I'm not working at Essential Wisdom anymore. We ran out of money at that company, before getting any customers. Major bummer; some great cutting edge web technology just going to waste over there. Well, rumor has it there are some customers in the works so maybe it will yet live. I hope so; for all my hard work and putting up with peanuts for pay I got a teensy weentsy bit of stock. Other than that it was probably a waste of my time.

I'm now working at ExpressBill, a division of Envoy which is a division of Quintiles. They do billing services, mostly for doctors so far. Basically they save the doctor the trouble of printing and mailing bills by doing it in large volumes, and charge him per piece mailed. We are trying to scale up the enabling software by rewriting it on a Sun Enterprise class server, and also trying to do it smarter (the old process is really not hard to improve upon!), and trying to be able to print bills for other companies besides medical ones.

Home stuff... well projects never end, and in my case they never move too fast either. A year after I started, I'm still working on my sci-fi sliding door for the multimedia room. But I made some progress weekend before last: it's actually all in one piece now! I got the major welding done. Next I have to incorporate some mechanisms into it, specifically an air cylinder to open and close it, and a locking mechanism, and mounts for the barn door type "trucks" that it will hang from. I was thinking at first of using electric screw propulsion but the air cylinder should give it a more authentic Star Trek type "whoosh" sound (and I'm hoping so much that it doesn't get overwhelmed with the rolling/scraping/squeaking type noises). And then there will be a lot of finish work; all those sloppy welds need grinding, and there is some rust to remove (used metal), and I'm thinking of getting it powder coated for a more durable finish. It's going to look approximately like the picture at the right. The area with the little holes is in fact metal with holes in it so some light will come through. The large areas are diamondplate (one with the diamonds facing in, the other with it facing outwards, so you don't get overwhelmed with too much diamondplate. IMO it only looks good in moderation.) The dark grey is 2" x 4" rectangular tubing (really that large, not cut down like a 2x4 piece of lumber). It probably weighs 100 pounds or so. The trapezoid sticking out is intended to recess into the wall as it closes which will make it more secure but mainly just because it looks funky; it's in the spirit of all the sci-fi shows (inspiration from Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, la Femme Nikita etc.) without being an exact replica of any of them. Oh and let's not forget the need for a laser beam running along the leading edge of the door to detect objects in the way and shut it down, so somebody doesn't get crushed in the doorway and sue me. No, I'm really not going to put this much into the other doors for the multimedia room. Only got one lifetime to finish this project. :-) I did have another dangerous idea, but I don't think I'm going to try it... since I will need compressed air anyway for the cylinder, what if I tried to do an air suspension? Have strategically drilled holes along the bottom, and a few on the sides near the top, and introduce compressed air into the frame. It would blow out the holes and maybe lift the door, so then there would be virtually no friction and no noise other than the rushing of air. Much more Trek-like, especially the old series. But I really don't know how much compressed air would be required, nor do I feel like hitting the books to find out. Doing compressed air at all might be more trouble than it's worth. I could use compressed air in the room adjacent to the multimedia room anyway, so I'm thinking of taking out the sidewalk by the back door, and running several items between the house and the garage: compressed air line, new heavy duty wiring (to get rid of the open overhead lines to the garage), and ethernet (ethernet because I want to have computer control of the pool paraphernalia - two pumps, the pool light, yard lighting, garage lighting, the fancy automatic irrigation dams I'm going to build some day, etc. And a computer in the garage could be useful anyway, for those yet-to-be-invented virtual Chilton's manuals and stuff like that.). Then with the sidewalk gone, I could run a pipe out from the laundry room to dump the washer water on the lawn instead of into the sewer. I still have to buy an air compressor though. Another one of those winter projects...

I finally got SMP working in my dual Pentium system; had to replace the motherboard. And I got a 16 gig RAID put together in my NFS server which is now a separate Celeron 333 machine. I'm trying to make it possible to record video so I can record TV digitally instead of on the VCR. But Linux is lagging a bit in multimedia support. The random Bt878 board I picked up (a Phoebe TV Master) doesn't totally work; I can only use the tuner, with no sound, and can't use the composite or S-video inputs. So I'm looking for a good deal on a Hauppauge WinTV board; they are supposed to work better, and anyway I want stereo sound. For now it still works a little better than the projector's NTSC converter so I'm using the tuner on the card to watch TV and having to select the same channel on the VCR to get sound. I'm also looking for a Matrox G200 or similar for driving a couple of sync-on-green fixed frequency workstation monitors. I intend to start working on a swing-arm monitor and keyboard holder soon so that I can use the computer from the recliner.

I have DVD now. The Samsung model DVD-905 was the only model I could find that had both RGB outputs (beware of so-called "component video" - what they usually mean by that is YCbCr components, which to me is senseless - why go through the conversions when your TV or projector has red, green and blue guns? Anyhow, high-end TVs want this wacko kind of component video, just to be different presumably. My projector, being designed for computer video, wants RGB.) and a built-in AC-3 decoder with 6 analog audio outputs. So I get to keep using whatever old amplifiers accumulate rather than having to go out and buy a fancy new receiver/AC-3 decoder/amplifier/tuner extraordinaire type thing like everybody else is doing, and probably end up with worse sound to boot. I do need to find a decent subwoofer and center channel though. Otherwise, the Samsung player is not so great. It has lots of little glitches. It's very hard to control when you get to see the menu screen for instance; there are two buttons that might be the one, Title and Menu, and I usually hit both of them frantically until it comes up. With some discs that doesn't work; you get to see the menu once, when you first insert the disc, and after you start the movie, forget it. There are layer-switch glitches. On one movie it skips the entire chapter following the layer switch, and you have to use the back button to get to it. On others, the image simply freezes for a split second while it accesses the second layer. I have had movies freeze up completely and had to eject the disc and put it back in and start over. Sometimes pausing the movie, or jumping around at all, will cause the picture to be jerky for a while until it gets its cache filled back up or whatever (that's what it feels like it's doing). Fast moving scenes can be jerky. On many movies, trying to seek backwards causes it to jump back to the beginning of the chapter, or even to the beginning of the whole movie. And Samsung does not acknowledge any of this on their web page. Toshiba players are known for these kinds of glitches but at least they release firmware updates to fix them. www.dvdresource.com lists a whole bunch of problems on Toshibas and which firmware patch to get to fix it. There is a little bit of noise detectable in the audio output when the head is seeking around on the disc, as when you access a menu (no music is playing while the menu is read off the disc, but in the total silence you hear some faint scratchy noises). Oh well. Most of the time if I just watch a movie uninterrupted and don't do anything fancy, it works.

The new stuff from Dallas Semiconductor is looking really interesting; especially since they introduced TINI which is a Java based microcontroller board. I think I may have found my X-10 successor at least for the short term. Too bad there's still not a cheap power line networking chipset to replace X-10. The idea of controlling lightswitches via a web server has got me thinking.

The touchscreen Road Riders are still sitting around waiting for some software to run. I've pretty much given up on getting Linux to run in 2 megs. I'm thinking a DOS VNC client might be the quick fix for those machines, but I don't think anybody wrote one yet.

I got the packet radio station working again for a while, but now that I upgraded electron's motherboard it's not working very well. I think it has something to do with the motherboard serial ports. I did put in a serious attempt at getting the Internet gateway functions working but didn't succeed. I was getting NetROM node broadcasts over the Internet from one of the Tucson stations but the connection was only one-way, I couldn't connect back to that station.

After years of thinking about it I attempted to create a database of all the packet stations in the state but now all of a sudden everybody else is doing the same thing. The TAPR one actually amounts to something now, although it could use some improvements.

I've also been working on a web based contact management system. I will probably be releasing it as open source soon. It uses a PostgreSQL database and PHP for the web front end. Not very fancy in appearance yet, but I have never found an address book type application that was flexible enough; they always do stupid stuff like give you a form with a fixed number of fields to fill out. This one is almost totally normalized; you can associate as many email addresses as you want with each person, for example, or none at all if they don't have email. The same goes for phone numbers, addresses, dates, records of particular conversations, transcriptions of messages they left on your answering machine, etc. It also subsumes the functionality of my ancient standby, the Cardfile program from Windows 3.1. I adapted a freeware .crd to text converter program to convert the cards to database records in a special free-form table. I'm tossing around the idea of an AI-like importer which can extract patterns from the cards (like phone numbers and emails and addresses - readily recognizable stuff) and put them into the proper contact management tables. I made some progress with Cup, the Java parser generator; I actually got it to recognize all known forms of phone numbers (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx, (xxx) xxx-xxxx, xxx-xxxx, +x xxx-xxx-xxxx etc.) along with nearby text which might describe the purpose of that phone number (by being alongside, or before the number with a colon). But that's on the back burner till I get the easier parts done. A Palm conduit is a high priority for me now that I have a Palm IIIx but there will be some compromises since the Palm contact database has the stupid fixed number of fields. I suppose I might eventually have to write a replacement contact manager for the Palm too; but I hate to do that. It's a lot of work and it's inelegant to duplicate functionality which is already in the ROM. Later I will probably work on storing images in the database as well; photos or business cards or whatever.

I went to LinuxWorld Expo week before last and had a blast. I went to the Python BOF and decided to seriously try out Python one of these days.

The Phoenix Linux Users Group has been growing pretty fast. I had been involved in it for several years; but now there are two monthly meetings, and probably a third starting up, in various parts of the Valley. I also usually make it to the Java Users Group meetings.

Around the beginning of June I started an aquarium. That has been fun, and rewarding. I seem to have a green thumb for aquarium plants, at least the easy ones that I got to start with. So far I have lost 2 fish, but right now there are 2 mollies, one of which (the female presumably) was pregnant so there are also 2 babies, 2 swordtails, a small cory and a Chinese algae eater (have to do some research to narrow down the species; it wasn't sold as a Siamese algae eater but it might be). Also lots of snails. They came with the plants I guess, in some kind of undetectable form; it took a couple weeks for me to notice a few of them. Now they are pretty prolific and there are more than I can count. Thanks to my dad for the tank and my mom for a couple of the fish. There will probably be a web page for the aquarium some day but I have to get a digital camera. The light isn't bright enough for my 35; I had to use really long exposures to get the light right and no doubt the pictures will come out blurred. I'm on a 'net mailing list where the serious aquarium plant people hang out, and learn a lot from that.

The vehicles are doing OK. I had to spend some money on the F250 on tranny work. Turned out I had the wrong starter in it, and it was not retracting far enough and grinding its gear against the ring gear. So now it's got a new flywheel (which it needed anyway; the jerking is finally gone), ring gear, starter, clutch, seals, etc. I guess I'm stuck with that truck for a while now, can't afford to get rid of it. I might as well start looking for an AC system and get the body fixed up if I'm going to keep it. The Z had a recall on its fuel injectors so I got them all replaced for free. Seems they are notorious for leaking gas and starting a fire. They replaced a lot of other stuff at the same time, and it's running pretty good now. No AC though; the compressor froze up last winter (it was using it to supplement the defrost I guess). I've been putting off spending the money to get that fixed and now summer is almost over.

I'm seriously thinking of building an electric vehicle. It may take a year or two to do that but I think now is a fairly good time to start. Maybe this winter. I thought about doing a conversion on the 68 Datsun, but I'm not sure; there are things I don't like about that truck, even as an ICE vehicle, and it sure isn't very aerodynamic either. I'd be much more inclined to build one from scratch, or nearly so, except that I suspect it'd be biting off more than I can chew. Since I practically always do that, if I'm afraid of it, it's probably downright impossible. I have to think of a modular, scalable approach so I can make progress and get something working in the interim, and refine it later. Another idea along those lines would be to use the chassis of the 7? Datsun (the one I was going to take the engine out of to fix the 68), and build a new aerodynamic body on top. That way I can concentrate on just the drivetrain at first and build the body later, and later yet, I could use it as a platform for further experiments like direct-drive at the wheels. I'm thinking the ultimate electric car is 4WD with permanent magnet pancake motors driving each wheel. The magnets are incorporated into the wheel, so that there is no need for brushes. The windings are fixed to the axle. So there is still only one bearing at the wheel, no separate motor bearings and no belt/chain/gear/u-joint type kludge. Then you just need a very fancy AC controller to drive the motors optimally under varying conditions, having a differential or 4-wheel-lock effect as desired, doing regenerative braking etc. Oh, and I would like to incorporate the idea of leaning the vehicle into curves too - like a motorcycle. Shifting the center of gravity makes it impossible to roll the car; your tires will lose grip long before the centrifugal force becomes great enough for a roll. I saw a very interesting 3-wheeler on the web which used that idea; but I think it could be done with 4 wheels too. Yeah, I'm definitely biting off more than I can chew. :-) And about the time I get it done there will be several affordable brand-new long-range high-tech EV's on the market from the major manufacturers. What am I saying, Murphy, you didn't hear that...

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