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Random niftiness [10 May 2008|01:26pm] Following a somewhat random set of links, as one does, I came across this gallery of photos of trains and trams in various parts of the UK around 1950, with a few photo sets from other places in Europe. Lots and lots of photos, a significant fraction of which are in color, showing the trains and the places they went through, all taken by one person (who's now, sixty years later, creating the website). Just as some random examples, here's the beach in Swansea (1951), the Charing Cross Tube station (1950), and a sightseeing monorail in Barcelona (1956). (Oh, kightp, you might also find these stage props he's made interesting.) 1 comment|post comment

In which Windows earns my respect, and I need to upgrade my computer. [01 May 2008|11:55pm] [ mood | impressed. Also annoyed. ] So, I was poking about on the internet this evening, as one does, and my computer had a bit of a glitch where the browser locked up for a half-minute or so. I found this a bit distressing, and wondered if there was some sort of software issue. And then the whole computer froze for a moment, which seemed a bit more ominous. "I wonder why my Windows installation is getting this flaky," I thought, "it didn't do this ever until just recently." And then it spun up a disk, and went back to acting normally. And a little message box popped up, saying, "You've just lost a disk." Slightly perturbed, I went into the Disk Manager utility to investigate, and discovered that that wasn't entirely the extent of it; both disks attached to IDE0 had little yellow exclamation-point icons and "unreachable" notations, and the partitions on them were listed as "Failed Mirror". And it occurred to me that there was perhaps some pleasant luck in that all of my software RAID-0 arrays were set up across two controllers. Suddenly, the idea of the system dealing with this with merely a half-minute of inaccessable filesystem and five seconds of minor lockup didn't seem like an unreasonable thing at all. Anyhow, it seemed like it was probably not a good state to be continuing to run the system in, given the sudden lack of backups of a lot of my data and the sudden evidence of why backups are useful, so I shut it down and power-cycled it to see if that helped. Which just provided evidence that the problem was repeatable, and a reminder that the BIOS kind of needed to read one of those disks to get to a boot sector. So it's currently not rebooting. Still, I'm rather impressed at how well Windows dealt with that. And I guess that means that it's really time to go ahead with the motherboard upgrade I've been meaning to get around to doing for about a year. Sigh; I really wasn't looking forward to all the reinstalls that I need to do for that. (Hmm. Okay, maybe I'm still a little annoyed at Windows, given that I've been swapping a FreeBSD install around between several different computers and it's been perfectly happy with the hardware changed.) Anyhow, internet access is likely to be a little spotty for a while until I get a chance to do something to deal with this. I'm currently using my laptop with a Google wifi connection, but those tend to be flaky when the sun's up. post comment

AKICILJ: Is the "Clean Water Action" organization worth contributing to? [29 Apr 2008|05:49pm] I just got a door-to-door canvasser who was asking people to sign up for Clean Water Action. From his pitch, it sounds like a good political lobby group, and reasonably sane (though there is the use of "chemicals" to mean "nasty stuff" rather indiscriminately in some of their materials). Anyhow, I said that I preferred to check out organizations via independent sources before signing up for them, so: Do any of you have any experience with this organization, or know if they're a reasonable group that does good work? If they are, I'd like to support them, but I'm wary of all the groups that have good intentions but poor implementation, not to mention the groups that don't even have good intentions. 1 comment|post comment

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention [28 Apr 2008|11:01pm] Because elisem said to, as follows: So here's the problem: yesterday I heard somebody say, "Fourth Street Fantasy Convention? Oh, yeah, I heard something about... oh, wait, isn't that convention invitational?" Which, you know, it is so very not. Although it's been a little quiet on the publicity end, this revival of the legendary Minneapolis-based fantasy convention of decades back is cheerfully open to everybody who wants to get a membership, and I hope lots of people do, because I'm throwing this big party on Friday night, and Bear and Sarah and some other folks are going to read necklace challenge stories and other Artists' Challenge works, and the more people who are there, the better it'll be. So here's the offer: if you publicise the convention in your LJ or anywhere else on-line, and link to the Fourth Street website or to my post about my party, and you send me a link (or post it here), I will put you in a drawing for a $50 gift certificate, to be drawn during the convention. Winner need not be present. If you like, you can go ahead and tell people you're posting this because I am bribing you with this because I want lots of people at my party to celebrate and to hear Bear and Sarah and everybody read cool challenge stuff... and tell them that if they put up the link too, I will bribe them with a similar chance. I wouldn't normally do a copy-and-paste post, but Elise's shinies are very shiny indeed. And also it really does sound like a particularly nifty convention that ought to be promoted. Links as follows: Official convention website. Elise's aforementioned party invite post. Steve Brust's post about what he is trying to do with the programming, which he is in charge of. post comment

So, this is how it goes, eh? [28 Apr 2008|04:39pm] I just wrote my very first multithreaded program using pthreads. A very simple "Hello World" that creates a short array of thread numbers, and then creates a thread for each element in that array; each thread then loads its respective number from the array and prints out, "Hello, I am thread %d!" Shortly thereafter, I debugged my first race condition in a multithreaded program. I suppose this is the way of things, then? 5 comments|post comment

[09 Apr 2008|10:01pm] [ mood | baffled ] People are strange. No, seriously. A screed about the importance of memorable domain names, posted across the front page of a how-to-grow-potatoes website (with actual content on breeding potatoes, mind you!) replicated across 95 different domain names? Does this make sense in your universe? (Also, did you know that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato?) 4 comments|post comment

April Fools jokes [01 Apr 2008|10:01am] [ mood | amused ] (Aside: Y'all know the difference between a joke and a malicious prank, and don't need to be told not to do the latter, right?) A friend's post (pointing out his displeasure with malicious pranks on the day) got me thinking about April Fools jokes that I've enjoyed. I particularly like the spoofs that hobby magazines used to do in years past. The "ClearView 3000" article that Scale Auto Enthusiast printed in the early 1990s was legendary -- a spray paint that would turn any plastic parts transparent, complete with photos of samples. (Especially funny to those of us who knew our model-car history -- yup, there's the hood from the '68 Firebird kit that inexplicably had a clear hood, and the body from the extra-rare clear-body MPC Charger kit, and....) Sadly, it had the unfortunate side effect that it didn't completely deactivate once the parts were clear, and after they sat for a month or two, they'd turn completely invisible. The April issue of their much smaller competitor, Plastic Fanatic (which had a short lead time, and in those days SAE had their April magazines printed and delivered to subscribers by late February) featured an answering spoof -- a product that you could spray around the room like an air freshener, and it would make your irretrievably-lost invisible model car parts visible again. And then there was the Model Railroader article in their "No, really, the real railroads do this too!" column (generally about things like sectional track, which model railroads have had since a decade after the dawn of time, and which is of course entirely unprototypical, except that now real railroads have flatcars of it for emergency repairs), about magnetic uncouplers. On model railroads, a common way of uncoupling the cars in a train without having to handle them is a magnetic uncoupler; a bar magnet set up under the tracks in such a way that if you stop a train with the coupling between the cars over the magnet, the metal bits in the couplers will be pulled apart and the car decoupled. As the story went, this small industrial railroad decided that would be a good idea to save labor in running their trains, and bought a bunch of large magnets sufficient to do that on a real railroad. The article described their travails in obtaining these -- the special all-wooden railcars that needed to be built for the transport, the selection of routes without metal bridges, the accident that occurred when they were transporting the magnets under a stone bridge at the same time that a small car was driving over it, and the time that it pulled the railroad manager's pants down by his belt buckle when he was riding on a caboose over one of the magnets. The things that I like best are the ones that don't involve telling tales at all, though. Some of them are just visual jokes; for instance, I'm fond of things like Coding Horror's new site design, which is clearly an April-1st-only redo to look like an old BBS login screen on a green monochrome terminal. But what I really like are the stories that sometimes accompanied the April-Fools jokes in the magazines; the ones where someone had done something that seemed entirely implausible or absurd, but had in fact done it and so the story was entirely true. 1 comment|post comment

Activism link. [29 Mar 2008|08:42pm] So, Amazon has recently decided that they will only carry books printed by small presses that use print-on-demand technology if they use Amazon's print-on-demand service; if the small presses continue to use the print-on-demand services that have served them well and provided good quality product for them in the past, Amazon won't carry their books. This blog post on The World on a Slant explains why you should care. This is a pretty big thing. Print-on-demand isn't just a vanity-press these things; a lot of reputable small presses use them, because carrying back stock is expensive when you're publishing for a niche market. 1 comment|post comment

Just a small random observation.... [29 Mar 2008|12:52am] It's pretty easy to make a round hole; a rotating drill does it nicely. Making a square hole generally means making a round hole and then cutting it out with chisels. It's also pretty easy to make a square peg; just cut the sides down with a knife or saw until it's the right size. Making round pegs requires a lathe, and those are heavy and not very portable. Fitting a round peg in a round hole isn't easy. Either it's too big, and it won't go in, or it's too small and falls out, or you've spent a lot of time and care making it just right -- and then the humidity changes and it shrinks in different ways than the surrounding wood and falls out anyway. Square pegs aren't any easier, and there's the additional problem that either the hole or the peg might be a little out of square, so even if it's the right size it might not fit well. On the other hand, if you take a slightly-tapered square peg and put it up next to a round hole, and give it a good bop with a mallet, the corners of the peg will push into the edges of the hole -- and, because it's only interfering in a few points rather than all the way around, it will squeeze into shape and fit together tightly, and then it will hold fast and not fall out. So, if you're putting together a barn frame with wooden pegs in holes, there's a pretty clear right way to do it. And that is, indeed, how a lot of barns were framed. Funny about the idiom, though. 5 comments|post comment

Random electronica. [28 Mar 2008|12:59am] I picked up a couple of things at the computer surplus store on the way home today. First was a network card for my new 486 computer. Yes, it's actually (mostly) new -- a new-old-stock single-board motherboard with built-in video controller and new enough IDE controller to support large disks, but oddly enough no onboard network card. And it only has one card slot, for an ISA-bus card. The only ISA-bus network cards the store had were some odd four-port ones from a company that's long since gone out of business, but I figured it was worth a shot. And, indeed, it turned out that FreeBSD's standard drivers work quite happily with it, though it took a bit of looking in documentation from two different network driver files to figure out why -- the controller chip on it is a clone of a fairly standard one. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get a connection; it would ping itself, but not the rest of the world, and the "connection" lights didn't come on. Eventually, I figured out why. It's an ethernet card, and a hub, on a single board. And so the ports on it are "hub" ports -- and so, to connect it to my real network hub, I needed to use a crossover cable. For some reason, this seemed rather amusing; I'm not sure why. (Sadly, it's only a 10Mbps connection, so it's not actually much use as a hub.) Also, I picked up a couple of game controllers to play with. I'm a bit confused by them, though -- they're standard original Playstation controllers, down to the "Sony Playstation" logo and the SCPH-1080 part number. But, instead of having Playstation (nine-conductor) cables, they've got flat six-conductor flat cables that look like heavyish-grade phone cables and terminate in an ethernet-style plug. Anyone have an idea what those might go to? They're also rather interesting on the inside; I hadn't realized just how little electronic circuitry was required to convert fourteen buttons of input into a serial data stream. It's just a couple of tiny 8-bit shift registers (half a square cm each) and some resistors. 4 comments|post comment

Oh, hey, LJ changed something. [20 Mar 2008|03:32pm] [ mood | contrary ] On a post I make that's locked to a set of custom friends groups, my view of it now contains a nice list at the top of the groups that it's locked to, and a different "two-lock" microicon in place of the single lock for normal friendslock. That's really very convenient indeed. I like that change. 2 comments|post comment

Oh, my. [14 Mar 2008|01:01am] [ mood | happy ] For various and sundry reasons, only some of which are poor advance planning, I found myself preparing a duck for roasting at 11:00 this evening. (To be roasted tomorrow morning, not tonight.) I decided, on a whim, to try doing some spices on it, inspired by desperance's recipe for duck confit and by the fact that I do have some juniper berries on hand. So, I took some peppercorns (1.5t, or thereabouts; I'm guessing since I didn't measure) and some juniper berries (3t) and put them in our spice-mortar, along with a good bit of salt (1.5t). And I tossed in some whole mustard seeds (0.5t) that I noticed in the cabinet, along with the leaves off a couple of 12" branches of rosemary. And I ground this up, which took a bit of work since the mortar really wasn't meant for quite that much at once, and so I poured it through a small wire strainer into a bowl, and ground up the dregs in small batches (except for the rosemary leaves, which don't grind up but just get bruised into the other bits). And then, curious, I tried a small taste of it. Just a touch, on the tip of a finger. Oh, my. It is entirely possible that this is the best taste I have ever tasted in my life. It's this complex mix of the rosiny evergreen depth of the juniper and rosemary, and just a bit of bite from the peppercorns and mustard and the sharp-edged salt, and it just melts and the flavors change as the various notes come in and fade out, and it's all this combined flavor rather than being really distinguishable bits. And it is absolutely marvelously glorious. 6 comments|post comment

Yes, of course, that makes perfect sense. Riiiight. [12 Mar 2008|10:32pm] So, we've got this relatively modern oven, with electronic controls and lots of buttons. To turn it on, you turn one rotary switch to "Oven On", push the "Bake" button, and turn the "Set" dial until the LCD shows the temperature you want. And then, after a moment, the LCD switches to showing the actual temperature in the oven. The LCD also, of course, has a clock on it. I suspect there is a federal law that all home appliances that have multi-digit LCD displays must use them to display a clock. So, as is a timely question right about now, how do you set this clock? Well, in the row of buttons like "Bake" and "Broil" and "Deep Fat Fry", there is one labeled "Clock". So the obvious thing to do is to push the "Clock" button and then turn the "Set" dial. I tried that. It didn't do anything. Well, almost nothing; it helpfully noted on the LCD screen that the oven was off. Which I knew. I tried holding the "Clock" button and turning the "Set" dial, which of course also did nothing. Then, I was enlightened, and proceeded to set the clock. You see, there is no "Oven Off" / "Oven On" switch. There is an "Input Disabled" / "Input Enabled" switch, which is helpfully mislabeled as a switch to turn the oven on and off. This mislabeling is, of course, obvious because it does not in fact turn the oven on. And so, to set the clock on the oven, you first turn the switch to "Oven On" to enable input, push the "Clock" button, turn the "Set" dial to the correct time, and then (because it seems like the thing one does) turn the switch back to "Oven Off" once it's set. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of our car radio, which one must first turn off in order to set the clock. 8 comments|post comment

Having fun, 1920s edition. [12 Mar 2008|08:52pm] I thought this was pretty nifty.... ( The Krazy Kat club, Washington, D.C., 1921 (photo, link) ) ( Also, from the same photoblog, auto shop class, 1927. ) post comment

A bad pun, which I must share. [29 Feb 2008|01:56pm] [ mood | mischievous ] I apologize because this is a really bad pun, as well as being a bit dated, but it won't leave my head. So I inflict it on you, my loyal readers. So, in the beginning, the Lord created the heavens and the Earth, and the plants and the animals. And the Lord said unto the animals, "GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY." And lo, the animals went forth and multiplied, and there were many Cute Baby Animals. The Lord looked down on all of this, and saw that it was good. Well, almost all good. There were only two adders, looking somewhat uncomfortable under His gaze, who were not going forth and reproducing. And the Lord said unto Samuel L. Jackson, "GO DOWN THERE AND SOLVE THAT PROBLEM." So Samuel went down to the adders, and they said, "Well, it's muddy down here, and lumpy, and uncomfortable, and we're kind of picky about bedding...." And Samuel looked up at the Lord, and the Lord looked down and said to him, "NO, YOU DON'T GET TO SMITE THEM. THAT'S MY JOB" So, he took his mighty hand and felled some trees, and built from their trunks a large smooth platform above the ground, on which the adders might be comfortable. And the adders saw it, and it was Good, and once nobody was looking, they were well on their way to producing cute baby adders. ... Now, the moral of the story is, ( punchline behind the cut ) 20 comments|post comment

Email out, Houseboat mush out, etc. [28 Feb 2008|07:38pm] [ mood | disconnected ] So, the server on which half my life is hosted seems to be having problems. As I understand it, the relevant support people have been pinged, but there's not as yet a prognosis or expected time of restoration. Thus, at the moment, I am not receiving email. If you want to email me, send it to first-initial-last-name at speakeasy dot net, and that will detour it around the blockage. Also, the "Houseboat" not-really-a-MUSH that I use to keep in touch with various of you is down, as a result of this. (Yes, I have local backups of the database, all 95 objects of it, if it comes to that.) My apologies to you all for the outage. Finally, anything hosted off dpdx.net, which is my research page and various little bits of software I've got for download, mostly, is also offline. Further reports as events warrant.... Edit: Seems to be back now. No idea what the problem was yet, though. 12 comments|post comment

Quote of the week. [26 Feb 2008|12:09pm] It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water---with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals---steel, copper, aluminium, etc.---because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes. —John Clark, describing chlorine trifluoride in Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, quoted by Derek Lowe in "Sand Won't Save You This Time". 3 comments|post comment

Sometimes modern technology is scary. [12 Feb 2008|06:19pm] [ mood | astonished ] I was writing a subroutine to run on one of the coprocessors on the Cell processor, and it occurred to me that I could make things run a bit faster in a particular case by assuming that the floating point product of 0.0 and any bit pattern would always be 0.0 (at least for single-precision numbers). Now, this isn't usually the case -- there are bit patterns that represent "not a valid number", and on a computer that does math according to the IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic, the result of multiplying "not a valid number" and 0.0 is supposed to be "not a valid number". However, the single-precision floating-point arithmetic on the Cell's coprocessors are not designed to comply with all the niceties of the IEEE standard for this; instead, like the Cray processors of old, they're designed to go as fast as possible. So it was a reasonable conjecture that they would, in fact, simply return 0.0 for everything. The question, then, was how to quickly get an answer that I'd trust. Google was one option, but trusting random stuff on the internet is unwise, especially when the risk is introducing a subtle and hard-to-track-down bug. The naive answer, of course, is to test every possible input. This is the sort of thing that every computer-science freshman knows is absurd and impossible -- the number of possible inputs grows exponentially, and you can get numbers like "every possible position of every electron in the universe since the big bang" without hardly trying. Even in this exceedingly simple case, there are 232 possible 32-bit patterns that could happen. That's a bit over four billion of them. Four billion grains of sand will overfill a 55-gallon drum. This is not really even a comprehensible number. ... Except, wait. This is a processor with a clock speed of 3.2 billion cycles per second, and it takes probably a few dozen cycles to test each number. That's ... entirely plausible. So I tried it. It turned out to take it about two minutes. They are, indeed, all zero. 14 comments|post comment

New email address. [30 Jan 2008|11:30pm] [ mood | shifted ] It appears that my Stanford email address has stopped working. It is somewhat unfortunate that this happened before I got around to sending change-of-address emails to everyone, but it did. Anyhow, my new email address is brooks -dot- moses /at/ dpdx -dot- net. Hopefully, that one should be permanent, for whatever values of permanent there actually are on the internet these days. post comment

Driving Redux; or, That Was Really a Bit Disappointing. [26 Jan 2008|12:56am] [ mood | sad ] So, thanks to all of your helpful advice (and thank you muchly for it!), suzimoses and I decided to go from Mountain View across to 880, and take that up to the Richmond - San Rafael bridge. And we decided that leaving at 5:00 was perhaps not enough, and that maybe we wanted to leave at 4:30, to give us three and a half hours before the 8:00 show. After all, it was raining a bit. The area leading up to Dunbarton bridge was rather messy; I should have taken tenacious_snail's advice and taken 237, probably, but it didn't make that much difference. 880 was surprisingly clear. Even through the maze (I took the left-hand path, taking 880 up to it, rather than the 980-580 jaunt) wasn't bad -- maybe a quarter-mile of backup before the merge. 80 to the bridge was packed but not too slow. And so we got to 101 at San Rafael at about 6:30, for an 8:00 concert. I thought this was plenty of time. I had failed to reckon with San Antonio creek. So, a little north of San Rafael, we hit 5 MPH stop-and-go traffic. And, figuring that it couldn't be that bad, and not having a map for the figuring of alternate routes anyway, we waited in it. And continued to wait. For two hours, during which we traveled about seven miles. Then we discovered why we had been waiting; the traffic merged down to a single lane, and proceeded in single slow file through a fifty-foot-wide stretch of five-inch-deep water flowing rather quickly across the road. (Don't try this at home; this was very much the sort of thing where the only reason it was safe was that we could follow the car in front of us and see that there were no unexpected deep spots. And there were a couple of cars on the other side of the road that had veered too far to one side and were now a foot deep in the water.) After getting through that, we merged with all the traffic from the other direction that the police officers were directing to make a U-turn at the edge of the water. Things were pretty uneventful after that, at least comparatively, and we rushed into the theater at about 9:40, just in time to pick up our tickets at the remains of Will-Call and hear the second half of the finale, and the encore. Which was quite fantastic, as the Jazz at Lincoln Center orchestra usually is. And then we headed home. After getting a map, on grounds that 101 was almost certainly still closed. The trip home was quicker, by a bit -- we took 101 south to 116 east at Petaluma (noting that 101 was closed due to flooding at that point), then found that 116 was closed due to flooding at Frates Road, and so took Frates road around to Adobe to where it rejoined 116, and then took that to the intersection of 12 and 121 outside Sonoma (and there noted that my alternate plan of taking 12 all the way down from Santa Rosa wouldn't have worked, as 12 was closed heading away that interchange), and then took 121 uneventfully to 37, and 37 back west towards 101, with a final detour along Atherton Ave to account for westbound 37 being closed due to flooding. Oh, and when we finally got to 101, we discovered that that interchange was the southbound end of where it was closed. From there, things were again uneventful, and by the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge -- which, I will note, starts to look like a vast unsettling Ayn-Randian industrialism monument at night in a bit of fog and rain and lit from below by sodium-vapor lights -- the rain had largely stopped and things were mostly pretty dry. And we finally got home, nine hours and ten minutes after we left. I'm still glad we went, and the bit of music that we did get to hear was quite fantastic, but I really do wish we'd been able to hear rather more of it! Whee, adventures. 2 comments|post comment

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