Silicon Valley Redneck

TFIL

The cats have been playing The Floor Is Lava lately, especially with regard to the carpet.

Methinks flea-bombing had better be a priority for Saturday.  And maybe I should dust the carpet with flea powder in the meantime.

Funny thing: the fleas have been leaving me alone, even as they make the critters miserable.

Question the goal

Seen here, via Insty:

Ravel said the solution should be for the commission to be eliminated and replaced by a model allowing for one-party rule. "It seems to me California, the Fair Political Practices Commission, did have five members, and the chair is the only full-time person. That was a really great way to get things done. ..."

... And one-party rule is a good thing, is it?  Getting Things Done is the goal, and not ensuring that the things done are right, proper, and acceptable to all parties?

Kinetis library grumble

Well, I'm back to the task of getting some firmware running on a Kinetis KEA-series MCU - the automotive subfamily.  Because sometimes the application calls for something more than just industrial spec.

I'd already noted that the support available under KDS is annoyingly different, and that KSDK support isn't there (and isn't planned for any time soon).

Well, now I have a little blinky-lights program running on the eval board using MQXLite, and it's time to bring in some real functions (like talking to the CPLD via I²C).  And: the device-driver conventions are quite different.  So I'll be needing to make a bunch of changes to, e.g., the I²C memory driver that was sitting around, already working on a different Kinetis part via KSDK and FreeRTOS.

Oh, well: another device-driver interface to figure out and hide behind my abstraction layer.

Update: Oh, great.  This family of device drivers doesn't appear to be actually documented, aside from comments in the source files, and... oh.  There's a missing function, SelectSlaveDevice, mentioned in the comments but nowhere to be found.  Looks like, yes, it's necessary to go to the "Methods" tab for the device driver and enable that one.  Between that little discovery and what I'm digging up from support fora, perhaps I'll be able to get this turkey communicating in the next few hours.

Update 2: OK, found the documentation.  It's in Processor Expert's "Help on Component" thingy, accessible via right-click.  Even includes a "Typical usage" example of sorts.  Thing is, the scheme this device-driver model uses for initialization and whatnot is not friendly to device abstraction on buses.  Oh, well: looks like I can't use static configuration for one-or-more memory-like peripherals, or maybe a level of indirection is required.

Update 3: Bad software architect!  No pizza!  Turns out the xxx_Init functions return a magical pointer, which is supposed to be passed to the subsequent I/O functions.  If automatic initialization is turned on, the init code calls the xxx_Init functions and simply discards the returned values, rather than, say, saving them in global variables that follow some naming convention (e.g., xxx_Data) or just storing it in a static variable for future use (since xxx_Init and xxx_TweakBits live in module XXX.c and are specific to device xxx).  So, for those device drivers that actually rely on the value, automatic initialization is right out, and each Init function must be called, once, from the application's initialization code and the returned value kept somewhere safe and passed to all the TweakBits functions.

Update 4: So now I'm trying to work at the LDD (Logical Device Driver) level, and having to implement my own blocking I/O operations.  MQX Lite provides semaphores: good.  But...

So I set an event handler to post to a defined semaphore on I/O completion (per device, and maybe per general operation type).  But that means I'd bloody well better wait on completion after each operation that's expected to generate a completion event, because there's no method provided to reset a semaphore without waiting on it, and I really don't want to end up in a situation where I'm one completion event ahead and failing to wait on completion of the current operation.

Or I could just set VALUE to zero when I'm about to launch an operation and I'm not sure the semaphore is clean.

Meta-lesson

Challenge: can you point to Aleppo on the map?

Okay, so can I?  Summon forth a Map.  Find Syria: it's right where I look first, alongside the Kurdish parts of Turkey and Iraq.  So far, so good.

Now look along the coast.  No Aleppo.  Hm?

Oh.

It's way the smeg inland.  Got a puny little creek running through it.  What would a sailor be doing there?  There appear to be some Syrial ports, but Aleppo sure don't look to be one of 'em.

The meta-lesson here: don't learn geography from fictional witches.

How high is up?

Actual headline:

DJI launches drone the size of water bottle

Cue Henry Morgan rant about products that are "king-sized."

Are we talking pint water bottle, or 5-gallon water bottle?

Kitty update

Took Huckleberry and Southmoon to the vet today, for checkups, catching up on vaccinations, and doing something about the flea situation.

They were amazingly well behaved.  In the exam room, Southmoon (generally the timid one) was wandering around exploring, while Huckleberry stayed in his carrier most of the time.

Official weights!  Huckleberry comes in at a bit over 13 pounds - somehow, he seems a lot heavier than that - and Southmoon at 12½.

Now they have a prescription for Revolution for the fleas, but it was out of stock - have to pick it up Monday.  Seems a lot of people have been reporting that Advantage isn't working this year.  Fleas have evolved resistance to it?  The product was reformulated and is now homeopathic or something?  Anyway, Revolution supposedly still works.

Flea-bombing of the house is probably a Saturday-afternoon thing, assuming the weather is decent.

Update:  The vet said the critters might be lethargic after their vaccinations.  Well, about 9 hours later Huckleberry made a mighty leap from the bed up to the top of one of the tall bookcases.  That's some lethargy.  (I don't think he's lithargic, either; he's not that heavy.)

Unclear on the concept

Headline sighted on a financial-news-aggregator site:

Trump and Clinton need better ideas for how to create jobs

Creating jobs (the productive sort, anyway - consult Bastiat for details) isn't something politicians do, and it's certainly not in POTUS's job description.

How about: better ideas for how to avoid destroying jobs?

Better still: how about a lazy, do-nothing, work-to-rule POTUS?  If it's not in fed.gov's job description, neither he nor any part of the executive branch will do it.  (Alas, this would actually require a highly energetic individual to enforce the work-to-rule order.)

Sticking my fingers in my ears

And not watching the precedential debasement.

Let me know if Hillary drops dead or Trump gets eaten by an alligator.

 

And furthermore: Am I the only one who gets Between Two Ferns mixed up with Fernwood 2Night?

Additional: I heard from someone who watched the whole thing on one of the big-name news-aggregator sites.  Apparently all the comments were pro-Hillary.  Comments unfavorable to the site's management's chosen candidate were not being approved by the moderators.  (I suspect that actual moderators may not have been involved, given the volume of comments; the easy approach would have been to limit commenting to pre-approved members who could be counted on to stick to the party / company line, and simply black-hole all input from the general public.)

But wait - there's more!: Third-party presence was unsuccessful.  Jill Stein reportedly showed up but was removed from the premises.  SMOD sent a minion, but owing to a navigation error it appeared in Australia instead.

Destination?

I hear that a lot of people - as in, far more than the usual number - are threatening to move right after the election, if the wrong lizard gets in.  For any given value of wrong lizard.

But whither shall they go?

I suggest Ukraine!  Yes, their politicians are always like this, but at least they get to throw the bums in dumpsters.

Branding

My route yesterday morning took me, unusually, past El Camino Hospital.

There were new signs, with a logo I hadn't seen before:

Does that logo shout "Hospital!", or what?

Or, maybe, "Rock concert!"?

More schedule slip

Operation Bug Out is delayed.  Yes, again.

My long-time plan was to sell the house before the election - but, what with the scouting trip having been delayed, and work for clients having resumed on return... well, sifting through the 28-year clutter accumulation ain't something that happens in a week.  And then there'll be repair & remodel work to be done, and, well, putting the place on the market in a month is not the least bit realistic.

After the election, not only will there be the inevitable short-term chaos (before Trump settles down to business-as-usual, and the public figures out that he's done so), but it'll be late fall, and then winter, and Not Really Selling Season.

And so it comes to pass that the Latest Revised Plan calls for getting the place ready at a sensible pace: getting the decluttering done in what remains of this year, then borrowing a pile of money around January / February to get the house and yard fixed up all nice for sale, listing it for sale probably in March, and paying everything off and departing before Spring is too far along.

Anyway, a bit of decluttering did happen yesterday.  Joy went through the closets looking for clothing that was no longer needed.  There was a raincoat I couldn't identify: forgotten ages ago by some former girlfriend?  And plenty of coats that are rather too tight in the waist, with a flavour of will-o'-the-wisp around the shoulders, where I have no intention of slimming down.

I really need to tackle the lab (again).  There's a large amorphous pile of Stuff on the floor, including some things I need to keep and a lot that I don't.  And then there are the sheds.  And the boxes and boxes of once-important papers, wherefrom I must extricate a few things such as brokerage statements before sending the bulk of the material off to recycling.

"...much of government operates according to the rules of madness..."

As the feller said, so many minutes ago.

Now there's a feral court ruling that the .gov has a vital interest in suppressing distribution of information on weapons technology, specifically including Defense Distributed's plans for 3D-printable guns.

Indeed, the State Department’s stated interest in preventing foreign nationals—including all manner of enemies of this country—from obtaining technical data on how to produce weapons and weapon parts is not merely tangentially related to national defense and national security; it lies squarely within that interest.

What. Is. This. I. Can't. Even.

The official position of the U.S. Government is now that furriners are too st00pid to figure out how to make zip-guns without detailed plans.  Never mind that the plans in question are for a totally lame "gun" that barely works, once, and requires expensive equipment to fabricate; it's information related to weapons!

Under this logic, Royal Nonesuch is a serious menace to national security.  His creations can be made from hardware-store parts using common tools.  And most of them even last for more than one shot!

This information must be kept out of the hands of foreign nationals!

Additional:

ITAR was meant to keep foreign powers from gaining knowledge of advanced military technology: nuclear weapons, missile guidance systems, and that sort of stuff.

Now, under the vastly expanded scope, it can be used to censor public discussion of technical aspects of common firearms - potentially including technical explanations of why politicians are talking nonsense.  Try to explain, for example, what a barrel shroud actually is, and you could be ordered to shush, least a nasty foreigner overhear you and gain forbidden knowledge.

So, yeah.  Goodbye First and Second Amendments, all in one administrative decision.  Any and all factual information about weapons of any sort may now be declared State Secrets, and public discussion silenced.

And you thought the Official Secrets Act was bad!

 

Yes, I did mean "feral" up there.

And speaking of perceptions...

...albeit within the range of sanity, and even normality, in this case...

Had a meeting this morning with a Guy In A Suit.  He commented on my mustache (see sidebar).  Now, the usual remark would relate to it being fashionable (the past few years), to barbershop quartets (before the recent cultural appropriation by hipsters), or perhaps to magicians (on a rainy day, if I'm wearing my cloak) or Brahmins.

This one, though, thought of SASS.  Which, yes I'd heard of them, but have never had any actual contact with them.  (And I need another hobby right now like I need a hole in the foot.)

Quoting Chesterton again?

Yup.

The madman is not he that defies the world. The saint, the criminal, the martyr, the cynic, the nihilist may all defy the world quite sanely. And even if such fanatics would destroy the world, the world owes them a strictly fair trial according to proof and public law. But the madman is not the man who defies the world; he is the man who denies it. Suppose we are all standing round a field and looking at a tree in the middle of it. It is perfectly true that we all see it (as the decadents say) in infinitely different aspects: that is not the point; the point is that we all say it is a tree. Suppose, if you will, that we are all poets, which seems improbable; so that each of us could turn his aspect into a vivid image distinct from a tree. Suppose one says it looks like a green cloud and another like a green fountain, and a third like a green dragon and the fourth like a green cheese. The fact remains: that they all say it looks like these things. It is a tree. Nor are any of the poets in the least mad because of any opinions they may form, however frenzied, about the functions or future of the tree. A conservative poet may wish to clip the tree; a revolutionary poet may wish to burn it. An optimist poet may want to make it a Christmas tree and hang candles on it. A pessimist poet may want to hang himself on it. None of these are mad, because they are all talking about the same thing. But there is another man who is talking horribly about something else. There is a monstrous exception to mankind. Why he is so we know not; a new theory says it is heredity; an older theory says it is devils. But in any case, the spirit of it is the spirit that denies, the spirit that really denies realities. This is the man who looks at the tree and does not say it looks like a lion, but says that it is a lamp-post.

Currently in the news: a man was shot by police while holding something.  The police say it was a gun.  Others maintain that it was a book.  The police say they found a gun at the scene, and no book.

Here we have two groups - not individuals, mind you, but groups - inhabiting entirely different shared realities.  Clearly one group is, collectively, mad.  Perhaps both are.  Is there such a thing as collective madness?  Can there be?

Whom shall we trust?  In some academic circles, it is taken for granted that a picture of a gun is, for disciplinary purposes, to be treated as a gun; that a depiction of a thing is the same as the thing itself.  Was it a book with a picture of a gun on the cover, or which mentioned guns in the text?  Or was it, perhaps, a gun engraved with text, after the fashion of a bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap?  A classic J. Pennington Booker custom dueling pistol, known colloquially as a "Book"?  It didn't qualify as a gun, using the artillerist's definition of gun?

It helps not that much of government operates according to the rules of madness, and that legislators routinely proclaim plain truths that are entirely at odds with objective reality.  But so long as the voters are kept sufficiently misinformed as to reality (and as to the claims made by politicians), this will surely continue.

Hm.

Toward the end of the recent trip, I noticed that my belt was getting a tad loose - this despite all the Southern restaurant meals and a lack of regular exercise.

On returning home, I found that I had indeed lost a fair bit of weight.

As of this morning, I've lost just about ten pounds since a month ago.  I've been sticking to two travel-related changes: water with meals instead of milk (so milk consumption goes from 2-3 gallons/week to just a slosh over the breakfast cereal), and a fairly early dinner with no snacking afterward.

At this rate, I'll be back to my early-1990s weight by Halloween, and trying to stabilize there.

We shall see.  It's looking like time to dig through the archives in search of smaller pants.

Opportunity

Spotted here:

As for the USA continuing to use the 16-bit IBM Series/1 for command and control, Schlosser admits their extended stay at the helm since 1976 has made them unhackable, but he worries about new dangers such as trying to repair one of these systems. Quite simply, "They're running out of parts!"

So, as the feller said, you can't get the wood, you know.  It's a common problem with older electronic systems, including military systems.

But the function can be replicated, as long as you still have the technical manuals.  Replication can happen at the board level, or at the system level - system level is probably easier.

You need three small teams, each with a copy of the functional specifications (old technical manuals plus new project strategy documents), and controlled communication among the teams.

Team #1 re-implements the required functions using modern technology.

Team #2 creates a test suite designed to confirm that a given implementation matches the specs.  (The test suite then needs to be tested against original equipment.)

Team #3 creates a test platform simulating the environment in which the system operates.

With management, it's maybe 20 people total (a complex system will require multiple sub-teams and more total people; for a relatively simple system, each team might be a single person; a 70s-vintage 16-bit mini sounds like a 20-person project, for getting all aspects of it verifiably right in a reasonable time frame).  Since it's a military project, add 900% overhead.

No, I'm not going to bid on it.  I'm busy, and I don't want any direct government contracts in any case - way too much of a headache.

I know there are companies out there replicating the functions of archaic electronic control systems.  I worked with one of them, several years ago, on a military project.  I've also done a one-off replacement for an analog module based on an obsolete chip.  There are plenty of things out there that need updating or repairing!

Eternal verities

Currently up on the Kindle: Bastiat's Essays on Political Economy.

Very first, introductory chapter: "Capital and Interest."  Explains how lending capital at interest works, and why this is so important.  (Go read.  It's simple, and enlightening.)

More recently?

Central banks have been lending capital at negative interest rates for a while.  This is clearly insane, but it's political institutions doing it.  And they tend to be lending to governments, which seldom adds much sanity.

And now?

This.  (Via.)

Yes, now you too have the opportunity to lend your capital to a private business, for a negative return!

Frankly, I think the entire political-financial complex has lost track of the whole concept of capital, and now believes it to mean money.

Money and wealth are not the same thing.  Speculating on financial-asset futures purely on the assumption that there will always be some greater fool to buy them later at an inflated price does nothing to create wealth.  And if the aggregate valuation of a capital market fluctuates dramatically as a function of projected tweaks to central-bank policy, it's not a functioning capital market.  (Hint: the market should be shuffling capital among ventures, favoring those most expected to put it to productive use.  The total capital should be fairly stable, gradually increasing as productive ventures create new wealth.)

But the system as it currently operates is putting big numbers in the bank accounts of a few well-connected people, so as far as they're concerned, everything must be fine.  Isn't it?

Spelling checkers are not enough

Spotted here while taking a break from the Verilog mines:

exquisitely quaffed gastroenterologist

Um.  Quaffed?  As in drunk, only you spill more?

Or perhaps "coiffed"?

Back to work!

Well... I've been partially back to work since Monday.  There's a lot of catching up to do.

Anyway, 'tis time to dust off a ToasterCo project that's been dormant for a few months, involving one of the Lattice MachXO super-CPLD parts (almost an FPGA, but not quite).  We're using the older MachXO rather than one of the more modern variants, because it's available in automotive-grade (and a convenient package, and other such fiddly details).

Now, last time I was working on this - basically doing some feasibility testing, making sure I could attain the required timing and so on - it took some fiddling.  I remember that much.  In order for the Diamond toolchain's programmer to detect the FTDI-based programming cable under Linux, one must rmmod ftdi_sio, right?  So the software can use its own, user-space driver instead of the usual FTDI comm-port driver?

Well, that didn't work this time.

After much fiddling, I determined that I had to unplug all the other FTDI-based serial ports (there were two plugged in, for unrelated projects), then re-connect the breakout board with its programming hardware, then do the rmmod ftdi_sio again.  After that, it's working.

Looks like I can't use the programming interface and have any FTDI-based serial dongles plugged in at the same time.  (Couldn't the FT2232 on the board be programmed with a distinctive VID/PID to mark it as a bit-bashing interface and not a serial port?  Seems like FTDI could designate an alternative PID or two for that sort of thing.)

It's never simple, is it?  And this isn't even the part they pay me for.

Update: Now things are together, and I can do some testing....

I'm trying to use Lattice's I²C slave peripheral module (RD1054).  The documentation, such as it is, seems to imply that sequential reads ought to work, and that data_vld should be asserted per byte.  Only... that's not what's happening.  I routed some signals out to test points, and hooked up a scope on the big, deep memory setting.  I see data_vld happening for the first byte, only.  Guess I need to dig into their code.

Foo.  I'm only trying to use the vendor's module because it seemed like it ought to be easier than coding my own.  I may end up dumping it and doing my own anyway (most likely using a state machine and a high-frequency sampling clock, just because I find synchronous designs easier to deal with than these weird things that try to create clock pulses using implied logic delays).

Update 2: Bleah.  The signals actually coming out of that module, as routed to pins and observed on the oscilloscope, bear little or no resemblance to those shown in the documentation.  (Also, the handling of the data0 state is clearly wrong, though I'm not sure what the right handling would be.)  Presumably it works in the simulation, but I'm not inclined to get up to speed on the simulation environment.  Um.  Maybe it works in simulation because those #1 thingies scattered through the code actually have an effect in simulation, while synthesis ignores them and lets the delays fall where they may?

Time to look on OpenCores.  Actually, I'm quite certain I did that before, and rejected all projects listed there.  Why?  Dunno; that would have been long ago.  Looks like there are some candidates, with BSD licensing (so OK for this project).  Have to review their documentation, and see if there's one with a decent interface and that isn't too resource-hungry when configured as a slave.

Update 3: Yeah, looks like the known-good-and-BSD-licensed one on OpenCores is designed to work with a processor, which is something I definitely don't have in this design.  Or, rather, there is one, but it's in a different chip, and the I²C is for it to communicate with the CPLD.

So, gotta write my own.  Or use SPI, maybe.  SPI is easy.

And furthermore: Southmoon has been trying to help all day.  Right now, she's lying on the Aardvark pod I was using to exercise the I²C (and will be, again, once I get my implementation done).  Maybe she thinks she can hatch it.

Path dependency: just say AAAAAARGH!!!!!

Yet another revolting development in user-interface design!

Over on Gocomics, clicking somewhere around the middle of a strip magnifies it, generally to the point of legibility (though for unspecified reasons some strips are only available in the default, shrunken format).

But!  There's a row of "share" buttons below the strip.  In particular, there's a "+" button, for several extra options.  If your cursor's trajectory takes it across the "+" button, a pop-up menu pops up... right where you'd click to magnify.  Click before noticing the pop-up menu, and who-knows-what happens.

Seriously, does anyone test these things?