Ramblings of a Coder

Brainfarts of an idle mind.

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Small Update

Sunday 16 December 2007 at 03:29 am

Updated the Video snippet that this system uses to be able to use Stage6 streaming too, i definatly prefer stage6 just because unlike youtube and google you can actually upload good quality video's and it doesnt degrade them to almost un-usable quality. it doesnt degrade tham at all really.. or least i havnt noticed any so far.

This system uses Divx for its video, which post people have these days as standard anyway. If not the it should direct you on how to get it, i highly recommend it because for streaming video Divx beats FLV etc hands down.

** Stage6 no longer exists :-( **

Above's just one of our wipes from Kael in The Eye last night which i recorded to test out this.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Random | One comment

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Something Stupid/Serious

Wednesday 05 December 2007 at 01:58 am

So as you my friends i did something stupid/Serious a few days ago, I wont really mention it online because well ;) ya never know who's gonna read these entries in the future. Just let it be known i've came out with nothing tacked onto me so its all good.
In other news though its now 2am on wednesday which means tomorrow i shall be going to the hospital for a CT Scan. Hopefully that goes nice and smoothly and nice and fast. Besides that i dont really have much else to say All my previous infections are still present and seem to go through a cycle of one clears up and the other comes back and so forth. Its more annoying now than anything else and thats only because I've kinda got used to the feeling.

Thats about it really, Hopefully have something good to post in a day or two.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Random | Three comments

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That time again

Saturday 10 November 2007 at 6:28 pm

So, a brand new year is just around the corner. And with that comes my son's 5th year which as anyone from the UK will know is the year you "typically" start Primary School at. For me personally this is a big thing as it gives me a larger part of the day of doing nothing because he wont be with me. So i was thinking, around 5 years ago at about this time i decided to drop out of education myself because the boy was on the way. Now that he's going back maybe its time for me to return and finish my own education?

My own Education history has been a rocky one, going from Electronics to Mechatronic to Software Design and even into the territory of Neuroinformatics, Not sure where I'd like to return to at this point as i enjoyed all those fields and still do. But being a bit older now and my own interests having diverged a bit from these fields to include construction projects, Rocketry, im really really not sure, I think I'd be great to go back and do some real Joinery etc too. But i cant remain in education permanently if i do decide to return to it in some form. So i need to pick a goal and head directly towards it

While i always have and found robotics and interesting field i don't really see a practical use for it in the real world. Especially not the side that actually interests me and that's the R&D side though not really something like this as it doesn't really seem that useful.

Point to note on this video, in case you miss it right at the start there's some hard to see white text reading "Accelerated x4" 

Software design would be a great field but i know myself i couldnt continue todo the work i currently do and education in the same field. But i'd have to be something i could bring this side of my life into. in some shape or form.
Needs a good long hard thing and a bit more research i think before i make any decisions.. and i do have a good few months to go before i need to actually decide.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Education | One comment

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Post Doc Visit

Thursday 08 November 2007 at 4:14 pm

So went to the doctors today, got the results back from my blood tests. Mostly clear sept i have extremely low results for , and high Iron levels (To much fish not enough veg). Which overall isnt even slightly intresting. I was called into to see the doc because the blood tests show that the infection that brought me to my knee's a few weeks ago hasnt cleared up yet, and its actually returning so im back on stronger meds for a few weeks, Mix all that in with the nasal spray stuff im taking just now which is actually causing slight nose bleeds to. Its all very annoying.

Not to worry though, they have a much better idea how to deal with it now that they've done full and correct tests and a few weeks of these new meds will clear it all up (So they say) then just another few months of the steroids and thats me free of taking any pills. and *Should* be able to return to my natural eating habits. though i probably wont as my taste buds have definatly recovered from years of smoking and i still cant eat some of the crap i used to. and i actually enjoy some stuff i used to hate.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | Three comments

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Tired

Thursday 08 November 2007 at 03:48 am

Meh, its 3am or something and im still awake, i have a docs appointment at 10am too. But i cant seem to get to sleep because we have scaffolding up around our house atm and its really windy. Clang, Clang, Clang.. i swear if there were workers on it atm i'd kill one of them.

Not really much else to say, The little repair on my laptop worked a treat. and im getting 3hrs out a full charge on it which is also nice. I've spend the past hour sitting here on it updating this website with things i've been meaning to add it it forever. Like the Catagory links at the side. Notice the Really Old Posts section, because i didnt have catagories before so everything was in one, and im not that bored to have gone through them all and sorted them. Also added the little Previous - Next right at the bottom of the page so its a smoother read if someone actually reads these.

O we killed Lady Vashj this week, that was a very intresting fight. Especially when your a solo hunter on the High Spawn Elemental section. Now thats definatly fun but hard.

Good fight, recommend getting in on it at least once if you possibly can.

Thats about it, Time to try and get some sleep again....

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Random | No comments

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Laptop Repair (Acer Aspire 5000)

Saturday 03 November 2007 at 10:02 pm

Recently my laptop broke internally. The little circle PSU port inside went, the pin inside somehow snapped of the motherboard. Course my laptop is out of its warranty at this point by a few months (Typical ain't it) so i decided fuck it. it was broke anyway with no way to charge the battery ever again so i couldn't break it any more than i already had. So i decided to dismantle it and make the repair myself.

I managed to repair it successfully, and if you want to see how the repair went then please click to read this entire entry. as i don't want just any idiot stumbling along and finding how to dismantle there laptops.

But before all that, let me include this little disclaimer, you try it. and you fuck it up. Its all your fault. Don't even attempt to come crying to me.

*Read More*

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Electronics | 81 comments

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Still coding

Wednesday 31 October 2007 at 9:46 pm

Been messing about lately since my last post getting right back into the programming side of PC usage. Been playing with some Javascript under its new name of 'Ajax'. Interesting what people are finally doing with javascript and the web, Calling it ajax and web 2.0 is all a bit bull-shitty though, same old stuff just used correctly finally.
Also been looking at open source software just to see what's going about out there atm, Highly recommend the Free Php/Javascript IDE Called Aptana, Found over here at http://www.aptana.com/
I did notice though that they've released a "Pro" version and are charging for it, Which seems to be quite typical soon as a open source program gets decent and people actually start using it. *Cough* X-Chat *Cough*, Anyway check out the community edition While its still free.

Also though on the open source software front i noticed Mozilla have spread into the IM Client field too with Instantbird, at the moment its very very basic. but it works mostly. Unless you create an IRC account for a server that doesnt exist. you need to actually go and delete all your settings to recover from that one :) I actually only found this one because Windows Messenger Live 8.1 keeps randomly just crashing for me and i was looking for a quick alternative to it. Its that basic I've actually been looking at the source code to it myself see if i can add a few things that i think all IM's require (Emoticons).

Still messing about with XNA too, just been working on my same old TBS game again, nothing really to show just thought it'd mention it. let people know that i am in fact still working on the idea.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Coding | One comment

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Small Things going out of hand

Saturday 27 October 2007 at 1:30 pm

Damn didn't even notice it'd been so long since i last posted till i seen Deez post in the previous entry.

Well lots of things have happened to me lately. Mostly you could say bad things with some good thrown in.
Let me start at the beginning, i managed to catch a small bacterial infection in my throat, Which alone isn't a great big thing and a small dose of antibiotics clears it up quickly. But me being me i ignore small illnesses and just suffer through them, Which was a profoundly stupid idea as it spread into my lungs and other parts. Causing me no ends of trouble with breathing, swallowing, eating, choking etc. etc. Enough that i actually ended up in hospital, and on some strong antibiotics for a week or so which cleared it all up BUT left me open to a fungal infection in my throat so yay three cheers and all that for me. Ever had a fungal infection in your throat? its quite uncomfortable and very very annoying. Anyway another course of meds and that has all cleared up now but I've been left with something called Post Nasal Drip now. Which is only annoying, feels like there's something at the back of your throat and you need to swallow/clear it.

Anyway thats a quick overview of the last few weeks bad side for me, BUT! on the bright side of all this. and this makes me thankful all that above happened to me. I HAVE STOPPED SMOKING, its been 3 weeks now since i last had a horrid fag and i have utterly no intention of ever going back to it. The cravings have long since passed too sept the occasional time, mostly when im sitting doing utterly nothing bored and i reach out for that ever present fag packet. I have to say now that i wish i'd done it long ago, i dont stink of smoke anymore and i dont wakeup with a mouth like an ashtray. Still wakeup with a completely dry mouth though but thats because of the stuff mentioned above and even thats going away.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | Three comments

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Still Alive

Monday 17 September 2007 at 5:42 pm

Hehe yea as the title suggests im still alive and about :) Just been busy with some work lately and havnt really had much to say.

Construction of the wall was going great till some important work that had to be finished A.S.A.P dropped into my lap, its almost done though just gotta finish my new table and im all set. Photo of an very unimpressive blank wall below.
Made a few changes to the website below as you might notice. Comments was to large i felt so i limited the size and let it Scroll, Also added a tiny bit of javascript and a image link to the archive section of the bar on the right, That was way to large so i've hidden it completely now. If ya wanna see it just click the little + image next to the title.

Basically though, i've either been working, eating, shitting, sleeping or playing WoW.. so really not much has been happening lately. Still looking for a house up north actually chasing up details on another one today. but we'll see how it pans out if/when i get more details.

Anyway images, here's one of a blank wall. and one of me playing WoW as my druid.

Incase yer wondering, I'd just seconds before finished cutting the plasterboard before taking the picture hence the dust "orbs" in it. ZOMG ITS A GHOST or so people would have you believe....

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | Three comments

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Construction

Tuesday 28 August 2007 at 4:38 pm

So, with the house deal turning sour and going south. And nothing else that interests us enough within our price range atm, I decided it was time to give me and the little woman a bedroom back. Till now our bedroom has basically been my space with my computers and electronics stuff and just about everything else I'm into. Wasn't a very bedroomy room.

So i decided it was time to build a dividing wall and split the room into two, Thus giving us a real bedroom and me my own space that no one can invade with stupid shit like ugly curtains etc etc. (Stuff all woman seem to want to put in rooms). It was going well i had the framework basically done till a little accident happened with the central heating and my wife's brain (Untreated wood and lots of heat = bad). Thats set me back a bit with having to resquare the timber and shit.

The Plan was to have the wall build and plastered for today and start constructing my work tables tomorrow, Obviously this isnt going to happen but i was taking my own sweet time with the work nice and slow and steady. Now I'll have to really focus on it for the next few days and get it done quick so i can get the tables build and my shit moved into the room.

In the middle of all this work it was also my kids 4th birthday, he had a great time and got lots of new toys and shit, Funnily though the toy he's played with most is the one that cost us like £2 to buy. Most inexpensive thing we bought him. Now its my turn and i have the wife pestering me what i want for my birthday. Which is honestly nothing, I'm 27 on the 30th.. and i basically have everything i want right now besides building a new PC, and that will come from my own money and not as a birthday present.

Anyway need to get back to the ole work bench and finish this wall.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | Three comments

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House Hunting

Wednesday 15 August 2007 at 3:24 pm

Was off up North lookin for a house over the weekend there. Nothing concrete found in this visit but still looking. Definatly when you get up there again though it cements the idea of getting there A.S.A.P. Who wouldnt wanna really?

See, i wanna be gone, and i wanna be gone now lol.

Got a few jobs to finish off too, so i'll be devoting most of my time to those and getting them out the door. Build myself that new PC i've been drooling over and all the while trying to get a house outta this shithole called the central belt. Thats my plan of action for the foreseeable future. Plus maybe winning the lottery and just all out buy a stupidly expensive house up there :P but thats luck based lol.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | Three comments

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random today

Friday 20 July 2007 at 7:21 pm

I've encountered a few things of intrest on my usb searches, Especially the numerous embedded processors out there with USB capabilities already built into them.. i think this one is an especially good path i might follow down further. I also liked Shadee's idea in my comments from the previous entry too. Both viable options.

I noticed on the news earlier that england is suffering from quite bad flooding once again this year, Glad i dont live down there. The extent of flooding in this local area has been the same as every other year.. about 1 inch of water covering the road by the train station. But as they say, Look on the bright side.. I doubt they'll have a hosepipe ban this year.

Potter mania has sweeped the nation too *sigh* (oo i wonder if this is why shadee has gone offline for a week!) With all sorts of rumours surrounding what happens at the end of the book. Personally who cares? why try to ruin it for yerself and everyone just buy the damn book and read it.

Anyway, I think im going to make myself a Electronic Weather station. Might be handy if/when we move up to Skye (Hopefully soon), Know cos looking out the window just doesnt cut it these days. And to go with it im also going to build myself a new PC before we move, Im still leaning towards AMD and course 64-Bit and it'd be kinda pointless at this stage not to go dual core. So that kinda limits my choices right there :D Probably a AMD Althlon 64 X2 6000. And stick with Vista course.

I found this free Searchable PDF creator on my travels in cyberspace today, No idea why i was even looking for it but i was. Supports Vista x64 so yay.

Updated the Links section of this front page, Split them up a bit. Removed the Images and just generally cleaned it up a tad, Also made the comments easier to identify on the individual entry page. I'd never actually noticed before today that there was no seperation between the bottom of the Entry and the First Comment. I also stole Morduun's Libary link he found and posted on his blog a while ago. Course using my own books instead, Well the ones that were within reaching distance of my computer anyway.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Electronics | Five comments

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USB and PIC's

Thursday 19 July 2007 at 12:46 pm

So while doing some quick research into building my own USB devices on the cheap (Hobby), I've noticed something. There isn't really a cheap and quick way to-do this. No wonder most hobbiest stick to Serial or Parallel, these don't require extra money or extra knowledge to use. Now when ya thing about it, USB was designed to replace these technologies right? So why didn't they think about it when they started. why make it so hard to actually just knock something up and plug it in and just have direct access to it, Take the parallel port, no fancy drivers required just a case of accessing the correct memory location to send/receive over basically whatever pin on the port you wanted. Simple and it worked.

But needless to say i haven't given up, Instead of trying to design something that i can just reuse and rebuild in everything i make from this point onwards. I've decided maybe it'd be better to design some sort of separate interface. That you can just plug your boards into. Now there's probably like a million of these out there i haven't really looked into it as yet. I may even borrow ideas from other people. But I'm thinking I still have old Serial/Parallel stuff about, and I'd kinda like to be able to use them without having to really re-invent the wheel. So why not a USB Interface that can also handle Serial/Parallel as well as having room for anything new i work on in the future. From a driver stand point this might be a nightmare and beyond me, Cos if you've ever tried to make drivers for Windows then you'll know that there isn't really a lot of good reading information out there about it. And most of the communities on-line are just a tad on the unfriendly side to new people.

The electronics sites I've encountered so far are quite the same I've noticed too, or they just look so bad on the screen that you never stay very long anyway. I'm sure I'll find somewhere that i seem to enjoy within all this eventually though i always do.

As far as the game's programming, Still havnt really produced anything of note just messed about with XNA. Its the language you see C# is nice but its so close to Object Pascal that i find myself writing in pascal then have to debug forever. Guess its just something i have to get used to. I know Microsoft are supposed to be releasing XNA 2.0 Soon, and the additions look very good indeed (Funny side note, i didnt find this information on a XNA website, i actually found it on the Pascal Website). Im just hoping they finally release a x64 compiler that you dont have to fight with Visual Studio Express to use.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Electronics | Two comments

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Vista x64 And Other Stuff

Thursday 12 July 2007 at 2:01 pm

So, a few weeks ago i took the plunge and finally decided to get rid of XP and upgrade to Vista x64, Course i wasnt sure how it was going to work out. know with the many many horror stories out there about vista. so i purchased the home basic version. And to put it bluntly, there's a few annoying things but i havnt had problems with running any DRM items, or those not so legal vids or that. I can still play WoW perfectly well. but i have noticed a tendancy for it to have graphics lag but not enough to stop me enjoying playing.

The only real problem with upgrading from XP to Vista is that your used to where XP puts everything, and in some blinding moment of pure bliss microsoft decided to move things about again so you have to go hunting for options.

Hardware wise, I havnt gotten my webcam, Wireless Card or my Bluetooth adapter working yet. Essencially because there isnt 64 Bit drivers available for any of them. So i think maybe some research into 64 bit driver development is required there. So if yas come accross any decent resource for this topic. the please come back and share them with me. I've seen 64 bit linux drivers for them all though. so there maybe some information to be gleemed from looking at the source for that.

Im also a bit worried about PIC development in vista x64 but havnt researched it to much as yet. Im sure that community will be on top of this though.

As you can probably tell my other hobbies are really surfacing more and more these days and im slowly getting back into the games programming to. This time i've ditched all these 3rd party languages and im slowly wading through and trying to learn how to use Microsofts XNA and course trying to get it to work in 64-bit mode. With this new found direction i found myself packing away my trusty old Delphi (which im sure i'll miss lots) and am getting stuck right into the C# language. its pretty similar to Object Pascal and im not having to many problems with it. Im also continueing on redesigning this website but i decided to just keep this blog system as i rather like it anyway. Back to C#, With the new OS and all, i was looking through the many small programs i've written for myself over the years, know the ones you write and find out that they're actually really handy and you end up using them constantly. So i've decided to redo these in C# and take advantage of the experiance i've gained with programming since i initally wrote them.

I've also decided to start keeping research documents for my many idea's, which i think i'll start posting in a seperate section of this website. And i've decided my first real electronics project will be some USB to PIC interfacing stuff. Im looking forward to actually starting that as the research i've done on it so far kinda points that its a P.I.T.A. which is always a fun/frustrating/rewarding thing for a project when your getting back into the swing of something.

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New Url, Same Page

Wednesday 11 July 2007 at 11:21 am

Ello All,

Stupidly let my old domain expire and one of those "we'll charge you a fortune to get it back" places snapped it up, so im now here at www.specis.me.uk or blog.specis.me.uk to come directly to here :D

Anyway gotta get back to updating all this crap. And finding out what im missing, probably just images and crap though so isnt to important.. and quite a few entries by the look of it. but meh my own fault anyway.

Charles McCrimmon (Specis) | | Uncategorized | One comment

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