When Contextual Advertising Goes Bad

Going into the Jeff Korson archive revealed some gems. What was on JeffK's mind on 4 June 2009? According to his blog

The Ten Commandments were given to the Jews by Mosses

Another gem reveals that one of these commandments is

Thou shalt not steel

Oh wise 133t JeffK, can we still iron? This is a good reason why you shouldn't entrust small soft plants that like damp conditions with God's message.
Anyway, back to the point. Looking through the "Tifton Gazette" revealed another victim of gun crime. No big deal, just another of the annual 30,000 casualties that makes the USA lead the whole world where it comes to gun deaths. But maybe they should choose their advertising more carefully:

From screengrab

Violence on the Streets

The Tea Party movement is all across the USA and people like Jeff Korson (GA) are in local media spreading the word. Although he is a small fish in a big pond, Jeff is a good indicator of how the Tea Party works.

Y'all watch out for them pitchforks! Main Street, Tifton, From blogpics

Jeff's latest opinion piece which you can find here is all about how the Tea Party is being threatened with physical violence. Watch out, because the Democrats are coming with their pitchforks, batons and guns! However, if you look at his actual evidence, the first video that he presents is a Democrat senator talking about fighting for fair taxes for the middle classes. Jeff, when she talks about fighting, she doesn't mean actual pitchforks and battles. It's a METAPHOR. Did you really think that the middle classes will borrow pitchforks from their gardeners and drive down in their SUVs to riot in Main Street?

While Jeff is at liberty to say almost anything that he likes due to the First Amendment, he should be challenged when it comes to false scaremongering like this. And if his fellow Americans won't point it out then I will. As Jeffk says "I pray this warning is way off base and We All have a Happy New Year.". I'm sure his prayer will be answered.

Update 04/01/2011. The Tifton Gazette published my reply in the Opinion section.
Link Here Hopefully JeffK will be seething at foreign interference with the affairs of the USA. Which is pretty much how the Boston Tea Party started.

Santander BS

What does BS stand for? Bad Scripting?

If you want to see the terms and conditions at Santander you go to this page and click on "Key Features, Interest Rates and Tariff of Charges". Then you end up downloading a file called StaticBS that you can't open. At this point most people would be stuck.

But having read this blog you'd know that all you have to do is go to your download folder, right click on StaticBS and rename the file adding ".pdf" to the end. Then it will open.

Some people go to great lengths to stop casual access to their terms and conditions. [UPDATE] It is now fixed

Wikileaks DNS

Wikileaks is difficult to get to right now. Not that I want to get there. Enough relevant information has been broadcast by the BBC and El Pais to meet my needs. Stopping Wikileaks now seems a bit futile and attacking it by all sorts of methods is just being a bad loser.

In case you really wanted to read Wikileaks for yourself the bare IP address is not difficult to find but here it is anyway.

I think that this is the official address of Wikileaks Wikileaks

And here are some other links just in case.

88.80.13.160 Wikileaks Wikileaks

204.236.131.131 Cablegate Cablegate.

Investing in Wind

A few years back I put my savings into the Stroud and Swindon Building Society. It gave a good return. The Stroud branch was a dusty and shabby relic from the 1970s. The good times didn't last and while the boss got a £334,550 pay-off I ended up with half a percent interest.

Now the building is being refurbished for Ecotricity and giving it a much needed makeover. It is beginning to look very fine.

In case you don't know, Ecotricity are responsible for many of the wind turbines going up around the country. Now certain people around here hate wind turbines because it will mess up their panoramic photographs they sell as Giclée prints. They would cite people like Prof. Robert Carter to support their claim that global warming is not caused by humans. However, many of his assertions can be shown not to match the evidence. Besides that there is the fact that even if we can continue to burn fossil fuels without guilt, these fuels are going to run out. We are already importing coal and relying on Russia for our gas and this is a poor state of affairs.
So here is your chance to help make more wind turbines. Ecotricity have four year Eco Bonds that pay a very generous annual 7%. How do they do this? Where is the catch? I have no idea, it is a matter to discuss with your financial advisor. The money invested goes into financing development of more green energy. The return is about double the Stroud and Swindon's best rate. This is only open until December 10 so you have to hurry.
I have the feeling that some of my money will return to the same building. I hope this time Dale will look after my money a bit better than the Stroud and Swindon.

Tift Theatre

Last year we went for a dinner and a night at the theatre. Not as sophisticated as it sounds. It was a quick bite in Krystal followed by three one act plays in the Tift Theatre by the local am. drams. How Krystal operates is that it serves very small plain burgers, almost bite sized. They are extra compact because they are square and so they tessellate better. And because they are so small you buy them in multiples.

Then we drove the last mile to the Tift Theatre. This is a fine 1930s art deco style cinema that despite all the odds has survived. Curiously, it uses the European spelling of theatre rather than "theater". Fortunately over the years the interior was covered with heavy drapes and so all the original details survived. Once the drapes were removed the bright design was revealed, bold colours and shapes borrowed from the circus. The exterior is brilliantly restored too and the animated neon marquee and bright sign boards are splendid. A very far cry from the mundane "Cinema 6" at the Tifton Mall.

Inside you can imagine that you have gone back to 1937. If I was a location manager who needed a period movie theatre this would be ideal. We were shown around by Mack Freeman who was setting up for the night's show. The stage was set as a cafe for the first of three one act plays.

The audience sits on metal framed tip-up seats with deep upholstery. The tipping is controlled by metal springs that creak and twang. Looking up you'll see that the projection window is empty. Instead there is a small data projector suspended halfway down the room that looks a bit feeble for that space.

That night we hurried our Krystals and arrived at the theatre with the marquee sparkling and announcing "Three One Act Plays". We were only just in time. The auditorium was completely dark as the lights had been turned off at the start. We made our way near the front and groped our way into the creaking seats. The lights came up and we found ourselves in in a largely empty theatre. John Tibbetts powerfully projected his voice in the way of actors, and this fitted the part well as he was playing God. I didn't understand a word of Roslon's Southern accent but I was probably the only one as everyone else in the audience was local.

The scenery ingeniously used the same brick wall prop for all three plays. In the interval we went and bought candy at the entrance desk and they asked us who we were connected to. Everybody else in the audience were friends and relatives of cast and crew. We had no such connection and we were there because I wanted to experience the theatre. The plays were certainly no Broadway hits and were more like school plays but they were charmingly performed.

You could imagine the cinema a couple of years after opening. Every seat filled, and the first reel of "Gone With the Wind" started. The crackly sound coming through and the projectionist cranking the focus to get the picture as sharp as possible.

Afterwards Tammy took some night pictures and the cars parked in front of the Tift Theatre went one by one as the cast went home.

Click here for Tammy's Pictures

South Georgia Ice Company, Tifton

The coolest place in Tifton has to be the ice house. The South Georgia Ice Company in Tifton GA has been making ice for a very long time. The ice would have been used everywhere in cool boxes in homes, shops, fisheries and even air conditioning. The most exclusive railway carriages had big ice trays and electric fans to cool the early railroad tycoons. The factory doesn't actually look like it is still operating as the building has a shabby abandoned air to it. But as we took pictures of it a worker popped out. He was keen to show us around the operation. Inside was a big hall where the whole floor was made of ice moulds. The workers hopped around like bees on a honeycomb. Some remains of rusting machines were left in place after retirement. It was probably too much bother to remove them. No attempt at hygiene was made and the notice on the door stated clearly that the ice was not food grade. Hoists and hydraulics help lift the moulds and send the ice through to a storage room. Outside you could still see remains of the train tracks and imagine trucks full of blocks heading across the state. A big propane powered engine in a frame in the loading bay powered an ice crusher which delivers the product from a large hose. It must be very noisy when a customer wants crushed ice. How does it survive today when refrigeration is commonplace? I have no idea who the customers are. Click the picture to see the whole gallery.

South Georgia Ice Company

Jeff Korson Synapse Fail

Now I'm going to focus on Tifton. Tifton proudly claims to be the heart of south Georgia, which is a bit like saying that Acton is the heart of west London. Around the USA there are people who are in the "Tea Party" and Jeff Korson in Tifton has an interesting article about climate change. His key idea is that climate change is not caused by the billions of tons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere by energy hungry humans. He starts the evidence with a link to a paper famous for bad science reporting, the Daily Mail!

The rest of the article goes through to state that warming is caused by all sorts of things including cosmic rays and vegetable decay. This is a decoy as these things have always been around. Jeff Korson is picking at small inconsistencies while completely ignoring the masses of real evidence.

His conclusion is that we can burn as much fuel as we like because global warming isn't our fault. But should you trust the scientific judgement of somebody who writes "final synapses". Doesn't he know the difference between synapses and a synopsis? And even if he meant synopsis it is the wrong word. Surely he intended "theory". But to compound the problem Jeff doesn't understand that there is never a "final" theory, just the best one that fits the evidence so far.

All about kites

reposted from the family website:

More about kites.

The first kite I remember making was at school. I was hoping that this would be a practical introduction to aerial exploration. I followed the instructions carefully and cut out the traditional kite shape that I had marked out with a ruler. I thought it was a bit small and the card too heavy but I continued. The colouring went well and I did a four quadrant scheme. Then the tail was made of woollen yarn and paper twist bows attached with sticky tape. Finally the flying line was attached, one metre of wool by which time I had realised that we had wasted our time making ornaments. We were allowed to “fly” our kites, which meant exiting the classroom by the big glass doors and running up and down the lawn with these fluttering kites never going higher than we could lift them.

Since then I have constructed a few kites. The most ecological one was made from Fenwicks department store plastic bags. It uses inflatable air channels to create the rigidity so as long as the wind blows it flies high. When the wind stops it collapses. It conveniently rolls up for carrying in a coat pocket.

In 1967 we stayed at Hing Hon road and I would go up to the roof. One day in the gentle breeze there were kites flying from the other roofs. This seemed reckless to me as there was nowhere to run if the kite drooped and needed some extra lift. And if it did fall out of control it would probably be lost on another building or street.

In the Bahamas kids would make kites and fly them from trees to sell them for pocket money.

I never used a Chinese kite but I did admire the fact that mere paper was good enough and the bold red, green, yellow and blue dragon print. Then there was the ornamentation that seemed only to make the kite heavier with tails and flaps. The delicate bamboo splints didn’t look like they would survive a collision with the ground. Even the flying line was delicate and looked like something that mum would have in her sewing box. But one day we went up to Barn Hill and Dad flew the kite. It went up in a gentle breeze and stayed up high almost still. In the same conditions the German kite would have stayed on the ground.

My usual kites were German mass produced plastic ones and were typically printed plastic film with an eagle or similar bird of prey. They were tensioned by flexible wooden spars and plastic brackets. The line was 100m of monofilament nylon on a Jürgens plastic reel with pivoted crank handles that I still use today. These kites needed a good wind. It usually required a good run to loft them high enough to catch the faster air away from the drag of the ground. And preferably somebody on the other end to pick it up and relaunch after the inevitable crash.

My smallest kite is palm sized and is made from a mylar and bamboo splints. It flies well on a short string of a couple of metres and in the lightest of breeze. My largest kite was a nylon sledge kite and was magnificent, but it was lost on the very windy day when it snapped the line.

The other type of kite flies near our house over the common.The red kite stays hovering in one spot matching the speed of the wind while watching the ground. Soon it will spot something and make a rapid dive, Then there will be one less baby rabbit or mouse on the common.

Cut backs

In these days of cuts it looks like Comet have cut back on their spelling. On this product page there are four spelling errors.
serperate briliant icluding Anit

Web exclusive product - Total serperate selling price £549.98, discounted selling price £522.48 (5% off)! Fantastic package offer - A sleek and affordable white notebook with an AMD Dual Core processor, 3GB Ram and 320GB storage puts you in charge of your everyday computing and entertainment needs. The E Series demonstrates extremely compact styling icluding a full size numeric keypad and a built in webcam. Including a briliant laptop starter pack (wireless mouse, laptop bag, 2GB USB stick and Norton 360 v4 Anit-virus software).

What, no Bluetooth?
But Comet have not cut back on the price. Save £50 by getting this from Currys instead.

Gloucester Citizen kills 435 people

Researching history comes up with some unexpected links. Telford's stone bridge at a place confusingly called "Over" should have been made of iron but the influential people in Gloucester forced Telford to use stone. This is a case where the influence was used wisely as the bridge is very sturdy and elegant. An iron bridge would have rotted away by now. The bridge got replaced in the 1970s with a wide modern road bridge. This is the bridge in the 1970s.

From G1761

And this is the A40 replacement bridge being built.

From G2001

In the background of the 1970s pictures you can see buildings. It turns out that these are the Over Isolation Hospital where tuberculosis patients were sent. Looking up history of disease in Gloucester revealed smallpox and cholera were occasional hazards. Smallpox broke out every few decades and patients were sent to other hospitals.

So we come to Samuel Bland, the founder of the Gloucester newspaper "The Citizen". He was very influential and led a successful anti-vaccination campaign. By 1887 he had managed to stop compulsory vaccination. Everything was OK until 1895 when a smallpox epidemic swept Gloucester. At the height of the epidemic he hosted an anti-vaccination meeting with Dr Walter Robert Hadwen as the speaker. Hadwen believed that innoculation was harmful and that sanitation was the proper remedy. There was even a riot in quiet leafy little Oakridge against the use of the pest house for Smallpox victims. The judge in that case criticised the local authority for the failure to innoculate and so intensify the epidemic. The Dr Hadwen Trust website fails to mention his connection with smallpox. 435 people died and of these 280 were children because they had never been vaccinated. The compulsory vaccinations were resumed. Incompetence did not hurt Bland's career and he was elevated from J.P. to Mayor a few years later.

Fast forward to 2010 and Andrew Wakefield and the media frenzy about the MMR vaccine. Again children died although nowhere near as many. Add to that AIDs deniers and other conspiracy theories propagated by irresponsible mass media. As happened a century ago and again now, when the media reports science incorrectly or badly, lives are at risk.

Linux Shell Scripts

Linux is tricky. It would be nice to make a simple package that I could bundle everything from a project into one easy install. But a quick look at the man pages and this is beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. So the next best approach is to knock up a script which automates an install. But how do you check that a package that you require is installed? This is what I came up with. It has some problems like you'd have to adjust the grep for other packages like minicom, which put up different packaging messages. There must be a better way to do this?

echo "Checking that dfu-programmer is installed"
dpkg-query -s dfu-programmer | grep not-installed
if [ "$?" == "1" ]; then
  echo "dfu-programmer is installed"
else
  echo "dfu-programmer missing"
  apt-get install dfu-programmer
fi

Yahoo Answers Top Non Contributer

Using the One-Strike-And-You-Are-Out system I'm banned from Yahoo Answers forever. However they don't delete the account and every few days I'm still getting my old replies chosen as best answers. My total finally went through 50,000 despite the ban.

From blogpics

Unfortunately, since I can not supply any new answers, Jessica, who asks
"Recommended breath mints for my step mom's dog?" might not get the answer that she deserves.

62 years ago at Aston Down

This is Air Marshall Tedder's Douglas Dakota KG528 with engines spinning at Aston Down.

From DakotaTour

Today the tarmac is mostly replaced by grass except for a car park area and the hanger is an industrial unit.

From DakotaTour

Yahoo Answers

I am pleased to have got to 49938 on Yahoo Answers. Although I am banned 4eva it is still crediting my old answers, about two or three a week. Also under some circumstances you get points for just visiting. Not long to the 50000 I am hoping.

Meanwhile lets review some of today's Yahoo questions from people that are beyond help:
1)
I'm trying to find a short in my car. I put in a larger fuse in the spot where a fuse keeps blowing out and some wire started burning.
2)
I am in love with my elementary friend. Is it possible that he likes me too?
3)
Can chemistry build on his part?
4)
Any Single Girls Out There?
5)
How do you zoom in phosphor?
6)
Will we ever again have a President as great as Ronald Reagan?

Robens Jibs

Robens Jibs look nice. And if you balance them up correctly like in this video you can spin your video camera around smoother than a hot buttered bannister. Link to Jib Video I know you all want one now, but oh dear, there isn't any address on their website. In fact there isn't any way of contacting this company at all except for one email address that you'll have trouble finding on Robens AV website
But never fear! Google Streetview to the rescue. It turns out that the demo video was shot at the same mill site as the dodgy Studio and Stage.

View Larger Map
So head on to Holmefield and make sure that any deal you do is in writing and not over the phone. I wouldn't want you to lose out to dodgy traders. Tell Richard that I sent you.

Ancestry.com Nuisance

Ancestry.com are not giving up easily. After ignoring all unsubscribe requests, all ancestry.com emails are now forwarded to my trash folder. But now a new email from
ancestry@ancestry-update.com
appears.

So that is also added to the delete immediately list.

Are ancestry.com desperately spamming or has a spammer opened a look-alike domain? In either case I don't care. All ancestry.com messages will be deleted unread.

Studio and Stage relaunch

Rogue traders,"Studio and Stage" have had a makeover. They have a shiny new website which looks very fancy. http://studioandstage.co.uk/

So lets deconstruct it. The title of the page is called "New Page 1". The subpages are called "New Page 2" etc. Hmm, Looks like they haven't mastered their web design software yet.

What does About say? It says come to our old website while we get this sorted out. Which is a blueyonder hosted website. Oh dear. Most unprofessional.

Then there are links claiming to have an association to Kuoni Engineering and West Yorkshire Theatre Company. These companies are so low profile as to have NO mention on Google whatsoever. In fact, this blog will probably come up top in a search for them.

Then there is Eric Robens the jib and boom manufacturer. The website looks less amateurish than Studio and Stage but it shares certain details. There is no online method of buying anything and no e-commerce set up. And lots of pretty pictures but no specifications. A dealer network is mentioned but not a single actual dealer. And no warranty information. And nowhere is mentioned the registered office.

If you buy anything from either of these companies you should ask them why this information is missing.

The technique is to offer tempting items but the only way to get any information is by phone. Then they will promise great things and low prices. Then they deliver a pile of crap. Then they won't give the money back and will employ all sorts of empty threats if you try and get it back. If you have given them money it may already be too late. My advice is to Google for "Visa Chargeback" and "Distance Selling Regulations".

What is the future for Studio and Stage? If they manage to stay out of jail then a career collecting trolleys at Tesco is well within their grasp.

Halifax e-commerce fail of the day

I haven't had an e-commerce fail for a little while but the Halifax breaks the lull. It used to be so easy to transfer money between accounts. Your accounts all showed up and you selected which one to wanted to move money to. Couldn't be easier. Then they changed it so you had to enter the account details. Why do this? Is it to increase the risk of making a mistake and sending the money to someone else's account. Then there is no indication afterwards that the transaction has succeeded or might do in the future. You have no idea when or if the money will be available.

Then just when you resign yourself to the inconveniences, the whole thing falls over and you get this message.

Service Interruption
One or more of our systems are temporarily unavailable.

This means that you will not be able to proceed at this time.

We are aware of the problem, and hope to fix it soon, so please try again later. We apologise for any inconvenience.

So I can't do anything with my own money. Fail of the day is hereby awarded to the Halifax.
--//--
The service did indeed return later but the transfer time turned out to be 48 hours. Is there a sensible explanation for why it takes two days to move money between a single user's accounts in the same bank?

Banned by Microsoft

I spent a while on Yahoo Answers. Finding genuine answers for really hard questions is a good way to keep your brain active and you end up learning a lot about subjects you might not have thought about. So a year on and I had nearly 50000 points and I made a single post that got me banned. No appeal. End of account. But I still get best answers as my older questions are resolved so I am now up to 49739.

What was this terrible answer that I posted?

If your PC fails without a recovery disk then how do you fix it? My answer was "download a CD disk image of Windows XP and use your license code to repair your installation". I thought that would be reasonable as you already have the software, just in a broken form. But BANG! Instant and final ban from Yahoo Answers.

I admit now that this was wilful and totally wrong incitement to break Microsoft's Copyright and I humbly apologise.

What I should have written is:

"Ditch Windows and install Ubuntu. You can install it as much as you like and break your dependence on Microsoft. Ubuntu is like Windows but without ever having to validate your license on the phone to a wretched foreign call centre when you change your graphics card. And you won't lose your freedom of speech for suggesting that you can download the operating system."

Nowadays Yahoo Answers has to manage without my expertise. So if your question today was called "C++ nested loop please help?". The answer is:

"Your month loop needs a pair of braces around the block of code otherwise it only executes the next line, and you left TotalRain uninitialised."

But you won't look at this blog so you will never know.

More Wanchai Ferry

Part 2 of my Wanchai Ferry General Mills brand experience. The other promotional coupon went on Bo Luo Pork. This was a much more satisfactory meal. The marinade was nice, the pineapple chunks went well with the vegetables. The tomato sauce thickened everything up nicely. It had a nice aroma, it looked good and it was a really nice combination. However, I did not trust the miserable noodles that were packaged with the last offering that I tried. So I replaced that with a similar amount of Sharwoods Medium Egg Noodles.
I might even try it again.

Ancestry.com and Cap Gun Dad

The internet blog is the ideal platform for petty rants. With that in mind first we have Ancestry.com. They are now spamming their newsletter. If you click on unsubscribe it pretends to have worked but a few days later you get another newsletter. I thought that Ancestry.com actually had a good reputation but now I recommend adding it to your direct-to-trash filter list.

Then today I had a car pass me and a loud pop goes off in my ear. What the heck was that? The blue RAV4 that just passed me had an open passenger window. OK, it must be a cap gun. But then it turns into a no through road. Right, I'll survey the road and find who did it.

Little kid with his scooter and the "smoking gun" evidence on the garden wall. Yes, it was a little strip of caps.

I did try to explain that it was rude and a cowardly lack of respect to aim drive-by bangs at strangers. Dad should have then apologised and that would be the end of the matter. But instead I was told "didn't I have better things to do with my time" and that I should "get a life". Clearly I do not have better things to do so I took a picture of his car, a blue RAV4.

[UPDATE] I did put my version of the events to the police and they agreed to have a word with the person. The dad was at work but the wife did give her sincere apologies and ensured me that there was no malice involved. Now why couldn't dad have done that yesterday? Strangely enough the dad claimed responsibility for the "accidental" firing of the gun that he apparently didn't know was loaded. How he managed to fire at precisely the moment the car passed and through an open window is another mystery. I am sure that this is the end of the matter.

Articlesbase joins my ban list

Articlesbase has many articles submitted by people. There are probably many useful and genuine articles. However the site is infested with fake PC advice such as this page http://www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/avgcsrvx-exe-has-encountered-a-problem-and-needs-to-close-clean-it-now--1088464.html which is just a way of selling useless software to the unwary. In fact any common problem seems to be spammed with links to buy a registry cleaner. Somehow Google ranks these results high. This site is going onto my blocked list because every time I do a search I get useless results from articlesbase.

Wanchai Ferry

What does Wanchai Ferry remind you of? A short, cheap and very scenic view of Hong Kong day or night. Or something hot, windy and smells of diesel? Which brings me to the new range of Chinese food kits from General Mills. I wouldn't normally buy that sort of stuff but I had a couple of promotional coupons so I thought I'd give it a go. Wanchai Ferry Xiang Gu Chicken looked good on the box. The packaging is great, the website is interesting. It all went well until it came time to add the black bean sauce. I don't know what they did to it but the whiff of vinegar and something unpleasant ruined the recipe. Then the noodles were inferior quality just to make it worse.

If you try this kit then sniff the contents of the packet before you pour it on your food. You may prefer to pour it in the bin. Have a bottle of Sharwood's Black Bean sauce on hand to use instead. And a pack of their medium egg noodles too!

The World's Newest Teletext Inserter

Here is VBIT up and running being controlled by a Justin Mattair AVR XMEGA.

From blogpics

And here is a picture of some dodgy looking VBI, line 12 to be precise. Mostly this is the fault of the low bandwidth scope but I might try some more decoupling.

From blogpics

This 13.5kg boatanchor scope, namely a Telequipment D755 is really difficult to use. It was last calibrated in 1987. It doesn't lock on TV signals, in fact it doesn't lock on anything for the first hour, no exaggeration. Probably some caps need replacing. But then it does manage to lock onto the field flag when it warms up. The A/B dual sweep is a wonderful thing coupled with a precision multi-turn delay wheel. I think it is a 10MHz scope but the poor thing doesn't have any contrast for fast signals so 4MHz is about the real practical limit unless you work with the lights off.
[UPDATE] The wobbly vbi was caused by not having the video output terminated. With 75 ohms attached it was clear enough to read the MRAG straight off the vbi.

VBIT - USB Teletext inserter

From blogpics

VBIT, as the pocket inserter is now called is up and running as far as the hardware is concerned. A few fixes to the power and pullups and a signal line that had to be added and it is now producing vbi. What sort of vbi I have no idea as my ex-military scope doesn't do TV signals. But it means that the video path and the FIFO are all operating. Now I only have two things left to do.

1) Fit it into a case
2) Write the software.

This week I'm going to try generating packet 8/30/1 and maybe some Softel optouts as those are simple single packets. But the full text service could take a few months to implement assuming that the processor can work fast enough. And when summer comes I won't want to spend all the evening picking through code.

Studio and Stage

This is a warning to everyone in the field of photographic and TV studios. Do not deal with Studio and Stage based in Halifax HX3 6SN. http://studioandstage.co.uk/ The company has changed name to escape the ripped-off customers but it is the same guy behind it each time.

If you have given them money then expect poor quality or unmerchantable rubbish. Don't expect a refund.

We should have realised when only a mobile phone number was listed. A real company of any size would have a land line.

We ordered a tracking system including rails and pantographs. The promised tracking was supposed to be as good as new. Then we were told it was brand new and made to order. It was scratched and bent and obviously worn. So we got low quality but workable rails and goods not as described. Also they promised rail extensions but those never appeared. The pantographs were much smaller than described and poor quality with burred edges ready to cut an unwary finger. So quite shoddy but maybe if it was cheaper it would do for an amateur's shed.

The coving was complete rubbish. It was supposed to have come second hand from a studio. As it turned out it was especially made for us. It was made from several ply of fibreglass and was so badly made it was not usable at all. Imagine a pile of lasagne sheets after you pour a kettle of hot water over them. Or imagine a few pages of mediaeval parchment that a toddler had spilled a pot of glue on. Also the key elements of coving, the corner curve was not supplied at all.

Despite being given many chances to remedy the situation all that we got were tactics designed to delay including false promises of a representative to visit, and bogus delivery notes and tracking numbers.

First they did not respond in a timely fashion. When they did reply they gave a cock and bull story about the corner pieces being manufactured. They also promised a shipment but gave no tracking number.

A few days later they said it was going to arrive with another shipper. This never happened either.

Then they gave a string of excuses including the weather and the Christmas break.

Then when pressed for a delivery date and tracking we got given a JPEG scanned image of a TNT consignment. This was a vaguely plausible except that the tracking number referred to a different delivery about 6 months old and the TNT guys who we know could confirm that there was no such delivery. Also there were minor errors that only a human could introduce. The TNT database would have rejected the details given. This was a photoshop job designed to stall and waste time. And clear evidence of fraudulent intent.

Then they changed their phone number to another mobile phone number. This is not the mark of a trustworthy company.

Then it was more nonsense about the weather holding up the packers. The packers were called "Pendign Packing" and somehow this company has managed to operate without getting a single mention on the web. But they happen to have the same postcode as Studio and Stage.
Then another pair of tracking numbers. One worked, the other didn't. In fact the other number was for a different consignment not destined for us at all. So some laughably amateurish attempts at flat coving looking like some sort of wrinkled parchment arrived. Then the curves arrived in several consignments. And the vital corner part never arrived at all. Like the keystone of a bridge, without this part, the whole coving can not be built. Personally I think that it is a difficult shape and they ran out of fibreglass trying to make something that they are clearly not competent to build.

So to sum up the trading standards points:
Goods not as described - Tracking was not new but worn. Neither did it have the promised extensions.
Inferior product - Coving is not of merchantable quality.
Goods not received in full - The corner part was missing.

And then the endless delaying tactics and bluff and bluster. This company is incompetent and fraudulent and should not trusted by anyone.

Inserter boards arrived

(Probably)
Nobody was home to accept the boards so they went back to the sorting office. The Irish Post Office confused matters because their tracking said that my package arrived in the United States.
Maybe the Irish Post Office thinks that the UK is about to become another American state?
Or maybe there was a clerical error at the manufacturers?
Or the An Post tracking system just doesn't work?
Hopefully the correct boards will be in the hands of the Royal Mail when I go there in the morning.
Engineering Change Note 2. Cut RESETN track to U2-40 and tie the pin to +VDD via 10k. Link RESETN to U3-1 and rename it CSN.
[Update: I got somebody else's boards. My boards ended up in the USA. Cockup in the post room I expect. Beta Layout had the boards remade in Germany and they arrived couriered in a couple of days after the mix-up was revealed. They had also been electrically tested as I could see from the pin marks. I would have awarded full marks for customer service. However the boards didn't come with my solder sucker (free gift for new customers) or the stainless steel laser cut solder stencil (which I didn't want anyway).

Teletext Inserter

A very long way to go with this project but all the hardware is now procured. This is the bare board still at the manufacturer complete except for the routing.

From blogpics

As for the software the command interpreter is running but doesn't have many commands yet. The settings code is installed but there are no settings to save just yet. Today's task is to generate packet 8/30 format 1. As there is no real time clock this will rely on getting synced up regularly and after power cuts.

Adulteration

At school, the extraordinary history teacher "Jock" taught us all sorts of things, not all of them on the syllabus. One of these was about adulteration of food in Victorian times. Chalk was being put in milk and flour to whiten it and bulk it up! Flour had other flours made from potato, peas and beans added for bulk. Thank goodness that doesn't happen now!

Which brings us to Penguin Biscuits. We all love that chocolate covered biscuit with a nice cuppa and a very fine tradition they are too. The ingredients include soya (bean flour) and calcium carbonate (chalk).

But nowadays due to the wonder of marketing, chalk is now a selling point ("Added Calcium") and therefore helps build childrens' bones.

Creationist Nonsense of the Day

Who needs a healthcare plan when you have this website on your side?
http://www.pray4trig.com/

This particular quote showed breathtaking ignorance:

God didn’t play any pranks on us. Dinosaurs were killed in the Flood buried under many layers of sediment in a matter of days and compressed under water deep enough to cover all the mountains of the Earth. That’s MILES of water. Incredible pressure. That’s how they became fossilized.

I can see at least five things wrong in that small quote. Everything in it is contradictory to the actual evidence. The scary thing is that nearly half of the USA population believes this nonsense.

Mattair XMega Development Board

Today a package arrived for me. Although it said "Priority" all over it, three weeks seems like a pretty poor interpretation of priority. Anyway, it was the new AVR Xmega development board from Justin Mattair . Despite the best efforts of USPS and Royal Mail to squash the box, it seems that the generous allocation of header pins provided structural support and prevented any damage. So I plugged it in and the blinkenleds demo started and the com port popped up.
Did I mention the pins? There are too many of them too close together to be able to fit more than one IDC cable header. So the cutters will trim one or two ports to size. One curious bit of design. The ground vias all have thermal relief patterns.

Demo time. A blob of solder connects one of the links required for the new demo. The instructions are a bit sparse and it said to link J15 and J27 but J15 is only needed for the mini joystick which isn't fitted anyway. Next it said remove the programming link. Where is that? I guess there is only one link that is removable. And indeed pressing the hardware button magically the unit becomes an AVRISP mkII. Where is the device driver? Hidden in AVR Studio 4 of course. Then it asks if I want to upgrade the firmware. Probably not! That is the quickest way to kill a programmer. With great trepidation I press the Program button and all the lights go out. Now what? I replace the programming link, press the reset button and we revert back to a serial device. Hmm, maybe that isn't what we wanted to do? Where is the USB/SPI bridge? I guess the USB chip needs a quick go with Flip.
So on with the jumper, hold HWB and jab at reset. Oh wow. Now we have mounted a DFU. Scrabble around for the Flip driver and "Your new hardware is installed and ready to use". So in Flip I look for the Xmega but heck, it isn't supported???? Oh, thats right, its the OTHER AVR I am supposed to be programming. Now it all programs OK and it is time to click Start Application. Bye bye DFU and hello XD200 USB-SPI configuration page. What do I do with this? Confused now. Where do I put these drive mounting commands in? Oh right. Its the magic jumper that needs to come off.
So now the terminal goes crazy flickering. That is different. Press the "any" key and wow, here are all the goodies :-)
What is the temperature? "Demo has not been written". I already knew it was 21C so that is no great loss.
Blink LEDs. Yes. blinkenleds are in full working order.
Finally a look at what I really need to be checking out. The SD card slot. And we have the magic incantations
di0
ds0
fi0
fs
fl
Wow. Now I can read my files.

Next to sort out why exporting Kicad to GC-Prevue put all my drill holes at the same location.....

It has a name! VBIT, a low cost teletext inserter

There comes a time in every project when it needs a name. This moment came when I had a pile of blueprints all with the title field empty. So VBIT is the name of this gadget. VBI is for vertical blanking interval and T is for teletext.
Isn't EDA software fun? Lucky I got all the components first and laid them out on a printout of the top layer. Why did the programmers postfix footprints with E for narrow and N for extended? So I had to swap these around. Also the SOIC pads were too small for hand soldering so I had to stretch them all by 1mm. Then the auto routing is brain dead so I had to lay out all the tracks manually. FreeRoute is very good but then I can't import the results back because the pads and tracks don't exactly line up so it fails the design rules check.
Then plotting to Gerbers is like warping back in time 30 years, when everything had to fit on a double density floppy. Why do I need to know all about drill decks and aperture lists? Madness!
So the design is now at the PCB maker but I already spotted an error. No pull-ups on the I2C. Oops. This is what it would look like if the pull-ups were fitted.

Engineering Change Note 1: pull up SCL and SDA to +3.3v using 3k3 resistors.

Should have walked home.....

New car, 1 in 8 Rodborough Hill, cotswold stone wall, heavy snowfall. What could possibly go wrong?

From blogpics

Teletext inserter

Teletext is disappearing region by region. In a couple of years there will be nothing left. Teletext will then be extinct and that would be a great loss to diversity. So I have started a captive breeding program. Now who would want a teletext inserter? They said that about the Komodo dragon and that got protected so maybe teletext has a chance too? This inserter board illustrated is ready to go off to the factory. It will be a lengthy teaching process of many months until it can insert as much as a filler packet. Re-introduction should be able to take place by summer 2010.

Trading in teletext inserters is permitted by CITES (Convention in Teletext Encoder Systems). You can help by buying one of these. They only require feeding +3.3Volts and vitamins C,V,B and S. This will be supplied as a board only and you'll need to put it in your own cage and add your own processor board.

* Analog teletext inserter
* Configurable by USB. Will run stand-alone once loaded up.
* SD card page memory. More pages than you can display!
* Packet 8/30 capable.
It isn't.....
* Broadcast quality!
* A bridge