Silicon Valley Redneck

Sometimes, elegance doesn't get the job done

So here I am working in Ruby again....

The object system works fine for the things I'd wanted to do up to this point.  And, unlike the other object systems I'd encountered, it actually makes sense to me.

But now there's an interesting situation, which surely isn't all that uncommon:

I'm presented with an array of bytes, purported to be a received communication packet.

A few of the bytes have constant meanings: the outermost wrapper.

Within that wrapper are more bytes, which have various meanings depending on the value of the format byte in the outer wrapper.  Typically, this will be another wrapper around an actual payload-data field.

The obvious thing to do with this is to have a high-level class that has the basics (information represented by the outer wrapper), and various subclasses to represent the different formats.

So... what I intuitively want to do is to pass the input array to the constructor for the most abstract class, and have it morph into the appropriate subclass based on the format byte, chaining the constructor for the subclass.

Alas, this is exactly backwards to the way instantiation works in Ruby.  So far as I've found so far, I need to identify the subclass in advance, and instantiate that, leading to the invocation of the superclass constructor.

Hm.  Well... I guess what I could do is to add a class method to the top-level class, so the user would call, say, FiddlyMessage.from_buffer(input_buffer), and that would find the format byte in the buffer and invoke the appropriate FiddlyMessageSubclass.new(input_buffer) to get the actual work done.

Still utterly missing the point

From here:

I continue to believe, and [I am] absolutely convinced, that at the end of the day, people are going to look back at the work we’ve done to make sure that in this country you don’t go bankrupt when you get sick, that families have that security,” Obama said. “That is going be a legacy I am extraordinarily proud of.”

Uh, right.  Except:

1. The insane premiums resulting from mandatory participation in the crooked system (plus the coverage mandates and other misfeatures that raise prices still further) mean a lot of families, if they actually sign up and pay the premiums, will have trouble eating.
2. Obamacare fails in any way to address the real illness-to-bankruptcy path, which runs via loss of income.
3. By the way: if you get sick and lose your income?  Guess what else you lose if you can't keep up the premiums.

The happy-shiny is all image, so the ruling class can feel good about itself.  The reality is that, once again, the working class gets the short end of the stick.  And, if you get seriously sick and don't have a large cash reserve (and good luck building one while paying big bucks for your health-plan premiums), you'll end up bankrupt.

Appallingly shallow...

... while at the same time probably not being shallow enough.

A Slashdot item links to this bit about the proposed use of artificial intelligence to judge reciprocal attractiveness in the context of computer dating services (as I so quaintly call them).

(A quick scan of the paper suggests that it's really using social networking as input, so the summary-of-a-summary at Slashdot suggested human-level shallowness that's maybe not there.)

But, if you're looking for hard-core attractiveness?  Especially, whether a woman will be sexually attracted to a man?  You're not going to find that in a dating profile nor a social network.  You need pheromone samples.

But, I hear you say, only animals have pheromones!  That doesn't apply to humans!

OK, so call it something else, then.  And yet: smell plays a huge role in human mating, and it's not the one the perfume companies like to push.  As fictionally noted in That-Idiot-Ivan's Alliance, it's how women identify prospective mates with complementary immune systems.  (That's one notion, anyway.  May or may not be right, but it seems to match the facts at hand.)

Evolution: it just keeps happening.  Its mechanisms are subtle, and you never really evolve beyond them, even if your grandma was a genetically-engineered transhuman.

(And, just to complicate matters, a woman's taste in men's pheromones is inverted when she's pregnant or on the Pill.  So there may be two questions: "Would she go for you now?" and "Would she go for you if she were/weren't on the Pill?")

Further: Be sure your proteins get along before you get too close.

Failure to grok the scale of the problem...

... and its nature, for that matter.

From this article:

He cites the movie Apollo 13. When it looks like the ship is going down, and someone says that this could be “the worst disaster NASA has ever experienced,” Ed Harris’s character says, “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” This, he says, is the Obama administration’s bunker-mentality.

The quoted Obamacare "navigator" is missing an important difference, here.

The Apollo 13 emergency was purely a technical problem.  The equipment had malfunctioned, and a technical solution was needed.  It was only difficult and dramatic because the failure happened in an inaccessible location, and people's lives depended on coming up with a workable solution in a hurry, with materials available on site.

So, think of it being on the scale (and nature) of just one of those "glitches" with the website.

In the case of Obamacare, there are many visible technical problems, which are almost certainly masking further technical problems which lurk deeper in the website and its back-end.

Worse, though, is the vast and tangled web of social problems involved in implementing the greatest tax-farming scheme in human history.  As noted in the article: people who have actually "found out what's in it" just aren't biting.  And that's on the demand side; on the supply side, we have yet to see how many doctors will settle for Obamacaid payment schedules.

It's a fine example of the conceit of central planners, and the ITCPAMOTM fallacy: "If They (i.e., a team of actual rocket scientists) Can Put A Man On The Moon, then... well, surely We (i.e., a self-selected group of liberal-arts majors who keep telling each other how smart we are) Can [fill in the blank with a vastly larger, more complex, and more expensive task requiring dictatorial powers and whose failure risks the lives of tens of millions of people and not just three].

Putting a man on the Moon was an expensive exercise in known physics and advanced engineering, and the only lives risked were those of volunteers.  Exercises in central economic planning are different in kind, and risk the lives of the unwilling public.

Happy Dark-Gray Thursday!

That's today's new name, right?  The shopping day that comes before Black Friday?

Anyway: have fun storming the mall, guys.  I'll be at home morning and evening (working at least part of that time, alas), and out to dinner with my parents and their neighbors this afternoon.  Tomorrow and the weekend, mostly work, hardly any play.

Sometimes things suddenly make sense.

I'd mentioned drooling over Appalachian real-estate listings, right?

One of the particularly droolworthy properties I've got bookmarked features a rather sensible brick house situated right near the highest point for miles... so, drainage ought not to be a problem.  It's mostly surrounded by trees, but the trees are carefully more than a tree-height from the buildings, so not much risk of roof damage.  In general: I Like How This Guy Thinks.

One oddity, though: there's no back porch for gazing out across the fields.  Instead, the house is built just a little to the roadward side of the high spot, dug into the... well, "hillside" would be rather a strong term... anyway, dug into the high spot, with the roof sort of peeking up above the top of the rise.

Well, this morning's weather report brings a picture of a huge blue-white arrow sweeping down out of Canada and across central-to-eastern Tennessee... where, on this property, it'd sweep across the hayfield, be attenuated by the trees, come up the side of the little rise... and miss the actual house almost completely.

So, y'know, maybe the guy who designed it that way had a good reason for it.

OK, so now I've seen...

...Two and a Half Doctors, or whatever.  Short Night, and Long Day, of the Doctor.  Words to that effect.

And now there's another un-numbered Doctor, this one between the Eighth and Ninth.  This in addition to the second First, who apparently existed in parallel to the canonical First.

And that superweapon whose operating system attained consciousness?  I was expecting Rose to say, "False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore, I shall refuse to perceive you."

Anyway, now we know how Gallifrey ended up wrapped up in its little time bubble, whence Rassilon expects the Master to retrieve it... or was that a different time bubble?  This is all so confusing!  With the Universe having been rebooted at least once, and clearly not being the one We the Viewers inhabit, it's hard to keep the story lines straight.

Um.  And those leftover Daleks, not destroyed in the Time War.  Did they survive the War Doctor's destruction of Gallifrey, or did they survive the Great Circular Firing Squad after Gallifrey wasn't destroyed after all?

Afterthought: Is it just my imagination, or was Clara wearing a wedding ring?  If she was, when will she tell her tin dog husband about her little hobby?

And furthermore: there's yet another Doctor, the Alternate-Universe Fourth, who lived to retire instead of regenerating.  (Maybe that's a better universe.  I never was a big fan of the Fifth Doctor, nor many of his successors for that matter.)

The ACLU needs to rethink its fundraising

Not only do they not get any money from me because, as I said right at the beginning of the call, I don't have any money to spare at this point....

Their fundraiser went right ahead and pissed me off by reciting the stock litany of Democrat gripes about the silly little crap* the "extremists" are forever trying to pull in Republican states (plus the over-the-top Democrat panic over arguably legitimate measures such as voter ID laws)...

...while totally ignoring the massive attacks on civil liberties being perpetrated by the crooks in power in, e.g, D.C. and Sacramento.

OK, guys.  If you want to be a narrowly partisan organization, go right ahead.  But you'll go without me.

 

* Like, oh, trying to impose Swedish-style restrictions on abortion.

A most curious omission

What with the JFK assassination 50th anniversary coming up, Althouse offers rules for stories about the occasion, and links to Wikipedia's list of conspiracy theories on the topic.

Which list, somehow, omits the authoritative one (video here, at the moment).

Update: Schizmatic mentions the "Kennedy shot himself" theory, without reference to Red Dwarf.  (Oswald was Red, of course, but not a Dwarf, unless he had height-extension surgery and shaved his beard.)

Further update: And speaking of time travel, look what happened the very next day!

Surprise!

In an utterly astounding revelation, it turns out that modern humanity's ancestry is not pure Cro-Magnon, and that our forebears* were in the habit of fooling around with Other Breeds.

Ya think?

The interesting aspect here is that such matings seems to have been common and produced viable offspring (so, not properly rishathra).

This blurs yet further the concept of "species."  If they can, and routinely do, interbreed...?

And if Those People are properly classified as Homo sapiens, then what's the big deal, anyway?

 

* Well, three of them, anyway.

I probably want the second edition of this

Cool!  Via El Reg: a buncha Aussies is working on a conductive-ink PCB printer, the EX¹.

One of their maybe-when-we-get-ambitious goals is double-sided printing, with a camera for alignment... but...

A less-ambitious goal is a non-conductive ink cartridge for silkscreen.  And: the FAQ says they're working on multilayer.

Why double-sided, anyway? With additive manufacturing, why not include a (high-capacity) insulating ink cartridge for soldermask and insulating layers (maybe in addition to the different-colored one for silkscreen), and do multiwire?

Multiwire wouldn't be good for RF, absent some way of controlling impedances (which could, I suppose, be arranged, even to the extent of printing coaxial cables), nor would it match the characteristics of normal production boards, but 'twould allow quick few-offs of insanely complex designs.

Truly epic incompitude.

Patterico has also picked up the story about the Obamacare website's back end being only about half-baked (60% done, 60% not done yet... not that much difference).

Not even the payment system?  Not coded yet?

Why am I not surprised?

After all, the front end - the part the end-users see - is the easy part.  A reasonably competent web-development team - say, three good developers and a manager - could have done the job, and done it well, in a couple of months, given a coherent spec to start with.  Heck, I could have done it in a single-digit number of months, and I'm not even a web developer!

And yet: after three years, the front end code was far from ready for prime time.  It didn't work.

Lurking behind the easy front-end code is the far more complicated back end, which deals with all the various, incompatible, fiddly databases, looks up your premium, calculates your subsidy, runs your application past the Department of Homeland Security, takes your money, and sends everything off to the third-party payment company of your choice.  Basically the stuff ehealthinsurance.com has been doing for a while, plus the incredible extra complexity of dealing with the government bureaucracy and the subsidy system.

And, unsurprisingly given the state of the front end, this part turns out to be about half written.  Tested?  Working?  What do those mean?

The really big complexity, of course, is the actual operation of the third-party payment system, and its interaction with the vast chaotic system that is the American Public.

Those of use who've been paying attention have been expecting, all along, the third part of the system to fail... but I, for one, was expecting the death spiral to start around the middle of next year (moved up from my earlier prediction of 2016-ish, once I saw what the premiums were going to look like) and proceed gradually, with things falling apart over a period of a few years.  Now, with even the easy stuff not working, the premiums turning out to be even more out of line with what ordinary people can afford, the coverage on offer being largely substandard, and the cancellation notices going out?  Dead and rotted by New Year's.

And meanwhile we have even more laws and regulations getting in the way of real reform.  Progress!

Addendum: and what's with "getting the system working for 80% of the users" or whatever the latest promise is?  Where I come from, that's called "zero-nines reliability," or, more commonly, "Does.  Not.  Work."

Please tell me Patterico is off his meds.

Because if he isn't... well.

Behold a tale straight out of tin-foil-hat territory, with four dead bodies (known, so far), government snoopery, high-risk raids in response to accusations (subsequently found to have been false) of minor skulduggery, and... oh, go read the whole thing.

This is just so implausible, right?  Our government, here, in the good old U. S. of A., would never do such things.

Or, rather: it's implausible unless you've been paying attention to the news the past few decades.  If you have been paying attention?  Alas, not that much of a stretch.

Losing the mission

From the latest at TSM, taken in turn from a comment there:

Coming off my yearly engagement with the think tanks, I've heard, for the first time, a series of data points coming from hospital CEOs that add up to one thing: the admission that exercising a hospital's primary function is no longer a source of value and revenue, it is viewed as entirely cost, risk, and liability. Consequently, they are no longer building any capacity, and are in fact looking for ways to reduce their capacity and eliminate hospital beds.

This is what happens when a business is run by the bean counters... which happens when it's big, or when it's publicly traded.

I've seen it many times in the high-tech area: under current accounting rules, R&D is pure expense.  You can't go investing in the company's future by developing the next innovative product, because that's classified as spending the shareholders' money to no good purpose.

Which is why established companies can only create ever-shinier cosmetic variations on the old product line, and replace R&D with M&A: to get a novel product, wait until some little startup company develops it, then buy the company.

Oh, and little things like manufacturing test are also classified as expenses.  Quality: we've heard of it, but have no budget for it.

All of which calls for a lengthy rant, but it's Monday morning and I'm already running late.

Dystopian dreaming

Just woke up from a pe-cul-i-ar dream...

Seems I'd done a Rip van Winkle, or a Philip J. Fry, or maybe just spent many years Elsewhere and out of touch before returning little aged since Now.

In any event, I'd returned to the Bay Area, sort of discreetly, and was trying to get oriented and link up with some familiar people, to which end I took a seat at the back of a classroom, which was supposed to be an intermediate step toward meeting up with my actual contacts.

Shortly the Sheriff came in - not the current Sheriff hereabouts, but a sixtyish specimen from Central Casting - and started grabbing people who'd been at someplace I'd never heard of.  A recent company, perhaps?  My cluelessness got me skipped over, for the moment.  He ended up leaving with nearly half the class, at which point most of the remainder self-organized and departed as a group.

Seems (1) the place he'd been asking about was the site of a famous recent battle, (2) the Boer War was on again, (3) the Sheriff was grabbing recruits for the Boer side, and (4) the other group was off to fight against the Boers.

There was also something about clandestine, subterranean, hydroponic coffee farms in the Santa Cruz Mountains (which is how I know all this was set in the Bay Area).

If any of this makes sense to you, please contact the Bureau of Mental Hygeine immediately.

IMAP pests

The past week so so, I've been seeing a lot of inappropriate activity on my IMAP server: attempted logins using nonexistent usernames, coming from a variety of IP addresses but claiming to be from 192.168.2.33 (which, ha ha, doesn't match my internal network, so there).

Just a short burst from any given real IP address, so I can't just add a firewall rule to make it go away.

I'm guessing it's spammers, trying to find valid username/password combinations on mail servers, for future use as spam relays.  Or... just trying to find login credentials in general?

Seems other people were seeing the same thing a year ago.

Beyond spin, and well into twirl

According to this in the NYT:

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law....

Hello?  Until a couple of weeks ago, 'twere Obama who refused to consider legislative fixes that might involve Republicans.  True, when the Republicans were trying to delay the individual mandate through legislation (y'know, legally), they were really bent on killing the whole thing... but now that Obama is proposing to delay it by executive fiat (i.e., illegally), suddenly Republican opposition to changing the law is the problem?

Windows remains unhousebroken.

That new (well, refurbished) lab machine I bought a while back, with Windows 7 on it?

I left a program running on it overnight, talking to the hardware on my workbench.

Windows rebooted sometime during the night, on account of having installed updates.

It didn't bother to ask permission.  It just rebooted.

Fortunately, it wasn't doing any important long-term data collection, just continuing to exercise a communication channel.

Using Windows for anything mission-critical?  Bad idea.

Wait, what movie is this?

Seems the fabled "Internet Kill Switch" is officially known as "Standard Operating Procedure 303."

Is that anything like Rule 303?

Science fail

The Chive has a list of Other Uses For Beer.

The compass one?  Totally bogus.  Putting a static charge on a needle won't magnetize it.  Also, needles that will float on beer are few and far between.  A cork is called for, which suggests that wine is more appropriate than beer (and you don't have to wait for it to go flat).

Also, they left out rocket propellant.