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xilinx fpga
Had a surplus wifi router and found it had two XILINX Xcv400e chips. It's a pity I can't do anything with the chips, as they are mostly impossible to remove from the board and reprogram. Interesting the way they work, they are programmed every time the product is powered up. The flash memory is used to push data to the FPGA which then is ready for use. So I could hypothetically reprogram these FPGA devices and use them for something.

FPGA info and how they work:
http://www.fpga-guide.com/technology/technology.html

http://www.latticesemi.com/products/fpga/xp/nonvolatilereconfigurabil.cfm

I found this seven pin transistor, this I can do something with. It can be used as a 5 amp switch, also as a positive to negative converter. It is the seven pin version, which has a "shutdown" pin which I can think of some uses for, like an emergency shutoff button or something.

I believe this component was used as a "buck converter". A diagram is here:

There is a very good description of "buck converters" on wikipedia here. I never learned about buck converters in my electronics training. They are very useful for lowering voltage. Really they are transistor controlled stewn voltage converters. The usual path to lower voltage is to use a step down transformer (or voltage divider which wastes energy). Few want to put a big transformer in their products. Wall transformers are ugly also. How else? To lower the voltage in a small space (and not waste energy) use one of these buck converters.

Also some a good photo here of a AMD motherboard that uses buck converters to power the CPU. Called a "multiphase buck" and it's used as modern computer CPUs can rapidly change the amount of power needed. Even though modern dual processors use 200 watts, they only need 2 volts.

More info on the switching regulator:
http://cds.linear.com/docs/Datasheet/1074fds.pdf

The LT®1074 is a 5A (LT1076 is rated at 2A) monolithic
bipolar switching regulator which requires only a few
external parts for normal operation. The power switch, all
oscillator and control circuitry, and all current limit components, are included on the chip. The topology is a classic
positive “buck” configuration but several design innovations
allow this device to be used as a positive-to-negative
converter, a negative boost converter, and as a flyback
converter. The switch output is specified to swing 40V
below ground, allowing the LT1074 to drive a tappedinductor
in the buck mode with output currents up to 10A.
The LT1074 uses a true analog multiplier in the feedback
loop. This makes the device respond nearly instantaneously
to input voltage fluctuations and makes loop gain
independent of input voltage. As a result, dynamic behavior
of the regulator is significantly improved over previous
designs.
On-chip pulse by pulse current limiting makes the LT1074
nearly bust-proof for output overloads or shorts. The input
voltage range as a buck converter is 8V to 60V, but a selfboot
feature allows input voltages as low as 5V in the
inverting and boost configurations.

miss landmine
The government of the United States of the America, has decided this month they will not join the landmine ban. I understand that there is possible risk to US soldiers by not being able to use landmines, but what is the risk to American civilians who visit foreign countries and get blown up?
Did Obama just let the military (Pentagon) make this decision, as they would know best in these matters? I understand land mines are smarter now and easier to disable, yet still why not just ban this all together? The existing "smart mines" are rarely used anyway, yet the military thinks they are a great deterrent.

Here is to those who love landmines. How sick. . why can not we as a civilization show some leadership in bring peace?? We are a leader in the world economy, yet we can not agree with almost every other country that these mines are a bad thing?

A secret meeting review was held on this matter (Obama where is the transparency of government you promised?). My guess is that in this meeting, somehow clever wording showed the landmine issue as not worth giving up, the landmines where spun as a "defensive" peaceful instrument of defense. Yeap peaceful alright. Tell that to these girls:

Miss landmine website

yamaha equalizer
I have one of these for sale on Amazon.com. . .nice EQ for the money. Has pink noise analysis and microphone jack for tweaking your audio environment.

http://www.amazon.com/YAMAHA-EQ-550-Natural-Stereo-Equalizer/dp/B00007MAM3/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_1

top ramen recipe yet better

Top Ramen low salt recipe

1 Top Ramen soup package.
1 tbsp chicken broth "better than broth"
2 tbsp parmesan cheese

Directions
Put top ramen in a bowl. Throw away "chicken flavor" packet.
Add hot water to bowl.
Add chicken broth.
Add 1-2 tablespoons parmesan cheese.

The cheese tends to congeal at the bottom, so mix well why eating. It also will melt into a glob on the spoon. But it adds taste, if you ask me.
This has about 600 milligrams of salt versus 800 milligrams of salt for ramen with flavor packet. It also has no MSG.

Why is MSG bad for you? One thing is that it keeps you hungry. . is boosts your appetite. So you keep eating which is not healthy, and then in lab tests it caused brain damage:
"high levels of excitotoxins has been shown in animal studies to cause damage to areas of the brain"
reference http://journalofhealthyliving.com/why-is-msg-bad-for-you.htm

amazon s3 storage and EC2 virtual (?)servers
Learning Amazon EC2

Yesterday I noticed Amazon S3 services is still charging me like 24 cents a month for storing some data on their servers. No big deal, I can afford that. I think there is about a gigabyte of test data that I uploaded to it using the old version of Jungledisk, which encrypts all the data before it gets uploaded. It's a good thing I didn't put any valuable data there, as I can no longer get the data off S3. Nice. . .smart move by jungledisk to encrypt, as you will go buy their product years later. Yet one problem. . .see the old version of Jungledisk automatically encrypted everything using your Amazon encryption key. Yet their new software is "dumbed down" like many software programs nowadays. Make it as foolproof as possible and so that users can't change any options. So they banished all the options to put in your key or select your old account settings. I will say Jungledisk is fast with tech support, they just emailed me back after only 30 minutes of putting in a ticket. . .yet their answer didn't solve my problem.

Update: After two more helpdesk emails, I now understand you have to use the "desktop edition" of Jungle disk to access your old JungleDisk data! Ahah! And indeed I was able to connect and view my old jungledisk files stored on Amazon S3.

http://jungledisk.zendesk.com/forums/51520/entries/80869
I found a poor soul here that had the same problem as me. . .unlike me, this guy seemed pissed that he could not use the new JungleDisk to get his data. A internet poster gave his solution, which was to use Amazon EC2 and run a virtual server on Amazon. How would that work?
His idea was to use a Amazon server (called EC2 services). From that virtual server, you can run the old Jungledisk, pull all your encrypted data off to the EC2 server. Then you can upload it back to your Amazon S3 server. The advantage of doing it with an Amazon virtual server is that you don't rack up transfer fees from Amazon. See Amazon charges to store the data, but charges more to upload or download the data. If you move data around within Amazon, it usually is free. They do have datacenters in Europe and the east coast of the US. I think they do charge you money if you are moving data from one continent to another. But for me the solution should work. So I just now tried starting a "instance" of a server on Amazon EC2.

Getting my feet wet with Amazon elastic servers (virtual servers).

After signing up to Amazon, authorizing my payment and such, I clicked to start my server. It wouldn't start! It says "starting up" and won't do anything else. Ok, so I tried to create a Linux instance instead. The linux server started right away! I could see how to SSH to the server, they give you a DNS name to connect to and some basic instructions. You can even get a "reserved IP address" from Amazon if you want, they call it an "elastic IP". It's good security as they use a certificate, yet not as easy as a username and password. For me I couldn't connect with SSH, as I would have to use puttygen and something else to create a private key that Putty would understand. I found some info here on how to do it:
http://lalit241.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/creating-applications-with-amazon-ec2-and-s3/

Well twenty minutes later and my Amazon Windows server still hasn't started. Have to try this later.

Update: I did get one windows server to run and was able to remote desktop into the server. Yet I tried again to startup servers and could not. . .same problem, windows servers on Amazon just won't start. It also took over 30 minutes to create a 20 gigabyte disk and attach it to a server. I aborted it and gave up on that.

art
maybe what a supernova looks like?
time lapse photo done in the garage with LED lights.

corporate America - funny
Found this company review on http://www.glassdoor.com Sounds like 90% of large corporations unfortunately.

Pros

great brandname to put on resume
steep learning curve on interesting topics
structures on disciplines imposed on you to form a good work habit
people try to be nice--at least they try

Cons

after one year you cannot talk in normal human language
after one year you only think in PPT format
after one year you cannot tolerate people who talk for more than 1 minute w/o stating their points in the most clear and concise manner
after one year you are very politically correct
after one year you are deprived of all your creativity

if you have not met each and every of the above expectations after one year, congratulations you are higly likely to be counseled to leave

Advice to Senior Management

be more transparant in evaluation process
be more honest on the current business situation

CRM and contact management
I was reading up on Act contact manager today. They seem to be the number one CRM program out there. Contact management is very important for businesses. . and with email the ability to track contacts brings new challenges. How many contacts do you have? How many sales leads do you make in one month? You may need CRM of some sort, if not Act, then there are others. One alternative is Microsofts CRM program called Dynamics CRM.

I can see why ACT has a following. It has easy to buy modules for various business sectors (finance and legal). It has hundreds of add-ons that people have developed to do the small part of CRM that they need.

Microsofts offering is like, well, like most of Microsofts products. They try to grab most of the low hanging fruit, and no easily visible customization to your type of business. Of course Microsoft products are customizable, but they don't market them that way. I work in the IT industry, and I thought MS Dynamics was only a ERP type financial program. If you have thousands of dollars to spend on a ERP program, Dynamics can do that as well. I can also see why they (MS) are slowly growing in customers, as they have a forty ($44) dollar a month online plan. The online version will frighten many, as they will have issues with all their CRM data online. . .can it be hacked? Can someone steal their data? Can the contacts be downloaded to my peer at home, whose sister is competing with me? And if the data can not be downloaded, how do I get a backup of it, if I need one off-line?

One person I talked to was amazed at how expensive Microsoft Dynamics is. I think Microsoft sees that true Outlook integration is only available from them, and is using it to their advantage. Many businesses just don't have time and experience to run a simple IT project. . .so they buy packaged software, thinking it's "cheaper". Often it may not be cheaper than paying a IT consultant to program something exactly to your specifications. Most any program, including Microsoft Outlook, can have a plug-in created at surprisingly low cost. Need every email sent via Outlook to be tracked in your help desk program? I have seen Outlook actually be used as a replacement for other programs by plug-ins. Since email is so universal, you can have plugins run all the functionality of another program. The bonus? You can only have one window open (Outlook) for most of your business tasks.
It's all very possible to get a programmer to do that, but you could also just buy an ACT add-on that makes it work. For example the folks at ACT have a helpdesk program addin, and is a helpdesk program as well!

sonic Prospector pinball
I hope to get this working before Christmas. . .so far I have only rewound one of the coils, and put in a new key for the money door. Kind of fun re-wireing the coil with the magnet wire. Lots more work to do. I still don't know why the "reset relay" keeps pulling. This is the relay that clears everything when the ball goes out of play and you play the next ball. Or so I think. . .I have the schematic and the manual but still trying to understand the system of relays, counters and buses.

makes you wonder
All I know is that the first time I heard about the shooting was on a finance message board. And that message was that there where SEVERAL shooters at the base and that they had many dead. And the second thing I read was that there was one shooter, but he was dead. Then the third thing was a single shooter, but he was alive! Tada! Makes you wonder!

I will also say I went on a military base about four months ago and the security was horrible. They let me (a civilian) on the base without checking hardly any of my credentials, and driving a car. I wont name the base for security reasons. I have heard similiar stories to another base. .very few armed guards to watch on things. But come on military you need to improve your physical security! If this Army base is like others, I am sure it is possible that terrorists could get on the base and start shooting up soldiers.

http://www.kob.com/article/stories/s1235603.shtml#disqus_thread

You know the story is starting to come apart when they start using the "magic bullet" explanation.

So, here is what I think happened.

I think that a GROUP of soldiers rebelled against further deployment. This is why we had early reports of multiple shooters, numbering up to 5.

But 5 soldiers shooting their officers signals mutiny in the ranks. It recalls the "fragging" of Vietnam days. It looks really bad to the citizenry. It could even spread to other soldiers and other bases where the military are stretched to the breaking point.

So, the DC boys look around and say, "Oh, we have this dead Muslim guy; we'll just blame it on him!" And presto-chango, five shooters pissed off with the wars becomes one conveniently dead Jordanian Palestinian Muslim with possible links to Al Qaeda.

got this email about the cost per soldier. Wow
Soldiers really are expensive. I remember hearing that to train a fighter pilot it costs over a million dollars. And this email did some basic math that reveals the costs of war in a easy to understand way. Because in reality it is hard for our heads to understand the numbers like billion. I think politicians think that most of us can't even understand a billion dollars. . . and it's probably true. A billion dollars, no forty billion dollars. What a heck of a lot of money.

One million dollars per soldier.

That is what it will cost to keep one solder in Afghanistan for a year.

40,000 soldiers will cost $40 billion a year. With unemployment rising, record foreclosures, and the economy stagnate; can the United States really afford to escalate the war in Afghanistan?

low cost PC for the digital divided
I have seen a few computer components drop in price, for example hard drives for $40 bucks. I thought maybe it was time to look at how cheap you can build a computer for, using new technology. It still came out higher than I wanted. Many families just can't afford even this low end computer. Must be a way to make it cheaper? Seems like maybe the government should give a small batch of money to the chip makers and electronic companies to make super cheap, low end components for poverty PC's. With even 20% government funded and rebates, a low end computer should really only cost half of this retail price. Just as the government did for Digital TV and gave out coupons, they should give out coupons for families in need of computers.

low cost PC project:

$44.99 samsung 160 gig 2.5 inch hard drive.
$47.99 gigabyte am2 microATX
$39.00 Sempron 2.7 ghz
$26.00 1 gigabyte ram
$26.98 Case with power supply
$112.99 19" LCD monitor with speakers
$10.00 Keyboard + mouse

Total $304.00

ATI 5750 versus Nvidia GTS250
The good folks at Gigabyte gave me some more information on the Radeon 5750 card they make. The card I looked at is model GV-R575D5-1GD-B, a massive graphics card that will power the gaming maniacs into the next year and then some. They sent me some benchmarks where they compared a GTS250 card to the ATI radeon card.

First impressions.
The first thing I noticed about this card is that it needs two (2) aux power connectors. Yes these class of cards pull more
power than is available on the PCI Express bus. Actually, the Radeon 5750 chip, or ASIC if you want to call it, that itself can use up to 69 watts. Thats why that big fan and heat sinks are there to radiate the heat. The entire card sucks down 100 watts during massive 3D games. So to power this board they request you have a 450 watt power supply. If you use two cards in crossfire mode, they ask for a 600 watt power supply! It seems they are being careful not to overload your power supply, as surely you can get by with less of a power supply in most instances. But of course better to be safe than sorry. Also as components age they may use more power. Hard drives may take longer to spin up or a DVD unit may fail and drain large amounts of power.

On top of card you can see the power connector:

In the test system that I used, a 300 watt power supply was all that was available. . .yet the card and system worked fine and booted up. This was a simple config, based on a basic ASUS system desktop with only one DVD drive, and one hard disk. If you have multiple hard drives, and multiple DVD drives you may not be able to run this card with only a 300 watt power supply.

You may need to do some math to figure out how much your current setup is using, or try using a wattmeter.

Once your radeon card is up and running, you might want to run some benchmarks. Many 3D games have "demo modes" that can show the FPS, or frames per second. The average FPS of a demonstration can be one test of the speed of your GPU and system. Another test program you can try is 3DVantage. This benchmark program pushes your card (and PC) with extensive 3D scene rendering. This is one of those programs that runs only on Windows Vista or Win7. You will notice in the benchmarks that gigabyte ran, these card compares to the Nvidia GTS 250 models of cards in many tests, but the Nvidia cards are slower than the 5750 ATI chip in many games also.

Why test? Performance punks love testing. Power PC geeks enjoy seeing their hardware meet expectations, but true geeks will also record these numbers and make "boilerplate" data that can be usedful later on when troubleshooting errors or performance problems with your PC.

And for some new technology, this card has a DisplayPort interface. . .one of the fastest refresh video buses you can have. So for the super high resolution games, DisplayPort will give you a better picture. And one last thing.

Experiments and your Radeon card.
Since these chips have massive parallel processing engines, they can also be used to crack passwords. A group of people at this russian software company use ATI and Nvidia GPUs to crack passwords for a variety of programs and applications.
"According to Elcomsoft, a Radeon HD 4870 graphics card can be used to try almost 16,000 passwords per second, using an “advanced dictionary attack,” which basically transforms entries from a master wordlist. A higher-performance solution, such as NVIDIA's Tesla S1070 GP-GPU, can raise the number of passwords per second to an impressive 52,000. In comparison, a 65nm-based Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor is only capable of trying 1,100 p/sec."
http://news.softpedia.com/news/GPUs-Good-for-Gaming-Hacking-Routers-Too-102189.shtml

And for the grand finale, with these GPU cards, you can donate computer time to several distributed computing projects to save the world! No joking, some of these programs are unfolding mysteries that may bring about revolutions in biology, astronomy, and other fields of science. Anandtech has a good article here on GPU science: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2849&p=3

Watt meter for finding out your PC power use.

dishnetwork DVR and directTV satellite TIVO
A while back I talked about how to pull videos off of a Dishnetwork DVR using linux and a windows decoder program. It worked well and I pulled several videos off.

Today I found a directTV TIVO dvr box. I connected it to a Knoppix linux box, but found no readable partition! That is because it uses a proprietary file system called MFS. It's not as easy to download the videos either. . .I spent an hour looking and found no easy way to pull the videos directly off a TIVO hard drive.

To copy a TIVO hard drive or to expand your tivo drive.

Method using a older TIVO box with a network add-in card.
http://cruftbox.com/cruft/docs/tivoextraction.html

Using the two TIVO USB ports (USB-Ethernet) to download recordings. This looks like a possibility for me. . .yet many steps and it's not easy. I need a USB to ethernet converter to make it work.
http://www.weethet.nl/english/tivo_dtv2_hacksleeper.php#tivotopc

Some media server based off tivo.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/galleon/files/galleon/2.5.5/

Tivo docs on how to upload videos to your TIVO (but not download).
http://www.tivo.com/mytivo/howto/downloadmoviesandtv/howto_download_videos_using_PC.html

california and marijuana`
The news this morning talked about Marijuana legislation in Los Angeles. It seems this is happening all over the place, as even a
town near me wants to slow down marijuana dispenseries. So the big and small cities of California are running afraid of medical marijuana taking over. Why is the medical marijuana issue receiving flak all of a sudden? What is the concern? Too many marijuana moms? Too many pothead out of work people? Well I am not sure you will have many people buying marijuana when they don't have a job! Who can afford pot if you don't work? Should maybe the councils be worrying about putting people to work instead of making these laws?

I am not sure what it is, maybe it's follow the leader, or a combination of things. In my small city they have too many massage shops, and then the thinking is that if we get some pot shops, then it will really be a "freak city" of sin and massage parlors.

The irony is that both the state and many of these cities are really hurting financially, and if business is happening in their locale, then they get tax revenue from these businesses. Money is money and they need it, and as the saying goes, if you make it legal you can tax it. If you make it illegal you have it go underground and you get no money from it. I suppose the thinking is that the medical marijuana issue creates more problems than it brings. What do the people think?
If you are interested in these issues, you should attend your local city council meetings.

Think global, act local!

the mighty "no spin" hard drives
When they say these drives are fast, they are not spinning you a story. These drives really are fast. Sixy to one hundred times faster than a hard disk drive, depending on what you are doing. Really this is good news as we should also have computers that use less power, as hard drives are power hungry spinning gyros.

The SSDs, they do have issues though. Fill them up and they get slower. And even though solid-state, they actually do wear out like mechanical disk drives. Even with no moving parts, the components start to degrade.

This article has some good insight into why you want a SSD. Some of the good, the bad, and the ugly on this new gadgetry.
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

death robots
First wired had a magazine article on drones, and now Popular Science has drones on their cover. Yet few talk about the real problems with robot war. It takes just a nickel of imagination to see the problems we will have with death robots flying around, or rolling on the ground. You want someone to be a terrorist, give them a robot where they can go in an kill people without any risk to their own bodies. Now that is escaltion of terror. In fact you could say we are escalating terror by using drones, and that we are ourselves terrorists for using them.
War fighting robots will be a nasty endeavor. I agree with most of what Tom says here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175137/droning_on

"So why am I not excited -- other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle -- that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any court or law.

Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7 assassination trade -- with our own set of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it's surely helping to pave the road to hell. "

US administration debating war plans.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091113/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_us_afghanistan

give till it hurts?
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/article/369766/Give-&;_ylt=Aj13su0V9.kw02tBM33ULjdl7ot4;_ylu=X3oDMTB2c2R2OWR0BHBvcwMyMgRzZWMDY29tbWVudExpc3QEc2xrA25leHQ-#39;Til-It-Hurts-Big-Business-%22Needs-to-Be-Much-More-Generous%22?tickers=GOOG,BRK-A,EBAY,%5Edji,%5EGSPC,XLF,GS&comment_start=21#comments

A yahoo story talked about how corporations need to give more, or suffer backlash. They didn't mention that corporations may need to PAY EMPLOYEES more or suffer backlash! What is more important to the employee, good pay or the company putting money into Habitat for Humanity?

Companies are stuck in a catch 22. They want to make shareholders happy, they want to make the corporate board happy, the employee, and the consumer. Yet they can't seem to do it. . .really the board and the shareholders are the only ones kept happy. Seems like most of the comments on this story where inline with "living wage" and blatant disgust about the rich in general.

Yet there is good in the world, and people do change. Just because you are greedy and won't give a dime to charity today, that may change. I suspect Bill Gates didn't give much of any money to charity in his early company years. Now look at him dumping cash into our libraries and school system. This is charity people and it does occur, we just need to make sure people notice when organization give.

The news is reporting that President Obama is likely to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan and that the Pentagon is getting ready to ask for $50 billion in additional funding for the wars after receiving $130 billion already. Obama seems to be on a slippery slope going deeper into a war quagmire rather than taking a path toward leaving Afghanistan.

We are asking you to write President Obama to end the war in Afghanistan and not increase the troops. We are also asking you to contact Congress to help us count the votes on escalation.

This decision comes after President Karzai was "re-elected" in a fraud-dominated election in which the corruption was so rampant his run-off opponent decided participation would be wrong, Karzai will not be a legitimate leader.

Malalai Joya, a 31-year-old activist and former member of Afghanistan's Parliament, described as Afghanistan's Conscience, sees the U.S./NATO troop presence as an occupation that does more harm than good. She sees it increasing violence and instability.

Her views are echoed by Matthew Hoh, a top Foreign Service officer who resigned over the failed Afghan strategy. Hoh is a former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq who served in uniform at the Pentagon and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department; he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province in Afghanistan. He resigned saying he could not understand "why and to what end" the U.S. was pursuing this war. Hoh says Afghans are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there. The growing military presence is not welcome, especially with a corrupt, U.S.-backed national government in charge. He describes the United States as asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war between urban and rural Afghanistan.

Please take action today. We urge you to take the following steps:

Write President Obama and tell him to end the war in Afghanistan and not to escalate it. Click here to write President Obama and your elected representatives.

Visit www.NoEscalation.org to help us track where Congress stands on the Afghanistan War.

Please make a contribution to Voters for Peace today. We need your support to continue to keep the pressure on Congress and the administration to end the war. Click here to donate now.

Thank you for supporting our efforts.
Sincerely,

Kevin Zeese
Executive Director
Voters For Peace