Hieroglyphics

Upon becoming frustrated with the enigmatic glyphs on the controls of his smartphone, my dad thought of the icons on the buttons in a particular computer program:

"In Unigraphics [a jet-engine-scale CAD program], a product I used to support, we have over a thousand symbols. Years ago, mankind invented phonetic writing so we wouldn't have to remember thousands of symbols, and now we're back to systems where we have to remember a thousand symbols!"

Having just finished a class on the era of civilization in which writing developed, I was highly amused. :)

PVU

So...

I like small airports. A lot.

I got a ride from a friend at 7 this morning to the Provo municipal airport. We pulled up to the Million Air building, got me unloaded, and off I went.

Through the normal doors, turn right, wait almost no time, check bags, step through the door, put everything through their one x-ray machine showing pass and ID after the metal detector, step into the waiting area/terminal. Board by walking across the tarmac and up a ramp.

Simple, condensed. Like this verbage.

They even let me board right after first class because I have no overhead bin item.

Cold seats though. That was a shock!

Cranky

You ever look down at your gas gauge and realize that you have drastically less fuel than you thought you did?

I feel like that today.

Just Go.

 "Why, I'm going to do as much as I can until I get kicked out of BYU," she huffed. I looked into her gaze, which she was casting condescendingly down her nose.

"Is that so? Why don't you just leave?" I demanded.

Touchpads

Computers are great.

Most of the time.

Linux is great too.

Most of the time.

I just want to thank bigbrovar for his blog post about getting HP Probook touchpads to actually work in Linux. The instructions worked nicely for me exactly as he wrote them. (OK, so I used a different temp directory...) (It also sheds a fair amount of light onto how to modify the source of an Ubuntu/Debian package and then proceed to use it as modified.)

I can now scroll with two fingers. Right clicking is not a phantasmagorical nightmare. Middle clicking actually can happen.

This is a happy thing. Verrra verra happy.

Graceful Exit

There's a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over -- and to let go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick of retiring well may be the trick of living well. It's hard to recognize that life isn't a holding action, but a process. It's hard to learn that we don't leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the dugout or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experiences and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along -- quite gracefully.
-- Ellen Goodman


For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
-- Albert Camus


Thank you fortune-mod (1:1.99.1-3.1ubuntu4-1mint1)!

Running

Follow-on to Purging.

Tired. Keep going. Need this to work...

The flint and steel wasn't sparking. The pile of rags wasn't lighting. The metal monstrosity he was crouched in was dark, with rare pools of light filling corners here and there.

Maybe it was because the flint was actually diamond and the steel was duralloy.

Meh.

He needed the fire.

The Geiger counter slung from his belt was ticking idly--too many times the room he was crouched in was suddenly flooded with radiation as the structure decayed, and the purple light poured in from between the rooms...all that that left for him was to run...

---

He panted. This door was a different metal than the rest. It wasn't warm. It did have a complex opening mechanism, though, so he set about actuating locking rings and solving ciphers...

He didn't think about much else. The door offered a hope, and he had latched on to that.

This disrupted the self-exciting nuclear field that had developed around him, and the fuschia aura in the structural interstices began to die.

---

It's open. What's inside?

Shifting his weight into opening the door convinced it to slowly swing open, and he stepped through onto a hard surface. Reaching down, he ran his hand across the floor.

Cool. Stone.

He felt for the torch on his belt--a lucky find in the last room--and cast it down the passageway.

Rough hewn, and it keeps going.

He started walking.

Purging

"Let it flow."

The sluices opened and the hot vitriol began pouring through the cognitive matrix. It was a calculated move: the blue crystalline flower at the center of the chamber had flared up to an astonishing brightness, something his course of action had not been intended to cause. It was beautiful... Deeper in the structure great shudders rocked the vessel, but those were unimportant systems. Only radiation and darkness down there, he told himself. Don't worry about it.

Squaw Peak Hike

Fall is amazing.

The colors, the temperatures, the brilliant sunsets across the cloud-shrouded mountains...

A few weeks ago I was riding home from work with a buddy when I looked up and noticed the deep, rust-red trees on Squaw Peak. It was inviting, and the weather was going to be perfect for hiking, so this last Saturday I talked some friends into hiking up there with me.

It was fantastic. Provo from that vantage point looks pretty cool, I guess, but the sun effects with the clouds as the sun starts to set are brilliant. The trees were a brilliant red...oddly enough, the same red as the dirt up there. I guess rocks up there are ferrous...and tan. We paused at the top to get some pictures--one is a fledgling pro photographer--and take a rest.

Those of you that know me know that I'm easily bored. Thus was the case this day, especially as the peak isn't exactly shaded from the sun, so I wandered off a bit.

Now you're not going to believe this bit--heh, you probably shouldn't--but as I wandered through a particularly reddish patch of sand, there was a kind of metallic groaning and suddenly everything was motion, sand, dust, and THUNK I was sprawled across the ground, half covered in dirt and rocks.

Right. Sinkholes. This happens out here in the desert, I've been told, and so I resolved to set to scrabbling up the sides and shouting for some help.

Well, I must have bumped my head, 'cuz all my "scrabbling" put out was a sort of demented groan. As I slowly recovered my oh-so-coordinated faculties I realized a few things.

One. I was covered in dust.

Two. There was sunlight. Huh. Must've fallen in through there.

Three. The ground was exceedingly flat and hard.

Then I rolled over and, as I got on my hands and knees, realized the ground was smooth.

Whaaa--? Sinkholes don't have--

So I sat up and looked around. From the sunlight and sky-light coming in from the hole I had made, I could tell that the roof of the cavity was about 18' up, the chamber was square, and...there were doors in the walls.

A bit of a shock, that. I'd read enough Andre Norton to think of ancient aliens right off, but I'd been alive long enough to suffer severe psychological dissonance with that idea. Could be Amerindian. Must be.

While my brain was sorting that out, I noticed shouting from outside--I must have made some sort of obnoxious noise as I was falling. Might as well help them find me, so I started shouting responses. "Hey!" "Down here!" "Helloooo!" They were terribly inventive. I know. I came up with them.

After a while a head interrupted the outline of the sky. "Hey, stand back, looks like it's a sinkhole! Kunkee, you OK?"

My head was clear enough by this point that I could get more than a grunt out, so I called back, reassuring them I was alright ("Yeah").

Wait. My friend is calling down through a hole in a roof of an alien room and all I can say is "Yeah?" Woof. By now the head had disappeared, so I shouted "You guys will want to see this!" and started really looking around. Two doorways were blocked with metal panels that didn't budge when I pushed on them. The doorframes were definitely metal, ruling out the ancient American origin theory. Well, my tired psyche sighed, might as well play with the alien hypothesis. (Oh wait! secret government agency!)

The third doorway wasn't blocked, so I got out my cell phone and started walking down the hall into its wan illumination. At first I tested every step, fearing that another collapse could leave me injured and further isolated from help, but the floorstuff was solid and I was soon distracted by other sights. Conduits and pipes ran along the top of the corridor I had entered, and dark, closed doorways appeared periodically in the walls. Each door was marked in runes--I say runes, but they were nothing like I'd seen before.

After a hundred feet or so I found myself in a larger room than my little phone could illuminate, so I started examining the walls at the entrance. Surely whoever built this knew what a lightswitch was.

Then there was a *clang* and the room was suddenly lit. (Apparently contactors were still in vogue when this place was built...) Turning from my avid inspection of blank wall, any thoughts of ancient Indians or secret government construction disappeared. A blue, ethereal head (well, they looked like eyes!) was staring at me from a above a waist-height dais across the room.

No Calculators

So my operating systems professor told us that we weren't allowed to use calculators on the test. Someone, knowing me, asked if slide rules were allowed.

He said yes.

I remembered my slide rule on Saturday when I got to the testing center too late, but forgot it on Tuesday when I actually took the test.

There was even some multiplication on it.

Sad day.

Iconoclast

I bought a beanie the other day.

It's blue. It's from the school bookstore.

I'm not opposed to a school logo. Heck, it's one of two pieces of schools swag I own.

I am opposed to form at the cost of function. The logo is stiff and pulls the insulating material (thin as it is) away from the part of the head it is supposed to protect.

No problem. I'll just reverse it. I don't care if noone sees it.

Wait--it has a stylized Z on the back, proudly declaring to the world the brand (Zephyr--the cheapest on the shelf) that I have chosen to support with my money and sport on my head. It looks vaguely like Harry Potter's scar. It's a good thing I derive as much amusement as angst from this fact.


I don't like logo'd clothing. I could care less if someone can tell by my Aeropostale` or Fommy Tilfigger or Aemairican Eegle logo that I'm important, stylish, wealthy, or even just informed. (I can count on one hand the number of people in these pidgeonholes I've had decent conversations with...then again, they were high-caliber conversations...) Even Walmart's cheap brands declare their existence in noisy designs and obnoxious lettering.


Other than the debatable aesthetics served by modern branding, my perception of the social functions thereof leave me nearly ready to retch. I would rather wear Harry Potter's invisibility cloak as a fashion statement.


So I'm an iconoclast. and a misanthrope. and an ignorant sniveling nerd. (Put that on a T-shirt and I might just wear it; then again, marginally offensive/in-your-face tees bug me too. "If my music is too loud, YOU'RE TOO OLD"? What do I care if you don't care that I think your music is too loud? Reach beyond high school. Grow a sense of humor involving actual wit.)


As an alternative, please see Chris Harrison's T-shirt collection. All aesthetic, (almost) no branding, just Ninety-Two Protons of Boom and family. The purpose of the design is not to flag etic or emic, or to flag social class (which, I suppose, it inevitably does anyway...), but to amuse and perhaps even enlighten. I see a old-style Russian construction scene with cyrillic lettering, hammer-and-sickle, and Tetris blocks and I smile.


If you're reading this and you like this sort of stuff, I hope your Wednesday is better than your Tuesday.


Cheers!

I has a happy.

To fully understand the title, I refer you to this artifact of our meme-driven culture.

See, I'm miserable a fair amount. Part of it is that the state of grousing is miserable. I admit that. ;)

Today was a good day. Its epilogue may not be the best (homework, programming, test, reading, and hip), but three things stand out:

• I got a letter from Salt Lake.
• I saw a friend of mine grinning ear to ear.
• I got to go play with electronicae anciens in my favorite job in the privileged accessways of the upper lofts of the Eyring Science Center.

Somewhere in there I found myself grinning like an idiot again. Hasn't happened in a while.

I has a happy.

Invisible

We walk the halls of your society.

We are invisible.

Your tales and your lore
ring loud off the walls.

It really is quite beautiful.

We'd eat with you,
but you wouldn't see us.
We'd talk with you,
but you'd stop your ears. (ctrl-Z. --Ed.)
We'd walk with you,
but our paths would diverge.

So we continue,
shadows in your culture.
the Noninitiate,
the crass, or profane--
spidering your walls,
occasionally whispering our secrets
    to those who might listen.

Someday you'll see:
your legends will hallow us.
Our steps in the sand
cast bronze for posterity.

For now, though, we'll crouch,
shadowed,
between flagons and ballads,
prodding and poking,
hoping for someone
to smile
to know that we're here.

Unknown

Living on the fringes, we become invisible.

Seeing, we see not--
what others miss, we catch,
what others catch, hits us in the face--
    or misses us--
    but sometimes crushes our souls.

It's why we don't play.
We'd rather watch.
It's more peaceful that way.

We don't even talk to each other,
except in awkward,
short,
snippets of English
or in movie quotes.
or in Pokemon noises.

Or in wordless sharing.

We love what we know,
but, unknown, feel unloved.

No one hears us scream.
We feel they shouldn't.
It would hurt.
us.
or them.
you decide.

--to the other of Us
  who will likely never read this

Once upon a time, time was fairly sick of being sat upon by once, so he ate a quart of egg salad.

Guess what!  My name is Kunkee, and my favorite thing to do is sneak up behind second graders and tie their shoelaces together!  This is becoming harder as of late, because it's now apparently super cool to not have shoelaces.  And I'm not talking Velcro either.  That was super cool when I was a second grader.  No, they just have these shoes with no laces, and for the life of me I can't figure out how they keep them on their feet.

Never fear, I have a backup plan.  I've started carrying my own shoelaces with me!  And silly string.  When the small children aren't looking, I sneak up behind them and dump half a can of silly string on their heads.  Then, when they're distracted with that, I lace up their shoes and tie them together.

I haven't tried it yet, but such an incredible plan is sure to be infallible.

Yesterday I got sued.  It was by the school district.  Really, what's their problem?  I mean, okay, maybe I shouldn't have ridden the principal's wheelchair off the slide, but come on!  He left it outside the handicap stall!  What was I supposed to do, just leave it there?  I also released his oxygen tanks into the atmosphere.  All this whining about filling the air with carbon dioxide, and yet they keep oxygen locked up in tanks?  I'm appalled at how green that principal isn't.

Other news in my life is that I have decided to become a member of the religion Pastafarianism, also known as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  It's a real religion.  Look it up.

Well, I suppose I'd better stop blogging.  I have to get back to my belly dance lessons.  Look out world, Kunkee's navel force will soon be taking you over!  Muah ha ha ha!

Got a letter today.

Tally is up to two.

Swamped

It took an entire week of school for me to go clear from
"I have no idea what's coming..." anxiety
to
"Yeah! I can do this! Leeeeeeeeroooyyy Jenkins!"
all the way to
"Every minute of my time is required by school and it won't be enough! OMGoodness Pwnies Can't Help!!!"

Really?

(It doesn't help that I recently rent a magnificent girl's heart more deeply than I ever imagined possible, and certainly deeper than I know. Me. I did that. Yes, it sucks.)

The commandos knocked out the last of his men on the bridge while three took him and held him at gunpoint. Artemis strode onto the bridge, surveying his mens' work.

"Good work men. Jimmy, Rob, start overriding the ship's systems." The commander nodded towards one of the consoles and two of the soldiers starting opening panels and splicing wires.

This will turn out OK, the admiral thought, reeling in shock. All of the ships already have their orders; we can't possibly lose.

 "How long until their encryption is cracked?" The dark captain paced, watching the two men work.

"At most five minutes, sir!" Rob barked.

That's not right...the codemasters set it up themselves! How could--

Sure enough, three minutes later the fleet's last commands were scrolling past on the main screen.

"What the--" the captain exclaimed, biting it off as his mind began to race. The commands on the display were his alright, but they weren't what he thought he had sent. Where had he gone wrong? Which strategy was he using? It looked like he had split off a flank under one strategy, then given the rest of the fleet separate orders after the enemy's fleet had moved to parry the manoeuvre. Why hadn't he called them back? What had been going through is head? How had he forgotten them?

"Uhhhh... You, you... You can't do anything from here. Any transmission will alert my men to the takover here!" The admiral was spluttering, hoping to shake his captor's confidence.

"Oh, we don't need to tell anyone what has happened here. Those that know," he gestured towards the enemy flagship on the holographic display, "are confident in my ability to do what I say I will. They are also confident in their fleet's hidden strength. I simply want you to watch as your fleet is eaten alive."

The admiral watched in horror as the enemy armada skillfully matched and capitalized on every awkward move he himself had ordered. Thinking of the excellent men, the fine training, the friendships he had built among them, he groaned. "A straightforward death would be much simpler..."

"No, my friend." Artemis grinned, baring every shred of the malevolence he exuded. "You live."

Hugs

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?

One Hand Clapping

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

My older brother knew. He could do it...so ipso facto meenie mo, I wanted to too! After all, it was *cool.*

Thus began my quest. Over a course of a few weeks, I watched him when he did it. Envy pushed my 10-year-old observation skills to their limits! This rare--nay, impossible!--gem would be mine. His posture, facial expressions, and even verbal mannerisms were scrutinized for vital details.

While I was observing what mattered to a wee 10-year-old, my brain got busy. Subtle muscle relaxations, inertia manipulation, and even rhythm were absorbed. Eventually I had to try--and so I did. To my satisfaction--and, I think, his dismay--I produced a satisfactory thwack-thwack-thwack as my relaxed fingers pelted my palm. Mind you, his sounded better, but mine was quite satisfactory to my
knee-high-to-a-grasshopper ego. As the months wound into years, attentive tuning of my arm and fingers' motion did improve the sound immensely--

--to almost as good.

nginx 405 Not Allowed

Ever since I was two I have reacted strongly to being told no.

"No you can't" sometimes even brings resentment.

"No you can't, you never will, and you can't change one thing" riles me like nothing else. (well, ok, maybe other things rile me, but whatevs)

For a tool like nginx, a good, capable web server, to repeatedly tell me "405: Not Allowed" is not cool. at. all.

For those of you who aren't terribly fond of technical discussions but are reading this for other reasons, you are perfectly welcome to ignore anything past this paragraph. Thanks for reading. :)

For those who have been Googling this for hours, please stay with me:

For one, nginx caching is powerful, and if you're using version 0.8 or newer it is most likely not the problem.

nginx is smart. If you try to HTTP POST to a static page, it will complain. POSTing is only useful for pages backed by server-side code (in my limited experience).

"But," you might say, as I did, "My nginx.conf very carefully guides all requests to my dynamic web server using the proxy_pass parameter!"

Remember how your nginx.conf uses those pesky semicolons? Think of C. Shudder. Reminisce if you like-- my point is that nginx.conf is, after a manner, a procedural programming environment. If you put your root server block above your dynamic server block, it will interpret them in the order it read them. Every time.

Solution? Change the block order or--as I did--merge the blocks and drop your "location /" section down to the end.

I hope this helps you. Good luck.

:)

DLT

Sequel to Waldoes
The knot in his stomach tightened.

He decontaminated and cycled the airlock, then inserted the DeLaurent Teleresonator in the microwave-sized cavity and recycled the air pressure.

One must be careful, he thought, so that the intense radiation in the chamber didn't escape and so that the particulates in the shielded cabin didn't enter the chamber and cause problems. Not too hard, especially if done right, but a royal pain if done wrong.

Knowing he'd be using this tool he had made sure to get a full night's sleep and to go over his basic quantum electrodynamics one more time with the other crew members, some of whom he'd kept up until odd hours in the past worrying over the problem. He pressed his face to the stereoscopic viewplate and once more inserted his hands into the waldoes' control mechanisms.

He had prepared, sure, but he was nervous. Every probability manifold he'd worked out on paper had indicated that this tool would either precipitate a proper runaway reaction or simply kill the fissile nature of the material. Still, he needed to know, so he proceeded. Besides, his friend told him, Wasn't it a Warshawski manifold? Wasn't there a whole range of non-extreme outcomes?

Arranging the reactor elements on the processing plate of the tool in the simplest, most straightforward arrangement he had come up with, he plugged it in and began to feed it power.

The Geiger counter started clacking more intensely, but from the other readings the baryonic fields weren't accelerating, so he continued.

The glow sharpened, then wavered, then went fuzzy, then turned a hot pink. It was an intense kind of light, with a hardness that suggested--no--

Relaxing the waldoes he pulled the textbook he had been poring over back off the shelf and flipped to the resonance section. Sure enough, there it was...but the only way that could be working at all was that--really? No...his small assembly was actually picking up the primary engine's resonance and...amplifying a harmonic? But, that--impossible--noone had seen it coming...perhaps one line of reasoning had suggested it, sure, but it was ridiculous, a tiny chance, not even in the Hausdorff domain, requiring mathematical gyrations fit for the circus--how--?

The dial said it all. Engine efficiency was up 8%--not perfect, but better, and as he ramped the Resonator's power back down he sat back in shock.

The captain would be happy.

Waldoes

The engineer pressed his tired eyes against the lenses once more. Inserting his hands into the waldoes' grips he recommenced the rhythmic click-clacking of the cubes of metal in the fuel service area. Their soft, bluish glow reminded him every second of just how dangerous these kinds of operations could be, and he was glad of the layers of indirection the chamber provided.

He had been trying different assembly methods and patterns. Keeping an interstellar drive running was usually uneventful--once cruising speed was reached, just replace a fuel rod now and again and the design took care of itself.

This time was different. The engine had been assembled with one particular pattern of nuclear resonance in mind, with a dozen of the best engineers and a colossal computer working out the simulations, yet a shift in the local values of a few of the universal constants had left it working at less than peak efficiency. They had even planned for this, and only a small change was required to retune the old resonance, but after months in space its vast emptiness was gnawing at him, even with the FTL newscasts. So, without the resources of a shipyard, he was left to mere experimentation, and as he shifted the blocks around he wondered. With this tamper there, this fuel pellet there, a neutron reflector there--almost, but not quite.

Every once in a while his mind would wander and he would visualize his handiwork going critical and taking the ship with it...not pleasant. That was why he hadn't slept well in days--he would wake up in the middle of the night worrying about how he had left the core elements, or wondering if a certain pattern of construction could work.

Ultimately it would either work or it wouldn't, sure, but it was such a complex system...

Direction

The navigator was examining the fine inscriptions etched into the surface of the compass in the control room bulkhead. He had had it installed in a more prosperous time, when the captain had advocated the acquisition of more expensive and more capable equipment.

Since then a LOT had happened. For one, the user manual had been lost--after all, who needs the manual to use a compass?

It wasn't a digital model. It had a digital interface--as everything nowadays did--but part of the draw of this model had been the ability to watch the spindle move. This had saved them more than once, most notable in the antimatter reefs where it had seemed to anticipate the shifts in the wispy, lethal structures.

The writing was intriguing.
NON-DETERMINISTIC QUANTUM-TEMPORAL REFLECTION SENSOR
5V 300mA DC DO NOT DEGAUSS

He tapped on the glass again. There were two spindles.

---

Many of my readers know I like to write and publish vignettes like this one. As usual, there may or may not be a metaphor underneath; however, in this case, I couldn't let go of that ending to do the metaphor justice. It was just too flavorful. For this reason, I've decided to publish that original, and then provide a more finished and complete version.

---

The navigator was examining the fine text etched into the housing of the compass in the bridge bulkhead. It had been installed in a more prosperous time, when the captain could afford to advocate the acquisition of more expensive and more capable equipment.

That had been years ago. During the renovations and crew changes since then, there had been a complete loss of all but the most essential (read: regulatory compliance) documentation, including user's manuals. Besides, who needs a manual to use a simple compass?

He suspected part of the allure of this model had been the free-floating spindle visible under the glass. Sure, it had a digital interface the ship's computer could plug into, but just watching the spindle swing as the ship came about was mesmerizing. It was a little quirky--while navigating the Behrer Antimatter Reefs it had seemed to anticipate the shifts in the wispy, lethal structures and guided them through safely.

The writing was intriguing:
GNOLAUM INSTRUMENTATION CORP.
NON-DETERMINISTIC QUASITEMPORAL QUANTUM REFLECTOMETER
5V 100mA DC DO NOT DEGAUSS
SEE MANUAL FOR CALIBRATION INSTRUCTIONS

He tapped the glass again. There were two spindles.

He remembered, now, that there had been ghost spindles while navigating the reefs. At the time he had just chalked them up to his fatigue. Perhaps the other instruments could provide disambiguating information...

It Takes All Kinds

The desk light clicked and its light knifed through the darkness, illuminating the study desk in the navigator's quarters.

His hands smoothed the large sheet of paper sitting there. The creases were still sharp from the years since he'd even considered extricating it from its storage spot.

"Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (C) 68-74 Interstellar Starlines Corp.," a line of text along the bottom declared. Splayed across the page were points representing every star that had ever been visited by humans, with tentative lines dividing them into categories. He traced these slowly with his finger, noting that his career had only taken him to a few of the sections on it.

He glanced up at the ship status panel he had rigged up some time ago. The ship was in fine health, and its bearing was holding steady at nine-zero-oh-two-two. At this rate it would reach its destination in less than six months. He frowned. The refit they were scheduled for there in the Vega system was a significant one, assuming nothing drastic happened on the way, and he knew it was a good system to be registered in. Still, he wanted to know.

Back to Hertzsprung-Russell. It would require some research.

Greetings, old friends

I stepped out of the airport doors and a thick, warm, humid presence wrapped me in its arms.

I hugged it back and shouted, "Hi, Humidity!!!" I had forgotten what it was to sweat merely because of one's environs. I had also forgotten how much I love warmth and moisture in one atmosphere.

Today I've been serenaded by a magnificent thunderstorm and pounding rain. I'm just now getting up from that nap. Cracks from lightning and the consequent rolling thunder...happy day.

I also got to tell the story of how I met Marissa to the ladies at church--that was fun. I am always reminded of how different that young lady is, and how much that makes her wonderful. (I also got to show off the pictures she sent me a while back. For not being 'stereotypcally' beautiful, I still think she's gorgeous so I don't often go back to the pictures. :)

Blessed

Okay, so the title's a bit cheesy.

But I like cheese.

Especially colby-jack, swiss, pepperjack, and sometimes a good cheddar.

I would consider those blessings.

Yesterday kinda dwarfed those two. Last week brought no letter from Marissa and a crushing crush; this week brought two letters from that magnificent young lady and a Pell grant.

That's right, I heard from a young lady I am quite fond of, and school is paid for.

Two of the largest areas of any import in my life, awash in happy all in one day.

(I might even be able to afford a carriage before all is said and done.)

:D

D'ni Goggles

I realized the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, and I must admit however, such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written. (IMDB Wiki)

So begins one's journey on the island of Myst.

I once found a series that provided backstory for the game. It was fascinating, from Catherine's playful torus of a world to the language of worlds, phrases for weather, ink etching itself into a page, to Ghen's dark insanity and Atrus' grasp on the edge of reality.

The ability to reach beyond one's world and speak into existence immeasurable wonders possesses an allure that I am drawn to. (Computers are a facet of this phenomenon.)

So it is with the main character's glasses. Throughout the book, the lenses that he and his father wear are adjusted for magnification and attenuation. Aside from some abstruse considerations (polarization), this is about all that is feasible without a power source and some basic quantum mechanics.

Still, fascinating--a set of goggles, perhaps somewhat less cumbersome than modern night vision goggles. A complex optical chamber with switchable lenses, controlled by sliding rings along the outside--two or three rings for various magnifications telescopic and macro, all designed to work with one other ring for focus, and one combination for 'real' sight. A series of rings with various light filters, from color notch filters to downconverting UV lenses to mere sunglasses. Perhaps a set for looking at the sun and welding. :)

Think--the wearer would be imbued with the ability to see the world around you in whatever way they could imagine, drawing conclusions, seeing patterns, playing with the world around them in a whole new way.

Totally worth the 2-3 pounds of brass and glass required on your face...

Getting Kinected

Yes, the pun...is horrid.

So today I finally decided to hook my Kinect up to my computer.

It's pretty cool.

I can get a rough depth map of the room, 640x480 webcam imagery, cool-looking near-IR imagery, and sound using it. I can also manually tilt it up and down and blink the LED.

How? I thought you'd ask.

LibFreenect is what I used. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. While this article provides a fairly good tutorial, it is a bit outdated. I followed his instructions roughly. His dependency list is fairly good, but I had to build and break it a couple times to find out which other packages I needed. Note that if it breaks on libxyz, you'll need libxyz-dev.

First, I cloned libfreenect's git repository. Entering that directory, one finds a nice cmake-based system that I don't understand at all.

Simply:
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
As per the instructions linked above.

Now this is where his instructions are outdated:
cd bin
sudo ./glview
Tadaa! You should now be viewing the depth map and webcam input in a nice big little window. :)

Notice that after the program finishes initialization, it dumps usage information.
w = look up
s = center view
x = look down
f = change view modes (near-IR and two(?) webcam modes
LED controls:
0 = off
1 = green
2 = red
3 = amber
4,5(?) = green, steady blink
6 = red-amber alternating

I has toy. Is happy. Now, to get AJ's pet project working with it...'cuz a Gumstix Tobi with a Fire CoM would totally run it. :D

Parallax

He couldn't believe it.

He peered into the telescope once more. A mere four parsecs back, the one star had seemed like a supernova compared to the other, more distant star--and oh, had it been spectacular!

Now the other was just as brilliant.

Leaning back, he pondered. Magnitudes hadn't changed--the instrumentation assured him of that. The parallax and the higher quality optics he'd acquired at the last station seemed to have done it--strange, what a bit of perspective would do.

The topology of subspace meant that the more distant one was his current destination, while the other was squarely out of his way. In contrast, normal space observations led one's mind to a different, technically impossible conclusion.

Occasionally the Madness would set in. It was rare, but in those cases his astrogator's training would kick in and start trying to work around physics, only to be barely set right by Reason.

This time, though, Reason and the telescope agreed, at least enough to stave off the Madness. For now.

Still it crept about in his mind, occasionally reminding him. Of his humanity, of his destination, of the Could Be, of the Might Be.

The Madness was his friend--a fickle one, true--but for once, impossibly, incredibly, amazingly, it seemed to drive him forward, towards the long game...and it brought with it a sense of euphoria long-run pilots often forgot.

The one was so close now--but for once the final run home seemed bearable.

I'm sorry I was bossy. And monstrous.

So, a friend or two has seen a thing or two about me.

Sometimes I'm contradictory, inflammatory, and arrogant.

It hurts. Once I noticed this when a third-order verbal spat led to my friend digging in and twisting my arm into realizing that she was right and that I had started it. (No, really, I'm pretty sure I started it and she is right.) Not an hour later I slammed on the brakes and stopped from being quite the same butte to a roommate.

Curious, no? Not the first time, and, sadly methinks, not the last.

By the way, an SAT study card once informed me that "ameliorative" means, as Webster's assures me, to improve or make better. (I actually ran into this root in Alan Dean Foster's Flinx series with the Meliorare society that worked to improve humanity through genetic engineering.) Isn't Latin great?

Now, you'll probably not notice that I haven't told half the story. I've seen 'ameliorative' used as a technical term, right next to pejorative, imperfect, subjunctive, and other language-related jargon. So, with a bit of Googling (which failed miserably from my wee Android device; try 'ameliorative euphemism'), here is what I learned:

1) She was right:
Amelioration (euphemism): making something sound better than it is
(This reference is actually quite cool and points out that the use of jargon has social implications that had been pointed out to me by a friend but that I rarely cognize. One of these implications involves this 'linguistic' amelioration.)

2) Understanding this usage is hard.

#2 is something I have run into previously as well. If I don't immediately understand it, no matter how marvelous or wondrous it is or may be, I suffer from the tendency to reject, spurn, trivialize, or analogize it out of significance. (For those of you pondering using this last path, it doesn't work.)

Hmm.

Transmission Received

Ever since she had killed the others he'd been on the run.

Shadows, shortcuts, cheats--he'd known some, and now he knew them all. The complex, seated as it was in the old Auburn mineshafts, was extensive. The mines had once been visible from space, and the Company had undertaken to "restore" the land. It had done so marvelously--and simultaneously built one of the largest government research stations in history.

Now he was inhabiting it's air ducts and service tunnels as a fugitive.

Occasionally she would find one of his hideouts, rat's nests he carved out where he thought she wouldn't notice. Then he'd close the compromised room off from his network and continue finding new sources of food, water, and a mockery of sanity. He left hints of his existence, though: that woman--six sigma tenacity!--needed to know her struggle against her was not in vain.

The radios were his favorite. Simple, set up strictly for Company propaganda distribution, yet with a little adjustment they could bring in the Outside.

One of these was his current focus. A wire here, some solder here, oh, such delicate work!

Then, a delicate shift of that inductor's core--


Transmission received.

The Captain knew how hard subspace jumps were. The time frames and energy requirements forced the crew into cryosleep. The cold was hard on the hull, even as hardened against the rigors of deep space as it was. As the time of the jump wore on the Jackson-Emery Expansion Drive would slowly relax the field and the structure of the ship would begin to bear part of the load of supporting an extra dimension against the confines of the sub-dimensional vector space...

Place
motivation
meh
graser

wanted
pulled
drawn

missed
missing

Ubuntu 11.04: Whaaaaat?

Stupid cousin.

Most of those reading won't find this useful. I do like feeding Google, though, so here goes...

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 from 10.10.

I am presently engaged in hating it.

Unity was a giant WTFreak era during my adoption, but a few minutes from a friend who 'gets' it helped loads. Now it's just three (big) complaints:
1: Meta-T used to be user-defined by me to open a new terminal. It now brings up the Trash Can. Seriously?!?!?! The Trash Can? Who hotkeys that, and THEN ignores the user-defined overrides?!
1.5: Why do I want a touch-capable interface with my touchpad and mouse? If my touchpad acts like a one-button mouse, how do I do anything? Hobbling along under Gnome is much more feasible.
2: Multiple Desktops. One X session over multiple displays has dead space that makes me nervous, so I use the ATI Catalyst configuration tool to set up multiple X sessions. My initial survey of all my options indicates that Unity has No Concept of this. I have no UI (aside from limited desktop-right-click-menu access) on my second monitor. Anyone with this issue may be interested in running "metacity --replace &" as a functional hack under Ubuntu Classic.
3: Widgets. I want a live CPU usage, temperature, and clockspeed display on my screen. No, pinning apps to the dock WILL NOT WORK. I tried. It doesn't do dynamic icons. Also, I already have my favorite Gnome apps. (Ubuntu 11.04 already killed my temp monitor app.)

Firefox 4.
Why did they rename "Organize Bookmarks" to "Show all bookmarks"??? Really?
New UI? Getting used to it. It is enough like the last one to struggle through it. (Stop Now! If I Wanted Chrome, I Would GET Chrome!!!)

I just spent an hour fighting with it. There is no clear winner. Am I frustrated? A little bit. I'm sure you can't tell.

So I decided to make a coat out of the sleeves of other coats.

It came out really well, actually. It's now my coat of arms.

He paced down the long shaft of structural duralloy that bore the weight of the starboard side of the ship. It shuddered occasionally, as the warp drive compensated for some ripple or wrinkle in spacetime. This corridor was one of the dimly lit service passageways, and he was wearing one of the frameworker's light pressure suits should one of the strained structural projectors give way.

They'd come a long way. Eta Centauri was many months behind them now, and most ships of this class needed drydock and overhaul once every six months. He wasn't sure how they'd kept it running, or how they'd keep it running for the remaining months of the journey.

He'd taken astrogation during pilot's training. He knew the hazards that Schwarzchild discontinuities posed, and he knew that even suns were hard to approach. The charts had shown several systems along the way, with warm main sequence stars shepherding known habitable planets along their narrow little Goldilocks belts. A few even had developed respectable civilizations...he often walked through the ship like this, and wondered if he were wise in putting off planetfall for so so long. It was dark out here. Super-relativistic travel did strange things to one's mind. The world outside raced along, with occasional messages drifting out from either endpoint offering a light at the end of the tunnel. Once in a while both would cease to exist, while other times the airwaves were packed with burst-encoded datagrams (not all of which came in chronological order). He could hardly believe the journey was nearly half way over, yet each second seemed to stretch out into weeks and years.

He'd wondered about the shipping lane he'd chosen. Every ship had a different fundamental phasing frequency, so there'd been many local-space neighbors traveling similar routes for stretches of time. Chat's with their systems engineers had saved him quite a bit of trouble before.

They were coming up on space that hadn't been charted recently. He knew the engine's control foils were growing thin and that the structural fields had to work harder every day, yet some days the velvety black seemed to waft them along of its own accord while the ship relaxed its panicked grasp on structural integrity.

He knew, somehow, that even when the ether seemed most opposed to their passage and the ship shuddered hardest, they could just slip the control rods a little further out and just shoulder through it. The old techneer wondered about that. Increasing the forward gravitic pressure while working through tight knots of entwined tesseracts could be just enough to fully collapse a primary vectoring projector...that wouldn't be good.

He'd ask a neighbor for advice. It always seemed to help.

Computer Engineering

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of hardware,
I shall fear no kernel.

And, y'know, I'll pwn the invading recognizers in hardware.

I have amazing friends.

I'm grateful.

Linaro Start Line

So, for work I've been asked to get a hang of the Linaro (www.linaro.org) toolchain.

What the heck does that mean?

More importantly, how can they reorganize their website so one can rapidly get started?

Well, first off, Understand who they are. Get on their IRC channel and ask questions--especially about where to find information.

See, I'm to do some kernel work, so I need to cross compile things. I need a full operating system to drop them in. Every time I try to Google or navigate their pages to find the processes I just read about so clearly, I get confused.

Thus I'm posting a tentative index to the learning curve pages.

Linaro is a set of programs that make it easy to build a ground-up ARM-based system. Presently Angstrom and Ubuntu (and one other?) have prebuilt images made with the toolchain.

I found that the best place to start is an impossible-to-find wiki page that links to several of the many HowTo articles available elsewhere on the site:
https://wiki.linaro.org/Mentoring/HowTo

Process to install an image:
Get an OS-specific image (a pain, more on this later)
Get a hardware-specific "hardware pack" (Not so hard...I think)
Run "linaro-image-create" with a slew of (well documented) arguments (more on linaro-image-create in a moment)
Plug in card
Boot

This "linaro-image-create" tool has a forest of voodoo behind it, most of which is designed to be hidden. This, of course, means it has some dependencies. If you're running any of the supported boards (run it with only certain arguments and it'll dump a list), it's a matter of enabling the PPAs (more on that later) and installing two packages, gcc-gnueabi-*? and linaro-image-tools. I think. I'm doing this on my machine as we speak.

OK. So I need to find the images. This has been a pain. The "Images" link on the page above isn't helpful.

AHA!

So, from Mentoring/HowTo, go to "Booting Hardware with Linaro Tools." I have a Gumstix Overo board, so that's what I followed from there. (Note the link down below to generic instructions for linaro-media-create.)

Here is where we install linaro-image-create. Follow the instructions at "https://wiki.linaro.org/Boards/Overo/Setup". (This page is rendered partially redundant by this wiki page, but valuable things are said here if you're running any Ubuntu 10.10 or earlier.)

This next part takes a touch of magic for me, as I'm running Ubuntu 10.10. See, the linaro-image-create that is in the PPA is too old to support Overo boards. (This won't be the case in Ubuntu 11.04 come April or May.) This means I need the bleeding edge build of linaro-media-create. (4.3 worked fine for me.)

Bleeding edge comes with a price: Dependency Hell. No matter what we do to shrink it, this special place will forever haunt those who strive to wander far from the well-trodden paths of software usage. I kinda like it sometimes--it's a big puzzle game.

In our case, the README that comes with linaro-media-create specifies two dependencies that can't be satisfied by Ubuntu 10.10:
python-debian >= 0.1.16ubuntu1
qemu-kvm-extras-static >= 0.13.0

I found it trivial to find the prerelease package of python-debian of a high enough version and get it installed. (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/49675715/python-debian_0.1.16ubuntu1_all.deb) (note that I did this AFTER installing linaro-image-tools the ordinary way, thus establishing its dependencies.)

qemu-kvm-extras-static is another ball game. See, it doesn't actually exist in 11.04. The tinyurl addresses provided give you small 7kB packages that install seamlessly but do nothing. (They are meta packages that will make the upgrade smooth, but this idea breaks when we pull single .deb's at a time.) At the time of this writing, the package you need is actually qemu-user-static, 0.14 or newer. Without this step it will crash saying that certain instructions are not understood by the emulator.

Once you find THAT (wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/65940960/qemu-user-static_0.14.50-2011.03-1-0ubuntu1_i386.deb), however, invoking linaro-media-create from the place it was untarred to should work.

You'll notice that the syntax of linaro-media-create is fairly straightforward, yet fairly involved. (I used "sudo ./linaro-image-tools-0.4.3/linaro-media-create --mmc /dev/sdf --hwpack hwpack_linaro-overo_20110202-0_armel_supported.tar.gz --dev overo --binary linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz") It requires two files be handy: the system image and the hardware pack. The Overo/Setup page hard-codes some possibly outdated images into their command lines. Here is how to find your image:

Go to https://wiki.linaro.org/Releases#Obtaining%2520and%2520Testing%2520Linaro%2520Images
Scroll down. Some structural details are located here that are nice to read, but we're looking for the headers "Evaluation Builds" and "Developer Builds." (Here GUI/no GUI and system size are required decisions.)

Aw Crapola. It seems at the time of this writing that these links link fine...but the pages they link to are blank. Lovely.

I pulled mine from
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-m/hwpacks/final/hwpack_linaro-omap3_20101109-1_armel_supported
and
http://releases.linaro.org/platform/linaro-n/headless/alpha-2/linaro-natty-headless-tar-20110203-1.tar.gz
per my decisions earlier. (Use the root URLs to find the latest and greatest of these.)
I'm not sure why mine worked with the hwpack a different version from the build.



Plug in the card you just made and try to boot.

I have yet to need the "sleep hack" or to encounter the bug listed here: "https://bugs.launchpad.net/linaro/+bug/728734?comments=all".

TODO: prettify and integrate with wiki.

Berry Punny

From time to time you will find items like this here.

Q: What do you get when Apple buys the capital of Libya?
A: IEEE!

(Edited 2-27-11. Original: What do you get when Apple buys Tripoli?)

Electric Tomato Plant

I planted a plant a month or two ago. I knew the soil wasn't the greatest--sandy, loose, quick to drain--but I looked at the plot and said, "This is just what Here needs."

It was hard to get growing. The first week was painful.

It started to grow. Two friends of mine offered stakes to support it. With some twine and encouragement it started to rise to the challenge.

I'm still not sure what kind of plant it is. Were it woody, it would grow strong and tall with kind guidance. Were it weedy, it would use the stakes and twine as a scaffold to reach air and sunlight but never stand on its own.

Today is a day of decisions. My friends have asked for their stakes back.

I remember the first week--I never thought this little slip could even take root where I'm growing it. Now its nodding its feeble head towards the sun, and I have to decide what to do to help it grow.

What kind of plant do I want?

Crowbars

If you do something stupid with an electronic power supply, sometimes they are equipped to sense it and throw a crowbar across the output to protect the insides. Picture a Jacob's Ladder running, an evil scientist cackling maniacally, and a hero sneaking through the shadows carrying a crowbar--he then poises to cast his payload into the crackling storm of electricity--

If you're reading my blog, you probably know by now that something rather technical shows up once in a while. This is one of those posts.

I'm checking out a Con Avionics HS26-13.5 analog power supply. It weighs a good 30 lbs. and is rated at 24-28 VDC at 13.5 A. This particular unit has been dropped on its head. The front right top corner has been displaced a good inch into the volume of the machine.

I could tell the case would short a couple of contacts inside if it were powered up, so I resolved to get the cover off. Well, first thing to do is take an odd silver (matte aluminum) box off the back. It's a -Con Avionics OVH26-13.5. Google says "con avionics ovh26-13.5" doesn't exist. At the moment I think it's merely a sophisticated external overvoltage crowbar circuit.

It's connected across the output. It has large bolt-mounted diodes or SCRs of some kind and an MCR648-2 mounted on the outside on a moderate heat sink. The supply is "HS26-13.5" while the attachment is "OVH26-13.5," so it seems to me we have Over Voltage Handler or somesuch with a common voltage-current pair with the supply proper.

Solfeg

After listening to his music tutor sing a long and clear note, a novice innocently asked him, "is that so?"

"Nah," the Master replied, "It's just me."

Realizing his pun had not gone undetected, "D'oh!" slipped past the novice's filter.

The Master shook his head at what a ray of light this young whippersnapper was.

Notably, he thought, This is fa' better then being T'd off. Lahts bettah.

Does that bring us back to sew?

Not without a bit more doh.

Making Kinections

So, I'm the proud owner of a brand new XBox 360 Kinect bundle.

I'm kinda giddy about it.

I'm quite happy about many other things too, like my internship.

See, internally it's a specialized PC (i386-compatible? ia64?) architecture. It plays fun games. It's one of the later revisions of the hardware, so ring-of-death and other issues have been worked out by all those who came before me. (Thanks!)

Also, the Kinect (with a $35 addition) can plug into the PC and use the libFreeNect driver to pull the 3-D and other informations out of it that the games on the 'Box can. See, I don't think dancing in place in front of a camera in order to make a figure on screen pretend to imitate me is going to be much fun--but driver and algorithm development, THAT will be awesome. :)D

I'm also pondering looking into rooting the box and installing Linux--but that'd require a hard drive as the installed nonvolatile memory is only 4GB. Also, I value it's Halo capabilities a touch more than I value its Linux or computing power. (What's in those things, anyway?) (I had to look it up. Check out the wikipedia article on its internals. Apparently it would be sweet for raw power's sake.) Thus, I probably will put that task off for quite some time. (I really wouldn't mind running Windows on it--I'd just love to have a general-purpose 3-core 64-bit PPC machine of my own.)

Biggest uses for it? Playing DVDs, playing games lots of people can play, and hacking the Kinect. That's about it. :)

(Microsoft, will you Please please please pretty please allow Steam to operate on XBox Live? I might even consider that grounds on which to get a paid subscription.:P)

The Crossing

Heh. I just wanted a melodramatic title. :)

I was traversing the parking lot today and ran into a friend of mine. After exchanging greetings and customary hugs, she and her friend went their way and I went mine. Despedidas were then exchanged, and as the distance between us increased a car passed.

So what.

Well, this car passing completely annihilated (to my admittedly faulty hearing) what she said next.

Well? Shout "What?" or "Come again?"

Nah.

"POTATO!!!"

The response?

"I'm glad you got that!"

Thus ended the conversation. I'm still not sure what I got.

Amusing?

Yes.

Odd Fellow

I don't often notice little things, especially little things about other people. I'll notice odd peculiarities in any of a number of circumstances, but I tend to avoid scrutinizing people. (Barring infosec transactions...then my CS nerd gets all excited.)

I sat in the lobby of an office today. Across from me was a kid with a light backpack and a ski jacket. He had the gaunt, taught face of someone historically loaded with worry but not yet accustomed to it. The load had yet to etch its indelible marks into his features.

He seemed to be meandering aimlessly without moving a muscle. Being in that place seemed important to him, though I couldn't tell why.

I think he noticed me. It's uncertain when a person's eyes are that glazed over just what is or isn't happening between the ears. The eyes also had a myopic cant to them; the world wasn't in focus. It wasn't a lack of physical focus only--it seemed like his next objective was clouded while his overall course was obscured completely.

Definitely muttering under his breath, that one. Some phrases encouraging himself toward some far-off unknown goal, some lambasting some turn of fortune or choice made.

There was a slackness to his posture that was odd. It conveyed that he might let go of the coat he was holding at any time, and that at the same time he might lose his seemingly tenuous connection with reality.

This guy didn't take care of himself terribly well. His gait was a bit uneven, and from the stoop of his shoulders his physical frame was an added layer of weight pressed under all the other loads he carried.

You could almost feel the warping of spacetime as his thoughts raced in tight loops of limited information, lack of perspective, fractured self-confidence, and timorous feelings. Occasionally he'd shudder out a sigh, I suppose out of sheer frustration with how limited he was in just grasping whatever the matter was.

Just after these brief moments a clarity would cross his face, and he would try to brook time and space for a moment and then rapidly descend into another spiral of angst and worry, frustration and annoyance.

His confusion increased when his test results came back.

After heaving a sigh he left with an air of determined resignation. A hint of frustration and confusion wafted in with that air, and perhaps an underlying layer of insanity.

Maybe someday I'll bump into that kid and ask what happened, where all his energies wound up. I hope so. I also hope things work out for him.