Silicon Valley Redneck

High finance WTF: Apple bond sale

Big news of the day: Apple sells $17 billion in bonds.

Wait, what?  Companies sell bonds to raise cash, no?  I thought Apple was already sitting on a pile of cash...?

Here we go, further down in the article: "...reluctance to share any of Apple's massive $145 billion cash pile..."

And, yes, there's sort of an explanation yet further down.  Seems to involve the screwy U.S. tax situation, and the expense of repatriating earnings.  Unless it's the former Nigerian Minister of Finance.  Which would make about as much sense.

Update: El Reg reports that, yes, it's an expensive scheme to avoid even more expensive taxes on repatriating overseas cash.  Which wouldn't work without the combination of high taxes and stupid low interest rates.  And still seems to make about as much sense as if the CFO had fallen for a 419 scam.

New toy

My Beaglebone Black just arrived!

Cute li'l rascal.  And, though it sports a micro-SD socket, the OS lives in 2GB of on-board flash.  So, the add-on memory card is optional.  Looks like a good configuration for designing into custom programmable instruments, with the power, Ethernet, and USB connectors exposed to the world.

Haven't powered it up yet.  Got work to do, and here it is the end of the month, Walpurgisnacht, and all that.

But!  I now have the mechanical sample that allows me to make sense of the cape template I found in someone-or-other's library (prolly Lady Ada's).  Looks like I pretty much have to keep my tall components - in particular, things that go at the ends, such as connectors - topside, unlike the RasPi crust.

For now, back to work.  Assuming, of course, that I can get the darn furry Huckle-beastie to go take a nap someplace that isn't on top of me.

Must be happy smiley day...

...at J. Pierpoint Manhattan.

The feral gummint having returned some of my money from last year, I went to deposit it today, and got lots of "Have a nice day!" variants.  And a smiley-face sticker on my receipt.

And, no, I wasn't in any sort of special costume; just my usual raggedy summer-weekday outfit.

OSH Park is a disruptive business.

Note how many PCB designs I've sent out to fab in the past couple of weeks, Just Because.

Latest one went out a few minutes ago.  It's a 4-layer design, for technical reasons, so I don't expect to get my boards for about a month and a half, but consider:

If someone were paying me to develop this critter, and needed it in a hurry, I'd fork over the $250 (or whatever) of the client's money to have Sierra Circuits turn the boards in a week.  Or even more money, for a shorter turn.

Otherwise, and if OSH Park weren't there... well, it pretty much Wouldn't Happen.  Oh, I might use BatchPCB, or even one of those cheap-ish but epically inconvenient overseas services that'll do small lots of little 4-layer boards, but I'd have to give serious consideration to the cost and effort.

As it is, I think: 4 layers, area a bit under a square inch, so a bit under ten bucks to have a batch made.  And I sign in, and upload my EAGLE file, and the auto-quoter quotes me $9.60, and the auto-previewer shows me pictures that look like my board, and then comes the minor inconvenience of having to go through PayPal (or Google Checkout) to pay for it.

So here I am, busily prototyping things that may or may not become products, just because I have the tools and the ideas and there's a cheap and easy fab service for prototyping small boards.

And, no, they won't be taking very much business away from the quick-turn and full-service fab houses.  This is entirely new business that, if the new service weren't there, wouldn't be happening at all.

(And a lot of companies aren't into the Efficient Prototyping thing at all, and insist on going the slow-turn, expensive, full-service route for first prototypes.  Like, an 8-week, multi-thousand-dollar fab operation, plus a full set of release documents, for a board that we hope will be good enough to deliver to end customers... when Sierra could have made a set of good-enough-for-engineering boards in under a week for maybe $350, and we could have used the next week making sure the hardware design was OK, then overlapped 8 weeks of serious testing with the production fab run.  Yes, I've seen this in more than one place.)

"Internet sales tax"

More accurately: Congress is attempting to grant states the power to tax businesses located in other states.

"To boost the British economy, I'd tax all foreigners living abroad."
        - Terry Jones

Seems to me the power to regulate Commerce among the several States has already gotten distorted in two important ways:

• Somehow, growing a little weed in your own window-box for personal use became "Commerce among the several States", and
• This power is no longer preëmptive.  Surely the intent was to prevent a hodgepodge of state regulations affecting commerce among the states... and yet, when Congress enacts a law regulating, e.g., intrastate possession of certain herbs, this fails to preëmpt state laws in the same area.

Well, now Congress is attempting to delegate its power to the states, which surely can't be legal... and thereby create exactly the hodgepodge that the Commerce Clause was meant to avoid.

Remind me again: what exactly is the point of having a written Constitution?

Integer arithmetic bites again

Ran into a little detail, in two different places in the same application that are doing semi-unrelated things, but both need to be performing the same kind of oddball arithmetic for basically the same reason.

Both had evolved kludges to get around the fact that we're dealing with integer arithmetic - if the CPU could just deal with pure, abstract numbers, all would be well.

Now we've run into a situation in which the kludges don't work all that well, and I really need an elegant solution which takes remainders into account.

So... time to review either number theory or fractional-N synthesizers.  I think I'll start with the latter, because they need to solve basically the same problem, and may get me close to a solution faster.

Another great idea down the drain...

...well, part of one, anyway.  The part I just spent a couple of hours on.

The big idea: nifty gadget (purpose undisclosed at this point, though it's a sensor of some sort) with a little AVR handing some basic control and monitoring functions, and a USB connection for power and communication.

The great little idea: hey, why not use at ATmega8U2 (or 16U2) and have the USB host comm stuff right there on the chip?  Could save maybe a buck, a couple of components, and half an inch of board length.

Looks plausible, initially, so I spend a couple of hours revising the board design, getting the layout just so, and...

Wait.  Before I send this thing out to fab, maybe... just maybe... I should make sure the firmware support is really there.

Well, yes, it is.  Sort of.  But, before I even get into digging into the licensing terms, I'm reminded of a little something.

VID/PID.  Gots to haz them.  Even if the device conforms to a defined class, and should be handled generically by a class driver.  Well... Linux is forgiving in this regard... but Windows, on encountering a CDC-ACM sort of com-port device, refuses to recognize it without at least a .INF file, which is identified in terms of VID/PID.

And, since I'm not about to pay the dues to become one of the 65534 (or whatever) possible vendors, this is kind of Out.

And so I return to Plan A, in which I use an ATmega88 or some such, plus an FT201XQ, which brings its own VID/PID and works with the FTDI virtual COM port driver.

Drives the price of the gadget back up a tad, and puts that quarter-square-inch back in, but I wont need to muck about with the USB nonsense.

Update: aaaand... the board with the ATmega88+FT201XQ is out to fab.  Another of my 1-square-inch wonders.  Fiberglass should turn up in my mailbox in a bit over 2 weeks, which is about the earliest I'll be ready to do anything with it anyway.

Took the afternoon off...

...put on my second-loudest Hawaiian shirt, and spent a few hours wandering around Design West, down at the San Jose Convention Center.

With the Embedded Systems Conference having been merged with various other trade shows, the result is enough to justify the drive and parking, and even a moderate wander around the expo floor took all afternoon.

Lotsa new shinies on display, and I picked up some useful information from vendors (even if the information was "nobody makes those in the temperature range you need").

I didn't engage in organized schwag-hunting, and won't be returning tomorrow to try to win a new-generation BeagleBone at the TI booth.  (Having heard from the BeagleBone folks that they'd actually shipped the first batch to distributors this morning, I ordered one from Mouser when I got home.)

I won a drawing!  I stopped by the EarthLCD booth to say hi, and was persuaded to drop a business card in the jar.  Returning at 1400 sharp, i.e., 5 minutes later, I heard several names go unanswered, one after another... and then my name.  Must be present to win and all that, and now I've got this ARLCD thingie, which seems to be a combination ezLCD and Arduino Uno.  Have to give it a try, in the not-too-distant future.  Might see what's involved in throwing together a cute li'l graphical status display, then feed it data from the RasPi with the new crust attached (once the crust is here and assembled).

Technical note

If you're trying to build a flyback converter, in a tiny space, to provide up to 500V at negligible current, for whatever reason, the TDK ATB322524-0110 seems a handy little off-the-shelf transformer for the purpose.

But!  It does need a low-on-resistance FET.  I've just been trying to drive one with a 2N7002BK, and even at 5V supply and 5V gate drive, I can't coax more'n 200V out of that puppy.  Around 1.7µs on-time, the transistor just doesn't maintain full voltage across the primary anymore.

I'll try again with a BSS138K after my next Digi-Key order.  In the board respin, I'll be changing to a different footprint to accommodate something with even better on-resistance.

And, yes, I currently have two reasons for wanting to step small-battery power up to a few hundred Volts in a small space.  Both are currently secret, because business.

Update: substituting the BSS138K, I get right about 400V out at 5V supply, 2.1 µs pulse width, 50 KHz.  Current draw is about 60 mA.  Looking at the drain waveform, the FET's resistance is still a significant factor.  The new board (currently out to fab) uses a still-lower-on-resistance part with a somewhat larger footprint, and should be more efficient.  Also, given that the load is basically zero, dropping the frequency to 25 KHz and bumping the pulse width to 2.5 µs keeps the output voltage up while usefully decreasing current draw.

In the live application, I can tolerate a fair amount of output ripple (more in one application than the other), so the MCU code to manage the PWM will probably be skipping a lot of cycles, and just turning the drive back on when the HV falls out of tolerance.

Pain, lower back, treatment of

Good: a new chair for my home office (the same home office I've been telling TurboTax I don't have, because that Gets Confusing).  The old one was rather decrepit, and was putting me in bad positions, so I figured that was probably a significant factor in my recent trouble.

Saturday's big activity was a shopping safari.  First to Mountain View, where the office-furniture store turned out to be closed despite what I'd read on the Internets, then to Santa Clara, where Santa Clara Office Equipment was indeed open.  After some discussion with the proprietor, who's a bit of a Character, I settled on the first chair that had gotten my attention after I walked in: high back, plenty of adjustability, aggressive lumbar support, and a reasonable home-office price.

The new chair is helping a lot.

Bad: laundering kittens in the sink (may be sung to a tune by Tom Lehrer).  Holding each little wriggling monkey in the pan of suds for the wash, then holding it under the faucet for the rinse, puts a significant strain on the lower back.

Also, Top Hat managed, in her panic, to inflict a row of scratches on my arm.  They'll heal....

The wash water got filthy.  They really were overdue for a bath.  I expect a lot of the crud was flea poop, and I'll give 'em a proper flea powdering after they've dried out.

Anyway, if I'm posting this I must be back in my nice new chair, recuperating.

Laundry time!

Well, he does need washing, and the hot water and bleach would probably be effective against fleas, and it's such fun to watch the kitten go 'round and 'round in the dryer....

Economic indicator

I went to Home Depot early this afternoon.

Normally, I wouldn't go to such a place on a sunny spring Sunday afternoon, because that seems like prime mob time.  But, I needed a couple of things, and was headed past that area, so I decided to give it a try.

The store was woefully understaffed for such a time, with only two live checkstands (plus several self-checkout lanes).  Except...

The customer population was astoundingly low.  No problem parking, no crowds in the way of reaching the merchandise I was looking for, and no line for either of the attended checkout lanes.

I didn't observe (in the small area I looked at) any shortage of stuff for sale.  Just a shortage of customers and customees.

This recession is Different.

It was at a meeting at the local Round Table several years ago, perhaps during the Early Bush Recession, that Gerald Nordley put into words something I'd vaguely noticed during the previous recession:

You can tell when we're in a recession, because the quality of fast-food workers goes up.

That's paraphrased, of course; memory gets fuzzy after a few minutes, never mind years.

Still: it's traditionally been true.  When the Silicon Valley economy slows down, there aren't high-tech jobs for all the highly-employable people, so some of them end up working fast food, general retail, and the like.  When things pick back up, they resume their interrupted careers*.

Ain't happenin' this time.  The people working retail around here these days are pretty much the usual ones, and there are ever fewer of them, what with understaffing and automation.

The lower-level jobs for people to fall back on just aren't there anymore.  And even if they were....

The young professional of yesteryear had low fixed expenses, and could afford to tighten the ol' belt and spend a while at a low-paying job.  Today, starting out with a crushing burden of student-loan debt, it's pretty much a high-paying job or nothing.

I've been mostly out of the techie social network for a few years now, so I've lost track of what's becoming of Silicon Valley's unemployed best-and-brightest.  Are they moving out of the area?  Going underground?  Going on permanent disability?  Some combination?

* That's the plan, at any rate.  In practice, some of those who started working retail a few recessions ago got stuck there forever, as resuming a professional career after more than a few months in the wilderness turns out to be problematic.

So, naturally, we need another round...

...of restrictions on guns, reloading materials, and any sort of identifiable chemicals.  (Because chemicals!)

The Al-Quaedish instructions for making crude bombs?  Call for using match heads and sugar.  Not commercial gunpowder, whether black or smokeless.  'Cause, you know, in most places where these guys operate you can't just walk into the neighborhood sporting-goods store and buy a can of powder for your smokepole.

I'm reminded that the last round of restrictions on the sale of blackpowder, back in the 60s or some such, was driven by a Dick Tracy story line.  ZOMG a bad guy in t3h funny papers is using blackpowder in a highly-contrived arson scheme!  We gots to ban itz!

And, should matches not be available?  Why, the good folks at the Frankford Arsenal addressed that one long ago (and in more practical fashion than the Rocket City Rednecks).  Look up TM 31-210.  Got salt, water, electricity, sugar, and time on your hands?

Update: and if we're looking at deflagrating compositions, I stumbled across a doozy back in high school*.  Two ingredients**; one easily found, while the other took a bit of looking for.  Part 'A' remains as easy as ever.  Part 'B'... well... I haven't looked for it in stores in a great long time now, but it's probably there if you look in the right places, and I just discovered that it's unexpectedly easily bought on line***.  Maybe even without getting on any (more) watch lists.

* I was trying to make pretty colored fire. What I got was quite an impressive bang, from a small amount of the mixture with very light confinement.  Thanks to the very light confinement, the fragments thrown around by the blast were bits of paper, and didn't go too far.

** Two ingredients, considered at the retail level.  At least one of them has several different chemicals in it.

*** Oh, and it can also be made at home, without too much effort, from materials which are and will surely remain ubiquitous.

Wait...

I've noticed that a 'J' sound transliterates into Cyrillic as 'ДЖ', which would transliterate back as 'DZH'.

So: is 'Dzhokhar' pronounced 'Joker'?

More goodies out to fab

Coupla new board designs are out to fab now: a nifty crust for the Raspberry Pi, and an accessory for that crust or for other related things.

There'll be a cape version for the BeagleBone, too, but I don't have a Bone yet, and I'm waiting to see when version 2 will be coming out.

No details yet on what these goodies are; it'll become public, one way or another, sometime this summer - either I'll persuade somebody to manufacture and sell the thing, or I'll just open-hardware it.

Anyway, I've just been testing some parts of the gadget, and they all seem to work as expected, so sticking 'em on a Pi crust and writing up some nice example code for how to talk to the features seems like a good strategy at this point.

Soviet grocery stores, pt. 3

Like many other people, I occasionally require a dose of pseudoephedrine to help unclog my sinuses so my brain won't hurt.

The routine, since the silly drug-war sales restrictions of a few years ago, has been: stop by the local SVN://drugstore; find the "Cough and Cold" shelf; grab a pull tag for a 20-pack of the store-brand 12-hour caplets; take the pull tag to the pharmacy counter to buy the actual pills.

Well, for several months now, it seems CVS has been having supply issues: no 20-packs in stock, but they have 10-packs, or no store-brand in stock, just the pricier name-brand Sudafed.  That kind of thing.  And it's not just the one store, either; I've tried a couple of others, with similar results.

Well, this week the local store didn't even have the pull tags.  Not for the store brand, in any size; not for Sudafed.  Nothing.

So, down the street to Walgreens, where they don't have store-brand 12-hour pills but they have plenty of pull tags for 12-hour Sudafed, in 20 packs, and they have the actual boxes behind the counter to back them up.  Price wasn't too bad, either.

So what's going on with CVS?  Why are they not stocking one of the few items people can't just order from Amazon?  Is it just management incompetence, or have they run afoul of the drug warriors and had their double-secret pseudoephedrine license pulled?

It's the 18th of April...

...and we all know what that means.

Yup.  Any earthquake that happens in North America today must be immediately blamed on a (white, male, right-wing) Patriot movement.

I don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to know.

Morning rush hour.

Car stopped in right-hand lane of freeway, by the barrier separating the freeway from an on-ramp.

Guy standing between car and barrier.

Pulling his pants up.

Oak moths

Sign of spring:
Silk strands flash in the sunlight.
Walk among the oak trees, and
Be covered in tiny green caterpillars.