Managed to get the K2 theme upgraded, so at least Learn Something looks like it did before the Great Upheaval. I seem to have widget problems, my categories are still broken, and WPG2 still won’t let me add pictures to posts, but one thing at a time.
Monthly Archive for August, 2008
More fun updating the site. I had to update the Wordpress engine again and this time I lost my categories and my theme doesn’t work right. Also Gallery2 images can’t be placed in posts any more.
I want some sleep so I’m setting the theme to the default and I’ll fix the rest tomorrow.
WordPress is close to being a really great product, but it’s fragile and finicky. It took me more hours than it should have to upgrade it. Why can’t I just click the Upgrade button? Maybe it’s time to shop for a new CMS.
Monday my Zilla controller arrived. Yowza! One less excuse for not getting the car running.
I spent much of the day happily rearranging the parts I plan to put in a water-resistant box in the rear of the Ghia. I think I have the correct layout now. It will minimize wiring and coolant hose runs and fit all the bits I want to keep dry — the Zilla and Hairball, the potbox, the DC/DC, and the contactors.
There’s a problem — or opportunity — though. The Zilla controller comes in two pieces: the power stage, the one that does all the heavy lifting of feeding battery power to the motor, and the Hairball, which is much smaller and covered with places to connect little wires to. The Hairball makes all the decisions and tells the Zilla power stage what to do. There are several versions of the Hairball, with different capabilities.
You’re way ahead of me, aren’t you? Yep, they sent me the wrong Hairball. I ordered the base version, which senses the throttle position by reading the resistance from something called a potbox, which is essentially a volume knob (potentiometer) with an arm on it that the throttle cable pulls on. What they sent me expects something called a Hall Effect Pedal Assembly, which is a replacement for the entire accelerator pedal that contains Hall effect sensors and wires directly to the Hairball. The Hairball they sent me won’t work with a potbox, so to use it I need to buy a HEPA.
The advantage of the HEPA is no potentiometers. They wear out, get dirty and crackly like the volume knob in your stereo, and stick. On your stereo that’s not a huge deal, but the Zilla equivalent to crackly music is a car that lurches or stumbles. The Hall effect sensors should last pretty much forever with no degradation, plus there’s no throttle cable or throttle springs or separate pot box to deal with.
The problem is that I’ve already spent the money on the potbox etc.
So now I’m faced with trading in the the better Hairball for the crappy one and hating myself in a few years when the potbox dies, or keeping the better Hairball paying more money for the HEPA and feeling smug about it for as long as I own the car.
Hmmm. Looking at my choice of words there, it looks like I may have made my decision.
I just had the first problem with my Samsung S1050 camera.
I noticed that some of the pictures I uploaded had funny dates on them, so I went into the camera to look at the date setup.
The page has three items: the date at the top, 08/05/08, then the time, then a setting to allow you to choose whether you want mm/dd/yy, yy/mm/dd, etc.
After flailing around with it, and actually calling Samsung and confusing the poor guy on the phone so much he dropped my call (on purpose? hmmm) I finally figured out what the problem is.
The date at the top of the screen, where you can set the camera date, is ALWAYS in yy/mm/dd format, no matter what it says elsewhere. I finally figured it out when I was trying to set the month and it started at 7 and went up to 50. That’s not days or months, so it has to be years. Similarly the second field goes from 1 to 12, and the third from 1 to 31.
Last month’s pictures came in as having been taken in 2007, which is because last month was month 7, and I thought I was entering the month because THAT’S WHAT THE CAMERA SAID I WAS ENTERING! Or so I thought.
I looked it up in the documentation, and there’s a reference to this in the section for initally configuring the camera. But not in the section for setting the date.
So what kind of a bug is this?
I guess officially it’s a documentation bug. It’s not a software bug, because it’s working as designed. IMO, it’s a design problem; specifically a user interface problem. The data entry fields are not labeled as to function. However, at the bottom of the screen, there’s a place to choose your date display format. I thought that this meant that the data entry fields must be arranged according to the way you’ve chosen to format your date displays.
I think I’ll see if Tog has seen this one.
I’m all done with my summer internship at the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. They had me working on some fancy Excel spreadsheets to help them predict the wind speed at the spaceport site. The internship was sponsored by the New Mexico Spacegrant Consortium, which does things like that.
I had a really good time, and I think I was able to help the Spaceport Authority a little bit. I plan to get back to them once I’m out of school and see if they’ll hire me.
Not only did I have fun, do something in line with my mission statement (”To contribute in a material way to the creation of a spacefaring civilization”), and get paid, I also get to give a little talk about my experience at the 2008 ISPCS conference. This means I get to go this year! Yay! I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get into this conference for a couple of years now.
I recommend you check out Spacegrant’s web site if you’re a New Mexico student looking for an interesting and well-paid internship, or perhaps a scholarship. Thanks, guys!
Oh yeah. My final report is available in the download area. Or just click here.
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