This webpage returned to its roots. i.e pure oldschool HTML4. No PHP, no MySQL. It was an overhead, considering the site is updated very not so often. Actually, it was updated twice during the 4 year period it is online :) So, I can see no reason to try the overhead of dynamic web technologies. I'll stick to oldschool. And by the way: Happy Easter to all the robots that visit my website and a few brave individuals.

epsiflash was revamped a little. Now it has both GUI and CLI interfaces. Also, the code was cleaned up a little. Two more chips supported. If you run the GUI version, beware of GTK 2.20, there's an upstream bug that prevents realtime threads to spawn from the main application. This causes epsiflash to segfault when trying to open a buffer window. Actually I think of dropping the GUI completely, less hassle with the upstream changing ABIs, and who would use a GUI to flash EEPROM chips anyway?! :) Download here

Happy new year to all the robots that visit my website :) and a few brave individuals. BTW: forgot to mention: last March during the Forever Copy-Party in Trencin Slovakia, I placed 2nd at the unusual 8-bit Poetry Compo. Here's my entry titled '8bit Legacy':

8bit Legacy

In the days of GigaHertzs
Youtube porn
And facebook craze
May I ask you just to stop
And remember what you've got

All the memories of the yore
When all kids played the commodore
When Clive Sinclair was the king
And Atari was top bling

Generation 'deep-hack mode'
Turning hormones into code
Fooling 'round with microchips
Till they found last byte to squeeze

Zeroes, Ones, there lies the truth
A humble legacy of your 8bit youth
Never shifted out of you
Never will, you know it's true

Pretty childish rhymes, but I am not a native speaker of English. Anyway hope you like it :)

I wrote an application to run Epsilon Universal Flash Programmer under Linux. Very preliminary version, with just a few chips supported. But it will be developed further. Download here

Yes, never!.

I was having minor issues with a disk in one of my computers, smartmontools reported it's basically OK, only a few sectors needed reallocation. So, I ran the badblocks, the filesystem was reclaimed, everything went fine from there on. Until yesterday. I noticed very slow response on anything reading the /var partition, which was of course on that disk. Logs were spitting out the obvious cruelty:

wd0a:  uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 986336 of 986336-0 (wd0 bn 986399; cn 1043 tn 12 sn 8)
wd0a:  uncorrectable data error reading fsbn 986336 of 986336-0 (wd0 bn 986399; cn 1043 tn 12 sn 8), retrying

Plus, the coredumps of any program that was trying to store anything on /var. So, I worked again with the smartmontools, only now it wasn't lying!

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE

  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x0008   085   085   000    Old_age   Offline      -       172870709
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0006   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0013   099   099   020    Pre-fail  Always       -       1483
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0013   100   100   036    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x0009   071   057   030    Pre-fail  Offline      -       8619136091
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   090    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0013   098   098   020    Pre-fail  Always       -       2558
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0010   088   088   000    Old_age   Offline      -       128
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

Not funny! I quickly backed up what was left in readable state, and put the disk offline. I'd be trying to recover more data with some offline tools. So, never trust older disks. Roll some offline backup, even if the disk is filled with just a bunch of family photos. You don't keep valuable data on old disk, do you? :)