Silicon Valley Redneck

"There is no such thing as a bloody cat license."

And I have this on the best possible authority.

Unless, as it turns out, you live in San Jose.  Seems the city, being hard-pressed to make ends meet, has started requiring cat licenses.  Even for indoor cats.

There's no cat detector van (yet), but apparently vets are required to report unlicensed cats to the city if the critters are brought in for rabies vaccinations.

Which creates an incentive not to get one's moggie vaccinated against rabies, no?

(Neener-neener-neener dept.: I don't live in San Jose.  Nor do I have a cat.  So there!)

Means, end, what's the difference?

So there's this thing making the rounds about lines of scientific endeavor which have the potential for both great benefit and great harm.

One of the lines selected for its dire potential is geoengineering.  Well, the potential upside is obvious.  The risk?  There's some muttering about unintended consequences, unpredictable changes to weather patterns, and the like - you know, the sort of thing you can get from biofuel plantations, wind farms, and large solar installations - but the really big danger is this: geoengineering might solve the climate-change problem and render the entire current climate-change political agenda irrelevant.

Yup.  The activists are fully invested in a specific agenda for addressing climate change (one which even their advocates admit won't solve the problem), and can't accept the idea that the goal of preventing catastrophic anthropogenic global warming might be achieved in some other way.

Isn't there some proverb to the effect that the means should be justified by the end?

LFCC Attack!

My vegetable patch, with seeds just sprouting, is beset by Little Furry Cratering Charges, otherwise known as Bushy-Tailed Tree Rats.

I'd put little chicken-wire domes over the planted spots (where there are holes in the weed barrier), anchored at two sides, but the varmints still infiltrated the areas by pushing in the wire elsewhere.

So, anchors on four sides now.

And I'm once again entertaining thoughts of a solar-powered miniature electric fence, but where to find suitable fenceposts?  (Hmm: 1/2" PVC pipe with some holes drilled through it: presto!)

I guess a minefield would be inappropriate; might (a) scatter bits of squirrel all over the neighborhood, and (b) put my toes at risk.

Rediscovering Sturgeon's Revelation

Ambulance Driver offers for discussion:

"Nobody in EMS is paid what they're worth. 25% are paid far less than what they're worth, and 75% are paid far more than what they're worth."

Knowing little of this "EMS" of which he speaks, I submit that, in the above sentence, "EMS" may be treated as a metasyntactic variable representing the name of nearly any occupation.

Changing the occupation will affect the exact percentages, of course, and the imbalance becomes more pronounced in the presence of an institutional "equal pay for equal job title" policy.  (Boxer and Mollie both have the title "horse."  If they get equal hay, based on their average value to the collective, Boxer is underpaid and Mollie is overpaid.)

It gets really crazy in engineering; on a challenging project, a top engineer can easily be worth 100 times as much (in terms of value delivered to the company) as a second-string engineer, but is unlikely to be paid even 3 times as much.

Even in low-skilled work, a strong worker with a can-do attitude is worth far more than one who is sickly or lazy, but it seems to me that there is strong social pressure (e.g., unions) to average out their pay.

The entertainment business seems to run the other way, with the Big-Name Stars raking in vastly more than ordinary performers.  I don't know how much of this reflects value delivered and how much is driven by the establishment's need to draw in low-paid talent with dreams of the big break.

Predator on the loose!

Atop the weed barrier this morning there rested the remains of a snail.

Predator!  Let's see, what preys on snails?

Skunks, rats, ducks, and French people, right?

Well... I haven't seen nor smelled any indication of skunks in the yard lately; there's no pond in the vicinity; and nobody's been at the garlic plants nor the butter bush.

So, I figure, it has to be a rat.

Time to fumigate a few hiding spaces....

Whew!

On such a sweltering day as this - 86 degrees hellishly Fahrenheit! - a freshly-cleaned fan is much more useful than a fan with a couple of years' accumulation of dust matted onto the upstream finger guard.

C function prototypes...

... are meant to be optional, no?

Well, sometimes.

I've got this here program that gets compiled with avr-gcc, and there's a function declared thus:

void spi_setdma(void *addr, unsigned len, int cmdlen, int csr)

And all had been well, until I called it from a function in another source file, with "len" having the constant value 32768.

And it completely Didn't Work.

The DMA controller's length register was somehow getting set to zero instead of 32K.

Well, after much futzing around, I realized that (a) len was arriving as zero; (b) cmdlen was arriving as a completely nonsensical value; (c) I hadn't put the prototype for this function in the header file, because originally it had only been used within its own source file; and (d) in a world where int is 16 bits, a constant 32768 gets automagically promoted from int to long.

Anyway, with the function prototype now global, it's working properly.

Happy Tax Day!

...Ugh...

Not only did I have to raid my retirement fund to cover the tax bill, but my water heater decided it was time to cash in its retirement account.

At least I caught it while it was still in the "drooling on the garage floor" stage, rather than finding out about it at 0430 after it blew out completely sometime during the night, as it more typically the case with these things.

And so, it awaits the arrival of the Grim Plumber to free it from its earthly bonds, that it may go to its reward in Appliance Heaven.

Update: the old water heater was installed in fall of '89... so, a bit over 22 years.  Not too shabby, in perspective.  It's just a big chunk of money to be shelling out right now (or, actually, on June 1, when the credit-card bill comes due).

Little Ruby Oopsie

It's one of those nonobvious consequences of dealing with objects.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you have an array of strings, thus:

@wossname = ["fee", "fie", "foe", "foo"]

Now suppose that you want to create a temporary string, which is the concatenation of the first n elements of the array, where n varies but starts at 2, and further that you need to stick a separator character, such as an underscore, between substrings, e.g., "fee_fie_foe".

Right, let's get to work!

idstring = @wossname[0]        # Get base name
1.upto(n-1) do |i|
    idstring << '_' + @wossname[i]
end

Which gives the expected result for idstring, but... Oopsie!  @wossname[0] now holds the concatenated value, 'cause idstring is @wossname[0], not a clone thereof.

And so it cometh to pass that I now initialize idstring to '', start the loop at 0, and check for idstring!='' before inserting the separator.

(And, no, this isn't the same as Array#join, as I don't want to use all the elements every time.  Though I suppose I could use @wossname[0..n-1].join('_').   Which would be kind of cryptic, and besides, I'm actually doing other things, inside the loop, with intermediate levels of idstring and some other stuff.)

Update: this other side of this, which had me really tearing my hair out, is this: being as how I'm using idstring inside the loop, and (sometimes) passing its successive values to a constructor, causing them to be incorporated into objects... I need to pass idstring.clone, or all the objects will end up with the same idstring, which will have its final value.  This looks remarkably like the effect of a stale pointer.

Gardening day

Anything to avoid proofreading my tax return....

Got the corn, beans, and tomatoes planted.  Squash, pumpkins, and peas, not yet.

Also, about 20 years behind schedule (and before the blackberry vines become impenetrable again), extended the Perimeter Irrigation and Soaking System through the berry patch, to cover the surviving blackberries and the recently added raspberries and boysenberries.

And: added wires along the fence for the new berry vines, and tied up a huckleberry plant that was flopping all over the place.

All this in the frightful afternoon heat; it's 67 degrees swelteringly Fahrenheit out there!

Tomorrow, maybe: put down the weed barrier in the squash patch, and get the squashes and pumpkins planted.