January 27th, 2010
This is video from last September of my first Ardupilot test. To keep the first test simple, I modified the software configuration to fly a simple fixed heading of 45 degrees when I engage the autopilot from the R/C unit. This worked very well for a while until the last attempt, when something glitched in the software/GPS and commanded a dive into the ground into one of the few trees in the field. The end of the video shows several frames of video as the pieces were stripped off the airplane by the tree. All the electronics survived the crash and I’m rebuilding a new airframe to test in the Spring.
Tags: Ardupilot, autopilot, Easystar, GPS, Hobby
Posted in Ardupilot, Electronics, Hobby | No Comments »
January 11th, 2010
I’m excited to try Charter’s new Docsis 3.0 60 mbit service in St. Louis. Pricing was $30 more than what I’m currently paying for 20/2.
Tags: 60Mbit, Charter, Charter Pipeline
Posted in Charter Issues, Charter Pipeline, Uncategorized | No Comments »
September 7th, 2008
I’ve been watching with interest the progress in CERN’s LHC and the upcoming first proton beam over the 27 km loop. Wednesday, September 10, 2008 is the day and I’m excited to hear how the tests go. The beam will be only in one direction, so any collisions will be from stray particles or beam positioning errors. However, as they calibrate the detectors and other instruments, it won’t be long until the many experiments planned for the LHC will commence. In particular, the search for the Higgs Boson is really exciting since this may finally add the source of mass for particles in the Standard Model.
One really enjoyable overview of the LHC is AlpineKat’s LHC Rap:
Tags: Higgs Boson, LHC, LHC Rap, Particle physics, Science
Posted in LHC, Particle physics, Science, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
June 13th, 2008
We have a suite of regression tests that we wanted to run automatically after our MSbuild build is complete. I’ve implemented these tests as C# code exported from Selenium IDE and preprocessed by some .NET code that I wrote. The tests are then compiled using MSBuild and executed. The problem I ran into that wasn’t clearly documented anywhere was how to run a Selenium RC test as part of a build process – which requires the Java based Selenium RC server running on port 4444. Since we run our test as part of a scheduled task, how do we maintain the Java Selenium server running across logins of the scheduled task?
My first instinct was to run the Selenium server as a Windows service and I found a forum post that provided a .NET service to do this. The problem is that when the service runs in the LocalSystem’s account context, IE was problematic for enabling the proxy that Selenium RC uses during the invocation of tests. Trying to modify the service to run as a legitimate user also didn’t work – since the service was running in a different Windows Station and IE did not run correctly in this mode either.
It turned out the simple solution was to just invoke the Selenium Server from the build batch file and then terminate the server when I was finished with the test. There is a built in command in the command line interpreter named "taskkill" that does the job for me. Here is the .bat file code that I used – and note that the first line kills any java apps that are running so be careful. I needed this line to abort a server in progress if the script or tests failed and left a java session hanging. My build machine doesn’t have any other java things going on so this worked for me. I’m using nunit to invoke my C# tests contained in "jalisngtests.dll". I’m also using the "sleep" command from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.
taskkill /f /im java.exe
sleep 5
start "Selenium Server" java ^
-jar C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0-beta-1\^
selenium-server-1.0-beta-1\selenium-server.jar
copy .\bin\debug\*.dll
sleep 20
nunit-console jalisngtests.dll
taskkill /f /fi "WINDOWTITLE eq Selenium Server"
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Tags: Automated Testing, Selenium, Selenium RC, Windows 2003 Server
Posted in Automated Testing, Selenium, Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Software Development Tips, Software Testing, Windoes 2003 Server | 2 Comments »
June 7th, 2008
After listening to Leo Laporte’s UGM (ultimate gaming machine) discussion on TwitLive last night, I pondered the question of best choice for a new UGM. I am running an Intel Q6600 (quad core 2.4 ghz) processor and have been pleased with it’s performance.
There was a spirited discussion on the show of which would be better – a Q9770 ($1400 3.2 ghz quad) or an E8500 ($277 3.16 ghz dual core). There was a common opinion that current games don’t make use of a Quad – that quads are for the future. However, I experimented around Christmas time with this very issue and found that both Supreme Commander and Crysis did make use of 4 cores. I posted in the chat room that Crysis did max out 4 cores (as I remembered) but after trying this out again – I was wrong. However, Crysis does make use of 4 cores and I do get a satisfying frame rate on my Q6600/8800GT combo.
Crysis
Here is what my Q6600 utilization is while running Crysis at 1280×1024. Not maxing out, but more than 2 cores are used. The third and fourth cores seem to get active when guns are fired – tracers, etc. Here is a post on the subject : Intel and Crysis Developers comments on Quad Core – Toms Hardware.
Supreme Commander
This is one of the first games to support a quad core processor. In the following run – I had 2 monitors displaying 1280×1024 and a very large scenario (8 players – 1000 units per). Notice that the four cores are not maxed out, but they are definitely in use. The second core is less loaded than the others but is still in use.
Games that Support Quad Core
Here is the list I found of current games that support a quad core:
Games and Dual/Quad Core Support
From the list:
Games that take advantage of Quad Core:
Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3
Tags: Crysis, DX9, Gaming, Quad Core vs Dual Core, Supreme Commander
Posted in Gaming, Q6600, Quad core, Windows XP | No Comments »
May 5th, 2008
Microsoft releases VPC versions of IE (6, 7 and 8 ) for testing. Here is the link to the Official IE Blog.
Tags: IE, Microsoft, Testing
Posted in IE, Microsoft, Software Development Tips, Software Testing, Windows XP | No Comments »
May 2nd, 2008
I had to call Charter back the next day – the first provisioning wasn’t performed correctly and now I’m seeing increased performance:
Not 16 mbits, but I like the almost 2 mbit up.
Tags: Charter, Charter Pipeline, Performance, Speed Test
Posted in Charter Issues, Charter Pipeline, Slow Performance | No Comments »
May 1st, 2008
Just called and I’m set up for 16/2. The pricing is the same as the old 10/1 price.
Tags: Charter, Speed
Posted in Charter Issues, Charter Pipeline | No Comments »
April 27th, 2008
I have a Q6600 system (quad core) with 4 gig of memory (3.5 gig usable), Windows XP 32 bit and could not understand why I had trouble opening more than 10 or 20 IE windows without weird issues in the desktop. I’d be missing portions of the UI, couldn’t bring up windows and generally things slowed to a crawl. How could that be with lots of free VM as reported by the task manager?
Well the answer is a tuning parameter that limits how much memory a given desktop application can utilize. This blog post from 2004 describes the problem in detail and has the fix! Windows XP flakiness – solved
I set my SharedSection value to 8096 and I can now open 30 IE windows with no issues. This has bugged me for months and the problem was forming a proper Google search to find this post. Thank you Kevin Dente!
Tags: IE, Slow Performance, Tips, Windows XP
Posted in Slow Performance, Tips, Windows XP | No Comments »
April 25th, 2008
Janna and I watched Lost last night and we were both blown away. Ben is a "badass" and Michael Emmerson is just an amazing actor to watch. I’m listening to the Jay and Jack Lost podcast on my normal morning walk.
Tags: Lost, Michael Emmerson, TV
Posted in Lost, TV | No Comments »
