18/02/2007 by peter.

The monster in question is the Rank Organisation. For those of you who don’t know, everyone who grew up from the 1950’s to 1980’s bought something from the Rank Organisation. They pwned everything form Hovis Bread and Sharwoods Sauces to Butlins, CetreParks and Oasis holiday resorts. From Xerox to Pinewood studios, Deluxe Film Services and Odeon Cinemas. over the last 2 decades however they have been selling off all these companies the last 2 being Deluxe and Hard Rock for $750m and $965m respectively. This is however still not enough as they are still $800m in debt. From its start in film and media, through its diversification and now its decline it has always been known for being very influential both socially and politically, buying up it’s competitors and becoming as much, if not more, of a monopoly as P&G are today. Interestingly, the UK government has just passed a bill making “Las Vegas style super casinos” legal and lowe and behold what are Rank Group Plc interested in now but gambling. Owning only 4 companies, Mecca Bingo clubs, Grosvenor Casinos, Top Rank Espana bingo clubs and Blue Square. One has to wonder whether the J. Arthur school of gong beating has struck again…

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15/02/2007 by peter.

No not that one, the other one. The anniversary of D-day February 1971 (36 years ago) they day the world went to hell in a handcart and Britain changed from L-S-D to decimal money. On that day the everyone thought that there would be chaos and the news papers would be reporting Armageddon with everyone engaging in rape, looting and pillaging (and other fine British traditions). The news rooms sat and waited. Then they waited some more until the story came in. A woman accidentally swallowed one of the new coins and was admitted to hospital but was soon released in perfect health. Whether you want to look at this as one of the least painless major changes in recent times or the efficiency of the NHS is up to you…

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12/02/2007 by peter.

People have commented to me about my post on PWM and wondering how it works. The basic idea it this. A byte of data is allocated to each colour red, green and blue giving 256 discrete levels for each or 16.7M coulours in total. A third byte is used as a counter. Firstly all three LEDs are turned on, then as the programme cycles it takes the counter value away from each of the RGB values and if the result is zero for one of these it turns off the appropriate LED. Once the counter reaches 255 it is reset and the LEDs turned on again. If you want more info on this i have written a programme for the PIC10F202 (the teeny wee microcontroller in a SOT23 form factor) which cycles through all 16.7M colours. what’s more the chip is so small you can actually embed it behind the LED!!

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09/02/2007 by peter.

At various times I have heard the media say that you can kill a virus. Now this is an interesting issue considering it is not realy alive. A virus basically consists of one or more protein molecules acting as a little shell and a strand of DNA or RNA inside. The data in the this strand of DNA or RNA codes for the proteins and how to assemble them along with a copy of this data to make a new virus. It is analogous to a factory making manufacturing machinery. In this factory there is a store of stock materials and parts and a shop floor consisting of machines that can request these parts from store and then assemble them based on a set of plans fed into it creating a new machine. Now what happens is some little malicious person inputs some plans for a machine that bumbles around with a copy of the plans to build itself and feeds it into one of these assembly machines. Once the assembly machine is finished its job the new bumbler will go off and find another machine. now if each set of plans says “make 1000 bumblers” then before you know it the factory will be over run with little wheeled things going around getting these big assembly machines to make 1000 copies of each of them. The are apparently reproducing and causing all other production to halt. Finally, if the bumbler tells the assembler to use parts of itself then the assemblers will die out and the bumblers will have nothing to “infect” but the only thing that needs to survive to get to a new factory facility and cause the same damage is the plans for this bumbler. one wouldn’t say the plans are alive but still they reproduce and cause havoc. In viral infections, the virus causes the cell it injects its DNA or RNA strand into to start producing copies of itself until the cell dies, bursts and all the new viruses escape. the argument over whether or not it is alive tends to centre around the reduction of entropy in their location (lots of ordered structure and behaviour happens in an infection) however they are no more alive than thet little machines trying to copy themselves.

Of course where theses plans came from in the first place is a far more interesting question….

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05/02/2007 by peter.

Many years ago in the dark and distant past the thermionic valve was king. The number of separate electrical connections were used to identify the type of valve, so a 2 electrode valve would be a diode, 3 would be a triode etc… Now the properties of Germanium crystals were known about but until manufacturing processes were sufficiently developed and the little people at bell labs found out about the fun things that happen at NPN and PNP junctions they were rarely used. The germanium diode was the first to be developed as a logical step from the crystal detector in the early radios. so called crystal diodes as they showed similar properties to the thermionic diodes but made from crystals. The next advance was when the “transistor” effect was discovered. The component seemed to behave like a triode and was therefore named the crystal triode. The name was soon replaced with “transistor” and people got down to finding uses for then and the manufacturing problems began. One fundamental problem problem was “how do we package these things”. Standard packages soon followed and were named Transistor Outlines. The different outlines were given an identifying number. The first was TO1 then TO2 and TO3. The Most common ones now are TO92 and TO220. Diodes were similarly treated
with the DO series of packages. When smaller and smaller transistors were made for surface mount a new series of packages was designed Small Outline Transistor or SOT. The one I am interested in at this moment is SOT23 which is 1.63mm wide x 2.95mm long x 1.10mm high and has 6 legs (originally designed to have 2 on one side a 1 on the other for a single transistor or able to have 2 transistors squeezed into it.)

Now that digression explains that this little black epoxy package should hold 2 transistors but the PIC10F series micrcontrollers are now avalable in SOT23 packae. Thats an entire CPU,programme and ROM Memory and other things like 8 bit ADC, clock generator and power management hardware all crammed into the space of one small or two tiny transistors!!!

I now that is impressive!!!!

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03/02/2007 by peter.

For those of you out there who have mastered PWM outputs on your μC and now have little RGB LEDs giving out 16777216 different colours and wondering what to do with this technology, you could build something like these people use in their shows. Seen them a couple of times on TV and they look rather good.

Just a thought….

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03/02/2007 by peter.

Here is an interesting list of power stations UK for all you wind farm fans. One wind turbine is about 2MW so go and tot up how many we need to replace one or two of our ageing coal or nukes. (Thankfully Chapplecross has since gone off-line after operating since 1959!!) And remember that a wind turbine doesn’t work in calm hot days (like the ones that killed 15000 people in France a few years ago and are now being prepared for with air con systems which guzzel power) or on stormy days where there are very high winds or gusting and blustery conditions with wind constantly changing direction like those we tend to get in winter here.

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03/02/2007 by peter.

The following sites may be of interest to those wondering if they are safe from the impending rise in sea level. Scotland is very mountainous and mainly made of igneous rock so river channels are deep and narrow thus being in a town next to a river usually means you are about 35 feet above water level, however England has lots of limestone and therefore has wide river valleys and large flood planes (which are cheap land and therefore used by councils to build council houses on) Something to think about…

Sea level Sim

Interactive map

Since the problem with burning fossil fuels is that you release carbon dioxide that was absorbed by plants in the carboniferous period and which was subsequently turned into coal and oil, we can expect to see temperatures and seal levels rise to the levels around that during and before this period, that is to say world average of 22 deg versus 12 today and sea level rise in the order of 300meters. However this is assuming we burn EVERY last scrap of coal and oil and since a fair quantity has been turned into plastic that is now in landfill, that ain’t going to happen. Also remember that since no little man has been recording sea levels over the last 500M years, all our information is based on scientific extrapolations so may be wrong like all science. Another thing you will have notice is that if the data we have is correct, then the time for the temperature or sea levels to change significantly may be in the order of millions of years, so no need to build houses on 1/2 kilometre stilts yet!
There is also the possibility of Global Dimming taking effect which will cause more problems.

One final note, remember weather is chaotic by nature, hence we have trouble telling what the weather will do tomorrow let alone in a year and there are natural cycles and cycles of cycles. For instance when the Romans invaded they grew grape vines as far north as Perth so it must have been as warm as the vineyards of France!!

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01/02/2007 by peter.

Just in passing I found a good looking book for anyone looking for a guide to electronics “Practical Electronics for Inventors” ISBN 0071452818.

Or for those of you looking for some levity check out the web comic  The Fart Party.

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29/01/2007 by peter.

if you look at Scotland’s power generation facilities (Power stations in Scotland) you will see that usually we have Torness and Hunterston B for nuke and Longannet and Cockenzie for coal power. However since Hunterston B (along with Hinkley B) has been shut down due to the possibility of boiler tube failure (HSE) and the coal conveyor at Longannet has collapsed and will take until mid February to be repaired while they hope they will get a licence to run it on gas in the mean time it not a good situation to be in. Another factor to consider is that the black start facility for Scotland is Cruachan hydro plant which recently had serious problems with it’s generators after they were reconditioned.

All i can say is that i hope it doesn’t snow!!!

(original story) 

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