Silicon Valley Redneck

New office equipment

My old laser printer (a Samsung ML-7300N) had gotten cranky... the duplexer had added an autowrinkle feature, and about 5% of the time the grinding and gnashing noises would be joined by a crinkling noise, and the sheet would come out wrinkled, often quite badly.  Sometimes it would wrinkle badly enough to jam the duplexer.

Hey, I paid a while $130 for that thing at a swap meet, just a few years ago!

Anyway, it seemed like time to replace it, so I'd been shopping around for a new laser printer with a duplexer.  Mostly they're quite pricey -- generally, the people who buy cheap laser printers aren't looking for automatic double-sided printing, but I print lots of stuff (including multi-hundred-page datasheets and user manuals), and I like to keep the volume of paper down -- but it turns out that Brother has a few cheap models with duplexers built in.

I ended up getting an HL-5250DN, $250 at the local Office Wossname.  Set up, plug in power and Ethernet, fiddle with CUPS, discover that there's something screwy with my local DNS, work around that, and hey presto -- a perfect test page from CUPS at 600 DPI, FAST!

So far, I'm quite happy with it.  It's fast, and reasonably quiet, and, unlike the old Samsung, it handles plain text properly, so "ls -l | lpr" doesn't lose characters into the margins.  I haven't tried 1200 DPI printing yet, but that's not a feature for which I expect to have much use (if I want to print fancy graphics, I'll use the inkjet and get color).

The one drawback is that the paper tray only holds half a ream.  Its big brother has a full-ream paper tray, but costs twice as much, and for that kind of price difference I'll just feed it half as much paper twice as often.  (Would a printer with 1500-sheet capacity be a triream?)

Update: one other problem... the printer identifies itself as BRN_84DB1E, which, owing to the underscore, isn't strictly a legal host name.  Linux doesn't seem to object to this; bind gives an error in the system log, but seems to add it correctly -- at least, nslookup finds it -- but if I try to ping it (or otherwise look it up through the normal name resolution system) on the FreeBSD system, I get an error related to the name lookup.  This explains why I couldn't get it configured on the server.  With the printer configured on the (Linux) workstation, I can print from anywhere... with the possible exception of Windows (got to check my Samba configuration).

Later: OK, I installed the fancy Windows software on the lab machine, and used it to reconfigure the printer's server function... changing the underscore in the host name to a hyphen, and changing the DHCP timeout from 1 hour to several days (so's it doesn't lose its IP address & host name when it powers down at night).  Now, I think, everything's happy.

Not dead, just not posting

I'm alive, really!

However... work is getting busy (which is a good thing from a financial point of view, but gets in the way of other stuff), and I've had sundry distractions to occupy my free time (one big one the last few days being my VHDL studies; I'm just about done with the reading-everything-in-sight phase and ready to start actually playing), and my typing ability is currently rather constrained after I hurt myself with a rubber ball.

Yes... a soft rubber ball....

OK, so here's what happened.  My left arm atrophied a bit while it was in the cast, so I got myself a squeezy ball to get some muscle tone back.  Worked a treat.  Unfortunately, I kinda overdid it - and other hand-using activities - and now my wrist is swollen & sore on the side opposite where the break was.

So, I'm currently wearing an Ace bandage when I'm out and about - taking it off for eating, typing, and whatnot - and kinda giving my wrist a bit of a rest.  It does seem to be improving now.

And, on that note, it's time to stop typing.  There's plenty of typing I gotta do tomorrow, for work.

Losing the point?

Word is that The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is about to move the Doomsday Clock forward again.  The countdown to nuclear Armageddon advances!

Er, now wait a minute.  This is apparently based on the situations with Iran and North Korea - countries with, maybe, a few nukes, and not very good ones at that.

If I'm recalling correctly, the Doomsday Clock was meant to reflect the imminence of an all-out nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  In today's terms, that would mean an all-out war of annihilation involving us, Russia, and/or China: the countries with large numbers of nukes.

If midnight on the clock has been downgraded from "nuclear Armageddon" to "nuclear war," then we're already more than 61 years past midnight!

If it's still meant to be global (or at least hemispherical) Doomsday, then how, exactly, is a showdown with Iran and/or North Korea going to initiate that?  We're busily trading with Russia and China, and I don't think anyone on any side is going to get trigger-happy over known fourth-party troublemakers.

Poker? POKER???

Finally got around to seeing Casino Royale 3.  It was better than most of the Bond films... keeping in mind that "most of the Bond films" means "Roger Moore."

Recall the three versions of Casino Royale: the first was the Climax Mystery Theater TV-moviette which made Bond an American and Leiter a Brit.  Bloody well unwatchable; I made it through the first few minutes before switching off in disgust.  The second was the well-known one with David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and that crowd, wildly parodying the Moore films not merely before Austin Powers, but actually before the Moore films themselves.  Then there's this new one, with the unfortunately-named Daniel Craig (I keep expecting him to be Craig Charles).

It's an OK action movie, though too heavy on guns and chases (both wildly unrealistic) for my taste.  Ian Fleming wouldn't recognize it, but any Hollywood stunt or FX person would.  And what's with the autodoc in the glove compartment?  Definite deus ex machina there.

The Bond reincarnation gets off to a bad start, with Bond, early in the film, being the rogue not-at-all-secret agent.  C'mon: it's too early in his career for him to run amok like that and be welcomed back - he doesn't have a reputation yet - and, with seemingly every enemy and tabloid in the known universe knowing his name and face, what sort of secret agent career can he have?

And the card game gets changed to some sort of poker.  Eh?  The card game of mysterious rich people and spies is supposed to be baccarat!  ("No, Pinky, baccarat.  The thinking person's game.  Nothing but the finest for Brain's Palace.")

In the last part of the film, some familiar plot elements from the book put in an appearance.  Still, as far as resembling the book goes, it's just about tied with the spoof with Woody Allen.  I really don't know why they bothered using the title.

Oh, well... it's worth matinee, if you can still find one.  More if you like generic action movies.  From the reviews I'd read, I'd really hoped for something more Bondian and less generically actiony.

It's been a while since I read that book...

...but I still managed a decent score:

                                 

One week       You scored 46 Survival!

yup, thats all that ill give you, you know enough, but unless you hook up with people more apt to survive

 

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Survival

Link: The Zombie Survival Guide Test written by dadeathwing on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Via Orac, who scored 50.

"Actually, I'm a mouse in a large mechanical suit."

No sooner does the hacker-friendly version of the Roomba appear than someone sets a rodent to driving one.

Next up: steam-driven tap-dancing legs!

(Via El Reg.)

Whoopsie!

Hmmm... yesterday I mentioned a potential new project?

Well, it turns out that the consulting company's year is starting out with a bang; it was just on a one-week fuse.  Looks like I'll be plenty busy.

So, I guess I need to come up with a list of reasons it's better for the company I was talking to yesterday if we handle their project as a consulting thing, with their people doing most of the work, rather than as a farmed-out subsystem.

Let's see... they spend less money (assuming they already have a junior engineer and a CAD person available to do the work); the expertise ends up in house, instead of walking out the door with me; the CAD files will naturally be in their preferred formats... sound convincing?

Actually, the second and third items are, in my experience, good reasons for not farming out subsystem development if you can possibly avoid it.  Too many opportunities for ending up with a design that you can't manufacture nor maintain.  (Not that you have those problems if you farm a subsystem out to me, but in my time on the client side of the business, I saw enough cases of wrong-format CAD files, CAD files not matching the hardware in use, clouded rights to the design, and so on, to make me leery of the whole idea.)

Ah, CES!

No, I'm not there.  I'm right here at SVR Central.

Insty, however, is reporting (along with others) from CES.  This brings back memories.

I went to CES once, back in 1987, with a band of hacker types.  It was huge, and flashy, and ever so Vegas.

I don't get along with Vegas.  I have an alarmingly low tolerance for fakeness, and fakeness is what Vegas is all about.  Even back then, it quickly gave me a headache.

The show itself was... well... not my cup of tea.  I like high-tech gadgets, within reason, but I want to know what's under the hood, and that's not what CES is about.  There wasn't much for me to do but wander around, occasionally say, "Ooh!  Shiny!", and flirt with the booth bunnies.  I don't think I even gathered as much as one bag of literature.

I like the little industry-niche trade shows a lot better.  The products on display are more likely to include things I can use, there's more emphasis on function and less on shininess, and sometimes the cute booth bunny will turn out to be the lead engineer on the product, and eminently prepared to answer technical questions about it.

There was this about Vegas, though: I managed to freak out some people by walking into a casino coffee shop at 6:30 AM, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, all dressed up, and looking for breakfast.  Just what the ordinary denizens needed to see, in their fatigued state.  (I think the LED bow tie might have added to the disorienting effect.)

New project! (Maybe.)

Just met with some people at a mid-sized company (some of whom I'd met previously, back in the Ciena days).  This is a potential project that showed up unsolicited last week, courtesy of a former co-worker (from multiple past jobs).

No names nor details here, of course, but they've got a subsystem resembling one of the more headache-inducing projects at Ciena, except that, from the information on hand so far, it looks like there's enough space to do it properly (no 2mm crimp connectors and tightly-bundled wires this time), and I might even manage to get a free hand in picking the microcontroller.  This looks like a job for an LPC2103 or maybe an LPC2132 (have to evaluate resource requirements).  And AGROS, of course.  A 32-bit processor and a multitasking OS may seem like radical overkill for the application at hand, but we're talking $3 or $5 microcontrollers here (in what's got to be a multi-hundred-dollar subsystem), and having a surfeit of resources is preferable to running out, right?  I'll probably even try to design in an RS-232 port for debugging, and they can leave the parts off the production boards.

One of these days, I'll even get around to packaging up AGROS for its open-source release.  Honestly!

Meanwhile, I should be ramping up my involvement in the consulting company, and getting up to speed on a management role.  (What, me management?  Heresy!)  Should be a busy year.

And now, it's time to review the materials I brought home, and then ask the prospective client for a few clarifications....

Guh. Double-whammy cold season.

Well, so much for the rest of this week....

There seem to be two colds making the rounds: a normal one, and "the cold that would not die."  I've had the latter since early November, and it's been gradually fading, though it's a bit hard to tell for sure when similar symptoms are triggered by heating-season indoor air.

Anyway, I seem to have gotten exposed to the normal cold over the holiday weekend.  Started a bit of a fever yesterday afternoon; general crud is ramping up this morning.

Foo faddle!

Ah, well... cancel previous plans... but I can't use the day for the two business meetings that would have otherwise been on my schedule for today.  Time to rest, veg out in front of the home theater, and/or start tinkering with VHDL, or maybe code up a personal medical log appette (possibly in scheme, with an SQL backend, of course).

2007Y! 2007, 2007!

Out with the ZOOG year and in with the ZOOT year!  I realize this post is a bit late, but my New Year's Day was busier this year than most.

As usual, I led my 7:45 AM hangover hike.  Last year we had exciting weather, with horizontal rain and sleet, and many newly-fallen tree branches obstructing the road back after we were done.  This year, we had boring weather: bright, sunny, just a slight breeze, and moderately cold (with only a few patches of frost in evidence).

A view west from the northbound ridge trail in Skyline Ridge OSP shows a fog-filled valley.  (As usual, click for a larger image.)

Alpine Pond was un-marred by waterfowl.

The view west from Borel Hill.  There's got to be an ocean somewhere under there!

The view east.  Can you spot the dirigible hangar hiding in this picture?