Silicon Valley Redneck

Oh noes! We're about to run out of...

...breakfast?

Tim Worstall explains the concept of "reserves", and why the alarmingly small numbers for certain metals aren't alarming at all.

Not mentioned: how proven reserves and prices can rise and fall together, in apparent defiance of the principle of supply and demand (hint: it's that pesky definition of "reserves" again), and the vast supply of germanium lurking in those menacing fly-ash storage ponds near coal-fired power plants.

And, since the topic of the day is hafnium, have some relaxing (if unrelated) music.

Exceedingly confusing errors

Two days in a row, yet.

Yesterday: one of the toaster controllers has an Issue.  My latest firmware build, which has a minor update to the FPGA code (Xilinx Spartan 6, code in Verilog with some third-party VHDL spliced in), has developed a lack of function in an area largely unrelated to the change (it shares a clock, and some inputs and outputs, but the state and logic are entirely autonomous).

Careful examination of the Verilog code shows no freaking way it can be doing what it's doing.

After much futzing around with bringing internal signals out to test points so I can stick a scope probe on 'em, I narrow it down: there's a register which should always hold one of three constant values, all of which happen to be 20 million at the moment.  There's an 'initial' block, which assigns value I, and a condition in which it's assigned value F, and an "if not that, but this other thing" which assigns value N.  If neither condition (both are synchronous, by the way) is met when the clock ticks, the register retains its current value.

Well, that register seems to have been ending up with zero stored in it... meaning that the first condition should have been met (it was; that's one of the outputs) and the register should have been reloaded with value F (it wasn't).

Some kinda optimization thing, I guess.  I split the "if not that, but this other thing" into "if not that, load value N, and also if that other thing do other stuff"; this solved the problem at hand.

 

Then there was this afternoon...

Other project involves some ARM Cortex M3 code, originally developed under an expensive proprietary IDE.  I converted the project to build & debug under Eclipse, which turned out to be a lot less trivial than it sounds, but that's another story.

Today's task was to set up, on the client's software guy's Linux box (Ubuntu 14.10, Uncanny Ungulate), a duplicate of the cross-development environment.  So, the Armstrap bundle of Eclipse & toolchain, plus CDT, plus the GNU ARM Eclipse plugins.  And stlink, built from source, which of course brings its own annoyances, but that, too, is another story.

In preparation for this, I installed all the stuff on my laptop yesterday evening, and verified that it worked.

So I get to the client site....

Installation of Armstrap: no problem.  Addition of CDT and the GNU stuff: no problem.

Try to build the project: problem.  Specifically, it can't find arm-none-eabi-g++ (nor, trying a dummy project, arm-none-eabi-gcc).  Says file not found.  I can find the file with ls; what gives?

Mess with $PATH.  Fiddle with project settings.  Mess with all kinds of things.  Still not found.

WTF????

Continue poking at the arm-none-eabi-gcc executable.  Try to run it from the command line: file not found.  Try to run ldd on it: not an executable file???!?

Eventually the answer turns up: those are the errors you get if you try to run 32-bit (ia32) executables on 64-bit (amd64) Linux without the compatibility libraries installed.  Install those, and the build works.  Seems I'd installed them long ago on my laptop, probably when I installed some other prebuilt distribution of the ARM GCC toolchain and it turned out to be ia32-only.

Then there was some further futzing, and then we needed to look up the name of the ia32-edition ncurses package so that gdb would run, and finally we had success (modulo a malfunction with the actual embedded application, but that was easy by comparison).

Or, and Umbongo?  Not a fan.  Aside from the stupid "Unity" desktop environment - let's borrow some bad ideas from Apple, and give Microsoft some new bad ideas all our own! - the package manager (software center, or whatever they call it) is remarkably unhelpful; many things we needed were out there in the apt repositories waiting to be installed, but were not findable with the search function.  Gotta find the names out there on the Web, and then apt-get will do its magic.

Leftovers

On my Tuesday-morning grocery run, I bought an unreasonably large steak during the post-Memorial-Day grillables sale.  I took it home and set it soaking in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Trader Joe's Smoke Seasoning, and salt.

Wednesday afternoon, I tossed it on the grill, and consumed about half of it with nuked mixed veggies.

This afternoon, I got seriously ravenous (owing to an early-and-light breakfast and lunch schedule), so 'twas time for an early dinner, in a hurry.  The leftover steak was calling out to me.  How to prepare it?

Hm.  Slice it up nice and thin.  Put a bit of olive oil in a pan, along with the steak juice.  Slice up a few mushrooms.  Fry the mushrooms until they start looking almost-done-ish.  Toss in the meat.  Stir until the meat is well warmed, but not much more cooked than it already was.  Eat.

Yum.  Sometimes the simple way of preparing some leftovers really does turn out well.  And steak-and-mushrooms remains a good combination.

Is there no limit to connectedness?

Trying to debug the networking code for an embedded widget.  It's being incredibly frustrating (large amounts of Other People's Code, not well documented, and not behaving itself; the poor documentation of certain aspects of the MCU doesn't help either).

There's some issue that has to be a corrupted list.  Could, just conceivably, happen as a result of network activity.

Just to narrow things down, I disconnect the Ethernet cable from the board.

And, at that very moment, the overhead light dims abruptly as one of the two bulbs burns out.

Eep?

Negative name recognition

Seems there's another candidate in the Republican primary.  Or will be on Thursday.  Seems George Pataki has announced that he's going to announce his candidacy, and what's with these meta-announcements anyway?

He doesn’t register on national polls and has been out of elected office for nearly a decade.

And furthermore, for every three people who recognize him as a former governor-or-something, five others think he was on Star Trek.

I don't get the "bracket" thing

Apparently it's something sportsball fans do...?

Then there's the XKCD version.  Eh?

Well, I've encountered, I think, seven of those in real life, and three of them have been in my kitchen.

How this maps onto the stuff in the middle, I don't grok.

(Is this the place to admit that I don't really understand Feynman diagrams either?)

Regarding the utter backwardness of today's Doonesbury

Anyone else notice?  Anyone bother looking at it anymore?

Well, I was at my parents' house, and there were Sunday funnies in hardcopy form, and Doonesbury is prominently featured in both papers, so it was kinda hard to miss.

Today's premise: Republicans oppose everything Obama supports, just because Obama supports it!  Even things they used to support!

This being printed on the heels of Republicans voting to fast-track the TPP, because Obama says it'll be good for business, and Republicans are pro-business, aren't they?

(And how far we've come, in less than a century, from a call for open covenants openly arrived at, to a brave new era of secret covenants secretly arrived at.)

A convocation of corvids

Was up in a tree that I passed this morning, walking the parental pooch in Palo Alto.

I'm not ornithologist enough to tell a murder of crows from an unkindness of ravens, but they were certainly one or the other, and noisy to boot.

A dystopian vision

2017: Galatea's Law requires all convicted sex offenders to carry approved registered cellphones with them at all times, enabling real-time offender tracking.

Several free apps are promptly available to sound an alarm when the user's location is near the reported location of any offender, and pop up the offender's name and mugshot; the rap sheet is available for an extra charge*.

2018: The newly-founded, and well-funded, Committee of Public Safety begins pressing to expand the offender-tracking program.  Why should the public be warned only of sex offenders?  Why, for example, should shopkeepers not be alerted to the presence of thieves?  Why should event-goers not be alerted to the presence of political dissidents and potential terrorists in their midst?

And why limit it to the convicted?  Surely, many guilty suspects are being set free on technicalities**.  The tracking mandate should be based on arrest records, and mental-health records.  Just to be safe, you understand.

Soon, offender alerts are as ubiquitous, and as meaningless, as Prop. 65 warnings... but no one who's ever been a suspect, or seen a shrink, can get a job anymore.

* Just in case anyone cares whether the alarm is about a serial child molester or just some guy who once mooned the CalTrain on a dare.

** Such as factual innocence, which should be no excuse.

Ah, Saturday.

Of a holiday weekend, yet!

Though, in the self-employed life, "holiday" isn't a particularly meaningful concept, other than "clients probably aren't at their desks."

And, given that I had a couple of sick days and a couple more low-productivity days last week, there's this big pile of stuff to catch up on.

Still: I slept in outrageously this morning, had a limited amount of caffeine, and then spent a little while out in the vegetable patch, clearing away weeds, preparing planting sites, and sticking seeds in the ground.  There's quite a bit yet to be done, plus overhauling the main drip line, but still: progress!

Meanwhile, various big hollow aluminum birdies are buzzing around overhead.  Helps keep Southmoon and Top Hat from wandering too far afield while I'm gardening, but I still need to keep a close eye on Huckleberry.

Almost time for a light lunch, then maybe I'll see about getting some real work done on that project that turns out to have been off the rails the past two weeks.

Select all images containing turnip testicles

The new image-based "prove you're not a robot" test can get... interesting.

Mainly because you're trying to prove to a robot that you're not a robot.  And, since the robot interrogating you can't, itself, pass the Turning test, well:

Just had to have a couple of goes to comment on a Blogspot post.  First try: road signs.  I selected the two images (other than the reference) that had road signs in them.  The robot said I hadn’t selected enough.  I selected a third one that might possibly have had a road sign hidden in it: fail.

Second try: steak.  I selected the two that had seared lumps of beef.  I hadn't selected enough.  O-kaaay... so for the third one I selected the grilled salmon fillets, and that time I passed.

Silly robot!  A salmon steak is a crosswise slice of the fish, not a fillet.

Monday morning come on a Friday this week.

Awake early, with sinus pain.  Oh, well: may as well get an early start on the day.

Read early-morning Internets & on-line funny papers, then declare shower time.

Hm.  Water's not properly hot.  Full-hot setting should be near-scalding; instead, it's Just Right.  Ends up being a shorter-then-normal shower as the available water cools rapidly.

Dry off.  Get dressed.  Turn on stove: yes, gas is present, so it's not a neighborhood gas interruption.

Out to the garage.  Water heater's blinky status light is dark.  Back indoors: furnace's pilot burner is on.  So, not a gas-supply interruption during the night.

Run through restart procedure for water heater.  Get blinky pattern that indicates a gas valve fault.  Wha'?  That thing's practically new; I think I got it just last year, and it was not cheap.  Well... turn the temperature setting up where I want it; there's a sound of gas igniting.  So far, so good; it remains to be seen whether it'll stay lit, get the tank of water up to temperature, and then regulate.

Maybe it was just a controller glitch.  Maybe.

'Twas on a Monday morning the Gas-Man came to call...

Update: There is hot water, and the blinky status is now reporting normal.  So... glitch?

More reading

I'm mostly over the crud, I think... unless recent bout of crud was my immune system trying to fight off the viruses, it's now given up, and I'll be coming down with three colds and two strains of flu by the end of the week.

Whatever; I had a moderately productive day today, but yesterday was still mostly curl-up-with-a-book time.

I buzzed through "The Commuter": Thomas Mays venturing into Tom Holt territory, with rather a lot of world-building behind a short story.  It's a fun read, if lacking in the utter madness of Holt's work, and it'll be interesting to see what else he writes in that world.

Then I made a start on Monster Hunter International, which seems to be background and/or inspiration for a lot of the current horror crossover genre.  All the extreme action and crazy SFX of a summer blockbuster, but the SFX are in the reader's head!  Wheee!  My assumption on meeting the fancy rich dude - Grant Jefferson? - was that he'd turn out like the rich young fop in $106,000 Blood Money; however, at the current stage of reading, this appears not to be the case.  There's still plenty of book left for him to turn to the Dark Side, though, and he seems the type to do it even without getting bitten by anything, unless he gets himself heroically killed Real Soon Now.

Oh, well.  Work's over for the day, and it's time to wind down.  Back to reading MHI.

Update: Farther along in MHI, and now I'm wondering if Jefferson will heroically foil the evil plot by failing to be sufficiently heroic for the villain's purpose.

Update 2: Elves and Orcs and Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, oh my!  And a werewolf with a waiver, who inexplicably isn't required to wear a collar and rabies vaccination tag.  And a grand flurry of plot twists, some of which are hinted at so that clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants can see them coming a few pages ahead and some of which are totally unexpected but make sense in retrospect.  And the significance of Chekhov's Dungeon turns out to be not at all what I'd expected.

So now there are how many more books to catch up on????

Oh, and the White Supremacist thing.  Seems certain individuals (maybe not individuals, but elements of the hive mind?) look at this book, see "men" and "guns" and "South", and declare it to be an egregious pile of racism and sexism.  Had they actually read the book, they might (I say might) have noticed that it is in fact aggressively anti-racist, and not sexist by any reasonable definition of the term.  But I guess reading is hard.

Silly spammer!

Message came in this morning that looked, from the sender and message title, like it could be legitimately related to a once-and-future business.

Turned out to be someone pushing software, or health insurance, or software that's an alternative to health insurance, or something to that effect.  Which, in any case, would have been the late boss's area, not mine.

There were a couple of fiddly little clues that the sender didn't know much about the company nor about myself.  I mean, apart from the company not being active, and the message having been sent to my personal e-mail (the company domain having expired and been snapped up by a squatter).

For one thing, he didn't notice that the company name is a TLA, and as such is always written in all caps.

For another, the message commenced with "Dear Mike," which isn't quite my name.

Subtle stuff, but the trained mind is alert to such details.

(Another sick day.  Dreadful headache, and at this point caffeine makes it more worse than better.  There may be more inconsequential posts as the day drags on.)

Sick day

Actually, two in a row so far.

I got all wore out at the Maker Faire on Saturday - lotsa cool stuff on display, but 7 hours on my feet, mostly in a crowded, noisy, and disorienting setting, is more'n I can handle these days - and I fear I may have picked up a virus or two as well.

Upper respiratory crud, sore throat, and a really nasty headache: not having a good Monday, and certainly not a productive Monday.

Oh, well.  While being useless, I made a little progress on my backlog of book readin', finishing Pixie Noir this afternoon (and now I find that there are two sequels already, so now there's more on my reading list instead of less).

'Twas a fun read: a genre-smash of hard-boiled detective, straight-up fantasy, and small-unit paramilitary, and probably some others I didn't recognize.  Not recommended for those who like their fiction to fit in neat pigeonholes.

One note: Lom supposedly has issues with silver bullets causing excessive barrel wear.  I looked at this before, and don't believe it: in a modern firearm designed for jacketed bullets, it appears silver should be no problem.  (Were I feeling highly motivated, I'd cobble together a hardness tester and poke some jacketed bullets and some .999 fine silver coins, but that's not a today project.)

Also: Now I'm trying to recall the Wild Hunt music from Der Freischütz.  Keep coming up with a hodgepodge of Wagner and Mendelssohn instead.  Have to clear out some opera-listenin' time, too.

Cashless

There's yet another proposal making the rounds, to abolish cash entirely, for a variety of purported benefits - mainly involving increased central control of the economy.

(Hint: the economy is not centrally controlled.  The economy happens all by itself.  Attempts at central planning mainly make it more difficult for the economy to happen.)

Not mentioned, that I've seen: going totally cashless would make bank runs in the classic sense impossible, as there wouldn't be any cash for depositors to demand.  Actually, though, the electronic form could be even quicker and nastier; depositors wouldn't have to go to the trouble of showing up on the front steps in person.

But, papering over all that, and assuming the totally cash-free, all-digital banking utopia, let us ponder the events of 4-5 May 2019.

After reading about the latest network protocol flaw, 14-year-old Dmitri M., of Zagreb, randomly sends a malformed packet to UDP port 5440 of a computer used by the bank at which his father has an account.  He gets an interesting response, once, and nothing further.

He then pokes various other computers similarly, and gets a similar response from the big bank downtown.  Hm.  Maybe it's something specific to banks?

Querying public-domain data, he compiles a list of IP addresses assigned to major financial institutions, and writes a little script to poke each of them in turn, saving the response.  Many of them respond and then, as with the first two, refuse to respond further.

Bank IT departments around the world suddenly become frantic, as the malformed packets cause the servers handling inter-bank transfers to crash.

They become more frantic when the servers come back up with their data corrupted, and no clear record of what transactions that weekend had gone through, and for what amounts.

During the weeks-long recovery process, the banks can't process any new transactions until they get the existing state sorted out... and they wouldn't want to have that service running anyway until the protocol bug was definitively fixed.

Eggs, many.  Basket, singular.  Or: baskets, plural, but with all the handles bound tightly together.  Good idea?

Maker Faire tomorrow

Yeah, going again this year.

Dunno about travel; in past years, there's been parking in a large garage within walking distance of the fairgrounds.  This year, nothing about that in the getting-there information; apparently those of us coming from the south are supposed to park at Oracle and take the shuttle bus, which seems rather less than convenient, especially if I buy anything large before departure time.

Anyway, gotta print some info, and some business cards.

Info should be easy: send to laser printer.  Complication: Huckleberry the Arcturan Megakitten hears the laser printer spooling up and jumps on it, causing jams and scattering of already-printed pages.

Business cards should be easy, modulo feeding the paper: I have a PDF formatted to match the laser-perf cardstock which I also have.  Just have to configure the new-ish office-type inkjet printer for letter-size paper (it's usually stocked with 11x17)... which means some significant futzing around in the "clear" area of the table, which all too often is full of cat.

Well, Top Hat had vacated the spot in front of the printer a while ago, so I just had to contend with a curious Huckleberry and Southmoon, both wanting to help.  Oh, and dragging the printer far enough out of its nook to change the magenta ink cartridge.

But... it seems that the office-type printer, while it handles 11x17 plain paper admirably, doesn't speak card stock: it consistently declares a jam, whether I use the cassette or the rear feed slot.

A little more bashing at that (and some searching of the Intarwebs), and if it doesn't start cooperating I'll just have to drag in the cheap&cheesy little inkjet to print the cards.

Update: Gave up, for now, on getting the big printer to handle thick paper (apparently the menu option for thick paper doesn't do what it says on the tin).  Ergo:

Out to the living room.  Fetch the cheap little printer.  Note that it doesn't have a power cord attached.  Find the power connector: a dainty 2-pin type.  Look for the cord.  Eventually find, if not the, then at least a cord that'll do.

Plug USB cable into workstation front-panel port (driver is already installed from when the printer was new, an emergency purchase when the old 11x17 inkjet died). Doesn't seem to work.  Kernel messages indicate a failure to enumerate.  Maybe it doesn't get along with the USB3 port?  Try a different one: also failure to enumerate.  Wha'?  OK, plug it into the hub where other things tend to be connected: now it works, and it feeds the card stock, and... most of the way through a page, it comes un-enumerated.

Guess the USB interface has some serious bobbles.  Oh, well: I got two almost-full sheets of cards printed, so I have enough to fill my pocket for a day at the fairgrounds.

Sounds like a job for Joe Biden!

Quoted sarcastically here, though not for the same reason:

If we want to balance the world of dotcom let’s create doteveryone. I would prioritise three areas that I think best demonstrate the opportunities we should be grabbing with both hands: education, women and ethics.

Er.  Opportunistically grabbing women with both hands.  Right.

Woof.

Toward the end of walkies, someone mentioned the possibility of a bit of rain later in the morning.

Arriving home, I checked the forecast: maybe some scattered rain from late morning through evening.

And, yes, we've had that today: the kind of scattered minor precipitation that sometimes turns up in spring around these parts.  Except that it also brought a bit of thunder.

Well, it's late afternoon now, and the deluge has arrived; rain intensity is around winter maximum, and not at all mid-May weather.

Probably won't help much with the drought, though.  Still gotta buy out some of those alfalfa farmers.

Applied strangeness

The Many-Erics Interpretation gained a new convert this morning!

I got an early start on morning walkies, and set out on a 7-mile loop with a real hill for the first time in far too long.

During the slog up the first uphill segment, I was passed by a group of runners.

Several minutes later, near the end of the second uphill segment, the same group passed me again, in the same direction.

"Wait, how is he here?"

"There are actually four Erics; that's how he can be everywhere."

There's actually a perfectly mundane explanation, but I prefer to cultivate the mystique.