Silicon Valley Redneck

Beyond autoplay

Just followed a link to ABC News.

Not only did the video at the top start playing unbidden, but the "pause" button didn't work.

Furthermore, when the short clip was done, it automatically started playing the next clip, which couldn't be stopped either.

I didn't get very far reading the article.  This stuff is annoying.  And ABC News is now on my "avoid visiting" list.

Hoo boy!

Work (play?) accident:

Lighter fluid and a charred pillow and mattress were found inside the apartment, along with the Molotov cocktail and several plastic bottles filled with gasoline and kerosene.

Hey, kid?  History lesson.  In Molotov's day, bottles weren't made of plastic.

Basic distinction:

• Glass bottles shatter on impact.
• Plastic bottles melt on ignition.

Via Insty.

Musta had too much sugar yesterday

Restless night, tossing and turning, with strange dreams, only one of which I can recall at all....

It involved a series of YouTube vids.  The latest celebrity endorsements of Obamacare.  By Daleks.  Get cov-ered!  Get cov-ered!  GET COV-ERED!

Well, I assume they would have been saying that.  I only saw the first few seconds of one vid, and I could just make out Daleks in the fog; they hadn't started talking yet.

Daleks, though.  Seems like a funny endorsement.  Wouldn't Cybermen be more likely?  Unless of course the whole thing is some sort of sneaky plan to ex-term-in-ate hu-man-i-ty, in which case it sounds more like one of the Master's tricks.

In any case, you can't keep your Doctor, and chances are he'll be retiring soon.

Unreliable sources

In among a post on Internet dirty tricks, governmental and otherwise, Patterico reminds us of some of Glenn Greenwald's past flakiness.

And, at first glance, Edward Snowden is the very epitome of an Unreliable Source.

Which should serve as a reminder.  If these guys were peddling a bunch of easily-forged, word-processed purportedly-secret documents?  No one would take them seriously, apart from a few tinfoil-behatted cranks.

Except that our government reacted in a way that confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents.

If the government had ignored the whole thing, apart from blowing raspberries and making cuckoo gestures?  They'd have had a hard time peddling their papers.

All the bridges rusting

Got a fiddly problem, on an old project.

The correct solution... well, the really correct solution involves understanding somebody else's software, which isn't really an option in this case.  The nearly-correct solution uses a small PLD... something along the lines of a PAL16V8.

O-kaaay.  SPLDs are still around. But!  I need to program it.  I have (but have never used) WinCUPL.  (Last time I used a PAL, I used ABEL.  Am I dating myself?)  And: the chip'll need programming, which (for these little devices) doesn't happen over JTAG; they need a special programmer.

Somewhere in my lab, I have... yes!  A Xeltek SuperPro Z!  Like this!  Hm.  Needs a Windows machine with a parallel port.  And:

Warning: SuperPro Z will only work on Pentium III 1.1 Ghz. or slower computers. It may create communication problems on new PCs. Please purchase accordingly!

Um.  It needs an old Windows machine with a parallel port.

Or I could blow $500 on the new model.  Or use a fancy-schmancy modern CPLD that gets programmed over JTAG.  (Paying an extra $3 for the chip is no big deal, for a production volume of 5 pieces, tops.)  But... this needs 5V-tolerant inputs, which limits the choices.  Still, plausible.

Or, I can use an AVR, program it to handle the lame transfer function, and figure out how to deal with the startup condition: those milliseconds after power-up when the MCU hasn't actually started running yet.

I think this ends up as an AVR-as-logic-replacement situation.  I've got all the development tools, and know how to use them, and the chips will happily run on poorly-regulated 5V.

Or, just maybe, I might use a pair of HCT logic chips and some resistors.  But that takes more board space than the AVR, lacks flexibility, and probably costs more.

 

(Bonus geekpoints for recognizing the title.)

Overheard in a bank

Customer ahead of me is preparing for an IRS audit.

Seems he'd gotten, basically, a form letter.  No sign that whoever prepared the you-are-being-audited letter had actually read his return or anything.  He thought it was a hoax, at first, but confirmed that it had in fact come from the IRS.

Suspicion is that the IRS has gone on a hiring spree, and is turning untrained people loose to troll for revenue.

Your tax dollars at play!

Must be a heck of a winter...

...in lovely Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.

This is the second time in a few weeks that I've ordered stuff from Digi-Key and it didn't ship by the next business day.  (This time: ordered Sunday, got acknowledgement e-mail, but Monday came and went and there's no shipping notice yet.)

Update: shipped Tuesday, arrived Saturday.  Seems the USPS was having a slow time too.

Oh, noes! Wetherz!

Over at Slate: the impending SoCal weather apocalypse!

In which this:

There could be some waterspouts or weak tornadoes over coastal areas on Friday into Saturday.

is amplified into:

Yep, full-out tornadoes in Los Angeles (minus the sharks, of course). They aren’t unprecedented: On March 1, 1983, one hit the convention center, injuring about 30 people.

Yeah, "weak tornadoes" = "full-out tornadoes."  Little whirlywinds that break a few trees are just the same as the monsters that tear up entire towns.  Because name.

And SoCal doesn't deal with them well.  That outbreak in '83?  The timing is about right... while I was at UCSD, there was a tornado alert.  The school was closed, and evacuated... so, instead of sitting around in a big sturdy concrete building, I had to go stand around in the open and wait for a bus.  In a torrential downpour.  With a tornado warning.  Brilliant!

A warped barrel is a fool's frustration

With regard to a DIY Krummlauf, Pinky asks: "How illegal is this?"

Wrong question, dude.  You're in California.  The question is: "A wacky cartoon gun having been shown on TV, how long until there's a new law against it?"

And then... Vera needs oxygen around her?  Naw.  Results as expected.  But they left out a possibility: depending how the gun is lubricated, what various parts are made of, and how long it's left in vacuum, it might just seize up.

This epically stupid idea went to market...

Kyle Mizokami explains some of the dumbness of a spiffy new smart gun.

But there's another thing....

See, the gun is meant to be enabled by a special watch.  Mizokami notes:

There’s another issue unique to the smart gun. It’s practically begging for hackers to attack it. Armatrix claims its system is encrypted. That doesn’t mean that someone can’t hack your firearm—it just means it won’t be easy.

And how would you know if your gun had been hacked? You wouldn’t—until you drew the weapon for self-defense and it failed to work.

Actually, disabling it doesn't require hacking.  Just jamming.  Interfere with the radio link between watch and gun, and the gun becomes useless.  And, a radio link with a 10-inch range?  Can't be using much power, so it doesn't take much power to prevent it working.

Further thoughts on that programmable instrument

The secret-for-now gadget, with the USB and Ethernet ports...?

General plan calls for having an app that runs on the PC, maybe written in Ruby with a Qt-based GUI.  Or, maybe, it's an occasion to learn some practical subset of C++, and still use Qt.

But, for futures... I took a look at "what's a cheap PC-type thing."  Netbooks are out.  New thing is Chromebooks.  Cheap.  And... well, I dunno how you'd go about installing furrin applications on one of those, but an idea comes to mind.

I probably ought to recycle the web interface from one of the mil-gadgets from a couple of years back.  Used AJAS (Asynchronous Javascript And SCPI) to do a pretty basic GUI.  If I can insist on a modern browser, there's no reason I couldn't do up a nice instrument front panel in HTML5, still using the SCPI port to communicate with the instrument, right?

Except that what led to this train of thought was a notion for beta-testing the gadget, and maybe shipping a cheap netbook with the software pre-installed, to save trouble.  And the beta-test site that comes to mind is under pretty tight security, and I dunno how they'd like having a Chromebook in their lab, busily trying to talk to The Cloud.

Oh, well: refurbished laptops can probably be had cheap.  Have a quick look at Newegg: yeah.  Many refurbs with plenty of capability (for this sort of thing) in the under-$200 category.  So, if I want to ship it with the software installed, a refurb laptop is probably the way to go.

The super-deluxe model could maybe come with a built-in RasPi and monitor or something.  (Yes, you can run Ruby+Qt apps on the RasPi.  Performance isn't wonderful, but it does work.)

Negative knowledge

The Adaptive Curmudgeon describes one form of it: the fluff that dominates "news" reporting.  May or may not be factually correct, but it's of no consequence, and it crowds out the important stuff.

You get the same thing in your local big-syndicate-owned newspaper, on network TV, or on, e.g., Yahoo! Finance!

Now here's Bill Maher, complaining about Facebook's new news-feed thingy:

‘Paper’ tracks the news you’re interested in and gives you more of that and less of everything else, never burdening you with contradictory information or telling you anything new. That’s what makes it ‘news.’ But only seeing the stuff that already confirms the opinions you already have isn’t news — it’s Fox News.

Always with the complaints about Fox News!  Just because it doesn't exactly match the lockstep biases of NBABCNNBS.

And, if you rely on Respected News Sources?  You're getting real negative information, in multiple forms.

First off, today's real professional journalists professionally know nothing.  About everything.  So they have no way of applying reality filters to reports.

Seriously: take any news story about a subject of which you have personal knowledge, and do a reality check.  Completely wrong from beginning to end, no?

Secondly, there's a large institutional bias, with a truly massive echo-chamber effect.  So, in additional to not being filtered by knowledge of reality, stories are filtered by strongly shared political bias.

Thirdly*, the reader or viewer is not the customer, and meaningful information is not the product.  Mainstream "news" exists to sell eyeballs to advertisers, with a secondary purpose of advancing the political views of the writers and publishers.  Ergo, sensationalism reigns.  Stories about the sky not falling are of no interest.

If you follow the mainstream coverage of any substantive subject of which you had no knowledge to begin with... you'll actually finish knowing less than nothing about what's really going on.  And with negative perspective, too.

There were 1027 abductions of children under age 26 in this state last year!  One victim was a cute middle-class blonde snatched by a stranger!  Here's her story, 1027 times!  Ignore the fact that 1019 of the abductions were custody disputes, and three were probably runaways!  Your cute middle-class children are in danger!

 

* "Or C-dly" -- Bullwinkle J. Moose

Limitations

Got an unscheduled requirement....

When I designed another of my little embedded-controller boards last year, I was assured that there was only one pulse-train input to be monitored, and that checking the frequency, pulse width, and duty cycle of another signal would be the responsibility of another board in the system.

You know what comes next, right?

Yup.  Many moons later, my board not including an FPGA for handling high-speed measurements, and it turns out that the other board isn't quite up to the task.

So... gotta do some cutting & patching to reroute an unused input to a pair of the LPC2387's pulse-capture inputs.  The only ones available are on Timer 0, which means I can't just take control of the raw hardware: it's used by the system timer.

First off, let's try the naïve approach!  AGROS has a pulse-capture handler.  Configure one input for interval, and the other for pulse width, and code up simple event handlers to be called on each pulse.

Turns out there are Issues with pulse widths less than about 15 μs, but (assuming reasonably constant pulse trains) there's an easy workaround.  That being fixed, all's well until the pulse rate gets a bit north of 30 KHz, and then everything falls apart.

Well... the event-capture system was designed for convenience, and for pulse rates of a few hundred Hz or so: think RC servo inputs, tachometers, and the like.  On each timer event, we have the interrupt, basic processing, then event dispatching (allocate memory, fill in event structure, search system table for any handlers claiming events of this type, call the handler(s), free memory, exit through the scheduler).  That we can't do this much more than 60,000 times per second on a 72 MHz processor, while still doing useful work and occasionally running the low-priority task that feeds the watchdog timer?  Not surprising.

But, 30 KHz is rather less than the frequency range of interest, so now I need to come up with a fix that bypasses the lovely shiny event-handling system, and just handles the interrupts locally.  Eminently do-able, I think, but not exactly clean.

Update: simply patching a cut-down and customized capture handler into the two table slots in question gets the maximum frequency up to 50 KHz, which is plenty... though for some reason the width capture isn't happening; I may have a wrong case somewhere.

But wait!  Since all Timer 0 interrupt activity goes through a single vector, and the wrapper selected is "reschedule always"... every smegging interrupt-generating event is causing the task scheduler to run, which is supposed to happen at 1 KHz, or "whenever something interesting happens."

So, aside from fixing whatever's not handling the pulse width correctly, I need to change the system-timer driver so that only the Match 0.0 event forces rescheduling, and others are conditional.

(When I get around to porting AGROS to the Cortex M family, I'll move the system-timer functionality to the dedicated ticky-timer that's included for the purpose.  ARM7 doesn't have that, so I've been using one of the general-purpose timer channels.)

Herding cats

Is something I do about once a day, at bedtime.

The starting point is, generally, three cats (sometimes four) on or around the bed.

The objective is to get all three (or four) of them out of the bedroom, and perhaps as far as the living room.

Piggy isn't that much of a problem; if dislodged, she'll grouch off to the living room (or at least the office) under her own power.

The Three Monkeys, though: they take some herding.

I find that leading them with a long wiggly toy generally does the trick, though I then have to prop the toy somewhere and get back to the bedroom and close the door quickly, because Huckleberry thinks the game is "fetch."

Or, a laser works pretty well.

Yes, the three of them will chase the same toy or dot at the same time.  But then they're littermates, so perhaps they flock better than a random assortment.

Afterthought: when trying to catch a pig, greased or otherwise, it is best not to be wearing big, clunky, noisy accessories that will scare the pig.

Pondering the future

Got a gadget in the works that's a little more ambitious than most of the little thingamajigs I've been fiddling with in my spare time.  It's loosely based on an idea I had a few years ago, plus some new ideas and information from a long-time occasional associate.

(No specifics until it's ready for market, or abandoned.  Watch This Space.  Won't be on the market for at least a few months.)

Anyway, this particular dingus is a piece of test equipment, which might reasonably be regarded as Durable Goods.  The reference instrument to which it will inevitably be compared is... well, 30-year-old specimens still sell for like-new prices.  Mine will be substantially cheaper (with a lot of functionality offloaded to a PC), but I want it to be comparably durable, partly for reputation and partly Just Because.

So, longevity considerations.  Using ceramic caps instead of electrolytics is a no-brainer these days, what with the dramatic improvements in ceramics... except that I think I'll need a couple of serious bulk caps.  In which case, electrolytics mounted in such a way that replacement is not too difficult (and any leakage won't destroy the main board).

Then, the PC interface.  I figure on including both USB and Ethernet.  Then I think about USB....

Have you plugged an old USB peripheral into a new PC lately?  I mean, a PC made in the last couple of years, running Linux or Windows, and a USB 1.0 or 1.1 peripheral or hub, plugged into one of the motherboard USB ports?  It Doesn't Work.  And usually results in the host port becoming inoperative until the next power cycle.  If you want to use a USB 1.x device, you need to go through a 2.0 hub.

So, I figure, if I design in the latest USB 2.0 interface now... in a decade, there'll be serious compatibility issues.

But the Ethernet should still work.  Thirty years from now, a 100BaseT connection?  Should still work.  Ethernet standards seem to be much more robust than USB standards - surprise, surprise!

"There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint"

Had a relatively low-carb breakfast this morning, then went for walkies.

Walkies ended up being 5 miles, rather than the usual-lately 4, and at a fairly brisk pace in the coolth of the morning.

By the time I got back to my car, I was thinking: COOOOKIE!

But, first stop was the vet's office, to pick up some seed cakes for Tinga.  They were giving away brownie bites!  (For people, not for birds.)  COOOOKIE!  Just the thing to avoid making a Trader Joe's stop while mildly hypoglycemic.

Turns out: refreshingly tired and chilled + chocolate = Bad Idea.  Came down with a bad case of buzz, and a headache.

I think I should keep high-butter, low-sugar cookies around for that sort of occasion.  With no chocolate.

That, or, y'know, just rest and let my body restore its own glucose level from the reserves... which are on the excessive side.

Update: it seems I can't handle chocolate at all this week.  Maybe I should just put it on the "things not to eat" list, along with rhubarb leaves and lutefisk-stuffed haggis.

Irresponsible speculation

I read somewhere in the last day or so - and neglected to bookmark it - that some of the protesters in Kyiv are rent-a-rioter types.

Which, were I the paranoid sort, might suggest that some puller-of-strings might be playing a game:

Once somebody we like has been elected, foment unrest.  If rioting breaks out, feed the riots.  When our friend in office calls for help, send troops.

...Naaah.  No country in the history of ever would even think about pulling a stunt like that.

Right?

Don't they have to lose a war first?

Reported here:

A United Nations panel has accused North Korea of crimes against humanity, including systematic extermination, torture, rape, forced abortions and starvation.

It is recommending prosecution of the country's top leaders by the International Criminal Court.

The ICC?  How many divisions does it have?

When making serious comparisons to Nazi Germany, it is important to remember the one essential difference between the Nazis and most of history's other great perpetrators of atrocities:

They lost the war.

Are we really going to go to war, to conquer North Korea and put a stop to the crimes against humanity?  (And, if so, where do we stop?  How are things in the Democratic Republic of the Congo lately?)

Or is this just more bruster from Hans Brix?

Pondering the life of a Google Serf

I'm wondering just how much those serfs (Google, or any of the other local big corporations) are paid, and how many hours a week they actually end up working (or otherwise having their time controlled by the Company).

And thinking: what looks like a frightfully impressive salary to a lad from, say, Bangor or Bangalore, looks a lot less impressive when you figure that, assuming you come in with a lot of capital for a down payment, the payments on one of those new condos around here (the ones from Ikea, that'll deteriorate rapidly if left out in the rain) will set you back around $40,000 a year.  Just to keep a roof over your head.

Yikes.

Just tossin' out a thought, here...

How come commercial aircraft don't have some sort of weight sensors built into the landing gear?

It'd provide a way of measuring weight and balance directly... and providing a check on the crew's calculations.  And, if the measurement comes up way too light, and it's not an obvious sensor failure?  Maybe take a dipstick to the tanks.

I'm thinking strain gauges bonded to struts, or pressure transducers on the shock absorbers: something that can (after calibration) give reasonably accurate readings, but doesn't involve adding a new point of mechanical failure.

Also: how about video cameras with views of the engines?  Couple decades back, I was involved in estimating a deluxe version of such a system (high-res, high-frame-rate cameras to watch for FOD during takeoff and landing, plus storage for the video); given the requirements for that application, we concluded that it was wildly impractical using the technology of the day... but, with today's technology, and if the requirement is just to allow the crew to see if an engine is on fire, or missing, or otherwise grossly wrong - and to be certain which engine is out of whack - it seems nearly trivial, and potentially useful.