Today, I:
– finished programming the arduino LED driver
– went on a motorcycle ride
– replaced the turn signals and brake pedal on my FJ600, readjusted the clutch, bolted on a strip of LEDs which will eventually be an auxiliary brake light
– hung out at ATC for a couple hours planning the groovik’s-cube project
It was a good day.

Today’s project is the software for a microcontroller-based LED system for the grooviks-cube project. We’re using Arduino boards; each board will drive four RGB channels, and a central computer will control the arduino boards via USB. Four channels times three components equals twelve individual outputs; the board will drive an LED at each output using PWM, which basically means flipping the current on and off faster than the brain’s persistence-of-vision threshold. The ratio of on-time to off-time determines the apparent brightness. The controller basically spends all of its time in a loop, flipping lights on and off, in order to maintain the right ratios of brightness and thus the right color.

The project is a lot of fun, and it’s reawakening my interest in interesting blinky electronic stuff. The Arduino board is an Atmel chip with an FTDI TTL->USB interface, power regulation, a timing crystal, and all the other stuff you need so that you literally just plug in a USB cable and go. Programming it consists of typing in your code and pushing “upload”; the board resets, reprograms itself, and runs your new program. Couldn’t be any easier.

This guy used a light meter to measure the brightness of his car’s taillight and his bike’s taillight, intending to build a new custom LED taillight. I’ve been thinking about custom LED taillight designs for my old Maxim, and for Adam’s Katana, so this is interesting data. He includes build photos for the project.

Another offering in the imminent market for general-purpose electric motorcycles is the Mission One. They are going way upmarket, though, with an estimated retail around $70k. Cool as the styling and 120-mile range may be, they’re pretty firmly stuck in a niche with this one.

I haven’t done any work on Radian since late February. I’d like to get back into it, but it’s going to take a while to remember what I was doing and why. I was in the middle of a module which builds three-address intermediate code from a flowgraph, inverting the functional description into a list of imperative instructions…

An even more interesting electric motorcycle option is the Electric Motorsport GPR-S: specs are comparable to the ZeroX bike, but it’s a little faster (up to 70 mph), a fair bit cheaper ($8500), and styled like a street bike rather than a supermoto. It is also available now – they are reported to have shipped actual production bikes to actual customers.

Interesting discussion of some difficulties in designing a compiler for the Ruby language.

This is a hub motor for gas-to-electric motorcycle conversions. The motor is built into the wheel, so there is no mechanical linkage; you just scrap the entire drivetrain and replace the rear wheel. Selecting and installing batteries is an exercise left for the reader, but this design removes a significant challenge from the conversion process.

It’s a small outfit – two brothers commercializing their hobby, from the look of it – but if they outsource the manufacturing there’s no reason they can’t produce a quality product at a reasonable price. It’s just a start, but it’s great to see this kind of thing becoming more practical.

Performance, of course, totally sucks – the EnerTrac specs suggest a top speed of “60+” – but the hub-motor design suggests that a hybrid bike might be practical. I can imagine adding a sprocket to one of these hub motors and installing it on a standard bike, then simply cruising around on battery power whenever low speeds and stoplights are involved. Using the electric motor for acceleration and the gas motor for cruising would save energy overall, without sacrificing speed, acceleration, or range. Assuming you’d purchase an off-the-shelf motor controller, the chief design problem would be the composition and location of the battery pack.

addendum: someone in Colorado has converted their FJ600 to electric power, using a more conventional chain drive setup. Top speed is 66 mph, using a 72-volt battery, but range is only 18 miles – nickel-cadmium is lightweight, but energy density sucks.

second addendum: Zero Motorcycles has announced an all-electric street bike, claiming availability next month at $10k. Specs are 60 mile range, 4-hour charge, 31-hp motor, 60 mph top speed. It may top out quickly but it’ll feel like a rocket getting there – that motor puts out 62.5 ft-lbs of torque, and the bike only weighs 220 lbs, so it will accelerate like nobody’s business. Fun, fast, reasonable commuter/errand-running range, no assembly required: $10k is high, but that’s to be expected for the first generation. The electric motorcycle era is much closer than I realized.

I am sorry to say that Ava and I did not get married today. I broke off the engagement on Wednesday. The stress of planning the wedding and preparing for the next step in our lives strained our relationship too much to continue.

I have nothing but love, respect, and hope for Ava.

The sunny weather this weekend brought all the motorcyclists back out of hibernation. It’s finally warm enough to skip the sweater I’ve been wearing under my jacket all winter, and my bike no longer needs a push when I start it in the morning. When I got to work today, the motorcycle zone in the parking garage was completely full. I’ve been parking there almost every work day for the last year, and that’s never happened before. I actually had to do a loop around the garage looking for a spot – there were bikes stashed everywhere.

Yesterday afternoon I cruised over to the Rocket Factory after dropping Ava off at her aerials class and spent an hour doing some basic tune-up work. I changed out the plugs, put in some new oil, and topped up the air in the tires. The back tire is new, replaced a couple of months ago, but now it looks like the front tire is reaching the end of its life as well. I’ve put a lot of miles on this machine – I don’t have an exact count anymore, but twenty miles every work day adds up fast.

On the topic of marriage: I am getting hitched, and soon. Ava and I will be exchanging vows, rings, and kisses at a little ceremony on the 18th, with a great big party to follow. It’s scary, of course, but exciting; this is clearly the right way for us to go, and I am looking forward to our future together.

The Iowa Supreme Court has just unanimously invalidated the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Iowa! I had no idea such a case was even in the works there. Now we must hope this doesn’t provoke a Proposition-8 style backlash – though California’s Proposition 8 has brought on a backlash of its own, with a Supreme Court challenge, a counter-petition, and proposal to remove all references to marriage from California law, substituting “domestic partnership”.

The Transactional Memory / Garbage Collection Analogy:

The purpose of this article is not to rehash excellent but previously published examples where software transactions provide an enormous benefit (though for background they are briefly discussed), nor is it to add some more examples to the litany. Rather, it is to present a more general perspective that I have developed over the last two years. This perspective is summarized in a one-sentence analogy:
Transactional memory is to
shared-memory concurrency
as
garbage collection is to
memory management.

The prose style is excessively wordy for my taste, but the content is interesting, and the core idea is entirely compatible with my own opinions on the subject.

I’ve never used Gmail. I’ve always had my own domain with its own mail server, and until I came to Microsoft I worked at home, so I only read mail on one computer anyway. The web-mail idea has started to make more sense now that I have a conventional commuter lifestyle, but I’m still not comfortable letting the Googlebot read my mail.

It occurred to me this afternoon, however, that the Googlebot already does read most of my mail. I just had a look through my 250 most recent messages, and after filtering out web site notifications (facebook, amazon, paypal, etc), 80% of the messages were to or from gmail users.

I am not entirely comfortable with this fact, but I can’t think of anything anyone could do about it.

Someone has actually managed to one-up Dr. Megavolt: it’s the Imperial March, performed on a Tesla coil.

I’ve decided not to go to Burning Man this year. There are many other things I want to do this summer, and I already feel overcommitted. I will miss going to the desert with my friends, but I’ve gone five years in a row now, and I don’t have the drive for it this time. It’s a good time for a break.

I will be playing a downtempo set at the wedgwood co-op Re.New party tonight. This means I will not be going to the Circus Contraption show at Theo *or* the Random Rab/Manahan/Skoi show at Church of Bass. Oh, life – so much good stuff you can’t possibly take it all in!

Shpongle will play a DJ set at the Wonder Ballroom in Portland on the 12th of June, with Phutureprimitive. In this case “DJ set” means Simon Posford and a table full of computers; Raja Ram, the other half of Shpongle, doesn’t seem to travel much. I was about to explain how certain I was that I would attend, along with as many friends as I could persuade to come along, but it occurs to me as I write that I may have already made plans to go climbing in Yosemite that weekend… alas, spoiled for choice.

Later this year, on the 30th of October, Shpongle will be doing another of their every-couple-of-years all-up live extravaganzas, with a dozen musicians and a stage full of dancers and whatnot. I’ve never been but they are reported to be spectacular. This one is an album-release party – #4, “ineffable mysteries from shpongleland”. It’s one night only, at the Roundhouse in London. London, yes. I’m tempted anyway.

Ski vacation.
I spent the last week and a half in Whistler, up at the Godwins’ place. This is the trip Barry organizes every year, and it’s one of the highlights of my winter. The snow was pretty good overall, and the last ski day we started early and got first tracks on several inches of fresh powder. It really doesn’t get any better. My new skis are solid and responsive, and I felt strong and pushed myself pretty hard.

The cabin offered plenty of time to hang around and spend time with friends, in the evenings or on the days I didn’t ski. We had the full DJ setup, as usual, and I brought my keyboard & loop system; we had an all-night party each weekend. The place has a very communal vibe – we play music for each other, cook meals for each other, share spare gear and treats and backrubs and whatever.

Music.
I’m going to be playing a late-night downtempo set at the wedgwood co-op party this weekend. The project is going well: I still have some technical challenges to smooth out, but I can play an hour of live, improvised downtempo pretty much on demand, and people seem to enjoy it.

In hopes of adding uptempo dance music to my repertoire, I’ve just bought a new groovebox, an Electribe EA-1: it’s a two-voice mono synth with an interface very similar to the ER-1 drum machine I’m already using. The plan is to mix sequenced bass lines and arpeggios with improvised lead lines. It’ll be less free-form than my downtempo format, where all the synth parts are improvised, but dance music really needs a reliable groove. I ought to have plenty of room to jam on top of the sequenced parts.

Dawn’s organized another jam session tonight. I think I’ll bring my bass again, instead of the keyboard. There’s something pure and simple and fun about rocking out with the classic guitar/bass/drums/voice combo.

Radian.
I’d hoped to spend some time working on Radian while I was up at the cabin, on days when I didn’t ski, but I did not end up having the energy for it. Work was pretty intense for the last couple of weeks and I guess I needed the time to rest.

I am thinking a lot about the design of the runtime support library and the “foreign-function interface”. I’d like to avoid bolting on a big chunk of C++ support code for runtime support; optimally the language would be self-supporting, able to run directly on the kernel API, or possibly on the C stdlib. I haven’t worked out how this could be done yet; building those low-level abstractions into the language seems to conflict with the immutable/functional core semantics.

Fashion.
Adam has been in touch with a buyer at Hot Topic recently, discussing the possibility of getting the Martianwear leggings into their online store. It’s pretty exciting, and I’m going to spend some more time soon working on that line. The next projects will be a girl version of the light-up hoodie, and a slimmer, lighter light pack design based on lithium coin cells.

Burning Man.
I still haven’t decided whether I am going to Burning Man this year. Many of my friends are making their plans, and I’m definitely tempted to join in, but I’ve gone five years running and I’m not sure I want to spend that much time and money this year. I keep telling people I won’t go unless I have an art project to build; now Barry’s talking about making a 24-foot lighted rubik’s cube, Gary, Jaime, Nell, & co are talking about an art car… and I’d still like to finish the bamboo/solar/LED tree-of-light project I abandoned a couple of years ago.

“Even if you’re designing for professional programmers, in the end your programming language is basically a user-interface design. You will get much better results regardless of what you’re trying to do if you think of it as a user-interface design.” -Alan Kay

Bright blue skies with little fluffy clouds on the way in to work; dry roads, not cold, air smelled clean. Couple of cute girls walking down the sidewalk grinned and waved as I turned the corner onto Galer. I felt good and rode fast.

I went over to Dawn’s place last night and spent a few hours jamming with her and Colin. On a whim, I brought my bass; I haven’t touched it in at least a year, but it was so much fun just rocking out that I never got around to unpacking my keyboard. It was nice and light and fun; we banged our way through a bunch of old familiar songs and had a good time.

My cute little car came with a serious muffler problem; noisy at the best of times, its engine note became a head-shaking, resonating roar when going up hills or otherwise working the engine. The eBay-sourced replacement arrived a couple of days ago, dropped on the doorstep as a six-foot-long lump of oddly-shaped bubblewrap. I met up with Adam over at the Rocket Factory this afternoon and got to work on the installation. The job went more smoothly than either of us expected: an hour after putting the car up on jacks, we had hung the new muffler-exhaust-catalytic-converter system, replaced all the bolts, and fired up the engine – which is now so quiet it feels positively civilized. Success! We celebrated with a round of beer at Hale’s. Now I’m back home and it’s time to do some laundry.

My car is equipped with its original 1987-vintage stereo, which no longer works. I don’t need a stereo when driving around in town, but I sure would like to have one by my next road trip. The car stereo I want to buy, however, almost certainly doesn’t exist: all I want is a plain black panel with a volume knob and a USB jack. No buttons, lights, colors, labels, logos, video panels, pop-out-folding-media-player navigation devices, or any other such flappery, please – just let my iPod fill the car with music.