Technical Difficulties from on Top of the Mountain

Bad references

2011-10-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

You would think you could use the web for working with Javascript. You'd be partially right.

There's lots of stuff to get your started. Lots of examples too. But thanks to minification, reading existing javascript source is getting a little more difficult. Worse for the novice however is the "magic" that libraries use. They're not very understandable to the mere mortal. I've been reading through spin.js which is less than 300 lines, and that includes three different ways of doing a spinner: css animations, setTimeout() opacity cycling, and VML for IE. But its full of css magic, and very short functions names.

I was trying to decompose it, and I remembered that there is another function similar to setTimeout(). setTimeout() calls the function once, and then spin.js anim() function calls again each time it completes its work. The other variant calls a function repeatedly at a prescribed interval.

At first I couldn't remember the second function, so I went looking on the web. I was certain that some reference for setTimeout() would mention the other version. If there is a page that connects them though, I sure couldn't find it. Thankfully, I not only remembered that there is this other version, but I finally remembered that I had used it in one of my projects to poll the address bar, when onhashchange is not defined. The function is setInterval(). When I went back to w3 schools, it was declared in the general list of window methods, but not associated in any way with setTimeout() or anything Timer based.

Blah.

Its the same, but its not the same.

2011-03-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Javascript tries to simplify some things. There's not more ints vs floats, there's just numbers for the novice (doubles for us old-timers). Kind of annoying when you want to write prime number code, or crypto software, and have it not suck. They also removed characters, and everything is a string.

Since everything is a string, they made a='x' the same as a="x", so you can use either quotes where-ever you want. You would think the same would apply for JSON, which is just javascript data. You'd be wrong.

I was hacking out a quick JSON dump from perl, and wanted to save myself some trouble and quote the variables inline with the formatting. In perl, single quotes means something different from double quotes. They're both strings, but perl only does variable lookup and escape sequences in double quotes, not single quotes. So I tried throwing out:

  "{ 'id' : $id, 'title' : '$title', 'link' : '$path', 'sentinel' : 1 }"

And spent the next hour arguing with prototype.js over why I was not getting a data structure at the other end. The data was coming through in responseTEXT, but even trying to convert it after the fact was failing. Finally, in desperation I added a second line in perl:

  $json_dat =~ s/'/"/g ;

and low and behold, it worked.

blah.
?

How they ruined C++

2011-02-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

I think that C++ was a pretty good language. I've written some pretty good stuff, even template things. But STL just did everything wrong. Take a look at the example of iterating through a list sometime, its terrible. My version looks like this in contrast:

  edata_list::iptr p(mylist) ; 
  while ( p ++ ) { p-> dosomething() ; }

Now they've added regex to C++, and its painful just to look at the examples:

    std::tr1::cmatch res;
    str = "<h2>Egg prices</h2>";
    std::tr1::regex rx("<h(.)>([^<]+)");
    std::tr1::regex_search(str.c_str(), res, rx);
    std::cout << res[1] << ". " << res[2] << "\n";

Compare to what this would look like in perl:

  my $str= "<h2>Egg prices</h2>";
  my ($tagstr, $word1, $word2)= $str =~ /<h(.)>([^<]+)/ ;
  say $word1. ". ". $word2 ;

Now, plenty of people have accused perl of being a write only language, but still, someone should have come up with something a little easier to type. Alas, guess we'll just all head over to javascript and get on with implementing solutions.

Avoiding the moss.

2010-02-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

I've learned a couple computer languages in my time. I've even written some frighteningly large programs in several of them.

My first language was BASIC. And it was pretty cool, because you just typed a few things into memory and ran it. It was pretty quick to try things out. And typing things in from scratch was usually the way you did things because the external storage on those early machines were pretty sad. I remember working for three weeks on a more complicated game, loading my work in from a cassette tape, adding to it, and then saving out before the end of recess.

One afternoon, I discovered the horror which is magnetic media. I had worn out the first part of the tape that I had been using over and over, and my work was gone. We eventually upgraded the lab to also have a floppy drive, but these had similar problems in terms of reliability.

Still I pressed on. BASIC had a few drawbacks. First it was slow, and second it didn't have much in the way of support for more advanced data structures. It was great if your biggest worry was to keep a list of 10 numbers, but if you wanted to do bigger and better things, Pascal had the moves. It was also the language of choice if you were trying to pass the AP Computer Science exams. So I learned about references, and lists, and other good things and built some pretty large projects in Pascal ( once hard drives and larger memory computers came along ), but there was a new language coming along that was threatening to surpass everything that had come before it: C.

C was actually a pretty old language, but it was finally breaking out of its roots and spreading out to the modern micro platforms. Its big thing over the languages before it was pointers. Pointers are a shortcut for walking around in memory without a lot of overhead. All the languages before it had things like arrays, where you accessed an element by saying "val := my_array[i]" but there were costs to doing this. To find where val was coming from, the program had to multiply i by the size of each element of my_array and then add that to the base address of the block.

Compared to loading, adding, comparing, and clearing values; multiplying two things takes an eternity on a computer (even today). And often you were going to look at elements from my_array in order, from beginning to end, or some such, so there really wasn't any need for all that multiplying. C let you code your program to take advantage of that. You would say, "my * ptr= my_array" and then p would start out having the same address as the first element in my_array. Then you would say, "p ++" and the compiler would add the size of one element to the address in p (an add being much cheaper than a multiply) and you would be ready to look at the next element in my_array.

If you were trying to write fast code, like I was because I was doing computer graphics, then this was great. It was also dangerous, since you could add any value to p and then look and see what was there. Sometimes you ran off the end of the world and started trying to look at memory that didn't exist, which caused bad things to happen, but if you kept things in check, it was great.

C carried me forward for more than a decade, but you can only write so much code before things become un-manageable, and in C you were always writing pretty low level code. On top of C, an object structure was added, it was called C++. It was pretty cool because you could create these families of objects that could share code when it made sense, and specialize when they needed to. They also added another language into the pre-processor, called STL which was a code generating language that does amazing things, only some of which I understand.

I built an amazing networking library in C++ (after nine revisions), and some other cool generic algorithms, and used those to build some pretty large network servers and other cool processing tools, but it took a fair amount of work to get things done. Around the same time, my friend tim was playing with another language called Perl, which was heading in an entirely different direction then my language choices before.

First, it was interpreted (ya just like BASIC way back in the day). Second it had some amazing stuff built into it already, like string handling and regular expressions, and data structures like arrays and hash tables. Sure, you could build these things in C++, but Perl already had it done, and with memory handling, you didn't worry about allocating things or getting rid of them when you were done. You just simply started writing things like,

  my $x_= { a => [ 1, 2, 4, ], b => [1, 2, 3], complex => [ { u => 1, v => -1 }, { u=> 2, v => 0 } ] } ;
  my $yflat = [ grep { $_ > 0 } map { @$_ } values %$x_ ] ;

and it did all the work for you. (don't ask me to explain what ends up in $yflat, I just made it up as an example.)

So I had two pretty powerful languages at my disposal at that point, C++ for writing heavy iron server stuff, and Perl for writing data manipulation/database/text/web stuff. That caused me quite a problem.

I like to continually improve myself as much as the next ultra-geek, but I had mastered such power tools, that other newer things out there just didn't seem to have much appeal. Ruby happened upon the scene, but its performance was dismal. Python seemed to have a lot more traction than Perl, but it was like Perl with training wheels. Sure, I know better than to write if ( a= calc() ) { ... } most of the time, but sometimes that actually is the clearest way to do things, and its valid C and Perl, but not Python. Java suffered from the same problem, it was a language designed for people who were not very good programmers.

I tried looking for other languages to try out. Lua seemed interesting, and fit a niche on small embedded systems (like phones and video games), but didn't even support simple shortcuts like a += 10, requiring the longer form a= a +10. Ocaml seemed to have some neat ideas, and good performance, but I had already done some ML type stuff in Perl, and having to type my plus operator seems a little tedious.

So I was sort of coasting along, expanding my skills in other areas, like database SQL calls, and the like when the web started getting interesting. I had done a little copy and pasting of web scripts for the front end to one of our gianormous perl apps, and I went back and started looking at the pieces, thinking to myself, this new javascript could be interesting. Then I got a chance to help tim out again on another project, and I dived way in on javascript and prototype.js and made quite a mess out of things, but did get the demo done.

Its at this point, where I either move on or get serious. I had just enough knowledge and experience to be dangerous, so it was time to find out more. Thankfully these days there's so much information online that you can just go nuts without much effort. I learned how the javascript inheritance model is completely different from C++, and how javascript has nothing really to do with java, and is really a closer cousin to lisp than anything else. Now my head is full of even more ideas and I need to go bang them out on some projects to figure out what I actually know, and where I'm just fooling myself.

A book like this is probably something I'll wade into shortly.

The same old code.

2009-08-21T11:33:00.003-07:00

Today I was playing with cygwin, and decided to cat all the source code on my machine to the screen. Something like this:

find . -name '*.c' -exec cat {} \;

No particular reason, and it didn't take that long since it was all coming off a solid state drive, though it did pause a couple times ... But the very last lines were:

int main(void) {
        printf("hello world\n");
        return 0;
}

Some pretty old code there.

Program to program communication

2009-08-13T21:00:00.006-07:00

Communicating between programs usually means across computers, especially when its a client program ( or web browser ), talking to a server somewhere else. For that you almost universally use a inet socket ( TCP, or UDP if you're a glutton for punishment).

There used to be a bunch of other protocols, but IP pretty much crushed them all. Ungerman Bass had its own SNA back when the internet was starting to form, Digital Equipment Corp had DECnet, IBM had SNA, and Novell Netware used IPX. But TCP/IP was good enough, pretty darn simple, and as we went from 1mbit to 10,000mbit, other things became the bottleneck. Sure if you run a telco, you may still wax on about ATM, but even the ATM network is carrying TCP traffic.

On a server however, you have a fair amount of traffic staying on the same machine, passing back and forth between different programs; usually a result of dividing a problem down into smaller parts that are hopefully harder to mess up. So you need a mechanism for setting up connections and passing messages.

Even in this case you could use INET sockets, but that's not your only option, nor is it the best choice for a number of reasons. First, there's a lot of overhead to INET sockets. Even if your packet isn't going to cross great distances, the operating system still does all the packet overhead like it would. This puts a limit on the number of packets you can read and write, especially a problem if your communications is a bunch of short messages. Secondly, when you create a INET service, it is visible to the network beyond your computer, allowing anyone running a portscan to find it. So speed and security are both good reasons to look elsewhere.

As the workstation market began to grow, and AT&T decided to wade back into the unix market; they added new kernel services to System V, called IPC ( inter process communication ). There were three parts: semaphores, shared memory and message queues. Semaphores allowed passing access or control between processes to a shared resource, shared memory seemed like a good way to avoid having to pass around large data sets when disk access was expensive, and message queues gave you both an orderly mechanism passing data, as well as atomically handling a message. Unfortunately at the time, all these data structures existed in kernel memory, and they were fixed in size ( originally compiled into the kernel settings ), so on a typical machine they were ridiculously small. One one HP machine with 64MB, the limits shown were 64 semaphores, 4k message queue, and 64k shared memory. Even today on a machine with 2GB of RAM, ipcs -l shows a queue size limit of 16k.

Moving on.

On unix, creating the raw socket() itself is protocol neutral. Its just that most everyone in the universe uses INET. You can also use sockets for RAW packets, ATM, Appletalk, IPX, X25; and one more format called AF_UNIX ( although its now refered to as AF_LOCAL for POSIX reasons, but the structs are still all un_ ). A AF_UNIX socket is for communicating locally on the machine. Originally, like INET sockets, there was a private namespace, using 32bit numbers which you used for the "port" number, but then they expanded it to also allow you to map the socket into the filesystem, so you would get a file that showed up like this:

% ls -lF
total 0
srw------- 1 woolstar users 0 2009-06-26 23:46 agent.16975=

ssh-agent uses this to allow ssh processes to authenticate against a stored key. Back when this first showed up, on some OS's you could actually just talk to this entry like it was an ordinary device. That was sort of the spirit of unix, everything was a file. You could open up /dev/serial0 the same way you would open up foo.txt. So back in the day, you could open this file mapped socket, send it some data, and then close it, and the interaction on the server side would look just like you had telnet'd in. Sadly, AF_UNIX sockets don't work like this any more. Even though they're sitting right there in the filesystem, you can't just echo "hi" > mytest.sock You have to use socket functions to connect to it and read and write to it.

Still, if you control both sides, the upside is definitely worth it. In some tests I did around 2001, for smaller packets on a single processor machine, AF_UNIX connections could out-run AF_INET by over ten to one. Also AF_UNIX allows some funky *magic* data to be passed between machines. Like one process can pass an open file handle over to another process. You can also authenticate your user id and group across an AF_UNIX connection and the kernel will validate you to the recipient. And as I mentioned before, AF_UNIX connections are only available on the machine, so there's no outside hacking into these services.

But for my current project, the lack of transparently using AF_UNIX sockets was a bummer, because I have a project I'm working on where a process runs and then opens up an external file to write log entries to. I want to have those entries go immediately into another process for processing, and so I wanted to throw a named socket into the file system and have the first program log to that "file". The first process is this big third part server that I didn't want to have to mess with, so spoofing a file would have been ideal. Luckily there's something else available now that will do it.

fifo(7) or named pipes

A fifo is like a queue, where you put several things in, and then pull them out. In this case the first thing you put in is the first thing that comes out ( First In First Out ... fifo). There's also FILO, but it doesn't make as good an acronym in my opinion. So the modern linux kernel allows you to create a named pipe in the file system, and as an improvement, you don't even have to have any active processes attached to either end. It could just be sitting there. Then when you want, you attach and try to read from it, which doesn't do much cause there's nothing in it. When someone else comes along and write to it, then the message shows up to the reader.

There are some caveats of course. If no one is hanging around waiting for the message, you can't write to the named pipe. The kernel isn't going to save things up for you. Also, if several processes are reading to a named pipe, you can't tell the difference. Its not like sockets where each connection will have its own file handle and you can tell the lifespan of each client. But for the purposes of log processing it will do just fine. At least I hope it will. I will have to get back to you on that.

Disturbing old things.

2009-08-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

There was a mouse down in the basement this weekend. The kids got all excited, until the mouse was smushed, and then they were all like, "papa, time to cleanup." Note for future adventures, smashing things are the most effective when hunting mice. Very hard to stab a mouse.

In the process of cornering the criter, I had to disturb a pile of wood pellet sacks from last winter's burning operation. I was saving those to count them, but I've done a terrible job of keeping track of how much I actually burnt per month.

I have some notes in twitter account, which turns out to be a terrible place to put anything you want to lookup later. Best I can find is numbers for January and March, 1,400 and 1,600; and 1,320 for April. Overall I had six tons, and there's about 18 bags left out of 300.

It seems I burn as much pellets as I have. So the lesson there for conservation, buy less pellets. Temperatures already getting down to 40s at night, so we'll see how that goes.

Lets get caught up to the 21st century.

2009-02-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

I get calls from my alumni association every once in a while for a donation, and once in a while I'll give a few dollars to be counted as a supporter. But I'm not an active alumni. Its not that I don't think the college is a good one, it is. There's just issues that have cut me off. One of which is long over, but the other, while completely solvable, sits between me and active participation.

My time at college was excellent. I was surrounded by a bunch of really smart people, had access to millions of dollars in equipment (what it took back in the stone age to have great computers--now you can get a really great computer at Sams club), and even had access to staff and faculty where I could just sit down and launch into a tirade, only to have my lack of understanding explained to me.

But the end of the eighties was also the ascendancy of Reagan and extreme conservatism, and it hit at college as well, with the Master of Student Houses running all over the student body, including banning the once a year all-house party (Interhouse). Students were no longer trusted young adults and future leaders, they were troublesome kids that needed to be policed. Luckily I got out of there just as it was getting bad.

Fast forward nearly twenty years later, and things have returned more towards the middle. Interhouse is back, and things seem a bit normal. The problem is, I've moved on, and need somehow to reconnect with things. To see what's happening on campus, with the students, with the faculty, with the institute. Something like the university's streaming theater, wich interesting lectures from people like Harry Gray ( a professor I actually liked when I was there ).

But I can't watch it, cause its in Real Video format.

Yes, I could go get the Real Video player and install it and all its associated spyware on my computer. But I'm not, and nobody else is going to anymore because Realvideo is so 90s. We moved past that to Flash video about ten years ago. And in fact, the future is to just let the user watch the file however he wants with a avi/mp4/ipod download. Its doesn't have to be HD. I'd watch Caltech events at 320x240, just like my John Stewart.

I even sent off a email to the director of the PR/Media department (who made this unfortunate video format choice in the first place), but I'm not holding my breath. The last media update on mr.caltech.edu was a entry about a radio broadcast in 1998; and a note about a lecture in the Biology department on October 2003.

I hope those memories from twenty years ago are not the last positive memories I have from college.

Treo 650 vs 755.

2008-08-21T01:00:00.000-07:00

When I first discovered the treo, I was very excited. I almost went out and got a 600, but came to my senses and waited for the 650. The 600 was low tech compared to the 650. The 650 had a 320x320 screen with lots of colors, a decent processor, a SD card slot, an improved keyboard and so on and so forth. When I got it I immediately set out to figure out how I could use it.

I was able to stuff quite a few programs on it, and tried to use it as often as I could. One problem was that cell reception wasn't very good at my house, so I couldn't use it much in the house, which was a little annoying, because I worked at home. So it wasn't very useful as a home unit, but it was fairly kick ass when traveling. Sort of.

The web browser was quite slow. It could easily take five minutes to login and display my home page on ebay. (It was also frightening that one page on ebay was over a megabyte of data.) The email client was ok, but the sms notification that I had new email didn't display anything about the message itself ( and was often larger than the message itself ), and deleting the text messages often caused the phone to reset.

Then, there was this ancient free AOL client, but it had an annoying habit that if you left it logged in, then switched to another app long enough, the connection went away, and then the AOL client corrupted its preference page; which on the next reset would cause the phone to infinitely reboot. That was loads of fun to cleanup after. Thank goodness I knew engineers that worked at Palm, and so I could get free tech support from someone who actually knew what was going on.

So things were a mixed bag at first. Then TCPMP came out. Suddenly I had a movie player that fit in my pocket. With that, travelling was a joy. I'd be sitting there watching the Daily Show, laughing myself silly, completely forgetting how tiny my seat was. (I had long ago given up trying to open a laptop in the small silver of space between my face and the seat in front of me.)

Over time I settled into using the Treo as a media player and as a cell modem for my laptop with June Fabrices PdaNet. Once in a while I'd use the web browser to read coding horrors or another lo cal web site, and I did get regular gurgles from the email when I had a posting to moderate for Flagstaff Freecycle; but those weren't killer apps. Google maps came out for Palm, which was cool, though I didn't need a map every day, but on those occasions that I did need it, it worked well.

So I settled at that point. The treo wasn't an internet device proper, but it could get me there in an emergency, and it meant that more powerful devices could get online when I needed to.

Newer treos came out, but they didn't really add anything useful. Same screen, about the same keyboard. Little faster cpu, maybe a little more memory, but nothing radical, like going from the 600 to the 650. I let it slide.

Then, after getting un-married, somehow my ex-wife decided that she needed to get her own cell phone plan, and after staring into space at the Sprint store for an hour, the service droid declaired that this would only be mostly possible if I kept five lines on my account by move a new phantom line onto a new real cell phone. I didn't really buy the explanation, but as I imagined spending another several hours at this store with my three kids running around destroying displays and digging ancient dustballs from beneath the counters, I gave into fate and let them sell me a Treo 755p.

It was a little bit cooler, a little bit faster. One nice thing was its non-slip case. My Treo 650 had to live inside a non-slip sleeve in order for me to keep a grip on it. But that bulked it up somewhat. The 755p could also read SDHC cards, though it didn't use full size cards, but instead used mini-sdhc. However they already had 4gb cards, and soon would have 8gb; so that was progress. Finally, it had next generation data support, which in Flagstaff didn't do me any good, but when I went traveling to a real city, it could reach speeds of over 500kb/s.

So I used my new phone and stuck the old one under a pile of papers on my desk.

Until a few weeks ago. When I went to pull the phone out of my bag and it had a giant crack across the screen and was displaying all kinds of funky colors, instead of something resembling a normal screen.

So I went back to my 650 for the time being. The major functions are all there, but surprisingly its the small things that I miss.

The 755p would blink a green light if there was a missed call/voicemail/text message. You could look at it, even with the screen off, and see if something had happened. Just a little software thing, but the 650 doesn't have it, and even the new Centro doesn't do it either.

The 755p has a better radio. The 650 doesn't work at all in a lot of spots in my house, and even sometimes will show two bars, but when I start a call it drops to no bars, or even no service at all. Sometimes it will show a bar, but no calls or text messages will come in, then I'll move it around on my desks and a stack of messages will suddenly arrive.

I'm back to having the messaging app reset my phone when I delete messages. Its still annoying. And it was doing it before I loaded any other 3rd party apps on there.

And the 650 is just slower. It lags significantly when doing simple things. They did some cleanup two generations down the line, and a faster processor and more memory probably helps; so the 650 feels like going back to a ancient processor with not enough memory to get anything done. I really don't want to try using the web browser at all.

Also, I have a Nokia N800 internet pad, which is the device I thought the Treo was going to be originally. The Nokia has a huge screen, two full size SD card slots ( so I have 12 GB of space for my music and movies ), wifi, a real processor, and a full featured browser that can do Flash and AJAX pages like Google docs. Plus I got off my butt and setup RSS feeds for my most read blogs on it. The treo makes a good internet tether for the N800 when there's no wifi around, so I don't think I'll try to browse pages on the Treo except in an extreme case.

I don't know if you can combine a Treo and an N800 into a single device. The N810 has a sliding keyboard, but still no phone. There are other N devices with phones, but they're mostly GSM, so its not going to replace my Sprint phone any time soon. I don't think I'll buy another modern phone right away. Maybe I'll look again with Palm completes the switch over to Linux and can make a phone with wifi that works at the same time as the phone.

For now I have a bag of tricks. Some tasks are handled with excellence, others are just barely covered, but I have reached an understanding of how my current pieces fit together and I'm cool with it. Its up to the consumer electronics industry to shake my out of complacency with the next great thing. Or not.

Its always exciting

2008-06-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

For the last several years, I've saved a few days in the summer to head off into the far reaches of Arizona ( yes, there are places even more remote than Flagstaff, just ask my cell phone company ), and spend some time teaching welding at summer camp. Its been a organic process, we started off with whatever I could borrow and stuff into the back of my car, but after several years of doing it, I can make my way through the classes with a minimum of fuss and damage. It also helps that a number of the campers are repeat offenders, and thus have some prior experience with my laid back style of teaching.

But no matter how smoothly things are going at camp, it seems there's always some excitement going on back at home.

I get out to camp the first day, get everything setup, and am relaxing on the bunkhouse porch before bed, when my friend tells me he has a message on his cell phone from my ex-wife. ( My cell company doesn't have any service out there.)

So I call, and the water's out. Its not raining, and the underground equipment area isn't flooded, so its not the obvious thing. My dad's there, and he's trying to figure out if there's power, but I have three levels of sub-panels cross wired into everything, and none of the breakers are labeled, so he's struggling a bit, but my memory can only go so far. I tell him to turn everything on, and then go plug something in down in the crawl space plug.

Unfortunately the first two work lights he grabs are burnt out, but I would have expected that, but he wastes time going around in a circle a little, and finally grabs my big work like, which does work, and confirms that there is indeed power down in the basement.

This is good news in that the power shouldn't have gone out, but bad news in that the pump is now the suspect, and replacing the pump could be a challenge. Give how non-linearly things have gone so far, I decide to call for backup.

The nice thing about having friends, is that you can call on them in the most desperate of times, and they'll come over and help. My life is so hectic, that I don't have very many people call on me for help that much, but I do try and do my part. Mr. Hess is retired, and his kids are all grown, so its easier to get ahold of him. He says he'll come over and take a look.

Thankfully, the next report I get, after I give the cell phone a chance to recharge, is that the pressure switch is burnt out, and so they just have to get a new one of those and things should be back in business. For some reason, that takes three hours the next day, but I'm hoping that its because they sat down in the cave yakking most of the time, not because it was a major engineering effort. The water gets restored, and the crisis is over.

I wonder what's going to happen next year.

Still Burning

2008-05-08T22:00:00.001-07:00

I'd like to say that the burning season is over. I'd like it to be over. But the fact that its May doesn't seem to keep the nights from dropping down into the mid twenties. Gads. The 2007 season pellets are gone, they went pretty fast:

Month	This year	2007	2006
September	160	360	-
October	960	1,360	-
November	1,120	1,640	1,200
December	2,080	1,920	1,720
January	2,240	2,360	2,000
February	1,800	1,920	1,280
March	840	1,320	1,080
April	240	480	440

You can see we burnt a lot less in March, but that was mostly due to the fact that there wasn't much left to burn. A lot more fires that much. April wasn't too bad, and I was home most of the month watching the kids while JM went overseas, so I let the temperatures in the house drop below 70°rees;F at night. But that's over now too.

Just when I was getting ready to enjoy having that third parking spot left, I got a call from a friend who had spotted a sale sign over at Ace.

2006 was a mess for wood pellet users. Nobody in town had consistent stock, prices was all over the place, and I ended up buying pellets from two hardware stores, Walmart, and the local gas station (who shipped in a supply from Canada). Part of the problem was a supply issue from a local pellet plant in eastern Arizona. So for 2007, the stores placed monster orders all over the place. Now it was May 2008, and they were sitting on top of a couple million tons still.

Ace blinked first. Normally a more expensive option (over priced only by the local grocery store), they dropped their price to $3/bag or $150/ton. There went my parking space. For about the same price as four tons before, I picked up six tons this time, and actually managed to get them all in the garage, in one parking spot. And because we now have what looks like an infinite quantity, we've relaxed a bit and started burning them again. Granted otherwise my basement would drop below 60°rees;F, but it still seems absurd.

I need to start setting up for next year with some solar plans. Maybe by 2009 I might not need to hand carry 12,000 pounds of wood pellets down into my basement.

Advise for students

2008-01-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

At last week's green building meeting, there were a number of design students attending the meeting ( it was on campus at the university, go figure ), and one of them asked us "old folk" what advise we would give them, nominally about how to work renewable and sustainable technologies into their projects.

I gave half a good answer: when it comes to choosing projects, choose the customer who's willing to be more adventurous. NAU had just given us a tour of their new building which they built with un-tested concrete mixes, and where they were refining the process as they went. There's actually a difference in the final product between the first floor and the third floor. That's just an astounding thing, to have a customer spending millions of dollars, and still walk out on a ledge to try 40% fly ash content in concrete and use the project as a laboratory to work out the problems.

While it would be nice to have daring clients on every project, an even better strategy might be to help every client take a step, no matter how small, away from the status quo. And to do that requires a special kind of promotion. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to progress is not lack of promotion, its the opposite: hype. Hype has done more to stall the implementation of sound technical ideas than anything else. Every new idea has its rough edges, and running a reluctant customer right into one of those edges will cause more problems, bad will, and general long term loss of credibility; than loosing out trying a new idea two times out of three.

The other way to help around this, is find ways to take small steps before pushing the customer to take big ones. Don't expect the customer to spend thousands or more on some new thin film solar panel if you've never even seen the device in person yourself. When I want to implement new technology in my projects, I play with the language/database/operating system first personally before I claim it should be used on a project. Even in metal working, I spend my own money on something, and check it out before I expect the shop/school/customer to use it. Doesn't mean you have to go as large, or go as nice as what you would use for the project. Just get your hands on anything, in whatever state so you can say, "Yes this is real, and I believe in it." Ebay is great for that.

Going with the way things were before is always going to be the least effort, so putting effort into moving in a new direction is how things will get changed. Do what you can to take on some of that effort, and help everyone you meet put in what effort that they can. You won't turn things around in one instant, but if you can look back at the end of your career and see how you were part of a larger effort that pushed society slowly in a new direction, that's something to be proud of.

2007-12-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

Still on fire. Another winter, another order of fuel. Last year I burned a ridiculous quantity of pellets, and it wasn't cheap coming up with them, or fun driving to home Depot to pick up 30-40 bags at a time then unload each carload in conditions that weren't always ideal. This year I decided to be a little more organized. I ordered a bunch early, which hopefully saved me some money, and also got someone else to deliver them.

All nice and neatly stacked in the garage for the winter (well kind of, one pile had to be left outside on the back porch due to logistic issues with the forklift). Only bought 8,000 pounds this year, mostly cause I didn't have the money to buy more, so I've been trying to make them last longer. Either this winter isn't quite so bad, or the fact that I'm not travelling as much (and thus keeping a closer eye on the thermostat), means our usage is down a bit, thankfully.

Month	This year	2007	2006
September	160	360	-
October	960	1,360	-
November	1,120	1,640	1,200
December		1,920	1,720
January		2,360	2,000
February		1,920	1,280
March		1,320	1,080
April		480	440

We are burning more wood, but that's fine with me. Next year, if I am really on the ball, daytime heat is going to be solar, and I'll just use the pellets to supplement at night. Or maybe its all wishful thinking, and I'll be spending all summer out in the woods gathering firewood.

Sometimes putting things off is your best bet

2007-11-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

They say procrastination pays off immediately, but of course the hard work guys like to think they end up better over the long term. Unfortunately the empirical evidence is not quite as conclusive, as you can see from this example.

My tire got a nail in it, which isn't that unusual. We built our own house about seven years ago, and I think the carpenters lost more nails in the dirt around the house then actually ended up in the frame itself. We have buckets filled with rusted nails gathered from the yard, and its still not unusual to pick out more after a fresh rain. Every once in a while one of those ends up in a tire, and thankfully the tire takes a little while to go flat so you have a chance to drive around a little while and maybe get the tire fixed.

Or sometimes not. Here, the nail went through the side wall, so the free patch option is off the table. Time to get a whole new tire, which just happens to be a special model that the tire store doesn't carry, and in fact they just started working with this vendor, so they don't even know how to order it exactly, but somewhere burried in the six manuals hidden under the counter is the proper code to enter into the computer to call up this mythical model (stock tire on 2004 Toyota Hylander btw), and maybe get it in in a week or two. Turns out not, but what the sales droid did find was the business card from the field rep who could get it ordered and it would be in in a week.

Luckily the Hylander has a full size spare, so I was driving around on that for a bit, waiting for my new tire to come in, which it did.

Now what I should have done was swapped out the spare for the new tire, since spares tend to age a little strange--being horizontal most of their life and subject to collecting water and mud up top and sort of just wallowing in it. This car isn't that old, but generally, the spare doesn't age as gracefully as the other tires, or get maintained as well. But in this case, forces were rolling my way to render the point moot. More specifically, I found myself running over the the drive shaft from a semi truck on the freeway, just a month later. These things make a regular car or truck drive shaft seem like a toy part made from legos. And they do a great job ruining tires too:

It didn't just put a hole in my tire, it took the whole side of the tire off. And not just the tire either, it took a chunk out of the rim. So, suddenly the whole spare tire situation was cleared up. I put my original rim and new tire back on (it was the same wheel that had suffered before), and my spare went into the scrap heap.

Oh, and instead of paying $340 to Toyota for a new rim, and spending another $160 on a tire; ebay fixed me up with a complete wheel and rim for $90.

A cautionary tale

2007-10-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

My laptop got hacked last week, which is quite a milestone. I don't run any firewalls or virus software on my computers. At least I haven't in the past. Up until now, I was pretty safe just running non-microsoft tools. Sure IE is hacked every other day, but you'd have to get pretty obscure to be targetting Netscape. Well, I guess not any longer.

Being the geek that I am, I spotted some errant processes in my process table. (Yes, I pretty much have an idea of what processes are supposed to be there.) I immediately found a directory with curious CCC.exe in it, and wiped all that out, but figured that was not the end of it. I caught a few more files, and sort of limped along for a week.

Then this weekend, I spotted some more suspects and did another round of hunting. This involved pulling out several DLLs from windows/system32 and when one got especially tough to gouge out, I started blasting away at the registry.

Bad move.

Now my computer powers up, examines it navel for quite some time, then spouts off about lsass - service not found. It gives me an OK button to push, which is not ok, but I don't have anything else to do, so I push it, and of course it reboots. After five or six rounds of this, I realize that its not going to do anything different no matter how many times I tell it that its ok so I just power down and pull the hard drive out to get at the important stuff, like Chuck - epsiode 3.

Actually, everything of real value lives on the SVN server, or in Google Docs, so I'm not really all that excited about this setback, just a little annoyed. This week is going to be filled with hours of joy as I hunt down my recovery CD, and the install disks for all those ancient artifacts called Applications.

Ok, from now on I only browse the internet from linux. Or my Nokia N770, which I can't find. Ok, my used Nokia N800 that I won on ebay, which isn't here yet, but should be arriving any day now and it better work this time.

Go Visa

2007-10-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

Trip to Arkansas $600
Admission to the Daisy BB Gun museum $2
Package of 5,000 BBs $9

Look on their mom's face when she sees what the three boys have done with the package of BBs ...

Hey, we got 4910 of them up pretty darn quick with that magnet.

Better to let them create

2007-09-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

If you are the type of person that likes things tidy, I suppose there is something subconsciously reassuring about sticking the kids in front of the TV. You know its not good for them, but while they're sitting on their buts, they're not running around the house making a mess. And trust me, kids are way faster at making the messes, than we adults are at cleaning them up.

I on the other hand, am not one for which organization and neatness are a high priority. (Just ask anyone around me.) So the kids and I have been having a great time these last couple of evenings.

Within minutes of playing last night, my three boys had organized the living room table, a left over box from a chair, blankets and pillows, and some giant cardboard tubes, into the most interesting collection of traps and travels for their marble collection; and they proceeded to spend hours inventing new games and spreading marbles throughout the house. Of course my ex-wife had a fit when she came home later that night; but I think the kids expanded their brains more in those few hours than they had in the last week.

Nothing in the air

2007-09-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

For the first time--in what may months, or even years--I am all caught up on ebay. No pending auctions, no items waiting to be paid for or shipped. Nothing gone back to the seller waiting for a refund. Its all quiet.

Its not that I don't have anything I could buy. I'm just sort of taking a break right now, trying to catch my breath with everything else going on. Also saving up my money, because its the time of year when I have a lot of extra expenses (like annual insurance & property tax), and also some other stuff in my life has generated enormous bills.

I'm also in flux on metalworking, which was a big area for equipment purchase over the last couple of years. I teach at a rented shop, which is rented from the local high school for use by the Community College at night; but there's a new high school shop teacher, so we're still in the middle of a stare down contest.

So between the fact that I have no time, I have no money, and I have no place to put new purchases, a slow down does seem to make sense. Hmmm, but that Rohde & Schwarz portable spectrum analyzer does look nice ...

Finding comfort in the little things

2007-08-09T00:59:00.000-07:00

When my life is falling apart, I grasp at the little victories. Today was a bonus, there were two.

With the prior success getting information on oil filters on my phone while staring at a wall of various sized canisters at the auto parts stores, I decided to continue the trend and actually reset the stupid MAINT REQ light that's been on on my dashboard for the last year. Click..click.. and the answer is, at least for a 2004 Toyota Highlander, hold the trip reset button down when turning the car on and it resets the Maint light.

Then, I was hanging out at the barber shop, and although there were five Wifi access points visible, they were all locked. So I poked around at the settings a bit more, told it it was ok to use phone connections as well as wifi points, and got it to DUN with my Treo. Did find with ebay. Got a little grumpy with Gmail. But still, a success.

Breath in, breath out. That's all I can ask otherwise at the moment.

From cool to even cooler

2007-08-05T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hooked up the bluetooth keyboard to the 770. Which is soo cool. Ok, the first couple of times the Nokia just reboot over and over again each time I tried to hook up, but this last time it just works.

Way better for entry. Before I was limited to writing one liners for email (twitter was just fine), but I definately wasn't going to pound out anything more complicated. But now, I'm jamming right along.

Now, I wish the think outside keyboard had a backlight. Trying to type in the dark doesn't quite work. Interesting note, the TO seems to pick up on the mode of operation of the host device. On the Treo, it was press shift first, then the letter (which matches how the regular keyboard works). But on the Nokia, its just hold down the shift while typing.

Now I just have to learn where the numbers & symbols are in the dark, and get used to the function keys.

Mixing dangerous things.

2007-07-29T19:20:00.001-07:00

Unlike mixing Coke & Pepsi, which produces a combination far worse than either by itself; the results from mixing Mr. Pibb & Dr. Pepper is not that bad. I guess there's not as much animosity there.

Little random notes.

2007-06-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

One of my excuses for not blogging as much has been Twitter, a site where you can post little one line status messages and other tidbits of wisdom. I like the idea, though it would be better if I had it merged into this journal (which other people who are more industrious have done), but unfortunately it suffers from the problem of not working.

After talking with the group there, they seem committed to a path of relying on a certain set of tools that aren't necessarily up to the task at the scale they want to run their service at. It would be like AOL building their instant messaging platform on top of Visual Basic, and insisting that no one write anything outside of that. I don't think AIM would have scaled to 600M users that way.

So my small tidbit for today: ssh -v -X hostname is the way to find those hidden problems with an install that you aren't going to see any other way. -v gives you lots of great arcane information, which combined with google reveals many things. Oh, and the answer was, sshd won't forward X11 without xauth installed.

The lack of being prepared with children

2007-06-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

Having kids is a real pain in the butt most of the time. Occasionally its great to have some helpers when building the ultimate LEGO battle vehicle, but the rest of the time they're screaming and kicking each other and just creating maximum havoc.

Even if you can get past that, they still manage to create situations in which no amount of preparation would have helped. Like today at the library.

We found an overdue book behind one of the beds (which one of my kids crawled under that bed to mope about losing a game of checkers), and so I was going to drop it off at the library. Somehow that simple errand got turned into taking one, and then two of the kids to the library for the evening, so off we went. Except that the one actually didn't want to go, he wanted to go get icecream with his mother, but now he was trapped in a vehicle with the wrong parent, going to the wrong place. But two year olds are actually someone adaptable, so the crying had stopped before we got to the library parking lot.

Once inside, we headed to the kids area, looking for movies to watch, books to read, and toys to play with (our library is pretty kid friendly). It was a quiet night, so I wasn't too concerned with the volume level my kids were making. We found a few movies, a book or two, and then we headed over to the play area to hang out. Zak had gathered up a pile of magazines to read, and I was just starting to get Oscar interested in a puzzle, when one of my obscure parenting senses (a sense you wouldn't use to much in single life, except maybe to tell that your milk is a few weeks past its expiration date) signaled that I had some parenting tasks to attend to.

Now Oscar isn't happy being messed with under the best of circumstances, so I started the long dance of corraling him into some place where I could change him out. That meant we had to leave the library sooner than later. Zakary's preference of course would have been the opposite, but that's part of having siblings. So we did a quick checkout, spent some time getting water on the front of our shirts playing with the drinking fountain and were finally out the door, and so I thought we were making progress. But of course that was just an illusion.

Outside, next to the library, is a bridge and a canal which 360 days of the year does not have any water in it. So much so, that they landscape the thing, and actually drive a mower up and down the sides to trim the grass. So its a great place to play, which is what my kids started doing. Running across the bridge, running down the banks of the canal, running under the bridge. Ok, fine.

The car was parked right there, so I dashed over and ditched the books, and then I thought, maybe I can change Oscar outside on the grass. I grab the diaper kit, which since its papa's, hasn't been restocked in 4 years, but there's still a diaper from our first child that might fit Oscar, and then I stake out a place on the side where I can keep an eye on things and call to Oscar to come over and get fussed with. This gives him a few minutes to rebel, and finally accept the idea without too much fuss.

In the mean time, Zakary is exploring the relationship between potential energy and kinetic energy, seeing how much speed he can build up running down the banks of the canal. Its mostly grass, so this seems pretty safe, and I leave him to it as I setup for a toxic spill operation. Oscar finally comes over and I just have his but on the ground, pants off, and I'm formulating a mop up strategy for the several pounds of green mud oatmeal when Zakary find the only patch of rocks within 50 feet, trips and scrapes up his hands and knees and starts screaming at the top of his lungs which is only reasonable given his predicament.

Thirty seconds earlier and I could have just let Oscar wander off in his original state. Two minutes later (yes I know, moms can do it faster), and I'd have been at a good wrap up point. But at this exact moment, I'm stuck in the middle of one project, unable to deal with the emergency.

I patched things up as quickly as I could, and went to deal with the fall, which involved a small amount of actual injury, but nothing serious. More serious was the strain on my piece of mind. Anyone who takes care of multiple kids on their own on a regular basis has either got to have been born rock solid mentally, or is probably somewhat unhinged. Of course my troubles weren't over after dashing through these events. At this point Oscar wanted to stay (now that he was all clean), but Zakary wanted to go home to get patched up with some Batman bandaids and some kind of consolation snack. And this was just a trip to the library. I don't even bring up the possibility of taking kids to the store to go shopping (of any kind). And even if we're not going somewhere potentially dangerous, there's always the issue of just driving by one of those places that cook potatoes in grease. Talk about your minefields.

Everyone is home and calm now. But its one of those days I'm not going to forget very soon. Maybe we'll stay home the rest of the summer. The kids can amuse themselves smashing rodent burrows with sledge hammers, and burning the vegetation with magnifying glasses. I'll just hide in the basement.

a few ways to make Twitter better

2007-04-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently, how would you make Twitter better. My first answer was just to make it work, as it has performance/scaling issues at the moment. But that's not a very satisfying answer to someone who's not an infrastructure mechanic. So, putting my user hat back on now that the week's pressures have flowed past, here's a list of things you might do to make twitter better:

edit/delete old posts
secret email gateway address for posting to
multiple secret addresses so I can revoke one and not another
random message feed : 1 per day, (or variable frequencies)
see what friends of friends are saying (perhaps in a much smaller font)
ability to nudge friends of friends
get friends to vouch for me to their friends
group friends
set limits on updates wanted per friend or per group of friend
more complex routing rules
multiple IM accounts, multiple sms #s
spell checker
mobile friendly page (lighter on javascript & images)
search on usernames
search on user web addresses
search on message text (who's talking about TIG)

Well, lets start there and see what else I can think of.

Still on fire

2007-04-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

I kind of hoped I'd be done with burning by now. I'd rather be relying on the sun at the point and not having to drag more bags of sawdust around. But it is not to be. The weather still wants to be winter, with occasional snow still falling and plenty of cold wind. So the fire stays lit. At least the stores still have pellets in stock still. Last time around now it was a little hard to find pellets in any serious quantity or at a decent price.

So March finished off still going regular,

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	1,640	1,200
December	1,920	1,720
January	2,360	2,000
February	1,920	1,280
March	1,320	1,080
April	?	440

I should try and figure where I can store a mountain of these things next year and buy them all early in the season while they're still cheap.

Still pushing at the straw.

2007-04-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Been fairly regular at starting up sharing on Fedora Core, and so managed to push another 100GB out since last time. Of course in that time, I've also added another 500GB to my desktop, thus continuing to demonstrate the hopelessness of net backups. But I'll keep at it, just for the heck of it.

A little test is better than no test

2007-03-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

While we eventually want to get to test first design, we're not there right now. But that doesn't mean I can't do anything. Usually its just proving out an idea, like this, my @tests= ( "a=1,rework=2,z=3", "a=1,b=2", "z=1", "rework=10,a=4", "z=118,rework=50", "rework" ) ; foreach ( @tests ) { my ($rid)= $_ =~ /rework=(\d+)/ ; print "rid $rid\n" ; } So the pattern gets checked out, including the usual suspects of edge cases. Looks good so its into production it goes. Just hope nobody breaks it.

Burning my way towards a better tomorrow

2007-03-10T22:00:00.000-07:00

Just managing to crawl out of the hole that is deep winter. No, I haven't got the plasma cutter working yet. I did get a CNC mill, but no, its not working yet either. Sigh.

But the good news is that winter is winding up, and so is my consumption of wood forest products for heating. As with everything around the house, its not a matter of point and click, but of experimentation and adapting to changes in the fuel stream. Yes, even the type of wood pellets matter, and the wrong ones can give you headaches of one kind or another. Take a couple samples from the last few months:

I started out the winter with 80 bags of pellets stockpiled up in the garage, and picked up another 60 or so through some effort at the hardware store, as they only got a delivery in every other Friday, and it didn't last too long. There was even some talk of rationing them (egads, is the planet really running out of vegetation?), but I managed to keep a fair number on hand.

These early pellets were from an Arizona company called forest energy, located only a few hours away from Flagstaff--more good news for the environment (some of the brands I burned last year came from places as far as Canada). These pellets were light in color, probably made from local pine. They handled well, didn't break up in the feeder, and burned nice and hot. But by the end of January I was running out, and needed to restock; so back to the hardware store to see what they had.

To give homedepot credit, they had really turned up the heat, and had a mountain of pellets stacked up, probably 10 pallets wide, 4 deep and 3 high. Tons. They had my usual brand, but the contents didn't look the same. The pellets looked a little green. Now green is a great color for "marketing" your product. Heatrs is even advertised as 100% organic, whatever that means. But when it comes to the fuel itself, green brings to mind wet leaves and anemic fires. So I wasn't that excited about this latest batch. Still I picked some up, as well as a new brand.

At first glance the pellets from Pennington Seed look really nice. The pellets themselves are very hard, look somewhat like red oak--a nice hardwood for burning. Now when picking out firewood, your hardwoods are greatly preferred over softer woods like pine. So initially, I was thinking the red oak pellets would be a better deal than the old pine ones. But unfortunately, the benefit in firewood is that hardwoods are denser, and firewood is sold by volume, usually a cord which is four by four by eight feet. Pellets are sold by weight (like breakfast cerial), so having a denser product wouldn't provide any more heat, just a slightly more compact product.

In the end, I went back to buying Heatrs, because the pennington has a real problem with dust. Its obviously made from very fine waste sawdust, and a significant amount of it ends up in the bag, stuck around the edges in the stove, and in the air around the room. Luckily the mess is mostly contained in the basement, but once its floating around, the next thing that happens is that the fan kicks in and sucks it through the filter (clogging that) and then blowing what got through up into the house.

Anyways, with all that going on, here's the totals for Jan & Feb.

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	1,640	1,200
December	1,920	1,720
January	2,360	2,000
February	1,920	1,280
February	?	1,080

Still a big jump up from last year, but I was seriously expecting to break the 2 bags a day threshold and just skirted under it by a bag. So why is it not bothering me to be quickly approaching five tons of burnt wood (all of which were loaded into my truck and unloaded into the basement by yours truly)? Guess how many times we've turned on the propane heat in the house this winter? zero. While the forced air frequently came on last winter, and we had to refill over 700 gallons of propane this spring; so far this year the only uses of propane have been for the cooktop and hot water. So we really have gone green, or at least have switched to renewable sources for the bulk of our heat. A good winter in my book.

Pushing the universe through a tiny straw.

2007-02-06T22:00:00.000-07:00

Back in November I was thinking about getting a new distro for replacing my way aging linux box with something more modern (upgrading from a P2 333 to a P3 800 — very exciting), so I went hunting for new distros. I downloaded Ubuntu, the new Fedora Core 6, and a couple others. Actually I torrented the distributions which is a great way to push around large 5GB files like this, and since FC6 was just out there was a lot of demand for seeders, so I started seeding. (There was also people sending out corrupt packets trying to disrupt downloads. Who does that to alinux distro? Microsoft?)

At first I just seeded until I had pushed up the same amount of data as I had downloaded, because that's just good manners. But then I got to wondering how long it would take to push up a truly large amount of data, so I kept it going on and off for the next couple of weeks; then the next month; then the month after that.

Well, almost 3 months later; I finally hit my original target: 100 GB. I'm sure my ISP is really happy with me now.

But it really demonstrates a problem with internet service: there really isn't sufficient bandwidth out there to do interesting things. Like if I created a HDDVD master, it just wouldn't make any sense to spend 1-2 months trying to upload it to the pressing house. You'd use fedex overnight (or fedex ground if you weren't in a hurry, but who are we kidding, the client always wants it tomorrow) and you'd have it there 40 times faster.

Another impossibility still is backing up your computer over the internet. You might backup a few files to a network repository, or maybe some photos to Flickr, but by and large, the files on your computer will die with your computer. Its not for a lack of want either. There are a hundred post bubble companies that would love to backup your harddrive over the internet if there was enough bandwidth. Heck, even I started a network storage company and we wanted to do the same thing. Individuals, small businesses, big businesses; it didn't matter; we'd take the files if we could get them. At the end of the day, though, about the only thing we could make work was to put big clusters of boxes at datacenters and sell near-line services to other tenants in the same center. There you could get a 1Gbit link for free, just run the wire across. On the network? Forgetaboutit.

And that was before Terabyte drives. I don't have one of those yet, but I do have two 300s and a 500. By the time I got those backed up over the net, I'd probably have 2TB more. Gads.

A random path.

2007-02-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was watching the last of the three PBS science show pilots (you can watch them online if you want). Science Investigators was terrible, 22nd century was ok, and Wired Science was turning out to be all fluff and not much useful science; but the last part was on rocket backpacks which is cool. I've seen shows about rocket backpacks before, and besides them being rather limited in use (15-20second total flight time), they seem to be rather expensive to fly, so I thought I'd check out how expensive.

They use the monopropellent Hydrogen Peroxide, so I jumped over to wikipedia to find out more about it. Sure you can buy it at your local pharmacy, but the good stuff is far more concentrated and a lot harder to come by. Handling stuff over 70% concentrated turns out to be really dangerous and so they tend not to sell it to people trying to build their own backyard rocket packs. This has led to people trying to concentrate the stuff themselves, usually to the detriment of anyone in the immediate vicinity. There are also other ways to hurt yourself with it and apparently spilling it on your clothes can cause them to spontaneously combust after a period of evaporation of the water.

Anyways, one of the big dangers from Hydrogen Peroxide is BLEVE which I know all about from reading about steam. That's when a bunch of stuff that should be a vapor but is a liquid because its under pressure, rips apart the container its in when a leak forms allowing the entire contents to vaporize instantly. (Translation: very big boom)

Because of the thousands dead in numerous accidents the 1800s when steam vessels failed, you're basically not allowed to run a steam engine without certification & annual inspections. Tanker cars for propane had to be redesigned in the 1960s after numerous fires turned into massive explosions, killing or wounding everyone in the vicinity.

While a picture is pretty impressive of one of these, I figured a video would be even better, so I went browsing around on You Tube.

Didn't get to the explosions of fuel tanks, but this science teacher sure looks like he was putting his life on the line just to try and blast some interest in science into his class. Go see the entire series, starting with Mr. Smiths Liquid Nitrogen Demo (vid 1).

Awake too early.

2007-01-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

This morning I got to watch Caillou with Oscar. Now there's nothing wrong with Caillou, I have nothing against bald, four year old Canadians, and I watch a lot of Caillou in the summertime. In the summertime the sun comes up at some ridiculously early point in the morning, and the kids just can't seem to stay in bed once the sun has been up for two or three hours. I don't know why, its a perfectly good thing to do; they just must have missed that one gene when picking characteristics from me.

But right now its not summertime, its the middle of winter. The sun isn't even really up at 7:30am, its just hinting at the brief appearance its going to make a little later. And thanks to that its also rather cold downstairs.

Oscar didn't seem to understand all this. Despite it being early, despite it being dark, despite it being cold; we got up and watched PBS. Tomorrow I'm hiding under the covers.

These guys have the neatest toys

2007-01-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

I would love working at Reliable Tools, they get the best stuff. It probably wouldn't work out though, I'd be playing with everything, not getting it ready for sale. Some recent items I'd love to have:

Magna Bend Roper-Whitney MBB-4181

The first tool we use in sheetmetal work is the shear which chops big sheets of metal into pieces just like a giant paper cutter. The next step after cutting is bending a flat sheet into something more resembling a box, tube, or some other 3d shape like a toolbox. (Not much call for flat metal, much more useful after its formed into something.) Now usually to bend the metal you put it in a unit called a Brake which clamps it on the top and the bottom and then has a hinged plate on the bottom that starts bending the sheet right where its sticking out from the clamp.

This works great when you're first starting out because the metal starts out flat. But start putting some bends in it and after a bit those bent sides start getting in the way of the clamp, leading to more complicated things like the box and pan finger brake where you can adjust the width of the top clamp with individual clamp pieces, but sooner or later you're still in trouble because those fingers are bolted onto some large fixed frame which gets in the way on larger projects, or some other problem arises. Happens to me all the time.

The magnabend gets around this by not having any frame or structure on top. It holds the top part of the clamp to the bottom part with magnets. I'm guessing electromagnets, pretty serious ones. Probably smash your finger if you left it in the wrong place. This solves all kinds of problems for bending because all you have to do is have about five inches of depth available inside your project somewhere, set these clamp pieces in there, turn on the magnets (whump) and you can bend away. Also, there's no hinges and structures on the ends, so your project could even hang off an end without causing any problems.

This one sold for close to a thousands dollars, which is why I didn't get it (I was saving up for a tabletop CNC), but it sure would be nice.

Hardinge Compound Cross Slide and Radius Turning Attachment

Another fun item was this lathe attachment for making doorknobs. What this does is pivot a cutting edge around the end of your spinning work piece cutting a nice round surface. Good for making ball pien hammers, babbington burners, bed knobs and other fun stuff in aluminum and brass. Unfortunately this one wouldn't fit our lathes without some major retrofit, and at $726, it was a little pricy for a nice-to-have item. Besides I've seen plans for building your own out there on the net, though of course I can't find my bookmark to the page right now (one of the hazards of having 18,000 bookmarks).

Clearing SEYI 330 Ton Straight Side Press SM1-330

Don't have any immediate use for this thing, its just so dang big. Like a 4000W laser, this is sort of a long term future kind of thing. Would be great for stamping out custom sheet metal (once I figured out how to make my own dies), or maybe crushing cans (making them really thin). Would also love to be able to drop forge serious sized tools.

Still, not on this week's shopping list, even with the reasonable closing price of $55,000.

Scaring people with Perl

2007-01-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Perl is not the language that most people think of when designing an application. Sure it can scrape web logs and turn X into Y in one line of code (where X and Y can be almost anything if you're Randall Schwartz), but beyond that its not used for much.

If you get in any further than a couple line script, perl just gets scary. Like today, my friend who aspires to greatness asked me if @$yy{key} was different than @{$yy{key}}.

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is that the first is an array slice dereferencing an anonymous hash in the scalar $yy. The second is dereferencing an anonymous array in the hash %yy under the key 'key'.

Perl lets you build so many layers of collections and lists that you just find yourself building these elaborate structures because they fit the data or how you want to use it. Pretty soon you're doing,

@{$res{$_->{channel_id}}{$_->{key_type}}[$k]}{qw(count z)}= @$_{qw(ct z)}

And thinking nothing of it. Ok, maybe you have to think about it a little bit because you get it wrong the first time, but a quick splash of Data::Dumper() and all is revealed.

Into the thick of it

2007-01-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

Winter arrived. But not as bad as I expected. I fired up the wood stove with a vengeance and have been trying to keep it fed, but there's a small problem of having a bunch of 30" logs over four feet long and not owning a chainsaw.

Yes, I know, you can get chainsaws at Walmart for $99, but that doesn't include the cost of gas, oil, replacement chains, sharpening, and loss of limbs when you accidentally cut through a leg thinking it was a branch. I have a long history of doing much high dollar damage with inexpensive common every day things, so a chainsaw is not something that is going to live in my garage. Not that I haven't borrowed one once or twice, but its an item to treat with the utmost respect and to use as little as possible.

Wood hacking

It turns out with a small electric saw and about twenty wedges you can eventually mangulate the wood into smaller pieces. It helps in this case that the wood in question has been dead a long time and in some cases is so rotted that the application of a hammer will cause it to crumble apart. But I digress.

So while keeping the house well above 70°F on most days, I've managed to stay under the magic 50 bag mark at least for this month.

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	1,640	1,200
December	1,920	1,720
January	to be continued...	2,000

We shall see how the we fare now in the middle of winter. Back to hacking.

What a waste, kind of.

2007-01-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

My fourth used Maxstar 150 purchase from Ebay continues the recent trends of disasters and arrived not working. Luckily it turned out to be simplest of things to deal with: the power switch. So off to the welding shop where I ordered a replacement (Miller part number 208550) for $5. It arrived today, though of course Airgas didn't call me. Luckily I called them and they found the part, so I went and picked it up along with some new fireplace gloves.

Staring at the lettering on the side revealed that it was a Cherry brand switch, and in fact that it was from the WR series. From there it was just a matter of decoding the option codes: circuitry, actuator, marking, housing color, function, etc. And that gave me the exact part number:WRG32F2FBBN.

Plug that into Google, and you get links to distributors, like Allied and Mouser, offering the part quantity one for $1.16 and $1.34. Looks like Miller paid about $0.75 for them in quantity. Oh well. I could have saved a few bucks, except the shipping would have probably wiped any savings out.

Well, if I ever build my own welder, I'll use a switch just like Miller, and I know where to get them.

No fear of failure

2006-12-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

One thing I love about this town, is that people here aren't about to let common sense get in the way of trying something.

Say for instance, that you moved here from California, and discovered that a truck would be much handier than that little four door car you used to drive to the frozen yogurt stand in. But its a subaru, and those are actually pretty good cars for getting around in the snow, and besides you can't really afford a new 4wd truck anyways. So what do you do?

Well, this person took out their saw and cut the roof off their car, then made up a rather clever back window for the front seat. A little rough around the edges, and I don't know how it does in the rain, but quite a bold step if you ask me.

What's on my kids' minds.

2006-12-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

Give them a camera and see what they take a picture of ...

Apparently they're thinking about their socks.

A semester of discovery

2006-12-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

Finished off my second semester of teaching, which was a big step up from my previous semester of only one class. Last spring I just had basic metals. This time around I did "Basic Metal Fabrication and Machining", "Thin Gauge Welding" and a workshop on sand casting.

The idea for the casting workshop was to get people into the metal shop that wouldn't have time for a full semester course, or who didn't know what facilities are available here. A friday night and an afternoon on Saturday is a much easier commitment. In fact we had four people in the class that had never taken any CCC class before. Even more amazing was that people found this class just by reading through the entire course catalog. Just imagine what would happen if someone advertised or put up posters somewhere, we'd be overwhelmed.

Friday night was boring lecture night. I went on and on about primitive people thousands of years ago putting shinny rocks near the fire and then having them melt into puddles, taking on the shapes in the sand/dirt. From there it was just a matter of making more interesting shapes in the sand, and figuring out more convenient ways to get the metal hot enough to melt. After about half the class is asleep, we move out into the shop where I connect with the visual based students by doing a demo. I pick one of the random shapes on the wall, pack sand around it, cut some gates from the shape to the pouring & air tunnels (call the sprue & risers), take the pattern out (don't want to leave that in there), put everything back together and then pour some metal in it.

Then comes the most important part.

I could do everything in a single day, but then we'd be stuck pouring more copies of the boring patterns we have in the shop. Its not that everyone doesn't need another metal picture frame, its just that most people can find something around their house that would be fun to cast in metal. So now I've lectured, I've demonstrated, and they all have an idea of how its done. Now I send them home for the night and tell them to bring in stuff of their own to pour.

The next day is easy. I really don't do anything. Of course ten people can't pack up sand projects all at once. Even with the new sand counter we built out, we're hard pressed to have five projects going at once. So I told people to pair up, and had the extras melting down cans so we had metal to pour. If you're going to do backyard metalcasting, better get used to skimming all the slag you get melting cans. Everyone did at least one aluminum project, a couple did two or more. Just about everyone melted scrap, and poured projects (which takes up to three people). By then we had done some pretty interesting things, including this casting of a plastic replica of a mayan calendar. In this first attempt the edges didn't come out because they were too thin, so the next go round we backed it up with a piece of cardboard and it came out quite well.

After lunch we switched to brass, and poured a bunch more projects, though everyone didn't get to do something because we ran out of brass. We did get a great replica of a dodge truck ram hood ornament (the brass version actually looks cooler than the chrome), and we did the calendar in brass as well which looked great. Everyone was totally thrilled with the results and several were considering taking the full class the following semester.

Thin Gauge Welding

My thin gauge welding class was a success by most measures as well. Sure we only started the semester with three students, and even after yelling and screaming and threatening the other classes I still didn't have a full class but that's ok. Yes, they docked my pay, but really, the $400 I get per month to teach a couple nights a week isn't a real budgetary make-or-break issue. What's important is that we did TIG welding for many weeks, used bottles and bottles of Argon gas, and a few students actually could turn out a good weld on thin metal.

One guy was just going to form up a box for a cover over his gas powered RC truck, but I made some suggestions, and pretty soon he had a mean looking metal body, complete with bumper and roll bar. Most excellent. Other guys welded up square tubing trays, pans and boxes, motorcycle ramps, abstract sculpture, and a couple even helped me with my project to weld together a couple of toolboxes for Christmas gifts. And unlike the other classes chewing up $40-60 a night in steel plate for welding coupons, these guys were just using 22 gauge sheetmetal scrap we have tons of (which helped me justify spending $800 on TIG parts).

Even better, we also got to do a bunch of experimentation. Besides making them spend more time with the gas torch filling large gaps, and patching holes; they also did some different joins with large gaps. One funny thing was that welding a T joint with a quarter inch gap is actually easier than welding one when they fit up. You can point the flame right under the vertical piece and weld a bead from the middle of the bottom piece to the edge of the top. Its like being able to reach both sides of the metal and weld it up. Doesn't take that much more filler either, as you're drawing it up right underneath instead of trying to push a puddle into a corner.

We spent a little time with wirefeed welders as well. Normally wirefeed welding on thin gauge is a source of constant burn through as I can attest to from prior experience, but I decided to try an experiment based on something you learn TIG welding. In TIG welding, when you're welding DC, its important to get the polarity right, as the negative side gets less heat than the positive side. Think of those electrons jumping from minus to plus and smacking the plus side with their kinetic energy. When the TIG torch is hooked up right the steel melts and the tungsten manages with its share of the heat. When its hooked up wrong, the steel just gets red and the tungsten is vaporized. One spec sheet lists the distribution in heat as 30/70. So I wondered if you hooked up MIG backwards, would you drastically reduce penetration?

To get as much leeway as I could, I bought some superfine 0.023 wire, and put it on the portable 110V machine with C25 gas. One of the curious things about this combination is that the wire is so small, that you can get spray arc transfer going with that low power machine. But we weren't here to sprayarc. With this setup, the specs for the machine said it was just within the realm of the possibility to weld 22 gauge with the power set to 1 (lowest) and feeder speed set to 30. However, flip the polarity around and its a whole different ballgame. At power setting 1 (of 4), I don't think the weld was even stuck the metal that much. Looked like a caterpillar. Turned it up to 2, still not much penetration. Turned it up to 3. Now things were looking better, but even lingering around didn't burn through. Turned it up to 4 and got it laying in pretty seriously and after hanging around in one spot long enough, I finally got it to burn through.

Well, if it takes that kind of power on 22 gauge, maybe it can handle something even thinner. Turns out we had some other scrap in the back that seemed to be pretty flimsy. My little dollar thickness gauge only goes down to 28, and this stuff was thinner than that. MIG weld it? Impossible most people would tell you, but my students didn't know any better, so they had at it. Now I'm not saying it was easy to weld—heck, 30 gauge is almost impossible to TIG weld—but they laid the torch way down, let the wire stick far out, and managed to lay some lines on that thing that didn't melt through. Even did a few lap joints. The most important thing there is not that they might try to weld 30 gauge again, but that it makes going back to 24 or 22 gauge seem like a walk in the park, cause you have the skills to lighten up if things get a little hot.

The second big experiment was being planned when it happened by accident. With wirefeed welding you have a variety of shielding options, from none (self shielding flux core), to expensive (argon + co2 mix). While C25 is a fun gas to weld with, I don't bother at home, I have the cheap CO2 tank which is just fine. TIG welding on the other hand is always done with straight argon, which has the double downside of being more expensive, and not very dense (argon is just a pressurized gas in the cylinder while CO2, like propane, is actually a liquid under a certain amount of pressure). So wouldn't it be great if you could TIG weld with CO2.

My first concern was the behavior of tungsten in the presence of CO2, but it turns out that CO with enough heat can be used to turn tungsten oxides into tungsten, so the pure tungsten should be ok. The second was how the metal would behave. The answer turns out to be that it does ok.

We came into the lab one night, and started TIG welding and things were looking a little strange. The arc was the wrong color (more yellow), and was behaving a little different with steel; but not enough that I would dig deeper. It was the one guy who was trying TIG weld aluminum that brought the problem to light. Unlike tungsten and other common metals, aluminum is one of those metals that will rip any oxygen around it off whatever it happens to be attached to and grab it for itself. (Another metal like this is Magnesium, which happens to burn just fine when surrounded by dry ice.) So while our steel welding was going ok, the poor aluminum welder was ending up with massive holes in his metal and little flecks of black.

With a trip to the gas closet, we realized that the high school students had hooked up a bottle of C25 (argon & carbon dioxide) to the TIG feed line, which is supposed to be pure argon, and so the aluminum was reacting with the CO2, generating additional oxide (which is smacked out of the way in AC TIG welding), and leaving a residue of pure carbon. We switched the bottle to pure argon so the aluminum welder could go back to welding properly, but have made plans to dedicate a couple of DC TIG stations to CO2 only (to save money for the shop as all that argon gets expensive).

Now if I had a real project, where the quality of the weld mattered, I'd still use Argon, as I have no idea how good a weld this shielding is making; but for the most part in the classroom we're just welding thin squares together or making some sheetmetal art, so we'll keep experimenting with CO2 and keep our costs down somewhat.

Basic metalworking and Machining

This was the third time for me teaching this class, and things didn't go as well as I hoped. I had hoped to focus more on the machining aspect of the lab, only to find out that three of our lathes were hopelessly damaged, leaving only one working machine. Worse, was having several students sign up with more machining experience and knowledge than myself, wondering what I was going to teach them. Definitely a little uncomfortable.

The final nail was the non-working CNC plasma machine. While I won the auction for a hypertherm Max 200 last August, the machine didn't ship until October, then it sat down in Phoenix for several weeks getting checked out, and finally arrived at the shop right around Halloween. At least the power supply arrived. There was no torch head or leads. Yet another call to the seller and I got some weak sounding explanation about the torch head being tied on in the back, but no such luck. Price for replacements? About $600 for the torch and another $500 for leads. Well, as much as I like to think of myself as a man with no financial bounds, the $4,000 for the power supply had already put a pretty good strain on my resources; and November is a killer month for finances, as the property taxes, homeowners insurance and the bill for the winter propane all hit at exactly this time. So no plasma torch this semester.

I have high hopes for next semester though. I'd better get the darn plasma machine working, cause I've scheduled a weekend workshop just in Plasma arts & parts.

Wouldnt it be nice

2006-12-13T15:13:00.000-07:00

So I love my big display. (In fact I love it so much I bought another one, though its supposed to be for work, but they haven't made up their minds about that).

My display is currently hooked to a PC, but a lot of people at the office use Macs, so I recently bought a Mac to test some stuff that doesn't work quite the same. I didn't want a big box, or an expensive laptop, so I bought an old used mini.

I just wish they worked together. The mini is sitting hooked up to an old Dell LCD display turned sideways. The stand didn't turn sidewasy, so the display is just proped up against the wall on its side. Looks pretty kludged. Here's hoping that some day a Mac Mini can drive an Apple Cinema 30.

Burning away

2006-12-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

Got into the wood burning rhythm so didn't need pellets going day and night last month. Now its winter for real, so some times with the wood stove going all out and the pellets burning at maximum its still cold. Bags of fuel dissapearing like mad as well.

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	1,640	1,200
December	burning day and night	1,720

Well at least the christmas tree hasn't died yet. Oh wait, its a fake. Nevermind.

What's that?

2006-12-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

Nasa's latest concept vehicles for going to mars? Alien invaders spotted outside the rings of saturn by amateur astronomers?

Nope.
Komatsu plasma torches.
Somebody in design must have grown up a SciFi nut.

Kudos to American Torch Tip for the sketches. I guess that 40A head isn't going to work with my MAX200.

Another piece bites the dust

2006-11-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Some things you get used to and figure they'll be around forever. Some things you're just to lazy to upgrade/replace. Like keyboards. Sure there's probably better keyboards out there, but the one I had from my old HP Kayak was still working and I still had one computer with that ancient PS2 plug, so I was typing along day after day without a care in the world. At least until today.

Today the space bar decided to stop working. Well it didn't stop working entirely—if you pounded on it hard enough it would reluctantly let out a space, but otherwise every sentance startedlookinglikethis. Still not to bad for IM but when trying to type code it can be a problem. Those computers are just so darn picky.

So out with the old, in with the even older. I found a really old IBM on the shelf, ways more than the computer, clangs everytime you press a key and its pre-human factors, so the rows of keys don't form a curve, its just a flat face of ancient metal buttons. Almost like the old days, typing papers on a manual typewritter. (Yes I did learn to type on a manual. I even have the box of correction tape to prove it.)

Full bore ahead

2006-11-05T01:18:00.000-07:00

Going gung ho with the pellet stove, didn't really realize how much until I went back and took a look at my usage logs for last year: which start in November. Gads, that's like now, and I'm already way ahead of last year:

Month	This year	Last year
September	360	-
October	1,360	-
November	maximum damage	1,200

I better start looking into buying my own forest and starting a pellet production plant. This is going to be killer. Really wish I had gotten farther on that solar heating project this summer. Next year for sure.

Deep science

2006-10-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

Most people live their lives day in and day out not worrying in the least about grain boundaries.

Sure, the spark plug wires in your car might wear out and have to be replaced (how can a wire wear out?), but for the most part you just figure that all that metal around you is just a bunch of atoms hanging out, mostly holding their shape (steel & aluminum), or pushing electricity around for you (copper, silver, aluminum, tungsten). Well sometimes what you don't know can reach up and bite you when you least expect it, so a little material science might be helpful.

So everyone's seen pictures of atoms all lined up in a row, which is how solids are organized. Sort of. As anybody who's ever broken open a rock, or chunk of aluminum or other metals knows, the surface you get isn't this perfect sheared face. Its chunky. That's because when something starts solidifying, it starts solidifying in multiple places and all these little crystals grow until they bump into each other. Each of these bits are called a grain, and the point where they meet is called the grain boundary.

If you're in to material science, than these boundaries hold all kind of secrets that scientists spend years glued to an electron microscope just to figure out. But that's not where we're going. The boundaries also present a problem to would be travellers trying to move around in there. I'm talking about electrons, trying to move through a piece of wire.

An electron trying to cross that boundary sees a gap. And that makes life a little difficult. In return for getting beat up crossing over, the electron punches back at the metal as it goes by. Just one electron doing that doesn't do much, as electrons are pretty small, but 1 amp of current going through a wire represents 6.25 quintillion electrons (6.25 X 10 to the 18th), so it can start to add up over time. This explains the problem the folks back in the 1970s were having with DIY solar power projects.

Back then, before computers were common (I know, hard to imagine), the fast switching power transistors that the computer uses in its power supply weren't very common either. That meant it wasn't very easy, inexpensive, or efficient to turn DC voltages from solar panels into 110 V AC that all your appliances know and love. Some people went out and stocked up on 12V RV appliances, but others got more creative and pretty much tried every single device out there to see how it would work on DC power somewhere between 90 and 120V.

Light bulbs (being just a piece of wire that heats up), would seem a natural. That is until you learn the physics:

Incandescent lamps can operate on DC voltages. However, two phenomena must be considered.
The first is the fact that light output of an incandescent lamp follows the Stefan-Boltzman Law which implies that light output is proportional to the fourth power of the operating voltage. Thus a 10% decrease in voltage results in a 34% reduction in light output. (not that great when your batteries are a little run down)
The second phenomena is metallurgical in nature. The incandescent tungsten filament in a lamp undergoes a grain boundary modification on DC operation. This results in a reduced life for some lamps when operated on DC. However this effect is very temperature sensitive, so normal lamps operating over 2800°K show little problem, whereas long-life lamps and very low-wattage types (such as night lights) operate at reduced filament temperatures (below 2700°K) which make them susceptible to this effect.
From: the new solar electric home

Curses, foiled by that grain boundary again. Luckily we now have IGBTs and MOSFETs coming out our ears and can take a DC power supply and chop its power into little tiny pulses which we push through a transformer to turn into anything from 110V AC to 480V 3&Phi,; so our lightbulbs will stay happy. Except of course that they're being replaced by CFL lights which are way more efficient, have they're own little inverter stuck in the base, and as thus, ironically, are perfectly happy running on DC.

Burning dead trees

2006-10-08T01:40:00.000-07:00

Its the edge of winter here again in the mountains, and that means the pellet stove is up and fired and I'm out scouting around for cheap sources of carbon and hydrogen. Actually this last week its been pretty warm which was nice because a few weeks back in what should have been the beginning of fall, it was darn cold. So cold in fact that I managed to burn nine bags of pellets to keep the wife from realizing/remembering how bad its going to be around February.

I did manage to pile very close to a ton of pellets in my Highlander for the week when Home Depot had lost its mind and was selling bags for $3.11. Unfortunately, by the time they had restocked, they had also come to their senses and raised the price to $4.39. Still cheaper than Walmart which has turned their entire garden center into a pellet storage facility where those pellets may live most of the winter if the price doesn't come down from $4.99. Still, I'm pondering how to keep my stock up for the winter. Based on last year's count, I need somewhere between three and four tons of pellets. Right now I'm sitting at about two (minus what's burning as we speak), so I'm going to need more, but I'd like to still be able to move around in the garage, and I had a vision of a large stack of pellets, sitting on the concrete next to the pit, exerting enough force to chip off a piece of the retaining wall and slide down into my underground pump room.

The second phase of my heating strategy is the same material, but in a rougher form: raw chunks of wood stuff. We have quite a pile of purchased wood sitting out back, but I like to start off the evening with sloppy pine mostly because I usually get it free or near free. The good stuff is $200 a cord, so its questionable how much we're saving burning that instead of other alternatives. Right around February we'll have every heat source possible running at 100% at the same time, just to keep us out of the ice age, so we need some of the good wood, but before then I'd rather be saving money (and spending it on ebay instead of on heating). So I try and get whatever pine I can. Last year we were finishing up a multi-year pile of dead trees delivered to our yard courtisy of a good friend, but this year I was wondering what I was going to do without much plan to resolve the situation on my own. Luckily God pitties me, and he knocked over a 80' tree right into a nice flat spot, and its even easy to get to with my car or truck. So over a couple of weeks, I went out and cut this enormous thing into slices 4-6 feet long and somehow managed to get each of them into the back of my dad's truck and dumped into my yard. Finally, when I though I could handle no more; he had someone else go and wipe out the last quarter in the space of an hour, so that I wouldn't worry about it any more. I also managed to get in on one week of the fire departments tree thinning and picked up a truckload of smaller stuff, but its completely green.

So starting off my log for the season:

September	360
October	worse

A tale of two Dews

2006-10-04T01:29:00.000-07:00

From season to season, it falls to my shoulders to do the grocery shopping. This usually happens during my prime thinking time: in the middle of the night. Sometimes I have a "I'm not tired" kidling with me (who is asleep by the end of our adventure), other times its just me wandering up and down the isles wondering what they were thinking when they invented strawberry and bananas shredded wheat.

One of my faults (or blessings depending on if my wife likes the selections), is that I buy things that are on sale. We currently have about 40 boxes of fruit chews in the pantry, because they were onsale, and then they were onsale more. "But they were only a $1 a box!" One area that I have a little more leaway is in my personal snacks, like my drinks.

It looked intriguing, it looked caffinated, and nobody else had been buying it, so it was cheap. In this case I have to side with the other people who weren't buying it. I can only describe it as if they took all the reject grape/cherry flavored kids cough medicine from the '80s and mixed it with Mountain Dew. Eyach. I guess somebody was buying though, cause they even came out with a sequell. Luckily these were both limited time disasters.

Cracked this case shortly after with some treppidation. Turns out this was much more on track with my tastes. I've been drinking a lot of Orange soda lately, but the hard part is in finding a mix that's properly caffinated. Sunkist has got it right, but all the other orange drinks seem to be pandering to the 8-14 year old market where it still has to pass the Mom test (well, any type of soda wouldn't have passed my mom's test, so maybe it only has to pass the mom lite test). Live wire is sort of hyped up orange soda with just a tint radiator fluid. Kind of like orange drink that's 30 years old, so the dyes have broken down and are off color, but carbonation never dies, so you drink it anyways.

So I'm liking it, but unfortunately I only have the one case of it. Not like this guy—he aparently bought every box in the store.

Changing gears in the middle of traffic

2006-09-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have been quite busy these last couple of weeks working on a number of things. Most of the time my brain is in perl, but occasionally I switch out of that mode and into C++ mode and boy does that take some work.

It could be easier. I know a lot of people who write code in perl like its just another version of C where you don't always have to put the semicolons at the end of the line and the variables all start with a dollar sign. Their code is rather long winded and misses at least half the point of perl. Several years ago, while working with my friend at another startup, I decided I was going to truely work in perl, and think in perl; which meant doing things differently than I did before. Miles of map{}s and grep{}s later, my code shows no resemblance to C, and I've actually had to work on using for loops again where they are occasionally called for.

C++ is another language, closely tied to its parent language C, but all about shifting away from the limited constructs of that ancient language and creating a environment where new more complicated objects can be created. Unlike lisp, where each problem is solved by creating a new internal language; C++ is all about creating new objects (and object slivers) that organize themselves around the problem until the problem is solved in a line or two. But given its much younger age, there are rough spots that have to be worked around.

The first problem in moving from one language to the other, is that the workflow is totally different. In perl, you move through the problem throwing patches of code here, and using the incredible syntax and components of the language itself to transmogrify the problem and bind the steps to the answer together. Its like using giant inflatable tubes and rings, and a whole host of super amazing sticky plastic to build a house. You probably wouldn't plan things ahead of time too much, you'd just start inflating parts and gluing everything together. If something wasn't turning out right, instead of trying to fix it; you'd just cut it out and do it again in a few minutes—the ultimate iterative environment. This of course would drive architects crazy, as they would be out of a job. And it would probably be an alien process to your regular carpenter who wants to have something to cut and nail together, and expects to report to the same site for a month or more before he has to move on to the next job.

Programming in C++ is even more alien. Its like creating the ultimate tool, that with one press of the trigger: will cut, assemble and fasten the entire house. Except of course, that the people who came before you only needed either a single room house, or a skyscraper. So you sit there with the cover up on the darn thing trying to jigger it to make a dormer. Or you decide you'll start with the one room, and then hit the button a few more times to make some more, then maybe try turning it sideways and see if you can shake out a second story. If you're lucky enough to go through this a couple of times without killing yourself, then the next time around you start to wonder if you might be able to start with the skyscraper instead, and then tack on dormers and pitched roof. And after about five or six of these, you start to understand the structure underneath and you start trying to make your own gadgets which goes along great until your wife asks if you can add on a garage.

It doesn't help that its been a while since I did any serious C++ work, and quite a bit of it was on startup projects where I had a blank slate to start with, and so amassed a closet full of rather complex gadgets. Some are easy to pickup after collecting dust. My tlist class is still one of my favorites, especially with my auto-iterating-pointer. When I show people, my loop, and its just: while (++ p) { p-> do(); }, they are amazed. But that's how things should be—powerful concepts, realized simply. That's what made C so great. The string copy function was just so darn simple:

strcpy(char *dest, char *src) { while (*(dest++)= *(src++)) {} }

Some of my other gadgets are not quite as polished, and I don't always cleanup everything before I put things away. I wasted a couple of cycles just this week trying to remember what the entire comm library was about as it seemed to be just another way to implement a io_framer. I finally reminded myself that having a framer function tacked onto a network library module was great when you were doing networking, but not so handy when you wanted to frame a stream. comm was all about separating out that orthogonal feature so that it could be reapplied anywhere, not just to the first thing I had thought of using it with. So now I can just assemble together a stream and a line based framer with the wave of my hand, and I'm all done:

People complain that modern languages are cryptic, and I've written lines of code in both C++ and perl that give others fits. But there's a reason for the madness. Programmers can only write so many lines a day, and for so many lines of code written, there's going to be a certain number of errors. The amazing thing is that this metric is the same whether you're writing assembly language or perl. The difference is, to accomplish the same task might take 30 lines of perl, or 200,000 lines of assembly. Still its all relative. The string copy example in C was probably just as foreign to your BASIC, FORTRAN, and PASCAL programmers of the day. It was too condensed, it was too simple. But ultimately, after one learned the new concepts of pointers, null terminated strings, and shortcut operators; one was much more productive in C than in those other languages, and C succeeded.

The question to the modern programmer is, will they learn the ideas behind today's power languages, and how long will I be stuck behind them in traffic while they try and change gears? Hmmm. Maybe somebody could invent a mental automatic transmission ...

Web 2.%&$#

2006-09-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to buy some cheap welding rod, which is unfortunately heavy. Each can is fifty pounds, and I'm interested in at least ten of them. Well, lets see how the web revolution holds up for this one:

Google freight shipping — freightquote.com

Looks promising, sort of the pricegrabber for freight shippers. Of course you have to sign up first (sigh), ok fine. blah blah blah, yahoo.com, blah blah blah done. Ah, there's my nice confirmation letter. Full of so many promises:

Freightquote.com is fast. You only need a few pieces of information, and in seconds you can choose a carrier, schedule a pickup, print shipping documents, and you're done.

Freightquote.com is easy. Track all your shipments and all your carriers in one place. Get all your shipment activity and freight costs summarized on one simple weekly invoice. And get great customer service through email, online chat, or toll-free over the phone.

Freightquote.com is free. Shopping at Freightquote.com is always free. You only pay for the carriers you use, when you use them.

Ok. login, press Quote & ship. bam!

They forgot one on that list above:

Freightquote.com is broken. We're full of promise but can't deliver when push comes to shove.
But we'd love for you to give us a call. Toll-free: 800.323.5441

Just so tedious

2006-09-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

At first it was annoying. A can would fall out of the six pack rings and you'd sit there struggling with it for a few minutes to stick it back in. Then it got to be a secret spy ability that you could put the cans back into a holder and mess with your parent's minds (my parent's minds were not on that solid of ground thanks to my efforts). Later as I took over stocking the dorm coke machine, it was all about how fast I could get the cans out of the stupid holder. Figured I knew just about all there was to know about those things in regards to a soda can.

So I was getting a fountain drink at the chevron station, and the guys were hanging out behind the counter, putting the plastic holders back on cans. At first I thought they had spilled some cans and were putting the holder back on. Then I saw one of them reach into a box where they had a whole role of these things and pull another few off. It turns out the station owner buys the cans without the plastic holders, then has the employees stand around putting them on manually. Its not that they're saving the money of not buying the holder, cause obviously they've got a whole box of them there. Somehow its cheaper to have people manually stick the things on than pay the bottling company an extra 0.3 cents a six pack to have a machine do it.

Must be really rewarding work too.

Just a little random

2006-09-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

I was helping a friend out over the weekend with a project and we got to the access control unit where he wanted to have long sequences of random numbers for the access key. "Fine," I said, "lets go find some random numbers." Sure you could use rand(), but unix random numbers have never had much respect. Long ago I pulled up a pseudo-random routine from the back of some programming magazine (that's how we learned about new stuff before the internet), and that's sat around in my toolkit for quite some time: #define Ra 1629 #define Rm 1048576 static unsigned long ran_seed ; void init_rand() { ran_seed= time() % Rm ; } int get_rand(int n) { ran_seed= (long) (Ra * ran_seed) % Rm ; return (n * ran_seed) / Rm ; } This is fine and all when you just need a few random bits for a game of hangman, or picking a random fortune, but its not so good when having something be random actually is important. There are of course larger pseudo-random cycles, and ways to whiten the data to avoid bias, but you're still dealing with something that's predictable on some scale or another.

At some point, once cyptrography became more widespread, having something better became more important and people started looking for real randomness. One such attempt was /dev/random which counted all the generic processes going on inside a computer, accumulating them together to produce random results. The length of a disk seek, the number of times an event was triggered, the checksum bits from various network packets received; thrown together and shaken. This produced decent results when used sparingly, but still not really random. If you're willing to spend enough money, you can buy these really cool boxes that have a radioactive isotope or high temperature thermal emitter and a detector that counts the picosecond spaces between individual particle emissions, but for something casual, these might be overkill.

Still, this is 2006, not 1984; there ought to be some solution out there perfect for the casual user:

Ah, web 2.0 to the rescue: random.org, using background radio noise from the atmosphere as an entropy source, this site produces numbers, sequences, raw bytes or even pictures.

HTML, http, soap and Corba are all welcome.

Its alive

2006-08-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

On my list of things to get done eventually this summer was fix my car. Last year wasn't a very good year for it, though given that its now 16 years old, its in pretty good shape considering.

The first problem I had was that the rings had loosed up over time and the vehicle was burning oil faster than I was checking it. It got to the point that one afternoon I hopped in the car, pushed the gas, sped up down the dirt road only to get about 2,000 feet from the house and have the engine seize up completely. When the starter can't turn the engine over (because the pistons have welded themselves to the side of the cylinder), you know you've seriously messed things up.

Unfortunately, Burke, my regular mechanic had retired, so I had to call around and find someone else who would work on it. Of course, the first thing everyone asks after hearing about how old this car is is, "and you want to fix it?" Well, my car may not be the prettiest thing after 16 years, but spending a thousand or two on it to get it back and running is still a lot cheaper than buying something new (or even used). Turns out that the Mitsubishi Eclipse (the sister car to the Plymoth Laser) was a hot car for many years over in Japan. This is a good thing, because they have some seriously strange laws about old cars over there, so after five years or so, its no longer practical to keep your car, and they junk them all for parts. So turns out if you really want to scrape the bottom of the barrel, you can pick up an entire engine for $400. I went one step up, got a block that had been drained of the shipping gunk, had new belts put on and spun up to check for about $800.

To remind myself to check the oil in the future, the old engine head cover now lives on my garage wall.

So I was back on the road, but my car wasn't done with me. It started hesitating on me when I tried to really punch it (I mean, that's what a sports car is for, right?). I took it too another mechanic to take a look at (not being totally happy with the guys who did the engine replacement), and he adjusted a few things, but it still wasn't happy. Then one evening I took it to the grocery store and it wouldn't start when I came out. Not being one to take a dying car lightly, I inched across the entire parking lot using just the starter motor; tried push starting it as well, and finally after twenty minutes of harrassment I got it to start. Things didn't get better though, pretty soon it wouldn't start warm at all, and I had to leave the car overnight in a few parking lots around town. Unfortunately my mechanic couldn't really tell what was going on at this stage, because he didn't have time to drive the car around long enough to warm it up where it wouldn't re-start. So I drove it around a bit more (I'm a glutton for punishment), and then I got it to the point where it wouldn't start at all. Success!

Larry took a look at it again, and found that the ignition wasn't firing at all. The computer wouldn't run the car. He was out of his element at this point, and his friends at the dealers all warned him that this was a doomsday car and it should be junked. His best guess was that the security module had decided that I was trying to steel the car and had engaged the anti-theft features. Somehow we got the car started one last time, and I drove it home where it sat in the yard for the next year.

So I was cruising the industrial machine section at ebay the other day, cause I'm always on the lookout for a good deal on a CNC gantry table or Synrad engraving CO2 laser, when my search string accidentally picked up "90 Plymoth Laser ECU replacement". Since I have a 1990 Plymoth Laser, I clicked through and pretty soon I ran across this section of text:

4. Symptoms
If any one or more of the following are occurring, a Motoguy's Garage Rebuilt ECU may help

Intermittent 'clicking' behind the radio

Random stalling and only restarting after several tries, or when the car has cooled

Running poorly with a severe decrease in power

Unable to start

No spark on two cylinders

Low, unsteady or oscillating idle

Check Engine Light always on

I don't use the radio that much (and its not a stock one anyways), but out of the other six symptoms I was hitting five pretty regularly. For an investment of $30 to $300 it sounded like I might have a working car soon.

First, I needed to find my ECU, as apparently there are a number of different models depending on year, engine, point of origin, and other some-such. I didn't really bother to pay much attention to the directions for finding it. I figured, how hard can it be to locate? 800 screws later, as I was about to detach the entire dashboard from the firewall, I decided to take a break and go back inside and look it up. Turns out I had past it an hour ago, sitting right there under my radio.

So my car runs on a MD128622 (also refered to on the side as 8622). 2.0L DOHC, non-turbo, california emissions version. In this case, it doesn't run; cause of fourty cents worth of bad parts—capacitors specifically. Seems that from about 1988 to 1994 a number of Japanese auto companies bought these capacitors from a vendor who didn't engineer the parts for the abusive environment that a car puts electronics through. So after about 10-15 years, the capacitors broke down, leaking all their electrolytic material out. This didn't just ruin the capacitor—it happened to ruin a fair number of the parts around it on the board:

Pulling the top off, things look ok at first glance. But then you zoom up into the center where the black can capacitors are, and the sight is not so pretty.

Like the stories say, looks like things leaked out and and have a made a fair mess out of the solder joints and parts near by. Also it looks like the protective shalack on top has been cracked and discolored. Reading the label on the side of the capacitor we learn a couple things. 1) the capacitor was manufactures in August of 1989, 2) the temperature rating for the part is supposed to be 105°C, and 3) Rubycon made some crappy capacitors back then.

Scanning the listings and reading more stuff on the net, it looks like the problem was pretty widespread, ranging from 1988 to 1994 and hitting Mazda, Mitsubishi, Honda and Nissan. By about 1995 things were under control in Japan, but interestingly enough this was not the end of the story,

On September 13, 2002, it was reported to Passive Component Industry Magazine by contacts in Japan that an unusually high rate of failures of low-ESR aluminum electrolytic capacitors produced in Taiwan by Lelon Electronics, Luxon Electronics, and other aluminum capacitor manufacturers had been traced to a problem with an aqueous electrolyte that had been used throughout the Taiwanese electrolytic capacitor industry.
Reportedly, the problem developed after a materials scientist working for Rubycon Corporation in Japan left the company and began working for Luminous Town Electric in China. The scientist then developed a copy of Rubycon P-50 type water-based electrolyte, used in low-ESR aluminum electrolytic capacitors developed by Luminous and equivalent to the Rubycon ZA and ZL series. Subsequently, the scientist's staff members defected with the formula, and began to sell and electrolyte at a low price to many of the major aluminum electrolytic houses in Taiwan, including Luxon Electronics, Lelon Electronics, and other aluminum capacitor manufacturers. (IBM has stated that five companies were affected, while other sources in Taiwan suggest that as many as 11 companies were affected.)
Unfortunately, the staff members who defected from Luminous Town Electric with the formula copied only the partial formula, and the subsequent electrolyte produced was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminum capacitor. The instability of the electrolyte in the low-ESR aluminum electrolytic capacitors using this water-based electrolyte leads to the build-up of excess hydrogen inside the aluminum can, which results in either a rupture of the can itself or destruction of the rubber end-seal. Either failure is potentially catastrophic due to the leaking electrolyte. According to top material scientists in the aluminum capacitor industry, if the correct amount of additives is not mixed into a water-based electrolyte, electrolysis will occur, releasing a high amount of hydrogen gas in the can and resulting in catastrophic failure.
From Passive Component Industry Magazine, October 2002.

In any case, with another replacement ECU, my car is alive, though a little out of sorts due to the battery sitting dead for a year and a clogged air flow sensor. But its alive!

Empires of Light -- A book report

2006-08-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

This summer has been flying by, but between periods of frantic coding and yard work, I have managed to get some reading done.

One very good book I've managed to finish is Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes (recommend from an EE times article dated Feb 2004, yes I'm a little behind on my EE Times reading as well). While it focuses mostly on the race to make use of electricity and build an electric infrastructure in the united states by Edison, Westinghouse and Telsa; there's also a very interesting section at the beginning on the foundation of electricity which I found facinating.

While investators into natural phenomina had been playing with static electricity for hundreds of years, things really got cooking around 1780 when Volta build the first battery. (more images here and here).

Not only did this revolutionize the investigation of electricity and eletrical effects, but it also revolutionized chemistry, as Humphry Davy not only demonstrated that the battery worked by electrochemical reaction, but he was able to extract the raw elements Sodium (Na) and Potassium (K) which did not exist otherwise in nature (nor could these metals be formed by chemical reduction as they are each the most positivly charged in their atomic groups). He went on to further extract Magnesium, Calcium, Barium and Strontium.

Not satisfied to only revolutionize chemistry and the understanding of the battery, Davy also invented the arc light, forming useful (though limited in life) work from this electric stuff.

Even with all these accomplishments, Davy will probably be remembered most for discovering something else entirely: Michael Faraday. Besides becoming a brilliant chemist (discovering benzene and the process for the liquefaction of gasses), Faraday was encouraged to look into electromagnitism, and would soon discovery the process of generating electricity from magnatism and invent a number of electric generators.

With all the scientific foundations laid out, it was now time for the engineers to come in and make it useful.

LINKS:
SF Chronicle review of Empires
Jill Jonnes: NY unplugged, article
wikidpedia on Fichael Faraday
The Royal Instituion Biography on Michael Faraday

Publications:
Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics
The Chemical History of a Candle

Just when you thought you already knew it all.

2006-08-12T22:14:00.000-07:00

I've been using the text editor VI for a long time, like over 20 years. After 20 years, there's not a lot that surprises me about vi anymore. Sure vim and gvim have fancy new features, but they're not real vi so I don't worry about it much.

Pierce pointed me at this, and as I was reading the reference contents I noticed something new:
:> n - indents n lines.
Not a earth shattering command, but its always fun to find out something new about something you've been using for over 20 years.

Disconnected from the regular channels.

2006-07-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

It was a busy week this week in Lake Wobegon. Oh wait, wrong show.

I was away part of this week, as happens every year. The timing is always right during Max's birthday, which caused the family some consternation until this year. Since this year he was in Kindergarten, we just moved his birthday to be before the school year ended. I wish I knew you could do that back when I was a kid, would have been handy. Maybe they've changed the rules since my parents were parents.

So for several days I had most of my garage, a pile of scrap from the local metalbenders, and a fair amount of school property packed up in my car and hauled out to Showlow to teach Indian kids how to weld. Its a little bit of a challenge teaching them in three days what we usually have a whole semester to go over, and they're not always ideally dressed (think shorts, tank tops and sandals instead of boots and long sleeves), but I've worked up enough of an idea what will fly in a couple of days to keep them occupied and otherwise out of trouble.

However, besides being in the middle of Max's birthday, this trip is usually in the middle of some big deadline at work; so I spend a portion of the day back in the huts, poking on my laptop and trying to get stuff done for work. This week was no different, as we had the usual circus of new hw deployment, cluster trouble, new processing, new market data, and a dog & pony show for the powers that be. Mornings were usually checking on various details while hanging on the line for several hours in a conference call (boy I love Free calling with SkypeOut) Nights I was back online, finishing this feature or that, creating new database tables with abandon and pushing data around as best I could.

When camp was over Wednesday (and we had launched our last 2L water rocket up into the air) I was ready to get home to my family, and my own computer lair. How ironic that the moment I get home my internet goes down. At first I didn't worry too much, DSL goes out from time to time, usually it comes back. So that night I poked around on my local machine, dealt with local issues like a new color printer that needed setting up, and then went to bed.

Come the next morning, I rose and headed back to my burrow to see what's happening, only to find out the DSL is still down. I call in to my service provider to harangue them some more only to find out that the mop on duty the night before didn't even create a record of my call. So I rail at level 1 tech support some more and settle down to get by as best I can.

The morning is not so bad, mostly spent on the phone again (only this time I have to tie up the land line which thankfully is working). Various jokes are made in reference to Cheeseburger Brown's excellent article on his time spent without internet and I get considerable millage from the phrase, "I don't know, the internet's down." After the conference call I link in on my laptop using my cell phone and can get a connection, though 2 bars on sprint wireless cannot hope to support a dozen x-windows, google mail, my IM services and various other windows. I give up a few hours later in disgust and take Max to swim class.

Facing the prospect that the internet will continue to be down, I dig into my bag of tricks and decide to go wandering out into the world to get my internet connection. There's a number of businesses that offer wifi, but being a runt of a town, most places close around 9pm. Luckily BBW is both a wifi hotspot and a sports bar—its actually open until midnight. I tuck the clan into its beds and head out to eat cheese fries and get some work done. The staff is very patient with me, I pick slowly at my food, drink a dozen refills of Mr. Pibb Maxx, and generally seem to be ignoring them. I try my best to be unobtrusive, and leave a big tip. The connection isn't perfect, I'm often re-logging into sessions that die inexplicably, but its a highspeed connection and I get a fair amount of work done.

The next morning with the demo looming, I return and work through lunch. Finally the bored meeting starts, we stop trying to make any more changes, I pay off my tab and head back home. Still no connection, and no help from my ISP, so I do what I should have done long ago and call the phone company. I get yet another inept level 1 phone droid who leads me through the process of disconnecting the power to my DSL modem and resetting it for the Nth time (I've done this so many times now, I'm able to do it virtually, calling off the power up sequence of lights, colors and blinks by heart, accurate to the second), and he finally runs a diagnostic from the back end and determines that a truck roll is actually needed to fix whatever mysterious ailment has infected the wires.

That night, I'm down in my basement again poking away at local matters when my computer suddenly chirps at me about some random bit of news acquired from afar. Curious, I look over and discover that 48 hours after losing my connection, it has found its way back to the house and is working again. Sigh.

Saved by habit

2006-07-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

I don't make the simple mistakes very often these days, that's what makes them all the harder to find when I do make them. I try to clear my mind and assume anything could be wrong when hunting problems, but its so much nicer where the computer can point them out in the first place.

if (1 == a) { ... }

People give me a hard time for writing code this way, but there's a very good reason to do it like this instead of a == 1 . Slip up and type a single equals and my code becomes invalid (in just about any language), slip up the other way and you have the perfectly valid but wrong a = 1 . So I had to smile today when the compiler complained to me:

Hadn't made this mistake in several years, but a few seconds later the problem was corrected. Somewhere else someone is cursing their program and it may be some time before they find the problem.

Random scraps on my desk

2006-07-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning up my desk a little while back, looking for my Round Table club card, which I did not find, but I did find lots of little scraps of paper with various notes on my desk. One, was a quote from Roman law which I've already lost again, but I remembered enough of it to find it on the web; so I figured I'd put it here where it wouldn't get covered up with un-paid medical insurance bills, monthly statements for my keogh, and other design notes from the ghost of projects past.

De minimis non curat praetor
(or, "The magistrate does not consider trifles," for those of you who can't read latin.)

Another ancient scrap on my desk, is a list of the nine Siggraph locations from 1987 to 1995 that I attended (by hook, or by crook, or by 1962 dodge sports van):

Anaheim (local)
Atlanta (road trip, mostly spent in NM looking for a new driveshaft)
Boston (airline travel voucher)
Dallas (another road trip, Pierce brought his motorcycle)
Las Vegas (not a great place to bring a black car in July)
Chicago (impressive unions)
Anaheim
Florida (time shares are great)
Los Angeles

Excellent, two more postage sized pieces of paper I can throw away now.

Fun and silly tools for the office

2006-07-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday a little while back (no I won't say how hold I am now except to say that to feel better, I count it in hex). Anyways, the local movie theater doesn't let you go to the movies for free anymore, and I've already mentioned how well Baskin Robbins does with birthdays, but a friend was in Phoenix and picked me up something completely impractical for my birthday.

Its a drink cooler (the blue spot is just big enough for a drink can), and it plugs into USB and runs a thermoelectric chiller.

I took it to the office this week, because I was there all week, and since they supply free drinks, I drink even more soda there than I do at home. Over the week we put it through its paces.

Left empty, it will condense some water out of the air, building up a nice little puddle, and then proceed to chill that puddle down quite cold. Probably mid 40°s. Given an entire can, starting at room temperature, its not so impressive, but does manage to put a small chill on the can. The sweet spot seems to be right around 1/2 to 1/4 of a can, where it can keep it nice and cool; so the original plan was to start with a can from the fridge, drinking it down while the ambient air fights the cooler over the temperature.

To get an idea how much cooling is going on, I did some digging around.

First off, USB is only allowed to put out 500mA of current to devices attached. There is something called USB power+ that lets you pull six amps, but I don't think this cooler is designed for it. Turns out the cooler is playing games though, according to the FAQ, the cool pulls a non-standard 1.1 amps (or 5.75 watts of power).

Ok, converting from power used to cooling, that's the next trick as its not watt for watt. See cooling is all about juggling entropy, thus in some circumstances its easy to get 4W of cooling for 1W of electricity (since electricity is higher grade power than heat is). Its like the thermoelectric powered fan on top of my woodstove. It doesn't make my stove heat the room any less, it just takes advantage of the fact that the top of my stove is at 800°F and I'm only trying to heat the room up to 70°F. Lots of entropy to spare there.

So a quick scan for peltier device efficiency finds this FAQ which places the TOC of its devices at around 0.7. Not that great compared to other systems, but pretty good for something with no moving pieces. There's also a fan blowing on the heat sink, and that's got to take a bit of power (its kind of noisy too), so lets say there's 4.4 watts left over for the junction. 4.4 * 0.7 = 3 watts of cooling.

So what's that translate into? 0.004 horsepower (not that useful), 0.00284 BTU/sec (that'd be more useful for heating). What's something that you measure refrigeration in? Well, the big coolers for machine rooms and such are rated in tons (which is like a ton of ice). That sounds good, as this thing supposedly would replace putting ice in my drink. So lets see. 3w = 0.00085304 tons of refridgeration, which would be 1.7 pounds of ice over a 24 hour period, or about 0.07 pounds of ice per hour. Now if we assume an ice cube is 2cm on its side (those little ones you get from the drink machine at 7-11), then that ice cube is also 8mL which is also 8 grams. So we would get about 4 ice cubes per hour, or one ice cube every 15 minutes.

I think a cooler with about twice the power would really do the trick (even on a full can), but then it would also really smoke the USB port on your power mac, and that wouldn't be good. I guess we'll just have to wait for peltier junctions to get better, or someone's going to have to open up the case and bring out some serious 12v power. Might need to upgrade the fan at that point as well.

Getting what I want by asking

2006-07-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

Twice last week I went from good to best with a little extra effort. It gives one hope for the future.

We were at Baskin Robbins to get icecream (I was hoping to get a free cone for my birthday, but it turns out you have to go to the web site and signup for spam in order to get a coupon for free icecream), so Max picks out some strange flavor with green and purple swirls, and I'm looking for something. I decide on Strawberry, because that's my second favorite flavor. I mention this to the person at the counter, and they ask me what my favorite flavor is. "Coconut Pineapple," I reply. "We have that flavor," she says. Really?

Coconut pineapple is this very strange combination that became my favorite back in the days of Thrifty Drugs Icecream. Back before playlands and stores focused on selling to preschoolers, the best marketing tool was cheap icecream cones (originally a dime, later on a quarter—still a great price). They're selection was somewhat limited, and past the usual vanilla and chocolate, some of the flavors were quite strange. Being a 13 year old kid at the time, strange was my reson d'etre; so I tried all the weirdest things, including the icecream.

Lumps of under-ripe yellow fruit in my icecream is still just as strange as it was way back when.

This week I was getting ready for my flight out, and I was pondering what to do for drinks. They used to serve a decent variety of drinks on the flights, but they've cut back further and further to the point where if you don't coke or diet, then you're pretty much out of luck. So I stop by the local minimart on the way to the airport, but unfortunately all I can find is Pepsi & Coke drinks. Sure I can survive a bottle of Dr. Pepper berries and cream on the flight, but it wasn't what I was really wanted. I go to pay for my DPBC but ask if they have any 7-up products. Turns out that over in a side cabinet, around the corner from the regular drink cabinets, below so odd brand of fruit drinks, on the very bottom shelf, they've got products from the 7-up bottler, including Orange Crush.

Saved again by standing up and being extra annoying.

Making random connections

2006-07-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

I watched Proof yesturday, cause a friend recommended it. It was a strange film, involving insanity and math, but it had one of those endings where the ending is not the end, but rather the beginning of something else.

As it was ending, and I was listening to the music, my brain said, "this is familiar." "Let me think," I thought. Lets see, Gwyneth Paltrow, the ending is another beginning, and that music. Could it be?

IMDB
Proof, no not proof of life ... that one.
ok, music, not on first page—typical
more cast
Original music by: Stephen Warbeck
scroll down credits ...
28. Mystery Men really?
31. Shakespear in Love ahah!

Same music, same girl, same pullback camera shot (turns out the director is the same too). Almost makes me want to go rent Captain Corelli's Mandolin and see if that has the same ending shot as well.

Watch out for wild animals

2006-07-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

I live in the sticks, surrounded by a couple billion trees, rocks and pinecones. There's a couple thousand people dumb enough to try and live up here as well, but basically the place is still run by the animals. Its no surprise to see an elk walking through the backyard in the evening or hear coyotes on the hill at night. And then of course, there's the deer on the road. I've seen plenty of them, I even hit one once (just grazed it). Perfectly ordinary around here.

So this Saturday I was out in California, driving up the I280 to work. Just me and a couple million other cars zooming around the bends, up and down the hills. In this urban spraw you're looking for accidents, bad drivers (worse than you), and police vehicles. What you're not typically looking for is deer. But that's what we saw that morning, walking warily across the highway, headed for greener grass on the other side I guess. Either the deer out here are smarter, or this one was very lucky, cause it managed to cross five lanes of traffic without a scratch.

Taking it easy

2006-06-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from LEGOland, we pondered our activities for the day. In the first corner, weighing in with a brand value of over $32 billion dollars, and an annual advertising budget bigger than some countries GNP: Disneyland. In the other corner: some sand.

Sorry Disney. No lines, infinite space, and the possibility of discovering strange green sea worms trumps space mountain. Maybe tomorrow.

Vending machines

2006-06-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Running Man there are all kinds of pop culture jokes. (The whole premise of the movie is put Arnold on a game show where convicts are chased by WWF thugs with weapons to see who can outlast who. Richard Dawson does a great job as the game MC.) But its not the usual thrills and spills that came to mind today.

There's a scene in an office building where the girl, after surviving her first encounter with the hero, is back at work and is helping her friend get a soda from a soda machine. Its just that they're having a problem coming up with $5 in change. Everybody laughed back then (this was 1987), everyone that is, except for the vending machine people.

Vending machine people were already planning for the age of the $5 soda and had just a bit before suffered a major defeat in their plans. Their first solution was the classic blunder of vendor control—the most obvious case of this was when the movie companies came out with a DVD player that charged you more money every time you watched a movie from your shelf—but the vending machine people did something almost as bad, they tried to get people to use coins that were convenient for machines, not for people.

You may or may not remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin. Most likely not. It was designed to be inexpensive, round (like existing coins), and small enough to fit through the existing slots on vending machines (IE almost exactly the same size as a quarter). The problem is that you can't tell it apart from a quarter without really looking at it. But nobody has ever had to look at their coins to tell them apart before. A nickel is completely different from a dime, and both are much smaller than a quarter (pennies are somewhere between a dime and a nickel in size, a completely different color, and not worth anything anyways, so nobody really cares about them).

Having completely blown it with the Treasury department (and set them back 20 years in getting a dollar coin out into the market), the vending industry had to come up with something else. The next step was the paper dollar handler which has become a fairly regular occurrence on soda machines, especially in places where the price is outrageous. However the dollar counter is error prone, has a hard time with paper money that wears out, and still requires the handling of a lot of cash by poorly paid employees. So they needed something more.

The soda machine in the hotel tonight has a credit card slot on it. This is almost necessary, since its trying to charge $2 for a can of soda. In all fairness, there's probably a $0.25 charge for the machine and dataline, and a $0.25 charge for transaction from Mastercard, but that still leaves $1.50 going to the hotel for one can of soda. Instead I went next door to McD and got a large fountain drink (4X the can) for $0.65.

NOTES: Currency flops through the ages @ CNN.

On Vacation, Day 2

2006-06-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

So we're on vacation, at Legoland, the purpose for this entire trip. Its not the same kind of park as Disneyland & Magic Mountain, because its not about characters & rides so much. Its about blocks. Sure, there are rides, but they're not as big as an attraction as the big shop (an 8,000 sqft store of just legos). The stores are such a big thing, that you can actually go to legoland for free on a shoppers pass (see shopping in the faq for details).

There are actually a number of uniquely LEGO things to do there, that don't seem like theme-park kind of things, but are fun to do. One is to sit in the parts shop at the back and just pickout parts and build things. Come up with a cool enough creation, and you can take it home (for only $28/pound), and there are some pretty cool statues of things made out of legos.

While things could have gone either way, two things really ended up making the park experience for Max. One, was an area where you built a small LEGO vehicle and then raced it against others (Max's was the fastest). The second was lunch.

Max doesn't eat a wide variety of foods, and in the protein department, he is especially picky. Vacations are a real challenge cause you don't run into vegan cheese, tofu icecream or yogurt drinks very often. He'll eat regular cheese on a few things, like quesadillas and pizza. But only pizza without any sauce on it. Legoland had a pizza place, but I was quite surprised when I asked if we could get a pizza without sauce and the helpful person behind the counter went out back and put one together special just for Max.

When you ask Max what his favorite part of Legoland is now, he says, "Pizza!"

We're on vacation

2006-06-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

Technical difficulties hits the road. Me and jr difficulties are on the road this week to legoland and points unknown in california, leaving the wife and other difficulties in training behind.

Step 1: 500 miles of driving. Down I17, around the worst of Phoenix via the 101 loop bypass, out to the west on I10 into the middle of nowhere.

Big surprise (not): all the fast food places with playlands have the playlands enclosed and aircondtioned. (Its reading 112°F on the vehicle too-hot-o-meter).

Discovery of the day: In the middle of the Mohave desert, at Chiraco Summit (home of the $4 gallon of gas), is the General Patton Museum. This is a different museum then the Patton National Museum of Cavalry & Armor. Get there a little early, as it closes as 4:30pm. Don't get there too early though, cause its hot and you don't really want to spend more than 15 minutes outside poking around old tanks and looking for rattlesnakes under rocks.

After that, the only other interesting sight on our trip was the windmills in San Gorgonio Pass. The first thing you notice is that big windmills seem to be sprouting little baby windmills (though the short ones were probably there first). The second cool thing you notice as you get closer is that there doesn't seem to be anyone hauling off broken propeller parts: blades seem to litter the ground around the windmills, and a number of windmills are out of service, having only one or two blades left. You'd think with energy costs being what they are, somebody would be out there fixing windmills as fast as they could. Well, maybe next year when electricity prices are up to twentyfive cents a kilowatt.

If you've planned ahead enough, you can even take a tour of the windmills. Website doesn't say how much though.

The word of the day

2006-06-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today's word of the day is Hentriacontane (also known as C₃₁H₆₄). I was going to go with Hexatriacontain which is the longest alkane listed in the Higher Alkanes table on wikipedia, but hentria sounds cooler. Plus its naturally created by bugs. (When you have three boys, anything having to do with bugs is cooler.)

Not much to look at, but supposedly useful if you're trying to attract other bugs. Probably work better than this:

Its hiding out there

2006-06-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend I had the kids at Home Depot and after they finished painting their creations together, we wandered into the store to look around and to wash their hands. As we headed in, I browsed various prices on various things but was in for a rude shock in the electrical department.

I keep a fair amount of wire around the house, just for whatever. Some 14 gauge for light work, lots of 12 gauge (yellow is pretty), and even some 10 for those welder circuits. I also have a bunch of heavy duty welding leads that look like giant jumper cables (handling 400amps takes a serious cross section of metal, otherwise all the energy heats up the wire and not the weld).

The last batch of 12/2 I bought around a year ago was $60. The same roll is now priced over $100. Why? I thought to myself. Sure oil is expensive, but shipping can't be that much on a roll of wire to get it to Flagstaff. Turns out Oil isn't the only thing that's more expensive in the last year. I knew silver was up there (the last silver I bought was at $4/oz, now its at $11), but I thought that was riding the gold bug's coattails. Turns out not, a bunch of industrial metals are higher as well, including copper. As recent as a month ago it was dancing around $4/pound, where as historically its been sitting around $1.60/pound. That's quite a jump.

That's going to have an impact on things—lots of things. Think you're safe because you're not accumulating electrical wiring like me? Well, are you going to be buying anything in the near future that uses electricity? has a motor? or a transformer? or a circuit board? Well, guess what those use: copper. Anything made by equipment that uses electricity: same thing. Replacement costs for pizza mixers, air conditions, and shop cranes is going up; and its going to take the rest of the economy with it. And with those other metals, you are basically seeing a 4X increase in materials for just about anything metal (even stainless steel—lots of nickel in there).

The fed has been trying to hide inflation for quite some time now, looks like its run out of places to stick it.

Great information from the original wayback machine

2006-06-04T21:00:00.000-07:00

If you want to learn more about something pretty recent, the internet will do ok. Its better if its a subject commonly referred to by geeks, but even basic stuff might get some treatment out there if you're willing to dig far enough. If you want to further back, looking for information on old topics, you've got to think out-of-the-box; or rather off-of-the-net. My favorite place is the local library.

Take any topic that was important/interesting/popular 20 years ago, and there's a good chance that your local library has all kinds of information on it. I've found lots of great stuff on metal casting (including a couple of styles of casting that have been subsequently banned by EPA); information on working with Beryllium (now recognized as a highly hazardous material), and other kinds of great stuff there. Its especially good at topics that were at the peak of their hype curve 20-25 years ago, then fell into a lull, only to return recently. (For those of you less that 30 years old, the one I'm currently thinking of has to do with one particular solution offered for the energy crisis of the late 70s: solar power).

In the mid fifties, researchers at Bell Labs had put together one of the first practical solar cells (or solar batteries as they were called back then), based on silicon (which is what most modules use today). While the price was horrifying, and the efficiency wasn't that great (around 6%); it was a solution made to order for space based applications where it got its first use. By the 70s its use in space, by the government and the invention of the amorphous crystal cell (which was used in solar powered calculators and the like), helped bring the cost down from the hundreds of dollars per watt, down to around $10 a watt. As the government started throwing massive amounts of money at further research into solar, the possibilities became endless and future looked bright.

Into this environment came a number of books, including: Photovoltaics: Sunlight to Electricity in One Step.

This is actually a quite brilliant book, with quite a few excellent illustrations, tables of facts, and information about the solar cell and the electricity industry in the early 80s. While the projections of the DOE and those of the authors are off by a mile (by 1985 gasoline was back down to 80¢/a gallon and nobody cared about alternative energy any more, especially not the government), the analysis was quite good on what was possible at the time, and what should have been possible in the future.

Fast forward 25 years, and gasoline is back over $3 a gallon, and everyone is screaming for alternatives. According to the book, 178 trillion killowatts strike the earth every second. Now a bunch gets reflected, and a bunch more gets turned into heat; but there's still at least 40 million gigawatts getting down to us at ground level. Given the 9.6 million square kilometers of land of the united states, and a hypothetical six hour solar exposure every day; that's 71,971 Quads of energy per year hitting this country from the sun. Putting this in perspective, the US used 98.2 Quads of energy in 2003 (pdf). Of that 40 Quads of energy (fuel) were used to create 12.5 Quads of usable electricity; so clearly there is the potential to harness the great deal of sunlight striking us to generate some (if not most) of our electrical power.

The book is full of physics, presenting concepts that I've struggled with for decades in such a clear way as to instantly provide enlightenment. There's also interesting data on different types of solar cells (historic, current and possible future). One interesting table for instance lists the issues of efficiency in the typical silicon cell:

Energy loss due to	percent lost

Overly energetic photons	32
Under energetic photons	24
Internal cell losses	21
Front surface reflection	3
Shading by electrical contacts	3
Cell packing gaps	2
Total	85

Shows that some progress has been made over the last twenty years in internal cell losses, as current state of the art for single cell is 22%. Also shows why multiple junction GaAn cells are so useful (captures more of the overly energetic photons).

I hope to post more figures & tables from this book over time, if nothing else, for my own personal reference.

So much for tacos

2006-06-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

So there I was, minding my own business down in the basement, doing something unimportant when I hear my wife upstairs yelling: FIRE. Gads.

So I run upstairs, not having any idea what to expect, and find that something has caught fire in the toaster oven. We quickly escort the offending items outside, and I extricate the flaming mass from its container, letting it burn a little before finally stomping it into little bits.

(sorry, no flamage pictures)

So I guess we're not having tacos for lunch?

I better turn that light off

2006-05-29T22:00:00.000-07:00

The power company finally realized after about a decade that they could print more than text with the modern high speed laserprinters they use to produce the monthly billing with.

So now we get pretty graphs and all kinds of other niceties. Of course this comes at the worst time for them. They're giving us all this information to help us get upset and mad as heck. Next thing you know, we aren't going to take it any more. Now if you live in california, you already have gone through this, but here in AZ we've been enjoying the fruits of nuclear power and long term fuel contracts, so energy increases are just now starting to bite us in the butt:

So I used less power, and yet my power bill this month increased by almost 20%. Its going to be an ugly summer unless I get off my butt and put some solar cells on the roof.

How to have a good week.

2006-05-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Partial schedule for the week:

Monday:

9:00 am	Root canal
10:00 am	Who cares, its got to be better than the dentist ...

Just too complicated for my old brain

2006-05-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I was doing software development on my own, and not having any schedule to keep I decided one day to checkout subversion. Since it was just myself programming, I hadn't been using source control (though I do have various little hacks to prevent the stupid things like removing my only copy of source; and I do have archives of past versions sitting around in tar files); but subversion was the new hip and happening thing so I decided to take a look.

Opening up the requirements page soon tempered my interest:

1. Apache Portable Runtime 0.9.7 (http://apr.apache.org/)
2. autoconf 2.50 or newer (Unix only)
3. libtool 1.4 or newer (Unix only)
4. Neon library 0.24.7 or 0.25.5 (http://www.webdav.org/neon/)
5. Berkeley DB 4.X
6. Apache Web Server 2.0.49 or newer
7. Python 2.0 (http://www.python.org/)

Some of the libraries that Subversion depends on themselves have dependencies that add features to what Subversion can do.

Ok, at the time my home machine was running Red Hat 7 (already a dinosaur), I was stuck with apache 1.3 for my user interface on the project, and I don't even think my version of GCC was up to snuff (they were changing it a lot back then). So subversion lost a supporter that day. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like anybody's learned much since then.

So now Ruby on Rails is the latest thing since slice bread. Ruby is a cool looking language though I've never dived in deep enough to find some way in which it was better than perl. The performance of the engine has never been that great, but these days who cares--all the servers sit around being bored 99.999% of the time anyways.

Our main project is back using perl and home grown macros to pump out interesting views of boring numbers, but I have a number of side projects including one to keep track of rafts. The perfect thing, I thought, to use Ruby for. (I know if I don't force myself to use Ruby for an existing project, I'll never get around to using it. Just look how far I've gotten with OCaml & Lua). Somehow I'll probably also get sparklines in there which should exercise Ruby iterators.

Thanks to a hard drive crash late last year, I have a box with a relatively recent operating system on it now (FC4. yes I know FC5 is out, but I'm not updating my system. I don't even know where my system is, exactly). If that hadn't happened, I'd probably be trying to install Rails on redhat nine or something, heaven help me. Looks like there's a fair bit of advise for installing this stuff onto FC4, so lets see what's required.

So, since the OS is already up and running, lets see what the list of stuff for rails looks like.

ruby and party
yumex (since nobody wants to use yum on the command line)
fastcgi (which requires ...)
lighttpd (which means I have to rewrite iptables)
mysql (luckily I already had that, as well as sqlite; ah but there is some weird password reconfigure to make it work with ruby)
ruby gems
ruby fastcgi bindings
bluefish
query browser (what's wrong with the commandline?)
true type fonts (huh?)

This looks like more than a one martini install. Well, might as well get started... More news as it happens.

It just seems to be how my life works

2006-05-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

Plan all you want, the universe just seems to conspire against you. Take this fine example I pulled up looking through last years photos, of how not to pour concrete.

Cement cures best at a temperature between 50°F and 70°F. Knowing that, we called the concrete company in June to get on the list for that summer. When did they actually pour our sidewalk? I'll give you a hint: that's snow falling in the picture. Well, at least it wasn't february.

Still cold, still burning.

2006-05-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

I had hoped to be done with pellets. Especially as I was down to a few bags after the fifteenth and wanted to just use those up and be done with it. I was also hoping to be able to fit the entire season's ashes into the ash bucket and only empty it once. No such luck.

Still burning. Got cold and windy again (even a little bit of snow/hail) and I'm still chilled down in the basement. Tried to go a day without long underwear on and after two days without the stove on I had to go run and get them last night. Tonight the pellet's are lit again and I'm warming up a little.

Usage to date:

November	1,200
December	1,720
January	2,000
February	1,280
March	1,080
April	440
May	...

Walmart ran out of pellets, but luckily now Home Depot has big piles of them. I wonder if they stock them all year round. I sure wish I had those solar hot water panels collecting heat. The sun gets upstairs so warm we have to opent the windows and let the heat out. Of course I also wish that I could close the door to the basement so that when it gets cold upstairs the worst of it doesn't make its way down here and freeze me out. Unfortunately physics is against me so I must call forth the tools of Engineering to fight back the natural order of the universe and warm my tootsies.

Visitors in the house

2006-04-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Its been my practise to keep cats around the house (or at least outside), but our last set ran off at the end of summer and we haven't gotten new ones yet.

What we did get was a visitor this week. Luckily our house is pretty devoid of food and water, so the mouse was not very fast and was caught with a piece of cardboard and a tupperware container. Not the evenest of matchups.

Turned the mouse outdoors so the hawks can have a snack. I let nature do my dirty work.

Arriving at the answer as easily as possible

2006-04-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

I was in a lot of competitions back in my school days. There really wasn't a lot else to do. I didn't really study, and the teachers figured they better keep me busy or I'd just cause more trouble that I was already doing. So I got sent off to win trophies. There were math competitions, orchestra competitions, physics competitions, engineering competitions, drafting competitions, science competitions, accounting competitions; I even got sent off to a spelling bee once (by mistake probably, I hate spelling). But one of my favor ates was the computer competitions.

The first reason I liked computer competitions was that the school, or some local business (back when local businesses sold computers), would loan me a computer for a couple of weeks to "get ready". Actually I'd spend every night writing and playing games on them. (Back then a computer cost more than a car, so my parents had not bought me a computer of my own.) My parents didn't know what I was doing on the thing, and maybe writing games could be considered "getting ready" in any case. The second reason I liked computer competitions the best was that I liked writing programs under pressure even better than normal, as I considered myself rather good at thinking under fire, and whipping out five or six solutions in a couple of hours by myself just left those other teams of three and four people in the dust.

Interestingly enough, I often missed problems or could not come up with a solution in the time allotted. Luckily, no body else could either, but I learned from those problems, especially in competitions where they handed out the answers afterwards.

On particular problem was called magic squares. Basically you had to generate all the possible permutations of valid magic squares for a grid of size N. I of course tried to write something that would automatically permeate the board through its valid values: put a 1 in the first square, then create a list of numbers remaining and use that to populate the adjacent nodes and so on and so on. A big complicated mess of permutation trees. And I was trying to do this in BASIC on a 6502 machine. In about 20 minutes. Needless to say, I didn't succeed.

The answer turned out to be far more simple. Create a square NxN filled with the number 1. Then start adding 1 to the first square, carrying forward when it wrapped beyond N. Sure this generates a lot of invalid answers, but you just test to see if its valid at the end of the day, and only print it if it is. Wow, let the computer do all the hard work generating thousands and thousands of wrong answers and only bother to say something if it happens to find one that's right. "Brilliant!" I thought.

Computer back then could handle millions of cycles per second and thousands of pieces of information with ease. Who cares if you send them down dead ends again and again. (Besides Marvin the paranoid android) This approach turns out to be even smarter when you want an answer that's good enough, but you don't care how good enough it is. I ran into just this situation a few years later.

We were living in California and the S&L crisis had just passed which meant there were a lot of banks around with the name "Federal" in them (as in the federal government had bailed the banks out and now basically owned them). I was banking at Fidelity Federal and had my checking account, business account and mortgage there. (Its convenient to apply for a mortgage from the same back where your checking account is--when they want to know your account balance and last six months history, you can tell them to go look it up themselves.) Anyways, out of boredom I had started reducing the fractions on my checks sometimes. Like 50/100 is the same as 1/2, and in fact back in sixth grade if you wrote down 4/8 for an answer instead of 1/2, you were likely to get marked off by the teacher--it wasn't proper. So I started writing amounts like 19/25 on my checks. Then I noticed something even stranger.

SIDENOTE (for those under 30) Once apon a time the world did not run on plastic & electrons. It ran on paper. Specifically little rectangular pieces of paper, a little smaller than money, called checks. They came from the printer in little books, and we'd carry one around with us everywhere and called them "checkbooks", and they had your name & address on them and a little number on the corner which went up on each successive page. The first one was 101, then 102, etc. Actually, a check with '101' on it made you look like a newbie, so if you were really hip, you ordered your first book of checks (for your checkbook) starting with 501 or something. Then you looked really cool. And then the really bizarre part was that after you wrote a check and gave it to the store, and then the store sent it to your bank to exchange for dollars, and the bank took the money out of your account; it saved up all these little scraps of paper and sent them back to your at the end of the month. I know, you're thinking crazy, but that's what they did.

Anyways, one day I was looking at the checks that came back from the bank (ok, must have been a really slow day), and I noticed that somebody had taken the check that I wrote for eighteen dollars and 19/25ths, and had entered 19/25ths into their adding machine to verify that it came out to 0.76 and had noted on the check that it was indeed 0.76 and they had initialed it. I couldn't think of one possible reason why you would do that, but for some reason I decided that it was my mission in life to keep that guy employed, by writing every check from that day on as an odd fraction. Now even numbers were easy enough to reduce, I could divide any number between 2 and 98 by 2 easily enough, but the odd numbers were a little trickier. You can't really reduce 33/100 exactly. But then I had a wild idea. Maybe I didn't need too. Maybe I only needed to get close (like say 0.005 close). 1/3 was 0.3333333, but it rounded down to 0.33. That ought to keep that poor accountant busy for hours. Now I just needed some way to come up with the right fraction that was close enough for any decimal amount.

The solution turned out to be simple. Let the computer try a hundred numbers that didn't work and then have it stop when it found one that did. I told it to start with 0 / 1, adding one to the top if it was too small and one to the bottom if it was too big. No finesse, no optimizations; just brute force. For 0.33 it would just try 0/1, 1/1, 1/2, and then hit 1/3. For something a little harder, like 0.37 it would try: 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 2/4, 2/5, 2/6, 3/6, 3/7, 3/8, 3/9, 4/9, 4/10, 4/11, 5/11, 5/12, 5/13, 5/14, 6/14, 6/15, 6/16, 6/17, 7/17, 7/18 and then finally get 7/19 (which is 0.368421). Notice how it runs over the same ground a lot, like 1/2 2/4 3/6 or 2/5 4/10, but who cares. The core routine is three lines long:

Eventually I souped it up a little, adding another test to capture the results within both 0.005 and 0.001 (just for some variety), and I also made a wrapper that would call that function for all values between 0.01 and 0.99 so that I could make a little cheat sheet to carry around in my checkbook and use when I was at the store and needed to pay with a check.

Don't get a chance to use that routine much anymore these days. Press a button, pay the bill. Occasionally you might see someone in the checkout line writ ting a small novel in order to pay for two gallons of milk and a bunch of bananas, but the check book is pretty much extinct. Too bad, I kind of miss that guy in accounting.

Words of wisdom from the lunch table.

2006-04-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

Hanging out with friends at the lunch table, they arrived at this bit of wisdom.

"Catsup is the duct tape of condements."
-- Willy W.

Sounds yummy. Maybe I'll stick to mustard.

How to use up an entire airline flight, and then some.

2006-04-14T11:25:00.000-07:00

Regular sudoku is pretty easy once you know a handful of rules to narrow down positions. I try to do the medium & hard ones without any pencil marks, but the extra hard I usually use pencil marks on. Still, I seldom take more than 30 minutes to do one.

This thing on the other hand took me hours. You spend a lot of time chasing down dead ends. Not sure I need that kind of aggravation on a regular basis. Maybe I'll just go back to the normal ones.

Random connections

2006-04-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

I don't think anyone actually reads my blog, except a few friends of mine. What's curious is how many people end up here accidentally. There they were, searching for something harmless, and poof, I end up being in the top ten results just out of pure coincidence.

Its really not my fault. I didn't set out to be the #1 results in google images for Maxstar 140, in the top 20 for dead hp kayak or the #3 results on the web for technical difficulties. It just sort of happened. And I've written about so many different things, that I end up with a lot of people bumping into old stuff I've written.

Just this week, I got a comment from The Modern Machinist who has a quite interesting site, at least I think its interesting. Its all in Russian, and thanks to his address starting with '-', babelfish can't load the page and translate it for me.

It does have some interesting images though. Kind of russian mythology crossed with a bit of Miyazaki.

Getting past technology

2006-04-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

I really like my JVC camera, even more so now that 4GB SD cards are only $129 and 8gb compact flash hard drives are $150, but as I gather up directories of clips and face the finite limits of my hard drive, I'm frustrated by the proprietary format the files are created in.

Actually its not strictly proprietary, its a MOD file which at least a handful of different companies and software programs know about. One of which is Power DVD which came with the camera. While I guess I could install Power DVD on every computer I might want to watch my clips on, I was thinking there had to be a better way.

It occured to me tonight that the camera didn't come with any Mac software, and there had to be at least one mac user out there that bought this camera and then tried to read the files that it created. So I pulled out my handy internet indexing tool and entered jvc mc500 mac. The results for the first entry were very promising:

As a Mac user I was initially disconcerted to find that the MC-500 had no Mac oriented software at all.
None. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Ahah. This person obviously found the solution, and indeed he had: Squared 5 MPEG Streamclip. Crossing my fingers, I went to the web site and discovered there were converters to decode or re-code those crazy MOD files for both Mac OSX and Windows XP. So I downloaded the PC version, ripped out all traces of Quicktime, loaded the referenced KL Quicktime Alternative and loaded my first clip. Seconds later I had saved out the file as a normal MPG file and now can read the files without any trouble in Windows Media Player and VLC. They're even a little smaller.

Click for 4MB MPEG file

Obviously the best solution would be if the camera output normal files in the first place, but this will do as a workaround until someone comes out with an affordable HDV solid state 3-chip videocamera.

In the news.

2006-04-07T20:00:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working for a company called IMMI that is a big secret, but we did just get /.'d. A lot of the commentors are so clueless its hillarious. "Why would anyone use a cellphone that monitors your music and tv listening habits?" How about because you get a free cellphone and free cellphone service? Heck, even I'll wear T-shirts with company logos on them if they give them to me for free. Though that's perhaps more because I'd be rather be spending my time at trade shows instead of department stores.

It just doesn't get any funnier than real life

2006-04-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

The wife is sniffing the air and complaining:

"What's that smell."
"It smells awful, like skunks."
...
"Oh, its my cooking."

Note: It didn't taste nearly as bad as it smelled.

2006-04-02T21:00:00.000-07:00

Well March is past finally. We used a lot of wood, and a fare number of pellets. Not as much as previous months, but still pretty heavy usage, as it was snowing right up until the end of the month.

Here's the usage at this point:

November	1,200
December	1,720
January	2,000
February	1,280
March	1,080
April	...

Its still freezing at night, but the wood stove seems to keep up with it most of the time. The basement itself is getting cold though, and so I continue to run the stove just to keep my workarea warm enough. Home Depot and Walmart both have more pellets in stock at this point, so I should be fine if I decide to top off the last of my reserves.

The big success was keeping the propane heat from coming on for most of the entire month. I think it came on twice. I haven't gone out in the mud and checked the tank, but I have great hopes that we've used very little of it. Given the price of propane these days, that would be a big help.

Passionate about metal

2006-03-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

The other thing the Creating Passionate Users people are looking for, is passion for causes.

Due to the odd circumstances of there being a window in my woodstove, I became curious about the temperatures going on there, and the possibilities of doing stuff like working metal with that heat. That led me to start experimenting, and then finally take some classes in metal working at night.

With that class, there was all kinds of things I could do. Melting down aluminum and casting it, cutting sheet metal and forming it, hand working copper and heated cast iron, machining metal on the lathe and mill. And then there was the welding.

But the high school shop that the community college rents was not the paragon of high technology. It was almost frightening to study a chapter in textbooks (written in the 1970s) and then look up and see exactly the same machines in the shop as in the illustrations for that chapter. Sure, you could make simple things, but when you really started letting the imagination run wild, you quickly got ahead of what the tools were capable of.

I kept hanging around after I finished the first class. I took the welding class after metal shop, then just started hanging around and poking at this and that. The teacher had bought a CNC plasma cutter in kit form, and another teacher had tried to put it together and managed to make a fine mess of things. So I took the project as my own and step by step fixed, adjusted, and replaced bits as needed, finally getting it to an operational state. Made a couple of cool things along the way too.

At some point the economy picked up again and I was making more money than I really needed, so I started picking up other things for the shop. First it was an infrared thermometer so we could read the temperature of the melted metal (they had been using a pyrometer before, but besides being slow, the high school students tended to leave the burner on while taking a reading, thus melting the wires in the probe.)

My next adventure was trying to bring the welding side up to snuff for TIG welding. The welding area has three types of welders available: gas, wire feed, and arc; and the arc machines can do stick welding, or TIG welding if you have the proper setup. Unfortunately if you go down to the local welding supply store, the proper setup for one machine can cost hundreds of dollars. Instead, thanks to the power of ebay, I was finding boxes of torches, collets, lava cups, back caps for next to nothing. Pretty soon I had more TIG stuff in my garage than the three local welding supply stores put together, and the school shop had complete setups for all of its Arc machines.

After hanging around so much at night, and coming by during the day; the teacher suggested I should just teach the class at night. That way he could take the night off (he teaches the highschool classes as well), and I could get paid. So now I run a dozen of so students every week through all the tools in the shop, and just hint at some of the possibilities. The students always come up with the most interesting ideas, from bringing in a titanium rod to experiment with on the lathe, to cutting designs with the plasma torch in quarter inch plate steel, and then pouring brass through the openings to create a brass/steel laminates. All the while I continue to collect more parts, tools, machines; all the while scheming to do bigger and crazier things, like getting a 3D prototyping machine to make shell molds for the foundry.

The other teacher shakes his head at all this activity. He was planning on retiring last year, but now has to stick around and figure out how to help raise the $25,000 for new stuff we want to do (on top of the $8,000 he's already come up with to pay for things I brought in after paying for with my own money). A few more years, and we should have all the tools we need to build a electric race car, or rocket ship, or something else the students will come up with that I can't even imagine right now.

Passionate about pixels.

2006-03-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

Over at Creating Passionate Users they're currently fishing for book content, looking for users that are passionate. Out of the four things they are looking for, I've got two covered pretty well:

> 2) Anyone who is passionate about any tech product

I have always been a resolution nut. Screen space is king when setting up a computer. It probably came from having access to HP workstations back in college (circa 1986) where the screens did 1024x768, vs the sad state of "hi-res" on computers like the apple 2, ibm pc, etc. A few years later there was a bump to 1280x1024, then at Xerox I got the monster Sparc 2 with a 1170x900 color screen next to a 1600x1200 monochrome monitor. Ah the wonderful debugging sessions done with that real-estate.

About the mid nineties we had enough money to do some upgrades so I got myself the 24" super wide hidef Sony monitor: GDM-W900 which supported 1920x1200 resolution. This became my main screen, and outlasted several computer upgrades.

This was a great monitor, but it was a CRT--the last vacuum tube left in the computer from the 1950s. It weighed 130 pounds, used several hundred watts of power, was about two and a half feet deep (requiring a custom table with extra depth and re-enforcement), and its rounded screen created an interesting effect when sitting about 14 inches away, looking from the center to the edges was like looking out across the horizon of a planet from space. After many years, the CRT was dimming and losing focus; LCD panels were finally catching up, and my wallet was getting ready for another big purchase.

Finally, as I pondered new ways of spending thousands of dollars, I settled on the Apple Cinema 30 display for my new computer setup. More resolution than before, and a bigger physical size than the old 24" monitor. (The IBM T221 actually has more pixels, but is only a 22" display, so its just a lot of very tiny dots.) With a second smaller 20" LCD monitor beside it, turned on its side (so that it matches the apple monitor in height and pixels), I now have a workspace 3760x1600 (6MP). This is about as close as I'm going to get to my ultimate dream station with the technology available. Helping someone else out on their tiny 17" CRT running at 1024x768 is physically painful these days.

Besides allowing me to work with a multitude of programming windows, read tabloid size trade rag PDFs in 2 page mode with full resolution, or tracking four different web pages at the same time; the cinema display makes movies look great, and makes hidef content look even better.

I couldn't find anything interesting that exactly fit the resolution of the display, but I did find a fairly high resolution background image Earth at Night from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

more about my bigger screen.

Take your son to work day.

2006-03-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

What could be better than doing some father-son bonding, by taking your kid to work.

Ok, maybe not at that age. But my oldest is now five, so if one day at work is good, then having him fly out with me for a trip to California for a whole week--that would be insane.

That's how I spent my spring break.

Maybe some help

2006-03-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

I hate physical media, just cause it takes too much abuse in the real world.

Of all media, I hate tape the most to the point that I've removed all sources of it in my life. No more cassette tapes fading over time in my car or for my home music, no more floppy disks or cartridge tapes losing data when travelling between sites. And no more video tapes showing dropouts and color shifts.

For data storage, flash media has become my favorite, but that has not stopped me from occasionally running over one with a rolling chair or otherwise crushing them. Their diminutive size works against them in these cases, as well as when it comes time to keep track of them. (I've also lost several SD cards on various trips.)

For archiving, and purchasing pre-formatted data, CDs and DVDs are a large improvement, but they are not invulnerable either. One particular album I like, I've had to purchase 3 copies of. The first one was stolen, the second one was scratched beyond all hope of reading, and the third one was warped by heat (luckily after I ripped mp3s of it). My music collection now lives on various computer harddrives where I listen to it. But I still tend to scratch up disks from time to time.

Thanks to Make: Blog for the link to Instructables, there may be an answer. Brasso metal polish.

I'll have to give this a try.

Just not my day

2006-03-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

10am
Wife calls to check in. Lets me know its snowing a bunch. Suggests I stay out in the bay area longer. "Sorry, its a non-refundable ticket." I'll have to brave the storms whether I want to or not.

1pm
Call the airline just on the hope that they've declared Flagstaff a disaster area. "Oh, you're flight's been cancelled." "So Flagstaff is closed?" "No, actually, the San Jose flight was cancelled. You're rebooked at 6:20pm."

So now I'm supposed to be flying into Flagstaff at 11pm at night in the middle of a blizzard. The roads out of town are even closed. You can drive a car around hardly and they think they're going to get a plane in there?

5:30pm
Still no change in their optimism so I hand over my bright yellow bag of goodies to the luggage machine and wander through security.

9:30pm
The flight wasn't so bad up until the end when we hit the storms around Phoenix. That's right its a monsoon in the middle of the desert. Any guesses what's happening up at 7,000 feet? Snow maybe? Still the computer is showing on time so that's all they're giving me.

9:35pm
The flight's cancelled.

We're directed to go mozy over to the customer support desk and dutifully gather around while they come up with some creative solution at the rate of about two per hour. Being at the end of this long line, I get on my cell phone and call Flight-fund. They ask me what I want to do, and having no great desire to try driving a rental car up the hill without chains, I suggest that I go back where I was before and just pretend this never happens. They let me know that they can't re-arrange my schedule because the computer hasn't released the Flagstaff flight yet, but that I should run over to gate A30 and throw myself upon the agents there.

Being that I am at gate B7, I sort of shlep my way over to A30--which is pretty far out there (maybe half a mile). Sufficiently winded and a little over-heated, I pant in front of the gate counter while listening to the agents wring their hands over not having enough flight attendants to send out the flight on time.

After a bit, I finally get the chance to tell my story, and they graciously offer to re-direct me back to San Jose. After I get the new ticket in-hand, I embarrassingly point out that I also checked a bag on the way out. They give my 1 in 3 odds that someone is paying enough attention to redirect the bag. I don't really care--I just don't want to sleep in the airport for the next two nights.

11:45pm
We arrive safe and sound in San Jose after a rough start climbing back out of the storm. Its always a comforting feeling when right after take-off the engines wind down in speed and the nose pitches down. But some how we manage to stay in the air and make it back where I started several hours ago. Of course my bag didn't make it, so I fill out the appropriate paperwork and leave it at that. After waking my friend Tim up, who drove back down and then took a nap in the parking lot, we head back to his place for the night.

1am
On a lark, I decide to call back and see about getting home eventually. After talking them out of sending my right back to Phoenix to be stuck all day again; I get them to book me for Monday. This takes about fifteen minutes on hold, as apparently the reservation computer still runs on cogs and belts. During that time they come back on the line and let me know that they've graciously decided not to charge me $100 for changing my reservation. Wow. You couldn't get me to Flagstaff tonight, and so you're not going to charge me extra to go another time.

I say nothing, as I'm too tired to respond with any wit or intelligence, and don't want to jinx my good fortune. Maybe I'll just go to bed now.

The grandslam of package delivery

2006-03-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

We're a little bit out of town--enough so that I feel a little bad dragging the delivery trucks all the way out to our house to deliver something, especially when its a single box, or small order. Its even worse when we get multiple trucks coming out on the same day. Just seems like there ought to be a better way.

Today we hit the grand slam of overlapping delivery waste.

It started with DHL which drove out a regular van to bring me 70 pounds of welding cable. That was probably the biggest package they had in the truck, as there seemed to be only a handful of other items rattling around a mostly empty cargo area. Very quick delivery I have to admit as it shipped out of Florida three days previous.

Next up was power converter from Flint, Michigan via UPS. This took a more typical week to get here. Its an odd week around here these days where UPS isn't out to our house at least twice in a week, and I'm sure there's been weeks when they've been out almost every day.

Next, Fedex Ground was out with an especially embarrassing delivery. One Switch. Even the box was impressive, it was probably smaller than a deck of cards. Still, I was glad to get it, as this switch fixes the Miller XMT 300 which wouldn't run off the front current dial control, as the control voltage was getting stopped by a bad switch.

Finally, not to leave my wife out entirely, she received a package from her mom through the Post Office. Of course the post office won't deliver packages to our house. Since our mailbox is down the road a bit, instead they leave us a little note telling us how fortunate we are that we get to waste gas driving into town, fighting our fellow citizens over a space since the city refuses to come up with adequate parking, and then hang out in line for twenty or thirty minutes (if we manage to avoid a busy time) to get a box.

Coming into the final bend

2006-03-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

So February didn't end up being that bad. A couple warm days (where warm is > 40° highs) and I was able to keep the burn to the minimum (midnight to 8am) instead of starting earlier. Even better, last night I didn't run it at all, though a chill has already descended upon the basement.

This is a good thing, as my reserve stock is down to its last couple of bags. I'd like to pick up a few more bags just to carry on, but the situation for purchase is not that great: home depot has been chronically out of pellets, and is rationing those small amounts that it does get in to 10 bags per customer, and to add insult to injury its raised its prices by over a dollar ($4.11/bag); mavrick has raised its prices from $3.50 to $4, and now $5/bag and to make matters worse, all its stock has been sitting outside where it got rained on last week, and pretty much nobody else has any at all. Maybe I'll keep upstairs warm with the wood stove and go back to wearing three layers of clothes in the basement.

Here's the usage to date:

November	1,200
December	1,720
January	2,000
February	1,280
March	...	depends on supply

So, three tons and counting. Wonder if I could strike up a deal with the plant in showlow to ship me four pallets direct for next year.

Update: Walmart has just realized that people in flagstaff use pellets, and after days of trucks arriving loaded high with them, they've managed to fill their entire garden center with pallets of pellets. Only $3.77/bag, so at least they're not being mercenary about it. Better head over there tomorrow and grab me some.

The most amazing customer support

2006-02-27T22:00:00.000-07:00

People are quick to tell you about when they've had a bad experience with an airline, store clerks, a mechanic, or some snafu at the local restaurant; but our culture has become so focused on price that, let's face it, these days bad service is the norm. We're so cheap, that there's no money in taking care of us. When someone tells me they had an awful flight on Northwest, I'm thinking to myself, "so what." Tell me if you had a flight that was on time--that would be remarkable. Calling a business oh the phone has gotten so bad, that often you don't know what country you've connected to, and if the accent doesn't prevent communication, the cultural gap does. So when something does go smoothly, or I find I'm talking with someone that has any idea about the subject I'm enquiring about, its a pretty remarkable thing, and I think, worth mentioning.

But before we get to the amazing experience, a little backstory. Well, ok, a lot of backstory.

So I had purchased a miller XMT 304, along with a bunch of other welders; but in order to run the big machines right, you need 3-phase power. Unfortunately when we pulled a the dinosaur that was there before, it was only using single phase 480V and there weren't enough wires to use 3-phase. So a few days later I went and bought some solid #10 wire, and it turned out to be stiff enough that I was able to jamm it up through 30 feet of conduit (with three wires already in the conduit) and down into the outlet box behind the welder. Then I hooked up the wire to the 3-phase shutoff switch, wired in the welder, and it still was only single phase. Finally we broke out a volt-meter and verified that one of the leads feeding that panel was dead also. Sigh.

So, we back traced the wire upstairs to the main panel (which is not labeled), and after turning off just about everything in the shop, we found the breaker that was feeding it. Turns out its a 2-pole breaker, not a 3-pole breaker. Luckily the wire ran all the way to the panel, so the problem was just the breaker. But this was no ordinary namby-pamby breaker, this was a 3-phase 150A I-Line manly-man breaker.

Normal household breaker vs Industrial Breaker of DOOM.
[click through to large image for full manly effect]

Just to give you some appreciation for the difference in sizes we're talking here: the contact lugs on a normal breaker are designed to connect to a 12 or 14 gauge wire which is about the size of a pencil lead, and can handle a current of 15 to 20 amps. The lugs on this Square D breaker can handle wire so large, they don't have a gauge for it. Just the copper part is about the size of your average garden hose, and then there's a rubber jacket around that. Instead of a screw head, the tightening nut takes a giant 3/8 Allen wrench (the same size you use to unstick a 1/2 horsepower garbage disposal). Not something you're going to find in the average homeowner's toolbox.

Everything about this part is large. Including it's price, which is over $1,400. I found these breakers online in the Square D catalog. Well, almost. What I had was a KAB26150 and what I needed was a KAB36150, but the catalog didn't mention it. All they talked about was a KA26150 (2-pole) which was $1,463 and its big brother the KA36150 (3-pole) which was $1,820; and would supposedly solve all my problems.

Now, not wanting to spend twice as much as I paid for the welder itself, I turned to my solution of all things expensive: Ebay. There I found a wide variety of KA and FA (the smaller brother which goes up to 100amps) breakers ranging in price from $20 to $200. Still no sign of a KAB or FAB, but what the heck, it's probably not important anyways. I finally settled on a FA36100 (3-pole, 100 amp) for $52 and I figured I was good to go. Even that was overkill for the line, as only the single welder is on that circuit and it draws 18.3 amps at maximum power. The original breaker could have run an entire room full of welders and still not have broken a sweat.

So a few days later, the breaker arrived on my back doorstep, and the next day I went down and with the shop teacher took apart the main panel, and stuck the new breaker in. Thankfully I didn't electrocute myself, and after wrestling the main 800 amp shutoff switch back to the on position, we were in business and the welder was happy.

But that part number was still bugging me. What was the B for anyways?

On a lark, I decided to call and ask. So I pulled up the Contact Us page, got the phone number (888-778-2733), and called it. It started off with a typical voice mail routing system, "Press 1 for Motor Control, 2 for Automation and Control, blah blah blah." I pressed 4 for Circuit Protection, and then a guy came on the line.

"Hello, thanks for calling Square D. How can I help you."
thinking I'd need to be routed to the right department/person, I started off somewhat high level:
"I have a question about a 3-phase I-Line circuit breaker part number."
"Yes, what is it?"
um ok...
"I'm changing out a breaker from 2-pole to 3-pole and its currently a KAB26150. I was wondering what the difference between the KAB and a normal KA was."
"The KAB has a bolt on the clamp that attaches to the I-line rails to increase its holding power. This is in addition to the lugs for the wire side. There are a set of black caps at the top, along the I-line edge the pull up and expose the screw head which you loosen to remove the breaker from the panel."
wow, I'm impressed
"But in reality, you don't really need it. What's your application?"
"This is going into a school shop."
"Right. Then the KA should be fine. The KAB was just in response to a holding specification that GE came up with in the 80s to try and lock us out of commercial bids. But the the KA & FA series have been in use for over 20 years now and they've proved themselves in the market. You should be fine."

No redirecting to somebody else, no looking it up, just rattled right off the top of his brain. The explanation, how to use it, and the entire political history behind it. This guy new his stuff.

Yup, there's the cap for the screw head and up inside (way up, look for it ...) is the screw that tightens up on the power rail. How cool is that.

sparklines sparklines and more sparklines

2006-02-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of reporting and analysis on various collections of data where the number of samples ranges from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of millions and I just can't see how normal graphs could have remotely coped with this. At best they could have summarized the data, pointed out one or two facts, at worst they would just have obscured all meaning. The one answer I keep applying over and over is ...

Sparklines.
It shows the littlest detail, while at the same time lets you step back and see the forest for the trees (or the trend from the data). I'm worried I've found the golden hammer and will forever reduce every problem ahead of me into a nail, but it seems in this case to be a good fit.

At the same time, I'm also trying to refine my rendering of these things. The original method with an entire <TABLE> in every cell was a little heavy handed and of course didn't work at all on my phone. For the example up above, several of the strips are just single height bars of different colors which I was able to do with <TD> blocks using width and color control in the TD tag. Even creating the entire strip ends up being child's play in perl:

Where $h->{$_} contains the array reference for one strip, and $color[$_] contains the color for the integer value at that point. Could have used names in the hash array, and a hash for the colors, but several years of assembly programming back in ancient times still leave their mark on me today.

I even got more daring, and did some variable height stuff using rowspan. The tick marks under the graphs are a trivial example. You want something like this:

Which you can do with a couple of <TR> where the larger ticks just stretch across rows. (I've magnified the effect here a bit, but its easy to change just by changing the heights of the three different TR's. Not wanting to type much, I generated all this with a little perl as well.

Growing the bars up is a little more tricky. I tried a couple of things for the battery life chart, and finally realized that you sort of had to fill in from the top. First you treat the top row as special, and you fill in every row with the inverse of the height of the bar you want (with a special case for bars that go all the way to the top). So if your graph has 10 steps, you go across the top row filling in blank bars of height 10-f(x) for each spot (and filling in solid bars for those places where f(x) = 10). Then after that you just step each row filling in just the bars that are that high.

So if for instance, my data points were: 6, 8, 2, 3, 1, 0, 3
My first row would have six blank bars of height, 4, 2, 8, 9, 10, 7; then the next row (row 9 counting down from the top) would have nothing in it, the next row (row 8) would have one bar of height 8, next row would be empty, next row (row 6) would have one, and on and on:

And once again, I found the solution to implement this was rather simple:

## first row pass ## fill in pass

Sigh. Now that I can see what I'm doing, I see I have a lot to do. Better get to it.

The trouble in owning a home

2006-02-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

After college, I moved out of the dorms into my first of many apartments. I figured I had entered the real world and was the master of my own destiny. Actually I was only partially correct. I was paying someone else to keep the roof over my head in one piece, and the things within the walls in their place (what limited facilities my first meager place had). Later I would realize what a sheltered life I lived back then.

I now own my own home, and all the trouble that that brings with it. Today's particular adventure was a loose drain hose on the washing machine (the connection was not a very good design--ah the joys of using the builder with the lowest bid) which managed to get about half the wash water down the drain, and the other half down the wall and all over the floor.

The washer and dryer are down in the basement, which is almost all concrete. Almost, except for the sheetrock wall right behind the washing machine. Still, being eight feet below ground level, I've had dampness and even the occasional puddle on the ground, so the damage was not extreme. No servers were fried, and no priceless equipment was ruined. A couple of cardboard boxes got wet, along with some particle board shelving and some throw rugs.

With a little re-arranging and a few minutes with the shop vac, things were on the road to repair. But at this point, with everything moved away from where it had been, I realized a lot of it should probably go somewhere else, so it was an afternoon of shuffling stuff here and there and tucking things away into different places than where they had started.

Par for the course when you have your own place. I just hope I never have to move.

Digital beats analog

2006-02-18T23:00:00.000-07:00

I was one of the first ones to get a digital camera. Back in the stone age of digital cameras, I couldn't really afford one of the high end ones, but Kodak finally came out with the DC20, a low end camera and I was all over it. The pictures were 493x373 and it stored about 24 pictures in its meager built in flash, but it was less than $400 and I got one.

Sure the picture is worse than a $10 web cam these days, but this was 1996. I took a bunch of photos with it, and given the limited bandwidth back then, the image size was just right for the web (nobody was trying to print digital photos back then). You couldn't go mad with taking pictures given its limited memory and the frustratingly slow serial interface for downloading the pictures (which would often get stuck), but once you finally got the data off the camera onto your computer, you were all set to take more pictures.

So I got used to taking pictures even when I wasn't committed to the result, and thus discovered the freedom that is frictionless photos. Jump forward ten years, and now I'm doing the same thing with video.

While tape was a great step over film (shooting a motion picture, even a low budget one, is an expensive proposition just from the point of view of the film itself, even if you do use shorts), and digital data on tape with digital transport to the computer made things painless to move around; digital storage for video takes the process from some pain to no pain. And standing at the point of frictionless video is truly remarkable.

Yes, I finally got the JVC GZ-MC500, a tiny little unit slightly larger than a tennis ball, that shoots video (and still pictures) on to compact flash and secure digital data cards. The thing is so small that every surface is covered with connectors and slots: battery here, charger there, video out down below, USB link around the corner, SD underneath behind the screen (which swivels up and out of the way).

So I get the thing, unpack it, turn it on (it came with the battery half charged, instead of dead), start taking a movie of the kids running around, and my three year old comes up and wants to see. He's used to being able to see pictures on the digital camera as we take them, so I try to explain that this takes movies, not still pictures. "Zacky SEE it!" he insists. So I switch it from record to playback, bring up the clip in the menu and show it to him. He grabs my brand new toy, and goes running over to his brother to show him, "Look! Zacky and Max." He then goes on to replay the clip ten times in a row, finally handing the unit back to me after he's memorized every last bit of it.

There's no way I could have done that with a tape based unit. I would have been cringing at the first replay (just due to dropouts), let alone be able to explain the concept of tape shuttling with rewind, fast forward, tape counters, etc. Now the shot is the shot, and doing anything and everything with it is instantly possible. And my kids will never know there was any other way to do it.

Some small technical difficulties

2006-02-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

The web site on which a large amount of my photos live, has been down for several days, for which I apologize to those needing access to those images. I end up writing about such odd stuff, that if someone else is unfortunate enough to be looking for the same thing, they end up on my page instead of somewhere more useful. If you want a picture of a Miller Maxstar 140, I'm not sure the first choice out of the entire net should be a welder sitting on the floor of my garage ready to go to camp. But the web is a fickle mistress, and so here you are (or at least here a couple hundred visitors a day end up after taking a wrong turn at Google.)

Since I was a unix head in college, I had to break with the crowd upon graduation, and bought myself a unix workstation for home use. Actually it was for work, but work was a startup based out of my one room 300 square foot apartment, so it was with me every waking moment. Actually I got two DecStations right off, and as soon as I could come up with more money, I also added an overpriced SGI 4D35. Over the next couple of years I added more machines, including IBM R6000 servers, HP 7000 RISC workstations, more SGI machines, and some Sun Sparc machines.

When it came time to put up a web server, a Sparc 2 was chosen, as the SGI's still had value running desktops, and the other machines were already dinosaurs. When it started getting long in the tooth (SunOS 4.1.3 never did have an ANSI C compiler for instance), I picked up some used Ultra 10s, one of which became extreme.infomagic.net.

It was handy having a ultrasparc for a web server. It never died, as cheaper PC hardware tended to do back in that day. Linux was already pretty popular, so there weren't to many script kiddies trying to hack into Solaris (I think we did get taken down once though). And every once in a while we'd need to try something weird, that was only available on Suns at the time (like this crazy environment from Sun called Java 1.0). This machine has served us well, but the new ISP has decided that it want to move all the hosted equipment to rackmount, so the Ultra went away on Friday.

Unfortunately I was travelling on Saturday, so I couldn't mess with it right away. I did manage to move some files around Saturday night, but didn't make a lot of progress until the following day when I started messing with the config files. After a couple false starts, I finally had the basics down and went to start things up, only to get:

(13)Permission denied: httpd: could not open error log file /usr/local/www/extreme/log/error.log.

I went and messed around with permissions set, users, etc. But couldn't make any progress beyond that. It didn't help that 'httpd -v' didn't return anything. Not very confidence inspiring. Finally I turned to google and got a hint from this article.

Subject: istalled fine (Fedora core 4) but HTTPD problem
> I can not get Apache (httpd) to start anymore..
> Looking at the '/var/log/httpd/error.log' it is showing me this:
> (13)Permission denied: httpd: could not open error log file /home/www/web1/log/error.log.
> Unable to open logs

> The directory is there, but the error.log file not!

Have you enabled the Fedora Security extensions or set an higher security level sa suggested in the howto? For me it looks like SE Linux or a similar extension is enabled.
It's the third image on http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_4_p2.

Turns out that SE linux is allergic to web servers. At least normal ones where you haven't locked down every possible directory, scripting language, and redirects. I'm sure its possible to get it working with selinux if you have a couple of weeks to work out all the issues, but if you're just trying to get it to work out of the box, the answer seems to be turn selinux off. So after a quick trip over to /etc/selinux/config and a reboot, httpd was up and running.

So images are back, mpaz4 is actually running three different web sites and a couple of other services, and as long as it doesn't reboot, everything will be fine (not all of the network-scripts are right, and so there's some handholding after boot to get routes and addresses up properly).

Cool java

2006-02-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

Went and placed an order today for some flash memory card readers, and mistyped my card number at first. The form caught the problem without even a submit, which means it had the code for checksumming right inline. So I pulled up the source and dug it out: <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"&gt function validateCreditCard(s) { var v = "0123456789"; var w = ""; for (var i=0; i < s.length; i++) { x = s.charAt(i); if (v.indexOf(x,0) != -1) { w += x; } } var j = w.length / 2; if (j < 6.5 || j > 8 || j == 7) { return false; } var k = Math.floor(j); var m = Math.ceil(j) - k; var c = 0; for (var i=0; i<k; i++) { a = w.charAt(i*2+m) * 2; c += a > 9 ? Math.floor(a/10 + a%10) : a; } for (var i=0; i<k+m; i++) { c += w.charAt(i*2+1-m) * 1; } return (c%10 == 0); } function validateCardSecurityCode(s) { var v = "0123456789"; var w = ""; if(s.length < 3) { return false; //alert('too short'); } for (var i=0; i < s.length; i++) { x = s.charAt(i); if (v.indexOf(x,0) == -1) { //alert(v.indexOf(x,0)); return false; } } return true; } </script&gt Very cool.

Time Travelling for Technology

2006-02-10T17:21:00.000-07:00

I haven't really made great strides catching up on my EE Times reading. I'm still about 23 months behind. Still, I haven't fallen any farther behind, so I suppose that's a good sign.

Ran across this story in the March 08, 2004 paper:

Nanochip Inc, a startup developing a MEMS storage product somewhat similar to IBM Corp's Millipede research effort, said last week it has secured $20 million in second-round funding that will be used to take its technology to the product stage.
Gordon Knight, CEO of the 10-person startup, said the Nanochip technology is capable of terabit-per-square-inch densities, is not fragile, and can be rewritten billions of times.
IBM's read/write head addresses the entire surface of the media. "There are technical merits to both approaches, but I think our approach is more-manufacturable," Knight said.
Meanwhile, Nanochip has "a ton of work to do" to prepare a product for market, added Knight, who estimated that Nanochip may be in production by the end of 2005.

Excellent--its early 2006, lets see how they're doing.

Web site is is still there, but doesn't look like its been updated since March of 2004 when the article came out. Verifying that by browsing the image/ directory. Everything was thrown up 07-Mar-2004 except for one image that was updated on the 17th.

Web site has a phone number, so what the heck, lets call it:

"Hello, this is Kim." (not her real name)
"Is this Nanochip?" I ask.
"Yes."
"Are you still in business?"
"Yes."
"Are you still actively developing your high density storage solution?"
"Um. Yes."
"Ok, thanks."
"Thats all?" she asks.
"Sure."
"Oh. Ok. Goodbye."

This company was originally founded by Tom Rust who put his own money into starting it up as well as drawing on investments from so other personal investors. It doesn't sound like they've moved very far past the early garage days.

Probably confused the heck out of them with my call ...

"Who was that that called?"
"I don't know?"
"You don't know? What did they want?"
"They wanted to know if we were still in business."
"That's it?"
"Yes."
"Weird."
"Yes."

Accumulating a few things here and there (a novice's inventory of welders)

2006-02-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Looking back over last year, counting up stuff for taxes, I noticed that I had bought a few welders. Then I checked again, and realized I had bought a lot of welders. Like 10. You may be thinking, "why on earth does he need 10 welders." Well, I don't. But here is what I was thinking at the time.

Esab Heliarc 160i		This was the first welder I bought back when I was rather poor but still wanted to get a welder. I had been buying up TIG part lots and so had already amassed quite a lot of torches, collets, tungsten, hoses, lava cups, etc. I figured it was time to get a machine I could use. I had borrowed a Maxstar from the welding shop before, but wanted high frequency start and a gas solenoid (so I didn't have to turn the gas on before welding). Unfortunately I didn't have enough money for a working unit, so this item was purchased in non-working condition. But it came with schematics so I figured, "how hard could it be to fix it." Turns out that was not the right question, the right question should have been, "when am I going to have time to fix it." The answer so far? Not any time soon. Trivia: This is actually a european unit which will run on 240V or 400V. At 400V it will put out 200amps.
HTP Invertig 201		Shortly after buying the other broken welder, the startup I was working for got some funding; and because I am a cynical old crudgemudgion, I got a large check. A very large check. (How large? Well part of it I used to buy a highlander.) Another part of it I used to buy this and a big MIG machine. This thing has all the bells and whistles. 200A power, AC/DC, pulsing, wave balance control, HF start, blah blah blah. The interface is a little clunky to use, but it welds just fine. (Better then me, that's for sure.) It is also a european import from Stel, though its relabeled from the original (also imported to England by Murex).
Miller Maxstar 140 2 x STL 2 x STH		While the HTP could do anything and everything, it wasn't a very mobile machine. Kind of like the ancient luggable computers from Kaypro, and compaq; packed up in a suitcase, resembling a portable sewing machine (back when they were made from cast iron). Yes you can get a 40 pound machine into the back of your car, but you're not likely to want to do it very often. So when I noticed that you could pick up a Maxstar for less than $500 from time to time, I suggested that the school should get one (or two, or three, or however many I could find). I started out geting one STL for the school (with a nice case), then I saw a STH machine with a finger tip remote, so I decided to get that for myself. Then another 140 showed up that nobody seemed to want, so I got that as well, and then recently there was another one languishing around for $410, so I decided what the heck. So we currently have three at the school, and the one I was going to keep is now at my dad's house. That's because, I then picked up a 150 ... Still, these are brilliant little machines, and with 240V sources, put out full power for whatever you want to do. They are amazingly quiet, and produce a very stable arc (unlike the older transformer based machines). At 110V they're limited to 90 amps, so I wouldn't try to stickweld that way, but for sheet metal work where you only need 40-60 amps, its more than adequit. Lift arc starting takes a little getting used to (you touch the metal, then lift off), but actually allows you to place the electrode exactly before putting down your visor (like you would do with MIG), so it works out pretty good.
Miller Maxstar 150 STL		Right after I had picked up a 140 STH for myself, this unit showed up online in a case with a remote, for a price I couldn't refuse. What's better about it? Come on, that's easy: 150 is 10 bigger than 140. Actually, it has a number of improvements over the previsous model. For one it can drive TIG at full power even using 110V assuming the plug doesn't melt. It also has a gas solenoid, so it turns on and off the argon for you automatically (a definite help for me). Otherwise its the same profile and weight, and comes in a nice carrying case like the 140. The STH has even more bells and whisles, including high frequence start, and pulsing. The HF start would be cool. The pulsing I could probably live without. Unless I'm willing to practise a lot more, I think turning down the power to 10 amps for something really thin is a lot easier then trying to get the pulsing settings worked out for some particular weld. Maybe its useful for stainless, so far all I've managed to do with stainless is create a tortured warped mess. Anyways, this is my new favorite on-the-go machine. Now if only my argon tank didn't weigh so much.
Chicago Electric WSM 130A		Now TIG machines are expensive, more so than any other kind of machine. For $200 I can pick up an acetylene torch kit, or a used MIG welder, or even a buzz box (AC stick). But for TIG you need to spend at least $500 for anything useful. Unfortunately there are a couple companies out there claiming you can buy something for less and still TIG weld. This unit is one of those. Harbor Freight will sell you this setup for $200 (+shipping) and you get what you pay for (or less). The machine does 130 amps TIG on 240V (and 90 amps stick, I don't know why they even bother with this). This is the same power you can get out of the Maxstar with 110V. But it gets worse. The duty cycle at 130 is 15%. That's 90 seconds of welding, then take a 10 minute break. I'm not sure it can even handle doing a eight inch seem weld without overheating. Still if you're only aspirations are to melt some sheet metal screws and fix the crack in shovel blade, this might be up to the job. So why did I get it? Well, I thought a used one for $120 would be useful for people to try it out in the shop and discover just how lame a machine it is. At least if they decided to still get it, they'd know what they were in for.
Miller XMT 300 CC		While 200 amps is fine and all. Sometimes you need a little more power. And sometimes you just want to get crazy. For a few dollars more, this beat up, patched together, inverter-of-doom was willing to put out 375 amps, and was loaded with all the TIG extras like a solenoid and HF start. Unfortunately all the power is only for those studly enough to have three phase power. The machine will run on single phase, but is only rated at 225A in that mode. So unless I can talk the power company into running three phase to my garage (or I pickup a used 20HP rotary phase converter online), I might as well keep it at the shop. The nice thing about power is the higher the voltage, the lower the current. So while it would try and suck 60A out of my wall socket in the garage, it only needs 20A to run at 480/3Ø. That means I can use inexpensive 12/4 to make an extension cord for it and be able to wheel it around anywhere in the shop or out into the parking lot. Now I just have to figure out how to get power for the water cooler, and I can run a WP18 water cooled 350A TIG torch with it too.
Miller XMT 304 CC/CV		Stick welding with quarter inch rod is fun and all, but if you've gone to all the trouble to regulate this much power, wouldn't it make sense to be able to switch over to holding the voltage steady so you could wire feed with it? CC/CV is the answer (constant current/constant voltage), and when this machine showed up in Vegas, I sent my friend Tom over with cash in hand to pick it up. There it sat for a couple of weeks until I found someone who had a friend that was coming to visit from Vegas, and we hooked this machine up this weekend. It burns like a champ, has a nice digital display, and more modes than even I know what to do with. Unfortunately its just a power source. MIG welding requires a wire feeder, and there's no extra help for TIG. Sure you can scratch start or lift arc it, but I'd like the HF & gas control like 300 CC. Miller is happy to sell you an add on, but they want several hundred just for that, and then its only rated at 250 amps. At least the wire feeders I've seen recently are rated 600 amps 100% duty cycle. Gads.

So that was my plan this year, at least for TIG. (I'll save my MIG machine acquisitions for another story) Now I have more welders in my own inventory that the school has in their entire shop. Course I'm happy to keep most of them over at the school anyways. I've got keys, and I don't have to pay the electric bill. Mr Hess just shakes his head and wonders what I'll think up next.

Thinking way outside the box

2006-02-05T22:00:00.000-07:00

Was wondering a little far afield while reading up on installing Ruby on Rails, and I spotted this funny looking thing.

Ah, a helicopter, you might say. But its not an ordinary helicopter.

The first thing you notice about the Kama K-1200 is that it has no tail. To make up for it, it has two main rotors. The interesting thing is that the rotors overlap--a lot. Kind of like egg beaters. The thing is also very narrow, just wide enough for one person, so it looks kind of like somebody smashed it in a vise or something. Using a light-weight high-power turbine, the helicopter (which weighs a little under 6,000 pounds), can lift its own weight in cargo (another 6,000 pounds); making it popular for crane operations, logging and other cargo operations.

Unfortunately for some reason, only 27 were ever made, though the company supposedly started up production of a variation designed for fire-fighting in 2005. Certainly an odd creation, but I'm always glad to see people thinking up unique ideas to age old problems.

Turning the corner

2006-02-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Another month's gone, so its time to see how we're doing on the burning of the pellets. Survived some cold spells, on, lets see, 2,000 pounds of pellets. Hopefully that's the peak of our usage as I've gone through everything from Home Depot, the last of the bags from Maverick, and have only a few of the old Walmart bags left in the garage. So the usage so far stacks up:

November	1,200
December	1,720
January	2,000
February	?
March	?/2

That's a lot of pellets. Luckily usage seems to be dropping off, thanks mostly to a warm turn of weather. While some Februaries are marked by highs of 20°s and lows around -10° this winter has been pretty mild. This weekend's forecast is a high of 60° and a low of 29°. Barely cold enough to freeze water. Still with only 20 bags left in the garage I should probably pick up one more load. Unfortunately most places have stopped carrying it already (you can't really store pellets for a long time, they get wet and mushy), and Home Depot is rationing what little they can still get. Well, hopefully I can pick up some tomorrow at craft day.

Danger! Professionals at work

2006-01-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the "professionals" are alergic to safety devices, or just lazy; but I've never seen a carpenter with the blade cover not permanently disengaged on their saw, or a framer with the safety still on his nailgun, or a shop with the guards still on the grinders. I was helping out over at a mechanics shop and asked for some safety glasses before using a hand grinder and it took some serious looking around for them to fine a pair. Sigh.

Combine no safety guard with a location with a view, and the outcome is of little surprise. I mean, how many times have you been grinding or buffing a small part and you press a little to hard for a moment and the part is whipped away out of your hand? Happens to me all the time.

At least nobody was watching through the window.