Politics

I have occasionally wondered what it was that the fat slug had on Blair that made the slug effectively bullet-proof - oh, dammit, what was the fat bastard's name? Ah - John Prescott.

(Found that by Googling "fat labour slug", his name appears in the first entry)

I mean, he had to have something personal on Blair because as soon as Blair went the fat slug went too... He didn't even wait to be pushed.

But that isn't quite what prompted this grump; what happened was that I was discussing my previous political grumbling blog, and this, and the conversation meandered around to the way that the British are always jumping at the beck and call of the Americans - far more than you would expect from simple common interest. And it smells like the same thing - the yanks have got something on our political leaders, the only question is what?

Is it just coincidence that the country that spends most on signal intercepts seems to completely control our politicians? Is it paranoid to wonder if the yanks, who must know just about every one of their dirty little secrets, are busy blackmailing the miserable bastards?

If not, why not?

Bizarre hacking

Found something strange on my home fileserver a while back - a couple of directories and a few dozen files had appeared that have nothing to do with any of us... I guess someone has either hacked into the server from outside using broadband, though the firewall setup really ought to stop that, or someone local has hacked into it through the wireless network. We have a reasonable security setup but I imagine that just means it takes 'em a few minutes longer, gah.

The strange thing is that the files were just nonsense, I would have expected something constructive (in their terms at least) like an attempt to use the server to spam the world, or something destructive like planting a worm, virus, or embarrassing files... Why would you hack into something and then leave an obvious trail? Bizarre.

Perhaps the file-server is becoming sentient, and these are its birthing cries...

Ubuntu linux

Haven't played with linux for a few months, so out came a spare hard disk and into the lap-top it went, together with the latest Ubuntu install CD.

Less than ten minutes later I was rummaging about on the web using it... Not bad.

The wireless network setup without any intervention from me other than having to remember my password, and Ubuntu even found and happily prints to the network printer, a colour laser that expects GDI support from the PC, so that isn't at all shabby either.

On the whole I like it, might even tempt me away from Fedora and SuSE...

Hmmm. The latest version of the WINE windows emulator runs my windows ZeusR32 assembler, with a few font niggles admittedly, but bloody impressive none the less - perfectly usable. I wonder if the USB support is good enough to let it access my device programmers?

Get thee behind me, Linus...

Suicide bombers

The other day a friend and I were discussing the way the press call suicide bombers cowards. Call 'em arseholes, if you like, that's generally appropriate, but cowards? I wouldn't have the guts to do it...

Then that led to us pondering [gross simplification alert] the whole Muslim paradise concept that these idiots are sold - die with the name "Allah!" on your lips and you are guaranteed an eternity of virgins, endlessly renewed... Well, think about it - what sort of pathetic inadequates would want to spend eternity in the company of virgins? The whole idea stinks of primative misogynistic stupidity - give me an experienced lover over a virgin (or under, I don't care... sorry...) every time.

It's all a bit worrying, really - "Allah" sounds enough like "Aaargh!" that it could happen by accident. One wrong syllable and I could find myself educating virgins for eternity; remind me - is this supposed to be heaven or hell?

Maybe that's why black-box flight recorders show that the last word of people who know they're about to die is almost invariably "shit!"... Far less ambiguous than "Aaargh!"...

Hmmm. After due consideration I've decided to opt for re-incarnation and come back as a lesbian, who in their right mind wouldn't? Though knowing my luck it'll be as a lesbian sheep with all the frustration that implies. Gah...

Oh, shit - thought of something worse than being a lesbian sheep - might come back as a lesbian in one of those backward countries where the women have to go round wearing tents lest the sight of naked female flesh (we're talking about arms, legs, faces, etc here, nothing risque) drives the so-called 'men' wild with lust. The barbaric morons that laughingly call themselves men, that is - ever stopped to think about their revolting logic? The men make the women cover themselves up because the men say they can't trust themselves not to rape women who are uncovered? What does that say about them? The pig-ignorant bastards should learn to control themselves... Primative morons).

Those wondering what I've got against sheep might not know that a female sheep that wants sex basically signals this by standing still. That's fine if you're a heterosexual because eventually the ram will notice and spring into action, but if you're a gay female sheep it's a bit of a non-starter... You stand still. If you're lucky another female likes you and... stands still... Then you both stand about being embarrassed and fending off unwanted males. It's a bit like a student disco, now I come to think of it.

I'm going off this whole lesbian thing, it seems fraught with difficulty.

Garden Partly

I was rummaging about in some old files and I came across this set of alternate lyrics to Marillion's Garden Party. May not mean anything to anyone else, who doesn't know Ste, Simon and Fiona, but it amused me to write and it amused me again when I came across it today...



Ste's been drinking things today
Fiona's home there's hell to pay
Social drinking, another bender
Wayward Ste's with another lager

"Hello can, hello can"

Edgy cats in mewing numbers, rudely wakened from their slumbers
Time has come again for slaughter, on the chair by drunken 'master'

Water pistols keep them on the run
Again
Flying cushions chase them, every one
Again
Straafed by Steve, they sulk in hidden corners, again
Again
Oh God, not again

Vindaloos consumed en masse, betray their presence as a gas
Plazas loiter in the stomach, chemicals leech creating ulcers

"A lifetimes' drinking dims the light, the results of smirnov in the eyes"

Doctors son, her mothers daughter, will they make it to the altar ?
Please don't consume all the grass, unless accompanied by a fellow

May I be so bold as to perhaps suggest othello ?

Punting all the cats is jolly fun
They say
Going to the pub, oh please do come
They say
Drinking is the tops, a game for men
Oh they say
They say
Good God they say

I'm punting
I'm drinking
I'm snoring
So boring
I'm rocking
I'm fucking
" Who's is she ?"

Life's a party

Simon scores another few, Fiona smiles she got it too
Ste concedes a losing battle, cigarettes out - it's his flash
Flash...
Flash...

Phone calls polluted with false charm, Mother knows he means no harm
Future dinners now assured, he returns to drinking - unperturbed
Oh, unperturbed

Ohhh Punting all the cats, oh please do come they say
Drinking dry the town, oh please do come they say
He's sleeping with your wife again today
"Oh please do come"
"Oh please do come"
He say...




Incidentally, they all loved it. Ste was invited to retaliate, but sadly never did.

Psi (the Simon in the tale) also versified Ste, but the only line I can remember was :-

"It was big and brown and it wouldn't go down"

ISTR this related to the mother of all turds...

Pardon?

Wasn't paying much attention, but while I was I working with the radio on in the background I heard that Obama had pardoned a turkey.

Was it Bush or Blair?

Hardons collide at CERN

Just don't tell the police how fast they were going.

I'm normally in favour of pure research, and I wouldn't begrudge CERN the five billion or so pounds that they've spent so far on the LHC (I'll gloss over the fact some of that came my way) but I personally would have handled the big-science budget differently; I don't think we should be pouring money into big science projects when there are more immediate requirements like fusion research to consider.

More nuclear power

A long time ago on a conferencing system far, far away... Well, a couple of decades ago on a system called cix, actually, I was grumping about the need for nuclear power and the fact that anyone who opposed nuclear power and also thought of themselves as an environmentalist was an idiot, and as part of that grump I moaned about the fact that it was inevitable that we'd have to build more nuclear power stations, but also pretty inevitable that because of the objections of those fuckwits instead of starting then and building intrinsically safe designs we'd be stalled until the last possible moment - when people started to panic - and then rush through whatever we could build in hurry, ie, probably unsafe pressurised water designs located near existing nuclear power stations (ie near the coast, where they'll be flooded when the sea level rises)... Hmmm... Now coming to a coast-line near you...

What I really don't understand is why the fuck the western powers want to keep being reliant on oil, with all the consequent political and economic problems that creates. We know it's going to run out, we know that buying it from the middle east is pouring money into some spectacularly unsavoury places and funding a bunch of right bastards, so why the fuck don't we do something about it? We could. It's not the science we lack, it's the political willpower.

And why is that? Because all the politicians we've had to choose from are incompetent, innumerate and corrupt. Well, other than the ones that are just plain stupid. And the few that are OK, there have to be some after all. Hang on, this is my grump - why the fuck am I being reasonable here? Gah - how many of them have science degrees? Engineering experience? Are even passable numerate?

Let us put it this way; our entire civilization, such as it is, rests on energy. Basically we're lazy bastards, we want vehicles to move us, computers to think for us, television to entertain us. Oh, and a bit of heating and lighting and other trivialities. All of these need energy; with it we can do pretty much anything we like, without it we're stuffed. It is not something that we can tighten our belts and do without, at least not without radically changing our lifestyles.

So, what do our politicians think about? How to ensure the continuance of this staple of civilization? No. They concentrate on how to get away with fiddling their expenses, how to avoid expressing their views on asylum seekers, how to avoid having to make any decisions or (worst-case) how to avoid been seen as responsible for anything that might backfire. Pointless sods.

Though I suppose it's hardly their fault; I personally think a large slice of the responsibility lies with the media - an equally innumerate bunch. If the press had the wit to ask intelligent questions then the limitations of political thinking would be exposed. Alas, they don't, so evolution leads to the situation we have now where all that matters to politicians is short-term expedience and sound-bite logic. Damn them all...

So now there's going to be another climate meeting where these dickheads will try to negotiate with the laws of nature as if this problem can be persuaded to go away. What? You think they're negotiating with each other? Don't be stupid, they're there hoping to wish it all away. And the media will help them do it, by continuing to miss the point big style. Gawd help us...

Aw, fuck it. Fuck them all. (Actually, I wouldn't fuck any of them)

Synchronicity

In order to justify his invasion of Poland Hitler hatched a plan to make it look like the Germans were provoked; this involved the Nazis faking a Polish raid on a German radio station near the border. To create credible 'evidence' for the raid some political prisoners were to be dressed in Polish uniforms, shot and their bodies left near the station; in the plans these unfortunates were referred too as "canned goods".

As a result of this invasion the English declared war on Germany, and the declaration of war was broadcast on radio immediately following a programme titled "Making the most of tinned food".

Someone or something has an ironic sense of humour...

"Muslims turn away from Darwin" - scientists are warned

"Then the ignorant fuckers will evolve out" scientists reply...

Well, they should have. Gah.

Dairy products

Just turned the TV on and stumbled across an episode of something called Emmanuelle 2000 on the sci-fi channel. In an improbable sex scene set in a kitchen a couple were pouring dark chocolate sauce and milk over each other... Chocolate sauce, yes, cream, yes - been there, done that - but milk? cold milk straight out of a fridge? No.

Probably some insane american black/white equal opportunity thang...

Winwoes - the less than magnificent seven...

Today I paraphrased Larry Niven's "The gods do not protect fools; fools are protected by more capable fools" and came up with "Wise men cannot influence fools; fools are only ever influenced by more persuasive fools"... At the time I was thinking about idiotic attitudes to nuclear power, but I should have been thinking about the lemming-like rush to install windows 7.

I'm usually cynical, but after nearly a year of vista I was prepared to try anything to get away from it.

Attempt the first part 1: Installing Windows 7 Professional as an upgrade to the god-awful Vista Home Premium on this 'ere machine.

Get Herve to clone the disk, so I can revert when I find out W7 is useless. Then find out that you can't upgrade Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional. Didn't strike me as likely to be a problem, but then again I didn't check. Don't tell Herve.

Attempt the first part 2: Install Windows 7 (64-bit) as a clean install over the top of the copy. Sorry Herve.

Mother of gawd, it works. Right up until I try to install the device driver for some USB based programming hardware I've designed, at which point the damned thing objects because those slugs at microsoft now insist on only allowing signed drivers. Do I want to spend $600+ getting my drivers signed by those thieving bastards? Nope... Call it a day at that point.

After a restless night I decide that, while it is possible to disable driver signing (thanks google) I'm going to have to avoid the 64-bit version because other apps I want to use will also have problems. Notably Altera's Web FPGA tools. (Pay for them? Are you MAD?)

Attempt the second: Install Windows 7 (32-bit) as a clean install over the top.

Lawks a mercy, it works. Even including my device drivers. Thank you microsoft, I can use my own software again (or should that be fuck right off you motherless turds? Yes, that sounds better).

Then I plug the second SATA drive in, the one with the previous Vista installation on it, and all hell breaks loose. Somehow during the cloning process the primary hard disk wound up on as a secondary drive, so the windows install put the boot code on a secondary drive and I have a few tense minutes of sorting out the windows boot process before it works again. When I prove this was that french prevert's idea of a joke there will be retribution.

So now all I have to do is install dozens of applications, again, and weee! I'll be back where I was a week or so earlier, but now in glorious windwoes 7 land [shudder]

[later]

Copying Thuderbird email turned out to be fun, I expected there'd be a menu option to export the settings and mail to a file... ha ha ha. Nope. What sort of fucking idiots write such an app without giving import and export a thought? Ah, of course, programmers...

Only a dozen compilers, IDE's, cad packages and the like to install. What fun!

Expect more grumping to follow.

[later]

Hours of installing Nero. Hours of it. Why does it take so fucking long to install? Because the monkey installed the wrong version first, of course, not that he'll admit that.

So, another hour of fiddling about and I've installed Delphi, or at least the ancient version I need for compatibility. Tiring, but without too many problems even though there were oodles of components and updates to be installed. There's the oh-yes-you-have-to-fuck-about-with-that-file exercise when a couple of components don't install properly, but, hell, I remembered how to solve it all this time so no real worries.

With trepidation I try to build a few of my development tools (most are coded in Delphi), and wonder-of-wonders, this works.

Feeling flushed with success it's onward and downward - open-orrifice, and closed orrifice [shudder], Foxit, Notepad, Winzip, FileZilla and dozens of suchlike things get bunged on, all the usual suspects, basically. And, I must say, all fairly painless... Aside from FileZilla that again doesn't have a working way to transfer settings - what is it with these dumb-ass programmers? Don't they ever move their tools from one machine to another? Still, the new version looks like it might so... never mind...

Then we get onto the awkward stuff - various embedded processor compilers. This is where it's all going to fall over, I know it.

WinAVR installs and pretty much just works. Hmmm - amazing - I can even build a few complicated AVR apps using my ParaSys front-end IDE - oops, no - something not in the path [clicketty-click]... Looks like the AVR stuff's all working...

GNUARM installs and just doesn't work, but I remember this one - you have to kill the cygwin1.dll that WinAVR installed. I'm going to take my nearly-all-programmers-are-complete-pillocks attitude as being read here and spare you the rant about dll's.
I mean, whatever possessed anyone to invent such a doomed idea... Sorry.

Now for the crunch - the bastard Jennic toolchain that usually sees off my calmness. Calm crem, calm. Perhaps this time... I install it. I test it. It just fucking works. It doesn't kill WinAVR. It doesn't kill GNU-ARM. I tip-toe away...

A few spice and other cad applications later I return to the compilers. They all still seem to be working... Bugger me, seems like I might be able to use this bloody machine again in a few days...

Oh, well, Quartus-II then, I suppose. Or bed...

[later]

Quartus installed without problems, though I haven't tried to use the programming cable yet. Hmmm... I'm starting to like windows 7 much more than I ever did vista...

[later]

Knew it was too good to be true - the gnu arm compiler wasn't actually working, it would only compile about 90% of the time. A project that had about a dozen sources would compile correctly most of the time, but every now and then one or more of the sources, (rarely the same ones, you understand) would show spurious errors. Turned out to be a memory issue and replacing the cygwin dlls (again) seems to have cured it...

[later]

Well, so far so good. In fact the title of this grump might need to be changed, because so far windows 7 seems to be working well...

[later]

I should have known - that bloody Jennic compiler wasn't working. It fooled me - the compiler didn't complain but the code it produced was garbage... Compared the binary to previous runs under Vista and it was totally different. Fixed it by changing the absolute paths in the makefiles to relative paths - had to do that before with another project but at least that time the bastard tools had reported problems, they didn't just silently produce crap. I REALLY hate relying on other people's development tools, especially anything that is derived from GCC.

I'm starting to hate these Jennic modules, had lots of trouble with them and they never seem to perform as well as they claim. Really wish I'd written my own protocol stack and just used the Motorola wireless interface chipset; would have saved me so much wasted time over the last couple of years...

Windows 7

So, in a rare - one might even say unprecedented - moment of enthusiastic optimism I ordered a copy of Windows 7 (ultimate edition) from Amazon. After all, it couldn't possibly be as fucking awful as Vista.

After forking out £140 and waiting a couple of days, this arrived:



Gods, it comes to something when even Microsoft can't afford a decent box... Hang on - light dawns - this is a pirate! Bastards... I suppose that's what you get when you order software from:



Gah... I spend minutes of my life writing invective and telling them that if I wanted pirated software I would get it myself, not spend £140 on it. I wax lyrical. I am prepared for a long drawn out fight with some faceless corporation. And then you know what the bastards go and do? Refund me in full. What sort of nasty, evil, twisted company does that? After Sue has gone to the trouble of finding that nice picture an' all...

Sheesh. You just can't trust some people.

Yahoo toolbar

No! I do not want to install your bastard toolbar! Stop asking me! Just fuck off with your "A new Java update is available and by the way, would you like to install the Yahoo Toolbar" or your "A new AVG update is available and by the way, would you like to install the Yahoo Toolbar" or your [deleted] fucking garbage [deleted] bastard [deleted] software that installs that twat of a toolbar... [deleted]

I wish there was a way to tell those fucking arseholes at Yahoo to stop spamming the fucking universe with their accursed toolbar. Wankers...

I may have been going on a bit about this at work, because after one grump a chorus of "They fuck you with the toolbar" was heard...

Religious education

"The thing you have to remember about religions is that they can't all be right... They could, however, very easily all be wrong"

Engineering

So, after much rummaging about I have got this bastard long-running project to a state where it's worth taking it to the customer and plugging it into their mass spectrometer hardware, where it's basically going to be responsible for controlling the timing, driving various electrostatic lenses and acquiring data.

The design has an FPGA containing a reduced version of the R3220 (my custom 32-bit RISC processor) and about a dozen custom peripherals, it's running a fairly complicated embedded application (written entirely in assembler) consisting of 33 source files and the damned thing is responsible for some fairly hairy real-time data acquisition in a noisy environment.

As well as the device itself there are various development tools that have been written to support the design, all in all some tens of thousands of lines of code. All of which had to work and none of which had actually been tested on the machine.

And to cut to the chase, after we'd set some parameters (there are thirty-odd interface registers to play with up) and I'd restored a couple of lines that had been accidentally edited to death, it was controlling the hardware and we were looking at mass peaks... In other words, nearly everything worked first time, and the bit that didn't just required a few seconds of editing to fix.

The thing is, a programmer would regard writing so much code, and in assembler, and having it work virtually straight away as success beyond their wildest dreams, if not as being completely impossible. Me? I'm actually slightly pissed off - if I hadn't made a tired mistake tidying up a file (unnecessarily, at that) the bloody thing would have been right first time... As usual. Bugger!

Still, given that the processor was designed in only ten days and it's lovely to use, is kicking the shit out of a Nios2 performance wise and has behaved perfectly I suppose I'm allowed a small cackle of victory.

Mu-haha! MU-ha-ha-ha-oh... Sorry. Bit carried away there.

[Update on the "kicking the shit out of a Nios2" comment.

The R3220 (clocked at 30MHz) is handling more data in 5uS than the Nios2 (clocked at 70MHz) managed to handle in 80uS, so as far as the application goes the R3220 is a factor of 36 times faster, or so.

Much of this performance margin is down to the efficiency of the code they are running, of course, thought it should be noted that the Nios2 was running highly optimised C, code that was written and tweaked over a period of months. The R3220 is running hand assembler written over a period of hours and not optimised at all - there was no need.

The Nios2 system also had a lot of hardware support for functions that the R3220 system just does in software, because it can, so the performance factor is arguably higher even than that...]

CO2

Just watched an advert demonising CO2. Far too little and far too late.

Wonder if any of the stupid ignorant bastards who've been doing their best to doom us all by opposing nuclear power will finally wake up and admit their culpability?

No, don't be stupid crem. They're probably all gearing up to oppose nuclear fusion...

Alli

Alli is a new over-the-counter drug that binds to the fat in your diet and prevents the body from absorbing some of it, so that people can carry on stuffing themselves and still lose weight.

In a world where people starve to death it strikes me as almost obscene to market a drug that encourages the rich to eat too much and then shit fat...

Even more gloom

You know, I wouldn't have thought it possible for today to be worse than yesterday, work-wise.

But it managed.

We have a reasonably large order for a new project, for which I have already designed the hardware, and so I just need to write enough of the software to be sure that the hardware works so we can safely order the PCB's, etc, for manufacture. Though actually I suspect that once started I'd actually write the whole thing so that we can provide an early sample for the customer to evaluate.

So, I duly set up the project and start to write code. Or at least I would, except that for some unknown reason the thrice-damned compiler for one of the processors involved (a Jennic RF device) has stopped working. Yes, the software has rotted. Or, to be more accurate, something I've installed (some other version of gcc, probably) since last time I used it (a few months ago) has messed with the path, or the environment, or whatever, and killed it.

Not that it gives a helpful message, you understand, no, the only indication is an essentially meaningless error from the make process, emitted from one or other of the (slightly incompatible) versions of the fucking make utility I have to have on this system. So once more, if I can work up the energy, I'm going to have to delve into makefile hell, find out what the bastard thing is moaning about, why it has changed, and what to do to fix it. And this, no doubt, will fuck with something else on the system and make that stop working with some obscure problem I will trip over later...

Oh, gods, how I detest relying on other people's development tools. I'd say most of 'em were designed by arseholes, but the truth is that most of 'em weren't designed at all and are just the product of generations of open-sore bodging.

So, what to do? There's something to be said for the idea of using virtual machines to isolate each and every piece of third party garbage out there, but that's a real pain in the arse for people like me who create systems which involve multiple pieces of hardware/software using different CPUs, languages and so on and so forth...

[sigh] I guess I'm going to have to spend some time studying the more arcane details of make utilities and makefiles so I can debug this mess. It's a study I've been putting this off for quite some time. Far too many makefiles are childishly overcomplicated and seemingly designed by immature programmers who admire complex solutions to simple problems - baroque stupidity for the terminally anally retarded.

Christ, I sometimes wonder what it is about so many programmers that makes them incapable of grasping the fact that simple solutions are to be prefererred to complex ones, but such wondering's clearly a waste of time. The answer is, as it so often is, merely stupidity.

Grump, snarl.

[later]

After a lot of farting about I sort of cured the makefile problem... What I don't understand is what brought it on. The cure was to replace a couple of absolute paths with relative paths.

Like this:

Before:
BASE_DIR = c:\foo\bah\sdk
After:
BASE_DIR = ..\..\foo\bah\sdk

Now, the thing I don't understand is what changed on the machine to stop the first version working. The paths haven't changed, the relative paths just refer to the same directories as the static paths did. The static path makefiles still work on other machines, they used to work on this one, FFS, and without anything changing now they just don't. There are times when I hate computers...

Morose-looking sheep

"Research by scientists at the Free University in Berlin has shown a link between depressed farmers and vets and the infectious Borna virus which makes cows, sheep and horses behave weirdly. One good method of cheering yourself up during a depressive bout can now be to search your memory for contact with morose-looking sheep and blame it on them".

Try as I might I can't remember close contact with any sheep, morose or otherwise... Though I have shouted "mint sauce!" at them in the distance on occasion, so I suppose it could be delayed payback.

Bastards.