:: ham and eggs from frgo ::

Once upon a time (May 25th 2010) there was a lonesome ML 420 CDI driver jetting along the German Highway A5 at a comfortable speed of just above 230 km/h. Clear open skies, a clear open highway. Nothing in the way for having a really good ride from South Germany to the famous city of Bremen, which, as people say, is a nice city in the Northern part of Germany. As it happens, too good a situation really may be, at times, too good to last longer than a few minutes. With a sudden "Klong !!!" the jolly ride became an Adrenaline-errupting momentary "Huh???" snatch. Roaring sound from the engine, loss of power, loss of speed, being in the third leftmost lane, trucks on the two right lanes with no space to go in between, now at 40 km/h on the left lane of the highway - and then, relief. The Bruchsal rest stop appeared and with the last remaining power and speed I managed to pull right and reach a safe place. Wow, ok, I mean, it went well, sure - but: What now? Ok, so there...

Once upon a time there was a rich SLIME version that had all bateries included in a few files. Now this old, old version is long gone. The Powers Of SLIME deleted the function slime-close-parens-at-point whose use and benefit is described in this blog post of Bill Clementson . For those requiring this exact feature here's the original code of that function: (setq slime-close-parens-limit 16) (defun slime-close-parens-at-point () "Close parenthesis at point to complete the top-level-form. Simply inserts ')' characters at point until `beginning-of-defun' and `end-of-defun' execute without errors, or `slime-close-parens-limit' is exceeded." (interactive) (loop for i from 1 to slime-close-parens-limit until (save-excursion (slime-beginning-of-defun) (ignore-errors (slime-end-of-defun) t)) do (insert ")"))) In addition to putting this in my .emacs file I have also the following line in it: (define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "...

A good friend made me being a hero: http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1263510185725RA80 That really put me to burst into a serious laugh attack - Thanks so much, Harry, for sharing this...

So, what's ACE+TAO? It's big, it's complex, it's middleware! See more info at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html and at http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html . In trying to compile ACE 5.7.5 and TAO 1.7.5 on my Mac OS X 10.5.8 system I encountered some strange error messages while linking. These were duplicate symbol errors I couldn't really track down to their root cause but was able to find simple cures. For those poor souls also hitting those faults the following list of changes may help: File $ACE_ROOT/ace/Based_Pointer_Repository.h File $ACE_ROOT/ace/Obstack.h Re 1. : File $ACE_ROOT/ace/Based_Pointer_Repository.h I had to comment out the ACE_SINGLE_DECLARATION on lines 82 to 84: /* - frgo, 2010-01-03 /// Declare a process wide singleton ACE_SINGLETON_DECLARE (ACE_Singleton, ACE_Based_Pointer_Repository, ACE_SYNCH_RW_MUTEX) */ Re 2. : File $ACE_ROOT/ace/Obstack.h I had to comment out the ACE_SINGLE_DE...

This is a follow-up to Part 1 . We're making progress: The panels are mounted on the tracking mast and we now have an impression of what 20 square meters look like when mounted on top of a 5 m mast... But see for yourself: Impressive, ha? Yep. Hope the neighbours will not complain ... It's our ground, sure, but the neighbours may still not be that happy... We'll see. Maybe a Sun Power Party will help ;-) Next step: Monitoring software and web publishing software to be installed and configured... To be continued. Cheers - Frank

The new year 2009 startet with a lot of changes - new company, new job, new ideas. One of those ideas was to reduce our CO2 footprint - and we quickly set on a set of things we wanted to do: Setup a photovoltaics plant that tracks the sun, and Setup solar panels to create heated liquid supporting our heating system. So, here it is: Step 1: Setting up the photovoltaics system. The tracking mount is on a mast that is about 5 meters high, and puts the DC panels right on top of our garage. When fully lit by the sun we will be able to get 4.5 kVA peak from the plant, amount to 6000 kWh per year. I shot a few photos from the poor craftsmen working in strong rain... This shows the truck taking heavy steel parts to the mast - only a few centimeters from our neighbour's house. As we had a major construction going on at the house at the same time they put all the parts straight into our garden - creating, well, a bit of chaos .... After about half-an-hour the fast-hardening cement w...

The RF amplifier will work with the tetrode tube GU-84b. On the left you see the anode voltage transformer - that beast delivers 2 500 Volts at 2 Amperes in continuous service. Current work is to program the controller that handles the operation of the power supply. The controller is based on the AVR microcontroller ATmega16 - a very flexible 8 bit CPU that can be programmed in C language using the GNU C compiler gcc in its avr-gcc incarnation ...  All this is done on a MacBookPro using publicly available tools on Mac OS X (10.5.2 currently). It's pure fun - I can tell you. You should try it one day... Oh, btw, the transformer weighs a woppy 52 kg.  Building the cabinet for the power supply is just about to be completed - and was not an easy task. But hey, it's just a hobby ... Now for the details - An AVR code excerpt: // ---------------------------------------------------- // MAIN // --------------------------...