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AKICILJ/DW: Patching knees of blue jeans? [06 Apr 2012|01:42pm] I've noticed something, now that I've had a dozen or so years of not outgrowing my blue jeans: They all wear out in the same pattern. There's a diagonal fold that goes out to the left knee, and eventually it wears through and there's a small diagonal hole there, and if I use the jeans at all actively after that, soon thereafter there is a large crosswise rip across the front of the left knee. This wasn't a problem for a while; my jeans were getting generally worn and faded out of "good clothes" usefulness faster than the knees were ripping through once I started wearing them for "old clothes" uses. But then I started exercising on climbing walls, and that changed very quickly -- I have at least a half-dozen jeans that would be great for climbing except that they've got a big rip across the knee, and a couple of pairs of good jeans that I don't want to subject to abrasive stuccoed walls. I tried simply sewing up the rips, pinching them together and stitching across the gap. This works for a week or three, but then pretty quickly pulls the crosswise threads out and there's a hole again. So, those of you with experience in the ways of fabric: What's the right way to repair a large rip in the knee of a pair of jeans? I don't really care about aesthetics, but I do want something that I can use actively and which won't rip out. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 10 comments|post comment

What will the future think? [05 Apr 2012|08:09pm] So, nanotech (as oft envisioned in science fiction) is boring; the laws of Thermodynamics have very clear things to say, and when we get around to asking, they will say them and that will be that. But the scientifictional trope of mind uploading, where a person walks into a disassembler and shortly thereafter there is an artificial intelligence that contains the memories and personality of the disassembled person and is a continuation of their consciousness, that is a bit more of an interesting question. Thus, a poll. In however many hundreds of years, when this technology is feasible, what will people think of our current undoubtably-quaint portrayals in science fiction? As illustrated by examples of formerly-science-fictional technologies that are now possible. Poll #1831646 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25 Mind uploading will be seen like we see... View Answers ...computers. It's even cheaper and better than they imagined; they had no idea how ubiquitous and pervasive it would be. 3 (5.2%) ...travel to low Earth orbit. Sure, you can do it, but the resources it takes require a whole country behind it. And not one of those little countries, either. 2 (3.4%) ...videophones. Been possible for a while, and everyone thought it would be ubiquitous, but nobody does it. Er, no, wait, now that it's been boring for a few decades, it's actually catching on a bit and nobody's noticing it's science fictional. 2 (3.4%) ...airplanes that fly by flapping their wings. Sure, you could do it that way, if you wanted to show off and be pedantically biomemetic, but why would you want to? It wouldn't work very well, and there are far better ways to fly. 5 (8.6%) ...flying cars. Who needs a flying car? They're completely impractical, and besides, we have telecommuting. The problem it's solving is obsolete. 1 (1.7%) ...ballistic travel to the moon. We can get there, but not that way. That way just turns people into a pulpy disturbing mess. 8 (13.8%) ...hypersonic New-York-to-Paris letter couriers. It completely misunderstands the problem, and is horrendously impractical. Solving the actual problem is trivial, and involves completely different technology altogether. 5 (8.6%) ...psionics. You actually thought it was possible? Hah! 2 (3.4%) ...nuclear power. Funny, it turns out to be a bit dangerous. Not really a home appliance after all. Nice technology, though. 1 (1.7%) ...robots that walk like humans. It turns out to be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. It doesn't at all imply the technological abilities you thought it did. 4 (6.9%) ...artificial intelligence. Half of it is still impossible, and half of it is now trivial so we've redefined it as only meaning the impossible stuff, and forget that the trivial parts are ubiquitous and run the world. 17 (29.3%) ...cats. Nobody understands cats. They just are. 8 (13.8%) ...this other thing which I will explain in a comment. 0 (0.0%) 4 comments|post comment

AKICILJ: floormats for standing desks? [23 Mar 2012|06:54pm] (I posted this on Google+, but I figure I should post it here as well....) I'm thinking about rearranging my office to make more use of the standing desk that I have. Any suggestions for an ideal floormat to use to stand on for this? Best would be something that is reasonably cat-proof, and I expect to be using it barefoot rather than in shoes. Also, it would be nice if it doesn't break if I put a stool on it, since I sometimes use a stool to sit at my standing desk, but of course I could just move the floormat out of the way first. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 1 comment|post comment

Well, huh. Score one for Microsoft product robustness? [12 Dec 2011|05:52pm] So, I've been having occasional issues with Microsoft Word on my laptop -- the main symptom being that the latest service pack update wouldn't successfully install. But today it decided to crash when I tried to start it and open a file. Earlier today, I gave up and found a PDF version of the same file, and then later it worked. Just now, though, I needed to edit the file so a PDF wouldn't work, and I got a little frustrated, so I tried re-opening it several times in annoyance. And each time it barely started loading the file and then crashed. And then something interesting happened. A dialog box came up saying, "It looks like Office is crashing repeatedly. Would you like to run Office Diagnostics?" So, I clicked "yes", and it did a bit of checking, and it eventually reported that there were some setup errors, and it had fixed them. (It also reported that there was a RAM error, but the help on that suggested that if there were also other errors that had been fixed, I should re-run the tests to see if it went away -- which seemed a bit odd, but they did indeed go away when I re-ran them.) After that, it seems to be working fine. I have to say I'm impressed. Problems like this will show up in software this complicated [1], but this seems to be a fairly effective way of dealing with it -- and I didn't even have to go looking for it; it was just there when I needed it. So, I highly recommend the Office Diagnostics thingy, if your Office install is acting weird -- it's in the programs menu under "Microsoft Office Tools". [1] "UNIX systems generally have a good, though not impeccable, record for software reliability. The typical period between software crashes (depending somewhat on how much tinkering with the system has been going on recently) is well over a fortnight of continuous operation." --Dennis M. Ritchie, 1978 Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. post comment

Speaking of recipes.... [22 Nov 2011|09:09pm] I was reading my grandfather's recipe for spaghetti sauce -- which makes over 3 gallons, judging by what goes into it -- and thinking, "Only four ingredients? I was sure it was more complicated than that!" The four ingredients, for the record, are four large cans of tomato puree, and some hamburger, pepperoni, and sausage. Then I actually read the directions, which involve frying an onion in olive oil, making meatballs with the hamburger and bread crumbs, eggs, salt, pepper, garlic salt, et cetera., and realized: Those are not the ingredients in the sense of everything that goes into the sauce. Those are just the things that you need to buy. Everything else is just stuff that Granddad would have automatically had around the kitchen, like the knives and hot water from the tap. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 5 comments|post comment

Things I have cooked today. [21 Nov 2011|08:33pm] I've been cooking a couple of things this evening for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, at my mom's farmhouse in Virginia. The farmhouse is these days mostly rented out on weekends for retreats or families in town for graduations or on summer weeks for vacationers, and thus the kitchen is not the best organized and nothing is at all where I remember it being. But it's workable. Here's what I cooked, with recipes and descriptions. ( Sweet potato pie ) ( Cranberry relish ) Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 5 comments|post comment

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011 [12 Oct 2011|10:24pm] It's not being a good week for leading computer pioneers; Dennis Ritchie is gone. As Denton Gentry said of Kernighan and Ritchie's book on the C programming language, "Its terseness was a continuing theme in the work of Dennis Ritchie; it says exactly what needs to be said, and nothing more." Unix and C were written for mainframes decades ago, when the idea of talking to a computer with something other than punched cards was still reasonably novel. And yet, the inventors of Unix created something that is inescapably foundational in computing today, from iDevices and Android phones (and even ski goggles!) to the DoD's largest supercomputers -- because they got the programming interface right, or at least right enough and simple enough; pointers and file-open and fork. And C is even more broadly foundational than that. Let me restate that, to avoid understating it. If you have any modern device that does more than the very barest bit of digital processing, there are pieces of that system -- probably the core, critical pieces -- that are written using pieces of programming interface that Dennis Ritchie and a small number of colleagues designed. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 4 comments|post comment

People may need to be aware of this.... [29 Aug 2011|06:51pm] The Tattúínárdǿla Saga: If Star Wars Were an Icelandic Saga. Pretty much what it says on the tin. That link is to an outline and detailed historical notes on the text; at the bottom of the page is a link to where the author has gone on to spin out the actual saga texts. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. post comment

Not actually an adventure per se [25 Aug 2011|03:39pm] [ mood | amused ] Although it looks rather like one. I left home a bit over an hour ago, driving a car with a bike rack on it and my bike on the bike rack, and I just now returned on foot carrying my bike helmet and a large bag of vegetables. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. 5 comments|post comment

In which embedded systems are strange. [14 Aug 2011|09:54am] I was connecting my laptop up to its docking station yesterday for the first time in a while, and I forgot to hook up the power cable to the docking station first. Thus, my laptop went through the usual BIOS bootup, and then put up a text screen saying approximately, "Your docking station has no power. Press F1 to shut down." So, I pushed the power button to turn off the computer, plugged in the power cable, and tried again. This time, I didn't even get a BIOS bootup -- just a character-screen cursor in the top left, and a locked-up computer. A few repeats of disconnecting the laptop from the docking station showed that something was definitely weird-wrong: Outside of the docking station, the computer would boot fine. Connected to the docking station, it would lock up. The solution turned out to be simple, in one of the sorts of ways that only makes sense in a very twisted sort of logic: I unplugged the docking station, connected the laptop to it, and booted it -- which got me back to the "Press F1 to shut down" error screen, at which point I pressed F1 rather than using the power button. Once I'd done that, the docking station cleared out whatever unfinished quest was confusing it, and when I plugged the power cable back in and rebooted the laptop, things worked just fine. Crossposted from Dreamwidth (original here), with comments. Comment here or there. post comment

Dyeing wash rags in lurid (or at least useful) colors? [18 Jun 2011|04:33pm] In which I am hopeful for useful advice.... I have a habit of using cheap bar towels (or, more precisely, towels from Target intended for drying cars, which are about 18" by 24" white terry cloth and available in packs of 24 for about $10, so there's not much expense in having lots of them) for drying dishes and cleaning kitchen counters and dusting and other similar sorts of things. A year or two ago, Suzi happened to wash some of them in the same load as a large red rug. This produced an obvious-in-retrospect result: A couple of dozen pink towels. This turned out to be an excellent occurrence, as now we have a second set of towels that can be used for the extra-cruddy tasks (like washing the floor) without concern that they'll end up mixed back into the set of towels used for drying the dishes. However, cheap towels wear out, and there are never enough of the pink towels to make up a laundry load, so I'd like some more of the pink towels. Or, more precisely, I'd like to take some of the dirtier stained towels from the white set, and add them to the pink set. Thus, my question: What's a good way to die these? I don't entirely expect the rug trick to work twice, as that was the first time it had been washed. I'd like something that would die the towels a distinctive non-white color that would last through lots of washings (although I don't care if it fades a bit), and won't bleed out of them when I soak them in hot water or cleaners. Any suggestions? Is cheap supermarket RIT dye sufficient for this, or will I end up with towels that will drip dye on everything I try to clean with them? 6 comments|post comment

In which Windows file-copy error-checking is insufficient [14 May 2011|08:34pm] My process for storing my digital pictures currently works like this, once they're saved onto my laptop: First, I copy them from my laptop onto my desktop computer, using a simple Windows-network copy. Then, I upload them from the desktop to a remote server using the Unison file synchronizer. Finally, I also run Unison between my laptop and the server to synchronize their databases. (If I have just a few pictures, or am somewhere else and have a good network connection, I'll use Unison between the laptop and the server first; thus, the importance of the database synchronization.) The most recent time I did this, I discovered that in the final laptop/server synchronization, six of the photos (out of about 3 GB of photos) did not match. A bit more investigation found that some small errors had been introduced between the laptop and the desktop, and then got propagated up to the server. Luckily, closing the loop allowed me to fix them in this case, but. So, the conclusion: Windows network copying of files does not do sufficient error-checking to avoid this sort of error in copying files. This is really rather concerning, given that pretty much all of my backup files over the years have gone through at least one copy of this sort, if not several. Does anyone know of any settings or configurations that I might be able to adjust to improve the error checking? Or, alternately, is this a known issue of some sort? I expect that the right solution is going to be either switching my copying tools or else md5hashing everything I copy, but I'm wondering if there are simpler solutions. For that matter, before someone suggests "switch to Linux" -- what does NFS do with regards to error-checking? What about Samba (if I'm connecting from my laptop), or SCP? And, for that matter, does anyone know what sort of checking Windows might be doing on file read/writes? It's possible that this isn't a network issue, but a disk I/O issue -- in which case, the same "what does Linux do?" question applies for 'cp'. Is there a "safe cp" that does error-checking? 3 comments|post comment

Achievement unlocked: Freezer deborked. [13 May 2011|09:35pm] [ mood | pleased ] (AKA, adventures in home repair #273) While cooking dinner, suzanne noticed that the fridge didn't seem to be cold, and pointed this out to me. This seemed likely to be a continuation of the observation we'd made a couple of days ago, that it was making a somewhat unhappy sound (but only mildly; a slightly louder-than-usual fan noise). I peered at it, and noticed that the compressor was running, but the fan in the freezer wasn't doing anything. This didn't seem like normal behavior. A bit of looking around online, and I found a parts guide for it, showing the fan and how it fit into the back of the freezer (on this site called YouserGuide, which seems remarkably useful for things where the company hasn't seen fit to put this sort of thing online themselves). It seemed simple enough, and I figured that if I poked at the motor I might be able to determine if it was indeed broken -- simplifying the call to get it repaired -- or maybe even unstick it enough to get it to work a bit longer, if the bearing had gone bad as I was guessing from the earlier sound. So, I unloaded the still-frozen food into a dense pile in the fridge, and got to work disassembling the back of the freezer -- after unplugging it, of course. Two unscrewed screws later, and I was looking at the fan. "Aha!" I said. It turns out the motor was perfectly fine -- but the freezer had been building up ice from condensation, and one of the places it had been building up ice was inside the fan housing. (It had also been building up ice blocking the air channel down into the fridge, which was probably also not good for things.) The noise had been the fan hitting the ice, and then the ice built up a little more and the fan stopped turning entirely -- luckily right next to sub-zero freezer coils, so it hopefully didn't get damaged from overheating as stalled motors often do. That was easily cleared out, and I reassembled the freezer and plugged it in, and was very happy to find that, indeed, the fan was now working and blowing cold air into the freezer and into the fridge. And, after putting the food back in the freezer, that was that. 3 comments|post comment

Adventures with a bread-making robot. [11 Apr 2011|09:39pm] I recently got a bread machine -- cjsmith was giving one away because it had been unused in her closet for quite some time, and I had been thinking that it would possibly be nice to have one but I wasn't going to go to much effort to buy one because I was afraid of it lingering in my closet after an initial burst of use, so it worked out nicely, and if my fear comes true, I can just continue the cycle of passing it along. It's a Welbilt ABM100-3, which seems to have been one of the earlier ones; it looks very much like a squat half-sized R2 unit with a clear glass dome. I have now made three loaves of bread with it, and am somewhat perplexed. The second loaf I made was a loaf of rosemary French bread -- I took the basic French bread recipe from the recipe book that came with the bread machine (3 cups flour, 2.5 tsp of yeast, 1.5 tsp each of salt, sugar, and shortening, and 1 5/8 cup warm water) and substituted olive oil for the shortening and added about a tablespoon of chopped rosemary. It worked just as advertised -- the bread rose up to the top of the canister in the bread machine, and baked into a nice cylindrical loaf. Quite tasty, too! The third loaf was supposed to be exactly like the second. However, when I looked at the bread machine after the rising cycle had nearly finished, the glass dome was entirely filled with dough that had risen well outside of its bounds. I averted disaster by carefully removing it and dumping it onto a baking dish and putting it in the oven -- which worked out quite well, despite the dough being too foamy to shape properly into a loaf, and my not really having any idea how long to cook it and also starting out with a cold oven. The bread turned out perfectly cooked, though I learned that I should have greased and/or floured the pan. So, the perplexing thing: This was exactly the same recipe, both times. Not only that, but yeast from the same jar, and flour from the same bag. The differences: The bag of flour had been open an extra couple of days the second time. The first loaf was cooked at tiger_spot's house; the second at mine, which is a bit colder, so it's possible that the machine overcompensated when warming the dough for rising. The second loaf had a bit more rosemary, which I can't imagine is the reason. In the first loaf, I added the salt and sugar directly on top of the yeast; on the second loaf, I put the salt and sugar on top of the flour -- but it should be pretty well mixed regardless. And ... that's about it. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might have caused this? I could just use the "in case the dough rises too much" suggested variation of less yeast and water, but then maybe it will be like the first loaf, and so not rise enough. Also, any good recipes for bread-machine bread, beyond the basics in its cookbook? I'd particularly like to find a good whole-wheat bread that's not just white bread with a little whole wheat for flavor like the supplied recipe. 16 comments|post comment

In which John Scalzi continues to defy common wisdom. [05 Apr 2011|12:05pm] We knew, for some time, that John Scalzi had an uncanny ability to sell fiction by methods that should not work, given his initial history of landing a book deal with Tor for a novel that he had previously self-published on his website. His latest coup completely surpasses this, however, and reaches to bewildering and amazing levels of implausibility that were not previously even imaginable. In a recent Whatever post, Scalzi revealed that he had received a writing contract from Tor solely on the strength of a query letter that he had posted as a blog comment, and which read, in its entirety, I'm totally going to write the "Shadow War of the Night Dragon" trilogy. Please have Tor back up the money truck to my front door. kthxbye. I stand impressed, and astounded. (Interestingly, Scalzi implies that he has done even more implausible things, but he does not state what they might be.) 3 comments|post comment

Adventures in UI usage. [16 Feb 2011|10:32pm] Poll #1705972 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32 So, if your cellphone provider website required you to log in with phone number and password, and the text box for your phone number was labeled: "Wireless Number:" and said underneath it, "(Example : 555-555-5555)", which of the following forms of your phone number would you suppose the website would accept? View Answers 650-555-1212 21 (55.3%) 6505551212 17 (44.7%) Hint: If you get it wrong, it helpfully reports, "L148: Your wireless number must contain 10 digits." (I shall post the experimentally-determined answer in comments, for discussion purposes.) 11 comments|post comment

So, Stanford people.... [03 Jan 2011|09:48pm] This thing where you replaced the Virginia Tech football team with Folger's Crystals at halftime? We kinda noticed. (At the end, it got to a point where ejalbert suggested Stanford should just let the band take the field and see what happened.) 1 comment|post comment

Found via Twitter.... [29 Dec 2010|02:13pm] "Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things" -- a photoblog of just what it says on the title, with a mission to "post pictures of Muslims wearing all sorts of things in an attempt to refute that there is such a thing as 'Muslim garb' or a Muslim look." What it is, is a photoblog of people being awesome who happen to be Muslim, and also of people being awesome and being Muslim in ways that are interconnected. (A couple of very different examples of the latter, which both happen rather randomly to involve middle-Eastern-heritage clothes: making a political statement in Iraq, and a mix of the traditional and not-so, with nicely-wry caption.) 2 comments|post comment

Not quite a review of The Salmon of Doubt [27 Dec 2010|08:55pm] [ mood | awed by quality editing ] I have just finished reading The Salmon of Doubt, which is a posthumous book with Douglas Adams's name on the cover. You should read it. I had not read it for quite a while, on the impression that it was a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide sequel worked up by another author from scrounged notes. It is not.[1] What it is is infinitely better than that, and far more wonderful. I found the process of discovering what it was to be deeply interesting and enjoyable, and I don't want to spoil that for other people who I know will click through "spoiler warning" cut tags, so for now I am leaving this cryptic note and writing up a review to post in a few weeks once I've pressed the book on several appropriate handy people. (Also, some of this is selfish; I am very curious whether the relevant handy people will have similar experiences of it to mine without my prompting.) [1] It appears that there is a book of that description, though, without so much as scrounged notes; perhaps I was confusing it with that.

Measuring aircraft by weight [26 Dec 2010|04:18pm] Computer programmers tend to have a strong aversion to measuring a programming project by the number of lines of program in the source code. There's a famous quote by Bill Gates about the matter: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." Obviously, you make progress in designing an aircraft by figuring out how to make it lighter weight, not by making it heavier. The thing is, though, that like any measurement the problem is typically not in making the measurement, but in what you do with it. In particular, though the number of lines of code in a project is certainly not be useful for determining how close to finished it is (given that much of the work is in the debugging and testing stages), it can be used to estimate the total amount of "progress" -- that is, programmer time and effort -- that's required in the project in total. For a given type of project, with a given programming team (or similar teams), the amount of effort is roughly proportional to the number of lines to be written. You can argue this by handwaving about making estimates and in this case or that case it worked, but there's still the compelling imagery of that quote to contend with. So ... what really happens if you try to measure aircraft by weight that way? I was curious and decided to try it. Just like with software, we can't expect similar results over very different kinds of airplanes, but we can consider similar ones -- for instance, Boeing jetliners. Thus, an experiment: Take the operating empty weight of Boeing's current planes (I pulled the data from Wikipedia), and their cost as a proxy for effort required (Boeing helpfully has a 2010-average-price list on their website), and make a simple linear regression for everything from the 737 to the 777. Then, use that to predict what a new 787 Dreamliner will cost. ( Results behind the cut. Can't possibly work very well, can it? ) 5 comments|post comment

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