Friday, March 07, 2008

www.philwinder.com

This site has been dead for quite a while, Though I may come back to it some day. In the mean time please go to:

www.philwinder.com

for the newest blog.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Fixed the SWLPT-54125 Pause doesnt connect Problem

Fixed the wireless card problem with the SWLPT-54125. When it installed, it wouldnt connect even though the network was there, it would "flash" the name of the network, go mad and show nothing again. In the mean time the processor went to 100% and paused all other processes for a split second. It was more than annoying. To get rid of it, I had to either disable the card or remove it completly.



It came to the time when the tech support where no longer responding because they didnt have a clue either, so I just tried it one last time. Removed the card, uninstalled the software, rebooted, installed the software, clicked restart, and before it did restart, put the card back in. Install the card automatically and boom. It worked.

I think it might have had something to do with a possible dodgy PCI slot. It felt like it wiggled about a bit too much in there. But hey, what do I care, its working and I dont have to connect to my partners laptop anymore.








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Project Ideas

Im just putting some of the project ides up here for future reference, so I dont forget (I do that a lot).

  • EBook Library Management
  • Active Filter designer Software
  • Layered (coded) data storage
  • Simple BCI (Body-Computer Interface)
  • AV Sender (Coding)
  • Time Stamp Website
  • Time Spend Monitor
  • Phased Array Ultrasound

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Random Rant of the Week: Islam and Do-gooders

Just read a post here about muslims and I was compelled to post a reply, It went on for so long, I thought I might as well post it here too!







Damn thats a good article, It just caught my eye and im glad I read

it. I fully agree with what Ziauddin is saying but when taking the

danish pictures as an example, I would like to put my perspective

accross.



Firstly, I am the first to admit that I do not know anything about

Islam! Now this is not because I was/am ignorant, this is because I

was brought up in a small east yorkshire town that didnt have 1 muslim

living there.



Secondly, the expression "deliberate misconstruction of Islam" is

greatly overemphisised. This article was presumably written as a more

elequent version of protest to the danish cartoons. Since his (I say

his, but for all I know, she could be a woman) argument was not to

stereotype all muslims into a catagory where they hate everyone else,

the above statement is essentially hypocritical. You ask why?



Well from my point of view (and I know that the cartoons where not

directed at me) the cartoons are exactly what they are. CARTOONS!



He thinks this is a form of racism, and yes there definatly are people

that are obviously wrong and downright discusting about racism, but

this is most definatly not!



Its just someone having a laugh!!



For example, take a look at some recent british sarcastic comedy on

TV. Pretty much all the comedy is based upon someone taking the mick

out of someone else, be it against chavs, alcoholics, M.P's jews,

christians, catholics or yes, dare I say it, MUSLIMS!!



If a black american took the mick out of white people because they cant

dance as well as we can, I wouldnt get offended, but, and heres the

thing,







if someone wrote and I quote:







“Massacre those who malign the Prophet” or “Butcher those who mock Islam”







Then I WOULD and DO take offence.



The exact same argument sprung up between catholics and the Monty

Python staff about 30 years ago. If you have seen any Monty python,

you will understand. All that happened then was a few priests and

ministors took to TV chat shows, and had a good old fasioned debate.

The came to the conlusion that they where having a laugh!



These days, catholocism is still here and the Monty Pythons Life of

Brian, (yes they really are saying that jesus was a coincinental fluke)

is a classic!







Now, bear with me here, imagine that you are like me, like any other

"normal" (debatable :D) white, christian/catholic/atheist living in a

small market town with hills and cows and some cool new invention

called the internet, and you first see a CARTOON (i stress the word

cartoon) and then see



"Butcher those who mock Islam"



Which one appears to be more offensive?



So all these people living in this market town will now have some small

irreprible predjudice that ALL muslims think this, not because they are

angry, bad, rascist people, but because that is all they see.







To take another example, which is the other way round, was the world

cup flag scandle. Thanks to a few muslim do-gooders, it got all over

the news that all muslims where offended by putting british flags on

their cars!! Do you know what I said when I heard that? "You have got

to be kidding" because its natural and a lot of people leave it at that

adding yet another prejudice, then I realised, pretty much all these

muslim fella's ARE british, and theyve probably got a flag in their

bathroom saying "GO ENGLAND" (even though we know that they will

undoubtedly loose :D)







Unfortunatly, we live in a world where bad news makes good news. You

will never see a young muslim lad helping a white granny accross the

street in the same way that you will never see a white lad helping a

muslim granny.



So we have to confide in the fact that in the middle of all these not

very nice people (I had to delete a swearword) there are a lot, and I

mean a lot of normal, nice people and unfortunatly there are going to

be people that go way over the top with their anti-offence morals (we

call them do-gooders), so just chill, take a step back and concider all

the good people that you have met and stop worrying, because at the end

of the day, its not worth it.



SCUM wil always be SCUM, you can bleach it, but it will always come back.







Oh and by the way, just for the record I have no affiliation to any

religion whatsoever. Muslim, hindi, christian? Whatever floats your

boat.







Cheers,







Phil Winder


Wednesday, November 08, 2006

XP Installation Problems

Had a problem when reinstalling windows, it would BSOD at 34 minutes. I fixed it by pressing Shift+F-10 during install and making a copy of setupapi.log in the windows folder. I described that the last thing to install was some ati inf file, so i deleted the incriminating file (atiixpag.inf inside the windows\inf\ folder) and shazam, worked like a dream.

Start of the ZBot

Basically want to create a cluster of robots using a mesh'ed ad-hoc network. This will be done using zigbee, but the problem is that I havent created any robots before so I will have to go through the motions before I get to the zigbee part.

So far I have created a primitive IR proximit sensor with some 10F PIC's. I have a few problems with the PIC's themselves, for example: If you connect the pic back up to the ICD2 before turning off the main power, the PIC will burn itself out. Secondly, I had a load of problems with trying to program the damn thing, I think it was due to inproper driver installation. (Make sure you preinstall the drivers for the ICD2 FIRST!!)

Next I am going to start on the actual motor control using some schematic I found on the net.