Category Archives: Entertainment

SC11: A Review in Schwag

Posted on 2011-12-04 by pappp


This is the less serious bit of review from SC’11, but there is fun to be had and a certain amount to be learned from the pile of schwag that comes back. The schwag pile is comparable to last year’s, but I was actively aimed toward useful or at least interesting junk this year, since I have > three cubic feet of this crap packed away now. Part of the point of this post is just to give credit (and links) to places that gave me cool stuff.

I find I actually use the various random bags I get, so I always end up with quite a few. Several were particularly nice: For the second year in a row, I would actually USE the conference bag (Back left corner) on it’s own, and I got another one of the ridiculously tough Tyan/Intel bags (far back, standing) which are handy for groceries and toting stuff around campus. Indiana University had a nifty little sling bag that I could contrive uses for (next to conference bag), and the giant blue CSC bag can consolidate a remarkably large pile of crap.

With regard to apparel, Silicon Mechanics again had the nice florescent green on black logo tee that I wear all the time, although this year’s has some text on the back that makes it a little less cool. We hung out for a while talking to the Pogo Linux folks and were handed a pile of their shirts (logo on front, gold circle around Tux on back, back visible in picture), which are pretty nice. The Adaptive Computing/MOAB “Lifes a Batch” shirt is clever in the same way the Platform Computing “Whatever” shirt from a few years ago – I don’t know that it will get worn much, but it’s a memorable marketing effort (and, by the way, Moab has become really impressive – it can do PVM type tricks that PVM can’t, and look good doing it). NIMS (I’m slightly embarrassed to say I don’t remember which relevant organization with that acronym it was) had nice Beanies which may see some use this winter. I have some fuschia compact umbrellas from the conference daily giveaway (I think IBM payed for/logo’d them) to be given as gifts – we brought back one or two each… plus a box of a dozen after they stuck the remainders out.

Going through the gallery of other neat stuff in order of a appearance:

  • Huge props to Samtec. I don’t recall seeing them at SC in previous years, but as an interconnect hardware vendor, it’s an entirely reasonable place for them to be. In addition to the fairly nice hat/pen/screwdriver schwag items and interesting to chat with booth staff, they were giving out trays of sample parts. I picked up the “Sample Solution” and “Rugged Power” kits, since those are the kinds of connector I use most, but the adviser picked up a full set to keep on file for helping students doing projects pick parts. Looking through them I wish I had picked up one of the R/F component boxes, because it had a gorgeous assortment of $Random_antenna_connector to SMC pigtails in it. I think I’ll be preferentially ordering/recommending connectors from them for a while.
  • Penguin Computing was dispensing nice umbrellas in addition to their standard “Sit through our talk for a 6″ Stuffed penguin” routine. I talked management tools with a rep for a while, but didn’t attend the talk this year.
  • Several places had nice small papergoods. I consume little notebooks and packs of post-its and tape flags pretty regularly, and can’t remember the last time I paid for them.
  • Isilon had a nice little screwdriver pod thing. There can never be enough multitools.
  • HP was handing out a … dorky green thing. It’s cute, and charming, and its belly is a lint-free screen cleaner, but I can’t figure out what the hell it is (alligator?). I think the confusing object is representative of their confusing business decisions of late – they had a carnival tricks theme going in their booth which also fits circus grade management.
  • AMAX and Extreme Networks gave me flash drives, in addition to the proceedings drive (which is 2Gb and looks like a Kingston like the last two years, but the USBID says knockoff). Apparenlty I missed some even nicer flash drives from other places that group mates found. Flash drives are always useful and appreciated.
  • The NNSA ASC booth was shoveling Flexible USB Lights out of their booth the last day, and I took a couple. I’m not sure what I’d use them for, but they appear to be identical to this $10 thing at Thinkgeek, so there’s that.
  • The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center booth was not very well staffed, but they had their usual reusable chemical hand warmers, which is a great gimmick.

The “trick-or-treating for grownups” vibe of going schwagging on the floor is a bizarre joy of supercomputing, and, in addition to the standard “memorable schwag makes you memorable” marketing function, actually provides an important mechanism for striking up conversations and encouraging attendees to make good coverage of the exhibit floor. I have a not inconsiderable list of organizations who have bought good vibes with a few cent trinket, and I am the sort of person who gets solicited for tech and academia advice, so the trinkets are doing their job.

Posted in Electronics, Entertainment, General, Objects | Tagged , | 1 Comment

A Day in the Life of the KAOS Lab Thought Process

Posted on 2011-10-28 by pappp

In which a simple “Do you know an easy way to convert an integer into a string of (character) digits?” turned into an expedition into ancient UNIX codebases. The process went something like this:

Labmate: Do you know an easy way to convert an integer into a string of digits?
< both of us type it in to google>
Looks like sprintf() is best, there must be a simple efficent algorithm.
How does printf() do it?
Let’s look in libc!
< grep through the various toolchain sources on my system >
Well, here’s the uClibc implementation… which is a terrifying mess of ambigously named function calls and preprocessor directives.
I wish I had some old UNIX sources to look at, that would be simple.
< a bit of googling later>
Holy crap, this is amazing! Full root images for a bunch of early UNIXes, many of them from dmr himself!
< download v5, grep /usr/source judiciously to find /usr/source/s4/printf.s>
Well crap, it’s in PDP-11 assembly, maybe a later version.
< download v7, grep /usr/src judiciously to find /usr/src/libc/stdio/doprnt.s>
Damn, still in PDP-11 assembly, but this is a fancier algorithm.
Hmm… the most understandable UNIX I’ve ever looked at was old MINIX…
< spin up BasiliskII, in ‘030 mode, use this workaround to make MacMinix run>
< more grepping for justice>
Eventually, we found the printk() from MacMinix 1.5, in all its awful K&R/ANSI transitional C glory

...
#define NO_FLOAT

#ifdef NO_FLOAT
#define MAXDIG 11 /*32 bits in radix 8*/
#else
#define MAXDIG 128 /* this must be enough */
#endif

_PROTOTYPE(void putc, (int ch)); /*user-supplied, should be putk */

PRIVATE _PROTOTYPE( char *_itoa, (char *p, unsigned num, int radix));
#ifndef NO_LONGD
PRIVATE _PROTOTYPE( char *_itoa, (char *p, unsigned long num, int radix));
#endif

PRIVATE char *_iota(p, num, radix)
register char *p;
register unsigned num;
register radix;
{
register i;
register char *q;
q = p + MAXDIG;
do {
i = (int) (num % radix);
i += '0';
if (i > '9') i += 'A' - '0' - 10;
*--q = i;
} while (num = num / radix);
i = p + MAXDIG - q;
do
*p++ = *q++;
while(--i);
return(p);
}
...

Which is, of course, a digit at a time in one of the most straightforward ways imaginable. Minix’s kernel is designed for systems so resource constrained it has a separate prints() that can only handle char and char* to save overhead, so I can’t imagine it uses a sub-optimal technique.
This kind of thing really makes me wish I had learned OSes in the old death-march through the UNIX sources (or at least the old Tenenbaum book with MINIX) way; things are too complicated and opaque now. There always seems to me to be a golden age from around 1970 into the early 1990s where the modern computing abstractions were in place, but the complexity of production hardware and software hadn’t yet grown out of control.
In a related note, as a tool writer, looking at the earliest versions of cc is AMAZING. Most decent programmers should be able to work through the cc from v5 UNIX (574 lines of C for cc proper, 6454 more lines of C and 1606 of PDP-11 assembly in called parts) in a couple hours, and fairly fully understand how it all works. Sadly, (pre-3) MINIX came with a (binary only) CC made with ACK, which is fancy and portable and way, way, way harder to understand. dmr’s simple genius was just that.

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Gendered Costumes

Posted on 2011-10-24 by pappp

I was eyeballing my bookshelf for a quick-n-dirty costume, because I putzed on doing anything interesting for Halloween, and might find myself in need of one. I came to a disturbing realization about the relative distinctiveness of male and female major characters in media I’m fond of.

Some examples:

Millennium Trilogy:
Lisbeth Salander: Black clothes, black wig/temp dye, and some costume punk jewelry. Best with a couple sheets of inkjet temporary tatoo stock for wasp and dragon. Recognizable to anyone who knows the character.
Mikael Blomkvist: No matter how hard you try, just a dude in a suit.

Lolita:
Dolores Haze: White top, white skirt, $2 heart-shaped sunglasses. Done. Plaid skirt and white button down with said glasses would work too. (Fun fact: those glasses are from the Kubrick movie, not the book.)
Humbert Humbert: Dude in a suit. (Unless you do something creative and likely to end in a public indecency charge)

Various William Gibson Pieces:
Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognition): Black tube skirt, black bomber jacket, clunky boots. Recognizable to anyone who knows the character – Hell, major plots are based on her taste. (sidenote: you can now get a black MA-1 lookalike for less than $50, instead of $600 for the Buzz Rickson’s in the book. Rothco even makes them in long to get around the “bomber jackets look like halter tops on my frame” issue.)
Molly Millions (Neuromancer) – Silvered dollar-store sunglass lenses adhered to your eye-sockets, unpainted aluminum-can nail extensions. Done.
Henry Dorsett Case (Neuromancer): Not even a memorable physical description.
Hubertus Bigend (most recent three novels): Granted, he’s recognizable, but an International Klein Blue suit isn’t exactly easy to come by, even as fabric stock.

Ready Player One:
[Redacted for thpoilerth]

Note that this isn’t total lack of ideas: there are some excellent costumes I can think of, especially from old video games, but not many fall into the “Less than $20 in readily available parts” range that my level of give a fuck supports. It doesn’t help that Female-As-Male-Character costumes are, as a rule, cute, and Male-As-Female-Character costumes are, as a rule, creepy. When we were kids we made jokes about Halloween parties always degenerating to girls in costumes and guys in indistinct black outfits. It’s true because it’s our culture.

Pretty sure if I end up needing a costume, my laser printer, a piece of elastic, and some poster stock will be making a rage comics face happen at the last moment.

Posted in Entertainment, General | 1 Comment

X11

Posted on 2011-10-12 by pappp


Dear AMD,
Randall Munroe has correctly pointed out that you are adversely affecting my quality of life. Please fix your shit.
Hate,
PAPPP

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Ready Player One

Posted on 2011-10-10 by pappp

Plans for the evening: Write some code I don’t really care for.
Actual activity for the evening: Binge the latter half of Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One.
As literature, it isn’t exactly stunning – the writing is standard mass market light reading fare (think Dan Brown, and that isn’t exactly complimentary) – but it is possibly the most glorious wallow through geek culture I’ve ever experienced. Geeky Movies. Geeky TV. Old video games. New video games. Geek issues. The Internet. All of it is, through a contrived but delightful plot device, the entire topic of the book. It picks up a huge amount of influence from predecessors in the style, especially Vernor Vinge’s True Names (One of my favorite novellas) and Cory Doctorow’s YA fiction (Little Brother is worth reading no matter how old you are) and makes self-aware references as nods to the things it borrows. The whole thing is extraordinarily masturbatory, to the point of occasionally damaging the storytelling and conception to reach through the forth wall, shake you and ask “Aren’t you excited too?!” but it is totally unashamed, and it is so much fun to just go with it (Enchantment of just going with it vs. disenchantment of thinking about it visible in the contrast of the review and comments here)

It’s also a little bit heartbreaking, because much of the promise the plot hinges on has been eroding away. It presumes that the copyrights on all the pop culture ephemera of the 1980s will have expired in 2044. Thanks to the concerted efforts of entities like Disney, that isn’t likely. Likewise, in an early chapter, it notes “People rarely used their real names online. Anonymity was one of the major perks of …” and goes on as though the “Avatars first, real identities (with physical baggage) for those you choose” model of the internet hasn’t been eroded is a matter of course, and hinges the bulk of the plot on that premise. It even accepts that various things online will need your real name and identity, but, like all such stories, posits that users will chose to go by their handle, and only use real names online where necessary. I grew up in that ‘net. My imagination is set in that ‘net. I want that ‘net back. But it just isn’t the way things are happening (this shame ray is pointed at Facebook and Google).

All that is to say, it isn’t high literature, it isn’t a worldview changer, but holy crap is it fun.

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Power Factor Corrector

Posted on 2011-10-04 by pappp

We’ve been tracking down the failure mode of power supplies in the clusters on campus, and picked up a plug-in “Power Saver” power factor corrector box for around $5 to look at in our experiments. Prices on these things range from about $5 (less than the cost of the components in small quantities… and in a nice wallwart case – this is what we paid) to over $70 (fleecing the morons).
This particular device is a “PowerSaver PowerStar CHT” (or some similar random string, the model is “CHT-001A”), about which a variety of bemusingly improbable claims are made.


Upon opening it up, it contains a large (5uF,450V) capacitor, two LEDs, three quarter-watt resistors, and a single-sided PCB with “Comment” all over the silkscreen where fields were not filled in. As best I can make out, the resistors are a very high impedance voltage divider to step down the 120V/60Hz from the wall to a level the LEDs can handle, and the LEDs are acting as their own rectifier. The capacitor is at least connected across the outlet. Curiously, only about half the board is populated, and I can’t figure out what some of the missing components would do – they appear to be a second independent indicator LED circuit rotated 90 degrees from the populated one.
Under a very limited set of circumstances (linear inductive load, like an AC motor) these things could actually help the power factor, but since most residential power billing is net, with no power factor penalty, it wouldn’t actually reduce bills. In the case of non-linear loads, like say, computer power supplies, it will do nothing useful. Experiment complete, although it may still be plugged in while instrumented for funsises.

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I’m mystified by how much I miss having a little kickstand on my handheld computer. The n810’s didn’t even work very well – only the “Closed” and “45° to the table” detents actually held – but being able to have … Continue reading →

Posted on 2011-09-09 by pappp | Leave a comment

Apple Secession

Posted on 2011-08-25 by pappp

Two notes on yesterday’s “Steve Jobs Steps Down As Head of Apple” news:
1. Last time Steve-o left, Apple did wonderful technical things for a while, because they still had the momentum in interesting directions, without the crazy. A stable CEO and present Steve is creating basically the situation that *should* have happenened in ’85 and ’98, so perhaps Apple will be doing genuinely interesting things again for a while.
2. I was expecting various high profile news sources to fall over themselves trying to figure out the appropriate way to note that Apple’s succession plan means that an openly gay guy is now the CEO of the (sometimes) highest market cap company in the US, but except for this Gizmodo article (apparently now removed), no one seems to be biting.

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Expected HTC Dobleshot/MyTouch 4G Slide: Purchased. Time to getting irritated and deciding I needed to root it: Approximately 20 minutes.

Posted on 2011-08-20 by pappp | Leave a comment

Quote Widget

Posted on 2011-08-15 by pappp

I has a quotes widget. Hopefully appearing over there -> in the right side bar. It’s picking from a selection which has been growing on my primary machine for years — I’ve been meaning to put a copy online since I accidentally wiped part of it out, then discovered my backup script hadn’t been saving dot files for months, and just found a suitable WordPress plugin to manage them. I think some of them are inappropriately long passages for the widget, but if I was interested in web design I wouldn’t be using the default WordPress theme tweaked only for functionality.

Posted in Entertainment, Literature, Meta | Leave a comment