Number seven

So, this is an empty bottle of Arizona iced tea (sorry, the home page is Flash. I really wish people wouldn't have their home page in flash.) I bought three of them, and this is the last. This isn't a returnable bottle. Iced tea has no carbonation, so no deposit/return is required. That's the way it is. But it is plastic, and therefore can be recycled. So, i flipped the bottle over to discover a number 7 in the triangle. It's very hard to see. I tried, but could not get a photo of it. The camera refused to focus on it. There's not much contrast. The raised triangle and number are not raised very high and the plastic is translucent, so even lighting it from a slant angle produced no defined shadows to help in reading it. All this to say, it's not very easy to read.

In truth, if i'd known that it was number seven, i would not have bought it. There are two reasons. From a convenience point of view, my curb side recycling only accepts number 1 plastic and number 2 plastic. So, i must go quite a ways out of my way to recycle number 7 plastic. But the other reason is more interesting. Number 7 plastic has a rather perverse history. The material was originally an attempt at making artificial female hormones, like estrogen. It has been said that you should not refill plastic water bottles because it's unsafe. IMO, if it is unsafe to refill, then it's unsafe to use for food in the first place. I'd like to see the material banned, certainly for food, but probably for everything. After all, if the material makes it to landfill, then it's likely to leach stuff we'd rather not have leached into the environment. Short of banning it, it'd be real nice if Arizona, and other companies would simply stop using it. After all, the stuff is potentially nasty, and what company needs to have a public relations issue on their hands. And if a company like Arizona doesn't do their own local bottling, then they should put the ban into their contracts with their bottling partners.

I'm not particularly worried about the effects of estrogen-like compounds in my own body. I'm an adult. But my kid's development could be affected. What, if any, long term research has been done? Leave a comment if you know anything.

Helicopter flight school

Excerpt from a toy helicopter's directions: "In if the flight does not have the impetus to change the operating lever, but the helicopter still in airborne spun, by now might adjust in your hand on remote control's vernier adjustment knob, balanced does not spin until the helicopter."

My translation: "Fly the helicopter to a steady height with the Throttle stick. Then adjust the Vernier adjustment knob so that the helicopter does not spin left or right."

Note that the diagram shows the Throttle stick and the Vernier adjustment knob.

Note to companies: I charge $100 per hour for translations. That's real cheap. This entire manual could be fixed in under an hour. Then your company won't be so embarrassed, and more of your customers will be able to figure out how to use their Holiday Gifts. Lowered childhood frustration might lead to world peace.

Neil Armstrong sent Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab on National Public Radio fame, a letter. And he talks a bit about what he and Buzz did on the Moon in '69. And, I agree with everything he said. I'd love to hear Neil make an appearance on Radiolab.

And, i haven't changed my opinion about what NASA is currently doing. Going to the Moon was dangerous. And worth it. As far as the space program goes, i'm not risk averse. While one should do everything one can think of to limit risk, it's required to make progress.

The Shuttle accident rate is 2%. That's the worst of any vehicle that carried anyone into space. In my opinion, that's unwarranted risk. Use more reliable rockets. Further, the Shuttle program promised that it would be cheaper, through reuse of systems, than other vehicles. But it hasn't delivered on the cost promise. It's easily twice as expensive. Don't get me wrong - the Shuttle is amazing. While the external booster issue that the Challenger disaster exposed seems to have been solved, the wing problem that the Columbia disaster exposed was not solved. The program should have been terminated. I understand that the long-canceled National AeroSpace Plane did solve the wing problem. But that's not something that could be retrofit into the Shuttle.

So, the recent success that NASA has had with SpaceX is encouraging news. I was hoping that when the Constellation program was canceled, that something like this would emerge.

Unkillable

Over at The Seanachai, Patrick has a new book - Unkillable. I've listened to the first seven chapters. If you loved How To Succeed In Evil, you'll love Unkillable. If you haven't yet succeeded in evil, you should do yourself a favor now. Then, do me a favor. Send him a few bucks. Maybe he'll write some more.

Be Unreasonable

The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment.
The unreasonable man adapts his environment to himself.
Therefore, all progress is due to unreasonable men.

In this case, NASA is taking the reasonable approach. If the astronauts experience bone loss, radiation damage, etc., then change their diet, give them drugs, or whatever to get them through it.

The unreasonable approach is to notice that astronauts do not have millions of years of evolution in near zero G conditions. So, provide them with artificial gravity. This can be achieved by spinning. Radiation shielding is expensive, but possible. 10 meters of water all around should do it. Since this weighs as much as a battleship, one should consider electrostatic and magnetic deflection as lighter and therefore cheaper alternatives. And one should test these technologies. Half a trillion dollars has been spent on the International Space Station.

Going to the Moon was unreasonable. Audacious aeronautical research, like the X15, was unreasonable. That's what NASA was created for. NASA is being reasonable when being unreasonable is called for.

Podcast file name convention

What's in a name? If you're publishing a podcast, the filename used makes a difference. File names must be unique, otherwise your subscribers will overwrite older shows that they may not have listened to yet. The file name should distinguish the show from other subscriptions the subscriber may have, much for the same issue. So, don't use 'episode'. Someone else may do that. Better, is something from the name itself. All In The Mind becomes aim, for example. And this show-unique bit should come first in the name, so the subscriber, using a sorted list, can see all your shows together.

After the show title part of the name should come a numeric part that makes each episode unique. One way to do that is to number them. The first show could be '1', and the second could be '2'. But, such numbers should have leading zeros so that in a sorted list, the lexicographic sort order also is a sequence sort order. So, use '01', at least, so that the first nine episodes sort properly with the tenth. It may be arrogance or optimism to use '001' or '0001' for your first show, suggesting that the expectation is over a hundred or thousand shows. But there are plenty of shows out there with more than one hundred episodes already. And some monthly shows are getting close.

Another way to do this is to encode the date. Some shows use a 2 digit year, 2 digit month, and 2 digit day. For example, 100823 is 2010, August 23rd. This has the advantage that the lexicographic sorting is also the date order. And the sequence won't break for another 90 years. Of course, a 4 digit year such as 20100823 also sorts properly, and won't break sort order for nearly eight thousand years. Either is fine. But i find that the four digit year is easier for a human to read. That is, while one hopes that it's a date, and one hopes that it's in the form of year, month, day for sorting, one must still guess that 10 is the year and not October. Dates come in all the permutations of order, in different cultures. IMO, the military gets it right with YYYYMMDD. While 2010Aug23 may be easier for a human to read, it fails the sort order requirement, and is therefore unacceptable.

Underscores are optional in filenames. aim100823.mp3 is OK. But they must be consistent. You can't use aim100823.mp3 one week and aim_100830.mp3 the next week. This error breaks the sorting order. Best to name these things with a script. Does it matter if the file name is the recording date or publish date? Probably not. There should be a publishing script that gets all the RSS details right. If there is, it could get the file name right as one of those details.

Speaking of underscores, are there characters that should not go into file names? Yes. No colons (:), no slashes (/), and no backslashes (\), because these characters are directory separators on various operating systems. But really, one should stick to alphanumerics, hyphen (-) and underscore. In command line environments, (parenthesis), dots (.), quotes ("'`), brackets (<{[]}>), pipes (|) and so on (~!@#$%^&*+=;?) can all be interpreted, making it difficult (but almost never impossible) to cope. Simply avoid these.

After the sequence number or date, a very brief description of the show may be included. This information can very easily be included in id3 tags within the file - and they should be there. But one or two words will often help the subscriber. Don't make it too long. Windows may have long filenames but DOS does not. And, like it or not, there are mp3 players out there that have 8.3 filenames. So long file names show up as micros~1.mp3 on these players.

What can be included as text within mp3 files? Some of the shows i listen to have complete transcripts. It's incredible.

What if you got it wrong? Should one rename old shows? Absolutely not. Once you've made an error, changing an old filename risks having thousands of podcasting software suites download these old shows again.

This podcast filename convention should also work for any other RSS published material, such as a blog. However, for blogs, the file name length does not have to observe the 8.3 convention. Short file names have mostly gone the way of the dinosaurs. You do use Rock Ridge extensions on your CDs, right?

Binocular spam

I got some spam by email recently.

The Optic 1050 binoculars, with up to 1000x magnification will allow you to see objects up to 35 miles away! The lightweight, rugged and durable Optic 1050 binoculars are only $19.98 and just $7.95 P&H. These super lightweight binoculars easily adjust to your eyes, are shock resistant with shatterproof lenses and feature wide-angle viewing.

Plus, with each pair of binoculars you order, youll also receive the bonus Pocket Spyscope. Its less than 6 inches long with 24x magnification. Thats a $50 value, yours FREE! You just pay $4.95 to cover shipping and handling. The Pocket Spyscope is lightweight and portable. You can see objects up to 7 miles away and it doubles as a magnifying glass for close up use.

National TV Bargains Power Binoculars...

Ignore the missing single quote in youll. Presumably, when they say 1050 binoculars, they're talking about 10x50 binoculars. Read this as "ten by fifty". But it's 10x - ten times larger than your eyes normally see. The big end of the binoculars are 50 millimeters. That's about two inches.

They say up to 1000x magnification. No. They're 10 times magnification. 1000 times magnification with binoculars that have a 2 inch big end would produce a useless, grainy image. For 1000x magnification, the big end would have to be about 20 inches across. And that would be pushing it. I'd really want the big end to be 40 inches across for 1000x. That's how optics work. Naturally, such an instrument would be more expensive, and less portable.

will allow you to see objects up to 35 miles away! How disappointing. I've seen the Andromeda Galaxy without optical aid. That's about two and a half million light years away. One light year is about 6 trillion miles. So Andromeda is more than 15 quintillion miles away. If i can only see 35 miles with these binoculars, but can see 15 quintillion miles without them, there must be something wrong with them.

shatterproof lenses. They must come from Krypton, like Superman.

feature wide-angle viewing. I suppose anything is relative. They're likely wider angle viewing than my telescope at low power. But they're not very wide compared to naked eye. But notice that they don't say what they're relative to. Nor do they give any measure of how wide an angle you can see with them. Normally, binoculars are sold with such a reference. It might be five degrees or seven degrees.

Pocket Spyscope. Its less than 6 inches long with 24x magnification. The length isn't that important. If this Spyscope has a diameter of less than an inch, then the views through it will be grainy. For 24x magnification, it will likely have to be two inches in diameter to be able to produce any kind of decent image. If it's six inches long, it's unlikely to be even an inch in diameter. This is not a $50 value. It's so mis-designed that $5 is too much.

You can see objects up to 7 miles away. So, it's not even as good as the binoculars? Well, that's the truth.

doubles as a magnifying glass for close up use. I think this says something about the way the optics work. I don't think means anything good for use with distant objects.

I have a pair of 10x50 binoculars. They're really good. However, if i want binoculars for hand held use (no tripod), then I find that 8x, or eight times magnification, is about as much as I can handle. With more magnification, the view isn't as steady. But I have a nice tripod. And my 10x50 binoculars work really well on it. I also have a small scope - much more than 6 inches long, and 2 inches in diameter. And it can magnify to something like 24x. But it is totally useless without a tripod. So, my best guess is that this 24x Spyscope is useless.

$19.98 + $7.95 + $4.95 = $32.88. That's the amount you can save by reading this post.

Everything breaks

An odd series of failures seems to have happened all at once. Seals on the oil pump for one car, the water pump, and now it seems, the thermostat of the other car, a printer, and the CPU fan for a computer. The phone. Having redundant hardware isn't enough. Well, nothing lasts forever. But the CPU fan is only maybe five months old. I had expected better. The worst failure, though, is a long lasting cold. Well, there's no fever. But it's been far too long.

This blog has been idle for quite a bit. Lots going on. There are about a dozen posts in the queue. Just have to get time to upload them. Also, i've pretty much abandoned my livejournal blog. The ads that livejoural have added are invasive. I don't like my own site. So, my astronomy stuff will start getting posted here as well in the near future.

English as a first language

I admit it. I hated English in school. Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word. It was more that there were other subjects that i preferred. I don't hate chocolate ice cream. I simply prefer vanilla. But i was talking to someone who majored in English in college the other day, and it got me thinking.

So why was English less than my favorite subject? It's probably the way grammar and spelling are taught. The way grammar is often taught is to explain the rules of grammar, with heavy emphasis on this is a noun and all sentences have at least a noun and a verb. It largely ignores the simple fact that English has no rules at all that aren't regularly broken. By the time the average American child is ten years old, they've learned 10,000 words of vocabulary, but also 10,000 rules of grammar. This is as large a vocabulary as adults master for most other languages. And really, come on. A rule for every word is pretty much the same as an exception for every rule. That's like saying that there are no rules at all. And American children don't learn these things by having to remember either the rules or the names of the rules. They do it by usage. And usage is how the language is defined. Really. Dictionaries are written by examining published material. That's why congress critters and others can routinely verb words. (The word verb is, of course, a noun). And, of course, learning just exactly what words are nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and so on, and what, exactly, the rules are for these things is roughly irrelevant to the English speaking child.

Here's an example. As a former child, i remember these, and swore i'd never torture my kids with them, should i ever have any. As a parent, i enjoy torturing my kids with them. There are few other perks being a parent, so one must enjoy the opportunities available. Johnny and me went to the park. The correct phrasing is Johnny and I went to the park. Please don't explain what rule this breaks. The correct way to teach this is as follows. One must drop the Johnny and bit and see if it still sounds right. So, Me went to the Park doesn't scan as well as I went to the Park. And yet, when i was a kid, i didn't respond even to the full grammar lesson, with what amounts to technojargon words and rules, using what ever in a sing-song voice, as i routinely get now, even with my methods. So, there are at least two things to note here. The education problem is much harder these days, now that we don't demand so much respect from kids. And, it's likely that we're attempting to teach kids the full grammar rules before they're mentally equipped to deal with them.

I did hear a Johnny and me reference on the radio recently. It was correct. Which is to say, it passed my test. I can't remember when (if ever) i've encountered anyone doing it right. Maybe the simpler rule is to simply always use Johnny and I. It may not always be right, but it may be right so much more often as to not make any difference. You heard it first here.

Spelling is even easier to teach. Tell the kids to write lots of stuff, and demand that they use spelling checkers. Have them turn off the word processor feature that corrects words as you type. This feature doesn't teach anything. Have the word processor mark anything it doesn't understand, and allow it to offer suggestions. This is how i learned to spell. Learning vocabulary words by rote was irritating. It also wasn't nearly as effective at expanding vocabulary as simply reading challenging books.

This correct-as-you-type feature is pretty evil. IMCO (In My Considered Opinion), the feature should be removed from all software. It often "corrects" words that have been typed correctly. That is, it often introduces errors. I often use a specialized vocabulary, for computers, engineering, or some other business. I end up having to type the same word correctly half a dozen times in the course of editing. I often have to come up with unique tricks to get what i need, such as writing some longer word, and deleting bits of it to get the right spelling. I even have to correct broken capitalizations.

I went to an Engineering school. And i work with engineers. With few exceptions, these people are brilliant, well rounded people. But they often have poor English skills. They leave out articles, make references using pronouns without clearly establishing what the references are for, and so on. And many of these people only know one language. It's often far worse when English isn't their first language. From a strictly business point of view, one might say, who cares? The work is getting done, right? And these people are brilliant, right? But poor documentation, especially unclear and ambiguous documentation can lead to needless rework and worse. Worse is documentation that misleads. One could call it anti-documentation. You're actually better off without anything. It has negative value.

Now, when i went to school for engineering, there was considerable opportunity to write. There were lab reports and other assignments. There were requirements to do work outside of your chosen major. Usually, these were not graded on English grammar or spelling, however. There were projects that one needed to do in groups. Since i had advanced computer editing, formatting and typing skills, i generally typed up the group projects. And, it was somewhat of a surprise to me that my ability to compose prose was generally superior to that of other students. After all, these kids were all off-the-wall brilliant. I completely ignore students for which English was not their first language here. I'm talking about native English speakers. And yet, as far as i recall, the school did not offer an English course of any kind. But one really needs a firm understanding of English to achieve technical excellence. And technical excellence was clearly the primary goal of the school. So, while it isn't my opinion that engineering schools need to have an English department offering and capable of granting an English degree, they should offer English courses as an option. Otherwise, all students are stuck with whatever they happened to learn in high school.

How large is your vocabulary? It's worse than impractical to try to list all the words you know and count them. Humans are terrible at listing things, especially when the list is long, such as when there are more than about three items. And yet, it turns out that there is a fairly quick and simple way to find out. Get a dictionary that brags about the number of words it contains. Many college dictionaries boast half a million words. Get a blank piece of paper and a pencil. A pen will do. Make two columns, Right and Wrong. Open the dictionary to a random page. Jam your finger down the left edge without looking. Then slowly move your finger down until a new word is exposed. Examine the word. Do you know what it means? Can you use it in a sentence? Try it. Then read the definition. If you were right, make a mark in the Right column. Otherwise, make a mark in the Wrong column. Do this exactly thirty times. Now the math. Take the total number of words in the dictionary, multiply it by the number of words you got right and divide that by thirty. That is, multiply the total number by the fraction you got right. That's an estimate of the number of words you know. If you don't believe it, you can always use a larger sample than thirty, or repeat the experiment, or change dictionaries.

So, my spelling is now good enough that i frequently argue with my spelling checker. But there is a word that i always spell wrong. Everyone has one. For me, the word is wrong, which i always spell w r o n g.

Practical hyperthreading

I recently read some inconsistent material concerning Intel's CPUs. It had to do with hyperthreading.

The idea behind hyperthreading is that you have more than one set of CPU registers (including hidden registers) so that it is very quick for the CPU to switch from one process to another. In fact, it can be done between every instruction. That is, if there are two processes currently runable, the CPU can execute instructions from alternating processes.

There are a couple of reasons one might want to do this. One might want to have separate state for operating system kernel instructions and user level instructions. One might have separate state so that interrupt routines would run quickly. No need to save the state, just use registers dedicated to running interrupt service routines. This was done for Digital's PDP-10 computer back in the 1970's.

But there is a problem for modern machines that's a little different. It's the memory wall. Eventually, the bottleneck for Von Neumen architecture CPUs is the communication of data between the CPU and main memory. One can delay this bottleneck for awhile, and this has been done, but it will eventually come up and smack you in the face. And these days, CPUs are much faster than main memory. So, while the CPU may execute instructions at three billion per second, main memory takes at least several nanoseconds to respond to a request. OK, so most memory references only go as far as the on-CPU chip cache. These requests may be satisfied in as little as a single cycle. But to go all the way out to main memory can take what seems like forever. At least, forever if you're a fast CPU. It can be over a hundred cycles.

So the idea is, have more than one process running. When an instruction is executed that fetches data from main memory, the CPU might have to wait for the result before the next instruction is executed. However, if the CPU switches to an entirely different process, then that processes' next instruction can't be waiting for this result. There's a better chance that it can proceed without waiting at all. If the CPU is idle less often, then it is doing more useful work per unit time. It's faster. For Intel, this is usually about 20% faster. That is, you get an extra 20% more cycles per unit time.

However. Let's say you have two processes. Each process will get about half of the available cycles. If the total is 120%, then each process will run at about 60% of the original speed. Yes, that's right, the total throughput is higher, but a single processor will run a single process faster. But consider that a single processor will run two processes at 50% each, rather than 60% each. Still, people worried about speed often want their single process to run as fast as possible. Can one get the best of both worlds?

Yes. Often, there is inherent parallelism available within an application. The operating system supports something called threads. An application can have two threads running at the same time. Both threads have access to all the memory of the application. And in a hyperthreading environment, both threads can contribute to the performance of the single application. Therefore, a single application can get the speed boost offered by hyperthreading. It requires more effort on the part of the programmer. The result is usually more complicated, and can be more difficult to debug (get right). But it can, and often is, done.

When hyperthreading became available, i fired up a benchmark, timed a run of one copy. Then timed a run of two copies at the same time. Then, i went into the BIOS, turned on hyperthreading, and reran both tests. With hyperthreading turned off, the results were 100% speed with one process, and 50% for each with two simultaneous processes. With hyperthreading turned on, the results were 100% speed with one process and 60% for each with two processes. There was no additional gain to be had in total bandwidth for more than two processes with my simple benchmark. The benchmarks perform a fixed amount of work. So by 50%, i mean that this work load takes twice as long (wall clock) to execute. By 60% speed, i mean that this work load takes 1.66 times as long measured by the wall clock (1 / 1.66 = 0.60). Very simple.

But i started this article talking about confusion i've seen. One of the things i've heard stated is that if you turn on hyperthreading, your speed is immediately cut in half. This may be due to the way that the tools report your performance. We pretty much have an idea what 100% means if there is a single CPU with no hyperthreading. 100% use means that the CPU is totally consumed. But with hyperthreading turned on, some tools report 100% if two threads are executing the entire time. And if only one process is running, these tools often report 50%. However, in this later case, the CPU isn't idle. It's getting 83% (100 / 120) as much work done as is possible with this CPU. But this is exactly as much total work as the CPU would have done if hyperthreading were turned off.

And it gets worse. Some tools report 200% instead of 100%, as above. That's on the same running system. With some tools reporting 100% and others reporting 200%, it's a royal pain to compare results. And those reporting up to 100% often end up reporting 102% from time to time.

And it gets worse still. The operating system reports the CPU time that a process uses based on the runable time and the number of processes that were runable at the time. But the performance during that time can vary by 20%. So, CPU time doesn't measure total cycles delivered very accurately or repeatably. Well, with demand paging, this has been true for awhile anyway. Page replacement interrupts, TLB replacement interrupts, and even I/O interrupts all take their toll on accounting. So, IMO, it's not that much of a loss.

My new 4 core AMD Phenom II does not appear to support hyperthreading. I wish it did. But it still suffers a bit from poor accounting. My operating system tools sometimes report up to 400% CPU utilization, and sometimes report up to 100% CPU utilization.

And yet, there is a downside to hyperthreading. It has to do with priority. I often run a very long running background process, with the priority set as poor as possible. And Unix (or Linux) will typically give this process nearly 100% of the CPU when nothing else is running. And if there is a normal priority process running, then the background process will get 5%, with the foreground process getting 95%.

But with hyperthreading turned on, two processes may run at full speed because the operating system treats threads as CPUs. Since there are two CPUs (there aren't, really), the operating system lets them both run at full speed. That means that each process gets 60% of the single CPU speed. That's much less than 95% for the normal priority process, and much more than 5% for the low priority process. And there are times when i'm impatient enough to want that extra 35%. In fact, it's been awhile, but at one time i ran a Unix variant that would give the normal priority process 100% percent, with no cycles at all going to the low priority process. I miss those days. They were nice, or is it not so nice?

Of Course

I just completed a three day course at work. That's one point of view. The course used to be four days or five days, but now it's three days. Same material. It takes time for the material to sink in. And the way that this might happen is if i read the 500+ page text book from cover to cover, and do all the exercises in the work book. And soon. But, in principal, i know it all now.

Early in the course, there was an example where there was a pin that was measured to be a certain diameter, and also, there was a hole that was measured to be the same diameter. The question was, will the pin fit into the hole? My response was to ask how big the hammer was allowed to be.

One can, indeed, jam that much information into one's brain in such a short period of time. However, one must be prepared to use a really big hammer. But it's not free. I now feel like i've been hit by a truck, and then run over by a steam roller. We have chosen to describe the result of the incident survival.

Ipod Shuffle - Not Dead Yet

My original iPod Shuffle classic isn't dead yet. Fortunately, the ring came off while i was at my desk, and i saw where it landed quickly. I doubt i could get another ring. It appears that the ring was simply glued on in such a way that the bubble buttons underneath can be pressed with it. So, all i should have to do is glue it back on. There are a couple protrusions on the back side of the ring that allow the ring to be aligned properly so the symbols match up.

I fully expect the device to die eventually. After all, there's a non-replaceable rechargeable battery inside. It won't last forever. And, the cover cap for the USB port doesn't have any kind of permanent connection, so one expects to lose this eventually. It came with a second cap that has a cord attached. I never use it. It's around somewhere (i never throw anything out), and could be used as a spare, i suppose.

I have three other mp3 players. They all have more memory than the iPod. From twice as much to four times as much. And they all have more features, for example, a display so you can see what track you're listening to. But i end up using the iPod the most. And that's because i use it while commuting to work. You see, since it has no display, it is designed to be operated without looking at it. The other units are way more complex, and really can't be conveniently operated without looking at them. I've seen an mp3 player without a display since my iPod, but by comparison, it sucks. It's much cheaper, and for example, suffers from having too short of battery life per charge. So my iPod may be irreplaceable.

There are bugs and limitations in the iPod Shuffle. It's not perfect. If you miss the last bit of a track, you can't simply "rewind" into it. And it can be quite painful to "fast forward" from the beginning, if the track is long. And this happens often. I listen to mostly talk shows, and have missed the final punch line of an hour show due to traffic, etc. Another issue is that, from time to time, it fails to turn itself off. So, the battery is dead, even though it was just charged to full. And speaking of charging to full, all you get is a green, yellow, or red light for a battery indication. This isn't really enough to tell if you've charged it enough. And, finally, sometimes when you pause the playback, it will turn itself off, but when it starts back up, it has forgotten where it was. I've run into a couple other bugs, not worth mentioning. Essentially no software is perfect. But simpler devices tend to have fewer issues.

Coupon

Here's a coupon, good for a 17% discount on all the gas you ever buy. It's good at every gas station on Earth. It's quite convenient. You don't have to show it to the gas station attendant. Since you keep it, you can reuse it forever. And you can use it even if you pay at the pump with a credit card. Did i mention that it's good for 17%? The coupon is free. Here it is:

But, i'm willing to bet that you won't use it. Here's how it works. Here in Michigan, the speed limit is 70 MPH (112 KPH). It's legal to drive at 62 MPH (100 KPH), but what people do is drive 75 or 80 (120 to 130 KPH), risking a speeding ticket. But i drive at 62 MPH. That's because there's a handy 100 KPH marking on my speedometer pointing straight up. And, my measurements show that the difference in fuel economy between driving at 70 MPH and 62 MPH is 17%. I ran these tests on four very different cars.

But you may find that you can't do it. There's a problem of the very worst kind. It's psychological. Despite the fact that in Michigan, trucks are never allowed to exceed 60 MPH, if you drive at 62, everyone passes you. I pass someone on the highway about once a month or less. So what i mean is, everyone passes you. And most people can't stand it. I drive my passengers crazy. You'll think that the other guy is "getting" something that you're not. They are. A higher gas bill.

My commute is 43 miles each way. It's almost all on the highway. If i could go 70 MPH, it would take 36.9 minutes to get to work. And at 62 MPH, it would take 41.6 minutes. So, 62 MPH is 4.7 minutes slower, right? Wrong. My record time is 56 minutes. I think of it as an hour, or an hour and a half if traffic is bad. But what i really mean is that traffic is always bad. But sometimes it's horrendous. So you might think that it takes five minutes longer, but the effect is not measurable. Except at the gas pump. I fill up less often, saving money and time.

I trained myself to drive at 62 MPH with my previous car. My Mazda has a cruise control. I'd set it for 62, and sit back and relax. I'd listen to some tunes, or a prerecorded radio show i'd downloaded from the web. It was really nice. I'm going slower, so i have the right of way. Everyone who wants to go faster must go around me. I don't have to disengage the cruise until i get where i'm going. Well, maybe sometimes. Like in Detroit where i have to take an exit just to stay on i75. Or in Troy, where despite four lanes, there's not enough room for all the cars. But now i'm trained, and that's that.

You can go to the Governator's web site and learn all about Eco Driving. You can buy expensive easy rolling tires and get maybe 2% fuel economy improvement. Or, you can go a bit slower - which costs you nothing - and get 17%. The coupon never expires. But there's no reason not to start today.

Warranty

The other day, the phone rang. It was a sales call. I call it phone spam.

"Our records show that you do not have an extended warranty on your Saturn."

Interesting. I own a Saturn. It is true that there is no extended warranty on it. But I didn't buy it in Michigan. It's never been in the shop. So what records are these? Either the Department of Motor Vehicles sold or gave out this information, or my insurance company did. I have a good insurance company. They didn't do it. I'm liking my government less now.

"How many miles do you have on your car?"

I decided to tell the truth. It turned out to be the right answer, and it would have been even if it was a lie. So i said, "Two hundred and fifty one thousand".

Pause.

"You aren't eligible for our extended warranty."

And that was that. They won't be calling back. I have a car that is in excellent condition and which is rock solid reliable. It gets great gas mileage, nearly 44 MPG, lifetime average. And they won't sell me a warranty that they'd push down anyone else's throat if they could. In the summer of 2008, it's Blue Book value went up by $2000, despite my having driven it an additional 70,000 miles. That's because gas prices went to $4 a gallon. Well, gas prices are going up again. I have a car whose value is increasing with age. It's been to the Moon (238,000), and it's showing every indication that it will make it back to Earth.

FPS games

This is a quick start guide for first person shooter games. This isn't about any particular game. These games can be complicated, and may take a long time to master. Go for the easy things first. Easy things first works for learning the piano too.

You can't shoot without a weapon. You can't shoot without ammo.

Aim the weapon, then fire. Unless you have infinite ammo.

You can't shoot if you're dead. Try not to get shot. Jump and dodge. Weave. Move all the time. Standing still is a good way to get killed. There is no hiding. So learn to aim while moving.

Learn your weapons. Fast/slow rate of fire. High/low damage. Long/short distance. Small/large area of effect. Delayed effect. High/low amount of ammo. Some weapons may have more than one mode of use. Use the right weapon in the right mode at the right time. Even if you're left handed.

It's good to know where the enemy is. It's very good to know where an enemy will be. Is the enemy moving to some obvious goal? Conversely, don't let the enemy know where you are. If you and an enemy are moving to the same goal, consider letting them have it. Since you know where they're going, you can let them have it.

The terrain can be your friend. Get to know it. There may be places where it's hard to see the enemy. These may be good for you too.

As you learn the game, identify skills to practice. Aiming. Aiming while moving. Jump to high places. And so on. If there's a feature of the game, see if you can use it. If your game has a novice mode, don't be afraid to use it, and even lose a few games practicing some skill.

Have fun.

Headache

I don't get headaches often. There's usually some identifiable cause. Dehydration. Nutrasweet (i seem to be allergic, and it causes what i call a migraine for about six hours. I say i seem to be allergic, but i've not gotten any such diagnosis. I say i call it a migraine, but how do i compare? Besides, the point is, with care (and increasing care at that), i can avoid it. I've been about a decade now since i was last poisoned.)

Well, here's an article that gives a reasonable overview of the subject. I doubt it's comprehensive. I don't agree with every word in it. I doubt an article could be written which covers everyone, since everyone is a bit different. But on the whole it's the best i've seen in ages - perhaps ever. And, it's out there for free. Can't beat that with a stick.

Jack failure

I thought i'd mentioned it in a previous post here, but can't find it. When jacking up the car to do maintenance, i always put something under the car, so that if the car falls off the jack, it's easier to jack it back up, and, by the way, nothing under the car get crushed. I'm thinking of myself, for example.

Well, i was changing my oil, and while pulling hard on the oil filter wrench (usually i can just twist it off with my fingers), the car rolled back six inches, falling off of the jack (closest to the tire). Fortunately, i had the jack stand set up. And, it held it. In fact, the car didn't even seem to drop any. I say fortunately, but it's the way i work. Always have a backup.

The picture is kind of odd. The right front tire is shown, jacked up completely off the ground.

In case it's not clear, i was indeed, under the car at the time.

Firefox and Thunderbird

I've used Thunderbird as my email client under Linux for quite a long time. I recall needing a gui email client because people (probably using Windows) were sending me stuff in styled text, mostly that could easily be sent as plain text. Anyway, it's been years.

But last Saturday morning, my main home machine rebooted. Twice. The logs showed nary a hint why. But afterwards, both Firefox and Thunderbird had an unacceptably small font, used for their menus and other dressings. The size of the content was easily changed. I'd never felt the need to change other font sizes. And there are three font sizes that matter. But only one had changed. I figured at first that i'd lost some font, and that these two applications needed it. But Google didn't seem to know where such files might be.

One of the suggestions was that the file userChrome.css could be modified. I ran "locate" to see where such a file might be. I didn't have one. A Ha! But, no, it's normal not to have one. And creating one didn't solve the problem.

There were other false leads.

What finally did it was to edit my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and in the "display" section for my nVidia card, i added the lines:
Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE"
Option "DPI" "100 x 100"

In particular, it sets my screen resolution to 100x100 dots per inch, rather than 75 dots per inch. And, i arrived at this result by measuring the screen, computing the resolution (in my head, despite having a computer in front of me that can perform a billion divides or so in a second).

No idea why a random reboot should cause this behavior. It'd been working for a decade at least. No idea why only those two applications should be affected. xorg.conf is supposed to affect everything. No idea why there seems to be a bunch of ways to address this issue. For example, userChrome.css made no difference at all. And, it was system wide, not user wide. I created a new user just to test this out.

I'm a Unix guru. But the complexity and rate of change has gotten so out of hand, that even i had huge problems getting this to work. We've totally lost focus. The documentation is out of date. There are multiple ways to do something, and only one works? This isn't Unix anymore.

But with this post, perhaps Goggle does know how to solve this problem now.

Dollar Store humor

My local dollar store has the slogan:

"Nothing is more than a dollar".

This suggests that a dollar is less than nothing, right?

Alzheimer's cured in mice

"Alzheimer's disease is reversed in mice using caffeine".

One of the quotes from the article is this: That's important because caffeine is a safe drug for most people. Note that they don't say that it doesn't have side effects. I expect sleep disorder, arthritis, osteoperosis, and addiction. Personally, i'd accept a little pain to avoid Alzheimer's. And, for a change, i'm glad that caffeine is addictive. If i had to take medicine for Alzheimer's, i'd be afraid that i'd forget to take it.

The Seanachai

I've been listening to podcasts since they came out. At first, i'd download them, cut them to CDs, and listen to them on my way to work and back. Since that was 2+ hours of driving a day (37,000 miles a year), i could listen to quite a bit. Much better than listening to the traffic report - which mostly told me that my last half hour was due to an accident that happened yesterday. But now i have an mp3 player. Or maybe three of them. And i wear headphones 24/7.

Patrick E. McLean's shows started out as bite sized 5-7 minute stories with extraordinarily great production values. Not just a good script. Not just a good mike. Not just good sound effects. But the whole thing just sort of sucks you in.

Now, i just put

http://www.theseanachai.com/feed/podcast/

into my long list of stuff to download. And every now and then, there's this totally off the wall incredible show. It's like Christmas.

I'm not the only one who likes it. Someone out at Bitstrips likes it too.

But the best is yet to come. You really have to check out SucceedInEvil.com. Patrick's novel is fabulous. I'm getting it daily at podiobooks. You can get it slower if you want.

But you should hop on over to the store and drop $12 for a subscription. I have no idea what you'll get. But it's worth it if you get nothing extra. In fact, it's too cheap by half.

Job Interviews

I recently wrote an extraordinarily brief summary of why i think job interviews are uniformly awful. I do computer programming, but it applies elsewhere. Here it is.

Programming is not a real time task or performance art. It's not a closed book test. Expect any such tests in interviews to fail. Worse, expect to miss great candidates because you've pissed them off, or they appeared less qualified.

Programmers need to have unusual skills. They often don't need to have common skills - such as being able to conduct themselves in an interview and sell themselves. Focus on what skills you need, and be prepared to accept that skills you don't need suck. Failure to follow this rule will prevent you from hiring the best talent.

Non technical managers have no way to evaluate technical candidates. IMO, they shouldn't be invited to interviews. In my experience, non-technical managers also have no way to evaluate productivity after hire. You can't do it on hours worked. And the non-technical manager doesn't have a clue how long a task should take, nor can they recognize quality (or lack of it).

The right way to hire a competent technical person is to have a competent technical person interview them. And that person much conduct the Turing Test. The Turing Test was devised as a test of artificial intelligence. The idea is that you can't define or describe intelligence, but if you are intelligent, you can recognize it in a machine. It sounds silly, but it's the best we have. And it works. Where i went to school (an engineering school) only one in four entering freshmen (all totally brilliant) graduated. And there didn't seem to be any way to tell who would make it. But of the 22 guys i hung out with starting in my freshman year, one transferred to another school and got his degree there, one had to do a summer session to get his degree, and one failed to graduate when his financial aid ran out. Four went on to get masters, and two got PhDs. And it's starting to become clear that some companies end up with uniformly high quality staff, and others don't. It's the conversation that does it.

Here's a sample poor conversation:

Q: Why did you leave your last position?
A: I was a contractor. The contract ended.
Q: How about before that?
A: I've been a contractor for twenty years. But in 1991, the company I was working for went out of business. It wasn't my fault.
(At this point I'm already thinking about my next interview. The question shouldn't have been why i had a run of short contracts, but rather why i worked one for six years. They assume it's due to not getting along with someone - typically a manager. But i could already tell that working for this guy wasn't going to be easy.)

When i was at Chrysler (and they were attempting to reduce staff), they sent out email with a list of questions you might be asked on your next interview, you know, to help you prepare. It was pages and pages of questions that you should never ask as an interviewer.

I have lots more on this topic. Perhaps i'll write a book.

Abiogenesis

We're just a little closer to figuring out how life got started. It could be wrong, but it appears we're on the right track. This could be big.

Have you run without being chased?

The craziest questions get asked on Yahoo! Answers. I've no idea where this one was leading. But here's where i took it.

Oh sure.

In Jr. High, cross country races were a mile and a half, so practices were 5 miles, every day. And they introduced the idea of "wind sprints". You'd run all out from one telephone pole to the next. Then you'd jog to the pole after that before running all out again. This jogging was described as "rest by jogging".

In High School, the races were 2.5 to 3.0 miles. My own school's course was 2.7 miles, went through the woods, and over the only hill around. Practices were 10 miles every day. It takes over 500 miles of running a summer to be at all competitive. More is better.

In college, the races were 5.0 miles. I was very slow. Clearly, no one was chasing me. I took nearly 25 minutes to run 5 miles. Barely under five minutes a mile. Practices were fifteen (15) miles, twice a day. That's right. 30 miles of running a day, every day. Except race days. On race days, you got to sprint for just five miles. My estimate is that i ran 2100 miles in ten weeks. That's about the distance from New York City to Salt Lake, Utah.

Kite

About a fifteen years ago, Dawn and i were driving from Tucson to LA. We'd just crossed the mountains. There was a wide open and fairly level prairie. Just this one huge tree. A simple fence ran along the road. There was a Bluebird on a fence post. I pulled over, went to the trunk, pulled out the 22x60 spotting scope and set it up. The Bluebird waited patiently for all this. And for maybe a minute sat there to let us get a look.

While Dawn was looking through the scope, the Bluebird took off and flew to the tree. In the mean time, i saw what looked like a gull flying down the mountain into the field. I said out loud, "What's a gull doing out here?" Dawn stood there unable to speak, and barely able to get binoculars up. It was a Swallow-tailed Kite.

The kite circled the tree once, then landed in it. Apparently, it didn't see the Blue bird. Apparently, being bright blue doesn't mean that you get eaten whenever a hungry kite comes by. The Bluebird didn't move. After a bit, the kite took to the air and decided to hunt for something on the ground. This was done by flying to what appeared to be an arbitrary spot to hover. And by hover, i mean that it appeared that it's head was somehow locked in an invisible vice maybe 40 feet in the air. The wings moved, other things moved, but the head did not. You could point the scope at the head. The tripod didn't move, and neither did the head. And after a bit, the kite would suddenly make a dramatic turn, and maybe 50 feet over, it would lock it's head there. What a show. Magnificent. After maybe twenty minutes, the kite went over the field, harassed a flock of Starlings, then flew back up and over the mountain.

Screwed

My wife teaches violin. This becomes important to this story later. She asked me if it was possible to make longer screws into shorter screws. "Sure", i said. But later it wasn't so clear.

In the mean time, the head board on the bed had come unglued, and the wood screws were stripped. Apparently, it had come apart before, stripping at least two of the screws, and it was put back together with glue and screws. One of the four didn't match the others. Clearly a substitution had been made. Now, two were stripped, and one of those two was bent. I did what i always do. I looked around the house for something that might work. In this case, it was a scrounge through my old wood screw collection. I found two screws that were slightly larger diameter. One was too long, and would poke through the other side of the head board. So i got out a hack saw and unceremoniously cut it shorter. With four screws that should work, i put it back together. It held for a couple days.



Clearly, what was needed was some sort of positive structure. Countersunk wood screws weren't going to do it. I went to the hardware store, bought four 2 inch 1/4-20 carriage bolts with nuts, for about $5. Now, 2 inch bolts are way too long. But the hardware store doesn't sell bolts exactly the length i need. So, i rummaged around the house for a way to cut them to length. I don't have a vice that will do it for me. I have a vice, but i don't really have a work bench. So i cobbled together this contraption. The idea is to cut them with the hack saw. There's a little overhang on the kitchen counter. A scrap 2x4 that i use as a back for drilling was clamped to it to keep the saw away from the counter. Vice grips could hold the screw. A big C clamp i use to fix wooden chairs holds this stack together.

I'm pictured here sawing with my left hand, and holding the end of the screw with my right. I'm right handed, so this doesn't really work. But what did work is to start sawing with my right hand on the saw, and as the screw is nearly cut through, i reach around with my left hand to keep the remaining bit of the screw straight. There's no way to get a picture of this. I should also note that the vice grip is clamped onto the little bit of the screw that i'm throwing out. The vice grip totally mashes the threads. It's very important that the final threads aren't mashed. And that's why my right hand had to do the saw. It's not that my right hand is oh-so-much better coordinated. It's that despite pushups and curls carefully matched for both arms for years, my right arm is stronger. When the saw catches, my right arm keeps moving, where my left doesn't.



After the screw is cut, there's a jagged end to it. I'm holding a file on the block of wood so it won't move, and moving the screw up and down the file. This de-burrs the screw, but also makes it so a nut can thread onto the end. And the result for the head board is that on the outside, the metal caps show. On the inside, the bolts barely stick out from the nuts. They have no way of sticking into the mattress.



Now, you might think that all this cutting and filing will heat up the screw, and possibly even burn your hand. Iron conducts heat quickly, right? But stainless steel does not. And oddly, i didn't learn this in Materials Science in school. I learned it from my brother the welder.



Back to the violin teacher. She gave me a bag of screws, with one dark one. "Could you cut these screws down to the length of the dark one?" So i used the contraption from the head board job. And now there's a bag of smaller screws. But an hour's worth of work was able to take a cheap bag of screws and make them into the custom screws that were desired. They're low quality because they're not very uniform. The heads are a little different than the master. The lengths are a little shorter or a little longer. But they may be good enough. And who knows where one might get the real McCoy?



But good enough for what? These are tuning screws. You screw them down, and they push a lever, which pulls on the violin string. There are tuning pegs that hold the other end of each string. And you use them to get the pitch of the string close. But they're not good enough to get the vibration frequency close enough. The tuning screws are what you use to get the frequency to that last few cents (hundredths of a half tone). And this exercise is all about having the sense to save a few cents.

Downy

I was sitting in my living room, and happened to see a bird that wasn't one i see every day out the window. I've not done much birding of late, but i picked up a handy pair of binoculars and looked. It's clearly a female Downy Woodpecker. And she went up and down the two crab apple trees in the median that divides my street. I went back upstairs and got the tripod. Then i went back up and got the camera. I took 187 pictures by holding the point and shoot camera to one eyepiece of the 10x50 binoculars, while sitting in my living room. So, i'm taking shots through the window glass. Usually, that's such a bad idea. Window glass is not what opticians call optic quality. There are all sorts of defects, which give you distortion. And you can get glare. And, the camera may attempt to focus on it. But the camera usually focused on branches if the shot was out of focus. Here's one of them.
You can tell that she's a female. The male has this unmistakable red spot on the back of his head. The view directly through the binoculars is much better than this picture. The detail is better. The color depth is better. The focus is way better. You're seeing the bird in this shot, dot for dot, cropped from the much bigger original image. All other shots are cropped and scaled smaller. This blog is only 400 pixels wide. You might think this shot was taken in the woods. But the background is in fact the neighbor's house. This is clear in the uncropped original shot. So you think you can't get wilderness shots here, but apparently, you can. She put on a great show, and i got this other shot.

This is at the top of the tree, with the gray sky behind her. She paused a bit, then flew to the other tree, where she then continued to put on a great show. Of course, that's my perspective. She was just looking for things to eat. She kept poking at the tree, though never seemed to do it any damage. It was an hour. She left after combing both trees. I hope she got something out of it. Maybe she'll come back. But she wasn't interested in the leftover fruit still hanging from the tree. The cardinals and squirrels eat it, and when there's snow on the ground, so do the robins. And there was a robin out too.

You can tell he's a male American Robin. His head is darker than the back and wings. The female would have the head the same shade as the back and wings. And he was digging in the dirt under this bush. He came out into the sunshine only a couple times. He'd hop up completely into the bush when someone would walk by, especially with a dog. Often the robins are wary but hang out in the middle of the lawn. The snow was melting, but the ground was probably still frozen. Robins around here migrate south if they can't find anything to eat. Many stay all year round.

I'm guessing that this is a female House Sparrow. I didn't snap this shot of her, per se. She appeared in this shot with the robin. I didn't see her through the binoculars with my eyeballs at all. Examination of all these shots reveals a bird nest i'd never noticed as well. European House Sparrows are not sparrows at all. Genetically, they're finches. They have that short finch like beak. But it's too late to rename it a House Finch. We already have a bird called a House Finch. House Sparrows are incredibly common around here. This one also seemed to be uncharacteristically shy. Didn't care one way or the other about the robin. Just unusually skittish. She didn't stay long.

Sign this form

Instead of fax, a recruiter sent me a Word doc form to print, sign, scan and send. Easy. The way it should have been decades ago. I've been waiting a long time for this. Oh, sure, MS Word isn't an open standard, but OpenOffice reads it just fine.

But first, my printer's black ink sprays everywhere. The company logo was blue. It came out fine. So, blue works fine. So i set the font to blue, to get clean output. Printed it and signed it.

My scanner wasn't working. It's not new, i've had it for a decade or so. It's a UMAX Astra 1200S. I had to clear junk off of it, plug it in (the wall wart died years ago, so it gets very clean 12 volt DC power from the computer, so it's been on all this time. I needed to plug it into the SCSI interface), install a driver (well, user level scanning software), reboot, and tell my scripts where it is.

Then, after the scan, i converted it to black & white, increased the contrast to darken it, then converted it to jpeg for email. Piece of cake.

So, now i have a working scanner, right? Well, after i find a place for all that junk. I can't just throw it all out. Some of it is stuff i'm supposed to scan.

Valentine's day

The official joke for February is as follows:

Two antenna met on a roof top. (That's where they hang out.)

And they fell in love.

And they got married!

...Well, the wedding, frankly, wasn't very good.

But the reception was excellent!

Plugs

I changed the plugs and wires on this 1999 Subaru Forester. These are the tools i needed for this delicate job. Yes, that's a hammer next to the very long scissors on the right. The box in the middle had the new wires. The new wires are now on the car. The old wires are to the right of the box. The new spark plug boxes are red, and are to the upper right by the white phone. The bright orange handle belongs to my newest favorite tool. It's got a flexible shaft, and a very strong magnet at the end. My previous big job, changing the battery in my 2000 Saturn (pictured to the left), netted me some very expensive metric ratchets. One ratchet covers 8, 9, 10 and 12 mm bolts. And it came in handy for this job on the battery and the windshield washer reservoir. Very slick. I have an engineering degree. I would not have signed off on this design. These are spark plugs.



This is the passenger side of the engine. The thing with the robot arm is a spark plug wire. There are two on each side. So the other one on this side is behind, and difficult to spot. And they come directly out of the side of the engine. In fact, this 4 cylinder engine has the cylinders horizontal, facing away from each other. I'd call it a "flat four". It sounds good, but nobody seems to know if it's a real name or not.

It's hard to see in the picture, but the robot arm ends in this big black knob. If you pull on the knob, this long tube thing comes out of the engine. It's flexible and comes right out. It's maybe 6 or 7 inches long. No plug. Where's the spark plug? There's no room to put anything else into the hole.

That thing to the left marked "Subaru" is the air filter. To get at the plugs on this side, you have to remove the air filter. No problem. Two clips and it's off. Well, the cover is off. You remove the filter, which is brand new. Then you can see the two bolts that hold it down. I used a socket wrench and the 3/8" socket. Why it has an English bolt is pretty much beyond me. Most everything else is metric. Pop these two bolts out, and the whole air filter is out. Then you can get at the plugs, right?

So you put your 3/8" spark plug socket into the hole... where it disappears forever. You can't get your finger into the hole to get it out. So you run to the internet for instructions. You discover that you need some long needle nose pliers with a bend, you need a strong magnet on a stick, you need a 3" socket extender (have one), you need a 1 1/2" socket extender (never heard of one), you need a ratchet wrench that has a hinge by the head so it can flop around, and so on. The guys at the auto parts stores have never heard of a 1 1/2" socket extender. So you go to a dedicated tool store, and pick up a set of extenders, that happens to include one. It also has a 3". It turns out you need two 3" extenders and the 1 1/2" extender. The magnet on the flexible arm has the bright orange handle. Very cool. Dropped tools and bolts can be fished out without having to duck under the car, and without having to see where they fell. Even the heaviest of tools can be picked up off the driveway without bending over. The bright orange handle is hard to miss in the clutter of the engine. Amazing. I'll be using it again.

So, you fish out the socket. When it's most of the way into the hole, you add a 3" extender to it. You fish that most of the way into the hole and add the 1 1/2" extender. You fish that almost all the way into the hole and add your new flexible ratchet wrench. And you feel the socket latch onto something. You assume it's a spark plug, and unscrew it. It comes out. And you disassemble the train of extenders and stuff as you remove it. Use the nifty magnet to pull out a spark plug if you need to.

The driver's side plugs required that you first remove the battery and the windshield washer reservoir. The batter is two small corroded bolts on the hold down clamp, and each terminal had a bolt to remove. The plus (+) side has so much corrosion that you wonder why it still works. But there's a bolt a bit away that's easy to remove, and disconnects everything. And the windshiled washer reservoir comes off with two easy bolts. Don't have to disconnect the tubes and wires, just set it out of the way. Then the two spark plugs come out as before, only you use a second 3" extender instead of the 1 1/2". It has to do with how much room you have.

It may be hard to see, but there's a hammer, and a large pair of scissors. I used them both. The robot cover on the new spark plug wires was longer than the original, and needed to be cut. The hammer was needed for some chiseling near one of the battery terminals to see the nut that you don't need to remove. That's corrosion you're chiseling.

The car has 173,000 miles, and belongs to my wife. The plugs were not corroded. They were not fouled with oil. They were not covered in carbon. They were just worn down. Instead of a 0.045 gap, they had twice that. The center stub was nearly gone. Every evidence is that they'd never been changed before. The car was running rough, especially at highway speed, and now purrs like a kitten. Well, a kitten that can cruise at 70 MPH down the highway for hours.

My wife's mechanic quoted $383. $93 of that was plugs and wires. The plugs and wires i bought totaled $41. I also bought $10 of transmission fluid. So, we saved about $330. Or we would have, except that the plugs were very difficult to get to, and i end up buying $50 in tools. Now the mechanic's quote also included a fuel filter and a pcv valve, and of course, labor for all of the above. The car didn't turn out to need a fuel filter or pcv, so those expenses were not required.

It was roughly five hours of labor, including trips to stores, internet searches and such. It was 22 degrees out when i started, and 30 degrees when i finished. The weather was clear, except that as i finished, it started snowing. Was it worth it? I think it was. And not just for the sense of accomplishment. And not just for the savings. The savings were around $300. And for five hours of work, that's $60 per hour - tax free. But one of the things you don't get when you have the mechanic work on it is what the diagnosis was. It might have been the PCV or the fuel filter, and you'll never know. All you know is all this stuff got replaced, and it works now. You've no idea which part, if any, did it. It was, in fact, the 2nd spark plug. That's the one for cylinder number 3. And the plugs themselves don't show this. They're all very similar. So you'd want to replace them all at the same time, because this job would just come up for each of the others in turn real soon. And you replace the wires because you already bought them, and it was such a pain to get at them, you might as well do it. And, these wires have an active component. Right down there where they connect to the spark plug is a coil. That's right, a coil right on the spark plug wire. Never heard of such a thing. I'd be fascinated to learn what problem it solves.

How to stop procrastinating for tests??????

On Yahoo Answers (Y!A) the questioner asks for Real world, tried and true solutions please!!! My answer follows.

I was going to join the Entire World Procrastinator's Society (EWPS - pronounced "oops"), but haven't gotten around to it.

About studying and homework. Convince yourself that it's stuff you like, and it's exciting, and you can't wait to do it. Lie if you have to. Humans have amazing powers of self deception. After no time at all, you'll believe it. You can do this socially too. Get a bunch of your friends, as a running joke, or whatever, to talk about your classes and exams especially as being so much fun. Rowlings has some great ideas that she uses with Hermione in her books, if you need them.

I find that it's not the work, which i enjoy, but starting it that's painful. Once i get going, i don't want to stop. Part of that is fear of not finishing. So again, you can lie to yourself. In homework you can tell yourself that "I'll just do one problem". Or, "There's lots to study for this test, but just now, I'll tackle orbital mechanics in two dimensions". Then add scope (more stuff) as you get into it. Do one more thing.

A spoon full of sugar doesn't seem to work for me. It just makes me fatter. Julie Andrews is clearly responsible for the fattening of America, herself being so thin and all, could afford it. And i don't recall her taking any herself, now that i think of it. Evil, evil, evil.

What part of computer science is easiest?

Some of computer science is pure math. I took a masters level operating systems course from a prominent professor. He'd done some great theoretical work involving page replacement, and gained a great reputation. But it wasn't at all obvious that he'd ever written anything, much less an operating system. The course was a disaster. But my point is that there are many things that are sort of part of computer science that have little to do with computers, and you can make a living at the highest levels of computer science without knowing a heck of a lot about computers.

I'd say of the bits of computer science i've done for a living, like building computers from parts, hardware troubleshooting, programming, requirements gathering, estimating, software architecture, software maintenance, testing, documentation, systems administration, teaching, database administration, network administration, web server administration, posting web content, and software repository administration that building computers from parts is easiest. Software maintenance is probably hardest, especially if you didn't write it.

I'm often asked what i do for a living. I answer "something with computers". I get blank stares. I like to be understood, and don't care for blank stares. But sometimes, i get the followup question: "What, specifically, do you do?". And i answer "Something. Anything. I do whatever they want me to do." If they continue again, i spit out a dozen unrelated industry keywords and ask if they know what they mean. If the answer is "yes", then i say that i do those things. My motto seems to be that my job is so secret, not even i know what i'm doing.

Snow

I'm considerably less enamored with winter today than i was yesterday. But while i was out there shoveling, one of my neighbors down the street got stuck with her car inches from freedom. Her front wheels were caught in the hard packed snow that the plow had left at the end of her driveway. So despite having 90% of the car in the road, the car refused to go anywhere. She's a good deal older than i am, so i walked over, cleared out the snow behind both front wheels, and then another neighbor and i pushed the car into the street while she drove.

She was grateful, but i really hope she doesn't get me something for Christmas.

Me? I'm nearly 50. I hope to shovel snow for another 30 or 40 years. If i don't, i hope it's because Global Climate Change has made it moot. It's not that i'm rooting for it to get warmer. That's a disaster i seriously don't wish for. It's that the alternative explanation is that my health won't allow it. And i'd rather live to be a healthy old bastard who shovels his own snow, helping out the younger 70 year old women down the street as needed, thank you very much.

I got to listen to quite a few podcasts while waiting for the driveway and walk to become cleared. For example, a recent study showed that humor is contagious, out to the third degree of separation. IMO, that's much better than passing around the flu. And, i've managed to do better than usual in that regard this season, so far. That tidbit is from Scientific American. This is a show that doesn't insult my intelligence, always has something interesting to say, and does it with a bit of humor. And, it's free for download. What more could you possibly want?

My biggest problem wasn't a sore back or arms. It was 20 degrees F (-6 degrees C). My biggest problem was overheating. My feet were hot in my new boots and wool knee sox. My thighs were a bit chilly, because jeans aren't so hot after all, my head was warm with hat over hood. But i probably shouldn't have also had the sweater on. My solution was to take my gloves off. I didn't just do that for the picture. Nothing wrong with my circulation.

Less Filling

Went to the dentist first thing this morning and got a filling. As first appointment of the day, there was no waiting. My tongue is about the size of New Jersey now. When i need to do something, i now have to check if it can be done while having a tongue that big. I can type, apparently.

After he took the needle out, i said with enthusiasm, "I like needles!". Then i added that i just wanted to say something he hadn't heard before. He said he doesn't hear it often.

I probably should have had breakfast first. But i was in such a hurry to get there on time. Can't eat now. Hey - it's a new diet! Weight loss is guaranteed! Or is it wait loss?

I woke this morning with sore neck muscles. I was reminded of the Steve Wright line.

When I woke up this morning, my girl friend asked me, "Did you sleep well?" I said, "No. I made some mistakes."

Science Fair Projects

Got a science fair coming up? Need ideas? Try these sites:

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/

http://www.cool-science-projects.com/

http://school.discovery.com/sciencefaircentral/

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sciencefaircentral/

http://scienceclub.org/scifair.html

http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/category0.html

http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/projects/index.html

http://www.freesciencefairproject.com/

http://www.ipl.org/div/projectguide/

http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/resources/cf/SciProjIntro.html

http://www.picadome.fcps.net/lab/sci_fair/science_fair.htm

http://www.sciencebuddies.org

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/

http://www.sciencefair-projects.org/

http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/

http://www.scienceproject.com/

http://www.super-science-fair-projects.com/



This just in:

How to make a telescope!

What spider is this?

This spider is prowling my basement. Any ideas what it might be?

I don't have arachnophobia. These things eat other things that would otherwise bug me.

Darn - the image is clipped. Use your browser to "view image" to see more of it, like the whole quarter.



Best guess so far - a Dark Fishing Spider.

Spaced Out

This question was posted to the Astronomy and Space section of Yahoo! Answers. I've copied the question verbatim. There were several replies complaining about spelling and that it was the wrong category. Such a wasted opportunity for "Best Answer" of an easy question. Then, i've copied my reply, verbatim.

I juz need sum help!! sumone??

okaii so ive been wiv my bf for ova 2 yrs now nd hes been acting wired l8ly so i asked him wat was up i ended up geting out of him that he doesnt feel the same neymore hes realli confused bout it all i dunno nd he says he doesnt wanna brake up yet.. were giving this week end ago 2 c wat happends but im so confused i juz love him so much i dun wanna loose him plz advice sum1 plz!!

This is Astronomy and Space, so expect some weird, even hostile answers.

We'll approach this as an engineering problem. What are the requirements? Clearly, you want to attract and keep your boyfriend. There are three things you'll likely want to do.

First, you want to be good looking. An attractive appearance is a proxy for health. You want him to think that you are healthy. Cut to the chase - ask him to start exercising with you. It could be walking, biking, running, swimming, whatever. And it would get you both off your butts doing nothing. Just making out isn't going to firm up your relationship.

Second, you want to appear smart. To do that, you have to pass some good ideas by him. This is hard, so one way to do that is to ask lots of people for advice. Yahoo! Answers isn't bad for this. You'll have to decide what is good, however. And, as has been mentioned, you might want to invest some time in spelling and grammar. You may have great spelling and grammar and are just doing this for style. How would i know?

Third, you want to appear happy. It can be such a drag to be with someone who is cranky or demanding. Be happy and and avoid being a nag. Learn some jokes. More than half of all jokes fail miserably, so you need a bunch of them. Learn what kinds of jokes he likes. But if you become a nag, your relationship is destined to the death spiral. He'll withdraw, you'll want more, and nag more.

Best of luck, and clear skies.

Is it right time now to start to bicycle on the road?

No. It was time at least three decades ago.

When i lived in Boston, the bicycle was by far the fastest way to get around town. When i lived in Philadelphia, the bicycle was by far the fastest way to get around town. Philadelphia police had several officers patrol by bike. I would say it's quickest in Detroit, but Detroit has nowhere that i want to go.

But if you haven't started biking around town, it's a good time to start. If everyone biked or walked places, there would also be health benefits - reduced diabetes, heart disease, better sex lives, and so on.

(more Yahoo! Answers).

Yahoo Answers

I've been goofing around with Yahoo! Answers of late. This is a sort of general forum where people can ask questions, and other people can answer them. I already have a Yahoo! email account, so it was totally painless to start.

I've no idea why i started. It's not like Yahoo! Answers is new. Nor is that i'd never heard of it before.

There's a section under Science and Math called Astronomy and Space. I do astronomy. Some of the questions looked easy. For example, every few minutes, someone asks if the world is going to end in 2012. The Mayan calendar flips over then - sort of like we did going from 1999 to 2000. Did we survive? There are no Mayans left to flip the calendar over. And someone has been saying that there is a planet out there, Planet X, that is going to strike the Earth in 2012. (We'd have seen it by now.) There's some other nonsense too. After typing in my answer for this a half dozen times, i started a file for frequently asked questions. Someone even asked people not to ask this question. That held the flow back for... less than 20 minutes.

When you ask a question, Yahoo! Answers generates links to similar questions. It's hard to imagine that you wouldn't notice that your exact question was already asked - and has answers - well before you get through the asking process. These people just want to ask for whatever reason. They aren't going to be deterred.

So, one day, i ran out of questions i could answer. It's not that somehow the river ran dry. It's just that Yahoo! doesn't let people answer an infinite number of questions. Once you start answering questions and they get picked or voted as the best, then Yahoo! Answers lets you answer more per day.

So what kinds of questions do i ask? Well, there are two kinds. First, i ask questions for which i think there isn't an answer. Second, i ask questions that will evoke some humor. Third, i ask questions for which i already know the answers. Despite these strategies, i've managed to learn something. Highly unexpected, but welcome.

Here's an example question - though i posted it under mathematics.

Why is the line at the bank that i pick always the longest?

There are five lines at the bank. They're more or less the same length. I do my best to pick the shortest one. I note who is at the end of each of the other lines. All four are served before i am. Should i apologize to the people in front of me for picking their line - thus slowing their service?

I'm hoping it's funny because it's common experience. After all, you only have a 20% chance of picking the fastest lane, so most of the time at least one other line is faster. You feel that despite your best efforts, there is no justice in the Universe - someone got ahead of you that shouldn't have. Everyone feels like that. But i've added another twist. The other four end-of-line people get served first. Is that fair? Am i such an intrinsically unlucky person that i should apologize to the rest of my line for slowing them down?

Of course the four other end of line people really were in front of you. They should be served before you. It's the people behind them that are in any way behind you. So, the answer is "no". The Universe works the way it should up to this point.

Yahoo! Answers are nearly a complete waste of time. It's the blind following the blind. Neither the questioners nor the answerers have much in the way of a clue what they're saying. And i'm not just talking about the ones who can't type. Is the best answer from the novices any good?

And what if you really know what you're talking about? What good does it do to say that the Earth won't be destroyed? The only help you can give seems to be when the student has copied the question verbatim from their homework. (I've asked people to tell me where they're going to school - but no responses yet.) And if you know the answer and bother to give it, aren't you bursting with pride?

Perhaps the right thing to do is to write a Yahoo! Answers bot. This bot will have the answers to a bunch of questions, and when one of them gets posted, it will spit out the canned answer. The trick here is to recognize that the question matches an answer. Step two would be to let the bot scan all the questions and answers, figure out what the best answers were, and feed those as canned answers in the future. It might be fun.

Just three more days to answer my question on Yahoo! Answers. Feel free to copy and paste from this blog entry.

New car

In 1986, i was working for Harvard University. I took the subway (the T) to work.

One night, i had a dream. I dreamed that instead of taking the T home, i got on a bus instead. There's a bus station right there at Harvard Station. No purpose in mind, just a whim. And instead of going South, i went North up Massachusetts Ave. The bus made many stops and people got on and off as one might expect. At one of these stops, i got off. Again, no purpose in mind, just a whim.

I walked further North down the sidewalk. There were lots of businesses on both sides of the street, but nothing of interest. This didn't bother me.

Then i came across a Chevy dealership. For no apparent reason, i walked into the showroom. A salesman walked up to me and asked me if he could help. I said, "No, i'm just looking around." He dangled some keys and asked me if i wanted to test drive a corvette. "It's free", he said. I said, "Sure", and drove the bright red car around the block and back to the showroom.

I got out, and he said, "I can let you have this car for no money down." I thought "no way", but signed the papers on a whim.

The drive home included a really fun bit on the Jamaica Way. It has all these small hills and turns. All dreams should be this much fun. The trip ends coming down my street. There's a parking spot that's very close to my house, and just after a driveway, so it's a smooth shot to park.

The car comes to a stop. I pulled out the key and looked forward. Right there is my 1978 Dodge Omni. I think, "That's right. I already have a car!".

That's when i woke up. No alarm. It was daylight. My bedroom was on the first floor, facing the front of the house. I got up and looked out the window. My Omni was exactly where it was in the dream. And behind the Omni was an empty parking space. It was a very vivid dream. I had the distinct notion that my brand new corvette had been stolen.

Birthday Gift

I bought a camera to give my wife for her birthday. It's a fairly low end digital camera. That's now an 8 mega pixel camera that can do 30 frames per second 640x480 video with sound. Wait a minute - 640x480 is better than TV (NTSC). Our son plays violin and piano, and the old camera can do video, but without sound. Our camcorder works, and has excellent optics, but is ten years old or so, and therefore is analog. I can't just send a clip to my friends and family by email. With a small, 1 GB SD card, the new camera can record approximately 13 minutes of highest frame rate, highest resolution video. That's more than the couple tunes our son usually plays. I can always get a bigger card. In fact, i own a 16 GB card that is in use in another device.

Well, i picked up a Fuji at the Grocery store. They didn't have the model i was looking for, but i figured i could return it if i didn't like it. Well, it's impossible to know if you're going to like it, because the box doesn't say everything you need to know. It turns out you need to install a driver to get it to work. The CD is supposed to have drivers for Windows or the Mac. But i run Linux, so this is a non-starter. Worse, the CD didn't come in the box. WTF? And, there was a note in the box that has the Fuji tech support phone number, and a hand scrawled note that said that the pictures from this camera were fuzzy. That's right, this camera had already been returned by someone as defective, and was being sold as new, though obviously, it wasn't refurbished or anything - they'd have noticed that there was no CD, and that there was this hand scrawled note. There were also a few pictures of some guy's family on the camera. I couldn't check them out on my larger computer screen because of the driver issue.

So, i brought the camera back, but apparently, the receipt was not in the bag. When i buy tech items, i always leave the receipt in the bag, just for this sort of thing. Apparently, i didn't buy it via a credit card - but rather my debit card (which is a Visa, BTW). They couldn't find the record of my purchase on their computer, and would not accept it without a receipt. I went back home. The receipt turned up on my kitchen table. Why was it there? Oh. I always put my grocery store receipts there. That way, when i'm unpacking groceries, i can check to see that i got everything i wanted, and can check that the prices were what i'd expected. So my habits conflicted - buying tech, and buying at the grocery store.

So, i did some research on line to see if i could find a camera that doesn't need a driver. I just want something that plugs into USB and mounts like a hard disk. No big deal. Nothing. Not a single ad, not a single review, nothing mentioned this critical issue. Not one product talked about compatibility with Linux. By the way, having to have the CD to install a driver is a pain for everyone, not just Linux users. Let's say you're at a friend's house and take some pictures. They say, "hey, could you send me a couple of those?" You say, "can't i just plug it into your computer and give them to you now?" If you have to install a driver, the answer is "no, you can't". Not unless you bring the CD with you. So, i'd avoid Fuji and Kodak at the moment, without regard to what computer and OS you use.

Well, my old camera is a Samsung. It still works. I like it. It just doesn't do sound with it's videos. It can store over 300 pictures on it's quarter gig SD card. So, i looked up Samsung cameras, found a cheap one, and ordered it. It's a Samsung 860. I'm happy to report that it does not require a driver, and just mounts like a disk drive. The camera is nice. It's very small - fits in my shirt pocket. It has two misfeatures. It does not have a look-through view finder like my old one. You must use the view screen. The view screen is hard to see in bright daylight. Also, it doesn't have a case. My old camera has both.

There's a third misfeature. Well, you might call it a misfeature. You see, it's so nice, that i want it for myself. My wife has lost two cameras already. I don't really want to give it to her. Yes, i picked it because it is cheap enough that i won't cry if it's gone, but it is really nice. And i also don't want to give her my old one. So, i'm going to have to buy a second one.

A funny story. I ordered a 1 GB SD card with the camera so i'd be all set when it arrived. The SD card arrived several days before the camera. I checked it out - it works fine. Only, by the time the camera arrived, the SD card was lost. I haven't found it yet. So, while at work, and on lunch break, i went to Best Buy, paid just over twice as much for another 1 GB SD card. But when i got home, and wanted to put it in the camera, i couldn't find it! I checked the likely places at the house - i hadn't been home long, and it didn't show up. I couldn't remember bringing it home, so i went back to the office and checked my desk. Nothing. The next day i was out at Walmart, and bought a third 1 GB SD card. I nearly lost it, but did manage to get it into the camera. Well, a week later, the second SD card showed up. It was in the refrigerator. I had gone out to lunch unexpectedly, and still had my bag lunch at the office. So i put the new SD card in my lunch bag so i wouldn't forget to bring it home. When i got home, i put my lunch into the fridge. Next up was a week a vacation. It didn't appear again until i was cleaning the fridge of old science projects. Maybe i like my chips cold. That's it. That's my story and i'm sticking to it.

Tor: Orphans of Chaos

I just I just finished the book, Orphans of Chaos, written by John Wright, and distributed by Tor books. Tor has this deal where they give out a free book every week. You can sign up for their mailing list. Each week, they send you a link to the new book. They have PDF, html, and moby formats. I read the book on my n800 pocket computer, using FBReader. This application reads html and moby formats. Evince reads PDF. FBReader with moby seems to be the best. The moby format comes from the Palm pilot. It's all one file, and supports styled text and embedded images.

So Tor.com is't just giving these books out from the goodness of their hearts. This book is no exception. The idea seems to be to hook you on the book, the author, or both. In the case of Orphans of Chaos, it ends with End of Part OneTo Be Continued in Part Two, FUGITIVES of Chaos, From John C. Wright, Available now in hardcover!.

Without any real spoilers, here are some notes. If you start reading this, and it seeems boring, note that the book starts pretty slow. It starts to pick up speed at around 20%. I don't have page numbers to give you, due to the electronic nature of the books. At the 50% mark, it's moving pretty fast. And, it ends with the above cliff hanger.

I liked the author's style, once he got going. It should be a good series.

One of the other books in my queue from Tor is Old Man's War. I have seen this book at Borders.

I also finished Interplanetary Hunter by Arthur K. Barnes. This is a light and fun little Scifi book, seemingly wriitten in the 1950's. At least, if it was written back then, it could be considered hard science fiction. But it doesn't take itself too seriously, so any science errors can be easily forgiven. For example, we know a bit more about Venus since then. I found it highly enjoyable. And, it's a great book all on it's own.

Delusional

In the masthead of this blog, there is a dictionary definition of delusional. And, i claim not to be there. At least not yet. Predelusional, whereever it it headed, is not delusional. Being delusional is having a false persistent belief or opinion not substantiated by sensory or objective evidence. This sounds like something else, though. It sounds like faith. Faith is belief in something without proof or evidence. Being delusional is having faith. Having faith is being delusional. If being predelusional is not delusional, then being predelusional is being faithless. There's something to be proud of.

"We must have faith", said Spock. He could have said, "We must have delusions." If they're really the same, then delusions can't be bad while faith is a good thing. Does it matter what your faith is in? Does it matter what your delusions are? It shouldn't.

OK, so let's say you are going to start a big project. If you don't think you'll finish the project, it is foolish to start it. What if you don't know? Then what do you do? You have faith that you'll finish it. Lie to yourself, if needed. Create the delusion. Delusions are good.

Perhaps life is a journey, and though i'm not delusaional, i expect to get there eventually. The road to salvation is narrow, as the razor's edge.