I took my inverted pendulum balancing robot, added a camera and wireless transmitter, and let everyone around the office take a spin. The event was not without mishap, but it’s a lot of fun to watch people interact with the robot, and not so much fun when they try to block it’s view, or just don’t get out of it’s way. Or they kick volleyballs at it. That’s just mean.

I’ve been trying to install Windows Vista since RC1. I have burned 4 coaster DVD’s that would get some percent of the way through the install and then fail with corrupt file errors. I don’t really need Vista, but I wanted to play with it nevertheless. I also picked up an ATI HDTV Wonder PCI with some Christmas money, and without Windows XP Media Center Edition, I’m stuck using ATI’s crummy media center software for watching and recording TV. It doesn’t even have a decent built in program guide.

So, I spent some of Friday night and Saturday giving Vista one more try at installing. I have 3 hard drives in my PC, so i cleared one of the partitions and went to work. I burned a DVD and tried to install from within Windows XP, which is entirely possible. However, I got the dreaded “corrupt file” error twice in a row. After consulting Google, I found out that mounting the Vista ISO using a virtual drive tool like Daemon tools will work for the install, since apparently the Vista installer copies all the relevant data to the hard drive, modifies the boot sector to boot, then does all the nitty gritty install stuff, but at that point you don’t need the install disc anymore.

After updating my Motherboard’s bios and giving Vista its time to install, I had a new machine up and going. Everything on the Microsoft site claims the HDTV Wonder is compatible with Vista, but the first message I got about hardware was that it wasn’t. Later I found out that Vista had installed the drivers for the Digital side of the tuner but not the analog side. I installed the Krams Driver and followed the instructions, but Media Center still refused to cooperate. Browsing the Vista Device Manager, I saw that there was a hardware component that hadn’t installed correctly. I clicked on it and did an auto update of the driver, and viola, the Analog and Digital components of the HTDV Wonder installed. Rebooting and running Media Center one more time gave me live TV, but with much studdering and skipping.

Eventually I found out that when I updated the Bios, I hadn’t reset my CPU clock, so my processor was running at about half horsepower. Fixing this made most of the studdering go away, but not all. It seems that my Athlon XP 3000+ at 2GHz just isn’t enough for Vista and Media Center, even with nothing else running. The same setup nets about 35% CPU usage on XP using the ATI media center. Arrrrg.

So, at least until I get a chance to upgrade my hardware, I’m going to have to stick with XP. My general impression of Vista is that it doesn’t have enough new stuff to warrant a change just for the heck of it, but it is fun to play with and pretty to look at. I’ve had some further problems with the ATI Catalyst Control Center not allowing me to change to the right screen resolutions, but other than that most things have been smooth.

One point to make, but that most who read this far will already know: Vista doesn’t have any major advantages over XP that I’ve found yet. If your computer is working for you fine as it is, you probably don’t have any real reason to upgrade. But, you probably didn’t have to read all of my rambling to figure that one out.

Here’s the GPS-track from last weekend’s Death Valley Trip, with altitude shown by color. I actually made it about 200 feet higher than shown in this track; I didn’t have the GPS with me whenI summited Bennett Peak Monday morning.

Gallery 2.0 was released a few weeks ago, with promises of easy install and easy upgrading from old gallery versions. Since I’ve been using Gallery for a few years now, I went for the upgrade. I’ve been using flickr for my more important photos lately anyway, so I didn’t have much to lose. I installed last week, but as anyone stopping in on the local gallery may have noticed, not all of my photos made it through the update. I didn’t lose anything, but Gallery 2.0 just can’t seem to import some photos from old albums. As of yesterday, I’ve imported everthing that the auto-importer would let me, but I’ll have to go back in manually and figure out what all is missing. The problem lies in that the importer, being all automated, fails on a few specific images. In the process, it freezes, and there is no way to skip that image and go on with the import process for the rest of an album. So, the gallery is back up, but will be missing major parts of some of the albums until I can get this worked through. This all makes me wish Flickr would add a few of my most desired features—mainly a gallery-like interface with sorting so that my picts come up in the order I want them to—and I could just make the big move to all flickr.

Since Google released the Google Maps API today, I took the liberty of hacking together a quick Amateur Radio Automatic Packet Reporting System ( APRS ) viewer for Google Maps. The first go at this took about 20 lines of code, but I plan to continue working on it and hopefully turn it into something useful. Reading the full api documentation, there is a lot of functionality that can be had in Google Maps.

The link to the Google Maps APRS page is http://gAPRS.net.

For those of you outside the Ham Radio loop, APRS is a system by which Amateur Radio Operators can transmit their position, as well as any number of other bits of information, over the airwaves for others to receive and decode. Popular sites which achieves much more functionality than my little hack are findu.com and APRSWorld.Net, both of which use free US Census Bureau Tiger maps.

Special thanks to Jim, KB0THN, for access to the APRSWorld.Net APRS database.

A few months ago, Google rolled out Google Maps, in my opinion the absolute best mapping site out there. Yesterday afternoon, Google added to the already superb service by integrating color satellite (or aerial) photography to the mapping options. Now, you can not only find your house like you can at Terraserver, but you can see it in color and from a recent image. Google has gone with tradition however, and, just like Terraserver and SpaceImaging, blurs the roofs of the White House and surrounding buildings, presumably to obscure the Secret Service posts on those roofs as well as a number of other buildings in the greater D.C. area. The National Security Agency doesn’t get the same treatment, but that’s not too suprising since there’s nothing too secret about the roofs around Ft. Meade. The airfield at Groom Lake, NV is only shown using the lower-resolution, presumably older imaging, although since Area 51 is in the middle of the desert, this isn’t too suprising. Many less-populated rural areas are covered using the same resolution.

I would like if they added a feature that would allow one to use the maps that they generate – right now the only way to save a map is to use a print-screen and crop out the map. This has a number of shortcomings related to the scale and location properties of the map, and keeps people from using the maps in applications outside of the maps.google.com domain.

Overall, good job Google. Keep the goodies coming!

Finally I got a job interview. Good thing? Heck yeah it is. Good job? Looks like it very well could be. Relocation? Maryland. Hmmm. Never been to Maryland. But, I’ll get to see how I like it early next month, when I fly up for the interview. Do I want to move? Well, I’m not completely against it. I have good reasons to stay and good reasons to go, but if it came down to it, I would move, given that the job paid for the expense of doing so, and that it was a job that I wouldn’t have a chance of finding down here. This one definitely covers both bases. We’ll see how things go and I’ll try to keep you up to date.

Another finally—finally I got that computer I was struggling with last week finished up. I’m letting it run a bit and burn-in it’s new 160GB hard drive, but it looks as if everything has worked out fine.

So the computer I’ve been working on for the last 7 hours? Well, I got everything installed pretty much how I wanted it – all the applications it needed to have, documents getting moved to their respective homes, and I decided to do a little cleaning up so that I could set the thing up to defragment as I slept. I’m uninstalling a couple of programs I need when KER-CLUNK-KER-CLUNK-KER-CLUNK-KER-CLUNK-KER-CLUNK, the thing starts clunking more than a ’54 chevy. I pull the side of the box off to make sure of which drive it is, and sure enough, it’s the one I’ve just installed the new OS on. I guess that’s for the better, the other drive has sensitive data on it, and this one had just been wiped clean, but give me a break. Now I have to come up with another drive and go through this fiasco again. Of course, I did learn a couple of things (XP won’t install to a slave drive that doesn’t have a master, even though the drive has no problem), and I’ll be able to do this quicker the next time around, but still. Not the best ending to an already-mediocre day. I’m getting some sleep.

I’m learning what it’s like to navigate the web without the luxury of a mouse. Mine is currently being used to do a reinstall on the computer a desk over. We don’t really think about it much, but there are scores of people out there that, for one reason or another, don’t get to enjoy the ease of “point and click.” Some of them are blind, some are disabled and can’t use a mouse the way that most of us would, and I’m sure that there are other reasons that I haven’t even contemplated. Nonetheless, these folks get the tedious task of wading though the scores of links on a normal page (like CNN or eBay) just to get to the one link or text box that they want.

While writing this, I had to hit tab about 20 times just to get to the text box that lets me type anything. As I’ve been doing a whorde of web design lately, I’ve been working hard to make sure that my sites are easy to navigate and make sense to alternate browsers, like the text browser lynx or a braille reading browser. This little exercise has definitely shown me how important that really is. On google.com for example, I had to hit tab 11 times before I got to the first link. To get to each subsequent returned page, I had to hit tab another 4 times. I’m sure those that browse the web this way often have their own little tricks, but personally I wouldn’t have the patience to do it.

Anyway, I’m hard at work trying to get Katie’s dad’s computer back in line. I installed XP on it a few weeks back and a couple of days ago it decided to loose ntoskrnl.exe. For those non-tech-geeks in the audience, that is the file that runs the whole computer. Without it the computer won’t even start. I tried all the normal fixes for this problem but with no luck. So, through Farris’ generosity, I’ve installed a new hard drive and I’m installing windows fresh on it, with hopes of salvaging all of the data from the old hard drive once this is running.