AppleTV, again

You know, for something that's supposed to be a brainless appliance, it's sure a bitch to set up. At least they included AirTunes in it, this software revision. I'm sure there's some sneaky DRM in there with that update I haven't caught yet. Curse you!!

sync

short: blather, only interesting to those interested in, uh, me.

bikes: I've been riding the bike to work, more or less, without exception for a month now. I've been averaging about a hundred miles a week on the 750 (which is a lot more than I put on the 250). Sandy and I have been going out when we can – because I'm riding so much more than she is, I need to be careful not to exceed her capabilities, so I don't, for example, take her out at night until she feels she's ready – but we don't get a lot of time together, and frequently when we do, it's not during "riding" weather.

I've figured out the issue with idling on my bike. It's twofold. The first, I was indeed right on. It's the carbs that makes it hard to idle. Basically, the way to get to "stage one" (it's a car thing), you update the intake (e.g., with a K&N and other intake goodness) and re-jet the carbs so there's enough fuel when you're at WOT. Problem is, carbs aren't very smart, and there's no O2S, so it's not like it can figure out that it's running way too rich when it's at low speed (you almost feel like fuel's getting spat at you standing behind it).

The second, Colin noticed. There's a sort of "stickiness" as you turn the throttle. As you get your wrist into it, there's a little resistance before it cracks open, and that little "crack" includes 1k-2.5k rpm. Past that, the bike spins up to 3,000 (which is the minimum rpm it's really happy at), and it feels like you're going to dump the clutch into a bike that's ready to jump. The answer is, no, it's not going to stand on one wheel and tear ass if you slip the clutch out at 3,000rpm. Different matter if you slip it in at 6-8k (yes, wheelie all the way up to and past 100mph). But that "stickiness" leads to it being kinda difficult at low speeds, and even Colin, who's about the most experienced rider I know, stalled the 750 on his first spin on it. I may get different grips or something (I need something wider for my hands, anyways), and an increase in diameter would fix that. I'd also like adjustable levers so I can make the throw a lot shorter, and the tension a lot lighter (I like driving with two fingers on each lever). But I kind of struggle with "should I keep it stock?" as I hate seeing ads on craigslist or ebay for a bike with a dozen or more "mods" that basically make it perfect for someone else, but potentially a problem for me. Oh well.

Speaking of the Ninjas, we got the 250's oil changed today, which is good. It really needed it. Not the worst oil I've ever seen, but it was definitely low. The bike runs better now. We'll see if it's burning oil or if the PO just neglected it. The 250 has a "captive" oil filter, much like a diesel Mercedes, whereas the 750 has your standard screw-on filter. The 750's oil filter is also located right inside the headers (it's a four cylinder...), so taking the filter off is guaranteed to get a few drops of oil on the headers, which will in turn smoke when the bike gets hot. But, it's easy enough to get at after you get the goddamn fairing off! I swear, I haven't had this much difficulty since changing spark plugs on a VG30. And PO on the 750 went all Incredible Hulk on the drainplug, and my 17mm spanner just didn't have the length for me to unscrew it. So, old oil remains in the 750. I borrowed a 1/4" driver with a 17mm socket, so hopefully I can teach that drain plug a lesson in the morning before the group ride we've got planned.

Which is the other thing – Sandy and I have been out before, but I've never gone out with anyone who had the ability to keep up with me – I went out with a friend today on an SV650S. While his bike isn't the crushing power of the ZX-7R, it's not like I'm hitting 90 on surface streets, and he kept up with me just fine, even when I was being "creative" in traffic. He's been riding a lot longer than me, and it was a lot of fun to be out with somebody who could both keep up and really ride well. Although he speeds a lot more than I do. I generally don't do any more than ten over, and he, well, he is happy to go whatever speed he's comfortable with. Tomorrow we may have five or six people out. A couple of SV's, a few Ninjas (250, 750, 636), and I don't know about the others. Should be fun. Let's hope nobody drops a bike in gravel or wet leaves or whatever.

Haven't made a whole lot of progress on the skunkworks. Been thinking about it, but been real busy with work (doing the NISPOM stuff is just absolutely mind-numbing, but required before we can move forward on SuperSecret Project X). The more I think about it, the more I really want to tell the story. I've even got some places where I want to develop one of the characters a little more (the one I really like but had to kill).

Another reason I haven't made a whole lot of progress is that the poor Mac is busy converting NEFs to JPGs for me. I used Automator to do it: apply a color profile, gamma correct, save as a jpg. However, it has mostly brought the machine to a halt. Which is peculiar – it has eight processors, and it's not using any of them 100%. This makes me think that while some parts of the OS are very MP-aware (quicktime), others really aren't (automator, Preview, Quartz, etc). So I've got eight cores at 35% CPU and thrashing ram and disk, so everything is on hold till those NEFs get converted. Word really likes to have its own machine (even eight cpus of machines), so I'm going to get back into the skunkworks after I'm done with those damn NEFs. Maybe what I need is 64gb of ram and eight of those 2.5" dual-drive enclosures in the tower. Yeah, when I've got an extra couple thousand bucks sitting around.

Lastly, wee, Gupta is getting published. Next year, July. Good news is, SFWA wants three credits, and I'd really like to be able to tack on a SFWA number to my submissions. I suppose that means I could also get nominated for SFWA awards, but I'm not anywhere near as awesome as Charlie, so chances are it won't happen. If it does, though, I might just wear a kilt.

Six hundred posts of worthless garbage!

It is on this six hundredth post of worthlessness that I celebrate the second publication of my works. Gupta is finally being published. It won't appear until late next year, but it's been specifically requested, and I'm pleased to finally see it in print.

And then there were two.

So we have both the 250 and the 750 (a ZX-7R) now. I'm really kind of at a loss for words. Taking the 750 out is both exhilarating and terrifying. It would be less terrifying if I knew Arlington PD would let me drive as fast as I "needed to" (note: not "wanted" to). The bike is so fast, it's kind of boggling. First gear is an exercise in keeping the front wheel down, and below 3,000rpm, it's a fight to keep it from stalling (I'm going to blame the carburettors for this one) – unless it's idling.

If you really grab the throttle and just open it up, it really moves. Fast. I guess we've all seen motorcycles pass us on the road when we're driving in cars. There's that check over the shoulder to make sure you're not too close, then a tug on the throttle, and the sort of sway-and-correct into the lane. I don't pass people because I want to go faster. I pass people because sitting behind them is dangerous, sitting next to them is dangerous, and at least if they're behind me, I can sort of see them.

But if you're doing 55 in a 45 (which everyone does), and you want to pass someone like this, on the 750 it's very easy to get up to 70 or 80mph without even really thinking about it. In second, in fact, it would happen almost instantly. That's the problem, of course. A "slow pass," where I would, in this case, speed up to say, 60, and then pass, is a problem on the bike because there's always an asshole on the road who doesn't want to be passed and will speed up when he is being overtaken. So you make sure you have enough go in the bike to get past them, but then you're being seriously Naughty. What's worse, is when you're there, the bike feels great. It really becomes a stable, road-carving platform above 8,000rpm. It's also loud as shit.

This means that everyone behind me, and everyone in front of me, knows that somewhere, near, there's a motorcycle, misbehaving. One of them is going to be a cop one of these days, and I don't know how to explain that. You admit culpability when you acknowledge you were traveling in excess of the speed limit (by a lot) and you did it to pass traffic, but does the cop understand that motorcycles and cars just don't mix well, and motorcycles just try to get out of the way? My guess is the roar coming out of the bike between 8-12k is enough to convince the cop that I had no intention of ever slowing back down to 55 (which I do, of course. just not as close to the guy who was on my tail.).

I've done lots of unintentional wheelies trying to get throttle/clutch sorted out, one of them up hill (hills are particularly tough for motorcycles). And then there's that vicious lift in first gear. If you have enough room to wind out first (you don't need a lot, but realize you'll be doing 70 when you want to slow down), the front wheel will come up and stay up if you slip the clutch a little getting in to gear, which you kind of have to do anyways with this bike.

I've ridden it about a hundred miles in two days. I know that it has a lot more to offer me, but I really don't know where its limitations are, whereas they were pretty easy to find on the 250. One huge difference is that rear tire, and I've leaned over further on this bike than I did on the 250, and at higher speeds. The bike felt solid, but I wasn't really comfortable cutting a line around a turn, hard on the throttle, at an angle I wasn't familiar with. So I backed off. It will take a lot of time, I think, to get used to the expanded capabilities of the bike. Right now, I kind of feel like I'm hanging on to some angry beast when I'm on the throttle, and I don't feel as balanced as I like when I get into higher angles of lean than I'm used to.

But then, it's only been two days. Here's to a sunny and dry (if cold) winter.

Faster than a speeding 250!

 

It's nice to have a second bike. Now we can go out together.

My first thought as I opened to WOT the first time was, whoa, shit, I'm not attached to this thing and I'm going to fly off the back! Where's my seatbelt????

The impossible is almost always possible.

You just have to get it out of your head that you can't do it, and then you have to start thinking about ways to do it. It is almost never the hand-grenade solution that fixes a problem. Usually, something hackish and clever does the trick. Why write a 3000-line perl module to de-duplicate my mp3's when I can write a 15-line awk script and do the rest in iTunes?

Throughout my career, I've been told that such-and-such is impossible. It's never been true. Never. What you find when somebody tells you something is "impossible" is a group of people who are engaging in serious group-think, and have convinced themselves that they have thought of every angle, every solution, and everything else. They really hate being told they're wrong. Worse, they deny that any novel suggestion could possibly work, and will often go out of their way to quash even looking into that novel suggestion. The only reason I can see for this is people being terrified of being proven wrong. I've been cast out of such groups for having such thoughts and offering such suggestions. The very notion that somebody is wrong is often very threatening to them.

I hate to place blame on people. I think it's pointless. Blame is only useful if you catch it before the act takes place – and then it's called "prevention," not "blame." So, they're not to blame, I'm not to blame. We've just got a problem, and as engineers or developers or even helpdesk phone jockeys, we have a responsibility to solve that problem. Pointing fingers and burning witches takes time away from solving the problem.

Today, while I worked a seventeen hour shift, I managed to pull off two different impossible tasks, the details of which I won't get into other than to say that there's stuff you "can't do" in OpenSolaris, and there's stuff you "can't do" in Windows. This is one of those instances where I had the motivation (which I also won't go in to; let's say that it's a personal thing), and wasn't going to let the impossible, the difficult, the hard, the incompatibilities, and the thinking get in my way. Thought and hard work prevailed where FUD had previously stymied any attempt at a solution. But, it's a one-time pass. You show somebody that the impossible is possible, and they tell you next week that something else is impossible, it's time to walk away. Such people are unchangeable, mercurial, and have motives that are much deeper than getting the job done. Work with people who want problems solved, and your life – professional and personal – will be a lot easier. Empire builders, silos, fiefdoms, etc., are the enemies of productivity. And you know when you're dealing with one. Get out while you can.

If we listen to these "that's not possible" or "that's absurd" people, we're worse than apes. Apes use tools.

Everything is possible, given enough thought and enough resources (in my case, it was time and lots and lots of thinking about the solutions).

I love programming.

Finding stuff like this in old tools I have lying around on older machines and in long-forgotten directories never fails to cheer me up:

# If we ever wanted to build a laser rifle, we'd need these

And, yes, the rest of the script did exactly that. Ran all the math necessary to collimate a beam into a coherent, directed energy weapon. How in the world did I forget this script?

skunkworks

1200 words today. slow day. lots of thinking needed to be done, and i did some revisions where i needed to. i am really close now to "finishing" the second act of the book. out of seven, or so. the good news is three of those acts are also written (making it almost five out of the seven; but i have to suture them together afterwards).

the little bar goes up

christ, it feels like i've been slogging at this for hours. i guess i have been. since meeting with $editor, there's another 2200 words in the skunk works. that's about 500 words an hour i guess, which is not quite the 5,000 words/8 hours i tend to pull when i really put my mind to it, but i'm happy with what i got accomplished. besideswhich, i'm supposed to be at work in, uh, four and a half hours.

i'll sleep when i'm dead, right?

fucking books. always demanding to be written. gr.

I'm not sure what I'm more excited about.

short: writing/editing, bike gear, and riding in general...

So, first, my editor used the word "great" not once, but twice to describe what is the last iteration of Gupta. It's now time to just dust off two sentences, and add a noun to a sentence that didn't have one. I think at that point, I may ask the two editors who liked it if they'd take it in its current form (e.g., with verb tenses fixed, without the hooker, and so on). I suppose I also have to re-format it into Shunn, which I don't really like. When I "write something for myself," I do it in Garamond or Myriad. But, them's the rules and if you don't play nice the editor ain't gotta publish it. Getting closer to SFWA.

Second, she's interested in one of the shorter stories I wrote, which is really (really...) rough and is essentially filth, violence, decay, dishonesty, and outright gore from end to end. It might get wound into the skunkworks (book!!) or it might just get spun out onto its own. Or it might go back into the slush pile as something to dust off later. At any rate, she's also going to get a peek at the skunkworks and tells me what she thinks of that. About 60k words in total, 25 or so written, and some sutures need to be made. So, work to go, but I might actually have a book finished by the end of the year, and even two more short stories (I can't foresee getting any further than that with the level of busy-ness wifey and I have had of late).

I can't wait to patch some of the Kubrickesque, just absolutely IMAX stunning scenery into the skunkworks. Gleaming arrows flying through space indeed.

Unfortunately, at dinner with $editor, a goddamn thunderstorm came in on us. I had the Ninja out, and I had even parked it in a corner that ensured (it was a covered garage, but the sides are open) that it was soaked when I got back to it. I, in my black jacket, black helmet, and enormous black backpack (no, really, it's a Brenthaven 17" powerbook backpack with a pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, a powerbook, notebooks, and all kinds of other shit) set out to take the bike into the rain. In the dark. Uphill even. How I managed to get up that hill and around that ramp is kind of beyond me, it seems a lot harder in the garage (we have a steep exit with a fence that requires me to sit half way up a hill and wait for it to rise; rear brake, lotsa throttle, slip clutch, thunk, pray.). But, I made it home okay, and the toughest parts were actually not the freeway (although the curvy ramp was tough because it merged in three surface streets onto the northbound and southbound sides of the interstate) but the surface streets, because I had to keep my eye out for standing water and slick surfaces like road markings. These are a lot harder to see on the bike than in the STI, which has xenon lamps and foglamps. The ZX-7 has HID lamps in it, so hopefully that will be easier to ride in the rain.

But I did it!! I rode home through a thunderstorm on the bike, at 9pm! Colin tells me at around the "six or so months" mark, people start to get a newfound feeling of confidence and that's when they mess up. Of course, that's the mark when I'm tripling my displacement and moving from "sportbike" to "supersport." Eeks, right? Everyone says, everyone drops a bike. Maybe I need to buy a beater Rebel or something and do what A Twist of the Wrist says to do: practice low-siding.

So, speaking of low-siding, knowing the ZX-7 is a fuckuva lot faster than the 250, I didn't feel comfortable riding it without armored pants and proper shoes. I picked up a pair of Coretech jeans, which are cowhide and some textile on the inside, with armor parts on the knees, and of course denim on the outside. Good stuff. They're comfy, don't look like you're trying to be Rossifumi, and I suspect they'd do a good job of saving my ass. I also got the Sidi Doha boots. They're a little tight on the inside (big) toe, but I have very long, very narrow feet, with very high arches. So, really, they fit pretty well, and I figure I'll just develop a nice comfy callous there. The tricky thing about them is they fit almost like ski boots – your heel is up, and toes inclined down. This isn't a real problem as such, but I've been riding in sneakers, and all of a sudden, there's a lot more (or at least much stiffer) material between me and my pegs.

One of the biggest problems I've had with bikes in general is the shifter. The brake is easy to handle, you just mash it. But while most of you "tap up" and "tap down" with your toe, I have to do it with essentiall the ball of my foot. So I don't have the same sort of, uh, dexterity or feeling there. I wore the boots to dinner, and walked around in them (not the most comfiest thing I've ever done, but I've certainly worn less comfortable shoes) and by the time I got on the bike again (in the rain, second ride in the boots), I had pretty well figured out where my foot was (because I had lost the feeling; sneakers are real thin in comparison), and was shifting normally. When I'd driven out to meet $editor, I'd been missing shifts or dumping the clutch because I'd miss the peg and goose the throttle. In rush hour traffic. On the interstate. That was pretty embarassing.

The jacket with its vinyl liner kept me dry, the pants didn't get too wet (which is good, they're not machine washable!!), the boots seem to have held up to the rain, and my only complaint is rain on the visor. I gotta get that figured out.

Heh, and I had a serious itch on my nose when I was sitting in traffic. I'd reach to scratch it (I did this three times.), and thump myself in my face. Yep, I looked like a complete idiot.

But, good ride(s), enjoying the 250 thoroughly, can't wait to get out on the road with Sandy and the two Ninjas, love the gear (although the Icon gloves I think are on the "gotta go" list, and I'd like a Coretech or Dainese jacket), and had a splendid session with $editor.

Pleased. Maybe I won't kill anyone in tonight's writing.

update

short: blather

Work fucking sucked today. From end to end. Nobody in particular at fault, it just led to my being so irritated and drained at the end of the day, I'd thought I wouldn't be able to get anything written. Sandy, however, proved to be very tired, and was "napping" by 1950, and snoring by 2200. So, I had time to write, and because I cooked last night, I had leftovers and didn't have to forage tonight.

But I was staring into the skunkworks, thinking, boy, how am I going to finish this scene? The two most important characters in the book are talking. I know what they need to say, because I know how the book ends. But the reader doesn't, of course, so I have to, you know, think about continuity and not referring to unknown information (at least not unintentionally). Dialogue, when I'm really early in to a book, can be pretty hard to put together. I may just start taking the Toby approach and "putting shit on paper" and then smoothing it through later, in the aim of getting stuff written.

So I did. I got about a thousand words written. And about three thousand yesterday, and five thousand the day before, and I've got another five thousand to staple to the end scene I'm writing at the moment, and then I get to write some pretty cool stuff that makes fun of Neal Stephenson (because he really needs to be made fun of).

And, usefully enough, there's continuity between two of the short stories I'm working on and the book – skunkworks – so I can continue to work on those without being too distracted.

Meeting with editor tomorrrow to, hopefully, wrap Gupta once and for all. I'm ready to move on. I have to. If I get stuck with Gupta for much longer, I'm really going to lose the enthusiasm I have for the rest of my slush pile, which is at the moment almost writing itself.

Lastly, taking a leisurely stroll through Stand on Zanzibar. Holy fucking shit, Batman, it's genius. I mean, I read Sheep Look Up years ago and I liked it, but I thought, well, that's kinda been done, and people have been playing that theme out for a long time, going right back to HG Wells and such. SoZ is so incredibly prophetic that, forty years after its publishing, you can see the exact structures, politically and socially he describes. It's dense, as the man is really, really smart, but I don't want to read it too fast, in the same way that I didn't want to read Cyteen too fast, because I knew when it was over, that was it. (although apparently Cherryh has wrapped a sequel to it. afraid.)

Oh. And Google Earth on a MacPro is very, very different than running it on an Air. And with two displays, I can actually fly (yes, fly!) through Peru on one monitor, while Word has 4-up on the other monitor (14pt Garamond even). It's like heaven. And don't even get me started on having that much real estate for iTunes. Squeeee!

Writer's block, only worse

Gupta is done. Mostly. I'm going to wrap it probably Tuesday this week, and then it's just a matter of sending it to people. I wanted to work on another short story, or, really, two or three, and get that SFWA membership started, but I've got the exact opposite of writer's block.

I complained about it in the past. When I was trying to finish the last 25% of Limits, this idea I had for a book, Foreigners, got about 15% of the way towards being a book, and of course, neither of them are fit to publish, or even casually hand around.

But here I am today, reading through my slush pile and a novel is eating at me. I swear, it's like I had some fierce Science Fiction Vindaloo and my guts are on fire with the need to write this fucking book. And, with deep guilt I admit this, I've been working on it all day. I've gotten a lot of work done.

I know I haven't got enough free time to write a book right now. I know this giant flow I have in my head right now will not be there tomorrow, or after a beer or two (which is what I normally use to get rid of this sort of distraction), but goddammit, It. Must. Get. Written.

I'm powerless to fight my own goddamn ideas and ambitions. I feel sick. You're my ideas, you can't tell me what to do!

...and I'm not alone. Ugh.

Spaces

I've actually gotten to the point where I'm using Spaces pretty effectively (with two monitors, I keep, for example, Word and Textmate on one space, Browser and email in another, iTunes and a Terminal in another, and so on, and lock them down in the control panel).

But Spaces really confuses Word, especially things like floating palettes. And iChat is pretty confused, too, since it may have a dozen windows open over several spaces. Which one does it go to when you alt-tab to it?

iTunes, Enterprise Edition, solved.

IM IN UR TOKYO3 STORIN UR CHOONZ

short: how to "fix" the "iTunes problem"

I've been bitching more or less incessantly about iTunes and file management, the way it stores data, and things like this. Originally, my complaint was that I had so much "stuff" that I wanted iTunes to manage it, make appropriate decisions about how to chunk and stream it across the network, how the underlying file structure should look, and its very, very serious lack of any robust query language (you can search for a word, or a tag, or whatever, and then make recursive searches of sets, rather like views in a database, but it's horribly coarse, and doesn't provide an interface to the filesystem, e.g., I cant get a cksum(1) of a file vs another). And, while it has a "show duplicates" function, it's too stupid to understand that I have, what, four different copies of No Phone by Cake, and they're all in fact different.

The other thing is, I was complaining I wanted to be able to store all my audio in one place, all my video in another place, all my iTunesU stuff in yet another place, audiobooks, and so on, down the line. You may not understand why I feel this way, but it boils down to essentially this. I need to know where stuff is so I can make decisions about how frequently to back something up, whether to back it up at all, what kind of media to put it on (RAID5 vs just some spare disk I've got lying around), whether to have Time Machine look at it, and so on. There are other reasons, but I think this is sufficient enough (I could even have network volumes store data for iTunes as I mentioned in my recent ZFS rant). Filesystems are very important to people who have lots and lots of data. How much is "lots"?

Well, after doing lots of manual and awk-aided cleaning and reaggregating of media files, the total is presently 891gb. That was a few days ago. We've since added all of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a few movies (the Mad Max movies, for example), a season of House, and so I would imagine if we haven't actually reached a terabyte, we will by next week.

But I've kind of solved my own problem, if you can believe that. iTunes has the option to "copy files to my iTunes library" when you add them, or to just leave them in place. It gets kind of interesting here, so pay attention or walk away because the details get tricky.

So, I had a lot of content attached to a RAID5 of 250gb LaCie disks (which have a very bad rap; ours have been running fine in hideous conditions for literally years), which was mixed. That is to say, video, audio – books, iTunesU, music, audible, etc – and I guess the other weird things that iTunes saves, like iPhone apps and iPod games, as well as PDFs that come with some albums from the iTunes Music Store.

This content worried me, because when I ran through it with awk looking for a way to get rid of duplicates, I noticed that I had not just duplicates, but in some cases quadruplicates (and in some cases, these "extra copies" were not showing up in the iTunes library, so while iTunes would tell me I had 339gb of content, I actually had a lot more on disk, and that extra stuff was duplicates – or was it?).

The problem I had was, well, once you've got duplicates noticed, how do you go and clobber them? I ran checksums on everything (this took a long time), and then used uniq(1) to show me the duplicate checksums. There were a lot. So, I created a new iTunes Library, this time letting it manage the files and structure, and using one monitor with vim open, ran through the duplicates, which roughly corresponded with some places in iTunes where duplicates were obvious. There were other cases where I had a 64kbit file and a 192kbit file, and of course since their checksums aren't going to be the same, having iTunes actually display the bitrate (among other tags) made the task of going through and eliminating lots of stuff pretty easy (as opposed to coming up with a tool to do this in the shell, I did it by holding down shift or command and zapping stuff with the backspace key). It took about eight hours, but I got all the duplicates out.

Another problem we had run in to is that, since we switched from the Mini to the Mac Pro, we've added a lot of content. Sandy's been adding content to her computers, I've been adding content to mine, and we've just sort of been storing them on disk, and had planned to drag and drop the whole deal into iTunes and just let it sort it out. Before doing this, however, I took my "clean" library, chown(1)ed it, and made it read-only. I then created a new iTunes library, this time telling it to not manage the file structure, and started cleaning up the content I wanted to add to the "new" library, segregating it into different folders, like "Sandy's Bleach episodes," "new itms purchases," "wmv files that need to be converted," and such. I kept these on a separate disk.

When I was satisfied with that stuff being relatively clean, I started adding each of these folders into iTunes so that they'd be available on the AppleTV, and began "cleaning" some of the new, imported content (like the anime) with the iTunes interface (which is, admittedly, pretty good for manipulating entire albums and ID3/attribute tags on files).

So, suddenly, we had all our old "clean" content, our new "clean" content, and our "imported, then cleaned" content available, in one single iTunes library. One day as I caught a duplicate I had missed, I used the "reveal in Finder" function to realize that, because iTunes is not managing the names and directory structure they're still (in the case of Bleach, named "[DB]...") or whatever. But, wait a minute. My library now spans the "original" raid, a new 640gb disk, a new 500gb disk, and the root volume, which is, uh, whatever it is, as well as Sandy's external pocketdrive.

I realized I'd gotten what I wanted: I could now store my media wherever I wanted to store it, add it to iTunes, and have iTunes organize it logically in its own little xml file. This is a huge plus, and it's a huge minus.

First, I got what I wanted. This is great. The problem is, since iTunes hasn't actually "corrected" the files, it's just corrected their entry in the xml file (the "iTunes Music Library"), the files on disk are still a mess (except the read-only library). So, if something were to happen to that xml file, I'd lose all the work I've been putting into this project for three weeks or so.

There is a solution to this, though. iTunes has a "consolidate library" function under File > Library, which will essentially take all these files on all these separate volumes, organize them the way it would prefer them to be organized (monolithically, on one disk, with "TV Shows" stupidly stored under "iTunes Music" along with movies and audiobooks, etc), but in the process it would also do what I was going to have the hardest time doing: writing a program to clean up all these files we had sitting around.

Ostensibly, I could pick up a LaCie Biggest Quadra, say, a 4tb model, tell iTunes to place my library there, and "consolidate" this library to that drive, and then keep up the same trick: triaging content into iTunes, groups of content at a time, using "consolidate library." This is kind of a problem, because I don't really trust iTunes, I don't trust Software Update to not fuck up that (presently very precious) xml file, and I don't especially want everything living in one gigantic 1+ tb directory. But despite all that "don't like" and "don't trust," I think I like the idea of iTunes cleaning up all that music, putting it on the (a new raid, the existing raid, whatever) raid, and making it available to Sandy and I (we use an "iTunes User" so that we don't have conflicting libraries) to manage iPods, iPhones, and the Apple TV.

So, I've kinda gotten my wish, but as is usually the case with Apple, it's fragile, consumer-grade (note I did not say pro-sumer), and Not Supported (imagine printing this post out and trying to explain it to a Mac Genius. Their eyes would bug out of their head.). The attitude of "if you want to use our hardware to do hard stuff, don't blame us when it breaks" sucks a lot, but at least I've got a workaround, a possible future solution, and "what I want" for the moment.

Motorcycle updates

quick: if you don't care about motorcycles, move along. there's some newbie wisdom here, if you can believe that, so if you're a new rider, you may learn something.

I rode the Ninja home yesterday, in the rain, because I got caught working a little later at work than I had planned to. It was mostly uneventful. I treated the Ninja just like I treat the STI: don't push it like there's dry asphalt under you (my plan for the STI is/was to run the Falken Azenis as winter tires and BFG slicks as summer tires; people think I'm insane, but I mostly think anyone who "needs" a better tire in the winter is being idiotic. You drive like it's wet, or snowy, and you won't lose traction. Tires ain't gonna help if you're stupid.). I had worried about my visor, but I found that, generally, the rain did a good job of flowing to the sides, and each time I checked a corner, it sort of "cleaned" that side of the visor (so check both your corners, and it's mostly rain-free afterwards). I suspect the visor is coated and I'll have to replace it at some point, but that's probably going to be a ways off. I hope. Gear is expensive.

So I leaned a little less, and kept my eyes open for puddles (motorcycles are real good at hydroplaning) and everything was mostly uneventful other than the fact I was wearing regular-ol-jeans, and those got kinda wet. The boots (Vasque, waterproof) were sufficient, although a bit clunky for operating a gearshift, and slippery when trying to get a good hold on the rear brake. The jacket, a Joe Rocket Phoenix II, with its vinyl insert (the jacket is otherwise a mesh textile, so air flows into it, keeping the rider cool) was sufficient to keep me dry, although it was hot as hell. I rode in to work with a sweater on under it (it was about 66F) and felt fine, but the ride home, I kept the sweater in my backpack and was way hot (ambient was 77F). For whatever that's worth.

I also performed, accidentally, my first "wheelie." I've learned a lot on the "little Ninja" in the time I've been commuting on it. First, it's not the STI. So driving around at 6,000 rpm is nowhere near as horrible as it is in the car. As a matter of fact, 6,000rpm is probably the least I want the engine running on city streets. If I need to throttle up (say, 55 to 70mph) and I'm starting at 6k, it's gonna be a slow curve until the bike "comes on" at 9k, and then it moves pretty durn quick.

So, from a stop, and pulling into traffic doing 60, I've learned that I just need to drive it hard. I shifted at about 13,000 rpm, which dumped me right back down at 9,000 rpm, and the front wheel (mind you, it's raining, and dark) lifted what felt like four inches. Maybe six. But not more. This, I'm told is called a "power wheelie," and should serve to indicate to new riders that even a 250cc Ninja, with a rider who weighs almost as much as it does, has a lot of power on tap if you operate it correctly. So I'll be paying a little more attention to when I'm shifting, and making sure not to do that through turns (thankfully, this was on the straightest part of the ramp).

The other thing I learned is that my buddy Colin is right. He says he never gets on the bike if he's angry, depressed, has had a drink in the last few ("few," not "one") hours, and so on, because the bike requires 100% of your attention, all the time, and if you don't have it all there, you can get killed. A personnel security issue at work was the culprit that kept me late, and I was irritated enough and preoccupied enough with the situation that I almost dropped the bike three times just coming out of the parking garage. By the time I got to the ramp, I was ready to call Sandy and ask her to just pick me up because I couldn't get into the focus I needed to ride. But, I stupidly plowed forward, into the rain, into the dark, and rode. I think what saved me in this instance is the fact that the new (I'd never ridden in the rain, and I try real hard to avoid driving home in the dark) challenges seriously engaged my attention. When I got home, I was still super angry, but when I was on the bike, I was checking corners, watching for cracks and puddles, minding my lean angle, and so on.

Next time I will just wait it out at the office, even if it means a few hours or some yoga, or indeed just ask for a ride home, because no argument or security issue is worth dying over.

We have purchased, this time with Hard Cash (rather than stock that's falling in a nauseated market), a Ninja ZX7-R (I'm not sure whether it's the R or the RR – I've been told the RR is "unstreetable," but there are few visual differences between the two). We're going to bring it home when the rain clears up. It's red, and looks a lot like this:

 

Which astute readers will notice is a hell of a lot more bike than our 250. It's also fully faired, and so should offer me a lot more protection from wind buffetting, and should also give me somewhere to "tuck in to." It's an unusally long bike, compared to everything else I've sat on or ridden, and I feel kind of strange reaching so far forward, but that gets me under the windscreen, and so on. I guess by design. It's a 750cc, makes about a hundred at the wheel, and kind of ironically, has nearly identical numbers to the 2008 CBR600RR "on paper."

The balance of the bike is a lot more forward than the CBR (which is magnificently balanced), with most of the weight being under the tank, or your chest if you picture yourself on the bike. It's also got phenomenal front brakes, which means one has to be careful when applying them. Of course, I haven't mentioned that it has a similar power curve to our little 250, and it comes on at about 8,000 rpm, and it will pull all the way to about 180mph. It's a fast bike.

The things I like most about the bike is that it's been taken extraordinarily good care of (still not sure how I feel about "persimmon red" – Airtech fairings in satin black may be in order), and it is 100% stock. Lots of the bikes on the used market have tons of modifications. This bike is cherry (no pun intended). It's also a very big bike. Sandy can't even get a leg over and triangle the bike, so there's no question of whether we'd be sharing this bike. And, while the power is frankly a little daunting, I don't think I'm going to have any more fears about getting into a fast-moving bit of traffic. She should be audible from a few blocks away if I get her up to 14k before I shift (and because all the weight is so far forward, it's actually pretty hard to wheelie the ZX-7R, although you can do it if you work at it). It will be nice having a sixth gear.

I've been thinking about getting a Yoshimura slip-on for it, just because it looks cool, but the bike really needs nothing. It's going to be interesting having my first "wet season"/winter riding experience being on what is essentially a MotoGP bike sold to the public for homologation purposes. At least I don't live in Pittsburgh or something.

As far as gear, since I never take the bike(s) out on the highway, I've not felt the need to pick up any real riding pants, but have ordered (arriving I guess this coming week) a set of Coretech denim "leathers" – they're actually denim, plastic, and leather – and a set of Sidi Doha boots. Don't want to come off the bike at all, but if I do come off her at 75, I want to make sure I've got ankle protection and I don't burn my ass off on the road.

And, lastly, the more I look at gear on Kneedraggers, the more I realize I don't really trust my Joe Rocket jacket, and I'd like to buy both supplemental back/kidney armor and a new jacket. But jeez, gear is expensive. Imagine, spending $500 on a new jacket, plus $500 for a new rain jacket, plus $250 for the armor, and another $150 for rain pants (that fit over your riding pants).

The Joe Rocket is functional and will work for commuting. But I'm under no illusions that either my Icon gloves or my JR jacket will offer me much protection at anything above surface-street speeds.

$6 tanks of gas are awful nice, but no matter what anyone tells you, riding a bike is not cheaper than driving a car. And nobody who rides a bike owns just one, either. It's an affliction.

I'll find somebody to get a picture of Sandy and I on the Ninjas so those who keep asking about it can see (her pink leathers, my "demon bike," the size difference, etc).

Media, stunning ignorance therein

A young black man has been paid by NASA to rap about physics. Apparently, even that paragon of journalism excellence, the BBC (well, okay, it was the Wales bureau...), has never heard of nerdcore, but even that's no excuse, as They Might Be Giants and The Dead Milkmen were recording such "nerdy" music when even I was a kid (wasn't my thing back then; fan of TMBG these days). I am undoubtably leaving things out, as people have been putting "learning material" to music for as long as there has been music, as far as I can tell.

In fact, if you want to be pedantic about it, rap started as oral history. That would mean that rap, by definition, is nerdy (is Ice Cube's It Takes a Nation, Hood Mentality, or Tomorrow nerdcore because it aims to educate its audience?).

And then, of course, there's Schoolhouse Rock, my favorite piece of which is actually a cover by Shannon Hoon (and you can listen to it right now!).

Holy interwebs batman! It's amazing what you can find if you look for it. I'm stunned that the BBC didn't even bother to note that this has been going on for as long as anyone cares to look back.

Interactions between Unix and Windows (or other directories)

short: it rant

Is it really necessary that Unix and Windows interoperate on authentication (the fabled "single sign on")? I would say that the answer is a definite "sort of." I'm real pleased with Solaris 5.11 and 5.10, and I've been thinking about running Windows, virtualized, within Virtualbox on Solaris on AMD64. This way, I get end-to-end support of my hardware, software, and virtualization environment from Solaris (the proverbial "one neck to choke"), and frankly I trust Solaris a lot more than I trust Windows, when running services.

And, let's be real. We don't run Windows machines as services. Services run on Windows machines. A Unix machine on the network is a service; it's a place people can shell into and do stuff. A Windows machine on a network is an IP address that might let you interact with it over metaframe or terminal services, but it's only barely multiuser and even then, it's just as if you were an ape at the keyboard.

So why not take your directory server, file server, and so on, and put them in very small, very lean Windows guests in Virtualbox, and then mete out the storage with ZFS?

I was initially impressed with our local EMC rep (who, incidentally, owns VMware, which I didn't know). But maybe that's because she's pretty. She had some pretty interesting things to say about Exchange and replication and things like this, but that's Sun's game, and has been (well, the replication part). If you want Exchange, great, run it in a virtual host with sixteen gigs of ram and a terabyte of disk on a ZFS volume, and then tune that volume from the Solaris side as necessary.

So all your guests can use Active Directory to talk to eachother (and AD itself is virtualized, remember) and all your users, whether they be Mac users or Windows users, get their "single sign on" to their email, machines, VPN, network storage, and so on, via AD (because, for whatever reason, nobody seems to like Sun's LDAP service). And your Windows admins (because you need em, you have lots of Windows "boxes") can all do their authentication and privilege management through Windows, which is what they want to do.

But, do you break down that last wall and make sure that anyone with a Windows account should be able to log into one of these Solaris (or dare I say Linux) machines? Maybe those Solaris machines should use krb or Sun's LDAP, or maybe even a shared set of keys (depending on your organization, how many 4x4 core Opterons do you need to run all your Windows services virutally?), to keep it simple.

Bottom line: Windows admins don't need to be on the Solaris machines, Solaris admins probably don't want to be on the Windows machines anyways, but understand what it means when the Windows guys say "Exchange needs three more terabytes." ZFS. Bang. "Sure, I'll get that done when I'm back at my desk."

I just don't trust VMware and I don't like it. It's burned me too many times, both on MacOS and Linux, as well as on Windows. Why let it continue to do so when Virtualbox is free?

Of course, I'm just me, an irascible systems admin who asks that systems be stable, scalable, and built well. Piddly shit and hacks piss me off, and that's earned me a reputation as an asshole. Sure, maybe I am. But then, the networks everyone else is making are falling apart at the fucking seams. I don't mean anyone in particular; I just mean, I've never met a Windows environment that seems to, you know, Just Work (except at Microsoft, which was blissful, I have to admit).

But even Microsoft would admit they'll happily sell you licenses to 2003R2 or 2008 to run virtually on Solaris – if you really want to. They make the money, and they support virtualization. They do, and their sales reps will tell you. So trust their OS to do what it does: one thing, at a time, with nothing else getting in the way (like, I dunno, a second nic driver or running three virtual guests).

Fucking Windows. I understand its place in the world, but I am so continually disappointed by its lack of administration tools, operator transparency, stability, and so on, that as I work with Solaris (now daily), I can't help but be disgusted – doubly – because my Mac treats me better, too.

OPSSEC and the family

It is unfortunate that one's professional life can become intermingled with ones personal life in such a way that said professional could have to explain operational security to un-read-in people.

When and how and where to talk. What to say, and not say, whether or never. What you can and can't say about your spouse at work. Where you can and can't go on vacation.

But these are facts of life, I guess, in the community. Your kids may not realize that torrent they're downloading only has one seed, and it's in Iran, and what that actually means. They may not understand that telling a friend of their at school that you're in Saudi Arabia for two weeks can literally filter into the intelligence-collection funnels of a "hostile" (at Microsoft, we used the term "coopetition" to describe Citrix – you may see the same sort of relationship here with, e.g., Israel) country or other entity.

After the lectures are done, and the cloak-and-dagger stuff is over, and the family is suitably scared but hopefully reassured Everything Is Okay, life returns to almost normal. But, it's sad that it has to happen at all.

The case for ZFS

I could make this a rant about iTunes, but really, the scope is greater.

/dev/disk2 298Gi 98Gi 199Gi 34% /
/dev/disk8s1 466Gi 20Gi 446Gi 5% /Volumes/DUMP
/dev/disk11s2 149Gi 115Gi 34Gi 78% /Volumes/ururu-chan
/dev/disk12s2 596Gi 571Gi 25Gi 96% /Volumes/Scratch
/dev/disk10 39Gi 54Mi 39Gi 1% /Volumes/Hanks
/dev/disk9 1.1Ti 842Gi 282Gi 75% /Volumes/Wilson
afp_3VnGRa0003wl0000oM0000VU-1.2d000005 74Gi 59Gi 16Gi 79% /Volumes/censored


These are mounted on five different protocols from two different hosts, spread out across ten disks, only two of which are actually identical (slash, naturally). It's sort of starting to look like Unix, right? I realize now that I could create an iTunes "pool" in zfs, just add storage as required, and have iTunes or an applescript agent poll, or just manually tell iTunes there's new stuff at so-and-so place, and my storage/duplication/performance problems would be solved.

And zfs is even as smart as hfs, knowing where to mount itself. I have heard rumors that the server product of Leopard groks zfs the way the client currently groks ntfs. Since zfs is pretty open, and Sun is trying to promote it, can I pretty, pretty please ask Apple to give me the option for zfs in future releases? Like, when all the cats are gone and we're waiting for Voltron or something?

Apple has nothing to lose, enterprise customers to gain, and my eternal gratitude. Which, lemme tell you, is worth a lot more than your quarter and cup of coffee.

A reflection on just How Bad It Is.

Okay, so we lost thousands of dollars in the market. Yet, we both have jobs, and yes, bought a (different) motorcycle. We will both get our annual pay raises and maybe one or the other of us will be promoted or move into a more lucrative or interesting position.

Every month, we make a payment on our car that brings it that much closer to ours, and as it stands, we still have a huge chunk of equity in it. Every year, I pay Virginia something like a thousand dollars in property tax on my damn vehicles. I pay almost twice that in car (and motorcycle) insurance for the both of us. I pay pretty close to 43% of my income to tax, be it state or federal, and on top of that I pay for health insurance from my employer.

But I also pour into a retirement fund. I have an IRA and a 401k. I do, in fact, own two very fast cars and two very fast motorcycles (okay, exaggerating on the two fiddy a little, but it still outguns the STI to 60mph – with me on it). I live right near DC, so there is an unending stream of new and incredible culture all around me. I can go to Halal markets to pick up meat, I can go to Kosher delis to do the same. I can go to the Chinese markets to get vegetables most of you have never heard of. Same for just about any other culture you can think of.

So, even if the stock market takes a giant shit, over and over again, and the government buys the airlines and amtrak, and luxury goods companies like Apple start producing more practical, cheaper products, well, we don't live in fucking afghanistan and pakistan.

The folks at polioeradication.org are reporting today (via PM) on the struggles they're having with polio vaccinations in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The conflict between government and irregular forces has led to mistrust of NGOs and ostensibly humanitarian organizations (and remember, you can't have "humanitarian" without "humint", so ymmv as usual). So you get this cockamamie shit like mullahs telling their particular wadi that the westerners (or indeed, the folks from Jalalabad) are not trying to vaccinate them against polio, they're trying to steal their precious liquidssterilize them.

So, naturally, the NGO folks are getting killed, otherwise attacked, denied access, and so on. And diseases like polio (polio folks, I mean, really. This isn't some new superbug.) are actually endemic to the area.

Those folks don't have health insurance, 401k's, IRA's, motorcycles, roads to drive them on, state troopers to pull them over, grocery stores, and computers with 20" LCDs to display the current OH MY GOD 5% downtick in the Dow.

Or, you know, you could be one of our boys (rah rah america, I know) getting shot at. Or one of the boys they're shooting at.

So, really, can we please stop all this whining and putting crying stockbrokers on the covers of newspapers?

Your fifty-cal sucks.

A while ago, I proposed to a friend of mine who, at the time, did not own a gun, that the .50 BMG was a terrible round for one of the purposes it's being used for today: long range, accurate shooting. In fact, I decided it was so miserable, that I ran the math, and found that the .338, the .22-250, and the .300 Winchester Magnum were all about equally matched at a thousand yards, and that the BMG was actually more prone to wind deflection and bullet drop than the others. Yes, that means my lowly rifle,



Is every bit as effective at a thousand yards, provided I'm not trying to put a huge wound channel into a guy hiding behind a piece of corrugated steel.

We have this confirmed kill out at 2,430 meters in Afghanistan, and I'm sure that particular Afghani thought it was a pretty effective round, and there's no doubt that the muzzle energy and terminal ballistics are impressive on paper.

But when we get down to look at the cartridge, we see something that is, well, what it is. It's a machine gun round. It's crew-served, not-quite-heavy weaponry. It's not an Oerlikon 20, it's not a Mk. 19, but it has a pretty good rate of fire, it's real effective out to a thousand yards at the cyclic rate, and has a huge range of different rounds, from the APIT to the newer Raufoss round. It can do a lot of stuff.

Who cares about all that? I'll never fire an APIT round as long as I live (I hope...). I probably won't ever get hold of any Raufoss rounds, and see no need for them, either. I'm not out there to put a really big wound channel in anyone. What I want is a round that goes forever and ever, and hits exactly where I wanted it to, every time.

But aren't people doing this right now with the .50 in FCSA and other long-distance shooting competitions? Sure. But Lutz Moeller is out-shooting them with the .338 Lapua. This has got to be maddening in the "heavy" class where people have guns that don't even resemble firearms, can weigh over a hundred pounds, and pretty much anything goes. Why do they go with the .50? Well, because it has a huge case. You can spit that sucker out of a gun going pretty fast, which means it's going to avoid wind deflection better, have less bullet drop, and be a more effective long-range round.

And then there are the people going with the various 6.5 benchrest rounds. The thing is, it's really easy to compensate for bullet drop. The equations are simple (largely; when we factor in things like humidity and very long flight times, they get more complex), and we can simply adjust our firing position to the appropriate MOA setting (remember, one MOA is ten inches at one thousand yards). The guys with the 6.5's don't need a lot of speed, and they can make it out to a thousand yards, and be very damn accurate, because the round is just built to be accurate. Take bullet drop out of it, compensate intelligently for windage, and you're going to be just as accurate as the boys with the fifties, only you're less likely to flinch, and you'll spend less on powder.

So, why not just take conventional wisdom and throw it right out the window? This is always a good place to start when conventional wisdom has failed to deliver anything useful. And useful, to me, is a four-thousand-yard-plus round. Read that again. Two and a quarter miles. The bullet drop on that sort of range is insane. You're literally talking a field cannon or artillery at this point, with multiple hundreds of MOA of bullet drop to compensate for.

Conventional wisdom says the .50 BMG is the biggest thing out there. Well, it's not. There's no reason at all somebody couldn't make a 20mm round (with the .50 being 12.7mm), so that it would have an adequate case volume to reach out that far, and having manageable bullet drop. Let's look at some ratios, some of which I've stolen from Lutz:

my $rimdia = 2   * $cal;                # outer dia
my $rimrad = $rimdia/2;                 # outer radius
my $ltos   = 5   * $cal;                # length to shoulder
my $bull   = 8   * $cal;                # bullet length
my $los    = 2   * $cal;                # length of shoulder
my $nel    = 1.2 * $cal;                # length of neck
my $casel  = $nel + $ltos + $los;       # length from rim to end of neck
my $seatl  = $nel / 2;                  # seating depth
my $oal    = ($bull + $casel) - $seatl; # overall length

So we have a 20mm round with a casing about 40mm at the base. We have a bullet that is eight calibers long, if you're reading the math correctly, five calibers to the shoulder, a shoulder of two calibers (which is to say 40mm from the "fat" part of the case to the start of the neck). For those of you still paying attention, this is a very big frappin round. Let me give you a small picture I rendered horribly from the dimensions:



To the left of the big black monster, we have a cylinder approximating the size of the bullet but not the cartridge of a .50 BMG. So, let's have a closer look at these dimensions:

                  caliber 20.00 mm
           overall length 312.00 mm
             rim diameter 40.00 mm
       length to shoulder 100.00 mm
       length of shoulder 40.00 mm
           length of neck 24.00 mm
      overall case length 164.00 mm
            seating depth 12.00 mm

This is pretty incredible. At 312mm, it's almost exactly a foot long from the primer to the tip of the round. The cartridge itself is 160mm long, which is to say, well, a little more than six inches, right? And the weight? Well, in order to get the center of mass roughly equivalent with the center of gravity, we'd have a hollowish front, with a heavier rear, but it would be in the 1000-1400gr range, or more. The other thing is, it would have Lutz's fancy little ridges (the Barnes TSX uses this to increase the velocity of the round; Lutz uses it to create micro-turbulence around the bullet which breeds greater wind resistance), so it could be loaded very "hot" and would travel very fast, and require a very high rate of twist. Let's say 1:6 to be conservative (he has talked about 1:4 or less...).

Of course, with this much powder capacity, that much twist, and the "TSX ridges," you'd need a rifle barrel that was enormously strong (did not exhibit "whip" that happens in longer barrels) and enormously long, compared to even the .50 barrels we see today. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see a six foot barrel, for example, that was 80mm in thickness or more. Do the math again, and we're talking about a big, heavy gun.

What do we gain with this? We've essentially taken the characteristics that make the LM-105 and the 6.5mm cartridges so damned accurate, and put a proper powder charge behind them. In the process, you've got almost a litre of powder capacity, and a gun that probably weighs well over a hundred pounds, and is probably carried in two cases or more – barrel, tri/bipod, and action.

Now, I'm aware that there are other 20mm rounds out there, notably the Lahti, whatever Anzio Ironworks is using, and the US Government 20mm grenade round. But none of these were designed to be long-range accurate rifle rounds. They were designed to be infantry weapons, for smacking tanks. The BMG was designed to be belt-fed, as is the US 20mm grenade. The Lahti is brutal to shoot, and inaccurate past a thousand yards because its case and bullet are 1939 technology. It's still going to put big holes in something at a thousand yards, but why bother?

Competition is now out to 2,000 yards, and the military is engaging targets at 2,000 yards plus. It's time for a new cartridge. So, bring on the 20mm. Build it with the right dimensions and the right technology, and I guarantee you'll be hitting within a few MOA at 4,000 yards. It will have more energy at 2,000 yards than the .50 BMG has at the muzzle, and be more accurate at 1,000 yards (although with a round like this 20mm, you'd zero at 1,000 yards, as opposed to, say, 300 yards!), and almost certainly more accurate at 2,000 yards. A rifle with that velocity, spin, and precisely formed bullet, zeroed at 1,000 yards, would have no problem whatsoever reaching out to 2,000 yards and hitting targets inside a 36" circle.



Now, that is an action.

Why do I rant here about this? Well, sadly, because I haven't got time to build one. It would actually be pretty easy to make the gun. Don't do anything fancy. Remember, you're making field artillery here, not a rifle. So look at the German 88 for your action, and probably a geared, two-piece action rather than a "bolt," in the traditional fashion. But still, not hard to do if you have a lathe or the CAD software to put it together (which I do).

I've found the hard part is finding somebody to make the brass. I can't make my own. I can't take 20mm brass from the USG 20mm Grenade, Anzio won't talk to me, and the Lahti is not a good substrate for the pressure and velocity I want. I could actually mill cartridges out of steel, but this is dangerous, as brass actually gives a little (hence the term "fire formed" or "fired once" brass) when fired, both protecting the gun and ensuring a proper seal.

I also can't find anyone who wants to make a 20mm bullet for me with the specifications above. I asked Lutz if he was interested, and he didn't get back to me, either.

Folks, I'm not insane here. I'd be really sad if I built a rifle to reach out to 5,000 yards and nobody could form the brass or lathe out the bullet to load it with. Surely somebody wants to see that sucker light up, right?

One of the most beautiful things about this "gun" I propose is that it is so horribly inappropriate as a "weapon" as such that not even a scare-monger like Nancy Pelosi could screech that it could be used to take out aircraft. Sure, it could be used to take out aircraft, if four guys towed the gun to the site, mounted it to an emplacement, assembled the weapon, calibrated their aim, and then fired. First off, a litre of powder going off is going to get noticed. Second, even if you did decide you wanted to send 20mm, 1400gr cartridge through an airliner, it would have so much energy, it would go through one end and out the other without even noticing it had traveled through the fuselage.

It's not an anti-armor weapon. It's not an anti-personnel weapon (just like Gerald Bull's superguns were really not effective at hitting Tel Aviv). It's a long-distance, highly-accurate, brass-or-copper projector. It's a tool to bring the art to the next level. It requires people to start dealing with more than just MOA of drop. Now you have to know a lot more. It makes competition even harder.

Can you imagine the X-Games first year of long-range rifle shooting? An entire firing line of 12.7, 15, 20, and 25mm rifles firing at targets multiple miles away? We've got the optics, we've got the math, some of us have the balls, the equipment is easy enough to make.

Come on somebody, do it. Or, help me do it. I'll make the gun. Somebody make me brass, and maybe I'll even get the copper lathed myself, and I'll be the guy to come up with the initial 20mm C (what I've been calling it – I have a whole set of diagrams and CAD docs on it) "loadings." And, let me tell you, when that kind of thing gets open sourced (I think it just did get open sourced, right?), and the 20mm's open up in Montana, Nevada, Alaska, or down at Quantico, people are going to take notice, and people are going to need one.

The other thing worth mentioning is even MacMillan has recognized the .50 has seen its day and progress needs to be made. Most people haven't heard of the "Fat Mac," and I've certainly never seen anyone shoot one, nor do I know of any weapon even chambered in it, but the specs exist. Folks, there's so much room to grow here, and nobody's taking the bull by the balls and moving forward with what we know to make longer-range, more-powerful rifles. Whether they have military utility or not (in the case of my 20mm C, probably not), they certainly have a civilian market.

Chuckle. Long-range sniping on Elephants. Imagine that. Throw conventions out the window (like the .577 Tyr, only more), and you get cool, cool shit.

As my portfolio slowly weeps

Who are the ones out there giving "the wave"? Well, so far, it's been maybe one out of ten people. How strange. And, forget cops. Folks, two fingers down, off the clutch, means "Hello." "Two down" or "Shiny side up." It's a greeting. If you're on two wheels, have some goddamn decency.

Also: not getting CBR600RR. Note the drop in price between when we decided to buy the bike, and today, and that we have not yet sold the shares. We were discussing the "responsibility" of buying such an expensive toy, and in the meantime, lost thirty points on the shares we were going to buy the bike with. Is this for the better? I don't know. If it turns out that the market is even more fucked when the 09's show up, we really screwed the pooch. If it recovers, Apple does okay over Christmas, and we don't get hit too hard on taxes next year, it's not bad.

So in the meantime, we buy some leathers and boots, look for a bike to pass the time between now and "when the market recovers," and I get to cry in my soup over not getting my black-on-black-on-evil bike. Well, as people say, fuck me running. If you see me on your bike, and I am on two wheels, say hello dammit, I'm having a bad year.