Christmas turned out nice, I hadn't expected otherwise really. I got a couple nice books and a record, and a handful of other nice things, so I'm happy about that. Merry Christmas it is indeed.

On the 26th, before leaving, we heard from my uncle that one of the tunnels along E18, the major highway connecting here and there, had collapsed, and the whole freeway had been closed. So we (my father and I) drove back along the older road further inland (highways 35 and 319) and made it home OK. The tunnel that had collapsed was the southbound half of Hanekleivtunnelen (all the tunnels along that road are twin tunnels, one bore for each direction) and they now run two-way traffic through the normally northbound one. Hopefully that one won't collapse ... but as these tunnels were built at the same time and run side by side through the same dodgy rock formations, I'm not too keen on using it until it has been verified safe. The other one turned out not to be....

Then yesterday I read in the paper, that this tunnel had started failing some 48 hours before the roof caved in, during the night between December 23 and 24. Some people living in the vicinity had noticed some bangs and noises, resembling the ones that they used to hear back when the tunnels were blasted out of the rock, on the evening of the 23.

And I had been driving through that tunnel some 14 hours later, in the early PM on the 24th... brr! (cue X-files music)

Yesterday the shop called about the car. Evidently they do do some work between Christmas and New Year. The generator had perished, and has to be replaced. This is a water-cooled unit, they said, so that meant expensive... just hope I've got enough money at hand now, or there won't be a particularly happy new year.

There's also rumors shown in some German newspaper and reported in a Norwegian one that the encryption called AACS on the HD-DVDs has been cracked, and DVD-Jon is interviewed about this, he is claiming this is for interoperability since it was a matter of playback control not copy-protection. Guess there'll be another test of the DMCA ere long, and tons of opinion posts on Slashdot, Technocrat, Groklaw, and elsewhere. Very interesting.

There are some 150000 people in this area, and it appears nearly all of them are queuing to park at the mall Sandvika Storsenter. Christmas shopping...

I went to Holmensenteret instead. Much nicer, but not all of the big chain stores are there. Not that it mattered, there was a christmas-time sale of music and movies, and I got some of these and some books, to give away. This also has a Vinmonopol store, where all the wine and spirits are, and that in itself is a big draw. And the parking structure is big so there is never any hassle with finding parking there.

Still, this mall seems to have problems keeping certain stores in face of competition from Sandvika, Liertoppen, and Trekanten, three of the large malls in this area.

There is no Clas Ohlson store other than Sandvika however. On the last junk auction, I bought a hand-held radio, but one of its battery packs had given out, so I opened it up, and found six AA-sized rechargeables inside that I'd like to replace. And there are suitable replacements available at the Clas Ohlson stores.

So I thought I'd go to the mall in Strømmen, on the other side of Oslo, and have a look there, but the traffic turned out to have gone to rush-hour proportions already, so I just went home instead. And wouldn't you know it, but just as I had about 3 kilometers left, the charging-circuits in the car gave out, and it started flashing a big red warning with a battery symbol and "visit the workshop"... so I just got home, opened up, verified that the fan=belt was still intact so that engine cooling worked right, and then called the "workshop".

Now, this is December 20, and in a few days, most of Norway will shut down, so of course, they couldn't guarantee any quick turnaround. They would fix it eventually, whenever that would be. But at least I got the car into the queue there, so that it will be fixed. Having it sit without power outside here isn't very useful, so there I was.

I took a taxi home, and I might be able to borrow one of the cars that my sister has. Good thing they hadn't left for their Christmas trip to the west yet...

I've seen the lights! They don't appear very often, but since the sun had a flare yesterday, tonight the aurora borealis showed. And there finally was clear skies, after N (*) days (and nights) of cloud cover...

They were the best northern lights I can remember seeing for a long time too: greenish-blue, looked like some enormous curtains or piles of ribbons, and some of them moved back and forth. Others were paler columns that appeared, moved, and disappeared. Behind it was a lower level glow that persisted throughout.

There are too many street-lights and exterior lights on the houses around here, but there are some darker places just a little north of here. Then there is the big parking lot at Tryvann, but the illumination in the tower up there gets in the way, and the lights in the visitor center or museum or whatever that other building up there is, also are a nuisance. But I know of another parking lot at the edge of the woods, and that proved to be nice and dark and quite a bit closer to home too... By the time I got there, the light-show was over, just the diffuse glow remains, but I know where to go next time.

(*) N being some indefinite, but rather large positive integer.

What is it about software running on Windows nowadays? There are all these programs that generate pop-ups wanting to be updated.... getting in the way of actually having things done. Stealing focus oughtta be punished along the same lines as stealing tanglible property.

It used to be just Windows Update every other Tuesday or so. Then Opera has occasional notifications about new versions, but these only come up when I start it, so they don't get in the way when important things are happening. And then there is the anti-virus that updates new definitions a couple times a day, stealing focus in the process, though I've become used to that now and let it run its merry way.

But at least, these have learned how to manage their updates without usually requiring a reboot. Windows update sometimes does, but considering that there may have been holes deep in the system that have been patched, that isn't too surprising.

So here I was, typing happily along, then wanting to read mail ... got a mail with a PDF attachment from a colleague, no problem there. After all, PDFs are common, and when not using Windows, there are xpdf and evince and so on that work fine. Lots of datasheets are PDF-files for examples...

This however was work-related, and so I opened it up in the Adobe Viewer there. Then some of the fireworks started... Nothing to do with the PDF itself, but the Viewer had suddenly decided that right now, this very minute, was when it would want to pull down updates to itself. I might have hit Return at some point and that would have been taken as as Yes to a question I never saw...

So it threw up a couple background windows with progress bars and went on its way. Oke, I thought, so I get the nice shiny new version. Being used to xpdf and evince, that just appear and just work without any further ado, I'd think this was much the same.

It wasn't, it popped up a top-level box asking if it was OK to reboot right now. Uhm? for viewing PDFs? gimme a break. Is this thing so strongly intertwined with the OS really? I mean, all it is supposed to do is show me the contents of PDF files that I might want to look at... but no, it is so bloody important that I have to pause the mail replies I was writing, saving and exiting everything and let the reboot proceed. Aggravating....

After the reboot, it came up again, evidently it had more stuff to insert, so no real use of the computer, and then another reboot. This thing is called Acrobat, is that why it wants to go so much up and down? Or is it just me being used to insmod-ing kernel modules in Linux and unpacking tarballs and ./configure make make install ... ? Stuff that might seem erudite at first but that Just Works once I get used to it? I'm a big fan of things that Just Works without me having to chase around for updates and fixes -- as it ain't broke, there's no need to fix it.

After the second reboot, the PDF viewer came up again empty. And just sat there filling the screen. Weird, but I could close it, and that was the end of this strange trip. It hasn't bothered me since, I'll grant it that.

In contrast, I installed Fedora Core on the Dell portable yesterday. That is an entire OS with a pile of applications. From scratch. Even that went smoother than this. I had to look around for the i8k kernel module that handles the fan and temperature controls on a Dell portable, but that was already in the kernel and the i8k.ko file was in there, just insmod it somewhere early and there we are.

And the machine runs a lot cooler with Fedora than it used to do with the previous Red Hat 9... possibly something to do with power controls being more optimal. Whatever, this is great news. This 4 year old Latitude became even more useful.

Elsewhere, the two-yearly fire and chimney inspection took place on Thursday. I should get more extinguishers and replace the batteries in the smoke alarms... As for the chimney, it looked ok, I have to put up a ladder and platform for them on the roof, so it can be swept ... strange how they managed to do without in the 30 years between the house being built and when they started demanding the auxiliary installations ... but I guess there is health && safety issues that were always there but are now being addressed. I asked the inspector if it was ok to put the ladder up beside the chimney with access from the porch, and he agreed that that would be fine. After all, it is him and his colleagues who will be using this for the most part.

And it is still unseasonably (though not unreasonably) warm. A customer in Texas said that there had been freezing temperatures in Texas City, just to the south of Houston ... that's almost colder than here. Bet it isn't darker though ... sunrise is around 0900 and sunset is around 1500 these days, and will be that way or worse for another month. December 22 is when the sun finally has reached its low point, but changes are slight around the minimum. Just consider a sine-wave, it changes slowly near the trough and peak.

Finally ... the car is back from the shop. I put it in there the last week of September, and for more than 6 weeks they had it to fix the rust problems on warranty. It was worth the wait, as the results look really good. Finally, there is a star visible at the tip of the hood. I have to forget using the left foot again now, as the borrow-cars were manual and mine is automatic. Won't take long...

As the saying goes. But these latest e-mails that try to install a Trojan have some serious factual errors in them that, perhaps, should be made common knowledge so as to thwart the social engineering aspect.

1. "Our firewall has detected worms in your mail" - Firewalls stop network connections, they don't look at E-mail data. Antivirus packages, mail scrubbers, and so forth do that. Not firewalls.

2. "Mail transaction failed. Partial message is available." Yeah right. Maybe if they used UDP without any checking that might have been the case. But E-mail goes over TCP. Either you get it or you don't. Not halfway or "partial". No way no how. Busted...

3. "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment" Unless the mail server is from the days of steam-driven paper-tape storage equipment and 5-bit Baudot teletypes, in which case someone has done a rotten job of interfacing it to the internet; there is MIME types and all sorts of good mechanisms to package mail with more than 7 bits per characters. 7-bit ASCII went out of style about 20 years ago... Internet has been operating on 8-bits since forever anyways...

4. "The message contains Unicode characters and has been sent as a binary attachment". You don't say? As I said above, there are plenty of ways and means of packaging this kind of semi-binary data.

Ugh...

But people that don't know the ways would tend to be impressed by the technical-looking mumbo-jumbo, and click on the attachment and chaos ensues... The invaders of Troy were successful using this trick several thousand years ago, and this is an attack method that still works. Seldom do we see cases when a little knowledge is worse than no knowledge.

Month: Another month, Mensis Octobris, the 8th month as per the Roman reckoning, and still not that cold outside: minimum last night was 11.2 C. This is at least 5 degrees more then usual for this time of year. I suspect that when winter finally comes this year, it is going to be really sudden. We'll see. I've got me a little project for recording more of the weather, notably humidity and rainfall, so we'll see how this will turn out.

Mercedes: And now both cars are off to the shops. The newer one is having a warranty replacement job of doors and quarter-panels, which already had been rust-eaten. Some problem with the W210/S210 series of Mercedes evidently, so the previous owner had booked it for last Monday. It is now 8 days gone, and hopefully I get it back late this week or early next week.

More Mercedes: The old Mercedes is at a different place, it has had to get new rear brake cylinders and pads, from the discovery of less than perfect brake action during the periodic test. Surprisingly enough, getting parts for it is still reasonably straight-forward, but as with everything, things take a little time.

Moving around between A and B: So instead of German stars, I have a small French lion as a lender vehicle. It does its job of getting me from A to B and back, but it feels rather perfunctory compared to the usual rides. I tried it on a longer trip this Sunday, but it wasn't taking the curves even as well as the old Volvo did, so it turned out to be a little less than fun. No crashes or problematic skidding, just tedious. So for now it's back to the A-B run.

Machines: As for machines and hardware, I am still thinking of where to put that noisy Poweredge so I don't have to listen to it. Then the HP9000/370 has to be found a new table, it is currently in the bedroom and will be full of dust ere long if it is to remain there... at the other end of the size scale, I've played a little more with the Picotuxes, they default to unsigned characters evidently, and the data-storage is big-endian, like the HP is. Nice to know when trying to port code that crashes with weird "should not happen" type errors... I'll have a go at some of it with Valgrind again.

Meatballs: Then I've been noticing what can only be called "meatball-molecules" when taking Swedish meatballs out of the freezer. They tend to stick together, two or three, and more, so I guess a suitable notation borrowed from chemistry would be Kb2 or Kb3 or even Kb11... Kb from the original name Köttbullar of course.

I have the 1964 Mercedes back, and it looks a lot better already. Polishing will be next.

Then I finally got around to mowing the lawn yesterday, before it became too much of a meadow...

And then, I'm 45 today. Doesn't feel very different from being 44 yesterday.

The old car is finally off to get its paint job this morning. How long ago is it that I was talking about doing this, now? Well, eventually I get around to turn things around, eventually. Expect it back by early next week, it is only the front right fender after all.

Next will be polishing and the roadworthiness approval test, which is due by the end of October, and then during the winter sometime, I'll get around to fix the gearbox, which is making ugly noises. Wheels turning slow indeed.

By now I have tried hooking up 2 of the free-standing Picotux 100 units, and tried out some more of the programming functions, both vis a vis the network and the serial port and GPIO lines. These systems, like the Picotux 112 already on its own circuit-board, have a read-only root partition and a read/write-able /user partition, and they can work as an NFS client.

1. An LM317 makes a decent 3.3V supply, but it has to be fed from somewhere above about 6V for proper operation. I got hold of some low-dropout 3.3 V regulators, LP3852, and these can be fed from the same 5V supply as the surrounding glue-logic, so that is better. I used a wire-wrap arrangement, and soldered-on thin wires on the first unit with a 317 and a 7805, and I made a small circuit board for the second unit with the LP3852. All the IO-lines are pulled up to 3.3 V with 33 kOhm resistors, so they have a predictable High state when used as inputs. Fortunately I have this lamp with a magnifying glass, so I have a chance of seeing what I am doing with the 1.27 mm pitch connectors...

2. The serial port runs a console at 38400 Baud, as part of the busybox. One way that I have been thinking of using this, without having to re-flash the units, is to connect a microprocessor to this port, have code there sit and wait for the # character at the end of the sign-on message, then have it give a command /usr/bin/progxx and then run whatever code is in that file. The serial-port action then becomes just the standard input and standard output of that program.

3. Since the Picotux runs on 3.3V, the voltage levels on the inputs and outputs are approximately the same as regular old LS-TTL. This makes interfacing quite easy. Having just 5 lines makes it necessary to do some kind of parallel/serial conversion in order to read the 8 bits coming out of an AD converter or control the 3 bits for selecting 8 channels in front of the ADC, so some trickery with shift-registers and multiplexers is indicated.

4. There are actually 9 different bits that control things outside from the program. There are the 5 nominal input/output lines, and the 2 serial data lines, which may be re-appropriated if the shell using them can be closed, another bit that controls the green LED next to the network socket, and a sixth IO line, which is used for the initialization-signal on poweron, but it may be reassigned afterwards, and at least used as another output.

5. The programming has so far given no surprises. Networking with sockets works just like one would expect, and the gpio library turns the IO-lines High or Low as requested. Shell-scripts work when beginning with the #!/bin/sh line (but not otherwise!) the only defined user is root, and there is a telnet daemon listening, which allows logging in without a 38400 Baud terminal. Which the old glass-ttys here don't support, as they are bound by the old RS-232 speed limit of 19200 Baud...

So what will I do with these? I can foresee replacing at least two of these old PCs sitting around recording thermometer data or controlling the outside lights and battery charging of the old car, with smaller, less power-hungry, and more reliable equivalents. The PCs may remain, but now they can be turned off when not really needed. Electricity is bound to be expensive this winter....

Another of them maybe I'll use with a DCF77 clock, to receive and interpret the time signal, and get accurate time when offline or out travelling. I already have some hardware, an 98 kr alarm clock from Clas Ohlson suitably doctored to control the receiver and read the received signal from the outside.

I'll probably think of more applications once I've finished these.

What is up with these selection-boxes for moderation? I just had some points, and awarded Insightful and Interesting to several posts. Then when I hit the Moderate button, one of them has become Flamebait? That just is obviously wrong. The post was not Flamebait but Interesting.

So I posted instead, making it past all the dire warnings about moderating being undone, so that Flamebait was extinguished, as it were. And I wasted 3 points.... but I guess that's better than the alternative.

I have had this happen once before, and the moderation then was eventually reported as Unfair. Is there a bug in the GUI or something?

Ten days ago I put in an order for some Picotux units. Last Tuesday, just as I had arrived at my sister's place in Nøtterøy, I got a phone call from UPS, that they had tried to deliver a package with some electronic components from Germany at my house and I wasn't there. What to do? I made an agreement that I'd come pick it up at their customer service center in Økern, Oslo, on Wednesday or Thursday.

Meanwhile I'd be installing network cables at her house. They have just had their DSL and VoIP units cluttering the living room, so there was a lot of rejoicing when I had moved them to the basement, near the point where the telephone cable enters, and just run a CAT5 up to a closet in a room off the living room, and put a wireless router there. Yes, my opinions on wireless are still not the best, but I'd thought I'd at least make a decent attempt at making it work there. As it turned out, the wireless parts did work fine, but there is a cable connection available there just in case. War-walking around their lot confirmed that the signals were good enough.

I have got a nice tan by now, sitting out in the sun. Weather has been really nice for vacation purposes this summer; as of writing this at 8.15 PM, there is 26 degrees C outside ... tonight could yet be a "tropical night" which is what we call it when the temperature stays above 20 C all night.

After the networking stuff was put in order, I went and picked up the picotuxes, 6 in all, of which one came as part of the "starter kit". So far, I have powered up that one, the one that has been mounted on a circuit board, and noticed a few things:

1. There is a serial connector that supports a terminal at 38400 Baud, no parity, 8 data, 1 stop, and the unit has a shell running here using this as the console. A second shell can be had by telnet-ing into the network port, it is just that one will have to figure out what the IP-address is first. /sbin/ifconfig in the serial port shell, or inspection of the DHCP table in the router will reveal this. Also, since this is DHCP, it seems to give different IP-addresses every time it is powered on.

2. The default configuration has a read-only root filesystem, so no editing the /etc files to change the DHCP into a fixed address, or adding other interesting actions during start-up. I will have to figure out the way the flashing works using DHCP, BOOTP, and TFTP... so I can change this. For testing however, there is a /usr filesystem which is read/writeable, and the unit also can work as an NFS client, so there is an easy way of accessing test programs and copying these program files into the memory of the unit.

3. I guess the limitation is that the root file system must be present before the drivers for the flash, read/write system are present, but the changes really only have to be to some of the files in /etc, so I might be able to edit the file-system and re-load it, then put my programs into /usr to be auto-run at the end of initialisation. I may also want to use the serial port for some interfacing to other hardware, so I will have to disable its shell, and just use the one available through telnet. There is a date command in the shell, but the circuit does not contain a live clock so it starts off at 1/1/1970 on each powerup, so some kind of clock-setting action on startup will likely be required.

4. Then there is the matter of getting the cross-compiler set up right. True to form, there is a CD with the entire source for everything on it, and there are binaries for i386 hosts, but there is somewhat thin documentation, apart from Makefiles and examples and source ... so I'll have to get some kind of "Hello World" going first.

5. The 5 digital lines have been assigned to the five serial-control lines on the unit with the circuit board, so there are 3 inputs and 2 outputs. Unless I were to attempt desoldering of tiny surface-mount resistors, I'd have to stick to this IO-assignment.

6. The other 5 units are loose ones, without any supporting circuits at all, and I will have to make a 3.3V supply for them, and also figure out a good way to connect things to the 1.27 mm pitch connector on it. I don't know if these also have the same basic installation of Linux and Busybox, and I will have to have a 3.3V supply going before I can find this out. Hopefully this is the same there, so I can begin by telnetting in through the network. I'll also try connecting some switches and LEDs to the 5 GPIO lines here, and see how well I can control these. Then it will be on to connecting some latches or shift registers, so I can read and control things with many more bits. There also appears to be an I2C interface there of some kind, which might be useful for something.

I'll be keeping notes!

Summertime... and the living is easy now that I have had the travel-money paid from the trip to Houston. So I went out shopping, got a new oil filter for the old Mercedes and some relays and connectors at ELFA, and then I placed an order for some of these Picotux controllers, small ARM-processors with network and serial connections running uCLinux. I have a couple ideas as to what I can use these for, so I'll find out about that soon enough.

Now I only have two cars again. I took the 1986 Volvo to the wreckers' this morning. So farewell, after 319531 kilometers, which is slightly more than a light-second, and 18 years which is longer than many marriages last.

I'll get used to this. I realized a while ago that I have had a strong, somewhat less than fully rational emotions about that car. Perhaps it was because it did replace one that was stolen, and I didn't want this one to be stolen either so it made me more (unreasonably?) protective? Somehow I don't feel the same about either of the other two cars, so this really is a kind of devolvement, apart from the joke about getting rid of a Volvo.... there is, or was, something else there.

I mentioned this to a pal on IRC, he said maybe "freed" was a more appropriate word when getting rid of an old car. I'll buy him a beer next time we're out drinking.

We'll see what will happen next.

There was a nice long spell of dry and warm weather that slowly came to an end last night. It had to end, it was unusually humid yesterday, when I was taking some custom parts off the Volvo, and basically tidying it up for disposal. Unscrewing a couple small things shouldn't be enough exercise so as to make me sweat, but still I did. That means humid. Then there was some rain during the night and more hot and humid today. It is raining for real now, but still quite warm outside. Nice in its way, I get things done inside now that I didn't feel like doing during all the nice weather. And I have a pizza on order, it is expected to arrive here within 45 minutes.

Been a while since the last JE. I tried writing up something for SMITE2 but there was absolutely nothing interesting happening that day. At all. So I'll pass this time round.

Then there has been some slight progress with the cars: the old Mercedes had a failure of the gearing, so I couldn't put it into reverse. Turned out there was one of the ball joints in the mechanism that had fallen apart, and Saturday I put a new one in. So that is fixed. The car still needs the paint job however.

Looks like I finally have someone who wants the old Volvo, probably for parts. After all, the engine and tires are in reasonably good shape so they would be good donated parts. The plates have to come off by the end of June, and I should be rid of it one way or the other by then. Even if I take it to the wrecker's, I'll still get 1500 NOK for it, and another 1450 NOK as the road tax refund since it is off the road by the middle of the year. So it is either that or give it away to someone who wants the parts.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine called this afternoon while I was in the Biltema store shopping for pipe fittings; he and his family had booked a trip to Italy for a week this summer, and now they discovered that the destination didn't exist after all. They are not alone, so we'll see how this turns out.

The neigbor on the northeast side had finally decided they would put up the fence between us that they took down with their re-work of their lot about 10 years ago. They've got a dog now, and wants to have a complete fence so it can run around loose within their property. In the process, we decided we'd get rid of some of the shrubs and a couple large trees on that side of my house, on my side of the fence. So the north-east, which always was a moist dark area, is now cleared and I'll have to make a lawn there now. Since all the trees were removed, that area isn't dark and wet anymore, and all the interesting plants are long gone. Just as well, there is enough other foliage and trees growing here as it is.

Now here's the pizza.