Friday, August 29, 2014
“Everyone's instant impression of the smell was that of spent gunpowder.”
“Everyone's instant impression of the smell was that of spent gunpowder.” Astronauts describing the smell of the moon's dirt...
Technological archaeology...
Technological archaeology... Recovering “lost” recordings from a homemade steel wire recorder. Awesome!
Oopsie!
Oopsie! A software bug put two of the (very expensive and vastly over-budget) Galileo satellites into the wrong orbit. They are completely useless in this orbit, so they are a complete loss. This is yet another blow to the European alternative geolocation service, which does basically the same thing as the American GPS.
Some poor programmer is in a world of hurt today, I'm sure...
Some poor programmer is in a world of hurt today, I'm sure...
“What is happening to my country?”, part 9,394 in a long series...
“What is happening to my country?”, part 9,394 in a long series... Peaceful demonstrators are threatened by rock-throwing thugs. What happens? Why, the police told the peaceful demonstrators are told to shut up and leave, of course!
Barn: ready for the foam and heating pipes...
Barn: ready for the foam and heating pipes... Lots of progress on the barn yesterday, as you can see in the photos below. The last photo shows the completed barn floor “underpinnings”: a layer of fine gravel that's been carefully leveled and compacted. The under-slab plumbing is in (drains for the toilet, sink, and floor). Next up, perhaps today: installation of the insulating foam that will end up under the concrete floor, and then clipping the heating tubing to the foam. There will be three serpentine loops of heating tubing, one under each of the three main areas in the barn (garage, workshop, dog agility arena). Each of these will have a separate thermostat when we're all done – a “three zone” heating system.
The “thumper” used to compact the gravel moves forward of its own accord, thanks to an asymmetric vibration pattern. This allows fully autonomous operation with a very simple trick: tie one end of a rope to the thumper, then tie the other end to a stake. The thumper will travel round and round the stake, slowly winding up the rope and spiraling in toward the stake, just a couple inches closer on each revolution. This results in thoroughly thumped circular areas with almost no effort. Nice trick!
The plumber very carefully pressure-tested the parts of the septic line that will end up under the slab. You don't want those to fail, because fixing them would require jack-hammering the slab...
The “thumper” used to compact the gravel moves forward of its own accord, thanks to an asymmetric vibration pattern. This allows fully autonomous operation with a very simple trick: tie one end of a rope to the thumper, then tie the other end to a stake. The thumper will travel round and round the stake, slowly winding up the rope and spiraling in toward the stake, just a couple inches closer on each revolution. This results in thoroughly thumped circular areas with almost no effort. Nice trick!
The plumber very carefully pressure-tested the parts of the septic line that will end up under the slab. You don't want those to fail, because fixing them would require jack-hammering the slab...
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| Morning: 8 pier pads and some gravel |
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| Tube forms for pier foundations |
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| Spreading the fine gravel |
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| Pressure-testing the drains |
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| Tedious work: compacting gravel |
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| The last load of fine gravel arrives |
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| Automatic compacting! |
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| End of the day: ready for foam |
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| Final drain installation |
“The most important story on earth.”
“The most important story on earth.” Excellent Taranto piece on the evil press coverage of Israel vs. the Palestinians...
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Office hours...
First, in my last job I kept very strange hours, which will surprise exactly nobody who knows me :) I generally arrived at work between 5:00 am and 5:30 am (after a one hour drive), and left around 2:00 pm. I was in almost perfect sync with people who worked on the East Coast, in a time zone +3 hours from mine.
Then I recalled one quite interesting problem I worked on at that same job. Our product was a SaaS product (otherwise known as a web application), and generally people logged into it when then came into work, and remained logged into it all day long. Each of our customers had a separate instance of our product. One of our large customers – out of hundreds of customers – was having a problem we were having trouble tracking down. Every morning their system would start thrashing like mad: CPU utilization spiked, disk I/O spiked, and response times were in minutes instead of seconds. After a half hour or so, every single morning, their system would settle down and start behaving normally. Diagnostics showed nothing. We swapped out hardware; no change. People were pulling their hair out trying to figure it out, while the customer was issuing escalating threats on a daily basis. I was one of the team troubleshooting the problem. I was chasing down a strange symptom we observed, and happened to look at the table that contained login information – and noticed that almost 1,000 (of 1,200 total) users were logging in within a 3 minute period. This seemed almost impossibly synchronized – how could 1,000 users all log in with such a synchronized schedule? That question prompted a phone call to the customer, who verified that in fact all their employees did report to work in exactly this synchronized fashion. About 90% of the employees were union members, and they clocked in precisely at 9:00 am, and out at 5:00 pm. In fact, our contact at the company was surprised there was as much as a 3 minute spread in the logins, until he realized that many workers probably grabbed a cup of coffee on the way in. Anyway, the high number of concurrent logins was the root of our issue. We had the company solve it temporarily by telling their folks to log in on a staggered schedule (based on the last two digits of their SSN); then we fixed the concurrency issue with a simple queue mechanism. No other customer had ever reported this issue, in years of experience with hundreds of thousands of users. It's all the union's fault :)
Mystery of Death Valley's “traveling rocks” solved...
Mystery of Death Valley's “traveling rocks” solved... It's ice!
Multiculti gone horribly wrong...
Multiculti gone horribly wrong ... in a new and awful way. Press reports are saying this happened (and is continuing to happen!) in multiple U.K. cities. This immediately makes me wonder if the same thing is happening in other European countries, most especially in southern France and Scandinavia...
Did Michael Mann help write the EPA documents...
Did Michael Mann help write the EPA documents ... the same ones that he claims validate his research?
This somehow seems of a piece for the guy who falsely claimed he was a Nobel Prize winner...
This somehow seems of a piece for the guy who falsely claimed he was a Nobel Prize winner...
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Take no prisoners...
Take no prisoners... Afghanistan has ordered its soldiers and police not to take Taliban prisoners – but to kill them outright instead. Why? Because captured Taliban are finding it relatively easy to bribe their way out of prison. That means the only way to stop a Taliban operative is to kill him.
Most Americans have no experience with the kind of pervasive corruption one finds in many other societies, and are constantly surprised (and appalled) at the effects of it. Afghanistan is one of those countries, and reportedly one of the worst – but it is certainly not the only one. I was once responsible for business subsidiaries in Russia, where we routinely paid bribes (for things as mundane as getting an Internet connection) and protection money (it would be a shame if something happened to your nice, modern office).
Locals quickly figured out that American money was being poured into our office in St. Petersburg, and it was obvious that people were angling for every possible means to take a chunk of that for themselves. Not by the means Americans would generally expect, either. One example will give you a flavor for it. Our staff there asked us if we would spring for a bottled water delivery service, so our engineering staff could stop drinking the municipal water – which smelled like gasoline and tasted worse. We said “Of course!”, since we didn't really want to lose staff members to poisoning. The first day's delivery consisted of 20 liter (~5 gallon) bottles filled with distinctly cloudy water. When our staff complained to the water delivery guy, he said: “Oh, you want the clean water! That will be 30 rubles (about $1) extra per bottle, cash only.” This enterprising fellow had found a way to bribe us for our water! Complaining to his boss didn't help, because of course his boss got a cut of it.
Take that story and repeat 100 times, and you'll see why we estimated that about 1/3 of our St. Petersburg operating budget went to bribes and protection money...
Most Americans have no experience with the kind of pervasive corruption one finds in many other societies, and are constantly surprised (and appalled) at the effects of it. Afghanistan is one of those countries, and reportedly one of the worst – but it is certainly not the only one. I was once responsible for business subsidiaries in Russia, where we routinely paid bribes (for things as mundane as getting an Internet connection) and protection money (it would be a shame if something happened to your nice, modern office).
Locals quickly figured out that American money was being poured into our office in St. Petersburg, and it was obvious that people were angling for every possible means to take a chunk of that for themselves. Not by the means Americans would generally expect, either. One example will give you a flavor for it. Our staff there asked us if we would spring for a bottled water delivery service, so our engineering staff could stop drinking the municipal water – which smelled like gasoline and tasted worse. We said “Of course!”, since we didn't really want to lose staff members to poisoning. The first day's delivery consisted of 20 liter (~5 gallon) bottles filled with distinctly cloudy water. When our staff complained to the water delivery guy, he said: “Oh, you want the clean water! That will be 30 rubles (about $1) extra per bottle, cash only.” This enterprising fellow had found a way to bribe us for our water! Complaining to his boss didn't help, because of course his boss got a cut of it.
Take that story and repeat 100 times, and you'll see why we estimated that about 1/3 of our St. Petersburg operating budget went to bribes and protection money...
Worried about Curiosity's wheel wear issues?
What the engineer should know about programming...
What the engineer should know about programming... A magazine article from 1957. Things have changed just a tad since then :)
Who needs that damned Constitution, anyway?
Who needs that damned Constitution, anyway? Certainly not King President Obama!
Related thought: do you suppose any foreign politician looks to the U.S. as a political model any more? I read an article the other day talking about a debate amongst German talking heads, wherein the conclusion was that Putin's Russia was a far more viable model for Germany than Obama's America...
Related thought: do you suppose any foreign politician looks to the U.S. as a political model any more? I read an article the other day talking about a debate amongst German talking heads, wherein the conclusion was that Putin's Russia was a far more viable model for Germany than Obama's America...
Barn: pier footing forms...
Barn: pier footing forms... Our builder finished these yesterday afternoon, but the field was too wet and mucky for a concrete truck to get in. We're hoping they can pour today.
The first photo just shows a rough form, sitting in its hole in the backfill. The second shows the two rows of four piers. The last shows the forms finished and ready to pour. These are held up by stakes and are only roughly in the design position. The top of them is several inches below the needed top of the pier foundation. Once the footings have cured a day or two, a round form will be placed on top, and the top of this will be carefully positioned and set to the right height. These will be poured next, after which the pier/footing “assemblies” will be backfilled around and compacted. At that point (hopefully still this week), it will be time to put a layer of fine gravel over all the backfill, and carefully level it...
The first photo just shows a rough form, sitting in its hole in the backfill. The second shows the two rows of four piers. The last shows the forms finished and ready to pour. These are held up by stakes and are only roughly in the design position. The top of them is several inches below the needed top of the pier foundation. Once the footings have cured a day or two, a round form will be placed on top, and the top of this will be carefully positioned and set to the right height. These will be poured next, after which the pier/footing “assemblies” will be backfilled around and compacted. At that point (hopefully still this week), it will be time to put a layer of fine gravel over all the backfill, and carefully level it...
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
The EPA deals in political propaganda, not science...
The EPA deals in political propaganda, not science... Warren Meyer of CoyoteBlog seems to be surprised by this.
I am not. I would expect the EPA to pay attention to the science only when it serves their political interests to do so. That's not very often, actually.
I am not. I would expect the EPA to pay attention to the science only when it serves their political interests to do so. That's not very often, actually.
Lois Lerner had a Blackberry...
Lois Lerner had a Blackberry... That's significant because some of her emails would have been stored on that device. But the IRS destroyed it, too!
They're just laughing in our faces, now. They don't even care if we know they're corrupt, lying sons of bitches. They don't think there's anything that we the people can do about it.
Are they right?
They're just laughing in our faces, now. They don't even care if we know they're corrupt, lying sons of bitches. They don't think there's anything that we the people can do about it.
Are they right?
Airstrikes in Libya...
Airstrikes in Libya ... were conducted by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, acting on their own. They didn't coordinate the strikes with the U.S., or get prior clearance for them.
The U.S. is receding from the forefront of world affairs. There is no effective leadership. Tin pot dictators like Russia's Putin, and posturing closet Islamists like Turkey's Erogodan are competing for the role. I just hope things don't go to hell too fast, so that our next president has a fighting chance to reassert this country's leadership...
The U.S. is receding from the forefront of world affairs. There is no effective leadership. Tin pot dictators like Russia's Putin, and posturing closet Islamists like Turkey's Erogodan are competing for the role. I just hope things don't go to hell too fast, so that our next president has a fighting chance to reassert this country's leadership...
The best of Harry Reid...
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