Silicon Valley Redneck

Oh, noes! Another privacy threat!

Latest fearsome news making the rounds: Android malware by name of PlaceRaider, which runs quietly in the background taking pictures at random and transmitting the picture along with location and orientation data!

So, were it to infest my camera, it would get basically three kinds of pictures:

• The inside of my shirt pocket
• My left forefinger
• The shelf where I keep it at night while it charges

If I had a newer model with a front-facing camera, it could transmit even more damaging images:

• An index card
• My left ear
• My face
• The underside of a shelf

And I'll have you know I don't share images of my left ear with just anyone!

Innaresting.

For those of us who never heard of it before (raises hand), Ace introduces us to the McGurk Effect: in understanding speech, visual cues (lip movement, or subtitles) carry more weight than auditory ones (i.e., the actual sound).

This explains the effectiveness of Misheard Song Lyrics videos; the subtitles lead the listener to perceive words he likely never would have thought of just listening to the song.

I suspect it's also related to the disturbing effect of having the audio just a little bit out of sync with the video.

Ripples in the space-time continuum

Just had a call from someone at my broker's office, asking if there was any way they could possibly make my life more and more wonderful.

Meanwhile, I'd postponed (on account of being busy and a bit under the weather) a meeting with my banker to discuss High Finance; he's trying to sell me on a super-duper new service level for which I'd qualify if I moved the contents of my brokerage account to the bank... which might actually be a good idea, being as how the broker's office is in a distant town, while the bank is just down the street, on the way home from Trader Joe's and practically next door to Target.

Will probably have that meeting next week, and make a decision a couple of weeks out after sober reflection.  Also, I worry that I might have to buy a frock coat and a proper silk top hat.

Anyway, as things stand now, when I amble into the bank the employees treat me as if I were wearing the full-on capitalist uniform.  Which, in Silicon Valley, I sort of am: after all, a lot of tech tycoons dress very casually indeed, and if memory serves the State Assemblyman representing upscale Palo Alto bears a remarkable resemblance to a street bum.

As J. Schwartz, New York once remarked: "Now, if I just had some money!"

Curious.

Joy says foreclosures apparently dropped abruptly in the past month.

A good statistic, right?

Also in the past month, the Fed started buying $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities.

Also known as: Attention all banks!  Time to bundle up all your worst mortgages and sell them to the Fed!

Much more profitable than foreclosing on them, no?

And, should the Fed try to foreclose on them... well, the next president will look like a big ol' meanie then, won't he?

Yeah. Right.

The Ministry of Truth just found 4.4 million jobs under the sofa cushion!

Uh-huh.

And I've been looking up old friends and former colleagues, and guess what?  Hardly any of them have regular jobs anymore.  In the past couple of years, a lot of those long-term jobs, with big companies, around Silicon Valley have gone away.

Now, some of these people are still working at their old jobs as consultants or contractors.  (Tells you something about the cost of having employees, hm?)  And the rest?  The occasional "back to school full time at age fortysomething", but mostly "looking for odd jobs the past couple of years".

And one of them was looking at his last week at a job he'd had for about 5 years; the company is withdrawing from California entirely.

Seems to be mighty little hiring going on around here (despite the occasional "hiring boom" headline), and a lot of employee-shedding.

Oh, well.  Opportunity!  The next few months look to be a struggle, but with a bit of marketing (plus, of course, actual work) perhaps I can establish myself as a sort of one-man skunk works, serving those startup companies that can't afford in-house engineering departments... and the big corps that have too much overhead to accomplish little stuff in house.

Another reason to beware of wild rodents

This morning, near the beginning of walkies, I spotted a fuzzy tan object in a parking turnout.

Stepping over the low fence, I got close enough to confirm that it was, indeed, a dead (and uneaten) woodrat.  One of the docents stopped at the same time, and spoke of tossing it in the freezer, on general principles.

Stepping back over the fence to the trail, I clonked my little toe on the top rail.  Five-Fingerses provide little protection against toe-clonkage.  Now I've got a purple toe.

Well, at least it doesn't seem to be broken this time.  Didn't get notably worse as I continued for another 3½ miles or thereabouts, and it's not terribly sensitive.  Just kinda sore, and very purple indeed.

I keep thinking I should install a set of steel toe caps on the old pair of foot gloves.  One cap per toe, of course.  Maybe with claws, like those things Die Fledermaus wears.  (Yeah, probably a bad idea: with the extra leverage, that fence likely would have broken my toe.)

Stop pulling back on the damn stick!

The Ben-Bernank continues printing money, at half a trillion bucks a year until further notice.

The stock market falls.

Gold, fer cryin' out loud, falls.

It ain't workin'!

Thing is: we've been out of airspeed for years.  At this point, we're also out of altitude... or near enough that there's not enough room for recovery.

Anyone bring the parachutes?

In which I attempt to reason like a politician

Headline:

'Psychopaths' Have an Impaired Sense of Smell, Study Suggests

Related story:

Certain Zinc-Based Cold Remedies Linked To Loss Of Sense Of Smell, FDA Says

Ergo:

Snorting zinc may cause psychopathy!

We need to ban zinc in any form which could potentially wind up in someone's nose!

Traditional sunblock, for example!  It's used on the outside of noses, and could all too easily find itself on the inside!

Yes, we must outlaw zinc products now!  Regardless of the cost!

If it saves even one life, it's worth it!

What a strange coïnky-dinky

If, as of this evening, one Googles Winston Smith's ID number... most of the results refer to a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Prevention Act.

Disappointment

Latest Maxim e-mail announced an industrial digital input serializer - this thing.  Neat!  I've been needing something that'll take highish-voltage digital inputs and convert them conveniently to, e.g., SPI at an MCU-friendly voltage!

Can handle 36V on the inputs: good.  Rated -40 to +125C operating: good.  TSSOP: good.  28-lead TSSOP for only 8 channels?  Questionable.  Runs on a 5V supply: WTF?

Er, is this thing really using 5V logic?  Seems like most of today's MCUs don't venture much above 3.3V, and they're trending toward even lower voltages (this LPC1313 I'm playing with today, for example, is spec'ed to run down to 2.0V).

And it seems to have fancy error checking, which implies (I think) that someone's planning to run SPI beyond the board with the MCU on it.  Excuse me, but isn't that what CANbus is supposed to be for?  Like, put of couple of these puppies and maybe some drivers on a board with an LPC11C24 or something?

And... the datasheet is under NDA, so I can't confirm the details just-out-of-curiosity.

Oh, well.  Call me when you've got a plain vanilla SPI (or I²C) input device with low-voltage logic and high-voltage inputs.  Maybe with a threshold-setting pin.

Yet another brain malfunction

Putting parts on another of my cute li'l prototype boards.

Coming up short a 3.3V low-quiescent-current linear regulator.  None to be found in the project parts bin.

On the other hand, I am finding two packages of a single-cell LiPoly charge controller, which has a vaguely similar part number and which I inexplicably ordered from both Mouser and DigiKey.  That part is used on two of the other gadgets, but that's no reason for ordering it twice.

Also, if memory serves, I have a footprint-compatible regulator with a slightly higher output-current spec on backorder.

Oh, well: If the higher-current parts don't wander in before then, I can tack the required regulator onto the next order.  For initial testing, I'll be feeding the thing 3.3V over the programming header anyway.  Gotta power up the MCU, establish communication, install some simple firmware to initialize the radio and put it in test mode, make sure I'm getting an actual signal, play with the control signals for the front end, write some actual operating firmware... only then will it be ready to operate on its own, at which point on-board voltage regulation becomes an issue.

Gotta start keeping a proper shopping list, and maybe a lab inventory.  Another little database/webapp project, IMCFT.

Update 1:

• Smoke test: passed.
• Bootloader communication test: failed.  OK, so what'd I do wrong here?  D'OH!  Had mode switch in wrong position, so no automatic control of RESET/ISP.  Set switch correctly, and it works.
• Bootloader operation test: I are confoozed.  The lpc21isp utility correctly identifies the chip as an LPC1313, then chokes with "Wrong answer on Erase-Command" - same after I update from 1.81 to 1.83.  Perhaps I need to try the official utility, which probably means plugging the pod into the Windows machine.

Update 2:

• Flash Magic thinks my LPC1313 works just fine.
• lpc21isp still gives the same error message; suspecting maybe it's related to my testing with an outsized binary (55K app for LPC2387; was handy, but doesn't fit in the 32K of flash), generate a hex file for a little LPC1343 app and try that: still the same error message.
• And so I'm getting the impression that I need to dive into the lpc21isp source code.  Had to do that once before, as I recall.

Update 3:

A bit of manual poking around at the bootloader leads me to surmise that the LPC1313, for whatever reason, behaves very oddly with regard to erasing block 0, or in particular erasing only block 0.  There's nothing in the errata sheet to suggest this.

So, I look at the options for lpc21isp again, and see -wipe offered.  I try the command again with the -wipe option, and it works a treat.

Update 4:

Dremel an LPCXpresso board (for LPC1114 as it happens) in half; jumper the SWD interface to my programming pod, which (apart from having a serial port and ISP interface) shuffles those signals from a normal-sized header onto the tiny cable for my itty-bitty debug/console connector.

The debugger talks to it OK, but initialization fails on account of I don't have a crystal on the board and haven't yet figured out how to configure CMSIS accordingly.  Also, I think this CMSIS is configured for an LPC1343, and is trying to set up the USB clock, and, Unexpectedly!, failing.

Come along Harry and Mary and Joe...

There was quite a crowd on the Mathilda/101 overpass this morning, around 0930.

I would have been there too, with a long lens, but I was cursing the unusually dense traffic while hurrying to a meeting.

Meeting over at 1035, I saw a crowd remaining on the Mathilda/railroad overpass... and, while creeping across in my car (hands on the wheel, not on a camera), I saw the elusive Delta-Winged Remora pass overhead, attached to a 747 which bore the characteristic stigmata of DWR infestation (the DWR injects its host with a hormone which causes unusual growths on the tail; the Russian species also causes atrophy of the central fin*).

So, sorry, no photos here, but I did see it.

Update: Evil Mad Scientists were in the main crowd.

Afterthought: first thing this morning, I noticed rather a lot of helicopters buzzing around.  Maybe checking for terrorists loitering on overpasses with man-portable anti-spacecraft weapons.  I'm sure a lot of those went missing after the Battle of Canary Wharf, and have never been accounted for.

* This isn't, technically speaking, true, but it ought to be.

Wait, subway tickets still work like that?

Somewhere around here, I think I still have a souvenir BART ticket with a nickel left on it, from a school outing back when BART was new.

Back in the day, you'd run the ticket through a money-taking machine, which would record the balance on the magnetic stripe; the turnstile leading to the train would record your point of origin, and the turnstile at the exit would calculate the fare and update the balance on your ticket.

I suppose there must have been some time-stamping going on, too... right?... to prevent people entering and exiting the same station at no charge, several hours apart, using one ticket to do that at the home end and another at the office end.

That system allowed the use of standalone turnstiles; the exit turnstile, after reading where (and perhaps when) you came in and how much money was left on the ticket, could simply look up the fare and update your balance.

In these days of ubiquitous networking, though, are such standalone turnstiles really necessary?

Apparently either they still work that way, or subway fare-system architects have a serious blind spot.

Y'see, with the balance being stored on the mag stripe, BART tickets were fairly easily hackable, and it didn't take people long to figure out how to write larger balances to them without the bother of actually putting money into a fare machine.

And now: someone's gone and found a way to reset the balance on a state-of-the-art contactless fare card.

Wha...?

They're still storing the balance on the card?

The turnstiles aren't networked to a server that keeps track of the balances, leaving the card with nothing to carry around but a unique ID?

How does this make sense?

(Yeah, sure: safety reasons!  We need to make sure people can leave even if the network is down!  Er, or maybe if the network is down you just let people leave and lose the fares?  Or record their card IDs for later processing, on the assumption that most of them are good for the fare?)

Afterthought: Inspiration strikes!  It can't be done the smart way because Privacy.  Imagine the potential for misuse if the subway's Central Computer knew that pass #41187936079 entered the system at 37th Street at 07:54:12.336 and exited at the Oak Avenue station at 08:38:46.047!  (I'm assuming that passes are can be bought at vending machines that accept cash, so there's the option of having a pass that's in no way associated with an actual person.)

Given how wound up some people get about cookies, or having web site owners see the search strings whereby visitors arrive, this may be the true explanation.  Mind you, those same people happily ignore real privacy violations by the real Big Brother, just so long as they're allowed to squawk about utterly inconsequential matters.

[Yes, the last four digits of the pass number are intentional.]

Hope.

Last Friday, stocks were up on news that the Ben-Bernank would be dumping $4×10¹⁰ into financial markets* every single month for the foreseeable future, or at least until the election.

This morning?  Down.

I keep telling ya: the financial markets are saturated.  Continuing to pull back on the stick is pilot error.

* Specifically, mortgage-backed securities.  This should, in theory, have the effect of keeping housing prices artificially high.  Which benefits me, I suppose, but for all you renters out there: look who's meddling in the market to keep prices up.

Attention to detail

I can't help thinking there's something wrong with this picture.

Srsly?

On top of everything else...

New water heater; medical expenses of bird, girlfriend, girlfriend's daughter's cat, and elderly Jeep; getting on scheduled-maintenance time for the Prius...

I just turned on my signal generator, an aging Higgledy-Piggledy 8111A, for the first time in a few weeks.  No Output.  Various bits had been getting flakey, and I'd been having to work around them, but a complete lack of output makes it quite useless.

For the moment, I should be able to get by with the cheapie that's been on the sidelines since I got the 8111.  Real soon now, though, I'm gonna have to scrape together the kilobuck for that new LeCroy signal generator that's been on my CAPEX roadmap since spring... and which I would have bought in June, had the money situation been favorable.

Stirring up dinosaur memories

Seems Western Digital is working on a new line of super-duper disk drives that'll be sealed, and filled with helium.

Back in the day, at my first Real Job, we had a minicomputer - a Keronix Nova clone, if memory serves - that had a high-performance disk drive.  A head per track it had, so seek time was zero, and that dome that contained the thick platter, the heads, and the motor was filled with helium.

Didn't store a lot of bits, but it sure was fast.  Good for storing program overlays (on a machine with a 32Kx16 address space).

(via Slashdot)

Hey, I just figured out...

...how Guaranteed Issue and Community Rating can be allowed to go into effect in 2014!

I've been assuming that either they won't, because the lobbyists who wrote the Affordable Care Prevention Act included some provision allowing waivers for companies that (a) would be left with no viable business model and (b) have made the right campaign contributions, or they will, and all the insurance company executives will collect their bonuses, golden parachutes, and early-retirement incentives and retire to Costa Rica, leaving the government to take over the wreckage.

But, today, inspiration struck!

See, the problem with GI&CR is that, if you don't like the idea of paying $10K a year or so for maybe $500 worth of actual medical care, you can sign up for a health plan after you fall off the roof or come down with cancer, for the same price as if you'd signed up while you were healthy.  This means there's no plausible business model, unless that first premium is insanely high - kind of like selling a $10 million life-insurance policy to an octogenarian.

So here's the deal!  The first premium is $200,000 ($1,700,000 in 2014 dollars).  But!  For only $500/month ($4,250 in 2014 dollars; medical examination required), you can get meta-insurance that will pay your health-plan premium for you if you ever need it!  And it'll happen automatically, even if you're in no shape to sign the forms!  Meta-premium will be higher if you're not so healthy.  Restrictions and exclusions apply.

Talk about a missing link...

Looking at a possible application for an industrial-temperature (-40 to +85C) microSD card, or some other form of bulk storage that meets the environmental spec.  (Automotive grade would be even better, but that's maybe asking too much.  It does, probably, need to fit in a tiny space.)

There are several vendors for I-temp cards.

There are several vendors for sockets, some of which appear to be of nice rugged construction and probably fairly corrosion resistant.  Basically: a piece or two of stamped structural metal, preferably stainless steel; a few gold-plated bent wires; and a molded plastic insulator.

But try to find an I-temp socket, and whaddya got?

Plenty of sockets rated -20 to +85.  I've found one rated -25 to +85.  There's a bulky socket, intended for environmental testing, rated -55 to +180, but that's hardly practical to incorporate into the application.

Kontron makes an SBC that apparently has the socket I need, or at least it has some sort of microSD socket and is rated -40 to +85, so presumably such a socket exists... if only I could find it.

And why the smeg are so many connectors only rated down to -20ish?  Every time I go connector shopping for a rugged application, I run into this.  Surely plastics that can survive a Minnesota winter can't be all that hard to come by.

Still waiting to hear whether the project is happening and what the requirements are, but it'd be nice to show up for the first meeting with a plausible solution all ready.

That explains it!

It's obvious that California is a one-party state, with the Democrats running the show and the Republicans apparently being a wholly-owned subsidiary whose purpose is to act as a scapegoat.

That would explain the corruption, but it fails to explain the utter chiroptera-guano insanity of the ruling class in Sacramento.

Now, at last, there's an explanation!  We're actually ruled by the Brain Slug Party!

(Via Slashdot.)