Silicon Valley Redneck

Another note on the droid-o-phone...

It doesn't have IRDA!  So not only is it not a TV remote, but it doesn't do the business-card Palmshake that was so ubiquitous for a while back in the 90s.

But fear not!  it has a camera with a flash, and the flash can be controlled by software!  So, in principle, it ought to be possible to exchange business cards in Morse code, using the flashes to transmit and the cameras to receive!

A quick search for Android Aldis lamp turns up a flashlight app that has a Morse button for manual sending, but I don't see anything that automates sending and receiving.  An opportunity!  A pointless and unprofitable opportunity, true, but an opportunity nonetheless.

Beware of spelling checkers

Seeing the red underline beneath "wherefrom"* (a perfectly good English word, that, even if forbidden to lawyers in some jurisdictions) reminded me of an amusing incident a few days ago.

I was composing a business e-mail, and, luckily, gave it a good reading-though before hitting send.

There, sans red underline, was a word that was supposed to be "count", but which was missing a letter.  And the typo was in the dictionary, so it wasn't flagged.  It was, however, quite inappropriate for use in a business e-mail.  In my line of work, at any rate.

(*The spelling checker thinks I might mean "therefrom", but doesn't even hint at "whence", which would be the more typical way of saying it.  "Therefrom" is entirely the wrong word for what I meant.)

Androids... everybody needs good androids...

A couple of days with the HTC Incredible now, and I'm getting somewhat used to it.

The UI does take some getting used to, but the "home page with side panels" approach is making sense now, and I've done a little customization.

Naturally, I grabbed a few apps for it.  First morning out at a client site with the new phone, I needed a sonic screwdriver (a fictional tool for fixing fictional problems; we were confronting a machine with an attitude problem, which seemed to call for a fictional solution).  There's an app for that!  Then, of course, I need fiddly stuff like a text editor, and a shopping list (trying OI Shopping List, which may or may not prove to be a satisfactory replacement for the old shopping list program on my Palm), and a scientific calculator that speaks RPN, and all that other stuff.

As a phone, it's not quite up to the Chocolate it replaces; I'm seeing slightly less coverage (morning walkies had extremely spotty coverage with the Chocolate, and has almost no coverage with the Incredible).  Also, I'm rather concerned about how long it'll run on a charge; it seems to be good for just about one day of playing with it, wandering in and out of coverage, and so on; when the Chocolate was new, it was good for about a week of standby plus a couple of hours of talking on one charge, and the Palm, with its aging battery, is still good for a week's typical use on one charge.  So, I'm thinking I might want a Minty Boost or similar... just in case.

The ergonomics are pretty decent, for something with no physical keypad.  The Sinister Death Grip covers the USB connector.  There's nothing around the edges that can be inadvertently pushed by pocket clutter to start MP3s playing or any such nonsense.  One problem, though: the volume control buttons are along the top of the left edge, right where they get pushed inadvertently when one holds the device in landscape mode, for typing, reading, or photography.

Fishing it out of a packet while it's ringing is a bit of a nuisance, as it's necessary not to hit the wrong spot on the touchscreen while doing so.  Eventually, it's supposed to replace the Palm and move to the shirt pocket, wherefrom the fishing will be less problematic.

Apparently there's even a built-in FM radio, which uses the earphone cable as an antenna.  I haven't tried that yet.

I still need to figure out how to migrate a bunch of stuff off the Palm: memos, of course, and a contact list that really needs to get merged with the cellphone contacts, my Thunderbird address book, and the LDAP address collection I set up a while back but never got Thunderbird to play nice with.  So, some manual labor involved there.

...And this thing has how many VAX equivalents under the hood?  And still manages to run all day on that little bitty battery?  I'd file this under "barely distinguishable from magic" (and thus, of course, not quite sufficiently advanced).

No, I haven't rooted it.  This is a communication appliance, not a plaything, and reliability takes precedence over hackability.  Having my work number out of order due to incautious tinkering would not be acceptable.

Dude!

I just scored some incredible THC!

I'm sorry, I'll read that again: an HTC Incredible.

I actually bought the thing at the Verizon store last month; three weeks and a bit on, FedEx delivered it this afternoon, just as I was rushing to get ready for a big meeting.

Home again, I figured out how to connect the micro-USB cable (upside-down is how), then went through the sync-contacts-from-old-phone, activate-new-phone sequence, and installed my customary Wagnerian Ring tone and Addamsian mail's-in notification sound.

The dinky touch-keyboard takes some getting used to, but it's not too bad.  Never replace the Model M, though.

There's much more to be figured out before it can replace my PDA, but for now it's set up as a phone, and seems eminently serviceable as such.  I'll probably have to learn Android programming eventually, but not right away.

(And, yeah, I'll want to set it up to talk to my home e-mail at some point, either using the web interface or via IMAP+SMTP.  Allowing SMTP from the phone may involve either a VPN or some other cleverness.  Oh, and I want to make it talk to my home WiFi network, too, but that seems to involve typing in the whole smegging WPA2 key, which is much better done with a cut & paste operation.  No, I don't believe in short, easily-typed passwords for securing my network.) [Update: managed to do it with a copy & paste, by installing a text editor and putting my WiFi key collection on the SD card.  Selecting a range of text on the tiny touchscreen is a pain.]

And now to deal with the stuff I promised to do after the meeting, which means digging out the laptop and checking in the various CAD changes that I was fiddling with while we were discussing.

And then test a fiddly little change I made to the code for one of the Egbert variants, just to make sure it really behaves itself....

Well, eventually I should have time to play with the new toy properly.  For now, I've confirmed that it makes and receives phone calls, so that's the essential functions taken care of.

Well, look what's six years old.

July 20th isn't just the anniversary of the first Moon landing!  Looking back rather less far, to 2004, it was the occasion of my first blog post, brought on by a long-expected layoff notice.

I haven't really kept to the original format (work musings and Kipling quotes), but the blog is still here as a place to vent, rant, grumble, and post compromising photographs of local wildlife, though that last has proven quite ineffectual as a threat for keeping squirrels out of my yard.

And, as has so often been the case over the years, life is hectic, and there's much to do and catch up on.  Doesn't help that the last couple of days I've slept in until about 0530, so trying to fit in the usual morning routine of checking the word on the Net, shower, breakfast, and morning walkies gets crunched a bit.  No, I can't skip morning walkies; when I do that, I blimp out and get sick and non-productive.

And so, it's time (past time!) to get going this morning.  Once I acknowledge the work day, I need to get some drawings handed off to various people and get ready for the Tuesday Teleconference this evening, which I think will include a new question for the customer (there being, I think, a key piece of information missing from one document, or at least requiring confirmation).

Nostalgia, and unreadable old formats

Slashdot's latest poll question: "The Oldest Timestamp On a File I Created and Still Have Is..."

My answer: 1980-1984, based on still having a bunch of 5¼" FLEX09 floppies with files I created back in the early 80s.  Not that I can currently read them, mind you; last time I turned on the SwTPC box it emitted a nasty smell and refused to boot -- possibly some of the electrolytic caps have gone bad.

On the other hand... somewhere around here, I have some paper tapes of stuff I created back in the late 70s.  Those, however, lack time stamps.

One o' these days, maybe I should fix the ol' SwTPC 6809 box.  Or just re-implement the whole thing in an FPGA.  Lessee, now: the 8K of SRAM plus 48K of DRAM comes to 458,752 bits, which... wouldn't fit in a reasonable-sized Spartan 3E.  So, an FPGA plus an SRAM chip.  Needs a 6809 CPU, a couple of standard Motorola peripherals, and a Western Digital floppy controller, as I recall.

Randomly check OpenCores: hey, here's the SwTPC 6809 system, implemented in VHDL!  Doesn't seem to include an actual floppy controller, but that's a fiddly detail. It's not like I'm really going to play with this any time soon anyway.

A little more resting time, then back to cleaning out the dreaded Space Under the Sewing Table what hasn't been touched these past half-dozen years.  Ugh.  Think I shoulda sent in a team of lizards first, to deal with the bugs.

Finagle's Law strikes again!

On and off, these past few years, I'd sought in vain after my copy of A Princess of Mars, which I knew to be somewhere on one or another of my bookshelves.

It's been long enough, now, that I can't even remember why I'd started looking for it in the first place.

Anyway, last weekend I was at a swap meet, and ended up buying myself a replacement copy.  In hardcover.  For 50¢, what the heck.

Well!  Today, inspired by a radio ad I've been hearing lately, I went looking for a collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers, which I'm pretty sure exists somewhere in my library, though I don't recall the title nor the dimensions.

I haven't found it yet, but there, on the third shelf I examined, was my old paperback copy of A Princess of Mars.

Figures.

Now... should I venture back into L-Space in search of that book, or start dealing with the living/dining room clutter in hopes of finding many misplaced items, such as a bunch of CDs and my green laser pointer?  Or!  Should I buy a replacement for one of the lost CDs (one that's still in print, that is), thereby causing the missing box/bag/whatever of CDs to resurface?  Or would that run afoul of Silverman's Paradox?

I want my Whackets!

Those whose joy in life is finding things to be alarmed about, especially where the younger generation is concerned, have found something new to fear.

A new audio narcotic!  Call Max Headroom to investigate!  There must be subliminal hexadecimal codes hidden in there to reprogram the kids' brains!

(Or is it more like Tek, and we should consult William Shatner?  I can never keep these futuristic techno-menaces straight.)

Closing the street for a block party

Back when I was a kid, the Marshall Drive (Palo Alto, CA) 4th of July block party sometimes involved actually closing the street to traffic.

This hadn't happened in a long time, what with the difficulty of getting the city's permission and the decline in neighborhood kid population.

Well, this year the street got closed again:

The limb in question spent a fair bit of time creaking, drooping, and making loud popping noises before finally falling.  Luckily, it was a streetward-growing limb, or the party might have come down with a bad case of Drake Elm Disease.