Feeling

Three worlds exist simultaneously.

In the first, cool, carefully prescribed inputs follow clean, mechanical pathways of polished cams, balanced levers, and oiled ways through a vast, steady ocean of linkages and stored history to produce elegant, unquestioned outputs. At the edges of the ordered world, restraining walls keep the ethereal tumult of the second out.

In this second sphere, whirling vortices clash. Great rivers of emotions slam into restraining dikes, spilling over and sometimes meeting others leading to synergistic amplification of their mutual innate chaotic intensities. Uncertainty and despair vie with hope and constancy, each flow waxing and waning as streams of anger, joy, uncertainty, vision, fear, and hope rush through the strained aether. Crossed streams variously yield singularities or supernovae, violent sparks or hardened silence depending on the nature of the meeting. It is quite hard for any solitary denizen to keep the overall maelstrom from rending the very fabric of the world; peace and silence are never an option, especially when The Accuser makes his destructive voice heard, but the sole occupant of the realm still seeks them ploddingly. This is what life is when the ordered world slowly grinds to a terrible, fatigued halt and the worlds' walls melt.

The third world is the one you, dear reader, share. It's the one called reality.

Here, when the world of emotion begins to invade the place of reasoned order and the flags for help are set, few answers indeed are sufficient to the plea "Help me feel, for I am feeling and don't know how."

Drumsticks

Gandalf opened the dusty book, slowly turning to the last written page of the History of the Mines of Moria.

After a surprised expression crossed his brow, he began reading, "Drumsticks, drumsticks in the deep!" After solemnly choosing the great tome, he declared "...there is nothing more."

Turning, he addressed the fellowship of chickens, "Fly, you fools!"

Semantic Jellyfish

There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful.

And that line is covered in jellyfish.

Welcome to Night Vale.

The podcast episode this somehow refers to is here, its Wikia page is here, and the project's home page is here.

I haven't listed to the Night Vale podcast. Perhaps I'll do that while I'm travelling to Washington. Still, my wife found the quote on Pinterest, and it's been eating at me. What does it mean?

And I don't mean, "How does this strange line fit into the Night Vale world?", no, I mean "What does that English construction actually say?" The more superficial question interests me here.

(Two friends of mine inspired this dig.)

Semantics: semaphore antics, when two Army signals specialists get bored.

Thus we see that the military is training jellyfish to assassinate writers in an attempt to control the global supply of--

**cough**

Pardon me. Now where was I? Ah yes...

Semantics: the study of meaning. (Thanks, Mirriam-Webster and Google.)

So what I get out of this quip is that the meanings of "weird" and "beautiful" are actually fairly close. I don't think I understood this until I saw this rendering, which made me realize that jellyfish really do play with that line. They are surreal and beautiful, especially when their colors are brought out like that. They are also utterly alien to me, a dry midwestern boy.

So I think that there is a line. It's thin, if it's not a proper probability field, and many things are in the same in-between-almost-both zone that jellyfish lie in.

There you go. That's what I think it means.

(With modern Art attempting to explore the distinction, I think the tentacles and neurotoxins could be brought in for an extended, painful analogy...)

Steam vs. Fedora 18

(Yes, this is a boring technical post. :)

I recently installed Steam on Fedora 18, as the post title implies.

The instructions from sten's ask.fedora post work magnificently...until it tells me that I'm not online:

Fatal Error: Steam needs to be online to update. Please confirm your network connect.

There are a number of awkward fixes like changing a config file that doesn't exist and simply reloading a dozen times. None worked for me, though, so I kept digging until I found Aleksandar30's post that details a snafu in Steam's server configuration in the 1.0.0.39 package Steam was linking to when I wrote this.

I haven't tried removing the /etc/hosts line since the Steam client updated.

Research and Sequestration

On a political note, I thought I'd ask:

If we're so strapped for cash that we're cutting all sorts of research funding and sending IRS employees home and cutting military spending and clogging up airports, why isn't the NSA et. al feeling the burn? Complete capture intelligence is expensive.

[Tech] Xilinx ISE, Vivado, and Fedora 19

[technical post warning :]

Once upon a time I took a sequence of classes in which I got a taste of what a class of microchips--FPGAs--could do. I have further seen their use in high-performance professional and research work. In simple terms, these chips allow you to try out microchip designs before spending a few million getting them actually made (with a few obligatory gotchas).

So, when the university I was attending decided to upgrade to Digilent Spartan 3E Starter Boards, I made a point of buying one of their old Digilent Spartan 3 Boards, featuring the Xilinx XC3S200-ft256 (Spartan 3) FPGA.

About a year and a half later, I'm just now getting to trying to play with it. As it turns out, older versions of Ubuntu don't play nice with ISE (a previous post described some of my problems), so I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to Fedora 19 to start working.

Tip 1: Vivado is distinctly not ISE. Vivado is their high-level SoC design tool, while ISE has less power and more control...and easier licensing. ISE WebPack is what they offer for free. Save yourself a 6GB download and don't download Vivado--download ISE. I got ISE 14.5.

Tip 2: Once I got ISE downloaded and installed, I figured out that the cable driver installation and the "Simulate Behavioral Model" function both rely on having GCC handy. In Fedora, I found a good post here showing this one command:

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

that is somewhat analogous to Debian and Ubuntu's "build-essential" package. This gets the simulator working.

Narrative: From here I went on to writing a small Verilog test that merely wired an input to an output. I also pulled in the UCF for the Spartan 3 Board (that Digilient no longer seems to host), configured it, and got it through the Synthesize - XST, Implement Design, and Generate Programming File phases without a hitch. (Not even a warning...except for an unused signal I forgot to take out.)

The next phase was "Configure Target Device," which pulls up Xilinx' Impact programmer tool...which didn't recognize my cable. Big surprise--it had told me driver installation failed.

Tip 3: use Tip 2 PRIOR to installation. If you didn't (or like micromicromanaging things), simply run (assuming you used the default root installation target):

cd /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/digilent

sudo bash ./install_digilent.sh

answer its questions, and smile. 

Tip 4: I'm not sure what problems it might cause (I was find all the way through launching Impact), but do remember to modify your environment. In my case, I simply added these lines to .bashrc:

# set up environment for Xilinx tools

. /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/settings64.sh

# because I didn't use the default

export DIGILENT_ADEPT_CONF="/usr/local/etc/digilent-adept.conf"

Tip 5: OS Not Supported
Dear Xilinx, >:-P Love, Jon

If you dig around, you will likely find and try

cd /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/install_script/install_drivers
sudo ./install_drivers

which fails miserably because

linux_common.h:29:4: error: #error "This kernel is too recent: not supported by this file"

So, off I traipsed to http://rmdir.de/~michael/xilinx/ where I learned I could run

sudo yum install libusb-devel # or your distro's variant; solves "missing usb.h" problem

git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver

cd usb-driver

make

LD_PRELOAD=/home/username/tmp/usb-driver/usb-driver $STUFF/ise

Now when I launch Impact, I can do a boundary scan and talk to the FPGA.

Next problem was "DONE pin did not go high." 

I tried FPGA Start Clock, High-Z unused devices, power cycling...but the next day it worked. (This was after a full power cycle of my aging P4-era box.) Make sure that Start Clock is set to JTAG, power on the FPGA, THEN connect the programming cable. That fixed it for me, anyways.

Mormons, Evolution, and Science (and perhaps magnets)

"We have the history recorded in the crust of the Earth. We have the history recorded in the scriptures. One day we will have all the facts and the two will blend together." 

--Paraphrase of a paraphrase of a quote whose origin may one day be hunted down

So...if you're wondering what Mormons believe on a given scientific topic, you'll probably find the answer in the best textbooks on the topic.