Silicon Valley Redneck

Key phrase of the day

Spotted here:

People like people, like interacting with people, like engaging with people and like being helped and attended by people.

Are you listening, Management?

I've been seeing a lot of stores cutting out the "people" element.  Reduced staff, self-serve checkout, and the perennial problem of high turnover of the remaining (and overworked) staff, so that no one really knows what's where.  And it's not like prices come down to reflect the reduced service.

This is no way to combat the Amazon menace!  If you don't have people available to provide information on the products you carry, I have to whip out my Droid-O-Phone and check the specs and reviews on Amazon... in which case, why am I in your store at all?

I buy a lot of stuff over the Interwebs these days.  Shopping locally?  That's for perishables, stuff I need today, things that need to be fondled before buying... and things that come from friendly little local businesses, where I know the people and they know their products.

Yeah, this is totally unrelated to the main topic of the article that triggered it... but it's a rant that's been building for a while.

So I made it to DesignCon yesterday

My lumpy schedule didn't quite prevent my taking half a day to go see the sights in Santa Clara.

There was somewhat more walking involved than usual, as the usual overflow parking lot at Great America was closed - something to do with stadium construction - so convention center parking was rerouted down the street a bit.

Not much new & exciting there. Most of the regulars were present, though a few more drop out every year.  There were a couple of PCB fab houses of which I'd previously been unaware; none of them fit my usual needs (got Sierra Circuits, PCB Fab Express, OSH Park, and BatchPCB for that, according to budget and schedule), but clients sometimes have exotic requirements, so it's just as well to have the exotic fab houses on file.

There was a fair amount of test equipment on display, most of which doesn't fit my budget at the moment, though that could change according to what work comes in.

Various connector vendors showed up; since I'm always looking at better/smaller/cheaper ways to get signals onto and off of boards, I stopped at most of those booths. Amphenol / SV Microwave has a cute new bayonet-locking mini connector, vaguely SMA-sized and more convenient.  The Samtec Firefly micro flyover system caught my eye, with something about a small-footprint optical link, but, with a choice of 10, 14, or 28 Gbits/sec, it's sort of Not At All What I Want (which is something bidirectional, with a tiny footprint, rugged, at least automotive temperature range, and, oh, around 250 Kbits/sec; needed for extreme galvanic isolation rather than speed).  AirBorn, noted for crazy-expensive mil/aero connectors with unobtainium plating, has a new line of high-density (by my standards) connectors at, apparently, quite reasonable prices.  And somebody (who I hope scanned my badge, 'cause I didn't get a flyer) was showing off a line of edge-launch RF connectors with a nice board-alignment feature.

Not much in the way of schwag; I was most of the way through the expo floor before I even found a bag to carry the flyers home in.  (Perhaps, for the next show, I should go counterclockwise. We are, after all, north of the Equator.)

And, no, I didn't take any kittens.  Not even to try to barter for test equipment.

Update: that new connector family from AirBorn is called verSI, and it's really meant for high-speed data, not dense termination of many discrete low-speed signals; contrary to what I thought I'd heard, the mating connector doesn't appear to be available with discrete-wire pigtails.  So, back to the same old mil connectors (expensive, inconvenient to use, long lead time, inadequate documentation), unless I can sneak in the sort of intermediate-spec 2mm pitch connectors from Harwin.

And I didn't stop by the Molex booth to ask why the Sherlock family isn't available with gold-plated contacts.  Really, guys: "an ideal solution for applications where secure mating is important" and no gold option?

Update 2: edge-launch connectors with board-alignment feature.

Balance of terror

The kittens have recovered from the Vacuum Cleaner Incident.  In fact, yesterday afternoon the monster came out again, and howled for a couple of minutes; the kittens, holed up in their favorite daytime nap spot under the comfy chair, only reached the "alert and curious" state, far from the previous day's panic.

They don't like being in their cage with the door closed, though.  So, instead of sleeping in their cage as per the two-legs plan, they've taken to sleeping on the sofa, after first clearing off the pointy plastic thingummies that are meant to keep cats off the upholstery.  Specifically, meant to keep Piggy off, 'cause she likes to pee on the furniture.

But, as long as the little fuzzballs are out there, Piggy stays clear of them, so they act as sort of an Active Sofa Denial System.

Piggy, meanwhile, is addressing the problem of kittens exploring the back part of the house by taking up a defensive position in my office doorway:

Git off my lawn!

Well, that could have gone better.

Joy decided the living-room carpet needed vacuuming, what with the shredded cardboard, scattered kitty litter, and other kitten-related detritus.

So, into the cage with the Muons, and out with the vacuum cleaner.

The beast being switched on, the kittens' manner went, in the span of a couple of seconds, from curious to alert to alarmed to ZOMG PANIC CLIMB THE WALLS!

The noise having been interrupted and the little furballs having been extricated from the high corners of their cage, I took them back to the bedroom until the monster had completed its work and ceased its howling.

After which... I carried them back out to the living room; Top Hat, being placed on the floor, promptly scampered off to the old favorite sanctuary under the dining table.  Huckleberry, who had been riding on my left shoulder, hopped down and followed.  Southmoon migrated from my right shoulder to the middle of my back and just wanted to stay right there, even when Huckleberry came looking.  Eventually, though, I coaxed her off - I couldn't exactly lie there all day - and she joined the crowd under the table, venturing back out a few minutes later when I was in the kitchen.

They seem to be a bit worried about the living room not being a safe playground anymore.

Oh, well: I assume they'll adapt.  Sooner or later, they'll presumably all end up in homes where cleaning is a regular occurrence.

Update: they stayed under the table for a couple of hours, and when they ventured out they were very subdued, and cautious about setting foot on the carpet.  They're perking up now, though, and starting to play again, including the occasional attempt to play with Piggy's tail.

A technological challenge

The kittens are starting to wander back toward my office and lab.

I should block the hallway against kitten infiltration.

Problem is: Piggy, the elderly cat, sleeps in my office and needs to get to and from the living room and kitchen.

So: what sort of barrier will allow an arthritic old cat to pass, but stop energetic little kittens?

Clearly, I need a semi-permeable membrane, permeable to everything except kittens.

Or, some sort of robotic Maxwell's Demon, using machine vision to differentiate between kittens and not-kittens, and open and close a gate accordingly.  And I need it, like, an hour ago.

Or some sort of trained rodent, but that would intimidate Piggy more than it distracted the kittens.  And, again, not in place by an hour ago.

Feral Caturday

Those clumsy, uncoordinated, frightened feral furballs I captured on Tuesday? Tiny, shivering, and as weak as the proverbial?

They learned to get down from the sofa yesterday.  This morning, they learned to climb onto it. They haven't quite figured out what those spikey black plastic things are for, though pushing them down onto a sibling on the floor seems to be fun.

I had to upgrade their containment facility, first from the cardboard box to a large storage bin for more room, and then adding a rim at the top to discourage escape, as one of them, after the first night in the bin, started jumping-and-scrambling over what had seemed a perfectly adequate wall.

Shown with a random military artifact for scale.

Update: General impression at this point is that they were born sometime during Saturnalia week, and may even be Children of the Mayan Apocalypse.

Which means they don't get the neutrino conversion until about the end of February, and adoption has to wait until sometime in March.

Meanwhile, they have names.  Sorting the cats by time of capture, and the bushes where they were hiding by distance from the shed, we have: Huckleberry (short-haired tabby), Top Hat (long-haired tabby with the hooked tail), and Southmoon (the Siamese-looking one).

Now that they've decided I'm not making kitten pie, they seem to appreciate being someplace warm and safe, with plenty of food and stuff to play with.  It's probably time to put a kitten barrier in the hallway, though; having them wandering around in my office would be a bad idea, for a variety of reasons, so it's best if they don't wander beyond the living room.

Update 2, Sunday morning: ICF v2.1 didn't last so long.  I figured I'd have another several days before Southmoon was big enough to jump out.  Nope!  After their morning romp, I put the tired little kitties back in their bin and set about gathering my laundry.  On my way out the door with the gathered laundry, I paused to say bye-bye, and the kitten inventory was one short already.

Fortunately, a friend had dropped off a loaner cage, with cold iron bars all around, just in time for this eventuality.

Having a little difficulty discovering the parameters

So there's this project, see, that uses moderate gobs of flash memory....

It has the usual constraints: limited space, at least I-temp rating, vast mechanical integrity, don't want to use lots of MCU pins to talk to it, and in general: a small-footprint chip with an SPI interface.

Well, there's this handy NOR-flash part, see, and it has the appropriate specs, and 64 MBytes ought to be plenty for the application at hand, and so it comes time to write the AGROS device driver for it.

And I note that it supports the Serial Flash Discoverable Parameters feature, and I think that this could be useful: I could write the driver for generality, and it could go out and see what chip is installed, and how it's organized, and all that good stuff.

And so I downloaded the JEDEC SFDP spec, and it was somewhat confusing, even considered in conjunction with the chip data sheet, and yet it seemed worth pursuing.

Eventually, for sufficiently this afternoon values of eventually, I tossed together a dummy driver and a test program for reading the SFDP data, and commenced to explore the address space.

OK, so the first several bytes that come back from command 0x5A, address 0, look right.  Two parameter headers, the first 9 DWORDS at 0x000448 and the second 81 DWORDS at 0x000400.  Which... um... actually, that doesn't look right; something about 0x51 × 4 being rather more than 0x48?

Well, anyway.  Try reading starting at 0x000448.  All FFs.  At 0x000400?  All FFs.

Look back at datasheet.  Address to 0x5A command is supposed to be zero.  Hm?  But it's clearly not ignored....

Oh, well.  Allocate a bloody huge buffer (2K bytes).  Read a buncha SFDP data starting from zero.  Has the header.  Has all FFs the rest of the way down.

So... am I reading the spec wrong, or has the chip vendor implemented it wrong, or is the chip not working right?

Well, if it doesn't start making sense Real Soon Now, the driver will have rather more limited capability, and the user will just have to fill in all appropriate chip specs when configuring the application.

Update: well, obviously. The addresses in the SFDP header are DWORD addresses, not the byte addresses that the 0x5A command takes.  And, contrary to the note in the datasheet, the 0x5A command on this chip does in fact handle nonzero addresses.

Feral kitten A&Q

A: Yes.

Q: They won't expect me to lactate, will they?

Fortunately (because I Am Not Programmed To Respond In That Area) there's KMR.  And cow milk.  And, while they appreciate being provided with milk, they seem to be chowing down just fine on solid foods.

And that light-colored critter that was looking so wild in the Saturday photo, and was so much trouble to nab on Tuesday?  It's perched on my shoulder, being distracting.  I keep telling it that cats that ride on shoulders are supposed to have an extra pair of legs, but does it listen?  Of course not.  If it listened, it wouldn't be a cat.

Alternate-universe photoelectric effect

Discovered early this morning, when the timer turned on the light over Tinga's cage.

When the box in the kitchen is exposed to ordinary visible light, it emits muons.

Raising the threshold energy* and eliminating an intermediate quantum state** suffice for the moment to inhibit further emissions.

* Making the sides of the box taller.

** Taping over a discontinuity in the cardboard, which could be used as a step.

Invasion of the Muons!

They're indoors now, in a temporary containment vessel.

Apparently they've decided I'm their new mommy already, 'cause I can't go near them without getting lepton.

As I understand it, these beasties are around 4-5 weeks old, and need another 3-4 weeks before they can be converted to muon neutrinos.

Only been indoors for half a day, and already they're needing a bigger crib, and they've gone from kinda-sorta walking in a wobbly fashion to trying (with alarming success) to climb the walls.

So apparently there's some big shindig...

...in Washington today?

A grandly expensive celebration of four more years of unbridled looting and crony corporatism?

This from the same crowd that was all upset about Mittens having a big fancy house that he paid for with his own money?

Yeah.  Money you earn in the private sector is dirty money.  Money that's taken from the private sector at gunpoint and handed out by the ruling class is virtuous money.

And, you know, our masters deserve their luxurious lifestyle, because they work so hard, like, 5 hours a day, 100 days a year or something for a six-figure pittance of a salary, so we can hardly begrudge them a few perks of office, right?

And, we must always remember, some animals are more equal than others.

Because antioxidants!

A feral momcat has stashed her clutch of grubs under my blueberry bushes.

There are three of the li'l varmints.

Not so well camouflaged, really (hint: fur:blueberries::tentacles:pie), but they don't photograph so well with a random pocket camera, and I'm not in the mood to fetch the EVIL Black Camera and fiddle around with manual focus just now.

Questioning the premise

Today's SMBC suggests a positive correlation between automotive ostentation and penis size, by way of wealth.

Captain Capitalism says it goes the other way, at least as far as the wealth factor: the flashy expensive cars are generally bought with borrowed money, and the drivers have very low net worth.

And, thinking back on people I've known who had expensive cars and weren't, shall we say, on the elderly side?  They tended not to be all that wealthy... or not to stay wealthy.  Overspending on status symbols is actually a pretty good marker for downward mobility.

Yeah, there are some people who really do have gobs of money, and can afford the mansions, luxury cars, and private airliners.  The number of wannabees, though, is much greater.

Well, apart from the pretty gold-plated pads...

There's another reason to like OSH Park for non-urgent, small PCBs.

I just ordered a board I'd designed earlier today.  It's a 2-layer design, 0.65" by 0.40".  Pricing is by the square inch, and there's nothing about a minimum billing, or rounding up to the next square inch, or any such, so... yeah.  $1.30 per set of three boards, shipping included.

So I ordered nine pieces.  If it works, I have a sometime-next-month application for six of them.  If it doesn't work so well... hey, it's under four bucks for the lot.  (OK, so plus $1 worth of parts to build the first one, and my time to assemble and test it.)

Update: a couple of hours later, and I get word that the panel is out to fab already, so I should have boards in my mailbox in maybe a fortnight.

Awww... another idea taken.

A few weeks ago, I was pondering 3D printing, and contemplating mildly exotic materials.  Such materials not being available off the shelf at all, let alone in the form of 1.75mm diameter filament, I had the notion that a home filament extruder might be a good thing to build... and that it could become a product, as others might want to play with materials, create custom colors from stock material, recycle old ABS scrap, and so on.

Well, it seems someone else had the same idea: Filabot.  Mainly for recycling, it seems, but it ought to digest bits of custom-blended plastics, no?

And the price seems reasonable.  Not that I have a 3D printer yet, so I don't actually have any use for a Filabot at this point, but, once the need arises, it's kinda nice to know that the gadget exists, even if it's not me selling it.

Expansive vocabulary + fuzzy mind =

My brain's a bit fried at the moment, and thus it came to pass that when I drove past a truck bearing the name "Garda Logistics" I somehow morphed it into "Gardyloo-gistics."

Which I believe calls for an entirely different sort of truck.

I'm afraid the Minister's fallen through the Earth's crust.

Large person falls through the sidewalk in NYC.

I thought the collapsing-ground thing wasn't supposed to happen until they move the Empire State Building.

Why not a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side?

Patrick @ Popehat has fun with the trillion-dollar coin concept.

The Californium idea is interesting, but didn't Larry Niven get there first?

A puzzlement

I've recently seen, on a couple of cars around the Bay Area, a sticker featuring three squares in a row.

One square is red.

One is green.

The middle one is white, with a menorah on it.

Mexican Hanukkah?  Italian Hanukkah?

I find the question asked on the Web, but not answered: what is it?

Or is the emblem in the middle not meant to be a menorah at all, but something else entirely?  The White Tree of Númenor, perhaps?

OK, so this time we were ahead of the Rooskies.

And, I believe, spent a great deal more money.

But theirs is more authentic.

Snake sculpture in Yakutia, made of frozen cow poop.

Snake sculpture in San Jose, that only looks like dog poop.

...And don't you love how Google's privacy feature blurs Quezovercoatl's face?