I've been working on a stepper based remote focuser for my telescope. I wrote some code last year to run on an Atmel AVR Butterfly and last week decided to pick up the project again as I'd be doing more imaging. Having a remote focuser is a tremendous asset when the scope is outside and I'm inside, obviously. What's more is that such a setup can focus automatically with the right software.

In any case, first order of business was to rebuild and reload the software. That quickly turned disasterous with two dead butterflies. I use the Ecros Tech butterfly carrier by the way. Makes working with the butterfly sooo much nicer. The problem was the AVR Studio 4.13 SP2 could not read nor set the fuses on the butterfly. I tried this with both JTAGISP and STK500 based ISP. Luckily when researching a different topic someone sent me to http://www.olimex.com and I happened to notice a blurb about a bug in AVR Studio that manifests itself like this. The version they recommended to install wasn't there anymore but the 4.14 beta was and it does indeed fix the problem! Check it out over here: http://www.atmel.no/beta_ware/

I had to reset a bunch of fuses but after a little fiddling my butterfly came back to life. I haven't tried the other one yet but I'm pretty sure it can also be saved. Of course this happened on the same day that I bought an AT90USBKey wich frankly beats the pants of a butterfly from an experimenters perpective. The loss of the LCD is a bummer of course but winning USB connectivity is huge.

Not sure if I'm the only one who noticed that Outlook 2003 displays HTML emails differently after IE7 was installed. I use Firefox as my daily browser but finally installed IE7 to investigate an interop problem with one of my sites. I recall some install option about ClearType and I'm pretty sure I said 'ok'. Big mistake. On my Samsung 940B monitor there are colored fringes and blurryness around my text in IE7 and OL2003. So I did a Google search and found this page : http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/03/03/543181.aspx . After reading it I disabled ClearType in IE7 (it's under the advanced tab) and whew! Everything is readable again. I'm sure ClearType is whizbang technology but it doesn't work on my system.

In my Asteroid Occultation site I generate dynamic Google Maps that draw the occultation paths with 5 Polyline elements. One of the things I wanted to do is center the polylines in the displayed map. Easy enough, I parse an XML response with coordinates (the AJAX part of the project) and store those in arrays. Simply take the middle coordinate from the middle polyline and center on that when the map is fully rendered. I wrote something like this:

var pts[];

// store coordinates in pts array

var middle = pts[pts.length / 2];

Easy as pi. Not. For some reason my maps wouldn't always center properly. Adding some debug messages I found that 'middle' was sometimes set to undefined. Unlike other languages I've used in the past (c/c++, VB6, VB.NET, Perl, PHP) if you divide an integer by another integer and use the result as another integer, you get, well, an integer. Not so in Javascript apparently. pts[5.5] is nothing. I assumed, incorrectly, that this would be pts[5] or pts[6]. For my application I don't care if the left or right middle element is chosen.

A little Googling found this article http://rextang.net/blogs/work/archive/2006/01/09/3325.aspx which suggests an easy way to turn a number into an integer. Simply do a bitwise or with 0:

var middle = pts[(pts.length / 2) | 0];

This works great! Someone then posted a comment saying that 'parseInt' is a more readable solution and I agree. I still liked the |0 solution though :)

SD Time's Linkapalooza alerted me to this site which provides 12 standard CSS templates to quickly create a professional appearing website. I think we'll all agree many sites could use a smidgen of professionalism :) Check them out!

This is a classic example of English understatement. I wish I could talk like that. The words I mean, not the accent, that's easy. The way he describes what happened to him (getting arrested in the most violent manner for jaywalking) is a great display of being able to being polite and accusatory at the same time. The vid is a bit long but worth it, I think.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2541133,00.html

After reading about a half dozen reviews online on the Vantec NexStar LX NAS enclosure I decided to get one. I have a small network at home with 3 desktops and a laptop. It makes sense to have a LAN accessible shared storage location to keep things like documents and downloads. We just moved so my budget is a bit limited. The NexStar seemed the ideal solution as it is a BYOD (Bring You Own Disk) solution. I have a few unused IDE drives lying around so this would be cool.

The first disk I tried, an old Maxtor 90840D6 with 8GB capacity did not work over the LAN. It worked fine using the USB connection. Using the web interface I was unable to configure shares on the disk. Bummer. So I put in a somewhat newer Maxtor 52049H4 with 20 GB capacity. Because NAS shares can only reside on a FAT32 partition I had to reformat the drives before installing. It also precludes me from arbitrarily trying other drives I have as they are NTFS drives with content I don't want to lose if I can help it. Back to the 20GB drive. This time I was able to create shares. Wooo! I needed to download an application and figured it was a good opportunity to store this on the NAS box for sharing. Firefox put the .zip on the share without issue. I then attempted to open the archive with 7-Zip . The archive opened fine but files could not be extracted. WinZip couldn't either.

I then proceeded to do various experiments to conclude the following:

• USB access works fine
• ftp writes corrupt files
• ftp reads corrupt files
• NAS reads corrupt files
• NAS writes corrupt files

This failure is so blatant that it's hard to believe Vantec would have shipped a product so horribly broken. It's also hard to believe the device could be so thoroughly broken without any complaints online. I suspect that it's a drive compatibility issue. Somehow these 2 old IDE drives do not work with the NAS/LAN code in de device. Other testers have used newer drives and have not encountered these problems.

Please add a comment if you have any experience (good or bad) with this box. I would prefer to not have to buy a new hard drive but it may be the only solution. I have contacted vantec and hope to hear from them soon.

We'll see what this is good for but I've now claimed my blog on Technorati. I'm supposed to put this snippet on the page:

I had several sites hosted at Blazernetwork for about a year or so. Service was reasonable, not great. Email outages were too frequent but at least they'd get repaired and we'd be up and running again soon after. Not this time. Last Friday afternoon email and web services went off the air and they haven't returned since (it's Tuesday now). All attempts to reach them were fruitless. Apparently they let their domain name expire. Not a good thing when that's needed to translate names into IP addresses.

Thankfully I was able to figure out the IP addresses for the Blazer machines where my stuff is hosted. An old email had the IP address of the mail host and it's still running so I could copy my IMAP folders over to my local computer. I then wrote a simple Perl script that uses wget to attempt retrieval of a file using ftp in the address range of the email server (assuming a 24 bit subnet mask). I then transfered all my files. Finally I needed a copy of my MS SQL database so I wrote another Perl script that attempts to open a socket on the MS SQL port number in that same range of IP addresses. Bingo!

I now use http://www.bananahosting.com which appears to work fine for now. I hope it stays that way as moving websites really is a pain. Luckily it uses HSphere so the learning curve isn't that great. It's a small shop but Johnny is on the ball and provides great support in his forums.