Weekend Engineering

Not particularly...

2012-01-24T09:21:00.000-08:00

As part of my ongoing rant about of bad UI, I thought this was worthy of note:

The word "help" or "helpful" occurs ten times in this dialog box, all to tell me why it can't help me.

And no, I did not find this particularly helpful...

Sticky and annoying...

2012-01-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

I've griped about other UI goofiness in Skype elsewhere, but below is an example of a behavior of which far too many programs are guilty: the sneak attack checkbox. I generally recharge my Skype balance whenever it gets below about $10, but I only want to do so manually. That way, my potential down-side is limited. If auto-recharge is on, and I unknowingly do something expensive, it could just keep drawing down my PayPal account. If auto-recharge is off, my Skype balance will just go to zero, and whatever I'm doing wrong will stop happening and the problem will come to my attention because Skype has broken. Except, every time I recharge my Skype credit, they pre-check the "here, let me turn auto-recharge on for you" box:

This is irritating for at least 3 reasons:

Things that can cost you should, in my opinion, default to off and require an affirmative selection, at least the first time if not always.
They are intentionally setting this to the state they want, not the state that they know I have selected every previous time I've gone through this process.
The placement, size, and layout of the checkbox dialog is not such that it leaps out at you. I have overlooked it at least once, and the had to go into my account control to figure out how to turn it off again.

Now, I understand perfectly well why they do it. Getting someone to subscribe for automatic payments makes giving them more money the default case. Health clubs and AOL have built entire business models around making it easier to give them money than to stop. But it is annoying and an abuse of the good will of the user / client, and we deserve better.

Droid Razr Touch Screen Noise

2012-01-03T01:43:00.001-08:00

Last month I got a new cell phone to replace my first generation Motorola Droid. I decided to get the Droid Razr, another Motorola product, and I've been generally happy with it. Some of the features just seem nuts to have in a cell phone, like HDMI output, and yet I've used it to watch a movie on a hotel TV.

One interesting sensitivity that I noticed today was that the touch screen keyboard became almost unusable while I had the Razr plugged into a wall charger. I have been using the "Swype" mode, which allows you to enter entire words as a smooth sweeping gesture around the keyboard. This time, though, it was detecting finger-lifts when I was still touching the screen, and the path it showed as where I was moving my finger looked like I'd had way too much caffeine.

Now admittedly, I was not using the charger that came with the phone, but it was the Motorola charger from my first Droid. That's the charger that I usually have in my backpack, and I have actually had occasion to look at the 5V coming out of it with an oscilloscope. It very clean and well regulated, even under load, especially compared to many other third-party chargers. On a hunch, though, I unplugged the charger, and suddenly the keyboard worked fine again. This may merit some further laboratory investigation, and it might provide good justification for building a controllable noise injection circuit...

How To Post To Blogger Via E-Mail

2011-12-30T18:51:00.001-08:00

If you have a blogger.com hosted blog account that you want to post to via e-mail, just log into your dashboard, and click on the "Settings" tab. Then go to the "Email & Mobile" sub-tab underneath that. Under "Posting Options" (the third major item down) you will find "Email Posting Address." Fill in the box, and then select whether you want e-mailed posts to be posted immediately or saved as drafts. Voila!

Then, once you're done with that, you might want to e-mail a test posting. Something brief, perhaps, like quick instructions on how to post via e-mail...

China Travelogue - The Great Firewall of China

2011-12-12T22:27:00.000-08:00

As my cousin Stacy pointed out last week, I have missed my deadline. I had set the goal of posting at least once a week here for the next year, and then only a few weeks in I missed that goal. The cause of my shortcoming is a combination of Chinese totalitarianism and my shortsightedness.

I’ve just spent two weeks in China on a business trip. Although I was aware of “The Great Firewall of China,” this is the first trip where it has completely thwarted my efforts. “The Great Firewall” is the wholesale, systematic censorship of Internet access within the People’s Republic of China. From inside China, it appears that a large number of common websites just don’t work. Attempts to connect to them result in a “connection reset” message, or sometimes the connection simply times out with no response at all. One of the sites so blocked is blogger.com, where I write this blog.

Reset connection to blogger.com

Timed-out connection to Facebook

There are some ways around The Great Firewall. Virtual Private Networks or “VPNs” can be used to create an encrypted tunnel between a computer inside the PRC and a portal on the outside, through which (virtually) all network traffic can be passed. From the user’s point of view, it is like browsing from the far end of the VPN. There are a few problems with this solution. The first is speed and bandwidth. If I have a VPN connection to my home, and I request data from a website, that data has to both go into my home machine, which is limited by my home download speed, and then be sent to me out of my home over the VPN, which is limited by my home upload speed. There is also some delay introduced for the VPN server at my home to encrypt the data for transfer over the VPN. All the traffic passing through the VPN has to traverse the network connection to the VPN server twice. This can, of course, be overcome by using a fast machine with a really high bandwidth Internet connection, but it still represents a bottleneck.

There are also some more technical VPN issues. If I’m connected to the Internet at my hotel in China, I need to make sure that the packets required to maintain that local connection to the hotel’s network aren’t shipped out over the VPN. For example, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used to get an IP address in most public networks. It is also used to renew that address when it expires. If that traffic isn’t left on the local network, then the Internet connection required for the VPN can’t be set up in the first place.

Another work-around is web proxies. These are similar to VPNs, in that you send your request for a web-page to a server somewhere else, that that server, acting as your “proxy,” requests the web page and forwards it on to you. That way, the routers filtering traffic from certain sites don’t know where your traffic is originating and let it through unmolested. There are many free web proxies, but most of them don’t work terribly well, although it wasn’t clear to me if they are simply overloaded, or if China is doing a really good job of blocking them as quickly as the pop up.

To access some static web content you can use a search engine as your proxy. Microsoft’s “Bing” works pretty well in China, and in several cases I was able to search for some content I wanted to see, and even though those pages were blocked, I could download the cached data from Bing. This only works for web content that is relatively static, and non-interactive. And while I could access the Bing cached pages, the Google cache did not seem to work.

It turns out that there is also a way to set up blogger to post anything mailed to a pre-arranged e-mail address. Since I didn’t set that up ahead of time (my aforementioned shortsightedness), I couldn’t use that on this trip.

So why does China go to the expense and effort of maintaining The Great Firewall? I think the pretense is to block “objectionable content” from the people of the People’s Republic. It seems obvious to me that it is an effort to manage the flow of information and control the mindset and mood of the populous. Above and beyond that, though, there also seems to be some element of supporting SOE’s (State Owned Enterprises) over their foreign competitors. Although China apparently has a booming social networking industry, Facebook is blocked. I would love to see the World Trade Organization, which China was so hot to join ten years ago, take a look at this aspect of it.

On future trips, I’ll know to set up more infrastructure in advance. But for now I’m just happy to be back on the right side of the Great Firewall.

Serving Size and Calorie Counting

2011-11-22T08:51:00.000-08:00

When you want to lose body fat, the only way to do it is to burn more calories than you consume. If you burn approximately 3500 calories more than you eat, your body will metabolize about 1 pound of fat to make up the difference. Now this has some interesting implications... Can you lose weight eating only Krispy Kreme donuts? Well, yes. You just need to eat less calories worth than you consume. Of course, an all-Krispy-Kreme diet would almost certainly lead to other nutritional complications. You would also probably be hungry most of the time because eating few enough donuts to lose weight would probably not be very satisfying. But it could be done.

If you are keeping track of you calorie intake, it is important to know what your actual calorie count is. Small errors add up over time. An extra 10 calories a day, which is less than one teaspoon of sugar, adds up to 3650 calories over a year; that's more than a pound of fat! Fortunately, there are standard nutrition facts labels on virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States, like this one on tortilla chips:

So, according to this label, the serving size is 28 grams, which is 140 calories. The FDA has rounding rules that allow manufacturers to round to the nearest 10 calorie increment for values >50 calories, so that means the real value is somewhere between 135.0 and 144.9 calories per 28 gram serving. Also, most people don't have or regularly use a food scale, so the label often helpfully provides a translation of the serving size into pieces. Here that is "About 13 chips." So when I was making nachos the other day I wondered "how close is 'about?'" The answer was, not too close:

Counting out 13 of the most uniform chips I could find onto a scale (yes, I zeroed out the paper plate), I measured 34.7g, which is 6.7g, or 24% more than the 28g serving size. That means that if I count out 13 chips and think I'm eating 140 calories, I would really be getting closer to 174 calories. To get the 28g serving size, I should really eat about 10.5 chips.

To be really precise, I should note that the primary measure for the serving size is given as 1 ounce, which is really closer to 28.35 grams. But that .35 grams is an error of only 1.25%, which is dwarfed by the 24% error above. There is also some normal chip-to-chip variation, which I didn't measure. And often a "chip" is actually broken and missing part. But ultimately, if you want to confirm serving size, the best way to do it is by weighing your food.

Do you ever keep track of your calorie intake? Leave a comment below!

Post-A-Week Goal

2011-11-13T00:37:00.000-08:00

A bit over a year ago, I set a goal to write a blog entry every day for a month. I managed to carry through on it, even though it wasn't particularly easy to hold to the commitment every day. I did not, however, take the next step from that goal, and continue making regular progress on other writing projects, or even here. So I'm setting another blogging goal. The goal this time is to write at least one posting here each week for the next year. If I pull it off, that means that I will write over 50 posts in the next year. Seeing that cumulative progress is, I think, a useful step toward getting myself revved up to do other, larger scale writing projects.

Of course, one of the problems with a "Post-A-Week" is that at least one day each week I'll have to actually finish something and click the "Publish Post" button. When I get toward the end of any given week, it then becomes a post-a-day goal, for that one day. So I should try to make sure that I write early in the week, and not late, to keep ahead of the curve. If my daughter ever reads this, she'll recognize this strategy from the last 5 years of me prodding her about starting her homework early.

For the purposes of this goal, I'll say that the week extends from Sunday through Saturday. And as it is currently 12:20 AM on Sunday, November 13, 2011, this entry will fulfill my obligation for the week of the 13th - 19th! Of course, I can write MORE than one a week if time and motivation allow, and I'll certainly try. But at least this week I'm finishing over 167 hours ahead of my deadline!

I've got dozens of ideas jotted down, and about 25 partially written posts already stock-piled. Time to start working through the backlog, polishing things up, and get them out into the world. And then come up with more!

How about you? What are you planning to do over the course of the next year? Leave a comment below and tell me!

Wait, what?

2011-11-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

Today a co-worker sitting next to me in the lab sent me a file on Skype. A moment later he said, "Oops, wrong file, cancel it." So I clicked on the "Cancel" button next to the Skype file transfer bar and was greeted with this dialog box:

That's right, to cancel the file transfer you have to click "Ok," and to NOT cancel the file transfer, you click "Cancel," which is to say, "Cancel the cancellation."

I went looking around and Microsoft does indeed discourage this kind of silliness. In an article on correct UI design here they say:

"... Never use OK and Cancel for yes or no questions.

Incorrect:

Correct:

Better:
"

Of course, this is made more amusing by the fact that Microsoft recently completed their acquisition of Skype. Maybe they'll fix this in the next update. Oops, nope, according to the release notes for the latest update it looks like they're focusing on more important issues:

"Changes:

Removed Google product bundling..."

So, what goofy or needlessly confusing user interface designs have you run into recently? Leave a comment!

Interview Scoring

2011-07-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, I was involved in a lot of interviewing for several technical positions at the company where I then worked. Generally, a candidate would come in, and multiple engineers would interview them individually for 30 to 60 minutes each over the course of the day, and then we'd get together in a conference room to discuss their merits. I realized that it was helpful to have a quick, common starting point for the discussion. If everyone agreed that someone was a dud, there was no point in continuing to talk about them. Likewise, if everyone thought they were amazing, we would be motivated to get an offer to them quickly and try to lock them in before they got another offer elsewhere. To facilitate this discussion, I developed a simple 1 to 10 point scale for broadly rating the viability of a candidate:

I will immediately tender my resignation if you offer this person a job.
Extremely weak candidate. This person is likely to be a long-term drain on resources, and may well never make the transition to being a net positive contributor.
Weak candidate. Initially, this candidate will be a net loss, requiring training, mentoring, constant guidance and close supervision. They may grow in time, and become a net contributor, but it is not clear when (or if) this will occur.
Mediocre candidate: This person demonstrated some obvious deficiencies in the course of the interview, although they were not a complete train wreck.
Fair candidate: This person showed no particular brilliance, but no glaring deficiencies either. They will require support and assistance, but it is reasonable to expect that they will become a useful if uninspired contributor in time.
Reasonable candidate: This person seems like they may become a valuable team member, after some start-up delay.
Strong candidate: This person is likely to become a valuable member of the team fairly quickly.
This is an extremely strong candidate. While not a rock star, they have an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge, and will come up to speed very quickly. Unless there is a rock star candidate in the line-up, we should very strongly consider making this person an offer.
This person is a rock star. They will make an immediate and valuable contribution to the company, and we are unlikely to find a better fit for this job than this candidate.
I will immediately tender my resignation if you do not offer this person a job.

At the start of the meeting, everyone would, without discussion, secretly write their score for the candidate on a piece of paper. Then we would reveal the scores all at the same time. The results were usually quite interesting.

Often, we would find that one person would rate someone wildly differently, higher or lower, than everyone else did. If the candidate was in the acceptable band to most of the interviewers, then the discussion became an exploration of the cause of the disconnect in scoring.

Engineers being engineers, they would often add precision to the scale. Scores of 7.5 or 6.5 were common. And once the discussion was underway, people were free to re-evaluate their initial score in light of the persuasive arguments of the other interviewers.

Depending upon the position, the rate at which a company is growing, and the level of candidate sought, the threshold for further consideration may well slide up and down. Some people will never consider anyone below an 8. Some jobs may be perfectly well filled with a 6, but you want to at least know that you're getting a 6 and not an 8. I would generally dismiss out of hand anyone below a 5; the dot com days of filling chairs with any warm bodies to boost acquisition valuations are, I hope, a thing of the distant past.

Finally, the score provided a short-hand for the relative comparison of multiple candidates, often across multiple weeks of interviewing.

This is obviously just a first pass go/no-go filter and a starting point for discussion. In some cases though, it helped keep the wrap-up meetings VERY brief!

Job Search Rules

2011-03-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

I have helped with the recruiting of new employees at a number of companies for which I have worked over the years. Based on that experience, I would like to offer the following list of suggestions for anyone trying to get hired. You've probably heard them all before, but I can tell you from looking at a lot of bad cover letters and resumes that many people just don't seem to take these to heart:

Your cover letter matters: it is my first impression of you, and if it is poorly written, I may not even get to your resume. It also indicates to me that you aren't just spamming every e-mail address you can find with your resume.

Proofread your resume. Then have someone else proofread it. Much like your cover letter, it is how I continue to develop my first impression of you. If you can't provide me with one perfect page of work that you had all the time in the world to do, what can I expect of you once you're under time pressure?

Provide a .PDF of your resume, not a Microsoft Word file. I may or may not have the correct version of Word, and I generally dislike opening .doc / .docx files of unknown origin, just in case some clever new exploit is floating around in them. Some people don't use Microsoft Office at all, especially Mac and Linux folks. I may also not have the same fonts as you. PDFCreator is freely available, and .PDF documents are, as the name says, portable across numerous systems.

The ONLY job of a resume is to get you an interview, and provide starting topics for that interview. Make it good, but keep it brief.

Polite formality matters: I want to know that you are capable of interacting in an appropriately professional manner, when needed. If we end up working together, then the abbreviated e-mails and collegial joking can begin. But don't jump the gun.

Sell yourself well: I want you to succeed, because I have a job to fill, so let me know how you will meet my needs. If we end up working together, I may, at times, spend more of my waking hours around you than I do with my family. I want to believe that time will be well spent, and that we will work well together.

Expect to be Googled: My goal is to find professionally relevant information about your work experience, but I'm going to see whatever comes up. I don't care about your personal life, but if I find your blog entirely about how to sell stolen lab supplies on eBay, I'm probably not going to want to hire you.

And finally, a couple suggestions from my various job hunts:

Talk to your friends: Almost every job I've ever had has been the result of a connection made through a friend, or friend of a friend. That's how you find out about jobs when the company is thinking of hiring, before they've even cast out their net. It's a lot easier to stand out in a hiring pool of one than when there are dozens of resumes coming in from a Craig's List posting or Monster.com listing.

Make targeted cold calls: If you know where you would like to work, do some research and then call them up, and ask to talk to the person likely to be your boss there. I really loved what was being done at Leapfrog years ago, so I called their engineering R&D office and asked for the CTO, who's name I had gotten from a web search. He was out of town, so I was referred to the VP of hardware engineering. I asked if he had any upcoming openings. He said he did, and asked me to send him my resume. Two weeks later I had a job there. This is important though: do not treat this as a "numbers game," but rather as a carefully targeted approach to somewhere you'd really like to work. Even if they don't have any openings when you call, they might know if any are planned in the near future. Or, if you present yourself well, they may even make some effort to find a position for you, or accelerate hiring for a planned future opening.

Have you got any good stories from either looking for a job or looking to hire someone? Comment below!

Manita Guidero / Nery, Alderwood Middle School Home Ec.

2011-03-23T04:06:00.000-07:00

I have been extremely fortunate to have had a number of excellent teachers throughout my life. Some I have kept in touch with, others I wish I had made more of an effort. One of the latter was my 8th Grade Home Economics teacher. When I knew her, she was Mrs. Guidero, although I learned that in later years, she got divorced and became Ms. Nery. She was about 40 years old and a new teacher to Alderwood Middle School when I arrived there in 7th grade. As I sat in her class on the first day of school, I was terrified of her. She was, I thought, an unreasonably demanding battle-axe, outlining in excruciating detail during that first class exactly how we were to put the headings on our papers, how she would brook no foolishness, and all the behavioral strictures we were expected to observe in her class. I found her so daunting that when one of the science teachers (another of my favorites) asked me to be a teaching assistant for him, I immediately dropped Home Ec.

The next year, I found myself back in her class, without the option of dropping. I quickly learned that she expected a lot of us, because she had a lot to teach us. I loved her class. I learned a lot about cooking from her, and I did great. I discovered that she recognized and respected good behavior, and was happy to give freedom to those who demonstrated they could handle it. By the end of her class, I had so much enjoyed myself that I ended up becoming her teaching assistant the next trimester. She taught me more about cooking, and taught me to teach, asking me to run entire cooking demonstrations in her class. At the end of the year student awards ceremony, she gave me the Home Ec. cooking award for that year.

Mrs. Guidero, later Ms. Nery, continued to teach at Alderwood for the next 17 years, becoming, I have heard, a pillar of the school. I suspect that she demanded, and got, the best out of a lot of students in that time. I often thought of her, and several years ago I finally did some Googling to try to get in touch with her again. I wanted to let her know what a positive influence I felt she had had on my life. I was sad to discover that she had died in a freak hiking accident in Glacier National Park on June 28, 2002 at the age of 59. I'm sad that I never got to talk to her again. I expect I am only one of many lives that she touched in the course of her amazing career.

I'm Illiterate in over 160 languages!

2011-03-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

I have been travelling to Taiwan occasionally for business, and although I've made some effort to learn Mandarin Chinese, I've not really had the time to make a serious study of it, so I know only a few phrases. The single most useful thing I can say is "I can not speak Mandarin. Can you speak English?" My favorite response to that was a guy who responded in perfect, unaccented west coast American English, "Yeah, what's up?" The reason I'd needed to speak to that particular person was because I couldn't figure out which "cycle" button to press on the coin operated washing machine I had just dumped my clothes and money into. The operating instructions, quite helpfully, were in Chinese and English, but step four was "select cycle." All five of the cycle buttons were labelled only in Chinese. I can't tell "ultra gentle non-agitating non-wash" from "shred your clothes and set them on fire," so I didn't really want to just pick a button at random. And this was only one of many experiences that has taught me how utterly terrible it is to be illiterate.

There is a LOT of good information written all around us, to the point that we take it for granted, and often don't even realize when we're absorbing data from our environment. But when that information isn't there, you really miss it. Ideographic Chinese is so completely unintelligible to me that it effectively isn't there. And when I want to get something as simple as a bottle of juice at 7-11, it becomes apparent. I don't like to drink caffeine or artificial sweeteners. When I picked up a grape juice bottle the other day, the only thing I could read on the label was "100%," which I eventually assumed was most likely "100% juice." But it could well have been "100% of your day's vitamin C," or "100% recycled bottle!" or "100% rocket blast wake up caffeine super energy cocktail!" And yes, I could have started asking people around me, but then I'd also need to explain in at least some detail what I was trying to avoid. If I had gone through that exercise, then I would always know in the future that I could buy that one item. But still, coming from a world where I can instantly know quite a lot of details of that product just by reading the label, illiteracy is a jarring change.

Maybe that's part of the secret to how people get by without being able to read: They always have, so they just aren't acclimatized to the huge chunk they are missing. But when an adult learns to read late in life, do they undergo a period of realization of how much richer their experience of the world can suddenly become? If you've taught any adult reading classes, please comment below. I'd love to know.

And maybe I should renew my efforts to learn some written Chinese as well...

Welcome to The FUTURE!

2011-03-21T07:07:00.000-07:00

When I was walking out of an MRT station (Metro Rail Transit - Like London's Underground) in Taipei this sign caught my eye:

Why yes, that is in fact an LED indicator board to tell you the status of the stalls in the men's room. No more of that pesky furtive glancing under the stall wall or embarrassing rattling of locked doors. Indeed, this was out IN THE MAIN HALL, so you didn't even need to go into the restroom to know what was available. This truly is an amazing time in which we live.

Seriously though, this got sorted into the bin in my brain labelled "Huh?"

- Is it useful and cool, or just kind of creepy?

- Who created this? It obviously took a great deal of doing. SOMEONE has this thing on their resume.

- Why is this the first time I've ever seen it? Is it really new? Or a pilot run? Or somebody's college art project?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, enough so to stop in a busy train station and take a photo of a restroom sign. What do YOU think? Have you ever seen one of these before? Comment below.

The New Inventors

2011-03-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

I was in Taiwan recently, and one night while channel surfing, I ran across a show on the hotel's Australian channel called "The New Inventors." (You can download episodes from their website!) Imagine "American Idol" except for inventors. And they're Australian. It is really really really cool, and it brings popular focus to things that really matter. I know, I know, American Idol is important too because it allows beautiful talented people under the age of 26 to sign tightly binding contracts with the producers of the show. Or something. But encouraging and rewarding people that are building a better future has the potential to change all our lives in ways we can't yet even imagine.

Post Office Adventures II

2010-11-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

I previously wrote about The Coming Inevitable Death of the United States Postal Service. Today, just for grins, I went back began during business hours to the post office where this adventure, to try to get my refund.

The guy at the counter looked at my receipt and said "You can't get a cash refund." No problem, I said, a credit card refund is fine. "No, we can only give you stamps." But I don't need stamps, I explained. The guy didn't seem to understand or care what I wanted, he had been trained "We Only Give Stamps," and there was no shaking his determined belief that this was his mission in life. He said that I wasn't listening to him or that I didn't understand. I pointed out that I understood the words he was saying, but that it made no sense. He was amazingly arrogant about it, and treated me like I was profoundly stupid. He also said, "How long ago was this anyway? This was back in OCTOBER?" (I refrained from screaming "DUDE! IT IS ONLY NOVEMBER SECOND!") I asked to talk with a manager.

The manager arrived a few minutes later and said, "Well, he knows this better than I do," in reference to the original counter worker. The manager suggested I could talk to the Customer Service line if I wanted, and I pointed out that I had talked with them, and they had said I MUST return to the original post office for a refund. He said "Well, the money is gone. When you pay into the APC it goes into their account. It doesn't go into my account." Again, he just didn't seem clear on the idea that I, as a customer, view the USPS as a monolithic organization, and furthermore, I don't care about their internal accounting procedures.

The manager said he would "talk to somebody," and disappeared into the back, while I was asked to move out of the way at the counter so they could serve other customers. About 8 minutes later he came back, shaking his head, and saying "product only. We can't give you a refund."

At this point, I didn't want to waste any more time on the experiment, so I said, "Fine. I'll take stamps." The manager directed me back to the original guy who had been so helpful. "You'll have to fill out the refund form," he said. Wow... I proceeded to do the worst job on any piece of government paperwork I have ever done, and he gave me $4.95 worth of stamps. I just hope I can use them before the post office goes out of business.

I now firmly believe that the USPS should be abolished. Better yet, everyone that works there should be fired, and the entire organization should be re-staffed starting with hiring managers from FedEx. Given the current unemployment levels, I'm sure there are plenty of people who would do an excellent job, after a few days of training about the value of (and need for) customers.

Fiction Fragment - The End of the World

2010-10-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

Since I had a request for more stories, and since it is still Halloween for the next 8 minutes, and since I like posting stuff and getting people's feedback on it, here's something I wrote in 2000. I know, it's cheating to pull things from the archives, but it has been a busy day. Lemme know what you think:

I'm looking at these notes and wondering why I'm bothering.  Bothering to write, and bothering to go through the motions of living.  I mean, I know I'm emotionally screwed up.  That rather goes without saying.  I maintain my air of "detached amusement," and it's served me well throughout my life, but now there's nobody around to even notice that I'm not falling to pieces.

Everyone is dead.

That's inconceivable.  Okay, how about this:  My entire family is dead.  That's a little more believable.  I always knew that I might outlive some of the people I care about.  But not EVERYBODY.

The entire city of San   Jose is dead.  Well, I didn't know most of the people in the city.

The entire United   States is dead.  Nations fall.  But traditionally it's the idea of the nation, not all the people in it...

The entire world is dead.  That means all the other nations are dead.  Every city is dead.  Every family is dead.

Nope, still isn't registering.

In the days during and immediately after the plague, I wandered around in a fugue.  For the first few days I was waiting to die myself.  Because everybody was dying.  I saw a co-worker crash and burn out in the office.  Theo.  He died right there in the lab, bled out all over the new o-scope.  We called 911, but the implosion of infrastructure had already started.  We left him where he fell, and didn't even turn out the lights on our way out.  It didn't matter.  The power failed the next afternoon.

I kept not dying, and then I got hungry.

El Camino was mostly clear, with only a few cars piled along the sides where they'd come to a rest even as their driver's expired.  I realized after driving past 4 miles of strip malls that I was looking for an open burger joint.  Every McDonanld's in the South Bay was closed.  That took a little while to get a grasp on.  So finally I turned down Lawrence expressway, and went to Costco.  I went looking for a snack.  I found a home.

What more could the last man on earth want, besides 582 gallons of Cran-Raspberry?  Or 5200 cans of Campbell's soup?  I also found a total of $14,000 and change in cash, and decided that I was now a communist.  To celebrate my political conversion, I piled the bonfire up in a wastebasket and used it to roast marshmallows to make s'mores.  I discovered that while food cooked over money may sound impressive, it tastes awful.

Being a Writing Writer

2010-10-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

It was one month ago today that I asserted I was going to try to write a blog entry a day, and I have (almost) managed to do so. At this point, I'm trying to decide how I want to modify the effort. I've enjoyed the requirement that I quickly write and publish something, and I have always managed to find something to write about. I want to keep writing, but I'm not sure these short pieces are all I want to do. I have long dreamed of writing a longer work. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) starts in 58 hours, and although I don't think I'd necessarily make the required 50,000 words for that, I may take a more serious effort at fiction writing. I know other people that HAVE completed NaNoWriMo, and their efforts were also inspiring. 50,000 words in 30 days represents 1667 words per day, or about 1.5 - 4 times the number of words I've been tending to write daily.

Of course the point of NaNoWriMo is to get over the feeling that your words are precious and must be perfectly crafted. That is for editing. The first thing you need to do is simply get ANY words out on the paper. Or word document. Or as I've been doing, Blog. And in that regard, this exercise I've been doing has been a good lead up to that. The lead-up that I haven't done is the pre-writing steps of coming up with a coherent story. But maybe I'll start by just trying to write various scenes, and stitch them together. So in honor of Halloween, and the completion of my month-of-blogging, here's a scene. And no, the rest of the story has not been written around it yet...

Dan felt the fingers tracing gently over his neck and upper back, but he was strapped face down on the table and couldn't turn his head enough to see the man standing over him.

"Your really should have been more careful," the man spoke in a calm, quiet voice. "Because of you, two people are dead, and a little boy is paralyzed. Was it worth it? Was Margarita Tuesday really worth the amount of pain you've brought into the world?"

Dan squirmed against his restraints, but there was almost no slack. Thrashing as hard as he could, he could only rotate his shoulders a few inches either direction. "Please... it was an accident... I didn't mean to hurt anybody."

"Maybe that was true the first two times you were arrested for DUI. But you knew you had a problem. You could have called a cab, or ridden home with friends. Instead you got behind the wheel of a Cadillac Escalade even though your license was suspended..."

"What are you doing? Please don't kill me," Dan pleaded.

"Oh, don't worry. I'm not going to kill you. I'm just going to insure that you can never hurt anyone again..." Dan felt the fingers tracing down his spin, from the base of his skull and on to his upper back. The rubber gloved hand stopped and gently pinched the spinal ridge...

Okay, I have more in mind, but what do YOU think happens next? What would you LIKE to see happen? (Hmmm... There's another idea for an entire blog, written as a Choose Your Own Adventure, with links to other entries in the blog as you read through it...)

"Dear Customers, Please Go Away!"

2010-10-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

I went to JoAnn Fabrics with my wife Chris this evening so she could get some material for a project she's working on. The store was a complete zoo, with a line about 18 people deep at the cutting table. When Chris finally got up to the table, she mentioned that she hadn't anticipated it being this crowded. The lady, one of only two working the table, laughed and said "Oh, it's always this crowded a few days before Halloween!" Hmmm... So, they KNOW it is going to be crowded, and yet they are obviously understaffed? Who possibly thinks this is a good idea? Was there really nobody else that the manager could have scheduled to work this evening?

Now, we get mailers from JoAnn probably once every few weeks, with coupons and discount offers and advertisements for all their sale items. They are not stupid about marketing, and they are obviously spending money to get people in the door. But once they get them there, *even when they know they are coming*, they don't then have enough staff to enable buying at the customer's pace.

It got better, though. Starting at about 8:15 or 8:30, they began announcing on the store P.A. that "JoAnn Fabrics will be closing at 9:00. Please finish your shopping and bring your final selections to the checkout." Of course, a lot of people were still waiting at the cutting table to be *able* to take their selections to the checkout. But more importantly, having gone to great marketing effort to get customers in the door, they were now not only understaffed to help them, but they were actively shoving them out the door because it was approaching their arbitrary closing time.

When we finally got through the line to the cashier (they had only one working the checkout, on this known-busy day) I mentioned to him that it seemed a shame to be shoving people out the door when they were there actively trying to give the store more money. He said it was too bad, but they had to lock the door at 9:00 PM. He had, either through conditioning or poor training or simple lack of imagination or care, come to the conclusion that the purpose of the business at which he worked was to close the door at 9:00 PM, and not to sell as much stuff as people possibly wanted to buy. Now, it if had been a department store, or some other type of retailer where a lot of people were just browsing, I could understand. Shooing the recreational shoppers out the door isn't going to cost a lot of lost opportunity. But from what I saw this evening, most of those people were there with intent to buy. They wanted to get more. They were looking for things to purchase. And they were being told, "Dear Customers, Please Go Away." It was kind of staggering.

The Inevitable Coming Death of the United States Postal Service

2010-10-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

My daughter wanted to ship a small birthday gift to an old friend of hers who now lives in Oregon. We used one of the fixed-rate boxes that I had picked up previously for free at the post office. The smallest box is about the size of a VHS video cassette (or the box your iPod came in, if you're under 20 years old...) and they'll ship it anywhere in the US by priority mail for $4.95. I took it over to the post office at 10:30 Sunday night, knowing that they had an "Automated Postal Center," or APC, where I could pay for the postage. I entered all the information, swiped my credit card, and it printed out this postage label for the package:

So, obviously, the printer was broken, and that label wasn't going to get me anywhere. No problem, I had brought stamps with me, just in case, and I stuck down eleven 44 cent stamps, one 10 cent, and one 1 cent, and then dropped the box in the parcel drop next to the APC. Two days later, it arrived back at our house. The postal service had bounced it to the return address because, at 14 ounces, it exceeded the 13 ounce limit for mailing packages without going to the counter. This policy was originally a response to the Unabomber (who was captured in 1996) and now it is part of the general air of paranoia that pervades "our Post-9/11 world(tm)". (I wonder if there is a study somewhere showing that 13 ounces was a magic threshold weight for lethal letter-bombs. That would have been a fun research project to work on...)

Today, thinking I would kill two birds with one stone, I took my lunch hour at work to go to the post office near my employer, to re-mail the package, and get a refund on my defectively printed $4.95 label. Well, one out of two isn't bad... (YES, IT REALLY IS!) The lady at the counter took the package, took off the warning labels they'd returned it to me with, and put it in the outgoing. She then said that, no, I couldn't get a refund on the defective label, I would have to go to the post office where I purchsed it. I politely pointed out that I'm not NEAR that post office during business hours, which is why I used the APC in the first place. She checked with her manager, and no, they just couldn't help. Apparently if THEY refunded the money, that post office would have to eat the cost, because there is no way for them to recover the money from the post office where I bought the defective label.

Okay, savor the irony of this for a moment. This organization exists (at great taxpayer subsidized expense, these last few years), for the purpose of supporting communications. And yet individual post offices are, apparently, run as rival factions with no means for transferring money from one to another. I pointed out that this was stupid. The counter lady agreed. And apologized. And suggested that I call the 800-275-8777 customer service number.

Knowing at this point that I was going to write this entry, I figured "why not?" Back at the office I called the customer support line, and they really don't make it easy to get to a human if you don't fall into one of the four available voice menu categories. But I eventually got a human. And she found in her information (to her surprise as well) that "the ONLY recourse" is to return to the post office where the APC problem occurred. It didn't matter that I had both the receipt AND the defective label, and that I paid with a credit card. I have to go back and talk to the APC specialist at THAT post office. She agreed that this was stupid. She even suggested I log a complaint, and helped me do it, and promised that someone would call me back within 2 days.

Sure enough, about 4 hours later, I got a call from the post office where the problem originated. I explained what I needed and why it was not convenient for me to go there during their business hours. And he agreed that it was unfortunate, but policy was policy. But, he pointed out helpfully, they are open until 6:00 PM.

So, what did I learn from this?

- Never EVER use the APC, unless you can get back to that post office, during business hours, if you have a problem.
- Don't mail packages after hours anyway, unless they are less than 13 ounces (or you want them delivered back to your own house.)
- Customer Service: Not a big concern at the United States Postal Service.

Maybe, if I happen to be near that post office during business hours, I'll head over and seek my refund. But mostly, I'm just going to quit shipping things USPS. I have always been happy with FedEx customer service... They have escalation paths for customer service complaints that get things fixed. And I'll encourage everyone else I know to do the same. But given the trajectory the USPS is on, and from what I've seen of their customer service, I have to believe that eventually even congress will take the hint, especially in these days of rising budget-mindedness, and pull the plug.

Postscript: I attempted to mail a link to this entry to the USPS Customer Service Center, to give them an opportunity to comment, but I ran into this:

Due to system upgrades, the ability to Email Us is also temporarily unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.

>Sigh...<

Real ESP

2010-10-26T22:51:00.000-07:00

Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is usually used to refer to telepathy or other paranormal or "psi" capabilities. The five "standard" human senses are really well suited to allowing us to interact with our environment, but even in the realm of nature they are not the only choices. Looking around the animal kingdom, we find some animals with senses that are more powerful than, or even just completely different than, our own.

Bees can "see" the polarization of light, which gives them a powerful aid in finding certain kinds of flowers. Some snakes have the ability to "see" heat in the long-wave infra-red. This means that they can detect the thermal energy coming off their prey, as well as off potential predators.

It is well known that dogs have an amazing sense of smell, that goes all the way from a massive olfactory sensory surface area back to a much larger portion of their brain dedicated to processing smells. This means that they literally perceive more of their world through smell than we do. When you smell soup, they smell every individual ingredient. Or the other day, I couldn't figure out why Dory, my Golden Retriever, kept jumping on the door to the room where we keep her dog food. It turns out that I had left the air tight lid off the bin when I got her dinner earlier in the evening, and she could smell the open bin from a room away and through the door, and she wanted at it.

Imagine if we had evolved on a world where hotspots of intense ionizing radiation tended to kill everything that came too close. It is not hard to believe that animals would have been under strong evolutionary pressure to develop the ability to perceive ionizing radiation. Maybe we'd "see" it or "hear" it, or maybe we would just get really uncomfortable and itchy as the radiation level rose. But someone from that world would, to us, seem to have a nearly magical ability to perceive that which we can't.

Or what about a world on which color vision never evolved? If everyone could see only intensity (black and white), but suddenly someone showed up with color vision, they would have this freakish ability to, for no obvious reason, know the *wavelength* of light coming off of objects, and not just the intensity. Of course, growing up in a world with no words for color, they would completely lack the vocabulary to even describe the experience. Or taking this idea one step further, imagine a world on which no vision at all had evolved. Everyone, and every animal could get some idea of what's around them by their sense of smell (which would probably be superhuman by our standards), and they could hear, and then feel and taste things when they are in contact with them. But then someone shows up who can seemingly know, as if by magic, what's happening across the room, or can sense things even up wind from them. They can dodge virtually any attack. They can attack back at distance with impossible accuracy. It would be the stuff of comic book super-heroes, or nightmare boogey men. People would say, "It's like he has some kind of fifth sense!"

Guns in the Movies

2010-10-25T23:16:00.000-07:00

Today, more technical "nit picking." Last month I went off on the novels of Dan Brown, and now it's the even easier target (pun intended) of guns in movies. Although they are a staple of action flicks, it's amazing how often movies get the details of firearms wrong. For example, I was watching the movie "Killers" yesterday, and Aston Kutcher asks his wife to bring him the Glock .45 he has in the nightstand. Then, as he points it at his head of a rival hitman, you hear him cock the hammer. Except that Glocks don't have external hammers. They are what is known as "Double Action Only" (which, is arguably ALSO a misnomer, but I digress) and the only way to cock the internal hammer is by cycling the side. But the Foley artist doing the sound for this movie knows that the sound that goes with putting a gun to someone's head threateningly is the cocking of the hammer. Even if there is no hammer.

Another common source of errors has to do with "blanks" within the plot of a movie. Blanks, when you know that they are firing blanks, are usually treated as though they behave like ammunition in every way, except that they don't fire a bullet. But again, the devil is in the details. In many semi-automatic rifles, like the AR-15/M-16, or the AK-47, the lack of a bullet with blank fire means that there isn't enough pressure developed in the barrel to cycle the action. There are two ways to address this: 1) You can put a device over the muzzle of the gun called a "blank firing adapter" that restricts the gas flow out of the barrel enough to allow blank fire to cycle the action, or 2) You can manually cycle the action after every blank you fire. But what you *can't* do is replace a magazine full of live ammo with a magazine full of blanks, and have the gun behave exactly the same except without the bullets (Yes, I'm looking at you, Die Hard 2.) Oh, and if you DO fire live ammunition out of a gun with a blank firing adapter on the muzzle, it often blows up.

The effects of handguns are usually portrayed incorrectly in movies as well. There are both errors in magnitude and time scale. The impact of someone shot with a handgun is often wildly exaggerated, with people flung backwards, physically knocked off their feet. If you've ever seen video of police shootings, though, what's striking is how someone being shot will often at first appear unaffected, or will just fall over as they go unconscious from shock or neurological trauma. Next, there's the problem of time scale: Most people shot in movies end up in one of two categories: Dead or complete recovery. The reality is that most people shot with handguns don't die (at least not immediately) but they will usually suffer adverse health effects for the rest of their lives. You just can't poke holes in a person without significant risk of causing lifelong damage, whether it is orthopedic, gastrointestinal, respiratory, neurological, or otherwise. People just aren't usually ever quite the same after they've been shot.

And finally, (and this is just a general rant...) there is the incredibly sloppy handling of guns in movies. Watch video of properly trained police of military executing a raid, and you'll see that to a man they have their trigger finger along the frame of the gun, above the trigger, and outside the trigger guard. From that position they can fire quickly if needed, but they aren't going to accidentally squeeze off a round if they are startled or bumped. But in movies you regularly see people running around with their finger on the trigger. That's a recipe for disaster.

Laptop Fan Replacement

2010-10-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this entry from my IBM Thinkpad T42 laptop. The fact that it really is an IBM Thinkpad, and not a Lenovo Thinkpad, gives you some idea how old this machine is. But in spite of being a bit over 5 years old, it works pretty well, or at least it does now that I replaced the fan in it. Late last year, it started failing to boot up, giving me the words to the effect of "FAN ERROR" in plain white text on a blank black screen, before refusing to boot further. Apparently the system can detect if the fan is not turning, and instead of risking thermal damage, it just won't boot up at all. I kept it going in the short term, long enough to migrate more fully to my desktop machine, by using compressed air to spin the fan during boot up (so the system thought it was turning) and then by using an external fan blowing across the heat exchanger to keep the laptop from over-heating while I was using it.

The compressed air trick was a hit-or-miss proposition, working about 50% of the time. Once the system was booted, it was fine though. The external fan also posed some hazard, and once or twice I bumped into the spinning blades as they whirred along on my desktop. Once I had everything off the ThinkPad, I set it on my workbench, not sure what I was going to do it with. Finally several weeks ago, I decided that since everything else about the machine seemed to actually work quite well, I would go ahead and replace the fan, and see if I can't get another year or two out of this puppy. Eventually, the display backlight will fail, or some other even more expensive component, at which point I will simply declare it dead and get a new laptop. But for now, I can squeeze a little more life out of it. It also has a feature that I really like, which is a parallel printer port, suitable for using the Xilinx Spartan-3 Development kit that I have. No other functional computer in the house as a parallel port anymore, and I'm leery of whether I could make the dev kit work with a USB base parallel port.

Now, it turns out that you can't just replace the fan in a ThinkPad. The fan is permanently riveted to the entire thermal module which serves as the heat sink for both the CPU and the graphics chip, and the heat exchanger that the fan blows air across.

Getting at the module is surprisingly easy. Just flip the ThinkPad over and remove the four keyboard screws and the eight wrist-pad screws. Then flip it back over, open it up, and lift out the keyboard and the wrist pad, disconnecting both of them from the motherboard as you go. Then there's just three more screws that hold the thermal module itself in, and the power connection for the fan. The entire disassembly only takes a few minutes. As always when working in a computer, make sure that the power is disconnected and the battery is removed. Also make sure that you are grounded and not providing static electricity shocks to the sensitive electronics. It may be a bit difficult to remove the module, because the thermal grease may have dried into a paste. Apply consistent force, and be aware that it may jerk loose when the grease lets go.

Once you have the module out, you may want to carefully clean around the area, and then insert the new module. Because the ThinkPad is pretty old, your "New" thermal module is likely to be a used or re-furbished model. That's what I ended up with, even though the vendor initially claimed it was "new". Make sure that you order the proper module for your machine. There will be a label with the FRU ("Field Replaceable Unit") number. For example, mine was 13R2657. I quickly discovered, however, that this FRU has been superseded by 41W5204. If the replacement module doesn't come with grease or thermal pads, make sure to add some where it was on the old module to get a good thermal connection to the chips. After all, a heat sink doesn't do any good if the heat can't get into it to begin with.

Once I got this machine back up and running, I discovered another interesting side effect of re-starting a windows PC that has been fallow for many months... There were TONS of updates needed. Windows XP, Firefox, Java, Adobe Flash, Antivirus, and several other apps all had pending updates to install, which brought the machine to a crawl. Then, with the new Antivirus profiles, it wanted to run a complete scan. So it took a couple of hours of mostly automated thrashing, but now it is as though I was never offline. I wonder how much longer this will last?

Disney and Name Brands

2010-10-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

It is one of the most recognized brands in the world: Disney. There's Disney Land, Disney World, Disney Studios, Disney Pixar, The Disney Channel, Disney Radio, Disney on Ice, Disney Cruiseline, and on and on. But before all that, Disney was a proper name. The name of a guy (well, actually two guys, Walt and Roy, but Walt was arguably the prime driver), who had a vision and determination. Through that determination, he turned HIS NAME into a WORLDWIDE BRAND. I mean, think about that in the context of the people you know. Isn't it kind of surreal to think that in some alternate universe, people are saying "This year, 20,000 brides elected to get married at Dreslough Land!" Or "Steve Jobs joined the board of Wilson today, giving Wilson-Pixar an exclusive distribution deal for the next 8 years." (Yes, I realize that Wilson is in fact the name of an existing sporting goods company, I'm just pandering to one of my regular readers...)

Of course, naming your company after yourself is not without hazards. Computer Scientist Dr. Gene Amdahl left IBM to found his own computer company, the Amdahl Corporation. He succeeded admirably, but when he left in 1979, he couldn't take his name with him. Amdahl (the company) continued to operate long after Amdahl (the man) was out the door. Since they owned the name, he had to find other monikers for his follow-on ventures.

And not all names are equally suited to being stuck on major ventures. My last name "King" is already a noun, and in fact one used in a lot of industries. King Corporation appears to have a fairly lame looking website describing what they do. But if you ask most people what the "King" brand is, and I bet they'll come up with famous horror writer Stephen King. Indeed, that's another way in which names can become widely known brands. If I say Clancy, King, or Rowling, you may or may not be able to envision what they look like, but if you read, you probably know their names and at least some of what their brand is about. Although perhaps that is just a subset of celebrity in general, which gives us "brands" like Eastwood, Newman, and Hepburn, or poisons others like Hitler. And then there are some names that span both celebrity and business brand: quick, what pops into your mind when I say "Hilton?" I suspect that above a key threshold age (45? 50?) you first think "Famous Hotels," and below that threshold age you initially envision "Purse Dog Wielding Heiress."

So, what would you want YOUR brand to be?

Cursive

2010-10-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

I'm currently listening to "Small is the New Big" by Seth Godin, and on my way home from work this evening he asserted that "Cursive is a fundamentally useless skill" in the modern age. Typing, he said, is far more useful, and if you were to create an ordered list of things kids need, cursive would not be in the top 1000. Now I like cursive, and I wish that I had the spectacular flowing penmanship of my maternal grandmother, or of my artist friend who writes letters that look like they fell out of the 18th century. My handwriting is somewhat cramped and angular, although still passably readable. But is it worthless?

I am generally of the opinion that I can type much faster than I can write by hand, but in situations when no keyboard and word processor is available, being able to wield a pen is a very useful skill. Most of my friends make fun of me for almost always having several pens in my various pockets, and I make lots of notes to myself in the course of a day. But do I need cursive? Most kids today use a somewhat modified printing for written work, and I will switch back and forth between printing and cursive depending upon mood or context, but I've always thought of cursive as slightly faster. This is easy enough to test... I made up a few sentences and timed writing them, both in cursive and printed. The printing was actually 0.4% to 1.0% faster, which for the size of my samples was a non-significant difference. Okay, so for speed it's probably no better than being able to print, although I do think my fast cursive is a bit more readable than my fast printing.

What other benefits does cursive offer? There is something intrinsically emotive about it. Years ago, my friend James explained that he always hand-wrote in his journal, instead of keeping a Doogie Howser style typed file on a computer, because he could tell from the words sloping off the page when he wrote drunk. I keep a hand-written journal, because I like the exercise of putting the words down with pen. Sometimes I write in cursive, sometimes print, very occasionally block lettering, but slowing down my thinking to match the speed at which I can scribe the words sometimes allows me personal insight, and sometimes just results in incoherent prose. I also like watching the liquid or gel ink settle into the textured surface of the page, glistening in the light as it first leaves the pen and then widening and fuzzing into the dried line.

What about you? How much do you hand-write? And how much of that is cursive? And are your kids learning to write in cursive?

Lab Notes: IR Remote

2010-10-21T21:55:00.000-07:00

This is an experimental blog entry. This is a set of notes, as I keep in my electronic lab book, on building a high-powered IR remote control. This gives you a look into my thought process as I'm starting a project. If you're not a EE or electronics hobbyist, a lot of this probably makes no sense at all. You may want to come back some other time when I'm back to writing prose rather than EE stream-of-consciousness.

This is something I've been thinking about for several weeks, but haven't done anything about. If I make progress on this, I might continue to edit this entry. To that end, I'll note Last Date Edited (and update this if/when I make changes): October 21, 2010.

Optimal wavelength: I've got IR LEDs from 810nm to ?? (lots longer.) What's the peak detection wavelength? The Sharp integrated remote control transceiver modules are at 940nm. Several other IR remotes seem to be at that wavelength as well.

Looking on Digikey for 940nm IR LEDs, there are a bunch. Let's say I want to go with a high-efficiency one, to get peak IR/watt. What are my choices? Searched 940nm in stock, and there are 60. Luminous intensity is given in terms of mW/sr @ xx mA. sr = steradian, but this increases with viewing angle (smaller angle, photons more concentrated). Some choices:

TSAL6100: 80mw/sr @ 100mA, 20 degree angle
TSAL6200: 40mw/sr @ 100mA, 34 degree angle
TSAL5300: 30mw/sr @ 100mA, 44 degree angle
TSAL6400: 25mw/sr @ 100mA, 50 degree angle
TSAL7600: 15mw/sr @ 100mA, 60 degree angle

These are all 5mm (T 1 3/4) LEDs with 1.35V nominal forward voltage. Are these all the same die, with just different optics? (Question: How do LEDs get different viewing angles?) These are Vishay Semiconductor parts.

And what viewing angle do I want for these LEDs anyway? Am I trying to make a remote that has maximum range when aimed, or maximum spread when spraying a large area? Well, if it was a super-TV-B-Gone, I'd go for the widest spread. But the primary goal is maximum range. So I think I'm going ot use the TSAL6100. 20 degree ( +/- 10 degrees of center) for the beam width. MAYBE I'll have one or two wide-beam LEDs just to provide some near-in breadth, at the expense of a little bit of range.

Of course, if narrow and far is really all I want, there's an OSRAM with 160 mW/sr at 10 degree beam width (P/N SFH4545). The forward voltage is 1.5V nominal, and it costs about 10% more than the Vishay parts above...

So how many of them to use? Inverse square law says I need to increase the intensity by a factor of 4 to double the range. So 4 LEDs gets me 2X the range of 1 LED. 16 LEDs gets me 4X the range. 64 LEDs gets me 8X the range. 256=16X, 1024=32X.

What are my limiting factors:
- Size: I can only fit so many LEDs on the front of my device.
- Cost: These things ain't free!
- Power: This is the real limit: at 1.35V Vf I could probably put two in series (2.7V) and still run it with a 3.3V system voltage. But that's nominal... Peak Vf is 1.6V so 3.2V for a stack of two. I could *probably* still get away with running those off a 3.3V rail.

How many of these 2 LED stacks can I run off batteries? I'd like to use 4 AA batteries, switched down to 3.3V for optimal efficiency. Figure 1A peak current is about what I want to draw. 8 x2 stacks of LEDs gets me 800mA. Or do I want to run the LEDs directly off the batteries? Not really, because battery voltage is going to vary from 6.4+V fresh to 4.0V dead, and the current would vary with battery voltage. What about voltage overhead for my switching NPN? Do I want to use a FET instead?

Or instead of doing two LED stacks, do I want to have one per BJT, but with a potentially higher peak current? What's my pulse length? At a slower modulation frequency of 36KHz, we've got a pulse of 1/(2x36000) = 13.8uS. LED Datasheet specifies a peak pulse current of 200mA for 50% duty cycle for pulses less than 100uS, so we're golden. Furthermore, Radiant Power per mA seems to scale pretty well from 100mA to 200mA, so running the LEDs at twice the current is just about the same (in this range) as twice as many LEDs.

Waveform: Remotes vary in the frequency of the carrier: 40KHz, 38KHz, 36.x KHz... I'd like to have the hardware capable of hitting all of these. Ways to generate a modulated carrier:
- Bit bang all the way - This is sloppy & potentially dangerous. If I'm running the LEDs at 2X nominal forward current because I'm depending upon them never staying solid on, then I really better never write code (or hang the microcontroller) with them solid on, lest I cook my IR emitters.*
- PWM on the uC turned on and off to gate it.
- PWM gated at the i/o (turning the output to a pulled input aught to do it.)
- Externally generated carrier externally gated (seems a waste of additional circuitry when my uC choices all have PWM / Counters / Timers galore.)

*This inspires an additional functional mode: IR Flashlight. Is it useful as a flashlight strobing at 40KHz, with the carrier just constantly on? Or is there any other frequency that would be better? Something that *doesn't* alias with camera imagers or video frame rates, presumably, as those are what I'd be using to view the invisible illumination...

Question: Which uC do I want to use on this thing? Driving factors: Power consumption (for battery life), user interface, programming environment.

Question: Do the IR Receivers depend upon the carrier remaining consistently in phase with itself over time? And do they care about runt-pulses if the signal is turned out mid-way through the carrier on-time? (i.e. Do I want a synchronizer for sending data with only integer numbers of in-phase carrier pulses?)

LED switching: NPN transistor... What about current limiting to the LEDs? Do I just direct connect the LED and depend upon a BJT + voltage rail to limit the forward current? Or include a small current limiting resistor? (Built a spreadsheet, and possibly breadboard this up or SPICE it to see performance over ranges of voltage, etc, etc.)

Question: What is my LED failure mode? If it is just thermal, could I mitigate it by heat sinking them? The LED datasheet calls out operating modes of much lower duty cycles (like 1%) with much higher current (like 1A) which suggests that it is not magnetostrictive failure of the bonding leads...

Also need a housing... Want to find something fairly rugged, that holds 4AA, with enough room for a small PCB for electronics, and enough front end face space for the LEDs and enough top face space for a good UI. Button pad? LCD display? Dunno yet...

Make vs. Buy

2010-10-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

When I have some project I'm working on, I will often err on the side of building things that I really should try to just buy pre-made. The most recent example of this was when I wanted to wall-power a canon point and shoot camera that I've had lying around. I wanted to do some time-lapse experiments with it without worrying about the batteries dying. I went to HSC and rooted around in the barrel connector bins until I found one approximately the right size to fit the DC input on the camera. Then I rooted around in my box of AC adapters at home, until I decided I didn't have anything quite right, so I headed back to HSC, and bought a regulated supply of the right voltage. But then I discovered that the supply I bought couldn't meet the peak current requirements of the camera. So I started thinking that I could just use a higher current, higher voltage power supply, and built an additional switching regulator circuit to get the proper voltage at the current level the camera needs. At this point I was several hours and probably $20 in gas and parts into this project. What I *should* have done, right at the start, is gone to eBay and searched for "AC Canon Adapter A540". When I did that, I found an electronics import-export company that sells a third-party equivalent to the Canon AC power adapter for $11.49, with free shipping. I ordered one, and had it later that week.

The inclination to build, even when I should just buy, is related to the inclination to tinker, and a desire to know exactly what's going on inside the box. If I buy a power supply, I get a few high level specifications. If I build it, I know EXACTLY what's going on in there. But the cost of the time spent being a control freak far outweighs the likely benefit knowing all the details. Indeed, most complex systems simply can't be understood, in total, by one person. There are some polymaths that come close, but most significant advancements come by building on the existing hierarchy of infrastructure, and driving deep into one area of specialization. Of course, like all things, there is a balance to be maintained. Good software engineers understand enough of the conceptual internals of a compiler to know how to avoid writing pathological code. The don't necessarily know all the details, but they know the parts they need to know. And that's another trick: figuring out which are those necessary parts.

And to borrow a line from Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that." I could delve much deeper into this topic, but I'm kinda tired, and want to catch up on my sleep. Goodnight.

Scald Burns

2010-10-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

When my daughter was ten years old, her braces got broken one night at softball practice. Since she couldn't comfortably eat anything solid until she could get to the orthodontist, she was going to make herself a bowl of instant macaroni and cheese instead of having the chicken dish originally planned for dinner. We had all gotten in the habit of making the instant mac-and-cheese by starting with water from the hot water dispenser in our kitchen. It was one of those boxy units with a 5 gallon bottle on top and two spigots, one blue for chilled water and one red for hot water. Because she misread the instructions on the packet, she filled the 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup up to the 2-cup line instead of the 2/3-cup line that she needed. A drop of hot water splashed off the top of the now-full measuring cup, and landed on her hand, causing her to flinch, and drop the measuring cup down the front of her softball pants. The thick nylon fabric instantly wicked the hot water to her skin, and held it there. Within seconds, she was suffering from first, second, and third degree burns on her legs. What followed was five days in an isolation room in the burn ward at Valley Medical Center, six weeks of missed school, and months of physical therapy.

This is a classic chain-of-events accident. If she had been able to eat the regular dinner, she wouldn't have made macaroni and cheese. If she hadn't misread the instructions, she probably wouldn't have splashed her hand, causing the larger hot water spill. If she hadn't been wearing conforming nylon softball pants, the water may well have just soaked her clothes but not stuck to the skin. But everything lined up for a catastrophic accident. The one causal factor that we really should have seen coming, however, was the temperature of the water coming out of the hot water dispenser. Most of these dispensers put out water at temperatures between 140 and 195 degrees Fahrenheit. Indeed, the one we had didn't even have a thermostat to adjust the temperature. It was fixed, and when I tested it later, it was at about 165 degrees. This temperature is chosen for the convenient making of tea or other hot drinks. But it is also surprisingly dangerous.

Scald burns can occur at temperatures as low as 120 degrees. The time to injury decreases as the temperature increases. And children get injured faster than adults. With 160 degree F water, an adult will suffer second and third degree burns in as little as half a second, and children will suffer third degree burns in as little as 0.2 seconds. This was, I'm sad to say, news to me.

X Axis: Time in Seconds to Injury, Y Axis: Temp in Degrees Fahrenheit.

(From www.tap-water-burn.com/pamphlet/images/plate2b.jpg)

I can understand that the convenience of quick hot beverages makes this a perfectly acceptable risk to people who are aware of it. The problem is all the people, like us, who were completely unaware of how fast injury can occur, and how serious it can be. These dispensers absolutely should not be where small children can get at them, and older children and adults should be taught just how dangerous the hot water coming out of them is.

Another critical bit of information most people lack is how to treat burns once they happen. What should you put on a burn? The answer is "cool water, and nothing else." Actually, if you have sterile medical saline immediately available, you can use that to irrigate the burn area. But unless you have sterile saline, use cool tap water. Never put any sort of spray, ointment, or home remedy on a burn. And if you're not sure if you should call 911, do it. Burns are serious injuries, requiring immediate care, careful professional treatment, and sterile isolation. Even "minor" burns, if they break the skin, should be carefully cleaned and bandaged, in order to prevent infection and a host of secondary complications. Err on the side of caution.

Because my daughter's burns were uncontaminated when she arrived at the hospital, they were able to use a beta-glucan collagen matrix dressing on them, which was at that time a relatively new treatment. As a result, she suffered through far fewer dressing changes than if she had gone through regular daily bandage changes, and her legs healed with almost no visible scarring. She was extremely fortunate, and she is now a vocal opponent of the use of any sort of "burn cream" or other treatment that can make the kind of outcome she enjoyed impossible.

Scald burns are the number one type of burn accident among children. The Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation launched an information campaign several years ago called "Hot Liquids Burn Like Fire." If you know someone that has a hot water dispenser, tell them about this. Spread the word. Burns are horrible, and often, they are preventable.

Conspiracy Theories

2010-10-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

I have worked at several publicly traded companies in the course of my career. At those companies, I was usually motivated to have at least some interest in what was happening to the stock price. Monitoring the stock quote online would often bring me into incidental contact with the online forums discussing the company and its stock. It was there that I saw first hand the wonderful wackiness of conspiracy theories.

People would weave elaborate speculations about how we clearly had our next three generations of products already developed, and we were carefully regulating our product introductions to manipulate the price of the stock, and to generate the best possible return for the senior management shareholders. When we did something bone-headed, it was some nefarious scheme to sew confusion in the market place, in anticipations of our next countering parry. And when some bit of news broke our way, it was because our behind-the-scenes machinations had come to fruition, and the genius of our master plan was slowly becoming evident.

The explanation that nobody was particularly interested in talking about was that we were working as fast as we could to release cool products as soon as possible so that we'd make enough money to be doing the same things this time next year. Our "mistakes" were actually the result of... mistakes. Our lucky breaks were the normal statistical distribution of events. Did we know what we planned on releasing in our next generation of products? Sort of. But we also knew that those plans would be radically modified, often until the last possible moment before shipping product, and many products that we got far into development on would never see the light of day.

It was, for me, a wonderful illustration of the reality of most conspiracy theories. They can sound plausible when you're on the outside, but when you're on the inside, you understand that there is nowhere near that degree of control being exercised by anyone. But, you say, maybe I was just an unknowing pawn in the carefully structured plans of my corporate puppet masters. Maybe. But unless they had completely separate development teams, working in different buildings, with different design repositories (which they didn't), I had pretty good visibility, even as a minion, into everything going on in engineering.

I tend to suspect that most other conspiracy theories are, like those I was speculated to be a part of, are just smoke and mirrors and the human ability to see patterns in chaos. The world is random and messy and hard to predict when you're trying to, and there usually isn't a secret deeper level of manipulation going on below the surface. Sometimes there may be, but not nearly as often as a lot of people seem determined to believe.

(... Or maybe that's exactly what they WANT you to believe. :)

Business Idea: Self-Education University

2010-10-17T16:27:00.000-07:00

The spread of broadband Internet connectivity means that more and more people have access to a fantastic amount of freely available educational material. Stanford Engineering is putting classes online for free. MIT has put a number of their courses online, also for free, as part of their Open Courseware initiative. Khan Academy offers a huge number of video tutorials. There are several groups approaching the idea of Open Source Textbooks. The democratization of information that began with the printing press has accelerated dramatically in the last decade, and it is now possible for someone with the determination and focus to get a really great college level education almost entirely for free.

Furthermore, as the economy stagnates, the pursuit of education during periods of unemployment or underemployment offers people with spare time an opportunity to fill their hours at minimal cost with activity that offers potential long term returns. Even if you can afford to "go back to school," you can keep learning without the benefit of a formal university structure.

One thing that a university degree offers, however, that you can't get on your own, is verification of an education. When someone has a diploma, it means that they were able to at least meet the bare minimum requirements for issuance of a degree by that university. If the university is, in turn, accredited, then you know that is has been scrutinized to insure that the curriculum meets at least minimal agreed upon standards of quality for a college education. The accredited university degree implies a great deal of backing.

When I'm interviewing a candidate for an engineering job, I want to know that they have, at least at some point in the past, acquired general engineering level math skills, such as an understanding of differential and integral calculus. If they have an engineering degree, I am usually safe to assume that they have had that exposure. I don't need to ask them specific calculus trivia to make sure. Likewise, an engineering degree implies a certain degree of breadth and exposure to structured problem solving that I want.

So what then of my self-educated candidate? If someone has taught themselves calculus by working through a plethora of online tutorials and work sheets and downloaded text books, how can I know that they really have the skills? And that's the business idea here... A series of testing centers which provide people the chance to demonstrate college level proficiency in a number of topics, by taking written tests in a secure and controlled environment. Essentially, it is like the AP tests, although you would be able to take them at any time you want. When you take a test in a topic, you receive a numeric grade, say from 0-100, indicating how you did. The test would be designed such that a reasonably high score, say 80, would indicate general proficiency, essentially a high likelihood of passing a college course in that topic. If you pass enough subject tests, they can be clustered together into a portfolio that essentially becomes your college-degree transcript equivalency. This would provide something that can be validated by the testing center to employers or other schools, indicating that you have the education you claim to have.

There are some obvious shortcomings between this and the real college experience. First off is the social. You know that someone who has gone through college has probably managed to work at least a little bit with other people, whereas someone could work though a degree worth of college level material, testing along the way and never talk to another individual. I don't really see any quick ways around this. This certification simply lacks any useful social metric.

Another limitation is project work. Often in college classes, the final product of the work is an almost incidental part of the process, which is the real learning experience. The product that results from a project course is also difficult to objectively evaluate in the way that this testing center approach would need to do. Furthermore, an important part of this testing center concept is that you clearly know that the person who walked in the door is the person that did the work, because they took the test there while you watched them, after you fingerprinted them, or did whatever other level of validation was decided appropriate to match the person with the educational certification. With any submission of outside materials, the provenance of that material is open to question, and brings into question the integrity of the resulting certification.

Even with these and other weaknesses, it seems that this is something that could be really big, especially for people who are motivated to get a degree-level education but can't afford the money, or perhaps even the structured time, of attending a college or university. Key to the acceptance of an approach like this would be maintaining the integrity of the testing. And there would be skepticism at first. But in time, I think, it would become at least as accepted as a "college level GED," and possibly eventually seen as a perfectly normal alternative to the "traditional" college experience, in some ways all the more impressive for the level of self-motivation and personal drive it represents.

Habit Formation

2010-10-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

Executive summary: Do not read this post. Come back tomorrow. You are warned.

I have heard it said that an activity must be carried out daily for six week to become an ingrained habit. Well, I haven't reached six weeks yet on these daily blog entries, but I know that they have not yet become anything near an ingrained habit. I was sitting here at my desk with 13 minutes until midnight, when I really should already be asleep after being sick the last few days. I was just about to call it a day, and realized that I've not written anything today. I referred to my list of pending ideas (currently a bit thin, I should work on that tomorrow) and didn't see anything I wanted to write about (in 11 minutes or less) so here I am making stuff up off the cuff, and writing a lot of run-on sentences.

Should I, on these days when I'm neither inspired nor particularly interested, even bother writing something? That depends a lot on what I think the purpose of this writing is. If I had any delusions that I had a large regular audience (Hi Dad!) I might go for quality over quantity, and make my adoring public wait an extra day in between. But it's not all about you, people. The point of this exercise from the start has largely been about writing on deadline, cranking text out quickly, getting something out every day (more or less) and not being too picky about the quality (or incredibly self-referential, pseudo-intellectually quasi-post-modernist bent) of the writing.

I must admit, the 230+ page views that I got for last Tuesday's entry about blood donation did give me a little shot of adrenaline. People actually read my words. Maybe I could come up with even more words that even more people would want to read. And maybe I'll even try to do that someday yet. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve. But today is not that day. Today you get this. See, I told you not to read it.

Home Sick

2010-10-15T16:29:00.000-07:00

There aren't many days that I'm actually sick to the point of not being able to do some useful work, but today was basically one of those. I managed to reply to a few work e-mails, but mostly I have just been sitting around all day, or napping. It's 4:07 PM and I'm still wearing my pajamas. My energy level is low, I'm achy, and my skin feels hypersensitive to any sort of touch. I called the blood center to let them know, following my platelet apheresis on Tuesday, and they said they'll check with one of the docs, but given that the symptom onset was several days after the donation, the product should be okay.

I suspect that I've got a bug that has been going around at my office. It's almost like a cold without respiratory involvement. I'm hopeful I'll shake it off by tomorrow. I'm sucking on Cold-Eeze Zinc Gluconate lozenges every few hours. They claim to have clinical backing for their claim of shortening cold symptoms. A quick Google search lands me here, at an abstract on a study of Cold-Eeze, with several links to related studies. It looks like these studies use incidental colds, and it would be really interesting to see a controlled lab study in which they spray rhinovirus up the noses of healthy college students, and then as soon as they exhibit symptoms, give half of them Cold-eeze and the other half placebos. (These studies are, obviously, more expensive and difficult to do, especially with large test groups.)

Oooh, here's a study linking my previous musings on the power of sleep with rhinovirus susceptibility... Again, the study is fairly small, but they really did give the participants rhinovirus nose drops and then see if they got sick. The differences were pretty stark. On that note, maybe I'll go lie down again...

Thumb Writing

2010-10-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Whoa! Sometime I stumble onto something that just surprises me. Following up on my post a week ago about writing these with my Droid phone, I thought I would try again, taking the advice of my cousin-in-law about using the soft keyboard because I couldn't get uppercase or alternate characters (pretty much any punctuation other than period or comma) and digits when I was using the Droid's slide out keyboard.

The first realization as I tried to do that just now was that I can't seem to launch the soft keyboard... I tapped on the text entry box, but it just sat there, instead of giving me the soft keyboard.

The second, and much cooler realization, however came when, on a lark I held down the SHIFT key while I pressed a letter. To my astonishment, I got a capital. I then tried the same with the ALT key, and that worked to give me the alternate keys. In the last year I have used this keyboard literally EVERY DAY, and I have never seen it behave like a "regular" desktop keyboard. It has always been modal... You press shift, and then the next key is capped. Or you press shift twice, and it is in caps lock mode until you hit shift again. I wasn't even aware that the key matrix could support the simultaneous key press behavior... Maybe everyone else with a Droid already knew this, but it was news to me!

The text entry still isn't perfect, because the self resizing text box keeps dropping the soft buttons on top of the line I'm writing at the bottom of the screen. I also keep hitting the SEARCH button next to the ALT and below the 'X' key which opens up the web search dialog. Also, the keys are so small that hitting ALT or SHIFT plus any of the adjacent keys at the same time is really difficult. Of course I just realized that the last gripe is easily avoided by using the other set of ALT and SHIFT keys, although I forgot they were even there because in modal keyboard mode I *always* use the left hand ones. And the Droid browser won't let me scroll down far enough to get to the Labels box, so I'll have to add those to this post later. But even with all these minor gripes, it is really exciting to discover a new capability of my phone. Even if I probably should have known it was there all along...

Pick-n-Pull

2010-10-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

My daughter drives a 1990 Subaru Legacy, which means her car is several years older than she is. I have been told that the engine will probably survive to 250,000+ miles. It has had a few problems over the years, such as a hesitating/stalling problem that was finally traced back to a bad fan, and a fuel injector that needed to be replaced, but on the whole it runs pretty well. But a lot of little things tend to fail over time. And when the driver's side sun visor joined the passenger side visor in falling off, I finally decided to do something about it.

I went to Pick-n-Pull. Pick-n-Pull is a chain of auto wrecking yards where you pay $2 to get in, and if you tell them a specific year and model of car that you're looking for, they'll tell you which row to look in. I found several Subaru Legacies in various states of decomposition. The place was fascinating to me. Over a thousand cars, many obviously the victims of accidents, neatly arranged in a grid where they were being disassembled and carried away in pieces by the customers to prolong the life of other cars.

In addition to paying $2 to get in (fee waived for a first time visitor!), you also sign a release so that if you maim yourself, it's your problem. And there are plenty of sharp, jagged, oily, greasy automotive components on which to hurt yourself if you're not careful. But mostly it's just a really efficient recycling of deceased cars before the picked over hulls are presumably shredded for scrap metal. You have to bring your own tools to disassemble things, but they provide wheel barrows for hauling off the larger pieces. And there were people wheeling away transmissions, axles, wheels, seats, doors, and pretty much whatever else they needed. They even have portable overhead hoists available to help you get the engines out if you need them. ("Please do not use the overhead hoist to pick up cars...")

Before you head out to your local Pick-N-Pull, you can see if they have the models you're looking for on their website, which seems to reflect the same data they use to point you to your targets at their front counter. I find this very convenient, but I've had mixed luck with it. Two of the 1990 Subaru Legacies showed up on their website (and the in shop database) as sedans, but when I got there they were all actually station wagons, which meant they didn't have the same kind of release handles or tail light fixture that I needed. Still, I found the visors I needed, along with a few other parts that have given up the ghost on Amanda's car.

Once you're done, you pay for your parts on the way out according to their standard price list. I have found the people that work there to be consistently courteous and helpful. And Pick-n-Pull even offer a 30 day exchange for store credit on any part that doesn't fit or otherwise meet your needs. ("Sorry, no cash refunds.")

I asked the guy ringing up my purchase what he considered the strangest thing he's ever found in a car.
"Blood," he said.
"Like, a lot of blood?" I asked.
"Yeah. Like someone was murdered in it," he said. "We called the wrecker to come take that one back. We weren't gonna touch it."
And the most memorable thing that wasn't a murder scene?
He laughed and said, "We found a pound of marijuana once..."

Blood Donation

2010-10-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Today's entry is one of those gimmicky pieces where the writing of the entry is intimately connected with the topic being written about. Yup, as I sit here typing this, I am hooked up to a Gambro BCT blood separation machine which is pulling blood out of my left arm, extracting the desired components (in this case platelets), and putting the bulk material back into my arm.

The fact that I can write this at all is a tribute to evolving medical technology. When I first started doing platelet apheresis in 1992, the machines used separate extraction and return needles, so I had to sit with both arms extended and unbending, a needle in each elbow. This pretty well limited what I could do during the 80 - 120 minute period of the donation to watching a movie. One time I had an itch on my nose that just wouldn't go away. I finally told one of the blood center staff, and she took a piece of gauze in a pair of tongs and used it to scratch my nose for me. When the single needle machines were first put into use, I didn't like them as well as the two needle process, and I continued to request the two needle machines for several years. Eventually, though, the single needle machines got better, and now that is all they use, except for white cell donations.

Although the donation takes longer, platelet apheresis is (I have been told) less physiologically stressful than giving a pint of whole blood. Donating whole blood is essentially bleeding out 7-14% of your entire blood mass, and you can only do it once every 56 days in the U.S. Platelet apheresis, on the other hand takes almost no red cells, and instead just platelets suspended in a few hundred milliliters of plasma. Because the human body replaces lost platelets in about 3 days, donors are eligible to do apheresis as often as once a week, and in an emergency, as often as every 4 days. There are a few other limits that the FDA puts on apheresis. You can only donate a maximum of 24 times in any 1 year period, and they limit your total plasma loss in any one year period to 12 liters if you weigh between 110 and 175 pounds, or 14.4 liters if you are over 175 pounds.

Right now I am donating a "double," or two sets of platelets, which are actually going into two separate bags. In total, they will take out 710 billion platelets, and about 415 ml of plasma, plus the tubes of whole blood removed at the beginning of the process for testing. Every blood donation is tested for a variety of diseases, including HIV, malaria, hepatitis, and West Nile virus, which is why they extract those additional samples. Sometimes the test samples are also used for additional research.

In order to keep my blood liquid while they are running it through the machine, they introduce an anticoagulant. The anticoagulant combines with calcium in the blood, creating a temporary calcium deficiency during the period of the donation. One side effect of this is a tingling in my lips, and mild muscle cramps in my jaw. To counteract this, they provide Tums antacid for me to suck on, which gives me back calcium. The tingling and other effects disappear as soon as the donation ends, and my body quickly metabolizes any remaining anticoagulant.

So why do this? Well, for one thing, someone has to... Platelets are used in the treatment of a lot of things, particularly for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. Currently only about 3% of the medically eligible population donates blood or blood products. Many people have asked me if I get paid for donating. The answer is no. Tax laws let me deduct the mileage to drive here, and the Stanford Blood Center gives me cookies and occasionally coupons for free movie tickets or Baskin Robbins ice cream, but I don't get paid. And really, if you were in the hospital and needed blood products, would you want them to come from someone that donated because he or she needed the money?

And, like so many things, this began in part due to a dare. When I was in college in the late 80's and early 90's, my best friend, who had been giving blood since high school, mocked me mercilessly because I wouldn't give blood along with her. So finally, during my senior year, I stopped in at the Stanford bloodmobile one afternoon when it was parked in front of my university residence. I mentioned to them that I was doing it in part to confront my discomfort with needles. "Well if you REALLY want to confront needles," they said, "you should try apheresis! You get two needles!" And here I am, 18 years later...

And the needle just came out, so it is time to go eat cookies and then go to work!

TPLO Surgery For Dogs

2010-10-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

I have been meaning to write for a long time now about Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy (TPLO) surgery for dogs. A common human knee injury is the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tear. In dogs, the corresponding structure is called the Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CrCL). When it fails, the dog's knee (stifle) joint becomes unstable and the dog goes lame.

Left untreated, a dog with a torn CrCL will have limited or no mobility, and the joint will suffer from arthritis and further degradation. In small breed dogs, the ligament can be surgically reattached. In large breeds, however, the inherent instability of the joint and the load on the ligament virtually guarantees that reattachment will last only a short time before it fails again. Instead, the large-breed treatment is to make a round cut to separate the top of the tibia, rotate it around, and then reattach it with a plate and screws so that it heals in the new position. The new orientation levels the tibial plateau so that it is stable, and the femur isn't always trying to slide down the top of the tibia.

About five years ago, our older Golden Retriever, a female named Dory, suffered a complete tear of the CrCL in her right leg. When our vet first explained the surgery to me, my first impression was "that sounds like a goofy hack." Rather than put the joint back together, they change the shape of one of the bones so that the joint is mechanically stable. Imagine that you have a big inflatable Santa Claus decoration sitting on your steeply sloped roof, and a rope tied to your chimney keeps it from sliding off. One day the rope breaks, and off it slides. Well, the TPLO approach says "instead of reattaching the rope, we're just going to cut out a portion of the roof, tilt it upwards, and reattach it to the house in that position, so that our inflatable Santa is sitting on a flat surface." I was skeptical.

Because our dogs are family to us, and the TPLO has the best track record for treating her type of injury, we decided we had to try. We checked Dory into the pet hospital one morning, and picked her up the next day with one leg completely shaved bald, a a spectacular scar. It took a while for her to heal, but eventually she did. Physical therapy involved gentle, short walks, and swimming. We put a cheap above ground pool into our back yard to provide a place to swim her regularly.

One unfortunately reality of the CrCL tear is that if it happens on one hind leg, there is a very high chance that it will happen on the other leg within a year. Sure enough, almost a year to the day after her initial injury, Dory's left leg went. We had the surgery on that side as well, and after more recovery and physical therapy, she was back up and doing great.

The initial quiet period after the surgery was the hardest. Dory had to stay in her box almost continuously, so she wouldn't be putting stress on the hardware holding her tibia together while it was healing. Getting just enough, but not too much, physical activity is hard for dogs that love to run and jump and play. The swimming definitely helped a lot, because it provided an exercise that, because it was non-load-bearing, she could do as much as she wanted, without the risk of injuring the healing bone. And as a water breed, Dory loves to swim anyway. We always put a doggy life vest on her, so that if she did get tired or cramp up or just want to hold still, she would float like a cork. But usually she'd paddle around and around until she was completely exhausted.

We have also been told by our vet that Dory has had the best TPLO outcome that she has ever seen. Dory is more of a hyperactive puppy today, at almost nine and a half years old, than she was when she was three. Except for being a bit bow-legged, it is impossible to tell that she has had major surgery on both legs. She runs circles (literally!) around our five year old male Golden (Rex), and she has amazing quality of life. To help maintain her, we do have her on low dose daily Deramaxx, an anti-inflamatory. We also give her Dasuquin, and Science Diet "prescription diet j/d," designed for joint health maintenance. And she's doing great.

I mention all of this because if you find yourself in our position, I encourage you to think very seriously about the TPLO surgery. It is expensive, and requires careful handling during recovery, but we have found it to be well worth it. With any medical procedure, there are no guarantees. But I can tell you from our experience, an excellent outcome is possible.

Everything Is Made

2010-10-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of human-made things in the world. In fact, if you live in the developed world, unless you are a farmer, or an extreme nature enthusiast, probably most of the objects you touch in the course of a day are "made" things. Now sometimes I rant about the apparently lack of thought that went into making some of those things, but I also find amazing the cumulative total amount of thought, and effort, and logistical backing that goes into making just about everything.

Pick something REALLY simple, like a cafeteria spoon. Stamped out of stainless steel sheet with a chrome finish, they sell for about 10 cents each. They are likely produced in a big metal press, probably somewhere in China. Someone had to design the spoon itself, with the exact size and shape and any stylistic flourishes, in order to make it. But someone also had to design the press, and the hydraulics to run the press, and the hydraulic fluid in the cylinders, and the control system for the pumps, and mounting system to fix the press to the factory floor.

Someone else had to make sure that there was sheet metal of proper thickness, quality, and composition from which to press the spoon. That required metalurgists, working together with refinery plant operators, to get from ore to metal of the right composition, and then a whole lot of industrial process control to roll it out into uniform sheets.

And getting the ore out of the ground required massive mining equipment like earth movers. Each tire on those earth movers required an entire supply chain of its own. Which was in turn fed by bulk rubber material and other chemicals that make up the rubber, and more metal, and more manufacturing machinery, with even more chemists, material scientists, industrial process designers, and engineers behind them.

So goes the chain of causality backward, until that one simple spoon has required the input of thousands of people and hundreds of industries. Of course, those thousands of people were simultaneously making possibly thousands of other products as well. And the mining, metal processing, hydraulic press manufacturing, and so on were all happening simultaneously. But it is surprising to think how much making stands behind that cheap little cafeteria spoon, and by extension virtually everything else with which we interact daily.

Walking Backwards

2010-10-09T20:47:00.000-07:00

I wanted to watch an AVI file that I had on my computer on my TiVo. No problem, I thought, I've even already written a blog entry about how to do that. So I referred back to that post, and discovered that it doesn't work anymore. Sometime in the last year I had updated to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software. And in so doing, I lost the ability to transfer video files from my computer to my TiVo. I researched this on the TiVo website, and thought, surely that function has just moved somewhere else in the software and I'm overlooking it. Nope, it turns out that the ability to upload from the computer to the TiVo has been reclassified as premium feature, requiring the $24.95 purchase of a TiVo Desktop Plus Key.

Now, charging me $25 to unlock additional functionality in software that I already have installed is a long-standing revenue strategy for monetizing "shareware" software. It's how they get you to go from using the free version, to paying money for added functionality. Except that three things about this really annoy me:

First, I already bought the hardware. I supposed you could equate buying the TiVo HD hardware to purchasing a computer, and now they're selling software to run with it. But buying a TiVo is not buying some hacked-up home media server box. It is an appliance, designed to provide a self-contained solution that offers additional flexibility to my television viewing. Generally when you upgrade the software on appliances you get fixes and sometime even enhanced functionality for free... Otherwise, you might go buy the competing product that offers better functionality.

Second, I am already paying a subscription fee to use the TiVo. I actually bought the lifetime service contract for for my TiVo HD, instead of paying monthly, but the several hundred dollars I paid up-front is effectively just the lump-sum purchase of an annuity for the monthly service fee. So I'm paying for this monthly subscription, and STILL the are charging more to get the added functionality.

Third, they aren't even asking me to pay more for additional functionality, they are asking me to pay more JUST TO GET BACK FUNCTIONALITY I USED TO HAVE. This is not how product evolution is supposed to work, and it's really annoying. They are probably counting on inertia to keep me tied to the TiVo platform, because I have already paid for the hardware, and I've already paid for the lifetime service contract. They probably also selected $24.95 to be a low enough price barrier that most people will just bend over and pay. But I feel like I'm effectively being fined $25 for upgrading to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software. How about instead TiVo reward customer loyalty by not removing useful features they've already previously released in earlier free versions?

UPDATE: I sent TiVo email about my gripe, and pointed them to this blog entry. They replied:

Hello Phillip,

Thank you for contacting TiVo Customer Support.

I would be happy to assist you in getting your feedback recorded and into the right hands. What I recommend that you do would be to fill out the TiVo Feature Request questionnaire located here: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm . I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause and invite you to contact us again if you have any other questions or concerns.

101009-00XXXX is the reference number for this inquiry. Please refer to this number if you choose to contact us again regarding this request. In order to respond to this email, please log into your account at www.tivo.com/mysupport. Replies directly to this email will not be received.

Sincerely,
James

TiVo Customer Support Representative
www.tivo.com/support
http://forums.tivo.com

I will submit the form, and see if I hear anything more about it...

Stuff I Want

2010-10-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the technologies that I would like to see really take off yet in my lifetime:

Life Extension - While I don't necessarily want to live forever, I'm nowhere close to bored yet, and I think I could easily keep myself amused with the things I'm already interested in for at least a few hundred more years. But my cells aren't optimized for that kind of span, and there are enough external sources of creeping degradation (random cancer cell clusters, environmental toxicity, sub-optimal diet and lifestyle) that I'll be lucky at my current pace to make it past 100 years. But these are largely engineering problems, and if enough of them can be solved, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to live a few hundred years, killed off almost exclusively by sudden accidents. The societal impact of this is a whole other discussion, but if I can have my biological age cleanly reset to 25 years old, I would be happy to have my social security eligibility also reset to 25...

Automated Transportation - There are a LOT of people working on self-driving cars. The idea of having the flexibility and convenience of automobile transportation together with the someone-else-doing-the-work aspect of riding a train or bus really appeals to me. On top of which, even though regular car usage kills tens of thousands of people a year, any automated technology won't be accepted until fatalities are virtually eliminated. So not only will I be able to ride anywhere I want while doing whatever I'd like sitting there, the likelihood of being killed while doing so will be far less than any road trip involving human drivers.

Less Stuff - When I was younger I felt that material possession was a symptom of success. I have, over the years, come to believe more and more that your stuff owns you far more than you own it. And even with that belief, I'm writing this at a desk piled with random bits of debris from my life, including several cameras, a digital audio recorder, three loose hard drives, two MP3 players, various office supplies, three headsets, and at least 500 pieces of paper. I can pare down or efficiently store the electronics, but the paper is just unnecessary. I don't really want paper, I want data. And while there are already online bill payment mechanisms and online document storage and online information management systems of all sorts, we aren't quite there yet. I would like getting a piece of paper to become the exception, and instead I just receive a secure, verifiable, digitally timestamped piece of data.

Clean Energy - We are rapidly coming up on the end of the age of oil, one way or another. There's still a lot of coal left, but that is still taking carbon out of the ground and dumping it in the air. We really need a clean efficient energy solution. Ultimately, it seems that it is going to be either direct nuclear (preferably fusion), or indirect nuclear, which is to say, solar. There has been a huge increase in solar energy production in the last few years, and the curve is getting steeper, but it is still a tiny fraction of our total consumption. There are also several related technologies that need to mature in addition to production. We need efficient storage and transport, and we need more efficient usage of what we do produce. There are almost no incandescent bulbs left in my home, and in a few more years, I expect I'll have started to go toward LEDs. It will be interesting to see if my first self-driving car (see above) is also entirely electric...

Of course there will be false starts, and development in directions that we can't even begin to imagine right now. There will also be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may have the potential to kill us all. But there's some of my wish list items. How about you? Leave a comment with the technologies you want to see come to fruition...

Maker Culture

2010-10-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

I have become intrigued with the profusion of "Maker Culture" particularly in the last few years. There have always been people that enjoy making things, whether they were weekend wood-workers with a garage shop, or crafters with a spare bedroom full of bead bins. My grandmother probably produced several acres of knitting in her lifetime. But in the last few years, there seems to be a spreading interest in making all sorts of things. Some businesses, such as TechShop, have sprung up around this. Make Magazine offers fantastic ideas and articles for people. Likewise, the Maker Faire is a part science faire, part show-and-tell, part rave that is now appearing annually in at least three places in the country.

The cost of high-quality tools for making things has also been dropping, sometimes due to concerted development (such as machine tools) and sometimes due to very clever hacking (such as printed circuit board fabrication.)

Machine tools, even those aimed at "professional" shops, have come down in price dramatically in the last few decades. And some things that simply couldn't be done at all are now commonplace. I'm thinking of computer controlled fabrication tools. Mills that used to cost in the hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are now in the thousands. Laser cutting / etching / engraving systems can now be purchased starting at a few thousand dollars. And the computing power, both embedded in these tools, and in the desktop computers that everyone has, provide almost unlimited control capabilities.

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) fabrication is something near and dear to my heart as well, because designing the circuitry that gets turned into PCBs has been one of my primary job functions for most of the last 15 years. The entire design flow goes something like this: Circuit Design -> Schematic Capture -> PCB Layout -> Fabrication.

Every step along this chain now is accessible, in some form, to the home amateur. There are design tools such as SPICE to computationally analyze the behavior of circuits. Schematic capture and layout tools are now available in free open source software such as KiCad and gEDA. And home fabrication can take advantage of technologies like ink-jet printing to print resist onto copper clad board with readily available consumer printers using a PCB starter kit from Full Spectrum Engineering. Of course, if you get as far as generating Gerber files (the standard graphical format for PCB artwork fabrication), you can just send your art out to a service bureau and have them professionally fabricated, often for less than $50 for small boards.

I realize as I write this that the field is so vast that it merits a much more detailed look at what can be done, and since this is "Weekend Engineering," clearly I need to do some projects and post some results... I'll try to include some original design work in upcoming posts. But for now, if you are interested in making things yourself, look around online because there is a community of like-minded people in whatever you want to explore. Some of the other categories of making that intrigue me:

- Silver-smithing
- Ammunition Loading (and even bullet casting)
- Home Video / DVD / BluRay production
- Do-It-Yourself Plastic fabrication
- Welding
- Robotics

And the list goes on and on and on and on... How about you? Leave a comment with what you like to make!

Mobile Data Entry

2010-10-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

i really like my motorola droid phone, but there are definite weaknesses... for example, the browser has various pathologies. as you can see, i cant seem to get capital letters or access the alt key functions for punctuation. the keys are also really close together, leading to about a five percent typo rate. but at least it works enough to write anything here at alll...

The Power of Sleep

2010-10-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Sleep is a wonderful thing. There have been various times when I have made a concerted effort to get enough each night, which for me is about 8 hours. When I'm sick, I am consistently amazed by how often I can feel better just by sleeping for 12 or 14 hours straight. And yet, even knowing that I feel better when I sleep enough, and it can cure many ills, I don't consistently get enough sleep. It is, I suspect, a problem of the delayed gratification of feeling generally good the whole next day, versus the immediate (perceived) reward of staying up late working on "things I want to do." Even though the things I often end up doing later at night are obviously, even as I do them, a giant waste of time.

Every person's sleep requirement is different. I have read that Albert Einstein needed 12 hours of sleep each night. Some of my friends claim to need only 4 or 5 hours sleep a night. I do tend to believe that almost everyone I know is chronically sleep deprived. And high school students are some of the worst of all. Research suggests that the developing brains of teens need about 9.5 hours of sleep each night, more even than 8 - 10 year olds. Instead, schedules overloaded with school, homework, sports, clubs, socializing, other extra curricular activities, and sometimes even jobs, lead to the zombie-like shuffle of chronic sleep deprivation. And it doesn't just make teens grumpy. Sleep deficit can result in increased chance of accidents, inhibited cognition, and diminished learning capacity.

Rotating shift work, such as the schedules used by many police departments, also results in extremely poor sleep hygiene. It can take weeks to shift your sleep schedule around when you change shifts, from days to evenings to graveyard, and about the time you finally settle into a new schedule, it's time to change again. It's like being continuously jet-lagged.

If you don't consistently get a good solid 8 hours of sleep a night, I challenge you to record how much sleep you DO get each night for a week. Then spend the next week making your very best effort to get to bed at the same time each night, and to sleep for at least 8 straight hours every night. You might be amazed how good it makes you feel. And before you point out how you can't afford the time, consider that the time you are awake, once you're well rested, will be MUCH more productive.

I'll try to get enough sleep as well myself... right after I take care of a few more things yet tonight...

Seeing Your Product In Stores

2010-10-04T22:13:00.000-07:00

Walking down the aisle at Fry's the other day, I saw something that made me smile:

This is Baseball Mogul 2010, the baseball simulation produced by Sports Mogul. Sports Mogul was created by two of my friends from the early-mid 90's, when I worked with briefly as a computer game programmer at Stormfront Studios. Clay and Dee Dreslough started the company following their time at Stormfront, wanting to take sports franchise simulation in a new direction. They have managed to keep the company alive for well over a decade now. This is a major accomplishment...

Anyway, the reason it made me happy to see Baseball Mogul in Fry's is because there is something immensely cool about seeing your product in a retail store. I have worked for a number of companies over the last 18 years, including:

- Amdahl, working on mainframe computers
- Stormfront Studios, working on computer games
- Alantec / FORE Systems / Riverstone Networks, working on network boxes
- NETSchools working on educational computers
- Leapfrog working on educational toys
- ShotSpotter working on gunshot location sensors

(And yes, I know that six of those eight companies have gone out of business or been absorbed by some other business. THAT is a topic for another entry someday...)

Only at Stormfront and Leapfrog did I experience the joy of seeing a product I worked on in stores for sale to the general public. If you ask most people that work on consumer products, I think you will find that they get a thrill out of seeing the fruit of their labor on sale in stores. It gives many of the seemingly abstract details of work a concrete reality. To quote the production credits for Chris Carter's 10/13 TV Productions, "I Made This!"

Upgrading a MacBook Hard Drive

2010-10-03T21:48:00.000-07:00

My daughter has a 13" MacBook that we got her at the start of high school. She is now in her Senior year, and the deal we have with her is that if she can keep this machine alive until next year, we'll get her a new computer as she heads off to college. She shoots a lot of photos, though, and keeping a large working set on her machine requires frequent swapping out to our home server. I finally decided this weekend that a relatively cheap and easy mid-life kicker for her computer would be a hard drive upgrade.

The MacBook originally came with a Seagate 160 GB, 5400 RPM SATA drive. This weekend, Fry's had the Seagate Momentus 500 GB, 7200 RPM SATA drive on sale for $69.99. Poking around a bit, I found this blog post that describes exactly what I wanted to do. Getting it all set up to back-up the drive really did take only a few minutes. And the Carbon Copy Cloner software really is great, free for download with a donation requested.

Once I had the new drive connected externally with a USB to SATA interface, it took about 5 hours to clone the 160 GB from the old drive to the new one. When I swapped the new drive into the housing in place of the old one, the machine booted right up with the OS completely intact. It was very straight forward, just like Mac stuff is supposed to be.

The one thing that was notable is a hierarchy of obscurity for the closures as you get into the machine. To open the battery compartment, you need a coin. To remove the door that covers the memory slots and the drive bay, you need a #0 (tiny) Philips head screwdriver. To swap the hard drive out of it's sheet-metal mounting bracket, you need a Torx T8 driver. That last one surprised me a little... Why did they go with the obscure Torx screw in stead of another Philips head? It's not enough to prevent swapping out the drive, just enough to make it inconvenient, unless you happen to have a set of Torx drivers at home.

My daughter is very happy with the 3X increase in drive capacity, and the 33% increase in rotation speed has also nicely improved the perceived speed of the machine. With a bit of good luck, this will take her through her AP Studio Art Photography program and the remaining 8 months of high school.

Re-Capping A PC Motherboard

2010-10-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

Another recent home project, in the category of things that made me unreasonably pleased with myself, was replacing two capacitors that had failed on the motherboard of my Shuttle SN68SG2 PC. I actually first wrote about this computer in the context of the number of restarts required while installing Windows XP. The machine is now 2 years old, and is my primary desktop PC at home. About a week and a half ago, I was working one night when it just clicked off. No warning, no shutdown, just >blink.< This is never a good sign.

After a moment of swearing, I realized that virtually all of the apps I use these days save automatically and so the actual risk of lost data was minimal. I powered back up, and everything worked fine, so I convinced myself that it was just some power glitch on the mains, and nothing to be particuarly worried about.

Two days later, it happened again. And this time I had to admit that it was probably a real problem, and I would have to at least keep an eye out for it. I powered back up, and went back to work... for about an hour. When I powered up following that third failure, I didn't quite get all the way through Windows booting before it dropped dead again. Once the mean time between failures of a PC is less than the boot time for Windows, it is pretty well shot.

Given the nature of the failure, I was almost certain that it must be the power supply. Nothing else, it seemed, was likely to cause such an instantaneous power-off failure like that. So I took the housing apart, measured the power supply, and figured out that there was a replacement available at Fry's. With the new power supply installed it came up, booted to my desktop... and then died. More swearing.

Finally I Googled around and came across this forum posting about my model. Sure enough, upon closer inspection, those same two capacitors in my machine were bulging badly:

When I removed them from the board, one of them also showed signs of electrolyte leakage on the bottom side:

Interestingly, when I measured the capacitance, both the failed caps actually measured *above* spec. The parameter that has gone bad, I suspect, is the equivalent series resistance. These are "ultra-low ESR" caps, meaning, essentially, that they store and release charge very efficiently. Or at least, they used to before their guts started leaking out. I don't have an ESR meter, but that is the usual failure mode. This is an example of the capacitor plague which dates back to the late 90's when some of the Chinese manufacturers got a bit sloppy with their electrolyte formulation. But since the parts only fail after several years of use, there are many millions of them in service.

Getting replacement parts was an interesting challenge. The original caps are 8 mm in diameter and 23mm long, with a capacitance of 1800uF, and a voltage rating of 6.3V. They were also nominally rated at about 0.015 ohms at 100KHz. I could have ordered from Mouser to get some almost exactly the same size and ESR, but it would have taken at least 2 days and cost $38 in shipping, for $2 worth of parts. The closest part I could find over the counter locally was at HSC Electronics Supply in Santa Clara, and they were 1800uF, 0.025 ohms at 100KHz, but rated at 25 volts. This meant they were appreciably larger:

Even the leads on the new caps were larger, 0.2mm wider than the originals, so I had to grind them down with a Dremel tool, and bend them inward to make up for their wider spacing. Once installed, the new caps stood a bit off the board, but it was a situation of "close enough." The off-board mounting proved fortuitous, because their extra height also caused them to interfere with the heat pipe between the processor heat sink and the fan. I ended up bending them over slightly to fit the system back together.

So in the end it was not a particularly clean and elegant fix, but it worked, the parts cost $2, and I was able to get them locally. I put the machine all back together, and it booted right up. And when I came back about 20 minutes later, it was off again. (#$%@!) Then I realized that I'd forgotten to reconnect the power to the fan when I put it all back together, and the machine had shut itself off because it had overheated. I let it cool down, plugged in the fan, and it has now been running for about a week. I'm hopeful that I'll get a couple more years of use out of it before I need to replace it.

Melting Ice - Latent Heat of Fusion

2010-10-02T01:04:00.000-07:00

One of the interesting experiments done in 8th grade physical science is a demonstration in which the temperature of a mixture of ice and water is measured, while it is being heated with a Bunsen burner or a hot-plate. Even though substantial energy is being put into the mixture of ice and water, the temperature stays fixed at (approximately) 0 degrees C. What changes, of course, is the amount of ice in the bath. Once all the ice has melted, then the temperature of the water begins to increase.

If you continue to heat it, the temperature of the water will increase in (almost) direct proportion to the amount of energy put into it, until it gets to (approximately) 100 degrees C. At 100 degrees C, the temperature will again hold steady, while the water boils, until it has been completely converted to steam.

The phase change from solid (ice) to liquid (water), and then to gas (steam) requires energy. That energy is well defined, too. The energy difference between liquid and solid is know as the "latent heat of fusion." In order to turn 1 kilogram of ice into 1 kilogram of water requires 333.55 kilojoules of energy.

Suppose you wanted to melt a column of ice 200 feet tall, and 10 feet in diameter. That would be a cylinder with a volume of pi * radius^2 * height = 3.14159 * 25 feet^2 * 200 feet = 15707.95 cubic feet, or (using Google to convert units) 444.8 cubic meters, or 444,800 liters. Ice has a density of about 0.9167 kg / liter, so we're trying to melt 407,748 kg of ice. This will require 407,748 * 333.55 kilojoules of energy, or 1.36 x 10^12 joules. 1 Joule per second is one Watt of Power, so if we were trying to melt this ice in, say 2 weeks = 336 hours = 1,209,600 seconds, we would need to continuously apply (assuming there were no other thermal inputs or outputs to our system) 1.36 x 10^12 joules / 1.2096 x 10^6 seconds = 1.124 x 10^6 watts, or about 1.1 megawatts.

Hmmm. That's a lot of energy to deliver, continuously, for two weeks straight, so it would be really hard to melt a column of ice 200 feet high and 10 feet across. Especially with a gallium arsenide laser. The motivation for this exercise is intentionally left cryptic. But I'm looking at you again, Dan Brown.

Making Stuff: Improvised C-Cell Batteries

2010-09-30T22:33:00.000-07:00

I get a sense of satisfaction, usually far out of proportion with the actual accomplishment, when I manage to achieve some minor technical win in day-to-day life. One recent example was the creation of improvised C-cell batteries.

We have a Sony shower radio that requires four C-cell batteries, which need to be replaced about every 10 months under normal daily use. It is, I think, the only device in our house that uses C-Cell batteries anymore. I end up needing to buy batteries specifically for it every time it needs new batteries. This last time the batteries died, however, I decided to take advantage of the fact that C cells are the same length as AA, of which we have plenty. And yes, I know that there are plastic shells into which you can slide a AA battery to make it C-size. But the same result can ALSO be achieved with strips of cardboard (in this case, cut from 12-pack Coke boxes) wrapped around the battery to achieve the proper outer diameter, and then duct-taped in place.

This is what the finished adapted battery looks like:

And here's the set of four installed in the radio battery compartment:

So, what are the limitations of this approach? Well, obviously the pseudo-C battery only has the capacity of a AA. If you look at many rechargeable batteries, however, you will find that the C-cells you can buy often have exactly the same storage capacity as the same brand's AA batteries. In other words, they are just putting AA cells into C-sized packages. The reduced capacity battery will only last about half as long as "real" C-cells, but then I can just untape them, unwind the strip of cardboard, and replace the AA at the core.

The peak current sourcing capacity of the AA battery is also less than a C-cell, but unless you're drawing really high current (and this radio just doesn't) this is not a limitation. Likewise, in applications that draw extremely high currents, the batteries may actually heat up enough due to their heightened internal resistance that cardboard duct-taped around the AA becomes a hazard. But again, this "transistor radio" application doesn't come anywhere near that level of current draw.

When working on home projects, I often have to decide up front that the amusement value of making something work is far more valuable than the actual fix. Was it worth the time to measure, cut, roll, and tape cardboard to build adapters when I could have just grabbed the batteries the next time I was at virtually any store? Of course not! Did it amuse me, and offer the satisfaction of a hack done entirely with materials I had on hand? Absolutely!

Writers Do Math, When Necessary

2010-09-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Writers read, a lot, according to several authors whose opinion and craft I respect. Most notably, I remember Dean Koontz in his book on writing talking about the need to read constantly. I also just like to read, because it is entertaining, and fun, expands my vocabulary and world view, gives me things to talk about with friends, and quite honestly, it's easy to do. But it also takes time. And while "I don't have time" is the frequent excuse of people who waste vast amounts of time doing inconsequential things (I'm looking at you, television, FaceBook, Hulu, YouTube, and most of the Internet), it is still hard to muster the 8 - 30 hours that it can take to read a good book.

In order to consume more books, I started listening to books on tape years ago, and I now try to have a constant stream of books on CD from the local library in my car. They're free, they're extremely convenient, and given the limited selection the library can carry, they tend to be only the most popular titles, which are often things I wanted to read anyway. Even with my relatively short commute, I get through at LEAST 30 minutes of "reading" a day, and if you include all other driving, I probably clear about a CD a day on average. That means I can listen to a 15 CD novel in about 2 weeks. Yes, you can argue about the merits of listening to someone read the text versus reading the printed page yourself, but I find the narration usually doesn't get in the way, and the time savings is well worth it.

The latest book I'm listening to is Deception Point by Dan Brown. It's a techno-political thriller that he wrote in 2001, after Angels and Demons, and before The Da Vinci Code. I'm on disk 10 of 15 so far, and the story is okay, although it frequently feels a bit thin in places, like he's milking more pages than are really merited from many of the story elements. But the things that have bugged me the most are engineering related nits which could have been largely avoided with some basic math and physics.

The most glaring has to do with the weight of a rock. I'll attempt not to spoil any of the story here, but several times there are references made to a rock which is initially described as "10 feet in diameter" weighing "eight tons." The rock is described as approximately spherical, which would give it a radius = diameter / 2 = 5 feet. The volume of a sphere is 4/3 * pi * radius^3, which means the rock has an approximate volume of 1.333 * 3.14159 * 5 * 5 *5 = 523.5 cubic feet. Using Google, we can easily convert this to liters and we get 14824 liters. Now, if it were made of WATER, and not rock, that 14,824 liters would weight about 14,824 kilograms = 32681 pounds = about 16 tons. But it's not water, it's ROCK. The rock is described as granite like, which would have a specific gravity, or density relative to water, of about 2.6. This means that it would weight 16 * 2.6 = about 41.6 tons. But even if we say it is the least dense rock we can come up with, pumice stone, the air-filled "floating rock" ejected by volcanoes, it would STILL have a specific gravity of 0.64, and a mass of about 16 * 0.64 = 10 Tons. The "eight tons" sounded wrong when I first read it, and now, especially after doing the math, it grates on me every time it is repeated.

So the follow-up question, of course, is why did this happen? Is there some major plot point I haven't yet gotten to about the rock being only 25% of the weight it should be? Or was it just sloppiness by Dan Brown, and then by his editors? Given how lauded Brown is for his extensive research, it seems strange and jarring that such a relatively obvious factual error made it into the book... And if anyone reading this knows Mr. Brown, I'd love to hear his explanation!

Writers Write

2010-09-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

I have long fancied myself a writer, but the volume of my output clearly says otherwise. I tend to worry that I've got a piece polished and shiny and finished to the point that I don't create much of anything. In an effort to break this trend, I am going to start a period of VASTLY accelerated writing. If I manage to pull it off, what you are going to see here in the next month is, I hope, at least one article each day, written in one pass, with only the roughest edges filed off. And of course, all of this will be done within the larger context of work, and family, and all the other ongoing responsibilities that I can't let drop either.

The longer term goal of this effort is to get myself unstuck, to advance several writing projects, both fiction and non-fiction, that I have been incubating for a very long time, and which I finally feel a need to complete. I'm not going to live forever, after all, and I don't want to die with too many of my words still in me. Furthermore, like so many things, the only way to improve my craftsmanship as a writer is to actually do it. Talking about it, thinking about it, pondering the greatness that I could one day shine down upon the world means nothing if I don't get started... and so I am.

If you're reading this, well, skip ahead to the next entry because this is just introductory late night navel-gazing. But if you HAVE read this far, please write a comment, or write me an e-mail, or call me (because if you're here, at least during this development phase in September - October 2010, you almost certainly already know me) and let me know what you think. I gotta work the keyboard, get the words out, keep the cursor moving. It's a cliche but that doesn't mean it's not true: Writers write. And dammit, I wanna be a writer.

California Extreme 2010

2010-08-07T23:16:00.001-07:00

I haven't written much here in the last year, but I wanted to do a quick entry about this year's California Extreme Classic Arcade Game Show. I didn't see much new at the show this year, but I did learn a lot. In an effort to inspire myself to write, I arranged with the Santa Clara Weekly to cover the show with a 500 word article. I even got a press badge to the event, and with Amanda along as my photographer, I interviewed some of the volunteer organizers.

I had always known that virtually all of the games at California Extreme are provided by private collectors, but I didn't realize how large some of those private collections are. One of the show organizers pointed out that over 60 of the games there were his. Another guy owned over 100 of the games. That just boggles my mind, that they are obsessive enough to collect that many machines, and yet also generous and trusting enough to let the attendees play with their toys.

As usual, I had a great time at the show, and I enjoyed the flash-back to my youth. It was also fun to again see and play some games that even predate me. There was a bar trivia quiz machine based on an internal slide or filmstrip projector. There was also an all electromechanical pinball machine that had only 4 digits on the score counter, and had bumpers worth "1 point." All in all, it was a lot of fun.

If you want to see the Santa Clara Weekly piece I wrote, it is here: http://scw.tearn.com/2010/07/california-extreme-2010.html.

Paperwork Paradox

2009-11-12T11:21:00.001-08:00

I haven't been writing much, but I came across something that was amusing and brief, so just a quick entry today... I was filling out a government form for my employer today, which included a list of yes/no questions. Question #4 of 18 was "Has a completed COPY of this renewal application form (front & back) been sent or delivered to the Chief Law Enforcement Officer (CLEO) of the locality in which the premises are located?" There are also spaces to fill in the date that you sent it, and the name and title of the Chief Law Enforcement Officer. The policy associated with this form requires that a copy be sent to the local law enforcement. But if you stop and think about that for just a second, you will see the problem. They are asking, as you fill out the form, if you have already done something with the completed form. The only possible answer to that question that is true as you fill out the form would be "no." But that will, of course, cause the form to be rejected.

Interestingly, you might try to get around this, by answering "no" (which is true), then copying and sending the form, which would allow you to cross out "no" and answer "yes." Except that this is still not true, because now you have changed the original, so what you sent is not actually a copy of the form, and the answer is still "no."

In order to successfully complete the form, I decided that the process of filling out the form and sending it to the local law enforcement office is an atomic operation, completed effectively all at the same instant in time. And since the form required when I signed it that it is "true and correct to the best of my knowledge and belief," that's my belief, and I'm sticking to it.

California Extreme 2009

2009-08-10T22:25:00.000-07:00

Every year, if my schedule allows, I like to go to the California Extreme classic arcade and pinball game show. I first stumbled across the show by accident several years ago when I happened to be walking past the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, and it was being held in one of the conference areas. This year the show moved to the ballrooms at the Santa Clara Hyatt at the Convention Center, and I spent Sunday several weeks ago reliving a bit of my childhood and seeking inspiration from games created when compute power was a lot more limited than today.

The admissions material accurately describe the show as a museum of working games. There were machines from the early 70's through the current decade, including many classics and some really rare ones. Some of the real oldies included "Computer Space," "Space War," Space Race," and "Tennis." Keeping these ancient machines functional requires ongoing maintenance, and is a labor of love for many of the collectors. The opportunity to get access to them, all set on free-play, for a day is well worth the $30/day door charge to get in.

Computer Space, which appeared in the movie Soylent Green, was amusing but not particularly compelling to play. The amazing technical detail about it, however, is that it has no CPU. It is entirely implemented as a state machine in 74xx series logic.

Tennis and Space Race were really engaging. They are both two player games, and rather pointless without someone to play against. Mike Napolitan and I played many games of both, chatting as we played. It's fun to imagine people 35 years ago playing those machines...

My favorite game, if I had to pick one, remains Atari Lunar Lander. In this game, you select one of four levels, which generally correlate with how realistic your flight controls are, as you attempt to land on the surface of the moon. On the expert level, you have to counter-thrust to stop rotating, or your rotational momentum keeps you turning the direction you started. Heavy gravity requires careful management of a limited fuel supply. The controls are simple, with buttons for rotate right, rotate left, and a thrust throttle lever. The thrust lever is a huge beefy handle with an awesome feel that you can really believe is out of a 60's era spacecraft. One more button, labeled "abort," allows you to terminate a landing attempt, and can be used as a "cheat" switch. It instantly reduces your horizontal velocity to 0, then automatically orients you vertically and applies a blast of thrust far more than you can get with the throttle, to immediately arrest your fall and accelerate you to about 50 feet per second upward. If you've let your vertical velocity get too high, this can save you, at the cost of a high fuel burn, but as I said it always felt like a cheat to use it. The sound is also really well designed, with a booming bass speaker to provide the rumble of a rocket engine throttling on and off.

Lunar Lander is not a twitch game, and actually requires thinking about the physics of a space ship. I'm not sure how popular it was in bars and then arcades when it came out, but I find it really compelling to play, and I kept thinking about how to determine the minimal-burn landing path that gets you to your target, often a tiny little landing platform, by which time you need to have minimal horizontal velocity and vertical velocity of less than 15 feet per second. It obviously wasn't as popular as the next game Atari released... Many lunar lander cabinets, both in production and in the field, were re-configured into Asteroids machines.

Some of the games at the show are prototypes. One in particular, "Teeter Torture" is one-of-a-kind, an Exidy title that even Exidy's old employees didn't seem to remember producing. Apparently for some time there was speculation that it was actually a bootleg ROM running on Exidy hardware. From a distance, it looks like a regular arcade console game, but when you get closer you realize that the artwork is all hand-drawn with art-markers, reminiscent of story-board drawings from a movie. The game play was fun, although the little gunnery station that the player controls was really (and probably unintentionally) phallic. The ROMs are available for MAME, but that one machine is the only known console.

Not all of the old games are good. Some were poorly-made movie tie-ins, like "Krull" or "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.." Some were fun and even successful but are showing their age, like "Red Baron" which has a nauseatingly slow frame-rate that renders it almost unplayable at times. And some are obvious rip-offs or amalgamations of other games. But many of them are still surprisingly fun to play, even if you are doing the same thing over and over again. And the minimal graphics and compute power lead to game designs that placed an emphasis on game play... That seems to have been lost in many of the modern crop of games that are graphically stunning but just not particularly fun to play. I think this show offers a lot to learn, and like I said, I always find it imspiring.

Here's the complete list of games that I played at the show:

Lunar Lander
Tail Gunner
Red Baron
Teeter Torture (One of a kind prototype)
Discs of Tron
Tron
Joust 2
Robotron 2084
Missile Command
Sinistar
I, Robot
Computer Space
Space Race
Tempest
Gravitar
Black Widow
Atari Quantum
Space War
Asteroids Deluxe
Turbo Sub
Crossbow
Rebound
Kick
Die Alien Scum (Prototype)
Rally-X
Stargate
Wizard of Wor
Gorf
Omega Race
Spy Hunter
Tapper
Reactor
Timber
Guitar Hero
Joust
Ice Cold Beer
Star Castle
Armor Attack!
Battlezone
Major Havoc
Time Crisis 3
Need For Speed – Underground
Galaga 88
Space Invaders
Xevious
Crazy Climber
Venture
Jungle Hunt
Deer Hunting USA
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Krull
Twilight Zone Pinball

Playing XVID Files on TiVo...

2009-08-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had some XVID files that I wanted to watch with my family on our family room TV. In the past, I have used an S-Video to Composite Video adapter, which I then plug into the 6-to-1 switch box that I put on the TV to allow us to select from the TiVo, VCR, one of three video game systems, or the digital camera input. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the adapter yesterday and searching my garage was not high on my list of Saturday projects. Then I realized that the TiVo-HD is a digital video player, and is already successfully connected to the TV, and is also connected to the home network via 100 MBit/second Ethernet. All I needed was a way to get it to play the video files.

Fortunately, this is a problem that has already been solved for me. A google search on "Transfer Video to Tivo" lead me here: http://www.zatznotfunny.com/gtt.htm

So I downloaded the latest free version of the TiVo Desktop software from here: http://www.tivo.com/buytivo/tivogear/software/index.html

Once I had that set up, I followed the instructions to get it talking to the TiVo in the family room, which just required getting the Media Access Key from the TiVo Messages & Settiles -> Account & System Info -> Media Access Key menu option.

Then I went in search of an MPEG-2 transcoder to convert the XVID files into the MPEG-2 files that the TiVo could play. While there are many pieces of software to do this, they often:

- Provide TOO much functionality, requiring the user to explicitly demultiplex the audio and video streams, transcode them separately, and then mux them back together, or
- Are trial-ware that expires after 30 days or watermarks the video output, or
- Require additional codec packs that may not be obvious or readily available.

After reading various articles about video conversion, I finally decided on "Super (C)" by eRightSoft: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html It is truly freeware, is easy to use but apparently quite flexible, and as far as I could tell it is widely used and likely legit and not a trojan horse or virus carrier.

Their download procedure is relatively insane, (described in various online forums with a variety of colorful language) in that you have to follow an easter-egg-hunt like chain of links to actually get the software. On that first page, go to a link at the bottom of that page and click on it ( "Start Download Super (C)" which takes you to http://www.erightsoft.com/Superdc.html ) . This in turn leads to another page with another download link toward the top of the page ( "Download and Use" which leads to http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html ), which opens yet another page where you will finally find the link to download the setup file at the bottom of that page: ( "Download Super (C) Setup File" which links to http://erightsoft.podzone.net/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe ). Apparently they do this so that they can monitor the referrer and make sure that you get to the download from their website, so you may well need to go through this entire sequence. Failure to follow the breadcrumbs can apparently result in an endless loop of getting booted back to the front page. They have a better description of which links to follow in a download help link on their website. Yes, it is nuts.

Once you finally have Super (C) downloaded and installed, you just need to click the unselected radio button in the upper left hand corner of the window to put it into transcoding mode, select .mpg Output Container and MPEG-II Ouput Video Codec, and MPEG2 Output Audio Codec. Then you can drag and drop your XVID files onto the window and hit "Encode Active File," and soon enough you will have a file that can be dropped into your My TiVo Recordings folder and it is available for transfer to your TiVo.

One of the trade-offs in searching for the "single click" solution to any problem ( like this MPEG-2 Conversion) is that the generalized solution is never exactly the optimal solution. But in this case, since the entire purpose of the files is to live on the TiVo just long enough to be viewed once and then discarded, any suboptimal limitations are as yet imperceptible to me. It might be that with lots of tweeking, I could get the created MPG video files smaller, or slightly better quality, but I just don't care. They were quite good enough for casual viewing before being discarded again, since I still have the source XVID files on my PC.

Since setting this up, I have looked around a bit more and some people have have even written software that transcodes files directly and serve to the Tivo in lieu of the TiVo Desktop software, but I haven't looked into setting this up yet. Maybe some other weekend...

Distributed Murder

2009-07-30T22:56:00.001-07:00

I had lunch with a friend today who suggested that I should post this here. And since I have about 5 other entries half-written, this seemed like something I might actually hit "publish" on yet today...

If you murder someone, you have deprived of the rest of their life... you have literally stolen all their remaining time. If we assume that your victim was going to be fairly long-lived, you might say that they had ahead of them:
- 100 years, or
- 36525 days, or
- 876,600 hours, or
- 3,155,760,000 seconds.

So murder is stealing about 3 billion seconds.

Does it hold then that if you steal 3 billion seconds, you have effectively killed someone? Imagine you are creating a product that will be widely used, perhaps a piece of software. Suppose that software is used by 20 million people, who will start it up 200 times each in the course of using it. But in your haste to get it out the door, it takes 3 seconds longer than actually necessary to start up.

20,000,000 users
x 200 starts
x 3 excess seconds per start
-----------------------------
= 12,000,000,000 (12 billion) seconds

Your minor negligence, coupled with wide spread use, has stolen time from 20 million different people that adds up to four human lifetimes. You have effectively killed four people.

Now, obviously there are a couple of critical flaws in this analogy.

When someone dies, it isn't just their time that is lost, but every interaction with every other person they would have had over those lost years. And all of the secondary, tertiary, and peripheral impact that person would have had but for their untimely death. Those interactions create a web of effects that extends far beyond the local experience or even the finite lifespan of the person themselves. Every life touches, directly or indirectly, thousands of others.

Then there is choice. People aren't (generally) compelled to use your product. If anyone finds the performance unacceptable, they have freedom to do or use something else. Working against this, however, is that the nature of the time theft (only a few seconds at a time) is similar to a fractional-cent rounding problem. Although it adds up to large totals, any given delay is *almost* imperceptible in the course of normal events.

Finally, you can make an argument that those 3 seconds aren't really stolen, that you aren't requiring the user to do anything during that start-up pause, so they will recapture them with some other task like reading another e-mail before they switch their focus back to your program. This leads to a whole different discussion of the cost of context-switching between tasks, but still, maybe the time isn't completely lost.

Even with these flaws in the analogy, it does provide an interesting way of analyzing the impact of widely spread frequently occurring small bits of time. Consider spam e-mail. A lot of people say "Oh, just hit delete and forget about it." But let's say it takes 1 second to identify and delete a spam e-mail. And suppose everyone gets, on average 3 spam e-mails a day. And by "everyone," suppose we mean all 1.5 billion estimated Internet users as of now. That's 4.5 billion seconds a day lost to spam e-mail. Spam e-mail is killing 1.5 people a day.

The time-in-lifespans is also interesting to apply to voluntary pursuits as well. Who wouldn't want to create something so compelling that someone else would contribute their entire life to it? Well, if you make a 126 second long video, you will consume an entire lifespan for every 23.8 million views you get. That means that this video is currently the sole-focus totally consuming life's passion of 2.76 people.

Finally, turning this around, it is useful to think this way to consider whether the things you are trading your life for are worth it... Even the little bits of time spent here and there add up, and subtract from your total limited lifetime allotment of time. 3 billion seconds may sound like a lot, but every second really does count.

Ever Rising Expectations

2009-06-06T18:23:00.001-07:00

On one hand, I know that the accelerating march of technology is a cliche. But I still find it interesting how some things that were novelties a few years ago, and still spreading last year, I just expect now. Three examples that leap to mind are TiVo (or more generally DVRs), cell phones, automotive smart keys.

I called my parents today to say "hi," but they were about to watch the Belmont Stakes, and so we quickly arranged to talk later. They don't take TV particularly seriously, having for years had about three and a half low-quality broadcast channels available to them. We just got their broadcast digital converter box working last weekend, so they now have about 10 nice looking digital standard def channels. And yet still I found myself surprised at the idea of needing to watch television according to the broadcast schedule. Of course they have a VHS VCR with which they could have recorded the race, if it was hooked up (it's not). But I realized that I now just assume everyone has a TiVo or other DVR with which to trivially pause or time shift their TV viewing. Almost everytime I turn on the TV in our living room now, it is paused at whatever the last person was watching. The notion of "live TV" quietly transitioned in my brain in the last few years from obvious to an amusing anachronism.

Likewise, cell phones have made the jump. When I swap contact information with people now, the question isn't "Do you have a cell phone," but rather, "Do you still have a land line?" I still remember telling someone to call me on my cell phone in 1994 and being met with an incredulous "Are you serious?" Now that same surprise would meet the news that someone *didn't* have a cell phone.

And finally, the Smart Key system in my Prius has managed to warp my perception of how cars should behave when I try to drive the minivan or my daughter's Subaru. I sometimes find myself walking up to the cars other than the Prius and standing holding the handle waiting for it to beep happily and unlock for me. Instead, it just sits there. Or sometimes I hop into the driver's seat and reach futily for the non-existent "Power" button to turn it on. The need to actually take the key out of my pocket just seems so retro now.

So what new functions, capabilities, and personal accessories will be so completely ubiquitous that we completely take them for granted in another 5, 10, or 20 years? And how can I start building them today?

It's a Wonderful Calculation

2008-11-12T22:57:00.000-08:00

November marks the official start of the "It's a Wonderful Life" season, in which my wife and I will use the DVD of this Frank Capra classic as background viewing more or less continuously until we ring in the new year two months from now. There are several major plot points in the movie that center around specific amounts of money. It's difficult to get a good grasp on the scale of these dollar amounts unless you adjust them for inflation. Fortunately, there are many good inflation calculators available online. Using the consumer price index (CPI) data from the last 200 years, they can calculate what a dollar amount from a prior year would be worth today.

For example, when Mr. Potter tries to hire George Bailey, George angrily says he's making $45/week, not $40. In the story time line, this happens in about 1933. $45 dollars in 1933 is equivalent to about $714/week in 2007 dollars (the last year for which this particular calculator has CPI data), or about $37,130. By comparison, Mr. Potter offers him a three year contract at $20,000/year. That is equivalent to about $317,160/year. That's a huge amount of money for a small-town businessman scrimping to get by, particularly when compared to what he makes at the building and loan. That's what makes it all the more amazing when he turns it down flat.

Later, Uncle Billy accidentally hands Mr. Potter the Bailey Building and Loan's $8000 bank deposit with the newspaper. That $8000 loss is what drives George to the brink of suicide. It doesn't sound like much, but in 1945 dollars, that was like misplacing over $91,200 now. Sadly, given recent economic news, it still doesn't sound like much. I wish any banking executive could get upset over a loss of $90K. You can almost hear the modern day dialog now: "Do you have any idea what this means? Bankruptcy and scandal and prison! Well, no, not really! But after the government bails us out, they might shave a few percent off my massive annual bonus! I may have to drive the same car for two years in a row! Intolerable!!" Sigh. I think I need to go watch "It's a Wonderful Life" now...

Installing Windows XP...

2008-09-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

My primary home file server PC recently died, so I build up a Shuttle SN68SG2 bare-bones PC to replace it. Then I got out the original installation discs for the Windows XP that had been on the deceased machine, and installed it on the new box. Just for grins, I kept track of how many times I had to reboot during the Windows XP installation. The sequence was as follows:

- Formatted the new hard drive, then copied the Windows files to it, then rebooted.
- Installed Windows, rebooted.
- Configured Windows, rebooted.
- Installed motherboard drivers, rebooted.
- Installed Windows Updater, rebooted.
- Installed Service Pack 2, rebooted.
- Installed Service Pack 3, rebooted.
- Installed the next 16 windows updates, including IE 7, rebooted.
- Installed PowerDVD software that came with DVD drive, rebooted.
- Updated Optical Drive Firmware, powered down, then rebooted.
- Installed Nero disc burning software that came with the DVD drive, rebooted.
- Installed McAfee Security Center, rebooted.

So 12 reboots to get the machine to a more or less usable point... Hmmm.

Subtly Deceptive Advertising

2008-03-16T11:16:00.000-07:00

I have always found the effectiveness of advertising to be surprising. I like to think, "Oh no, surely I am far above being so obviously manipulated into buying stuff I don't really want or need." But I know, deep down, that I can be manipulated just like virtually all consumers. Junk-food ads, in particular, make me drool. I want that artery clogging burger even knowing that the real product looks nothing like the studio-beautified example shown in print or on TV. And a close-up of the bubbly spray off the top of an icy cold Coke brings back fond memories of happy times with friends, and makes me really want that Coke... and I don't even drink cola anymore!

But worse than that sort of direct manipulation in advertising is use of the false comparison. Often advertisers not only have to make you want their product, but they have to make you want it more than some competing alternative. Usually this involves explaining why the benefits of one outweigh the other. But there is also a way to "cheat": the false comparison. The latest example I've seen is this photo from a postcard advertising invisalign braces:

The apparent message in this photo is "invisalign looks better on your teeth than conventional braces." The unspoken, subtle and manipulative implication is "invisalign users have better, smoother skin with no wrinkles or visible pores, their lips are full and glossy pink, and their noses are tinier with smaller nostrils." This is, or course, absurd. But that's the message your brain picks up without you ever being aware of just how bogus the comparison is. All you register consciously is, "wow, the invisalign side really does look much better."

If you look for it, you might be surprised how often this trick is used in advertising, particular in "before and after" photos. But it usually only shows up in professionally produced mass advertising. Many small businesses and small web sites will run very reasonable photos of "this is what it looked like when we started" and "this is what it looked like when we finished." But the cost of mass mailings or print ads is so high that advertising firms have to do anything they can to improve the success rate for their client, to justify selling them more advertising.

This technique feels sleazy to me, and makes me dislike products that use it. And it's not even necessary. I think invisalign is a great product. But the use of this false comparison technique actually makes me think poorly of the company and, by extension, what they are selling. I suspect that's not the perception they were hoping to buy with their advertising dollars.

Bad Hardware UI Design

2008-03-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

I am cheap. I admit this by way of explanation for why I often buy the lowest cost functional equivalent for many of the things I use. In electronics, this means that I will purchase the no-name brand if it offers the same functionality as the branded version. Looking at Gigabit Ethernet PCI NICs recently, I realized that they were ALL using the exact same Realtek chip. Thus it made no difference which one I purchased, they were all basically the same component on a PCB implementing the chip maker's reference design, with price as the only differentiator. You could possibly argue that there are differences in quality of PCB fabrication or assembly, but they are all made in China, and there's a pretty good chance that multiple brands came off the same assembly lines, or at least lines at the same manufacturer. They have all been cost reduced to the bleeding edge of functionality, so to my thinking they are all basically the same.

The differences that do pop up between the name brand products and the no-name versions are in the little design details. It struck me twice this weekend when I ran across amusing examples of bad hardware user interface design. The first was this USB drive housing for ATA hard drives:

Notice that they have helpfully labeled the LED as "LED." What does the LED indicate? I have no idea. To find out, I would have to read the documentation. And I'll bet that it was not written or edited by a native English speaker. I'm okay with this, because I bought the $19 box instead of the $29 box, and I'd rather have the $10 than a well-labeled LED since I'm generally not looking at it anyway. Still, I find it kind of sad that it was important enough to cast the text under the LED into the metal of the housing, but not important enough to actually convey any information with it.

Likewise, this consumer widget helpfully indicates the specific color of the LEDs:

Now, you might glean some additional information from the adjacent position labels on the switch, inferring that green means it is cooling and red means it is warming. Although it could also be that green means it is working, and red means it is not. Or green means that it is at temperature, and red means it is in the process of changing temperature. I just don't know. In any case, perhaps this is the last market differentiator available at the low end. If I had a choice between the cheap item with a random, useless UI design, and one in which someone had put several hours of thought into how to make it slightly more usable, I'd probably buy the slightly more usable one. Although only if it doesn't cost any more...

Welcome to Weekend Engineering

2007-12-31T14:01:00.000-08:00

I have considered, for years now, whether I had anything worthy of adding to the massive stream of effluent that makes up the blogosphere. And if I did establish a blog, what sort of voice would I try to maintain? Some pretentious psuedo-wit that uses words like blogosphere and effluent? And worse yet, would I turn into one of those "wink-wink, look how clever I am with my self-referential humor" gits? Would I even find myself displaying affectations like British-isms thrown in to further my pathetic self aggrandizement?

I just don't know.

But I do know that every now and then I run across or learn something that is worthy of recording SOMEWHERE on the Internet so that the next time someone else needs to know the same trick, there is a slightly higher chance Google will show them the way. And thus I'm establishing Weekend Engineering.

I may also use this to document my own projects, if I do anything in the open world. We'll see. In the meanwhile, here's a start. Now the next interesting question is whether there will ever be a post #2!