another year, another theme.

Something that’s escaped me recently is that Koko Wa Raionzu turned two years old last October.

Holy crap!

I wouldn’t think it looking back on it now, I rarely ever update this thing. But I do anyway whenever I’m like “oh noes, I’m bored!” Just to be, yknow, part of the blogosphere. Lame I know.

Life as ever has been keeping me busy, it’s had it’s ups and downs. I’ve been playing with CakePHP and virtualization with VMware vSphere and ESX at work, installing and playing with multiple Debian boxes at the same time. Eight SSH windows you say? HAX!

I’m currently writing up a couple of guides to the more complex nuances of digital electronics starting with flip-flops (no, NOT the kind in the pic.)

And I’m going to try and update more.

yes I know, you’ve heard it before. Don’t expect miracles. But I will honest to zod try dammit.

Verilog HDL, FPGA, UART, OMG acronyms!!!!!

Since I was a little lad, electronics has always fascinated me. So much so I have the Resistors app on my phone in case I need to ID a resistor quickly (yay for caps usually having their ratings on them in the first place). However all my experience to date has been with analogue circuits — digital ones have always been a bit out of my league.

UNTIL NOW.

I’m currently learning Verilog with an eye to getting an FPGA dev board sometime soon so I can make some Really. Cool. Stuff.

Suggestions and pointers would be welcome if you have experience in that kind of thing. We were all noobs once!

A decent Xmas #1? YOU’RE SHITTING ME.

http://uk.launch.yahoo.com/c/uk/single_charts.html

British public: I have new found respect for you. Keep it up.

Simon Cowell: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA PWNED

X Factor fans: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA PWNED

Sony BMG: uh… well done, you got Xmas #1&#2, now go back to making shitty music.

A Mnemonic for Cat5e cabling

Today I had to wire up some Category 5e ethernet cabling. I’ve had to do this since I started working in IT but every time I’ve had to resort to looking up the TIA/EIA586B spec via Wikipedia to get the wiring correct.

I’m kind of sick of this, so I came up with a mnemonic to remember it. I’ve seen one but it involved boobies so it’s not really suitable for a work environment. Well, most, anyway.

You have to remember 2 things though:

1. Each pair consists of a Colour/White strand and a White/Colour strand. The Colour/White strands (pins 2,4,6,8) are in UPPERCASE, and the White/Colour strands (1,3,5,7) are in lowercase.
2. Both Blue and Brown start with the letter B, so for Brown I use the letter ‘R/r’, being the second letter. Blue has no letter R so this avoids ambiguity.

If we take o=Orange, g=Green, b=Blue, r=bRown, this gives us:

o O g B g G r R
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8


If we split this into even/odd pins, we get

o g b r for the odd pins
O B G R for the even pins

The mnemonic is:

our good boys run Over Bloody Great Rails

So next time you have to hand crimp some Cat5e just say this to yourself, and remember the first 4 are the odd pins and the last 4 are the even ones.

Bear in mind this is only valid for TIA/EIA586B. For non-PoE A/B crossover cable, just swap the Green and Orange pairs round at one end. I haven’t thought of a mnemonic for this one yet, though, so you’re on your own. A word of warning though! This will only work for data-only Cat5e — you risk seriously damaging your kit if you run Power over Ethernet or phone signals through this kind of crossover cable. Something tells me that your average onboard Ethernet chipset will not appreciate having 48V DC shoved up its backside.

Remember, with the advent of widespread support for Auto-MDIX there is often no need to run x-over cabling at all and just using straight B-B cabling is the best idea unless neither of the PHYs on either end support auto-MDIX.

I don’t know why I bother…

saying I’m going to update this when I blatantly don’t. But anyways…

Emma finally discovered this blog… she awww’d. a lot. We celebrate our year anniversary in a matter of days, so here’s to many more of them, and a long life together ^_^ *hugs*

In computer news I’ve transitioned away from x86 completely, believe it or not PPC is now my arch of choice in all its incarnations. It’s so much more efficient in terms of flops vs megahertz, and what with its use of EFI/OpenFirmware as opposed to that outdated shite known as the BIOS I find it far more flexible and geek friendly. And to those who say PowerPC is dead, you have obviously never seen a PS3. Or any Cell-based machine for that matter. With Power7 on the horizon, it’ll be a worthwhile competitor to x86 for years to come.

On the subject of PowerPC machines, if you have an old OS9 Mac I’ll be putting up a page in the near future with speed tips and tuningness for G3/G4 machines that actually work as opposed to the crap you see on other ‘old mac’ sites. I’m writing this from Em’s ‘house iMac’, specs G3/400, 384MB RAM, 9GB slow-as-molasses hard disk. When I came across it it had Virtual Memory and RamDisk enabled, and as you can imagine that + slow HDD = PAIN. That has since been remedied by yours truly

The recession seems to be showing signs of waning at long last — I’m now taking up a post at Colchester-based web dev house WDL as a code monkey there. The folks seem nice and they have a purty website (http://websitedesign.co.uk/) to boot.

Finally, I’m offering CV and cover/spec letter writing services on a trial basis. The people I’ve done this for so far seem to be quite happy with what I do to their stuff and it’s got them so much further in their jobsearch. If you’re interested in this drop me a line the usual way (see Contact page).

That’s it for now I guess, I’ll try updating this on lunch breaks and stuff in the future, but of course no promises.

Just a quick one!

Life is strange. One week you’re all like zomg bored, next everythings happening and you have to fit an ass load of stuff into an hour.

- I’ve started my own studio! XD More details on this to come when I have more time to write it up.
- The ‘m’ word has been coming up in conversation more and more… nuff said about that.
- The F65 is the bolix, but the D700 is WAY FREAKING BETTER. DX/VR for the win.
- GETTY IMAGES CONTRIBUTOR! YAY! I’m a good little photomatographer.
- I’m having to look for a job, again. In a recession. Methinks, this could be quite difficult. *sigh* But still I’m going to try my best ^_^
- I have a facebook addiction. OH NOES. (Add me, or die.)

That is all for now :3 but I’mma be posting again in the next few days to elaborate on the above. But right now, I’m in a rush…

lol kthxbai, love and snuggles.
C

Life, Death, and the Battle of the Cameras

Weyy! WordPress FINALLY lets me into my account! About time.

This blogpost will be in 3 parts, as evidenced by the title…

life:

been k, I guess. Me and the other half are seeing each other more and more, and it’s great. Apart from that, things have been pretty uneventful. Apart from…

death:

People keep dying around me! and it tends to be peoples’ mums as well, which is even more depressing.

battle of the cameras:

I’ve started to see a fair few faults in the old S1000, which is still *GASP* working as well as the day I got it. But…

• it’s SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Very, very slow. As in: press shutter release, make a coffee, come back, wait for it to take the f**king picture slow. Well, OK, thats a bit of an exaggeration. But omg, it can be frustrating.
• That lens. IF this camera was an SLR, this wouldnt be an issue. But it’s a fixed lens bridge camera. Yes, it has 12x optical zoom. But at the nearer end of the zoom range (~40/50mm), it suffers from horrendous barrel distortion, and ZOMFG CROMAB. This has been a pox on my S1000 pictures for a while now, which I usually get past by turning them into duotones. But this annoys the crap out of me…
  

  This is why I'm never, ever buying Fujinon lenses. Ever.

• …and let’s not forget the lack of any… well, useful features, like a hotshoe, or RAW format images, or any of that shizz.

However… this doesn’t mean the S1000fd can’t take some bloody fantastic pictures… click on any of them for the full size.

View over the lake in Central Park, Chelmsford. (1/50s, f/6.4, ISO64, Shade WB)

The new Kings Tower development at 53 Marconi Plaza in Chelmsford. (1/240s, f/8, ISO64, Shade WB)

And last, but definitely not least, my favourite from the above shoot…

My very first attempt at a panoramic sunset pic, and it came out beautifully. (1/400, f/6.4, ISO64, Shade WB, about 120mm. equiv)

With all this said, next week I’ll be taking ownership of a 2nd-hand Nikon F65 with 28-80mm lens (:D), I have an assload of 100, 200, 400 and 800HIE film ready to rock and roll as soon as I get it. I also have a wishlist of accessories I want to get, including:

• film scanner (well of course… 15Mpx crystal-clear TIFFs from negatives? yes please!)
• more freaking lenses — I have my eye on a 50mm prime next… and this takes Nikkor F-mount lenses which are a dime a dozen (uhm, try several grand a dozen, but you get what I mean…)
• Speedlight. This is a no-brainer.
• Cokin P mount. I already own a massive set of assorted Cokin P system filters, just need the mount for them

and the best bit is? these are all (just) in my price range.

I think I just found a hobby to replace computing, to be quite honest. This is fun s**t! lolol. BTW, going to Harwich in early April for a photowalk if anyone’s interested… xD

This was a triumph

Just a little post to let y’all know I’m still alive…

Um, not much has happened though relative to the subject matter of this blog, to be quite honest. My TX1000 got destroyed in a… uh, freak accident so I’m not going to be updating as much for a while, nevermind the fact a tiff with the most assholish landlord in the whole world got me kicked out and I no longer have ADSL. (This can be considered a good thing though, given that I was with BT before…)

I still have a laptop available, it’s a Packard Bell Pentium III 733 “beast”, without internet though, but I may restart development on a game project I started a while ago. It’s just (barely) well-specced enough to run Visual Studio ‘05 and the debug build of the existing code. So yeeah…

I’m now on Xbox Live from time to time, see the About page for my gamertag, reaper has kindly given us access to XBL on his 360, most of what we play online is either Halo 3 or COD4. Also look out for coming mention of |3wG| from time to time xD

Also, I have a big, big event planned for the start of November of which a few people who need to know are well aware… let’s just say I have much, much saving up to do @_@

Me and Em are still very much head over heels in love… we just celebrated our 5 months yesterday. xD I just hope that 5 months turns into 5 years… or decades… or more <3 heheh.

Anyway that’s all for now folks, stay tuned!

Hackers are people too!

Go up to a random person in the street. Ask them what a “hacker” is, and 9.9 times out of 10, they will say “someone who hacks into computers/steals your personal data/gives you viruses”.

The popular press has done nothing to help this, every other week in some red-topped tabloid there’s a story claiming “Hackers break into x”, but the thing is –

We aren’t the ones breaking into your bank account and siphoning off money for their own personal gain. The names for the people who do that kind of stuff are “computer criminals”, “Nigerian 419ers” and many other terms, but not hackers. For this we have only mass media to blame, people believe what they see on TV and, unfortunately, take it as gospel.

A hacker is someone who hacks things. Hackers wrote Apache, the software this blog is running on, because many people added “hacks” to make Apache better. Hackers wrote ModSSL/OpenSSL as a “hack” to Apache, without which you wouldn’t be able to conduct secure purchases online.

So for those of you still unconvinced, I urge you to watch a documentary called “Hackers are People Too”, by Ashley Schwartau, a Def/Toorcon regular and somewhat talented film-maker. It portrays us in a light that the general public usually don’t see us in, which is a welcome change.

Remember guys: Hug a hacker today! =3

A Rant About PowerISO

Anyone heard of PowerISO? (Yes, that includes you, reaper)

Of course you have.

If you’ve ever come across DAA images, you’ll have run into the same brick wall I have many a time. The only program that’ll easily mount these is PowerISO. I had the displeasure of having to install this shitware a couple of days ago. BAM! Instant problems.

Where do I start?

• It’s slow. Like, REALLY SLOW. Every right-click is now accompanied by a ~10sec delay as PowerISO’s context menu integration kicks into life. Even on the system tray icon.
• Constant bluescreens. I’m under the impression that it’s because PISO is chewing through kernel memory like it’s going out of fashion.

So, I have these precious few nuggets of advice to share with the world.

1. DON’T buy it! You’re throwing your money away.
2. If you download .daa images via BitTorrent, don’t seed them (or I will personally find where you live and smite you down).
3. Finally, if you do end up with a .daa image, use daa2iso to convert it to an ISO, which you can then mount using something far superior like WinCDEmu. daa2iso is an open source utility that will convert .daa images (which are really just renamed .iso.Z files, compressed using zlib, no more) to ISO’s. Windows version here, unix users can simply (iirc) zcat whatever.daa > whatever.iso for the same effect.

Remember folks, open standards are the future! Badly written crapware most definitely isn’t.