promed to save the day..

First, how was directionality of infection established?  Was the worker sick when he came in contact with pigs?  If so, what lapse in biosecurity allowed a sick human worker to even be on a swine farm as standard biosecurity practices on progressive or up to date swine farms would screen such an individual out and prevent him or her from coming into contact with pigs?  Has the worker tested positive for the novel influenza A H1N1 virus?  What is the prevalence of the new virus in the swine herd and finally, but most importantly, what quarantine and traceback procedures are in place to make sure that the swine herd does not infect other swine farms?  Finally, although we know animal diagnostic laboratories have never seen this virus before in pigs, what surveillance efforts are being made to look at previous swine serum banks or test apparently healthy swine herds on a population basis to actively ensure swine populations are free of this novel influenza A H1N1 virus.

(emphasis mine) I've been saying that what I've read makes it looks like H3N1, although details are so sketchy and the signal to noise ratio is ... boy, I don't know what the data-appropriate term is for a "whiteout" condition (that is, when there is so much data flowing it's impossible to watch anything meaningfully within a length of time that allows you to react in a time appropriate for the data you observe). At any rate, a bit-out it is. And none of the people talking, except a very few, are making any sense about this ... pandemic. I really don't think it's that big a deal, unless we start seeing this thing with a mutation that works (extra point if you can name the enzymes it needs to do this). If we do wind up with an H3N1 or H1N1 that is bidirectional from pigs to people, we'll be in Pretty Deep Shit... speaking of, where's PETA?).

I wish people would just shut their respective yaps and listen. There are a few things you need to concentrate on:

• don't go to work if you're sick.
• if you are sick, don't go to work. if it gets worse, go to the hospital. you'll be fine.
• wash your hands, idiot.

 please consider the internet to be read-only for a while.

Need to get back out on the bike

Grunt. It's been too long. I can't keep doing this five-days-between-rides thing, or I'm not fit enough to get back on the bike and ride like I want to. I'm either brilliant (aw, shucks), or seriously deluded, clearly. I've managed to convince myself that the bike is good physical therapy. And, for that matter, my orthopede. That's, well, kind of shocking. But you know what they about putting proofs... (I wonder if anyone's made an interface for the Nike+Run thingie that works on automobiles or bikes...)

Whilst atop my pile of bit detritus, watching the interwebs roll by, I come across this:

"It's not a simple matter. All these pigs won't be killed like you're pushing a remote-control button," he was quoted as saying by the state-owned Al-Ahram daily [see also item 2 below]. Mr Amin said that a farmer at an undisclosed location had been nabbed with 300 pigs as he tried to smuggle them to freedom on Wednesday. Armed police are stationed outside some of Cairo's pig sties to prevent such attempts.

"nabbed with 300 pigs"? I mean, ???!!. And now the "armed" police are guarding pig farms? I don't suppose there will be a "save the swine" mujahedeen corrective action" to counter this new anti-mulsim froth. Let's also not pretend for a moment this has anything to do with H1N1 (although, if you ask me, this is starting to look more like A/H3N1 all the time. I'd love it if someone could clear that up for me...) because it is positively clear that this is spreading via human-human contacts. Only a fool (or someone entirely without understanding of how the influenza, or indeed all kinds of virus) would behave this way.

I don't suppose any of this has anything to do with a particular religions and their feelings on pork?

Old flames

So, just the other day, I found myself driving the Z. This was very strange for me. First off, the car doesn't have a motor. Second, I've had that car since I was a kid, and its very smell evokes a lot of what I guess you could call emotional baggage. I mean, I remember where I was living, and the people I knew back in California, the time my (then girlfriend) wife actually managed to get the car bump started with me, I mean, all kinds of stuff just flooded back to me, and it was just a strange feeling. I wouldn't go as far as to call it "good" or "cathartic", which are two words I think someone familiar with me or the project would expect, but at least now, I know what I've got coming to me. It's not just a car, and getting into the car and taking it out for a spin is going to involve all the stuff I've collected and either stored or not dealt with and properly expunged, and all the stuff I wind up storing &c in the process of getting it back into self-propelled status. For those still scratching their heads, the Z was being winched, and I was steering (instead of pushing). But, the day we had the Z out on the winch, I got to talk to two former Z owners, both of whom had owned multiple Z's and ZX's over the years (none of this silly post-96 Z business) and verily swooned when talking about them. One woman, a complete stranger, didn't just tell me she loved the cars, but she instructed me to get it back on the road, I mean, seriously was telling me I must do it. I think she sort of misunderstands what it takes to go from a car that's a big hulk with no engine or transmission to one which is, er, habitable for brief periods. Hell, I know at least one person who would tell me right now that I don't understand that. Maybe I don't. We shall see.

And then, of course, the only other love in my life, at least wheels-wise, the Hammer. We went and got it finally – finally! – put back together, and we had ourselves a small outing. Boy, I got the hell beat out of me. I'm sore, even with the fentanyl, but I've been thinking that the best way to get better, muscle-and-soft-tissue (yeah, that phrase, "subjective soft tissue damage", again) wise, is to just get back to riding, working, walking, etc. I thought to myself as I was leaning into turns and weaving the bike around (it has been some weeks since I rode, I think, so it was gently – no thrashing it involved), gosh, I really do have to stretch and flex these very goddamn muscles which hurt so much when I ride. So, gladly, I think I'm right in that respect. This means, hopefully, that a dosage of steady employment coupled with time on the bike, will bolster that injured muscle/soft tissue I've got going on in my lower back (the aforementioned broken ribs were accompanied, naturally, with soft tissue damage – I tried to explain the pain to a physician, and I said, have you ever looked at, for example, a rack of ribs at the grocer? Have you noticed that there is meat on the bones? So, if you were to, you know, break that bone, you might, possibly, damage some of that tissue. I was kind of disgusted that I had to explain this to somebody who appends "medical doctor" to their name, but there you have it.). How funny it is, that motorcycle seats do not have bolsters, then. The rider, in effect, is his or her own bolster. Those muscles which are coddled and swathed in beautiful fabrics in your cock-waving M3 are beaten with a mallet on a motorcycle. Hm. Maybe there's more to that motorcycle-macho thing than I thought. On the other hand, riding a standard or upright bike is a lot easier to do than your average sportbike. Thoughts abound.

It's kind of odd, to think how much these beasts, my little projects of internal combustion, adrenaline, and potential (and realized!) injury are associated with so much emotion and feeling. They're not the cold lumps of metal and plastic they appear to be. I can't say they are if they make me feel the way they do. They, both of them, really are, in a way I can't exactly describe (and I guess have failed to), like lovers.

death on a cracker

You've heard of "death by chocolate." This is sort of like that. It's a dessert, or an appetizer, or even an amuse-bouche. Any cracker will do, but the payload is the important part, so err on the side of mild. A saltine is a pretty simple and easy to obtain cracker, but water crackers hold up a little better, and thinly sliced pieces of pan-toasted (in the same manner you make croutons) bread from a baguette is probably the best choice.

Cheese should be something with flavor, and a fairly dry cheese, although it must have some oil. I wouldn't go as dry as parmesan, or romano, but a combination of the two  might work if it were ground or in thin (very thin) slices. Gouda is wonderful, but an aged, not smoked or fresh gouda. The various bleu cheeses are a bad idea, although gorgonzola is a good choice. Basically, something with a flavor that can stand up to the next ingredient, which is sort of like the nuclear weapon of the culinary arsenal. We get a cheese stocked locally that has peppadew in it, but is otherwise a traditional jack cheese. I have no idea what a peppadew is, but that link gives you an idea of the other possible characteristic of the cheese: don't be afraid to go down the road of cheese with added ingredients. Improvise. You'll have to.

The third ingredient is a habanero pepper. I get about six crackers per pepper. I slice the pepper thinly, and horizontally (across the middle, rather than from the stem down) so they form a ring that I can place on the cracker. I place cheese atop the pepper (I use Red Savinas because I grow them myself; you may find this entirely intolerable and prefer something more like a scotch bonnet, or if you simply haven't the stones, a jalapeno or poblano).

This is the magic. You then nuke it. Give it fifteen seconds or so in the microwave, and make sure that the cheese and the pepper are still firmly joined — this may require some re-arranging — and then another fifteen. Leave them to cool, because you don't want them to get your hands oily.

Precautions. First, working with habaneros, especially of the Savina or other super-hot strains is best done with gloves. This prevents getting their ... treasures in places you wouldn't expect, like under your fingernails, in your eyes, on other sensitive mucosal surfaces of your body (you would not believe how often you touch such surfaces in a given day if you started keeping track; this is another reason people should wash their hands more and learn how to use hand lotion). Second, good grief, they're spicy. The original recipe is the Leary Biscuit. Basically, by heating the cheese, we create a bit of a solvent, which takes the pepper's oily bits (which is where the spicy stuff is, thankfully), and places it into solution. The cracker serves as a substrate and something to pick it up with (otherwise, really, this would be fondue, right? — not that habanero fondue is a bad idea, really…). As with preparation, take care not to get the cheese and oils on your hands.

In general, they are delicious. It's a terrific dish for a summer day with a nice, solid beer (a very hoppy something or other, or something sweeter like a belgian double bock, or a lambic ale maybe) that can "take the heat," as it were. The cheese means that you get to taste all of the pepper, the pepper means you get to experience the heat for, depending on the pepper, even up to a few hours. It kind of sticks to your lips, which is the fun part. You'll be sitting there an hour later, grinning like a fool, reaching for a beer, thinking, man, were those tasty. But you probably won't want another serving for a while.

Enjoy. I figured I'd write this down and submit it to the vast interwebnal peanut galle(r)y for mass consumption because there's no reason potheads should have sole use of the Leary Biscuit as a vehicle for delivering the goodness of plants.

Cheers.

Obscenity on the interwebs.

short: "soft" censorship, and the categorization of the obscene and genre, again. perhaps ad nauseum.

I am really quite upset that Google has seen fit to "warn" users that Becky's weblog is obscene. I have commented at stupendous length about this in the past. Becky is amazingly insightful and has a talent I admire greatly. She reads at least as much as I do (which is to say, a lot), and is able to provide links to both sources and videos to complement or bolster her expressed opinion.

Becky, I think, is also a lesbian. I'm not sure, because I've never really read her site because of her sexuality, I've read it because of its political commentary. I've read it because of her very insightful commentary on the Libertarian party, which I'd desperately love to be a part of but just can't see making any progress or, really, doing anything useful whatsoever. I continue to read it because, despite the incredibly busy layout of her weblog (which is her prerogative; I've heard people tell me the colors on my site "make their eyes bleed." fortunately, I think most of the regular readers herein are of the RSS variety, rather than "direct hit" variety), it is a very good read.

So, from time to time, I think because she is, you know, an adult, and has, you know, a healthy sexuality and libido, makes sexual comments or posts a picture of a naked person on her site. This is obscene? No, folks, this is not obscene, nor does it need a warning unless we assume that the readers of the entire blogspot.com domain are too fucking stupid to realize that sometimes people who have smart thoughts about things like, oh, our president, might also sometimes think about things like, oh, maybe the shape of somebody's ass.

I am really, desperately disappointed with the person at Google who was short-sighted enough to classify her site as worthy of a big warning banner. I'm not going to go as far as to say I know a lot of people at Google, and I know that their politics run in a certain direction and that direction is counter to Becky's, and that might possibly have something to do with it, because I really don't think it went that far. I think what happened is somebody (probably several somebodies) "flagged" the site, and some mindless automaton at Google looked at the website and saw nipples. Or half-covered (gasp! that's even worse!) nipples. Or mentioned possible sexual combinations of, I dunno, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (like I said, I don't read her site for the occasional sexual commentary/banter/whatever). It makes me ill.

I say the very same things, only perhaps a little more heterosexually (and again, I am not even quite sure what Becky would classify herself as, sexually), and maybe I make more comments about unix, microcontrollers, and the department of defense than she does. But I've posted pictures of futanari, and of guro (for fucks sake!) and semen-on-chicks, and the lot, and I've done it for the same reasons she has. Because, really, somebody has to point out that this is no more chaste a society than it is a secular one, and none of these debates are free of sexual bias than they are of any other bias.

I think what has happened, and this is the part that makes me oh-so-angry with Google, is that this "warning" as been erected specifically because Becky is a woman, and women are not supposed to have pictures of naked or close-to-naked women on their website. If her template were purple script (as in Chancery, not "font") on an ivory background and she talked about politics while occasionally pining after various female celebrities, we wouldn't be discussing (and the discussion I think is happening elsewhere; I realize this is a monologue and rant) this at all. That part, people, makes me really angry. Of all the enlightened organizations in the world, Google, with its "20% time" and continual innovation, its information-must-be-free mantra, and so on, has no fucking business calling her website obscene (sorry, pdf, but it's the crux of the matter, the definition of the word, and Becky is no stranger to Potter Stewart-ism).

I'll say it again. It really, really saddens me that somebody has made this judgment; that a judgment was made at all. I wish I could think of something to do, to help point out how horribly absurd this all is, but I'm afraid this is the best I can do. If any of you would like to point out, on your own, or email Google, you're welcome to. However, Google has something of a reputation for being a big old juggernaut, way too busy to answer or consider individual letters. (I guess with the exception of weblogs flagged obscene, and even then, only the flagging, not un-flagging-thereof).


And, sadly, this isn't the first time this has happened to her. What the fuck is wrong with the internet? The very people that make these decisions are the same people that read William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson and think the internet is some vast wild west, and that people are homesteading on blogger, that this is their own private island of expression and public thought. Yet, they're letting their own prudish, egocentric biases into the network like a bunch of frightened children or dithering, borderline-senile senators. Good god, people. Grow the fuck up.

pipe dreams

I find myself thinking, the more I read about the UAVs and UGVs and UUVs being developed, that the skills I've developed working with microcontrollers is really rather portable to both the civilian market and the defense/intel market. The civil sector hasn't quite figured out how useful they are, but things like UAVs are great for aerial surveying, and civil security agencies ("mall cops") haven't figured out how useful things like hover-and-stare capabilities and micro-uav's are. Then there are throw-bots and the like.

At any rate, I'm not sure I really want to do that, but I am really starting to enjoy working with C again, and seeing represented in hardware and software the ideas I'm trying to implement. You know, having a diode or voltage regulator instead of an assert() or whatever.

Anyways. I should probably spend less time reading trade rags and more time relaxing on the weekends.

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.