Welcome to my nightmare

My life as a clip show

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:31:29 GMT

For your amusement and mine, I gathered up a pile of video clips from my files and edited them together into a short movie. The order is random, the music happenstance, the ending abrupt. Several of you appear.

58MB of clippy goodness @ 640×480

YouTube version

Visit to Raleigh/Durham/RTP!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:43:24 GMT

fizzygeek, merde and I are going to be in North Carolina this weekend to see Don Dixon with his old band Arrogance! Anybody want to hang out?

Bizarro eBay auction

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:20:03 GMT

This eBay auction for "Copyright For Sale - INNOVATIONMAN New Art Diamond Gold" with an asking price of $21 million makes amusing (if whacko) reading.

Excerpts:

large If marble canal who cover 7 covers the ball of energy.
Such as the criminal groups that Like hydrogen. Hydrogen is 25% men and women have a body containing hydrogen.
101% human spirit, ghost or analog electromagnetic wave and Plaggansakis Plagganhlns. The live trees and mountains. To maintain that the existence of the analog soul.
Fly to see a beehive and has a bitmap inside the eye can see a night-owl. Infrared and find objects that look coordinates with sequin advanced degree of range of voice and eyes.
Power body player Ceramic ตัวละคร ที่มีพลังร่างกายเป็น เซลามิก

Wait, what?

Numbered in case of just such an emergency

madbodger@livejournal.com — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:18:31 GMT

I opened a box of Doodlecakes*, and found that they had been numbered at the factory, apparently to tell me in what order to consume them:

* They aren't really Doodlecakes, I just call them that, from a faux product on Zoey 101. They're really Hostess Streusel Cakes. Note that freshchocodiles.com also allows people to buy Chocodiles on line (at jacked-up prices) if they aren't available to you locally. Luckily the doodlecakes are available locally (if irregularly).

Happy Birthday and Transformers

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:41:11 GMT

Happy belated birthday to keighsie and ayasdollz!

When we spent a day with them out in Arizona, we got to take a ride in their car. As it happens, they had the Transformers score on the stereo. I had seen the movie, but it was raucous enough that I didn't really get a feel for the soundtrack. But this was the kind of lush, majestic program music I really enjoy. So a few weeks ago when putting together a CD order, I decided I wanted that.

It turns out the score was not released originally, the soundtrack CD that was released was the other music from the film. But the fans really wanted the Steve Jablonsky score, so it was released afterward. Apparently only the one pressing, and none of my usual vendors had any copies. I ended up buying one on eBay from a nice fellow in Japan. I'm glad I got it, it's great driving music, thanks!

Bizarre, but why?

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:11:02 GMT

I needed a real-time data feed to test the my SOAP API code, so I connected to LJ's real-time stream*. This worked really well, handing me chunks of XML describing whatever postings were occurring at the moment, and let me test my message processing software nicely.

However, I noticed something weird. More than a third of the postings were in random-looking journals, consisting of great piles of links to other random-looking journals, along with some throwaway text (example here).

This must produce a fair amount of load on the LJ servers, but I can't figure out why anyone would bother creating a bunch of random journals, and then massively post links between them. Strange DoS attack? Google link-stuffing? Spammer whitening?

Should I report this to LJ?

* http://atom.services.livejournal.com/atom-stream.xml

Details on XML (and other) feeds here.

Your Co-Worker could be a Space Alien!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:48:38 GMT

Years ago, my friends and I found this quiz (by Michael Cassels of the National Enquirer) very amusing, as we're all apparently space aliens. So I dug up a copy for your edification.

Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human — but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts.

They listed 10 signs to watch for:

Odd or mismatched clothes. “Often space aliens don’t fully understand the different styles, so they wear combinations that are in bad taste, such as checked pants with a striped shirt or a tuxedo jacket with blue jeans or sneakers,” noted Brad Steiger, a renowned UFO investigator and author.
Strange diet or unusual eating habits. Space aliens might eat French fries with a spoon or gobble down large amounts of pills, the experts say.
Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don’t understand earthly humor may laugh during a serious company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger.
Takes frequent sick days. A space alien might need extra time off to “rejuvenate its energy,” said Dr. Thomas Easton, a theoretical biologist and futurist.
Keeps a written or tape recorded diary. “Aliens are constantly gathering information.” said Steiger.
Misuses everday items. “A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails,” said Steiger.
Constant questioning about customs of co–workers. Space aliens who are trying to learn about earth culture might ask questions that seem stupid, Easton said. “For example, a co-worker may ask why so many Americans picnic on the Fourth of July,” noted Steiger.
Secretive about personal life–style and home. “An alien won’t discuss domestic details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends,” said Steiger.
Frequently talks to himself. “An alien may not be used to speaking as we do,so an alien may practice speaking,” Steiger noted.
Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high–tech hardware. “An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on,” said Steiger.

The experts pointed out that a co–worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien.

A stunning example of doing it right

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:24:15 GMT

After all my issues over the last week dealing with expanding filesystems, I got a treat. My work laptop was originally set up for multiboot, with a 10GB partition each for MacOS, Linux, and Windoze. The rest of the disk was formatted FAT32, which they can all access (Windows offers little choice in this).

I ended up not using multiboot, and running other stuff with VMWare Fusion, but kept running out of space in the MacOS partition, as many things like to be there, and are tricky to relocate. But I had an unused 10GB partition adjacent to it. Any chance I could combine them and expand the HFS+ filesystem to take advantage of the additional space. At first, I started looking for an external drive to stage everything on while I repartition the drive and built new filesystems, but then I remembered I'm using a Mac.

So I went to Disk Utility, combined the partitions, and dragged the filesystem to fill the larger space.

And it worked. While I was using the machine. I magically had 10GB more space, and I didn't have to shut down any programs, log out, reboot, or anything like that. I actually did this while I was chatting with people, and the only bobble was the network connectivity bounced, so I vanished and reappeared a few seconds later.

Now THAT impresses me, all the more so, given my (now) intimate familiarity with the complexity of changing filesystems and partitions. Good on ya, Apple!

The woes of too-small partition virtual disks

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:50:51 GMT

I've been instructed to install our company's product, Velocity, at the customer's site. As the customer doesn't have network connectivity, I decided to create a virtual machine under Xen (which we're using because Oracle recommends it), install the software on that, get it configured and tested, then move the VM to the customer's site.

So far, so good.

It turns out there are two ways to create VMs. One is to install the OS from an ISO image, the other is to use a “VM template”. And the only way to gain hardware virtualization is to use a template. The templates come with already-built virtual disks. These virtual disks are small (4GB), and more space is intended to be added with additional virtual devices.

This is awkward, as it involves coordinating various hunks of virtual disk and keeping them together and in synch, as well as ferreting out all the necessary mount points so nothing overflows the small root filesystem.

Fortunately, I can use resize2fs to “grow” a filesystem while keeping its contents. Unfortunately, the virtual drive doesn't have room to do so. Fortunately, I can make it bigger by just tacking more space on the end (dd with the "seek" option can't really do it, so I have to make a sparse file with dd then concatenate that onto the virtual disk file).

The virtual disk, however, is partitioned. And the partition labels don't describe the additional space. So I attack it with fdisk and then parted. I figure I can just move the swap partition (whose contents are ephemeral and don't matter) to the (new) end, and then expand the root partition. Unfortunately, parted refuses to do this, as it performs the resize operation automatically with the partition expansion, and it complains that the filesystem contains options that are beyond its ability to resize (because Oracle runs SElinux).

So I download the source code to parted, remove the filesystem resizing bits, recompile it, copy it to my VM server, and grow the partition, leaving the filesystem alone.

Now, how to grow the filesystem? The resize2fs utility only works on block devices, not a chunk out of a file pretending to be a disk drive. A real partitioned drive actually appears as a set of block devices, but the fake one doesn't. Some research turns up the losetup utility, which makes a file appear as a block device. Unfortunately, it doesn't support partitions. There's a version that does, if you unload the module and reload it with some options, but that's not the version that comes with OEL.

How about if I bring up the VM? That will make the virtual drive appear as hardware inside the VM, and the usual hardware partitioning support will let me see the partitions as block devices.

No joy, that's the root partition, and it won't let me resize the root file system while it's in use.

So I make another copy of the original small virtual disk, set it as the boot drive, and configure my modified one as an additional drive. Then I reboot, and can resize the filesystem. Shut down, make the new file into the boot drive, reboot, and I'm good to go.

I'm not the only person who's had this issue, the 'net is full of unhappy people fighting versions of it. The offered solutions consist of pulling numbers out of fdisk or parted, doing math on them, then abusing losetup to mount part of a file at the calculated offset. The problems with this are the annoyance and danger of juggling lots of magical numbers, and the fact that losetup will mount everything from the offset forward, not stopping at the end of the partition.

So I'm going to work from home today, and write a set of utilities to deal with this. They'll be fairly simple, without knowledge of filesystems and such. One will just read a file that contains a partitioned virtual disk, and break it up into individual files that can be operated on separately. Then another utility can assemble a bunch of files into a virtual disk and create the matching partition label.

I'll also make another utility that works like mkfile, but grows existing files instead of creating new ones.

There are some finicky details like preserving virtual heads, cylinders, and sectors (which is silly, as modern drives aren't orthogonal and it's all fiction, but filesystem drivers and BIOS routines still care deeply about this obsolete arcana), but I can make the splitter emit a header with the old values, and have the file extender use that file to calculate a boundary that's an even number of these pretend cylinders, and the reassembler propagate that information into the new disk label it creates.

Fortunately (and perhaps frighteningly), I have experience writing disk formatters and partitioners.

EDIT: I wrote 'em, but can't do real testing with the 32-bit OEL here at home, so real testing will have to wait until tomorrow.

Stollen for Riapants [sic]

madbodger@livejournal.com — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:30:08 GMT

And nicked by me from kdsorceress.

Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

Like kdsorceress, I'm happy to take questions/comments. You have the floor.

Don Dixon!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:49:25 GMT

First, we got to see Don Dixon and Jamie Hoover at Jammin' Java in Vienna, VA in April. Don was very friendly, chatty, and huggy. Later, we heard he wouldn't be touring any more, which made us sad.

But then he showed up at the fabulous and bizarre O Mansion, where we saw him on Sunday! He brought along Marti Jones as a surprise guest! With him were Mark Bryan (of Hootie and the Blowfish) and Danielle Howle, who were also a lot of fun. Poetry, singing, silliness, and much music. Good crowd, too.

And Don's playing with his band Arrogance in September down in North Carolina! Yay!

Lego Carousel

madbodger@livejournal.com — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:04:15 GMT

javasaurus, call your office!

iPhoto 9 with face recognition!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:48:49 GMT

I was watching TV the other night, and saw an ad about the face recognition in iPhoto 9. I have a copy, but hadn't been aware of that feature, so I went off to play with it. It's actually surprisingly good, and makes guesses of people's faces fairly well, even at odd orientation, partially obscured, bad lighting, poor focus, etc. A quick way to catalogue a lot of photographs by who is in them.

As I have photographs containing my friends and family as well as celebrities, the opportunities for mismatch are rife. iPhoto does do a good job of recognizing faces sideways and upside down, by the way.

Um, no.

Dorothy is also as cute as a button, but this is Jessica Alba.

I take it iPhoto does not include text recognition, or this would have been a giveaway.

Bwahahaha so not!

It nailed me so well it didn't even have to ask. The girl, however appealing, is not Jamie Lynn.

I tried one of the cast of Zoey 101:

Well, it got Jamie Lynn right for once. But wha?

This program seems to share my fondness for Jamie Lynn, but this is just wrong.

Bzzzt! Zero for four. Try as I may, I can't see the similarity between Piper Perabo and Nisha.

Oh, come on! That's not even human!

Dude. Not even close. Sheesh!

Okay, at least I can see where it got confused here. Kurt, you see, wears similar dark glasses:

No, but thank you for playing.

Elements!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:55:39 GMT

Theodore Gray's excellent site about elements and chemistry, makes excellent reading. He also has a really nifty book out showing dangerous and impressive demonstrations of chemistry. I bought a signed copy, it's a really fun read. Granted, about a third of the things he shows are things I've tried myself, and a handful more are things I may well try in the future. The rest are something I'm not about to attempt alone!

While admiring his excellent element collection, I started musing about what sort of an element collection I could assemble from things I already have around. There are a lot of judgement calls involved, but here's a first cut. I could make a case for things like chromium and vanadium, as I probably have some bits of stainless and other interesting steel alloys, but I can't point to them, so I'm not counting them. Similarly with several other elements (potassium, fluorine, bromine, niobium, manganese, and so on).

pure, separate

pure, inside something

mixture/alloy

compound

trace

do not possess

radioactive

mkfile(8)

madbodger@livejournal.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:32:05 GMT

We're working on a project at work that uses Xen to run virtual machines (VMs). These VMs are running Oracle, which eats up disk space like a maniac. So the users asked us to add some 300GB chunks to the virtual file system. This is done by creating 300GB files and attaching them to the VMs. The guys created the first one by using dd (the Unix "convert and copy" command, so named because "cc" was already taken by the C compiler) to copy 300GB of zeroes from the /dev/zero pseudo device to a file. Then they made more by copying that file to additional locations. The /dev/zero trick is at least reasonably efficient, as the kernel just zero-fills chunks of memory as needed. But copying that file is a lose, as the system has to suck all 300GB off the disk drives, and write it back out.

However, there exists a command (on Solaris and BSD) tailor-made for the purpose. It's called mkfile(8) and its sole purpose is to make files. And I remembered that it did so much faster than coping stuff from /dev/zero. But Linux doesn't have that command.

I really thought it would, but a quick scan of the RPMs on the install media didn't reveal anything likely. A little scripting (and rpm2cpio) produced a list of every file in the whole distribution, but no mkfile.

So I tried to dredge up memories of how mkfile worked. I vaguely recalled it hinged on creative use of mmap() or lseek(), so I read those manual pages, and found this:

The lseek() function allows the file offset to be set beyond the end of the file (but this does not change the size of the file). If data is later written at this point, subsequent reads of the data in the gap (a "hole") return null bytes ('\0') until data is actually written into the gap.

Aha! All I have to do is write a short program that parses command line arguments for the file name and size (with optional units), open the desired file, lseek() off to the size (minus one), and write a single null byte, and voila!

So I did. Sure enough, my home-rolled mkfile was faster than dd. On local drives, it was nearly instant, even for huge files. On the OCFS2 volumes used by Oracle, it was rather slower (journaling, coordination, and all), but still outran the next-fastest method 2:1. Unfortunately, it wouldn't run on our VM servers, as the Oracle VM Server (OVS) distribution was 32-bit, and I had compiled it on a 64-bit VM that had gcc installed. So I went and rebuilt it for 32 bits and tried again. No joy, the 32-bit OS only supports file sizes up to 2GB. A nice research exercise, but ultimately, it didn't end up helping me.

Note that the version I wrote is on the customer's closed network and I don't have access to it, but in case someone needs it, I found another person's version here. It's a little wonkily-written, but should serve.

Science! And photography!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:11:56 GMT

A while back, I bought a big, weird-looking tube on eBay. I had more-or-less forgotten about it until I came across it again whilst moving house. Curious, I endeavored to determine what it was. After some research, I found out it was a "finebeam tube" (Fadenstrahlröhre). In fact, my tube looks like the one in the picture, and bears the same part number. However my unit sports an oddball plug instead of the ordinary pins on the (supposedly more modern one) available for sale today (for a whopping US$1,858!).

The tube contains a simple electron gun, a set of deflection plates, and gas (generally helium, hydrogen, or neon) at very low pressure, enabling the beam to be observed. It's used to illustrate electron physics, the effects of electrical and magnetic fields on electron beams (with an additional set of Helmholtz coils and a variable power supply), and even compute the specific charge of an electron.

Some searching failed to reveal a socket for it, or even a pinout. There are only six pins, and their functions were reasonably well documented (heater, heater/cathode, Wehnelt [focus] cylinder, anode, and two deflection plates). Probing the connector, I found two pins with continuity. This showed that the tube was at least electrically intact, and those would be the heater pins. The various tubes on the web seem to want between 4 and 7.5 volts on their heaters. May as well try to light it up! I rounded up a tube tester, and wired a couple of its socket pins to the heater pins on my tube. Gradually bringing up the heater voltage in a darkened room presently resulted in a dim orange glow.

Encouraged, and motivated by the possibility of actually seeing an electron beam with my own eyes, I rounded up an adjustable regulated power supply (Heathkit IP-32) capable of delivering zero to 400 volts. The procedure was a bit tedious, as I'd have to connect a wire to a prospective pin on the tube, turn on the supply, turn off the lights, and wait for my eyes to adapt to the darkness to see if there was a visible beam.

I got a beam! It was dim and fuzzy, but definitely there! I brought fizzygeek down to see it, and she was able to see the beam easily (I suspect her years of darkroom experience helped).

I wondered if I could photograph it. I grabbed a tripod and borrowed fizzygeek's Canon G9, as it has a reasonably fast lense and sensitive (ISO 3200 equivalent) sensor, but no joy. No worries, just an excuse to get out the big guns. In this case, a DSLR and a cable release. Unable to get good focus with a generic 55mm lense, I got an ancient Micro-Nikkor I had picked up on eBay for $15 a few years back. Now to figure out exposure. I generally have a good eye for such things, but this was a bit far out on the reciprocity curve. I tried a few seconds, but just obtained a faint smudge that I assume was the glowing cathode. Cranking the camera all the way to its 30-second limit, I still didn't have much. Then I realized I hadn't checked the aperture! Sure enough, it was pretty stopped down, so I cranked it all the way open. Bam, bright screaming overexposure! This surprised me a little, as I didn't think there was that much light available, but I happily tweaked settings until I got a decent exposure. I took the memory card upstairs to view the results on the big calibrated LCD monitor.

I figured the next thing to try was to deflect the beam using the built-in deflection plates. The power supply included an additional "bias" output, variable from zero to -100 volts, so I strung another wire, and started trying pins. Sure enough, I was able to deflect the beam. Since electrons are negative, and I was applying a negative voltage, the beam deflected away from the plate I was connected to. This way, I was able to figure out which pins went to the deflection plates.

The beam being deflected up by negative voltage on the lower plate.

Beam deflected down by negative voltage on the upper plate.

Beam deflected enough to strike the lower plate.

I noticed that the anode cone was glowing in the pictures. Very pretty, but I didn't remember a glow. The purplish cast to the photo gave me the missing clue: that particular DSLR was the UVIR version (thanks gravitrue!), sensitive to ultraviolet and infrared light as well as the visible spectrum. And I hadn't moved the UV+IR blocking filter when I changed lenses.

I went back downstairs, screwed on the filter, and tried again. Sure enough, the exposure was now about what I expected (the additional light outside the visible range was what had thrown me off). And indeed, in the visible-only exposure, I didn't see the anode glow, and the heater glow was a more appropriate intensity and dull orange colour (the copious IR had made it unnaturally bright, and tinged it an otherwordly lavender).

Beam picture with visible light only.

I made a few more shots in extended spectrum, and visible-only. In these shot, there's a clear reflection of the window on the tube's envelope, making it look like it's light out. To me, it didn't look light outside at all, but at these exposures, it was easily enough to photograph. Also visible here is the glowing spot the beam makes when it impinges on the glass. The blurry glow in the background is the meter light in the tube tester.

Visible light only.

Same shot with UV and IR unblocked.

Here's one final shot of the tube with a small light on. You can see some of the heater glow, and just barely make out the spot where the beam is striking the glass.

Mirroring monitors

madbodger@livejournal.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:59:45 GMT

For a demo today, some people wanted me to "mirror" their monitors, so the screen showed the same content as the projector connected to the other video output. I got a quick lesson in the difference between technologies.

How to mirror displays

Windows:

Right click on the desktop, menu pops up
Select "Properties", window opens
Click on "Settings" tab
Click on "Advanced" button (screen blanks temporarily)
Click on "GeForce" tab
Click on "run Nvidia configuration" button (screen blanks temporarily, new window opens)
Select "Multiple Screen Configuration" in the left navigation bar
Click on "Clone Displays" radio button (screen blanks temporarily, projector loses synch)
Click on "Okay" (configuration window closes)
Click on "Cancel" in Advanced properties window (window closes)
Click on "Cancel" in Properties window (window closes)
Right click on the desktop, menu pops up
Select "Properties", window opens
Click on "Settings" tab
Reset screen resolution (projector regains synch, new window pops up)
Click on "Yes" to accept new resolution and close window
Click on "Okay" to close Properties window

Many steps and three programs later, screens are mirrored.

MacOS X:

Press F7

Hal Sparks, Serenity, Dr. Horrible at the Drafthouse!

madbodger@livejournal.com — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:54:47 GMT

Hey, there are two fun events coming up at Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse!

Saturday, June 27 at 1PM:
The Annual Can’t Stop the Serenity Charity Screening - Double-Feature!
With Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on the big screen, and see the trailer for Browncoats: Redemption!

Friday, August 7 and Saturday, August 8 at 9:45PM:
Hal Sparks Live
We love us some Hal Sparks! Gamer, actor, comedian, all-around fun guy, fizzygeek and I will be there to see him Saturday with bells on!

In other news, the Hannah Montana movie is screening there tomorrow (Monday) for $1...

Nokia lossage

madbodger@livejournal.com — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:27:19 GMT

I use my cell phone with a car kit to keep it charged and let me control the phone easily. To answer the phone, I just thumb the big button. To adjust the volume, I turn the knob. To make a call via voice dialing, I thumb the big button, wait for the breedle, and say the name I want to call.

However, the phone cares deeply about the state of charge of its internal battery*. Even though it is connected to the car kit, and has a continuous source of power, it worries incessantly about electricity issues. If it gets down to 99% charge, it starts recharging. And when it finishes charging, it notifies me by beeping and displaying a "battery full" message.

To dismiss this helpful and informative message (which appears a few times an hour while driving), I have to open the phone (displaying the same message, and assigning the "OK" function to the "enter" key), and press the (tiny) "enter" key. This is not really something safe to attempt whilst driving.

UNFORTUNATELY, the voice dialing feature is disabled while the phone is in this state. Mashing the big button only results in a disappointed-sounding "boop" noise, with no explanation. This rather defeats the safety and convenience of voice dialing. Bad engineering! No engineering biscuit! Bad Nokia!

I wrote Nokia to complain about this, but their reply only told me that I'm required to "confirm" the "Battery full" message. Fail.

Now, if only there were a nice rugged GSM cellphone with Bluetooth that works well with a car kit and an external antenna jack or coupler.

* Technically, it's a cell, not a battery, but the phone (and most people) refer to it as a "battery", so I will here.

Math, astrophysics, and humour

madbodger@livejournal.com — Fri, 22 May 2009 02:21:49 GMT

Quite some time ago, I read a humourous piece about the mass of Pluto. The writer decided to collect the estimates of Pluto's mass over the years, assume that they were all, in fact, correct, and apply a curve fit to their values over time. He came up with some sort of a sine function to an irrational power. He went on to say that the sine function would pass through zero some year hence, and then become negative. And he pointed out that a negative number to an irrational power yields a complex number. And gleefully added something to the effect that "while this idea may be repulsive to some, Pluto will be repulsive to everything.". Sadly, I don't remember where I found this essay, and the usual array of search engines comes a cropper.

Musing on this somewhat abstruse bit of humour, I recalled the recent ballyhoo over the IAU no longer regarding Pluto as a planet, and started to wonder. Was this theory actually correct, and Pluto is indeed shrinking? Are they trying to soften up the blow for when Pluto either vanishes in place or, repelled by the Sun, scoots off into the eternal darkness, never to be seen again?

One thing I like about GPS units

madbodger@livejournal.com — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:00:20 GMT

Here in Virginia, there's a silly law against radar detectors*. A while back, cops would pull over any car with wires leading up to the visor, as they might lead to a radar detector. These days, with all the stick-on GPS units out there, this abhorrent practice seems to have been abandoned.

In which madbodger is a happy/sad fangirl

madbodger@livejournal.com — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:39:04 GMT

The good news:

Alan Tudyk on Dollhouse! Squee!

The bad news (could be spoilery)

Wiring standards

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:30:31 GMT

Some time ago, I realized I was taking a lot of time finding, making, and debugging RS-232 connections and cables. After some thought, I decided to simplify my life by using a system of modular connectors and cables, and adaptors to various connectors and pinouts. I found that 8P8C (oft called RJ-45) to DE-9 and DB-25 male and female connectors were easy to find, affordable, and available in a variety of colours. I rounded up a bunch of them, along with a spool of 8 conductor silver satin cable, matching crimp-on connectors, and a crimp tool. The tool also cuts and strips the wire, so making up a cable of any length is quick and easy. Then popping on the right adaptors would yield a cable with whatever characteristics I needed at the moment.

The missing piece of the puzzle was how to pin out the connectors. At the time, I didn't find a lot of information on existing standards, other than a mention of one system that allowed use of a straight through cable to make pin-for-pin connections, and a rollover cable for null modem connections. Thinking on this, I decided it was not for me, as it would require multiple ground connections, Y connections, or some assumptions about the characteristics of the equipment to be connected.

I therefore decided to roll my own. Since ordinary 6P4C modular phone plugs will mate with the 8P8C jacks (albeit mashing on the wires a little much), I wanted to allow use of phone cables as patch cables as well. Some such phone cables only contain two wires (the center pair). Therefore, I elected to arrange the signals so even such wires would yield a useful (if minimal) link. So I made ground and TX the center two. Another wiring of the adaptors makes them ground and RX, for a one-way null-modem cable. The next two out got RX and DTR, so a common 4-wire phone cable can provide two-way connectivity, along with a signal lead. Working outward, I continued to add signals, in what I considered a logical order of precedence.

I shared this wiring with several friends, including rmd, who published it on her site as well. I figured the more people who used my scheme, the more convenient it would be. The document is still available on my web site.

Fast forward to today. I was looking up pinouts for Cisco console connectors, thinking I could just make an adaptor for that (Cisco uses 8P8C connectors for the console connection on many of their products, and uses them with rollover cables and adaptors, or all-in-one cables to connect to DE-9 serial ports).

I found that, over the years, a few different standards for this sort of connection had emerged. Cisco's scheme, documented here by a Zonker that is apparently not rmd, uses two ground leads in the center, and a fairly symmetrical pinout around it. Another scheme, also based on rollover cables, is the Yost one, which became fairly popular when it was published in a Unix System Administration Handbook. Dell had their own bizarre scheme for RS-232 over 6P4C.

Today, there's actually an international standard for this sort of wiring. It's EIA/TIA-561, often referred to as "RS-232D". How do you think it is wired? It doesn't use up multiple wires for ground and all signals are straight through. In fact, it looks very like my old scheme, although the pinouts don't match exactly. I assume the thinking behind it is similar. I am rather pleased with the indirect vindication. However, I'm left with the decision to just keep my existing adaptors the way they are, or switch them all around to match the new standard (and place a note on my web site explaining the change).

But is it cool?

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:34:14 GMT

They've been testing the fire alarms at work lately. For hours on end, there will be bouts of an ear-splitting screech for 1-15 minutes at a time. Most of the folks rounded up earplugs. But I wanted more. Fortunately, the Peltor Solution II hearing protectors/headphones that fizzygeek and I take to auto races were in the trunk. So I rounded up them and the iPod, and replaced the shriek of the fire alarm system with tunes of my own choosing. The folks at work were impressed and amused. Apparently they only see industrial-strength hearing protection in such places as on aircraft carrier decks.

fizzygeek's bday party

madbodger@livejournal.com — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:35:34 GMT

This year, fizzygeek decided the best way to get the party she wanted was to organize it herself! It's at Buca Di Beppo on Saturday, March 14 at 4PM. Details here.