Pat's Log

Six Digits

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:03:00 -0500

Shortly before Christmas, the car rolled over the 100,000 mark. Not bad for a nearly eight year old machine. Many hundreds of thousands still remain in its life. Still, the first six digit number for cars is almost analogous to a human turning forty. There will be no gray hair here!

Also, Christmas was good. The fact that there is a week off from work is even better.

Quovis

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:43:00 -0500

My 1:12 scale Dumas Trojan F-31 build is finally complete. It took over a year to get the job done, and considering the poor condition it started in, I think it turned out really great.

The boat has been named Quovis. This is in line with the naming scheme I'm using on my model boats, where the Latin translation to English is a used as a pun. In this case, Quovis means "to whatever place you will." The intention of "place" is not necessarily physical, but I'm interpreting it that way. It beats the silly names boats normally get, in my opinion.

Aside from some rear-deck warpage that I may or may not address in the spring, this boat should be in the water as soon as it becomes liquid again.

The next boat on the list is another complete overhaul/reconstruction; this time it will be the Billings Boats Thor coast guard vessel.

Counterflow Wort Chiller

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:58:00 -0500

I made a fresh batch of beer tonight. For the occasion, I've spent the last couple of days planning and building a counterflow wort chiller.

For the uninitiated, the counterflow chiller is a device consisting of a copper tube within another tube (or hose). While the inner tube has a hot liquid (beer wort) flowing one way, the outer tube has cold water flowing the other way. In this case, the outer tube is 5/8" garden hose, and the inner tube is 3/8" copper tube. The only real construction was at the end parts, which needed soldering.

But it works, perfectly. It took boiling wort right off the stove and cooled it down to 15°C at the other end.

This brew of beer also marks the first batch that I'm making without starting with a kit. Just grain, malt extract, and hops. Here's to hoping it works out.

AMD64 Flash Instability

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:38:00 -0500

Wow. I can't believe the problem's finally been solved.

Ever since the x86_64 version of the Adobe Flash Player came out, I've been using it. However, at some point this year it became rather unstable. I assumed it was related to the Ubuntu 9.04 release. With the 9.10 release of Ubuntu, the Flash was completely unusable; even YouTube would crash it. The strange thing was that my AMD64 Debian Unstable system at work didn't have this issue.

All sorts of possibilities existed. In the end, I finally found the solution in a forum thread. Apparently, early AMD64 chips (including my fx-51), do not implement the "lahf" instruction. Also, Adobe apparently calls it in their plugin.

The solution is quite ingenious. A man named Maks Verver came up with a thirty line C program that gets compiled as a library and loaded by Firefox on startup along with the other plugins. It simply implements a signal handler for SIGILL (illegal instruction), checks for the instruction in question, implements its functionality in software, and resumes. Brilliant.

I can now laugh at lahf.

Hobby Day

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:55:00 -0500

So it seems I missed November altogether. This is the first month where I didn't take a few minutes to write something here. I guess nothing important happened. The weather was spectacular. Geocities went away. The lousy economy is starting to frustrate me a little.

To alleviate the economic blues, I took a day off from work, right in the middle of the week. Most people would call this a "personal day." I call it a "hobby day." I spent every waking minute of the day trying to complete my Trojan F-31 boat model. In the end, it didn't get finished; it only takes one little thing to go wrong, and a few managed to go wrong. The end is very near.

Still, amazing progress. I made all of the railings, masked the whole boat and painted the window frames, cut the windows, tinted the windows, installed all of the lighting, painted and installed all of the fittings, and applied decals I made last weekend. I'm sure something is missing from that list, too!

This build has turned into one hell of a project.

Drive Surgery

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:23:00 -0500

I've had this laptop hard drive at work whose motor was seriously failing that would have been nice to recover. However, after running for a few minutes, the bearing would inevitably sieze, and there would be read errors.

I noticed last night that I owned another very similar drive -- just one digit different in the part number -- that had a perfect motor, but bad platter or heads (causing read errors). After opening it, it became clear that the difference is the number of platters. The motor in these is integrated right into the aluminum chassis, so just swapping it is not possible.

No matter, I moved every other part from the drive I wanted to recover. To make a long story short, it didn't work. The drive wouldn't read properly.

But it was still a fascinating experiment.

Oh Em Gee

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:36:00 -0500

Before leaving a foreign country it's always nice to do a little bit of duty-free shopping. Alcohol is a good place to start. Now, there are some bottles that are a little out of my price range, and then there are ones that are just simply ridiculous.

An example of the latter is this bottle of Glenfiddich. While a pricetag of NTD288,000 might not seem like any meaningful number, with today's exchange rate of 30.7262, that is in fact a bottle that is damned near ten thousand dollars. Granted, it's older than my father. I've always wondered how a five hundred dollar shot tastes...

I felt cheap and bought a hundred dollar bottle of scotch instead.

Strangest Thing Ever

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:51:00 -0500

I am on my way once again from Ottawa to Taipei. The trip isn't starting well, as I've already been at YOW for almost an hour after I was supposed to land in Toronto. The plane had a flat tire. Go figure.

But the strangest thing happened while I was waiting for my flight. Two things that my brain could not process simultaneously: I was staring into the face of radio host Lowell Green, but the person I was looking at was wearing a Xandros shirt. Very unusual. This was somewhat difficult to resolve, so my brain paused for a moment. When he asked "Can I help you?", only then did the voice straighten out my confusion. Apparently his son-in-law works in my office.

Hopefully the rest of this trip goes more smoothly. The sun's going to go down in a couple of hours and I still have three planes ahead of me today!

A Clean Engine is a Happy Engine

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:23:00 -0500

The checklist is done. I set out earlier this summer to take care of everything I knew was wrong with the car when I bought it, and a few new things.

Earlier this summer, mechanics took handled new tires, new control arm bushings, and new rear brakes. Then I got some rust taken care of, a new windshield, and filled in some paint chips by myself.

Well, today seemed like a nice day for some car work. Seeing as I've never, ever poked around the engine of my car, there was plenty to do. I started with the cabin air filter; it was all clogged and was starting to get mouldy. Then, an oil change. I've never done one of those before. It's amazing, the oil filter in this car is in a canister right at the front of the engine, on the top. Super accessible, really easy. Then I cleaned the mass air flow sensor. Finally, I took the cover off the engine and checked up on the spark plugs.

With a clean bill of health, and a completed checklist, the engine deserved a little bit of cleaning up. It's true, a clean engine is a happy engine.

Beautiful BC

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:55:00 -0500

The vacation is over now, it's the end of August, but I thought I would take a few minutes to reminisce about the land of the mountains falling into the ocean...

The second leg of our vacation was more relaxed than the first. Everyone was exhausted and so we took it easy. That's how family vacations go. We visited (obviously) Vancouver, Victoria, Butchart Gardens, Whistler, Squamish, the Science Place, and everything along the way. We also visited many of the upcoming Olympic sites. Throw a wedding in there, and all of the time flies right by. I found myself not in a mood to take too many photos, but I got some fantastic ones of plants.

One of the highlights of the trip was probably driving the Rav4 down the very twisty and very steep highway 5 between Merritt and Hope. Wow.

WestJet was its usual chipper self. On the flight home, the entire safety demonstration was recited as a poem.