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Scrapheap take 2

Some of you will know about the Scrapheap Challenge application that a team of 3 of us put in a couple of months ago, we got through to the final hurdle before the series – the production company wanted us, but Channel 4 apparently didn’t, and chose a different team over us.

Well, we’re trying again, this time for the Scrapheap Challenge Roadshow, and in some ways it’s easier as we do the build in Aberystwyth, and don’t have to take a number of weeks out of our lives here in order to film for the show.

We started the build on Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then had half a day of filming yesterday (Thursday), and it all went very well. I’m not actually on the 3 man team this time, but am quite involved with the team, doing a fair amount of the design and build along with Ian, and we’re due to take our creation down to Beaulieu in a couple of weeks.

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Residual network problems

There may be some residual issues with connectivity to sites on this server, as it appears there are a couple of routers that were mis-configured. Hopefully most of it is sorted out by now, but if there are oddities, such as drop-outs in service for a few minutes, then please try again a few minutes later to see if it clears.

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rsphoto.co.uk detagged

I decided that I was not going to renew rsphoto.co.uk – I haven’t updated the site in months (or years actually) and I know that it’s a bit of an odd time to choose to do that, especially with the new camera, but I can always integrate it into another domain, probably just use a subdomain of theshipmans. So the site is gone for now, but will return in some form or other – maybe Suzy will do a redesign of it for me if I ask her nicely enough. 😉

Oh, and apologies for the downtime over the weekend, the local substation had to be upgraded here, so there was no power to the networking equipment for the duration.

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New Exhibit for the Museum

I got given a new exhibit for the Museum this morning that was quite exciting, Fred L presented me with a frame of Magnetic core store, he apologised for not being able to tell me what machin it came from, but it’s a very interesting and exciting addition to the museum. I’ll get a photo of it, hopefully tomorrow, and in due course hope to build a display case showing various forms of memory, with this being a primary exhibit.

Wikipedia link
Core memory at Columbia University
Detailed description of Magnetic Core Storage

Nice site with computer history on it

Oh, and my 1Gig CF card arrived for the Nikon today – I would not like to imagine how large a 1G core store would have to be!

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Transport

My car failed its MOT today – little things, but they have to order in the parts, so it’s got to go back in next week for the repairs. The bike is back running again, after I found the problem – I went by the old adage “If you think it’s electrical, check the electrics. If you think it’s fuel, check the electrics.” I checked the electrics, cleaned and gapped the plugs, but still nothing. Turned the petcock from auto to prime, and she fired up :-D.
I’ve just got to reconnect the vacuum hose to the right place on the carbs, and then book that in for the MOT and get her taxed, and it’s on the road for the summer :-D. Then it’s just deciding where to go first. I really fancy the Viaduct De Millau, but maybe I’ll start with somewhere closer to home.
It’s nearly a year since I was out of the country, and I’m getting the wanderlust again – still hoping for that trip to India over the summer, but if nothing else a few days on the bike might help, and I need to start planning so I’ve got something to look forward to.

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New Camera

I finally got hold of a Digital SLR – a Nikon D70 second hand to go with my existing Nikon lenses. It produces some great results, but shows some inconsistencies in software implementations – especially Gallery.
The D70 has an EXIF tag it adds to pictures if they are taken rotated to portrait orientation, and it then displays those pictures rotated on the rear LCD screen. If you open those pictures in Nikon’s photo editing software, they are shown in the correct orientation. If you load them into other photo editing software, they are shown in landscape orientation, requiring rotation.
OK, so I can live with using the Nikon software for now. I’ll look into writing a filter for Photoshop to rotate the image, and delete the EXIF tag at a later date, or see if there’s some other piece of software that will do that for me.
I then tried to upload them to Gallery, and admittedly I’m still using Gallery 1, so that might be a cause of my problem, but it might lie elsewhere. Anyhow, I loaded the photos into Gallery Remote, and that rotated the images correctly – so I didn’t need to hit the rotate button – I proceed to upload the images, and they display all in Landscape orientation :-S – Doing a search on the Gallery site tells me that the version that I am using 1.5.1 should support auto-rotate, but it’s not working, so it looks like I’ve got more searching to do.

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CentOS threatened with FBI for “hacking” a web site.

A Jerry A. Taylor appears to need to get a clue – despite the fact that he has “22 years in computer systems engineering and operation” , when his hosting provider mussed up, he decided to threaten CentOS, as obviously the fact that the web server was displaying a nice message from them it was their fault.

You really can’t make up stories like this, and this guy is set to become an internet legend.

One of their websites still hasn’t been fixed when I write this.

I actually can’t believe how civil the guys at CentOS kept being in the face of a complete and utter… I would have probably taken them up on thier offer to send in the FBI, and let them be had for wasting police time.

Centos full email exchange

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Computers and Mice

Computers should be kept away from mice – they don’t mix! I have just got my Sharp MZ-80K out of the box from the loft ready for my computer museum exhibition for National Science Week on Thursday and Friday.

I opened the box (yes, an original 1979 box), and inside to my horror I see small shreds of paper. I’ve seen this before – the cats brought a mouse in, and it managed to hide out in my office at home when it was just a store-room. We cleared that room out a few years ago, and moved the MZ-80K up into the loft out of the way. Anyway there was distinct evidence in the box of mouse related activity, and upon further investigation, the little blighter has eaten the bottom half of about 15 pages of my Hisoft Pascal manual – fortunately I have a photocopy of that manual, also in the box, but untouched – the animal only goes for original paper.

So I clean out all the remains of the mouse nest, get the machine out of the box, perform a cursory examination of the inside of the machine – one wire chewed through, but it’s just one of the wires connecting the led that displays keyboard state – no worries there, that can be fixed in due course. Ok, plug it in and switch on – the sound of the monitor powering up, and immediately down again – hmmm, something not right here – I guess there’s a fuse just blown for some reason.

I check the fuse in the plug – that’s ok, right how about the resistance between the neutral and power on the plug – that’s too high to be a primary winding on the transformer – time to take the power supply apart.

As soon as I start to take the PSU apart I realise there’s something amiss mainly due to the number of peanuts falling out of it… Some old fashioned form of capacitance – nope just a mouse’s winter store – when the blighter was in my office it must have found the bag of peanuts for the birds and relocated a number of them inside the power supply – must be causing a short somewhere, sure enough the primary input fuse has blown on the PSU, and I’m going to have to try to replace that tomorrow – I’ll take the machine into work, and see what Ian thinks of it. There’s going to be some damage to some components I think, but hopefully nothing that can’t be fixed. After all, this thing was my first computer – my parents bought it for my in about 1979, and its been through a lot – it would be a shame to lose it to a mouse.

2006014Mouse/DSCN0247.jpg
more photos of the damage can be viewed here

And finally, talking of the 70’s check out the David Gilmour concert on Radio 2 – you can watch some of it by pressing the red button on any BBC TV channel, or listen to it on the Radio 2 listen again service – I just love the sax in Shine on you Crazy Diamond.

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The beast lives again

After my last post, things have moved on… Apaft from the amazing smoking BBC model B, everything survived science week. And tonight I brought home the repaired power supply for the MZ80K, plugged it in, and it all works again – some of the keyboard switches are a little sticky, but it didn’t take very much work to revitalise them – I love old robust technology.

museum/DSCN0268.jpgmuseum/DSCN0271.jpg

At one time I tried to build an add on graphics board for the MZ80K, and my soldering skills were a little less than perfect when I was at school. I soldered directly onto a static RAM chip, and ended up blowing the chip slightly – 8 cursors on the screen at a time, and an upset machine. It was a little worrying, but I was able to order a replacement chip, and a socket to mount it in ( I learned that lesson ) . I soldered the socket onto the board, inserted the chip, and everything worked again. The socket can be seen on the large version of the right hand photo – it’s blue, and near the middle of the circuit board.

Another time, the lid of the machine came down when I left something on top of the power supply, breaking the corner off the tape deck control circuit board – half a dozen wires now jumper the 2 halves back together, and it still works well today. Try doing that with your modern PC! Mind you – the games are not exactly the height of technology.

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Cobalt RAQs and BlueQuartz

I’ve just come across an interesting development from the Cobalt Raq series of servers. I am probably a long way behind the times, but BlueQuartz is the open sourced version of RaqOS. It can apprently be installed on top of Fedora Core or Centos, and looks to be a nice start to the project.
It doesn’t yet install as easily as RaqOS, that just installed via net boot onto the appliance, and you have to install the host OS first, and then layer the BlueQuartz scripts etc on top of the server, but I’m sure it will become easier – in fact I’ve just noticed that there are people selling CDs that purport to install the whole thing on ebay. Just another thing that I must explore in the future – it would mean that I could set up a more powerful machine with BlueQuartz to replace the Raq that I use as a teaching server.