpress database tables. Heck, I may get brave one day and go back to an improved homebrewed Ralford.net.

Until then, I hope you enjoy my Wordpress blog: Ralford's Ramblings

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  [Jessica]

Yay it's 2009. YAYYYYY! (banging pots and pans and giving Jessica kisses) For those of you with the funny glasses, YOU CAN'T WEAR THEM NEXT YEAR

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  [Good Clean Fun]

There's this commercial I saw most mornings last year by some company called Areva. I think they make electricity or something. Anyway, the animation and music for the commercial seriously make it.

Here it is on You Tube:
Areva Commercial

And a music video for a band called "Royksopp" that has an equivalent fun level:
Royksopp - Remind Me

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  [Hardware]

After my lengthy complaint about floppy drives, someone at work brought up a situation where floppy may be a necessity: for the case that bootable removable media is required, but bootable USB is not supported by the OS.

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  [Music]

I use subversion religiously at work to keep track hardware designs that are in progress. Subversion and other version control systems have a simple process:

1. Check out a document out of the repository to make changes to it
2. Make the changes, to hopefully better the document
3. After the changes are made, do a "show diff" (if the document is a text file) to review the changes that were made
4. If you're happy with the differences, commit the updates back to the repository, and pick up where you left off at a later point in time

The same methods can be used to write music:

1. Take an existing idea of a song, whether from memory or a recording
2. Re-write sections as necessary, with the goal of making it sound more fluid and/or groovy
3. After sections are rewritten, review the song, and compare it to the previous state before changes were made
4. If satisfied with the changes, record the changes on paper or recordable media, and continue the writing process at a later date (do NOT use floppy discs)

Without using version control with hardware, it's easy to lose track of the changes someone makes to a design. Similarly, if an musical idea isn't recorded on paper or tape/CD/minidisc, it becomes more probably that the progress will be forgotten.

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  [Music]

I threw this mix together tonight, and am really digging how it turned out. The mix all started when I thought about making a soundtrack for my life, but there were way too many songs to choose from, so I weeded out what didn't fit in . What's left are tunes that span from my middle school days to my freshman year of college... some damn good times not to be forgotten:

1. Possum Kingdom (Toadies)
2. Bats in the Belfry (Dispatch)
3. Beercan (Beck)
4. No Rain (Blind Melon)
5. Mr. Jones (Counting Crows)
6. Low (Cracker)
7. Voodoo Lady (Ween)
8. Praise You (Fatboy Slim)
9. Longview (Green Day)
10. Sex and Candy (Marcy Playground)
11. Hey Jealousy (Gin Blossoms)
12. I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams (Weezer, with Rachel Haden)
    (f)Rachel Haden is from The Rentals. I never knew the whole story behind who wrote or sang this tune. Once again, Wikipedia saves the day.
13. The World Has Turned and Left Me Here (Weezer)
14. Interstate Love Song (Stone Temple Pilots)
15. Time Bomb (Rancid)
16. Seed (Sublime)
17. Right On (Pain)

There are certainly a few songs on here by bands that I haven't explored, but these songs all remain favorites.

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  [Hardware]

Found a website this morning that has an archive of just about every CPU and co processor that ever existed: www.cpu-collection.de. It has pictures as well as blurbs about what makes each chip unique in the history of computers.

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  [On the Web]

I stumbled into this new software client called Me.dium on the devnulled weblog (the writer is actually on the development team for the software). It lets you interact with others that also have the client. You can talk with them, and also see what websites they are browsing.

The neat think that struck my eye is the box that can sit on your webpage (you can see it running on the side of the devnulled page). Inside the windowy thing (I hate the word "widget"), it shows you who else is visiting the site and gives you links to what else they are browsing. Neat.

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  [Hardware]

Here is a great applet showing how enhancement mode N-channel MOSFETs work:
N-channel enhancement MOSFET

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  [Hardware]

As we move forward in 21st century, I'm continually baffled that the world is still supporting floppy controllers. I associate floppy disks with old 486 problems - they remind me of resorting to my 5-1/4" boot disk to get me out of weird situations. They also bring back memories of shareware games that came on one or two 3.5" disks, like the old 1st persons Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, and even old Apogee Software games like the side scrolling Duke Nukem. A friend of mine still has the original Commander Keen on a 5-1/4" disk.

Where I work, there was once an engineer that used floppy disks regularly. He was a BIOS developer, and would throw binaries on them and give them to other engineers for BIOS testing. I've occasionally used them for DOS boot disks, but nine times out of ten, they don't have the capacity for the files I need, so I just use a bootable USB key, or a PCMCIA ATA flash card. I've been using the same USB key and ATA flash card for at least three years now, and haven't had them "go bad" on me. But I lost track of the number of floppies I've thrown away. Flash technology can be used on every PC these days. Even my ancient desktop PC that runs at 733MHz has USB ports, and the PCI bus is always expandable. It has a floppy drive, but I just don't trust it, as whenever I've put a floppy in it, it comes out covered in dust.

As we approach 2008, we still don't leave the floppy behind us. In fact, there are designs in progress where I work that have floppy controllers on boards next to USB 2.0 and IDE flash chip sockets. The only explanation I see for this is that it doesn't take much effort to design a floppy controller into hardware. It's on almost every super I/O chip out there, and what could go wrong when connecting a handful of low speed signals to a 0.1" header? Especially when it makes that one customer happy. I haven't used Vista yet, but the save icon in Microsoft Word for XP is still a picture of a floppy disk.

I was digging through a bin of old computer hardware in my closet, and found a pile of old hardware I've never parted with: eight 30-pin SIMM RAM (FPRAM) modules from my old 486, an old modem, a Pentium 75MHz processor with the P54 core, a 5-1/4" floppy drive from my old 486, and about six 3.5" floppy drives. I also found an old add-in board with some funny looking chips. One chip, in a 44-pin PLCC package, was the Western Digital WD37C65C. I looked up this guy and found out it was the first PC/AT floppy controller, designed back in 1987! Digging around some more, I found a scanned copy of the WD37C65C datasheet.

So here we are twenty years later, and the computer hardware world just won't let go of the floppy. We've been through ZIP drives with parallel port interfaces (ooooh, so enhanced!), minidiscs, and even USB floppy drives. ZIP disks were cool for backup for some of us here and there. I got my hands on one back during my freshman year in college. By that time, email was a more convenient way to get my files between my dorm room and lab. Minidisc technology is my favorite - with the shudder door having "don't forget the floppy!" written all over it. The USB floppy controller is an excuse to have another USB product. If the interface is there, use a disk-on-key already!

I don't think I have a good solution for how to move the world away from the floppy. Unless... One day I design a USB key that's shaped like a floppy disk, complete with write protection as it was on 3.5" disks. The shutter door will also be there, and when you open it, you'll see some flash memory.

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