This evening, things got off to a bit of an inauspicious start after I made the PCB for the power supply for my new Luxeon LEDs, which I'm experimenting with to see whether they make for good lighting for my Dad's old boat.

The driver IC is a tiny little SOT23-5 sized device, i.e. it's roughly the size of a grain of rice. They really aren't that hard to solder - only 5 pins, and I was using solder paste and hot air.

But you try and find the one you dropped on the floor. I got one out of the packaging, and then it suddenly...disappeared. And has not been seen since.

Fortunately, I had bought 10 of these ICs. So the next one gets assembled with the rest of the components. The circuit is pretty simple - all the hard work has been done by the engineers who designed the chip, all I had to add was an inductor (it's a buck converter), a 0.1 ohm current sense resistor, a couple of capacitors for decoupling, and some connectors for power etc. And lo, there was light.

Well, that's until I decided to do a test with a lead acid battery powering it all, and I must have momentarily touched the flying leads I'm using to power the breakout board possibly in reverse bias. I don't actually know what happened, well, except the chip promptly failed and started working as a resistor, with the LED no longer being particularly bright, and the PCB getting pretty warm. No magic smoke was observed, but my oscilloscope very quickly confirmed that there was a distinct lack of switch mode power supply like activity going on...

So I desoldered that chip, and soldered on the third. Well, after dropping the thing twice while trying to turn it over the right way, and nearly losing another one. (So much for antistatic precautions when it falls on the carpet).

But it worked when I got the board powered up again, off the lead acid battery. The tiny LED (it's the size of a 3mm indicator LED!) is now adequately lighting my room, all by itself. It doesn't fill the room with light quite like the room lights do (a pair of 60 watt incandescents), but this tiny LED is putting out an impressive amount of light. If I put it in an Anglepoise lamp enclosure it'd make a great work light for use when soldering boards.

My Dad's boat is quite small, so I think half a dozen of them over the cooking area will provide excellent lighting. What's more the PCB that I soldered the LED to (it's in a leadless package) provides an adequate heatsink (I didn't even etch the LED's PCB, I just cut out pads with a dremel cutting wheel, and soldered the LED package to it - it has a thermal pad under the LED, plus the anode and cathode). The PCB even right next to the LED is only warm, not hot.

LEDs have come along in just a year, the previous white LEDs I tried with this level of brightness got much, much hotter. This is a "cool white" LED (the most efficient colour that Lumileds produce in white). I was concerned that the light might have been a bit too blueish, like my bike headlight, but it's not - it really is proper white, rather than the very pale violet of other "white" LEDs that I have tried.

Next will be to make some smaller PCBs custom shaped to fit the boat roof liner. The data sheet provides a pattern for making a PCB that acts as a better heatsink than the one I made, so hopefully I can get the size of each module pretty small (which will keep the cost down, since I intend to get the PCBs made up by someone like Olimex).

I added UTF-8 support to my ZX Spectrum ethernet card project (since it has its own character generating routines)...I then used my dodgy 6 months worth of learning Spanish to translate all the menu items and messages to Spanish.

I was most gratified when I posted the string tables on a Spanish Spectrum forum that people said I'd done a good job so far! Not too many messages were too horribly wrong.

Anyway, there's a screen shot of an 8 bit system outputting accented chars from the 0xC3 part of UTF-8 here...
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/00020.jpg

I'm going to make some custom light fittings for my Dad's old boat, which after 6 years is almost ready to be seaworthy. All the old fittings in the cabin are incandescent (plus a couple of 12v florescent strips). I'm going to replace all the spots, and add some downlighters, all based on LED technology. The florescents, we'll keep.

Browsing Farnell, I've found Luxeon LEDs that now achieve 100 lumens per watt (100 lumens output, 3.5v forward voltage, at 350mA). These LEDs can be driven to a maximum of 1 amp. The efficiency drops off as you increase the current (when running them at 700mA, they have an efficiency of 75 lumens/watt, giving something like 180 lumens). What's more I have some similar Luxeons from last year with the Lambertian lens and they give a nice, spot-free wide angle illumination (the ones I have already are red, though).

I'm going to build a custom power supply for each LED - there's quite a range of high efficiency buck converters specifically designed for LED power illuminators. The power supply should be pretty small, I think the PCB should be about the size of a postage stamp (all bar the inductor will be surface mount). The driver IC has a control pin, so it'll be trivial to make the lights dimmable. The LED driver can achieve 95% efficiency, too.

The biggest issue will be thermal dissipation - there's not much room to dissipate the heat the LED generates in the small amount of roof depth, so it may be simply best to use a fairly large sheet of aluminium to keep the LED cool enough.

Who says lights are boring? This sort of thing gives the opportunity for much tinkering!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4969360.ece

It's hardly surprising that the use of "herbal refreshments" is as old as society itself. So remind me, why do the authorities criminalize people who are simply doing what members of society has done, ever since society began?

Last weekend, I went to London for a long weekend. Primarily, to see a friend of mine who was over from the USA for a few days, but also to catch up with other friends in the area.

London's one of those places that I love visiting, but I'm not sure I'd entirely want to live there - a commute from anywhere reasonably priced to most of the sort of places I would likely to work would probably be the best part of an hour each way (but on the flip side I wouldn't need a car any more). But it does have its good points - for instance, with so many people living there it's not hard to find a band of geeky friends with whom to socialize. The Isle of Man just doesn't have enough technology passionate people, so most of my geeky activities end up being solo efforts.

On Monday, we went for a quick trip around the Science Museum, and it has the coolest display I think I've seen in a long time - the Listening Post exhibit (actually, a geek-art installation) - http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/listening_post.aspx . The website picture doesn't do it justice at all. It's constructed out of dozens of 4x40 alphanumeric VFDs (vacuum flourescent displays - one of those "lets fire electrons around" display technologies that seems to have been hanging on forever, and probably won't get pushed out until OLEDs have truly become a long-term usable item). The displays are supported on narrow transparent columns, so in the dark room that they are in, you don't actually see the supports - the displays appear to be floating (and you can't see the bezels of the displays, so it looks like what they are displaying is just hanging there). It's big enough so that it can fill most of your field of vision.

Watching the display was at times moving, at times mesmerising, and slightly trippy. It is accompanied by sound, too - various sound effects timed with changes on the VFDs, as well as a computer generated voice for the dynamically generated stuff. We sat there for some time in silence, watching it. It really was truly awesome. (In fact, it has reminded me that I ought to figure out what sort of thing I should make with the big box of IN-12 nixie tubes I bought about 18 months ago for this kind of thing).

Unfortunately, though, the Science Museum's rack of Strowger telephone exchange equipment is no longer alive. It used to have 8 phones connected to it, so that you could watch the switches step, and that was always a favorite exhibit of mine. But now it sits silent. It was so much more informative when they had it working.

Last weekend, I went to London for a long weekend. Primarily, to see a friend of mine who was over from the USA for a few days, but also to catch up with other friends in the area.

London's one of those places that I love visiting, but I'm not sure I'd entirely want to live there - a commute from anywhere reasonably priced to most of the sort of places I would likely to work would probably be the best part of an hour each way (but on the flip side I wouldn't need a car any more). But it does have its good points - for instance, with so many people living there it's not hard to find a band of geeky friends with whom to socialize. The Isle of Man just doesn't have enough technology passionate people, so most of my geeky activities end up being solo efforts.

On Monday, we went for a quick trip around the Science Museum, and it has the coolest display I think I've seen in a long time - the Listening Post exhibit (actually, a geek-art installation) - http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/listening_post.aspx . The website picture doesn't do it justice at all. It's constructed out of dozens of 4x40 alphanumeric VFDs (vacuum flourescent displays - one of those "lets fire electrons around" display technologies that seems to have been hanging on forever, and probably won't get pushed out until OLEDs have truly become a long-term usable item). The displays are supported on narrow transparent columns, so in the dark room that they are in, you don't actually see the supports - the displays appear to be floating (and you can't see the bezels of the displays, so it looks like what they are displaying is just hanging there). It's big enough so that it can fill most of your field of vision.

Watching the display was at times moving, at times mesmerising, and slightly trippy. It is accompanied by sound, too - various sound effects timed with changes on the VFDs, as well as a computer generated voice for the dynamically generated stuff. We sat there for some time in silence, watching it. It really was truly awesome. (In fact, it has reminded me that I ought to figure out what sort of thing I should make with the big box of IN-12 nixie tubes I bought about 18 months ago for this kind of thing).

Unfortunately, though, the Science Museum's rack of Strowger telephone exchange equipment is no longer alive. It used to have 8 phones connected to it, so that you could watch the switches step, and that was always a favorite exhibit of mine. But now it sits silent. It was so much more informative when they had it working.

It only gets worse, if it was bad enough having a friend killed by a driver pulling out from a junction without looking (see the JE from a few days ago)...well, his Dad had gone looking for him and encountered the accident scene. Understandably, he's a total wreck.

The thing is Jonathon and his father were not just a father and son, they were very close - like extensions of each other. When they were over at ours Saturday two weeks ago, you could see when they found something amusing, they thought of it at the same time and gave each other a knowing grin. It's not just a father losing a son, it's a father losing a very large chunk of himself.

The driver of the other vehicle was an 18 year old man, with another two 18 year olds in the vehicle. The police are prosecuting the driver for causing death by dangerous driving, and he'll almost certainly go to prison for it. Drink was not involved. But whatever the judicial system does, there's so many lives that are going to be deeply overshadowed by this.

It's just so bad on so many levels.

So, I've been using the Rosetta Stone language course for long enough I'm doing Level 3 on their Spanish course (which I made an internet subscription to, for 3 months).

So what do I think of it so far?

It's by far the most effective way that I've found to fix new vocabulary in my mind - that's for sure, and overall, I think it's been the best thing I've done so far to bootstrap my knowledge of Spanish. However, I do have a few points I don't like... ...well, really, it's just the Milestone at the end of each unit. You have to answer it exactly, and, well, there's often more than one way of saying something which is perfectly valid so half the time you're trying to guess exactly what it wants which sort of detracts from its entire purpose. My other minor gripe is that the speech recognition isn't as great as the hype makes out, although that's not to say it is not fit for purpose (which it is). I also agree with what others have written on the 'net about the Rosetta Stone software, it shouldn't be the only thing you study - it makes it ten times easier if you also do a bit of basic grammar study as well. Fortunately, there are quite a few good web sites on Spanish grammar that are freely available.

But I'm now to the point where I can actually understand a few news articles on the BBC Mundo podcast, and on telemadrid.es, which I am extremely pleased with given that I've not even been learning for 6 months. Reading is of course a lot easier than listening, since you can re-read stuff and put any words you really can't get into WordReference. Formulating sentences of my own is still quite difficult, at least syntactically correct ones... but when I get frustrated I have to remind myself I've only been learning this for less than 6 months - and so far, I've learned more Spanish in that time than I did French in 8 years of school French.

I'm also coming to the conclusion that we teach languages totally and utterly wrong in this country. I see no evidence that the way languages are taught has changed since I was at school. There was a news article, in fact, on language teaching in Britain a few weeks ago on Radio 4's PM which sort of highlighted it - they had a 16 year old girl who had scored good marks in all her French exams but could barely string a sentence together when put on the spot. The fault, I think, is that it seems that languages are taught in schools in English, not in the language itself. So students at GCSE level are not thinking in the target language, they are thinking in English and translating. This may work fine for a written exam where you're not on the spot, but won't work for speaking and listening very well at all - and I think this probably was this girl's problem - when asked to tell the interviewer what her day was like in French, she had to think about it in English and try to translate, instead of just saying it in French. The other problem is certainly student attitude, in other countries students are probably very aware that English is the lingua franca of business (and even more so for technology, so I bet virtually every geek in non English speaking countries has good English skills) so if they don't learn it they might not get on as well later...and English speaking students know that the lingua franca of business is English, so they feel they don't need to bother learning another language...especially when it's taught at school in a way that is no fun at all, and is all about memorizing long lists of words with their English translations and nitpicky grammar points.

One thing has changed quite a lot since I was at school, is that when you're learning a new language it is so much easier to get hold of material written and spoken in the target language that's of interest thanks to the internet.

Also, I'm almost at the point where I can look up a Spanish word that I don't understand in the Spanish definitions on WordReference, instead of the Spanish - English dictionary. Once I can confidently do this, then I guess my knowledge of Spanish has become self hosting a bit like getting a compiler compiled with itself :)

Barely 4 months after my friend Michael was killed by a driver who failed to stop, another friend of mine has been killed by a driver who failed to yield the right of way. He was 2 minutes from home and an MPV (minivan) pulled out on him, and he died on impact.

My friend Jonathon was only 20.

I just can't believe it. His father is crushed by this, they were so close. They were only over at ours last weekend.

I just can't believe it.

Please, if you drive a car, remember this. Look twice, three times - whatever, just look real hard before moving off from a junction.

I'm thinking of handling my domain using Google Apps (as well as someone else's - the reason I want to handle mine is to see how it works before telling someone else whether it's worth doing). However, I have just a slight problem with spam. I get something like 350-400 spam emails a day. If I subtract mailing list traffic, less than 0.5% of my email is legitimate. Even if I add mailing list traffic, less than 5% of my email traffic is legitimate.

Can Google's mail technology effectively filter this much spam with an acceptably low false positive rate? If you've switched to Google to provide your mail exchange, how well has it dealt with spam?

In this day and age of NAT and multiple firewalls, you'd think active FTP (the one where the client turns into a server for the data connection to come back in) would be long dead. Seriously, active FTP has been obsolete for over a decade.

So...today we have a supplier who...only supports active FTP. "Oh, we only open the two ports on our firewall". Yes, so you're expecting me to open a port inbound on two firewalls to a specific workstation to allow the data connection to come back *in* to us. Have they never heard of connection tracking or an FTP proxy? That's how the rest of the planet does it who hasn't rightly decided that ssh's sftp is about a million times better than ftp. Fortunately, we have an ssh server they could download the file from us with. (And guess who introduced ssh's sftp to them in the first place...)

I'm getting worried about this particular supplier, while their web based software works, we've been uncovering more and more WTFs in other components as time goes on. Unfortunately, we were forced into a rushjob to select a supplier for this particular part of the business, and now we're getting to pay for it.

Today's favorite sentence in comp.risks.digest:

"It might turn out that, without anyone really noticing, the global financial
system has gradually turned into something that is mostly a MMORPG."

  -- Daniel P. B. Smith in <CMM.0.90.4.1222033840.risko@chiron.csl.sri.com>

Why is it when you take a motorcycle apart to remove a specific component (say, for instance, removing the rear shock absorber) you end up thinking of all the other things you'd now like to take apart and clean up/replace/recondition? What was going to be a 15 minute job this morning has now taken over two hours, but at least I've got stuff done.

The new rear sprocket I got turns out to be several teeth larger than the old one. I do have a new chain too. I'll have to ask my Dad who has experience of these sorts of things whether it's going to be geared to tall with a bigger rear sprocket. (Actually, it might not hurt with today's fuel prices to have it geared tall, but the acceleration will suffer).

My RC heli is driving me nuts. It keeps losing power (completely) and this lead to a pretty bad crash last time it happened. I changed nothing at all on it so I don't know why it should intermittently lose power. I will have to take it apart and put it on the bench and hook the ESC up to the oscilloscope, then the radio outputs, to try and find out whether it's the radio or ESC. But before that I'm going to have to almost completely disassemble it because the crash this caused bent the tail boom and broke part of the frame.

I'm also still tinkering with my Sinclair Spectrum ethernet board. It's nearly finished now, so I'm going to soon try and see if any other retrocomputing hobbyists want to try and write some software that uses it. I wish the z88dk's assembler had #ifdef directives, it would have saved me a lot of time... still, nothing a perl script couldn't solve!

Probably my biggest time sink project right now is... learning Spanish. I have become totally addicted to it. I do at least an hour of the Rosetta Stone every day, read BBC Mundo in my breaks at work, and often at home. But it's still hard, and the Rosetta Stone stuff is getting quite tough now, I'm halfway through it and it's getting into more complex bits of the language. I've also found a good grammar site here - http://www.webworkbooks.com/spanish/grammar/ which serves as a good companion to the Rosetta Stone stuff. The amazing thing I think is that since mid May, I have learned *far* more Spanish than I did French in around 5 years of compulsory French at school. I think there are two keys to language learning - 1. the motivation to do it (without that, I don't think you'll get anywhere) and 2. doing plenty of the language in a way that doesn't use translations from your own language. I have found Rosetta Stone by far the most effective way of learning *and retaining* what I've learned.

I also bought a Spanish keyboard (an Apple one, even though it's mainly for my PC rather than my PowerBook) so I can practise writing. I got the Apple one as it looks nice, and is no more expensive than any other comparable USB keyboard (it's pretty cheap actually) - and Apple made it easy to buy a foreign keyboard from my own country's online Apple store.

Actually, the funny thing about reading the news from BBC Mundo (the BBC World Service in Spanish) is that it covers much different stories than the normal domestic press does - understandably with a much bigger focus on Latin America. I wouldn't have known anything about Hugo Chavez's blatant attempts to provoke the United States (did you know he's even invited the Russian military to Venezuela - a couple of long-range bombers were there a couple of weeks ago and they have a naval exercise planned), and the also the goings-on in Bolivia (they have been doing America-baiting too, and having trouble with separatists). I've learned some interesting new words from Hugo Chavez like how to curse at someone (yes, he really did say "Yanquis de mierda, váyanse al carajo cien veces!" on live TV - mierda meaning 'shit', I understood this sentence to approximately mean 'shitty yankees go to hell 100 times'). Chavez speaks quite slowly and clearly, well, except when he starts ranting then he becomes rather hard to understand! It's a pity he's such an asshat though - he obviously has desires to become a dictator - he's been passing laws left right and centre to clamp down on freedom of speech (you can go to jail for over 3 years just for saying 'Chavez is a crank' now in Venezuela), and has ejected the Human Rights Watch guy from the country for daring to criticise his increasingly dictatorial government... It's interesting that he's backpedalled a bit too since making the 'shitty yankees' speech, I think someone brought it to his attention that the USA just happens to be his country's biggest customer *and* biggest supplier.

Just some random thoughts at the moment...

Who would have thought in 2008, one of the world's largest insurers would be a nationalized US firm - the Republicans of all people socializing the losses, and that Barclays Bank would be picking over the fresh carcass of Lehman Brothers?

I really hope we avoid another great depression, but if we do it'll be pure luck. The bankers don't seem to know what they are doing, and evidently haven't known what they've been doing for some years...

It's with some sadness that I found out this morning that the aircraft I did my private training and instrument training in, and was *the* workhouse for the Bay Area Aero Club was destroyed by Hurricane Ike, which hit the Houston area on Saturday morning. The BAAC club house is also badly damaged.

The plane, a Cessna 172, N1219F, has been in the club since the early 1980s and has taught hundreds of pilots to fly and flown tens of thousands of hours as a good honest club aircraft. It may only be a thing, but it feels a little bit like the passing of an old friend.

It's funny how we get sentimental about machines.