My programming is going well… I am starting to run out of CPU time again… This time it was also with sending to the serial port consuming too much CPU time. Just a little too much. Since I was not using that information I simply stopped sending it. Problem solved. My problem now is that the buzzer also operates in a brain-dead way, using too much CPU… I can fix that without too many issues… I Hope.

One of the problems I was having this afternoon was using the LED’s. What I was doing to change colour was multiply the value used to output the LED’s by 2 in order to change the colour from red to green. It did not quite work that way though – since it left a couple of LED’s on. Setting the bit at the bottom ON, rather than ON fixed this. The way this works is that each BYTE controls 8 LED’s… 4 RED and 4 GREEN. And they are mixed, so if you have it set up for RED, all you need to do is shift right one bit to make them green. But at the same time you must turn the LED at the bottom off by setting it high. Boring details, but it is important for me to know what I did… Took too much time working that out.

From the RISKS digest, “As is often done in Europe, the agency operating streetcars in the French city of Grenoble has provided ticket-selling machines that can be operated in more than one language. It was reported this week in uk.transport.london that if you select English, the machines welcome you to London’s Croydon Tramlink system! Seen here“

There are also more reports in RISKS DIGEST reporting that some ATM’s in The Netherlands have some buggy software. They have been mis-programmed, and now their keyboards no longer recognise the 7 button. So people with 7 in their PIN’s cannot operate the ATM’s for at least three weeks!!!