37 comments on “Project complete (at least for the moment) ”

• Comments are now closed

1. Rogue Trooper 1

   28 February 2013 at 2:28 pm

   5’10; Made In The Shade. (enjoy your sojourn)
   • Rogue Trooper 1.1

     28 February 2013 at 2:31 pm

     btw, comments a day?
2. lprent 2

   28 February 2013 at 2:36 pm

   From me? It has been coming down.

   Let me see…
   • Rogue Trooper 2.1

     28 February 2013 at 2:45 pm

     quality before quantity ( a few Great Whites out there Blue)
   • lprent 2.2

     28 February 2013 at 2:55 pm

     Chorus are having fun with my links today. Over the last few days we seem to be getting disconnects from the net all of the time. Part of the the bloody fibre rollout. Haven’t gotten a response from Orcon since I emailed a complaint in yesterday afternoon.

     Thank god I’m not working from home at present.

     Anyway, can’t keep a link open long enough to finish testing the query right now.
3. geoff 3

   28 February 2013 at 2:41 pm

   Can you say what the product is?
   • lprent 3.1

     28 February 2013 at 2:59 pm

     This one… (checked that it was ok to say)

     http://www.vespermarine.co.nz/watchmate-vision.html

     I wonder if there is a better image around..
     • Rich 3.1.1

       28 February 2013 at 4:58 pm

       Awesome. I used to work in marine electronics, worked on the early versions of this
       • lprent 3.1.1.1

         28 February 2013 at 9:44 pm

         Yep. This does the same thing with a lot less hassle and an ability to handle places like the Malacca Straits or the English channel.
4. Colonial Viper 4

   28 February 2013 at 2:55 pm

   There’s nothing quite as thrilling as hitting a ‘go live’ or ‘ship day’. It’s quite awesome in fact.
   • lprent 4.1

     28 February 2013 at 3:10 pm

     Yep. In my case being on tenderhooks for the last couple of days while it goes through final acceptance testing. Waiting the the gotcha bug to show up that requires a week to fix.

     The one we caught yesterday was like that.. It was (paraphrasing the code)

     
if (vessel.target())
{
data::GeoPos::degrees cog = vessel.target()->COG();
......
}


     Problem was that this a multi-threaded app, and it got replaced with

     
boost::smart_ptr target = vessel.target();
if (target)
{
data::GeoPos::degrees cog = target->COG();
......
}


     Because it was quite feasible to have a target be destroyed in the model on the incoming thread between the test for existence and the access to a method. But storing in a local smart pointer means that cannot happen because the target method used a mutex to protect the creation of the pointer, and the pointer is reference counted.

     It crept in during some late changes to graphics filtering rules. Took a few hours to prove that it wasn’t in any other locations apart from the two that I found it in. A not quite paranoid enough programming error by someone more at home with circuits than strousoup
     • Lanthanide 4.1.1

       28 February 2013 at 4:24 pm

       *tenterhooks
       • lprent 4.1.1.1

         28 February 2013 at 9:45 pm

         Yeah. But the testing is pretty paranoid. Engineers are pretty good at the task.
5. Mark Fletcher 5

   28 February 2013 at 4:13 pm

   You say;
   “More importantly this is the result not of the extraction of resources and mining of the soils. It is purely the result of pure intelligence and the teamwork of a diverse group of engineers, programmers, artists, prototypers, production, marketing, investors, and the crazy bugger with a vision. ”

   May I ask where the plastic, silicon, copper, fibreglass, glass and rubber to name a few components that went into what looks like a very good product came from?
   • McFlock 5.1

     28 February 2013 at 4:35 pm

     most likely the bulk of it came from somewhere that doesn’t have a $15b tourism industry that has a tagline of “100% pure”.
     • Mark Fletcher 5.1.1

       28 February 2013 at 4:46 pm

       Be that as it may. So it’s OK to “rape and pillage” other parts of the earth and then say that “the result not of the extraction of resources and mining of the soils” just because it didn’t happen here. The original statement is in the words of my grandfather is “Handling the truth in a careless manner”.
       • Colonial Viper 5.1.1.1

         28 February 2013 at 4:51 pm

         the alternative is to opt out of the modern technological economy Mark.

         But don’t you agree that its better (for us, in the short term) that the pollution happens elsewhere and not here?
       • McFlock 5.1.1.2

         28 February 2013 at 5:09 pm

         You confuse what I said for a NIMBY response.

         The value added in NZ was not from mining, but from intellectual endeavour: the “knowledge economy”. Remember that? It used to be big, before keyster and blinglish decided to save us with cycleways and sweatshops.

         Basically, the product managed to garner export earnings without compromising other (higher earning) industries. Unlike, for example, mining or dairy farming.
         • lprent 5.1.1.2.1

           28 February 2013 at 9:53 pm

           Precisely…
   • Colonial Viper 5.2

     28 February 2013 at 4:50 pm

     Mark good point. However, the majority of the value of the product is in the IP, not in the plastic parts, circuit boards or shrink wrapping.

     The common denominator is actually the embodied energy of the final product.
   • lprent 5.3

     28 February 2013 at 9:52 pm

     There is kind of scale difference between the dumb extraction of tonnes of phosphate from the soil every year and exporting it as milk or that dumb lignite briquitte proposal for Southland, and the minimal amounts of actual material we use.

     Talking about your inability to perceive scale, how does it feel for you to be both a mindless sperm AND a purportedly thinking human being.
6. the sprout 6

   28 February 2013 at 4:18 pm

   Congrats on the project completion lynn. I would love to see a standard banner/ home button at the bottom of the pg or right col
   • lprent 6.1

     28 February 2013 at 9:54 pm

     Yep…
7. MrSmith 7

   28 February 2013 at 5:03 pm

   Lynn could you have a look at the comments editor as hasn’t been working for me for a while and I neeeeed it.
   • Draco T Bastard 7.1

     28 February 2013 at 6:15 pm

     If you’d read the post you wouldv’e noticed this bit:

     And yes fixing the damn re-edit is top of the list, closely followed by the wsiwyg comments editor, and re-enabling registration.
8. Paul Campbell 8

   28 February 2013 at 11:27 pm

   what you waited for the software before you shipped the hardware? 🙂 I build VOIP stuff for the US market (I live in NZ) we build and ship our hardware long before the software is done but make sure it hits the upgrade servers the day the first box or handset hits the stores – makes for scary deadlines long hours and a faster time to market
   • lprent 8.1

     28 February 2013 at 11:42 pm

     Different type of market to one that is on land and near a high speed net.

     Many of the first units out have long since been sold and are going directly to vessels. It gets quite hard to upgrade software when the download has to be done via satPhone (if you are lucky).

     Anyway the hardware completed its final testing on monday when the last of the materials arrived. The engineering on those is somewhat complicated by being a lot of RF. The only standard electronics in the assembly was the wee linux box that I was coding and its screen.
     • Colonial Viper 8.1.1

       28 February 2013 at 11:55 pm

       I presume the RF engineering wasn’t done in-house, but was bought in?
       • lprent 8.1.1.1

         1 March 2013 at 12:01 am

         From what I understand much of it was in-house at board and antenna level. Chips? I have no idea. I have enough of a problem keeping up with the software systems..
     • Paul Campbell 8.1.2

       1 March 2013 at 10:40 pm

       I also do firmware for RF handsets we do software update over the air, not a highspeed net CRCs duplicate copies of everything hot stageable backup copies etc etc one screw up and we have 200,000 bricks out there – update carefully and often makes for a continually improving product
       • lprent 8.1.2.1

         3 March 2013 at 10:57 pm

         I use MD5’s at a 4k blocks for (in one case) 60MB of chart upgrade to linux. The same routine now handles a ~80kb upgrade to the firmware of the RF board which is far more dangerous. It spools it locally and then runs the same library code as the flasher routine to upgrade the RF board via internal serial.

         I bricked several units developing the linux update code. The first version acted as a proxy (usually TCP/IP to Linux to serial to RTOS) but the latency gave a some good bricks through timeouts. Spooling it worked a lot better because once I start upgrading that sucker I cannot walk backwards easily like I could with linux code. Damn thing controlled the power to linux and itself. You could wire it to shift modes – but I’m more interested in code than hacks.

         I don’t write RTOS code. I write for Linux. My system there doesn’t brick because it processes the update and flips links at the last stage. It keeps several old copies and the invariant booter code flips it back if the upgrade doesn’t work. Having a lot of cheap NAND makes things a bit easier.

         Sorry about the delay. Got dragged to a wedding. Sobering up now.
9. Murray Olsen 9

   1 March 2013 at 2:00 am

   Thanks for your work, lprent. Even though I’m from from the raving loony Marxist left, I appreciate it.
10. Descendant Of Sssmith 10

    1 March 2013 at 5:13 am

    The arm on the puppet needs to be adjusted. It needs to be bent like the rest of me.

    Some lyrics don”t even need adjusting.

    On the waves of the air,
    There is dancin out there.
    If it’s somethin we can share,
    We can steal it.
    • Descendant Of Sssmith 10.1

      1 March 2013 at 5:16 am

      Don”t know how this ended up attached to this post lol.
11. ropata 11

    4 March 2013 at 2:38 pm

    Hi, a couple more requests for the site
    – default font to something more modern e.g. Calibri
    – ability to click an author’s name and get their posts

    cheers
    • lprent 11.1

      4 March 2013 at 4:11 pm

      The second one is already there. Just click on the authors name. The only one not working in Helen Kelly because I forgot to put in the .htaccess fixup.

      Or do you mean the comment authors? That won’t be hard.

Links to post

1. The economic value of the internet « The Standard: posted on 11 March 2013 at 11:42 am

• Comments are now closed

• Log in
• Donate
• Contribute post

• Articles RSS