Silicon Valley Redneck

Memory exercise

Was watching a recent vid on the uToobz, and there was a bit of very familiar music.

Very distinctive.  I should know what this is, dang it!

But, y'know... haven't been listing to the musics so much, these past couple of decades.

It kept rattling around my head.  Oughtta be something by... Dvořák, maybe?

Sort of, er, overture-ish?

Carnival Overture?  Hm.  Look it up: yup, nailed it.  Only took a day and a half to make the association.

Which, given that the last time I'd herd it was probably more'n twenty year back, I guess isn't all that bad.

And, come to think of it, during my highly-productive creative periods, I've usually had music on while I was working.  Keeps me from watching vids, or worrying about politics.  Maybe I should resume this habit.  Just have to avoid anything with words I'd be trying to understand - English or German, no; Italian, Russian, Finnish, Latin, etc., yes.

 

Meanwhile, I've been more or less lining things up for The Great Server Migration (a holiday-weekend project).  Aside from tracking down some documentation, I've also updated my DNS to have a TTL of 1 hour.  May set it shorter in the morning, when I'm ready to start playing, but I wanted to make sure the change propagated.  Once all changes are made, I'll put it back to a more relaxed setting, as I don't anticipate making a lot of changes in the long run.

That, and some Real Work for ToasterCo - updating some CPLD code to implement a couple of newly-required features, and playing with the toolchain settings to make the revised design fit.  I still need to verify that the changed settings haven't broken anything; I never have trusted logic compilers.  Heck, I still don't entirely trust C compilers.

Awww. Not standard.

The PicoScope line of small USB oscilloscopes recently came to my attention, for the n+1^st time.

It occurs to me that such a thing might be useful in some future test setups, even if the gadgets do tend to come in their own housings, not designed for mounting inside fixtures.

So I take a quick look at their documentation... and, as one might expect*, they're not even pretending to use the USB Test & Measurement Class.  The protocol is proprietary all the way.

Oh, well.  They do seem to have unofficial software (including drivers) for Linux, so it's still plausible. I'm not crazy about incorporating proprietary drivers, but at least the drivers are available.

And it gives me a decently small and affordable option for an already-designed-and-tested embeddable oscilloscope, should I need one.  Have to keep that in mind.

... Hello?  Those guys also make a 6 GHz vector network analyzer?  Ain't cheap, but such things aren't.  I could maybe build a cheap one (with cheap-VNA specs) for 3 GHz... maybe.  Have to review the theory behind them.  A 6 GHz unit with decent specs, for $6K?  That's an accomplishment.  (Yeah, I've been wanting a VNA of my very own for many years, but the ones I've had the opportunity to snaffle have been huge old things.  Also, I haven't wanted one enough to shell out any cash for it.)

* USBTMC and SCPI are rather cumbersome... but they're standards that have evolved, in SCPI's case, over the course of decades (not quite strange æons, but close).  I've put some thought into better ways of doing generalized T&M instrument control, and it's nontrivial.  Ergo, for my own line of Gadgets, I'll be sticking with TMC and SCPI for the default firmware - there may be options for, e.g., CDC and some sort of scripting language, but the base firmware will be as standards-compliant as I can reasonably manage.

Monoculture.

Monocultures are a bad idea, okay?

They're brittle.  It's the main reason I worry about GMOs and agricultural cloning.  It's one of many good reasons to worry about centralized government.

And the latest cyberattack hitting so many big institutions and messing with the global economy?  Everybody's using Windows on x86-architecture hardware.

At least some of the servers aren't... yet.  Those tend to be *NIX or some proprietary OS, running on some form of Big Iron, whether a traditional architecture or something custom.  And they don't tend to have office suites and e-mail clients running on them, and if they're running SMB servers, at least they're probably not all running SMB-server code with the same bugs as the Microsoft implementation (though Samba surely has its own issues).

A lot of the Windows use is due to software lock-in: users need some particular applications, and those applications are only available on Windows.  Software vendors: help fight the monoculture!  Write your applications using cross-platform libraries, and distribute them for Mac and Linux too!

Then there are the uses that just don't make sense.  Why is radiation monitoring around Pripyat done using Windows machines?  Why use Windows for such a thing?

And, speaking of fallout: expect a massive multi-governmental effort to destroy Bitcoin's anonymity. Easier to demolish one large piece of free-market infrastructure in the interest of tracking down one particular set of cockroaches than to harden (or diversify) critical infrastructure against future cockroaches.

(The solution to all manner of ransomware?  Force all financial transactions to go through a central clearinghouse, so they can be recorded, traced, taxed, and so on.  Bonus: Big Brother will know exactly what you bought at the drugstore.  Because Big Brother needs to know these things, the better to look after your best interests.)

It's 0230. Why am I awake?

Ugh.  Between a dose of pseudoephedrine (on top of having had too much caffeine lately) and what turns out to be a pseudoephedrine-resistant sinus headache, I've been awake for about an hour.

It doesn't help that all three cats are also awake.  While I was trying to sleep, Huckleberry was galloping around the bedroom looking for mischief to get into, then when he calmed down a bit Top Hat started playing with her rattly mouse, tossing it to herself and making quite a commotion, and then Southmoon came in looking for attention.

So, up way early.  Guess I'll get out for very early walkies, and maybe do a long route at an easy pace.   But it's still much too early for that.

... Oops.  This isn't the day for long walkies; I plan on spending the afternoon at the Sensors Expo, in - oog- San Jose.  Which means I'm not taking an afternoon nap, and also I probably don't want to wear out my feet in the morning.

Maybe I should go back to bed now, and try to have a normal morning.  At least the cats seem to be settling down.

Update: Huckleberry hadn't really calmed down.  He just summoned Great Cthulhu.  Again.  And is vigorously playing with It.

Update 2: I must have had a weird morning yesterday, too, and somehow forgotten it.  When I went to take my morning geezer pills today, I found the Tuesday-morning pills still in the dispenser.

Testing. Testing.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

New keyboard is go.  Repeat, new keyboard is go.

My brand-new Unicomp keyboard just arrived.  Makes my typing sound a lot faster.  No unintended cAPS lOCK.  I'm having some finger-alignment issues, and I may want to raise my seat about half an inch, but so far I'm happy.  Especially comparing it to the cheap Logitech that just went to the Emergency Spares pile.

The keyboard arrived in a box of suitable size, packed within a box more suited to a 5-octave keyboard that had me worried about desk space.  The inner box, while reassuring in terms of dimensions, had a disconcerting rattle.  Two of the keycaps were indeed loose... and there was a note detailing how to re-install any keycaps that had come loose in shipment, including how to deal with a dislocated spacebar.  Not bothering to read the note first, I just snapped the caps back on: no problem.

The whole thing does have a good, solid, quality feel to it.  The caps may be dislodgeable, but they're designed to be removable and replaceable, and it's not like they show any signs of springing off while I'm typing.

OK, so it's not one of those cutesy manual-typewriter-styled keyboards.  Nor a multi-colored gaming keyboard that lights up.  And it doesn't articulate.  But it's a proper PC keyboard, dang it, right out of the days when IBM still knew how to make keyboards!  And it's made in Kentucky!

Hm.  One cautionary note: it's designed for use in a clean office environment; there's no protection against ingress of dust, food, cat hair, beer, flying solder blobs, etc.  So I won't be getting more of these for use in the lab, workshop, or other messy settings.

And now, I'd better do some writing on a report for a client.  And then maybe code some Python or something.

Where did the Sunday go?

The morning, as usual, was used up by mundane matters, such as laundry.

Then a quick lunch, and off to recycling with the defunct (not to mention big and heavy) inkjet printer / MFC.  It seemed to be Printer Day there, with an abundance of tall, serious-office-type printers (or printer/copiers, or whatever) in the parking lot.  Also several largish CRT TVs, and a couple of big rear-projection TVs.

Then one thing and another, and not really getting to the real work I should be doing (still need to put in a couple of hours on a preliminary pass through those schematics).  But I did get a bit more lab-tidying done.

I unearthed various AVR development tools that had gotten misplaced over the years (or, most likely, as JCM was closing down) - but not, alas, my Dragon board, which seems to have vanished entirely.

And!  The remnants of Project Bluebird, and some prototype hardware (and a prototyping test fixture) from Project Spyglass!

Both of these are tales I'll have to tell in detail later.

Project Bluebird (which did not involve LSD) was notable for two things: the speed with which I took an idea someone tossed out and turned it into working prototype hardware... and the speed with which the business fell apart, for multiple reasons.  The name was inspired by the much earlier (and with a different company) Project Rainbow (which did not involve making ships disappear), because both involved low-data-rate indoors radio communication and drastic power management to get many-year working life out of a lithium coin cell.

Project Spyglass, as far as I know, was a success, though we didn't keep in touch with the people who were to take it to production, and I don't know what the official name of the product would have been.  Also, it was destined to be an Asia-only thing.  It was optical in nature, though the code name was apparently taken from a golf course.  In general terms, the mission was to measure the intensity and color of a large number of LEDs - potentially hundreds - in the space of a few seconds, and at drastically lower cost (for n > about 10) than existing solutions.  The solution we came up with was interesting.  Comes the time to write it up, I'll have to figure out what level of detail is OK to publish.

Update: And then the new printer (Canon PIXMA iX6820) arrived, and there was much fun setting it up.  The complications:

• Telling CUPS on the workstation (Debian 8) it was an iX6520 didn't work.
• It was past closing time at the lab, so connecting to the machine that has Debian 9 installed, or to the physical Windows box, would have involved waking Tinga up, and she would have been all screechy.
• Configuring (or, apparently, enabling) the Ethernet port is done via USB, using proprietary software that only runs on Windows.
• Trying to install the software on my Windows 7 VM was an exercise in frustration; a bunch of things went wrong, and I'm not sure how the blame should be apportioned among Canon, Microsoft, Oracle, Linus, LG, Lite-On, Intel, and myself.
• Looking for a Linux driver for this printer gets a page at Canon that autodetects the OS (64-bit Linux) and says there's no driver available.
• Some of the trouble I was having might have been related to the printer needing a power cycle (not just a USB logical-unplug-and-replug) after either the iX6250-driver adventure or the switching back and forth between Linux and the Win7 VM.

Well!

Maybe (I say maybe) I could have gotten the WiFi connection working without the Windows software; haven't figured that out yet - curse the modern custom of not shipping a printed user guide, and assuming that everyone will RTFM in the context of the proprietary app!

But, as it turns out?  Returning to the driver page at Canon's web site, and manually selecting the target OS as "Linux" (neither 64- nor 32-bit) does get a driver, with all the disclaimers about it being unsupported.  It installs on the workstation.  Once installed, it works, though I'm not sure it's supporting all the capabilities of the printer.

Good enough, though.  I now have a legible print of the schematic (for sufficiently take-my-glasses-off-and-squint values of legible).  Print quality is decent on plain paper, and quite good on glossy - quite a bit better than the WorkFarce was at its best, and about on par (as I remember it) with the Stylus 1280 as I used it.  Also, it fits in the available space (though an overhanging bookshelf doesn't leave enough room to open the hood properly, so access to the ink cartridges requires, for the moment, propping the hood open with a pencil or something).

Update 2: Turns out there is a Windows-less network-connected approach that works.  As delivered, the printer is ready to associate itself with a WiFi access point using WPS.  I just had to remember that my access point has a firmware bug such that, contrary to the instructions to "click here and then press the button on the device within two minutes", it's actually necessary to press the button first, then click.  The sequence having been gotten right, the printer does indeed connect to the network.  Doesn't seem to pass a hostname to DHCP, though.  But!  Running the Print Settings utility on the Debian 9 system, clicking Add, and selecting Network?  The program finds the printer, no problem.  Trying to configure it is another matter; it results in a frowny-face message about not being able to find the driver... but it ends up configured anyway, and it can print a test page, so I guess all's well.

Ah, cool weather!

Well, cool-ish, anyway.  Good enough for me to be productive.

Divided the morning between physical stuff (clearing another few cubic feet of Stuff out of the lab) and doing the dist-upgrade on the VPS (appears to have been successful, or at least Subversion came back up OK; I still need to make sure web and mail services are alive, because switching Gumbyware over is on the agenda for next weekend).

This afternoon?  A bit more lab-tidying (I need to procure some more mid-sized plastic storage bins and organize a bunch of spare equipment, project parts, and such), and there's also the current project for ToasterCo, which is back in my court after a long absence (their technical staff being more overloaded than usual, so progress on such low-priority projects gets to be slow).

A quick check shows that Apache is indeed alive on the upgraded VPS, though I'm sure it hasn't made any of my broken PHP3 scripts start working again.  Exim appears to be running.  So does Courier, but Thunderbird can't seem to talk to it.  Hmph.  Oh: there's a complaint by the server about the certificate having expired.  There was some weird incantation to generate the courier server cert, wasn't there?  Like, it doesn't just use the one Let's Encrypt provides?  I really need to automate that, as part of the every-few-months certificate renewal process, so that everything that needs to get updated does get updated.  And maybe it needs to run in a cron job, at a suitable interval?

Oh, well.  Time to stop writing and do something useful.

Update: Growf.  That ToasterCo job?  I really want a nice printed copy of the draft schematic.  This calls for using the inkjet printer, and B-size (11x17) paper.

Now, once upon a time, I had an Epson Stylus Color 1280.  It did one thing: it printed.  It did it well.  It did it for many years.  Eventually, it wore out.

Inkjet printers that speak 11x17 are expensive these days.  But!  There are "multifunction centers" that will handle such a paper size.  So, a while back, when I had to replace the old printer, I bought another Epson: a WorkForce WF-7610.

As a printer, well, CUPS drives it well enough, and the quality is good enough for my purposes.  But it won't nohows feed cardstock (I can use another, cheap, 8½x11 printer for the things that call for cardstock).  It's horrendously bulky.  The paper feed has always been finicky, and has been getting worse lately.  And this afternoon?

I can't seem to get it to feed at all - or, rather, it will sometimes feed and eject the top sheet, and then complain that it can't find any paper.  Seating the paper tray has gotten problematic.  So I  move a bunch of stuff out of the way, drag the printer out to where I can have a look at it, and....

Huh.  What's this odd-shaped nylon* bit doing underneath it?  Seems to be a pin broken off of one end of it.  Maybe it's part of the paper feed, or paper presence sense, mechanism?  And this other weird nylon bit, that's been kicking around for a while: I'd assumed it was a fragment of some long-since-dismantled CD-ROM drive, but maybe it fell off the printer?

Oh, well.  Printer repair isn't a priority at the moment, and I don't have a large enough cleared work surface just now anyway.  Guess I'll print the schematic out at letter size, and switch back and forth between the teeny printout and the fractional-page (when zoomed to legible scale) viewport of the PDF viewer.

I wonder if there's a repair manual (ha!), or at least an exploded parts list, for the WF-7610....

Incidentally, why is it that sites peddling printers don't have a handy filter-by-maximum-paper-size capability?  Am I really the only one who shops for larger-than-letter-size (but smaller than hyper-expensive large-format) inkjet printers?

Oh, hello!  Searching for wide format inkjet printer on Amazon now turns up something from Canon that gets good reviews, appears to be supported by CUPS, is just a ferschlugginer printer, and for $105 I can have one on my doorstep tomorrow.  For not too much more, I can get a pile of spare ink cartridges with it.

So maybe I recycle the clunker instead of trying to repair it, get something new and more suitable to my purposes, and try to give away the box of spare ink cartridges for the Epson.

Update 2:  That letter-size inkjet?  It's a bargain-basement Canon, bought a while back when the Epson was being uncooperative, I needed to print something small in color right away, and Fry's had this one on the shelf for cheap.  After sitting in the living room, unused the past several months, it happily prints the CUPS test page.  Printing at the default setting is fast, but not very legible at the small feature size (this is a C-size schematic scaled down to A-size, so half the original linear dimensions).  Selecting a higher print quality gets all the quality I could reasonably expect, but, given the scaling, I have to take my glasses off and squint.

Post-relocation, I may splurge on a 24"-wide printer that'll let me do real C-size prints (correction: 24" printer width allows 22x34, which is D size).  Here, such a thing fits neither the budget nor the space available.

Southmoon keeps trying to be helpful.  Given her diminutive size and lack of opposable thumbs, she mostly just gets in the way.

Update 3: Support for the specific model of printer that's on order is in recent editions of CUPS, meaning not what's on the workstation.  The lab machine has Debian 9, which does have new enough CUPS.  (So does the VPS, but I don't have a USB cable long enough to reach from here to Dallas.)  Or maybe I just scare up the right .ppd to install on the workstation?

... Hey, wait.  I think the new printer has an Ethernet port on it.  So in fact I could set up a VPN bridging my LAN to the VPS, and run the printer driver on the VPS.  In Dallas.

But that would be silly... which might just be enough justification to do it, if I had a bunch of time on my hands.

* Afterthought: It looks like nylon; it feels more or less like  nylon, but the break doesn't look anything like nylon.  Must be some other sort of translucent, semi-stiff plastic that lacks nylon's toughness.

What's the use of wearing braces / hats and spats and shoes with laces

Randomly happened across Cody's demonstration of How to Woad Your T-Shirt.

This, um.  Well.  Now I understand this bit:

I don't know how they make it, but I always know when,
For the odour alone would knock you dead,

Somehow, though, he managed to get through the entire video without singing.  (And, given the average quality of YouTube performances of "Woad"?  Singing ability is not required.)

Don't forget the Bizet.

For some reason, Raconteur Report had dropped off my regular-reading list quite some time ago.

Some of the recent posts are worthy of pondering - in particular, this one, on the subject of jamming.  If the Deep State, Google, Amazon, etc., are gathering too much information?  Flood the system with spurious information!

Go forth and do random things.  The linked item includes many suggestions (some quite illegal; some not banned yet).  There are certainly many other possibilities.

Keep in mind that, in many areas, Big Brother is already implementing mass surveillance, e.g., recording the license plates of all cars that park near the county fairgrounds on days when politically-disfavored events are being held there.  Mass facial recognition in public places is getting to be a thing: is anyone peddling custom masks, so one could walk through the wrong part of town disguised as a local prominent citizen?

And then there's all the fun one can have with ordinary talcum powder (use your imagination).  Or with soap bubbles plus rumors.  Or an old radium-dial watch, if you can still find one.

I'll surely have many fine ideas, but probably won't be publishing them, especially the ones that are dangerous, or overly disruptive, or based on any sort of inside information.  And, if I act on any of them, I certainly won't be publishing that information!

(Pop-culture reference in title.)

Further excavation

It's not as hot today as earlier in the week, and I managed to examine, clean up, and pack another couple of shelves worth of binders'o'stuff before overheating.

A lot of it is course materials from my college days - things I'd saved as worth referring to in the future.  A quick scan shows that I probably will want to refer back to them eventually, and so they get retained.

One item is an oddity: the binder is covered in silver handprints, meaning that I was carrying it on that Halloween when I attended classes with my face and hands covered in powdered aluminum (and with bronze powder greased into my hair).  But... the contents are from a course that was not only earlier, but at a different school.

Guess I recycled whatever had been in the binder, hauled the older course materials out of whatever box they'd been inhabiting, and put them in the binder I'd freed up.  If memory serves, the later course materials weren't particularly interesting anyway.

I also dug out the technical manuals for some of the disk drives wherefrom I'll be wanting to retrieve data.  I may create a couple of specialty interface boards for talking to legacy storage devices - one for floppy-like interfaces (8" floppy, 5.25" floppy, ST506), and one for parallel-type interfaces (SCSI, Micropolis) - and see if they plus open-source firmware can become products.  Surely there are other people out there wanting to read legacy media into modern computers.  (Hm.  Does the USB Storage device class play nice with magtape?  What was the interface on the old Diablo disk drives, and would anyone want to connect one of those via USB?)

Update: Having rested a bit, I started digging into the really big pile in the lab.  Got a fair amount sorted - the top layers are mainly boxes'o'stuff relating to current work, so those can be put on the shelf recently cleared of older clutter, and some of the bottom layers can go straight to recycling.

Why, though, do I have a new-in-box giant cooling tower for an LGA1155?  I suppose I got it - maybe as part of a package deal? - as part of the new-a-few-years-ago workstation, and ended up using the stock cooler, which is good enough and much less cumbersome.  Ordinarily, this would go in the "recycle" box, but, as I'd just this afternoon (while resting) sketched out an idea for a gadget (potentially a product for the amateur science crowd) that needs a fair-sized plate-to-air heat exchanger, and this seems well designed for the purpose, I guess it goes in a "keep" box instead.

A bunch of receipts, from 2010/2011.  What are those doing in the lab?  Check for anything that looks important.  Dump everything in the recycle bin.

Many more outdated (but at least PCI-bus era) boards: video, Ethernet, USB, Firewire.  And two entire motherboards, with CPUs installed.  I must have put those in the pile as outdated back around 2010, or earlier (given the vintage of the papers stacked atop them).  Not old enough to be proper historical artifacts, so: into the "recycle" box with the lot of them.

Aaaand... there are now several square feet of visible floor space in the lab!  The paper-recycling bin is pretty much full.  The electronics-recycle box is filling up.  I haven't added very much to the current "stuff to store for future use" box.  I need to make a hardware-store run for some more plastic storage bins for categories of stuff - got one for USB odds & ends; I need one for networking odds & ends, and a few for various categories of project parts.

Progress!

Never fails, does it?

There was an unscheduled repair job on a small electronic dingus.

The electronic side of the repair is complete; the main obstacle was figuring out where the conductors were hiding in the ornamental wires.

That leaves a mechanical detail.  The best solution: a small glob of polycaprolactone.  Which is right... um... in one of those boxes I packed up last week and stuck in storage.

Oh, well.  Hot glue will get 'er done.

Sometimes, enough gets to be enough.

Several weeks ago, my old (not exactly high end) keyboard, with the PS/2 plug on it, developed some non-working keys.  I don't recall the cause, but a spilled liquid might have had something to do with it.

Not finding anything with a PS/2 plug available in the nearby store, I bought a low-end Logitech USB keyboard.  It does make (vaguely) clicky sounds.  What it doesn't do is feel right.  I keep missing characters, or hitting cAPS lOCK without realizing it, and my hands get kind of crampy after I've been typing for a while.  I'm just not getting used to this thing.

Finding Unicomp keyboards back in stock at Amazon - last time I'd looked, the Unicomp store had been empty - I've just gone and ordered one, as bog-standard as possible.  Should be here Tuesday.

Because sometimes you just have to shell out the dough for a quality tool.

Poor choice of candidate

I came across this Ossoff-icial campaign video, linked by someone who thought he came across like a corporate CEO.

Which, yes.  Specifically, the CEO of a vaporware dot-com that specializes in burning capital.

But, aside from that?  The face reminded me of someone.  Thinking... thinking...

Aha!  A certain ophthalmologist is who.

Assad, Ossoff, whatever.  Doesn't Ossoff look like a younger edition?

Silly (OK, so sillier) side note: A Google image search for ossoff gives various sub-search suggestions across the top... with George Frideric Handel coming before Karen Handel.

Afterthought: Ivanova explains the election!

“I believe I will vote for Marie Crane. I believe a leader should have a strong chin. Santiago has no chin. And his vice president has several. This to me is not a good combination.”

Additional: One might think Assad is a carpetbagger of sorts.  Well, look: Syria is mostly Sunni.  Assad is an Alawite, sponsored by the Shia theocracy of Iran.  With additional support from Russia.  So, kinda like the guy from the minority party, who doesn't live in the district, and whose support seems to come mainly from far-off places?

Not quite so hot today.

I got another few cubic feet of Stuff out of the house - some to storage, and some to recycling.  Progress!

Supposed to be another scorcher tomorrow.  Maybe I'll spend the afternoon sitting at my desk with a wet towel over my head, and see if I can get some real work done.

Funny I haven't seen this quoted recently.

I'd somehow completely forgotten this bit:

Mayor: Drebin, I don't want anymore trouble like you had last year on the South Side. Understand? That's my policy.

Frank: Yes. Well, when I see 5 weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy.

Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of "Julius Caesar", you moron! You killed 5 actors! Good ones.

In other pharmaceutical news

Headline:

New Paper Says Puberty Blockers Aren’t the Answer to Gender Confusion

Well, maybe not.  But they could still be the answer to putting on authentic performances, of, e.g., L'incoronazione di Poppea.

Multiple YIPE!

Tam linked to this thread, regarding narcotics overdoses & deaths therefrom.

Tl;dr: a great many overdoses the past few years.  Quality control of street drugs is appalling, and a dose of "heroin" may be heroin plus filler, or just filler, or pure heroin, or heroin plus fentanyl, maybe diluted with filler or maybe not... so an addict (or an occasional user, for that matter) may take what appears to be his accustomed dose, and get something over an order of magnitude stronger than what he expected.

YIPE! #1: That quality-control thing.  Seems to be way worse than last time I was paying attention to such things.

YIPE! #2: The numbers!  How many people are messing around with opioids?

YIPE! #3: The accidental ODs of bystanders, or of cops who touch evidence.  Sounds like some of these newfangled opioids would make fine chemical-warfare agents: absurdly low lethal dose; easily absorbed by inhalation or through the skin; quickly incapacitating.

And now I'm pondering potential offensive uses of these things, and getting really worried.  As, it seems, are some of the Authorities, though it's not clear what can be done about the problem.

No point quarantining Trenco; we've got synthetic thionite now.

Update: Much more, and in some considerable depth, from Bayou Renaissance Man and Borepatch.  BRM is getting the comments (from sundry perspectives) that Tam would have gotten if she still allowed comments.  Sounds like it's a big problem, rapidly worsening, probably with multiple causes (possibly including enemy action), and the likelihood of solving the problem is basically zilch, or even negative (i.e., we'll get dramatic action that makes it worse).

Another thing requiring organization

I still haven't moved the e-mail server from my DSL line to the VPS in Dallas.  That calls for a weekend more or less dedicated to the project, what with the need to shut down the existing server, bring up the new one, move all the archives over, and test everything, all while not trying to conduct business.

This weekend is probably not good, because Reasons.  But next weekend - aha! - is a four-day weekend.  Excellent!  I can plan around getting the task accomplished Saturday and Sunday, with Monday as a buffer and Tuesday as time to put things back as they were, should all else fail.

Yeah, the mail and web functions do need to be separated from the IP address of this here DSL connection before I go moving and losing that address.  I already moved the Subversion server over, but the web server gets complicated (some of my cool stuff on Gumbyware Classic depends on a rather outdated version of PHP, what with having been written about 15 years ago), and the mail server has some quirks in its configuration, most of which can probably be dropped at this point, but I need to be certain.  (Also, some of the existing configuration is tied into things I set out to do with LDAP, back in the day, and I have no intention of dragging the LDAP folly into the new configuration.)

Update: It's just come to my attention that Debian 9 (stretch) is out.  So maybe this weekend is a good time to dist-upgrade the VPS (and some of the physical machines at home, too).  Better to do that before migrating the mail service.

Update 2:  I did the dist-upgrade on the lab machine, and I Am Not Impressed; the latest KDE appears to have a generous dose of Lose (settings program not reachable from the menu without some editing, and doesn't appear to work when invoked as root; no apparent way to put the launcher in classic mode, and modern mode is painfully cumbersome; my old customizations appear to have been entirely lost; and this is all just in the first little while of trying to use it).  Also, x11vnc no longer works the way it used to, and it's not clear that it's even usable - I figured out how to make it run and accept connections using the GUI mode, but it'll randomly disconnect and need to be restarted from the local console, which makes it decidedly less than useful.

Guess I'll upgrade the VPS over the weekend anyway, but anything with a GUI (workstation, laptop) will have to wait a while.

Also, I haven't yet confirmed that some things I sometimes need to run on the lab machine will still run.  If they don't... well, I know they still work on the laptop, so I guess that can be used as a temporary measure.

Update 3: I seem to have found the right incantation for x11vnc... maybe.  Have to see if it crashes eventually.  The Start menu can be put back the way it belongs; right-click on the icon and select Alternatives.

Update 4: Oh, great.  Looks like the latest version of NFS doesn't work with the version that's running on the aging server.  So, unless I come up with a fix for this, definitely no upgrading of workstation nor laptop until after the move (at which point I'll be setting up a new file server with current software).  This seems to have turned up first back in 2015, with much discussion of whether there should even be a fix for legacy support.

...But, with a bit of tinkering, I find that forcing the NFS protocol (on the client side) to 4.0 changes the error message, and forcing it to 3.0 makes things work.  Ergo, behold /etc/nfsmount.conf on the newly upgraded box:

[ Server "vetinari" ]
    nfsvers=3.0

Oh, and I tried running one of my sometimes-mission-critical Ruby scripts.  Seems to be OK, aside from a bunch of warnings about GdkPixbuf::Pixbuf.new(path) being deprecated.

A note on the Warmbier matter

Sample lack of perspective here:

There is no theory of justice, no school of thought that would justify the treatment to which Warmbier was subjected.

Actually, there is.

See, Warmbier allegedly laid hands on a poster bearing the likeness of the God Emperor, defiling it by his touch.  Lèse-majesté has always been a serious crime - in some cases, it's considered high treason.

Just because the USA rejected this legal theory back in 1776, and Europe has largely allowed it to fall by the wayside, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  Mocking Presidents and Prime Ministers is perfectly acceptable - indeed, practically a civic obligation - but monarchical societies operate under very different legal systems.

And death by torture as a punishment for laying hands on the King, even in effigy, is entirely within historical norms.

Additional: Note that it is even now a crime in Russia to depict Tsar Vladimir as a gay clown, though this doesn't (officially) carry the death penalty.

Little too casual with the numbers, there.

Spotted here:

The sun did not really dance in the sky. We know this because, of course, everyone on Earth is under the same sun, and if the closest dying star to us suddenly began doing celestial gymnastics a few billion other people would surely have reported it.

A few billion?  The world population on 13 October 1917 was under 2 billion.  Not all of them lived on the same side of the planet as Portugal, and of those that did, not all would have been outdoors and not under clouds, etc.

So, the number of potential witnesses was certainly not what one would normally call "a few billion."

Oh, and that cinnamon bun?  That's not Mother Teresa; it's a cartoon Dwarf.