Vroom Vroom!

(Reposted from old blog)

Two posts in such a short window of time? Don’t have a heart attack, I’m waiting for Brian to finish his thing then I’m going to try to convince him we should go get food. Not a whole lot of chance that’s going to work….

Anyways this is the first post in a new category, for the documentation of the development proceedings and frustrations and hopefully successes of the Clarkson University Mini Baja Electronics & Data Acquisition Subteam.

When I find time and I’m not sitting here waiting for Brian, I’ll post the work diagrams and objective lists we have so far. Here’s a quick skim of our goals this year:

• Refine the sensor interface so that the readings are cleaner and more stable
• Track cars position, heading and speed using a GPS receiver this year
• Make the fuel gauge work
• Make the radio telemetry work
• Kick ass
• Take names
• Apologize to name-lacking victims

That’s about it, expect more later on I suppose…

Triumphant success! Wait it crashed….

(Reposted from old blog)

Ok, so my programming class got me in to the MSAA (Microsoft Academic Alliance) so I thought I’d try out Visio. See I’m working on my Mini Baja Car Computer for the team again, revamping it from scratch. I’ve decided to take it in ‘reverse’ this year. I’m designing the whole thing out with big fancy diagrams and write-ups and listings, and then from there creating the final schematic and PCB layout. So Visio makes sense for this job, since I’m still writing my Vista Article and it seemed like a good test to run, it was free after all. So…

It worked. I made two awesome diagrams to start and more on the way, all at the Baja meeting while listening to Steve and Kevin babble about CVTs and clutches. Then I decided to go home and relax for a bit as it was a long day.

File->Save

File->Exit

Program closes all nice and neat… wait, no, “Microsoft Visio 2007 has stopped working, searching for a solution to this problem…”

It crashed on exit, bad luck right? Except it keeps happening over and over again, and not just with Visio. Since my hard lock experience trying to run AVP2 a week or so ago (I maintain the games crappy coding caused the hard lock) Vista has been in a slow steady decline. While this is characteristic of most Windows installs, this happened much too soon for my liking. I may have to cut the article short as an unstable system is not conducive to things like, passing my classes, which arguably take precedence over this.

So I’m making an observation that Vista is much more finicky about terminal (the doomed-to-die kind) crashes than XP was/is. Perhaps it’s a temporary issue that a battery of system maintenance can fix, but I find Windows is like a car, once it’s damaged, it’ll never be completely fixed. I’m also afraid to look at the kind of mess the registry has probably become over the course of the test.

On the upside, the update that theoretically increases boot up and shut down time actually worked wonderfully, a little bit of respite from all the trouble I’ve been experiencing with my ‘random’ crashing.

That’s all for now, just thought I’d check in with y’all

Godzilla is roaring again....

(Reposted from old blog)

…Sort of. The problem was that Ubuntu has decided it prefers the internal sound chip over my SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS Pro card….so…uh, working on it, but moving my stereo sound plug to the mainboard jack sufficed to restore some functionality.

I’m working on updating more of the sites content to make it more up to date and hopefully the trouble of doing that will motivate me to finish the PHP/SQL content backend, but I’m very busy lately.

Also, I’m sketching out loose plans for CCFL mood lighting for my room, powered by some random data such as weather, ambient noise/temperature or even time of day. I have to see if I can reliably control the brightness of CCFL tubes of Red, Green and Blue colors which will then, with a diffuser panel, give me a pretty nice color spectrum. In theory, we’ll see….

Ajax, Quiet trouble and more…

(Reposted from old blog)

Well all those promised updates got stalled when in the midst of a Jurassic Park movie marathon Godzilla stopped outputting sound, and for a while she wouldn’t even boot. I’m currently debugging this mystery but it’s prevented me from working on the site. I’ve been playing around with CSS/Ajax stuff too and I’m trying to think of a good excuse to make one of my pages Ajax powered, any ideas anyone? (Not that anybody reads this…)

I bet everyone will read my blog and want to be my friend when my next project sees the light of day

Anyways, expect updates soonish and another entry in the Vista Article series as I explain why the Windows API has become even more irritating…