World Champions and Wales

Well I should have gone with my hunch and put some brass on the Kiwis. Everything pointed to a big upset the way the Sydney press was crapping on that it was going to be a walkover. It reminded me of the tri-nations triumph in England in 2006.

I sat down with Melsy to watch the match but assured her it would be turned to another channel after 15-20 minutes if it was going to be the usual pounding the Kangaroos give us. Sadly Mel didn’t get to change channel and I got to see a very entertaining game in which we actually won.

The recriminations are going down here in Sydney with Ricky Stuart dreaming up a number of conspiracies against his team by the ARL to keep the people’s interest in the game. You can’t call the ref’s decisions marginal, they were pretty spot on. And you certainly can’t rig the bounce of the ball for that last try. Perhaps the only one that was dodgy was Slater’s wing and a prayer pass but then that’s his trade mark and usually they’re 50 points in the lead so it doesn’t matter anyway.

Bottom line: Kiwis didn’t run out of steam like they usually do combined with Aussies believing the TAB odds. Great game. Oh, and we're the World Champs at something.

Wales Game

I watched this game on replay and was mildly worried by the lack of SMS messages from the UK and NZ. It worried me that there were not the usual celebratory text messages even at the end. Melsy teased me by saying she knew the final score and I’d be surprised. Didn’t fool me but caused unnecessary concern shall we say.

The first half was the usual with a pumped up Welsh team doing their very best and the All Blacks doing just enough to make sure they were within a converted try. The Welsh had the majority of the possession and made some good plays. I liked their team and their aggression at the breakdown. Awesome crowd even better Haka theatre!

With Mel’s little tease still in the back of my mind I went into the second half expecting it to go down to the wire. But then out came Richie and the boys and gave the Welsh a lesson in how to prevent the other side scoring simply by keeping the ball and grabbing it back every time the other side got it.

Highlights:

Richie looks to be taking the mantle of world’s best referee from Fitzy. I was most impressed with how Kaplan deferred to him a couple of times and conceded that he was right but unlucky. All good stuff to have in the bank next time there’s a 50/50 situation.

Soalo is also showing signs of being an excellent ref.

Jimmy Cowan is starting to show Marshall-type traits. He’s starting to be an all round player with sniping runs, good defence and barking orders at the forwards.

What’s with Kaplan suddenly policing the put in at scrum time? They’ve been throwing it into the second row for several years now! I had assumed that everyone was on board that the put in was no longer a contest. I’m going to start watching that more closely.

The Obama Lapdance

Now that you’ve put the collective Kleenex back on the bedside table and you are feeling the afterglow of Obama winning the US election its time to have a reality check: The Obama Lapdance, not unsurprisingly, is about to leave you without satisfaction after a really quite exciting campaign in which he promised soooo much change but told you soooo little about what that change would actually be. But you got all caught up in the excitement and thought, as a lot of people did, that surely a black man in charge is enough to bring change to the Whitehouse after 8 years of a hick cowboy (the fact that Dubya was never a rancher and lived most of his early years in the cities of Midland and Houston - with holidays in Maine - should not get in the way of a good image).

I had hoped for change but I suspected there would be no change and, now that he has announced some of his cabinet, I know there will be no change.

As I told my son last week, listen to a person’s words but judge a person by their actions. Obama certainly has the words and the best speech writer going and it was all made considerably easier because his message of change matched 50% of Americans belief that they needed change. The fact that only 50% of Americans wanted Obama is a bit lost on the international community as they sit back and get entertained by the Obama Lapdance but I digress….

The way I judge Obama is by his actions and from what I can see he’s the same as Bush but potentially worse because he’s sucked in a huge amount of goodwill from meaningful progressives and liberals both in the US and around the world which he is about to crap all over. The first actions you should judge Obama by are the appointments in his administration. FAIL. It’s basically a shocker of insiders, war hawks and people with very dodgy histories. Some are recycled from the Clinton years and still more from the George H. W. Bush term. So we are in keeping with the “Bush-Clinton” theme of the last 20 years.

Here’s an article on the appointments so far. Its pretty scary reading.

I note that Israel’s stranglehold on policy will continue if not simply by the number of dual citizen Israelis in the cabinet. How they can allow a person to hold high office with ANY other citizenship other than US is beyond me!

Given all the lip service paid to change surely Obama could have put one or two progressives in his cabinet just to keep the bastards honest, but alas, he hasn’t. I guess the $1Bil he spent on his campaign needs to be paid back in favours some time.

PS: And before you say Obama had donations from the little people let me tell you that was in the beginning of his campaign (see “Inflating the numbers” in the article above). After that it was all BIG MONEY. Wall Street paid more to Obama than they did to McCain. These people invest money for a return. Obama will give them their return.

Rugby Scorboard Project Update

I have made quite a bit of progress on the scoreboard. Having managed to program the I/O, LCD operator panel, the scoreboard itself and detect buttons I felt I was ready to build the hardware and leave the programming for now.

Here are the photos so far.

This is the base with the LPC2103 mounted:
















Back view of base complete with BIG rubber feet to keep it from sliding on the ground marshall's table on a cold winter's day:
















Back of top of console















Front of console. The black buttons are to setup the game. There will be a SELECT and A and B buttons. The red and black groupings of buttons are the "Home" and "Away" for +try, +conversion, +penalty and minus equivalents.
















This is the pull up resistor bank partially completed. 0.1uF capacitors to reduce bounce and noise.


















This is my GROWING kits of parts

Beware of What You Want – My Predictions for the US Election

Barrack Hussein Obama has the momentum and I read that most of the world outside of the USA is a big supporter of this bloke. Hey, why wouldn’t we given the mess Dubya has made? George W Bush has taken the US’s reputation and trashed it, bankrupted the place and started a false war in Iraq using trumped up intelligence (sic) reports. (FYI - there is a movie coming out by Oliver Stone called “W” which whitewashes Bush as a bumbling nice guy who “got it wrong”. Don’t be fooled by this movie).


It may not be as close as it appears. The US presidential election is not simply a popular vote – it’s an electoral system which means that a big majority in one state does not necessarily help you win the election overall. Also, it is well understood by pollsters that a significant minority of people are reluctant to say they will not vote for a black man so the margin of error is higher. Our newspapers in this part of the world show glowing reports, but then as I said above, anyone outside the US wants a dramatic change in US policy and so this Obama character looks to be that.


But have you actually looked at his policies? Looked at what he says he’ll do? If you look past the feel good “Change” message what do you see? This is what I see:

It Doesn’t Matter Who Wins

The US economy is stuffed and the so called Banking Bailout a heist of monumental proportions with the money being used for banking consolidation first and foremost and to stave off the impending depression caused by the derivatives scam that these very same bankers created to steal real assets. Vice President in waiting Joe Biden’s speech to the faithful tells you what’s really coming. All the nasty medicine is waiting until the next pres is signed up. One thing I am convinced of is that this will be a one term president.


The Democrats, of which Obama is one, have had control of the congress for two years and continued to support the wars, subsequent patriot acts, military commissions act and trillion dollar defence budgets. I mean this guy voted for the retrospective [retroactive] FISA bill!!!! Why does anyone think there will be fundamental change? There won’t be but he’ll make great speeches.
Put simply, Obama is a globalist like the rest of them. Don’t get fooled by the left-right paradigm as we are presented with two candidates that essentially have the same broad policies but say it in different accents.


Obama is saying a whole lot of warm and fuzzy things and giving us all hope that things will change, they won’t. Only real change will occur when enough people understand the trap of the left-right paradigm and seek to influence government from the grass roots up.

Xobni - Outlook Email Searching Tool

I rarely recommend software but this is one excellent utility.

Some people still categorise their email manually which is so yesterday. With the current packages searching email is so good it makes categorising obsolete.

This tool takes it to the next level for speed and sophistication. Check out the statistics pages you'll be surprised.

Only useful for M$ Outlook users. I'm using Office 2007 with Xobni and it integrates perfectly.

http://www.xobni.com/

Rugby Scoring System

I recently embarked upon a project to build a rugby scoring system. In the many years of being a ground marshal at village rugby games I got sick and tired of being asked the score or the remaining minutes in the half/game. The closer the game, the more often people come to the scoring tent to ask.

It was with this in mind that I had a look on the Internet for a scoring system. I had scored at Andrew’s basketball games so I was familiar with how easy the system can be made to operate. Unfortunately I could not find anything that was a reasonable price for my low-end requirement. Sure there are ones for 10’s of thousands but nothing for a couple of hundred. Being an old ham and an electronics hobbyist as a child I thought what a good opportunity to re-kindle this hobby and what better than a project to help the rugby club?

First I needed a display. There aren’t many out there and I didn’t want to build one from scratch (with LEDs, muxes and transistors). I found this one for $170 at Jaycar:

It is 8 characters wide and 50mm high and it works a treat. With some boxing and a shade of some sort it will be plenty bright enough for a clear winter’s day. It can scroll through several messages so I will have a sequence something like:

HOME 33

AWAY 24

TIME 10m

Problem #1: The display is operated by a program on a PC or using a TV-like remote control. This is not much use when I want to drive it from a program on a small microcontroller. In comes the old programming skill to reverse engineer the serial protocol that drives this thing. I downloaded four different serial sniffer programs before I got one that did what I needed. The best one was called Comm Port Toolkit. It allowed me to scan the serial connection and insert my own strings to test my theories as I developed them. It has a 30 day free trial period without limitations which should be ample time for me to reverse engineer the protocol and test it. In fact, I’ve pretty much nailed most of the operations I need to perform on it already.

Then I needed a microcontroller that had the following:

1. Serial port to drive the display sign

2. LCD interface for the operator

3. Real-time clock for timing the game

4. Sufficient i/o to handle home and away, plus/minus try, penalty and conversion buttons as well as some control/setup buttons

I chose this board because there looks to be good tool support for it and it used very little power and had a battery backed up RTC: LPC 2103.

I got a compatible LCD display like this one for the operator:

The LPC2103 came with an older version of Keil uVision CARM which I installed and familiarised myself with. Being an old C/C++ programmer the C was pretty easy to master but I must admit I am rusty.

Problem #2: Programming the LPC2103’s flash from my Vista laptop via a USB to serial connection (because my laptop doesn’t have quaint stuff like a DB9 serial connection and the uVision doesn’t run on Ubuntu) didn’t work.

The Phillips flash programmer that came with the board just would not work so I downloaded one from here called FlashMagic which works great. Since I am not using it for production or commercial use then I can use it for free!

After a couple of hours I had downloaded into my LPC2103 a few of the test programs and was able to see them operate. One was to control the LCD and another to echo characters from the serial port.

Problem #3: In the old days of ASCII/ANSI terminals I would just fire up Windows Terminal on my PC and view the serial interaction. I had my sniffer working so I could see what was being written to the port but had no way to respond. Seems they dropped Windows Terminal from Vista. No worries, I found that my Ubuntu distribution comes with Minicom which is a simple terminal emulator. I configured that in short order with a bit of trial and error to figure out which ttySx is the serial port Com2. If anyone is reading this and can tell me how to determine the tty# of a port on the back of a clone PC I’d like to know. I simply tried a few until it worked. My assumption is that ttyS0 is COM1 and ttyS1 is COM2 and so forth.

So by this stage I have been able to do the following:

· Write a program and download it into the microcontroller

· Drive an LCD

· Drive a serial port

· Figured out most of the LED display sign’s protocol

I then combined two of the example programs – UART1 and LCD – into one which tested my rusty C skills. I really thought I would never use things like “extern” again. It took me an hour or so to remember/re-figure-out the compiling and linking rules. It’s amazing how you unlock one small item of information in your memory and it opens a whole room of memories from my programming days.

This week my goal is to:

1. Sense switch actuation in the program using the general purpose i/o ports.

2. Drive the LED display sign from UART1 (serial port) from the LPC2103

3. Set and read the real time clock

Melsy tolerated yet another visit to Jaycar in Blacktown on Saturday to pick up some more bits and pieces (including a xmas present to Alyssa to smooth things a little). I got a case with a sloping front which will be the operator’s panel, some mod wire, ribbon cable and once only push button switches. The only other item that I will need with be a power source. I am hoping to buy a small lead acid battery to drive everything. It will need to last a full day of rugby (7am to 4pm). When I get closer to the end I will figure out the current this setup draws and get an appropriate sized battery.

I go to sleep wondering about switch bounce on GPIO lines. How much fun is this?