Silicon Valley Redneck

Another holiday I don't celebrate

It's National Gorilla Suit Day!

Now, if I were going to wear one of those hot, shaggy suits, January would be the time for it.  On a January night, such a garment might even be tolerable.

Still, my closets are rather full, and why would I want to take up space with a suit I'd only wear for a portion of one day a year?

(Oh, right.  The same reason I'm storing a regular suit-type suit that I only wear for a portion of one day in several years.)

Wait a minute, though... I do have a shaggy black fake-bearskin vest.  I usually claim it's wookie skin, but today I could claim to have killed some guy in a gorilla suit and made a vest out of his skin....

A quiet little trade show

Having, somewhat unexpectedly, a slow day on the work front (this was originally supposed to be the day of a great panic getting a system assembled for a customer, before various changes came along and delayed things), I stopped by RTECC for an hour or so.

Not a big exciting thing, but the sort of trade show that can be shoehorned into a workday, and I gathered a modest pile of literature (mainly on mini-PCs and panel computers), and gained an important tidbit of knowledge about using touchscreens in certain unusual environments (which I'm not sharing at the moment, but it'll influence the testing to which we subject panel computers).

Lots of companies with itty-bitty computers of various descriptions, some with RTOSes or development tools, and some with unique goodies (at least one of which I'll have to look into further: a stackable, USB-controllable family of bitty boards, for which I may have uses in the foreseeable future).  Ah, and here's info on that: what they're doing is stacking up boards PC-104 style, only in a smaller form factor and using USB on a stackable connector as the bus.  Clever!

A free lunch was on offer - just the thing to draw in a midday crowd of Zoidbergs - but it turned out to be box lunches of California food, featuring greenery and weird sauces, so I scuttled home for a proper hot lunch after making the rounds.

Vocabulary expansion

Metanoia?  Never heard of that one until today.  Sounds like just the right level of alertness, i.e., halfway between ortho- and para-noia, right?

Well... Roger Kimball used it this morning, in such a way that the meaning (in general terms) is clear from context.  Lex actually bothered to look it up.  Means "a change of mind."

And, as Kimball suggests, it's unlikely that Those Who Rule Us All So Wisely will experience one of these.

The rest of us, though, had better be mindful of Change and of our minds.  Mustn't be unmutual.

Well, there's one thing ticked off the list.

Having bought myself that second shed for Saturnalia, I got busy moving stuff out of the rented storage locker... and juggling the clutter... and taking loads of stuff to recycling, Goodwill, and whatnot....

And, today, I finished clearing out the locker.  Last of the stuff out (including a huge bar of stainless steel that probably belongs to the rocket society), floor swept*, locks off, signed out, gone.

Shoulda done that about 4-5 years ago, of course, but better late than never, and that'll save me a fair chunk of money every month.

Still got room for trimming some recurring expenses, and there's still a bunch of clutter reduction to be done around here - loads of stuff that could be disposed of, but first I need to sort through the boxes and determine what goes and what stays.  And there are a couple of ancient PCs wherefrom some data should be removed before they get recycled... I think I still have an XT-compatible keyboard around here somewhere, and I should be able to find or make an adapter to plug an SVGA monitor into an EGA card (before the last remaining CRT monitor goes away) while I copy files to, er, whatever density of floppy that old beast can handle... and then hope that a modern machine can read that old format.

Hmmm.  Or maybe - just maybe! - the HD controller in the old AT can also handle the drive from the XT.  That might simplify things a bit.  I might then be able to plug that controller into a newer system that still has an ISA slot, but can run Linux off a CD, talk to the network, and suchlike niceties.  Then I could just save images of the old hard drives to some tiny corner of the file server.

* I swept the floor, yes, but I did not polish up the handles on the big front doors.

Computers are such annoying critters

Yesterday evening and today have been... odd... on the computer front.

Yesterday morning, I was playing around with power management on the home-theater system, and didn't manage to get it to do what I wanted (suspend to RAM when I push the power button) - though I think I know now what the problem is - but apparently caused the remote-control gizmo to develop a wedgie, because when evening classic-TV-watching time rolled around, the remote wasn't working, and I couldn't get lircd to run.

Well, I eventually got that sorted out: the lircd log file had filled up with repeated error messages in the morning, eventually reaching a size of right around 2³¹ bytes, beyond which lircd could, apparently, no longer log, and would refuse to run.  Deleting the log file got it working (or, at least, got the demon running) again.

Also amid the fun, I ran a big software rearrangement on the workstation to allow installing a couple of video-editing programs.  This called for a reboot, which seemed like an opportunity to swap in a new DVD burner.  Curiously, after the upgrade and both before and after the reboot, the CPU watcher was showing solid orange on both cores, i.e., system functions were eating all available CPU time (while very little CPU time showed up in actual processes).  The first test of the DVD burner gave the system a wedgie, after writing about 7 of the 7.5 gig I was trying to write, requiring a hard reset.

Well, apparently the hard reset led to some of Firefox's files getting corrupted.  My bookmarks were gone and non-restorable until I deleted places.sqlite, and, just now, I tried to use the search bar and got no response except for this highly informative message being logged to the error console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIFormHistory2.addEntry]"  nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/search/search.xml :: handleSearchCommand :: line 443"  data: no]

Well, this is particularly interesting in that there's no such file as search.xml anywhere that I can find - maybe it's in Mozilla's source code? - but calling up Google the old-fashioned way and trying random variations of keywords from the error message eventually led to a suggestion to delete formhistory.sqlite, which in fact turns out to solve the problem.

And now, that having been dealt with, it's time to get back to work, making sure that the product is broken in exactly the way the customer specified, and furthermore that it's only broken for the customer who asked for it to be broken.

Drizzle, drizzle, little cloud

It sounds decidedly rainy out there.

You'd think it was winter or something.

Well, I guess it's time we got some rain; there's been basically nothing since the big storms of December, and (for example) the pond at Rancho San Antonio was still dry as of yesterday morning.

Still, I think I'll skip my morning hike and get some work done in that time.  The forecast calls for intermittent rain the next few days; I sure hope it's intermittent enough that I can finish moving a bunch of stuff out of the storage locker before the end of the month.

It's a pleasure to present a laurel and hearty handshake to our new...

...Commie.

Really, now: I turned on the radio for a few seconds this morning, in search of the traffic report, and got a random few seconds of Pinky's inauguration speech.  The random few seconds, paraphrased: Markets bad.  Rich people bad.

It's alarming enough hearing the politics of envy during a campaign.  In an inauguration speech, doubleplusungood.  It sounds distressingly like we've got us a Red President.

I've been predicting for a couple of years now that Chimpy's place as Worst President Since Clinton would not long outlive his term.  The events of the last couple of months - the outgoing administration's bailout party, and Pinky making the pilgrimage to the back room at the Dairy Freeze to learn what T.H.E.Y have decreed to ensure continuity - had led me to believe that (a) Pinky probably wouldn't do anything radical, and (b) he'd have to work really hard at being worse than Chimpy.

And yet: if those randomly-selected seconds of that speech mean anything, I expect bad times for the productive classes.  And, as His Majesty took the throne, and waved his magic scepter to heal the world's ills, the markets responded:

Dow           -4.01%
NASDAQ        -5.78%
S&P 500       -5.28%

I guess tomorrow morning will show what Asia and Europe really think of our new Change.

Incidentally, I should probably apologize to the lab mouse pictured above for applying his name to our new Chief Exec.  The Pinky that can throw its friends under the bus is not the true Pinky.

Such a peculiar dream

My day began weirdly, as I found myself partly awake quite early, then dozing off again, and drifting in and out of a dream....

It was one of those where I'm back in college.  This time, though, I was back in the dorm, and trying to leave my room in the morning.  The lock was stuck.

I somehow got out of the room (perhaps using the old out the window, around the ledge, in the fire escape trick), and found that the lock could be forced from the outside using a camera tripod as a wrench.  (Don't ask me how any of this makes sense.)

I then proceeded to unwedge several other locks, while reports filtered in of stuck locks on other floors.  Apparently someone had gone on a supergluing spree (how a superglued lock could be fixed with a wrench is left as an exercise for the analyst).

Meanwhile, another student had come up with a set of maintenance barcodes for the locks.  (Apparently these locks had both a keyhole and a barcode scanner.  Go figure.)  We got busy trying to figure out which code to scan to unjam the locks (though it's not clear whether one of the special codes would perform the machanical unjamming function of the tripod/wrench, or the barcode part of the lock also needed to be unjammed from some sort of digital wedgie).  Was the Master Reset code the right thing to use, or would that require the lock to be rekeyed?

At last report, I was puzzling over the maintenance codes, the minimal documentation for the locks, and some possibly-related schematics, attempting to document the whole mess to the satisfaction of the resident adviser, a cranky middle-aged woman of a nontechnical bent.

Was this trying to tell me something?  Is there a product idea in there?  Well, back when I was in college, barcode locks might have made sense for low-security uses; back then, the state of the art in dot-matrix printers was the DECwriter with its amazing 7-pin printhead, or one of those TI things that used the thermal paper, so printing one's own barcodes was nontrivial... and even office photocopiers didn't make copies good enough to work with the primitive barcode readers of the day.  These days, it'd be just about secure against a toddler... and a simple mechanical latch requiring some combination of strength and height can perform that function just fine.  So, probably no product inspiration here, unless I can somehow send the dream back in time to the year I was actually living in a dorm.

Kommt mit Zacken und mit Gabeln

I'd been getting notices that there was some sort of Neighborhood Enhancement Program thingy in the works... which led me to look up and down the street and realize that with the housing-boom gentrification of the last couple of years, I've got the last untidy yard on the street (though I believe there are still a few others on side streets).

Thus it was with some trepidation that I attended the meeting this evening, in the park clubhouse that had, years ago, been the polling place.

Well, the guy from the city was there - from the Department Formerly Known As Code Enforcement - and he was promptly swarmed by the angry villagers with pitchforks and torches demanding that he do something about the Brass Rail, and the overflow parking from the high-density housing that replaced the local trailer park a few years back, and the young hooligans with their fast cars.

The front-yard jungle at SVR Central didn't even rate a mention (though I do plan to get in a fair bit of tidying before the weather gets too hot... and I've already sprinkled pre-emergent weed killer around to discourage dandelions and the next generation of hackberry trees.)  The city guy also mentioned various forms of help with house painting, and the house is definitely overdue for sanding and a whole new coat of paint.

(My army of giant robots also didn't rate a mention, but that's no surprise as I've been keeping that out of sight of the townspeople until it's ready to deploy.)

Oh, and something that did get mentioned, repeatedly?  There's this homeless guy living under a bridge in Palo Alto, see, and... no, I realize that's not in this neighborhood... it turns out he owns a dozen or so homes in the area, one in this neighborhood, and they're just standing vacant.  Have been for a decade.  Falling into ruin, but not subject to condemnation because they're not occupied.  Go figure.

OK, now this is a strange spam.

I noticed the last entry in the mail server log as soon as I sat down in front of the computer this morning: from a gmail address that sounds vaguely legitimate, but also doesn't sound like anyone I know.

Sorting down through the night's mail, I eventually arrive at the message.

Subject: congratulations! you are a toyota lottery winner

Hmmm.  Well, I do have a Toyota, but I don't recall entering any lotteries, and you'd think Toyota would use capital letters in the subject line.

The To: address is someone I don't recognize, on Bellsouth.  I'm on the Cc: list, along with a couple of dozen other addresses... several of which I recognize as Sierra Singles people, at least one of whom also drives a Prius, though I'm pretty sure some of the others have nothing to do with Toyota.  Did someone's e-mail broadcast get swept into a spam target list?  Or, perchance, an address book compromised by the latest malware?

On to the message body:

PRIZE...AWARD
This is to inform you that have been selected for a cash prize of £3,600,000.00 (Three Million Six Hundred Thousand Great British Pounds)and a brand new toyota car (Toyota Prius) International programs held on the 28th October. 2008 in the London Uk.

You can view our website to view your car
(<http://www.toyota.com/prius/>)

Description Of New Toyota Car to be Shipped to you.

New Toyota Car :......................Year 2007 Model
COLOUR OF CAR:.......................Light Blue Colour
MODEL:...............................Toyota Prius 2.0i ES
Manual
ENGINE TYPE:.........................1973cc 4-cylinder
POWER:...............................145bhp
TRANSMISSIONS:.....................Five-speed manual
FUEL:................................29.1mpg (combined)

Yeah.  A new 2007 model?  When it's 2009 already?  And what's a "Prius 2.0i ES"?  Last I heard, the Prius didn't have such sub-model designations.  And...

A Prius with a manual transmission?  Nope. Not even in England. They're not built that way, and cobbling a manual transmission onto one isn't an option (there's no place for it to go).

And what's with the 145bhp, and 29.1mpg?  Think maybe this is some other car altogether, and someone just changed the model name, instead of copying & pasting actual Prius specs from Toyota's web site?

"And to all the rest of you, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."

Preparing the new stimulus package

Hey, I remember how this goes!  I saw this back in high school!

Free money!  Almost ready for you!

Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr demonstrate how it's done.

Expect the free money from Washington to be distributed with rather less class.

(In the 30 years or so since I saw The Magic Christian, I've managed to forget most of it.  A few bits stuck in my mind, though, and the "free money" scene is assuredly one of them.)

Iggle upgrade

My upgrade of EAGLE from 4.x to 5.3 arrived from CadSoft this morning.  Installation was straightforward.  Looks like it's going to behave itself.

I haven't started exploring the new features yet (what with there being real work to do today).  On a quick look, though, it's nice... and the bundled library collection has expanded quite a bit since version 4.1 (though a lot of them are user-contributed and contain only a few parts; a bit of central work on compiling master libraries would have been a good idea).

Update: the user interface is improved in various little ways (though I'm not sure I like the new delicate pastel look).  It has PDF export built in!  And cross-reference labels (though the mechanism is a bit awkward).  And... user-defined attributes!  Yippee!  That's a feature I'd really been missing.  I'll have to investigate just how this works in detail, but it should certainly allow me to tag passives with things like tolerance, voltage or power rating, dielectric type, and so on... normally leaving these blank, but having them available when I really need to differentiate things in the BOM.

The autorouter seems (based on a couple of quick tests) to work about the same as ever, and still doesn't deal nicely with user-defined power/ground fill (polygons may fall apart at the last minute), and still likes to route traces through the corners of SMD pads (I don't know that this is an actual problem, but it doesn't look right).  It seems to me that the overall result looks a bit cleaner than the old version's usual output.

I still need to try running some of my indispensible ULPs (slightly adapted from user-group programs) to make sure they still work... and then see how to incorporate the new attributes into the BOM program.

Grumble grumble modern WiFi grumble

Fry's had wireless grouters on sale for $15 again - the Airlink 101  AR430W - so I picked one up, on account of my existing access point being a mere 802.11(b) slowpoke, and me having the notion that fastish access to the house network with modern security features might be appropriate.  (What I actually want is an access point, not a router, but access points weren't on sale.  I may eventually get a nice access point and stick the cheap router behind my mother's PC so's to have secured wireless access at my parents' house.)

Anyway: set it up (pretty much trivial), give it 256 bits worth of /dev/random for the key (enabling WPA-PSH/WPA2-PSK), and....

The SSID shows up.  My shiny new (well, new in 2005) dinky laptop, running Debian-stable, doesn't know how to talk to it, even after I install wpa_supplicant from source; the supplicant keeps saying authentication timed out (and logging strange errors, including "operation not supported").  If I reboot in Windows, it works.  Hmmm....

Much futzing around.  Eventually I fire up the old laptop running new Kubuntu-Heffalump, plug in the PCMCIA WiFi card, move over the same wpa_supplicant.conf... and it works.  (Well, it connects to the router; then I need to do 'ifup ath0' manually at the moment.)

Well, it could be an ipw2200 driver issue; that's an old version of the driver.  Or, mayhap, a kernel issue.  Must be time to update that system; it's still on 2.6.18.  Or maybe I have to update the whole system to -unstable, which is really not something I want to do, as the configuration is somewhat brittle (though I suppose the current -unstable might actually have better support for that oddball laptop than the version I'm running now).

Update: fixed sources.list; did a dist-upgrade to the latest -testing (which, being a several-month upgrade, needed quite a bit of manual intervention); rebooted (which worked); now it's running the 2.6.26 kernel, and wpa_supplicant tells me that I need to use the wext driver instead of iw.  OK, so I do that, and try to set up the interface/supplicant using one of the newfangled utilities, which apparently doesn't work... but now, mysteriously, when I do an ifup on the WiFi interface, the supplicant wakes up and uses my configuration file, hooray!

So, I guess if you're using a reasonably current release of Linux, WPA does in fact work, though the mechanisms may be obscure.

I also (as long as I was working on it) installed a dinky USB Bluetooth adapter, and, attempting to follow someone's slightly dated instructions that didn't really match my system, eventually did manage to pair it with my cellphone, after which a minor change to the kppp configuration let me use EVDO with the phone still in my pocket.  So, the USB-to-cellphone cable is now optional, though potentially useful for charging the phone's battery.

Yeah. OK.

Currently making the rounds:

The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has defended the fur industry saying it is justified because the "beasts" fur comes from would "kill us if they could."

Yup.  It's well known that minks consider human liver a delicacy.  Back before Og got into the fur business, prehistoric man was terrorized by marauding foxes, chinchillas, and such.

(Understand now: I say this as a carnivore who wears some leather and, occasionally, fur.  What I don't do is claim that the cow would have eaten me if I hadn't eaten it.)

Happy (oog) New Year...

For the first time in several years, I'm not out leading a hike in the hills this New Year's Morning; I sent the group off with a substitute leader and came home.

I'd had Great Plans for the week after Christmas: holiday rush over, work pretty much idle until next Monday, time to myself - there are so many creative things I can work on!

Alas, 'twas not to be.  While I didn't have the string of misadventures that befell some people, my plans started to go wrong Christmas afternoon with a sore throat.  Which developed into a pretty much standard winter cold.  Which, basically, made me kind of useless for a few days.

Then, as the cold symptoms were sort of tapering off Monday morning, I lost my voice almost completely.  (It's gradually coming back.)

Then, on Tuesday morning, I felt it necessary to run one particular errand before the end of the month: off to the storage place to let them know that I plan to be out by the end of January.  As long as I was there, I figured I might as well pick up a Prius-load (Joy having taken the Jeep off to Tahoe for the week) of stuff that goes in the most inaccessible corner of the new shed.  Said stuff being, pretty much, my college-era computers, as they're things I don't want to get rid of, but don't actually expect to need access to any time soon.

So what happens?  Well, I pick up my primary computer from my college days - an SwTPC 6809 beastie - think 8 bit processor, 56K RAM, and, er, a big honkin' linear power supply - set it on the hallway floor so I can close the door (lifting mainly with my knees, not my back, like the safety posters say), and - sproing! - now I can't stand up straight.

Well, I can almost stand up straight this morning, but I'm not sure hiking up and down hills would have been a good idea, so, between that and the lingering cold symptoms, I felt it prudent not to do the hike.

And what have I accomplished in the Christmas-to-New-Year's week?  Apart from lying around sniffling?

Well, I had this big party balloon left over from my birthday, y'see.  And, when you're me and you have such a balloon, there's only one thing to do:

Yes, you try to turn it into a blimp.  Alas, not having built any RC flying machines before, nor having Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk's degree in Blimp Engineering, I didn't get it right, in several important respects... the main one, when all's put together, being control authority.  Had I thought it through, I would have had a wide, boxy bit just at the back for the motor, propeller, vanes, and servos, and a long skinny body with the radio, motor controller, and battery strung out along it.

As it is, my RC blimp turned out to be a sort of miniature aerial Bootle-Bumtrinket.  Looks cute, but is utterly lacking in maneuverability.