A form letter

Dear (name of project owner),

I see that you have created (name of project) and submitted it to the multiverse for debian and ubuntu consumption, as well as released the source under the GPL. I thank you and admire you for your dedication to open source software. I am writing, however, to explain that I think you may have missed the point, or might be duplicating efforts.

For example, the use of (previously extant package) with the (some kind of flag or behavior) feature enables the same behavior your new application, (name of project), provides. While I understand that you may not have been aware of (previously extant package), please understand that these problems have often been solved, and the amount of effort you expended in writing (name of project) could have been spent in bettering the functionality of (previously extant package) or by contributing to another project that needs developers.

Furthermore, the repositories are so cluttered now with redundant software packages and varying colors of the same piece of software that I feel (name of project) serves to degrade the performance of packaging systems, slow down the mirror servers, the packaging software itself, and possibly lead new users, such as yourself, down the wrong path.

I humbly request that you remove (name of project) from the package list and instead offer your support and any unique functionality in your project to (previously extant package). This will benefit everyone in the long term, and I hope my above explanation of using (previously extant package) with the (flag or other behavior) feature is more than sufficient to meet your needs.

I also want to thank you again for your time and effort with Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, and the Open Source movement in general. You're a real credit to your generation. The next step in your career towards mastery of Unix and Linux should be to not only become familiar with the tools and software that exists already, but to teach other new users like yourself how to use them. I hope this message has helped you down that path.

Best Regards,

Alex

Notes taken today on the Arduino project

short: ignore if you're not paying attention to the frankenbike project

Sensors:

• O2: We can tell if we're running lean or rich here. Might as well go wide-band, if I'm starting from scratch. Note: will need a bung welded.
• RPM
• Lean angle
• Accelerometer: I'm using the LIS302DL "piccolo" accelerometer, and it's pretty easy to use, doesn't take up too much space or other resources. Almost done with its software, in fact.
• EGT: not sure why, yet, it just seems like something worth having. Will also prefer a bung.
• Ambient temperature, pressure, humidity: this helps understand how our air charge looks compared to our (relatively static) fuel. It also helps alert the driver (via a BIG BRIGHT LED) when the temperature is at or very close to freezing as ice is developing on the road.
• H2O temperature: very good to know if the engine feels like overheating.
• Throttle position
• Voltmeter: nice to know you're charging, and that your battery is in good health.
  

Questions:

• Can we create kml/kmz routes from NMEA data from the GPS unit? That would be fucking awesome, especially with telemetry data collected. I am guessing FOSS software exists to do this.
• Need to figure out how the tacho, among other sensors (like H2O temp) actually get data. I assume the tach is off a crank trigger and the H2O temp is just voltage, but how do I know what 120 vs 220 °F is?
• This is probably a good time to check out the Megasquirt-n-Spark to see how it works, what it does, and if I can (ab)use it to do anything, or if maybe they have data I can pilfer. Their shit is open, as mine is (and will continue to be).
• Do I actually have enough processor power, at 16mhz, to parse NMEA data from a GPS unit that's reporting at 4800bps? I've parsed NMEA in perl before just fine, but this time I'm doing it in C for fucks' sake, and on embedded hardware. I am afraid. Maybe somebody's made an NMEA library for Arduino already. If not, hopefully I'll be able to release one when I'm done.
• Ideally, we'd be getting location, heading, and speed data from the unit, but oops! this requires storing data from one "chirp" to the next from the GPS unit. Complexer and Complexer. Argh.
• It would be trivially easy to have a "G meter" made of an array of LED's. Figure, each LED represents .5g, so if 2 are lit, you are pulling 1g in whichever direction. Assumedly, you would be interested in knowing if you were stopping at 1g, accelerating at 1g, or turning at 1g, but that last bit brings up a new question.
• A bike on a lean.. "Z" is my elbow/knee/whatever. Is the force of the bike cornering going to be pushing Z towards the base of the tire, or is it still going to be towards the ground? I haven't thought hard enough about this, and I'm actually starting to wonder whether the "turning g potential" of a bike is a meaningful number. Lean angle and speed strike me as more important, but knowing lean angle and g lets me know how well the tires are adhering, because as they slip, there's less "to-tire" g and more "to-ground" g, which we can correlate with lean angle. And that might actually be useful.

Anyways, that's all for now... back to my little hacking cave. I literally forgot to eat yesterday because I was writing the piccolo code. What a pain. It's like when I first fell in love with perl. There were days I'd just drink beer after beer until the code was done, sort of "titrating" the "beer dose" such that the "coding mood" was appropriate. Never quite "drunk," but certainly not "hey, this is probably how my employer wants me to code."

Fortunately or not, I don't drink much at all any more, and this is neater shit than an IRC chatbot. It's even a marketable skill, programming microcontrollers.

Oh, and I have to do something I've never done (which is why I started taking inventory of sensors): write a file system. I'm not going to use FAT or anything like that. I think I'm just going to use vectors and write directly to bits on the SD/micro SD interface, but it does mean I have to use the microcontroller to read it back to me in a meaningful format. Maybe I'll build one just to read the data off the SD card and turn it into something ASCII and useful. Hrms.

Why can we not make our own drugs?

This is not as kooky as it sounds from the topic, and anyone who knows me or has read this long enough knows my opinion. So, if you don't care for the politics of it, move along.

Why must it be illegal for Americans to cultivate p. somniferum or c. sativa (or c. indica)? What about b. caapi or other psychotropics? Just as we now differentiate between "for distribution" and "for personal usage," why not discriminate between "for personal use" and "for manufacture"? I am racked with terrible back spasms and the occasional migraine headache. Why should it be illegal for me to produce my own opium tea or my own marijuana for relief of either? It's certainly not hard to do, and it's very difficult to do it at a level of production that I could produce enough to sell to anyone. I might be able to make spaghetti with meatballs and a pinch of marijuana (in the sauce, rather than puffing away at the table one evening with friends over, as I might with a bottle or two of wine), but I see no real reason for people to need to be able to produce commercial quantities (which is a subjective quantity, I agree, and a niggling issue) of drugs.

But as I taper down off my latest set of fentanyl patches (yeah, I get really injured once or twice a year – this time it was a buncha broken ribs and a concussion), and hover over detox each step down, and feel like utter shit, I think to myself, why am I doing this? Why can I not just self-medicate and ask for help if I feel like a) I can't get enough analgesia or b) I can't stop?

Alcoholics do actually check themselves into rehab and know they have a problem. So do nicotine addicts. Opiate addicts are no different. I'm going to tell you I don't think pot is addictive, but I think there are people out there who feel that they have a problem with it, and I don't see why we shouldn't help those people the same way we help alcoholics or nicotine users.

By giving me fentanyl for my pain, we ensure that I get adequate analgesia, but we also ensure that my body becomes dependent on it, and that I'm going to go through some form of detox or a complicated (usually and a complicated) ramp-down process. If I could just titrate my dosage using e.g., opium tea or home-brew laudanum (boy, that would be nice – simple syrup, a skosh of laudanum, and lemon in a glass for a migraine), why is that a problem? People don't trust me to take an effective, appropriate dose? Studies show that people use as much morphine as they need when they're on self-dosing systems and tend to stop using them of their own volition when given the option. Conversely, when they're taken off the self-dosing systems (the "morphine clickers" in hospitals) before they are comfortable with their pain level, they suffer more post-operative pain and require more percocet/vicodin/whatever and are more likely to become addicted to said post-operative drugs.

Man has been making his own analgesics for as long as there has been pain. From simple topical poultices to more refined substances like laudanum, people have created drugs that were strong enough to treat the pain they had. As humans, we're clever and like to invent shit, so we've created drugs like tramadol and fiddled around with the opiates to create opioids like, well, fentanyl and – good god, people – alphamethylfentanyl. I think it's probably a good-ish idea (I have mixed feelings about drug control in general, and don't like the idea of one class/caste/profession holding the keys to something as important as pharmaceuticals; doctors are, in a way, a cartel) to keep some of these superdrugs under control, and keeping it mostly illegal to produce them without a license.

But if I want to grow poppies, cannabis, b. caapi and p. viridis in my home, and make my own tinctures and teas and topicals, why on earth is this illegal? I would wager that the number of pain patients in hospitals, or the resources the medical uses to treat pain is of a rough ratio to the amount of people we have in the penal system on drug charges.

The Economist has even run, on its cover, this very month, a story about the drug war being a complete and utter failure.

Maybe this administration could actually leave a lasting legacy by raiding the paramilitary organizations that hunt down marijuana grow labs and taking troops in afghanistan off of "burning poppy fields" duty (farmers who have poppies to grow have better things to do than lob mortars; by the same token, americans with their own source of opiates do not need to rely on afghani farmers for heroin, and the whole myth of al-qaeda being supported by drugs crumbles all by itself), and taking the billions of freakin dollars and putting them somewhere useful like healthcare instead of taxing my health benefits (I'm unemployed, but I know my next job will have said benefits, and I know this administration is going to bump my taxes to cover the uninsured rather than do more useful clever things).

I wish I could just throw up my arms, yell, "this is all fucked!" and ignore it, but I live in pain. I have injuries at the moment, and I guarantee before the year is out I'll have broken a limb, dislocated a joint again, come off the bike, or something else stupid. I'm just prone to injury. Some people are prone to brilliance; I'm good at getting hurt. This isn't drug seeking behavior, it's called leading an active life and, maybe, being a little clumsy.

Pharmocracy, people. Say it with me. Start talking to people, asking them if they think the whole pharmacy industry, from the companies themselves, to the doctors and hospitals, to the pharmacies themselves, are a well-oiled machine that works well and serves its purpose with few faults. Let's fucking fix it. I'd settle for it being fixed in my lifetime, but I suspect nations will fall before personal drug use is legalized in those nations.

I'm not satisfied with non-arrestable-offenses and approved-for-medical use. I want the system fixed, and I'm really goddamn tired of the excuses for why it's so fucking broken. Even doctors complain about it, and they're part of the institution perpetrating these evils.

Aaaaaaaaaaargh (that was a Howard Dean yell; I'm not sure how it's spelled).

I kinda get the iTunes DJ thing

except I don't go to a lot of house parties. Basically, for me, it lets me treat my MacPro like an AppleTV – hey you, play X track for me – or an Airport Express (which the AppleTV does now anyways), I guess. The problem is, I despise the iPhone because my fingers don't work real good on its touchpad (it's because I'm a zombie, because my fingers and eyes aren't aligned properly, or because I have big fingers – but Gaynne at work showed me once my hands are as big as hers, and she has no problems.. so I'm still unsure why they don't like me, but it's clear that the iPhone started it; I'd own one already if I could use the thing). I also don't have a touch (and do they do WPA2 with enormous keys anyways?).

So I can't tell my MacPro what to play on its iTunes library unless I screen share – get this – from its dual displays onto my Air. This is really hard, as its resolution is something like 3840x1080, and my Air is of course something closer to 320x240. It tries to display the whole thing, like so:

 

The thumbnail links to the full-size image which will show how hard it is to read text in iTunes (for example, can you make out any of the tabs in Minefield... er, that might be Safari?).

Apple, I think I finally get it, but, um, did you maybe goof and not let me control one Mac with another Mac via the same mechanism? (and since Genius ain't perfect, if I don't want to listen to System of a Down, I have to try to re-screen-share to change tracks)

And yes, I am sure there is some growl-or-other based app that lets me do just this. I am simply pointing out that the implementation here is, uh, iffy.

despite my ever-growing fears of their taking over the world

I have converted my Grand Central number to Google Voice, it's configured, and I'll probably be switching over from Skype (primarily because Google Voice is so goddamn slick, like the rest of their software). Details, for those who care, when they arise.

The dreaded interview

short: yep, you'll wanna skip this one.

As a consultant, I've been on lots and lots and lots (like, dozens) of interviews. Many people find them quite intimidating. As if their whole life hinges on how their tie is knotted or if they use "less" or "fewer" correctly. I've been amazed at some of the things companies are willing to put candidates through, though, these days. I've been given exams that were laughably easy, sadistically hard, and even exams that were so poorly coded (as in, online exams) that they could be gamed with modifications to the exam itself.

And the in-person interviews. One company had me for – I shit you not – ten hours, with six different interviewers, and then followed that up with two four-hour interviews. That was the worst. I've had others that kept me for six or eight hours, but the norm seems to be two to three hours.

Phone screens are a kind of funny all by themselves. They're almost never conducted by technical people, and I've actually heard people say "oh, well, you said you know X, and your first job with X was in let's see, 1996, so let's just put down ten years of experience with X" when in fact I'd probably had a solid year of experience with "X". But there are also the companies out there who will burn up a four-hour cell battery in a technical interview involving questions that are unrelated to the job itself. Lots of these are technical people who read things like "Interviewing Technical People for Dummies" (oh, if I could find that book in a bookstore somewhere, I'd buy a thousand copies of it to let the author know his work was appreciated) and ask abstract mathematical or questions that provoke the interviewee into thinking "differently."

I've never found those to be productive because they don't tell the interviewer anything about the interviewee other than whether they can answer questions which have been answered on the internet (how many cubes in a 10x10x10 cube?) or are pointless demonstrations of knowledge of protocols (can you explain how a tcp handshake works? – this for a non-network-engineering position). But, I keep hearing them.

And, the thing that bugs me the most is that with very few exceptions have I ever worked on a team composed of people who were all perfect fits for the position, had all the skills they needed, and were all adequately compensated based on their skills and contributions.

So the interview process is broken. Pretty gosh darn broken, if you were to ask me. Sadly, I don't have a real solution except to give everyone a run at positions they're qualified, or some sort of communal work process... work gets pushed into a pool, people work on the project until it's finished... where finished is, I guess, the best solution. Maybe that's the way to do it. Groups of disconnected hacker-types from whereever coming together to do work on anonymously-serialized (so nobody really knows who they're working for, lest there be favoritism or sabotage or anything...) projects and the most elegant, most efficient, or most whatever, is the one that gets the hackers paid.

Sigh. But I'll keep interviewing until somebody comes up with another way to do things.

why???

Apple, why did you not ship me a 64-bit compiler, and for god's sake, a 64-bit perl with my 64-bit desktop? Do you know how embarrassing this is?

thunder% perl schwartz.pl.txt words
perl(29599) malloc: *** mmap(size=99618816) failed (error code=12)
*** error: can't allocate region
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Out of memory!
thunder%


Oh, oops, looks like you've got a thirty-two bit perl, Mr. Avriette, here's 2gb of memory. Go run along now and play, just don't try to ask for 2.00001gb, or your ass is getting canned. It's like speeding or something. Try to do too much and, zam, the gumballs come on, a guy in a hat comes up to you and gives you some garbage about what you were doing not being safe when, clearly, you're both still there (so, it's not unsafe, right?), but you're not allowed to continue along 270 at 140mph. Even though you're fully capable of it. It's a sixty-four bit Xeon for crissakes. Gr. It's the perl equivalent of an unrestricted autobahn.

And, just so nobody gets on my case, yeah, I did. I downloaded the source to build my own 64-bit perl, and discovered that Apple didn't give me a 64-bit gcc, so in order to do this simple task, I'd have to bootstrap a 64-bit compiler, which is traumatic in and of itself, and then I'd have to go along and build my perl.

Apple, sometimes you make me very sad.

Data Architecture

I love seeing the title Data Architect. See, it helps if one considers "data" as a big gelatinous mass of stuff from which we want things. So for one to be an "architect" of data, one has to grab hold of data as it is produced, and stack it into neat little piles from which our "things" can be extracted later, easily.

Unfortunately, we see Database Administrators using this title more and more because, well, I think the term "Architect" makes people feel very proud of themselves and all their myriad achievements. Ironically, using the title indicates a sad misunderstanding of what data, and databases, really are. A Database Architect, or even Schema Architect, is somebody who decides how data should be organized, once they are presented with that big gelatinous mass of stuff. This is where people use tools like perl, ruby, and even (cue twilight zone noises) awk, sed, cut, tr, and so on (ok, stop with the soundtrack) to format the stuff into the schema which the architect has designed. This is a good process because it means I can get my things out.

I personally love getting data in that giant mass of goo and forming it into something useful, gathering metrics about it so I know how much storage I need, and how my database is going to perform, and so on, but I'm kind of a perv in that regard. What I really wanted to get at, though, was that there's another side, and a title that might be more appropriate than "Data Architect" – Data Archaeologist or Data Archivist. But, please, people, stop tacking "architect" onto your title in places that puff up your business card. It's kind of like kids with Honda Accords and loud mufflers.

"...what's that? I can't hear you over the sound of how much data I'm architecting!"

Why doesn't this happen to me?

Just check this out.

I must have a shortage of snark around here.

Complaining, loudly, from the monkey's head.

Once upon the time, at the foot of a great a mountain, there was a town where the people known as happy folk lived. Their very existence a mystery a world, obscured as it was by great clouds. Here they played out their peaceful lives, innocent of the litany of violence and excess that was growing in the world below. To live in harmony, with the spirit of the mountain called "Monkey" was enough.

The one day, a man came along and plugged his amplifier into the mountain. A strange buzzing began emanating from the mountain, sometimes camouflaged in the distorted amplifiers of other musicians who sought distortions in their amplifiers, to get the "tortured 303" or "overloaded 808" sound onto their wax. But without actually testing the amplifier independently of the mountain, the happy folk had no way of knowing that their very own amplifier was suffering from poorly made capacitors and a fundamentally poor ground channel. Poinz has a lot to say about this, but all I can say is ignorance is bliss, and I will only quote a very small bit of what he has to say here:

        Two things are probably occurring to you right about now.   First, that the proper functioning of all this single-ended system depends very heavily on the net resistance of the ground reference being precisely zero ohms (so that no voltages are developed in this leg of the circuit); and that this is maybe not precisely the case.   The second is that, the preceding being true, this grounding deal is starting to look like a real can of worms.   Right on, bro or sis; that queasy feeling you're having about the grounding of your piece is bringing you onto common ground with people who have many years of schooling in this discipline.  There's also a kicker here; in that it's important, both for operator safety and to inhibit the ingress of RF nasties into the circuit, to have the box that it's mounted in grounded as well; this now becoming also a part of the ground reference.

...

        The ground bus technique is a very close electrical approximation of star grounding that avoids the million miles of ground wires everywhere.   The ground reference is a nice fat (I use 12 gauge Romex conductor) wire that runs the length or width of the chassis, to which individual circuit and PS grounds can be brought at convenient points.   This is then brought to chassis ground as before; usually starting at this point.   I start mine at the rear chassis wall, attaching it to the bus that picks up all the ground sides of the input RCA's.   The output transformer secondary grounds and the (also fat) wire to the chassis, which is attached to an output tranny mount, attach right here also.   The bus runs straight forward through the chassis, ending up at a terminal strip that's mounted to a front screw of one of the input tubes; about an inch from the front wall of the chassis.   All the power supply grounds are gathered at the ground terminal of the dual 100µF PS cap, and then brought to the bus by a piece of 16 gauge stranded (a cutoff of the line cord).   I tried positioning this major pickup experimentally, and could not measure or discern any difference at any reasonable position.   Try it yourself.   The ground bus should not be brought to chassis at more than that one point.   This creates a circuit (loop, remember) called a ground loop, which can develop considerably more current (and noise) than the single-ground bus.   That is, the bus (between the two chassis ground points) forms one leg of the circuit, and the chassis (between the two bus ground points) the other.   A great deal of the troubleshooting in pro-sound and recording studio situations involves finding and eliminating ground loops.

Well, I have serious ground hum in my amp, and I have serious lack of quality in my capacitors. The good news is I am looking for a headphone amp, so I needn't worry about anything too medieval and too chaise du électricité. The bad news is, I'm probably screwed if I want good ground and capacitance.

For the first, right now I have two choices: the wall, which is what most people use, except I am using either my computer or my iPod for audio, and as such I use an amplifier in the middle. The amp itself gets its ground from either a) the wall, as when it is at home, b) USB (when it is mobile) or c) AAA-sized batteries. You may be surprised to learn that the cleanest ground I've gotten so far is from the batteries. I think this is because my building was wired by monkeys, and nobody figured the preamp outs on the MacPro for audiophile quality (you'd be using digital-optical, not 1/8", right?), and really slacked on the ground there.

For the second (if you've lost track already, we're at capacitors), good caps are both expensive and dangerous. The better they are, the bigger they get, the hotter they get, and the better they are at killing you. So I'm kind of peeved that it's not likely that I'll be able to get capacitors of any decent breeding in a portable amp – such as the amp that has so tragically failed me, the Headroom Total Bithead. I think, with my new soldering table and everything, I may actually start doing the DIY-DAC-PIMETA amp thingie and finding a portable case for it. Or, maybe, find one that's good enough to be used both on my desk and in my pocket on the metro. Maybe I'll even have a special discharge probe I can use as a taser from my caps. :(

If you love me, and you've already paid my rent, and you've already bought me that pair of Sennheisers (the reason I'm complaining is I just "tuned up" Sandy's Shure's any my Ety ER4's, and I'm hearing noise in my amp, and I am a sad panda), and you've also already bought me that amplifier for my desktop, please just buy that portable amp that's built out of better components than .. well, I'm not going to insult; they got me onto audio-hi-fi, and I now know what ground and capacitance hum is because of them (well, and Poinz), and for that I can't throw stones. But, please, buy it for me, so I don't have to build my own amplifier.

Do it for America. Do it for 9/11. Do it for Obama. He'd want me to have a better amp. You know he would.

Jaunty, cool stuff

Am now running Jaunty on our MacPro alongside Leopard Server, in its own little container. We can talk to it locally and get hardware acceleration, or we can talk to it more slowly over RDP.

It installed, well, I won't say shockingly easily, and I did have to change my deb sources to anl.gov, but lvm is back in the installer, and it installed with everything working but XWindows. After fiddling with X a bit, I realized it was probably best to let Vritualbox handle whatever magic it does there.

But it's got support for my Wacom in el Gimp and I can't wait to start using it as a musical device.

As for all that other stuff, like getting Nexenta running and OpenSolaris (and maybe even nebooting off the Mac across its private network). I am in general, just really super pleased.

hey look what fell out of my cf card

We returned from Maui in 2006. April of 2006, actually. And we had a hard disk fail in the interim, and everything was stored on flickr. Furthermore, flickr would happily take the uploads of NEFs and just turn em straight into jpeg's. And we never really got to see how good some of them looked. So lately, we have had this MacPro with, uh, twelve (emphasis for my own shock, not bragging value) gigs of ram, so we can more or less run Photoshop and Bridge right next to eachother (and Logic and iTunes, too).

I do have a complaint about Bridge: it's single threaded. Or at least, behaves that way. When it has a folder with 225 images to thumbnail, it goes one by one. Folks, with twelve gigs of ram and eight procs, you don't gotta wait for the one to finish to start the next. Anyways.

I wanted to post some of these here, because they are not on flickr, and because they're the pictures of Maui you really don't see elsewhere. Everyone else posts pictures of beaches and surfers. We always go to Hawaii for different reasons. These are the things I remember.

Please do not redistribute these images. They're dramatically scaled down, and you may use them for personal use, but I don't even like the creative commons non-commercial-use license for these. I may someday turn a great deal of these into stock photos because these, and quite a few others, turned out just magnificently (and shame on us, we had no idea).

Also, these are the pictures the way they were taken. Some of the colors are incredibly beautiful and almost hard to believe. That's what got us to take the picture, believe me. Beyond telling Photoshop to "auto" level it (and sometimes not, as it seemed to drown out the colors for some photos) and sometimes opening (or closing) the exposure a little (which I think is fair), they haven't been altered, other than for their size. None have even been cropped or otherwise framed. This is Maui.

So, here is our Maui. Clicky the thumbs for beeger images:

Awwww, such a cute little mailserver.

thunder:~ alex$ telnet mail.rri-usa.org 25
Trying 206.230.62.68...
Connected to mail.rri-usa.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.rri-usa.org ESMTP Service (Lotus Domino Release 7.0.3) ready at Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:41:28 -0400


I never get tired of seeing this. Way to go, Mike and Paul. You're fucking winners.

It take all kinds

You know, I don't very often get people leaving comments that aren't worth posting, and the reason moderation of comments is on is simply the huge amount of spam I was getting before (and didn't notice!). Yet this morning, I got a comment from an angry man complaining that I'd been generally unkind to persons of a homosexual persuasion. I don't recall ever doing that, and I kinda perused through the things I've said over the years, and I don't recall ever saying anything that would have offended this particular homosexual, or homosexuals in general, but there you have it. Comment.reject();

I suppose in the future, Mr. "Independent Observer", I will be very careful to not offend anonymous homosexuals. If you care to leave an email address, or had left the comment non-anonymously, I might have even published it and a reply. But as it stands, I see it as equally hateful. I'm happy to clear up any disagreement we might have – I'm a nice guy – but this issue is really silly.

And, I don't think I've ever done anything to wrong you personally. So, maybe, just don't bother to take anonymous early morning potshots at me about silly little issues about which bolt goes in which hole, et cetera.

Yours,
alex

Your chance to host the Z!

The Z is being evicted by a man who is having some confusion about his soul. I'm frankly not sure I understand what goes into the reasoning of "You should stop the project because since the project isn't finished, finishing it is bad for you. I don't want you to overdo it by finishing it.", but that's what I've been given.

The Z does not leak any fluids as it has no engine. It needs four new tires, so it presently sits on three semi-inflated and one flat tire. It is a very small car, smaller than a Saturn Ion (I've parked the two next to eachother, I assure you, the Z is much smaller), and doesn't take up much space. It does however need to be covered because sheet metal of that era was so prone to rusting that exposure to rain and salt is enough to start ugly cancerous growths (and since this is a California car, there are actually only two places where it has rust requiring anything more than minor sanding).

So, if you've got a garage bay you're not using, or you think you might be able to fit it in nose-to-nuts or something, let me know. I'm not made of money, and I'd prefer gratis, of course, but I am willing to pay to keep my car safe. Just please, let's agree that you won't threaten to harm my car while it's in your garage.

Please, somebody, I know many of you who read this regularly have room for it, let me borrow a bay in your garage.

The cool kids on the block for today are

DIY-UAV kids over at ArduPilot. My un-asked, and thus un-answered question is, has anyone considered making a very long-term flight with a vehicle like NASA's Helios? Solar panels are getting cheap, wings are inexpensive to build, and if you're not hell-bent on self-deforming airframes (maybeDryden knows something I don't know), it seems like the hard part would be getting the thing to have enough lift to get up, up, up, up and outta the lower atmosphere, and then coast on batteries for twelve hours. How much does that much LiIon weigh, d'ya think?

Blimps, which they're making, are a step, but they're not enough of a step if you want to make true UAV's. Now that United Nuclear has jet-friggin-engines, it's entirely possible for somebody to build a nap-of-the-earth, 200+mph, unmanned reconnaissance vehicle with a very low radar cross section. And, exactly how hard would it be to shoot down something smaller than a 6-cell Mag-Lite? You could do it with pulsejets, too; people are already doing remote control pulsejets – but has anyone even tried making one autonomous? The great thing about some of these components is their very high survivability. Maybe if your development environment is Tora Bora (sorry, Tony Stark), it sucks when you crash, but if you're developing in your average California park (grew up there; lots of room to do lots of stuff with aircraft and rocketry), even if it does thump a landing, chances are your controls are at least mostly salvageable.

And, there, I've said it, the R-word. Yes, unmanned (of course) autonomous rockets, or even ground-guided, or guided via (well, I'm not sure what the civilian term is other than "cruise missile," but Boeing likes to call them "Loiter Missiles" today), which we can see defined here in a dissertation – pdf link there, folks – (©Mary Cummings, 2004):

The new version of the Tomahawk, the Tactical Tomahawk, will have the capability of redirection in-flight.  With this new capability, the Navy would like to implement an entirely new mission for the Tomahawk as an overhead loitering missile that circles until redirected to an emergent target (see Appendix A for a more detailed explanation of the Tactical Tomahawk domain.)  The implementation of the Tactical Tomahawk means that battlefield commanders will have more flexibility and options.  It also means that a layer of human control will be needed where none previously existed. The Navy foresees that within a single “strike” (a predetermined time span in which a group of missiles and other weapons are launched for a common mission objective), a total of 128 missiles can be launched.  A strike typically lasts 2-3 hours and it is possible that several strikes from different platforms could occur in quick succession if not simultaneously.

which, again, needn't much human intervention.

Tee-hee, I am sure if there are lists out there, I've just gotten myself put on at least one of them, but really all I'm interested in is ways to make my motorcycle warmer when it's 17F out, ways to keep the cat off the counter, and making my own Korg KAOS pad since I can't afford one (I am poor because I don't design autonomous missiles).

Aim for the top, right?

Nobody's ever given me a way to throw down and rank how big my ... tunes are. Well, let's assume I'm the last ever user of Sonicswap, although I joined well over a year ago. Matter of fact, we're coming up on two years. I knew I wasn't a 103 or a 108... ninety-nine is more like it, but let's watch that number get smaller and smaller. Sooner or later, I'm going to run out of shit to add to the library.

Between now and then, I'm awful pleased to see that, if we are to assume there are a hundred thousand users, I'm in the top tenth of a percent. That, and $4 will get you a cup of coffee.

flag day

I had no idea going over stuff I wrote before the concussion would be so emotionally and mentally grueling. That sucked.

raining, pouring, what's the difference

Short: Trotsky, Guevara, and Marx are going to come back from the dead and start a zombie apocalypse in California. Here's how.

After putting in, manually, over sixty dvd's to back up my music collection, per Apple's instructions, the application promptly crashed. At first, it said, wait a minute, I'm not sure I can work with that laser in that DVD drive (wish I'd gotten a screen cap of that), and burned two coasters. Finally, I said, ok, skip it, and it proceeded to crash. Only it didn't crash with the familiar "send apple this crash report," it rather left it in the oh-so-easy-to-find ~media/Library/Logs/CrashREport/iTunes_2009-03-15-015810_thunder.crash. And naturally it's fully of useful information. You could click the link and see the whole thing, but I don't see the point. It looks a little something like this:

18 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x95371143 DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 1181
19 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x9537057d SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 405
20 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x953703e2 SendEventToEventTargetWithOptions + 58
21 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x9539ed54 ToolboxEventDispatcherHandler(OpaqueEventHandlerCallRef*, OpaqueEventRef*, void*) + 356
22 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x953714fc DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 2134
23 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x9537057d SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 405
24 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x9538ced2 SendEventToEventTarget + 52

Those of you with sharp eyes will note the variables with quite names like OpaqueEventRef and so on. Hey, we really don't want anyone but us to see this kind of stuff because, dammit, they might be trying to (emphasis mine) steal some music they goddamn paid you for.

There's no option in iTunes to say "please start over with your backups from disc #59." iTunes is smart enough to notice that the discs themselves are backup discs and offers to restore from them (hurrah!), except it doesn't actually verify that this is disk #60 of 102. So I'd have to start my backups all over again, only the DVD+RDL disks are $1 each, and that's going to cost me another $100. At this point, I could have, folks, bought a fucking terabyte hard drive and backed up on to that. Now I have sixty useless (well, mostly useless) DVDs, and still no worthwhile backup of my iTunes + DRM library!!!

I want Apple's management to take a look at this image:



One can only hope it's some sort of sick joke that AUDIOBOOKS HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED and they cost money that goes right into someone's pocket. Where is your humanity? Do you fail to understand this content, this man, entirely? It's like selling Ayn Rand toothpaste or bathroom fixtures.

We talk of people "turning in their graves." Well, surely, there's a zombie apocalypse coming upon us, real soon. And I can't blame Che too much for eating some people in the NorCal area. This above image is a huuuuuuuge mistake. I don't imagine it will be fixed, and I imagine it's just one of many that will continue to denigrate and defile men such as Guevara, Marx, Trotsky, or, hell, even Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. The dead will rise and they will correct the evil in this world because, seriously, the evil quotient is going through the roof. How can they not?

We all have our place in life, but I don't think mine is #108.

I noticed Sonicswap today after they spammed me about some service they'd set up – gasp – on my behalf. I notice, to my chagrin, that I'm only the 108th most music-having dude on the site. Now, there are tens of thousands of people on the site.... but I'll be damned if I'm going to settle for that. It's time I re-collected my damn tunes.