A great flying quad-copter:
I’m having some trouble with the MTK GPS and the winter weather in St. Louis, but otherwise, this is the best flying copter I’ve ever had. It has a GPS/barometric pressure/sonar rangefinder driven autopilot that will be able to fly waypoints and come home on command. I’m working now on a tilt/pan video camera transmitted to the ground and commands on a bidirectional data link (XBEE). Highly recommended and available at: DIY Drones.
Short version – If you run into IE 8 suddenly crashing with a DEP exception after installing Microsoft’s Office Patch KB977724, you need to visit the following link to get a hot fix for KB977724.
Long version –
I spent half a day trying to figure out why I suddenly had IE 8 crashing in Windows Server 2008 while working on Sharepoint 2007 WSS development. The DEP exception would lock up IE 8 with a small dialog box indicating that IE had crashed. I tried the standard stuff – going through the add-ons disabling everything and nothing reliably stopped the crashes – except for running IE with no add-ons loaded. I thought it was related somehow to SharePoint 2007 or possibly an exploit of some sort. A day later I found this post above which doesn’t specifically mention IE 8 – but does work for my situation. I think that SharePoint’s interaction with Office 2007 is causing IE 8 to crash.
This is video from last September of my first Ardupilot test. To keep the first test simple, I modified the software configuration to fly a simple fixed heading of 45 degrees when I engage the autopilot from the R/C unit. This worked very well for a while until the last attempt, when something glitched in the software/GPS and commanded a dive into the ground into one of the few trees in the field. The end of the video shows several frames of video as the pieces were stripped off the airplane by the tree. All the electronics survived the crash and I’m rebuilding a new airframe to test in the Spring.
I’m excited to try Charter’s new Docsis 3.0 60 mbit service in St. Louis. Pricing was $30 more than what I’m currently paying for 20/2.
I’ve been watching with interest the progress in CERN’s LHC and the upcoming first proton beam over the 27 km loop. Wednesday, September 10, 2008 is the day and I’m excited to hear how the tests go. The beam will be only in one direction, so any collisions will be from stray particles or beam positioning errors. However, as they calibrate the detectors and other instruments, it won’t be long until the many experiments planned for the LHC will commence. In particular, the search for the Higgs Boson is really exciting since this may finally add the source of mass for particles in the Standard Model.
One really enjoyable overview of the LHC is AlpineKat’s LHC Rap:
We have a suite of regression tests that we wanted to run automatically after our MSbuild build is complete. I’ve implemented these tests as C# code exported from Selenium IDE and preprocessed by some .NET code that I wrote. The tests are then compiled using MSBuild and executed. The problem I ran into that wasn’t clearly documented anywhere was how to run a Selenium RC test as part of a build process – which requires the Java based Selenium RC server running on port 4444. Since we run our test as part of a scheduled task, how do we maintain the Java Selenium server running across logins of the scheduled task?
My first instinct was to run the Selenium server as a Windows service and I found a forum post that provided a .NET service to do this. The problem is that when the service runs in the LocalSystem’s account context, IE was problematic for enabling the proxy that Selenium RC uses during the invocation of tests. Trying to modify the service to run as a legitimate user also didn’t work – since the service was running in a different Windows Station and IE did not run correctly in this mode either.
It turned out the simple solution was to just invoke the Selenium Server from the build batch file and then terminate the server when I was finished with the test. There is a built in command in the command line interpreter named "taskkill" that does the job for me. Here is the .bat file code that I used – and note that the first line kills any java apps that are running so be careful. I needed this line to abort a server in progress if the script or tests failed and left a java session hanging. My build machine doesn’t have any other java things going on so this worked for me. I’m using nunit to invoke my C# tests contained in "jalisngtests.dll". I’m also using the "sleep" command from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.
taskkill /f /im java.exe sleep 5 start "Selenium Server" java ^ -jar C:\selenium-remote-control-1.0-beta-1\^ selenium-server-1.0-beta-1\selenium-server.jar copy .\bin\debug\*.dll sleep 20 nunit-console jalisngtests.dll taskkill /f /fi "WINDOWTITLE eq Selenium Server" |
After listening to Leo Laporte’s UGM (ultimate gaming machine) discussion on TwitLive last night, I pondered the question of best choice for a new UGM. I am running an Intel Q6600 (quad core 2.4 ghz) processor and have been pleased with it’s performance.
There was a spirited discussion on the show of which would be better – a Q9770 ($1400 3.2 ghz quad) or an E8500 ($277 3.16 ghz dual core). There was a common opinion that current games don’t make use of a Quad – that quads are for the future. However, I experimented around Christmas time with this very issue and found that both Supreme Commander and Crysis did make use of 4 cores. I posted in the chat room that Crysis did max out 4 cores (as I remembered) but after trying this out again – I was wrong. However, Crysis does make use of 4 cores and I do get a satisfying frame rate on my Q6600/8800GT combo.
Here is what my Q6600 utilization is while running Crysis at 1280×1024. Not maxing out, but more than 2 cores are used. The third and fourth cores seem to get active when guns are fired – tracers, etc. Here is a post on the subject : Intel and Crysis Developers comments on Quad Core – Toms Hardware.
This is one of the first games to support a quad core processor. In the following run – I had 2 monitors displaying 1280×1024 and a very large scenario (8 players – 1000 units per). Notice that the four cores are not maxed out, but they are definitely in use. The second core is less loaded than the others but is still in use.
Here is the list I found of current games that support a quad core:
Games and Dual/Quad Core Support
From the list:
Games that take advantage of Quad Core:
Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3
Microsoft releases VPC versions of IE (6, 7 and 8 ) for testing. Here is the link to the Official IE Blog.
I had to call Charter back the next day – the first provisioning wasn’t performed correctly and now I’m seeing increased performance:
Not 16 mbits, but I like the almost 2 mbit up.
Just called and I’m set up for 16/2. The pricing is the same as the old 10/1 price.
