nerd1951.com

Activity on nerd1951.com has been little to none for the last several months (I have a talent for stating the obvious).  But his is about to change.  nerd1951.com will be getting a complete make-over soon.

My interests have moved on from computer networking in embedded system to multi-media and embedded systems.  It seems that a lot of the current interesting work in embedded systems includes multi-media.  The applications range from portable entertainment gadgets to robotics.  Tele-presence and remote sensing are important multi-media embedded systems applications.

The blog portion of nerd1951.com will be moved to its own page and I’ll continue to use Wordpress for that but I’ll probably delete most of the old content.  The main page will be dedicated to projects and news from other sources and will include some multi-media content.  I’m looking at using joomla for that.

I’m also working on a fun digital speech processing application that I will share here after the website make-ver is complete.

When a system is well designed you can use it without even realizing the complexity of the technology behind it. This is true of the Zipcar car sharing service.

For those of you who are not familiar with the service, Zipcar allows you to rent cars by the hour or the day. In the cities where Zipcar operates, their cars are strategically located around the area, especially around public transportation hubs. You can search for available cars on the Zipcar web site then reserve the car you want. If you need to extend your reservation at the last minute you can do so using your cell phone.

Cars are accessed using a membership card that uses an RFID technology to unlock the car. When the car has been returned and your reservation is over, Zipcar automatically bills your credit card.

Zipcar employs a range of technologies that must be integrated seamlessly in order to provide an easy-to-use service. First there is the RFID technology employed in the membership card. The car must communicate with the back office to determine if you have a reservation. I assume that Zipcar uses satellite communications for that purpose. The back office must track which cars are available and which cars have need reserved. They also track when the cars have been picked up and returned. Finally the back office operation has to take car of the billing to your credit card.

The Zipcar website does an excellent job of presenting the member with all of the information that they need. You can see where available cars are located and the cost of using them. The web site also displays your future reservations and billing history.

All of these technologies spanning from the RFID on the membership card to the communications with the back office and the web site have been expertly woven together. The most impressive part is that the user never experiences the complexity of these technologies interacting. I use the service often without even thinking about it. This is the best indication of a well designed system.

Nerds like us don’t get much love but obviously someone loves nerds.  If you have a special friend that likes Hello Kitty she might like this.

OK – this is not technical in any way – just a pure rant.

When did we go from being people to being resources? Was it when everyone started using Microsoft Project? I hate seeing my name listed under “resources”.I never see anything but people listed on a project as resources. I’ve been on projects where test-beds or prototype hardware were the critical resources during integration. Yet they were never resources on the Microsoft Project schedule.

The other thing I hate is the Human Resources Department; now days just H.R. When I first started working this was called the Personnel Department as in “person.” If we have a Human Resources Department should metropolitan police departments have Canine Resources Departments and Equine Resources Departments? Actually I’ve worked for some tech companies that should have Equine Resources Departments for some of the managers, marketing folks and even some engineers but that’s a different story.

I guess another part of it is that you never lay-off resources. You just downsize. Somehow downsizing your resource head count sounds better than laying-off people. And no one gets fired anymore; just terminated. Well that’s all for now. I have to go see to my terminated bovine resources.

Some things that help make a normal life pleasant can get to be distractions when you’re way behind schedule on a project. Nerds are legendary for ignoring these distractions when a technical challenge requires their full attention. Details like hygiene and nutrition are the first casualties in battles against bugs and deadlines. It’s really hard to be fresh smelling and perky looking when you’re in the middle of marathon systems integration problems and have been working for eighteen hours straight.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve really noticed a decline in my eating habits. I usually try to prepare my food from fresh unadulterated ingredients; lots of vegetables, beans, salad and grains and a good bit of meat too. But I cook from scratch and watch the carbs and fat. That is until I hit systems integration.

I started out last week with salads for lunch and home made chili for dinner. When the chili and the lettuce ran out, I switched to carry out food. I tried sticking to wholesome stuff like the local kabob place, easy on the rice and Chipotle which is quite healthy and tasty without the rice and tortillas.

Then I started eating at odd hours, late at night or very early in the morning. I switched to the diet of the legendary first generation of hackers at MIT, like Richard Stallman. I started alternating between Chinese carry out and pizza washed down with lots of Coke.

I knew I hit bottom this morning. Taco Bell is open late around here. They call the time between midnight and two AM, “The Forth Meal.” I found myself driving to the Taco Bell to get there before closing so I could get mine. A few hours later I was at McDonalds’ getting a sausage, egg, and cheese McGriddle and another Coke.

I’m lost now and I’ll admit it. I’m not eating again until I can cook something for myself. Right after a shower and a twelve hour nap.

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news a lot lately as they begin the process of bringing it online. Any physics experiment on this scale is bound to inspire some geeky humor (I don’t believe that’s an oxymoron.) Here is a sampling of some of what I’ve found on the net:

First the question on the minds of many,
Has the Large Hadron Clollider Destroyed the earth yet?

Next is the LHC Rap. This is actually pretty well produced and explains what they are hoping to accomplish. When I watch this though, I can’t help but think that all those people dancing around probably have PHDs and learned more math by the time they were twelve than I’ll ever know.

And finally, you can always count on XKCD as a source of relevant (pardon the pun) nerdly humor:

I also found a funny play on words or two but they’re not for a non-X rated website. I’ll leave those to your imagination. A Google search for them is an optional exercise for the reader.

Today I was walking past a hall way discussion when one of our engineers said “This is a wavelength,” holding his hands about 8” apart to illustrate. After I passed, I turned around and said “but this is a nanosecond,” Holding my hands roughly a foot apart. The three of them just looked at me blankly. My nerd humor has reached such a pinnacle of nerdlyness that even other engineers don’t understand my jokes. Then one of them chuckled and said, “You can tell it took us longer than a nanosecond to catch on.

Had they ever been to a lecture given by Admiral Grace Hopper, they would have understood immediately. Admiral Hopper was a pioneer in computing in the Navy. In order to illustrate the speed of what happens in computers to her less technical fellow officers, she would pass out “nanoseconds” pieces of wire, a little under a foot in length that showed how far light could travel in a nanosecond.

This got me thinking about the bandwidth and data rates of the equipment we work with in the early 21st century. It takes an electrical signal about 1.5 nanoseconds to travel the length of an equipment shelf in a standard 19” rack. In the nineties, we could clock backplanes with a central clock. Every module plugged into the backplane would use the same clock to synchronize data transfers. We could live with the propagation delay across the backplane for clock and data as long as we kept the data rate below about 500 MHz.

In the late nineties we ran into the physical limits of this approach as we started dealing with data rates of 1 GHz, 2.5 GHz. and even 10 GHz. Now such data rates are common place and in a modular design, this means that data arriving from different modules is skewed according to the distance the data travels. The solution is that now both clock and data are carried together and the data must be synchronized at its destination. Often the clock is derived from the data stream itself.

So now I think “Wow, 100 picoseconds is this long,” holding my thumb and index finger about an inch apart.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been pursuing a car-free lifestyle for almost two years now. I need to explain that a car-free lifestyle doesn’t mean that you never drive anywhere. Some places really are difficult to reach without a car and if you need to move something heavy any distance, you need some kind of vehicle. To me, living car-free means not using a car for your every day trips, primarily commuting to work and shopping.

Living car-free became more of a challenge when I moved at the end of January. The distance to work changed from six miles to twenty five miles. On a good day I could drive this in about 35 to 45 minutes. If there’s an accident or the weather is bad, it could be much longer.

Using the subway and bus, it takes me a little more than an hour and a half. But I use most of that hour and a half. Being stuck in a subway or on a bus with nothing to read but Stroustup’s The C++ Programming Language has motivated me to read it from cover-to-cover. Something I would never have done otherwise. I’ve always just read bits and pieces for reference. Reading the entire book, I uncovered many nuggets of C++ wisdom that have paid off in my work daily. I’ve also been able to do quite a bit of writing while riding to work.

I can also bike part of the way to work and bus the rest. This is still the same hour and a half commute but I get a good 15 or 16 miles of biking in, mostly on hiker-biker trails away from the traffic.

Where I live now, I’m only a mile from restaurants, supermarkets, movie theatres and all kinds of stores. Almost everything I need is within walking or biking distance. If I want to down town DC, I’m only a half mile from the Metro station.

So, while I call this car-free insanity, as I watch the price of gas creeping closer to four bucks a gallon, it doesn’t seem so crazy.

Arthur C. Clark was one of the giants in science fiction.  Most people only think of him as the author of 2001 A Space Odessy.  Read Childhood’s End for something completely different.  Like many scifi authors of his time he had a background in science, with a degree in physics and mathematics.

I enjoyed reading his stories at a time when space travel was still a dream.  His generation of scifi authors helped us imagine what space travel would be like.  Remember, 2001 was released before Apollo landed on the moon.

Arthur C. Clark also developed the idea of communications satellites in a technical paper in 1945, years before there were any rockets capable of reaching earth orbit.

You wouldn’t guess by watching programmers in many organizations but Agile Programming is really a process. Some of the various agile methods’ common components are: extensive user involvement, multiple incremental releases, test first and refactoring.

Unfortunately, most places I’ve seen that use “agile methods” in embedded systems development have simply regressed to their old habits from the 1970s when hardware engineers controlled the process. No planning, minimal if any documentation, just code and test until you’ve beaten the software into submission. And, like any battle, this often left the programmers exhausted and a bit bruised too.

Even Scott Adams, author of Dilbert has commented on this.  He really nailed it in a recent comic, and as Wally observes “I’m glad it has a name.”