Posted: July 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Classic Computing | No Comments »
For the past several days I have battled with a Mazatrol M Plus controller connected to a Mazak V65 machine center and after rigging up a 25 to 9 pin null cable was having no luck sending programs from the PC to the Mazatrol. We were able to send from Mazatrolt to PC. Hmm.. tried everything under the sun.
Different cable – same diagnosis. Different PC – same diagnosis. Then returning after my lunch break I pondered FIFO buffers. Geeky yes. Irrational – no.
Turns out the Transmit Buffer on the PCI Serial ports default to an ITL or transmit buffer of 14 – whereas the incoming buffer size on the 10+ year old Mazatrol is likely less. I changed it to 4 and low and behold we were sending and receiving. The Receive Buffer on the PC would work at default 16 due to the lower incoming buffer size of the Mazatrol. When you think of it like a geek – IT does make sense.
Posted: July 19th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Apple iMac | No Comments »
Having dicked around with this iMac for a week and some – im very impressed. Upgraded Tiger to Snow Leopard and it took about half an hour. I didn’t have to touch anything. Compare that to a Vista-7 upgrade on comparable hardware – with the upgrade option – at about an hour or so.
Productivity-wise I’ve not yet taken the plunge. Finding OSX applications for the best Adobe apps are easily obtained. So too, is Microsoft Office.
Hardware-wise I have to really respect the 3-year old design of the machine and its style/function but feel sadness at its 1gb DDR2 667 ram. Considering my main rig has 12gb of DDR3 12800 ram. Yeah – just a tad of differential. Compare the 2.0ghz 2mb cache duo core with my main rigs quad processor @ 3.6ghz Corei7 920 with 8mb cache. What can ya do. Buy the big mac? Not there yet.
All-in-all I enjoy its placement on the kitchen island – as it looks classy – makes for quick use – and feels like a quick in and out type function as opposed to my main rigs cockpit type setup. Simplicity saves the day. So simple, the goldfish can figure it out.
But when you need to blow some shit up – I don’t think I’d start with an iMac – however as the first proverbial bite into my apple experience – im genuinely impressed and left dreaming for the flow and style of OSX snow leopard vs. Windows 7.
And wait until i get home later today – I’ll have some keen rants on how even I felt .. well.. wrong – feeling impressed with Windows Vista/7 before playing with Tiger/Snow Leopard.