Ralford.net

  [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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  [Hiking]

Yesterday my friend Steve and I went up to Bear Meadows, which is just off the MST near Little Flat. To get there, we drove by Tussey Mountain ski area on Bear Meadows Road, and made a right crossing a bridge onto the dirt road which took us up towards the fire tower at Little Flat. This was my first hike of the Fall season. We began our hike at about 1:15 in the afternoon.

We headed North on the MST along Fourth Mountain, first passing the Tom Thwaites Monument on our right. Taking a break for peanuts and water after our first 2 miles, we decided we would make a loop around Bear Meadows instead of backtracking to Steve's truck. We continued another 1.5 miles along the ridge, where the trail curved left with the mountain, crossed a gravel road, and began to drop into the valley that holds Bear Meadows.

Coming down the left side of the ridge, the MST took a sharp right, while we continued forward on the blue blazed Gettis Trail. About a quarter mile later, Gettis Trail curved to the right, and we continued to the left on the unblazed Bear Meadows Trails. Bear Meadows itself was off to our left along the trail, with the ridge of Fourth Mountain we had just hiked sitting behind it (dropping off the ridge with Gettis Trail had looped us back in the direction towards Little Flat; so at this point we were in parallel with the ridge we just hiked). The trail was fairly open to the woods, with less brush and a rock-free path in comparison to the ridge-top we just left. Numerous rhododendron groves clustered both sides of our path. We only made our way to the marshy area of Bear Meadows once (see our pictures), taken there by a path unintentionally left by other hikers. For the rest of our hike, the trees hid the view of the marshy meadows.

Towards the end of the Bear Meadows trail, we made a "T" at a parking lot at Bear Meadows Road. A monument stood at parking lot, stating that Bear Meadows was named in 1966.

We took a left turn onto Bear Meadows Road, crossed a bridge, and made another left onto the Jean Aron Trail. This crossed North Meadows Road (which we actually encountered previously before coming off the ridge of Fourth Mountain), and turned into Lonberger Path. About 20 minutes later, and we made a left onto the unblazed Kettle Trail. This was the hike's first physical challenge, and it gave us both a workout as we made our way up the ridge-side to Little Flat. At the top, we arrived at the MST with a "T", just across from the Tom Thwaites monument. Here we sat on a bench and caught our breath. Back at the car, we concluded our hike around 4:30. From my MST topo maps, we estimate the loop was about 8 miles. A great hike to start the Fall!

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  [Life]

Holy crap - it's been ages since I've put a post up here. Honestly, I haven't been up to too much. This occurred to me last night after talking to my first college roommate. The last month or two I've been enjoying my place at Pleasant Gap. That's been nice. I still haven't purchased a real family room set, but have curtains up, and most of my belongings are where I want them to be. Hopefully I'll get a sofa and matching chair for my family room pretty soon, and maybe some paintings and pictures for the walls.

Been sick for ages it seems, but just got over the yearly 2-week cold. My friends always say I get sick cause my immune system is weak, but I like to blame it on running around too much (which I suppose weakens the immune system). It never feels like life presents me with enough stress-free-Ryan-time - more of that would really keep me in good health. After finally going to the doctor, he gave me a prescription against allergies, and somehow, two days after that, I felt better. There's nothing like feeling healthy though - and it makes me want to run around again.

My Fall is looking fairly quiet, and I hope to keep it unoccupied. Planning too many things is sometimes not good. I'd prefer for empty weekends to pop up, so I can wake up and say "i feel like driving here today", without having some other obligation. Aside from going to a friend's wedding and my Thanksgiving trip to Toledo (both will be fun), I really want to get in the woods a few times before cold settles in. Ah, I have some tickets to see The Decemberists down at the 9:30 club for their 11/9 and 11/10 shows. That show will be KICK ASS. If you are not already listening to them, you are seriously missing out! Get yourself some tickets, and come hang out that weekend!

Ok, i'm signing off for now. Down in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, right now cause my employer has a booth tomorrow at the Real Time and Embedded Computing Conference. Come check us out!

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