Busy busy busy

Well.. life presses on.. and somehow I find it's almost a month since I posted here last..

I mean.. just how? it's not like I visited another planet, or entered a tech free lifestyle growing corn & making bread.. is it?

Well, here's some of what I've been up to..

Compressing Postcodes..

The UK has postcodes, which are of a similar purpose to zip codes in the US. You put a postcode, and a house number on an envelope, and in theory that's pretty much all that's needed to get the letter to the destination.

I've never really put much thought into how they were constructed, until I met a stack of data that was indexed using postcodes as the lookup, very handy, but it was causing the data size to exceed a limit which meant I couldn't embed the data into a blog post ;-)

I went hunting, and found a document explaining the structure here. I ran a quick scan over my data, discovering I had 121 postcode areas present in my list, some 129 sub bits of them, and some 4000 or so last bits =) Eg, PO1 3AX, PO being what I'd call an area, 1 being the sub bit, and 3AX being the last bit.

I started playing around a bit and here's what I ended up with...

on Hosting, and other such things..

I remember walking along the seafront, back in the mid 1990's, trying to explain these things called 'mp3s' to a few non technical friends. Attempting to explain that here's a way to fit an 'acceptable' quality version of an audio track into something that would fit on a couple of floppy disks. How important it was that the size was small enough to be transferable within an 'acceptable' timeframe, and that most people really didn't care for CD-quality (most of them still using cassette tape for Cars, Walkman's etc).

I remember saying this will really change things, that I wasn't sure how the music industry would cope with their content becoming available in the same way software was, with all the positives and negatives that brought with it.

Well.. here we are.. almost 20 years later, and there has been Winamp, Napster, Peer2Peer, Lawsuits, iTunes, YouTube... we're currently in a time where we are able to share information with millions of people, just by making a blog post, like this one.. so I figured I'd try hosting some of my music, and was a little surprised by the process.

Portable recording in stereo ?

I've got this other blog, where I wibble on about musical stuff, and after watching Dr Who the other night, I ended up with a nice enough bit of noise that some people might call it 'music'.

"Excellent!!" I thought.. "I shall share this with the entire world!!!"

Of course, that means somehow getting the noise from the piano, into the intertubes. I'm smart enough to know that my piano is a) digital, and b) has line out jacks. And I know I have a big pile of cables, some of which may even be adequate to use with said jacks.. I've also got a netbook thing, which has some sort of audio built in.

How hard can it be? about an hours worth harder than it should have been! There may have been simpler ways to do this.. but here's the tale of how I ended up sorting it out...

If Microsoft made cars, you'd need to reboot them..

Except in this case, it would appear that the 'Microsoft' might be 'Mercedes'. Discovered that the car didn't want to talk to me this morning, it decided I, the key-holder, was a non-entity. No amount of button pressing would awaken the car from its nightly slumber, and the second key fared no better.

Odd, unlikely both keys would go flat, especially since the nice people at the Merc service desk take such pride in ensuring they swap out those CR2032s for us on a regular basis ;-) Tried the key for the other car, 'Chrirrup!' .. Ok, it's not radio interference..

Somewhere around here I guess I should have stopped thinking like I was debugging code, but as we'll see, that wouldn't have been such a bad idea ...

T-Balancer BigNG .. return of the dusty controller.

No, this isn't a post about Thomas the Tank Engine.. this is a post about a USB programmable 4 channel Fan Controller, I know, I know.. but don't worry, Thomas is safe & having a rest.

This is a tale instead of what happens when you go hunting through a cupboard, and discover a bit of tech you had laying around, and think 'hey, I could probably use that to power the fans in the storage server', it probably happens to you every day... No? Well, you've missed out on all the fun then of discovering how to hook up drivers to your aging widget of choice, for your not so aging operating system..

Here's my tale of random pluggery =)

Drive Failures Anonymous

"Hi.. my names Samsung, and I'm a drive failure.."
"Hi.. my names Western Digital and I'm a drive failure..."

"Welcome guys, why don't you tell us a bit about yourselves, if you feel like sharing.. everyone here has been through what you have, haven't we people?"