Can you Tune a Fish?

There is an
article on the Internet about a Self Tuning Piano. This piano uses power to tune each string - creating a piano with 250W or there abouts of power heating the strings.

The problem is that the piano really needs to be tuned through playing as the activity of playing will cause the strings to cool, and the temperature of the strings is driven through open loop control rather than closed loop.

Update and Apology

I am now in New Zealand, and I am emjoying myself. The guest house on my friends property is beautiful. I really love this country - so beautiful and peaceful. We spent the morning working on getting his digital eight track recorder working - something that did not work reliably. In fact it turned Jazz into something like Rap. Or turned Jazz into something like Jazz on a scratched CD.

I went shopping today and picked up a few CD's that I have been meaning to buy - The Soundtrack to Local Hero by Mark Knopfler, The 20th aniversary of BandAid's Do They Know It's Christmas, and the Best of Belinda Carlisle. Unfortunately the CD player in my laptop has firnally stopped working so I will be going into Kevin's Recording Studio tonight to play these at full volume!

I would also like to make a formal apology to my ex-fiance about comments made on this blog. The comments were insensative, and I unreservably retract them, and apologise for any pain or suffering that they caused. Whilst I took great care not to cause any harm, I acknowledge that some of the comments may have been interpreted that way. That was certainly not my intent. Nor was it my intent to damage anyones reputation. I would like to apologise if any of my comments led to this conclusion.

New Zealand... The Answer

So, how was my trip? Well, it is interesting to see how prayers are answered. Going to New Zealand was my way of giving myself some time to work through some personal issues – a cancelled engagement in fact.

Thursday I arrived in New Zealand. Friday I receive an email from an unexpected source. From someone I did not know and I had never heard of. I will not go into the contents of the email. In the past I did promise myself to put any such emails on this site.

To be frank, the email shocked and scared me. It disturbed me and made me really angry. It made me want to get revenge. What I did not expect was that this same email within a few hours gave me peace. It is a peace that I had been struggling to find for some days.

Those very few people who have seen the email might be surprised at my reaction. But it really did give me the peace I needed. I guess it really gave me full closure. It also gave me some perspective on things, and where things had got to. And on how caught up in things I had got. So I just let it go.

So the trip was a success. I really need to thank Kevin and France Crossley for their hospitality. Just talking to them about things really helped. They let me stay in their guest house and opened their house to me. They invited me to come to New Zealand for a few days – I did not even need to ask them. How cool is that? Kevin once again told me many stories of the good old days, and the coffee was fantastic.

There is something to be said about sipping a fresh cappuccino in the back of a motor home in the middle of nowhere. It also gives one a bit of perspective. Of what life is all about.

Thanks to them I was able to afford to spend time in another country for less than the cost of spending it in Australia in nice hotels. With internet access and people to talk to as needed. Four nights away is not long enough to spend away but I do have a business to run. Personal issues have caused me too much time away from the business so I could not stay.

I now have some work to do for Kevin. I need to replace a couple of IC’s that might be faulty on his Fostex 2000 8-Track digital system. I just need to track down the parts first.

Cute Teddy Bear

I think this is SO cute...

According to the BBC, a company in the US state of Vermont has sparked controversy with a teddy bear in a straitjacket emblazoned with a love heart for Valentine's Day. For when you are mad about someone, such as in the TV Series Mad About You featuring Helen Hunt and Paul Riser

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Here in New Zealand I am staying in a place called Coatesville. It is about 3KM from Albany, about 30KM north of Auckland. It is a really nice little town. Quiet. Peaceful. Albany has a megacentre strip mall with the normal sorts of shops. And Westfields are about to start building a shopping centre there. North Harbour Stadium is also in Albany.

Today I went out to near Helensville, a location that is aparently used in a lot of movies since it looks like a town from the 50's. Kevin and I did some walking in the countryside whilst his wife did some riding. This was enjoyable. I took a lot of photos - and I will add them here when I get the chance.

I saw a property in Coatesville on the way there that was used to shoot part of the film of the C.S.Lewis book "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe". I have been meaning to read this series of books for years. Maybe now I will.

New Zealand Photos

Here are some photos from my New Zealand Trip. Enjoy

Copyright and Fostex

I was looking at the Soundtrack to Local Hero, and something struck me. The copyright data for the album is incorrect, and actually fraudulant in some jurisdictions.

The songs for the album were written and performed sometime in the early 1980's - about 1982/3. There is one song that was listed as being recorded in 1982, however the remainder of the songs are listed with a Copyright and Performance date of 1998. I find this rather strange personally.

Sure, the album was remastered in 1998, but the original music was written and recorded in the early 1980's - about 15 years before. It can be argued that re-mastering the CD effectively extends the copyright on the performance, but it does not extend the copyright on the actual music.

Copyright in some jurisdictions lasts from 25 years from when the work was done. In others it is 90 years after the death of the last author of the work. So by not including all the details you can effectively extend copyright a few years in some jurisdictions.

Fostex.

I did some more work on the Fostex 8 track digital recorder. This is a nice piece of equipment that cost about US$50,000 about 10 years back. Yesterday I was able to confirm that there is an internal fault in the machine. this is a 6U box that is rather heavy running multiple processors, FPGA IC's and lots of DSP. As nice as it is, I suspect it is fairly well un-repairable. The only part I could think of that could have failed is surface mount and does not look damaged. I wonder if that is faulty... Is it worth finding out?

What is a Blog?

Recently someone asked me what a Blog was. Blog was the word of the year for 2003 or 2004 but the word is still not well known throughout the population. Some people who have heard the word have no idea what it means.

With the creation of the Internet over the last 30 years came electronic mail. This was followed by mailing lists where you could send one message to a group of people. Following this came electronic bulletin boards where people could add their own content on subjects of their choosing.

With the World Wide Web came the ability of people to add their own Home Page - a page about themselves and their life. Over the last few years people have started using the internet for a personal public diary allowing family, friends and others access to their life.

Webloging (or blogging as it is called) is a type of web page that is very easy to update. The most recent information is at the top. Old content is automatically archived. A site like Blogger.Com can help with writing the web page.

New Zealand here I come

Tomorrow morning I am flying to New Zealand for a few days. Probably the weekend and not much more. I am staying with a friend and we are going to see if we can fix his recording studio at the same time. It should be a good break, and I am sure that they will be interested in hearing the complete story about the trip:-)

Findwindow Question - Windows CE

No blog for a while. I have no excuse

I have been working on doing a vehicle tracking interface for OziExplorer CE. This required me to use VB.NET under Windows CE. An interesting exercise. I have had issues getting the install program to work. It would not install the OpenNetCF SmartDeviceFramework that I had used for the FindWindow function.

Searching on the net I a Blog Entry with an example in C-sharp. With some help of another Blog I was able to convert this to VB.NET under Windows CE.

Public Declare Function FindWindow Lib "coredll" (ByVal lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As IntPtr
oziwindow = FindWindowCE.Native.FindWindow(vbNullString, "OziExplorer")

So Easy when you know how