mouldy.org

Overall thoughts:

• This is a very small, neat, lightweight player.
• Battery life could be better
• Audio quality (specifically noise floor) could be better
• Tactile interface is great
• Being able to just copy MP3s to it like a drive is awesome
• It's just so... tiny. And it plays videos.
• UI responsiveness improves with 1.03 firmware, and you get a lot less crashes with funny characters in your filesystem
• Much more solid-feeling than the Clix 2

Time to see what makes it tick.

The case is held together with clips along the edges. I pushed and twisted and poked trying to make it spring apart like the previous Clix, but it's a lot simpler now. Stick a fingernail into the edge with the power/volume buttons and lever the base outwards, away from the screen.

Today, we have a special guest: a Linksys-branded Sipura SPA-841 VoIP phone.

Sipura/Linksys SPA-841

Let's see what's inside.

Opened SPA-841

Overall, this device looks like it was built to be low cost, while acknowledging that volumes also won't be very high. This is usually a bad combination as a manufacturer - you end up having to use a lot of (expensive) manual labor, since it's too expensive to tool up machines. Rather than integrate the LCD into the mainboard, they've soldered an adaptor cable to a header on the mainboard. The same is true of the off-board connections; most of them are soldered rather than using dedicated connectors, saving a few cents per connection. Most of them are covered in hot glue to provide a little mechanical stability.

Introduction

Robotics is an area that I'm interested in for the long term. It's similar to software development twenty years ago: it's immature, there's no general consensus on what the 'best' way to do things is, and there are a lot of unsolved problems. The development cost is starting to come down to the point where ordinary individuals can tinker and learn without external sponsorship.

I think the 'unsolved problems' element is important. In software, 20 years ago, we were contrained by technology and immaturity. We didn't have cheap multi-GHz CPU's. We didn't have cheaply accessible worldwide communications networks. We didn't have stable, reliable, cheap operating systems. In 1988, we had the 8086, DOS and maybe a megabyte of RAM.

I'm struggling with the idea of value in work that is performed.

I think this is related to my general dissatisfaction at web development. Sure, there's a lot of stuff going on. Sure, there's even a little money to be made. But why is it valuable? Why does anyone care?

Ultimately, we're just presenting and shuffling textual information. This is valuable to a point. Certainly, I love to be able to punch in any old company's name, get info on their offerings, contact numbers, buy their stuff, etc. That's great.

Sidebar: I'm trying to find some good Bluetooth chips. There are a half-dozen manufacturers that make them. Philips/NXP make some very promising-looking products but don't provide a datasheet on the web, so I can't decide whether they're suitable. I find the number for the local sales office and it turns out to be a poor woman in Accounts who doesn't know why she's getting so many technical calls. She forwards me to reception. Reception says that no, NXP doesn't exist any more, it's some other company. This other company doesn't have a website, but here's the mobile number of a guy that can help me. I call the mobile. Guy doesn't call back. It's like, I will give you money if you answer a few simple questions, and I can't even find the right person to talk to.

It's official. I am finally pronouncing ZFS 'buggy'.

I do not trust the integrity of my data with this filesystem, and I suggest that you do not use it for any purpose.

I've tried three platforms so far, trying to find a stable ZFS system. They are:

OpenSolaris

Didn't support any common SATA controllers. Crashed if you looked at it the wrong way. Actively user-hostile. Tiny user community, most of it hostile to Linux users and noobs.

Linux ZFS-FUSE

Leaks memory and crashes about once a week, more if you use it. I can't complete a scrub or a complete copy of my storage pool (800GB) in one pass: the machine must be rebooted in the middle. Sometimes claims that the pools are fully intact but contain no data, which is somewhat disconcerting. Little hope for future updates as Sun has 'purchased' the developer that was working on the project.

I've been lucky enough to use a Hakko 852 at work. It heats up quickly and accurately, gives you fine control over the air flow rate and has all sorts of temperature profiling magic. It's an elegant weapon for a more civilised time.

The Aoyue 906 is not an elegant weapon. Where the Hakko 852 is a perfect lightsaber, the Aoyue 906 is a wooden club in flourescent paint.

This is a post-in-progress. It's not nearly finished. If you have any ideas of your own, please post a comment below!

Introduction

I own a Dell XPS M1210. I bought it because it was powerful and small and kinda lightweight. I didn't buy it because I wanted to sit on an aeroplane and work.

Nonetheless, it'd be nice to get a bit more battery life out of it. There are a lot of reviews out there raving about the battery life, but that's the review models sing the 9-cell battery. It's an 80 watt-hour pack that sticks an inch out the back of the machine, ruining advantage number two: small size. So I bought the 53Whr 6-cell battery and only get two and a half hours of battery life. This laptop is a power hog.

Need to access some MySQL databases in Python right now? As in now, really, I don't have time to read stuff, and please stop rambling because you're wasting my time now? Read on!

Getting started

Access to MySQL databases is through the MySQLdb module. It's available in the python-mysqldb package for Debian/Ubuntu users.

Your first step in any Python code is:

import MySQLdb

Python database access modules all have similar interfaces, described by the Python DB-API. Most database modules use the same interface, thus maintaining the illusion that you can substitute your database at any time without changing your code. I suspect that anyone doing this in reality has failed with hilarious consequences, but nonetheless...

One Percent

During his keynote, Jobs asserted that they have a first-year target of 1% of the mobile phone market, or 10 million units.

To anyone who's dealt with startup companies or has researched starting one themselves, this should sound awfully familiar. This is one of the oldest bogus assertions in an entrepreneur's pitch: "We only have to get 1% of the market to be successful". Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start" calls this the Chinese Soda Lie: "If just 1 percent of the people in China drink our soda, we will be more successful than any company in the history of mankind."

Maybe I've just been asleep, but the price and difficulty of using CPLDs and FPGAs in hobby electronics projects has gone through the floor in recent months.

CPLDs and FPGAs are types of PLDs - programmable logic devices. They let you implement digital logic without the expense of fabricating a new IC. As a simple example, you could buy one FPGA device and program it to act like a large collection of AND gates. Then you could reprogram it to act like a CPU, or a JPEG encoder. One physical device can implement the functionality of any device.

This is similar to what a microcontroller does; indeed, for many projects, microcontrollers are preferable because they're easier to use. As soon as you need high performance, specialist hardware or flexible I/O, CPLDs and FPGAs are superior.