DVD Recorder out of control …

Some days things just go wrong. You make a mistake and in order to fix that you make an even worse decision.

Last week I was attempting to format a DVD on my new computer with Windows Vista installed. Since this seemed to take a very long time I wanted to do something on my second computer I currently have available in parallel ( with good old Windows XP on it ) but unfortunately I confused the keyboards and after hitting the wrong key the formatting of the DVD was aborted. After that Vista was having problems accessing it again, thus I decided to feed it into my DVD Recorder which would do the formatting much faster anyway. So I thought.

After the DVD disappeared in my recorder ( an Orion DVD/VR-2962 SI ) it went into “Reading…” mode …. and stayed there forever. “Reading…” was displayed on the screen ( actually “Lese…”, which is “Reading…” in German language ), and didn’t go away even after minutes. The problem with this machine is that as long as it is analyzing ( “Reading….” ) a new DVD there is no way to access the setup menu or do anything else with it. No multi-tasking .

Now I really seemed to be in trouble. I pressed the Eject button but nothing happened. What to do ?`I tried several alternatives like pressing the Eject button for a minute or pressing it rapidly again and again, I turned off and on the recorder keeping the Eject button pressed … nothing. I started reading the user instructions – an unmistakable sign of trouble. First I scanned through the troubleshooting pages: nothing useful. Did those pages every helped anyone solving a problem ? Thus I started reading more through the instructions without finding anything helpful.

My insubordinate DVD recorder.

I started my research in the internet. Almost nothing, except one hint: disconnecting the machine from the wall power, waiting for 1 minute, then turning it on again and keeping the Eject button pressed or press it rapidly. I tried this and several variations of this procedure. Nothing. “Reading …”. No way to do anything with this recorder anymore. Basically a piece of scrap now, except I could start to disassemble it. Damn, that’s really not what I wanted to spent the next hour with after I already wasted almost an hour of my time. I tried to push the DVD tray or even used a knife trying to open it with some form of violence. Nope, didn’t work. Damn ! I did what more was a reaction of frustration than another attempt to fix the situation: I hit the recorder with my hand on its top right above the DVD tray. The Eject symbol appeared on the screen and the tray opened smoothly.

Violence against machines – and of course against people – should always be the last option. It is said to make things worse. And I guess this is true in most cases. But not always.

Of course I didn’t try this again. After a reboot of my Vista machine it was cooperating again and recognizing the DVD and I was able to get it formatted. What a silly way to spend my time. At least I got some story to blog about here.

Engineers needed ! ( EWeek 2008 started in Germany )

 

EWeek is coming up again here in Germany. Since three years I am participating as one of the engineers sent to several schools in our area to explain students why it is important ( for our economy ) and exciting to become an engineer and what should be considered before chosing this profession.

As I updated my presentation for this year ( only some minor updates so far with some new statistics ), I discovered some interesting facts:

• in the year 2006 48.000 job offerings could not be filled with engineers in Germany,
• causing a loss of 3.5 billion Euro for our economy. Other studies even mention loosing orders worth 18.5 Euro !
• Most engineers ( 15.000 ) have been missing for research and knowledge management related services,
• 12.500 engineers have been missing for metal processing, electrical industry and automotive,
• machine construction ( the classical and in Germany very traditional engineering discipline ) is on rank 3 with a lack of 8.000 engineers.
• The average yearly salary of an engineer in Germany is 58.550 Euro, this is 20.000 above the overall average  salary in Germany ( pre-tax ).

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Source: bild der wissenschaft 08/2007

One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

Nicholas Negroponte, sun of a Greek shipowner and brother of the US vice secretary of state has initiated a project which not only has a very reasonable objective – getting all children of the world access to the internet and all available information and enable them to learn on their own, no matter how wealthy their family is – it is also coming with a very interesting technology challenge: to develop a laptop with all the capabilities needed for such a project for the cost of $ 100: “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC).
The price for this device itself is fascinating, but more fascinating also the features of this product:

• the laptop can be used to write, do calculations, play or listen to music,
• the laptop makes it very easy to connect to other computers of its kind nearby and automatically to the internet if one of these other computers has access to the internet, thus makes it very easy for kids to collaborate ( e.g. to solve school homework ) or to get to the world wide web, also through a special user frontend called “Sugar“,
• the screen can be turned around and the entire thing used like a book, also the screen can be turned into a black-and-white mode with good contrast which makes reading screen contents easy even in sun light
• besides regular power connection power can also be generated with a yo-yo type device by pulling a string to generate power: 1 minute exercising for 10 minutes computer power.

One way to build such a cheap computer (current price is around $ 175, but assuming higher production volumes until 2009 it is expected to reach the $ 100 target) is to avoid latest technology where not needed: this laptop comes with a 366 MHz AMD processor and 128 MByte RAM. It runs on Linux.
In additional it has been designed for maximum reliability and maintainability. There is no hard drive in this computer, a 512 Mbyte flash memory is used instead. Most repair can be done by the kids themselves, like replacing the light emitting diodes for the screen. Part of the project is also to organize repair centers and spare laptops in case of a more severe problem.

You would think that this is an outstanding project ? Sure it is, but it came as a surprise to me that there are actually 30 more competing projects out there. Intel for instance offer a $ 300 “Classmate PC”, Microsoft thinks offering a cell phone makes more sense, capable to connect to a keyboard and a TV screen.

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Source: bild der wissenschaft, volume 7/2007, article “Vor dem Lernen Leine ziehen”
Also check out this video; it covers a little bit technology at the beginning, then has lots of interviews about the vision behind and the justification for the project. This project really takes Web 2.0 to a next step – giving access to the web to “information have nots”, like Nicholas Negroponte call those who do not have access to the world wide information net.