Zagadka's Site

Had a BBQ with Mum and Dad today.

We installed a lock on the garage door finally. Along those lines, we got an electrician today! (Instead of an airco mechanic) He was good, installed a smoke alarm , changed a few light switches and fixed two light fittings. The wiring in the house is so damn old it's insulation is decaying. Not cool.

Have you noticed some of the ads for kids toys these days? Saw a good one thismorning for a transforming wrecking ball crane truck.
The punchline in a COPS style voice was "This is the type of hardware you need WHEN YOU NEED TO TAKE A BUILDING DOWN!" kel couldn't understand what I was laughing at... and then it was "TRANSFORMS INTO (something) TO FINISH THE JOB"! hahahah! The whole way they market this crap is just lame. While in the shot the toy was "TAKING OUT" some grey painted foam buildings where they crumbled and exploded amazingly.

The weekend at last!

What a huge week! I even did some patch panel work this week. One of our customers (in their wisdom) glued their patch panel to the wall because they could't find any screws. Which is fine, but it's crooked! There is NO chance of getting it off the wall now without taking out chunks of wall. Anyway, my job for the day was to take their blue spagetti soup and turn it into a working LAN, which I did. The annoying part was the patch panel, it wasn't all that spectacular and I ended up having to strip and twist (to make them thicker) the wires to get them to contact the V blades in the punch down. I got it all sorted eventually. The other weird thing was it as a 568B wired panel, which is odd. I've not seen one before. Most of the outlets needed to be re-crimped too. I ended up offsetting the rack-mounted gear on one side by one rack hole so that they were level!

IDE Tape drives. The bane of my existance. We have tried about 8 IDE cards now and they just do not want to play the game. The one that is working is chewing up one whole core when doing a backup, that's crap. Reason is because we can't see the IDE ports on the IDE controller card because it's RAID. The IDE ports aren't shown in the device manager. So, we can't force the drive to use DMA mode. It's annoying because it's going to probably mean a board swap and more down-time for the customer. It's a damn shame too because everything else in the server is perfect, they've done everything right. RAID 5 with a hot-spare, lots of RAM and regular backups. It's a really frustrating problem!

Yesterday and today were coding days. I added a few new features and fixed the interface mainly on our Sugar project. I am really loving the YUI library. It's great. I've used it to do small popup dialogs that grey out the site into the background, you fill out the form then it goes away. This is the *good* kind of popup though, it does stuff for you. It schedules a followup call for our projects when you hit the button. It also updates some other status' that allow us to monitor the progress through a project.

Computers are dropping like flies at home. The HTPC died, and tonight has mysteriously started working again. Which was good because I needed to nick one of it's SCSI drives for the server, which lost a drive in it's RAID 5 array. I booted the HTPC and copied all the data off it. The lone SCSI drive in the HTPC is an U160 drive only 16GB I use for recording to. I've thrown that in the server, replacing the dead one and it's rebuilding while I type now. It's unfortunate because the replacement drive, although quicker, is much, much louder. It's all I've got though. I've gone from a Seagate ST318275LW (18.2 gig 7200RPM Ultra-2 SCSI) to a Seagate Atlas 10KII (18.2G 10000 RPM Ultra-160 SCSI). The other down-side is that drive will far out-pace the other drives in the array, it's kind of a waste throwing a nice U160 drive in with Ultra-2 gear. What I really want is to get another 2 or 4 disk array of 320GB SATAII drives. That would be nice =) The other thing that annoys me about this failure is that it's the other RAID 5 array that has the hot spare! This array doesn't!!! Grrrrrrr.

Hopefully the data is all-good and it's happy when it's done and I reboot.

Today I went to Josh's and finished off some of his house LAN. At least now the Cyber-Den is wired for LAN! Ben came over too for some LANnage, but had a nasty piece of spyware that was really difficult to remove. I ended up sticking his hard drive in another computer to delete the infected files. A pair of DLLs working in unison, delete one's entries, the other re-writes them etc... Josh also got a new video card which unfortunately didn't want to play the game =/ Lots of weird graphical corruption.

We had hamburgers for lunch and of course some OLD.

Massive week of programming and call-outs.

This week and part of last week, Tape drives were the bane of my existance. This customer's Sony Tape drive just did not want to play the game at all! It turns out the problem was the IDE controller on the mainboard. Most of the new Pentium D chipsets don't come with IDE controllers, so board manufacturers have to 'tac one on' somewhere. In this case they solved the problem by using a USB to IDE bridge on the board as the on-board IDE port. This is all well and good until you introduce tricky things like Tape drives and Retrospect backup. Retrospect backup doesn't play nice with USB-IDE bridges, at least not the old version that the customer has because it says to windows "go away, I'm going to talk direct to the drive" instead of using the windows drivers to communicate. The other problem is, the USB-IDE bridge might not be a full-to-spec IDE port, so, when MS Backup or retrospect tell the drive to do something or request some sort of status from the drive, it falls over.

Once we were over that hurdle I started trying different IDE cards, another boggle in it's self. Most of the available IDE and SATA/IDE PCI cards are RAID by default now. You can't just buy two dumb IDE ports on a card anymore... which sucks arse. So, we get a nice array of 5 or so different IDE and IDE/SATA controller cards and try it. Most don't detect CD-ROMs, the very last one I tried, with an ALi Chipset was already behind the 8 ball as we pretty much assumed it'd not do the job, being ALi. This stupid ALi SATA/IDE controller card was the *only* card that detected both CD_ROMs and the Tape Drive.

OK, so we slap the controller in the server and 'hook 'er up' and it's all happy, except the backup process is now chewing out one whole core of the CPU to it's self and it's slowing everyhing that's running on the server down. Grrrrrrrrrrrr... My current running theory is because the thing is a RAID card, you can't see the individual IDE ports in the device manager. Because you can't see the individual ports in device manager, you can't force them to do DMA mode. Because the Tape Drive is not using DMA mode (god knows why not 'cus it detects as UDMA 5) it chews out a heap of CPU time dumping or reading data to and from the tape. Yay.

It's pouring rain now. It has been for days. I sat down for 5 minutes outside and shot half-a-gig of photos in about 10 minutes. I didn't really achieve what I wanted (frozen motion water drop type shots) but I came close. It's very overcast so I had to bump up the ISO to expose the drops quickly enough to get the "frozen motion" type shot. The other problem I have is my 28-70 f/2.8 lens' Auto Focus is screwed, so I can't set it on AI Servo mode which is a continuous auto-focus mode.

It looks like the changes to the level in the back yard helped a bit but not that much. I cleaned the compost heap, I mean, gutters today. That's why they were overflowing during the rain. The downpipe was clogged and there was about 75mm of muck all the way along the gutter!

Major Down-Time!

Finally I have the net back and we're all settled into our new house! (Except Liam who refuses to sleep!)

Massive week of code writing, only a few call-outs.

I've got a new toy, well, have here a potentially new toy, I haven't decided yet... A 100baseFX switch. I can interface stuff with the 2924XL-M Cisco with the fiber modules at last. I am having my doubts about it though. It appears to be slow - for example, there is a 50ms ping from the Fiber switch to the Border Router. It's on 100MBit Copper and it's only one hop, technically no hops. I guess that's to be expected with two media conversions in the middle. The other thing that is bothering me is some corrosion on the 100baseTX uplink socket. There is also some corrosion on the inside of the chassis. My primary concern is port 4. It gets "phantom" connections indicating 100baseFX full duplex with traffic (Green and Orange Lights on) with only it's "dummy" (The fiber ends are protected by a rubber dummy that fits into the socket and seals the socket from external dust etc) in. I've been messing about in the switch's configs to try to speed things up, including setting full-duplex, updating via TFTP the onboard software and also configuring some other bits and pieces like auto-negotiation and trunking. Turning all the crap off basically and making it "just" switch the data. I'm going to try some of it's multimedia and streaming stuff later, I believe it has a "low-latency" configuration.

I've been umming and aaahing all week over wether or not to buy it. But as of tonight I have all the info. So, we will see!

Lots of code on the main form I've been working on in our Sugar project. Finally All the data comes out where it needs to be, now I need to make it save it back in (if its changed). I've done a lot of javascript validation and such, learned a lot. The rest of the forms will be much easier. I love YAHOO YUI though, it would have been much harder to do without it. The events and popups in particular, this is a big-mother of a form for loan pre-aproval. They want to know incomes to underpants colour pretty much, so it needs lots of keyup and lostfocus events for validation.

There are mostly two events per numeric field, blur and keyup. I'm primarilly using keyup for addition and updating total fields, although it validates as well. Blur is pretty much zeroing empty fields so everthing looks nice. YAHOO tooltips. Bloody excellent. I'll definately be using them again in other projects. The really cool bit is you can put full CSS+HTML into a nice looking popup on a mouseover that times out like a real tooltip. This is without crappy CSS based rubbish and DIV hiding and showing that takes about 20 lines of HTML and CSS and JAVASCRIPT. These are so simple, the customer loves them! Simpler code, plus you can stick DHTML in them if you want to. I'm using hard-coded content at the moment for them. 1 line, define the content, 2nd line, define the popup with the ID of the element you want to mouse-over. Beautiful!

What a huge week! Finally we're out of the unit. Been so busy I haven't even blogged.

Liam's first birthday today! We had Mum, Dad, Jen and Chris over for a bbq. We got him an Elmo cake because he absolutely loves Elmo! He got a lot of presents too! A nice reversible jacket from Grandma, A big Elmo that talks from us (It's nearly as big as him and he loves it!), Jen and Chris got him some bath toys and another toy. I'm going to have to come back here and edit this because linking people to stuff isn't working. I'm pretty tired! He had a great day too. He was also tired and cranky at home time for everyone... Liam had lots of attention all day. He even managed to snaffle some icing on his cake with a quick grab, he wasn't too fussed on the taste of it (what taste?!). It was that piped on icing that doesn't taste like anything...

The HTPC crapped it's self today after I tried to install .NET framework 3.0 without SP2 on there. I eventually sorted it out though. I'm currently working on installing the software that this whole thing was for! The problem was at first, after attempting an install of the HTPC software, the start menu and task bar weren't started and neither were any of the services. A very broken box. So I tried to install SP2. Same problem. So I did some digging scrying of logs and it seemed that the RPC service not starting was the core of the boggle. So, I checked all the permissions in safe mode and re-booted. It worked. So, now I am going to try the rest of the software and probably another .NET install over the top because I'm not sure if the first one even completed.

RC Day today! Josh is coming over with is lunchbox and we're going down the park!

I nearly struck disaster though. My charger would not make a connection to the battery, so, I broke out the other mechanical charger - which was also borked. I took it apart and worked on it. The problem was threefold, one there were a number of dry joints about the place, two the trickle indicator globe was shorted and the ammeter shunt was not actually connected to the board!!! This meant that the charger was trying to charge the battery through the windings of the ammeter! I fixed all of this and re-assembled. It was now fine. The original charger, upon checking wasn't receiving the full 13.8 volts from the power supply - there was a corroded contact on the fuse holder which was to blame. A little scrape and re-fitting of the fuse and we're up again! Two working chargers, now that I have spent the time to fix the older one! I think I will keep the older one as it has a discharge function too. The circuit is also much more robust using a pair of 20W resistors as shunts.

Should be a good day!

Another massive week. I just have no time! Today I will probably clean up a bit, there are some bits and pieces that I'd like to gather up and put in boxes so they are out of the way. On the cards is also re-visiting the mechanical speed control in my RC car that I resurected the other week. It seems that I have actually put too bigger resistor on it and it's wiping out the whole voltage and just extending the neutral contact.

What a massive day! I'm back up in the office this week working on SugarCRM again.

I resurected my RC Car today. I replaced the shunt resistors and servos. I also had to repair one servo whos limiting wiper wasn't even touching the final output gear - so it was just continuously grinding away agains the mechanical limit (a lug on the final output spur). It turns out that the other radio and servos are OK but I can't mix them - they aren't compatible. I only have one set of crystals though =/

I found a perfect double-tapped resistor in my collection of bits and pieces recovered from old TVs and Stereos. I soldered that in and fitted a spacer to the old mount and it fits clsoe to perfect. Although I can't put the body on properly anymore =/ I will have to remedy that with some creative mounting or some agressive grinding =)

The buggy looks like something out of mad max - all battered and beaten, looks like it's cobbled together out of bits found in the desert!

I also had to repair my charger. It appears to be working but doesn't indicate it is. Well it pulls the current and the battery gets charged so it must be. All the voltage measurements I took worked OK. There are a few blown resistors. Perhaps a short inside - the resistors are only related to the indicator LEDs. The charger is a aligator clip type arrangement designed for a car battery. I hooked it up to my trusty Manson Power supply which can deliver up to 25 Amps at 15 Volts. It's going to come in handy later when I test motors and what not, though they will probably peak above 40A...

Speaking of repairs I came across two beautiful repairs I made about 10 years ago!

I have assembled my rack and fitted all my gear into it. There was some trouble locating the screws to hold on the rack-ears for the Cisco 2924-XL-M switch though. There was some initial trouble with the orientation of the horizontals on the 19" wide side because they did't mesh with the verticals. So I had to pull it all apart (pain in the butt - friction fit joins) and then re-assemble it.

From The Top:
* Cisco 2924-XL-M with 2 x C2922-XL-V Dual 100 Base FX Fiber Modules.
* 3 Empty RU for Potential Cisco Routers Later.
* 56K Dialup Modem, Billion ADSL Router and Netgear Wireless Router.
* IBM 8045-012 Hub - Used for watching the LAN.
* D-Link 14 Port 10 Base T Switch + 2 x 100M uplinks.
* Cable Organiser
* Cisco 4000M with 2 x NP-1E (Ethernet) and 1 x NP-1RV2 (Token Ring) Interfaces.
* Dell Poweredge 2400 Server.

Tomorrow I am going to go through the bits of RC Car that I picked up from Mum and Dad's today. I had the wrong idea about the bits being together, as in something that resembled a car. It will be interesting to see what I can cobble together with these bits. I have a Tamiya Super Hornet with a smashed front, and cracked gearbox, broken wing. I have a Tamiya HotShot which is pretty slawed too. It's actually not in one piece, got cracked suspension mounts (tricky single-shock suspension) and probably gearbox troubles. I also need to fix the front gearbox and re-install the center shaft so that it does 4WD again... I have two body halves, the gear train, shocks and running gear are all in bits in my container (I'm not usually one to misplace bits - although I can forget where I "organised" them to...). I have an Attack II Control in unknown condidtion with - of all things - a 9v battery snap on it that I have obviously modded in there at some time. Ah the modding started early. I have crystals which is an excellent start and two radio recievers. Now one RX is in the parts box and the other is in the car. I'd say one is dead. Guess which =)

Unfortunately I couldn't find my l33t 13T (that's 13 turns), pretty labelled bright looking, fins at the back and replaceable brushes racing motor. It's gotta be somewhere at Mum and Dad's still. That was good I got it for like $5 years and years ago, we are talking pre-highschool. So, I dunno, maybe 8+ years ago. Bougth brushes and stuck them in and cleaned it all up - but never used it.

I have a lot of small nuts, bolts and washers available from my electronics collection that I am pretty sure I will need! I also need to track down some resistors for the speed controllers - or get an ESC. Probably resistors for now 'cus they're going to be free =) In my wisdom I had removed the resistors and jumpered them, so, it's either full-throttle or nothing on the speed control at the moment. Now that I actually know why they are there and what they do - I think I will put them back, they chew power though. I have a backup remote control that I bought for $8.50 from eBay and also a set of ball-bearings for $9 including the teeny tiny ball bearing in the middle of the diff!!! This will help with run-time. Some of the cheaper upgrades until I get a car working ! If I get ambitious I will make my own ESC, I can probably look at that now pretty easilly. There is a DC Motor Controller Kit from *shudder* Dick Smith that would be easy to modify as an ESC. It's a little bigger than a bought one but will pack lots more punch and would have a better current-handling capacity. If not, there's always eBay

Today I'm going to assemble my rack and put all the switchgear in it. I need to take out one of my existing shelves first though. Lots of stuff to move.

Today I went to Josh's new house to install a LAN. We managed to get all the cable pulls done but unfortunately it was getting late so I had to go before I finished. The cables for the "Cyber Den" are all pulled though the floor and ready to take sockets though. The patch panel is also neatly finised. I also ran out of time with the phone as there was a dodgy connection in the phone line where the outcoming cable was not following standard. Unfortunately I didn't have time to pull apart the connection and inspect it. The connection is a nasty one by the looks of it. Three cables coming into a bundle of twisted-and-taped type joins. No solder it seems. I will see though apon further insepction.

Much vegetation. Not much news.

It's now burned permanently into my brain!

Pull R9, R10, R11. Break the trace from pin 6 to the +10V rail. Repace R10 with a 3.3KR 1/4W Carbon Film Resistor. Replace R11 with a 33 microfarad 35 volt electrolytic capacitor with negative facing the SCR. Turn the board over. Scrape the broken pin 6 trace on the pin 6 side. Solder a 15V Zener Diode from pin6 trace to ground. Solder a 1n4148 signal diode from pin3 to pin 6. Add a 680p ceramic cap in parallel with C2 on the back of the board. Run a 330K 1/4W Metal Film Resistor in heatshrink from pin 6 to active after the fuse.
Fit the power cord, socket and mounting block. done.

I modified 16 boards in this way - it doesn't seem like it'd take so long. It took me a little over 8 hours. It is delicate work though and must be done accurately or the board will toast it's self. Something different. I did enjoy it - even though I was stuffed after 8 hours of soldering and assembly =)

What a massive day! Programming, Electronics and Sales. I'm still working on the supplier pricing updater. I learned a modification to a lighting board that needs to be made on a number of units for an associated company - The actual run of modifications I will be doing tomorrow. I also worked on our other project - the SugarCRM modification.

Today I started work customising the SugarCRM objects that we have chosen that are most suited to hold our customer's data. Other than that it was the sales floor for the rest of the day!

I have acquired an IBM 8245-012 100 MBit Ethernet Hub from my boss. Hub you say? Yes, Hub. Stick a hub inbetween you and the LAN so you can monitor all the traffic - once I set up port mirroring on the cisco switch. This is an inegral part of troubleshooting a LAN at a higher level than just LED on equals link. Slowly I will build up a lab for learning. I really need to get at least a CCNA I think at this stage. The knowledge I would gain would be excellent. I am currently a bit weak on the complexities of routing. I have no doubt I will learn what I need to learn from the "intermanet". I have an audio rack here which will be suited fine for communications gear. I need a few of the higher/medium end routers to work with though. Currently I have a 4000 series router and a shelf that I can use to add it into the rack. It's only 18RU and 450mm deep anyway - I can't add my dell servers into it, besides, they've got no rack rails anyway.

Back to work! Automagic updates of prices from the supplier. The code does it, but needs work on it's mechanics. Getting the pricelist from the passworded area of the suppliers website, loading it up and unziping it all with a few commands in the console issued through a web-interface. I love wget, wget is my friend =)

We started discussing the work we needed to do on the crm + asterisk project we have undertaken. It's going to work well I reckon - just a matter of moulding SugarCRM into something that matches the customer's business logic and work flow.