Silicon Valley Redneck

Happy new year!

Early?  Naw.  It's already been next year for an hour and a half, in Vladivostok*.  Another half hour, it'll be next year in Tokyo.  So party already!

(Here, it's getting on toward sunrise Dec 31st, so there's plenty of partying time left.  Or, for me, plenty of time to ignore all the partying.)

* The Russians are ahead of us!**

** We must not allow a New Year's gap!

Profiling!

Ventured out on errands today, during a break in the rain.  Among them, stopping by my bank to deposit a check.

The clerk, not one whom I'd encountered before, seemed politely suspicious, and kept asking questions.

Maybe I match a profile of some sort?

Wears a heavy coat in hot weather ⇒ suicide bomber.

Wears shorts, short sleeves, and slippers in the dead of winter ⇒ nutter*, possibly on drugs?

Anyway, I seem to have passed the test. (Yes, I am on drugs.  For blood pressure and cholesterol.  Also pseudoephedrine, at the moment, and caffeine**.)

* But I'm saving up to be eccentric.

** And I can't seem to find Gary McGath's "The Alternate World Temperance Union" on the Web anywhere.

Oh, fiddle faddle.

Preparing to embark on a bit of a lab tidy.

The first small box o' clutter I pick up is odds & ends related to the li'l booksize PC which is the lab Linux box.

From the contents, I determine 2 things:

1. It has 2GB of RAM installed.
2. The motherboard can only handle 2GB of RAM.

Well, this wouldn't really be a problem, 2GB normally being a great plenty for Linux, except that a couple of months back I was trying to run one of those Eclipse-based ARM IDEs on it - it is, after all, the lab machine, and gadgets being debugged generally belong on the workbench - and found that it kept choking on account of running out of memory.  Upgrading the memory was sort of on my to-do list for Real Soon Now.

Apparently the Java environment does something or other that makes physical RAM a critical resource.  All those decades of work to make virtual memory transparent to the application?  Pfffft!

Oh, well.  The new (refurbished) lab Windows box may do OK on that front, and it can run sundry development tools (e.g., those for playing with the various STM32 Discovery boards) that are not available on Linux in the first place.

When did CNET become a hive of malware?

Found a RAR file that'd been sitting around for a while without being unpacked.  Can't remember what it is.

Turns out it's password-protected.

Look for a RAR password cracker.  Oh, look: there's a promising-looking one, for Windows, downloadable from CNET.  Guess I can run it on my Windows VM.

But wait: Joy has reported having picked up nasty malware on her PC, twice in the last few months, apparently from things she'd downloaded from CNET... which, last time I was looking for Windows freeware, used to be a reputable source.

So: caution is in order.  Set a restore point... well, first, do a disk cleanup, then zero the free space, then bzip up the whole VM (that zero-the-free-space step makes a huge difference in the resulting file size).  After that, set a restore point, then install the downloaded program.

Immunet promptly notifies me that it's quarantined two trojans.

Hokay!  Back to the restore point, the RAR still undepasswordized.

Looking around, it appears that tales of unwanted toolbars and trojans coming from CNET started last December.  And... still going?

WTF?

I wunner if this style of cookery...

...would have protected me against viruseses.

Brigid, on cooking with Jameson's.

Brings to mind Miklos Molnar.

All I want for Chrismas is 'bout two spare weeks

So here we are, 1 week from year's end, and, as usual, I need at least 3 weeks to get caught up.

Now, if Santa would just bring me a couple of special, off-calendar weeks, I could use them for resting, house-tidying, and catching up on various pet projects.

As it is, I've got somewhat more toaster-related work than anticipated, and I lost a few days to the dang virus, and the last few days of a project that should have been finished back in April are about to be in my court.

Also, "during the down week" (hah!) I need to shut down all the computers, clean the dust out, replace the fan that's getting noisy, replace the batteries in the UPS (and see about adding a cooling fan so maybe the replacements will last longer), ....

And wasn't I going to use this time to learn LabVIEW?

Update: come to think of it, Santa (or the Hogfather, or the substitute Hogfather) clearly has the ability to create time bubbles, so a couple of off-calendar weeks would be a perfectly plausible thing for him to bring.

Pondering the Washington Monument Strategy

We see it several times a year, any time any government budget is being discussed in public: if we cut next years's spending (i.e., decrease the amount by which spending will increase over this year's) by even a little bit, the only possible response will be to cut essential (or popular) public services.

Well!

Let's take a look at this, shall we?  If the most draconian cuts involve trimming a few percent off the planned spending levels, and make it impossible to provide public services, let's play a little game here.

Let's propose cuts to each department budgets right up to the point where that department, by its own assessment, will no longer be able to provide any public services whatsoever.  How much can we cut?  2%?  5%? 10%?

Let's say cutting 8% off the proposed budget would result in a complete shutdown of a department's public services.  What to do?

Clearly, we give them back that 8%.  They're using that money to do something important.

It's the other 92% that needs cutting.

This would seem counterproductive.

Set out to bake a pecan pie.  All ingredients on hand, right?

Well... apart from having just enough actual pecans indoors.  The reserve supply is out in the shed, on the other side of rather a lot of weather.

Anyway: recipe calls for ¼ cup of maple syrup and ¾ cup of corn syrup.  Got plenty maple syrup.  Corn syrup hadn't gotten onto the shopping list because the bottle seemed to have at least one pie worth in the bottom.

Oops.  Bottom of the bottle (Betty Crocker brand, from several years back 'cause I just don't use that much of the stuff) is deceptive.  Not only does it taper, there's a huge dimple in the bottom, making the last half-cup look like a cup or more.

And so I ended up using a bit more'n half maple syrup, because the visual cue from the bottle of corn syrup had been telling me it wasn't time to buy the next bottle yet.

Now, why would a company in the business of selling corn syrup want to package its product in a way that discourages buying the next bottle in a timely fashion?

And, as it turns out, the crud I've had the last few days?  It hasn't gotten better today, and, while the pie was in the oven, I determined that I'd added a bit of a fever to the symptoms.  So, not going anywhere with that pie.

Oh, well.  Spread over a few days, pecan pie makes a fine breakfast.

Motivation

Suppose, for the moment, that you're a loser who dreams of being Somebody - of being remembered forever.

Now take a look at who's remembered.  For example: which name is more familiar, Norman Borlaug or Lee Harvey Oswald?

Yeah, yeah: not a fair comparison.  Oswald did something bold and newsworthy, i.e., killed a high-profile politician.  All Borlaug ever did was spend decades working to improve agricultural methods and crop breeds, and maybe he saved the lives of a billion people*.

So we see that, once the Press had gotten established and the latest shocking news would be all over the world in mere days, the easy path to notoriety was to bump off some random archduke** or famous musician, and journalism would do the rest.

But, somewhere along the line - was it the attacks on Gerald Ford and the Bishop of Rome? - the Important People made themselves much harder to get at, what with armored vehicles and armed guards and so on.

And so it came to pass, many years since, that one notoriety-seeking loser hit upon an innovation: rather than try to get at a well-protected Important Person, he'd commit a grand atrocity upon helpless and unprotected children, and within hours his name (which I shall not repeat) was a household word, worldwide.

Others have repeated that act over the years since, with variations.  Some have been more successful than others; those who stray too far from the story template receive little attention.  (Wasn't there a guy a few years back who murdered a bunch of children by driving his car into the group at high speed?  Yeah: big in the local news for a day or so, a brief mention on the national news, and soon forgotten.)

And, every time an atrocity that fits the template is perpetrated, the talking heads are on it 24/7, giving the public every last detail (even if most of the details later turn out to be completely wrong), and reinforcing the template.

So back to our starting supposition.  If you're a nobody, and wish to become an instant Somebody, is the path not clear?  Has cable news not told you what you must do, and how?

I mean, hey, if you spent a few decades slaving away in a genetics lab and developed a better way to feed the masses, you'd probably just be demonized anyway.  (Frankenfoods!  Enabling population growth!  Corporate profits!***)  Certainly you wouldn't get a lot of news coverage; any coverage there was would be of your detractors.

What's the lesson here?

* Poor people.  Most of them with dark skin.  Hardly newsworthy.

** Though hardly anyone remembers ol' Gavrilo's name; it was kinda swept from the headlines by subsequent events.

*** Worse still, you might develop some new high-yield strain with improved tolerance for climate variation, thereby undermining the climate-change agenda.

Oh, is the world still here?

Guess I'd better pay the phone bill.

Update: huh.  Can't find a YouTube vid of the IWW song "We're Still Here."

Update 2: wrong keyword.  Hadda look for the singer, not the organization.  Here we go.