http://www.doctort.org/adam Maker of Finest Quality Digital Things Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:02:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Halloween usually isn't very popular here in Australia but this year it sure was! Residents of Matthews St, Davidson were inundated by hundreds of kids demanding sugar. My own kids were among the throng, I was surprised how many people were there. http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/halloween-comes-to-sydney.html I'm looking for a little bit of freelance work at the moment, if you are interested in someone to help you out with digital circuit design, embedded systems design or programming, application development or even web sites or server back end work, drop me a line at adam@siliconsparrow.com. I've put ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/you-can-hire-me.html Look out for this new disease sweeping the children of the world. Symptoms include coloured spots on exposed areas of skin and uncontrollable giggling. http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/textapox-is-catching.html Here's a Python gotcha that got me. Here is my function to print out a range of sinusoidal values: import math def cycle(centre, range): theta = 4.71 speed = 0.1 for ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/python-function-is-not-callable.html I just want to say that women just have more stuff. Here is the state of our dressing table right now, you can just see my stuff in the corner there if you look closely but look at my wife's stuff - handbags and hats and jewellery oh my! http://www.doctort.org/adam/bizarre/girls-have-more-stuff.html I'm still messing around with my bookkeeping. Here is another nifty formula for OpenOffice Calc. I have a list of revenue and the dates that revenue was received like so: DateAmount 10 Jul 2009$1,080.00 18 Jul 2009$144.45 30 Jul 2009$2,248.40 2 Aug 2009$1,000.00 5 Aug 2009$522.30 I want to create a month-by-month summary of these figures. Here ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/more-spreadsheet-tomfoolery.html I realise I've been a bit dark lately with my blog with very minimal posting over the last few months. A lot of things have been changing around here. My wife and I have swapped roles. That's right, I'm the housewife now and she has a full-time job. I'm still doing ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/metamorphosis.html Controlling the parallel port has always been a pain in Windows 2000, XP and later. In DOS or older versions of Windows you could just write a byte directly to port 0x378 and that was it. Now you can get the same level of simplicity using inpout32.dll and Python. Go here ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/parallel-port-control-in-python.html Just a quick note for my future reference. I'm setting up my budget spreadsheet for the new financial year and I have converted the Australian 2010 income tax rates into a spreadsheet formula. I use OpenOffice, it should work fine in Excel too. =if(A1<=6000;0;if(a1<=35000;.15*(a1-6000);if(a1<=80000;4350+(.3*(a1-35000));if(a1<=180000;17850+(.38*(a1-80000));55850+(.45*(a1-180000)))))) http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/australian-income-tax-spreadsheet-formula.html One of the little rules in our house is that kids are not allowed to watch TV before school in the morning. But these two are so addicted to the glow of a screen, they watch my screen saver and pretend it is a movie! Sometimes they are quite amusing to watch, ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/tv-addiction.html I've never done a good 'ol consumer rant on this site so here we go. I'll put my grumpy old man hat on... A couple of months ago, it so happened that I bought a Toshiba laptop and a Dell screen in the same week. Both products offered a $100 cash-back ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/toshiba-vs-dell-cashback-deals-and-customer-service.html There are so many guides out there on how to make a Linux kernel and so many of them are out of date, I thought I should write down a simple step-by-step of the current way to do it as of early 2009. My goal here was to compile a new ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/creating-a-debian-kernel-package-for-v2626.html Just say you want to input a single key from your user such as asking "Would you like to continue [y/n] ?" without requiring the user to press ENTER. You'd think you could do it like this: char c; cin >> c; cout http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/reading-single-keystroke-on-linux.html I've taken that old Simple Slide Show program I wrote years ago and given it a bit of a brush-up. I also changed the licensing so it is open source. As a bonus, I have added a new feature to allow you to customise the colour and font used in the ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/simple-slide-show-is-now-open-source.html It's incredible the things you can do in Linux. Here's two amazing things I've done today: Amazing thing #1 I had a corrupted disk and I wanted to run some recovery tools on it but to be safe, I wanted work with a copy of the corrupted disk. So I created a ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/linux-is-amazingly-useful.html This is a guest post contributed by Richard Geoffrion. Thanks for sending this Richard, I hope others will find it useful! First off, thank you so much, Adam, for the primer on getting Warcraft II working under DOSBOX. The “-t cdrom” option was the piece I was missing to get my ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/nerd-notes/networked-warcraft-ii-under-dosbox.html I've just upgraded my HTPC to the new Mythbuntu 8.10. I must say that setup is a helluva lot easier than previous versions of Myth although I found my ATI card did not work at all and I had to exhume an ancient nVidia card from my parts box. And ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/update-on-twinhan-remote-for-mythbuntu-810.html I've set up a simple website to hawk my RS232 Rate Converter. The product is now ready to sell. Hooray! The address is http://serialgadget.com/ http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/baud-rate-converter-website-is-up.html Thanks to some help from Stack Overflow, the new and excellent Q&A site for programmers, I have put together a PHP class which can perform a currency conversion using up to date exchange rates pulled live from Yahoo. Here is the code for y'all to share: <?php // fx.php - PHP Code ... http://www.doctort.org/adam/general/currency-calculation-in-php.html Massimo Sanna is a reader of this blog and has designed a PCB for the MIDI Sync Box for all of us to share. Thanks very much Massimo!. Click here to download the PCB layout in TIFF format. http://www.doctort.org/adam/midisync/pcb-design-for-the-midi-sync-box.html