Silicon Valley Redneck

Not much in-front-of-the-computer time the past week

The lack of posting lately is partly due to my recent inability to spend much time in front of the computer.

I did something evil to my lower back on Monday, not noticing it at the time, and my ability to sit in one place, or to stand around, has been quite limited.  This made, e.g., a Friday-morning dog & pony show at a client site highly uncomfortable, and I spent most of that afternoon horizontal and largely inert.

It seems to be getting better now - this follows the pattern of a similar problem in 2004, which motivated me to get a decent office chair in the belief that it was caused by poor posture while sitting in front of the computer.

I've been using Tiger Balm, despite the annoying radio ads, and it seems to help, though I keep having this urge to photoshop a martyr's belt onto Tigger - which is perhaps more appropriate than it sounds, given the role of the Tamil Tigers in pioneering the use of these devices.  Tiger Balm has the interesting side effect of repelling moths... just in case anyone actually needs a personal moth repellent.  (Does camphor also work on mosquitoes?  That would be more useful.)

Posting will likely continue to be light for the next couple of weeks, as I catch up on the work I should have been doing last week (both in front of the computer and at the workbench), and commence work on Operation Mothball Humball - about which, more later.

For now, my sitting-still time for this session is about used up.  Time to get moving....

Functional jewelry concept

I don't recall exactly what brought this on, but it must have been something I read and misinterpreted sometime last week.

Idea:

Bugzapper earrings!

Well, why not?  Look at those keychain Coleman lanterns (not that I've seen anyone wearing those as earrings).  Take the same general form factor, and have the zapper grids, high-voltage inverter running off a watch battery, and a little light source, and maybe a warm CO₂ source to attract mosquitoes (if it's powered by a methanol fuel cell instead of a watch battery, that'll supply the warm CO₂).

It's all Bush's fault!

Yes it is!  I was very nearly late for a meeting with a client this afternoon, and Bush is to blame!

I set out for the client site by my usual route, and discovered that (1) the onramp for 237 Eastbound was closed - no big deal; I didn't want to go that way - (2) traffic on 237 Eastbound was zipping right along, and consisted entirely of emergency vehicles, and (3) traffic on 237 Westbound was not moving at all.

Turning on the radio, I was reminded that this was Visiting President Day, and that this was the reason for the traffic disruption... though the location and direction seemed rather odd.

Anyway, I ended up driving further North on 101, looping around, and getting on 85 in a roundabout way, eventually reaching the client site.

At least he didn't steal my luggage.

Whoopsie!  Time to take Tinga to the vet now, and there had better not be any darn politicians in the way!

Update: actually, the location of the disruption makes sense if the route was Ellis -> Middlefield -> 237, which was probably the least disruptive way to get from Moffett onto 237 (237 was disrupted, but 101 wasn't).

Something under the perch is drooling?

I've already mentioned, many times, Tinga's persistent troubles.  She pulls out the feathers on her chest and belly at night; send her to stay with the vet for a few days, and she stops; bring her home and she starts again after a couple of days.  It's like she's decided it's the fashionable look for teenage parrots or something, and next she'll want a tattoo or a beak piercing.

Well, about a week ago I set up a webcam pointed at her sleep cage, using a motion-detection feature in the bundled software to try to catch her in the act, which maybe would help figure out what was going on and why.

In order for the webcam to work, I had to leave a night light on.

She hasn't been pulling out feathers the past week.

So: is it a Heisenbug, which disappears when monitored?  (In electrical engineering, this is known as "Ship it with the 'scope connected.")

Or... was Tinga not the one pulling out the feathers after all?  Was it really the bogeyman doing it, and the night light keeps him at bay?

Was she pulling out the feathers just to leave them under her perch for the Feather Fairy?

Stay tuned....

Just how silly can tests get?

Orac buzzed and hummed and linked to yet another quiz: "What Disease Are You?"  Looks like I'm a doozy!

What Disease Are You?

You Are Rabies!

Also known as Hydrophobia, you tend to be exciting and spontaneous. Energetic and daring, your friends value your ability to eat things after the five second rule has expired. While you are greatly appreciated for your ability to take chances, you have been known to "bite the hand that feeds you." You have a great sense of humor when you can manage to wipe the foam off of your mouth.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Well, I'm feeling a bit rabid at the moment, and ready to bite rapidsvn, or should that be rabidsvn... Debian-stable comes with 0.7.0, which is old; when I try to build 0.9.1, I get a weird link error; 0.9.0 builds OK, but gives a shared-library-related error when I try to run it.  Version 0.8.0 builds and runs, but it isn't the latest... actually, looking at the changelog, there doesn't seem to be any reason I need the latest, so I guess I can stop foaming and get back to work, now that I wasted all this time taking quizzes while waiting for the program to build, repeatedly.

'Tis the Eighteenth of April...

Is this the day Charlie Richter rides through town on horseback shouting, "The Earthquake is coming!  The Earthquake is coming!"?

Or does San Andreas come down the chimney?

Should I be keeping an eye out for Thumper, the Earthquake Bunny?  Does he bring Earthquake Eggs, or perhaps Earthquake Pills?

Is it time to watch out for graboids, or, since the Maker Faire is coming up this weekend, sandworms?

Holy Saturday, Batman!

This would seem to be the perfect day to review a DVD of Parsifal, except for two small details:

1. I don't have a DVD of Parsifal;
2. Even if I did, I wouldn't have time to sit down and watch it.

Yes, it's a busy weekend, and mostly personal stuff which won't get blogged, in accordance with my "no blogging personal stuff" rule.

I will, however, note that it's time to mail off my tax return, following an adventure at the bank...

<flashback time="Wednesday morning" dissolve="wavy">

So I walked into my old bank financial center carrying the most recent statement for my IRA, with the account number on it, and a checkbook, wishing to add money to the IRA ahead of the deadline for last-year contributions.

The IRA had been sitting idle for a long time, as from sometime in the early 1990s to mid-2004 I'd had a 401(k) available, so putting money in the IRA didn't particularly make sense.  For 2005, it made sense again.

The teller looked at the account number, poked at her computer, asked around, and told me I'd have to talk to the financial advisor, who doesn't work Wednesdays.

<advance time="Thursday morning" />

I walked in again, waited in line for the financial advisor, and handed her the same papers, expecting a simple "poke numbers into the computer and it's done" transaction.

Nope.

My old IRA is handled by the Boston office, and the physical check and paperwork would have to get there by Monday, by way of some intermediate office.  Erk!

So, after much futzing around, the solution turned out to be this:

I opened a new IRA with the local office, put my 2005 money in that, and signed the forms to have the old IRA transferred to the local office and merged into the new one.

Ain't banking fun?

</flashback>

And now, it's time to confront my busy weekend.

April showers bring strange behavior

Now, here in the Bay Area, we don't normally get much in the way of April showers.  I think that must be more of an East Coast thing.  Around here, it's "February showers bring March flowers," and "Corn should be as high as a cow-pony's eye by the Fourth of June."

Sure, we get a few sprinkles most years, and every so often Bealtaine morning will be cold and cloudy and the Morris dancers will have to work overtime to make the Sun appear, but March and April are predominantly bright sunny spring months.

Anyway, with all the unseasonable rain we've been having this year, it felt like hot chocolate time.  With marshmallows.

Yes, it's a Peep in a hot tub!  Or a yellow rubber ducky in a mug of hot chocolate; take your pick.

Ugh.  Chocolate and sugar... I think I'll go play with my Buzzy the Hummingbird doll now.

Grumble grumble seasonal paperwork grumble

Well, the tax stuff is more or less done, modulo the personal review and a trip the the bank financial center tomorrow to make that IRA contribution before I file.

One of my business ventures, and one of my investments, producted considerably more paperwork than money... and I'm not convinced that Haddock Hatchet is really doing the right things.  Probably should have taken this mess to a professional a couple of months ago... but for the amount of money I actually made last year (it was one of those skinny cows) it didn't seem worth it, and besides the paperwork for one of the business ventures didn't get done until the end of March, owing to another party's illness.

What with the lumpy distribution of my income, I ended up (a) having to pay underpayment penalties, while (b) getting overpayment refunds.  If I'd kept better records of when, exactly, the money had come in, I guess I could have avoided this, but this year I'll attempt to be prescient and guess how much total income I'll have for the year when figuring quarterly estimated tax payments.

Ah, well... by the end of tomorrow I should have it all out of my hair, for the moment, and then I can get back to fattening up this year's cow.

Why hadn't I noticed this before?

Over at IMAO, Laurence has a helpful new "Know Thy Enemy" post up.

It includes this handy (and well-known) nugget:

• According to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood of Christian children is used in the making of matzoh, or the unleavened bread used in Passover rituals. However, like many best-sellers on the New York Times list written by their own columnists, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion just happens to be full of crap.

Now, here's the odd thing: the whole business of Passover matzoh goes back to the Exodus... which means that the use of the blood of Christan children in making matzoh predates Christianity by about 1300 or 1400 years, depending on whose chronology one uses.

Obviously, the predatory Jews had time travel!

This implies that all the alien abductions, cattle mutilations, and so forth, are actually being perpetrated by evil Jews from the pre-Christian past, who need Christian victims for their rituals!

I'd pursue this insight further, but have to get busy battling an evil Zionist plot called "work," which was clearly invented for the sole purpose of keeping people too busy to uncover Zionist plots.

Pesky annual gummint forms...

I tell ya... these forms get more annoying every year!  Especially when, on top of having my own business and being a partner in another, I foolishly went and invested in a municipal bond fund last year, thereby gaining a few bucks in dividend income and a whole new can of worms, tax-form-wise.

Once again, I'm using commercial software (installed on that Windoze machine in the lab) to fill out the darn forms... and it remembers stuff from one year to the next, which is usually good, especially with regard to keeping track of depreciation.

It gets real aggravating, though, when it insists on going off on tangents... I ended up telling it that, no, I don't have a home office (though in fact I have a sort-of office and a definite lab), because the stuff it insisted on knowing was too much trouble.

I think using a real accountant might have made for less hassle, though, what with some important business paperwork having arrived late this year (owing to someone else's medical problems), getting all the necessary stuff to the accountant would have been a serious mad dash.  At least I don't have a Cathy-style Big Box O' Receipts... not that any of the stuff in a box of receipts would have anything to do with taxes anyway (it's amazing how much that you'd think would be deductible, or a business expense, isn't).

Ah, well... I think I have all the complicated stuff done.  Tomorrow, dig up all the estimated-tax payment records.  Oh, and figure out what my first-quarter estimated taxes look like....

Interesting (?) defense tech

Kesher Talk links to a Fox News (yeah, I know) report on a new gizmo to protect armored vehicles against RPGs*.

My first thought: millimeter radar and a shotgun.

The animations and commentary portray a scifi force-field bubble around the protected vehicle.  The demos show RPGs exploding, in an ineffectual way (not proper detonations, as well as not having reached the target), as they cross an invisible barrier.

The explanation given: radar tracks the incoming round, and a classified countermeasure is used against it when it comes within range.

So, yeah: millimeter radar and a shotgun.  Well, perhaps not exactly a shotgun; it's conceivable it could even be a laser, but some sort of automated smallarm seems most likely.  Since RPGs move fairly slowly, assuming the RPG was fired from a respectable distance, there's time to bring a projectile weapon to bear (especially if there are many of them, with their rest positions pointing in different directions; think B5 defense grid).

Blasting the incoming rounds at a consistent distance would create the illusion of a scifi force-bubble... isn't it nice to have the enemy thinking you're using magic?

Um... I wonder how much acquisition/tracking time this takes.  I'll refrain from helpful-to-the-enemy speculation about tactics to defeat it; let 'em figure the trick out on their own.

 

* But does it work against LARPs?  Sorry, wrong kind of RPG.

Update: Samizdata points to some articles with better information.  Apparently the interceptor is a small rocket, not a shotgun.  Something like a baby Sprint?

I have this terrible feeling of déjà...

Good evening. Tonight on It's the Mind we examine the phenomenon of déjà vu.  That strange feeling we sometime...mes get... that...

Fetch morning Murky from driveway.  Skim through front section.  Feed birds.  Set table.  Pour cereal into bowl.  Add milk.  Refold morning funnies for breakfast reading, starting with the second page.  Commence...

...er...

The first one looks familiar.  So does the second.  And the third.  Look up at the top of the page; it claims to be the Friday paper.  Check the first page of comics; those are fresh.  Eh?

On closer examination, the second-page comics are individually dated 4/5, which explains why they look so much like the ones that ran on Wednesday.  Not that the artists conspired to duplicate their 4/5 strips for 4/7 (and only the ones on that page).  Just some sort of SNAFUBAR at the paper.

They can't even get the comics page right, and we're supposed to trust them with the news?

An inauspicious beginning to the day....

Tired feets

Well, the home datacenter is more or less back together, and the office is much quieter with the new server (or, rather, without the old one).  Still a few details to be sorted out, but overall it's working.

This afternoon, I ventured down to San Jose for the Embedded Systems Conference.

Parking was a problem.  Typical big-city politicians: build a big, ego-boosting convention center, name it after one of their own, and forget the minor detail that people will have to get there somehow.  Not only was the Convention Center parking garage filled, but so were the other nearby garages... I eventually found a lot about 5 blocks away that had space.

On to the gathering... it was BIG!  I spent 4 hours stolling around the exhibit hall, and I'm sure I missed quite a bit.

Lots of interesting stuff (FPGAs, microcontrollers, development tools), lots of stuff for which I don't have any particular use (single-board computers, expensive development tools).

I wasted a fair amount of time shooting the breeze with various old-timers (loosely defined: anyone who remembers what core memory was, or the name of the company that made the original 6502, or the previous meaning of "Flip-Chip").

This time, I was being a bit selective about gathering literature, so I didn't end up with a stretched arm.  I didn't actually buy any development kits, either... though I did pick up a discount coupon for one, and had a close look at another.  Sooner or later, I'll pick an FPGA family to play with, and buy the kit....

Anyway: lotsa shiny stuff, and a long time on my feet.  If I'd gone yesterday (instead of staying home migrating to the new server), I would have been in mud boots instead of office shoes, on account of the weather, and maybe my feet wouldn't have gotten so tired....

Chaos day

Oy.

So, yesterday I... well, that's another story, and doesn't really relate to today's troubles, except in that today's troubles seem to have precluded any useful results (so far) of yesterday's efforts.

Anyway, this morning I was sort of vaguely awake for quite a while before noticing that it seemed to getting suspiciously light outside, and my alarm light hadn't come on.

Now, there are various things that can cause the alarm to fail.  The bulb could be burned out.  The power could be off (but then I'd hear the beeping of the UPSes).  Or... the cron job didn't run.

Yes, the poor old server made it past the vernal equinox (possibly fooled by the continuing wintry weather), past April Fool's Day, and then croaked during the night.  The root hard drive (system files, mostly) had gone bad, only two and a half years after the warranty expired.

And thus it came about that I spent my Tuesday morning frantically recovering all my important data from the second hard drive, putting it on the new server, and getting the new server ready to connect to the DSL line in the mailserver/router role.

Turns out I hadn't gotten around to configuring Exim yet.  It's Exim 4, and the old one was using Exim 3, and I don't have the book for Exim 4, and the local computer bookstore doens't have anything for Exim 4, and...!  Aha!  Humball is using Exim 4, and has a configuration very similar to what I want.  So, a quick file snarf & edit, and mail is working!

(No spam filter yet.  I get a lot of spam.)

Also, the nameserver is at least somewhat working, the router is working, NFS is working, it's faster, and this room is a lot quieter with the old server turned off.

For some reason, though, Apache is once again refusing to start.  I thought it had been working before????  Oh, well, that's sort of a lower priority; www.gumbyware.com will be offline for a while until I sort that out.  Then there's a postgresql database to be dumped from the old version, and restored as the new (or otherwise converted).  And SAMBA, and CUPS, and....

And now it's lunchtime, and, while the cupboard isn't entirely bare, I think it's time for a grocery run.

A bad precedent remains intact

While it's seen limited use (so far, at any rate), one of the most disturbing asserted executive powers in the GWOT is that of detaining U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, as enemy combatants, and holding them indefinitely outside the legal system.

The Supreme Court has left this power intact, refusing to hear an appeal by Jose Padilla.

Yeah, I know... this power of detention was upheld back in WWII, by FDR's pet Court... the same one that upheld a lot of other nonsense.  Can't we just edit the whole FDR era out of the legal precedents?

Look, U.S. citizens within U.S. jurisdiction have definite rights under the U.S. Constitution.  If a citizen genuinely is an enemy combatant, then that's treason by even the narrowest definition, and he's entitled to a trial and a fair hanging (but not drawing and quartering).  If he isn't, then the government has no business detaining him as one, though of course he can be tried for any actual crimes of which he's accused.

"Enemy combatant" status is for foreign nationals who were fighting us, who presumably would resume doing so if released, and who are not subject to our laws.  A proper enemy combatant can't be put on trial for waging war against us, per se, because, if he's an enemy national, making war on us isn't a crime.

Jose Padilla is a U. S. national, subject to our laws, and subject to the protections of our Constitution.  If he has been waging war against us, that's the crime of treason, and he can be tried for it.  If he was part of a terrorist plot, he can be tried for that (as could a foreigner, for that matter; terrorism is a crime).

Alas, the Court has once again upheld a bad precedent.  (If it hadn't, it would have opened a whole new can of worms; attempting to change Padilla's status from "enemy combatant" to "criminal suspect" would have created an interesting challenge for the prosecution; I have to think that many judges would be inclined to throw out a criminal case that followed an extralegal detention.)

***Now just a doggone update: I'd forgotten part of the history of the case, and the news report left out important bits.  This story provides a link to the actual opinion, which has a handy "the story so far" section.

Padilla has already been reclassified as a criminal suspect, and charged with crimes.  This is as it should be.  The can of worms is, however, open, as the courts are having to deal with a suspect who has been detained outside the legal system; surely this will create headaches, and not just because of overzealous civil-liberties groups.

The bulk of my rant is not affected by this.  Detaining our own citizens, on our own soil, outside the legal system, is a power our government ought not to have.

More on workers foreign and domestic

OK, so maybe Bubba ain't into the whole "honest day's work" thing (see previous post), but all is not lost.  CDR Salamander notes that, contrary to alarmist chatter, the US is well ahead of India and China in the percentage of population earning defense-related science and engineering degrees.

(OK, so "defense-related" is kinda narrow.  Basically, it's looking at rocket scientists.)

Their numbers are higher, but then they have a much larger population, so that's hardly a surprise.

This raises the point that the reason for importing engineers isn't that Americans are no good at engineering, but that there are so many engineering jobs here in proportion to the population.  Well, that and the imports are willing to work cheaper... and are more readily exploitable, at least until they get their green cards.

CDR Salamander does raise some issues regarding the large numbers of foreign grad students, and their effect on the grad-school environment.  Stuff to think about....

A different perspective on Mexican laborers

Note the title: that's "Mexican laborers", not "illegal immigrants" nor any of the goofy euphemisms in common use.

Gene at Say Anything offers an anecdote which, if true, runs counter to the canonical VRWC assumption that illegal immigrants, owing to their illegal status and consequent exploitability, are working below minimum wage and without benefits, thereby eliminating minimum-wage positions for our native pool of unskilled labor.

According to Gene's tale, many Mexicans, who are likely here illegally, are actually working for decent (or at least well above minimum) wages, sometimes with benefits, and presenting all the required documentation for employers to hire them legally.  (Whether the documentation will stand up to careful scrutiny is another question, and not the employer's problem.)

So, why are they taking these jobs away from the native labor pool?  It's 'cause they're willing to work hard, and Bubba ain't.

Makes sense, when you think about it.  If somebody's gone to all the trouble of sneaking across the border and buying a new identity, he's going to be a motivated worker.

This also suggests that a guest-worker program of some sort may actually make sense... if jobs that pay more than minimum wage are indeed going begging for want of capable workers, then there's a need either to (a) import such workers, or (b) motivate Billy-Bob to get off his duff and do an honest day's work.  Maybe both.

There's a lively discussion in the comments.  Again, I don't know how much of the tale is true, or to what extent it's representative.

Certainly, there's a large class of jobs that don't require any particular skill, but do require a modicum of physical fitness and a decent work ethic.  Thinking back to my own experience... growing up in middle-class white suburbia, I earned a considerable amount of pocket money doing weekly gardening work for various people.  The key to satisfied customers?  Unlike any of the other teenagers they'd employed, I would - get this - show up on time and get the job done. It seems the middle-class white-boy work ethic was terribly weak back then; if it's gone downhill since, is it any surprise that furriners are stealing our jobs?  Hardly counts as stealin', if they've been abandoned....

(Link via Classical Values.)

Meanwhile, Capt. Z has gone off his meds again, and has his own thoughts on the matter.

Piratical enough?

A friend is planning a pirate party later this month.

Some props might be in order.

I've been meaning to play with this CAD software, and learn to do useful 3D mechanical drawings.

The convergence:

A mountain howitzer tube on a naval carriage?  Doesn't look quite right, does it?  (And not just because my CAD skills aren't up to speed.)

It's the derringer of maritime artillery.

And, thus, a natural for pirates!

(If you're willing to overlook the question of where a bunch of early 18th century pirates would have gotten their hands on a model 1835 mountain howitzer tube, of course.  Hey, if I can wear a Knights of Columbus hat and a Soviet saber as parts of my costume, I can get away with an anachronistic cannon, OK?)

Now, IMCFT, to build the puppy at 1/4 scale.  No, I'm not planning to take powder & ball to the party!