Posted by Joseph on Tuesday July 26, 2011, 9:22 pm

I spent a while trying to finish the software and firmware of my Computerised Irrigation System, and it seems like it's done (at last).

On the test rig:

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Description: I think it's finally done...!

Free SoundCloud Downloader

Posted by Joseph on Sunday June 26, 2011, 10:07 am

Just a quick post to announce my new SoundCloud downloader service called SoundScrape. This new service allows you to download any track from SoundCloud simply by pasting in the URL and letting SoundScrape do the hard work!

Take a look: SoundScrape.net

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Description: My new free site, for all to use

Windows Update on NT4

Posted by Joseph on Saturday June 25, 2011, 12:30 pm

Since Microsoft quite unexpectedly yanked NT service packs off their download site, I've been quite unsure of whether it's still possible to get the post SP6 rollup plus other updates. A quick search revealed the post service pack 6 rollup on their website, and luckily once you have IE6 installed on NT, you can still access Windows Update to get the updates released after the rollup.

Why am I still using NT? I have an old Pentium MMX system with 64MB RAM which is fully NT compatible. But the reason I want to use it is for control/automation projects, due to it having two parallel ports and two real serial ports. And of course, you can write apps using VB6 ;)

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Description: Luckily still around

Timing from the Past

Posted by Joseph on Thursday April 14, 2011, 8:03 pm

Dug out an old lump of code off my Toshiba Satellite 110CS running MS-DOS 6.22 for a visitor interested in my UT70B Multimeter Interface Software for DOS. I wrote this application in QuickBasic 4.5, and never quite finished it, although it mostly works. Looking through the code, I pulled this snipped of code as an embarrassing example of how I used to do timing in my QB apps:

DO
        Count = Count + 1
        IF Count = 5000 THEN Count = 0
        IF Count = 1000 THEN LocVar = LocVar + 1
        IF LocVar = 57 THEN LocVar = 1
        IF Count = 2000 THEN LOCATE 2, 1: COLOR 7, 5: PRINT BlankBar$: LOCATE 2, LocVar: PRINT "ALPHA EXPERIMENTAL BUILD!"
        COLOR 7, 0
        DataCollect$ = GetData$
        IF LEN(DataCollect$) THEN
                LOCATE 4, 1: PRINT "                                                 "
                LOCATE 4, 1: PRINT STR$(GetValue(DataCollect$, NegPos$)) + Sign$ + "    " + GetMode(DataCollect$, Sign$, NegPos$)
                AddList (STR$(GetValue(DataCollect$, NegPos$)) + Sign$)
        END IF
LOOP UNTIL INKEY$ = CHR$(27)

In case you haven't yet realised, the timing was done by looping, whilst maintaining a loop counter, and branching off when the loop counter hit certain values! I just had no clue how else you were meant to do it in QB!

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Description: Digging out some old QuickBasic code

Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD

Posted by Joseph on Saturday April 2, 2011, 2:06 pm

I was having a little browse over on eBuyer to look into the economics of getting an SSD (Solid-State Drive) for my Macbook Pro, just to see how much it would set me back. Not surprisingly, SSDs are extortionately expensive, costing around £500 for 250GB. Of course, that price will depend on the performance of the SSD, as well as the brand (budget Chinese brands are of course going to be cheaper). Immediately turned off with the thought of parting with 10 weeks drinking and clubbing money, I stumbled across a hybrid SSD.

This model by Seagate - the Momentus XT features 4GB of flash, and a range of hard disk sizes all on one self-contained hard drive unit. This is where the magic happens. The Momentus XT is essentially a standard SATA hard disk, and behaves to the operating system just like that. The OS just sees the hard disk, and not the flash. However, the onboard firmware running on a microprocessor does something very clever: it analyses the areas on the disk which are most accessed and written to, and migrates it from the magnetic hard disk onto the NAND flash. Now whenever the host computer requests that piece of data (remembering that the OS still thinks it's on that area of the disk, and is being 'tricked' by the XT firmware to think it's still there), the XT firmware catches this request and delivers the data from the flash, which it manages by itself. This is such a clever idea!

From what I've seen, users are reporting very positive results, with some saying that they are seeing 80-90% of the performance of a real SSD at the fraction of the cost (around £80). Earlier firmware versions were problematic for some users, but those issues seem to have been ironed out in the latest builds. I am very tempted to kit my MacBook Pro out with one of these!

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Description: This could be a great stop-gap solution until SSDs become cheaper

SoundCloud App for Mac OSX

Posted by Joseph on Friday April 1, 2011, 5:41 pm

Since getting my new 13" Macbook Pro (2011 Core i5 Sandy-Bridge), I've been interested in seeing what applications are available for Mac OSX. I opened up the Mac App Store a while back, which went round in circles whenever you tried to verify your billing details. Since Apple released OS 10.6.7 update, the App Store actually works for me now. I came across an official SoundCloud application. For those of you that may not know, SoundCloud is a popular music service which Artists can upload their work, and you can listen. The website itself is a breath of fresh air, being ad-free and nicely and minimalistically laid out, but the pitfall is the use of Adobe Flash. Some SoundCloud pages can have many instances of the player on it (i.e. multiple tracks, each with their own player and play button), you can probably imagine that being a bit of a sluggish browsing experience at the best of times. Anyway, the wonderful SoundCloud app for Mac OSX is laid out just like iTunes, and everything loads in a breeze. Browsing through tracks is snappy, as well as the search feature. Nice one SoundCloud!

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Description: Seriously better than the site

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