Silicon Valley Redneck

A strange expression

Two of them recognized the flashing red siren....

Hmmm.  Flashing red siren?

Is that some sort of Indian sea-temptress, lounging on the rocks and opening her trenchcoat to lure unwary sailors?  Mythological creatures gone wild, anyone?

Is that anything like an aluminum falcon?

From a Bloomberg article on the Icelandic financial crisis:

There was public outrage three years ago when environmentalists poured yogurt over aluminum representatives to protest a new plant.

Aluminum representatives?  I've heard of aluminum Christmas trees; is this something similar?

Come to think of it, that could be a great idea: low maintenance, easily stored between sessions, unlikely to take bribes... Aluminum 2010!  Elect a metal construct to replace that meat-based politician you've got now!

(Via Insty.)

Timely article, but...

Somewhere among the holiday scramble I seem to have gotten exposed to the latest What's Going Around virus, 'cause I've got a sore throat and more of a stuffy head than usual.

This leads me to think that my plan for the day, which involved a 7-mile morning hike to burn off some of those holiday calories, might not in fact be the best idea.

Now, via Insty, there's this NYT article that suggests that exercising with a cold is a good idea.  So, should I revert to my original plan?

Well, not in my personal experience.  A few times in past years I've gone hiking when I was just-about-recovered from a cold, only to have a relapse. For me, at least, waiting until I'm fully recovered, plus a couple of days, seems to be the right approach.  (But, then, the article is about athletes, not deskbound engineers.)

Wait... haven't I seen this?

Observe the trailer for some new movie called, apparently, UP.

Does this put anyone else in mind of The Crimson Permanent Assurance?

Those aren't pointy shoes

Melissa Clouthier decries a fashion trend: men wearing shoes with (if one follows the links and looks at the pictures) slightly tapered toes.  These she calls "pointy shoes."

Not even close.  These, now, are pointy shoes:

 

And let us not forget Bored of the Rings:

"But what does that mean?" asked Bromosel, rather annoyed that he was being referred to in the dialogue as "the man with the pointed shoes."

'And since then, some people have called me "Two-Sheds"'

My big Saturnalia present to myself arrived this morning: a perfectly ordinary garden shed.  Or, rather, a garden shed which is a smidgen less than six and a half feet tall, and which, therefore, I can put right next to my back fence without annoying the zoning folks.

The workman showed up, spent an hour or so working in the mud, and handed over the keys.  Now I need to put some shelves in it... and then juggle stuff among it, the sideyard shed, my lab, Goodwill, the freecycle list, the recycling center, and the dump... and eventually end up with an empty storage locker on which I'll then be able to stop paying rent.

And no, I have no plans to write any music in the shed.

Gore, Keanu brought a necktie

Or words to that effect.

What's that you say?  That line isn't even in the remake?

However will the new generation of filmgoers grok Army of Darkness?

Well, maybe they'll read the reviews, skip the new version, and watch the original. I certainly don't intend to see the new one, unless perhaps in the context of an MST party... and it is time to watch the classic again, isn't it?

What is it with these color-and-SFX reimaginings, anyway?  The classic-ish version of War of the Worlds wasn't especially good, but at least it made some kind of sense; the Tom Cruise version was just incoherent.  And the SciFi Channel apparently got the urge to revisit the Flash Gordon serials, resulting in a series in which Flash didn't have silver underwear, Dr. Zarkov didn't have a rocketship, and everyone had gratuitously complicated personal lives and spent a lot of time running around in fields and jumping through wibbly patches in the air (and there's rather a lot of convenient end-of-episode amnesia).  C'mon, the original had pretty darn tacky sets, props, and effects, but at least it tried.  Oh, and the Get Smart movie?  Reasonably entertaining, yes, but it wasn't Get Smart.

Hmph.  I feel a lengthy rant coming on, and there's no time for it now (never mind no time to watch all the remakes of the last several years alongside the originals).  Maybe another time.

Well, this is annoying.

What with Firefox 2.0.x having officially reached the end of its supported life, I switched to 3.0.4 last week.

There were a couple of transition annoyances - mainly, it lost many of my newer bookmarks until I deleted all my bookmarks and did an explicit import from the old 2.0 bookmarks file, and of course I had to go out and find compatible versions of some of the extensions I use.

There's an ongoing problem, though: duplex printing.  I don't find any references to this on the Web, so there doesn't seem to be an answer (if I find one, I'll post an update).

Now, here's the thing: I have a duplex-capable printer (Brother HL-5250DN), Linux (Debian-unstable), and CUPS.  The .ppd file and lpoptions quite clearly specify DuplexNoTumble as the default... and yet Firefox insists on defaulting to DuplexTumble every freaking time I go to print something.

It doesn't seem to be one of those KDE-vs-Gnome things, either; I just fired up the Gnome CUPS manager, and it thinks NoTumble is the default.  So, unless I switch to the Page Setup tab, and change the duplex setting every time, my printouts get formatted for flipping along the short edge instead of the long edge.

Ah, well... printing from browsers has been problematic for a long time (and not just Mozilla products, and not just under Linux), but this is just plain bad integration.

"Never forget that you could die tomorrow..."

Fun fact from an NSF.gov page*:

3 minutes after a person is stung by a deadly box jellyfish, s/he may be dead.

Well, duh!  2 minutes after reading this, you may be dead, even without the intervention of a box jellyfish!  You might just drop dead of a heart attack after being startled by the meteorite that, at this very moment, is plummeting toward your desk!  Or you might break your neck after tripping over a power cord while running to the window to look for the meteorite!

Life's uncertain, and if you use the right weasel words, almost any statement can be made trivially true....

* If NSFW means "not safe for work", does NSF.gov mean "not safe if you work for the .gov"?

Another bogus study

Found on Slashdot: a Stanford energy study concludes that some of the things the politicians are pushing are Really Dumb, and that we should instead be doing the things that some other politicians are pushing.

Hmmm.  Well, some of this is pretty obvious; that corn ethanol is a boondoggle has been apparent for quite some time, and solar-thermal makes a lot of sense if you have some way to store the energy for use at night.  But....

I have to wonder what assumptions he's making about photovoltaic technology, which he ranks relatively high.  And he's down on nuclear power.  I wonder what assumptions he's making there?

Oh, here we go:

...nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy...

Er... what?  Where's that carbon coming from?

And this:

"Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it's straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do," Jacobson said.

Bzzzt!  WRONG!

There's no fargin' connection between a nuclear power plant and a uranium enrichment plant.  They're altogether different facilities.

Now, if you have a power reactor, it does produce plutonium, which can also be used for making bombs... though the plutonium from a power reactor is ill-suited to the purpose owing to the high concentration of ²⁴⁰Pu.  And, in the interest of reducing waste and getting the most mileage out of the fuel supply, it does make sense to reprocess the fuel... but there's really no need for every country with reactors to have fuel-reprocessing capability; just have a fuel-exchange program with a member of the existing nuclear club to trade your nasty used fuel rods for nice clean new ones.

Philosophical ponderables

Rambling about the Web in an idle moment, I found that Inner Prop has some... interesting thoughts on religion.

No, I don't have any enlightenment to add just now, though his thoughts are sort of relevant to a largish essay that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, regarding the importance of religion to a secular state.

Anyway, thought-provoking reading.

Happy 36-Bit Wednesday!

Yes, once again it's DEC 10.  Break out a moby of vintage core and celebrate!

Waiiiit a minute...

According to El Reg, some Aussie's been convicted of possessing kiddie porn on account of having videos of Bart and Lisa Simpson having sex.

Er....

Quite apart from the minor detail that Bart and Lisa aren't people, how can they be underage?  They were 10 and 8 years old, respectively, in 1989.  So what were their legal ages when the offending vids were made, huh?

(There's got to be a Twilight angle in here somewhere, too, but somehow I don't see a vampire wanting to go into a bar.)

Funsies!

South-Pointing Chariot

You're doing it wrong.

Well, golly: the state's going bust.

Who'd a' thunk it?  California is just plain running out of money. Surprise!

Well, OK, I've been expecting this for years, but with the recession I guess it's gotten imminent and kinda hard to sweep under the rug.

So what happens to a state that runs out of money?  A reorganization is definitely required; can states file Chapter 11?

Or does it get declared insolvent by the feds and sold off to some other state?

But what state could afford to buy California and its debts?  It'd have to be a consortium, or maybe California gets split up and the parts sold off.

So who are the potential buyers?  Texas?  Minnesota?  Dubai?  Microsoft?

Maybe I should get busy building that nuke, so I can declare myself sovereign.  (What do you mean, you haven't read Snow Crash?)

The stupidity-enrichment centrifuges must be working overtime

Following links from TSM this morning, I arrived at this tale of fire extinguishers, and the banishment thereof from English apartment buildings (excuse me, blocks of flats).

Notable quotables:

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: 'Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.'

Yup.  Right up until someone actually moves into the building and piles a bunch of excess cardboard under the stairs.  Or the landlord covers up damaged carpet with incompletely-fireproof throw rugs.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire.

Riiiight.  And those cheap 1A; 10B:C extinguishers I keep scattered around my house would be totally inappropriate for use on a flaming block of magnesium (or, for that matter, uranium), for which you'd want a D extinguisher.  For anything you're likely to encounter in a residential setting, though, the basic multi-purpose extinguishers are just fine.

A session of slow-motion head-bashery winds down

On and off for the last few weeks (IMCFT, what with work being in Busy Mode), I've been trying to add support to AGROS for the USB device interface on the LPC2148 (and thence the LPC23xx and such).

Well, it's been frustrating.  The NXP documentation isn't very good, and the various sample code isn't set up to show just how the interface actually works.

Eventually, looking at Micrium's code, I figured out what I think is the last bit of magic: Set Address needs to have the command issued to the protocol engine once (so it takes effect on the next Setup packet), not twice (to take effect immediately), and the Set Address command needs to be ACKed with a zero-length packet.

Anyway, instead of seeing a half-second (or five-second) timeout and bus reset as with the various b0rked attempts, I'm now seeing a Get Configuration Descriptor command immediately after Set Address... and I'm not responding to it, because I haven't built a configuration descriptor yet.

Off to do some real work now (you know, the kind that pays the bills).  Once I get my USB driver working properly, I expect I'll post some nice sample code that shows just how the interface gets used.

Having USB device support in AGROS may come in handy for real work soon... toss in an ACM layer and a SCPI interpreter, and it looks like part of a line of quick'n'easy custom test equipment.

(Update: the USB class for something that speaks SCPI should of course be TMC, not ACM.  I think I have a copy of the TMC spec squirreled away somewhere... and it can't be any more perverse and incomprehensible than the ACM spec... can it?)