I’ve had my blog up for over a year but it wasn’t until recently that I started to regularly read a significant number of other blogs. When I was following only a few different blogs the Firefox built-in RSS was good enough. Once I tried to follow more than a dozen blogs it quickly became apparent that I needed a more efficient program. So I started trying out a whole bunch of open source and freeware RSS readers. My hands down favorite is RSS Bandit , an open source .NET framework application (that makes it Windows only, sorry). I’ve been using it for a while and it works very well for me. One word of caution, an RSS reader speeds up checking blogs so much, you may end up reading many more blogs than before. 😉
Some new DST information
I’ve finished most of my home office updates for the new daylight saving time. DST settings updated automatically on WinXP causing appointments in Outlook to be wrong for the new DST weeks. However using the Time Zone Data Update Tool for Microsoft Office Outlook fixed all the errors. Purdue University has posted a couple of Outlook articles that helped me get started, see them here and here.
Microsoft’s articles for home users and professional users are a good start but since Microsoft has terminated support on so many old versions of products they really can’t be expected to do much more. Well the good folks at IntelliAdmin.com have made things easy for us. They’ve written automated update tools for the Win98/ME and Win2K operating systems.
The embedded devices I use that have automatic DST capability mostly can’t be corrected. In addition there is a possibility the settings will be changed back again in a couple years so, I’ve decided to disable auto DST on them and some are being permanently changed to operate in the GMT timezone (embedded servers).
I haven’t decided yet how I’m going to handle my Jornada 720’s running the HPC2K version of Windows CE. Microsoft has knowledge base articles here and here, and an overview article with information for users of recent versions of CE. For older versions of CE I haven’t found any authoritative information. I’ll post about my J720 solution when it’s solved.
A great little article
Yesterday was P.Z. Myers 50th birthday, John over at Stranger Fruit pointed me to this older post by P.Z.:
The proper reverence due those who have gone before
This is one the best articles I’ve read in a while, I highly recommend it. Oh, and a belated happy birthday to P.Z.
PICkit Serial Analyzer
The end of this month Microchip will start shipping the $50.00 PICkit Serial Analyzer. This looks to be a great bargain for embedded systems developers. Having a quick and easy way to test the various serial protocols used in embedded systems has traditionally involved expensive test gear or homemade solutions.
The PICkit Serial Analyzer connects to a Windows PC via USB and to the device under test with a six pin header. With it you can read and write using any of these protocols: I2C, SMBus, SPI or, USART. The system provides custom script building, data display template customization and a software API for custom applications.
A birthday salute to one of my giants
While I was preparing my Darwin day post it occurred to me that I don’t take the time to celebrate the giants upon whose shoulders I stand in my everyday work. Researching the birth dates of my personal giants it became clear that the majority have SI units named for them. Since my initial list came out too short for my purposes, I decided to add in birthdays for everyone whom has an SI unit named for them. The additions gave me a list that is long enough to sink my teeth into. My first entry doesn’t fit neatly into the categories I outlined above but, his contribution is important to embedded systems designers everywhere.
James Thomson was born February 16, 1822 in Belfast Ireland, he was the first son of James and Margaret Thomson. His mother, Margaret Gardner Thomson died in 1830 so his father James raised their seven children alone. In 1832 his father took up the Chair of Mathematics at Glasgow University and two years later at the age of twelve James and his younger brother William began studying at the university. James graduated in 1839 and began his apprenticeship as a civil engineer but do to health reasons decided he was not cut out for the hard physical labor common to civil engineers of the day. So beginning around 1843 he devoted himself to inventing machines and theoretical studies making many contributions to physics and engineering. He was living in Belfast when in 1857 he became Professor of Civil Engineering at Queen’s College. He stayed in Belfast until 1873 when he accepted the Glasgow University Regius Chair in Civil Engineering. He remained at the University of Glasgow until 1889 and died May 8, 1892.
While James Thomson had many achievements including helping his brother William (Lord Kelvin) he caught my eye because of the radian. The term radian was used in print for the first time by James on June 5, 1873 in examination questions he wrote at Queen’s College. He also helped spread the adoption of this unit of measurement in consultations with other scientists and engineers. (See A History of Mathematics By Florian Cajori, page 484) He is also credited with the invention of the non-SI unit the poundal.
The radian is the SI derived unit of measurement for a plane angle. Most people are more familiar with degrees for measuring angles however, the radian is extremely important because it encapsulates the value of PI. PI, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is an irrational real number that can create a mess in formulas when degrees are used for the angle measurement.
So, lets raise a glass and toast James Thomson, MA, DSc, LLD, FRS for being a giant on who’s shoulders we can all stand!
References and further reading:
Biographies
Wikipedia
Dictionary of Ulster Biography
Who, Where and When: The History & Constitution of the University of Glasgow [pdf]
His father
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
The radian
Wikipedia
Angle measurement
Radian Measure
A History of Mathematics By Florian Cajori
Origin of Radians
It's sad when people believe psychics
This post on the NeuroLogica Blog made me sad. It is tragic when parents start to believe psychics, who are all[Edited 6/11/07] mostly frauds and con-men, and because of it may deny their child medical attention. I hope their daughter survives but I’m not hopeful. 😦
The Earth Is Not Moving, are these people insane?
I think the people who run this site must be insane fixedearth.com.
CNN corrects its error
Last week I wrote about my disgust with a segment on CNN’s Paula Zahn Now show. Last night they corrected their error and included an atheist in the discussion of atheist’s. I have sent them a thank you message via the CNN feedback form. If you sent a complaint and now feel, as I do, that CNN has corrected their mistake I strongly encourage you to send them a thank you message.
The video is available here and the show transcript is here.
Happy Darwin Day
Today, February 12th, we celebrate Charles Darwin‘s birthday. Take a moment to read this short biography or view his life in pictures. If you’re more ambitious you can read some of his great works at Project Gutenberg or the University of Cambridge Darwin website.
Over the past year and a half I’ve looked at the intelligent design hypothesis debate. I’ve read everything I could find written by the proponents and I can’t find anything useful in this hypothesis. It very simply boils down to a hypothesis that when you see something in biology that you can’t explain, stop looking for an explanation and simply say, it’s that way because some intelligent designer made it that way.
So, as far as I can tell, proponents of the intelligent design hypothesis are either trying to avoid doing the hard work (lazy) or are simply pushing to substitute a philosophy/religion for science. I firmly believe we should not teach laziness or philosophy/religion in science classes lest we stop all the wonderful advancements that humanity can make in coming centuries.
Firefox problem fixed
I’ve been having a problem with slow response from Firefox 2 on one of the PC’s I use. Pages would stutter just before finishing loading and opening empty new tabs was slow. Occasionally Firefox would crash hard while loading pages.
Since it was only this PC with the symptom I figured it was one of the many add-ons causing the trouble. I disabled them all and sure enough the problem disappeared. Carefully re-enabling add-ons a few at a time I determined the culprit was MozCC.
A Google search led to this promising article but then I realized I already had a newer version. Checking the comments on the main MozCC page gave me the solution posted by Tyran. I quickly hacked up the version override and MozCC 1.21 works great in Firefox 2.
Paul Hutchinson's Blog 