Silicon Valley Redneck

Wait, what?

From this piece in The Economist:

His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world. ... In the euro zone they march against austerity ...

DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.

The theme of the article is, roughly, this:

They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.

And yet: they're marching against so-called austerity, which is just a slight decrease in the rate of expansion of the corruption, inefficiency, and arrogance?

Some of the other examples sound remarkably like "We demand our subsidies!"  Also known as: "Where's our share of the corruption?"

Makes one suspect that the protesters in question are highly confused... or that the author is.

 

But... this business of middle-class people getting out and protesting in the streets.  Could It Happen Here?

Durn tootin' it could, and it will.

See, middle-class folks don't generally do that sort of thing for various reasons, the most famous being that We Have Jobs.

Only, increasingly, We Don't.  When you have a large chunk of the former middle class becoming chronically unemployed (and discovering that the so-called "safety net" is reserved for the welfare caste, and not available to down-on-their-luck taxpayers), the restraints will be falling off.

Ergo: yes, we will be seeing that sort of thing here.  The Tea Party is just a well-mannered preview*.  Throw in the ongoing slow-motion economic disaster and the State's increasingly open penchant for treating the People as the enemy, and... well, expect ugliness.

 

* The Infest Whatever movement was an ill-mannered bit of fakery staged by the younger sons of the Aristocracy, and doesn't count.

In which I rave about Solder

I had a few boards to rework today, for a client.  Pretty simple; a few small SMT parts to pull & replace.

Except: it was a lead-free board, so melting the existing solder was a Royal Pain.  My usual approach in such situations (drenching the board in flux and applying hot air until it chars not generally being acceptable) is to apply some tin-lead solder to the parts in question, and allow it to form a lower-melting alloy than the tin-silver-copper stuff that's already there.

Well, just this morning the postman brought me a syringe of tin-bismuth low-temperature lead-free solder paste.  I'd ordered it for doing the flip sides of my little boards, and in particular the Geiger-counter boards, which have proved highly problematic when the solder on the previously-installed components now on the underside of the board melts at the same temperature as what's under the to-be-soldered parts on the top.  (In fact, I ended up soldering the flipside components on the last one with an iron.)

Inspiration strikes!  Goober a little tin-bismuth solder around the old parts, apply just a little hot air... and it melts, gets right in there, and alloys into the old solder, quickly resulting in a removable chip!

The pads having been cleaned up, the tin-bismuth stuff proves right nice for installing the new parts.  Quick melting, excellent wetting, all the stuff you don't expect from lead-free solder paste... nor even from the leaded stuff.

Highly recommended.

Update: I wonder if anyone at the solder companies has considered fiddling the standard tin-silver-copper lead-free alloy with a few percent bismuth... or perhaps indium or gallium... in pursuit of an alloy with a melting point closer to the old tin-lead eutectic and maybe better flowing & wetting properties.  Surely they have R&D metallurgists on staff... or don't they?  The industry has seen, what, three new alloys in the last five decades?  And modern accounting treats R&D as pure expense.  Maybe some mad metallurgist working in his garage needs to build the better alloy.

Worms. Why'd it have to be worms?

Top Hat has been having "outside the box" issues lately... and one of her recent deposits was, as Dr. Zoidberg would say, "something crawling with parasites."

No wonder the poor thing's so puny!  If she didn't have all those parasites, she'd probably be the size of a German Shepherd by now!

And so we dug out the sample vials from the critters' first trip to the vet, and waited for Top Hat to make another deposit within 12 hours of a time the clinic would be open... which eventually happened, this afternoon, while I was out and about on work-related errands.

Joy took the vial to the clinic, and the vet on duty proclaimed the li'l white wriggly things to be Worms, All Right, and the sample needs to be sent off to the lab for official diagnosis, but it seems all four felines will be needing to go in for a dose of Ivermectin.  Or Iver Johnson.  Or something.

Ick.

Update: Dipylidium caninum, positive diagnosis.  Flea tapeworm.  Apparently Ivermectin isn't generally recommended for use on cats, though there are those who swear by a little drop of the stuff on the back of the neck monthly for all manner of parasitical infestations.

Anyway, for feline tapeworms it seems Praziquantel's the stuff.  What with the clinic in question being open only Tue-Wed-Thu, and Joy being away next week, and me not being in the mood for singlehandedly taking the critters down there... well, Amazon carries chicken-flavored Praziquantel pills for cats, so I order a dozen for $25, and cough up the extra $18 to get 'em delivered tomorrow (being Saturday) instead of Tuesday.  Later, I'll order some anti-flea pills (and maybe someday soon we'll flea-bomb the house, which should also conveniently get rid of spiders and such).

Yeah, this kinda jumped out at me...

...when the standing issue in the Prop. 8 case was first raised.

John Fund comments on the implications for the concept of initiatives.

Look, the whole idea of initiatives is to allow the voters to pass laws that the political establishment doesn't like*.

If the only parties with standing to defend a law in court are a few of the same government officials over whose objections the law was passed... well, what's the point?

(No, I'm not a fan of Prop. 8, but both factions are going about this entirely wrong, and from a structural perspective the antics of the SSM proponents are the more damaging.)

 

* Though we've lately been plagued by "initiatives" written by political insiders; "the Governor's package of initiatives" is pretty much routine these days, and I seem to recall some recent "initiatives" placed on the ballot by a majority of the Legislature, which wanted to pass a law but didn't want to take responsibility for it.

Of planned obsolescence and trust

Well, my HTC Incredible is getting on toward 3 years old, and, while it seems like time to get a 4G phone with a bigger (more geezer-friendly) screen, the old phone is still in fine condition, not even urgently needing a new battery.

Except: the software's been increasingly unstable the past year or so, and for the last couple of weeks I've been getting a persistent "Phone storage space is getting low" alert.

Apparently the updates to the Verizon-installed, non-removable apps that I never use are piling up, leaving basically no space.  Or something; it's not clear whether the complaint is about internal flash or RAM.

There certainly does appear to be a RAM shortage, which there never was before.  Thing is: the RAM is being eaten by some combination of system services and mandatory crapware.

Of particular annoyance (though it doesn't appear to be taking up all that much RAM) is the Slacker Radio app... which, not only can I not remove it, I can't even kill the running process.  Or, rather, if I kill the process it promptly respawns.

And I have a strong suspicion that there are other immortal processes that don't even show up on the task manager.  (In fact, I'm certain a lot of processes, immortal or otherwise, aren't visible; it is, after all, a running Linux system.)

So, two points.

First, the accumulation of vendor-pushed crapware and crapware patches means that a new phone becomes mandatory rather than optional (unless of course I root the phone I've got, but it's meant to be a communication device, not a hacker toy).

Second, just how confident is anyone that none of these unkillable processes are spyware?  For all I know, one of the processes I didn't ask for and can't get rid of is gathering location data and ambient sounds, and transmitting bundles of where-I've-been and what's-been-said-in-my-presence back to Verizon and thence the NSA... and maybe to commercial competitors of my clients.

Maybe I should root the thing?

Update: apparently the warning was in regard to "application data storage", whereof a huge amount was being consumed by Google Currents, Facebook, and Firefox.  Of those three, I actually use Firefox once in a while.  By clearing the application data for those three apps, I got rid of the warning.  Sometime when things are slower, I'll go through and see what else needs its bloated app data zapped.  And, when cash is less tight, I'll look at shiny new phones.  Like maybe an unbranded Nexus... not available for Verizon's LTE network, so I'd have to switch carriers, which would mean doing another round of homework: when I switched to Verizon many years ago, it was because the other carriers' coverage around the South Bay was seriously deficient, and perhaps that's changed by now.

Further on the gov't/terrorist thing

Note how our esteemed masters confront a genuine national security problem.

We have seriously leaky borders.  A medium-sized terrorist army could just saunter across, disguised as itinerant farmworkers or meese*.

At this very moment, Congress is debating how best to address the issue.  And what will come of this?

There'll be a promise to improve border security, someday, maybe.

Meanwhile, we'll have even further escalation of the intrusive worker-tracking system, to ensure that when the terrorists arrive here they won't be able to find legitimate employment.

Which is obviously a big help, because the ability of illegal immigrants to support themselves by honest labor is the single biggest threat to our security.

Right?

 

* Or possibly a giant wooden moose.

Patterico asks a question

And includes a poll.

"Which Frightens You More, Terrorists or the Government?"

What with his blog naturally attracting law'n'order, conservative, terrorist-hatin' types, naturally my response (Government) was... solidly in the majority.

And for much the reasons given by others:

Yes, the terrorists hate me - not personally, but as part of a group that is Not Of Their Tribe.  They certainly want to kill people like me.  Heck, it's possible one might stumble across one of the more terrorist-disrespectin' posts on my blog and start hating me personally.

But!  Their demonstrated capability is to kill perhaps dozens of people at a time, once in a while, getting up into the low thousands on the rare occasion when a grand plot comes together.  (I expect I could run up a bigger body count single-handed, were I so inclined.  Fortunately for all concerned, that's contrary to my nature.  Quoth a military acquaintance: "I'm glad you're on our side.  You are on our side, aren't you?")  The likelihood of J. Random American becoming a victim of terrorism is almost laughable.

The government, meanwhile, has a demonstrated capability for wreaking destruction on a massive scale; has a history of rounding up its own people; has vast surveillance systems in place; and has taken on a life of its own.

“THIS is the State above the Law.
  The State exists for the State alone.”
[This is a gland at the back of the jaw,
  And an answering lump by the collar-bone.]
        - Kipling

See also: The Golem of Government.

Further: those currently in power in D.C. and Sacramento hate me - not personally, but as part of a group that is Not Of Their Tribe.  They may not specifically plan to kill me, but they make no bones about their intention to put People Like Me in our place, with edicts backed ultimately by deadly force.  And, should any of the myriad officials in either of those places be offended by one of my blog posts... well, there are so many laws and regulations that I'm almost certainly in violation of something or other.  Oh, look!  I have a pipe nipple, and a bag of sugar, and my Internet history shows I looked up a popular al-Qaeda publication back in April.  That adds up to possessing an item and a substance with intent to construct a destructive device, no?

So, yes: the government is a vastly greater threat than the terrorists.

And furthermore: much of the damage associated with terrorism is actually caused by government overreaction, which creates large and persistent drains on the economy and destroys trust within society.

Look, an occasional bee sting won't kill you.  Even a dozen bee stings in close succession won't kill you.  But!  If your immune system overreacts to the bee stings... your own immune system can kill you in response to a single sting.

And that, folks, is what's happening to our society.  Our immune system - those functions of government set up to defend our society against threats - is instead destroying society through a series of massive and escalating overreactions over the past few decades.  Whether the threat is drugs, guns, the Mafia, or terrorists... the reaction is disproportionate, destructive, and never scaled back.

Egregious medical ignorance

So, it seems inhaling alcohol fumes is the Trendy New Thing.  Again.

Now it's called a "Vaportini".

The linked article has a couple of scary quotes from a doctor, plus this:

Unlike drinking alcohol, where the liquid is metabolized through one’s liver, inhaling alcoholic vapors sends ethanol straight to the lungs, the blood stream and ultimately, the brain.

And the reporter got this where?  Like so many alarming medical claims, this rests on profound ignorance of basic anatomy, and is well into "not even wrong" territory.  Through the liver?  Really?

From the doctor in question, there's this:

“The danger mainly is that it leads to rapid intoxication in that you don't know you're getting drunk that fast,” Glatter said.

Which does make sense; it's at least plausible that taking a deep breath of air with a sufficient concentration of alcohol vapor would lead to rapid absorption through the vast surface area of the lungs.  Whether it's actually right or not is another question (to which I don't have the answer offhand, but if I weren't so lazy I'd start looking at things like the vapor pressure of ethanol at 37°C, the average volume of a deep breath, and the volume of blood that you're trying to raise to ~ 0.1% ABV).

Medic!

The kittens are getting big, and strong, and have Very Definite Opinions on certain subjects.

One of which is: bathtime.

They'd all been showing signs of being past-due for a trip to the kitty laundry: feeling and smelling kinda grubby, scratching more'n usual, and sitting in the laundry tub looking expectant.

So: out to the garage.  Laundry-tub faucet in warm-shower mode.  Water and puppy&kitten shampoo in dishpan, nicely sudsified.  Towel handy.  Grab Southmoon. who's sitting there watching me.  Into the sink!  Um.  In?  Like, all four legs?  Pleeeeease?

Much struggle and some nasty scratches on my right wrist later, Southmoon hasn't exactly been shampooed, but at least she's had a bit of a rinse.  Quick towel-off, then it's time to interrupt Huckleberry's nap.

For someone who almost jumped in the shower with me this morning, Huckleberry is remarkably uncooperative.  I manage to get a little shampoo on him, and rinse him off... and now I've got nasty scratches on my left wrist.

Having no remaining unscratched wrists, I decide not to argue the point when I pick up Top Hat and she commences struggling.

Well, I guess they're not totally mad at me; a damp Southmoon just came and sat in my lap.

Maybe next time I'll use the bathtub.  And maybe leather wrist protectors, or just make sure all claws have been safely trimmed a couple of days ahead of time.

The stuff that crops up via Facebook...

Yeah, I've got a Facebook account.  Never post anything, and seldom even look at it.  I sometimes use the "private" messaging thingy to communicate with those who don't check their regular e-mail.  I assume that anything put on Facebook, regardless of privacy settings, will eventually become public, or be shared with strangers.

And sometimes I get odd friend requests.

Like this one from "Carissa Aldridge" that came in a couple days ago.

Hm.  Profile consists of photos, and no actual information.  The name doesn't ring a bell.  Looking at the photos... I'm pretty sure I'd remember if I'd met her.

She's got a list of Facebook friends who, from the photos and names, come across as the sort to respond to friend requests from unknown hotties... and who might be the subjects of scrutiny by some Three Letter Agency or other.

So, sorry, Carissa, or George, or Dmitri, or whatever your real name is.  You're not getting access to the "friends only" material that I never put on Facebook anyway.

Such a way to start the morning

Wake up; deal with immediate matters; sit down at desk; start poking at computer.

Notice that Iceweasel has gone poof during the night.

Oh, well: check e-mail.  Thunderbird promptly gets a wedgie.

Go to one of the shells, and try to run top to see what's going on.  Get a bus error.

Oops?

Well, maybe last night's apt-get upgrade broke something.  Start exiting editors, CAD programs, and so on in preparation for a reboot.

After a couple of exits (and an error message about not being able to write to a .rc file), KDE's window manager gets a wedgie.

CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a plain text console... gets a black screen.

Tapping the power button gets nothing.  Ditto the reset button.

Hold the power button for 5 seconds, forcing a real power-off.  Turn power back on.  Wait for (normal-looking) boot.

Things seem to be back to normal.  Except...

NoSquint's global settings have stopped working, and changing the settings on one site changes all.  Well... Iceweasel has updated itself to 17.0.6... let's dig around and see what could have happened.

Aha!  There was up update to NoSquint, back when Firefox went to version 17, that appears to be related to this.  NoSquint isn't on automatic compatibility check & update... so... install the newest version for Firefox versions < 20.

That fixes it.

Now, at last, everything appears to be working normally.  Except for the minor detail of my not yet having launched any of the CAD software I'll be needing once the work day starts.

Oh, well.  Happy Friday!  And happy solstice!

Oops.

In among all the other things I'm juggling... I'd made a rudimentary mold for encapsulating the logic-interface version of the Geiger module, and yesterday I got around to goobering it up with mold release, inserting the assembled module, and pouring in some polyester resin.

Today, I extracted it from the mold... with great effort.  A straight cylindrical mold cavity turns out to be Not Such A Good Idea - who'd'a thunk it?

And, post-extraction, It Doesn't Work.  I'm guessing something, e.g. the transformer, got dislodged in the struggle.

I should maybe have done a function check before trying to pry it loose....

Oh, well: I've got a couple more boards, and components, and another shipment of the tubes came in.  Next time, one of several options: turn a Geiger-module-shaped mandrel and form a flexible mold around it; make another hard mold, but in halves; or spring for that beastie-blaster chambering reamer.

But probably not until next month.  Remainder of this month is pretty well spoken for, what with one thing and another.

Ability to duplicate binaries

Is important.

Article @ KDE, linked by Slashdot, goes into some of the difficulties.

I maintain, for a client, a couple of codebases for which ability to reproduce the binary is important.

For releases, I build the binary using a virtual machine, which includes the toolchain I need for the purpose.  That's the binary used for official testing.

Then I bundle up exactly the source code (including libraries) that went into the build, along with a snapshot of the virtual machine, and burn it all to DVD-R.  Two copies: one for my archives, and one for the client's.

Anyone with VirtualBox can run the virtual machine and rebuild the binary using exactly the build environment I used.

For the really critical one, production builds (as opposed to engineering builds) use the release timestamp instead of the current timestamp, so the binaries really do come out identical.

It's not really practical to distribute Open Source software that way, of course.  Though a few years ago I did try out a Linux distro that was almost entirely custom-compiled, with only the starter system and toolchain delivered as binaries and everything else arriving as source.

Whooooof!

Got a slightly early start on the day, and decided to make use of it by taking the Long Option for morning walkies: 8.mumble miles, with a decent hill in the middle.

Being as how I'm not fully up to speed*, this took rather longer than one might wish, and I didn't get back to my car until 0925, what with stopping to chat with people I hadn't seen in a while, buy eggs at the farm, and so on.

Then a couple of urgent morning errands, and now home.

I have the definite feeling I should have fried up some pork sausage this morning.  The pastry-and-eggs I had wore off about the time I finished the hike.

Still not much in the way of photogenic wildlife; the camera seems to keep it away.  I did get some snaps of the Dread Guardian of the Forest, who'd just caught a chipmunk.  (Photo to follow; gotta work now.)

Update: I can haz stripey skwirl?

Incidentally, that was quite a small chipmunk; the Dread Guardian is a rather young, and not notably big, pygmy mountain lion. As in, smaller than a going-on-6-months-old, runt-of-the-litter, Top Hat.  Alas, I was unable to include an obscure military artifact for scale.

* Except that, assuming it was 8.4 miles and I started at 0645, that works out to a bit over 3 miles/hour, which pretty much is full speed. Maybe I just need to start earlier, or only do the long edition on days when I don't have anything urgent the rest of the morning.

Another "Why didn't I think of that?" moment

With a twist: I did think of it, before it was practical.  And then forgot about the idea.

I just got my new cordless-phone system.  Haven't unpacked it yet; that'll probably happen Sunday afternoon or some such.  It's got 5 handsets and a base station with an answering machine.

And, like many such gadgets these days, it allows docking a cellphone via Bluetooth.

Back when I got my first cellphone - summer of 2000, that would have been - I was kind of wishing for a way to hook it into my home phone system.  Having worked, a few years earlier, on a gizmo called a "Multi Line and Station Interface", whose function was to connect together multiple telco lines and multiple internal telset lines, I had a pretty good idea of how to accomplish this in analog.

Thing is, it would have been analog.  This was back in the days before ubiquitous Bluetooth and DECT, so I would have had to tether the cellphone to the line-switching box using a nonstandard headset cable*.  Which, were I parking the phone for charging purposes anyway, wouldn't have been totally out of the question... but the whole business made such a thing implausible as a product.

And life went on, and I got used to having the cellphone on my belt or, when I got a smaller replacement, in my shirt pocket, and I completely forgot about the home-cellphone-dock idea.

* And the box would have been connecting to analog phones (or cordless-phone base stations), so it would have had to provide -48V and generate ringer voltage, and....

The things you don't see when you've got a camera

Monday: up early, 7-ish mile hike, plenty of cute wildlife out and about, including li'l spotty fawns.

Tuesday: up kinda-sorta usual time, 5.mumble mile hike, fair amount of cute wildlife, including fawns and chipmunks, plus a bonus Bloody Great Hawk on the ground near the parking lot on my way back.

Today: up kinda late, grab EVIL Black Camera, 5 mile hike while lugging camera with long lens, nary a cute critter to be seen.

Tomorrow... well, I hope to wake up on the early side and get a quick start on the day, allowing at least the 7-mile route for morning walkies, and commencing early enough that the critters won't be already hiding from the sun and crowds.

Well, at least stepping up the morning walkies seems to be having the desired effect on my waistline... leading back to the problem I had years ago, during my backpacking days, that pants that fit around the waist get to be way too tight around the uphill muscles.

AM Kitteh!

Huckleberry's having a nap on my desk.

He just shifted position, and I started hearing AM radio, along with 60 Hz buzz.

I've heard of picking up AM radio on dental fillings, but on a kitten who isn't supposed to have any metal parts?

(He'd kicked the speaker cable, which had thereby attained just that degree of looseness that allows it to act as an antenna, and the speaker system had become a rudimentary radio.)

"That's the second-biggest bumblebee I've seen this week!"

Spotted at a bus stop on my way home from morning walkies: a slightly chubby Sikh wearing a yellow turban and a yellow-and-black-striped T-shirt.

I'm not sure where the week went...

...but somehow it got to be Sunday already.

Making preparations for visiting my parents this afternoon; my father's been doing all the cooking these past many months, and getting tired of it, so I'll be taking dinner: got a chicken in the smoker, bread dough in the works, and corn soaking in slightly salty water in preparation for grilling in the husk.

Inbemongst of that, I'm declaring a Day of Weekend to deal with stuff like installing a new showerhead and assembling the Bixler (now waiting for the glue to set on the GPS module (inside the nose, above the battery) and the aft antenna (just forward of the tail servos), and the Pitot tube is in place (poking through the nose, above the battery, next to the GPS)).  Initial testing will be with the store-boughten radio, which doesn't use any of those amenities, but they'd be hard to add once the fuselage is glued together.  Oh, and I still need to add a pair of little teeny eyes (hardware type), up top, 71mm aft of the leading edge of the wing, for balancing, and mayhap a third somewhere out toward the tail, for hanging from the ceiling.

And, last time I headed out back to tend the smoker, I found Southmoon playing with the Bridgeport.  At least she didn't have it turned on (and she'd also need to turn on the phase converter, which is probably a step too many for a youngster who doesn't even have opposable thumbs).

Downside, upside, all a matter of perspective

Apparently Martian soil has a very high (~ ½%) concentration of perchlorates.

The downside: the dust would be a significant health hazard for Terran settlers.

The upside: it's great fertilizer for stage trees!

...Maybe there used to be a Slaver stage tree farm on Mars...?