Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page

Chills. The ache in his throat, the climbing roar of the mixed voices…

My social life has been a bit thin of late. To some degree I think this is just the usual thing that happens to people in the full swing of adulthood – my friends are mostly all paired up now and a surprising number are having kids. That’s been going on for years but it seems to have become more the norm than the exception, and perhaps the critical mass necessary to sustain a lively communal culture has been lost as people dig in to their more private family activities.

But I have also developed an increasing suspicion that blame for the apparent social silence can be laid at the feet of Facebook. I suspect that it has reached its own critical mass, where people are now so used to using it, and so used to finding all or nearly all of their friends there, that they have to some degree forgotten that there are people Facebook cannot reach. Perhaps us non-Facebookers are now such a small minority that one really can get away with forgetting to keep us in the loop.

How can you measure the number of parties or dinners or random let’s-go-to-the-arboretum-for-a-picnic events that you haven’t been invited to? How do I know whether they’re not happening, or they’re happening, and I’m not being invited because I’m not on facebook, or they’re happening, and I’m not being invited because nobody likes me anymore? Do I need to find new friends, or do I just need to poke the ones I already have and remind them to tell me what’s going on?

Ava learned today that one of her best friends is getting married in a few weeks and had neglected to invite her. Why? Because they sent the invitations out on Facebook, and Ava doesn’t have an account. Yes, yes, there was apparently a postscript offering to send out paper invitations to anyone who wanted one, but… you still had to be on Facebook to notice it. All the planning, all the messages, all the conversation has apparently been happening on Facebook. Ava didn’t know it was going on, so she didn’t ask about it, and everyone else was so used to everyone being on Facebook that they didn’t notice she wasn’t on the list.

I don’t like this. One company should not own the infrastructure for our social lives – especially not a company as greedy, intrusive, and all-around antidemocratic as Facebook. But who’s going to stop them now? Replacing Facebook with G+ would be just as bad, really: the problem is not Facebook itself, but the fact that we’ve lost the old, open, interactive web as everyone has piled into Facebook’s walled garden. Everyone used to complain about evite, but at least you could see an evite invitation when someone mailed it to you! With Facebook, you can either join up and sign your life story over to Mark Zuckerberg, or you get nothing. This is not okay.

It’s hard to imagine a way to solve this problem. When will we reach the point that not having a facebook account makes you an unreachable crank? Imagine how we’d feel about someone under the age of 40 with no cell phone in 2012 – when will society at large feel that way about people with no facebook account? Have we already reached that point? I certainly hope not, but the trends I see are curving toward that future and not away from it.

So cold this morning. I rode in wearing a fleece jacket under my thinsulate-lined leather bike jacket and I still felt the cold air trickling in any time I didn’t hold my chest just right so the collar line was pressed against my neck. Wow.

The pair of Headway cells I ordered showed up yesterday, and test-fitting them in the electric motorcycle frame shows that the layout will work pretty much exactly as I hoped. Some time in another couple of months I’ll make a bracket which will place the motor right about where the old gas engine’s transmission used to sit, then I’ll fill the rest of the engine bay with stacks of these batteries.

Maybe I’ll spend a couple of hours working on the polartec lining for my ski jacket tomorrow. It’d be nice to have my ski gear all set and ready for whenever I get a chance to hit the slopes.

The Samsung Chromebook is a full-sized, ARM-based laptop with 2GB RAM and 16GB flash storage, which costs only $249. A cheap, power-efficient netbook with a big screen? Cool! Now if only there were some way to run a normal operating system on it…

I got Ubuntu installed on my ARM Chromebook tonight. Here’s a messy brain dump of what I did. The system was already in devmode when I started (see http://goo.gl/TSZxs for info on how to achieve that). I also already had a tarball of an Ubuntu filesystem, created with the “rootstock” tool. [edit: you can use the distributed ubuntu-core tarball directly from ubuntu as well, and then install additional packages on top]

Get an SD card, insert it in a reader on your Ubuntu PC…

This sounds like fun – I have a Raspberry Pi sitting on my desk at home doing all of nothing:

Do you like Unix? Do you really like Unix? Well, what if I told you there’s a little-known operating system out there that’s more Unix than even Unix is. Cool, right?

Well it is true! Plan 9 occupies an interesting niche in the open source operating system world. It is a full-fledged descendant of Unix, but not in the way that most systems out there are. It took the bones and beating heart of Unix and then built a brand-new cybernetic exoskeleton around it, with lasers, and heat vision… oh wait. You want to boot this bad-boy up, right? Well, okay, we’ll do that. But what hardware shall we run it on? Hey, you got a Raspberry Pi? Well then, read on!

I’m not sure why it sounds more reasonable to install Plan 9 on a tiny cheap computer than to put it on a full size computer where one could actually have some elbow room for one’s experimentation, but there’s something indisputably cool about the thought.

The other thing I hate about Android: I can’t send mail, and it won’t tell me why. I haven’t sent a single email with my phone since I got it last Christmas. (Another way this fancy Galaxy Nexus is actually worse at being a communication device than the old, supposedly obsolete Blackberry it replaced.) I don’t remember the exact error message, but it was two words, along the lines of “connection failed”, containing zero useful information. After discovering FOTAKill earlier today – resulting in hour after hour of beautiful, calm, serene not-being-pesteredness – I thought I might take another crack at the email thing.

Yeah. I poked around until I found where “outgoing settings” lived, set all the switches and turned all the knobs, then sent a test email. No error message. Yay, I thought, it’s finally working! That wasn’t so bad.

Twenty minutes later I got a little concerned. That’s a long time for email to spend in transit. I sent another message. An hour later, still nothing had come through. I sent a couple more messages, to various different email addresses.

Yeah, no. They’re all sitting in the outbox, not going anywhere. No error message, no nothing, they’re just not sending, and the Android system either can’t or won’t tell me why. There’s a little spinny widget thing in the bottom bar that looks like it might be trying to tell me that the phone is working on something or other, but nothing happens when I click it, and it never stops spinning.

Oh, well. Progress, eh? Does Google even test this app, or do they just assume everyone is going to use gmail?

Google has apparently produced a new version of Android. My phone is now bugging me to install it. A notification pops up: “there’s a new version, would you like to install it now, or later, or get more info”? “Later”, I click, because I’m not sure I want it, and I sure don’t want to deal with it right now.

This process repeats EVERY HALF AN HOUR.

Who on earth thought this was a good idea, and how can I get them fired?

Now trying to find out how to completely disable all upgrade checks, for ever, because I’ve seen more of them in one day than I should ever have to deal with in the entire life of a phone.

OK, more information: you apparently solve this problem by installing an app which is inscrutably named “FOTAKill”. This is that sort of app which gets temporary download links in forums, so the best thing is to just search for “FOTAKill.apk” and browse the endless list of discussion board links until you find one that works. Download, install, and…. that’s it. If you’re curious about what it actually does, the source code is available, but all I learned from looking at it is that Android isn’t like any other operating system I’ve ever used.

a Businessweek article claims that airport security is killing us:

There is lethal collateral damage associated with all this spending on airline security—namely, the inconvenience of air travel is pushing more people onto the roads. Compare the dangers of air travel to those of driving. To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

It’s certainly true for me: since 2001, I always choose to drive rather than fly if I have any way to make my schedule accommodate the extra time. I’m going down to California for a Christmas visit and you can bet I’ll be taking the car.

It’s a Friday night. Nobody, so far as I can tell, is doing anything, anywhere. What the hell? I don’t want to just sit around and write code all evening, after sitting around writing code all day, and pretty much all week, but there doesn’t seem to be much else to do. Hrmph.

As we saw in the last couple of Presidential elections, there are no “red states” and “blue states”; there are cities and there are not-cities.

The curious part is that even as America’s population has grown more urban, its culture has grown more conservative, such that our Democratic president gets excoriated for “socialism” even though his policies would have sounded unremarkable to a Republican in the ’80s.

Well yeah! Marriage equality looks set to pass in Washington, Maryland, and Maine, and the state-constitution-amendment banning it is failing in Minnesota. For the first time in the USA, marriage equality is being supported by popular vote and not just by court action. At long last the tide has turned and the current is flowing in a positive direction. So glad.

Overheard at work: “Our data model is 95% irrelevant under a foo-only paradigm”.

Hacker Monthly collects the best articles linked on Hacker News in a given month and prints them out as an actual, on-paper magazine. That’s a neat idea. I’ve been following Hacker News for years and I’d guess that one monthly magazine is just about the right size to print the really good stuff that shows up there.

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings working on the chandelier project driver board firmware. I rigged up some very simple demo software a couple of weeks ago to make sure the hardware worked, but it was only driving 3 bits per pixel. I haven’t introduced the 24-bit color driver yet, but I’ve gotten the scanline blit time down to 1 microsecond, which means I can theoretically do 8-bit linear PWM across all 192 LEDs at about 244 Hz. Nice. But I plan to take this further: given the STM32F103RBT6 controller’s 72 MHz clock rate, I should be able to do a full scanline update in 140 nanoseconds, which correlates to 12-bit linear PWM at 120 Hz. I’ll then apply gamma correction, yielding a perceptually linear color space, for a working resolution of 6 bits per channel, or 18 bits per pixel. That’s better than most LCD projectors, which can only do 15 bits.

It’s still not quite as good as the Groovik’s Cube drivers, which did 8-bit gamma-corrected PWM, for a perceptually linear 24-bit colorspace – but it doesn’t need to be that good, and to be quite honest neither did the cube drivers. I pushed them as hard as they could go out of personal pride; I was at a real low point in my career back then, and pushing that code as close to the limits of the hardware as it could possibly go made me feel like I still had skills that were worth something. But really, it could have run 15-bit color and I doubt I could have told the difference.

In any case, each cube driver could only manage five lights at a time; the whole cube needed eleven of them. Just one of these chandelier drivers can wrangle 192 lights at a time – so while it may only be doing 18-bit color, each one of these chandelier controllers could theoretically drive three whole cubes at once, with capacity to spare. What I’m losing in per-pixel resolution I’m more than making up in overall display resolution. It’s going to look amazing.

I sent a copy of my Bejeweled clone to the guy who developed the Gamby. He liked it and now it’s one of the standard example games. Whee.

Permamake is a shell script which automatically builds a source tree any time one of a list of files changes. It works on anything which has a Makefile. The author uses it as a local continuous build system.

The downside of the motorcycle commute is that car drivers, who generally don’t see you, frequently pull incredibly dangerous maneuvers which it is up to you to avoid. Today’s incident happened a block after I pulled off the freeway coming home. A car in the left lane abruptly cut across my lane, aiming for the gas station to my right. The streets were slick, so I couldn’t just grab the brake – I pulled the throttle instead and aimed for the gutter. I almost made it, but the car’s right front fender hit my muffler as I went by. It made a real bang, but I stayed upright, and it so happens that my muffler was already scraped there from the crash I had a year ago.

It only just occurred to me that I was probably supposed to stop and talk to the driver – it was a collision, after all! But I simply didn’t think of it; I was too focused on surviving, and then it just didn’t seem to matter. Huh.

Well, anyway. This sort of thing happens at least once a month, though usually there’s no actual contact between vehicles. It’s just part of the life. At least the bike gives you the speed and maneuverability you need to make up for its lack of visibility.