An update

Being unemployed should in theory give you lots of spare time. It’s a nice theory, it hasn’t worked out in practice – hence lack of updates here.

Job hunting happens and I’m keeping an eye on my old lab and things happening there, I see that two projects I’ve been associated with in the past or are directly related to my research have recently made the news, the test of the ATLAS Magnet at CERN and the report from research at the University of Rochester of the formation of Black Metals.

I worked for a period of two years in the ATLAS collaboration before drastically switching field and working with lasers for structuring materials. I’ll be following both these stories pretty closely in the coming months.

WinPic800 + Willem Programmer + Linux

I’ve just solved one of the last problems that had me booting into Windows every so often – being able to program Eproms and Pics.

I’d never had much luck running WinPic800 or the eprom software under wine on linux. Now with the updated version of wine I’ve found I can. Yay!

The following is taken from several websites and usenet postings – I’ve not seen all the info in once place, so I’m putting it here.

1) Install latest version of wine – at time of writing this is 0.9.22 (I make no promisses this will work with earlier or later versions of wine)

2) Run winecfg and selected Win98 as the emulated windows version. Later versions do not allow direct port access that the programmer software uses.

3) Run regedit and add the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/wine/VDM/ppdev/

4) Add a new string value to that key (type REG_SZ (this is the default anyway))

378 /dev/parport0

5) Make sure you have the ppdev kernel module loaded (it usually is by default)

6) [nasty evil hack] chmod 777 /dev/parport0

7) Test out the software.

Joblessness

Last week I joined the ranks of the great unwashed. Not that this has actually stopped me from going to work – I mean I have a job, I’m just not getting paid for it. If nothing else, going to the lab gets me somewhere warm, and stops unwise self experimentation on the effects of a diet composed entirely of twix bars.

I’m applying for jobs all over the world now. London, Holland, Germany, Singapore.

Singapore? What the fuck? I don’t speak the language, I’d never get any work done as I’d be in a restaurant all day and I’d never survive the flight over. What was I thinking.
I wonder if they import twix or double decker bars.

Oh. And Antarctica. I think you get to travel by sea for that one.

Apple batteries and Virgin Atlantic

I see from Slashdot reports that Virgin Atlantic are banning all Apple and Dell batteries due to potential fire hazards. The fact it is the Sony made batteries that exhibit this fault, and are found in many other laptops besides those made by Apple and Dell seems to have been ignored.

At the second security checkpoint, just before boarding the plane at Heathrow, I was asked to remove the battery from my Powerbook. The Powerbook was in sleep mode at the time, so I had to stand to one side, start up and then shut down the machine to safely remove the battery. Once done I presented the Powerbook and battery to a second guard who asked why I had done this and professed to know nothing about such a ban. On the return trip, no one said anything about the battery.

This seems more like an effort to be seen to be doing something on the part of Virgin Atlantic rather than any real attempt to prevent a potential problem. I’ll not argue that Li batteries are harmless, indeed I read recently in a us.mil report that modern fully charged Li-Polymer batteries are approaching 1/3 the energy density of TNT. The report illustrated this with dramatic photographs of the results of batteries malfunctioning in active service.

I wonder just how many other Li batteries were on that Heathrow-Dulles flight that were not on the banned list. I know I was carrying another four in my hand luggage; PSP, camera & spare and mobile ‘phone.