Silicon Valley Redneck

How to lose the middle

I see there's a new group on Facebook:

"Against Gay Marriage? Then Don't Get One and Shut the Fuck Up."

Yeah.  That's, like, really going to persuade moderates.

Telling the opposition to STFU may feel good within the echo chamber, but it really pisses off people on the outside.

It does, however, appear to be the preferred debating tactic on many subjects nowadays.

Bad incentives

There's an aspect of sustained government deficit spending I haven't seen addressed yet.

Consider: U.S. government debt still carries a low interest rate.  Still a low risk, yes, but quite a low return.

So: why would anyone be lending money to the government for so little return?

Aha!  Well, looking at all the other options for investing large amounts of cash, not only are they generally quite a bit riskier, but most of them are currently showing even lower returns.

Now, if (for example) the stock market were actually headed up, and businesses were doing well, just how eager would anyone be to make negligible-interest loans to the government?

Seems to me that the parties responsible for selling government debt have an incentive to keep other investments unappealing.  Just how much influence they have in that regard is another question... but having the incentive there strikes me as a very bad thing.

I guess I won't be getting the H1N1 vaccine after all.

My vaccination plans for the year were simple: given that this is projected to be a bad flu year, and that I've got a bunch of time-critical work to do over the fall and winter, I was going to wait until the promised H1N1 vaccine showed up around the beginning of October, and get that and the seasonal-flu vaccine at the same time.

(I don't normally bother with flu vaccine, mainly because I haven't had actual flu in a great many years.  Bad colds, yes, but nothing with proper flu symptoms, and the flu vaccine isn't supposed to do anything about colds.)

Well, I finally got an announcement from Kaiser regarding the new vaccine: they just got a little, and they're rationing it out to those who really need it, in which category I don't qualify.  Also, owing to the combination of unusually high demand and the switch from seasonal-flu vaccine production to H1N1 vaccine production, the supply of regular seasonal-flu vaccine has dried up.

Sounds like by the time the H1N1 vaccine is available to the general public, most of us will have had the disease already.

Clumsy virus cover letter

It claims to be from Facebook.

So why does it have a Polish return address (...@spl.ia.amu.edu.pl)?

And what does it say about the .zip attachment?

Dear Facebook user,

Due to Facebook policy changes, all Facebook users must submit a new, updated account agreement, regardless of their original account start date.
Accounts that do not submit the updated account agreement by the deadline will have restricted.

Please unzip the attached file and run "agreement.exe" by double-clicking it.

Thanks,
The Facebook Team


Confirmation Code #: 7568426071

Hmmm... run "agreement.exe" by clicking on it?  No attempt to disguise it as something other than an executable?

Are Facebook jokes the new Polish jokes?

Is someone at the POLSKIE TOWARZYSTWO AKUSTYCZNE ODDZIAŁ POZNAŃSKI conducting an experiment in user psychology?  And what does that have to do with acoustics?  If I ran the program, would I get something of an acoustic nature, or just a virus?

"Take me to your lizard."

Remake-o-mania strikes again!  It seems V is returning.

I saw the original, when it was re-run sometime in the 1990s.  Wasn't all that great.

You'd think maybe The Network could come up with some new stories, instead of remaking old shows.  But, of course, you'd be wrong.

(Oh, and the title of the post?  Another HHG reference, of course, and one that's topical these days, as some of the people wake up and decide that voting for a lizard may not be in their best interest.)

Life continues crazy

The good news: I'm just about over the creeping crud.

The usual news: a project went into total-panic mode this morning.  I hastened to order the necessary materials for the first unit, but, since the CNC guy is booked solid this week, I decided it'll be faster & easier to spend a day at the Bridgeport than to find another CNC shop and get up to speed with them.

So, once the raw materials arrive, I'll have a bunch more to do on that project, in a roaring hurry.  Meanwhile, I need to generate a set of prints to work from....

(Dang.  And now it occurs to me that, while I ordered some fresh taps, I neglected to order nice fresh sharp drills of the corresponding sizes.  Oh, well... those can be bought locally easily enough, should the need arise.)

And, taking a break from this, I nipped out to Weird Stuff to spend $3.28 on a vital piece of test equipment, to wit, a four-port 10Base-T hub.  With a button to swap the direction of port 4.

And, using this newly-acquired item, I confirmed that autonegotiation works as advertised on the LPC2387 + whatever PHY is on the eval board + the AGROS driver.  I'd tested with fast Ethernet, both half- and full-duplex, and now I've tested low speed and direction swapping, and I can ping the board in all tested configurations.

So there's one little thing ticked off the to-do list, anyway.

And now, back to the 3-D electronic drawing board, to start converting my lovely 3-D model into 2-D drawings suitable for working from.

Soon, the prototype hardware for Project Egbert should be turning up, and then I'll be plenty busy with that.  Getting that prototype built has been several panics in its own right.

If I didn't go to the party, how come I have the hangover?

Happy extended-morning day, when it's earlier than you think!

...And I've had the hangover since yesterday afternoon, without the benefit of having been drunk first.  Being as how the headache, soreness, and general fragility follow a spot of upper respiratory crud, it's probably a virus of some description.

Probably not H1N1, though, or I should by all accounts be doing an impression of the Great Green Arkleseizure.  (Or would that be h2g2?  Well, better either of those than N₂H₄, I guess.)

In any event, this looks to be rather an unproductive weekend.  Got to spend a couple of hours making a mockery mockup of a test fixture out of foam-core and CAD prints, and maybe - just maybe - I'll get some more work done on AGROS, though finishing the TCP/IP stack (which had been on the agenda for this weekend) seems infinitely improbable.

TCP/IP stack, or chicken soup and Looney Toons?  Decisions, decisions....

And there's another thing to keep up with!

At some point, I'll be wanting to check out the new Kubuntu - Kleptomaniacal Kangaroo, or Kokomo Kola, or whatever it's called.

Gotta see if KDE 4 has shaped up any.  Like, to the point where anyone would actually want to use it.

Not in the next couple of weeks, though.  Ack!  Just picked up one more tech-support request in the queue.  At least it's a lowish-priority item*.

(Then there's the question of what machine to install it on for playtime.  Probably the beater laptop in the lab.)

* Update: turns out the strange behavior whereof the customer complained was in the spec.  The solution was to remove the kludge I'd put in to implement it (logging the change and the reason for it, of course).

Ah, the fluctuating economy!

Well, we're trying to build the first cut of Project Egbert.

A few of the components I'd picked out are turning out to be out of stock.  I'm sure I checked availability on every component at the time I picked it.  (And, alas, not everything is multiple-sourced.)

One of the parts, a moderately specialized item for which there is no handy drop-in substitute, seems to have vanished from the supply chain within the last couple of weeks.

It's like somebody else designed in the same part I did, only a little earlier, and his design just had its first production run.

Business picks up for one company, and suddenly supply chains get drained - and, in the case of this particular part, it looks like we're supposed to wait for the factory to get around to its next quarterly production run.  Unless, of course, they other guy is buying enough to get them to run another batch early.

Or I can find an alternative part, and re-spin the board.  A re-spin was in the grand plan anyway.  Now, can I find something that does what I need, over the required temperature range, in the available space... and that's reliably available?

Meanwhile, I'm buzzing back and forth among (a) the software and documentation aspects of Egbert, (b) making improvements to AGROS in support of Egbert and a couple of upcoming projects, (c) two other projects that need a little of my time at this point, and (d) fighting off another case of the creeping crud.

Hey, progress!

Yesterday evening, I got the AGROS TCP/IP stack plus LPC23xx Ethernet driver to the point of usually answering pings, after a fashion.

This evening (sneaking in a bit of work time after being out and about all day), I fixed an off-by-one bug in the Ethernet driver, eliminating some rather puzzling behavior on the transmit side.

See the result: once the debug printfs are commented out, ping response is 1.5 ms for 800-byte packets, and 0.29 ms for 80-byte packets.  Not only does a ping flood not break anything, but I'm not seeing any dropped packets.  (This has a hub in the picture; I don't know how much difference a switched network would make, and it's past Tinga's bedtime, so the lab is closed.)

Not too shabby for something that's written more for convenience than for efficiency, and that therefore ends up copying the packet contents around a few times.  (Were I really going for performance, I'd be trying to keep things inside the DMA-able Ethernet buffer memory as much as possible, and get aggressive with scatter/gather buffer management.  The current ping process involves two copy operations, one from the receive buffer to the response packet image in main memory, then another from the finished response packet to the transmit buffer.)

Still a fair bit of work to do, but my confidence is improving.

Morning update: same performance with the hub out of the picture (though I haven't tried enabling full duplex).  It's a somewhat slower ping response than the lab PC, running Windows XP... but since that's running on a 2 GHz Athlon, and AGROS is running on a 0.072 GHz ARM7, I'm not too worried.

Quick test of full duplex: no change, not that I really expected any.  I think the time is being spent moving the bytes around in memory.

Now I gotta do some unrelated mechanical engineering.