Silicon Valley Redneck

There's got to be a song in this.

China's oddly-named currency unit, the renminbi, is once again in the news.

Had I more free time, and parodic aptitude, I'd try to mangle Kipling's "Rimini" into something about this newfangled currency.  Using Leslie Fish's tune, of course.

Once again, Clarke loses a billion dollars in his spare time

Insty links to an article about self-cleaning solar panels, and wonders if he should short Windex.

I promptly think of a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, from (if memory serves) sometime in the 1980s, in which a major character had made his pile by inventing a way to make windows self-cleaning, thus eliminating the need for windshield wipers, window cleaners, and such.

I seem to recall it involved piezoelectric actuators and surface acoustic waves in some way.

Funny thing: just a few days ago, I was staring at a big glass building and wondering if anyone had gotten around to inventing Clarke's self-cleaning window for real.

And then they woke up, and it had all been a dream.

Or did they?

Does Schrödinger's cat dream of quantum mice?

Yeah, I saw Inception.  Seems made to lead people to argue endlessly, and then to buy the DVD so they can watch it over and over, back up, skip from scene to scene, and argue all over again.

No, I'm not going to offer any major spoilers here.

I did note a sort of meta-oddity near the beginning, though.  Amid the ever-so-Hollywood gasoline-rich explosions, people were firing suppressed pistols which made action-cycling noises instead of the traditional Hollywood Pfffip! Pfffip! sort of sounds.  Then this turned out to be a dream... which leads to the interesting point that, if you're going to introduce suppressed firearms into a dream that you're trying to convince someone is real, you need to match them to his expectations, which means you need to know whether his expectations are based on movies or on something closer to reality.  The same should apply to explosions, of course; realistic HE detonations would look totally wrong to someone who expected FX fireballs.

Yeah, there was an awful lot of gratuitous violence, and atrocious marksmanship.  You'd think specialist orcs of the subconscious would have better training, but apparently not.

Oh, and before the movie there were ads.  One was for an upcoming TV series called The Event.  Mitchell and Webb say: Remain Indoors!

Hey, lookie!  Here's a handy guide to preparing for The Event.

How utterly retro.

In a whimsical mood, I decided to check the availability of a once-popular dual triode.

Turns out there's a web site named for it, and selling it and its various relatives.

Firefox's dictionary, meanwhile, is ever so up-to-date, and thinks "triode" must be a typo.

Anyway, it does seem that there are plenty of places selling such, er, "hot-carrier depletion-mode field-effect devices."  Some of the other old favorites, too.

And the main supply voltage in most of the things I'm working on these days wouldn't even warm up their filaments....

D'OH!

When your main program is busy-waiting on a global variable that gets set by an interrupt routine?

Helps to declare that variable as volatile.

Elsewise it gets confusing, when the program hangs but tossing a printf into the wait loop mysteriously makes it start working.

No, I'm not using an RTOS on this dinky microcontroller.  Seems like more of a bare-metal job.

...And it gets more interesting in a day or so, when the application starts needing exclusive use of the one and only serial port and it's bye-bye to printf.

Great. More stuff to occupy my copious free time.

Just when more work shows up, so does my recent Amazon order: two volumes by Adam Smith, and one by Eric Hoffer.

I read The Wealth of Nations a couple of decades back, in a modern edition that omitted a large chunk of the text to make room for a lengthy introduction explaining how Smith couldn't possibly have meant what he wrote.  (The freshly-arrived copy is over 1200 pages, all but a few of them Smith's own work.)  I recall gaining some significant insights from that long-ago reading, and it's definitely time for a revisit.

First up, though, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which has been on my get-around-to list for a great long time now.

Eventually, I'll get to The True Believer.

Time and motivation permitting, there should be some bookblogging in the near future.

Update: just got an e-mail from Amazon announcing that

OnTrac attempted to deliver your package but was unable to leave the package unattended. If necessary, please contact OnTrac at 1-800-334-5000 ext. 4200 to make alternate delivery arrangements.

and describing the contents of the package that arrived earlier, while I was at home.  Huh?

Dep't of gratuitous annoyitude

So here I am, using my precious weekend time to try to get caught up on a neglected aspect of a Big Project - an aspect which I should be able to get done in about one solid day's work - and a complication arises.

I have some AVR code, written in C, which I'd been running on an ATmega16, 'cause that's got a JTAG port.  Compiles OK for the ATmega8, too, but in reality it'll be running on an ATmega168, just because I'm anticipating a certain amount of bloat to set in.

So now I change the Makefile to compile for the '168, and it has many errors, with sundry register names and such being undefined.

Apparently the register names got changed.  Looks like some of the definitions also got changes, wherefore I am led to the belief that I'd better look carefully at the operation of the UART on the '168, just in case Atmel's gone and made it incompatible with the older models.

(I'm also having some concerns about Atmel as a business.  It seems that many of their popular single-source products are on 6-month backorder, and in some cases their distributor stock check shows thousands of pieces in stock with a distributor whose own stock check comes up zero.  This led me to check the financial news, which cheerfully informed me that Atmel had just had an unexpectedly good quarter.  Er, guys?  Boosting revenue by selling all you've got, and saving on costs by not making any more, is not a sustainable business plan.  If I can't count on having the products available, I'll have to start designing in your competitors' parts instead, no matter how much of a pain they may be to code for.  A device driver is a one-time annoyance; a procurement problem is forever.)

T-shirt wars

Google results:

che guevara t shirt
About 330,000 results (0.13 seconds)

The first several results are businesses selling the shirts.  Indeed, the first two are businesses specializing in Che stuff.

norman borlaug t shirt
About 3,180 results (0.20 seconds)

No obvious shirts for sale.

Now, I ask you:  which of these guys is more deserving of being on a T-shirt?  Who should be a hero to the productive classes, or to the world's poor?

Think anyone's priorities are maybe a little FUBAR?