Silicon Valley Redneck

Circadian rhythm

Is out of sync today.  Somehow, the clock showed an hour later than usual when I woke up.  (Golly, I wonder how the clock could have gotten ahead of me this time of year!)

Probably doesn't help that I'd had a few nights of unfocused anxiety and little sleep, and was finally more-or-less back to normal last night.

Ah, well: with my new resolution to make more efficient use of my time, I'm now only 25 minutes behind my typical schedule.  Morning target, once I'm back in sync: up by 0430, out the door by 0645, and get in a 7-mile hike with actual hills before it starts looking like work time.

And it's better than having a disrupted cicadian rhythm, and needing some multiple of 17 years to return to normal....

Dependency hell

So, I've been using DownloadHelper to snag videos off the Intarwebz, usually in .flv format.

And I sometimes want to watch them out in the living room, on the big screen.

And the living-room computer doesn't, currently, handle local .flv playback.

Thus, I've been comverting them to .avi format.

Well... the latest FFMPEG/WinFF combination on Debian-testing appears to be b0rked.  (Unless FFMPEG is officially obsolete, perhaps, and I need to install something with a libav-derived name instead.  Must look into that.)  Anyway: just used avconv, sans options to convert a bunch of .flvs to .mp4, which doesn't result in a notable increas in file size.  But: the video doesn't play back on the living-room machine.

My old script for converting .flv to .avi using mencoder works on these, though the file size increases dramatically, and the files play back... but mencoder reports many dropped frames, and on playback the sound and video gradually drift out of sync.

So, time to update FFMPEG and Xine on the living-room system so's I can play back some of these newfangled formats.

Now, when I set up that system, back in '05, I figured on a totally stable configuration.  In fact, the plan was to nail down the configuration, including a couple of specialty peripherals.  So I installed Slackware: easy to nail down, awkward to update.

And now, when I go to update the video-playing software, I find that sundry libraries are out of date, I don't have yasm installed (what the heck's a yasm, anyway?), and even make is out of date and gives confusing errors when I try to build FFMPEG or libav.

Oh, well... got yasm and the latest make installed; just got libav to build; now having a go at xine-lib.

Update: With libav 0.8 built and installed, I can't build xine-lib 1.2.1 even after futzing with the config script to play nice with the outdated gcc.  The old xine-lib 1.1.0 and xine-ui 0.99.4 do build... but, even with what ought to be the new library, xine can't play those .mp4 files (no video, and a serious wedgie after a few seconds).

Oh, well: guess I'm stuck with playing the poorly-sync'ed .avis for now.  Perhaps, when time allows, I should (much of the original justification for a nailed-down customer installation now being well in the past) just do a fresh install of Debian-stable + debian-multimedia.

Good advice, regardless.

Over at Lex's ongoing virtual wake, Jim Shawley linked to a post from a few years back on the importance of looking for the airplane that isn't there.  Just in case, on this occasion, it is.

A post that comes to mind from time to time, as circumstances crop up, and whose importance is by no means limited to aviation.

I've long been in the habit, sometimes laughed at by passengers, of looking for the car that isn't coming.  Looking to the right, for example, before turning left from Rengstorff onto Charleston in Mountain View, despite that fact that the westbound lane doesn't exist to the right of that location.

Well, there never has been unexpected traffic at that spot, but: the morning of this past Thanksgiving, I was headed off to Whole Foods in search of a pie, in my little Prius.  Down Mathilda (by whatever name) to Stevens Creek.  Light is red, so kinda coast toward the intersection in the right-turn lane.

Light turns green just before I reach the intersection.  Destination lane is clear to the right.  Reflexively stop anyway and look left for the car that isn't there...

...And a bloody great gravel truck comes barreling through the red light.

That pause cost me a couple of seconds, but I lived to have the pie.

A sip of Guinness

At 1700 PST exactly, as Lex's wake gets underway around the world.

Soon it'll be time to head down to the pub in search of company (and a chemically-inoffensive drink).

Wowf!  That Guinness is powerful strong.

Update: Not off to the pub.  That sip (well, four or five sips.  Maybe six) was too much for a guy who's been known to get tipsy on a couple of slices of fresh-baked bread.  Must be for those who have strength before they start drinking it.  So, hanging out at the virtual wake on Facebook.

Paging David Brin...

This sounds remarkably like his "refrigerator laser", which I'd always regarded as, well, a bit of clever fast-talking that couldn't possibly work in the real world but which was handy for plot purposes.

Coming soon: Destination Sun!

This just calls out for comment, one way or another.

I just stumbled across the LTC4310 Hot-Swappable I2C Isolator.

There are so many things wrong with that...!

And yet: while it's a product that shouldn't exist, it's also a product that's long been needed.

Because some nitwit, long ago, decided that the Inter-IC Bus would be an excellent choice for handling configuration and supervisory activity on backplanes and across modules.  In electrically noisy environments.  Despite its complete lack of noise immunity, incompatibility with galvanic isolation, and general unsuitability for running more than a few inches.

And, somehow, it became a telco industry standard for that sort of thing.

So, for those stuck with misusing I²C is noisy or hot-plugged applications, there's now a chip to make your life tolerable.

And, for those trying to communicate among modules in noisy environments, and not constrained by the stupid decisions of decades gone by: might I suggest RS-485, or CANbus?

CRAP!

Lex had been blogging about his office's technical difficulties lately - a rain seal coming loose last week, a chute failing to deploy yesterday.  Other stuff, less alarming in isolation, but all adding up.  Work being more exciting than it should be.

And each time I refrained from the modified standard Failblog comment: "Did you died?"

Then, this morning, I check the Castle, not that there's usually anything new this time of morning, and find this.

A Google news search a few minutes ago on his real name turned up but one story, and that in French.  A search for the plane's name turned up many accounts of an unnamed pilot having died in a crash, details unspecified, except that his plane apparently ran into a building.  A second chute failure in one day?

And another voice of decency goes silent.

One more I never met, and now never will.

Crap.

Later: Trying to grok.  Still failing.

A writer with style, and with plenty to say; who expressed his thoughts at least as civilly as the occasion called for and often more so; who attracted a civil (and somewhat diverse) comment section.

A fundamentally decent person.

Who, at perhaps the 60% mark of his proper lifespan, had the opportunity to trade life in the cubicle farm for his dream job, and shared his adventures with us.

Whose exciting new job was clearly dangerous, but, after his years of flying off carriers and sometimes into actual combat, surely his skill would see him through.

And now he's gone.

My world has a hole in it.  And I'd never even met him.

Somehow, in other areas, the world seems out of order this morning.  Everything out of sequence, sideways of normality, or just not right.

Eg låg og eg datt,
eg drøymde i natt,
eg totte den visa var bakvend ratt.

And now work calls, and I must to a client site, secure in the knowledge that all I need do to survive my work day is to keep my hands out of the high-voltage section.

A mere meanwhile away...

...I mailed out a bunch of checks on the 25th, for bills that come due on the 1st.

Most of them cleared on the 28th or 29th.

Except for the two credit-card payments, for the cards from the same bank as the checking account.  Those still don't appear to have been processed, which makes them nigh unto a week overdue.

I don't like past-due payments.  They do bad things to my credit rating.

Gonna have to call my banker tomorrow and see if he can sort it out.

Update: the payments showed up this morning (the 7th) as having happened on the 27th, so all is in fact well, and I didn't need to call the banker after all.  Took a few minutes with the calculator to figure out what the on-line info on my credit-card account was telling me, but now that's making sense too.

Now I just need a goodly slug of income between now and April 15th (the money still due from some of last year's work, plus what's currently in the short-term pipeline, should just about get me through tax day).

Shopping irritation

One of the things I really like about Digi-Key's web site is the ability to do a parametric search.

Amazon is still, notably, lacking this.

I'm sort of toying with replacing my DVD player (which seems to be going flakey), and the existence of blurray players with network features for under $100 caught my eye.  Gee, there's one from LG that has an Ethernet connector (which saves trying to enter a 64-hex-digit random WPA key), and component video out (I have no intention of replacing my projector with an HDMI model until it needs replacement).  Hmmm....

But wait!  It supports Netflix, YouTube, and a couple of others... but not, apparently, Amazon video-on-demand (nor files on the local network).  And way to filter these things by on-line services supported?  No.  By network connection type?  No.  By video output connectors available?  No.

Eventually I find the list of devices that support AmVOD.  Minimal description, if any, given in the list.  Have to click through to the product pages... which tend to be highly uninformative about what connectors are provided.  And the first though I look at have purty pictures of the front of the unit and the remote control... but none of the back of the unit, where the information is.  I want my connector pr0n!

Oh, and some of them have both Ethernet and WiFi... with cryptic words implying that the Ethernet is for some special purposes only, not for the Internet features.  How's that again?

Oh, well: back to Plan A, i.e., take no action until further notice.

Update: it appears that the living-room computer, which serves as the alternative DVD player (actually, the primary DVD player, until the pause button on the remote stopped working), has eaten yet another DVD-ROM drive.  Surely I have another PATA DVD drive somewhere....

In like a lion, eh?

Well, the month didn't exactly begin thus, but today was entirely Marchworthy in terms of wind.

None of the promised daytime rain materialized (just as well, since some of it was supposed to have happened during my morning walkies, and I like cool-sunny-breezy weather a lot more than rain during my outdoors time), but some of it seems to have happened overnight.  The pond at Rancho had water in it this morning!  Well... a puddle at the bottom.  No, I didn't wallow in it.  Showing up at the office in tropical-casual attire, I can get away with.  Showing up covered in mud is for special occasions only, and "there was a mud puddle" is insufficiently special.

The forecast for middlemonth, 15th through 20th, is currently: rain.  Rain, rain, rainnity rain rain.  Looks like I'd better catch up on gardening before then: at least finish with the blackberry thicket and get the disintegrating weed barrier pulled up, the soil amended, and fresh weed barrier in place.

And, after that, out like a lamb?  The forecast casteth not that far to the fore.  And, for all I know, the rain currently on the schedule may be on allocation, and Mongolia might yet bid higher for it.

Oh, and the wind has not been kind to the loose planting soil in the parking strip.  I should maybe, quick before the seeds germinate and put forth delicate little roots, give it another raking to smooth & redistribute it, and then cover it with some manner of biodegradable mesh.  But not this evening; I'm already settled in.