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.

Winter

Alder looked out the window at the softly falling snow, appreciating the monochromatic scintillation as the blanket grew deeper.

The newcomer was sitting up in her bed, starting at him hard.

"How do you stay sane? Well this blasted winter ever end? It's so...plain!" Her outburst was vehement, but there was a hint of realization in it.

"You don't understand, your highness. I know winter. I hardly know anything else. It's harshness is only broken by its occasional harsh beauty." Noting the princess' distress, he began pacing in front of the wall of windows that overlooked the snow gardens.

"There is one thing we do know, those of us that live here: We know that winter will end.

"This knowledge--not the belief the city folk accuse us of--keeps us alive. Perhaps, during your stay here, you will see spring. You may even bring it to us."

He stopped, intently studying the promise of spring glimmering in her eyes, fighting to the her icy visage.

Perhaps, one day.

A Break in the Case

The search had been quite fruitful; nearly every cubic kilometer of the old Luk'naga golem was accounted for. Varying sizes of chunk drifted in a tesselating grid of parking orbits around the cold, methane-bitten surface of Niffleheim, the most neutral of all the space spanned by the Mul'ulanki federation.

Some chunks had been easily repurposed and were now fully functional members of the warship-cum-planetoid. Most, however, still maintained a defensive, preservationist stance, punishing salvage and recovery attempts while refusing to be reprogrammed. This tenacity was most curious to the commander, but the techies insisted that this stubborn nature was in keeping with the original design and would be a great asset were it properly turned to the federation's purposes.

Except that we can't even melt it down without losing men left and right... The commander shifted the can of pencils from one place on his desk to another, and started reading the reports, hoping for some clue that would let them reuse the recovered components.

He didn't notice the pencils start to rattle, but he did notice when the deck lurched about a foot to his right. That felt like a hyperjump, but the magnitude could only imply a full attack fleet or--that--

He stared out his office's full-wall porthole, barely comprehending. A small planetoid was hovering at the lunar L1 point. The markings were right, and the geometry fit what intel the federation had bothered to collect: this was the Nar'ara golem. Something was missing though...no support vessels? Not even a squadron of fighters on patrol? What was going on?

He absently fingered his watch to answer the chirping that had started just as the lurch had. "Sir, you've probably seen it, but we need you down in Control pronto. The golem is hailing us, and I think this one's above our combined pay grades..."

---

The Interfederation Astrophysical Year was conceived as a method for fostering goodwill among the polities of Cluster 6. It involved a wide range of scientific explorations and experiments that would not only push the limits of current physics, but would provide vast quantities of data that would illuminate ill-explored facets of everyday navigation. Probes into Oort cloud ionization, Phil's Phenomenon (a queer error in hyperjump projections), and numerous other oddities were scheduled, with each federation vowing to share any and all data acquired for the benefit of all. It ended up occupying the better part of a decade.

For reasons yet to be understood, the Nar'ara had only deigned to volunteer their golem to the effort.

It was on an assignment from the Secretary General of the IAY that the golem had shown up to recruit the Luk'naga to perform some experiments regarding the effects of light on gravity. (The effects of gravity on light were already understood, you see.)

Nobody tells us anything, the commander thought crossly. He had just gotten off the comm with the President herself, who authorized the release, complete with nuclear arming codes. Wow. I guess we'll just babysit this wreckage until it gets back...

---

Now, this is curious. My administrators have not bothered to gather intel about the foreign federation, yet here I am cooperating with its golem. I have a question or two that ought to be cleared up...

---

The commander stood behind the lead engineer's chair, leaving over to make out the figures on the display.

"It just stopped snapping back, like that?"

"Yes sir. We were only testing reprogramming channel one, which is what this screen shows." The civilian pressed a few keys and the patterns on the screen shifted subtly. "Shown here is channel two," again, another yet less subtle change, "and here is channel one on the first find. Since it hasn't snapped we've successfully repurposed all sixteen channels of the prime evaluator drive. We don't know the status of the Deep Sigma Phi, but at least one channel has not snapped in three other wreckage fragments. We're working as fast as we can to try other modules, and I think we'll be ready when it returns." The techneer was clearly proud of his team's achievements in the past twenty-four hours.

"You've done good work here. Get some rest; I'll be by at 1000 tomorrow to follow up." The commander was pleased as well; his long-sought dream of full recovery of the golem's might and glory for the Mul'ulanki federation was in reach...assuming nothing else went wrong.