A Few Thoughts…

If you haven’t read Cory Doctorow’s post about the iPad, you should go read that first.  No really, go read it.

Okay, now that you’ve read that, here’s a response/continuation from a college student named Carolyn referencing Doctorow’s with some expounding on the potential issues resulting from the iPad’s closed-ness.

Now it’s my turn – to start, I am not an iPad owner and I do not plan to be in the near future.  Though I would not turn it down if one was offered to me, I do not see the benefit of this particular device at this particular time in my life.  Rather, I should say I cannot justify the expense for the benefit gained from it.

I have a problem with Doctorow’s argument at the root.  He basically ascribes a desire to tinker with a product he owns is his right, and I completely agree.  Where his argument becomes invalid is when he makes this statement:

The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better.

What he fails to mention is the price point of that Apple ][+.  According to wikipedia, that would be $1200 in June of 1979.  According the the March 2010 Consumer Price Index (pdf link) (CPI) from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the June 1979 CPI was 72.3.  In January of 2010, when the iPad was announced with pricing, the CPI was 216.687.  To calculate the value of the 1979 $1200 with the value of today's dollar, we use this equation:

Year A Value * (Year B CPI / Year A CPI) = Year B Value

Which, for our numbers yields:

1200 * (216.687/72.3) = $3596.46

So for the equivalent price of a new Apple ][+ you could buy more iPads than one person needs (7 of the base model at $499 and 4 of the top-end model at $829).  All of the above was said to make a single point: comparing the iPad to the Apple ][+ is completely and totally ridiculous.

The state of the economy of tinkering no longer relies on a completely developed product like the Apple ][+.  With products like the Arduino, PIC, and AVR, and sites like Sparkfun and Adafruit, the barrier for entry into the tinkering market is incredibly low.  For tens of dollars you can get a basic toolkit, and a project kit to learn about how to program a microcontroller and make it do something.  And if you break it, well, another part is only a few dollars away.

The iPad is not a toy for a tinkerer, it wasn’t designed to be.  Do I like the fact that I can’t tinker with it if I want to – not particularly.  I also don’t have to buy one because it’s not the only option available!  The advancements that have come along with making the home/handheld computers do things that no one could have dreamed about in the late 70s has come at a cost – they aren’t open to someone wanting to learn about the principles of engineering.  Luckily, in the advancing world of mass-production and feature size reduction, the physically larger components now are available at prices which make learning fun and easy on the budget.

Doctorow’s statements are legitimate, and he’s entitled to his opinion and decision to not purchase an iPad.  But I think to limit his opinion to the iPad is a little silly.  But that’s just my opinion…

I’ve been looking for a setup to handle all of the USB devices I have, which also need to be plugged in to charge. I’ve seen a few plans for nice charging stations to make, but nothing that incorporates the computer connectivity. Why would I want to build two things stations when a single one would do?

So I started looking at the USB 2.0 spec about power requirements. As it turns out, externally powered hubs are required to supply 500 mA to all ports. It is also recommended that the hub draw its power from the bus, to allow continued operation in the absence of the external power source. What is not specified is if the hub is required to deliver power to the ports when it is not receiving power from the bus. If the device does power the ports when the bus-supplied power is absent (e.g. – when the computer is off), then it should work as a charging station for USB-connected devices.

The downside to this is that I’m pretty sure the boxes of these hubs aren’t going to advertise whether or not they deliver power to the ports when the bus power is removed, which means trial-and-error. I am going to guess that the cheaper hubs probably wouldn’t go to the trouble to handle switching power to the ports based on the availability of the bus power. So hopefully my trial-and-error won’t cost me too much.

Now I just need to decide what I want this station to look like, and how I’m going to flush-mount access to the unused ports. Maybe the hub also needs to be easily disassembled

Think you’re a computer guru? Not just someone who ‘knows a bit about computers’, but someone who lives, eats, and breathes the world of computers? Take the quiz and see how you do. Okay, InfoWorld didn’t call it the Computer Nerd Test, and I normally don’t think of them as the type that would put out a quiz with this level of nerdiness required. There’s an answer guide at the end.

Out of a possible 100 points, I got 55…guess I’m not as big of a nerd as I thought! Leave your scores in the comments!

Take the Computer Nerd Test

I enjoy being a HAM. I feel like it ties my modern-day activities as a computer scientist to the hard engineering roots of the past that gave us many of the technologies we have today. But many of today’s HAMs are the same HAMs of the past 30+ years. And in no knock to them at all, the pushing-the-edge technology is kinda hidden behind outdated looking (or just plain not updated) websites. And many times, there’s virtually no presence on the web at all – even from vendors! What’s a HAM to do!?

Well, luckily there are a bunch of us who are looking to bring the world of HAM into the 21st century. I just ran across Ham Twits, a list of HAMs on twitter. Granted, not a pushing of the technology, but certainly a group of individuals who are merging modern technology trends with a beloved hobby (and they’re listed alphabetically by last name, so KC8APF, you can make the top of the list!).

I’ve been trying to think up something that might make my HAM hobby have a wider acceptance in the general community. Something that has a some ‘Wow’ factor with it. Simply put, kids are so used to long-distance communication, and most of them don’t even care to think about how the connection happens to impress them with satellite communications (though moon-bounce can be kinda cool still). If you have any ideas for something that has some wow-ness, leave a comment!

I’ve ranted on this before, and I probably will again in the future. Word is a fine tool for writing short papers – but in the technical writing world, it’s only barely adequate. It can get the job done – not easily or conveniently though. Several of my co-workers would be in favor of doing documentation in Latex, but many (including those in charge) are not.

The documentation process would be much easier (SCM tools can easily handle text files – go figure) and it would be much easier to maintain formatting across multiple writers/editors. In general I think those writing the docs would be more productive because they can sped time writing the content instead of worrying about the formatting. Just because the ‘World runs on Windows’ and by extension ‘Writes with Word’ doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for a task – merely the most convenient. People spend a lot of time learning new languages and new techniques to be able to solve problems better, and then fall back to what is most convenient method of documentation. Scratch that – Word isn’t even the most convenient, it’s just the most pervasive in the office environment.*

If you have a little while, do yourself a favor – learn Latex! There is a little bit of a learning curve, but you can very quickly become proficient at writing documents which are easy to maintain, and look more professional than 99%** of the documents written in Word.

* Excel is still awesome, and the best tool for the job in many cases*
** 78% of statistics are made up – though this does not indicate that my estimate is wrong!
*** Footnotes are also a LOT easier in Latex…

I just got this in an email about Google Apps, haven’t tried it yet, but I think it will come in handy!

Share this tip with your users via email:

Flexible Usernames

You can add ‘+anything’ to your email address, and it’ll still arrive
in your account. These additional aliases are great for filling out online
forms, communicating with clients outside your organization, or signing up
for newsletters. Instead of questioning whether you want to provide your
primary email address, you can create a ‘plus’ alias, and then create a
filter to organize incoming mail.

Here are some examples:

– I just purchased an online tutorial, and and they want to send me an
email confirmation. I can input my email address as
username+tutorials@example.com. Then, I can create a filter to label messages
sent to my ‘+tutorials’ alias.

– I’d like to sign up for an industry newsletter – but I don’t want
a ton of mail, and I don’t want to see it in my inbox every day. I can
sign up with username+newsletter@example.com, and create a filter that
labels those messages ‘Newsletter’ and skips my inbox. Now I can read
the newsletters at my leisure, and I know where to find them.

It’s been a while since I’ve had to pull an all-nighter. And last night was probably the most difficult of them all, since all previous ones had been working in groups. Last night – it was just me. Sure the music and coffee helped to keep me awake for a while. But come 0345 (after having been up since 0600 the previous day), I was more than jouez au poker gratuitementjeu poker tourfrancaise des jeuxyahoo france jeuxjouer au poker virtueljeu de poker internetjeu de streap pokersalles de poker en lignejouer au poker francaisvente de jeu de pokerpoker gratuites hors lignejouer au poker texaspoker fr onlineregle de jeu de pokercomment télécharger jeu pokerjouer online poker touroù jouer au poker en lignele poker online françaisvente jeu de pokerpoker gratuites compoker tour gratuitesjeu poker holdem gratuitespoker 770jeu gratuites poker holdtelecharger poker en ligne gratuitesjouer texas holdem gratuitespro poker tourjeux poker a telechargerjeux gratuitsstud poker casinojeu poker tour en ligneworld poker compoker a jouer gratuitementpoker on line gratuitesjeux tour de pokerpoker gratuites sur macpoker en ligne mac ospai gow poker paginas internetpoker casinono deposit bonus pokerfichas poquerdouble bonus poker downloadpoker paginas webjoker pokerpoquer de dadosjuegos strep pokerpoquer comwww poli poquerpai gow poker onlinejuego omaha poker ready for a little nap to help rejuvenate. No luck – the lab floor was quite cold, and worse my mind was racing along from all the aforementioned coffee. So after 2 hours, with only 30 minutes of real sleep, it’s time to get up, change into some clean clothes, and see what can be made of the day.

On the plus side, the majority of the code is working – just not correctly. I’m supposed to be writing/reading to/from the Real Time Clock (RTC) over the I²C bus on the board we have. And It seems to be responding correctly with the right ACKs and everything – but the data comes back as zeros…even if I manually set the clock to something other than zero (which it ACKs). Oh well, the code has some impressive sloccount stats for a 1-night code session I suppose: 1 person for 3 weeks. Not bad for 12-hours start-to-finish! At least I know how it’s supposed to work!

I need coffee….and nothing it open on campus yet….

I think working at Xetron has spoiled me some. Sure, if you talk to me I’ll complain from time-to-time about the political issues in the company, but that’s probably present in all companies. What I mean, is that the pace of the work, and the expectation for picking up new material quickly has really pushed me to the point where classes like the one I’m at are really only useful for the materials which are given to us.

Since I’ve done some device driver work (very little, but some) before, I knew a little bit about the topic which I was coming into. Apparently, the little work I had done was at a large enough scale to cover a lot of the topics I didn’t already know from my architecture, compiler, and OS classes from grad school. So today I find myself sitting in the class thinking mostly about the work that is piling up back at work.

Timing of this trip has turned out to be less than optimal as I now have a rapidly approaching deadline to hit back home – woohoo for overtime I guess. I have one more trip out this direction (though for a much shorter period of time), and school starting before the deadline, not to mention 2/3 (of my 3 person team) will be gone for one of the weeks as well. So, we’ll see how quickly we can get things done I suppose

In other news, the presentation of the material in this class is somewhat less than what I expected. The book we were given is nice, though I would like an index for quicker searching. The materials the presenter is using doesn’t match our book however (he’s the author of the book, and so teaches from his “beta” copy), and is in exactly the same docbook-eque format. Now, I’m all for using some format like docbook for books (go figure), but for a presentation? He’s constantly scrolling around the screen, which after 4 days is kinda making me sick – and I can’t directly follow along with the book because, as I mentioned, it’s not exactly the same – though a lot of it is.

At least do what a lot of my professors have done – make landscape pdf pages of what you want to show, then go full screen and use the page up/down do move through the content! It’s much more presentable and can still be generated automatically from the source (not sure about docbook, but certainly from LaTeX). The other things that’s bugged me is the out-of-order presentation of the material. We’ve been jumping around to different chapters, making it hard to get an idea of what builds on what (if at all), and where we’re at in the progress of the course. Not a huge deal, just something my engineering brain doesn’t like to deal with. Anyway, if this is par for a RedHat course, I won’t be finding myself at another one anytime soon.

I’ve had the chance over the past few days to have more access to the internet than normal – a lot more access. I’ve become very used to only getting on the internet for a few minutes a day while at work (unless I’m researching something), and then to check my email and things at home (which doesn’t take very long).

Currently, I’m in Baltimore at a device driver training class. The class for the most part is interesting, some material I already knew from the little device driver work I’ve done. After two days I certainly feel more comfortable digging around in kernel code, but the classes seem very long to me. Part of this can probably be attributed to the fact that I don’t know anyone else in the class. Anyway, the lack of discussion on my part leaves me with time, staring at a computer with an internet connection. After about 20 minutes total during the day to ready the news, I’ve got nothing else to do. And just like in high school, the labs don’t really appeal to me, since I can’t find much practical use for most of them in my daily activities.

Anyway, this break is almost over, and we start discussing race conditions and synchronization methods – a topic which I have fairly extensive experience with, despite most of my professors saying that most people don’t do concurrent programming (and almost no one does them correctly). There will be some new things – spinlocks , and the kernel lock and such, which should be interesting, but I think I could probably get most of it from the book. Oh well – maybe next time I can get someone to come to the training with me…

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything – not that my many fans are complaining, I probably talk to the people who read this blog almost everyday anyway! But for those who are a ways away, here’s what I’ve been up to since school has been out!

To start off, I have joined the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. It’s been a good long time since I’ve looked skyward at night and really studied what I saw. There are a few constellations I remember from when I was younger, but I certainly didn’t study any nebulae or other heavenly bodies. They have 4 telescopes at their headquarters, and I’m working on getting checked-out on the 14″ Newtonian. Once I get the key, I can head up whenever I want! And, they’re working on building a radio telescope using gnuradio – which I’ve been wanting to work with for a while now! I also managed to run into an old friend who I never knew was a ham or into radio-astronomy, so that was really cool! It has been a real thrill to start finding things in the night sky again (and meeting some new friends here on the ground)!

I’ve also been doing a bit of reading – quite a bit for me, but others might laugh at what I’ve accomplished in the month and a half of no school reading. I started with C.S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters” and would recommend it to anyone interested in getting a good dose of thought about the subject of temptation.

I then moved on to a book I’ve been wanting to read since the TV show “The Unit” was released (great show by the way). The series is based on a book by command sergeant major (ret) Eric Haney called “Inside Delta Force.” It’s a wonderful look at (some of) the training that the elite forces of our nation, and of some of the monotony of the missions they were tasked with. I wished there was a little more information about some of the “more exciting” missions they were deployed to, but of course, most of those details are probably classified.

Now, I have turned directions once again, and am working on a book entitled “Poincaré’s Prize: The Hundred-Year Quest to Solve One of Math’s Greatest Puzzles” by George G. Szpiro. We were having a discussion at work about the need to have n-1 dimensions to visualize an n-dimensional object (think drawing a cube on a chalkboard) – and applying that to higher dimensional objects. I knew that Poincaré’s Conjecture had something to do with a problem involving higher-dimensional objects, and that triggered a search of the bookstore for more information! I’m about a third of the way through it, and I can’t really say I fully understand the problem yet – but a lot of background knowledge being covered, which is necessary since I’ve never done any formal studies in topology. I tend to like to jump into topics like this and struggle through them – which, I guess, is a good thing since I’m a grad student!

HTG work has been going well – we’re trying to slow down some of the development on our first application and let it ride for a while. We need to get some more clients using it before we invest too much more time in it – not that I have invested a lot of time recently – Tim and Wyatt have been cranking on it hard for the last several months, and they deserve a break. Unfortunately, it’s to a point where I think I am unable to come in a make a contribution to the project feature-wise without a lot of time studying the existing implementation. And there are rumors about rewrites, but that’s another story.

We have a few new apps in the mixing pot, some that might make us some money even! One of the projects is mostly being used to bring us up to speed on a newer development model (Ruby on Rails). There look to be some really promising things with the Rails framework, and hopefully we can leverage the nice things the language provides and develop some awesome products!

Well, I think that’s all for now. We have an HTG dev meeting here in 5 minutes, and I need to get some more coffee and switch mindsets over to ruby before the others show up ready to run. If you’ve made it this far – thanks for sticking with me