Ted's Blog

I'm just kidding about the title. It just seemed like a good title for a third installment (see Episode 1 and Episode 2).

Arni, Madis, and Martti have been staying with me now for 6 weeks and have another 6 weeks to go so we are halfway. They continue to work like crazy: out the door before I wake up and home around 10 PM. Though they asked to borrow my car again the weekend after I let them use it for a Sunday get together (in Part 2), I have decided not to let them use it anymore. Here's the reason why:

Arni bought a digital camera with part of his earnings last year and he loves taking pictures with it. He was showing me some of the pictures of what they do when they all get together on Sundays. They just go to water parks, play soccer, go to Stone Mountain, or whatever. But in that set of pictures was one of my speedometer:

So now they use the van. Apparently that doesn't slow them down because the next weekend one of their pictures was of that speedometer at 100.

Arni apparently comes home for at least a little while every day. I've discovered him home a couple of more times, plus there are little Arni signs left behind like the remote control being set to TV mode which I don't ever do. Or .ee internet sites in my browser's location bar. Or the lid left off of the peanut butter. And so on. He can still get plenty of work in I guess and the other two guys are never home (of course they don't have a van).

I went to Anna Marie Island a couple of weeks ago and had to be out of town for four days, leaving Saturday and coming back Tuesday. Dad was extremely worried about me leaving the Estonians on their own and refused to pick me up at my house so that I would have to leave my car at his house if I wanted a ride to Florida. He wanted me to bring my computer too, but had no leverage on that. I was a little worried and didn't want the Sunday get together to be held at my house (someone pointed out to me that if 3 of them can stay in one room they could easily fit 40 in the house). Even though I had bought my airline ticket for Tuesday I told them I didn't know when I would be back and it might be Sunday. They asked "So you're driving to Florida on Saturday and coming back Sunday?". I'm such a horrible liar. I said "Maybe so. I'm really just going to have my picture taken." Anyway, it was fine. There were no signs of damage, but there were no signs of cleaning having taken place either to cover up signs of a party.

They were getting homesick so they asked if they could download some songs from Arni's computer back in Estonia. I have dialup but it is unlimited usage, so I said it would be fine. They started the download that night and the next morning it was still going. Eventually they downloaded about 100 songs, most of it disco or just pop: George Michael, Eurythmics, Queen but also some "Karl Madis," "Genialistid," and "Caater-Caater featuring Anaconda."

Katie really looks forward to them coming home each night, but they don't have much time to play with her and she still follows me around the house (Clio, of course, doesn't leave my side).

One day Martti said he had a question for me about America. He said "Who is this Uncle Sam?". I told him that Uncle Sam was a nickname for the government. He said "Is it a real person?".

Though they don't get a lot of fresh fruit or vegetables (they do eat salads) I have brought stuff home from the Dekalb Farmer's Market. They are amazed at the size of American produce. They even said the blueberries I brought home were much larger than the ones in Estonia. So I showed them some grapefruit I had bought and told them they were lemons.

Last Sunday they brought over a couple of Estonian girls that also work for the book company (judging from the picture of the two of them in the back seat of my car they live somewhere near Spaghetti Junction). I don't think they have a car so the guys give them a ride to the get togethers and had them over for dinner afterwards. It was still just frozen pizza, but this time they did bake them in the oven instead of the microwave. They got one of the girls to give them all haircuts and also had them take a picture of the four of us below.

Madis, me, Arni, and Martti

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Posted by Ted at 7:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

After Jeb's success with ads on mac.fiveforks.com I thought I would try it out on the only page on my website that seems to get any traffic, the Dejumbler page. Of course as soon as I put an ad on there traffic dropped off sharply and I wonder if Ask Jeeves knocked me down in the rankings when they saw a Google ad? All my referrals come from Ask Jeeves which for some reason ranks the Dejumble page very high when you enter "unscramble" in its search engine.

Anyway, after 4 days I've had one click-through which was me seeing if it would really work and I guess they knew that because I didn't make any money on that one. That's out of 90 page views. Since you only get paid once you've reached $100 it could be a long wait.

What bugs me about the whole thing is that I could tell Google what kind of ads they should put on my page: puzzles, Scrabble, games, crosswords, etc. But instead they are reading the text on my page and putting stuff in there about programming and coding. I couldn't see a way to give Google any hints on what to advertise.

Posted by Ted at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

I got the JP1 cable (to connect my universal remote to my computer; see earlier blog) a week or so ago. Then I had to learn how to use it. There are a whole host of programs that do different things, all written by a community of people who aren't making a dime on any of this. The main program is called IR which actually talks to the remote and can store settings in files on your computer. It has a graphical interface like a typical Windows program and presents a ton of information though you can ignore most of it.

Another program is called KeyMaster and is actually an Excel spreadsheet with tons of macros attached to it. It is used to handle "upgrades" which are the settings for operating a particular device by remote. A lot of devices are built in to the remote, but others have to be added via these upgrades because 1. the devices are newer than the remote, 2. so old no one thought they would be needed, or 3. so obscure the manufacturers of the remote didn't include them. You can find thousands of upgrade files on the internet, but you get what you pay for. Some work okay and some don't.

Looking in the JP1 forums file section, I found an upgrade for the brand of receiver that Susan has, KLH. I used KeyMaster to open the upgrade file, then I chose my model of remote, and then copied the settings into IR by going to the Devices tab and clicking New. Then you paste in the two text fields from KM to be download to her remote. Once I figured out what was going on it wasn't that hard. Well, except when she took her remote home it didn't work on her receiver. I had backed up the settings before I gave her the "upgrade" so I could restore the remote back to when it did work (by learning the functions from the original remote to the new one). But it's more efficient (and elegant) to use an upgrade rather than just learn all the functions.

You can also make your own upgrades. What you do is learn all the functions you can from the old remote into the new one by pointing the old remote at the new one (the universal remote has an infrared receiver for this). Then you upload these learned functions into IR. IR is able to break down the signal for each key press into its pieces. Every time you press a button on a remote a stream of information comes out. It might look like this:

+9002 -4498
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -574
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -1700
+550 -40514 +9002 -2266 +550 -96716

I believe these are frequency differences from the base frequency of 38095 so I think "+550 -1700" is like a binary "1" and "+550 -574" is like "0". The other stuff must be saying the protocol and saying the signal has ended.

The signal when a button is pressed has to say what language it is using, what brand of device it is addressing (for example KLH), and what particular device you are talking to (the model 3100 receiver). You wouldn't want to press Power for your Sony TV and have it turn on the Panasonic DVD player or even the Sony CD player. So there have to be separate ways of talking to each device. And IR shows you this.

Once I had learned each signal it told me I was using the NEC1 protocol (or language), and the device code (which seems to identify the brand and device) was 65. The only difference between each learned button was the OBC code, which was a number between 0 and 30. However, a few of the learned functions had other data that didn't fit that pattern and I figured that the remote just hadn't read the signal from the original remote correctly. When I re-learned those and downloaded them back to IR they fit into the pattern of NEC1 and device 65 and I felt pretty confident that the universal remote was acting as a device to read infrared signals and store them to be used by the computer.

Once you've got that all straight you can start making an upgrade in the KeyMaster spreadsheet. You just enter the things that are the same (NEC1 and Device 65) and then assign the OBC code to each function (power, volume+, volume-, etc.). Once everything is assigned then you can create the upgrade file by pressing a button in the spreadsheet (it stores the upgrade data as a text file). And once you have that you can erase all the learned codes taking up the remote's memory, load the upgrade file into IR, and install the nice compact upgrade into the remote. Of course you also want to post it to the internet so that no one else has to do the same thing.

The problem is that there are a number of different JP1 universal remotes that have different button arrangements so, for instance, my remote has a SLEEP button, but its broken predecessor does not. So my upgrade wouldn't work on my old remote. The spreadsheet, then, has to be pretty smart because it keeps up with each model of remote and which buttons are available in addition to the different protocols for all the remotes in the world and how to break down the signals.

Finally, the remotes have pretty limited memory and there are different kinds of memory for different functions. So there is some amount of memory set aside for learning signals from another remote. Then there is memory for upgrades. And there is memory for moving keys. If you do more than a couple of upgrades, you will run out of upgrade memory. So it is best to do some stuff through just learning the buttons directly into the remote from another remote as well as doing upgrades.

I haven't actually tested the new upgrade on Susan's receiver so I don't know that it will work, but I sure don't see why it wouldn't.

Posted by Ted at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There once was a brother named Jeb
And not many things rhyme with Jeb
And though he really likes iPods
They can't be owned by people named Jeb

Posted by Ted at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I just found out about this today. One of the bridges I've been working on for years that finally got underway on construction is now being put on hold because they have found hundreds of bats on the existing bridge raising their young. Somehow the story was put out on the wire by AP and immediately picked up by all kinds of newspapers and websites across the country. It looks like once the babies grow up the bats will move on. Then we will have to tear down the old bridge because the new one goes in the same place. For now the traffic has been diverted to a temporary bridge across the creek. I'm not mentioned or quoted in the article (in the extended entry).

Though the text of the articles is the same as the AP release, the headlines varied:

Bridge man, don't touch those bats (Kansas City Star)
Bat Season Delays Ga. Bridge Demolition (Yahoo and most others)
Bat babies delay bridge demolition (CNN)
Bat maternity season delays bridge demolition in Georgia (WCCO - Minneapolis)
Make way for baby bats (MSNBC)
Bats at Work: Georgia DOT yields to helpful critters (Winston-Salem Journal)
Baby bat season delays bridge work (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Quand les chauves-souris stoppent les démolisseurs (Sympatico - Quebec)

Most of the stories didn't have pictures, but
MSNBC and CNN did.

OMAHA, Georgia (AP) -- The baby bats clinging to their mothers under the Talipahoga Creek bridge look like space aliens, with their gray, scrawny bodies and pointed ears.

But the way Georgia highway officials see it, they are still babies. And until they are big enough to fly away on their own, a project to demolish the bridge will just have to wait.

"I appreciate our animal friends," said Billy Willis, president of Albany's Southern Concrete Construction Co. "You've got to live and let live."

Just before the demolition project was to begin early last month, someone noticed the colony of 200 free-tailed bats living under the bridge.

Biologists confirmed that some were pregnant, and the state and the contractor agreed to postpone the work until mid-August.

Free-tailed bats are a common species in Georgia, but they are protected by state law just like most other non-game species.

The bats are not visible during the day, but their clucks, chirping and twittering resonate beneath the bridge, about 30 miles south of Columbus.

Jim Ozier, a Georgia state biologist who studies bats, said the animals often roost under bridges because the concrete holds a lot of heat.

"Plus, they can forage along streams and wetland areas to eat pests, such as mosquitoes, moths and beetles," he said.

Ozier hopes to work with the Transportation Department on building bat houses under other bridges.

"There are a few things people assume are bad, like snakes, bats and spiders," he said. "But for the most part they aren't damaging and they do some good things."

Posted by Ted at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)