Some Memorial Day Music...

Thank You...

CP/M in Your Browser...

When I think about things like this, it seems to me that we have nearly arrived at the point where a conventional desktop is unnecessary.  That's Google's thesis with their ChromeBook, and I'm beginning to think they might actually be right...

JavaScript Tool Summary...

A nice compendium...

What's the Chance...

...that the breath you just took had some molecules of air that were part of Julius Caesar's last breath?

Answer here.

A Trip to the Mountains...

When we left this morning it was overcast and raining, so I didn't bother taking my camera.  That was a bad mistake on my part, as Cuyamaca and Laguna mountains were in bloom – flowers everywhere we went!  Bright red penstemmon were perhaps the most common flower we saw, and far more of them than we can recall ever seeing before in our mountains.

We started out by stopping for breakfast at the Descanso Junction Restaurant, where we both had a meal large enough to fuel us for the entire day.  After that, we headed north on Boulder Creek Road.  The creek was running higher than we've seen it before, and clear.  The ford's lower edge is shown at left – if you're familiar with the road, then you know that's much higher than normal.

We stopped there for perhaps 20 minutes, and I took a walk along the north side of the stream, upstream.  It was still drizzling, and the plants along the stream were wet, so I was soaked from my hips down.  I saw quite a few nice things along the way (below), and I came back smelling strongly of plant I walked through – not sage, but with a similar smell.

Then we drove on up to where the short cut to Eagle Peak Road branches from Boulder Creek Road, and took the shortcut.  This turned out to be a beautiful drive, full of wildflowers (especially monkeyflowers and a variety of cheerful, bright yellow wildflowers).  The streams all along the road were flowing higher than we've ever seen them.

Once we hit Eagle Peak Road, we headed north and saw something we never expected: a waterfall with water!  This is a fairly tall waterfall, 50 feet or more high.  There's a rough turnout where you can park and walk south along the bluffs for a great view.  The water was pouring over this falls, and in one spot the swiftly falling water was turned 90° to shoot out straight horizontally.  It's a most pleasant spot for a little sightseeing.

Then we kept on back up to Boulder Creek Road (where we bought some honey at a roadside honeybox), over the hump on Engineer Road to Cuyamaca Lake, then down the Sunrise Highway to the turn on to Pine Creek Road, down Noble canyon.  Along the way we had spectacular displays of many different wildflowers, most especially penstemmon, lupine, snow-on-the-mountain, and fireweed.  We also saw redbuds about to bloom – lots of them, right where we thought they'd all be permanently killed by the 2007 fires.  The wind had kicked up, gusting to 50 or 60 mph, and clouds were scudding by at this speed just over our heads.  This made for really interesting and fast-changing lighting effects that we greatly enjoyed. 

Here's our remaining crummy cell-camera photos...

Post Office's Last Gasps...

The U.S. Post Office's travails were entirely predictable – in fact, they were predicted, by a great many people including me.  The reasons are many, and most are easy enough to understand.  The simple fact that the Post Office has a half million union workers is almost enough to understand the entire problem.  If you're interested in the details, here's a great primer.  It focuses on the looming financial crisis, but along the way gives a very accessible description of the myriad ways in which the Post Office is in trouble.

The linked article talks mostly about various “fixes” for the Post Office.  The most important reform, however, isn't discussed: removing the U.S. Post Office's government-granted monopoly on first class mail delivery.  A dose of competition would result in great delivery of services that people were actually willing to pay for – and an end to the subsidization of the things people don't want (such as junk mail).

The challenge is that a half-million member union is a potent political force.  Their ability to make political donations means they can (effectively) buy off the politicians who might consider removing their monopoly.  So the reform I advocate isn't particularly likely to be implemented.  But I can dream, can't I?

Rain and Changing Plans...

It's the end of May, and we're getting more rain – most unexpected out here in the high desert chaparral.  We've only had a few tenths of an inch (about 5 mm), but that's enough to thoroughly wet down our yard and trees.  We were planning to burn our brush pile today, and to work more on trimming our pine trees.  The rain put the kabosh on those plans!

So we're switching to our backup plan: breakfast at Descanso Junction Restaurant, and a drive in the mountains.  Race and Miki will keep us company.  Woo hoo!

Bobcat on a Cactus...

With an amazing backstory.  Via reader Jim M.

Thank You, Team 6...

Unknown source, via reader Jim M.:

Thanking Obama for killing Bin Laden is like going into McDonalds and thanking Ronald McDonald for the hamburger. It's the guy cooking the burger that should get the credit, not the clown.

Tunny Machine Back in Action!

If you're a technology history junkie like me, you probably know about the Tunny machines.  They were an important part of the Bletchly Park efforts that decoded Nazi messages.

The British National Museum of Computing has recently finished building a complete, working replica of a Tunny machine.  In the course of doing so, they've now documented exactly how it was built (this documentation didn't exist before they started their work).

This is something I would really like to see.  Next time I'm over in England, I've got to make a point of seeing this museum (I've never been there)...

Lunokhod I Lives Again!

Well, sort of.

This Soviet achievement in 1969 was completely overshadowed by the American achievement of putting astronauts on the moon.  The Soviet moon rover was, however, quite a technical feat in its own right.

Clearly, though, the Soviets needed a dose of design talent.  Lunokhod's “washtub look” would have made Stalin quite happy.

While Lunokhod's electronics failed a long time ago, the device itself was recently located by imagery satellites in lunar orbit, and a scientist has now succeeded in bouncing light off the retro-reflectors mounted on Lunokhod's back.  With its location now precisely known, Lunokhod's retro-reflectors have now become an important part of a modern science effort.  Not bad for a 42 year old piece of space junk!

Geek Humor...

If you're a developer, this is very funny stuff: how to write unmaintainable code.  A sample:

Recycle Your Variables

Wherever scope rules permit, reuse existing unrelated variable names. Similarly, use the same temporary variable for two unrelated purposes (purporting to save stack slots). For a fiendish variant, morph the variable, for example, assign a value to a variable at the top of a very long method, and then somewhere in the middle, change the meaning of the variable in a subtle way, such as converting it from a 0-based coordinate to a 1-based coordinate. Be certain not to document this change in meaning.

2012 Is Going to be an Interesting Election Year!

Sign outside Clovis, New Mexico:

Forth...

Here's a discussion about Forth, a programming language blast-from-the-past for me.  There was, in the late '70s, a period of time when Forth was the only high-level langauge for microcomputers that actually worked reasonably well for real-world projects.  I used it fairly extensively on Z80s, and a bit less on several different Intel single-chip solutions.  I liked it a lot - it was very light-wieght, lent itself very well to a serial terminal development environment, and let me build up a library of “stuff” that I could use as tools in different environments.  Turbo Pascal was the first practicable alternative I found to Forth, and that wasn't useful in embedded systems.  Forth and assembler were the only languages I ever used in that world...

62% Top Marginal Tax Rate?

This is so depressing...

Sad...

Spirit abandoned...

Aging Geek...

Debbie and I are very tired and sore this morning, after spending the weekend working on our pine trees.  We've got about two-thirds of the work done now, and the part that we've finished looks great.  There's a large pile of pine brush in our front yard, ready for burning next weekend.  We burned yesterday, but because we can only burn from 8:15 am to 10:00 am, we couldn't get all that much done.  The pile grows larger.

Meanwhile, we exercised – hard – virtually every muscle in our aging bodies.  We're paying for it this morning!  Oh, the aches and pains!  Sure will feel good when this goes away...

Amazing Gymnast...

My mom sent this video to me, with a forwarded note that this was the granddaughter of Nadia Comanecci, the amazing Olympic gymnast.  Nadia, who won her Olympic gold medal in 1976 at the age of 14, has one child (a five year old daughter) at this writing.  This is actually a video of Boyanka Angelova, an accomplished gymnast who is completely unrelated to Nadia.  But who cares?  It's amazing, and beautiful!

UNIX Tools...

An interesting collection...