Upcoming Lunar Eclipse on Saturday

Read about it here at Shadow and Substance: "Astronomy portrayed simply... with less lines and less numbers and with more animation!"

Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology

Lubarsky’s Law of Cybernetic Entomology:  There’s always one more bug.

Brother, is that ever true.  Stare a the same damn model for fifteen years, and they still pop out occasionally.  Their occurrence does seem to be reducing exponentially with time however.  I predict that thirty years hence, my successor will still be finding increasingly small fractions of bugs in that particular program.

Solar a Go Go

Just spent the weekend in the woods camping with the ham club.  We ended up running three of the four radios as well as the all-important coffee grinder off of my little portable solar system.  Two radios were co-located in one screen tent and ran directly off of 12VDC, while the third was about 100 feet away, which required stepping up the power to 120VAC, lots of extension cord, and a step-down power supply.  The stepping-up part is shown on the right, in the form of that little Cobra power inverter.  Worked like a charm, and even ran the coffee grinder without complaint.  A 140W Kyocera panel kept the entire system topped up all weekend – we had nice weather.

If you want to get started on your own small solar system here's the best article on the net to get things rolling.  Also for your edification, here's a short article by a man who's living the solar *ahem* dream.  Thanks, but one weekend was enough for the moment.

Still, it made for an interesting experiment in remote radio operation.  If you're interested in the specifics of the system, it's built around the same main components as this kit.  Nice stuff, but a little spendy.  If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably go with these people.  Very reasonable prices, although it is kind of hard to tell from their crappy web site.  Sorta-local too, in Hattiesburg.

Ah well, it was a good weekend in the woods, camping in beautiful weather.  What more can one ask for?  

Everybody's Daily Moment of Zen

In today's Astronomy Picture of the Day we have:

If you're not checking out APOD regularly, you're missing out.

Disk Access Faster than RAM?

Talk about some sloppy research.  Here's the article.  It has links to the original research paper.  Go read, at least the somewhat lighter article; I'll wait.

OK, so I guess it comes to a surprise to some people, but hand-packing on-the-fly-allocated storage using Java or Python probably is slower than slinging the same information to disk.  Because, I don't know, since about the Carter administration, OSs and I/O controllers have stored things in (usually) dedicated ram that allowed the CPU to rampage on with better tasks.  Then the relatively inexpensive controller could do the waiting for the disk to come around for the next write.  This is not rocket science, this is rudimentary data buffering.  Nothing I wasn't doing with a PDP-11 30 years ago.  Except that in that case it was nuclear data to 9-track tapes, which were orders of magnitude slower than the processor could theoretically feed them.  Even so, with clever pre-culling of the data and double-buffering schemes, the output times were essentially nil.

I notice though that the article does not address getting the data back off the disk.  That is another matter entirely.  But even that can have remarkable efficiencies if the the read cycles are not entirely random.  Why are these techniques mysteries to the authors?

Use the tools before you, people.  Some very smart engineers have spent decades sharpening them, and I doubt you'll do any better by hand-knitting your own flint blades.

Book Discussion: "The Heritage of Heinlein"

Hmm, a good time saver here.  This book is a thorough, top-to-bottom discussion of Heinlein's body of fiction, taken with a major period for each chapter:

1. A new Calling: For Us, the Living
2. Early Professional Writing
3. Transitions
4. The Juveniles for Scribner's
5. The "Classic" Period
6. Stranger in a Strange Land
7. The Final Period

If you are familiar with Heinlein's work, these will stand out as obvious demarcations.  Naturally a book of this sort is very spoiler-riffic, so it is not for readers new to Heinlein who wish to enjoy his works afresh.  But for the old curmudgeon who has read nearly everything the man wrote, it can provide some new insights into various stories.  More importantly, it relives said curmudgeon of re-reading some of the earliest and late-period stinkers.  For example I never really liked I Will Fear No Evil, but having read it in my early 20's, I always felt that I owed the book another chance.  However, after reading these authors' analysis of the work, it now seems that my remembered impressions of that book are justified.  Like I said, a good time saver.

One unexpected point hammered home in this book is how shot-through with solipsism are Heinlein's stories after 1945-1950-ish   Hardly something I ever expected from The Grand Master of Hard SF, a writer who has inspired generations of hard-nosed scientists and steely-eyed engineers, but there it is.  Hadn't really noticed, until now.

In the end, I gained a few new insights into Heinlein's work, and saved myself the trouble of plowing through a half-dozen of his lesser novels in hopes that they were not as bad as they seemed when I read them two or three decades ago.  (In all case the authors confirm that, yes, they really were that bad.)  But for Heinlein's better stories, these analyses were a welcome refresher for the plots and themes, sometimes with several new viewpoints I hadn't considered.  Altogether, a worthwhile read.

As a final note, this is definitely a book you should consider buying on kindle rather than in print: $16 vs. $40, respectively.  That differential is a fair chunk of the price of a new kindle e-reader!  Here, have some cover art:

Again, a worthwhile book.  And despite having a fresh copy of The Authorized Heinlein Biography on my shelf, I'm going to take a break from Heinlein and go read other things for a few months.

Whacky Jeep Concepts

Some of them even interesting.  Article over at Fox.

Yes, it's been light posting lately.  Heavy work plus an impromptu Apalach trip kind of been soaking up time and brain cycle.