Silicon Valley Redneck

Hey, looky: I been productive

Despite difficulties in walking from one room to another and sitting at my workbench, I got in a bit of SMT assembly today:

Lessee now: micro-USB at one end, DE-9P at the other.  Must be a serial-port dongle!

But why, you may ask, did I build my own USB serial port dongle?  And what's with all the extra components?

It's isolated, that's what!  And, yeah, there are isolated RS-232 dongles on the market, but I think this'll be cheaper (after I fix either a footprint or an ordering code, and thus eliminate the labor of converting a wide SO-16 into an SOJ).  Won't have UL certification, and isn't really designed to provide safety isolation, but for eliminating ground loops when connecting to the debug ports of embedded systems it should be just the ticket.

Oh, and: no (0) through-hole components, so no pointy pins protruding from the back of the board on either side of the isolators.

It also has a little brother that skips the RS-232 transceiver, isolated power for the RS-232, and full modem control, and just provides TX, RX, and basic modem control at logic levels, using power from the target system.  I haven't assembled one of those yet.  For the folks using, e.g., Arduinos to control power systems with ill-behaved grounding, it ought to come in handy.

Update: Family photo with baby brother.

I'll entertain the possibility that the production version should use an SMT header.

Ongoing misery

The sciatica continues.

I'm relegating the narcotic painkillers to bedtime use, as they don't seem to have much effect on the pain per se (and if they did, it would maybe enable me to damage myself further without noticing).

The last couple of days, I've been needed at a client site, but unable to venture beyond my front door.

It's also got my metabolism cranked way up, basically burning all available calories; food input produces a spike in heat output.  Body temperature regulation is working fine, but I'm drenched in sweat as I maintain my usual 98.4°F.  Oh, well... I'm not blimping out due to lack of exercise this time.

I sure hope this clears up by Tuesday, so's I can go to the client site where I'm needed, and heroically solve the mysterious problem (which I suspect involves a ground loop, though there appear to be other issues too).

Meanwhile, certain errands have become Urgent, and I'll be needing to stagger forth today, all dosed up on ibuprofen and cyclobenzaprine, to deal with Absolutely Necessary Stuff.

Also: I've been occupying my waking-but-nonfunctional time re-reading the works of Larry Niven, with the result that when I doze off for a moment I typically have a dreamlet that would kinda-sorta make sense in a Known Space context, only it doesn't really make sense even that way.  Kinda puts me in mind of one time in college when I was sick and wasted a block of time by (1) re-reading Childhood's End and (2) listening to Der Ring des Nibelungen straight through; by the end of this, I was in a very peculiar mental state indeed.

W.H. Donovan, Gharlane of Eddore...

Science Has Gone Too Far!

Seems a team of mad scientists in Überwald has created a living human brain in a jar.

Even the Gligstith(click)optok would grow their cultured food headless.

Growing little individual human brains from scratch?

That's... disturbing.  Even if they're not putting little bowls of them out as appetizers.

Obligatory Marx Brothers reference

So, the Ear Leader wants to have another go at this short victorious war thing?  With Syria this time?

Will our rulers at least give us a proper song and dance?

So I went to my regular doctor today...

Revised diagnosis: probably sciatica rather than bursitis.

Which makes sense, given that most of the current symptoms (as opposed to a week ago) seem like pinched-nerve stuff.

It also ties together this episode with the occasional episode of lower-back pain that's somehow tied to the left leg; that sort of thing has been happening an average of maybe once a year, the past decade.

Short-term treatment is the same.  Long term... I'm supposed to be making connections with a physical therapist.  Work on the back, and maybe the problem won't happen again, or as often anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm still in a great deal of pain despite a fresh supply of narcotics.  Also kinda incoherent because of a fresh supply of narcotics (well, that on top of sleep deprivation).

Somehow I missed this one

Seems the Ear Leader thinks a law degree ought to take two years, not three.

Because, clearly, the biggest problem facing this country today is a scarcity of newly-minted, ⅔-educated lawyers.

Now I know how Barney felt...

...after he stepped in the puddle of Dehominant B.

While the actual bursitis seems to have subsided, I now have more or less nonstop muscle spasms in the left thigh.  Back in '10, when the doctor told me to rest and gobble ibuprofen, I also talked him into prescribing a muscle relaxant... which I've since used up, so there's none on hand now.

Having neither atropine nor 2-pyridine aldoxime methiodide available (besides which, I don't think I've been exposed to any topical cholinesterase inhibitors, so neither of those would really be appropriate), I guess it's time to go see the doctor... presumably Monday.

Getting from the parking lot to the check-in desk to the second check-in desk to the examining room to the pharmacy promises to be a new adventure in pain.

Meanwhile, I have it on good authority* that beer is a muscle relaxant.  Not that I keep beer around (rotten grain and herbs, yuck).

Update: Just got off the phone with Kaiser; I should be able to get my hands on some cyclobenzaprine by lunchtime, hurray!

Update 2: Got the cyclobenzaprine (100 tablets!  I should have plenty left for next time!) about noon; took one immediately.  Felt much better until late afternoon, when spasms returned.  Took another at early bedtime; slept for a while, then woke up just after midnight with, again, leg spasms.  Directions say "3 times a day", but the effect only lasts about 4 hours.  Supposed to be seeing my regular doctor this morning....

 

* Ford Prefect, of course.

Well, that's one side of it.

McMegan suggests that ARMs, after accelerating the up-side of the housing bubble, have slowed the down-side.

Makes sense.

Thing is, though:

On a more theoretical level, this suggests that ARMs will magnify the effect of monetary policy, while fixed-rate mortgages blunt it. In a land of ARMs, every decrease in the interest rate translates into money in the pocket of the average homeowner, and a lower risk of default for banks.

Now consider the flip side.  In a land of outsized ARMs, any increase in mortgage interest rates triggers a new wave of defaults.

This gives us two compelling reasons that the Fed must continue its negative-real-interest policy for preferred debt (home mortgages and government bonds) forever, flooding the markets with funny money and keeping returns on private capital appallingly low.  Absent ARMs, and the risk of foreclosures and bank failures, only the government-borrowing reason would apply.

(And, yes, the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage probably doesn't make a lot of sense either, but having gotten established as the standard, it drove up prices in its own way, making it mandatory.  Had society standardized on, say, a 7-year fixed-rate new-home loan, I expect prices would have risen more slowly during the pre-ARM era.)

See? Nothing's safe!

Once again, the Sun is flinging energetic particles in our direction.  It just keeps doing that, doesn't it?

As with any nuclear power source, the Sun is dangerous.  Big radiation leaks like this get all the attention, but just stepping outdoors on an ordinary day will get you a dose of deadly solar radiation which increases your risk of cancer.

We should reject dangerous solar power, and rely instead on gentle, safe lunar power.

Improvement!

Well, the bursitis seems to be subsiding... the discomfort is now dominated by lingering side effects, such as sore muscles from the days of spasms.

I did a little bit of walking this morning, as needed for a few important errands, with no obvious ill effects.

 

On the way home, I noticed that an exterior panel had been removed from the Blue Cube, which apparently has been closed for some time and is now being disassembled.  I hadn't seen anything about this in the news, though I had noticed the removal of the big dishes (which could just mean that they'd dropped their subscription to the Centauri Channel or something).

I suppose it'll be replaced by a Glass Cube.  Sorry: first a special EPA remediation site, as with any other retired government facility.  Then a Glass Cube.

Wrong universe?

So I followed a link from Slashdot to something randomly geeky: signs of ambitious employees, with Trekkie examples.

There's this:

It’s the Star Trek equivalent of an ensign in Communications taking it upon herself to learn to speak Kzinti.

This, according to TFA, is a sign that someone is striving to become more valuable to the company.

I submit that learning Kzinti, in a Star Trek context, is a sure sign that you're in the cartoon series.  Look around you.  Is everything suspiciously pink?  Cartoon series, for sure.

In any of the canonical series, learning Kzinti would be more along the lines of an our-world employee studying a language mentioned in a novel that doesn't even exist in our universe.  This involves great effort and adds no value as far as the company is concerned, unless there's a plan to cross over the the universe in which the novel in question exists, and have some dealings with the fan club.

Progress, maybe. A little.

Well, I got one little project delivered yesterday... basically a half-day project that took a week, only a half-day of which was billable (much of the remainder having been spent out on the porch with some light reading).

There's a bunch more work in the queue, a fair amount of it increasingly urgent, but what with the bursitis still being in full swing and most of the high-priority work requiring workbench time and lots of moving around, I don't think I'll get much of it done in the next few days.

So: time to dust off a non-revenue project on which one of the behind-schedule revenue projects depends: a sort of fieldbus protocol for AGROS, initially using UART/RS-485 as the bottom layers.  I just need maybe half an hour of workbench time to hook up two boards and a USB dongle, after which I can be productive from the comfy chair at my desk.

Additional workbench time this morning: installing four little SMT trimpots, and taking a few measurements of mechanical doohickies that should fit together exactly but don't, quite.

Grrr.

Looks like my Subversion working copy of an important project has Gone Funny, somehow.

The repository is fine, as far as I can tell.  I can browse it with kdesvn, and nothing untoward happens.

If I try to view the status of one particular subdirectory in kdesvn, it hangs, waiting on non-interruptible I/O that never completes, so the only way to make kdesvn go away is to reboot.

If I point a shell at the root of the working copy and do "svn status", it looks reasonable.  If I've just crashed kdesvn, I may need to do "svn cleanup", which appears to complete OK.

If I do "svn commit" and fill in the comment, I get this:

Sending        Documents/Thing1/thing1-function-and-firmware.docx
Adding  (bin)  Documents/Thing2/field-reprogramming.odt
Adding         firmware/Thing2/Thing2-2013aug19.hex
Sending        firmware/Thing2/Makefile
Transmitting file data .

(Names changed just in case they might reveal anything.)

And I wait, and wait... what I've found on the Internets suggests that, eventually, it'll either complete or give an error message... for sufficiently hour-ish values of eventually.  It's been a bit over half an hour so far.

Update: a few hours later, still no go.  Narrowing it down: the problem has to be with either the new hex file or the Makefile.  The Makefile is open in jedit, but so's everything else.  The hex file is...

...wait a minute...

...is open for reading by a Windows program - a flash programming utility.  Which, despite (or due to?) keeping the file open, is noted for refusing to believe that another program could have been writing new versions (so it's actually necessary, if the hex file has been rebuilt, to select a different file, then re-select the updated one; merely exiting and restarting the program won't necessarily work).  Typical egocentric Windows program.

Anyway, terminating the Windows flash-programming program releases the SAMBA lock, which I guess allows Subversion to lock the file over NFS and complete the commit.

Giants in the playground

There's a happy-happy article in the morning Murky about how the huge gleaming new office buildings in Silicon Valley are being snapped up by the megacorps.

And there's a reassuring note that at least some of the megacorps claim to be expanding into the new buildings, not moving into them....

...But.  The thing about migrating megacorps is that, when they decide they don't really need all that space, and end up vacating the old undersized campus after all... what they leave behind is only usable by a slightly smaller megacorp.  When a tycoon gets tired of his Lamborghini, some up-and-coming young whippersnapper could use it just as well, but when a company tires of its several-million-square-foot office complex, how long will it stand empty before a remotely plausible buyer comes along?

Bulldoze the little business parks and low-rise office buildings to make way for the giants, and the migratory giants leave only second-hand giant habitat in their wake; the ecosystem for growing businesses is gone.

Business idea

Tour the Mediterranean by trireme!

(And get plenty strong and healthy on your vacation!)

Unthinkable!

Angelo Codevilla makes the preposterous suggestion that, instead of using our drones to pick off random alleged terrorists based on unreliable intelligence, we should use them to threaten the territorial strongmen into suppressing anti-US terrorist activity.

But... but... droning the strongman would be regicide!  It goes against the fundamental basis of international law and the Westphalian world order!

Next thing you know, he'll be suggesting the the President and the Tsar resolve their latest pissing match personally, with sabers, instead of by proxy, with cannon fodder.

1. The U. S. Senate never actually ratified the Treaty of Westphalia, did it?  So, like, we're not technically a party to it?
2. But what, you ask, of Uncle Ronnie's attempted bombing of Qaddafi?  Wrong kind of question!  That was an attack on Qaddafi's fembot squad, and Q himself was merely potential collateral damage.  And arresting Noriega in his own country was a totally legitimate exercise of ordinary police powers.
   
3. Now I'm having an idea for a world-building exercise: suppose treaties were negotiated by military diplomats instead of royal diplomats, and signed by generals instead of kings?
   

Another of those character-alignment tests

I always fall in a blurry zone involving lawful good and true neutral (possibly reflecting my Jewish and Viking sides).  This one, via Random Nuclear Strikes, gives these results:

I Am A: True Neutral Human Ranger (6th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-14
Constitution-10
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-8
Charisma-14

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter's dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Structural problem, structural solution

Jeffrey Dorfman explains a basic incentive problem in the mortgage business, and how it could be addressed through a system of deferred incentive payments.

Reminds me of an idea I had several years ago.  A friend had a fairly new car: still under warranty.  It was on its third transmission, under warranty.  I presume the executive in charge of that model had collected big bonuses based on initial profits, when the cars sold... regardless of the eventual losses to the company (and thus its shareholders) during the warranty period.  Idea: why not have the bulk of the bonus paid when the warranty expires, rather than when the car sells?  Might encourage more attention to quality, and better long-term profitability.

Pondering the predicament of others

So here I have this temporarily debilitating condition... if rest, ice, and OTC pills don't clear it up in a few weeks, there's the (eek!) surgical option.

The pain, when I try to move around to get to places where work is to be done (such as the next room; forget about the consulting-company lab) is such that by the time I get there I can't actually accomplish anything.

But, it's temporary.  Last time, it lasted about a month.  This time, I'm taking more care not to aggravate it... maybe it won't last as long.

There's a nontrivial percentage of the population with chronic pain, as bad as mine or worse, forever.  In order to be even remotely functional, these people need serious pain meds.

But!  We can't have them becoming dependent on those meds, can we?  Oh, no indeedy!  That would be as bad as letting terminal cancer patients have heroin, and perhaps become addicted in their final weeks of life!  We need ever-stricter laws on the dispensing of effective pain medication to protect these people from themselves.

And just what is the constitutional justification for the Harrison Act, anyway?

Helpful hint

If you're having aches & pains in the upper-leg area...

...and using one of those methyl salicylate / menthol pain-relieving goober-on preparations...

...be careful when applying it in the groinal region.  Certain bits in that area are highly sensitive to such chemicals.