Well, it’s been a while since I last posted something other than a release notice for one of my WordPress plugins, so here goes…

It’s been a busy few months. For a large part of November (and the first week of December) last year, I was on site at two customer sites in Scotland. It was a mixture of Aberdeen and Inverness, when the snows hit… thankfully I got out of Aberdeen just in time although my drive to Inverness was pretty scary. Heavy snow, lots of slush and snow on the roads. I lost it on a traffic island at one stage, thankfully I recovered. Thankfully I didn’t have to drive the whole way in it. It cleaned up and turned to rain about half way there, but still, driving in the middle of nowhere in the dark, freezing conditions. Fun Fun Fun… and the worst of it is, I’d do it again tomorrow if I could

In Aberdeen, didn’t get too many chances to visit restaurants and stuff, busy busy busy, but I did manage to hit Rustico in the center of Aberdeen and Four Mile House on the outskirts. Both really nice food. Rustico is an Italian place and Four Mile House is more traditional fayre. At Rustico, I tried squid for the first time… people laugh when I describe it as fishy chicken, but thats the only way I can think of to describe it. Had a lovely seafood pasta… king prawns, kalamari, mussels and some big chunks of some nice meaty white fish. Really nice. The only negative point about Rustico was the number of staff… one to take your coat, one to take you to a table, one to take your order, one to bring your drinks, one to bring your food, one to smother your food in parmesan and yet another to grind your salt and pepper for you… I like to see one member of staff so you have a chance to build a bit of a rapport with them.. and you feel more inclined to leave a tip.

Four Mile House was nice too, but it is more traditional fayre, but if thats your cup of tea, I’d highly recommend it, in fact I’d highly recommend both places.

Onto Inverness and well… we (I was with a colleague) were staying just up the hill from the castle. A 5 minute walk away was The Castle Tavern. Real ale and nice food. ’nuff said. I tried so many beers while I was there. Also pushed the culinary boat out a little… tried venison, pheasant and haggis. They are all quite nice, but I don’t think I’d have pheasant again in a rush… especially as it had extra lead shot Also had tapas for the first time (in a little Spanish restaurant on the opposite side of the road to the Castle Tavern)… really good.

And now, well, I was back in Aberdeen last week but right now, I’m sat in the Wellington Park Hotel in central Belfast. There are a few things I like about coming to Belfast.

1. The Barking Dog – I love this place. The food is excellent. It has a nice atmosphere (even if you’re there on your own, which I normally am) and it serves my favourite local brew, Belfast Black, brewed by The Whitewater Brewery down the coast in Kilkeel.
2. The Wellie Park’s Hot Chocolate – Yummy. Hot, milky, choclatey and normally accompanied by delicious marshmallows.
3. Villa Italia – Just down the road from the Wellie Park, past Queens University Students Union is Villa Italia. No suprise, it’s an Italian restaurant. The food is fantastic. Was there last night, had squid stuffed with rice and prawns served with a tomato, garlic and sweet chilli sauce, followed by half a roast duck served with roast apple and accompanying vegetables. Every meal I’ve had there has been amazing.
4. Daltons Sandwich Shop – In Lisburn town center you’ll find Daltons, nestled in the pedestrianised area just down from what I believe is the Linen musem. This place does a mean chicken ceasar sandwich, in fact they do a whole range of amazing sandwiches. But the chicken ceasar… possibly the best sandwich I’ve eaten.
5. The Castle Gallery in Lisburn – I bought my first painting from here, and then I bought another. A couple of amazing Lorna Miller cockerels. I shouldn’t go in here, but I made the mistake today. No Lorna Miller’s that I really liked (don’t get me wrong, the figures Andy had in the gallery were good, but they don’t float my boat like her cockerels), but I did see a couple of paintings by Dennis Orme Shaw I really liked… maybe I’ll go and buy them tomorrow

There are a whole bunch of things I like about Belfast, particularly a lot of the restaurants just past the Uni. Apparently there is a good chinese place on the opposite corner to The Barking Dog, so maybe I’ll give it a try the next time I’m here.

Paintings… I never thought I’d be one for art gallery’s… normally I’d just shuffle past as I went about my business, but that first painting. I have no clue why it grabbed me, but it did. I regretted not going in there and asking about it as soon as I got on the plane to fly home and then I just kept thinking about it. Hoping it would still be there the next time I was out here. Thankfully it was and that as they say was that… I bought it. I’d actually bought a painting! And then another. And now, well, I like looking at them and having a mooch round other arty places. Suddenly I can appreciate them. I just wish I had more cash. I saw a really nice one on display in Aberdeen airport. Way out of my price range unfortunately, but I would have loved to have it hanging on my wall so I could enjoy it at any time.

I’ll probably be back to my usual release notices only soon. I decided late in 2009 that I’d had enough of not having B.Sc. after my name, so I signed up to do a B.Sc. in Computational and Mathematical sciences with the Open University. To my family, I think they thought this was a bit odd… the computing they could understand, but maths! I passed my GCSE maths with flying colours, but A-Level maths… I just didn’t get calculus and from that point all further studies in physics, maths and electronics were doomed. But, I decided I’d give it a serious try with the OU and I picked a level 2 computing course (M255 – Object oriented programming with Java) and a level 1 maths course (MST121 – The title of the course escapes me). I hated the computing course, absolutely hated it. Being told not to handle errors and such like was just so alien to me, I did it anyway and lost points, but despite my lack of interest I still managed a fairly respectable grade 2 pass (only 7 points short of a distinction courtesy of a poor exam result), but the maths… can’t get enough of the stuff. So much so, that I’ve actually switched to doing a straight maths degree.

So, this year I’m taking two maths courses. MS221 which is a continuation of MST121 and the OU’s pure maths course M208. As a result, I suspect my time for fun stuff will be limited until October again, but hey ho. I thoroughly enjoyed the maths and if I knuckle down I’m fairly confident I’ll be OK. I actually get a lot of what we’re doing now. It just kind of clicked.

And on that note, I’d better knuckle down and get this software tweak I’m working on finished so I can deliver it to the customer tomorrow morning. I had hoped to get ACFW Version 1.0.0 finished whilst I was out her, but work has overrun somewhat and I’ve just not had the chance. Still, there is the weekend… oops… no scratch that… LittleBigPlanet 2 is released tomorrow… bye bye weekend Maybe I’ll write a little review if I can squeeze it in between Sackboy and erm… more Sackyboy

Well, I figured it was about time I gave the site a major overhaul, so here we have it.

The new theme is based on a theme by styleshout, developed by Ekta Paneri. I was hoping to use one straight out of the box so to speak to save time, but unfortunately that wasn’t to be. Once I got it plugged into the widgets sidebar system it needed some serious tweaks for some reason… still… its working now and looking funky in Opera (although I can’t seem to resolve the spacing between the text and the helmets), IE (missing the helmets because IE is a pig) and Mozilla/Firefox.

The only problem is that for some of it to work properly I’ve had to lose the Markup plug-in… so, its going to take me a while to go through all the posts and such and sort all that out (what a chore ). But once its done, it should be funky.

With regards to comments and such like… if you want to comment, then you’ll have to sign-up an account, sorry about that, but I’ve closed comments to all but registered users simply because of the amount of spam I was having to delete.

Anyhow, if you spot a problem with the new theme or anything else on the site, drop me a mail at athena at outer hyphen reaches dot come.

Known issues with the site:-

• Opera – Versions earlier than 7 may have problems with scripts for the event calendar and also display the helmets for every list items in the side bars
• IE – Has problems… nuff said.

I’ve been tweaking now for quite a while and well, I have to say, I’m getting real tired of trying to support multiple browsers. With The Outer Reaches I had a nightmare, and that uses tables… but with CSS… layout is specific to each rendering engine, and that is a complete drag.

Surely there is a rendering model in the CSS specification… there must be for it to mean something, so why in the hell does it vary from browser to browser. So far, IE is the worst… whilst it might have a funky DOM and some uber cool goodness (somewhere… I think), it sucks. Opera… well… the less said about that the better. I stopped supporting Opera with OR when their security model blocked the graphics pack. And that brings me onto another thing… why in gods name don’t they resolve the issues with parsing images/stylesheets instead of blocking pages from using local content… I have a legitimate reason to use local content but its becoming increasingly difficult.

Couple that with the fact that IE 7 is real picky about sites using SSL with their own self signed cert’s… it all make up for one big ARGH!!!!!

FireFox and Mozilla all the way baby

So why do I still use Mozilla? Simple… my passwords. I have the majority noted down, but its still a major pain in the butt having to dig them all out… so, why on earth doesn’t FireFox include a password importer for Mozilla password files?

Anyhow… enough of this, I have work to do

Just thought I’d mention this as its something I’d never considered before when diagnosing problems with faulty electronics and if it saves someone else a headache, then its all good.

If you are tech savvy and know what an electrolytic capacitor is and what it does when used for power supply smoothing, you can skip this next section.

For those of you who don’t know what an electrolytic capacitor, here’s a quick run through.

Capacitors are electronic components that store electrical charge. Electrolytic capacitors are a special variaety, most are made out of aluminium foil, paper and a substance called ‘the electrolyte’. This is all wrapped up and sealed in a small aluminium can. These capacitors are mostly used for smoothing power supplies. The general idea is that you connect one across your power supply lines. It charges up to the voltage present on the lines, then if the voltage dips mometarily, the charge from the capacitor will supplement the power and help smooth out the bump. That in a paragraph is what these components are and what they do… in one case.

The problem with them is that they are quite volatile. The electrolyte is normally an unpleasant concoction of chemicals designed (I think) to help store the largest possible charge in the smallest possible area. The particular problem this post refers to is caused by bad electrolyte. By bad I mean it degrades easily, and when it does, the capacitors can fail. When they fail, they can explode and spew their content all over the inside of the equipment they are in. A prelude to this is sometimes bulging of the can of the capacitor and/or leaking electrolyte.

In bad cases, the electrolyte can breakdown completely, when this happens a short circuit can develop and this will ultimately result in big problems.

So far in the last 18 months or so I have had to repair three items of kit… all failed because of faulty capacitors. The first was our DVD player. It started suffering problems… tray wouldn’t open, when it did, it wouldn’t close… it had intermittent crashes at various points. These problems got worse until it finally gave up the ghost. A quick peek inside and it became obvious what the problem was. An electrolytic cap on the power supply board was bulging. Whipped it off the board, stuck in a new replacement, fired it up… perfect. The second item of kit was a little trickier to deal with as it is significantly more complex and a hell of a lot more expensive to replace.

Spirit’s computer. EEP It just stopped. After having numerous problems with it, that gradually got worse (these problems included random crashes, weird BSOD’s, graphics cards appearing to fail, lots of memory access errors and numerous others), it finally got the point where it wouldn’t even run past the BIOS POST. And towards the end of 2005, my development database server had become so unstable it was unuseable. This particular machine had been getting worse and worse over about 2 years… it started with simple hang ups when running X but progressed to the point where the only way it would survive the day was if it was fired up and left well alone. These two machines are now running sweet after I risked it and replaced all the electrolytic caps on the motherboards myself.

Anyhow, the point is, if you are experiencing weird problems you just can’t explain or get rid of, then this could be the cause. You can, if you feel up to it handle the recapping of a motherboard yourself, but its not a nice job. It took me over 6 hours to recap Spirit’s motherboard and about the same plus numerous trips to the local RS trade counter to fix up mine. But it was worth it. The graphics card we thought was failing appears to be working perfectly. The machines seems to be running better (can’t explain this) and so far they’ve been used pretty heavily without any problems (touch wood).

My one piece of advice, which is covered on badcaps.net (a site dedicated to the problems of numerous motherboards which have failed due to faulty caps) is always use the correct size of capacitors. This applies to the capacitance value (this is measured in Farads, although a Farad is rather a large unit, so most electrolytic caps use micro-farads (uF) to measure their capacitance). The rating (this is measured in Volts. The rating of a replacement must be equivalent or greater than the rating of the existing part). And last but by no means least, the physical dimensions. Because I needed to get the machines up and running in a hurry, I took a couple of gambles. I didn’t check the length. Most caps used on motherboards are radial devices (that is the two connection leads protrude from one end, allowing the device to stand vertically), since they have a height above the board surface, if they are too long they can get in the way of heatsinks and expansion cards. So, if in doubt, double check what you can get away with by measuring it up. The other critical dimension is the diameter. If the devices are sitting right next to each other on the board, if they are too big, you won’t be able to replace them.

Thats all I have to say, apart from thanks to badcaps.net for the excellent information.