Silicon Valley Redneck

The computers are gaslighting us.

Had two similar-but-unrelated episodes over the weekend.

While composing the "Political labels" post, I suddenly found that my spacebar had stopped working.  Well, sort of.  If I typed some text into the composition box, then a space, then more text, the space wouldn't happen.  But I could go back and insert the space.  And the spacebar worked in other contexts.

Same thing happened in this morning's post.  Apparently Typepad's editor gets into weird issues if a paragraph with line breaks gets too long...?

Then, Sunday morning, when I stopped at a gas station, all was normal until I was ready to drive off.  The post-fillup checklist calls for resetting the "B" trip odometer.  But... the button wasn't working.  Or, rather, it wasn't being recognized most of the time; if I pushed it persistently enough, it would cycle the odometer display around to the next mode, but I couldn't get the press-and-hold reset to work.  Button all worn out?

Next time I started the car, though, the button worked fine.  Apparently the computer just didn't want to hear it on that one occasion.

I expect cats to behave this way.  Computers are supposed to be consistent.

Oh, My Dear Aunt Sally!

I nearly forgot: it's Precedence Day!

Remember:

Postfix
Prefix
Mulops
Addops
Shiftops
Relops
Eqops
Bitwise AND
Bitwise XOR
Bitwise OR
Logical AND
Logical OR
Ternary
Assignments
Comma

Let's all chant the handy mnemonic...

Wait, what?

Never mind.

Does not compute.

Seen here, among other places the past couple of days:

Local Fox32 News reporter Rafer Weigel, who has been following the case closely, reported on Twitter that his police sources were able to prove that the brothers purchased the rope that was taken into evidence after it was used in the alleged assault on Smollett.

The rope?  Did the store record the serial number, or what?  How do you prove that a piece of clothesline bought at a particular store at a particular time is the same piece of clothesline that now resides in an evidence locker?

I submit that you don't, and that this is a ruse akin to accepting as evidence a redacted version of a phone call log - which could then be compared to the actual call log maintained by the phone company, to see what the person providing the redacted log wanted to hide.  I think it likely that the cops bamboozled the brothers in question into believing that they could prove that it was the same piece of rope, and thus got them to confess.

 

I keep meaning to write a longer post on the topic of hate crime hoaxes in the time of the Panopticon, and how they somehow seem to acquire the status of Deep Truth in the face of all  evidence.  (Look how much video evidence there was, on Day One, that the Covington Kids did nothing wrong and that the hate-crime narrative was a flat-out lie.  And yet, somehow, the Narrative was ascendant for many days, and still seems to be widely regarded as fundamentally true despite the evidence.)

Political labels

Seldom mean what people think they mean.  And they get in the way of clear thinking.

Noted here:

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust — basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat — numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity¹, support for authority and hierarchy², sexual conservatism³, and distrust of outsiders⁴.

I've inserted some footnote numbers.  Now, my footnotes!

1. This is highly dependent on how broad a view of "religiosity" one takes.  There are plenty of fervently religious people who reject traditional forms of religion, but for whom political movements take the place of the Church.
2. Authority and hierarchy... hm.  Such as...
   Dressing up in matching outfits... pink hats, red cloaks and white bonnets, black T-shirts and masks, etc.?
   Carrying matching mass-produced signs?
   Chanting slogans helpfully provided by the leaders?
   Uniting behind the Green Leap Forward?
   Demanding that all health care be placed under central control?
3. And just which political alignment is associated with the current, real-life Junior Anti-Sex League and its various offshoots?
4. We must prevent Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus!  He might damage our fragile little minds!

I could probably come up with some examples of traditionalism, too, but I'm not feeling especially motivated.  Got better things to do with what's turning into a bright sunny morning.

Additional:  Traditionalism?  Oh, yes.  Longing to undo all the economic progress made by capitalism and return to a simpler age (that never was).  Back to the days when most people never traveled beyond the nearest village (Trotsky's grand rail vision was, recall, meant to be liberating: transportation for the masses who had heretofore lacked the means to travel).  Mostly, back to the days when peasants dared not talk back to their betters.

Question of the day

What is 2.4710538×10⁶⁸ acres?

(Hint: the surface area of the Sun is only around 1.5×10¹⁵ acres.  Which isn't really a hint, except in pointing out that the question probably doesn't relate to anything tangible, and is likely even sillier than you thought.)

Two wrongs, etc.

Actually, it's more than two; it's a clusterwrong.

The latest Deal seems to be this: Congress hastily passes, unread, a monster "spending" bill, written in secret, with various non-spending things buried in it.

In particular, it includes, along with token border-barrier funding, restrictions on actually building a border barrier.  Great.  And there's a wonderful new feature whereby relatives of potential sponsors of unaccompanied minor illegal aliens are granted immunity from deportation...?

It'll probably be months (if ever) before we learn what other Easter eggs lurk buried in that vast pile of paper.

Anyway: the other part of the Deal is, Trump signs the bastard and then promptly declares a national emergency and sets about building the border barrier regardless of Congress.  In what universe does this make sense?

Plenty of clarity on this multiple idiocy over at National Review, e.g., this.

Additional:  Speaking of Easter eggs lurking in large legal documents... look what was hidden in the Treaty of Versailles!

Of bills of material and other databeese.

I had some dim recollection of having some SQL related to the BOM problem, somewhere.

Oh, yes.  From 2009, in fact.  Almost 800 lines (including comments), not quite finished, for a comprehensive database system for my sort of business.  Entities (people, vendors, clients, and so on), components, bills of material, inventory, capital equipment, billable hours, expenses, a mechanism for attaching comments to just about anything at any level of the hierarchy... and some comments at the end about access control, not yet filled in.  Oh, and change tracking (an early version, before I split that out and implemented it for a project that needed change tracking and for which none of the off-the-shelf systems seemed suitable).

It was meant to be used with a bunch of PHP scripts that I never got around to starting on, because life got busy and the big database project was relegated to the far-back burner.  (Actually, I had part of a framework for the PHP stuff, but... I don't recall how far I got with that.  It'd be in an older version of PHP, anyway.)  

Hm.  So maybe I should break out the portions relating to components and bills of material, and just implement that part (when I have time).  The original plan, though, was to have everything nicely integrated; breaking it into multiple databases calls for having some sort of cross-database identification mechanism.  Shouldn't be too difficult, but it'll take some planning.

And, probably, I should set up some kind of accounting software before implementing the financial side of the database system, and have a plan for exporting the necessary information.  With some kind of tagging, so things don't get into the accounting system twice... does accounting software understand that concept?  There's also stuff that should be imported back from the accounting package, probably.  So much to ponder!

Update:  Took a quick look at the GnuCash documentation.  The import format is mainly a Quickbooks-defined thing.  Which... OK, yes, simple text format and all.  But it seems to be lacking in some rather basic things one would want in a format for transferring financial data, in particular any way of tagging transactions with some sort of unique identifier.

GnuCash can also import CSV files, but I don't see anything describing what fields it expects.  Guess some playing around with it is called for, In My Copious Free Time.  I'm guessing that the fields are user-configurable, but have no clue what the options are.

Update 2:  BOM generation might perhaps take a pick & place CSV file as input, store not only the BOM data but the data for emitting a pick & place list in whatever format is called for... including perhaps a file tailored for a particular machine and setup?

Also, I'm reminded that the "entities" table was also meant to be referenced by the "components" table, for the vendor field.  I guess if the components gets stuck in their own database, there can be a "vendors" table that just stores names, and we make sure, if and when the accounting database happens, that the "entities" table has corresponding entries with matching names.  (Ugh.)

Tree seeds.

Insect-fornicating tree seeds.

NYT opinion piece:

The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like

"Realistic"?  I do not think it means what you think it means.

Sure, let's put every aspect of life under centralized control, run by people who are clearly not qualified to tie their own shoelaces.  What could possibly go wrong?

And isn't it strange how the precautionary principle doesn't apply to the schemes of collectivists?

But, I guess, what can you expect from people who think Oaxaca Alexandria-Quartet is super-smart and stuff.

New scam making the rounds?

So there I was, running a few errands during a break in the rain....

While I was in the drugstore, my phone rang.  Caller ID showed the first six digits being the same as mine, which pattern seems to be popular with caller-ID spoofers for some reason.  So, probably fake.  But it could be an agent wanting to show SVR Central, so I'd better take it.

Phone: [Ring tone]

Me: Hello?

Angry female voice: I'm reporting you for harassment and fraud.

Phone: [Call ended]

Er... what?

Am I expected to call the (presumably spoofed) number, thereby establishing the harassment, and... pay off the caller not to report me?  Or what?

(And it's a good thing I am answering the phone, because the next call, about ten minutes later, was indeed from a potential buyer.)

A quick search doesn't turn up any results for that particular phrase in relation to phone calls, so maybe it's a new scam that just started today?  Or was it targeted?  Wouldn't it make more sense to target somebody who has money?

TDS (the other meaning)

Total Dissolved Solids, that is.

I don't quite recall how I ended up watching this video in the wee hours of the morning, and they don't seem to have posted a followup with actual meaningful data, but....

As part of a tap-vs.-bottled water comparison, the Corridor Crew bought a HoneForest TDS meter from Amazon to see how "contaminated" the water was.  On the back of the box is a handy scale, running from "ideal for drinking" pure distilled water (ugh) to nasty unsafe mineral water.

Which is nonsense, of course.  A raw TDS reading doesn't tell you whether you have 100 PPM calcium or 100 PPM polonium.  And pathogens, not being dissolved, don't even register.  (I'm thinking that most dissolved organics wouldn't show up, either; that probe looks like it's just measuring conductivity, and therefore only looking at ions.  Would it notice dissolved sugar or VX?  Were I feeling motivated, I might break out the megohmmeter and some samples from the pantry and the pesticide cabinet.)

I was hoping the video would include lab results showing what was in the tap water, not merely how much, but no.  They haven't (so far) posted a followup with the results, either.

A day for being useless

I seem to have brought something home from DesignCon, apart from the usual bag of vendor literature.

Something presumably of a viral nature.  I thought for a while I was just having the indoors-in-winter cough (which for some reason gets worse in banks, particularly), but this actually seems to be general slow-moving upper-respiratory crud.

This has not been good for, e.g., sleep.  So here I am with not only the usual crud symptoms, but also a few nights worth of sleep deprivation.

Various napping, and some idle reading.  Probably time to set aside the remainder of Ignition! for the coming weekend.

Oh, yes.  I did a bit more tidying of the BOM script and associated data file for EAGLE (the old, permanent-license version).  This led to some further playing with DipTrace to see how it handles BOM export, component attributes, and so on.  It has a rudimentary, but usable, feature for exporting a CSV file with configurable fields, so... I guess as I make the transition to DipTrace, it'll be time to stick my part data into a real (PostgreSQL) database, and have a Ruby script to take the CSV file, do database lookups (looking up all matches for the attributes specified, and, in the case of multiple matches, maybe picking the cheapest), complain about parts for which there is no match, and, when all's settled, export maybe a fully-filled-out CSV or XLS(X) file, or maybe store the BOM in the database for future extraction and formatting.

Hm.  I also need to look into extracting part information (manufacturer, part number, description, pricing) from Digi-Key, Mouser, Octopart, or wherever.  I've been scraping pages manually these past many years, which is inconvenient (but doesn't break every time a website changes).

Stupid contract-manufacturer tricks strike again?

Troubleshooting some boards that died in the field.

I'm developing a nasty suspicion that... well... I think this is the same batch of boards that we had to have reworked because the CM had installed some wrong resistors.  I think they may also have substituted something else for my carefully-specified 50V ceramic bypass caps.  Hey, most of the time you don't need a 50V rating on bypass caps, right?

I'm not altogether sure how a cap failure would cause the particular failure cascade I'm seeing, but there's no way it makes sense for anything else to have failed first and killed the cap, unless it was something in the outside world.

Growf.

And, of course, my multimeter doesn't have a "capacitor working voltage rating" measurement feature.  Maybe because that isn't something that can be measured on a small sample size nor in a reasonable time.

Always have your prototype & pilot runs done domestically.  Locally, if possible.  Even the best local CM can botch, e.g., a novel soldering process, but messing up a build this badly seems to be a cut-rate-overseas specialty.  When it's time to go overseas for volume production, hire a good CM-wrangler.

Also, have the CM stamp the boards with a lot number, or date of manufacture, or something that you can use to identify which ones were built in the same run.  (This is a new lesson from this particular adventure.  It goes in The Book.)

(A reminder to the bean-counters: doing it over is more expensive than doing it right.  Especially if it's in beta by the time you discover that it needs to be done over.)

Correction:  Not the CM's fault this time.  Somehow the BOM ended up with a 16V cap specified.  So the error is in our (mostly my) process.

Update:  Looks like the root cause is... er...

Sometime around 2016-ish, I inadvertently copied a working copy of my personal-projects repository, instead of creating a symbolic link to it.  So there I was, editing a local copy that was neither archived nor checked back into Subversion.

In 2017, if memory serves, I had a hard-drive failure.  Which wouldn't have been that big a deal, except that it took out the local copy of the stuff I'd been working on.

Which, apparently, included the changes to the BOM-generation script to append certain attributes to the part database lookup key.

Leading, eventually, to failure of capacitors.

Update 2:  Report written and submitted, including rework instructions for the existing boards and confirmation that only the two types are affected.  Script, and corresponding data file, updated, and absolutely definitely for sure this time checked into Subversion.

Now I can get back to the work I was supposed to have been doing this week.

Snowy hills

Over in the East Bay hills, there's been a fair amount of snow (by local standards) the past couple of days.

No, I didn't hike up to one of the peaks and build a snowman.

Sunday report

Open house again today.

The weather was actually quite favorable, and we had several people show up, some of whom seemed potentially serious.

In between visitors, I continued reading Ignition!, getting to the chapter on hydrogen peroxide.  Hey, I've worked with that stuff...!

Wherefore much of the material in that chapter was, in one way or another familiar.  I hadn't, however, heard the story of the Rat Test.  That... would have been... interesting, if carried out as originally specified.  And I'd heard something about the H₂O₂/JP-4 spill tests, but I think it was garbled; the book brings fresh (or at least new-old-stock) knowledge.  Not that I'm ever likely to be involved with that stuff again.

Then on to the chapter on the wondrous propellant combinations that produce hydrogen fluoride as exhaust.  Man, I thought SRB exhaust was nasty.  And at least the SRB propellant is fairly safe to handle before burning.

Now it's time to wind down; there's actual work-type work to be done tomorrow.

Additional:  It's somewhat alarming to realize that, in that book, hydrazine is one of the safer materials under discussion.  Also, it seems I was misinformed, all these years, regarding the reasons for using UDMH.

Actually...

George Will has an interesting piece on the nondelegation doctrine, and a legal case relating to Trump's big beautiful tariffs.

In the last paragraph, though, I spot this:

James Madison was, as wise people usually are, an accomplished worrier who rarely worried about the wrong things. It turns out, however, that he did when, in Federalist 48, he worried about Congress “drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” For generations, Congress has been a centrifugal machine, spinning off powers.

As Insty has been known to remark: embrace the healing power of "both".

If we're pondering the "vortex" metaphor, think of a centrifugal pump.  It sucks things in and spins them off.  Now think of Congress: it sucks in powers not properly assigned to it (Tenth Amendment!), and, having no clue what to do with them, promptly spins them off into a vast array of executive-branch agencies.