September 2013
iOS Upgrade
The iOS 7 Upgrade fun was slightly marred today by a glitch in the order of updating iTunes and iOS. Read More...
G-Code: A poorly define language
18/09/13 12:31 Filed in: Electronics
Many Computer Controlled Machines used for CNC use NC-code / RS-274D / G-Code / Gerber to describe their programs. This language appears to be very loosely defined. To save others searching I am summarising some sources and observations about this language. Read More...
PCB Routing
18/09/13 11:21 Filed in: Electronics
I recently acquired a Roland iModela iM-01 which I intend to use for routing small PCBs. This is the first of a series of articles about getting to a working toolchain. There is a bit of a learning curve with using CNC and many of the tools only exist for Windows. One of the things I wanted was a tool path tracer - so I could quickly see what the NC-code / RS-274D / G-Code does. Read More...
Perl on BSD talking to MS-SQL Server
13/09/13 10:27 Filed in: Programming
A lot of broadcast monitoring equipment seems to use Microsoft SQL Server as backend for storing alerts and other data. As we use a FreeBSD based monitoring box it proved necessary to find a way of accessing these servers via ODBC. Read More...
Not good news for Science in Australia
11/09/13 09:25 Filed in: Science
Australia has a new federal government and it looks like world opinion of science in Australia has taken a hit. New Scientist just ran an article entitled “Australia rips up climate-change policies” (10 September 2013) which covered a number of policies:
- climate
- National Broadband Network
- Specific research projects
- NICTA