Thursday, July 17, 2008

Spat in me kitchen


It's new kitchen time. Whoopie... I left the project entirely to She Who Can't Be Ignored, but today she pinned me down and waved a book full of central heating radiators at me. I never could have imagined there were so many ways to design something that is essentially a tube with fins.

"Do you like this one?"

"It's fine. It's a radiator, what about it?"

"But do you like it? It's cheaper than the other one"

[Alarm bells start ringing]

"Cheaper? How much was the other one?"

"About two, well, no, slightly over two - depending on the colour"

"Over two what?"

"Two thousand. But don't worry, I wouldn't pay that much for a radiator, it's absurd. This one's only about a thousand..."


[crem is speechless for quite a while]

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Uh-oh...


I've been working on a fairly complicated data capture system of late, and major parts of this system are the transceivers which are responsible for talking to sensors over a wireless link. Each transceiver can handle a couple of hundred sensors, so they're fairly busy and (trust me on this) fairly complicated...

All the parts of this system have unique serial numbers, which the various protocols use to identify them. These serial numbers are really just that - numbers - but in order to reduce the scope for confusion and detect errors I've encoded them as a set of characters. One example is JM99-K634.

"Why is he boring us with all this?" I hear you ask.

Because purely by chance, the system has just decided to use the identifier AE35 for a transceiver... Fans of 2001 will understand that this is not auspicious. I think I'll pretend that one doesn't exist...

Confused?