10 second thoughts: Gradle

In my opinion, Gradle is a bad idea, implemented poorly. It should never take dozens of gigabytes of RAM and many tens of minutes, just to load its config files and determine that the command asked was mistyped.

H41-08U: Caravan of Ignorance

Amazing how people like to celebrate their stupidity and parade their ignorance as a virtue.

Post by Global Secular Humanist Movement.

colordiff trailing whitespace again

Why do I keep on having to do this?

I think I shall leave this version of the patch right here for future reference.

--- /usr/bin/colordiff 2010-06-01 12:47:41.000000000 -0700
+++ colordiff 2014-01-02 13:29:03.954751310 -0800
@@ -61,4 +61,5 @@
 my $diff_stuff = $colour{magenta};
 my $cvs_stuff  = $colour{darkyellow};
+my $trailing_whitespace = "\033[0;41m";
 
 # Locations for personal and system-wide colour configurations
@@ -311,4 +312,5 @@
 
 foreach (@inputstream) {
+    my $added_line = 0;
     if ($diff_type eq 'diff') {
         if (/^</) {
@@ -317,4 +319,5 @@
         elsif (/^>/) {
             print "$file_new";
+            $added_line = 1;
         }
         elsif (/^[0-9]/) {
@@ -337,4 +340,5 @@
         elsif (/^\+ /) {
             print "$file_new";
+            $added_line = 1;
         }
         elsif (/^\*{4,}/) {
@@ -379,4 +383,5 @@
         elsif (/^\+/) {
             print "$file_new";
+            $added_line = 1;
         }
         elsif (/^\@/) {
@@ -406,4 +411,5 @@
             elsif ($sepchars eq ' >') {
                 print "$file_new";
+                $added_line = 1;
             }
             else {
@@ -426,4 +432,5 @@
         $_ =~ s/(\{\+[^]]*?\+\})/$file_new$1$colour{off}/g;
     }
+    s/(\s+)$/$trailing_whitespace$1/ if $added_line;
     s/$/$colour{off}/;
     print "$_";

kthxbai!

Goodbye 2013... Hello 2014.

That was one fast year... Zoom!
When it comes to personal objectives, not a particularly successful year.

Retrospective

As a courtesy, the link to last year's retrospective is right here.

As with last year, lets start with the notable flubs:

• Failed to spend enough time to relearn the piano.
• FOSS flubs - failed to get code out there and adopted.
• Continued to fail to maintain fitness... I end this year at 211lbs vs last year's 206lbs.

As +Eric Idle says; always look at the bright side of life. There were a few very minor victories:

• 400KHz I2C on Raspberry Pi to a PIC16 microcontroller slave.
• Managed to test OQGraph3 with TokuDB on MariaDB.
• Reduced by 20% the reading list backlog.
• Did manage to get together for a few meetups with other Blizzard alumni.

Wish list for 2014

Obligatory wish-list for the new year which contains some duplicates from last year. As always, these aren't resolutions but wishy-washy objectives which may or may not be met, blah, blah...

Perhaps a little shorter list than last year.

• Free and Open Source Software projects
• Dedicate some hours to help polish OQGraph by March.
• Split the WL#820 project into lots of separate commits.
• Personal development:
• This time, really do set aside some time to relearn the piano.
• Complete at least one large project (electronics, pi, etc).
• Organise the office, really! It's a dump!

tldr?

2013 was a forgettable year except for time with my daughter.

Accurate notifications: 249,561,088 Invitations!

It's always nice when applications give notifications which are useful and informative. In this example, I present a picture of a terribly useful notification from the FaceBook app on an iPad mini...

#iPad #Facebook

Kickstarter: Smoothieboard

This looks like a fun kickstarter project:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/logxen/smoothieboard-the-future-of-cnc-motion-control

I like modern phones

I really do like our modern era of customisable smart phones... The HTC One is truly the best phone I have ever owned.

The point if this posting: The recent Android 4.3 upgrade also upgraded the system apps. This meant that it came bundled with Google Hangouts and Google Maps 7. Both of these apps are a UI nightmare and so, I have removed them and installed the older Google Talk 4.1.2 and Google Maps 6.14.4 apps.

Much nicer!

#HTCOne #Android

Google Contacts UI fail

There is clearly enough room to not truncate the name if the name was shifted up.
#google #android #fail

The flute makers and the rebellious child.

I posted this text in a comment on Facebook. Perhaps I had heard it from somewhere or perhaps it is totally original. I don't know. I post this tiny story here for more people to enjoy:

Imagine a happy functioning society of flute makers, who spend their time toiling the fields, making beautiful flutes with intricate carved patterns and playing music which is a joy to listen to. However, they are all born blind but to them, this is completely normal.
One day, a child is born but she could see: She learned growing up to pretend to be as blind as her brethren but in her rebellious teens she decided she wanted to paint the colours she saw.
Such blasphemy! Colours! Her parents were so sad that they gave birth to such a deformed and mentally insane child that did not want to make flutes and play music but instead she wanted to paint imaginary "pictures" that no one can feel and she talked about "colour" nonsense that no one can hear. How does one hear the colour "red"?
The child was obviously insane.
However, the village elders know a cure. They can put out her "eyes", obviously a physical defect, and she would be just like everyone else: Normal.

Battle for the post smart-watch era...

I was considering how there are many players in the space, with Google acquiring a player, Samsung about to launch a product, there is also Pebble, Sony already entrenched and even Apple looking like it's interested in playing.

One of the biggest criticisms I have seen with several reviews of products is over integration and battery life. Random neurons fired and I recall reading that there was already a fuel cell developed that could generate electricity from blood plasma.

So, here is the idea: A subcutaneous implant with an OLED display, a digital smart tattoo, fuelled by the wearer's blood, Bluetooth connectivity to a phone and maybe a bunch of medical applications, like monitoring blood glucose, etc.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

While on FaceBook, I had encountered the following take on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and it didn't seem to flow right for me and didn't feel adequate, scientifically.

So I came up with the following variant:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!
Giant ball of incandescent gas,
Compressed under its own mass.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
how I admire what you are!

Glowing bright, nuclear fusion:
Hydrogen to helium, C-N-O!
Billions of years of fuel to burn
until the iron cools the core.
Red dwarf, white dwarf, Supernova!
Infinite universe, full of awe.

Twinkling star, far away:
Distorted by our own atmosphere.
Scientists with their adaptive optics,
study the night sky, beauty abound.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
Science tells us what you are.

I give it to the world under the following license:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Modern electronics...

Modern electronics is so tedious to solder by hand. Here is a successful attempt to solder an extension to a microphone.

Recording ideas

Being conscious of the weird ways that our minds work is a useful thing. One if the more interesting studies in recent years revealed that our minds scrub some information when passing through doorways. Recently, I have adopted the policy of not passing through a doorway if I am incubating a new idea and will try to record the idea before I leave the room. For this, I have found that the Google Keep app is really quite useful.

Apple Yawn.

Apple iButt Yawn! Didn't their old Dot-mac, MobileMe do this years ago?

A tale of two Pis

Since I have two different Raspberry Pis, both model B but one is made in China, the other is made in the UK, I may as well post a picture of them side by side.

HTC One charging oddity

This is mostly just a post for my personal reference:
After mucking around with the phone, plugging in and unplugging things from its USB port, the port may suddenly stop working and the phone won't even initiate charging when the charger is plugged in. Soft reboots or soft power-down/power-up doesn't appear to fix it and the phone won't appear when plugged into a computer's USB port.
The solution is somewhat simple: Force a hard reboot by holding down the power button for 10 seconds. The following reboot, it appears to work again.

Goodbye 2012. Hello 2013.

It's that time of year again: Reflect on the year's successes and flubs... Of which some were "resolutions" and some were merely wish-list items.

Notable flubs:

• Practically all work-related items were flubs but there again, I didn't seriously expect Blizzard to give me the "pink slip".
• Most FOSS project items were flubs but there again, changing job and relocating puts a serious crimp on one's free time.
• Failed to maintain the fitness improvement - Finished 2010 at 235lbs, 2011 at 198lbs and I'm finishing 2012 at 206lbs. Could be worse, I suppose.

Hard pressed to think of any real successes which were on the 2012 list. There are a few work successes at my job at +LinkedIn but they don't count because this time last year, I was only a user of their site.

Anyways, on to non-work wish-list for 2013... Not solid resolutions because, meh.

• Would be nice to get back to under 200lbs again.
• I am going to make time for Free and Open Source projects:
• OQGraph for MariaDB
• Cleanup the v3 work
• Get it merged into trunk.
• External Stored Procedures for MariaDB
• Cleanup the current work.
• Include the proof-of-concept work to split the parser so that the stored procedure parser is plugable.
• Get it merged into trunk.
• Playing with Raspberry Pi
• I plan to outfit my Pi with more IO using cheap PIC16 parts and make all the source and schematics open.
• I want to make a small bipedal robot, powered by a Pi or two.
• Is it possible to use I2C as a Transport for NDBCluster?
• Just for fun:
• Participate in more get togethers with other Blizzard alumni who are now in the SF Bay area.
• Personal development:
• I'm planning to relearn the piano.
• Read more books. I have a backlog of books, including fiction books, that I want to read.
• Eventually get my home office organised.

I'll see where it leads...

What my Nexus One phone looks like right now.

Test post

Testing posting from Google's Blogger app while waiting at allergist's

Tip: Automounting NFS

Useful blog post for automounting NFS shares.

free gas at corner of collins ave and eckhoff st ... near gene audry jct off I5. 3600psig CNG today only!

Things to do...

Need to stop procrastinating and to create a VM image of my ol' trusty OS/2 machine, especially as it appears that the venerable Tyan Tomcat PentiumMMX motherboard has finally stopped working. Maybe I could try swapping the CPUs or something or there is the Intel OR840 PentiumIII motherboard floating around... The only real problem is that the old case is a AT Medium Tower and the OR840 is an ATX motherboard, so there is the issue of PSU incompatibility too.

An idea to increase power/efficiency of a Natural Gas (CH4) Internal Combustion Engine (ICE).

While I was driving to In-N-Out, earlier today, an idea struck me as to how to improve the performance of a Natural Gas powered Internal Combustion Engine...

Essentially, the waste gases of a natural gas engine is water vapor and carbon dioxide with trace amounts of other pollutants.
A major waste product of the engine is heat, especially excess heat in the exhaust gasses. What do I define as excess heat in the exhaust? Quite simply it is heat above the point required to keep the water content of the exhaust in its vapor phase. At standard atmospheric pressure, it would be 100ºC. With an engine with a 12:1 compression ratio, this temperature would be at least 182ºC, plus a bit more for the motive power of the engine - so lets say around 200ºC.

The exhaust gases could be condensed to form mildly acidic but otherwise pure water. This water could be warmed by the engine's cooling system up to equal the temperature of the engine block, which would be a little under 100ºC. At the point of the engine cycle just after the intake valves close at roughly the point where compression begins, a small amount of this warmed water could be injected as a fine aerosol spray. The subsequent combustion of the natural gas could provide enough energy to also change the injected water into its vapor phase, increasing the post-combustion pressure within the engine, providing more motive power.

The key thing to do would be to monitor the temperature of the exhaust from the engine to ensure that there is excess heat within the system to vaporise the injected water so that the water is not injected at a time when there is insufficient energy to support it as it would likely result in reduced engine performance.

How well would this perform? Well, to be honest, I have not run any detailed numbers but I don't think it would be too far fetched to imagine this improving power by as much as 10%, maybe even significantly more. Increased performance would mean less time spent accelerating and perhaps less fuel to maintain steady velocity which both would mean significant gains in fuel efficiency.

What other uses for the condensed water can I think of? Perhaps some form of evaporative cooling system for the intake air? Another idea to entertain.

If only I had the time to play...

At the Shoreline Amptheatre in Mountain View, almost at work but since it is a vacation day...

I think I am beginning to get an idea what being a "groupie" feels like. Following NIN through California

Verizon has awful customer service!

As anyone who has had to call Verizon can probably attest to ...

VERIZON CUSTOMER SERVICE SUCKS.

And for a phone company, the call quality of their customer service sucks -- as they transfer you from one call centre to another, the voice quality gets progressively worse and worse.

Perhaps the poor line call quality is intentional - so that after an hour and being bounced from one call centre to another, you're forced to disconnect and try again because everything becomes unintelligible.

Even though you enter in your "BTN" number, you get sent to a call centre on the other side of the country just to be sent back...

I am so tempted to just cancel.

W the hell is "Cyberinfrastructure"(aka I expected better from the IEEE Computer Society Magazine)

We live in a strange era of "tubes", "Engrish" and "Yet Another Invented Word Misusing Word Stems".

What is the subject of my wrath? Quite simple really.... The use of the prefix "cyber-" to mean "The Inter-Network".

Cyber-this... Cyber-that... What a load of rubbish. It is diluting the real meaning of Cybernetics, which is the science of feedback and control engineering.

And this rubbish word "Cyberinfrastructure", as seen at the top of page 40 of the January 2009 edition of the IEEE Computer Society magazine "Computer", is a case of a few people wanting to sound "smarter" by abusing a word used in science and engineering.

To me, they have just made themselves sound less educated.
Instead of the abomnation "cyberinfrastructure", why not use "network infrastructure" or "data grid".

Bah!

You may choose to blame my rant on the fact that I have a degree in Cybernetics.

Random thought

With how often I use the CDROM drive in a laptop, I wouldn't mind if they went away completely. I think my next personal laptop will not have such low-density storage built in but only as an external device. That freed space could be used for other stuff such as more battery or even to reduce the overall bulk of the machine.

Makes something like the MacBook Air a tempting choice for the future: 2010 is the year when I will replace my personal laptop.

(Katie would disagree: She uses her laptop as a personal DVD player)

Actually, it very good and tasty dogfood!

In response to the Slashdot article: As Christmas Bonus, Google Hands Out "Dogfood"... A small number of people have expressed displeasure at only getting a G1 smartphone as a bonus.

Personally, I am very happy to receive the dev G1 phone... It wasn't something I would have purchased for myself (tough economic times ahead yadda yadda yadda) nor was it something that I would have asked anyone else to get for me. It gives me the opportunity to play with it and maybe develop a few stupid little applications, just for fun: It will be a much appreciated toy for Christmas.

Will it replace my old phone? Don't know yet. It is a lot bulkier than my Samsung Trace. For now, I'm giving it a test-drive.

In any case, this is the most valuable Christmas bonus that I have received in recent years - so I kinda feel that anyone complaining about it are kinda being ungrateful. I am used to getting perhaps a company-branded backpack, shot glass, towel or USB pen drive as a Christmas bonus from my previous employer so this phone gift is positively extravagant by comparison. Even considering that I occasionally worked long hours and was key in developing a few features which formed the foundation of my then-CEO's promise, I appreciated the small token gifts and I still enjoy using them today.

I never expected, nor did I ever receive, a large bonus from my previous employer.
I never expected any bonus from Google this year, especially considering the current economy.

Just my 2c opinion..

Bumper sticker

While driving to work, listening to "Capital G", I was thinking that the following car bumper sticker would be just perfect:

"Oil Pump" Bumper Sticker
by

windyone

Make custom bumper stickers On Zazzle.com
See more United States Bumper Stickers

Nine Inch Nails

The concert was great. The 10 second review: The Oakland event at the Oracle Arena had better sound quality, I think the concrete metal and plastic of the Forum in Inglewood echoed a bit and dulled the sound. However, we had better seats at the forum and the set was slightly better I think...

The cost of Natural Gas

It is quite amusing sometimes to look at official statistics: 4 times more natural gas is lost in storage and in the natural gas pipe network than is used for transportation.
This means that they (Sempra etc) could in theory sell natural gas for use in transportation for free and write it off as 20% increase in network storage losses.
However, the cost of fuel to owners of natural gas vehicles in California is up to 3 times higher than the cost of fuel to vehicle owners in Utah. Given that the wholesale price of natural gas is prroximately $9.03 per 1000 cu.ft. and the retail price to CNG vehicle owners in California is around $2.89 / gge (1 gge = 127.77 cu.ft.), then the natural gas companies have a profit margin of approximately 150%. If California is really serious about reducing pollution, natural gas vehicles needs to be encouraged since natural gas is the source fuel used by all hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, whether the natural gas is cracked in a converter at home, within the vehicle itself (natural gas fuel cell) or done industrially at the filling station. Price gouging by the natural gas suppliers needs to stop - CNG vehicle owners should not have to have a home filling station fitted just to avoid the inflated prices at the filling stations.

There can be a whole new service industry,

Here is an interesting business idea which maybe someone can run with and exploit:
For a nominal fee, perhaps $5-$10 per week, a company can provide a junk call phone screening service. Here is the details:

• A FXO/FXS device is plugged into your PC which is wired to the internet.
  
• The phone line from customer's phone service plugs into the PC.
  
• All the home phones are connected to the PC.
  
• Outgoing calls are unhindered... The service may optionally route the call through cheapest path.
  
• VOIP-based phone services, such as Vonage, can skip some of the above.
  
• An incoming call which matches customer-supplied list of phone numbers causes home phones to ring.
  
• All other incoming calls are immediately picked up by the computer.
  
• If it sounds like a FAX, receive it and store on hard drive.
  
• Otherwise, call is routed to phone-screening operator, perhaps in India or wherever is cheap.
  
• If caller can identify themselves, matching supplied list (such as credit card account number), the call may be forwarded to the customer's home phones or a pre-recorded message can be played back at the caller.
  
• Forwarding services can be provided for extra $$ subscription... No need to miss an important call. Forward to a VOIP target, or a cellphone perhaps...
  
• All received non-personal calls can be recorded. The operator will notify the caller immediately after answering the call.
  
• The audio file will be stored (long term) on the customer's PC.
  
• Short-term audio retrieval would be available online from the service's web site.
  
• All received calls, (CID details, date, time, duration) are logged/archived on customer's PC.
  
• Recent calls list may be viewed online.
  

Now, wouldn't it be funny when a Telemarketer from India is received by an operator in India, and you never need be bothered by a phone call in the middle of the night?

Call came through.

Well... I predicted that it would happen back in 2006... I said that Microsoft will change to a subscription model within the next two years and here is the announcement!

Cannot say that I am surprised.

Speculations

Some people have asked me of what I think lies ahead... so instead of having to remember what I have told who... here are my wild speculations.

My opinions and speculations:

• We will see $5/gallon during 3Q08.
  
• Federal Reserve base interest rates will rise by 0.5% before end of FY08
  
• Residential property prices will bottom out during 4Q08.
  

MSOOXML has been made an ISO Standard,

Of course, the challenge is to now produce a OOXML document which conforms to the now ratified standard which is capable of thoroughly crashing implementors of OOXML readers, including MS Office, and to create such a document which to fix the problem would require breaking away from the published specification and rendering documents in an incompatible manner.

Given the penchant for largely undocumented binary globs in the file, I should imagine that this should be possible - because by the nature of being undocumented, they are not part of the standard so a document which has an 'invalid' binary glob would still be conforming to the OOXML standard.

Anyways, it is not a disaster - I am sure that there must be plenty of ISO standards which are defunct or rarely used because they are irrelevant or unimplementable. OOXML is likely to become another one. Where people fail to specify exactly which ISO document standard, that is their own problem. Supporters of ODF should continue doing what they were doing - refining their specification and making it good and stop wasting time trying to berate their competitor.

Besides, now you have an easy way to tell PHBs about what each of the two standards are about:

When archiving legacy documents, use ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML.

For all new documents, use ISO/IEC 26300 Information technology - Open Document Format.

I now have Time!

Well, it is done.

I am now officially a jobless lazy bum. On the plus side - I now have time!

Time to think about relaxing properly. Time to read one of those dozens of books I never seemed to have time for.

There are a few things I need to do - but there is no work stress or pressure. This weekend will be the first in years where I have no deadlines to think about. Okay - I did have a couple of deadlines but they don't matter anymore.

Important things have happened - Iain M Banks has published a new Culture novel: Matter. I plan to read it this coming week... but not too fast - I shall wait until I have a nice open slot for that activity so I can enjoy his work fully.

"Chick-Kut-Teh"

Wonderful news: The nearby 99 Ranch Market now stocks the Bah Kut Teh kit near their section for Indonesian foods. No longer do I have to travel to San Francisco's Chinatown just to purchase Bah Kut Teh spices..

This evening, I prepared it using about 2 lbs of chicken with some baby carrots and sliced white onions thrown in near the end (the two vegetables which Katie readily eats). Served with steamed Jasmine rice. Perfect.

Of course, the best is yet to come... Tomorrow, it would taste even better!

Early morning activity...

Waking up and then moving a whole bunch of stuff is not an ideal way to start the day. It's not even 8:30am and I feel tired. At least everything is operational again, For a number of hours from yesterday afternoon, we were essentially offline with not even the house phone nor DSL connected.

Used the opportunity to vacuum the cooler fins inside the Quad G5 - it was truely impressive how much dirt had collected there - amazing that the machine did not suffer badly from overheating problems.

The sorry state of computing literature

While I was browsing a Borders yesterday evening, a revelation came upon me as to an analogy for the computer book situation:

Imagine in a bookshop that there is a "Food" section where there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, all quite clearly divided into sections:

• How to eat Pizza
• How to eat quiche
• How to eat soup
• Serving food
• Table settings
• The Art of Plating
• Slicing Turkey
• Serving Pie
• Reheating Dinners

Dozens of sections about food... yet none of them actually tell you how to make anything. No ingredients. No recipes.

That is the state of the majority of computer books and computing magazines today.