Laptop Hard Drive Crash

Another hard drive has crashed in my laptop.

While I am unable to recover my data, and will have to scrounge for replacement parts, I did come across a website with an interesting variety of Datacent.comFailing hard drive sounds.

Fixya. Fixed/Neutered.

I am a user on Fixya.com.

While they have 'fixed' the problem of hidden formatting consuming space in posts, as encountered here. They have done so by brutally sanitizing the HTML to the point where it will delete any specaly formatted content, often losing the critical distinction between A and A or ^B and _B.

Sorry about asking to be contacted here, but I don't want to expose my current e-mail on a help forum and it is no longer possible for me to embed it to be visible to only the intended recipient on Fixya now.

`ell, only one letter off.

A few years ago I canceled my spare Bell internet account because they would nolonger allow me to suspend it and resumed billing me unannounced, would not allow me to move the email to another acitve account, and would not allow me to only pay for hosting.

$25/mo for an email service that deletes my email without warning was a bit steep and I told them then to close the account.

I figured that after a couple of years the name would be released and I would be able to reopen it with my current one. This is what happened:

System		Welcome Darren {### ####}.
System		Connecting to server. Please wait...
System		Connection with server established. Please wait...
System		Balaji has joined this session!
System		Connected with Balaji
Balaji		Hi Darren {### ####}, welcome to Bell Internet Services, my name is Balaji. By looking at the option you have selected, I see that you have questions regarding your account, how may I assist you with this?
You		I am tryign to move my old emailaddress again.
You		IN 2007 I canceled a redundant account when maintaining it became too expensive.
You		I was unable to associate my original username/email with my current account.
Balaji		Sure, I'll be glad to assist you in moving your E-mail address Darren.
You		I need to do so now to consolidate my identity.
You		thankyou.
Balaji		Welcome.
Balaji		Could you give me a couple of minutes so that I'll get the information for you.
You		yes.
Balaji		Thank you for being on line.
Balaji		Once the account is terminated, the E-mail account associated with the account is also terminated.
You		However the user handle was not. I am unable to use "{####_###}"
Balaji		I apologize for the inconvenience caused to you.
You		The account { b1{######} / {#######} } still appear valid to one bill too, though I have forgotten the password.
Balaji		The E-mail also comes with the account. Once the account is terminated you can't access your E-mail Darren.
You		I never expected to; however the fact that the handle was not released is actually a good thing. It means that someone else cannot assume my identiy as easily.
Balaji		I am sorry for that.
You		Don't be, it was some major oversight that there is not an extablished proceedure for moving e-mail addresses between accounts.
Balaji		The E-mail also comes with the account when you have subscribed with Bell. Once the account is terminated you can't access your E-mail Darren.
You		... By which I mean that I have multiple bell accounts, but when I moved back to my mother's there was no mechanism by which we could keep both email's without paying full price for both accounts.
Balaji		May I have the b1 number of the active Internet service?
You		b1{######}
Balaji		Thank you.
Balaji		There is no possibility to have the {####_###}@sympatico.ca , because you account (b1{######} ) has been terminated.
You		...
You		There is no means by which the email from the terminated account can be associated with the active one?
Balaji		I have checked the information Darren you can't associate the active account. As your account is Terminated.
You		So since December of 2007 all bell customers who moved in together, got married, merged businesses, combined offices, ect. They all have had to either pay an obscene amount of money for 'just the email' or give up that identity, and the professional/personal connections therein?
Balaji		here is no possibility to have the {####_###}@sympatico.ca , because you account (b1{######} ) has been terminated.
You		Yes?
Balaji		The E-mail also comes with the account. Once the account is terminated you can't access your E-mail Darren.
You		If i were to pay to reactivate the account, would the email address then be portable?
Balaji		I do understand Darren. Unfortunately it is not possible to reactivate the account once it is terminated.
Balaji		Darren, I do understand your concern, Email is a service provided by Bell together with Internet service, and all email accounts are connected with their internet accounts.
Balaji		We cannot provide email service alone to any customer, The internet account once terminated cannot be reactivated.
Balaji		Darren, you can try to create the {####_###} email address with gmail, yahoo or hotmail.
Balaji		I appreciate your understanding in this regard.
You		THe problem is that I associated my {bank}, {portfolio} and other professional accounts with this address becasue at teh time I belived that this was safe. When emails started disappearing (becasue my ### stole the acount information and some idiot kept resettting the password for ###) I moved most things to another service, however these two accounts are permanently associated with this address unless I can countersign an email from them.
You		I understand that there is no established method for remeding this currently and I will pursue another avenue for resolution.
Balaji		I'm really sorry and I apologize for the current situation.
You		Out of morbid curiousity; Does Bell currently have a mechanism by which email-addresses be moved from active accounts can ?
Balaji		Darren, I can understand your need for the email address, however email addresses cannot be transferred to different address.
You		thank you for your efforts.
Balaji		You are welcome.
Balaji		Is there anything else that I can do for you?
You		I will be reposting this chatlog, would you like to have your screen name redacted?
Balaji		Darren, I have provided the information to you based on the actual policies of Bell.
You		Then that is all. Thankyou again.

So eventhough they know it's me, they still have the account on record, and will never use that username/email for any other purpose they will not even sell me my email and are telling me to go away.

The address cannot be moved from any account to another. The original address cannot be removed from the first account. And the account cannot be reopened for a couple of weeks for any amount of money.

It would seem that Bell is only interested in customers who are in a rut and are unprepared for / have no idea why anybody else would be on the internet.

In a nutshell;
if your situation changes for better or worse and you find yourself sharing your line with another Bell subscriber, Bell is telling you that you both would have been better off using Hotmail from the start unless you have the money to pay for two broadband connections, since Bell nolonger sells 'only email' or 'dial-up' anymore.

I am defintely going to see if I can't get bell to fix this.

Eazy, like riding a bike.

The EZ-USB board last mentioned on this blog in Yeah! was built a while ago. Even used some of the board art as the background to this blog. But I did not post the build logs because I must have been clicking the wrong button all along.

I'll summarize the build here:

Oddly the most arguious part of this build was getting the PCB made. There was a miscommunication and I misunderstood that the PCB design would be sent out after my boss 'did something' to the Eagle files. That never happened, instead when I went to collect the PCB I received a blank piece of photo-sensitive board and a (discount brand) transparency sheet.

In the time since I last made a board by photoengraving we had installed a new experimental etching process. A year ago we diped the boards in heated baths of feric chloride (etchant) with an array of aquarium air pumps to provide circulation. Now we had a metal cage that holds the blank PCB in a small container with twice as many aquarium pumps blasting the etchant onto the PCB, no heater. This is partly because disgruntled jokers kept bypassing the automatic shutoff and leaving it on over the weekend, but mostly because when the etchant is opaque this still will etch a board in a couple of minutes.

My lack of familiarity with the new arrangement meant that it once I had the pattern printed onto the transparency (which was unexpectedly difficult due to network problems) it took four attempts to get a useable board.

Fail #1: hot seat.
It seemed to have etched nicely when I checked it after three minutes, however when I did extract it there was a long scratch across the board that cut through rows of wires. These had to be bridged using wires, dozens of them.

There were dozens of vias too since the original design called for the lines to be brought out in signal rather than pin. These were connected using wires, dozens of them.

The vias that would be concealed by the main IC would also have allowed easy rework if the IC was off its mark. These also are to meet for specific power requirements. The new plan called for the 24 gauge wire to form a platform under the IC and bending the pins down to the board, a baker's-dozen wires, and a hundred pins.

I'd done this with a 20-SOP (0.05") and even a 48-TSOP (0.02") before and figured that it would work with a TQFP-100 (0.02"). After many attempts I could not get the vertical pins onto their pads no matter how many times I tried and I figured that the chip must be riding up at an angle on these wires.

After disturbing much of the fancy repair work I'd done earlier it seemed likely that the IC would not have enjoyed this much heat so etching another board and using 30 gauge FFC instead seemed more reasonible than continuing.

Fail #2: repeat.
Being very careful not to scratch the mask I photo-developed another board and then used a Sharpie 'industrial ink' pen to draw in the details that didn't turn out, put it into the etchant and watched.

After a few seconds it became clear that the board was not being etched evenly, and I very gingerly repositioned the board when the definition of the traces were clear in one patch, but not the rest of the board.

Eventually it became clear that part of the photo-mask was eroding but other areas were not etching. This was probably due to a combination of uneven circulation of the etchant and contamination of the board. (my colleagues were eating fried chicken and also making PCBs for their own projects) TO fix this I tried to cut the copper between traces w/ my knife and return the PCB to the etchant. This did not result in the copper being removed after a couple of minutes. So I removed the board to try again, at which point a bit of the vynil I had used to hold the board to the cage brushed against it and removed part of the normally acid proof mask.

Fail #3: cleaner is better?
After decling to go to the pub with my friends/coleagues for lunch (which I regret) I tried again.

This time thoroughly cleaning all of the equipment and replacing the photo-developer solution, to eliminate contamination. Collecting a fresh blank PCB to avoid mask voids where air has leaked in and eaten it away. Over exposing the board to make absolutely certain that not even an invisible trace of the mask remained. And finally resolving not to handle the board once it was in the etchant.

This did not work.

While I was working through the chicken my friends had left me the board was buffeted against its cage and recieved many scratches. And the over exposure caused many defects. All of which would require hundreds of wire bridges to repair.

Fail #2: the sequel
Not anticipating any greater success with the current pattern, I went ahead and tried to repair these boards and if another PCB is to be made in the same manner than a new design would be used, one that is single sided and not 'consumer ready'.

I drilled the hundreds of vias/pads by hand before heading home where I pre-soldiered the entire surface of both boards to eliminate any small break. Used the CAD files and my knife to carved every single line that did not etch from Fail #2 out of the copper cladding. Used a desklamp and a marker to highlight the dozens of breaks in the pattern.

Fail #0:
Back at work the next day I tinned a fresh chip, and positioned it on Fail #1;

It did not fit.

I did check the fit on a plain piece of paper; but the transparency was clearly out of scale when I lay it ontop. Want to know how was this was possible?

Remember the printing problems?

We have a mix of Win9x, Win2k, Mac and Linux machines, and everyone outright owns their own machine in addition to the pool of machines provided. We also for baffling reasons don't use printing permissions, so often times someone in one department will try printing to the first printer they see on the network, instead of the one they are sitting next to. And when that doesn't work they try printing again. Then when that fails they try another printer at random. And when that fails they try the first one again. ...

Now this wouldn't be an issue if we didn't have seven printers in on the main print server workgroup and another fourty in various offices. My lab's printer is the first one on the list so it is often out of toner and paper, or getting stuck when someone ques to print A4 and it only has letter and A3. To combat this IT has set the print server to always override print-settings to use HP's 'econo-mode' if a user prints twice to the same printer within a 30 minute window.



Econo-mode itself is actually quite clever. It applies a gradient to dark areas so that the edges that the human eye follows are clear but less toner is used in the middle. And the page is scaled vertically by 5-15% depending on the amount of toner used on each line, tightening line spacing and saving even more toner. All of which does not negatively affect human readable text and graphics.

But my work is technical. A 5% distortion is enough to put a sliding rule graph out by an entire order of magnitude. And even regular scaling to a PCB prevents pieces from mating, printed component to be incorrect values, IC pins sitting onto the wrong pads, header pins not fitting without breaking.

At this point I cursed and redesigned the board and stayed late to finish building the board.

Success from failure:it just never ends.
Redesigning this board a fifth time has allowed me new insight to its design. This iteration brought the board to approximately the size of a floppy disk, and there was no real need for it to be breadboard sized, and the whole peripheral plan was a bit half-baked. As a 3.25" double sided board it would have sufficient space to bring two rs232 transceivers and keep the extra leds and buttons. I've never seen a user plus the original into a breadboard and build their circuit next to it anyways, it's always three boards, one for each edge and one for the circuit.
Now it's one plus the double sided 3.25".

The tie in: product placement.
The SSD mentioned on this blog in Cloning for fun or profit can be reduced to four chips, this SoaC, voltage-level converter, power and SRAM. And the sweet part is that now the medium for loading/unloading data from the XT/AT can be a USB cable, and users can expand the capabilities of this card using software.

There are a few more posts to summarize about acually programming this chip, but I will continue that in a later post.

What?

Adding symbol GND to F09-S would exceed the minimum number of pads (11) availble in package variant V

This is a device I copied directly from Eagle 5.7.0's library (con-subd.lbr) because in my design only one of the two shield lugs were being wired. I was only conecting to 10/11 pads, but adding annother GND symbol increasing the symbol count to 11 actually exceeded the pad limit of 11.



The connect window shows that there are infact 11 pins already defined, including G1 and G2. Typing show G1 in the command line is unsuccessful, therefore these pins must be defined within a symbol.



A look at the symbol (GND.sym) appears to illustrate a single pin, right clicking and selecting properties reveals G1, a wire and a circle. G2 must be nearby, and show G2 in the command line reveals that it is hidden under G1, backwards!



So in the schematic editor by using the wire tool and clicking on the GND symbol only the top pin was engaged. Had I run Eagle's Electrical Rule Check it would have produced a warning that would have confused me and prompted the same response.



The workaround:

This is a common symbol in Eagle's library, let's hope that 5.9.0 has it documented.

EDIT: typo, G2 and G1 transposed.

Connecting

After I wrote that last post about my being unable to connect my brother found the new modem outside. The technician that sent it the day before said

[...] How long have you had this problem? Lets look at you router's status-* Holy-Shit! How are you even able to connect? [...] Your modem is dying, there have been more than 200000 ATM Cell Header Errors in the last two hours! [...]

and decided to send a replacement overnight express. The courier instead of putting it in the locker box or ringing the bell decided to leave it balanced on my doorstep with the "Signature Required" label face up. The courier’s website says it arrived at 1:10 PM. :|

When I installed it in the exact same place the old one was I found that while it worked considerably better than the old one, it still did not connect for more than a few minutes and about the time it racked up 10k errors I decided to try connecting it in another room. There it worked brilliantly, only one error in the first ten minutes. Thinking back to the technician's questions about what might be connected to that socket, and the knowledge that I'd in the month prior had to dig a shorting electrical recepticle out of the wall that had been plastered inplace decided to replace that socket in the first room. Now it works and picking up a phone (wired or wireless) doesn't fast-resync the DSL line.

Thinking about it now, I also recall that the cable box was secured to the electrical meter by means of framing screws, I wonder if this is the source of the phantom rings that have been annoying us during the day. I will need to make a meter long insulated screwdriver and remove them. It can't have been legal to drive metal spikes into the meter the first place.

unable to connect.

Another DSL modem has failed and I am now waiting for a replacement.

My connections have been deteriorating since the meter guy had a tantrum and tore the phone and cable boxes off of the wall two years ago. I strongly suspect that the 'contractor' they sent out to fix it wired something into my loop that should not be there since

1. the boxes are now supported by their wires
2. there are wire splices outside of the box
3. my digital cable is fed through the phone box
4. there are loose fasteners inside the sealed boxes
and
5. without exaggeration, I can throw a rock and hit the CO across the intersection from my house and yet my signal quality swings from nil to excellent every few mintues

As a subscriber to both Bell and Rodgers I am understandably disappointed;
when I travel south into Toronto for work I am not excited to be meeting in person with my peers but able to get their e-mail.

If only my mother wasn't javascript:void(0)determined to keep her Bell e-mail address, then we could switch to a better DSL vendor (who would actually be selling us Bell internet, but at a better price and) with technicians who would understand that a loop that has toased three modems probabaly has something wrong in it.

New Toy

I have received my Sworche:Mover MP5 Player in the mail today from DealExtreme:(SKU 28877).

I was asked by a number of companies to source an affordible 'mini' PDA. I figured that repurposing a handheld game&mpeg player would be the only way we could stay within the $50 price envelope set by cellphones with PDA capabilities while remaining fabless.

I've intentionally broken and repaired it already and I have to say that the build and design quality are to par with what my clients are seeking, and significantly higher than I was expecting (which was not great). This appears to have been repackaged as packing the materials and methods of each of the accessories are different from each other, and what is discribed by vendor. The distributor tells me that this is because of their quality control checks. This would also explain why thie unit has evidence of having been cycled (charded, discharged, configured and fully feature tested).

With little modification I should be able to add touch, USB and bluetooth host capabilities; however the software needs significant work, especially the spectrum analyser.

Fortunately my clients are companies of software developers who are responding to requests by three different distributors. Two of which have tried to deploy what are now being called 'mini PDAs' due to a trademark infringement suit.

Because of a confict of intrest I terminated relations with one client when another offered me a permanent position- shortly before that company tanked. So this player will be my USB drive/e-book reader for the time being.

Edit: LOL, I just noticed that there was no opening in the case for the "Opuonal" camera.

Aww ----

Exepcting my travelling companion to stir up shit I decided to remove all CAD programs from my laptop before travelling to the states to avoid accusations of illegally exporting technology in addition other technological activities which are legal where I am now, but not in the states.

Upon returning I recieved notice that one of my major projects was due and I being the dubious bastard I am, was waiting for the request before submiting. (Also the design was still a bit rough.) I was surprised that the Eagle link was still in my startmenu; However, this link was broken as Eagle's uninstaller had neglected to remove the links and associations from my system.

Undetered I downloaded the new version from their homepage and after installing it was surprised that it was requesting the My Documents/Eagle be created. Figuring that I deleted it I clicked no and started to browse for my not in a default location projects folder on my C: drive. It was not there. Neither was the copy of an old backup on my desktop that I had included in Eagle's directory config. And my backup drive is nowhere close to up to date as I had to use that cable for my network printer.

So now a major project is due and the best backup I have is eight months old.

"...."

Edit: Language