The Rodent's Burrow

A bunch of months ago, I started getting an inkling of how short life can be, and realised there were lots of things I hadn't done but wished I had. Some of them I'll never do, but for others I can correct the omission. Three of those are hacking with chemistry, hacking with electronics, and hacking with machining. I've got a cabinet full of reagents, a case full of glassware, and some crucibles, but all I've really accomplished with them is to puddle some low-temp elements (such as tin) and smelt some very low-quality bronze. The machining I'll cover another time.

For the electronics aspect, I've always kept my hand in a little. I've got a few of those multi-drawer parts cabinets full of ICs, LEDs, transistors, resistors, capacitors, and what-not. I also have a 18" x 18" x 24" box full — and I mean full — of TTL ICs I scrounged from a computer electronics lab that went belly-up. I recently added to the instrument collection with a capacitance meter (very sweet). and a few weeks ago I buckled down and actually tried something new.

I got interested in the RepRap project at OSCON a couple of years ago (although I still haven't finished building one). That led me to get interested in stepper motors, which subsequently got me interested in microcontrollers. So I bought a programmer, some chips and crystals, and have started playing with them.

The absolutely coolest part, though basic in the extreme, was that my first microcontroller programme, in a language I'd never used before, for a device I'd never used before, to do a thing I'd never tried before — worked on the first try. Running a very close second for coolness is the fact that this is the first time, in decades of writing code, when something I wrote had an immediate and direct effect on the Real World[tm]. Admittedly it was just blinking some LEDs in a particular pattern, but it was the first time I've written software to control hardware. It wasn't a very complex programme, to be sure, but it did involve setting up a timer and handling interrupts.

One thing with which I'm not yet comfortable is the dedicated nature of microcontrollers. For years my code has been geared to 'get the job done as quickly as possible, and then relinquish the CPU.' That's the timeshare model. For microcontrollers, though, it's perfectly acceptable to stick in an infinite loop when you want to while away some wall-clock time.

Technorati tags: PIC  microcontroller  electronics 

Scribed by coar at 2008-05-02 10:24:53 at 2008-05-02 10:24:53, updated at 2008-05-02 11:06:49 (0 items in this thread)

They still don't know for sure what's causing my anæmia, which means tests and more tests. The most recent was a combined EGD and colonoscopy visit to the local scalpel-palace. I won't go into the prep activities, but I very strongly recommend reading Dave Barry's column entitled A journey into my colon — and yours. It's screamingly funny as well as informative. The good news? I don't have colon cancer.

Anyway, I've been on the equivalent of Zantac[tm] for years, since probably before GERD became fashionable. Apparently we started the treatment too late, though, because the EGD apparently revealed some patches of Barrett's esophagus tissue, which essentially means that part of my esophageal lining has turned into gastric lining instead. In order words, part of my esophagus thinks it's a stomach. And since that means the wrong kind of cells in the wrong place, it's probably not too surprising to find that it's a potentially precancerous condition.

Between the hollow hawser they shoved down my throat and the biopsies they took while doing it, for the last couple of days my throat has felt like I swallowed razor blades. And not the Lady Schick type, either; more like the Clint Eastwood shoot-em-up-and-shave kind. But wait, there's more: In the (fortunately unlikely) event that this does evolve into a case of the Big C, it's apparently easily handled if caught early enough. I hear there's a procedure available over at Duke that excises the objectionable tissue using lasers. So I'll replace the razors with an activated car cigarette lighter. Something to look forward to.

And they still don't know why I'm anæmic, so the next stop is probably a hæmatologist.

Technorati tags: GERD  Barrett's+esophagus  dysplasia  cancer  EGD  colonoscopy  anæmia 

Scribed by coar at 2008-05-01 16:49:20 at 2008-05-01 16:49:20, updated at 2008-05-01 16:52:14 (0 items in this thread)

When Hernán left me Tuesday night, he said he'd come by at 10h30 this morning. In fact, the desk called me at 09h55 to say he was in the lobby and waiting, so I had to rush. When I got to the lobby, Jon maddog Hall was already there. We were originally going to be on the same flight in from Miami, but there was some screwup in Boston and his plane got delayed. So instead of arriving late Tuesday night, he arrived around 04h30 Wednesday morning. Sans his checked baggage, too. When we met in the lobby he hadn't managed to get any sleep, either, but he's a trouper and off we went to the University. A professor from Venezuela, Francisco (I forget his last name, and don't seem to have his card) was there for Vision2006 as well, and staying in the same hotel so we all went together.

IIRC, virtually as soon as we got to USMP we were taken to the gymnasium, which was serving as the plenary hall for the hundreds of people present. Shortly after our arrival, Jon and I were put up on stage with a number of other people, all sitting at a couple of long tables at the back with little flags showing our nationalities in front of us. What happened then is pretty much a blur to me at this point; I don't remember if we answered questions or what. After that session was over we went back to our seats.

At lunchtime a bunch of people piled into cars and went to a place the name of which I never did catch. I was introduced to another iconic non-alcoholic drink made from purple maize (?), but at the time it wasn't to my taste. I never got around to giving it another try, though. And then back to USMP.

After the plenaries we went to the FIA-DATA building, where we were led into a classroom that had had almost all of the furniture removed. Being nearly the only ones there, we grabbed a couple of the only seats and just chatted. Someone came up with a Coca-Cola or two for us. People started coming in and being led over to us and introduced, and gradually the room filled up — around the edges. Happily, one of the people to whom we were introduced was an exceedingly helpful young lady named Karla (again, the surname escapes me) who ended up being delightfully omnipresent for the rest of the week and who did a lot of translating for us.

The centre of the room remained as vacant as a dance floor at a computer club. After a few opening remarks which I didn't understand, servers started bringing around little trays of drinks and snacks. One of the first was little glasses of pisco, which Jon battened onto but I declined. So someone brought over a tray of small tumblers containing a startlingly yellow liquid, and I was assured they weren't alcoholic. What they were was sweet, with a tantalisingly familiar taste. It's called "Inca Kola."

We alternated between the FIA-DATA office where we had our laptops set up (so we could continue to work on our presentations, natch) and the great hall (gymnasium, that is) which was set up for the plenary sessions. maddog apparently speaks no more spanish than do I, so language barriers ringed us round.

Maddog's baggage still hadn't arrived by tonight. How infuriating.

Technorati tags: Vision2006  Lima  Peru  Open+Source  Free+Software  USMP-LUG 

Scribed by RoUS at 2008-04-30 12:50:39 at 2008-04-30 12:50:39 (0 items in this thread)

The annual board elections at OSI were held today. The new board is comprised of (in reverse lexical order):

• Michael Tiemann
• Bruno de Souza
• Alolita Sharma
• Nnenna Nwakanma
• Russell Nelson
• Martin Michlmayr
• Harshad Gune
• Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
• Danese Cooper
• Ken Coar

Technorati tags: OSI  open+source 

Scribed by coar at 2008-04-02 13:36:51 at 2008-04-02 13:36:51 (0 items in this thread)

When I was a kid in Florida, there were two main vegetation banes of kiddish existence. One was sandspurs, and the other was a thing we called 'sticky-leaves.'

Sandspurs are quite the botanical fanatics; close up, they look like distilled hell. When they get stuck in your skin, that hypothesis is confirmed. The spines are incredibly hard, and will drive through even the toughest callus (and kids used to running around on the burning Florida sand develop some of those). And when you try to pick them off, they'll happily go through your fingers with even greater ease. (The remark in that article that licking your fingers first is correct; but even then they'll yang you but good.) Even when they're green and the spines haven't fully hardened, they're deadly.

But everyone has heard of sandspurs. They were (are?) a fact of life in Florida. You dealt with it. The plant we called sticky-leaves was less offensive to kids, but a source of enormous misery for mothers. See, they're fairly succulent, so there's no real kiddish disadvantage to running through them, but the underside of the leaves is Nature's improvement on Velcro™. The leaves and stems are pretty delicate, so once the underside brushes against your socks, the leaf gleefully (not tearfully, alas) parts company with the parent plant and goes off to see Le Monde with you.

The leaves are so delicate, in fact, and the stickiness so pernicious, that trying to peel them off is worse than trying to remove a price tag from a CD wrapper. The only reliable way to remove them is to wait for the leaf to dry out, and then crumble it off.

Sticky-leaves are essentially a ground-cover weed, and in some cases empty lots were saturated with them. In fact, making swords from palm fronds and hacking through fields of sticky-leaves was a source of endless kiddish delight.

I've described them to the SBH on many occasions, but something on the telly tonight made me go looking online for them. However, I haven't found the term online in appropriate usage, and I don't remember well enough what they look like to make a reasonable search by eyeball, so I'm thinking the name 'sticky-leaves' might have been a strictly local colloquialism.

Does anyone know the plant to which I'm referring?

Technorati tags: sticky-leaves  botany  Florida  weed  Velcro 

Scribed by coar at 2008-03-30 23:17:39 at 2008-03-30 23:17:39 (0 items in this thread)

I haven't blogged for a while; things are stacking up. However, yesterday's misadventure needs to be mentioned because it's going to have a definite impact on my correspondence.

Yesterday the laptop I use for email crashed (ran out of power). Thunderbird was active when it happened. And when I brought it back up again, my INBOX was gone. Missing. Abest. Along with the 6'000-plus messages it contained.

Shit.

Well, I can get the inbox back from 2008-02-29, and I have all the incoming mail since then, so I can recover most of it. But most of the 6'000 messages actually got moved in from another folder for processing — but I don't remember which one. :-(

So it looks like the fun aspect of this is going to be merging all the backed up folders from 2008-02-28 into the active ones (necessary to recover those 6'000 messages in one or more of them), recover the inbox from the same backup, re-download all the incoming mail, and then go through and purge all the duplicates.

Unfortunately, we're talking about a total of maybe 6GiB here, so it's not going to be a quick thing. So if you've sent me email recently, or if we're in the middle of a conversation, please bear with me while I get my brain back..

Technorati tags: email  Thunderbird  Mozilla 

Scribed by coar at 2008-03-29 14:24:40 at 2008-03-29 14:24:40 (0 items in this thread)

Sorry, but this is just too funny. Someone selling heavy water (deuterium oxide, ²H₂¹⁶O) for skin care: D₂O.

There's nothing wrong with it, and as far as I know the physical qualities attributed on that page to deuterium oxide are roughly correct (although ingestion in large amounts is, in fact, deleterious to the health), but it still tickles me.

(Yes, I know ²H₂¹⁶O isn't radioactive, but it is 'heavy water' and there's a lot of cultural association with early experimentation with nuclear weapons. Poetic licence.)

Technorati tags: deuterium+oxide  dihydrogen+monoxide  heavy+water 

Scribed by coar at 2008-03-21 10:54:14 at 2008-03-21 10:54:14 (0 items in this thread)

I've liked my Nokia phones, but each has new quirks. This latest one, the N73, is no different. It's not fully compatible with the 6310i, so I can't copy over all my messages, for one thing. I can live with that, but the real corn-popper is that it apparently won't work with my Jabra BT250v Bluetooth headset.

I follow the [minimal] instructions to pair the headset with the phone, and it appears to work. However, it doesn't autoconnect, and when I try to connect manually I get a message about "Unable to create Bluetooth connection." The headset is blinking every three seconds, which (according to the manual) means that it thinks it's paired. And the Jabra site indicates that the N73 is supported.

This really sucks, as I use the headset a lot. I haven't found anything online about it yet, but it seems really odd that this would happen — so I expect I'm doing something wrong, although I haven't figured out what..

Technorati tags: Nokia  N73  Jabra  BT250V 

Scribed by coar at 2008-02-28 14:30:45 at 2008-02-28 14:30:45 (0 items in this thread)

On Wednesday I went into the lab to remove the last of my servers from &BigCo;'s infrastructure. It's a big bugger, about 100kg, and with not much clearance to the floor. I unhooked it and started rolling it out.

First obstacle: the rubber padding on the ramp to the next raised-floor lab. It turns out that this box has little 'station-keeper' feet that you crank down (with a spanner) to keep it from wandering away, and one of them was down too far.

Second obstacle: Same thing, on the ramp leaving the raised-floor lab.

Third obstacle: The bloody thing wouldn't go straight when trying to push it down the carpeted corridor; it kept crabbing to the side and swerving into the wall. At this point I completely removed the station-keeper, but noticed that one of the casters was damaged and had a tendency to get wedged, so I had to put the box down very slowly and carefully to keep it in alignment when it hit the floor.

Fourth obstacle: The front panel fell off. So I stuck it back in the lab, intending to come back and get it.

Each of these adjustments involved tipping the box over on its back in order to get at the undercarriage. I'm no muscleman, and this was starting to seriously piss me off.

The box rolled on the carpet, but reluctantly. By the time I rounded the corner, about a third of the way to my car, I was huffing and puffing something fierce. I stopped to catch my breath, but it didn't seem to help. I sat down on the box, but that was even worse, so I stood up again and leaned against the wall. It was getting progressively harder and harder to breathe, and I was starting to feel light-headed and lose track of my surroundings when someone passing asked if I was all right. I answered, "I don't think so," at which point it sounded as though several people started running around trying to contact Security or something, with acerbic comments about cell phones not working in the building. "Call Security!" "Get the Command Centre!" "Call the front desk!" During this my benefactor asked me if I wanted to lie down, and it sounded like a really good idea, so I half lay down and half collapsed to the floor. At this point my breathing started to get a little less laboured, although I was still sweating profusely.

After what seemed like about fifteen minutes (although I have difficulty judging duration at the best of times, much less when I'm having trouble breathing) someone showed up from the local fire department and started asking me questions. It was long enough that everyone around was wondering where the hell they were, and I think I muttered something about, "This is a test. If this had been an actual heart attack.." I called the SBH to let her know what was up. Someone else, bless her, got me some damp paper towels for my forehead, after I had drenched my handkerchief mopping it. The exact chronology is fuzzy here, but someone assured me the box would be moved to the security desk where I could get it later. (I think everyone thought I was crazy when I hinted that I'd like the box to end up in my car before the ambulance carted me off. I probably was crazy.)

The gurney eventually showed up, I was able to climb onto it, and out to the ambulance and off to Duke Hospital emergency room. (They don't call them 'emergency rooms' any more; they're 'emergency departments' now.) The EMT, Matt Baker, was very pleasant and told me what he was doing (EKG, blood glucose, et cetera). The other EMT, Larry, was the silent type. Finally at the hospital, they tried to put me in three successive 'empty' triage rooms, all of which were actually occupied. I ended up sitting in a waiting area for a couple of hours, being regularly assured that a room would be ready for me in about ten-fifteen minutes. The SBH showed up pretty soon; she took a taxi as soon as I called her. When I actually did get assigned an observation room, I stood up and gave myself a hearty crack on the noggin from the metal heart monitor sticking out of the wall just over my chair. I sat back down with a thump, and I was a lot more cautious on the second try. Finally in an examination room, there were more hours of delays, but I had another EKG and I encountered two doctors, a PA, and some nurses (one of whom drew six tubes of blood). One of the doctors, Dr Norman, was very civil and friendly and she answered all my questions, and told me I'd be moving to the observation area overnight; there'd be a stress test and possibly a cranial CT scan the next day. The PA was also nice, but the other doctor, Dr Lopez, was a bit of a dick. He kept breaking eye contact and wouldn't let me finish answering his questions. He'd ask, I'd start to answer, and he'd interrupt assuming he knew the rest of what I was going to say. And a terrible bedside manner, too. Like I said, a bit of a dick. Of course, Dr Norman mentioned moments later that Dr Lopez is the boss..

More hours of waiting before I got wheeled farther back to the observation section, and the rest was boring. They hadn't let me eat or drink anything since arrival, and hospital food being what it is, the SBH went to the cafeteria and brought me a couple of cheeseburgers and fruit juice. Then she went home, not only because it was boring and I seemed to be stable, but because she had to look up my prescriptions so I could give them to the PA so I could have my meds in the evening and the morning. (I managed to get them all eventually, but they came filtering up from the pharmacy one at a time, and they kept screwing up what I was supposed to take when.) Twelve more tubes of blood were drawn over the next few hours, and the PA came in and told me the findings so far. (I forget if it was the day PA or the night PA, Adam Coleman.) EKGs looked good, no nasty enzymes in the blood indicating heart damage, but some apparent anæmia. I had a long talk with Adam in the middle of the night about it; what could cause it, what it meant, what could be done about it, why it could have easily been the cause of my almost passing out, and so on. Nice guy. I also watched CSI for the first time — several hours of it, in fact. Not a bad show.

I waited until the last bloodletting was over before trying to go to sleep. I usually sleep on my side, but that wasn't easy to do with all the wires. There were half a dozen disappearing into a hole in the chest of my hospital gown, which went to the overhead monitor, plus the O₂ saturation clip on my finger. I had to ring for a nurse and get disconnected when I wanted to go to the loo; I'd end up carrying loops of cable over my arm like an ancient Greek carrying the drape of his mantle.

Breakfast was baaaad. I think it was supposed to be scrambled eggs, potatoes, and oatmeal; what it actually appeared to be was a dome of yellowish stuff, a bunch of brown lumps, and a bowl of watery goo. Not appetising. Lunch was marginally better.

There were two ways to do the stress test: either on a treadmill or with an injection that would raise the heartrate. Because of my knees I opted for the injection, but the warnings were the same in either case: the test could result in stroke, cardiac arrest, lightheadedness, respiratory distress, et cetera, et cetera. Cover their butts with sheets of paper with your signature on.

The testing part is the sonograms they take while your heart is thrashing. The tech was left-handed, but the gear was set up for righties, so he had to sit on the bed and lean over me to reach everything. I was able to see the monitor; it's kinda weird (but also neat) to see one's heart thumping away, the valves all doing their thing and all. One of the features of the device was that it could simulate the sound of the blood passing through various parts of the heart. That was disconcerting; the first time he turned it on it sounded like someone flushing the loo.

After getting a baseline they start pumping the drug (Dobutamine) into you, and your heartrate starts to go up. I could see it happening on the monitor (I was facing away from the sono screen), and I could feel it in my chest and hear it in my ears. To get the last little bit, they had me lie on my back and wave my legs around in the air. Feh.

One of the side effects they didn't warn me about is that Dobutamine can make you feel like you have to pee really badly. Heart's going mad, legs thrashing in the air like demented semaphores, and now you feel like you're going to be providing a water feature any second. Lovely.

When it was over, I got wheeled back to my room at the other end of the hospital. Then back to bed and more waiting.

At each stop throughout my stay, I got an EKG. There was one in the ER, a few in the observation area, one in the echo room, and a couple more in the observation area. Each new EKG got new sensor pads stuck on me, so that after a day I felt like some sort of patch panel. And some of them really stick, too, so removing them stings like blazes. (I didn't even manage to find them all; when I got home the SBH pointed out one I'd missed, stuck to my neck.)

The final results came back about 30 hours after I arrived at the hospital. My heart's in great shape, but I've got this bloody anæmia (no pun intended) again. And no known cause. So limited exertion and iron therapy until we get that sorted.

No wonder I've been wheezing bringing the groceries up the stairs. I thought I was just in worse shape than expected, but apparently my blood's ability to transport O₂ has been degrading over the last few months.

Technorati tags: ambulance  anaemia  hospital  Duke 

Scribed by coar at 2008-02-28 14:01:44 at 2008-02-28 14:01:44 (0 items in this thread)

Every now and then I use Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other tools to try to track down people from my past. (Mwahaha!) One of those I look for was my roommate 33 years ago, Rodolfo Padilla. I was never able to find him, though; the closest I cam was a news story that seemed to indicate someone with that name had been killed in an aircraft crash.

So it was surprised I was when he contacted me on Facebook last week. He's now mayor of a city in Honduras. Small world, eh.

Technorati tags: Tabor  Honduras  Facebook 

Scribed by coar at 2008-02-18 11:48:50 at 2008-02-18 11:48:50 (0 items in this thread)