Re:Obligitory Arduino Fetish Rant
on
The Awesome Button
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Arduino gives you all the pieces you need to start using microcontrollers - hardware and software environments, lots of contributed libraries and applications. If you want to write stuff from scratch you can, but if you want to get started building your blinky-light thing, it's all there, and then you can go on to more complex projects. It has a few limitations (Teensy gets around the USB-vs-serial issues, for instance), but it's pretty complete and extremely expandable. If you're more interested in tweaking bits, you can use many different tools, but if you're really trying to add blinky lights to your backpack or move the servo arms on a robot thingy or program the lights on your Christmas tree to respond to music or controlling your thermostat, you can use the Arduino tools to do that without diving into the bit-bashing first.
And yes, you could have just bought the AVR ATmega chip yourself, but then you'd have needed a in-circuit chip-programmer device, which costs just about the same as an Arduino, and you can load a program into the Arduino to make it be a chip-programmer, so you might as well buy the Arduino anyway.
If it wasn't Propecia, maybe it was a different anti-baldness pill, but I remember a coworker commenting about it back in the ?late 90s?. I don't remember whether he decided to take the pill or not, though.
If it wasn't Propecia, maybe it was a different anti-baldness pill, but I remember a coworker commenting about it back in the late 90s. I don't remember whether he decided to take the pill or not, though.
If he bought it from a store nearby, you'd think the store would worry about him showing up and insisting on his money back plus some extra for his trouble.
Sometime last year I was working on a router or maybe a firewall at some remote site that I could only access by dialup modem, because the WAN hadn't been installed yet. It was very nice to notice that it supported xmodem, as did my terminal program, so I was able to back up the configuration files instead of cutting and pasting them all from the screen. Dragged up a lot of old memories...
Back in ~1994 the place I was working had a mail system for PCs and servers that the IT department had cobbled together out of Kermit and airplane glue. If you had more than 200KB of mail it would crash your computer and die in ugly ways. It was really annoying, after having been on Unix mail systems since the late 70s, and having used Kermit successfully to do real work as well. Worse than IBM PROFS, worse than Prodigy over 300 baud, much less capable than Fidonet or most 1980s BBS systems. And the IT department always worked in their offices with PCs that were on a LAN, while out in the field we used laptops and dialup.
Back in the MS-DOS days, people used to complain about how non-user-friendly Unix was. It had too many commands, and that was soooo confusing. Much better to have MS-DOS, where there weren't very many commands, and half of them didn't work.
Now, Macintosh people could get away with saying Unix wasn't user-friendly, because their system really was.
These days, you're mostly using any of these systems to run a browser and a media player, and you deal with the media player by clicking on a file name, so it hardly matters what's underneath.
A couple of years ago my department laid off a bunch of us, but I found another job inside my company. The catch was that instead of telecommuting plus frequent customer visits, I've got a long commute in a direction where public transit isn't available. It really takes an annoying amount of my time, plus a lot of money spent on gas (I could reduce that by spending a bunch of money on a new car instead.) But hey, it's a job, I get to keep my benefits and get a similar salary. But, like going to an office almost every day? What a weird way to work, hadn't done it in years.
Back in the 90s I was commuting by train, which was better. It still took too long, but I could read or work on the train, and I could get out of the office at a reasonable time by saying "gotta catch the train" and get home at a semi-civilized time of day.
I never could get more than 10-20 pages into Gravity's Rainbow. And you left out A Brief History of Time.
I forget whether the "advanced academic computing theory" course I first used Knuth in was "CS100" or "CS201", probably the latter. But that was 30+ years ago, and kids these days get to college having been exposed to a bit more than BASIC in high school. And self-taught programmers these days probably don't bother with assembler language unless they're trying to automate toasters (so the "instructables" DIY crowd) or write viruses.
Yeah. I remember when I was running the machines that some physicists were using to do a networking simulation. Their core loop was grunging through a linked list to find the next event. I was disappointed that turning it into a heap only tripled the speed of the whole application, but the data set was large enough that the machine had to page it in and out, and there were other parts of the program that took time also, but until we fixed the event list, they weren't the dominant time-wasters.
Languages in vogue in 62? (Not that the first volume actually shipped until 68...)
That would be Algol, which would have been a great language for Knuth to teach in (and the CACM used it for most articles about algorithms for years, though they still tended to be in Fortran then.)
LISP was around, but was sufficiently abstract that it wouldn't have matched most of the things Knuth was trying to teach because it doesn't have the physicality.
But even F0RTRAN II would have been better than Knuth's pseudocode for most of his examples, if you got a newer version that had COMPLEX numbers.
COBOL had enough header baggage that it would be awkward, and I don't know if the early COBOLs could have done the job or not.
Assembler languages? Most of them would have been more clear than MIX, though I can understand not wanting to show manufacturer favoritism, and there were some weird ones that would have been worse. The PDP-1 came out in 61, but I'm not sure how many were around that early, and the 1965 PDP-8 was wildly successful but Knuth was probably well into writing and not willing to abandon MIX by then.
I remember when I first got to use Virtual Machines, on an IBM VM/CMS system back in the mid-late 70s. You could define a virtual machine with a whole megabyte of storage! That was as big as a quarter of the physical RAM on the whole mainframe, not that it would actually all be in core at once!
And yeah, Knuth's volume on searching and sorting was really important when computers had that kind of scale, and the principles mostly still apply even now when disk drives are the slow part and tapes don't exist.
In a computer course? You betcha! If you're lucky, the compiler will find spelling errors and typos for you, and if you're not, it'll let them through to become runtime errors. When I was in college, we used the Cornell version of the PL/I compiler that auto-corrected mistakes, sometimes even correctly. (Since we were using punchcards, even having it correct them badly was helpful, because it would let more of your program run so you usually find one or two more bugs if you had any.)
As George R.R. Martin said to fans wanting to know when the next volume of "A Game of Thrones" was coming out, "I'm not your bitch."
Have you worked all the problems in the previous volumes yet, or just the easy ones?
Yeah, ok, me neither:-)
Actually, I'd probably have gotten through much more of the first three volumes if Knuth's coding style wasn't so horrible. There's MIX, which was the ugliest baroque botch of an assembler language out there when he could have taught the same lessons with a simple clean assembler language, and pseudocode, which tended to be ugly spaghetti code that was much harder to follow than either Algol (which had been the CACM standard language for publishing algorithms in for a decade or so) or top-down-structured pseudocode. On the other hand, the math parts were brilliant and clear, and the code did represent them adequately even though it wasn't very readable.
Mozilla Firefox is crashing almost daily for me, between full crashes and times that it leaks enough memory that it hits 1.5GB and stops responding, or burns the whole CPU core and nearly stops responding. Firefox 4.0 is a bit better than FF3.x - at least sometimes when it crashes it's not burning the whole CPU, or not leaking all the memory it can get. There's really no bloody excuse for it - you'd think this was the 20th century or something, and we knew better back then too.
I've moved about half my work over to Google Chrome, though there are things that don't work reliably on Chrome and information that I don't trust Google with. Occasionally it'll crash and turn all the pages into "Oh, Snap!", especially for random news sites like you get by opening up everything in FARK in separate tabs. One other important difference between Chrome and Firefox is that Chrome splits things up into more processes, so damage is a little better contained, but there's no easy way to say "kill ALL the Google Chrome, restart and restore all the pages" the way there is with Firefox.
IE7 has been reliable, and at least it has tabs, but it's pretty lame and doesn't give me all the ad-blocking script-blocking protection that the other browsers do, so I only trust it for a few work-related pages and a few pages that are IE-specific and fail on other browsers.
This isn't the first time we've seen this - it's been proposed in Oregon and California and probably other states, with no success. I don't know who's pushing this one, but apparently now they're trying to sell the Feds on it.
There's an easy way to track mileage if you want to - it's the odometer. But no, the people pushing this one want to have a mechanism for tracking your driving in much more detail, and that's really what this is about. I don't know if they're doing it because they're Big Brother types who want this for the tracking system, or if they're hardware vendors who want to make everybody buy their hardware, or if it's really just some guy that's obsessed about it.
I liked the First Doctor. I never got hooked on the show, but some years after my parents' kids had all moved out, they started watching Dr. Who on PBS, and I occasionally caught episodes when I was visiting them.
The special effects in the early shows were great - they'd have some scene in a cave and be dropping big cardboard rocks on people because real Styrofoam was just wayyyy too expensive for their budget, and it was fine. So it was kind of weird seeing the Eccleston versions where they actually were spending a lot of money on visuals.
I only caught a couple of the David Tennent episodes, and he didn't seem to have really turned into The Doctor by then, unlike Eccleston who did that pretty fast. Haven't seen any with the new kid yet - he looks way too young for the part.
30 Rock came out around the same time as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was a far more creative show, and which got cancelled after about two seasons. I like Tina Fey, but the writing wasn't as good and I found Alec Baldwin's character to be an uninteresting caricature.
24 was creative enough that it taught a generation of Army interrogators how to get information out of prisoners, and I've never forgiven Kiefer Sutherland for it, in spite of it being a well-paced and interesting show. (Also, it's very strange to have The President keep showing up on car insurance commercials...)
My office is down in the basement, in a room full of routers and firewalls and other random gear we're testing. We finally scrounged up some spare sound-baffle stuff so it's a bit quieter.
Occasionally we get surveys from the Corporate Real Estate Droids about how well they're supporting us. They do ask what floor we're on, and for our building the choices are "1-6". Ummm, no, we're on floor 0 here.
The Texas find is interesting, because it's dealing with settlement of North America, but to me the India find in the same article was much more interesting. Acheulian stone tool designs in India at 1.5 million years BC, saying humans migrated out of Africa at least 100,000 years earlier than we thought! That difference is a lot longer than the time modern Cro-Magnons have been around.
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Arduino gives you all the pieces you need to start using microcontrollers - hardware and software environments, lots of contributed libraries and applications. If you want to write stuff from scratch you can, but if you want to get started building your blinky-light thing, it's all there, and then you can go on to more complex projects. It has a few limitations (Teensy gets around the USB-vs-serial issues, for instance), but it's pretty complete and extremely expandable. If you're more interested in tweaking bits, you can use many different tools, but if you're really trying to add blinky lights to your backpack or move the servo arms on a robot thingy or program the lights on your Christmas tree to respond to music or controlling your thermostat, you can use the Arduino tools to do that without diving into the bit-bashing first.
And yes, you could have just bought the AVR ATmega chip yourself, but then you'd have needed a in-circuit chip-programmer device, which costs just about the same as an Arduino, and you can load a program into the Arduino to make it be a chip-programmer, so you might as well buy the Arduino anyway.
If it wasn't Propecia, maybe it was a different anti-baldness pill, but I remember a coworker commenting about it back in the ?late 90s?. I don't remember whether he decided to take the pill or not, though.
If it wasn't Propecia, maybe it was a different anti-baldness pill, but I remember a coworker commenting about it back in the late 90s. I don't remember whether he decided to take the pill or not, though.
If he bought it from a store nearby, you'd think the store would worry about him showing up and insisting on his money back plus some extra for his trouble.
Back in the 80s, one of my cow-orkers bought a VCR "off the back of a truck" in New York. It was really a VCR case with a brick in it.
These days when I've had bricked electronics, it just means that the firmware has gotten too hosed to boot, but this was genuine brick.
Wow - finding 128 MB Flash drives is pretty tough these days! He must have gotten some really cheap leftovers.
Sometime last year I was working on a router or maybe a firewall at some remote site that I could only access by dialup modem, because the WAN hadn't been installed yet. It was very nice to notice that it supported xmodem, as did my terminal program, so I was able to back up the configuration files instead of cutting and pasting them all from the screen. Dragged up a lot of old memories...
Back in ~1994 the place I was working had a mail system for PCs and servers that the IT department had cobbled together out of Kermit and airplane glue. If you had more than 200KB of mail it would crash your computer and die in ugly ways. It was really annoying, after having been on Unix mail systems since the late 70s, and having used Kermit successfully to do real work as well. Worse than IBM PROFS, worse than Prodigy over 300 baud, much less capable than Fidonet or most 1980s BBS systems. And the IT department always worked in their offices with PCs that were on a LAN, while out in the field we used laptops and dialup.
Back in the MS-DOS days, people used to complain about how non-user-friendly Unix was. It had too many commands, and that was soooo confusing. Much better to have MS-DOS, where there weren't very many commands, and half of them didn't work.
Now, Macintosh people could get away with saying Unix wasn't user-friendly, because their system really was.
These days, you're mostly using any of these systems to run a browser and a media player, and you deal with the media player by clicking on a file name, so it hardly matters what's underneath.
A couple of years ago my department laid off a bunch of us, but I found another job inside my company. The catch was that instead of telecommuting plus frequent customer visits, I've got a long commute in a direction where public transit isn't available. It really takes an annoying amount of my time, plus a lot of money spent on gas (I could reduce that by spending a bunch of money on a new car instead.) But hey, it's a job, I get to keep my benefits and get a similar salary. But, like going to an office almost every day? What a weird way to work, hadn't done it in years.
Back in the 90s I was commuting by train, which was better. It still took too long, but I could read or work on the train, and I could get out of the office at a reasonable time by saying "gotta catch the train" and get home at a semi-civilized time of day.
I never could get more than 10-20 pages into Gravity's Rainbow. And you left out A Brief History of Time.
I forget whether the "advanced academic computing theory" course I first used Knuth in was "CS100" or "CS201", probably the latter. But that was 30+ years ago, and kids these days get to college having been exposed to a bit more than BASIC in high school. And self-taught programmers these days probably don't bother with assembler language unless they're trying to automate toasters (so the "instructables" DIY crowd) or write viruses.
Yeah. I remember when I was running the machines that some physicists were using to do a networking simulation. Their core loop was grunging through a linked list to find the next event. I was disappointed that turning it into a heap only tripled the speed of the whole application, but the data set was large enough that the machine had to page it in and out, and there were other parts of the program that took time also, but until we fixed the event list, they weren't the dominant time-wasters.
There was this little thing called TeX that occupied a bit of his time....
Last time I saw Knuth, he was over at Techshop making stuff on the laser cutter.
Languages in vogue in 62? (Not that the first volume actually shipped until 68...)
I remember when I first got to use Virtual Machines, on an IBM VM/CMS system back in the mid-late 70s. You could define a virtual machine with a whole megabyte of storage! That was as big as a quarter of the physical RAM on the whole mainframe, not that it would actually all be in core at once!
And yeah, Knuth's volume on searching and sorting was really important when computers had that kind of scale, and the principles mostly still apply even now when disk drives are the slow part and tapes don't exist.
In a computer course? You betcha! If you're lucky, the compiler will find spelling errors and typos for you, and if you're not, it'll let them through to become runtime errors. When I was in college, we used the Cornell version of the PL/I compiler that auto-corrected mistakes, sometimes even correctly. (Since we were using punchcards, even having it correct them badly was helpful, because it would let more of your program run so you usually find one or two more bugs if you had any.)
As George R.R. Martin said to fans wanting to know when the next volume of "A Game of Thrones" was coming out, "I'm not your bitch."
Have you worked all the problems in the previous volumes yet, or just the easy ones?
Yeah, ok, me neither :-)
Actually, I'd probably have gotten through much more of the first three volumes if Knuth's coding style wasn't so horrible. There's MIX, which was the ugliest baroque botch of an assembler language out there when he could have taught the same lessons with a simple clean assembler language, and pseudocode, which tended to be ugly spaghetti code that was much harder to follow than either Algol (which had been the CACM standard language for publishing algorithms in for a decade or so) or top-down-structured pseudocode. On the other hand, the math parts were brilliant and clear, and the code did represent them adequately even though it wasn't very readable.
Mozilla Firefox is crashing almost daily for me, between full crashes and times that it leaks enough memory that it hits 1.5GB and stops responding, or burns the whole CPU core and nearly stops responding. Firefox 4.0 is a bit better than FF3.x - at least sometimes when it crashes it's not burning the whole CPU, or not leaking all the memory it can get. There's really no bloody excuse for it - you'd think this was the 20th century or something, and we knew better back then too.
I've moved about half my work over to Google Chrome, though there are things that don't work reliably on Chrome and information that I don't trust Google with. Occasionally it'll crash and turn all the pages into "Oh, Snap!", especially for random news sites like you get by opening up everything in FARK in separate tabs. One other important difference between Chrome and Firefox is that Chrome splits things up into more processes, so damage is a little better contained, but there's no easy way to say "kill ALL the Google Chrome, restart and restore all the pages" the way there is with Firefox.
IE7 has been reliable, and at least it has tabs, but it's pretty lame and doesn't give me all the ad-blocking script-blocking protection that the other browsers do, so I only trust it for a few work-related pages and a few pages that are IE-specific and fail on other browsers.
This isn't the first time we've seen this - it's been proposed in Oregon and California and probably other states, with no success. I don't know who's pushing this one, but apparently now they're trying to sell the Feds on it.
There's an easy way to track mileage if you want to - it's the odometer. But no, the people pushing this one want to have a mechanism for tracking your driving in much more detail, and that's really what this is about. I don't know if they're doing it because they're Big Brother types who want this for the tracking system, or if they're hardware vendors who want to make everybody buy their hardware, or if it's really just some guy that's obsessed about it.
I liked the First Doctor. I never got hooked on the show, but some years after my parents' kids had all moved out, they started watching Dr. Who on PBS, and I occasionally caught episodes when I was visiting them.
The special effects in the early shows were great - they'd have some scene in a cave and be dropping big cardboard rocks on people because real Styrofoam was just wayyyy too expensive for their budget, and it was fine. So it was kind of weird seeing the Eccleston versions where they actually were spending a lot of money on visuals.
I only caught a couple of the David Tennent episodes, and he didn't seem to have really turned into The Doctor by then, unlike Eccleston who did that pretty fast. Haven't seen any with the new kid yet - he looks way too young for the part.
(Roger Moore? Are you serious? Dalton ok.)
30 Rock came out around the same time as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which was a far more creative show, and which got cancelled after about two seasons. I like Tina Fey, but the writing wasn't as good and I found Alec Baldwin's character to be an uninteresting caricature.
24 was creative enough that it taught a generation of Army interrogators how to get information out of prisoners, and I've never forgiven Kiefer Sutherland for it, in spite of it being a well-paced and interesting show. (Also, it's very strange to have The President keep showing up on car insurance commercials...)
My office is down in the basement, in a room full of routers and firewalls and other random gear we're testing. We finally scrounged up some spare sound-baffle stuff so it's a bit quieter.
Occasionally we get surveys from the Corporate Real Estate Droids about how well they're supporting us. They do ask what floor we're on, and for our building the choices are "1-6". Ummm, no, we're on floor 0 here.
The rest of us get to use Linux...
The state doesn't all resemble Boston.
The Texas find is interesting, because it's dealing with settlement of North America, but to me the India find in the same article was much more interesting. Acheulian stone tool designs in India at 1.5 million years BC, saying humans migrated out of Africa at least 100,000 years earlier than we thought! That difference is a lot longer than the time modern Cro-Magnons have been around.