Silicon Valley Redneck

Most of my stuff is in storage, so...

... I won't be observing National Gorilla Suit Day.

(I think I still have the book, but that would have been one of the first things to go into storage, a couple of years ago.  Probably at the far back of the locker, at the bottom of a pile.  And I think most of the Don Martin books are long out of print, as are so many other treasures, so replacing it might be a problem if it's somehow gotten lost.)

Long afternoon

Wandering around DesignCon, looking at the shinies, chatting with people, etc.

Not a lot really excitingly new this year, at least not among things that pertain to my world.  There was some impressive-looking high-end CAD and simulation software on display, but I don't know how much was new.

Things I might actually find use for, in the foreseeable future?  Well, Siglent and Rigol are both continuing to put out some pretty amazing test equipment in the low-professional price range.  Harwin has upgraded the power contacts in the Datamate series.  A few companies were showing off pogo pins that were basically the size of dust.

And DipTrace had a booth there, but I hadn't gotten around to compiling a suggestion list.  Oh, well.

Afterthought:  Speaking of expensive CAD software, I meant to stop by the Altium booth.  Oh, wait: there wasn't one.  Several other regulars were missing, too.  I thought the expo was smaller this year; normally, one afternoon just isn't enough time.

Œdipus could not be reached for comment

What the actual...?

Seems some politicians, in freakin' Virginia fer Cthulhu's sake, are seriously proposing to legalize infanticide.

Yeah, yeah... fine ancient tradition and all that... back when babies were delivered at home and official records were scarce, maybe it was unofficially OK for an inconvenient infant to die or disappear, and you'd just explain that it was stillborn, or carried off by a wolf, or kidnapped by the Wee Folk, or something.  But for a baby delivered in a hospital, surrounded by health-care professionals?  Something ain't right here.

I've always been kinda squishy pro-choice.  First trimester and all that.  But right up to the end of the third trimester, and now pushing into the fourth?  I'd call it a false-flag operation meant to drive the squishes into the pro-life camp, except that New York just passed that right-up-to-delivery thing.

OK, 48-hour rule.  Wait for clarification.  Maybe the Virginia pols aren't who they seem, and it really is meant sarcastically.  Maybe the whole thing is being misrepresented.

But it's looking more and more like the Progressive political class is not merely insane, but actually evil.

Incidentally, have you noticed how the most vociferously "pro-choice" politicians so often oppose choice in health care, transportation, education, and just about everything else?  Hint: if you're pushing for government monopolies, you're anti-choice.

Additional:  This may be driving some mainstream Democrats away, judging from random overheard conversations.  Also, it seems the bill in question was introduced by a freshman legislator, elected with the assistance of lobbying groups, who doesn't really have positions of her own and was fed the text of the bill and a few talking points.  "Let's elect a lobbyist-supported, media-promoted blip!" somehow doesn't seem like a great strategy, and may be mightily unpopular by 2020.

A little reminder for Google

"The server is taking too long to respond" is not a legitimate outcome for an HTTP request.

Certainly not when "too long" is on a timescale of seconds rather than minutes.

It's sometimes really obvious that Chrome is maintained by people who never spend any time away from the very finest, uncongested, high-speed 'Net connections.

I've been saying since the 90s that Web designers should be forced to use dialup; it's becoming apparent that the same should apply to browser maintainers.

Meanwhile

Landscaping is nearly wrapped up; I guess they'll finish this afternoon.

Contemplating the updated condition, I realized that the next significant rain will likely wash away the mulch in the splash zones under the downspouts.  What to do?  Sticking diffusers (think: tank-style muzzle brakes, minus the hole in the middle for the shell to pass through) on the ends of the downspouts seems a good move.  Off to the shops to look for them.  Observation #1: there's no such thing.  Observation #2: if there were such a thing, it wouldn't be made in a size to fit the ancient downspouts.

There were plastic splash thingies for putting under downspouts, but they didn't look promising.  Some sort of shallow ceramic bowls, with drain holes so's not to provide mosquito-larva habitat, might be the thing.  So maybe back to the stores for some terra-cotta plant-pot saucers and a masonry drill?  Thursday, maybe; tomorrow is (I hope) DesignCon day.

The plan is coming together.  Looks like, what with one thing and another (weather being a factor here), the open house will be the second and third weekends of February, not the first and second.  Such is life.  Shoulda sold it last summer, really, but things always end up taking longer than you'd think, especially when a thirty-year accumulation of Stuff is involved.

Cortigiani, vil razza dannata

In pondering the worship of stupid, ignorant, arrogant Socialist (Fascist, Communist, etc.) politicians by the stupid, ignorant, arrogant members of the corporate establishment Press, something occurs to me.

Many of today's "journalists" seem to have no marketable skills: they can't code, they can't weld, they can't mine coal, and most of them can't even write good.  It seems the only jobs open to them are Character Assassin and Flatterer.

And a permanent one-party state is nearly as good as a hereditary monarchy when it comes to supporting a permanent gaggle of courtiers.  For a while, anyway.  And the stupid, ignorant, and arrogant never seem to perceive that the gravy train can't last.

Mulch, mulch, glorious mulch!

Yeah, more of it.  Another forty bags.  And then yet another twenty-five.

The yard is looking all tidy now.  Well, mostly; the guys weren't finished spreading the last of it when I left, and they still had some ground-leveling to do in the side yard, so that the back door of the shed would open fully.

Also, the rental furniture was delivered this morning.  All very impressive, if a bit chunky.

And photographs are taken.  I'll probably post a few, later this week.

With the Politics of Envy in full swing...

Let us remember that the effect of taxing the income, or the assets, of the "super rich" is to take money from those with a demonstrated aptitude for creating wealth and give it to those with a demonstrated aptitude for destroying wealth, i.e., redistributionist politicians.

Redistributionists are incapable of comprehending this because, never having created wealth in any form themselves, they firmly believe economics to be a zero-sum game.  Thing is, treating anything in real life as zero-sum inevitably turns it negative-sum, as coercion and incompetence destroy the very thing being redistributed.

Additional:  You know what comes soon, right?  Politics of envy, redistribution, failure... and then it's time to round up the usual (((scapegoats))), if you catch my drift.  Lunatics of all collectivist stripes from Communist to neo-Nazi will be totally on board with that.

That got to be quite a day.

Off to the Official Residence early, to fetch back some stuff that still needs to be handed off to the rocket society; that's not happening in the next few days, so the stuff will have to stay in the garage at the Interim Digs.  Said stuff includes a hugely heavy bar of 304 stainless, and a medium-sized tank of argon.  Oof.

Then back down there.  Pack up some boxes, and haul them off to storage.  The off to Home Depot for a new laundry tub, as the old one was looking highly disreputable even before the extended bout of painting and attendant paintbrush cleaning.

They have two of the suitable sort of laundry tub.  They're inextricably wedged together.  At least one is missing its legs (if there's a set of legs between them, it's wedged between them).  One appears to have been returned after having been monkeyed with.  There's a bundle that includes stuff I don't need (like a new faucet) for more than twice the price, but the only two units are in open boxes and it looks like things are missing.  Foo.

Off to Lowe's!  They have... well, basically the same thing.  Nothing in purchasable condition.  Now what?

How about HD Supply?  Wander around the warehouse; eventually find the category.  They have several of the basic model in stock, all a bit dirty, some complete with legs and whatnot.  Score!  Bonus: the price is a bit lower than the other places, and the quality is better.

By now it's gotten to be 1100, and I'm supposed to be meeting Helpful Neighbor at noon for a Very Busy Afternoon, so nip into the Carl's Jr. across the street for an excessive burger, then back to the Official Residence.  Get the sink assembled, though just sitting on the patio, before the Helpful Neighbor and his confederate show up.

Then it's off to Home Depot for a truckload of red mulch (which ends up being 33 bags @ 2 cubic feet each).  The inventory wrangler warns us that what we see is what they've got.  Back to the house, and... well, I get busy swapping in the new laundry tub; the other two set about spreading mulch in the front yard.  When it's all used up, plus the 7 bags I'd bought earlier, the front yard isn't completely covered, and there's still the back yard to be done.

Back to Home Depot, and buy their last 15 bags of that brand (being the cheap stuff).  Try Lowe's next?  Yep, they have just-about-the-same red mulch for just a little more.  Get 16 bags of that, plus one 8-foot prefab lattice-top fence panel.  Back to the house....

OK, that covers the front yard, and will make a token start on the back (in the back, the guys are just scattering the bags around the area to be covered, not opening them yet).  Set about installing the new fence panel: rip out the old, rotten one, jam the new one in (with much futzing around, sawing, etc.), and call it good, except for the minor detail that we didn't get fasteners, so that'll have to be left for tomorrow.  It's a tight enough fit that, absent an unexpected wind storm, it should be fine until then.

Then one last (for the day) trip to Lowe's, for what ends up being 46 bags of mulch, which end up scattered (unopened) around the back yard.  We'll need more.  Tomorrow.

So that's 110 bags of mulch and one fence panel purchased, loaded, and unloaded.  Makes for a considerable workout for the upper body and the credit card.  (Yes, I was doing my share of the loading and unloading, just not the spreading, which is what I'm paying the other guys to do.)

By this time it's 1630, and that burger at 1100 isn't feeling so excessive after all.  I'm sore, out of breath, and ravenous.  Back to the Interim Digs in some haste, to nuke a plate of last night's leftovers.

Tomorrow promises a long day with a lumpy schedule, but not so much manual labor on my part.

And now I'd better check on the laundry - yes, this is laundry day, too, and I didn't get started on that until after dinner.

Engineering always involves tradeoffs and compromises

El Reg marks the sesquidecennial of the Opportunity rover's arrival on Mars.

Designed to operate for 90 Martian days, and cover just over 1,000 metres on Mars, Opportunity has exceeded expectations, trundling at least 45 kilometres (28 miles) for more than a decade.

Which... is kind of amazing, until you give it a close think.  Consider the following three design challenges:

1. Design a toy car that can crawl over rocks, with a 90-day working life.
2. Design a toy car that can crawl over rocks, with a 90-day working life.  It has to operate in a somewhat harsh environment.
3. Design a toy car that can crawl over rocks, with a 90-day working life.  It has to operate in a somewhat harsh and largely unexplored environment with unknown hazards.  Delivering it to its destination costs a gazillion dollars.

In scenario 1, we're probably looking at a mass-produced consumer item.  There'll be millions produced, so unit cost is an important consideration.  If a unit doesn't make it to 90 days, there'll be a disappointed kid; if his parents are motivated, there'll be a warranty return.  We want most units to last until the warranty expires, but in the end the design will mainly be optimized for minimal production cost.

In scenario 2, it could be an industrial product.  Volume might be in the thousands, and the customers are willing to pay for reliability and will be annoyed if they don't get it.  Repeat business may also be a factor, in that customers may plan on buying a new unit every 90 days until they're done with whatever they're up to.  We balance our design efforts between cost reduction and reliably meeting the 90-day working-life promise.  The resulting product has an excellent chance of remaining usable long after the warranty expires, apart from any components with highly predictable wear properties (which may be chosen to last just-long-enough with a reasonable margin).

In scenario 3... well, this is basically a one-off, so unit cost isn't much of an issue, and will be dwarfed by the delivery cost anyway.  A single failure is ruinous.  We optimize for reliability, reliability, reliability.  In designing for minimal chance of failure during the prescribed 90 days in unknown conditions, we basically throw quality and redundancy at it until we're highly confident of success.  Is it any surprise that the end product ends up functioning for many years?

Hmmm.

Turns out there are various people offering second-hand Tesla battery modules (24 V, 233 AH, about 55 pounds, around 18 KW peak) on eBay, for around $1200/module.

Which might be of interest, once I have my new workshop set up.  Possibly next winter (what with the move as yet not underway, and there being sundry priorities even once we get moved, I don't think I'll be building any novelty electric vehicles in the next few months).

Gotta be careful with them things, though.

Once there was The People—Terror gave it birth

Fine piece by Kevin Williamson over at NRO, regarding the hard left turn by various high-visibility Democrats.

A couple of quibbles.  For one thing, Williamson asserts that Warren's proposed federal wealth tax is unconstitutional.  This is true, if we assume that the Constitution means what it says.  Trouble is, the relevant clause says:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

This was eventually modified by the Sixteenth Amendment, which allows taxes on incomes.

But...

The Roberts Court, in its need to uphold Obamacare, ruled that the individual-mandate penalty was a tax, not a penalty, and was therefore admissible under Congress's power to levy taxes (and the Origination Clause could go hang).

And, indeed, the penaltax is partly based on income.  There is, however, a floor that applies to persons with no income.  And that, friends, is literally a capitation, or poll tax: exactly the thing expressly forbidden by the Constitution.

So I wouldn't count on the Supreme Court taking any notice whatsoever of limits on the power of taxation.

The other quibble?

Like many similar proposals, it probably would not raise much revenue and might in fact leave the country as a whole economically worse off.

"Might"?

Regarding exploitation

A thought occurred to me a few days ago, in a non-economic context (here omitted, for good and sufficient reasons), that can be translated to free-market economics and the perception thereof.

See, in a truly free market (which, yes, doesn't actually exist), every transaction is purely consensual and voluntary, and thus both parties come out ahead, because why would they consent if they weren't coming out ahead?  And thus it is a positive-sum game, and total wealth (by whatever measure) increases at every turn.

Perception, though, is tricky.  If A and B conduct a transaction whereby the interests of both are advanced, it is still entirely possible that B benefits from the transaction more than A does.  Which we can be tricked into believing is not fair, and somehow exploitative.

It gets worse, though.  Suppose the transaction is coerced, and entirely to A's detriment.  Logically, A is being exploited... right?  And yet, if A is substantially wealthier than B, and is being coerced into transferring some portion of his wealth to B, somehow we can end up perceiving that A still has too much, and that B is the party being exploited in this arrangement.  Worse, we can be tricked into this perception even if B is many times wealthier than A (some conspicuous Democrats are playing that game at this very moment: if you have "too much money", by some nebulous definition, you haven't given enough to Big Brother, who has vastly more than you).

Which gets back to the issue with Arnold Kling's Three-Axes Model: it's awfully easy to spoof the axes, and, e.g., identify an oppressor as being the oppressed, or even to claim that freedom is coercion (just as standing still with an awkward smile is "aggression").

Owth.

I thprained my tongue.

No, it doesn't really interfere with talking, never mind typing.  This morning, it was interfering with yawning; come dinnertime, and chewing turns out to be problematic.

And I'm quite aware that it's not literally a sprain.  Whatever the problem really is, I'm sure it doesn't sound as funny, nor convey the situation as succinctly.

If symptoms persist, see your doctor.  Which I ought to be doing anyway; he's been pestering me to come in for a checkup for about two and a half years now.  I should be able to schedule that in about a fortnight, unless some new chaos breaks out.

Logic: how does it work?

Headline at the Mirror:

How having TATTOOS affects your sex life, according to scientists

Er...

A survey by researchers from the University of Miami has revealed that people with tattoos are more likely to take risks - and this has an effect on their sex life

Hello?  Maybe it's the predilection for risk-taking that affects their sex lives and leads them to get the tattoos?

Yeah, it's a lame tabloid.  But you won't find much better at the "respectable" papers nowadays.

(And, yes, tattoos may well be, statistically speaking, a marker for naughtier-than-average people.)

More jiggery-pokery.

After walkies, 'twas time for some lingering electrical-and-plumbing activities at the Official Residence, followed by a return to my desk at the Interim Lair to see about getting some work done.

Which mainly was supposed to relate to the new ToasterCo project, but an issue with a different ToasterCo project cropped up and called for diving into some old Verilog and the corresponding C and documentation.

I ended up coming up with a hack (but a documented one!) whereby a 4-bit noise-immunity field is now 8 bits, by virtue of the top nybble being passed in a heretofore-unused nybble of a different register.  (It's a little complicated, but looks unpleasantly like a lot of layers-of-afterthoughts that have somehow ended up as How It's Done in the wonderful world of personal-computer hardware.)

Added:  Yes, it should be backward-compatible.  That's kinda important. Needs testing, though, and that may not happen right away (turns out the tweak may not be needed for the project at hand, and there may not be time for proper testing before the thing has to ship, so it may just ship with the previous FPGA version).

Actually, given how finicky the timing can get, deploying a new FPGA version properly gets rather time-consuming, as somebody has to go in and review all the timing violations to make sure that none of them will interfere with operation; "all the features seemed to work OK on the bench on one unit at room temperature" is insufficiently comforting.

It's always something

House preparation is getting closer.  We're attending to the details of staging for an open house.  Maybe we should have curtains?  They're not all that expensive.

So off to Home Depot for curtain rods.  We find one we like that's long enough for the living room.  Three of one style and size that we like, suitable for the bedrooms.  That would do for the dining room, too, but there isn't a fourth one.  Foo.  Well, maybe we can find one at another store.

Install the rods.  Decide that we really want one of the living-room style, rather than the bedroom style, for the dining room.  Back to Home Depot: they have a couple in the right style, but not long enough.

Look at curtains at T J Maxx; find something maybe suitable for living & dining rooms, being 84" long by adding up to sufficient width.  For the bedrooms, we want 63" long curtains (or, better yet, around 48", but that doesn't seem to be a thing).  T J Maxx has 84" and 96" lengths; no sign of anything shorter.

Next day (being Tuesday), try a different Home Depot for the other curtain rod (the web site says three are 3 in stock at that store).  Don't see any.  Go next door to Target and look at curtains: nothing suitable, and, if memory serves, nothing shorter than 84".  Then to Walmart; there's a decent assortment of curtains in various lengths, including the needed 63", but not really in quite the weight nor colors we're looking at for the bedrooms.

Today (Wednesday), I had various stuff to deal with, and meanwhile Joy spent the whole freakin' day running around to two different Home Depot stores, eventually finding the curtain rod (apparently inventory tends to be wildly inaccurate the month following Christmas), two different Walmart stores, and two different Target stores, plus going back to T J Maxx for those LR/DR curtains.  Ended up with probably-good-enough curtains and towels, all (we hope) color-coordinated.

Staging furniture is scheduled for Monday, and we hope it's all in the expected colors.  This weekend: changing some doorknobs and locks, again, to make the colors all some out right, and Helpful Neighbor will be fixing another section of fence and spreading mulch around the yard (yes, we're paying him).

And I need to pack up the various tools that are currently strewn around the garage.  And, once we're quite certain we're done painting, I need to replace the garage sink, as the current one is in exceedingly shabby condition (especially with all the paint cleanup that's been done in it the past few weeks).

Sleepy Monday morning

It's a government holiday here in the States...

... I mean, a government holiday on top of the "shutdown"...

... And things are very quiet at the moment.  Or maybe it's just that the overnight storm has passed, the cats are all out in the garage looking for rodents, and I'm the only one at my desk.

An odd note: during the storm, something ran across the roof.  Something with the gait of a squirrel, but much much bigger.  As it departed the roof, there was a weird squeal, resembling the sound that convenes a meeting of the Possum Lodge.  A terrified possum, perhaps fleeing the Three Wolves of last night's Moon that lurked above the clouds?

This morning brings three things at El Reg that call for comment.

There's a claim, in court yet, that IBM has been engaging in illegal age discrimination.  Well, duh.  I hadn't heard that about IBM, but it's a well-known fact of life in Silicon Valley.  Also, older employees tend, suspiciously, to be laid off shortly before their stock options vest.  The corporations just get away with this stuff, regardless of which party is nominally in power in Washington (there's only one party in Sacramento).

Remember Ra^thergate?  A Canadian crook made a similar mistake:

One document was said to have been written, printed and signed in 1995 but used a font only released in 2002, and the other said to have been written and signed in 2004 used a font released in 2007.

Remember, kids: old documents need to look old.  And there's a big difference between typewritten and typeset.

And, a look back at the Apple Lisa.  Sing along!

This seems... odd.

I spotted a suspicious, but attributed, statistic in this article, so I clicked through and found, indeed, this assertion:

CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Huh.  if something happens to 1/6 of the U.S. population per year, you'd figure that, statistically speaking, it's happen to me every several years, right?

I never seem to come down with foodborne diseases.  Like, at all.  (The report doesn't seem to be including ill effects from, e.g., sugar overdoses.)

Am I particularly resistant, or is a substantial portion of the population doing something horribly wrong?  Eating raw chicken, say, or salad?  Not washing their hands like their mothers taught them?

(I also question the meaning of "48 million people" getting sick; is it actually 48 million people, or 48 million incidents, with some people being counted repeatedly because they get sick multiple times per year?  Since it appears to be a statistical extrapolation, I rather suspect the latter.  There's a big difference between "48 million people got sick last year" and "half a million people got sick 96 times each last year".)

Aw, it's all cloudy.

No chance of seeing the Super Blood Three Wolf Moon from here.

(Or whatever it's called.  Probably just as well it's hidden, anyway.  The cats wouldn't like it if I suddenly acquired wolf powers.)