We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • bellamania

    Bellamy calls for more sea power
    Apparently, David Bellamy said that “if people wanted to help combat climate change they should wear an extra layer of clothing in winter”. Uh, what?

  • only in Scotland …

    Tyre sabotage brings race to halt
    Police are investigating after carpet tacks were spread across roads bringing a major cycle race to a halt.

    Just a few reasons why sabotaging the Étape Caledonia was wrong:

    • it’s a charity event – it was supporting Macmillan Cancer
    • it’s the only mass-start bike race of its kind in the UK
    • the roads were closed for three whole hours; c’mon people, it’s not like it’s days of inconvenience.

    At least the race will go on next year.

  • smarter meter

    I just signed up for Toronto Hydro‘s Time-of-Use (TOU) Metering programme. While it was mentioned in this month’s PowerWISE (hey, am I the only one who reads the info inserts that comes with their bill?), it doesn’t seem to have been officially launched.  On first look, it’s fairly nifty (click the image for a full-sized view):
    daily TOU breakdown hourly
    Since I’m a Bullfrog customer, I don’t think I get charged TOU rates (hey, it’d be nice; actually, if coupled to current capacity, I’d make hay while the sun shines/wind blows/water flows …) but at least I get to see the data. I wonder if the front end is scriptable? I’d love to be able to track my usage day by day.

    (And to think, yesterday I was on the cusp of buying a Black & Decker Power Monitor. If it had ethernet/wireless/bluetooth, I’d have been on it like an X on a Thing That X Likes. It looks a bit complex to install.)

  • nine in the bed, and the little one said …

    I don’t know if this is worth posting to RISKS:

    I used to manage wind farm SCADA systems. The supplier is a market leader in the wind industry. The components used to feed data to the central SCADA are industry standard, accurate, reliable units. The complete cost of the SCADA system and associated metering probably runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This isn’t el cheapo stuff, and is put together by knowledgeable engineers and technicians.

    So I was a little surprised to see that the generation report for a wind farm was showing a total of -8.3 GWh, when a similar wind farm nearby had generated 1.8 GWh for the same period. What!? Crossed wires on the meter? Inconceivable!

    No wires were harmed in the making of this error. For metering power delivered, power plants use interval meters, which behave extremely similarly to your household electrical meter. They’re a little more accurate, have a few more features (like these ones have ethernet ports for remote reading) but they’re basically the same: any energy that goes through the wires gets added up on a counter. Take two readings a known time apart, subtract the later from the earlier, and you’ve got the total energy delivered.

    The wind farm’s SCADA polls this meter every ten minutes, and stores the result in its database. When you want a generation report, the server goes through the data, subtracts the last reading from the first, and presents that as the generation. Simple; what could go wrong?

    The bods at Major Wind Turbine Company were baffled. I was confused, and a little annoyed as I had lender and a board of directors breathing down my neck for revenue numbers. So I dug into the raw ten-minute data, and found this:

    kWh Delivered
    Wind Farm A Wind Farm B
    T=0 9523886 9999237
    T+10 min 9525238 575
    Difference 1352 -9998662

    It doesn’t take a genius to realise that the meter at Wind Farm B rolled over at 9,999,999 kWh, and so should really have read 10,000,575 kWh. The poor little SCADA didn’t know to check for rollover, and happily subtracted the later number from the earlier.

    I should add that there was no risk to public safety or system operation caused by this error. Just a few lost hairs from me.

    (Actually, many years ago, I had access to the source of an extremely early wind farm SCADA server. It was written by a series of summer students, with variable names and comments in their native language. It was pretty hard to follow. One little nugget I did pry out of the code was that they used a simple arithmetic mean for averaging wind direction. That meant that it took the mean of 358° and 2° to be 180°; not so smart …)

  • pix

    this cubicle protected by Flying Dog Pudge
    this cubicle protected by Flying Dog Pudge
    sometimes you just have to go barefoot
    sometimes you just have to go barefoot

    (Flying Dog Pudge is one of Catherine‘s collages.)

  • fast fixed-point MP3 encoder for ARM

    CompRec, though extremely poor quality (no psychoacoustic modelling! Old-school twinkly-burbly MP3s here we come!) is a fast MP3 encoder you can build on the SheevaPlug. It’s perfect for my limited needs.
    (thanks to wb6ymh for finding this.)

  • time to get MAD

    The prime reason I bought the Sheevaplug is to run the automatic podcast. Every day, the script has to decode a bunch of mp3s to WAV format.On a normal computer, this takes a few seconds per file. On the Sheevaplug – with no floating-point instructions, things get painful:

    $ time lame --mp3input 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.mp3 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.wav
    ID3v2 found. Be aware that the ID3 tag is currently lost when transcoding.
    LAME 3.98 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
    Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 16538 Hz - 17071 Hz
    Encoding 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.mp3
    to 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.wav
    Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (11x) 128 kbps qval=3
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA
    7750/7750  (100%)|    8:45/    8:45|    8:46/    8:46|   0.3851x|    0:00
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    kbps        LR    MS  %     long  %
    128.0        2.1  97.9       100.0
    Writing LAME Tag...done
    ReplayGain: -8.9dB

    real    8m46.408s
    user    8m45.940s
    sys    0m0.090s

    That’s right – nearly 9 minutes to decode a song! My very first Pentium 75 could probably do better than that.

    I’d heard that MAD was really fast on integer-only CPUs, so I tried it:

    $ time madplay -o 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.wav 03-in_the_aeroplane_over_the_sea.mp3
    MPEG Audio Decoder 0.15.2 (beta) - Copyright (C) 2000-2004 Robert Leslie et al.
    Title: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
    Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
    Album: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
    Track: 3
    Year: 1998
    Genre: Alternative
    Comment:
    7748 frames decoded (0:03:22.3), +1.2 dB peak amplitude, 1423 clipped samples

    real    0m7.134s
    user    0m6.500s
    sys    0m0.580s

    Seven seconds sure beats nearly nine minutes. Now, if only I could find an integer MP3 encoder …

  • awe-inspiring terminal output

    sheevaplug terminal outputWell, not really that awe-inspiring. But it does show that the Sheevaplug boots and runs out of the box. Given that it has only 512MB of RAM and the same amount of Flash storage, it’s a fairly small system.

    I really want to have this replace my Firefly Media Server installation on the laptop. First, I need to work out how to get it to boot from an external HD.

  • sheevaplug, I haz it

    It arrived!
    sheevaplug development kit

  • Proclamations

    Take heed, fell people of Storex: may your website forever remain broken for the crime of putting a tamper-resistant product sticker on the front of my filing cabinet. The hour spent removing its tiny sticky shards was not a pleasant one, nor will it be one I get back, mark my words.

    Know this, excellent people of Scraperite: your blades of finest vorpal plastic cut through the sticky clogging evil like enchanted senna through a dwarven granny.

  • the undying love of a spammer

    New job, so new phone. Within minutes of turning it on, I get text message spam. I get two every day, at just after 6am and 6pm. They’re all from the one number — 647 238 9575 — and they’re all from someone who (purportedly) loves me very much, and wants me back in their life. Knowing me, it’s understandable, but I know spam scam when I see it.

  • good, not quite great

    I accidentally dropped and broke my car mp3 player, so had to come up with another music solution. I caved and bought an iTrip for my iPod Nano. It sounds pretty good.

    What’s good about it is that it allows you to charge your iPod from a standard USB Mini-B. What’s not so good is that it doesn’t have full USB pass-through, so you can’t sync your iPod, and have to stick with that stupid dock cable.

    (and don’t get me started on the really annoying connector on my work cell phone …)

  • wildlife and environs

    (the abandoned donut shop has quite a history)

    I also saw and heard a woodpecker: local woodpecker.

  • no service is not free service

    via outage
    Hey VIA Rail, if you make an announcement that wireless is now free on the trains, you should really clarify that the service doesn’t actually work. So it’s not really much of a service, is it?

  • The return of Arthur

    Pretty much since the new year, I let me hair just go. This was mostly because I’d lost the coordinates for Arthur, the Scottish barber who first dealt with my hair in 2006, and I’d been following him from location to location. I have weird hair, and Arthur knew just what to do to make it behave.

    A couple of weeks back, I was wandering idly along the Danforth, and after looking into a barber’s window, cursed the fact that I’d lost touch with Arthur. I walked a little further and — as if by magic — met Arthur. It seems he’s moved to the neighbourhood, so now we’re back in touch. The haircut I got on the weekend is awesome.

    Arthur now does house calls (preferably near TTC stops), and is looking for some new clients. He’s been doing this for longer than you’ve (likely) been alive. I hesitate to post his phone number, so please contact me and I’ll pass on the details.

  • canadian compact car

    This was advertised in the Globe & Mail on the day I was born:
    viva-globe-1969
    My mum bought a second-hand Viva estate in 1975. We thought it was huge.

    The image is via the archive at Toronto Public Library. More cool stuff there than ever. (via)

  • XTC as The Dukes Of Stratosphear

    A couple of my favourite albums are being reissued: The Dukes Of Stratosphear.

  • i can has all the animals?

    Toronto Public Library has a subscription to Safari Books Online, so I no longer need to worry about the ageing O’Reilly books on my shelves. They’re all here, for free, at the latest version.
    (via)

  • bike, loader, snow

    bike, loader, snow
    Someone was inexpertly practicing scales on a brass instrument nearby. The wind brought the smell of an early spring barbecue.