Silicon Valley Redneck

Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,

Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed.

Sometimes I get tired, and just want to flop down on the sofa and read some book*.

Currently on the Kindle: 1215 And All That.  No, I don't remember how I ended up at the author's web site.  Must have followed a chain of links somewhence**.

Anyway: I'm about halfway through.  It gives the history of the Plantagenets*** in rather a casual format.  They come out sounding as trailer-trashy as our own contemporary ruling class, but with ways of dealing with people who annoyed them that would make Colombian narcoterrorists wince.

On a scale of zero to Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing?  We're distressingly far along.  We're not, yet, at the point where politicians and clerics play poker with inconvenient journalists and pundits, but the urge to silence them by force is there, and not well (if at all) concealed.  And the contempt of the rulers for the ruled is there for all to see.

Don't you hate it when history keeps falling into familiar ruts?

 

* If watching some television is a thing, then so is reading some book.

** This is totally an English word, even if it isn't in the dictionary.

*** My spelling checker doesn't approve of the plural.  Apparently one Plantagenet is enough.

Sunday morning twinkles

Out to the front of the house in my pajamas, now that Tinga's awake and squawking to be moved from her sleep cage in the lab to her day cage in the living room.

The front windows are flashing red.

Mnfxt?

Peek out the front door: in view from the doorway are one full-sized fire truck and one paramedic van, blocking my driveway.  Not that I'm going anywhere in my pajamas.

I'm not on fire (I checked very carefully), so I suppose there's a medical emergency next door.

Bouncing around...

I should really be working on the current toaster project, being as how that's what pays the bills.  Managing to get a few hours in today, anyway, and making some actual progress.  Which, as usual, involves finding holes in the spec.  Fortunately, the holes I've found so far have all been things I can fix myself, without Going Through Channels.

 

Among other distractions, I re-examined my multi-function button controller for use with MCUs with built-in bootloaders, found a silly bug in my implementation, fixed it, tested...

...And that MCU is doing something very strange indeed.  Like, after a reset with the BOOTMODE signal held LOW (i.e., active, selecting bootloader mode), instead of coming up in bootloader mode like a good little chip, it resets itself every just-over-a-second until such time as it finds BOOTMODE inactive, then it happily launches the application.  The bootloader configuration area seems to be erased, so I should be getting the default behavior, right?  And I could have sworn bootloader mode worked on the previous prototype, using a chip from the same lot but without the fancy button controller.  So... WTF???

 

In other news, pygmy mountain wion wants a tummy wub.

 

Update: OK, so if your KDS-built KL27Z project is preventing the Kinetis bootloader coming up... and you've confirmed that the bootloader configuration area (BCA) is all FF, so default... but the chip just keeps resetting itself (with pulses on the RESET line, yet) when you hold the NMI line low?

Look at the contents of address 0x040D, the initial value of the FOPT register.  It's probably 0x3F, which tells the chip to boot from flash and ignore the BOOTPIN input.  It needs to be 0x3D to enable the BOOTPIN function on the NMI pin.

This is set in (scrolls down through the .map file) startup_MKL27Z4.s, which hides under ./SDK/platform/devices/MKL27Z4/startup/gcc/; it contains these lines:

.section .FlashConfig, "a"
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFF3FFE

Without any provision for changing key values via project settings or anything.  So, ya gotta go into the ferschlugginer system-provided source file and change that to:

.section .FlashConfig, "a"
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFFFFFF
.long 0xFFFF3DFE

Do that, rebuild, and everything's hunky-dory (give or take some confusion later on, when you're done with the bootloader, hit reset-but-not-into-boot-mode, and for some reason it doesn't seem to work right, but unplugging and replugging brings it back up in normal operating mode, no problem).

How much popcorn do we need?

Random things to watch for in the coming months and years (may be updated over the weekend as more stuff pops into my head).

 

Between Hillary's e-mails and Trump University, there's a nontrivial probability that, by the time the election comes around, both major parties' candidates will be under indictment.

This assumes that Hillary gets the nomination, which circumstance is itself likely to precipitate unrest even in the absence of visible chicanery.

 

Then we have the latest in monetary policy: proposals for both negative nominal interest rates on savings (the real rates have been negative for years) and further restrictions on cash, such as eliminating the hundred-dollar bill and the five-hundred-Euro note.  Negative rates ought to lead to people keeping cash in their mattresses, of course, since losses to inflation will be less than losses to the combination of inflation and negative interest.

Now, negative interest will drive inflation in a way that near-zero-but-positive interest doesn't (owing to the way that time-offset dollar/antidollar pairs are created), which may lead to people having to go to the store with wheelbarrows full of...

Um...

Wheelbarrows full of bits?  It's only virtual money in bank accounts that gets created this way.  The supply of paper currency would actually be diminishing.

So, perhaps there gets to be a disparity between paper dollars and bank dollars, with the physical paper currency having a substantially higher value?  We already see small discounts for cash as opposed to credit cards, despite the special laws to protect the interests of the credit-card companies.  Perhaps we'll start seeing unwritten, but widely-understood, very large cash discounts as a paper dollar becomes worth, say, 20% more than a bank dollar.

 

Addendum 1: I keep forgetting about this one.  Given the near certainty that foreign powers (including but not limited to Russia and China) had access to Hillary's ill-secured private server, we may assume that they have all of her e-mails... including the "purely personal" ones our own government doesn't have.  Blackmail, anyone?

 

Addendum 2: The press was prevented from seeing and/or photographing Hillary's movement from her car to her private plane.  Why?  Well, supermarionation can do many things these days, but it still can't make the puppets walk convincingly.  A less plausible explanation is that she's seriously ill, and will (as I speculated earlier) drop out before the general election, leaving the victory to Trump, a Clinton proxy.

 

Addendum 3: The movement to purge schools (etc.) of the names of flawed historical figures proceeds apace; I just learned that my old junior high school, once named after David Starr Jordan, is to be renamed owing to its old namesake having held views which were common in his day but are now beyond the pale.  I think this was such an emergency that it's now known as The Junior High School To Be Named Later.

Clearly, no Western historical figure is good enough to have a school named after him.  Perhaps the schools should all be designated by numbers?  Or named after the Deity?  (Not just any deity; most of them led quite scandalous lives.)  Or named after generally-acceptable non-Western historical figures?  Pol Pot, Che Guevara, Idi Amin...?

Memories...

Had dinner at the nearby Denny's this evening - the one on Mathilda, just the other side of 101 - for no adequately explored reason.  (Of note: at 1730, it was practically empty.  Cause for alarm?)

If memory serves, I'd been there once before, back when I was in high school.  With a friend from school, and one of his friends, a retired rocket scientist.  We hung out late into the night (late by my standards, anyway), chatting about one thing and another.

Sometime during the intervening decades, I had an idea for a series of short stories, vaguely along the lines of Clarke's Tales From the White Hart, featuring a group of Silicon Valley guys* who gather at an un-named always-open restaurant in just about that location, that being a fine spot for a group of mad scientists, mildly irritable engineers, extremely-mixed-media artists, and whatnot to gather late at night a couple of times a month to tell tall tales and come up with preposterous schemes.

That would have been Silicon Valley as was, though.  Not what it's become today, with overworked, hypercaffeinated youngsters dominating the working population and noplace nearby for those artists to have their workshops.

I never did get around to writing any of those stories.  Could probably still be done**, only set in some suburb of Dallas or maybe Huntsville.  Someplace with a mixed population that includes not-overworked techies, retired aerospace engineers, artists, and suchlike.  Wichita Falls, maybe?  Seems to be attracting a population of Interesting People.

 

* And maybe even a gal or two.

** Probably not by me, though.

More calibration

Today's Slashdot poll: daily caffeine intake.

Nonzero tiers: <100mg; 100~299mg; 300~499mg; 500~699mg; ≥700mg; lots.

Um.

I'm currently at ~70mg/day, which is way too much.  Need to get down to maybe half that, and then try to taper back to zero.

People really consume those much-higher doses?  On an ongoing basis?

I think I'll go hug my Buzzy the Hummingbird doll.

Not exactly best practices

OK, so I'd been aware that some of the cheap little biometric lock-boxes (typically for stashing, gun, hand, 1ea.) used cheesy solenoids to unlock....

Now look at this.  A not-so-cheap safe, with multiple big impressive bolts and everything.  And the unlocking mechanism is: a solenoid!

Yeesh!  They save single-digit bucks by using a - dink! - solenoid to unwedge the mechanism, instead of using a motor and geartrain (as in, e.g., a cheap little model-airplane servo) to disengage the lock (or, better, to engage a transfer bar of some sort).

So there's one fiddly little bit that needs to be moved out of the way, and it can be moved by a strong magnetic field (as shown at the link), or by acceleration (seems some of these things can be unlocked by simple vibration).

Caveat, as the feller said, emptor.

Ugh.

Multiple ugh.

Sinus crud (pseudoephedrine-resistant sinus crud at that).

Foot still a little sore; ankle very sore.  Yesterday morning, the ankle was good for a four-mile hike.  Unfortunately, I went just a little more than four miles.  On my way through the parking lot, heading back to my car, the ankle switched from mildly uncomfortable to owowowow! in the space of a few steps.

My metabolism is messed up.  There's a known fix for this, but: while my metabolism is telling me go for a run, or at least a long hike, my ankle is telling me oh no you don't either*.

The correct caffeination level is currently unattainable; I've gotten to the point where I can have a simultaneous caffeine-withdrawal headache and caffeine-overdose headache.

And then there's the global-financial-markets situation in general, and Chipzilla's share price in particular.  I get the sinking feeling that I should have cashed out last spring.

Bleah.  Maybe I'd better have a nap, instead of more caffeine.  And a moderate-sized afternoon meal in place of lunch and dinner.

 

* As the brick said to Bill Cosby's karate instructor.

Calibration

I keep thinking of Huckleberry as being a small critter, because, after all, he's a cat, and also my reference for domestic critters is a standard poodle, by comparison to which he really is quite small.

But he's bigger than a fox, and about the size of a smallish coyote.  Which is consistent with his having outgrown his "large" critter carrier, and the "one size fits all" cat harness.

He remains, however, smaller than the average bear.  And presumably will, even when he's all done growing.  (Note to self: monitor credit-card statements for unauthorized purchases of feline growth hormone.)

A bit late for New Year's, but still.

Clear cache.

Clear data.

Uninstall.

Rinse, repeat.

No more Angry Birds and variants.  No more Fruit Ninja.

The mobe games were time sinks, and time sinks I don't need.  The Rovio offerings had gotten particularly worse, with bugs, incomprehensible and inconsistent in-game physics, ever mode intrusive ads, random changes of rules, and wanting to be played at particular intervals.

When I decide I do need a time sink, on account of my brain being out of order, there are always books.  And small mindless projects.  And big mindless projects, like determining that any box or pile of paper that's more than three years old and is not brokerage statements, tax records, nor irreplaceable memorabilia*, can safely be recycled.

Meanwhile, on this fine Tuesday morning with the end of a short month approaching, J. Pierpoint Manhattan's on-line banking system appears to be b0rked.  Oh, well: I know I have enough in the checking account to cover the end-of-the-month bills, and the ones I pay on-line aren't due until the actual end of the month, so it's not time to panic just yet.

 

* There's a stash of carefully-selected 1980s-vintage articles on minicomputer architecture somewhere around here.  I don't remember where it is, but Southmoon seems to have found the mother lode, and occasionally brings me a shredded page from it.  Aieeeee!

 

Update: Another much-overdue resolution dealt with this afternoon, viz., get a darn haircut, ya hippie!

Update 2: Top Hat is somewhat put out about my not sitting on the sofa playing mobe games; that was her daddy time.  I'll have to spend some time out there reading books.

OSH Park strikes again!

Earlier this afternoon, I ordered a set of little-bitty boards containing a sub-circuit that I've been meaning to test, and not getting around to.  Price, including shipping: $1.90.

An hour and a half later, I got an e-mail notifying me that, owing to my order fitting into an available space, I'd gotten a free upgrade to a 5-day turn.

Which is nice, especially considering how little I'm spending.

(The upcoming flurry of business-card-sized boards will be more profitable for them, at seven whole square inches per.)

Scary cab driver?

Seems the alleged Kalamazoo killer was allegedly driving Uber passengers around during and after the killing spree.

Which... sounds kinda scary... like... wait, don't tell me... aha!

More bad science from Mythbusters

Yeah, Pinky and the Brain are at it again... this time ("Rocketmen") with gummy-bear rockets.  Or not.

The first round almost made sense... until it turned out that, in addition to the experimental fuel grains, they were using an entire unproven hybrid-rocket system, so there were far too many variables, and no knowledge was gathered.  Also, they hadn't bothered doing small-scale static tests in the bunker back at the shop before going full-scale out in the desert.  So, neither good science nor good engineering.

Then, they had custom APCP fuel grains made up: one with dry, powdered extract of gummy bears, and one with dry, powdered extract of dog poop.  Um, okay.  Issue: surely a better test would use the gummy bears as both fuel and binder?  But I guess they had to work with the existing process.  Which leads us to:

What was the composition of the resulting propellant?  Was the alternative "fuel" simply substituted for the usual dry, powdery ingredient (i.e., aluminum) in a typical 70/15/15 mix, giving 70% AP, 15% "fuel" and 15% binder-which-is-also-fuel?

They had a control rocket with the standard composition; I submit that there should have been a far-end control, in which the "fuel" was some inert material, such as sand, leaving just the oxidizer and binder reacting.  My suspicion is that it would have had nearly the performance of the dog-poop rocket.*

 

Sheesh.  Maybe post-move I can have a YouTube show seriously looking at the science behind the stuff that's been flubbed on Mythbusters.  More thinky, less splodey.

 

* Afterthought: Maybe they should also have tried a plant-based renewable biofuel.  Dried, powdered hemp, maybe.  See how high the rocket can get on that.

Who is this God person, anyway?

Jose Camoes Silva ponders how one might verify the identity of the Deity.  Specifically, how can one tell the difference between the One-True-God and an arbitrarily powerful alien, or even just some spoiled rich kid from Betelgeuse V?

The difference, of course, is that the One-True-God created the Universe, and everyone else did not.

I thought of this one back in my college days.  And a story idea sprang into being!

The only surefire way to verify the identity of the Creator is to build a time machine, travel back to the Beginning, and watch.

So Bob does this.  When he arrives at the Beginning, it's dark.  D'OH!

So he turns on the headlights....

On tweeting oneself in the foot

Twitter has been playing a fun new game!

A while back, they revoked Milo's blue tick,

No, not that one!  The "verified" blue tick,

because, it seems, his opinions were so disfavored that his identity had become uncertain, much as an expired or revoked driver's license no longer serves to identify the bearer.

Now, they've got this new "Ministry of Free Speech" or whatever, and its first official act was to suspend the account of Some Other McCain.

All this is maybe popular, for the moment, with the current crop of Social Justice Howler Monkeys... but how will it go over with the shareholders?  (Yes, the management of a publicly-traded corporation - Twitter is one, and the Committee of User Safety is acting as corporate management - has responsibilities to the owners: the pension funds and whatnot that put up the capital for all the fun and games.)

Consider: the SJHMs aren't paying for the service.  It's "free".  To the extent that Twitter has a revenue model - it does have some sort of revenue model, doesn't it? - the revenue comes from advertising (I assume there's advertising there; I have good filters in place to make it go away) and data mining.  Both of which depend on traffic volume and user count.

So, outrage storms are good for business.  To the extent that banning the occasional high-profile user stirs up an outrage storm, that's good for business.

But, silence too many of the users who provoke outrage?  Or merely make them feel unwelcome, so they take their opinions elsewhere?  No more outrage storms.  Less traffic.  Fewer users.

Twitter needs the provocative opinions there, for the outrage machine to get outraged about.  Make them go away, and all gets calm, cozy, and quiet

And that's not good business.

 

Afterthought: Maybe the whole thing isn't meant to be good business?

According to the rumor mill, Twitter doesn't have a revenue model, is burning through Other People's Capital at a ferocious rate, and is effectively being run as a communication channel for Progressives organizing for the upcoming election.

So... I was speculating about venture capital being a conduit whereby the contents of pension funds could be funneled to various sorts of cronies?  Perhaps Twitter (the corporate entity) is just a way to use third- and fourth-parties' retirement funds for partisan political messaging?

And furthermore: For First Amendment purposes, as has been noted elsewhere, Twitter Inc. is a private company, as distinguished from a government agency.

But, from a financial perspective, it is not a private corporation.  It is a publicly-traded corporation, partly owned by random members of the public, and the money it's spending is very definitely Other People's.  How it chooses to run (or ruin) its business is therefore a matter of concern to securities regulators.

A mite blustersome this morning

Sounds of air and water at the windows.

And it's (counts on fingers) the middle of February already.  Since when do we have winter weather in February?

This must surely be a sign of the Apocalypse.  Wind, Rain, Fender-Benders, and Being Late For Work*?

 

* Not being able to recall, offhand, the names of the Four Bikers is a sure sign that I haven't re-read Good Omens recently enough.

Do I, in fact, know what?

Seen here, via Insty:

Keep the pencil out of your you-know-what

Lest you be thought insane, and invalided back to Blighty?

Or am I missing something?

"Startup"

You keep using that word...

Once upon a time, there were startup ventures, attempting the impossible (or at least the highly unlikely) with limited resources.  As Jordin Kare put it:

They don't have fancy buildings. That money goes for tools

Now we see things like this:

$2 billion startup GitHub

That's a startup???

Yeesh.

Then I ponder.  I see things like this (via), and I note that today's Sand Hill Road bandits aren't the Gnomes of yore, carefully investing their own money, but instead are monocultural youngsters playing with institutional money (i.e., Grampaw's pension fund).  And the companies they fund do indeed have fancy buildings, and expensive marketing campaigns... but, somehow, they seldom seem to have money left over for things like tools.

This leads me to suspect that "venture capital", nowadays, is a conduit for funneling other people's money into the pockets of real-estate developers, marketing companies, and other cronies.  And, of course, Creating Jobs (not necessarily for employees who will actually help develop a product, you understand; just Jobs for their own sake).

And, for years now, I've looked at the Big Shiny Buildings inhabited by software companies of rather modest output (and, often, perennially negative cash flow), and wondered just how many people inhabited those buildings, and what exactly they did*.  'Tis another mystery of the high-tech world.

 

* But not whether any of them had read The Mythical Man-Month.  The answer to that would be: no.

Perhaps a change of direction is indicated

A few years back, I wrote sort of a poor man's test automation and control panel framework - the beginnings of one, anyway - using Ruby and GTK+.  More recently, specifically after Qt became available under LGPL, I started playing with substituting Qt for GTK+, since the GTK+ API for some features that I regard as indispensable was not at all stable, and besides Qt looks slicker.

Well, there were silly issues with background images not working right from stylesheets when widgets were created from Ruby, and then there's the minor detail that the Qt bindings for Ruby seem to be no longer maintained, so there's no support for Qt5, which has some nice features that I'd want to use, and....

Well, so maybe I'd use ECMAscript, which is supported as part of Qt5?

This whole things has been on behind-the-back-burner priority for quite a while now, though with the new mini-test-equipment program it seems like time to dust it off, no?

And then... someone mentioned node.js, in an entirely different context.  I took another glance at it.  And... maybe?  Hm.  Other people are already using it for lab automation: good!

So there may already be a suitable not-NI framework for the instrument-communication and test-sequencing side of things.  As for the control panel?

Well, looking at what's routinely done with HTML5, a control panel with the usual features would seem to be a perfectly mundane browser app.  And the new canvas feature appears to support the kind of cool stuff I'd started playing with in GTK+ back in the day, for fripperies like steam gauges and Nixie readouts.

This also provides handy separation of the test application and its GUI.  GUI runs on the user's browser; test app runs on the lab machine (which could also be running the browser); they communicate over TCP or whatever.

And, since the software framework was supposed to end up open-source anyway (I want to sell hardware and consulting services, not software and tech support), piggybacking on something that's already happening seems like a good move.

This also leads to a thought about communication with gadgets....

SCPI, Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments, is kind of long in the tooth, innit?  There are Issues, for example, related to its HP-IB origins; SCPI over TCP turns out to be rather troublesome for application programmers owing to the lack of the out-of-band signaling that the old bus provided.  And it's not really for programmable instruments so much as merely connected instruments.

So... what about instruments that have built-in JavaScript  interpreters, and can take immediate commands and scripts to be stored for later execution?  And return data in JSON format?

I haven't looked yet to see if anyone's already playing with that, but it seems worth a ponder, next time I have some pondering bandwidth available.  I haven't even looked at the size of JavaScript interpreters.  (Or perhaps some sort of tinyJavaScript?  Anyone remember the various flavors of tinyBASIC, etc.?)

Anyway: to the back burner with this!  I have more urgent stuff to do the next couple of weeks.

Update: A bit of fiddling while my brain is fried this fine blustery afternoon.

I determined that the version of node.js included in Debian-Jessie is way outdated, and followed the instructions for installing from a node-oriented repository - on my workstation, which is still on Wheezy.  Then I tried a little code sample that uses the serialport package (which appears to be nicely cross-platform):

eric@magrat:~/tinker/node.js$ node listserial.js
/dev/ttyACM0
/dev/ttyS0
/dev/ttyS1
/dev/ttyS2
/dev/ttyS3
/dev/ttyUSB0
eric@magrat:~/tinker/node.js$

Hmmm.  Notice anything interesting here?  Yes!  It finds not only ttyS* (including the ones that don't actually exist, but this is a longstanding Linux Issue, and the application may need to do some filtering to eliminate ports that can't actually be opened) and ttyUSB*, but also ttyACM*, which some serial terminal programs don't seem to know about after all these years - USB modem?  Wozzat then?

So... assuming that the rest of the library actually works and talks to the ports as it should, that's a good start on communicating with MCUs.

This may not sound like a big deal, but the absence of proper cross-platform serial-port support for Ruby has been a persistent annoyance.

What I do when my brain isn't working

This isn't really supposed to be a holiday for me; there's all manner of stuff I should be doing, some of it for actual clients, but...

Well...

My brain just isn't in working order.  Can't do anything that requires thinking, or focus, etc.

Also, I'm not feeling altogether well, so anything involving major physical exertion is out.  Ergo, no yard work.

So do I turn on the telly?  I do not.  I don't actually have a telly, as such, though one of these computers has a tuner card installed, so watching the teevee is not entirely out of the question.

No, I try to do something at least a little bit productive with part of the day, as long as it doesn't get complicated.  In this case, solder paste was involved.

I think I'd mentioned something about ordering thermocouples from Amazon, right?  They arrived just about the time I was ready for them.

Yes, that's my proof-of-concept, 4-channel thermocouple-to-USB board, slightly under business-card size.  I assembled it and implemented the 4-channel version of the measurement task today.  It works, at least as far as rudimentary testing can determine (all four channels read room temperature; if I pinch one, it reads skin temperature; if I hit one with a flame, it reads around 800°C and the other three don't change).

Got the connectors, a somewhat upmarket analog MUX (low ON resistance, but mainly very high isolation), a thermocouple-to-SPI chip, an outrageously overkill $4 MCU (think: massively overclocked VAX), and the usual odds and ends, including a second MCU (handling the multi-function button) that I'll have to replace eventually because I didn't test its firmware well enough before soldering it down.

The readings aren't hooked up to SCPI commands yet, though.  Determining exactly what the commands should be (read a channel, read specified channels, set measurement rate, ...?) and implementing them gets into needing-to-think territory, and my brain's not up to it.