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Sun, 27 Feb 2005

motorcycle diary

It was really nice out here today, if a little cool (bright, sunny, 60ish), so I went and hit Lime Creek Road (perhaps the most awesome stretch of motorcycling road on the face of the earth, or at least in Texas) on Rosalyn, and DAMN was it a blast.

The disposition of my motorcycle ownership has seen some changes recently. First, Rosalyn got a new Termignoni full race exhaust and an STM slipper clutch (funny, STM doesn't seem to have a website; I suppose that's not surprising, considering it's a tiny little shop in Torino, Italy where they make clutches by hand). The difference in performance (not to mention sound!) with the new exhaust system is nothing short of incredible, and the new clutch makes her shift like a dream.

Simultaneously, I reexamined my overall vehicle situation and discovered two things:

  1. I have too many vehicles.
  2. There's no way I'd choose to ride Layla over Rosalyn.

As a result, I decided a while ago that I would sell Layla if the opportunity arose. A couple weeks ago, said opportunity did arise: a guy contacted me saying he was looking for a black ZX-10R (they stopped making the black ones in 2005, dumb bastards). Mine was fucking trick (damper, stainless brake lines, -1 countershaft sprocket, double-bubble windshield, speedo healer, exhaust, swingarm and frame sliders... the works), so we both walked away happy: he with a hot motorcycle, me with my asking price. Hooray for free enterprise.

Maybe I'll ride Valentina to Elysium tonight...


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Thu, 24 Feb 2005

some look-and-feel updates

My blog started annoying me because the load time was getting too long, so I cut down the default number of posts displayed to 25. Then, so that it was easy to get to older stuff, I had to add the index links you now see off to the left. These are generated by a slightly modified version of the flatarchives plugin.

The other thing I did was hack the writeback plugin slightly so that it put an extra little piece of encouragement in the writeback link for stories with no associated comments. It's so simple, it's a wonder there's an entirely separate plugin to do this in the blosxom plugin registry.

Has anyone implemented some sort of authimage thing for blosxom yet, or am I going to have to do this at some later date?


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Wed, 23 Feb 2005

ghetto fabulous

Today Tim's car had a flat, so he asked me to give him a ride over to the tire place to pick up his car. On the way, we spotted perhaps the most ghetto thing ever: a golf cart with motherfucking spinners. Behold:



Thanks to Tim for taking the pictures while I drove. Also, thanks to whomever owns the golf cart for not spending as much on the rest of the cart as he did on the wheels; otherwise, we might never have seen it riding down the road on the back of a flatbed.


This is the kind of event that makes me glad I carry my camera with me at all times.

By the way, there are some new pictures available.


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fruit of last weekend's labor

Last weekend I had some spare time while I was doing laundry, so I decided that it was time to set down a board layout for the single-digit Nixie clock I made a long time ago. I didn't have any more B-5853 tubes, but I do have a large number of B-5440s, which are even better for this purpose because they have stiff legs. I even found this nifty little page, the soculator, that will generate an Eagle script given some tube parameters. Hawt!

I was pretty anal about this layout, and I actually put the switches and transformer directly on the board. I ended up making a few Eagle library parts in the process, but it was a good refresher in using Eagle (though I suspect that these days the Orcad interface might be more intuitive, given that I'm using Cadence, which is made by the same company). Other than the Nixie and the 74141, I believe all the parts are available from Digi-Key. I love Digi-Key...

By the way, gerbv is a hot little program. It'll do cool things like superimpose several Gerber files, and it allows you to turn individual layers on and off. You can also control how it superimposes layers (e.g., xor, or, and, invert), which would probably make for some interesting pictures given the right Gerber file. It can also export PNG files, the result of which you see on the right.

Another incredibly hot utility is gbtiler, which lets you take one or more Gerber files and tile it, thereby putting several copies of the same (or even several different) layout(s) in the same Gerber file. Since Advanced Circuits allows 66 square inches (used to be 88; I'm not sure when it changed) for $33, you may as well take full advantage, right? Technically, they don't want you doing this, but I just put through an order for four of these guys tiled up and they didn't bitch too much. You just have to explain that you need several on the same PCB for an "experimental apparatus" or some such nonsense. Hehe.

I can't wait for everything to get here...


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another reason fvwm2 rules

I'm a devout fvwm2 user. My desktop is ugly and plain, but it's completely useable.

For example (from my .fvwm2rc): 

# shift- to move a few pixels
Key   Left   A   S   CursorMove -1 +0
Key   Right  A   S   CursorMove +1 +0
Key   Up     A   S   CursorMove +0 -1
Key   Down   A   S   CursorMove +0 +1

# shift-meta- to move 1/4 page
Key   Left   A   SM  Scroll -5 +0
Key   Right  A   SM  Scroll +5 +0
Key   Up     A   SM  Scroll +0 -5
Key   Down   A   SM  Scroll +0 +5

# shift-control- to move a full page
Key   Left   A   SC  Scroll -50 +0
Key   Right  A   SC  Scroll +50 +0
Key   Up     A   SC  Scroll +0  -100
Key   Down   A   SC  Scroll +0  +100

So I can hit shift-<up|down|left|right> to move my cursor around the screen, thereby shifting focus (sloppy focus goes without saying, and anyone who doesn't like it needs a trip to the Ministry of Love). I can do basically everything without taking my hands off the home row—no time wasted moving my hand to the mouse. (Note that the reason that ctrl-shift-<left|right> only moves 50% in the x-direction is because I have a double-wide screen thanks to my dual-headed setup. A virtual screen fills both of them, but by moving over 50% I can straddle two adjacent ones.)

I think fvwm2's slogan should be something like

fvwm2: finally GUIs don't suck


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Tue, 22 Feb 2005

homeless fireman

Like George, I've now had the experience of starting a large fire on my stove (my experience ended with a pan cover and a wet towel, however). Fortunately, I was able to continue my cooking unhindered. It's interesting to note that my smoke alarm is nothing more than a very loud particulate-activated beeping device; no one beyond earshot is alerted to its state. Is that a good thing?

Speaking of my apartment, I am apparently "in danger of being evicted" because one of my fucking neighbors keeps complaining about the volume of my stereo (what "in danger" constitutes is unclear... I have a feeling it just means "we are now giving you a warning"). What pisses me off is not that there's some danger of eviction, but that if I hadn't gone into the office to retrieve a package today, I would never have known about any of this. I checked my lease agreement, and my landlord is required to notify me of complaints from my neighbors. Guess I'll just have to turn off my subwoofer until I move out...


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OSX Exposéd

I finally got around to, ahem, obtaining a copy of Panther, and I installed it on dagny (did I mention that I decided to rename the GettoBook dagny-taggart?) last night. Seems pretty cool; most things appear not to have broken too badly, with the notable exception of XDarwin, but that's nothing a little dedicated poking can't fix. Having been looking forward to it for a while now, Exposé still managed to impress. Man, it's too damn sexy. I just wish I could run it on an x86 instead...


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Mon, 21 Feb 2005

Beck-tacular!

There's a new Beck album, Guero, coming out on March 29th. Moreover, it's being released not only on CD, but on vinyl. Holy SHIT.

In addition to that, he's already come out with a new single and a new EP this year, all based on tracks on the forthcoming album. Because I drink way too much Diet Mountain Dew, I've already gotten all of it for free from the iTunes music store:

These tracks all rule, but my two favories are the first and last from GameBoy variations.

As an aside: Apple has made it increasingly difficult to break these damn songs out of m4p format. I'm glad I got these for free or I might be annoyed at the inconvenience.


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Sun, 20 Feb 2005

movies movies movies

I went and saw Constantine yesterday, and it was actually somewhat better than I expected! Who would have thought that cancerous exorcists made good superheroes? Also, I want one of his crucifix-flame-shotguns.

Almost as exciting as the movie itself were the trailers that preceded it: the Ring 2, Sin City, and Batman Begins are all coming out in the not-too-distant future. I am like crapping my pants in anticipation!

OK, well, since I have off from work tomorrow (yeah, OK, I'll probably work anyway...), I'm gonna party like a rockstar tonight. Gotta go get ready...


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Fri, 18 Feb 2005

I... am... job.

Goddamn I've been working a lot. I've been at work past 9:30p every day this week. We're now in emergency-get-this-motherfucker-taped-out mode. In fact, we got an email from the division manager saying that they need everyone to push hard, and that they understand that this is a burden, so any time we work late, feel free to expense meals.

Mike's response: "sweet! The ProSLIC team just got a raise!" I'm just glad that digital is the critical tapeout path.

Amazingly, working late didn't stop me from going out to a couple bars last night, which in turn led to meeting some new people, which led to dinner plans for next weekend. Sweet!


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Wed, 16 Feb 2005

an anti-policy move

Normally I don't touch "satisfaction surveys" with a ten-foot pole, but when I saw a SPAM from Dell asking me to rate my satisfaction (which reminds me... how in the fuck did they get my email address when I explicitly refused to give it each and every time they asked for it?), I couldn't resist. Highlights from the survey:

If Dell failed to keep any commitments made to you, please explain what happened:
I explicitly informed the technician that I had changed my address, and that the computer should be shipped to the new address. This was at least somewhat understood, since the RMA box arrived at my new address in Texas. Unfortunately, upon completion of service, the computer was shipped to my old address—in Massachusetts. I spent a total of five hours on the phone with Dell and DHL straightening things out. The majority of that time was with Dell, not DHL, and I found that while DHL's agents where knowledgeable and helpful, Dell's were unable to communicate effectively, did not know what to do, and were completely unhelpful. This experience has convinced me that I will never buy another computer from Dell again. Sure, the price is right, but that savings of a couple hundred bucks is more than made up for in the abysmal technical support and customer service.
What does Dell Technical Support currently do well, and what can be improved?
I can only assume that the first half of that sentence is intended as a joke. As to the second part: bring your call centers back to the US, for the love of God.


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Tue, 15 Feb 2005

hey-la, hey-la...

...my laptop's back. Perhaps Handel would be more appropriate than Feldman, Goldstein, and Gottehrer [1], but you get the point.

Turns out that they decided to go all-out; in addition to the aforementioned replacements (mobo, cpu, heatsink, fan), I also got a new keyboard out of the deal, this one with a working stick-pointer-device-thingie (a.k.a. "clitoris"). HAWT.

[1]Robert Feldman, Gerald Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer wrote the words and music to The Angels's My Boyfriend's Back. No, I didn't know that off the top of my head, I just work that hard for you, dear reader.


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Fri, 11 Feb 2005

instant karma

I think that I've now been repaid for my angry rampage against poor "Kim." That, or Dell's incompetence is some unbounded function of a random variable.

I sent back my laptop. The technician called me yesterday to tell me that he was replacing the motherboard, CPU, heatsink, and fan—basically, everything but the keyboard, display, and case. They send it out yesterday, it's supposed to get here today, everything is happy.

They sent it to Boston.

I just spent an hour and a half on the phone straightening things out. Hopefully I'll see my laptop again some day. I'm just glad that I didn't send them the hard drive.


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did I ever tell you...

...about the time I had three stars? Y'all can decide for yourselves whether this is a true story or not.

I was out riding Layla with a couple buddies last Labor Day weekend along FM 1431 from Lago Vista to Marble Falls. It was around noon, and we were doing about 110 or thereabouts when we blew by a police officer going in the opposite direction.

I don't know why I decided to do it, but as soon as I'd done it I couldn't go back: hammering the throttle to the stop, I took a few miles of 1431's wide sweepers at 150+ MPH, all the while looking for a side road onto which to turn and hide. After putting some distance between me and the po-po, I dropped off onto a little twisty side road, got out of sight, and dismounted. About a minute later, I saw the cop blast by, siren blaring, and decided that the best thing would be to lay low for a while.

Remember, this was Labor Day weekend, which means that the cops were out in full force already. Moreover, 1431 is close enough to Lake Travis that there was a roving police chopper aloft. Noting that, although I was well hidden from the road, my bike was quite conspicuous from the air, I hid it and myself under a small stand of trees and tall weeds, took off my riding gear, and hunkered down for a while.

The buddies of mine who had been riding with me weren't so, ahem, decisive as I, and had pulled over immediately upon seeing the trooper's lights. Not able to be in two places at once, however, Mr. Trooper had left them unmolested on the shoulder of 1431 as he gave me chase. Now they were calling my cell phone, leaving messages warning that "the cops are pissed and looking for you; get off the road and stay off for a few hours!" Of course, I'd already planned on doing this, but having confirmed that I'd be laying around for a while, I decided it was best to take a nap.

When I woke up about an hour later, I decided I was sick of having three stars (remember, there were choppers involved...), so I called another buddy of mine (who owed me something of a favor, considering that I'd found him and called for assistance after he supermanned off the outside shoulder of Lime Creek Road while taking its nastiest turn and ended up hidden from the view of the road with a pelvis fractured in three places) and had him bring me a change of helmet and jacket. (He happens to live not far from where I was, so it wasn't a terrible inconvenience for him.)

Having new clothes (and thus down to only one star), I pulled my bike out of the ditch, hopped on, and cautiously followed him back to his place, where I returned his gear and recovered my own.

I didn't ride Layla again for a couple weeks. You know, just in case.


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ugliest... code... ever.

Or, at least, close. I have a feeling that my bash coding is going to get uglier now that I've started regularly using array variables. 

for i in *; do IFS='%'; DATA=($(id3v2 -l "$i" | perl -e \
  'chomp(@foo=<STDIN>); $outstr = 
  int(${[split(/: /,${[grep(/^TRK/,@foo)]}[0],2)]}[1]). "%". 
  ${[split(/: /,${[grep(/^TT2/,@foo)]}[0],2)]}[1]. "%". 
  ${[split(/: /,${[grep(/^TP1/,@foo)]}[0],2)]}[1]; 
  $outstr =~ s/\//-/g; print $outstr."\n"')); \
  mv -i "$i" \
  $(printf "%2.2d" ${DATA[0]})"-""${DATA[1]}""-""${DATA[2]}".mp3; done;

Yes, Jim; at the point where I'm invoking perl, I may as well just have it do everything. Whatever. This is the product of my evolutionary style of commandline coding, not some (clearly aesthetically inferior) process of careful design.


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Mon, 07 Feb 2005

fucking tech support

It seems like everyone's bitching about tech support, so I figured I'd join in the fray.

My laptop has, for the third time, decided that it wants a new motherboard. That is, it refuses to power up, instead flashing its Caps Lock light at me. "Call Dell," it's telling me. So I did.

"Thank you for calling Dell technical support, my name is Kim, how may I help you?" a voice answers. Fuck you, I think, with that accent there's no way in hell your name is Kim; it's fucking Vishnu or something. I politely give her my name, then read off the "express service code" (express my ass) and service tag number (what's the point of having two separate numbers, anyway?) from the back of my laptop. That's when things start to go downhill.

"Riad, can I please get your email address?" No thank you, I tell her, I'd rather not receive emails from Dell. She starts to protest that they won't give out my address, that I'd only receive customer catalogues and other information of interest to Dell customers, and I explain—just as patiently, for now—that information of interest to Dell customers is of no interest to me. She insists, telling me that the information they would send me via email was necessary for a happy life or some such bullshit. Honestly, I'm not exactly sure what reason she was giving the second time around, because I interrupted her halfway through, saying "ma'am, I am not going to give you my email address. I do not wish to receive any email from Dell regarding anything at all, period. If you insist that I give you an email address in order to continue this call, I'll give you a fake one. I don't have time to waste arguing about this with you; let's proceed directly to my technical issue." She gave up.

I explained what was going on, noting that this had happened several times before, and that each time I'd gone through the same debug process, only to arrive at the conclusion that I needed a new motherboard. As I expected, she launched straight into the boilerplate debug process as if I hadn't said a thing. I played along, and we reached the conclusion that yes, my Caps Lock light was flashing. Her next approach was new: "you said this has happened before; has the memory been tested?" Wow, she's more clever than the last few tech support people I've spoken with, but no cigar this time, "Kim." Between the first and second motherboard failures, I completely replaced the memory, upgrading from two 128 MB DIMMs to two 512 MB DIMMs. I explained that the last time I experienced this failure, I swapped back in the old memory and still got the same behavior. This, I thought, will surely put this line of questioning to bed. I was wrong. "Kim" kept at it, saying "let's try removing the new—"

"Kim, I've already explained to you that I've ruled out memory issues, and I've explained the process by which I ruled them out. The computer fails to behave whether I have one or two of the new DIMMs, one or two of the old DIMMs, or no memory at all. It is most emphatically not caused by the memory, nor is it caused by any other device installed in the system. We can remove the hard drive and the PCMCIA cards as well; it'll do the same thing. I assure you, the only course of action that will result in a working computer is a motherboard replacement. Let's skip this futile debugging effort; just issue me an RMA number and stop wasting my time."

It worked! By some miracle, "Kim" skipped the remainder of the debugging charade and just issued me a return! By God, being a prick got me somewhere!

I think I managed to shock "Kim" when, just before hanging up, I thanked her for her quick help and wished her a great day. She kind of choked, then returned the greeting and cut the line.

Look, I realize it's not her fault, but frankly I don't care. Whether she's the motivation or just a cog in the machine, she's a waste of my time, and that's a good enough reason for me.


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Fri, 04 Feb 2005

I am your nerd-God; you shall have no false idols before me

Issel offered up a nerd quiz on her blog. According to this quiz, I am a nerd GOD.

I am nerdier than 96% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

Then again, given my previous entry, y'all knew this already.


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when I think apt-get synaptics, I touch(pad) myself

Gentlemen... BEHOLD! 

[root@kung-foo /home/kwantam]# apt-get install xfree86-driver-synaptics
(foo foo foo)
[root@kung-foo /home/kwantam]# more /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
(foo foo foo)
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics TouchPad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "CorePointer"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "LeftEdge"              "1700"
        Option          "RightEdge"             "5300"
        Option          "TopEdge"               "1700"
        Option          "BottomEdge"            "4200"
        Option          "FingerLow"             "25"
        Option          "FingerHigh"            "30"
        Option          "MaxTapTime"            "180"
        Option          "MaxTapMove"            "220"
        Option          "VertScrollDelta"       "100"
        Option          "MinSpeed"              "0.06"
        Option          "MaxSpeed"              "0.12"
        Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.0010"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
EndSection
(foo foo foo)

Now I can use the far right side of kung-foo's touchpad as a scroll wheel.


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Thu, 03 Feb 2005

problem-solving

Mike and I decided that we weren't going to waste our time with part 2 of Monday's design review, scheduled for this afternoon. Thus, we both brought laptops to the meeting and proceeded to do work and ignore the review except when interrupted by the one or two nuggets of relevant information.

Unfortunately, the conference room in which we were having the meeting only had one conveniently-located network jack; fortunately, both of us had wireless network cards. Thus: 

[root@kung-foo ~]# cat /root/adhoc-route.sh 
#!/bin/bash

if [ $1"x" = "x" ]; then
        OUTIFACE="eth0"
else
        OUTIFACE=$1
fi

iwconfig eth1 essid "kung-foo"
iwconfig eth1 mode ad-hoc
iwconfig eth1 channel 3
iwconfig eth1 rate 11M
ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

modprobe iptable_nat
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -s 192.168.1.0/24 -A POSTROUTING -o $OUTIFACE -j MASQUERADE
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
/etc/init.d/dhcp3-server start

I can specify a different outgoing interface so that I can, for example, route through ppp0 when I'm connected to my cellphone.

Note that this entry was written while in the design review. I should blog from meetings more often...


[ permalink | 1 comment ]

Wed, 02 Feb 2005

elevator music

Here at work they just installed a new transparent HTTP proxy that does virus scanning and filtering. I dislike it for two reasons: first, it's slow, since all the HTTP traffic in the company has to go through it, and second, you have to authenticate to it. I'm not willing to send my password over the network in cleartext, so I, well, don't. Instead, I'm back to doing what I did for years at Analog Devices: I ssh (fortunately, I don't have to tunnel through a proxy to do so; I can just ssh directly anywhere I like) to graviton (yes, the machine in Random), where I have squid set up as a proxy, and I forward a local port to the squid proxy port on graviton. My browsing is faster and more secure than everyone else's, and I don't have to be subjected to occasional "this site is being scanned" tripe.

I've once again gotten into is bittorrenting lots of stuff at home. This makes positron slightly too unresponsive (due to an easily-saturated uplink; fuckin' SBC...) to stream MP3s, which is how I'd been handling my need for a constant audio barrage at work (delivered via my supremely sexy Bose TriPort headphones). Fortunately, I've rediscovered (yet again!) Digitally Imported, a web radio station that broadcasts several streams of (IMHO) good trance—the perfect music to work to, at least if you're me (I listened to di a whole lot while writing my thesis, which cemented my association of trance music with productivity). di's free stream is only 96 kbit; you can pay to get up to 160 kbit, and I used to be a Platinum subscriber, but frankly the difference in quality isn't so noticeable when it's only background music. Nevertheless, I might renew my subscription just to support the service.

See? People are willing to pay for web radio if it doesn't suck.


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