Silicon Valley Redneck

That's convenient

I'm implementing another AGROS-based doodad, and once again using SCPI commands to communicate with it - not that SCPI is particularly wonderful, mind you, especially when moved outside its original HPIB context, but somebody else is going to be communicating with the gadget using LabVIEW, and I might as well make his life easier - and, inevitably, I run into some syntax I hadn't needed to handle before.

I already had handy parsing functions for numerical arguments and such, but now I need to handle channel lists: (@1, 3, 6, 12:17, 94) and like that.  And, given that the range of channel numbers can be quite large (and that the standard calls for the order being significant), I can't just set bits in a bitmap.

First go was to stick parsing code in the handler for each command or query that needed to handle such lists, but that opens a can of maintainability worms, as well as being wasteful.

I was almost thinking it was time to learn enough C++ to handle this sort of thing, and then redo the whole SCPI subsystem in C++... but that's another can of worms.  Still, the concept of handling it the way I would in Ruby, i.e.,
    cmdline.eachify_channel_list do |chan|
        relays.close_channel(chan)
    end
has a certain appeal.

Well... how about if I write an iterator with a callback?  Straightforward enough, except: C doesn't have lambda expressions, so I'll need a named top-level function for each callback case, or some sort of multi-function callback function.  Ugh.

But wait!  I go rummaging through the current GCC documentation to see what extensions are on offer (AGROS is highly GNU-toolchain-specific anyway), and I find that it now supports full-on nested function definitions!

Which is rather more than I need for the purpose at hand, but it's a convenient way of having a small function, about whose name I need not worry, to handle callbacks from the iterator function.

Was ist LOS, anyway?

What with Joy working on Android apps, and the only Android device in the household being my cellphone, and me needing the cellphone to make calls on (not to mention keeping my calendar and grocery list on it), it seemed like time to run down to Fry's and see what the Bargain-Basement Droid Device of the Week was.

Well, the bargain of the week was a Coby product that didn't actually seem to work properly, or maybe we just couldn't figure out how to get to the menu.  In among the low end, though, there was a funky unit with an 8" screen and squarish form factor, demo unit only, with the screen inexplicably covered with what seemed to be sticky-tape stickum (removable with a bit of elbow grease).  Marked down from $160 to $80, and it seemed to work and to have all the necessary functions, so what the hey.

Anyway, it's made by a company that's apparently called AOC, except that they spell it ЛОС, which I naturally mispronounce as "loss", in much the same way that when I see a car branded ΚΙΛ I pronounce it "kill."  (Hey, my first car was a killer.  Said so right on it, in Spanish.)

 

This doesn't sound right.

Spotted here:

Further, Haidt (a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and a former liberal who became a centrist in the process of conducting this research) finds that liberals and conservatives alike form their political beliefs according to three values: caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty.  Yet conservatives also hold to three other values: loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity.  This accounts in part for the liberal failure to understand conservative viewpoints.  As Chivers puts it, “Conservatives can understand the morality of liberals, but much of conservative morality is alien to their opponents.”

I think this runs afoul of the changing meaning of "liberal."

While real liberals aren't much on loyalty or respect for authority... those who are called liberal today are quite vehement on those topics, as long it's loyalty to Party or identity group, and the authority of the Party or of some (usually self-appointed) panel of experts.  I'd say sanctity figures in somehow, in an odd way: certainly there seem to be things held in great reverence, but my impression is that they're all outside things which are disunderstood (or, rather, it's a noble abstraction that's sacred, and the abstraction is projected onto the actual thing, which is often quite nasty in real life).

One of those Big Serious Essays I never get around to writing is on the difference between what modern "liberals" believe they believe and what they actually believe; Intelligent Design figures strongly in this (a lot of people who sneer at creationists express beliefs which rest on ID of one sort or another, and lefty economics is solidly in creationist territory).  There's probably a similar essay to be written about "conservatives," but there's not so much opportunity to observe them around here, so I haven't built up a picture of their meta-beliefs.

Making a start on the resolutions. Ponderments to follow.

These past few weeks, I've been feeling a Big Important Post coming on, full of ponderments and resolutions.

Well, what with work, illness, distractions, and whatnot, that post isn't happening just yet.

I have, however, followed through on a couple of minor items.

Secondly, look over there on the right.  See, a whole new blogroll!  Now in alphabetical order!  Not much, true, but the old one was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of those links had gone stale or even vanished altogether.  I probably dropped a few that didn't need dropping - this was a start-from-scratch list based on what I've been reading the last few days - so it'll be growing a bit.

Firstly, look over here, through my webcam.  Oh, that's right, I haven't got one.  Anyway: I got my spring haircut today.  From now on, I'll be keeping my hair at a reasonable length (which will disappoint Joy, who thinks I should have a ponytail).  Ergo, a cooler head, less grease, better efficiency.  And, with a cool head, I'll be more inclined to exercise more, and get in better shape (which is the biggest item on my list).

The next couple of weeks are likely to be a scramble, what with needing to do my taxes and come up with the cash to pay them.  So, Other Priorities get underfoot once again.

Anyway, there's a serious post to follow, eventually, and perhaps something of a change of direction.  Towards, maybe, having a direction?

Passwords

I note that the Great Password Discussion has returned to life, and once again the pundits are debating whether "t7X@phN" is really better than "correct horse battery staple"... while Joe Internet is still using "12345".

Somehow, though, little or none of this gets communicated to web developers.  Rather a lot of sites have, apart from rather feeble rules about minimum lengths and using both letters and digits, additional completely arbitrary constraints.  Like, rather small minimum lengths (so, not only no "Admiral Ges Vorrutyer wears pink fuzzy bunny slippers", but not even "correct horse"), or must-end-with-a-digit, or only-letters-and-digits, not even plain ASCII punctuation.

All of these added constraints are seriously bogus: there's no technical reason for them, and they limit the search space for password crackers.

Really, now: your hash function, whatever it is, will happily accept any blob of data it's given, so (given minimum length and character-diversity requirements) basically anything that can be submitted via an HTML form ought to be an acceptable password.

Even if "𓂀ᚘ𐂅𒁱𓀄🍔" is a little awkward to type.

Update: El Reg reports on a Bishop-endorsed password scheme:

The bishop suggests users derive their passwords by selecting their favourite passages, taking the first letter from each word in the quote, and appending the chapter and verse from which it is derived.

For instance: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" from Luke chapter 23 verse 46 would create the password FiyhIcmsL23V46.

Er... appending chapter and verse completely fails to add entropy; it's just more typing.  Unless of course there's another verse with exactly the same initials, in which case the six extra characters convey one bit of information.

Footnote: Personally, I use a couple of different password schemes.  For low-security purposes, I've got stock passwords that are easy for me to remember but reasonably nonobvious.  For better security, I use one of the random-password-generator utilities.  I used to have an "unsecured" (no password) WiFi access point on a dedicated, heavily firewalled Ethernet port; when I changed it to connect to the internal network, I created a 256-bit WPA key with /dev/urandom, which is fine for cut'n'paste but a royal pain if someone wants to connect a device with no way of importing a file and, often, no keyboard.

Wandered around the Embedded Systems Conference this afternoon

ESC seemed rather smaller and less exciting this year; that seems to be generally the case with trade shows lately.  Even combined with other shows, the expo hall (the only part I get to, 'cause it's free) was pretty much a one-afternoon thing.

There being some sort of sensors-oriented event there, I'd hoped to badger a few sensor vendors, but the sensors corner of the expo hall had something like three booths, only one of which had component-level sensors on display, and those accelerometers, on which topic I don't currently need to badger anyone.

There was some other interesting stuff, including a few companies whose products and services may suddenly become relevant to my world later this year (in one case, possibly next week).

The one thing I'm kind of excited about, and hadn't already been aware of, is something I would have totally missed in my normal pattern - but, late in the afternoon, I happened to stop by the LeCroy both to say "Hi, what's new since DesignCon?" - and the answer was, a new range of waveform generators, just arrived from the factory this week: the WaveStation.  For the price - the base model comes in at just under $1K - this thing is t3h aws0mz!  All the essential features of an arbitrary waveform generator that also does standard waveforms, modulation, pulse trains, and the like - and it's dual.  Yup.  Two output connectors.  Two channels.  Which means... well, it won't drive a 3-phase motor, but (keeping in mind I haven't read the manual yet), seems like it ought to be capable of generating a signal pulse on one channel and a gating pulse on the other... which I sometimes need, when testing features of the toaster controllers.  And so it goes in this year's capital-equipment budget, perhaps in late spring.

If there was exciting schwag this year, I missed it (but then I was never much of a schwag-hound).  Came away with a few pens, a sample heat pipe, and a little eval board for one of ST's Cortex-M0 MCUs, which has some potential utility, someday.

"I'll mix the Rooster Sauce."

Not so long ago, I covered over my parking strip with nice soft store-boughten planting soil, and sprinkled it with wildflower seeds and such.

Well, things are starting to sprout.  But, in addition to the plants, something else has appeared: some sort of critter has been digging and pooping there.

So, it's time to load up the sprayer with small mammal repellent and douse the area.  We'll see how that works.  Meanwhile, my front yard smells like a Thai restaurant.

"I do not think it means what you think it means."

Three recurring words in Obamacare reporting that never cease to piss me off:

Insurance, as in "require all Americans to have health insurance."  Nope.  The mandate is for a comprehensive health plan.  An insurance policy would prevent unexpected medical costs being dumped on the public; the mandate requires that routine health-care costs go through a third (or fourth) party.  Yes, a comprehensive health plan does include an insurance component, but that's a small fraction of the cost of the plan.

Reform.  Again, nope.  Obamacare doubles down on the existing broken system, locking everyone into it while breaking it further.  It's actually preventing reform, which should be happening spontaneously (though dusting off the antitrust laws, and fixing Medicare payment practices, wouldn't hurt any).

Affordable.  Surely you jest.  Forcing everyone into the most expensive and least efficient system for paying for medical services is the very opposite of affordable.

C'mon, get real...

Having the need to reinvent the high-frequency 10X scope probe, I disassembled a Tektronix P6137 that was sitting around with a "broken tip" tag on it, just to see what was inside (having only a general notion of how they work, especially with regard to frequency compensation).

I remain unenlightened at this point, though maybe tracing the little compensation board* will be helpful.

As long as I had it open, though, I decided to look for a replacement for the broken tip.

And, yeah: the second search result is a replacement tip, for $35, which I guess isn't totally unreasonable.

The first search result?  Same company, but it's the complete probe kit... for $9999.99? Nein.  Especially when, a few results down, somebody else is offering a used probe (albeit with only a partial kit) for $100.

*This compensation board is a little circuit that flattens the frequency response, correcting for the interactions of probe, cable, and instrument.  It is not a government panel that determines payments.

 

Update: somebody else already dissected a (less pricey) probe and put up a single-post blog documenting the innards.

Acrobelfry is being a pain again

I don't know if it's Adobe Reader 9.4.7 for Linux, or the way it interacts with KDE 4.7 or some other aspect of Debian-testing at the moment (the moment in question being the last few months), but....

Saving files is sloooow.  The save-file dialog comes right up, more or less, but doesn't accept clicks for quite some time.  The application appears frozen (I can drag the dialog box around, and the display doesn't update behind it), but isn't consuming much in the way of CPU cycles.

Printing is likewise slow, though not to quite the extent.  Again: dialog box pops up, then there's a long wait before anything is clickable.

I mainly notice these when it's been running for a while, and I've opened a bunch of tabs.  Since the tabbed interface is my main reason for using the Adobe product instead of something open-source, so I can keep a bunch of datasheets and standards documents open and handy, this is the usual situation.

Oh, and speaking of the tabbed interface: it's gone funny, as have other bits of the UI.  Focus keeps getting lost or reassigned.  I have to go through weird sequences of clicks to change tabs, select the menu bar so the tools will activate, and restore focus to the document so the scrollwheel will scroll the document view instead of, e.g., switching tabs.

All this is stuff that Used To Work.  And it's not like other apps (including commercial ones) have similar problems on this system; they all behave themselves.

It's almost like Adobe has become a big established company, with no need to concern itself about whether its products actually work.  Next step: becoming a government agency.

Bring back engineer pr0n!

Over at the Castle, Bad Cat Robot expounds (in short form) on the need to bring back the sense of wonder in science fiction.

Ah, yes: the good old days!  When the hero would invent a star-drive, build a space-ship, and go gallivanting off around the galaxy, fighting and/or befriending bug-eyed monsters along the way!  And, if a villain was needed, a lawyer or pointy-haired manager would do nicely!

And, indeed, this is the sort of thing that used to inspire a new crop of budding engineers: the notion of creating cool new toys (yes, folks, toys can be created, not just bought), using them to do awesome stuff, and making the galaxy a better place.

Not only is it inspiration to the young, it's escapism for those stuck in the world our future turned into, in which even a small and mildly innovative project drags on interminably, and no mighty deed would ever get past corporate management and government regulators.

So bypass the publishing cartels, and go back to writing the good stuff.  Perhaps it'll inspire the youngsters, and show them the future we've lost.  And maybe, just maybe, they'll try to salvage it from the present we have.

More teevee

Still under the weather, though I seem to be recuperating.  So, what with my brain being out of order, it's an occasion for more mindless entertainment.

The boss had mentioned Rocket City Rednecks, on account of he's been having business dealings with someone connected somehow with the show (that was a few weeks ago, and the details escape me).

It's kind of a fun show - sort of like of Red Green, if the denizens of Possum Lodge were Southerners and also were Piled Higher and Deeper.  And had a penchant for kludging laptop computers into their creations, and occasionally resorting to math.

And that counterweight-catapult gizmo with the balloons is kinda halfway to an idea that's been rattling around my head for a couple of years now, as an untried solution to a common Scrapheap Challenge problem: imparting controlled multi-G acceleration to flangable objects using block & tackle and a 16-ton weight.  Sometime when health and work schedule cooperate (i.e., not anytime in the next few weeks), I need to test the concept, and, if it works as it ought, make an instructional Youtube video or something.

Oh, and the "this stuff is dangerous" warning?  In the case of the moonshine rocket fuel, yeah: that kinda stuff can get you shot by the revenooers, can't it?

Anyway, as edumacashional teevee goes, it's not even up to the recent standards of Pinky and the Brain and the Three Stooges Mythbusters, but it is fun.

Downtime

Virus.  Ugh.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's a virus.  The boss had similar symptoms a couple of days ahead of me.  Debilitating headache, sore throat, queasiness, wobbliness, and bonus all-over soreness.  Body temperature a couple of degrees below normal, which might account for some secondary symptoms (and which doesn't match flu hardly at all).  I thought at first the sore throat was just the result of talking too much while making the rounds at the Design2Part show on Wednesday, but no such luck.

Got a little work done yesterday, but not a heck of a lot.  Hard to focus on anything that requires actual thought.  Kludging up an RF test widget: yes.  Analyzing a critical QA document: not a chance.

And, just in time to occupy some of that can't-do-much-useful time, there's a new edition of the popular battery-decharger app, The Birds Who Commandeer Neutral Transport - oops, no, those would be Angary Birds - sorry, Angry Birds vs. Captain Link Hogthrob.  A few hours of semi-mindless entertainment, fun while it lasts.

And there's napping to be done.

Meanwhile, work gets further behind, and next week looks like ever more of a scramble.  Such is life in the small-business lane.

Gotta run down my task list and see if anything calls for making lights blink.  It's easier to focus on work if blinking lights are involved.

Forgetting the details of a political year

Over at Patterico's place, Karl has a post about the political climate of 1980, and how people forget what it really was.

There's another, more famous political year, a bit further back, whose history is even more distorted in the popular memory.

I keep noticing how many people - notably, those for whom it's Forever 1968 - have completely forgotten how things stood in that year.

Yes, 1968 was the glorious year of anti-war protests, burning draft cards, and the great masses of We the People demanding that the U.S. get out of that accursed never-ending war in Vietnam.

Which Nixon got us into.

Er... wait.  How's that again?  In the Wonderful World of Forever 1968, did Nixon steal the election in 1960, so in '68 he was running for a third term?  Are the entire Kennedy and Johnson administrations airbrushed out of history, except for Camelot and the Great Society?

Or did Nixon use the Republican Time Machine (invented by Karl Rove in 2003) to go back and start the war before he took office?

Uh-oh.

News from Mercury:

Something besides volcanic eruptions and asteroid and comet impacts has sculpted the surface of Mercury -- an unknown process, possibly still going on today, that causes the ground to swell from the inside out.

It's been incubating in the Sun's warmth since time immemorial... and now it's hatching!

Diodes. Why'd it have to be diodes?

Let's see... I've had issues with reverse current (and its change with temperature) a few times.  Forward voltage, once in a while.  The diode property of the day is...

Junction capacitance!

Perfectly straightforward circuit.  Gate of FET has a weak pulldown to handle startup conditions.  Logic can drive gate HIGH or LOW via a 10K resistor (a value that can't be much reduced due to constraints elsewhere in the circuit).  A pair of global enable signals, when in the LOW-to-disable state, pull the gate LOW through Schottky diodes of a familiar type.  So, the global enables and the logic all have to agree that the FET should be turned on before it gets voltage (in excess of a Schottky drop @ low current) applied to the gate.

All seemed well, until, in checking out a reported timing issue on the tens-of-milliseconds scale, I observed that there was a microsecond-scale ACTIVE pulse on the output of the FET when the enables went HIGH, but before the logic had gotten around to taking action.

Oog.  Edge getting coupled backward through the diodes?  Edge getting coupled backward through the diodes.  Capacitively.  Turns out those suckers have 60 pF typical junction capacitance, each.

Tossing in a 470 pF cap from gate to ground suppresses the pulse, without obvious untoward effects.

A possibly better solution is to swap the diodes for a footprint-compatible model of adequate specs for the application and 2 pF maximum junction capacitance @ 0V.

 

Teevee

Been watching some recent TV during downtime.  Specifically, Archer, whereof I first read here.

Crazy animated spy-show spoof.  With extra crazy.  In crazy sauce.

Er... not a kid-friendly show.  Nor Santorum-friendly.  Nor Eloi-friendly.

Joy keeps getting Archer mixed up with the Tick's sidekick (only he doesn't wear a bunny suit, and doesn't fly).  I get him mixed up with Sam Spade's sidekick (only he hasn't been shot with a Webley-Fosbery, and isn't dead).

Oh, and that authentic weaponry?  Drawn well enough for me to notice when someone's brandishing a single-action pistol with the hammer down.  (Funny how none of the characters in these shows ever spot that, even, in The Rocketeer, when the thugs pulled the menacing-with-uncocked-1911s bit on a bar full of WWI vets.)

Anyway: for those who like spy spooves and don't mind over-the-top sex and violence in their comedy, it's a fun show.

Huh.  Silly spellchecker flags Eloi and Rocketeer, but doesn't mind spooves.  Until I type it a second time; then it flags both of them.

Scare

Wednesday, 2200ish: bedtime, a little on the late side for me, but, as previously mentioned, my circadian rhythm hasn't fully adjusted to the time shift.

Wednesday, 2330ish: wake up, whazzat?  Phone?  Phone.  Whereza phone?  Missed it.  Hmm?  Prolly the I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up people wanting to tell me that my mother pushed her button, and has been assisted, and everything's OK.  I mean, who else calls my home phone at such an hour?

A moment later: cellphone.  Private number.  Well, my parents' home phone has been mostly reporting as private ever since they got that AT&T Per-Verse thing ('course, that had a few weeks at the beginning when their phone service was flakey in arcane ways, so having everything working except for outbound caller ID is not so bad).

Anyway: it's my mother on the phone.  My father's just been loaded onto an ambulance with what might be a heart attack.

Wednesday, 2350ish: dressed again, grab swig of caffeiniferous nectar, get in car, head for Palo Alto, pick up mother, head for Stanford Hospital.  Apparently he'd been having moderate chest pain for a couple of hours - not a sudden collapse, but neither a wait-until-morning nor a drive-yourself thing, given his history.

Thursday, 0010ish: arrive at Stanford Hospital.  Or the hospital complex, at any rate.  It's a big complicated place by day, and it's night, and the roads are all torn up.  Head for main entrance & associated parking - oh, foo, we forgot to bring my  mother's handicap placard - well, find a drop-off area, anyway - hmmm, apparently 0015 is "after hours" at this entrance.  Well... so let's try the emergency-room entrance.  Follow the blue signs, in the dark, on another big loop around the detours; find emergency-room entrance.  Nice attendant offers mother a wheelchair, and opens gate of lower parking lot (across road) so's I can stash the car.

Thursday, 0030ish: arrive on foot at emergency-room entrance.  Security checkpoint?  Metal detector?  Oh... this is maybe the trauma center for East Palo Alto.  Have to check my dinky Swiss Army Knife (as if there weren't plenty of deadlier things to hand in any hospital).

Father is off being X-rayed.  Some minutes later, we get to visit him: lying down (like all the other patients), but alert and coherent.  They've been feeding him dynamite, and the pain has diminished to 2/10.  No word of a diagnosis.  A little later, when the nurse comes around again, the pain is down in 1/10 territory, but he now has some abdominal pain too.  She gives him another dynamite pellet.  We leave him to rest for a while.

Thursday, 0200ish: they've given him a dose of morphine, and it's sleepy-byes time.  He's being officially admitted, so it's time for the rest of us to go home until the morrow.

Update, Thursday, 1030ish: heard from my mother, who'd finally heard back from the hospital after a couple of hours of runaround.  He'll be ready to go home soon.  So, off to parents' house to await the call.

Final update: Waited and waited... around 1245 the call finally came, and we went over to pick him up.  Found him standing outside the main entrance, looking healthy again.  Release had been delayed by further tests - stress echocardiogram or some such.  Which, like the night's X-rays, revealed nothing to explain the evening's symptoms.  And so, back to normal, but with instructions to talk to his regular doctor and his cardiologist at the earliest opportunity.

Helping to understand...

Over at Instapinch, some commentary on the preliminary NTSB report on Lex's crash.

An informed take on the sparse facts, and enlightening as to just how conditions and events seem to have stacked up.

Could be that, no matter how well anyone and everyone performed that day, it just wouldn't have been good enough.  And there are endless what-ifs: what if he'd had a few seconds more fuel, or a few seconds less, or if any of a long series of decisions that day had been timed just a little differently... just one parameter tweaked a little....

But, no: sometimes, with everyone making the best decisions they can at the time, with the best information they have, the whole endeavor runs up against the forces of nature and the laws of physics.  And going back and tweaking history is not an option.

There may be useful big-picture lessons as the investigation proceeds; perhaps changes in equipment and procedures will be called for, to prevent the next loss.  And it remains to be seen whether any of the day's actions should have been taken differently.  We shall see what comes out of the investigation (actually, multiple investigations) in due time.

Distracted.

Having an inefficient morning.  Had a look at a certain one-week-later preliminary report.  Not a lot of information, but what there is fits together and is consistent with both initial news reports and the facts (but not the speculation) that had come through the rumor mill, and my poor Visualization of the Cosmic All now includes a scenario which makes a lot more sense than the one I'd earlier been pondering and failing to grok.  And no tinfoil is required, which is a big plus.

Anyway: having been in something of a blueberry-muffin mood since yesterday evening, and finding the weather forecast non-conducive to venturing forth into the hills, I set about making muffins.

And, being distracted, left out the sugar.  (That's one of those things that can happen when you don't use recipes.  Recipes: they're like checklists for the kitchen!)

Sugar-free, whole-wheat blueberry muffins.  Edible, and I do need to cut back on sweets, but... I think the remaining ones will be best cut in half and drizzled with honey.

And now, time for work: stuff to respond to, a preliminary schematic to finish, strategy to discuss with the boss (or, if he's still afield today: there's plenty of other stuff that needs doing, and strategy can be discussed tomorrow).