Silicon Valley Redneck

At least my car isn't observing...

...National Illness and Injury Month.  The Prius is back from overdue scheduled maintenance (got 118K on it now), with no problems found, and the original traction battery (and even the original auxiliary battery, a common early-failure component) still in fine shape.  Still needs a new windshield (from a February mishap, one dark and stormy night), but that's a non-urgent expenditure at this point.

The score so far: my mother is still in the hospital, but is supposed to go home next week.  Her poodle is in the hospital (a different one) following emergency surgery yesterday; I think she's supposed to be going home tomorrow.  My father is frazzled from all this, but still in good health.  My injured shoulder is gradually recovering, though I had a bit of a setback yesterday as a result of a weeding session.  Joy is OK, but her car is in the shop (I haven't heard a diagnosis yet).  My parents' next-door neighbor is in the hospital, following removal of a brain tumor that caused her to lose her balance and fall down (with significant injuries due to the fall).  At least one business associate is out with some nasty bug, which he doesn't think is swine flu, but it leads to further delays in his project.

Still a few hours to go... and I sure hope Tinga doesn't decide to run up another of her huge vet bills.

Hey, tomorrow's a whole new month!  And, if the weather forecast is to be believed, the Morris dancers will have their work cut out for them, getting the Sun to come up.

Mythbusters misinformation

Well, the voiceover blew this one, right at the beginning: yes, match heads do contain potassium chlorate.  But, "so potent it's found in gunpowder"?  No.

Mr. Voiceover Man, repeat after me: Gunpowder. Does. Not. Contain. Potassium. Chlorate.

Gunpowder - the traditional stuff - contains potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur.  Has for centuries, and that's common knowledge, despite the Official Secrets Act.

Chlorate-based gunpowder variants are... exciting.  Often in a bad way.  Trying to use them in, e.g., a musket is just asking for trouble, in the form of flying shards of musket barrel.

(Update: yeah, they got away with the match-head cannon... but that had a lot of paper mixed in with the pyrotechnic composition.  Had they loaded their gas cylinder with just the pyro comp, sans paper, the results would likely have been much more dramatic.

Oh, and I think they should have lit their million match heads from the bottom of the barrel.

And, on the 5 million Legos, they could have tried this little thing called "doing the math."  Calculate volume of 7-foot sphere; divide by volume of Lego brick; come up with a guesstimated BOTE number of 1.2 million if it's solid and properly spherical, which kinda gives an upper bound.)

Extrapolating this notion...

Just glancing at the front page of the dead-tree DNOC / bird-cage liner, I see a poorly-written story about some local (regional) government agency's plan to Address The Problem Of Grocery Bags. It appears that the idea is to ban plastic bags, and impose a 25¢ fee on paper bags.

Hmmm.

I have here a paper grocery bag, this same newspaper, and a scale.  Let us experiment.

A good stout brown-paper grocery bag weighs in at 68g (OK, if I were in pedantic mode, I'd either say it masses 68g, or convert to dynes to have the proper units for weight).

Today's newspaper weighs 342g.

So, the newspaper contains just over 5 times as much paper as the grocery bag.... and it's in the form of several sections, each made up of many sheets, which can easily get separated and blow away independently, if litter is the concern.

So, should the newspaper be subject to a $1.25 fee?  More?  If not, why not?

Good idea; wrong time; wrong people

And so it accelerates: the call is going up for a state constitutional convention here in California.

Good: the state urgently needs an application of the constitutional overload reset button.  The "constitution" has grown to the size of a phone book, and is full of spending obligations, contradictions, and forgotten features.  Starting over from the basics would be an opportunity to shed locked-in spending, and to restore comprehensibility.

Very bad indeed: the political class, i.e., those who would be doing the rewriting, has so far learned exactly the wrong lesson from the current financial crunch; witness the persistent demands for the state to take on vast new obligations at a time when it's far from being able to meet the ones it already has.

The outcome I would expect would be a new document nearly as contorted and lacking in coherent guiding principles as the old one, but with the dominant political class's current goal met: removal of all restraints on taxation and spending.  Naturally, there would also be special goodies for all the special interests, to get them on board, as well as some sweeteners for the masses - everyone's entitled to $50!  Yeah, and roast beef on Tuesdays!

Who shall debug the debuggers?

It seemed like time to hook the LPC2378 eval board up to the JTAG debug pod, the better to make sure that the low-level initialization code is doing its thing.

And so it came to pass that I connected the ol' Nohau pod, that'd mostly worked pretty well over the years (though software updates are now out of my price range), and... it didn't work.

Now, wait a minute: didn't I have it working at one point last summer?  Check with the LPC2148 board: it works.  Connect the Olimex OpenOCD pod to the 2378 board: it works, though my 30-day evaluation license for NoICE expired about 200 days ago.  Play with supply voltages, the Nohau troubleshooting screen, ....  Hmmm.  Results seem very inconsistent.

Ponder.

Ah.  There's the trick!  I had the JTAG clock set to the default 0.5 MHz.  You'd think that'd work, what with the MPU having a 12 MHz crystal connected, but....

But, the LPC23xx family doesn't run off the crystal on reset.  There's an internal 4 MHz oscillator that's used initially.  D'OH!  Yeah, that's great from the perspective of letting the firmware make sure the crystal is working properly on startup, but it does mean that the debugger needs to be run more slowly.

Setting the JTAG clock arbitrarily to 0.1 MHz got the pod working properly.

Earlier, though, I'd been shopping around for a replacement for the Nohau - something maybe with current software, and with the right special function register definitions for the parts I'm actually working with (the Nohau has a part-menu selection for LPC2378, but as far as register definitions go, the closest it comes is LPC2138, which isn't very close).

I suppose getting a live license for NoICE, to go with the OpenOCD pod, is a plausible option; that's certainly in my price range, even for the version that supports all manner of targets.

Looking at the various other pod+software offerings on vendor web sites, I noted a great lack of the information needed to make a decision: (a) what's included, (b) what it does, (c) what it costs, (d) where I can buy one, and (e) what limitations apply to the version that comes in one of those attractively-priced starter bundles.  (Seriously, if the software has a $3000 price tag, and the starter bundle with software, JTAG pod, and an MPU eval board goes for $350, I really want to know what's wrong with the software in the bundle, whether I'm thinking of buying it for myself or asking my boss to buy it.)

Maybe there's a market for a course in "selling to engineers 101."

And, after all that, the LPC23xx task just got pushed aside, as there's at least one flavor of revenue work on tap for tomorrow.  Gotta do the revenue stuff so's I'll have money to buy the new toys (currently on the shopping list, a USB protocol analyzer pod).

Update: looking now at the code I'd loaded in the 2378's flash last summer, I see why it's not signing on: the initialization code is definitely for a 2148, and getting stuck in PLL initialization.  So, I must have tested the debug pod and/or programming via serial port, but never used a correct binary.  So now I just need to produce a correct one (starting with the configuration files...), and not worry about why the old one isn't working.

"I don't know why she swallowed the fly..."

My mother's celebration of National Illness and Injury Month continues!

Recap: she started the month with a trip to Stanford Hospital for scheduled heart surgery.

The operation was a success, but caused a stroke.

After two weeks in intensive care, she was mostly back to normal except for having very limited use of her right arm (an improvement, at least, over none at all the first couple of days after the stroke), and so, last Thursday afternoon, she was moved to Valley Medical Center, the big county hospital complex with the fancy rehab facility.  (The move was a clown show in its own special way.)  Intensive physical therapy was scheduled for this week.

Well, 'long about lunchtime on Sunday, her roommate was moved out, without explanation.  By the time I, and some friends of the family, and my father, went to visit late that afternoon, word was starting to get around that she was nominally in isolation (though there wasn't any sort of notice to that effect on her room, so it all depended on a nurse who'd gotten the word intercepting any visitors) because she (or maybe the roommate, or maybe both) had tested positive for MRSA.

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do.

I haven't gotten the midday report from my father yet, so I don't know if he's gotten any further information, nor whether anyone's found her cellphone, which somehow got misplaced (and without which she can't call outside the 408 area code, and everyone she knows, apart from me, is in 650, or further afield).

And, y'know, maybe there's a reason Stanford has more hand-sanitizing stations and reminder notices regarding same than the Great Temple of Semmelweis in Eisenstadt.

Meanwhile:

I'm slowly recovering from my shoulder/neck injury caused by overenthusiastic gardening weekend-before-last, but still in quite a bit of pain, and not getting much sleep.

My parents' next-door neighbor, who has apparently been having balance problems for a while, fell down and smashed up her face over the weekend.  This got her to the hospital, where a CT scan revealed a brain tumor - apparently not malignant, but big enough to account for the balance trouble.

Seems like a good month for staying in bed.  Except that, in addition to the arm, my mother is going to need help getting walking again, largely because of all the time she's been spending in bed.  Sometimes, ya just can't win.

Update: I'd almost forgotten that Patterico is celebrating the month with an unusual new allergy.

Hmph.

What with having a couple of likely projects in the pipeline which will involve FPGAs, and the connection of sundry peripherals thereto, and the Xilnx/Digilent Spartan 3E board having an abundance of vendor-selected peripherals and a notable sparsity of handy headers for connecting my own (without resorting to a fancy expensive half-pitch thing), I recently bought one of Spark Fun's S3E evaluation boards - a handy thing with the chip on a breakout board, with a breakaway extension carrying voltage regulators, an SPI PROM, JTAG headers, and suchlike fine things.

And, as it happens, I'd also recently bought a Xilinx CPLD eval board that came with one of the Digilent "JTAG3 - with SPI!" parallel port dongles.  (I'm not sure what the "with SPI" is supposed to mean, as there doesn't appear to be any documentation available for the puppy.  Whatever.)

So: 6-pin connector on the JTAG cable; 6-pin header on the eval board.  Check the markings.  Oopsie!  The signals aren't in the same order!

And so it came to pass that this afternoon I saw fit to make a converter cable to go from the 6-pin connector at the end of the JTAG cable to the 10-pin JTAG header on the eval board.  Assembling this cable, mind you, when my shoulder and neck are still messed up from last weekend, and doing delicate work, at bench level, under the magnifier, is perhaps not the best of ideas.

The cable being completed, I pause before connecting and applying power.  I plug the cable onto the unpowered board, and check continuity from the cable's pins to the board's 6-pin header.

Oops.  TMS and TDO don't make it through.  Eh?

In fact, they're swapped.

According to the silkscreen, the 6-pin header has:
TDO
TDI
TMS
TCK
GND
VCC

Consulting the eval board schematic, I find that the pinout of the 6-pin header is actually:
TMS
TDI
TDO
TCK
GND
VCC

Which, by a staggering coincidence, is exactly the same pinout as is marked on the JTAG cable.

And - tadaaa! - iMPACT finds the cable and the FPGA.

I guess I will, however, have to track down the SPI PROM's pins on the FPGA breakout... 'twould have been nice to have those on a header on the support board, next to the PROM itself.

...I still haven't done much on the software project that was on yesterday's to-do list (getting AGROS working on the LPC2378).  Got a bit of thinking done, and came up with a strategy for handling the LPC23xx family, but those configuration files are gonna require rather a lot of typing, and just writing up this blog post has exhausted my typing ability for the day.  Time to go do something that doesn't involve neck/shoulder stress positions.

Missed the tea party

I'd intended to go to the San Jose tea party yesterday, but decided it was better to stay home - I seem to have damaged a muscle in my shoulder over the weekend, then slept on it wrong Tuesday night, with the result that I was in a great deal of pain Wednesday.

It's a little better this morning, but I'm still a bit iffy about trying to go anywhere or do anything.  Ah, well - there'll be other such events; it's not like the politicians are going to get sane and honest any time soon.

Oh, and there seems to be a widely-held misconception, among the talking heads and others, that the tea-party thing is all about current taxes.  Yeah, it was held on Tax Day, and those of us who actually pay our taxes, especially those who pay directly, tend to be riled up on that day... but, really, the big issue this year is the wild explosion of irresponsible spending, and the resulting debt and future taxes (or the choice between high future taxes and hyperinflation).  And then there's the harm to the economy brought on by massive, ill-considered intervention.  Yeah, let's have the country go further into debt to (a) prop up failed businesses for the moment, undermining the established legal processes for dealing with failed, or failing, businesses; (b) put well-run businesses at a disadvantage by subsidizing their failed competitors; and (c) re-inflate the housing bubble, so as to keep housing overpriced and perpetuate the need for the easy credit that played such a big role in getting the banks into this mess.

And doesn't it make all kinds of sense to address a purported lack of lendable money in the banking system by having the government borrow all available money, and then some, and then give some of it to the banks...?

Curious name

That AlloSphere thing doesn't look very spherical.

Nor, for that matter, very oniony.  Not so much as an onion dome.

Might have been a good name for a Gilroy blog-ring.

Now there's a silly statement.

From this article on PopSci:

"If someone snuck sibutramine to scientists in one of China's [illegal] cottage laboratories, they could reverse-engineer it in a week," he says.

Hmmm.  Starting with a sample of the chemical to figure out how to synthesize it?  How very spy-filmish.

How about just sneaking the name to one of those cottage-lab scientists?  He might type it into his search bar and... gee, looky here, there's all kinds of information, including the IUPAC name.  Much more informative than a physical sample.

The Ides of Taxes are upon you

Finally got all the numbers into TurbotAx... or at least all the ones I'm gonna bother with.  I know I'm missing some legitimate business expenses, but the fool program is not friendly to any business of a non-officey nature... and I don't try to claim office supplies as business expenses because then I'd have to make some pretense of keeping track of, e.g., how much printing was business and how much was personal.

Then to print, sign, write some checks (tax due + 1Q09 estimate + electric bill), stuff envelopes, weigh, stamp, and have everything ready to pop in the mailbox tomorrow en route to morning walkies.

Oh, and old FlounderAdze is still unclear on the concept of duplex printing.  The federal forms happened to come out right the first time, but I had to redo the state forms manually, what with the first page of the 540 being on the back side of the filing instructions page.  The 1040-ES vouchers (complete with inappropriate guesstimated amount filled in for all 4 quarters) printed on the bottom of 4 consecutive pages, i.e., odd and even quarters being on opposite sides of the same sheet from each other.

And, while I was sitting here contemplating the big chunk of my little income that goes to the government, the Sierra Club called looking for a donation.  Riiiiight.  Oh, and it's for the specific purpose of promoting an initiative to force greenhouse-gas reductions, by decree.  Which is to say, further cripple the state economy.  What a wonderful idea!

Update: And the preprinted mailing label from the IRS, that came with the 1040-V and envelope?  Only partially gummed, and what is gummed doesn't actually stick.  Break out the glue stick, it's bring-your-own-adhesive!  Pathetic.

It's cold outside...

Do mechanoids dream of hydraulic rams?

Thanks to the miracle of the Great Global VCR, I saw the misnumbered Season "9" of Red Dwarf last night.  Properly Season 11, it consists of a single, three-part episode, "Back to Earth."

I don't want to post too many spoilers here, but... well, it involves transdimensional cephalopods, though we never get to see R'lyeh, nor even Kadath.  As for the hydraulic-ram angle, I sort of wondered right away when the Cat had taken up origami, and whether those were squids or spaceships (of either 1940s or Vorlon style), but things didn't get really obvious until the exterior shot of the building housing the Creator's office.

It really is a shame, though, that the Creator didn't see fit to give Kryten his own series.  Maybe something of a humanitarian robotarian character, like that series of benefit concerts Bender once did.  He could have presided over teams of crackpot specialists racing against the clock to restore life to machinery that had been left for dead.  Alas, he was written out of our dimension, and his actor has been left publishing a vlog on an antique Mac.

Anyway, it's all good fun, if rather bizarrely meta, but I wish they'd hurry up and film the real seasons 9 and 10, complete with an explanation of how the ship reverted from the original-plans model to the as-originally-built model.

Sign

Oy. Monday.

And not just any Monday... apart from being Perfectly Ordinary Monday (or whatever the day after Easter Sunday is called), it's a day for poking numbers into Turbot Ax, and seeing how much more money I'll be sending to the kleptocrats... and if I'm rich enough to be paying that much in taxes, why the heck is there so little money left in my bank account at the end of the year?

Oh.  Right.  Self-employment tax, that fine regressive burden on those of us who don't have bosses.  Work odd jobs, have your income reported on 1099s, and you're automatically a member of the entrepreneurial class.

And then there's the fun in tracking down where in the program to enter the numbers (some of them guessed at) for two transactions, or one transaction in two parts on different days, relating to a case of corporate meiosis.  A total of $21.12, and I wasted how much of my time figuring out how to report it?  (I can't really make heads or tails of that section of the brokerage statement, either, so I'm not even sure if that was real money.)

Now I'm almost done... but I still have to sort through my pile of receipts and figure out what I bought from out of state. Grrrr....

All this when I've got a sore neck & shoulder from the weekend's gardening activities.

Uncertainty

I've seen a great many suggestions lately for how to deal with the pirate problem, off Somalia and elsewhere... most of them wildly implausible for either practical or political reasons.

But how about this: suppose the Navy maintained a presence at each end of a pirate-infested passage, and made contact (or attempted to do so) with every US-flagged ship entering or leaving, either on the surface or by transport helicopter.

In some of these contacts, a couple of dozen Marines would be transferred, along with weapons and supplies.

Guessing which ships had the Marines would be an entertaining pastime for the pirates.

Get a few other countries to contribute resources and/or money to get their ships included in the program, and the piracy business might get unappealing.  As the pirates got tired of the game, the program could be tapered off, with the promise of ramping it back up if the problem reappeared.

But, I expect the actual response will be along the lines of threatening to cut off their Internet access after three incidents.  'Cause, y'know, downloaders are the sort of "pirates" the Government is prepared to deal with.  Actual, murderous, on-the-high-seas pirates belong to the barbaric past, and a modern, civilized, enlightened society need not concern itself with them.

What am I missing here?

So there are these "New Way Forward" anti-tea parties going on....

And the premise seems to be that (a) the big banks are too big, so (b) they must be nationalized forthwith.

Er... so a de facto oligopoly is bad, because the power gets all concentrated, but a de jure monopoly would be good, because...?

(3) Profit!

Ugh.

This being a slow week on the work front is both bad news and good.

Bad, of course, because when things are slow I don't have billable hours, and thus don't have positive cash flow.

Good because, well, this month is starting out crazy.  My mother's in the hospital (went in for a valve job, had a stroke and probably also a bad Fentanyl trip, and, a week on, is still in the ICU, though definitely on the mend now).  I've been playing musical cars this week (don't ask).  I've gotten (once again) hooked on morning caffeine the past couple of months, and now I've gotten into one of my caffeine-intolerant phases (so I have a choice between a caffeine-withdrawal headache and a caffeine-overdose headache; there is no correct dose).  Throw in a horrible case of spring allergies, with a sinus headache on top of the stress- and miscaffeination- headaches, and I'm not a happy bunny.

And it's tax time.

My taxes are considerably simpler than my father's; his are insanely complicated in a normal year, and even more so just now, because he shuffled a bunch of long-term investments last year, with unanticipated consequences.  Still, just figuring out how Turbot Ax works this year is a perennial pain, and there's a big stack of papers to be sifted through, Cathy-style, in search of those few things that are actually relevant.

Oh, and the 1099 from the brokerage doesn't mention last year's capital loss.  Eh?  I thought when the FDIC declared WaMu insolvent, the shares were wiped out?

Ah.  The shareholder value was wiped out.  The shares are still on the books, at a guesstimated heminickel a share.  So, I guess I don't need to dig through the archives (I'd had that stock for a long time, and for most of that time it seemed like a good idea) in search of the cost basis, until such time as either it actually ceases to exist or I decide to sell it... assuming it could be sold.  Is there some way of scrapping stock when there's no buyer?  Forcibly donating it to some charity I don't like?

Oh, well... I'm pretty sure I actually have all the tax stuff in hand now.  There's no particular incentive for me to finish the tax forms early, because any overpayment from last year just ends up going towards this year's estimated taxes.  Which will need paying.

And I need to come up with a good tea-party slogan to accompany a portrait of Comrade Napoleon.  What with the pigs having made themselves comfortable in the farmhouse and all.

Lunch.  More paper-shuffling.  Nap.  Visit mother.  Yet more paper-shuffling.  Maybe tomorrow will bring revenue work (if not, there's no end of background work to be done while waiting for the stuff in the pipelines to show up).

Book bonanza!

I dug into the "old office stuff" boxes in the shed today, out of a vague notion that I might find both my college-vintage copy of Tanenbaum's Computer Networks and a book on antennas.

Bingo!  In one box, I found Tanenbaum (yeah, I could have bought a brand-new fourth edition for a mere $86), the antenna book, and several potentially-relevant volumes on power electronics, UHF, spread spectrum, and telecom protocols.  All a bit dated, but it's not like the basic principles change much, and sometimes the older books explain them better.

Also a dictionary (as if I didn't have two of those already unpacked), some books on DOS programming (including device drivers), and... well, I really need to put together some boxes of outdated and/or redundant books to leave on someone's doorstep.

Sometimes I wish...

...that I hadn't done that upgrade to Debian-unstable on this workstation a couple of months back, what with it not being, technically speaking, necessary in order to get the application I wanted.

I just did another apt-get upgrade, and got (part of?) KDE 4.2.2, which comes with a new version of Konsole.  Which does have some nice new features, making it friendlier to set up, but, alas, it didn't restore all my old sessions.

And what prompted the upgrade?  Well, my inkjet printer had stopped working, and it was obviously a driver problem.  I thought CUPS might have gotten out of sync.  Turns out the actual problem was than an earlier dist-upgrade had deinstalled cups-driver-gutenprint, and the various other options that the CUPS configuration menu offered don't in fact work.

Re-installing the Gutenprint driver and telling CUPS to use it gets the desired results, and I've almost got the new Konsole set the way I want it.

Now I just need to get used to the new, pastel-shaded icons for klipper and KMix.

But if this succeeds, I'll need a new gimmick!

Fear not, though: the notion of Bringing Back the Glamorous Mustache seems unlikely to catch on anytime soon.

After all, most of the guys who put in significant grooming time nowadays tend to be a bit on the, er, metrosexual side, and classically masculine facial fungus somehow doesn't quite fit with that.

(A cavalry mustache does, as it turns out, come in handy for intimidating Indians; apparently there's some cultural significance that far predates the British rule of India.  Not that I actually wanted to intimidate them, you understand; it's just one of those bits of trivia I picked up during my stint in Corporateland.)