Found this while searching for the digits for Hank and Davis:
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/spacecraft/q0164.shtml
Good for endless hours of exploration, and not shy of math either.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Dell Amber Light of Death
Turning on the powerstrip to my Optiplex GX260, the power light blinks yellow (amber). Pressing and holding stops the blinking, but it goes back to blinking when pressed again.
Many folks have had this problem. Diagnosis is made harder because this model lacks the ABCD indicator lights on the back (Note: I recently noticed that it actually does have the ABCD lights. I'm not sure how I missed them when looking for them before). Some folks had to replace their power supply. Some had motherboard issues. The following link (and maybe one or two others) implicated a USB port. Those folks had actual bent traces in their USB sockets. In my case, I just had to move my JTAG adapter to a different port. It seems like after the equipment move when I plugged everything together I had changed which USB socket on the back I was using and one of the USB sockets on the back is somehow bad.
The USB case:
http://www.randomfix.com/2007/04/19/dell-dimension-%E2%80%93-flashing-orange-power-light/
A guy who had to replace his power supply:
http://forums.computing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=140031
Many folks have had this problem. Diagnosis is made harder because this model lacks the ABCD indicator lights on the back (Note: I recently noticed that it actually does have the ABCD lights. I'm not sure how I missed them when looking for them before). Some folks had to replace their power supply. Some had motherboard issues. The following link (and maybe one or two others) implicated a USB port. Those folks had actual bent traces in their USB sockets. In my case, I just had to move my JTAG adapter to a different port. It seems like after the equipment move when I plugged everything together I had changed which USB socket on the back I was using and one of the USB sockets on the back is somehow bad.
The USB case:
http://www.randomfix.com/2007/04/19/dell-dimension-%E2%80%93-flashing-orange-power-light/
A guy who had to replace his power supply:
http://forums.computing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=140031
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Somebody F#@%'d with my path
OrCAD no longer starts. Thank you 560 admins. Was getting an "Application has failed to start because cdsCommon.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem"
Found that this dll existed perfectly happily in the tools/bin directory under my CDSROOT directory. Found out how to change the $PATH variable in XP. Added the tools/bin directory to the $PATH and it's up now. My $PATH didn't have anything obviously wrong with it before I edited it though, even though there was no OrCAD paths in it. Either a chunk of the $PATH just got bitten off, or some other variable that OrCAD uses in place of the $PATH was mangled. The $CDSROOT and $CDS_LIC_FILE variables were both there and looked good. A search of recently changed files is what leads me to implicate the admins, as some WBEM stuff changed and the wbemcore.log file seems to indicate that something bad happened on Sunday and there was some kind of restore. Also Patchlink ran on Monday.
To change environment variables, right click on my computer, select properties, go to the Advanced tab, click on Environment Variables. Per: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm
There's almost nothing on OrCAD environment variables to be found through Google, but the following few OrCAD forum posts were very enlightening, all about customers' struggles to solve the maddening slow start problem that everybody I know is also experiencing:
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9172
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14748
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=12819
Found that this dll existed perfectly happily in the tools/bin directory under my CDSROOT directory. Found out how to change the $PATH variable in XP. Added the tools/bin directory to the $PATH and it's up now. My $PATH didn't have anything obviously wrong with it before I edited it though, even though there was no OrCAD paths in it. Either a chunk of the $PATH just got bitten off, or some other variable that OrCAD uses in place of the $PATH was mangled. The $CDSROOT and $CDS_LIC_FILE variables were both there and looked good. A search of recently changed files is what leads me to implicate the admins, as some WBEM stuff changed and the wbemcore.log file seems to indicate that something bad happened on Sunday and there was some kind of restore. Also Patchlink ran on Monday.
To change environment variables, right click on my computer, select properties, go to the Advanced tab, click on Environment Variables. Per: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm
There's almost nothing on OrCAD environment variables to be found through Google, but the following few OrCAD forum posts were very enlightening, all about customers' struggles to solve the maddening slow start problem that everybody I know is also experiencing:
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9172
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=14748
http://www.orcad.com/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=12819
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Bit by Xilinx again - FSM in BRAM
First attempt to move my FSMs into BRAM failed with this message:
"ERROR: Portability:3 - This Xilinx application has run out of memory or has encountered a memory conflict..."
Most of the xilinx forum posts on this problem are answered with "we don't know, have you tried more RAM?". Some interesting other responses:
This is the most pertinent response, which talks about a few cases which produce this problem. It hints that piecemeal compilation is possible but I've never seen hints of how to do this before:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/15336.htm
This guy seems to know what he's talking about, and he heroically bought a new computer, then switched to Linux to get it to work:
http://forums.xilinx.com/xlnx/board/message?board.id=ISE&thread.id=4524
This guy also went to heroic lengths, and came to the conclusion that he was being limited solely by computing power, wants supercomputers in The Cloud to do it for him.
http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
This hint was for possibly an older version of XST, but it offers the hope (taken) that I can just turn off RTL Schematic generation:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/16904.htm
"ERROR: Portability:3 - This Xilinx application has run out of memory or has encountered a memory conflict..."
Most of the xilinx forum posts on this problem are answered with "we don't know, have you tried more RAM?". Some interesting other responses:
This is the most pertinent response, which talks about a few cases which produce this problem. It hints that piecemeal compilation is possible but I've never seen hints of how to do this before:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/15336.htm
This guy seems to know what he's talking about, and he heroically bought a new computer, then switched to Linux to get it to work:
http://forums.xilinx.com/xlnx/board/message?board.id=ISE&thread.id=4524
This guy also went to heroic lengths, and came to the conclusion that he was being limited solely by computing power, wants supercomputers in The Cloud to do it for him.
http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html
This hint was for possibly an older version of XST, but it offers the hope (taken) that I can just turn off RTL Schematic generation:
http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/16904.htm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)