Silicon Valley Redneck

Reading

Currently reading, In My Copious Free Time: Anathem.

I'm up to page 407, rather less than halfway through.  Time to start guessing what's ahead!

Here's a guess: the Cousins are Russian-analogs (Russian on account of the writing on their ship).  During the Terrible Events, some of them, foreseeing their annihilation, bunged themselves into an immense icosahedral Orion-drive spaceship and launched themselves into the void, perhaps on a lengthy trajectory which, all these centuries later, has brought them back into Ardre's neighborhood.

It could be a generation ship, or perhaps there's a Thousander longevity secret to which they're privy.  Maybe both.

Anyway, it's a sort of flying near-quadramillennial math, about to open its gates to see what's happened in the world.

That seems to fit all the known facts up to this point.  Reading time permitting, I'll eventually learn what the author thinks that stupendous stone spaceship is.

 

Why we need the "save" button

...Or, at least, why I need it...

The idea has been making the rounds lately - most recently, here - that the "save" button on various sorts of data-manglers (word processors and such) needs to go away; that any changes you make to a document should transparently become permanent.

I'll offer just a few examples of why this is a Bad Idea, absent some other, easily-used, mechanism for not saving changes.

First off: I'll occasionally decide it's time to develop the memory card in one of my cameras.  This calls for hoovering the photos off the card into a directory somewhere under /mediafiles/photo/, which now contains the master images (the originals being deleted from the memory card).

OK, so now I'll pick some set of them to crop, scale, contrast-fiddle, and otherwise irreversibly mangle.  These files I open.

Next, I go through the open images, one by one, making changes and saving under the edited/ subdirectory, possibly with informative names.

Absent the "save" button, I'd have to do the "save as..." immediately, to avoid having the master overwritten!

The same issue applies if I'm editing a word-processor document, to create a new revision.  I'd need to be extra-particular about saving under a new name before touching anything.  And, if we're talking about something like MS Word, which sometimes declares a document "changed" on the basis of having been printed... or a spreadsheet, which I probably do need to reformat in order to print it, but generally don't want to save the changed formatting... there are just wonderful opportunities for terminally screwing up document control.

And then there's the fun case of leaving a document open for reference, intending that it be read-only, but potentially having a stray keystroke fall into its window.  Instant unintended permanent change!

Then figure in buggy software, and things get really fun!  Not that you'd ever, for example, suddenly realize that Word had totally botched a cut & paste operation, decide to back out your changes, and have Word crash on you, after having permanently saved the botched change.  No, never happen... right?  And with auto-save, you have to rely on "undo", as "revert" no longer exists, as there is no "last save I did" to revert to.

Yeah, some of these things could be handled by going through and removing write permission from all master documents, so that auto-save wouldn't be able to change them.  But this means that I have to (a) manually change the permissions every time I save a file for what's supposed to be the last time, or at least the last time for a while, and (b) manually change them back if I decide to update that file after all.

Next thing you know, we'll be bringing back VMS-style file versioning: How%20I%20Spent%20My%20Summer%20Vacation.doc;337 and all that.  Hey, with cheap terabytes these days, why the heck not?

Update: how's this for another case?

I have a bunch of files open in jedit, as is usually the case.  Many of these are under version control.  My apprentice checks in modified versions of a couple of these (or maybe I do so, from my laptop).  I update my working copy.

In such a situation, jedit pops up a dialog box letting me know which files have changed, and giving me the option of reloading some, or all, or none.  What would a "no save button" editor do?  Automatically reload the changed versions (hey, maybe I wanted to save the version I'd been looking at, under some other name), or automatically re-save the versions it had open, overwriting the updates?

 

Save us, Zombie Ed Wood!

The latest story making the rounds: Scientists Agree that if we don't mend our ways, we shall surely be visited by beings from another world, bent on exterminating us as a menace to the Universe.

Excuse me, but was this not the premise of Plan 9 From Outer Space?

And will the aliens be raising an army of zombies?

Seems like another good reason to be prepared for a zombie apocalypse.  Just, y'know, in case the movie got it right.

 

Sometimes there's just no summer vacation

The weekend got divided, more or less, between napping and work - some household chores, but mainly Project Forkbeard, which is getting mighty close to integration.

Project Forkbeard is that toaster-controller project with the extreme environmental requirements and cramped size limitations, that ended up with an AVR MCU synthesized into a Spartan 6 FPGA.  It's pretty much working now, modulo one section of analog signal conditioning where we're still waiting to hear from a vendor just what the input is going to look like.

We're still a little fuzzy on the low end of the temperature range, and will probably end up having to do our own screening on a couple of the chips, including the Spartan (as, for some reason, Xilinx has no interest in providing a low-temp screened version of a $15 chip when they've got a $5000 part that would do the job, apart from not fitting in the space and taking way too much power).  I have tested it to around -50C, for a sample size of one, with nary a hint of trouble, and am pondering locking the one sample in a cooler of dry ice just to see how low it will go before it stops working.  May get a blog post out of the environmental testing.

So, there's that project coming together, rather behind the original schedule, but at least I'm not the one holding up the parade at the moment.  Then there's ongoing tech support for the various manifestations of Project Egbert, which my apprentice is gradually learning.  Then there are a couple of new projects in the works, one of which calls for me to build a smallish, special-purpose centrifuge (awww, why couldn't it have been a cyclotron?), while the other, from what little we know so far, involves retrofitting some fancy equipment with certain features that Some Of Us push real hard to include from the get-go on those rare occasions when we're in on the beginning of a project... because we know for certain that they'll be needed before the more discerning sort of end customer will accept the product.

So, lotsa interesting stuff, most of which needs all the serial numbers filed off before blogging.  Little in the way of, well, summer fun.  Not that we're really having summer weather this year anyway, but the weather we are having woulda been nice for getting out among the redwoods.

 

Nostalgia

Finding a bit of time to shop for winter clothing before the retailers declare ski season (because, around here and with my metabolism, my idea of winter clothing is what's generally regarded as tropical summer attire, and not sold much past July), I swung by the J C Penney store at Vallco (or, as they call it, Cupertino Square).

Got some decently-priced shorts... and found a fair variety of short-sleeved silk sport shirts, with pockets, on closeout for $20 each, so it was spree time, even if they do call for hand-washing.  (The tag actually says "machine wash cold", but who the heck throws silk in the washing machine?)

Anyway, this puts me in mind of the Old Days, i.e., junior high school through about... well... a decade and a half past high school.  My favored footwear back then was J C Penney desert boots (or, as the Civil War reenactment types call them, "brogans"), which were cheap, and comfortable, and lasted through a great many miles of walking.

I actually went looking for those desert boots again, not too long ago, and found something resembling them, but decidedly Not Cheap.  (Right at the moment, though, the similar-ish Clarks Bushacre boot is marked down from $90 to $50, which makes it not totally out of line.)  Given that my current footwear requirements involve softness and flexibility, those old suede desert boots with the thin rubber soles are sounding mighty appealing... though so far I'm managing to get by with a pair of plain black bargain-bin river shoes for those occasions that call for something more mundane than Five Fingerses.

Anyway, this in turn put me in mind of that old store, from way back when.  It was in Mountain View.  In a place called, if memory serves, Mayfield Mall.

Looking back on Google Maps to where I think I remember it being, southeast of San Antonio, northeast of the Central Expressway overcrossing... yes, there's Mayfield, and... there are vacant buildings that still have a vaguely mall-ish look to them.

And there's some history preserved on the Web: here, here, and here.

 

Zeffky!

Recent geekrumor was that, Gnome having out-KDE4'ed KDE4, Linus had gotten disgusted with the whole mess and switched to Xfce.

Huh.  I remember trying Xfce, back in the late 90s.  Actually, I think I installed it somewhat more recently than that, on a vintage tablet with a 386 and 8M of RAM or some such.

It's been a while...

So, I installed Xfce 4.8 on the experimental machine, and gave it a quick test drive.

The good: uncluttered, not a lot of fancy visual effects, has a nice panel widget for keeping track of mounted / mountable devices, has the sort of desktop icons for removable media that KDE used to have.

The not-so-good: still buggy; the panel clipboard widget won't close once it's been opened, and the terminal, on opening, promptly shrinks itself to minimum possible size even if it's been set for 132x40 or some such.  Also, there's no menu editing utility; lxmed is supposed to be usable for the purpose, but appears to be finding an entirely different menu system.

So, back to yucky KDE4.  Slogan: "It doesn't suck as badly as it used to!"

Or... maybe I should try it on the lab machine, under -stable.  Could be that the version provided by -testing is just that little bit buggier.

 

Oh, and I did give the new machine a performance test, compiling my current FPGA code.  On the current workstation, with the old Core 2 Duo, a mundane compile (with none of the really time-consuming optimizations turned on) takes several minutes, and usually fails to meet at least one timing constraint, which I'd been figuring on worrying about later.  On the new one, with the Core i5, and letting it use up to 4 threads, it takes under a minute with some additional bells and whistles turned on... and those bells and whistles enable it to meet all the timing constraints.

I also discovered that the 64-bit version (lin64) of Xilinx ISE 13.2 seems to have a problem; the mapper fails to run with some strange unresolved symbol.  The 32-bit version runs fine, though, and it's not like my little toaster-controller designs really need a 64-bit address space to compile in.

Update: OK, so Xfce 4.6 (as found in Debian-stable) doesn't have the clipboard & terminal bugs.  Actually looks fairly usable at first glance, aside from (1) that lacking-a-menu-editor thing, and (2) becluttering the desktop with every smegging file in my home directory.

Yeah, I need to move a lot of stuff out of my home directory... the more so because having a networked $HOME just doesn't work on modern Linux, what with sundry window managers and applications storing not-properly-sharable data in ~/.whatever, or even ~/Whatever, causing problems when one logs in on a differently-configured host, or attempts to run any Mozilla product on two hosts at once.  Methinks all the real data will migrate into networked /userdirs/$USER, with a symlink from local ~/Data or some such.  This means changing the Apache configuration to look in the right place for public_html, grumble grumble.  Not sure what the other ramifications might be.

 

Negotiating

Susannah Breslin's latest post is on why men are better negotiators than women.

Well... it's interesting, but rather full of generalizations.  By her standards, I'm a terrible negotiator, and hardly a man at all.

Mind you, there are some sorts of negotiations at which I'm completely no good - mainly those in which the other party is dishonest, and those in which dishonesty is expected.

Still: when I'm negotiating consulting business, there's no need for lying, guilt (or immunity thereto), nor intimidation.  The prospective client needs some work done, I need money (and enjoy a moderate technical challenge), so the negotiation is over what needs doing, what I can do, whether they can afford it, and how to structure the work (I usually try to arrange things so as to keep project status visible to the client, thereby boosting confidence and reducing the risk of last-minute failure or of the sudden discovery that my design and their requirements don't line up).

Anyway, lying is what bosses are for... and if you need to lie to your boss, you need to find a different job.

I'm not much on intimidation, either, but there may be issues of perception there; my self-image is, roughly speaking, goofy pencil-necked geek with useful skills, while it seems some people perceive me to be an irritable gorilla with useful skills, so there may be an unintended intimidation factor.

Also, there are some transactions in which negotiation is more or less mandatory (e.g., buying a car), but it's not really necessary to push for the best deal, just a satisfactory one.  Going for "good enough" (which means doing your homework ahead of time, and knowing what you want and approximately what it ought to cost) avoids both the stress of trying to get the best deal, and the regret of having gotten a bad deal.

And there's always someone even worse at negotiation: on a few occasions, near the end of the day at one swap meet or another, I've encountered an artifact I coveted, marked with a reasonable price.  By the simple tactic of peering intently at it and rubbing my chin for a few seconds while pondering whether I really wanted to lug it home, I've gotten it for anything down to half price, because the seller either really needed to get some money for it or just didn't want to be the one lugging it home at the end of the day.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

Lex and his commentors express some concerns over the upcoming feature film about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails.

They seem mainly concerned about historical accuracy, and whether it'll be more about race guilt than about the, y'know, Tuskegee Airmen.

Guys?  This is Lucas we're talking about.  Here's what can go wrong.

Apart from the obligatory 633 Squadron homage with turbo lasers, consider this plot twist:

Plucky young Princess Liz, dancing with one of the Airmen, discovers that he's actually a Nazi android programmed to betray them on their next mission!

Quickly deactivating him (with a twonky borrowed from the Torchwood Institute), she disguises herself in his uniform and takes his place on the mission, heroically saving three Allied bombers before herself being repeatedly saved by one of the Airmen.

Upon landing, she is spotted as a ringer (though not for who she is, and she gives a false name), but is accepted as an honorary Airman, and there is much rejoicing.

With an Ewok band.

...And then, in Red Tails II, we'll get the story of Charlie's secret elder half-brother, who was smuggled to one of the Colonies and grew up to be a fighter pilot like his father....

 

Different worlds

So there's this List of ten things not to keep in your wallet or purse.

Having seen the title, I started making my own list before looking at the article.

None of the things on my list are on their list!

Here's what I started out with:

• Cobalt 60
• Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine
• Dimethyl mercury
• Hydrazine
• Anthrax spores
• Livestock

I'm sure I could have come up with a few more... all of them much more important not to keep in your wallet than the wimpy stuff on the Yahoo list.