Silicon Valley Redneck

Now, let me get this straight...

Financial markets were high ahead of the Brexit vote, as polls showed a certainty of Remain.  OK.

After the Leave result, markets took a dive, what with the unexpected outcome and proclamations of impending doom.  With ya so far.

But, the world having entirely failed to come to an end, markets have more than made up their losses in the last few days.  Aaaaand?

The central bankers are now talking about even more stimulus and lower interest rates in order to bolster market confidence in the post-Brexit era.  Wait, what?

When all you have is monetary policy....

Oh, well.  This crazy inflation of asset prices benefits me, as long as I get out before the music stops.

Progress!

On the non-toaster work front - that project with the little teeny board with the $2 MCU - the subsystem-level prototype boards came in today.  Well, I got them today; the client got them yesterday.

One problem noted so far: my footprint for a 3.5mm pitch pluggable terminal block wasn't very good, and the headers ended up installed backward.  Turns out that the easy way to reverse them (at least the 2-terminal ones) is to pry off the insulator and re-install, just leaving the pins soldered in place.

Other than that, one of the boards is working as far as I can tell, and the next needs some firmware written for it before it will do anything much but all three of the autonomous power supplies come up as they should, and the things that the MCU is supposed to control come up in their safe states, so all's well so far.

I guess over the holiday weekend I'll be writing enough of the firmware for the second board to get the essential functions working, and then proceeding to the third board (which depends on the first two, plus some Linux code) and the fourth (the tiny one, which runs the same firmware I've been working on while waiting for the boards to come in, except that it's a different model, so one module changes).

There's also some setting up to do on the test-fixture front.  And... the final fixture needs to include one of Board A, one of Board B, eight of Board C, and one Linux SBC (various instances of Board D are optional).  Also a bunch of cabling among them.  Maybe I'll want to bolt all these buggers to a slab of wood.  After all, the complete fixture needs to get handed off to the client's techies for their development, and having everything neatly organized might be better than trying to transport another Roger Amidon Spider.

How my day started

A huge gray fierce bumblekitty jumps on your nightstand!

> ignore bumblekitty

The bumblekitty hits!

The back of your neck tickles.

> ignore bumblekitty

The bumblekitty hits!

Your ear tickles.

> pat bumblekitty

The bumblekitty hits!

Your ear tickles.

> get up

OK

> check internet

They're rioting in Africa

(You know the rest)

> write blog post

A little gray mouse-loving doggy jumps on your desk!

The doggy hits!

You can't reach your mouse.

 

Yeah, that's pretty much how things are starting out.  Now that Huckleberry is off the mousepad, Top Hat is back and pawing at me, when she's not at the recycle bin playing paper-shredder.  And here's a pygmy mountain lion (Southmoon) to squeak mournfully and give me reproachful looks unless I turn around, reach down, and give her a belly rub.

Meanwhile, on the other work front...

One thing about spending most of my time in the embedded-MCU world: I don't use floating point a lot.

But, what with the $2 MCU in one of the current projects having hardware floating point built right in at no extra cost... I figure, well, I might as well use floating-point calculations for stuff like calibration factors, because it's easier than mucking about with scaled integers, innit?

And besides, I'm using the KSDK implementation of printf, which never heard of my %p scaled-integer format.  I miss my printf.  I should port it to this platform.  Anyway!

I enabled the floating-point formats in the print_scan module, and soon discovered that I was getting wildly wrong answers.  Like, 10.0/65535 was coming out 1.000153, and (10.0/65535)*16985 was coming out 3.5917.  Eh?

Well, it's pretty obvious that the actual arithmetic is right, but the formatting is wrong.  Like, the integer part of the output is high by 1.  But not always.  Feed printf a nice clean constant 2.47, for example, and it comes out 2.47.

So I end up digging into mkfloatnumstr, where the actual conversion happens.  There's some code that doesn't quite make sense, that's obviously the thing that's incrementing the integer part.  Disregarding Chesterton, I boldly comment it out!

At this point, everything I throw at it works... except that 5.000 comes out as 4.000, and 10.000 becomes 9.000.  Oh.  Right.

[Added: These weren't actually exact numbers to begin with; the input was, e.g., 5, and the output being sent to printf was the nearest approximation the hardware was prepared to attempt.  Which was probably 4.999something.]

Some rather common numbers, like 5 and 10, don't represent exactly as binary floating point.  Thus, some fiddling is needed to make the binary version of 9.999999whatever come out as 10.

The original code having been rather less than useful, I just throw in a quick hack to check for fractpart > 0.9995, and figure that's good enough for the current application.

But methinks that module may need a rewrite... or at least that one function.

Somewhere around here I should have my totally portable floating-point formatting functions that I wrote back in the 1980s, for use on targets such as the 68000 and DG NOVA.  Might just be time to look for them... and I hope they exist somewhere other than a 9-track tape.

Update: My first hack didn't work right, either; 2.75 plus quantization came out 3.75.  Next try was waiting until after the fractional part had been converted, and checking for carry (leftover fraction >= almost 1).

Well. That was Interesting.

Over at Toasterco, my understudy had been struggling for a couple of weeks with a manufacturing problem; a batch of controller boards (the crazy complicated, do-everything model with zillions of little SMT components) made by a new contract manufacturer had a high failure rate, and the failure mode made no sense.

Basically, all signs pointed to the I²C bus being wedged LOW (both signals).  This led to various trouble.

So, I spent a couple of hours over there - hey, their lab is air conditioned!  Things continued not making sense.  The SDA and SCL lines were clearly being actively driven low, showing about 0.25V with the normal 10K pullups to 3.3V, and maybe 1.2V with a 330 Ohm pullup.  But then....

The I²C bus has a level translator between 3.3V (the MCU and a few other things) and 5V (a parallel port that really does need to run on 5V).  Were I designing the thing today, that wouldn't be necessary, as there are now 16-bit I²C I/O port chips with split supplies, so the bus can run on one voltage and the I/O on another.  But that's now, and the board was designed then, and it needed the bus bridge.

On the 5V side, there are two pullup resistors, as one might expect.  But.  Wait.  Er...

Know what you get when you place a pair of 0402 resistors next to each other on a 25 mil grid?  Right!  It's kind of hard to tell which pads are what.  And the 0402 resistor footprint in my library at the time had "part goes this way" markings in the assembly drawing, but not on the silkscreen.

So, yeah.  The resistor pair was rotated 90° from its correct orientation.  One resistor was between SDA and SCL, while the other was between 5V and 5V.  Result: SDA and SCL on the 5V side drifted LOW by default, causing the translator chip to drive them low on the 3.3V side.

0225. Mnfxt.

Sometime around 0130, Huckleberry declared Playtime.

He was very persistent about it.

After half an hour of that, I decided I might as well crawl out of bed for a while.  Not sure that was a good idea, really.

Oh, well.  Looks like global financial markets are perking back up a bit.  Speaking of which:

I noticed a headline yesterday to the effect that Soros hadn't shorted the Pound this time.  Really?  So he was so wrapped up in the globalist ruling-class bubble that he truly believed that Brexit was inconceivable?

Funny how the overlords in their shiny palaces never quite get the message that the undifferentiated plebs resent having their lives micromanaged from afar by people they don't know and didn't vote for.

And, closer to home, that (and of course Identity Politics) is how you get things like the Traditionalist Worker Party.  Look at the front page of their web site, and their platform seems almost reasonable in the current political context.  (Mostly wrong, but reasonable.)  Dig a little deeper, and you get to the part where America is for White People, and I'm not White, and they want me to wear these parentheses, just so they know who We are, mind; there's no mention of putting me on the train to Happy Fun Camp.  Yet.

Enough randomness.  Back to sleep.  Maybe.  (Playful fuzzballs aside, I think my metabolism has shifted recently, and maybe I'm burning some fat and liberating stored caffeine.  Yes, I know caffeine isn't traditionally considered fat-soluble, so it's probably something else.  It's 0248, you expect me to make sense?)

A minor oversight, perhaps

There's this cool list of places to live elsewhere in the solar system.

Included in the list: Titan.  Advantage:

Energy, and lots of it. The great lakes of Saturn's moon Titan are filled mostly with pure methane, providing a near limitless supply of power for human activities.

All together now:

What do you do for an oxidizer
What do you do for an oxidizer
What do you do for an oxidizer
Way out there on Titan?

More Brexity randomness

For the Texit crowd: will ya hold off until after the election, at least?  Maybe until next year?  Some of us are attempting to adapt while on constrained personal schedules, and there's altogether too much boat-rocking going on already.

...And I think I saw a reference to "Trexit", which I suppose refers to secession by dinosaurs, or perhaps by fans of some old TV show.

There's much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the globalists, including claims that leaving the EU will hurt Britain's place in the global economy.  Which is odd, because last I checked most of the globe was on the outside of the EU, and Britain alone will have much greater flexibility in its dealings with the U.S., China, India, and so on.

Over at the Torygraph, there's something about the EU being prepared to ban Brit-style high-powered electric kettles and toasters.  Because ecosomething.  Which, actually, makes negative sense; taking time-related losses into account, a high-powered kettle will use less energy bringing the water to a boil than a low-powered one.  But you can't expect virtue-signaling EUrocrats to understand physics, I suppose.

And, really, the EU has been notable for nonsensical regulations (nonsensical in terms of stated purposes, at any rate; they may make fine sense in terms of trade protectionism).  Remember the compliance nonsense the Raspberry Pi team had to go through: not only did the single-board hobby computer have to meet EMI regulations (this part makes sense; it's meant to prevent the product interfering with other things), but it also had to meet EMC regulations, including operating normally through high voltage zap events, as if it were a finished product for some mission-critical application.

 

Yeah, I've been casually using "Britain" to refer to "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."  But was anyone calling it "UKexit"?

 

Update:

Found here; apparent origin here.

They're rioting in Africa (whistles)

Hm.

In defiance of polls and Conventional Wisdom (but consistent with the actual ballot counts I was seeing shortly before bedtime PDT), Brexit has passed.

Well, someone had to be first to leave the EU.

I rather suspect that this is the inevitable result of the EUracracy getting greedy; when the central planners assert ever more control over people's lives (never mind large national issues such as immigration policy), and there's just no way to claw back even a little bit of local control... well, the choices are total submission or total secession.  There's just no compromise available.

So now world financial indices are way down (having soared the last couple of days on growing certainty that the proles wouldn't vote against the Party).  I suspect they'll recover quickly, as the Brits reassert their essential Britishness and fail to riot in the streets, etc.

For those with a pile of cash on hand: this morning seems like a Buying Opportunity.  (For the rest of us, not so much.  I'm just hoping that (a) I don't need to free up any more cash for a couple of months, (b) things get back to normal-ish fairly soon, and (c) I can complete the selling side of Operation Bug Out well before the next trigger, which presumably comes in November.)

Update: I bet Hillary's son-in-law is making out like a bandit with all the market swings.  Probably Soros, too.  People in certain positions always find ways to come out ahead.

Update 2: Wait, did Trump the Insult Comic Dog say something almost diplomatic?

More POSIX annoyances

So here I am, trying to figure out how to handle message I/O on a serial port, to and from a little gadget that should respond quickly, and there really ought to be a timeout on the scale of several milliseconds.

The application (which Someone Else will be writing) that uses this will be running on a little Linux single-board computer.

It's a right pain.  It's almost like UN*X is basically a timesharing OS or something, and not an RTOS.

Oh, and just to bring ever more sunshine into my life, there are many of these serial ports.

There are sundry cute mechanisms whereby one can attempt to manage multiple asynchronous communication channels, but none of them look very promising.

So now it looks like I'll be learning about pthreads.  I think spawning one thread per channel to handle receive operations, plus perhaps one overall to handle housekeeping, may do the trick.

Turnabout, and all that.

Spotted here:

Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties

Yeah, well.  Political professionals and parties have been busy demonizing various portions of the electorate for decades.  What do you expect?

Two annoyances in rapid succession

Had some background music playing on YouTube, selected from my Watch Later list.  (Tchaikovsky's Symphony #2, if you must know.)  There was some interesting nerdvid in the Up Next suggestion list; I figured I'd watch that once the music was over.

Came the finale, I set aside what I was doing and... wait, now it's playing Berlioz!  I didn't tell it to do that!

But it seems that Watch Later is an autoplay list, and there doesn't appear to be any way of disabling that.  Hitting the Back button got a different Up Next, not including the thing I'd intended to watch.

Foo.  Can't anyone do a UI that isn't obviously broken?

 

At nearly the same time, I wanted to print, for reference in an upcoming programming task, about a page and a half from a lengthy vanilla-HTML page.  So: select the area of interest, File->Print..., and select Selection.

Yeah, it printed the page and a half I wanted.  Plus 22 pages of "this page intentionally left blank" (Firefox header and footer; interior of page void of content).

Printing in Firefox (and, come to think of it, every other browser I've used over the years) has been broken since the days when it was called Netscape and 56K dialup was pretty impressive.  The details of the breakage change over time, but, really: failing to suppress leading blank pages for "print selection"?  That's pretty lame.

Back to handling "print selection" by copying & pasting into OpenOffice... which usually works, more or less.

Four weird sisters, hand in hand...

The hot financial headlines over the weekend concerned the "Quadruple Witching" event, whereby four different types of sophistercated financial-stuff deadlines would all line up, at which time the global economy would be taken out to Salisbury Plain by Druids and sacrificed for the solstice*.

Early morning: Global financial indices up, most of them substantially.  Oh, wait: there's one outlier that's down.  What's that based on, solstice-witch hedge funds?

Well, maybe it just doesn't work with four.  Or maybe clickbait headlines have little connection to reality.

 

* While the frogs croak *brexit* *brexit*.

Question assertions.

Assertion: Military-looking rifles such as the AR-15 have no use other than indiscriminately killing large numbers of people in a hurry.

Question: So why do the police need them?  Is indiscriminate slaughter part of modern police work?  If so, wouldn't it be better to disband the police?  Seriously, why would we want a bunch of government-run death squads all over our homeland?

Question: Why does the freaking Internal Revenue Service need them?  Are they planning a massacre of taxpayers, or what?

Question: ...Wait.  Are you calling the U.S. military a bunch of indiscriminate mass killers?  So why didn't they just exterminate the entire population of Iraq in 2003, salt the ground, and be done with it?

 

Assertion: Some journalist just bought an AR-15 for $500 cash from a stranger in a burger-joint parking lot!

Question: What's the going price for a used AR-15?  (Seriously, I don't know this offhand.  A couple of decades ago it was in $700 territory, I think.  Hasn't it gone up since then?  Especially for a no-paper-trail deal, during a call for confiscation?)

Question: Is it a real AR-15?  Is it a .22LR lookalike?  Airsoft?

Question: Is it stolen?  Hotter than the proverbial $2 pistol?

Autosuggest D'OH!

Awright, Android team!

Why is it that when I start typing in D'OH on my phone's virtual-keyboard thingy, all the suggestions are in French?

The keyboard is definitely in English mode.  French isn't even one of the options I have configured.  The overall phone setting ought to be American English (and appears to be, given that it expects American spellings of disputed words).

Why is it suggesting foreign terms instead of a common American one?

Bullcookies.

Your ad blocker is interfering with the operation of this site.

Nope.  Your ad blocker blocker is interfering with the operation of your site.  Bye.

 

Additional: The Web today without adblocking is a bandwidth-sucking horror.  Those of us on not-so-fast connections see a dramatic slowdown if we allow ads.  And: do you realize that some people still pay for incoming bandwidth?  That having sites transfer an order of magnitude more data in ads than in content costs viewers actual money?  When I'm using my phone as an access point, this is of great concern.

Besides which, ad delivery networks invariably involve cross-site scripting, which is a huge security issue.

So, if you want me to look at ads?

1. Host them on your own server, not on someone's advertising network.
2. Keep them compact and unobtrusive.
3. Never, ever, use Flash.
4. Every so often, try using your site on dialup.

I've been telling Webmasters to do this last one since... well, since the mid-90s, back when basically everybody was still on dialup, but Web designers mostly looked at local copies of their sites and never shared the dialup-user experience.

Incidentally, the Angry Birds game series has been destroyed by the advertising.  With the ads, the games are slow, constantly interrupted, and effectively unplayable - and, in the absence of a network connection, they won't even start.  Does anyone even play the games anymore, or is Rovio now purely a merchandising and movie business?

Rapid change of scale

Spotted here:

By 2010 several different companies had developed laser guided versions of the World War II era 70mm air-to-ground rocket. Developing a guided 70mm rocket took longer than expected because the manufacturers underestimated the technical difficulties of getting the laser seeker and flight control mechanisms into that small a package, at a weight and price the customer could afford. The price of the new 70mm missile is now about $30,000 each.

Grabbing my bilingual ruler, here... from the electronics perspective, using this year's technology, 70mm is freakin' huge.  Especially if you don't need long-term stabilization (which, given the operational lifetime of the platform from power-up to impact, is not going to be much of an issue).

I'm thinking the biggest challenge would be the mechanical apparatus for steering the rocket; the electronics and (I think) optics ought to be ridiculously easy to shoehorn in - even into a smaller platform, better suited to (pondering how to word this) highly selective strikes.

40mm smart bomb, anyone?  Fitting in the guidance machinery is ever so much easier if it's a simple air-dropped gravity bomb, so you don't have to work around the propulsion.  Also, not much worry about acceleration forces and such.  How many 40x100mm smart bomblets could a modest-sized drone carry, perhaps in a Calico-style helical magazine?

Hm.  Come to think of it, I don't know much about the optics requirements.  That'd certainly be dependent on the characteristics of the targeting laser; use a big enough laser, and the seeker can be pretty small.  Were I actually thinking of getting into that business, I'd have to do some research.

Double hm.  Call the payload of a 40mm bomblet 45cm³ of RDX; that's about 80 grams, or 2.8 ounces.  That's enough to do some localized damage; with precision delivery, it sounds like a plausible weapon.  Quick look: less bang than an M67 grenade, but more than a classic pineapple - hey, I didn't know that was a Browning design!  Anyway: BOTE calculations suggest the 40mm smart bomb / mid-sized drone / rotary magazine setup might be a viable weapon system, and it doesn't take a huge nation-state budget.  Doesn't have to be a drone, either; a Cessna could carry a heck of a lot of these things.  Or the drone could be a converted Cessna, saving the weight of a human pilot.

Update: How about...

A 40mm,
      drone-droppable,
            precision-guided,
                  reloadable,
                        paintball bomb?

Product idea?  (Using an electrically-initiated, fast-acting, chemical gas generator for paint dispersal is one of those things that obviously ought to work, no matter how badly it failed when Mythbusters tried it.  But they were trying to use high explosives, weren't they?)

Oddly missing library

Curious.

There are CRC functions used within the Linux kernel, but there's no off-the-shelf CRC library* (at least, not readily findable in Debian) for the C application level.  Java, yes.  Perl, maybe.  Not C.

Oh, well.  Guess I'll just have to use the same adapted-from-elsewhere CRC16 implementation I've been using in embedded applications since forever.  Bonus: it's the same one used on the other end of the line, so they're sure to match.  Which is great, unless there's a bug that's invisible by virtue of being the same at both ends.

 

* And I don't mean the one that includes the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

Smashing the Overton Window

There's an old(-ish) saying that I don't recall exactly, and Google is no help this morning.  Goes something like this:

Society is a horse, not a car.  If pressed too hard, it will buck and throw off its rider.

The current generation of full-time Activists is intent on shifting the Overton Window a long way in the currently favored direction - so far, indeed, that the Unthinkable of a year ago suddenly becomes this year's Policy, while all that was within the Sensible spectrum becomes the new Unthinkable.

Metaphorically speaking, they're trying to shift the window by multiple window-widths.  With a bulldozer.  At ramming speed.

See the result: amid the rubble, no window remains.  Attempts at moderate discourse are denounced as Not Promoting The Cause, and therefore necessarily racist/sexist/____phobic.  Even silence may be taken as hostility; mild disagreement is virtually equivalent to mass murder.

And, no room for civil discourse remaining, see what creeps out of the rubble!  Seriously, look at the stuff that's suddenly becoming acceptable on both "left" and "right"*.  Hard-core eliminationist rhetoric against designated scapegoat groups.  Denunciations based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, party affiliation: all are acceptable, now that nothing is.

Congratulations, guys.  Enjoy your civil war.  Your masters will be sitting in their mansions, laughing.

 

* Those are stupid labels, but they're the ones in use, and they're reverting to the 1930s meanings, splitting hairs among totalitarian movements.  If your spectrum runs from Trotsky on the left to Hitler on the right, where do you put Milton Friedman?

QOTD

OK, a few days ago, but still.

Civilization exists between barbarians on two sides. In form they are entirely different but in need they are identical. Uniformity and submission were not abstract ideas to early man, they are a way of life baked into our instinct. All civilization is a renunciation of instinct, so saw two utterly different men as Hayek and Freud.

James Wilson, in comments, here.