Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

I’m just going to quickly stroke my own ego a little bit. Apologies.

In my Popular Posts list, I have about 1800 page reads of various items, but only stuff that is viewed as a single page is recorded here. Thus, hits on the main site page, or a category index page, or even a daily page with only one post on it, would not count as a view.

I assume that this value refers to the past month, as it doesn’t seem to increase forever.

If I look at my referer list for the past month, I see there have been just over 9000 page views on my site. This includes all page views, such as those discussed above that are not counted. That means 7000 views are either index page views, or more interestingly, Long Tail posts. That is, posts that are not in the top band of popular posts.

View Comments (0)  

I use, and really like, Crocodile Technology, an electronics and motion modelling system, which interfaces well with a really nice PCB layout program.

However, it isn’t especially extensible, or so they would have you think.

But, the component information is all stored in XML files, so in theory, it should be possible to create new parts, either in a new XML file or by editing one of the old ones, that can extend the functionality of the program.

For instance, I want to be able to create a part that is the UM66T, a great little 3-pin (TO-92 package) melody generator. We buy it in four varieties, each of which is a different single-voice tune, such as Small World, Fur Elise and so on.

At the moment, I need to model the circuit with the kids, and then add the pin layout of a TO92 component in RealPCB, which is somewhat error prone. It would be much nicer to be able to model it all in Crocodile Technology, including having the music play.

This is what the XML code for a part, in this case a Red LED, looks like:

<part class="electronics/red-led" proto="electronics/discrete-led">
  <p key="vf">1.567</p>
  <!--  1.9V @ 10mA  -->
  <p key="img" type="resource" flags="user-hidden">electronics/ledred</p>
  <p key="meta-parttree-order" type="int" flags="user-hidden">30</p>
  <p key="meta-label" type="string" flags="user-hidden">Red LED</p>
  <p key="meta-icon" type="resource" flags="user-hidden">electronics/icons/red_led</p>
</part>

View Comments (0)  

Ricky Gervais

This site has the archives of the Ricky Gervais podcast. I’ve removed my listings of the URLs, as they are changing from time to time, so visit the link above to download them all. I may still create a feed XML, but I may not…

View Comments (5)