Get the book: http://www.debuggingrules.com/. Full disclosure: I am the author. But it was IEEE Software Magazine that said this should be required reading for all technology students. And unlike most other tech books, this one's cheap, funny, and a quick read.
Remember the Bill of Rights was just to make clear stuff that the founding fathers were specifically worried about. And the 9th amendment speaks to that directly, making clear that "Doesn't apply here" doesn't apply here.
9th amemdment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The 10th amendment points out that since the constitution *doesn't* give the *government* the right to prevent us from taking pictures from public places, it can't prohibit us, or Google, from doing it.
10th amemdment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Number keypads were designed for accountants, with 0 at the bottom and increasing with more reach. For an accountant, 0 is obviously supposed to be near 1.
Phone keypads were a modification of the dial phone, which starts and 1 and goes up to 9, then 0. They felt that ordinary people don't start counting with 0, they start with 1, so that would make more sense. (Ask a child to count, they start with 1. And the Romans didn't even have a way to say 0.) And another aspect of this decision was that the old dials would click once for each position, and starting with 1 made it obvious to map digit 1 to 1 click, digit 2 to 2 clicks, etc, and map digit 0 to 10 clicks, rather than 0 to 1, 1 to 2, etc. You can't map digit 0 to 0 clicks, you'd never know you dialed a 0. So you could only call Romans.
I got a CD equipped clock radio for Christmas, along with a Wake Up compilation of tunes. Cool enough. Except that when the alarm triggers, the first thing I hear is the loud spinning of the CD. Then a few seconds after I'm awake, the music comes on.
But that's not the stupid part. If I hit the snooze button, the music stops, but the CD keeps spinning, noisily enough to keep me awake. And if I look over to see how much more snooze time I have, the time display reads "Track 01". No time.
I once had a solar-powered calculator that shut itself off (to save sunlight?) after a minute.
MyYahoo has a feature that updates the "most popular" news items every 5 minutes. I often scroll down the list, picking articles to read in a new window, then going back to the main window. I am often a few articles from the end when the page updates, reordering everything and making me scan from the top. I actually tried to point this out to them, and they got all hung up on what browser I was running, my OS, exactly what did I click, etc. I couldn't get them to understand that this was just an ANNOYING FEATURE OF THEIR SOFTWARE and either fix it or at least acknowledge that they thought it was better that way.
A very readable "debunking technology history" book is Future Hype by Bob Seidensticker. It is full of wonderful examples of "internet time" innovation back before the internet, or even electric service, was invented. Puts the awe of our fast-paced world in some badly-needed perspective.
I was involved in the 1975 alternative to Atari's home Pong game, called TV Tennis by Executive Games. Executive Games was an entrepeneur who came to MIT's Innovation Center to find people to design a "home video game" like the coin operated Pong games. We did it with discrete analog and digital circuits; ball and paddle movement were analog, and thus game speed was controlled with a pot, from very slow to unbelievably fast. Much more challenging than Atari, in our opinion. There was also a practice wall which looked like a stack of paddles, so the ball would come off at seemingly random angles, and a robot paddle which came out of a debugging tool (see my book "Debugging" for this war story.) We also had our controllers at the end of a cable, allowing players to sit back and not crowd around the console like the Atari game. You could hold the controller and use it with one hand, leaving the other free to hold your beer. (Yes, I was still an undergrad, but the drinking age was 18 in those days.)
I remember not being taken seriously by National Semiconductor when I asked for quotes on counter and gate chips in 100,000 quantities -- there was no market for logic at those levels in that era, consumer electronics was all radio. But we did ship 67,000 games before Christmas 1975.
Building games out of discrete parts proved uncompetitive in the long run, and Executive Games dropped out after building a hockey game the next year. When I graduated (in 1976) I interviewed with a division of Fairchild in hopes of designing games on a chip. During the interview, one of the managers showed me a prototype game they had built, thinking it would be a good way to use up millions of TTL (the original very popular logic family, now obsolete due to high power consumption) chips they had in inventory. He showed me a 5" by 10" circuit board covered with TTL chips, and my immediate reaction was "That's all TTL? You must have had a power supply the size of a shoebox." He dropped the board on the table, and said "We worked on this for 9 months before we realized that, and it killed the project. When can you start?" I did take the job, but ended up designing clock radios, so I came back East after a short time.
The biggest success story out of our little game venture was Glen Dash, who was our RF guy, getting our TV modulator through the FCC. He understood the physics and electronics and laws, and was able to establish a relationship with the folks at the FCC. He parlayed this into an RFI/EMI compliance consulting business which paid his way through Harvard Law and Sloan (MIT) Business schools, and he eventually sold the company and retired. He now runs a gentleman's farm in Connecticut and goes on architectural digs to the Middle East with his own ground-penetrating radar gear.
The Yahoo news headline about the auction of the bulbs said "Original Edison lightbulbs to go under hammer" My first thought was, "Don't smash 'em! They may not work too well but they're a valuable piece of history!"
Two kind of silly, but useful devices:
1. In the early 70's I had a portable stereo tape deck which did not shut off at the end of a cassette tape. After a while I noticed that tapes were getting munged at the beginning because the tape would stop, and the capstan pin would sit against the rubber roller until someone shut it off, and that left a dent in the roller, which then stretched the next tape every rotation until the dent in the roller relaxed. We made a circuit which monitored the output from the tape deck, and after 30 seconds of no sound, it would pull a solenoid down which pressed the OFF button. Worked great.
2. In 1989, before the one-cup coffeemaker craze, I would often lament the waste of time, sugar, and cream when I would pour a cup of coffee from the office pot, add the mix-ins, and then taste it, discovering that the coffee was too old, and thus bitter. I went to radio shack and bought a magnetic window alarm sensor and a multi-function stick-on clock-timer. I wired the clock so when the battery was connected, it was in timer mode, and started counting time. Then I connected the battery through the sensor, which detected when the water reservoir cover was closed. When someone made a fresh pot, they would open the cover (disconnecting the battery), pour the water in, and close the cover (reconnecting the battery). The timer would be reset by the power outage and start timing the age of the pot. I found that anything over about 15 minutes was not worth drinking.
The perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer -- debuggingrules.com
There are versions of this that can print in metal even, they fuse a metal powder mixed with some nin-metal binder, then somehow get rid of the binder and fill in with more metal.
What drives me crazy is that all new toilets have fancy, artistically-shaped drain holes but all plungers are round. High-tech plungers with accordian-fold power reservoirs, etc, but they all have round seals that don't fit the square holes and all that power leaks around the corners. You get shitty water squirting up around the bowl and no pressure on the plugged pipes.
Damn, I wish the plunger people would get with it, or the toilet people would go back to round holes.
"American Standard" seems so ironic at times like that...
"Future Hype" by Bob Seidensticker gives some historical perspective on "revolutionary" technologies. It's an fascinating read and not too expensive. There are sure to be a few of Bob's "Technology Myths" touted as truth by Okin.
A link to Amazon (for the truly lazy:) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1576753700/
Gunz
A friend of mine appeared in a panoramic photo of his MIT reunion class twice. The class was two or three deep on a bunch of bleachers, so the photographer took 3 pictures, scanning left to right. My friend stood at the left end for the first shot, then ran behind everyone to appear at the right end by the time the third shot was taken.
Debugging by Dave Agans: universal, often neglected principles to avoid long debugging cycles. Illustrated with interesting war stories and amusing anecdotes. This is one you'll actually read all the way through. Called a classic by several reviewers, including IEEE SW and Dr. Dobbs.
It was reviewed on Slashdot http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/02/21/228241.sh tml, and is endorsed on the back cover by Rob Malda. (Disclaimer: I wrote it.)
You can get it on Amazon but they sold out this week, so for Christmas you'd have to go Barnes and Noble and pay a bit more.
Oh, and it's cheap ($15 on Amazon, $22 on B&N) but well worth the money.
See http://www.debuggingrules.com/ for info, samples, free poster, etc.
If the Gulf Stream is slowing, bringing less warm water to the North Atlantic, wouldn't it also be bringing less cold water back down to the equator? And not carrying warm water away as fast? In which case we get warmer equatorial seas, and stronger hurricanes. Hmmm...
I tried it after the last slashdot post, using only songs, not bands. Bands don't work, songs do. I found that:
1. It introduced me to a number of new bands, and obscure songs by familiar bands, that I really liked.
2. It played some stuff that was bad, and I just skipped it, or told it I hated it.
3. It did not have an extensive enough library -- there were songs I couldn't base a station on, and there were limited songs in the set played, so that when I came back the next day I got the same songs.
4. Sometimes the similarity in sound is uncanny -- piano or guitar riffs, syncopation rhythms, etc.
5. I will use this for as long as I can get it.
6. SUBJECTIVE OPINION: I am a musically-jaded late-60s early 70's blues-rock-by-classically-trained-musicians fan; I have grown tired of the old stuff and have rarely heard new stuff of anywhere near the caliber of Tull, Led Zep, Yes, the Who, Jeff Beck, Allman Brothers, pre-Nicks Fleetwood Mac, etc. (TMBG and NRBQ excepted); As a result, I have not been very interested in listening to music for the last 20 years; Pandora has rekindled my love of music.
I always have one above my bench, but then again, I designed the poster and think it's both amusing and useful. Downloadable from http://www.debuggingrules.com/
These subjects are the essentials of any kind of engineering, albeit some with a slight bent toward software (UML, re-factoring). But even those subjects could be generalized.
When I wrote "Debugging" http://www.debuggingrules.com/ I was trying to avoid narrowing the focus to a particular language or platform, so it would be a "timeless" book. In fact, I had found the rules I used to be universal for both hardware and software, and then had some fun by generalizing across medicine, automotive, and home repair.
Many general books have been written on time management and business economics, but we could use some on architecture/design, problem analysis, and spec'ing.
We could design robots (and other AI machines) like this; the good news is, given an accurate enough model, they can be every bit as intelligent as humans. The bad news is, it'll take 20 years to train them, and some will turn out lazy or criminal.
If a satirical news site can't make fun of the September 11 terrorists, then the terrorists will have already won.
Seriously, I found the September 11th coverage to be a breath of normalcy after the event. This is what we are trying to keep, and the fundamentalists are trying to stop.
This brings to mind a pet peeve of mine -- toilets with non-round drain holes, which can't be sealed by round plungers. It drives me crazy. It's "American Standard" for chrissake, and you can't plunge it when it plugs; the water just escapes around the corners of the square hole. They look stylish, though, at least when they're not plugged.
Slashdot Mirror
Get the book: http://www.debuggingrules.com/. Full disclosure: I am the author. But it was IEEE Software Magazine that said this should be required reading for all technology students. And unlike most other tech books, this one's cheap, funny, and a quick read.
Great idea! I can photocopy my ass AND my cubicles!
Remember the Bill of Rights was just to make clear stuff that the founding fathers were specifically worried about. And the 9th amendment speaks to that directly, making clear that "Doesn't apply here" doesn't apply here.
9th amemdment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The 10th amendment points out that since the constitution *doesn't* give the *government* the right to prevent us from taking pictures from public places, it can't prohibit us, or Google, from doing it.
10th amemdment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
I suspect he meant (or actually said and was misquoted) 16 *cores*, which is a much harder thing to deal with.
Number keypads were designed for accountants, with 0 at the bottom and increasing with more reach. For an accountant, 0 is obviously supposed to be near 1.
Phone keypads were a modification of the dial phone, which starts and 1 and goes up to 9, then 0. They felt that ordinary people don't start counting with 0, they start with 1, so that would make more sense. (Ask a child to count, they start with 1. And the Romans didn't even have a way to say 0.) And another aspect of this decision was that the old dials would click once for each position, and starting with 1 made it obvious to map digit 1 to 1 click, digit 2 to 2 clicks, etc, and map digit 0 to 10 clicks, rather than 0 to 1, 1 to 2, etc. You can't map digit 0 to 0 clicks, you'd never know you dialed a 0. So you could only call Romans.
I got a CD equipped clock radio for Christmas, along with a Wake Up compilation of tunes. Cool enough. Except that when the alarm triggers, the first thing I hear is the loud spinning of the CD. Then a few seconds after I'm awake, the music comes on.
But that's not the stupid part. If I hit the snooze button, the music stops, but the CD keeps spinning, noisily enough to keep me awake. And if I look over to see how much more snooze time I have, the time display reads "Track 01". No time.
I returned it.
I once had a solar-powered calculator that shut itself off (to save sunlight?) after a minute.
MyYahoo has a feature that updates the "most popular" news items every 5 minutes. I often scroll down the list, picking articles to read in a new window, then going back to the main window. I am often a few articles from the end when the page updates, reordering everything and making me scan from the top. I actually tried to point this out to them, and they got all hung up on what browser I was running, my OS, exactly what did I click, etc. I couldn't get them to understand that this was just an ANNOYING FEATURE OF THEIR SOFTWARE and either fix it or at least acknowledge that they thought it was better that way.
A very readable "debunking technology history" book is Future Hype by Bob Seidensticker. It is full of wonderful examples of "internet time" innovation back before the internet, or even electric service, was invented. Puts the awe of our fast-paced world in some badly-needed perspective.
I was involved in the 1975 alternative to Atari's home Pong game, called TV Tennis by Executive Games. Executive Games was an entrepeneur who came to MIT's Innovation Center to find people to design a "home video game" like the coin operated Pong games. We did it with discrete analog and digital circuits; ball and paddle movement were analog, and thus game speed was controlled with a pot, from very slow to unbelievably fast. Much more challenging than Atari, in our opinion. There was also a practice wall which looked like a stack of paddles, so the ball would come off at seemingly random angles, and a robot paddle which came out of a debugging tool (see my book "Debugging" for this war story.) We also had our controllers at the end of a cable, allowing players to sit back and not crowd around the console like the Atari game. You could hold the controller and use it with one hand, leaving the other free to hold your beer. (Yes, I was still an undergrad, but the drinking age was 18 in those days.)
I remember not being taken seriously by National Semiconductor when I asked for quotes on counter and gate chips in 100,000 quantities -- there was no market for logic at those levels in that era, consumer electronics was all radio. But we did ship 67,000 games before Christmas 1975.
Building games out of discrete parts proved uncompetitive in the long run, and Executive Games dropped out after building a hockey game the next year. When I graduated (in 1976) I interviewed with a division of Fairchild in hopes of designing games on a chip. During the interview, one of the managers showed me a prototype game they had built, thinking it would be a good way to use up millions of TTL (the original very popular logic family, now obsolete due to high power consumption) chips they had in inventory. He showed me a 5" by 10" circuit board covered with TTL chips, and my immediate reaction was "That's all TTL? You must have had a power supply the size of a shoebox." He dropped the board on the table, and said "We worked on this for 9 months before we realized that, and it killed the project. When can you start?" I did take the job, but ended up designing clock radios, so I came back East after a short time.
The biggest success story out of our little game venture was Glen Dash, who was our RF guy, getting our TV modulator through the FCC. He understood the physics and electronics and laws, and was able to establish a relationship with the folks at the FCC. He parlayed this into an RFI/EMI compliance consulting business which paid his way through Harvard Law and Sloan (MIT) Business schools, and he eventually sold the company and retired. He now runs a gentleman's farm in Connecticut and goes on architectural digs to the Middle East with his own ground-penetrating radar gear.
Dave Agans
debuggingrules.com
Read Debugging (I wrote it just for people like yourself), and put the free (as in beer) poster up on your cube wall. www.debuggingrules.com
The Yahoo news headline about the auction of the bulbs said "Original Edison lightbulbs to go under hammer" My first thought was, "Don't smash 'em! They may not work too well but they're a valuable piece of history!"
Two kind of silly, but useful devices:
1. In the early 70's I had a portable stereo tape deck which did not shut off at the end of a cassette tape. After a while I noticed that tapes were getting munged at the beginning because the tape would stop, and the capstan pin would sit against the rubber roller until someone shut it off, and that left a dent in the roller, which then stretched the next tape every rotation until the dent in the roller relaxed. We made a circuit which monitored the output from the tape deck, and after 30 seconds of no sound, it would pull a solenoid down which pressed the OFF button. Worked great.
2. In 1989, before the one-cup coffeemaker craze, I would often lament the waste of time, sugar, and cream when I would pour a cup of coffee from the office pot, add the mix-ins, and then taste it, discovering that the coffee was too old, and thus bitter. I went to radio shack and bought a magnetic window alarm sensor and a multi-function stick-on clock-timer. I wired the clock so when the battery was connected, it was in timer mode, and started counting time. Then I connected the battery through the sensor, which detected when the water reservoir cover was closed. When someone made a fresh pot, they would open the cover (disconnecting the battery), pour the water in, and close the cover (reconnecting the battery). The timer would be reset by the power outage and start timing the age of the pot. I found that anything over about 15 minutes was not worth drinking.
The perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer -- debuggingrules.com
Look at Z Corporation : http://www.zcorp.com/
There are versions of this that can print in metal even, they fuse a metal powder mixed with some nin-metal binder, then somehow get rid of the binder and fill in with more metal.
Dave
What drives me crazy is that all new toilets have fancy, artistically-shaped drain holes but all plungers are round. High-tech plungers with accordian-fold power reservoirs, etc, but they all have round seals that don't fit the square holes and all that power leaks around the corners. You get shitty water squirting up around the bowl and no pressure on the plugged pipes. Damn, I wish the plunger people would get with it, or the toilet people would go back to round holes. "American Standard" seems so ironic at times like that...
"Future Hype" by Bob Seidensticker gives some historical perspective on "revolutionary" technologies. It's an fascinating read and not too expensive. There are sure to be a few of Bob's "Technology Myths" touted as truth by Okin.
A link to Amazon (for the truly lazy:) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1576753700/
Gunz
A friend of mine appeared in a panoramic photo of his MIT reunion class twice. The class was two or three deep on a bunch of bleachers, so the photographer took 3 pictures, scanning left to right. My friend stood at the left end for the first shot, then ran behind everyone to appear at the right end by the time the third shot was taken.
Debugging by Dave Agans: universal, often neglected principles to avoid long debugging cycles. Illustrated with interesting war stories and amusing anecdotes. This is one you'll actually read all the way through. Called a classic by several reviewers, including IEEE SW and Dr. Dobbs.h tml, and is endorsed on the back cover by Rob Malda. (Disclaimer: I wrote it.)
It was reviewed on Slashdot http://books.slashdot.org/books/04/02/21/228241.s
You can get it on Amazon but they sold out this week, so for Christmas you'd have to go Barnes and Noble and pay a bit more.
Oh, and it's cheap ($15 on Amazon, $22 on B&N) but well worth the money.
See http://www.debuggingrules.com/ for info, samples, free poster, etc.
If the Gulf Stream is slowing, bringing less warm water to the North Atlantic, wouldn't it also be bringing less cold water back down to the equator? And not carrying warm water away as fast? In which case we get warmer equatorial seas, and stronger hurricanes. Hmmm...
I tried it after the last slashdot post, using only songs, not bands. Bands don't work, songs do. I found that:
1. It introduced me to a number of new bands, and obscure songs by familiar bands, that I really liked.
2. It played some stuff that was bad, and I just skipped it, or told it I hated it.
3. It did not have an extensive enough library -- there were songs I couldn't base a station on, and there were limited songs in the set played, so that when I came back the next day I got the same songs.
4. Sometimes the similarity in sound is uncanny -- piano or guitar riffs, syncopation rhythms, etc.
5. I will use this for as long as I can get it.
6. SUBJECTIVE OPINION: I am a musically-jaded late-60s early 70's blues-rock-by-classically-trained-musicians fan; I have grown tired of the old stuff and have rarely heard new stuff of anywhere near the caliber of Tull, Led Zep, Yes, the Who, Jeff Beck, Allman Brothers, pre-Nicks Fleetwood Mac, etc. (TMBG and NRBQ excepted); As a result, I have not been very interested in listening to music for the last 20 years; Pandora has rekindled my love of music.
I always like to refer to a part number in emails to purchasing as "P.N.#No. 1234"
No one seems to notice the triple redundancy.
I always have one above my bench, but then again, I designed the poster and think it's both amusing and useful. Downloadable from http://www.debuggingrules.com/
These subjects are the essentials of any kind of engineering, albeit some with a slight bent toward software (UML, re-factoring). But even those subjects could be generalized.
When I wrote "Debugging" http://www.debuggingrules.com/ I was trying to avoid narrowing the focus to a particular language or platform, so it would be a "timeless" book. In fact, I had found the rules I used to be universal for both hardware and software, and then had some fun by generalizing across medicine, automotive, and home repair.
Many general books have been written on time management and business economics, but we could use some on architecture/design, problem analysis, and spec'ing.
We could design robots (and other AI machines) like this; the good news is, given an accurate enough model, they can be every bit as intelligent as humans. The bad news is, it'll take 20 years to train them, and some will turn out lazy or criminal.
If a satirical news site can't make fun of the September 11 terrorists, then the terrorists will have already won. Seriously, I found the September 11th coverage to be a breath of normalcy after the event. This is what we are trying to keep, and the fundamentalists are trying to stop.
This brings to mind a pet peeve of mine -- toilets with non-round drain holes, which can't be sealed by round plungers. It drives me crazy. It's "American Standard" for chrissake, and you can't plunge it when it plugs; the water just escapes around the corners of the square hole. They look stylish, though, at least when they're not plugged.