Brett Trotter

I wanted to play around with my Altera DE2 a little and see what it could do, so I created a clock. It started out very simple and with a few relatively small additions, yielded a somewhat useful project.

I posted a new article with some code over at CodeProject.com that controls a Scott Edwards Electronics LCD. If you have one, you may find it useful.

Link here.

update 11-09-08: Recently, my code was promoted to an official article, so the link has been updated.

This is a totally off the wall, and is just a general idea- the details need fleshing out, and it may already exist somewhere, but to my knowledge it is an original idea.

The basic idea is for a replacement for IP that would authenticate all connected nodes using public key cryptography.

I had a sudden flashback to Windows 3.1 days and had to recreate the argyle wallpaper. I loaded the old one and it seemed too small. Then I remembered that screens were 640x480 then, with a 32x32 tile, there were 20 vertically- so with a modern 1280x1024 screen, they'd be about 52x52 (technically 51x51, but that wouldn't work quite right) to give the same visual effect. Just resizing would look silly, especially considering it was a low bit depth image before and even the center color was being represented by a 50% mix of two colors placed adjacently in a grid. So, I fired up Photoshop and made a new one in true color at 52 pixels. It's quite funny (to me at least) to see a Windows 3.1 wallpaper on Vista with Aero enabled!

Original argyle.bmp
New photoshop format, so you can change colors
new argyle.bmp

Here are a few lessons I learned in the school of hard knocks when my RAID split.

After much frustration with my nVidia drivers, I felt that a newer nVidia MediaShield/NVRAID BIOS might help and put together a few new BIOSes based on the current 1405 release with updated nVidia and Silicon Image BIOSes.

Attached are EXPERIMENTAL BIOSes with the updated PCI modules inserted.

This will -not- work for any board but the A8N32 SLI Deluxe. The A8N SLI Deluxe has an incompatible Award based BIOS and a Silicon Image 3114 instead.

This one worked for me with two mirrors, but has not been tested with RAID, spans, stripes, etc.
nVidia MediaShield 5.60 and Silicon Image 3132 SATARAID v7.4.05

This one is currently working for me, again with two mirrors.
nVidia MediaShield 6.94 and Silicon Image 3132 SATARAID v7.4.05

This one has not been tested at all and is likely not to work, but I had to try due to the "it's got a higher version, so it must be better" factor.
nVidia MediaShield 9.83 and Silicon Image 3132 SATARAID v7.4.05

I make absolutely no warranties for these. They may work great for a year and set your computer on fire. I don't know. I've been running the 6.94 version for a couple days and seems happy with the nVidia 15.01 Vista 32-bit drivers from July. BACK UP YOUR DATA just in case!

Up next, migration/raid tips so that you might not lose your data due to the missteps I made.

08/15/07 update: still going strong!