Silicon Valley Redneck

Cautionary tale

Spotted here:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full.

This, kids, is why we don't use flammable Moon wax.

Gah.

Looks like, between taxes due and 1Q estimated taxes, my entire cash reserve goes to the revenooers this Wednesday.

Good thing I kept that reserve.

Sure hope nothing breaks any time soon.  And I guess I won't be taking a vacation this year, nor doing any new drought-resistant landscaping.

(Oog.  And I'd better transfer the last of the cash into my checking account, pronto, 'cause it takes until end-of-tomorrow to go through, and the IRS can magically process a check the day it was written.)

A very Top Hat day

0335: Wake to the sound of horking from the hallway.  Crawl out of bed and investigate.  Top Hat, the shaggy beast, has deposited a monster hairball on the floor (at least it was on the vinyl, not the carpet).  Clean it up, stare at the Internet for a while, and return to bed.

0748: Driving across a bridge, or causeway, over some wide, slow river.  Top Hat suddenly gets excited, leaps out the passenger-side window (despite it not being open anything like far enough for that), does a perfect belly-flop into the water, and commences dogcat-paddling to the shore.  Get off the bridge, pull over, park, and run back to retrieve the soggy bundle of fur.

0750: Wake to the sound of Top Hat galloping into the bedroom and leaping onto the nightstand and thence the headboard for a look out the bedroom window.

1440: Get my brain working almost well enough to make sense of that brokerage statement (unless I've gone delusional, which is always an option).  Figure out, in general terms, which pages correspond to what totals, and where those numbers need to end up.  But then Top Hat decides to help, in her inimitable way, by sitting atop the forms and giving her best Dot Warner impression.

The others have been more or less behaving themselves.  It's mostly the bumble-kitty being strange today, in real life or otherwise.

IDEs, again.

Integrated Development Environments, that is.

Not a fan.

I'm still trying to evaluate such things for a client project and for future use.  Main requirement, really, is a working debugger; all else could be handled just fine with the GNU toolchain and a Makefile.  I'm not about to use straight-up arm-whatever-gdb, on account of that having an exceedingly steep learning curve for a tool that I'll be using infrequently (and thus having to re-learn every time I need it).

I've tried Eclipse-based things a few times over the past many years, and never gotten anywhere.  With most of the not-totally-proprietary IDEs (and, in particular, Freescale's Kinetis Design Studio) being based on Eclipse nowadays, I guess I need to learn it now.

Well... the latest Eclipse, from the official source, won't even think about running on current Debian-stable, so I'd installed it in a Linux Mint VM, and not gotten very far with it.

Now there's this Armstrap project, which has its own Eclipse + ARM toolchain bundle, which does run on my workstation, and comes with... maybe?... most? of what one needs.  (It's for 64-bit Linux host systems, though, so it won't run on my lab machine, but neither will the 32-bit down-rev Eclipse in Debian-stable, which bombs almost immediately with an out-of-cheese error.)

So I try to set up one of the sample projects... and there's a huge amount of per-configuration-per-project stuff that needs to be filled in manually (well, cut & pasted from an example somebody else has already done and posted on line).  This basically means that the approach to using it will be to create a project that's configured for one target, and then copy and modify it for subsequent projects.  The whole project-creation process is wildly cumbersome, and importation doesn't appear to work the way one would expect.

Seems to be another case of a grandly general-purpose does-everything tool that's epically inconvenient for actually doing any one specific thing... and that, while the learning curve for any given aspect may be nominally easy (because GUI!), the overall learning path for being able to useful stuff with it is very long indeed.

Oh, and I seem to have missed something-or-other in setting up the example project.  The compiler can't find a definition for some #define symbols from a header file.  The header file is definitely #included, and there's no error for a missing include file, but several symbols from that file are coming up undefined.  (Yeah, I have seen much earlier versions of GCC fail to complain about missing files, but I don't know if that's what's going on here.)  Maybe I need to put a syntax error in the header file and see what happens.*

Playing around with (better-integrated) KDS for a while first might make more sense, except that the Kinetis stuff is for pet projects later on, while the ARM-Eclipse-in-general (well, for an STM32 target) is needed kind of now-ish.

* Update: Did that.  Adding a #foobar directive right after the #define for one of the "could not be resolved" symbols gets an error message for the invalid directive... and then the same error messages about undefined symbols (or symbols that cannot be resolved, which I assume means not-defined).  So... um...?

Update 2: Ah.  For STM32xxx parts, at least, the trick is to install this Eclipse goodie.  That (a) seems to fix the build for that laboriously configured sample project, and (b) adds nice new options for creating a project preconfigured for one of the STM32 parts.  Also, (c) it adds nice options within the project settings for configuring the processor type and so on.  So maybe this will be useful after all.  Still have to demonstrate debugging some code via ST-LINK/V2, and figure out how to import a project from a proprietary IDE.  And then figure out how to shift the code base address, because the final application will involve a bootloader and won't be running at nominal zero (fiddly detail).

Maybe we do need more H-1B visas

Though not for Google, if they're having a thousand applicants per opening.

No, there's another area in which qualified 'Murricans are hard to come by.

The next-door neighbors have had a team of plumbers swarming their house for over a week now, basically re-doing everything under the house.

This being the California flatlands, and only three feet of landfill above a flood zone, the houses don't have basements; they have low crawlspaces.  There's a little hatch in the floor of one closet for crawlspace access.

Well, that was good enough back in the early 50s, when these houses were built.  But it seems that plumbers have gotten bigger, and they no longer fit in that space.

So the neighbors are having a new access door installed out on their patio, and vast amounts of dirt removed from under the house to enlarge the crawlspace to accommodate modern plumbers.

Do we need to import some Southeast Asian plumbers, who are closer to the size of 1950s American plumbers?

Or maybe Tibetans.  They already have that global network of secret tunnels, don't they?

Interpretation

So... that shooting in South Carolina.

Does indeed look bad for the cop, maybe depending on what went before.

The background looks bad for the legal system, maybe.

But, the business of moving the Taser afterward?

The standard interpretation is that the cop was tampering with evidence, to make it look like the shootee had been in control of the Taser at the time of the shooting.

Which would be pretty dumb, considering the arrival of another cop in frame, and the known presence of the guy recording it with his cellphone.

But why else might he have done that?

How about: securing the weapon?  Maybe the department has severe penalties for misplacing a weapon, and he wanted to make sure it was where he could keep an eye on it?  Or maybe he just didn't want some passerby to pick it up?

So that part might have been reasonable.  Not necessarily right, but something a reasonable person might have thought appropriate under the circumstances.

Update: On the gripping hand... seems the cop claimed the deceased had tried, or was in process of trying, to steal his Taser, which is pretty clearly a lie.  This implies that the evidence-tampering interpretation may well be correct... in which case, given the presence of witnesses and video, it would mean the cop is too stupid to live, and should have his life support disconnected.  (Because, seriously, anyone who'd plant evidence under those circumstances is too stupid to be breathing unassisted.  Mice are smarter than that.  Pond scum is smarter than that, and it doesn't even breathe.)

Translation

Roger L. Simon points to claims that the English and Farsi texts of the new... agreement, or something?... with Iran don't match, in significant ways.

Having zero Farsi comprehension, I can't evaluate this, and I'm not about to pester any Persian friends for help this time of the morning.

But, I really must ask: does the State Department have any competent Farsi translators?

I'm reminded of the beginning of the current administration, and the infamous Overload Button.  It seems that, at Hillary's age and supposed high-level international experience, she not only didn't have any Russian-speaking friends but didn't have a clue what Cyrillic writing looks like... but did the State Department also lack translators?  After all, the SecState ought to have had official translation resources handy, and any lack in that department at that time would have been an institutional failing inherited from past administrations.  (And wasn't there something about Jimmy Carter and a Polish translator?)

Or... did Hillary's personal staff hand the button thing off to a random intern?  And were the details of the Iran thing handled by interns, because the professionals kept having Opinions about it?

Are our betters in Washington actually good at anything?  Would we be better off replacing the whole hive of scum and villainy with the first n names out of the flyover-country phone book?

Aard-Wino strikes again

So I've got this gadget, and for convenience it's got a built-in nano-Arduino, or at least an ATmega328P with the Ardunio bootloader installed, and running at 3 Volts-ish and accordingly 8 MHz using the internal oscillator (to save 70¢ and a few square millimeters), and...

Well, out of laziness, I'm using the Adafruit NeoPixel driver to talk to a string of WS2812B addressable LEDs.

Took a bit of fiddling, and for some reason they want 400 KHz instead of the expected 800, or at least if I specify 800 KHz nothing happens, while at 400 they work...

Except that if the supply voltage is a little high, and the temperature is a little low, things get all squirrely, and I've been trying things like increasing the series resistor in the data line from the MCU (helped) and adding a monster bulk cap across the LED-strip supply rails (helped), and...

Well, none of this really solves the problem, so I decided to take a closer look at the timing, though my scope tells me the data rate is exactly the specified 400 KHz.  Maybe I need to fiddle with the parameters?

So I start looking at Adafruit_NeoPixel.cpp, and where NEO_KHZ800 is used, and.

Um.

There's a comment.

Running 800 KHz on an 8 MHz part requires special low-level bit-bashing code, which is implemented only for ports B and D, those being where standard Arduini keep their DIO pins.

My LED data pin is on Port C.  Which isn't supported at all.

So when I selected NEO_KHZ800, the driver did Nothing, because it didn't have the code to handle that data rate, at my MCU's clock frequency, on my nonstandard choice of pin assignments (it happens to be on the right side of the chip, so there).

When I select NEO_KHZ400, it mostly works despite being entirely the wrong data rate by a factor of 2.

Guess I need to copy the block of code for Port B, set it to handle Port C, and tweak it appropriately, 'cause I'm sure not adding a patch wire to that QFN.

Update: Yup.  Seems to work.  Now to stick one of the reprogrammed prototypes in the freezer for a while.

The new definition of "middle-class"

Having both rich-people problems and poor-people problems.

Poor people problems:

• How the smeg am I going to pay these bills?
• What if my aging car breaks down?  Again?
• Can I put off fixing the driveway for another year?  Or three?

Rich people problems:

• Why is this 1099 from my brokerage in a format that doesn't match what I need to complete Schedule D?
• And why in Chtulhu's name is it so freaking long, when I thought I only had two transactions last year?
• Argh!  I have to pay tax on a pile of automatically-reinvested dividends!  But those didn't result in cash to pay the tax with!
• Wait, did client "G" file a 1099 for last year?  And what was the number on it?  Did I get a copy and misplace it?  I know what the number should have been, but there's an alternative number that's a few hundred dollars off....

The whole business with Schedule D, and never yet being able to import data from my brokerage, plus the various wrong-format problems I've encountered over the years, all make me suspect that going back to using the paper forms might be less of a hassle than using TurboTax.

Or maybe next year I'll get organized sooner and use a professional tax preparer.  Especially if I sell the house this year.

Holy Saturday, Batman!

I forgot to look for Parsifal on the radio.

So much for annual rituals.  Is Live From the Met even on any local station anymore?  Do they still perform Parsifal on Easter Eve?  (I remember tuning in, rather late, one year long ago and getting Die Walküre instead.)

Come right down to it, that hasn't been an annual ritual for me for a great many years.  Life kinda got busy and disorganized.

Never mind.

Gentrification. Yup.

House across the street sold recently.  Slightly bigger'n mine, on a slightly bigger lot, but the layout is not so good, and the corner lot has hardly any back yard.

It had been all gussied up for sale.  Rumor has it, it was bought by a flipper... in its already-gussied-up state?

Asking price was $829,950.

The day after the sign out front was changed from "Sale pending" to "Sold!", the house was tented.  Eh?

Now... finally... a listing site has been updated to show the actual selling price.

$911,000.

Termites and all.

Another house, down the street, on a 10% bigger lot than mine, with a bonus room grafted on, not gussied up and offered as-is and looking fairly shabby (though someone did mow the front weeds before the open-house), is currently pending.  Have to see how much that'n went for.

The era of million-dollar teardowns hasn't reached this little neighborhood yet, but with all the commercial development in the area and the increasingly nasty commute into the area, it'll probably happen this summer.

So when do I declare Peak Bubble, cash out, and rent a trailer somewhere?  Dunno, but I suspect I should be Taking Measures to facilitate a rapid departure when the time comes.  (Stuff like moving my web/mail/etc. hosting from the DSL line to a rented VPS, and seriously weeding through the clutter, and figuring out how to sell the heavy machinery.  Oh, and making sure I have change-of-address forms for all the credit cards, including the seldom-used ones.)

Hey, at these prices, I bet I could "downsize" to a pretty dang awesome farm in TN, equip my new R&D lab (barn, whatever) rather nicely, and have enough cash left in the bank to live quite comfortably for a decade or so even without any actual income.

Update: Latest rumor is that the flipper rumor was wrong, and that the new owners are actually planning to live there.  Well, that would make a lot more sense.

Helpful

Huckleberry and Top Hat want to help me sift through last year's financial paperwork.

They both like to lie on piles of paper.

Top Hat offers to shred the evidence.  (Er, Top Hat... those in that pile are receipts for business expenses.  Shredding them is counterproductive.)

Southmoon, at least, hasn't taken an interest.  Yet.  She likes to lie on papers, too.  And maybe she'll contribute a dead leaf or a bit of cardboard.  (I gotta train that critter to bring cash, jewelry, and stock certificates.)

Well, with the relevant papers sorted from the other vaguely-financial records, the piles aren't too deep.  But Schedule D will be a pain (what with having to dig through long-archived records), and Schedule C will be at least as much of a pain as usual (for the second year in a row, I'll be reporting income that wasn't reported on 1099 forms... last time, because the payer died before doing the paperwork; this time, because the payer is an overseas business and doesn't do U.S. tax forms).

Oh, well.  I assume that reporting income that the IRS didn't already know about won't get me flagged for an audit... right?

Now, how to shuffle papers and Turbot Ax, in my office, without the cats getting in the way, but without blocking ventilation and having it get all hot and stuffy in here?  Maybe I should add a screen door, and claim it's a tax preparation expense?

Update: The brokerage statement is 34 pages long, of which 16 are used accounting for my sale of a rather old and underperforming mutual fund... which had, apparently, accreted quite a few shares, accounted for in small lots, over the years.

Update 2: Once again, Schedule D is a wholly unnecessary pain-beyond-imagination.  TurboTax and the brokerage don't seem to agree on exchanging data, so I'll have to enter everything manually.  The brokerage statement, apart from having one sale spread across 16 pages of small fiddlies, isn't in the format that TurboTax expects me to transcribe from.

And it's looking like a Really Good Thing that I kept half of the proceeds from one of last year's two sales in reserve... 'cause between tax due and the first-quarter estimated taxes, things are looking quite alarming so far.  But of course I won't be able to get to the final numbers until I slog through Schedule D, and then Schedule A.  And then there are the inevitable California fiddles.

And... has anyone out there, ever, received a 1099-DIV with a nonzero amount on line 10 (Exempt-interest dividends) and actually known what states were involved?

More on those development-software matters

Yeah, the usual.  Need a build/debug environment cheap enough to allow multiple seats, for commercial development, on a shoestring budget.

There's some configuration of Eclipse (whereof I've never been a fan, but it seems to be the basis of most of the free-or-reasonably-affordable packages that include a debugger) which is supposed to be useful.  But... it depends on the latest version of Eclipse.  Debian-stable has an antiquated version of Eclipse, and the latest Eclipse depends on the latest Java and possibly some other things I haven't gotten into yet.

So, maybe I need to play with Eclipse on a more-up-to-date VM.

Meanwhile, one client's project in in CrossWorks... which uses the GNU toolchain, but doesn't make important stuff like a Makefile and the ld script accessible, so it looks like converting a project out of CrossWorks has to be done by hand (there's plenty of information about how to convert projects into CrossWorks).  A commercial-use license doesn't come close to fitting my budget (and the client's firmware guy isn't finding the package useful for debugging anyway, only for building and flash programming; I haven't explored the reason for this).  Since we're getting into a need to debug code written by another (now departed) contractor, having actual debugging capability is a bit of a priority.  Doesn't need to be sophisticated, but I need to be able to set breakpoints and examine memory, at least.

And now Atollic doesn't have an on-line price list, but insists on being contacted for a quote, so I can't just take a quick look to get a handle on whether their product might be suitable.

Well, maybe I should check out CooCox, even if it does make make me want to append "for Cocoa Puffs!", and I need to register to download it, and it's taking an awfully long time to send the confirmation e-mail.

Hmph.  Anyway, it's time to give up on doing anything constructive for the next few days, and deal with the Great American Time Sink.

Condition Yellow

A state of relaxed alertness.

Self-defense gurus are big on this, and almost invariably focus on awareness of threats.

Fourth paragraph here mentions the other aspect of it.  (Via Tam.)

Being alert, in a general sense, and maintaining situational awareness, does indeed help in avoiding trouble.  You're more likely to spot the lurking thug... or the truck swerving into your lane, or the impending traffic jam ahead.

But!  You're also more likely to spot the baby bird underfoot, the lone flower growing out of a stone wall, the scenic little side path, or the tiny bistro with the fascinating menu.

Condition Yellow is where you experience the wonders of daily life.  It's where you make new friends.

Altogether too many people live in Condition Purina: alternating patches of White (completely oblivious to the world around them) and Red (frightened out of their wits, seldom over any objective threat in the local environment).

As an essential part of a happy and healthy life: pay attention to your surroundings, and work on your threat-assessment skills - because the local world is, in general, a much less scary place than you'd think from watching TV, and it's important to react to real threats and not freak out over illusory ones.

 

Yeah, my local world is particularly un-scary for a variety of reasons: I live in a pretty safe area; I'm a morning person; I'm not mixed up with recreational drugs and the associated people; and I amble through life looking like an amiable, well-fed apex predator and, apparently, like an authority figure of some sort.  If you skitter through the night like a frightened rabbit, expect to be picked on by all manner of predators, including toy poodles.  Even if you're little-bitty, attitude counts for a lot.

Worldview

Interesting profile of Eugene Volokh, here.

The author has some fascinating assumptions, and keeps seeing, e.g., free speech and free markets, or free speech and freedom of religion, as somehow contradictory.

Hello?  Supporting all those things, and other freedoms besides, is perfectly consistent*.

Comes back to the old question: if your political spectrum runs from Trotsky on the Left to Hitler on the Right, where do you put Milton Friedman?

Methinks the author needs more exposure to outside-the-bubble ideas.  Might, eventually, learn that libertarians aren't SoCons, and maybe even that most SoCons aren't the fire-breathing monsters and book-burners** they're made out to be.

 

* Hint: "supporting free speech" while insisting on a "right not to be offended" is contradictory.

** See previous post for a clue as to who the book-burners are these days.

In case there was any doubt

To any who were paying attention, it's been obvious since she was Mayor of SF back in the 80s that Dianne Feinstein is a Fascist.

And yet California elected her to the Senate, and, despite everything, she still keeps getting re-elected.

Well, now she's calling for censoring the Internet, to remove, among other things, all copies of The Anarchist Cookbook.

Double-take.

Yes, that Anarchist Cookbook.  The pile of crap so wildly inaccurate that it's commonly believed that the CIA had a hand in writing it, with the goal of encouraging anarchists to blow themselves up or poison themselves, or at least to waste their energies on super-weapons that just won't work.

Ayup.  Fascism and aggressively malignant ignorance go together.  Not only does she not realize that the book in question is less than useless to terrorists, but she completely fails to comprehend that the Internet is international, and large parts of it are completely outside U.S. jurisdiction.

Unless she's proposing to bomb servers where offending content is hosted... or create a Great Firewall of our own?

Just for the record

Should my embedded-systems consulting business ever be called upon to cater a gay wedding...

...Well, it's about as likely as a pizzeria being called upon to do so, innit?  Maybe they want custom blinky fairy lights or something...

...Hey, ya think I'd turn away business?

Well, yeah, in some cases I would.  Consult the Isher business policy.  Until I figure out how to enforce a "no domestic law enforcement use" clause (and I've got some ideas), the secret-weapons business is on hold.

Also, I wouldn't knowingly do business with Communists, Nazis, nor the Klan, at least not without being quite certain there was no evil use to which they could put my creations.

And some customers just seem like altogether too much trouble, or are way too polite about wanting a machine to calculate nine billion specifically-constrained Unicode strings.

Spam subject line of the day

"Make Twenty Disappear"

I didn't bother reading the contents.  I assume they want me to send $20 for more information.

Kind of like the Dispos-A-Dime machine, scaled up 200 times!

I can't find anything on-line about the Dispos-A-Dime.  'Twas in a daily-paper comic strip, many years past.  Frank & Ernest, maybe?  The thing looked like a vending machine, and had a coin slot and a sign:
        Dispos-A-Dime
        Deposit 10¢

Another useful chip

From Micrel: MIC2876, a synchronous boost regulator with bidirectional load disconnect.

Just built up a test board (1/2" by 5/8", dominated by the input and output headers; actual circuit about 3/8" square) and verified what it does:

• When it's operating, it steps 1-cell Li-Ion voltage up to 5V (or other combinations; this pair is what I want it for), with minimal fuss and reasonable efficiency.
• When the ENABLE pin isn't being driven high, it disconnects the load from the supply.
• It operates at a decently high frequency, so the components can be small.

So, when you'd like to have a boost circuit, but you're worried about that pesky business of the input having a straight path through the inductor and rectifier to the output... this is a handy solution.  Boost regulator and power switch, all in one!

Mind you, there are also applications where you'd actually want a boost regulator whose "off" output was at supply voltage; I had one of those a few years ago.  The requirement at hand isn't one of those.

Update: With a 500mA load, and the particular 1.5µH, 1008 inductor I picked, efficiency is about 75%, and the little board gets rather alarmingly toasty.  I've got a 1µH part of the same footprint and lower resistance that I can try, later.  If I end up using this thing in the actual gadget, I may need to resort to a bulkier inductor (for which there'll be some room, on the back of the board, if I push some other stuff around).  I still need to get a handle on current demand (peak, average, and how long the peaks last) for the application.

GOP strategy 2016

1. Wait for Hillary! to get the Democratic nomination.
2. Plaster Hillary!'s face and voice all over YouTube.
3. Win!

Srsy... the Dems expect to get the youth vote again?  Their strategy clearly involves keeping the low-information voters in the dark.  In the YouTube era.  When, no matter how appallingly stupid the Republican leadership may be (and don't get me started...), all it takes is one guy with time on his hands to collect video clips, assemble a bunch of 30-second "meet the old SecState" spots, and spread them around.

(Wait, she's only 67?  When she's not carefully packaged and stage-managed, she looks and sounds a lot older than that.)