Since the early 90s I’ve had the exact same pair of sandals, which I’d wear whenever I was out washing the car, or doing other things which sandals are appropriate for. They are the ones seen above, an old, very worn pair of Nike Air Deschutz. They would still be plenty serviceable, except that the last time I was watching Tobi she chewed part-way through one of the straps. That, and they are beyond the not-particularly-attractive stage.

When at REI last night I came across some Ahnu Tilden II sandals on clearance $49.83. The size 10 seemed to fit me well, so I picked them up. After going for a few walks around here and trying them out I think I like them, I’m just not accustomed to my toes being enclosed while not wearing socks, so they’ll take a little getting used to. Here is a photo of the sandals themselves, if you are interested.

Just after starting to descend The Rollercoaster at Stony Creek (a windy, narrow, fun descent from the highest point in Macomb County) I applied my rear brake and started to hear a tremendous houl from my rear brake and found myself slowing very quickly. I was able to finish stopping with my front brake, just as someone behind me asked if I was all right, and what the sound was.

A quick check showed that the upper bolt on the bracket which connects the caliper to the frame itself had come off and that in squeezing the rotor the caliper had rotated forward and lodged itself against the disk, slightly stuck between the frame and the disc. Walking about 15′ back up the trail I found the screw, I was able to partially put it back in by hand. Because of the length of the tool I couldn’t fit it between the rear rack and screw head, but thankfully the person who had stopped had a much shorter wrench and I was able to tighten things back up. A quick readjustment of the brake and I was on my way, with the brake actually working better than it had previously.

I’m not really sure how the screw came out. It was tight the last time I checked it (a few weeks ago), and it had thread locking compound on it. I do wonder if the combination of the rear frame, the slightly ratting bag, and the rough trails contributed to the bolt loosening.

Today I headed back out to Stony Creek with the frame removed and with only a multi-tool and my keys. While I didn’t like riding without the ability to fix a flat, I accepted the risk of a five mile walk until I can sort out the CamelBak Question. Things went well, and it seemed like it was a generally a quicker ride with the lighter bike, except it seemed like I had a much harder time getting up some of the steeper / longer hills (generally in the two-track area) because I kept spinning the rear tire. Twice I just stopped part-way up and walked. It was a much quieter / pleasant ride, although I do think I’ll get (or fashion) a soft chainstay guard to cut down on the loud chainslap.

Now it’s time to shower, eat something, and poke a bit with Ivan’s P3. I received new firmware, but it still doesn’t seem to be working, so I’m going to write a little test software for the PICs and be sure they are working right.

To those of you who ride bikes and read this, I have a question about CamelBak bags.

See, I have a frame for the rear of my bike, and with its bag it’s great for touring type riding, but it has a couple deficiencies:

· It rattles a LOT on even small bumps.
· While it holds the normal bike stuff I’d want to bring (multitool, spare tube, pump, keys, wallet, cell phone, tire levers, Clif bar) it doesn’t hold my camera very well.

Yesterday I swung by REI and picked up an Aero Wedge Pack (Medium) for $26. It was really easy to fit to my bike, but with it I have nowhere to put my pump. I can fit a tube or patch kit, but not any method for reinflating things.

I’ve been hesitant to get a CamelBak because of the price, and because when outside in warm weather while wearing a backpack my back tends to get really, uncomfortably sweaty, to the point where it makes me hot a lot quicker than normal.

I’m just not sure what to do, and I’d love suggestions. I could keep the small Topeak bag, and carry a patch kit and CO2 inflator in it instead of a spare tube. The on-bike water (about 1.5L) is sufficient for most rides I’ve been on so far. I could return to Topeak bag and get a CamelBak and use it instead of the rear rack / bag full time, or at least until I need the rear stuff. Or I could deal with the really loud / bothersome rattling and lack of space.

If you would recommend a CamelBak for me, which model? The M.U.L.E. seems to be the most popular, but it’s also REALLY big. I don’t know if it’d be overkill. It’s $86 and REI, and returning the bag I purchased yesterday would offset $26 of that.

Something I’ll post about later, probably with a photo: While riding The Rollercoaster at Stony Creek yesterday my rear brake suddenly seize, accompanied by a loud howling sound. What had happened? Somehow the upper bolt on the rear disc brake mount had come out, causing the brake to pivot forward and the upper edge of the caliper to stop the bike as it ground against the edge of the disc.

I actually found the bolt a little ways back down the path, and it wasn’t too difficult to get it back in and get the brake readjusted. I did run into the problem the rear rack being in the way of the bolt, and my multitool wouldn’t fit in there. Thankfully someone who had stopped had a shorter one and I was able to tighten things up with that. What’s strange, though, is that this bolt was tight not too long ago, and it was Loctited.

So, in wrapping up the testing of Ivan’s P3 I found one more problem: MIDI Sync output isn’t working. I think I’ve narrowed the issue down to the software running on the PIC which handles this. Here’s what I know as of last night:

· U1, the main CPU on the P3, has two lines coming out of it which either connect directly to the DIN sync port or to U19 used for conversion to MIDI sync.
· I am seeing nice square waves on the PIC’s GP4, and these pulses change width with tempo change.
· The line running from U1 to the PIC’s GP5 goes high when the sequencer is running, then low when it isn’t.
· I don’t see any data coming out of the PIC on GP0, which is what connects through a 220Ω resistor eventually through to the MIDI port.
· There are no shorts on any of the lines.

In troubleshooting the PIC itself I have:
· Read out the firmware from the PIC, and received new firmware from Colin (the designer) for the PIC. These did not match, and the new firmware did not resolve the issue.
· Tried a spare PIC which I had sitting around in my parts pile.
· Wrote a test program to blink all GPIO lines on and off and successfully ran it on both PICs.
· Confirmed that the PIC is connected to power and ground and other lines, as expected.

After this, I pretty much have run out of ideas. This morning I threw the firmware Colin had sent me into a disassembler, and while I’m not very good at reading assembly, I think I’m that GP0 and GP1 are used as inputs and GP2, GP4, and GP5 are outputs, confirming that the firmware I was sent is for the v1.6 PCB. There is lots of BTFSS GPIO,0 and BTFSC GPIO,1 which are used for reading pins, and lots of BCF and BSF on GPIO,2, GPIO,4, and GPIO,5. GP2 (GPIO,2) seems to be used the most in the program, so I think it’s the MIDI port, and this would match what I see in my old photos of the v1.6 board, as GP2 connects through a 220Ω resistor to the pin header. GP4 and GP5 probably mirror the input received on GP0 and GP1, but I’m having difficulties confirming which pins are sync and which are enable.

I just pulled apart the older file which I had read out of the PIC previously and it seems to read from GP4 and GP5, with MIDI data going out of GP0. These port uses match my observations of the pinning of the v1.5 board, so I think that the older firmware looks somewhat right. That said, it clearly wasn’t working, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting this.

I think tonight I’ll try to write the originally-read firmware back into one of my new PICs, then I’ll drop it back in the P3, just to see what happens.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, this is my understanding of what the PIC12F629 on the P3, U19, does (or is supposed to do) on the the v1.5 boards: It watches for when GP5 goes high (an indication that the sequencer is running) and when it does, it sends out a MIDI clock message with each pulse it sees on GP4 (not sure if this is done at the rising or falling edge). It then stops sending these clock messages when GP5 goes low. On the v1.6 boards it seems to do something similar, but since it has three outputs I believe it also sends the DIN sync output as well.

There are also more photos of last night’s work at the bottom of this page in the last two rows.

UPDATE: One thing I didn’t test was input on the pins and the internal oscillator. I make a quick change to the blinky LED program to run from the internal oscillator and another version which I can use to test if all the inputs work. I’ll try that tonight. At this point it’s almost not enough for me to fix the problem, I want to know what wasn’t right.

When I woke this morning I had received a response from Colin Fraser in regards to the problem mentioned in this post. He mentioned two things: the issue isn’t likely to be caused by timing because he specifically checks for the LCD to be available before writing to it, and that he has seen an issue where the transistor which enables the R/W line of the LCD doesn’t have enough gain. To increase this gain he suggested replacing the 22K resistor at R20 with a 10K part.

I did so as can be seen above and this is the result: a P3 displaying things properly. Thanks, Colin!

Now I just have to do a little bit more testing (I’m paranoid about these things), then I can pack up the P3 and send it back to Ivan. Of course, that will come after dinner. Danielle is in the kitchen with bunjamin where they are making making naan and Mattar Paneer with this recipe from Manjula’s Kitchen. I’m looking forward to a very tasty dinner.

Upon arriving home from work today I found a white box in the mail from Scotland indicating that the new LCD for Ivan’s P3 had arrived. This is the replacement that Colin (the Sequentix guy) offered to people as a replacement for PLEDs which had failed. After eating a bit of dinner I set to installing it.

Because of the spacing of the LCD and function switch board I had to file away a bit of the PCB in order to make it fit nicely. Thankfully Sequentix’s page on the replacement LCDs had mentioned this, so I was expecting to do it.

All in all, it went well. After getting the LCD working I installed the v4 firmware and MemX board, getting the machine wholly up to date.

I’m running into a bit of weirdness with the LCD, though. As can be seen on this page of photos, the display seems to be cutting off some characters during boot, corrupting others, and occasionally causing weirdness. I’ve tried making a new cable and replacing the IC directly connected to the LCD, but that hasn’t been successful. I’m really afraid that the controller on the LCD may be messed up. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to use one of Ivan’s spare LCDs which he was sent (by way of me) by Crystalfontz as replacements for his failed PLEDs.

UPDATE: I just emailed Colin, the Sequentix guy, and asked for suggestions. After talking with a few people I’m starting to feel certain that the problem may simply be that the LCD doesn’t start up fast enough for the P3. It seems that with the HD44780 protocol the LCD talks the user can set up custom characters in the CGRAM (character generator RAM). While I may be way off base, I’m thinking that the P3 sets up the special characters it needs on boot, then tries to display stuff. I think that if the LCD isn’t running stable yet then these characters, along with data written to the display controller itself, could become corrupt or lost, displaying the symptoms like what I’m seeing. Hopefully I’ll find out for sure soon. If this is the problem then a fix would simply require the P3 to wait for another 250ms (or so) at power-on.

When I was leaving for work this morning, and throughout almost the entire drive, it was abnormally foggy. This was really nice, as I like fog, I just wish I could have gone out in the woods on my bike and enjoyed it that way.

Also, it’s been confirmed that HP is going to buy EDS. I don’t know many details, except that EDS will probably maintain its name / brand, and that the drastic (~25% or so) increase in EDS’ share price made my 401(k) go up a bit, which is kinda nice.

One sure can find odd things back in the woods.

I’ve recently returned from visiting my grandparents up north and doing a bunch of biking along the roads and trails, finding all sorts of interesting places which I’d like to explore more in the future.

I ended up having to put the knobby tires back on my bike for the offroad riding, but I was glad I did. I had no problems wandering around all sorts of fire trails, dirt roads, and other random, interesting areas. One of those more interesting areas was what I first thought to be an oil drilling dumping ground. It contained all sorts of interesting metal parts, old vehicles, trailers (including some marked radioactive), and other discarded stuff. After talking to my grandparents it turns out that I was on the property of a friend of theirs named Charlie who happens to collect a bunch of stuff like that. Best I can tell, he is also the owner of the old CD vehicle seen above. (If any of you can figure out the city it is from based on this photo I’d love to know.)

While I didn’t go that far (only about 30 miles over the two days), I do definitely want to head back up there and do some more riding. I would definitely like to tackle the portion of the North Country Trail which I happened to come across, but I’m not really sure if it can be legally biked. The information I come across on this seems very, very mixed. I figure if I’m careful, stick to the trail, and don’t bother anyone it won’t be a problem. That said, I turned back at this point because it was too steep for me to ride up. There is, of course, a whole bunch of ORV trails in the area, but they are too sandy to ride on a bike. Even my wide knobby tires regularly sank in past the rim.

If you’d like to see the KMZ aggregated to cover most of this weekend’s riding it can be found here, with the nodes differentiating things by ride and date: 10-11-May-2008.kmz

The rest of the photos, including the ones from when I headed out wandering on the sandbar off of Old Mission Point, can be found here: Up North (May 2008)

(Oh, and yes, I know those photos are a bit crap. They were taken with my old Nikon Coolpix 5400 which was nice for its time, but is now just so-so. Also, it’s big and not weatherproof one bit. I’m thinking I’ll probably replace it with one of these Olympus shockproof and waterproof, internally zooming cameras. The quality probably won’t be great on them either, but at least it’ll fit nicely in my bag and I won’t have to worry about rain or a fall damaging it. Although, realizing that the camera is five years old, maybe those photos aren’t that bad…)

I’m sitting in Espresso Bay in downtown Traverse City, leeching bandwdith from the first AP I found called ‘linksys’, tunneling everything via SOCKS (SSH tunnel). I drove up here yesterday in order to visit my grandparents who live about half-way between here and Grayling.

While I like visiting them, I find it a bit difficult to be in this area at times. I’d really, really like some nice veggie food, or at least some mostly-veggie Thai or Indian or Middle Eastern, but that doesn’t seem to be available. Despite being near water, seafood around here isn’t any fresher than it would be in Flint or Grand Rapids. There does seem to be a local organic / veggie eatery called the Homegrown Organic Eatery (WARNING! MySpace link), but it closed at 8pm. I think I’ll probably just end up grabbing a bean burrito from Taco Bell on the way back to my Grandparents’ place.

On the upside, I did get to do a bunch of outdoor things today. I first went for a bike ride, then swapped the touring tires out for knobbies, then went another 10 miles or so back on random trails that I came across in the woods. Some of the trails were particularly difficult because if the extremely (in many cases 100%) sandy soil in this area, but overall it was fun. I also managed to end up on some piece of property full of oil drilling remains, semi trailers (one marked Radioactive), campers, mobile homes, and other pieces of scrap. I think my grandpa knows the owner of the property and hopefully I’ll be able to get back there tomorrow with my camera and grab some photos.

My main reason for heading to Traverse City today was so that I could make my way up to Old Mission Point (at the 45th Parallel) and wander around the beach there. I ended up wandering down the beach, walking across a bunch of rocks, and ending up way out in the water on a rather interesting sand bar after quite a bit of walking. I think it’d be nice to bike up the peninsula one day, but it’s 18 miles (each way) of rather steep hills. The main road up to the point does have nice bike lanes on it, though. There are also some quite nice trails along the point in the park which might be good for riding around as well.

In lieu of other food I think I’ll just head back to my grandparents house now and grab a bean burrito from Taco Bell on the way. My grandma made turkey for dinner, but that’s one meat I particularly don’t like. No matter what it always tastes dirty to me.

Oh, something very positive: lunch today was pizza from the small convenience store near my grandparents house. While picking up the pizza with my grandpa I found that the store carries a small assortment of very good beers along with the normal stuffs. There were probably two doors worth of better Michigan beers and other imported things. While I don’t plan on getting any beer this weekend, it’s nice to know that it’s available in the future.

On Monday Danielle was in Detroit while her mom was having some stuff done at the hospital, so she swung by Mexicantown and picked up some La Jalisciense flour and corn tortillas.

One of these corn tortillas toasted on the stove, with a bit of cheese, makes for an absolutely wonderful late dinner / evening snack. I can’t stop eating them. Now to go make more, except this next one will be flour, I think…

Tom’s of Maine (not to be confused with Tom’s of Finland) has changed the formula of their Natural Original Deodorant Stick and added hop extract.

It works well and keeps me less stinky, proving that there actually is a valid use for hop extract.

Yesterday while Danielle was over I picked up a six pack of New Holland’s beer The Poet. I’m happy because Meijer is now carrying it, which makes it easy to pick up for enjoying with dinner. Unfortunately, all but one or two bottles of this beer seem to be as flat as you can see up above. There’s just no head / foam on it at all.

After finding the contact page on New Holland’s site I emailed Isaac Hartman, who is listed as the Ambassador of Great Beer (Sales). Hopefully he’ll respond and, at the very least, do what he can to ensure that their beer at Meijer is better in the future.

As this beer tastes pretty sweet, I’m figuring that it didn’t bottle condition right. Maybe New Holland gave Meijer a few cases of them expecting them to age a bit in the store room or on the shelf and instead they just went into refrigeration. Or… who knows. It’s definitely not right, though.

Today after getting home from work I ate some carrots and hummus and hopped on my bike, intending just to run up to the bank and go to the ATM. Instead I ended up going to the ATM, then winding my way through industrial parks up to 24 Mile and M-53, where I turned around under the bridge after coming across this amusingly broken set of toy guns. I then wound my way home, taking time to ride through every industrial road / park I came across, racking up a total of 15 miles.

Yesterday I received this box in the mail, and tonight I opened it and grabbed some pictures. See, a guy by the name of Jan Czmok, who is the only person (that I know of) besides me to build a complete MIDIbox SID-NUXX (you can see his photos of his here) wanted to buy a for-repair TR-606 on eBay, but the seller would only ship to the US, so I’m relaying it for him. Here is a mirror of the auction, if you’d like to see it. For reference, the auction closed for $255.

I wish him luck in fixing it up because it’s not in particularly good shape. While it doesn’t seem to have a smell, the damage to it makes me think that it was either left in a garage for a few years, that it survived a flood, or maybe that it was just left at the bottom of a septic tank full of angry lobsters.

If you would like to see the full photos of the TR-606, click on this link.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today. You all made me smile lots. (Yes, I do share a birthday with Karl Marx, and yes, I am now 30.)

I received the SiI3124-based disk controller mentioned earlier, but it didn’t wish me a happy birthday. In fact, it just didn’t work as I hoped. For some reason its on-board option ROM isn’t starting up when the rest of the computer does, so it’s not initializing the disks and making the main BIOS aware of their existence. This prevents me from booting off of them. FreeBSD can talk to the disks on it just fine, but without the BIOS it’s not useful to me.

When I tried the card in my MAME cabinet and it works fine there, so I think something like the following is occurring: The on-board SATA / RAID controller is a SiI3114, and when I disable this via the BIOS, perhaps this somehow disables the SiI3124? Or, perhaps when the controller is enabled, the option ROM from one is interfering with the other? After all, the SiI3114 BIOS still loads and displays. I did also try changing the PCI enumeration order and tried the cards in other PCI-X slots and the lone PCI slot, and none of that produced positive results. The SiI3114 always enumerates first (or not at all?).

As a test I put a classic Adaptec AHA-2940UW (can you believe this card is more than 10 years old at this point?) card in the box and its option ROM displayed just fine. So, the motherboard seems to handle disk controllers in slots, just not this one.

Instead of the SiI3124-based card I really would like a 3ware 9550SXU-4LP, but its $319.99 price tag is a bit hard to stomach. Maybe I’ll just return the card and stick with the onboard controller and software RAID.

Oh, and if you want to see them, there are more photos of the Koutech PSA421 in banstyle.nuxx.net here on page 3 of my gallery.

Today after getting home from work I decided that I would finally update my resume. It wasn’t updated for any particular reason, but I felt that I should condense it a bit, incorporate the work I’ve been doing for the past six months or so, and generally tighten it up. So, I did.

While I still need to put together the plaintext copy (which shouldn’t be too difficult), and barring any last minute quirks or tweaks that might be needed, it’s done. If you would like to see it, here’s a PDF copy: steve_vigneau_resume_02may2008.pdf

If you are one of those folks who just doesn’t like PDFs, here’s it in two 150dpi PNGs: Page 1 · Page 2

Things have been a bit boring around here lately, with me working at my job, working on the new server, riding my bike, and trying to relax a bit, so I just thought I’d post this photo of Souther Tier’s Back Burner, a decent (and quite hoppy) barleywine which I drank while watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Danielle on Sunday night.

Today I got GEOM-based disk mirroring working on banstyle.nuxx.net, but in doing so I realized that the on-board SiI3114 controller only supports SATA/150 (aka SATA I) and thusly no NCQ, which disappointed me. To remedy this I ordered part number N82E16816104007 from Newegg.com, a Koutech PSA421 4-Channel Serial ATA & Serial ATA II 64-bit PCI Host Controller which appears to be a reference (or very standard) implementation of the SiI3124 PCI/PCI-X to 4 Port SATA300 chipset. This should fit in the one usable slot in the case and provide the SATA interface that I really want. I just wish it’d arrive sooner.

Yesterday I received very kindly sent FedEx package containing some spare computer hardware a friend of mine had, a pair of Opteron 885 dual-core 2.6GHz CPUs and 8GB of registered RAM, to be used in my new server.

I’ve been having some problems with it all, but I’m not quite sure what the cause is yet. With all 8 DIMMs fitted the machine kept hanging while installing FreeBSD 7.0. Per my friend’s suggestion I’m trying the install again with only one DIMM per CPU installed, as he said he’s seen problems with a fully kitted out machine installing some OS’, for som reason. For the first half of the memory things have gone just fine, so I’ll finish running through the pieces two at a time. After those tests I’ll run Memtest86+ on discreet pairs of DIMMs, then on the full 8GB.

I might also install XP on it so that I can run SiSoftware Sandra on it for a while, as it’s really good at eating a machine alive.

Unfortunately I can only run these tests during the day because the server is simply too loud to do otherwise. I measured it at 74dB while standing next to it at the keyboard, and the noise seems to be three distinct tones (low, mid, and high) caused by the different fans in the box. It’s really not much different from a siren. The noise is enough to bother me a bit while just sitting around the house doing other things, so trying to sleep while it is running would be just awful.

Oh, and some quick testing last night showed that it ran most things in openssl speed faster than my Mac Pro. Hopefully I’ll be able to run the whole DB from RAM.

Hmm, I just dropped the full 8GB back in there, turned on PowerNow! and ACPI 2.0 and I’m building ImageMagick to see how things go. While that runs I think I’m going to go for a bike ride.

I actually managed to leave work early enough today that I was able to go for a nice bike ride after work. It was only 1:16 and just over 16 miles long, but it felt good. I made my way from home over to River Bends Park in Shelby Township, then headed down the foot / bike trail through the woods. This is a 2.5 mile winding trail with some nice hills, sharp turns, and interesting things to look at. I found that the tires I have are pretty okay for this sort of trail riding, except on parts of the path. Oh, and I also found that moving quickly through a swarm of bugs while breathing heavily through one’s mouth is not particularly pleasant.

Since I’m uncomfortably stinky, and because I finally stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way home and purchased more deodorant (I’ve been out for a week), I think I’ll go shower. Oh, and my new server was actually delivered today, so I think I’ll unpack it and grab photos of it post shower. I also might try a new (to me) Southern Tier beer called Back Burner, but I’m not sure… Maybe I’ll just let that wait for tomorrow. I’ve already got enough things I still want to get done tonight.

Oh, want the KMZ of today’s ride? It’s here: 24-Apr-2008.kmz, and here it is in Google Maps. Please excuse the two tracks. Google Earth can’t merge tracks (I imagine there is a good reason for this), my GPS decreased the resolution when saving the current log to a file, and it seems that multiple Active Logs had to be created to deal with the number of points I was generating today. Oh, yeah, I decided to try doing one-per-second points which, as you can see, has resulted in a much smoother route plot. It’s too bad this relatively short ride filled 49% of the memory on the GPS. Maybe I really do need an SD based GPS data logger…

Tonight I ended up staying at work until about 8:20pm helping a coworker out with something. It’s not set and he’s on vacation tomorrow, so I’ll end up working on it too. Ah well.

Since I got home too late to go ride my bike I ended up boxing up Ivan’s P3, making a frozen pizza, then watching some TiVo’d stuff and WTVS-HD before wandering back up here to my computer. So, why did I box up the P3? Well, remember the failing PLED post? Yep, it’s bad. While the first one didn’t display very well, the second doesn’t display at all.

I had actually emailed the pictures of the questionable display (1, 2) to the tech support people at Crystalfontz to see if what I was seeing really is indicative of a failing PLED. One of the tech support people replied, confirming that it is what I thought, and suggesting a replacement display. If you’d like to read the whole thread between the tech support person and I, it’s archived as a PNG here.

So, now Ivan is sorting out grabbing a new LCD and then I’ll get back to work on his P3. For now I’ve boxed it up and it’s sitting in a safe place, above ground level, not below any water pipes.

My next (current?) project is now a set of PCBs similar to the RS232 to Eaton Leonard Level Shifter boards which I did last year, but instead accepting ~7VDC - ~40VDC (or straight 5VDC) for the power, with the conversion being handled by a reference implementation of a switching supply. (This is the supply whose ripple is shown here.) The parts are ordered for the first run of them, I just need to wait until they arrive, confirm the footprints, order the PCBs, test, and build.

But for now? I rest.