So begins a new phase

Me putting the key in the lockToday begins a new phase of my life. After a decade long bout of dither­ing about whether I was going to buy a house or not, I’ve finally signed over my life for 30 years to a mort­gage com­pany. I’ve watched the mar­ket go up, down, up down, and then spin around. I’ve watched friends buy and sell houses, and yet never been able to quite com­mit myself. The real­ity is, I was never sure I’d found the “right place,” or at least the “right now place”.

I’m not sure what to make of the whole thing, but it’s a feel of exhaust­ing right now. While every­one involved – my friends, real­tor, banker, loan offi­cer, etc. – has made things as easy as one can pos­si­bly imag­ine, it’s been a stress­ful expe­ri­ence for me. Giv­ing up six-figures of finan­cial free­dom for a tiny chunk of land, and a build­ing in which to shove more money, feels me with a sense of dread. At the same time, it’s nice to have a place to truly call mine.

At least in another 30 years.

The illusion of decisiveness

Many peo­ple have com­mented to me that I seem very “decisive” — which, come to think of it, is entirely too close to being the decider, so I’ll try not to be offended — but the illu­sion is quite thin if you know me well. Take, for exam­ple, the recent house pur­chase. From a dis­tance, it appears as though I made a snap deci­sion and stuck with it, but that hides a near decade-long tur­moil inside about things that influ­ence what and whether to buy.

Before I could make that deci­sion, I had to fig­ure out first whether actu­ally intended to stay in the DC area for another 5 – 10 years. Hav­ing been here for over 16 years now, and hav­ing talked about mov­ing for the bet­ter part of a decade, I came to the con­clu­sion that while the idea of mov­ing was intrigu­ing, I actu­ally had devel­oped a pretty decent life for myself here: good friends, a decent job, and more impor­tantly, famil­iar­ity. If I were actu­ally going to make a move, I would have done it long ago. The truth is more mun­dane than that; I sim­ply like com­plain­ing. Hav­ing made that deci­sion, I had to dig through my own fears of los­ing my job, being home­less and a mul­ti­tude of other semi and com­pletely irra­tional thoughts that have kept me par­a­lyzed for so long on this front.

Finally, there was the conun­drum of whether to buy some­thing older — fifties or six­ties — and “fix it up”, or go for some­thing newer that was more ready for me. For a long time, I’ve toyed with both, but mostly the for­mer. The trick is, and this is where my own crazi­ness plays into the sit­u­a­tion, I know that I have a sur­plus of ideas, and less moti­va­tion than required to com­plete them. I also dis­cov­ered that if I wanted to have a place in a loca­tion that kept my com­mute within a man­age­able time, I was going to spend 95% of my bud­get just buy­ing the place, and it would be a long time before I’d be able to do any kind of sub­stan­tial ren­o­va­tions that I imag­ined. That, com­bined with “will this neigh­bor­hood ever really sup­port a house like that” made it clear that as great a fan­tasy as that was, I needed to ground my ambi­tions more reasonably.

So, after years of mulling, stew­ing and other culi­nary metaphors, I finally decided. It looked easy, but it wasn’t. Then again, it seems my friends warned my real­tor of my traits. Thanks, guys/gals.

Taking the plunge

Two days ago, I took the plunge and made the for­mal deci­sion to buy a house. I signed a con­tract on a new place com­mit­ting to close before the end of March. I’m not sure if I’m numb, ter­ri­fied, happy, sad, excited or all of the above.

The unbearable heaviness of drivers

It doesn’t seem like much to ask. A tiny lit­tle thing. All I wanted was to get a copy of the PPD for my Sam­sung ML-2151N that has been my trusty laser printer for many years. I had mis­placed it some­how, and couldn’t find the dri­ver disk any­where. So, nat­u­rally, I went to the Sam­sung web­site look­ing for it. What I found for a Mac was a PowerPC-only dri­ver pack­aged in a StuffIt Installer pack­age. To even run it, I would have to install Rosetta, and that seemed a bit exces­sive just to install a dri­ver. Never mind that it was a 20MB file. A PPD is nor­mally 5-10KB of text. Com­pressed, it’s per­haps 3KB.

Well, after dig­ging around, I dis­cov­ered that bur­ried inside a hor­ri­ble Linux installer — which put Intel-only pieces in a “noarch” folder, and set per­mis­sions on direc­to­ries to bizarre options — a PPD that would work! So, I’ve retained a copy that any­one else can have. This is no doubt copy­right Sam­sung, and I claim no own­er­ship, inter­est, blame, or beers, in the actual cre­ation or updat­ing it. Mostly, I just wanted peo­ple to have some­thing if they needed it. It should work on any of the ML-2150 series (ML-2150, ML-2151N and ML-2152W).

You can down­load it here (4KB). To use it, all you need to do is install it in the fol­low­ing loca­tion on Mac OS X, at least as of 10.6:

/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/

Good luck.

Entropic programming

Photo of Simtec Entropy KeyWe all have weird obses­sions that we deal with. Mine is ran­dom num­bers. Don’t ask. Any­way, I’ve also been play­ing with some sim­u­la­tions and crypto work and needed a bet­ter source of entropy. So, after a bunch of research, I decided to buy an Entropy Key from Simtec Elec­tron­ics in the UK. They were the only ones who had a nice USB-based solu­tion that wasn’t out­ra­geously expen­sive. In fact, it was down­right cheap. Yes­ter­day, I got it in the mail, and it works lovely on Linux, but I really want to dig into it on my main machine, which is a Mac.

So, I’ve started down the road of port­ing their code — gen­er­ously pro­vided under MIT license — to the Mac. Mostly, I think it’ll not be too bad, but that depends on if I want to take advan­tage of all the IOKit good­ness, or just the “basics” of func­tion. So the ques­tion is, how much of the yak gets shaved? What­ever I do, it will be under the same license. Unfor­tu­nately, the last time I wrote stuff the low-level was when V20s roamed free on the Earth.

Just a note that so far, the pro­to­col doc­u­men­ta­tion is bril­liant. It’s clear, con­cise, and best of all … a text file. Huzzah!

Rethinking Scala

Book coverAfter sev­eral peo­ple I respect ques­tioned my rush-to-judgement with Scala after my first expo­sure about a year ago, I’ve decided to dive back in and see if I can push through some ini­tial squea­mish­ness. I had picked up Pro­gram­ming in Scala by Mar­tin Oder­sky, et. al. I had got­ten around 50 pages into the book — out of 700+ — and run into some­thing that just annoyed me to no end. Most lan­guages are base-0 for index­ing into arrays, etc., although some are base-1. Scala, how­ever, is base-0 for arrays and lists, but base-1 for tuples. This incon­sis­tency just annoyed me. It even required a 1/3 page expla­na­tion of why it was thus. While tech­ni­cally cor­rect it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I put the book down.

Last week, with a sprained ankle, I picked the book back up. Now, hav­ing got­ten through the first 14 chap­ters, and 260+ pages, I’ve changed my mind, though I’m still not sure of my over­all feel­ing. There’s a lot of inter­est­ing ideas, and the type sys­tem is the least annoy­ing one I’ve ever seen. They quote one of my heros, and the cre­ator of Smalltalk, Alan Kay:

I’m not against types, but I don’t know of any type sys­tems that aren’t a com­plete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.

Well, Scala is def­i­nitely not Smalltalk, but it does have a rel­a­tively unob­tru­sive type sys­tem, at least so far. A mature type-inferencing engine ensures that you don’t type things more than you absolutely have to. In fact, Scala does solve some of the sym­met­ri­cal issues that many lan­guages besides Smalltalk have. Since every­thing, so far, seems to be a method invoka­tion, many things are pos­si­ble in ways that Java, etc., can never immag­ine, and more like what I’m used to in the Smalltalk world.

No final opin­ion yet, but it’s giv­ing me some ideas, and gen­er­ally any­thing that stim­u­lates ideas is worth learn­ing. I still think that Clo­jure has a more ele­gant syn­tax, but it’s com­piler is not yet as opti­mized as Scala. Yet. Ver­sion 1.3, which is now see­ing the light-of-day, promises to get a lot closer.

It was bound to happen eventually

Twenty plus years online, and it was even­tu­ally doomed to hap­pen. Some­one has decided to hijack my iden­tity — or at least part of it — in order to com­mit a crime. Clean­ing this mess up is going to be some kind of fun, but not sure it’s the kind I enjoy any more.

The web­site that was reg­is­tered was protectep.com, and it appears to have been reg­is­tered through a Chi­nese reg­is­trar (bizcn.com), who as far as I can tell has none of the nor­mal email addresses avail­able (host­mas­ter, etc.), so I’m left with try­ing to fig­ure out how to get the domain revoked and more impor­tantly, my name taken off it. They got enough of the infor­ma­tion right that it “could” be me, but enough wrong that it’s obvi­ous they aren’t me. Clean­ing this up is going to suck.

Please don’t go to the site as it con­tains mal­ware. I repeat do not go to the site.

Hope and change; disillusionment and despair

N.B. I began this post about a month ago, but I never really could find a way to fin­ish it. Rather than allow it to linger, I’ve decided to pub­lish it.

In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Com­mu­nity?, Mar­tin Luther King Jr. writes:

Unfor­tu­nately, when hope dimin­ishes, the hate is often turned most bit­terly toward those who orig­i­nally built up the hope. In all the speak­ing that I have done in the United States before var­ied audi­ences, includ­ing some hos­tile whites, the only time that I have been booed was one night in a Chicago mass meet­ing by some young mem­bers of the Black Power move­ment. I went home that night with an ugly feel­ing. Self­ishly I thought of my suf­fer­ings and sac­ri­fices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake think­ing, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and under­stand­ing for those young people.

For twelve years I, and oth­ers like me, had held out radi­ant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lec­tured to them about the not too dis­tant day when they would have free­dom, “all, here and now.” I had urged them to have faith in Amer­ica and in white soci­ety. Their hopes had soared. They were now boo­ing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were boo­ing because we had urged them to have faith in peo­ple who had too often proved to be unfaith­ful. They were now hos­tile because they were watch­ing the dream that they had so read­ily accepted turn into a frus­trat­ing nightmare.

At the start of Decem­ber 2010, I wrote about my dis­il­lu­sion­ment with Obama and the Demo­c­ra­tic party, but also the unrav­el­ing of the demos in democ­racy itself. Hav­ing had some time to rumi­nate, I find myself in a dif­fer­ent place: Not how did Obama dis­ap­point us, but how did we dis­ap­point ourselves?

These thoughts are lit­tle more than a col­lec­tion of ideas for my own con­sid­er­a­tion and I do not have answers, nor do I believe that there is a answer, but instead, a col­lec­tion of them as unique as the peo­ple who ask them.

Did we imbue Obama with the pent up hopes and dreams of the lib­er­als? After eight years of Dubya, eight years of Republicanism-light and the “third way”, and 12 years of Reagan-Bush, the true lib­er­als of the United States had taken a beat­ing at the poles, and so when along came some­one who seemed so very dif­fer­ent than every­thing before him, did we just assume that he held beliefs that found no sup­port in his own words?

Because he was black, did we see him as “like us”, rather than see­ing him for the mod­er­ate and con­cil­ia­tory Sen­a­tor that he was? One can not ignore the idea of “lib­eral white guilt” that per­me­ates and flows through much con­ver­sa­tion. Did we make what amounts to a racist deci­sion — though more pos­i­tive than most — to lump Obama in with our per­ceived notions of African-Americans? Just because some­one votes for the same party as you doesn’t mean they believe as you do. This is the most dif­fi­cult ques­tion to con­sider. I was raised to be as “color blind” as is fea­si­ble, and to judge peo­ple on their mer­its, not their phys­i­cal attrib­utes, and yet we all har­bor gen­er­al­iza­tions, resent­ments, assump­tions and con­cerns that we know we are wrong to feel, and so we pre­tend we don’t.

Was it sex­ism against Hillary Clin­ton? Was it Clinton-fatigue? The sex­ism is hard to know, and for myself I can only say “no”, as I grew up with a bril­liant and strong mother, and knew that any woman could lead as well, or bet­ter, than a man. I did, how­ever, hold tight my con­cerns that Hillary would bring back the ani­mos­ity of the Clin­ton era, and that the insane hatred of her by the right would rekin­dle all the strife I hoped to leave behind. I was naïve.

So, even after all that, and all my dis­ap­point­ment, I return to the fact that given the choices in the gen­eral elec­tion, there was no choice for me. McCain rep­re­sented more of the same, but with an arguably more incen­di­ary tem­per, and accom­pa­nied by some­one who rep­re­sented one of the most ter­ri­fy­ing prospects as a poten­tial suc­ces­sor as I had ever seen. No, there was no choice, only the deci­sion not to just stay home.

And with all of that, I leave with the words of Bobby Kennedy after the death of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., which ring as true today as they did near 43 years ago:

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil dis­or­ders. A sniper is only a cow­ard, not a hero; and an uncon­trolled, uncon­trol­lable mob is only the voice of mad­ness, not the voice of the people.

When­ever any American’s life is taken by another Amer­i­can unnec­es­sar­ily — whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defi­ance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in pas­sion, in an attack of vio­lence or in response to vio­lence — when­ever we tear at the fab­ric of life which another man has painfully and clum­sily woven for him­self and his chil­dren, the whole nation is degraded.

Among free men,” said Abra­ham Lin­coln, “there can be no suc­cess­ful appeal from the bal­lot to the bul­let; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seem­ingly tol­er­ate a ris­ing level of vio­lence that ignores our com­mon human­ity and our claims to civ­i­liza­tion alike. We calmly accept news­pa­per reports of civil­ian slaugh­ter in far off lands. We glo­rify killing on movie and tele­vi­sion screens and call it enter­tain­ment. We make it easy for men of all shades of san­ity to acquire weapons and ammu­ni­tion they desire.
Too often we honor swag­ger and blus­ter and the wield­ers of force; too often we excuse those who are will­ing to build their own lives on the shat­tered dreams of oth­ers. Some Amer­i­cans who preach non­vi­o­lence abroad fail to prac­tice it here at home. Some who accuse oth­ers of incit­ing riots have by their own con­duct invited them.

Some looks for scape­goats, oth­ers look for con­spir­a­cies, but this much is clear; vio­lence breeds vio­lence, repres­sion brings retal­i­a­tion, and only a clean­ing of our whole soci­ety can remove this sick­ness from our soul.

For there is another kind of vio­lence, slower but just as deadly, destruc­tive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the vio­lence of insti­tu­tions; indif­fer­ence and inac­tion and slow decay. This is the vio­lence that afflicts the poor, that poi­sons rela­tions between men because their skin has dif­fer­ent col­ors. This is a slow destruc­tion of a child by hunger, and schools with­out books and homes with­out heat in the winter.

The most pow­er­ful thing the Pres­i­dent has is not the econ­omy. It is not the stroke of the veto pen. It is not the bombs that fall in the night. The true power of the Pres­i­dent lies upon the bully pulpit.

Is it warm in here?

The Reg­is­ter, which has never billed itself as much more than a tabloid for tech­nol­ogy has an arti­cle up about how, hor­ror of hor­rors, Apple refused to repair an iPhone 4 that was oper­ated at –12C. Apple quotes the oper­at­ing tem­per­a­ture range as 0-35C, which means the phone was 1/3 of it’s tem­per­a­ture range below the bot­tom. Not exactly “design tol­er­ance”. The com­menters, of course, are livid that elec­tron­ics actu­ally have tem­per­a­ture ranges they work in.

Here’s the truth of the mat­ter. Elec­tronic com­po­nents gen­er­ally come in 3 tem­per­a­ture ranges: com­mer­cial, indus­trial and military/extended. For pas­sive com­po­nents, like resis­tors, the ranges typ­i­cally break down as:

  Tem­per­a­ture — C Tem­per­a­ture — F
Com­mer­cial 0 — 70 32 — 158
Indus­trial –25 — 85 –13 — 185
Mil­i­tary –55 — 125 –67 — 257

Hold up now!” you’re say­ing. Apple says 0-35C for oper­at­ing — we’ll ignore non-operating tem­per­a­ture as it has other fac­tors asso­ci­ated — not the 0-70C that the pas­sive parts say. That’s absolutely cor­rect, how­ever what Apple is quot­ing is the “envi­ron­ment”, not the part. The delta between the two is allo­cated to air flow, heat dis­si­pa­tion, etc. In a tiny lit­tle phone that’s packed full of high tech­nol­ogy, there’s a lot of con­cerns around both of those things. This is why the phone phys­i­cally gets hot. The entire phone is a heat sink in some ways.

I even left out another tier above mil­i­tary that’s not com­monly seen: radi­a­tion hard­ened. You can fig­ure that one out. So why doesn’t Apple just use indus­trial parts? Two reasons:

  • They cost a huge amount more, often dou­ble or more
  • Often “bleed­ing edge” com­po­nents aren’t available

Do you see the trade-off here? Let’s say a thin-film sur­face mount resis­tor of typ­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics costs 10 cents in pro­duc­tion quan­ti­ties (10,000+), an indus­trial ver­sion of the same resis­tor might cost 18 – 25 cents. It doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up. It’s not as sim­ple as peo­ple think, but then it rarely is.

The thing is, even more than oper­at­ing tem­per­a­ture is the idea of humid­ity. For exam­ple, when you walk in out of the cold out­doors in win­ter into a warm house, often your glasses fog. This is con­den­sa­tion out of the air. Sim­ple enough. Now, what do you think hap­pens when this hap­pens inside elec­tron­ics … because it does. This is why the humid­ity is speced as “non­con­dens­ing”. You can deal with 95% humid­ity — think New Orleans in the sum­mer — if it’s not going to con­dense due to tem­per­a­ture deltas, but even low humid­ity — think Phoenix in the win­ter — can con­dense if there’s enough of a tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ence. Even using recir­cu­late on a car A/C can sub­stan­tially increase the humid­ity. This is why your win­dows can fog up fast in winter.

These are the trade-offs that exist in the world of hard­ware design. You could make a phone that can deal with all sorts of con­di­tions — even being under­wa­ter — but nobody would want it because it’d cost a for­tune and be the size of a brick, and likely weigh as much. Some ven­dors might quote dif­fer­ent num­bers, but I’m 99.93% cer­tain they all use the same basic grade of parts. What they are doing is play­ing the odds based on their test­ing. Not ever man­u­fac­turer accepts the same odds.

As for the case of this iPhone, it’s likely the dam­age was done by con­dens­ing water, not the tem­per­a­ture itself. The tem­per­a­ture was only a catalyst.

My God, what have we done?

Where to begin in think­ing about the tragedy in Tuc­son yes­ter­day? It must be called, first, what it is: an assas­si­na­tion attempt intended to cause fear in oth­ers. It must be called a true act of ter­ror in a time when the word has been diluted to mean any crime for which the gov­ern­ment doesn’t wish to develop an actual case. It does not, how­ever, exist in a vacuum.

As atro­cious as the event is, it is the years of vit­ri­olic hate that cre­ated the cesspool of pol­i­tics and the near total col­lapse of social inter­ac­tion which ter­rify me more. No longer do peo­ple of dif­fer­ing opin­ions come together to break bread; instead, they demo­nized each other as trai­tors and worse. No longer do peo­ple look for com­mon ground; instead, they covet the dif­fer­ences as a wedge to divide and con­quer their opponents.

I will not play fair and bal­anced with my opin­ions, for they are not. Fair and bal­anced is what drove this sit­u­a­tion. Fair and bal­anced is what legit­imized socio­pathic com­ments as being equal to sane, thereby rob­bing our pub­lic dis­course of its most mod­er­at­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic: shame.

Too many peo­ple step forth onto the pub­lic stage and make out­landish and out­ra­geous claims and com­ments, ascrib­ing to their oppo­nent the most nefar­i­ous of intents, while the entire time the fourth estate sits idly by, val­i­dat­ing the insan­ity with their silence and false equiv­a­lence. No longer are peo­ple will­ing to say “I was wrong”, instead we receive the slimy “I mis­spoke”. No longer are bla­tant fab­ri­ca­tions called the pre­med­i­tated lies that they are, instead it’s just an opinion.

Every­one is enti­tled to his own opin­ion, but not his own facts.
 — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

For the last 20 years, in my view, we have absolved our­selves from the need to speak truth, or even pre­tend that there is such a thing as truth. Facts are prov­able, and not sub­ject to per­cep­tion. Opin­ions are lit­tle more than inter­pre­ta­tion and per­cep­tion of real­ity. Only one is worth of being used in gov­er­nance, and the other is sim­ply bunk. We must strive to be hon­est and truth­ful in our gov­er­nance if we are to sur­vive as a peo­ple; per­haps, as a species.

With all this, I am reminded of an exchange between Joseph N Welch and the noto­ri­ous Sen­a­tor Joseph McCarthy on June 9, 1954:

Until this moment, Sen­a­tor, I think I have never really gauged your cru­elty or your reck­less­ness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Har­vard Law School and came into my firm and is start­ing what looks to be a bril­liant career with us. Lit­tle did I dream you could be so reck­less and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true that he will con­tinue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar need­lessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to for­give you for your reck­less cru­elty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gen­tle man but your for­give­ness will have to come from some­one other than me.

Sen­a­tor, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild. Let us not assas­si­nate this lad fur­ther, Sen­a­tor. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

What we have wit­nessed these last few decades is the McCarthy­iza­tion of Amer­ica, with a satirist stand­ing in as our generation’s Joseph Welch. The vit­riol from the right seems sub­stan­tively more angry than that from the left, and cer­tainly more caus­tic and spouted with more hate, but it comes from both sides none the less. It poi­sons the well of democ­racy, and in doing so elim­i­nates the abil­ity to gov­ern. Per­haps that is the goal after all.

A lit­tle over 45-years ago, on August 6, 1945, Com­man­der Robert Lewis wrote 6 words in his log: “My God, what have we done?” What he had just done was destroy the entire city of Hiroshima with the first use of an atomic weapon against a peo­ple. J Robert Oppen­heimer was more intro­spec­tive in his thoughts after the first test at Trin­ity: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Is any­one who engages in these ver­bal weapons of mass destruc­tion so intro­spec­tive to what they have brought forth into the world?