Dead Programmer's Cafe

Month: May 2005

  • TT: Planetdoes News

    While buying coffee at hidden Starbucks I browsed through the little pamphlets that they have next to condiments and stirring sticks (did you notice that they have Splenda now?). What have I learned? Firstly, I learned that a Starbucks grunt’s official title is “hourly partner”. Cordwainer Smith’s rhyme comes to mind : “I need a temporary dog / For a temporary job / On a temporary place / Like Earth!” I kind of collect peculiar corporate job titles, as I’ve mentioned at the end of an earlier Thought Tally.

    Secondly I learned that you can come into any Starbucks and ask for complimentary coffee grounds. As it turns out, coffee grounds make an excellent nitrogen fertilizer for your garden. I wonder if Starbucks coffee is a good fertilizer – it sure tastes that way.

    ***

    Why I drink the Starbucks fertilizer? Because my lunch break is short and Joe’s is in the Village. By the way, recently I’ve learned that there’s another good coffee place called Ninth Street Espresso. I need to pay them a visit.

    ***

    I also need to some other coffee and caffeine news. There’s a new trend in espresso making. The innovative barristas started cutting off the bottoms of portafilters. This lets them notice any minute imperfections in packing of grinds and have outstanding quality control of the extraction. It also looks cool as hell. I am thinking about doing the same with one of my spare portafilters.

    I learned this interesting tidbit because these days there are several outstanding blogs kept by super high quality coffee house operators. There’s Victrola Coffee, Blue Bottle Clown College and Tonx Dot Org. I suggest that you subscribe to their feeds unless you can’t stand heartbreakingly beautiful photos of artisanal caffeinated drinks.

    ***

    In other news I seem to be totally addicted to matcha tea. I got some awesome “thick tea” from Japan and it rocks.

  • The Fantom Photo Album

    Being a fan of photography has its upsides and downsides. On one hand photographers notice more things. Beautiful things. Unusual things. Things that only can be seen through the lens of the camera that lives inside your brain.

    On the other, if they don’t have a camera handy, or the batteries are dead, or there’s too little light, or if taking photos is prohibited or just simply not wise – photographers become agitated and miserable. Oh, the most wonderful moments that should be simply enjoyed can be poisoned by worrying about lighting, f-stops above all — the lack of camera in your hands.

    The shots that did not happen – those are the worst. They linger in your head for a while, but then the moment passes, and the fata morgana of the perfectly composed and exposed picture dissolves into the bitterness of a missed shot. It’s even worse if you just did not have the guts to take out your fully charged, properly equipped camera and point it’s soul stealing eye at the situations, people, things and places that simply must be photographed.

    Let’s see, off the top of my head, three shots that did not happen and still drive me nuts:

    1) A young woman occupying the two-person seat of the R40 train (you know, the one next to the cab), bathed in the unearthly greenish glare of fluorescent lights, opposite a guy reading a newspaper and another one dozing. She is as pissed off as can be, the expression on her face a mask of anger, sadness and disgust. Yet she is dressed in a brilliantly colored butterfly costume, with big transparent wings. I just did not have the heart to take out my camera from my bag.

    2) A bum sitting in the street, slumped in a cheap computer chair, kind of like the guy on the logo of my website. He rested his head on the handle of a shopping cart filled with ivory colored computer towers and topped with an old CRT monitor, a keyboard and even a couple of mice and modems. I think I even noticed a hub in there somewhere. The yellow plastic of old equipment and the depressed, bearded and unwashed guy would have looked ordinary in a cubicle farm, but outside in the midday New York sun they looked sad and alien. My camera was with me, but I forgot the flash card at work.

    3) Japanese museum, a glassed in stand containing a samurai’s suit of armor, surprisingly small in size. The ghostly reflection of a petit Japanese girl’s face just would not line up with the dark opening in front of the horned helmet. The museum was closing, the lighting was dim, and I just did not feel like waiting for the perfect shot.

    But then again, there are times when you take a picture, and then feel that you probably should not have. Those primitive people that feel that a photograph steals one’s soul might be onto something. It sure feels that way sometimes.Being a fan of photography has its upsides and downsides. On one hand photographers notice more things. Beautiful things. Unusual things. Things that only can be seen through the lens of the camera that lives inside your brain.

  • Scobelology

    Back when Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet, this dude named James Parry figured out an interesting promotional trick. He built a homegrown Usenet search utility and tirelessly trolled it for the mentions of his own nickname, “Kibo“. When he found some, he would join the conversation. This feat of persistence gained him thousands of fans and even a homegrown religion, Kibology. I don’t think anyone has figured out a finer way to waste time, especially considering that commercial application of search technology in the past tended to mint millionaires and billionaires.

    I have a special folder in my Bloglines accounts that holds a set of very popular, but surprisingly unreadable blogs. Remembering Kibo today, I think I understood why Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble has so many readers. He’s the Kibo of bloggers! Look (and this is just one page):
    Joey is 10x the guy I am
    Rick Segal debates my impact
    Alfredo asks what Wired’s top 40 list says to me
    And this is just the first page! The quick pitter-patter of Scoble’s posts is filled with references to other people’s posts about him! Can Scoblelology be far behind? So far no hits.

    Still, this does not explain why people read Joi Ito’s blog. It could be more properly described as “Where in the World is Joi Ito”. It’s all “Off to Japan“, “Off to SF“, “Off to Japan“, “Off to Australia“. I get it, he’s a world traveler.

  • Three Years of Poor Grammar, Bad Spelling and Procrastination

    I started this blog in May of 2002. I got my first digital camera around this time as well. So, it’s time to look back at my 3 years of blogging and 3 years of digital photography.

    My mostly backed up (is yours?) photo folder holds about 27 gigabytes of photos, which translates into about 16,500 files (I use Picasa to organize them and a usb drive for backup). That’s about 458 rolls of 36 exposure film. At 5-6 bucks a pop for film and then a couple of bucks for processing that’s a lot of mon-ay. Of course I print a lot less and mostly show pictures in the blog, but still this is a huge economy.

    In three years of blogging I wrote 824 posts containing 117,274 words. Considering an average of half an hour per post that’s about 50 eight hour work days. That is a lot of time, people. Considering that I do not write posts at work, this is a very sizable chunk of my free time. I could have written a book in this amount of time.

    According to Feedburner my current readership is puny. 47 (a special number, isn’t it?) livejournal readers, 8 from Bloglines, and a couple of others, some of which are probably bots. When I hosted my site in Livejournal it seemed like I had about 250 readers, but as it turned out most of those were just “you added me, I added you” kind of deals. Even then I was far behind Ripley the Cat (and I find it very hard to get over this fact).

    So, sob story about the number of readers aside, now I am a member of the elite group of bloggers who have been doing this for 3 years. How elite, you might ask? Let’s ask Mighty Google. Here is a graph of how many results come back to “x year(s) of blogging”, where x is “one”, “two”, “three”, etc. This, of course has just a slight correlation with the number of years people have been blogging, as “hundred years of blogging” brings back three results.

    My website that hit the Information Superhighway back in 1996. It helped my future wife find me and gave me some rudimentary skills for my first web job. The blog hasn’t been so useful or popular, it seems. Maybe back then there was less good content on the web, and now there are shite waterfalls of it. Or maybe I need do something to market it. Like asking my staunch 47 + 8 + x readers to link to their favorite post or two (all of the old posts are searchable from https://www.deadprogrammer.com). Right?

  • Amdahl : Business in the Front, Party in the Back

    A few years ago I purchased a strange piece of computing history on eBay. Some guy in Canada was selling what he described as a “model” of an Amdahl processor. He did not include a picture with his listing, and because of that I was able to snap it up for about 30 wing-wangs.

    When the package arrived, it turned out to be a real 42 (!) processor board from an old Amdahl mainframe that was “presented to T. Eaton Company for its purchase of Amdahl 5995-3550M processor in June 1992” as the plaque said. T. Eaton Company no longer exists, it was swallowed by Sears. Neither does Amdahl – it is a part of Fujitsu now.

    The little cooling towers made it possible to air cool the chips.

    The back of the board was very strange though. All the wiring seemed to be done “point-to-point” by hand. Overall, thinking about how many work-hours went into designing and making that board made me shudder.

    [update] Thanks to the Boing Boing liks this seems to have become the second popular post on my site – first one being the Revelation post which gained popularity thanks to being the only google result for “omnioum finis imminet” for a while. I’ve got some great information from former Amdahl employees:

    Tom: ”
    The item is an MCC (multi-chip carrier) from an Amdahl V8, V7 or V6. Many were plugged into either side of a large frame which connected the MCCs to each other and to power, the console, memory, and the IO cables.

    The finned gizmos are cooling towers glued to the top of the individual chips. A plastic cover directed cool air over the towers and fans exhausted it out the top of the frame
    hese were used in the 470 series computers. The follow on computer, the 580 used much larger boards about the size of a pizza box. They were inserted into a plenum (which became known as the pizza oven) with ZIF connectors on the side. They had black instead of gold cooling towers with more fins.

    The board is circa 1980. The back wiring was done in Japan because they couldn’t find enough people in the US who could do it well. I believe the chips were laser bonded on the front with the hand wiring on the back. Note that the circut boards were multi-layer and the back wiring was only used where they couldn’t get enough paths from the circut boards and for engineering changes after production.
    ”

    NoOneAtAll : “Amdahl used to give out dead hardware and out-of-date engineering samples to their sales guys made into lots of different things. I’ve seen coasters made out of unusable processors, an Amdahl sales binder made from a set of bad carrier boards, a couple of plaques like this one made from DOA MCC modules, pen holders made out of ribbon cable, etc.

    An IBM reseller I worked at spent Amdahl’s entire corporate lifetime telling them no. By the time the sales guy gave up, pretty much everyone at the company had been hit up by the guy as a possible lead, and pound for pound there was more dead Amdahl hardware repackaged as kitsch on the desks in sales than we had actually moved in Amdahl equipment. ”

    [update] Two similar processors just came up on eBay. The picture quality is ghastly, but they seem like a bigger version of the one that I have, with even more complicated back wiring.

    P.S. Don’t forget to take a look at the rest of my blog, or if you are interested in Amdahl, at the rest of my Amdahl-related posts.

  • Of Wangs And Core Dumps

    I started learning programming on a Soviet computer called Iskra 226, a few of which were given to our after school program by the kind Navy bureaucrats. I vividly remember finding a BASIC program already stored on the hard disk that cheerfully asked a few questions about the weather and the megatonnage of a warhead and then quickly calculated the size of the epicenter, severity of fallout and whatnot. The teacher was not amused and asked me to delete the program before anyone else had a chance to see it..

    Although Iskras turned out to be less popular with other kids who preferred Soviet knockoffs of Sinclair Spectrum which had good graphics and buttloads of nice games that could be loaded from audio cassettes, I preferred the loud monochrome screened monster. You see Iscras had peripherals – a dot matrix printer that sounded like a machine gun and a humongous hard drive that sounded even louder.

    Later I learned that Iscra was a clone of a Wang 2200 computer. And even later I learned a bit more about Dr. Wang’s company. So, continuing my Computer History Through Coffee Mugs Series, I present to you a prized mug from my collection:

    As it turns out, Dr. An Wang also happens to be the inventor of magnetic core memory, a technology that always fascinated me. Here is a core memory plane from my collection:

    Core memory stores bits by sending current to donut shaped rings of ferrite. Wikipedia article explains how this works. Early core memory arrays used a small amount of larger ferrite cores. Later ones, like the one on the above picture used buttloads of tiny little cores. From what I heard, these amazing devices were assembled by third world garment workers. By hand. Under microscopes. If you have any doubt that this is true, take a look at these close-up shots that clearly show that this is done by hand:

    Jay Dubya Zee shed some light on how horrible is the job of people who assemble camouflage nets. Think about how much worse is doing something like this:

    How much ram is this you might ask? The back of the card holds a label. It says:
    Lockheed Electronics Company, Inc.
    Data Products Division
    Core Memory 8k x 18
    8200-0001
    2001002326-1A1 HK022
    7530

    These days core memory is still used in aircraft and spacecraft because it keeps the information when power is off and is supposedly less prone to radiation.

    The word wang these days mostly means “penis”, a common name of a Chinese restaurant, is used on t-shirts, as a sentence enhancer or just at random. Also, unexplicably, “wing-wang” is another name for a dollar.

    Memory dump files are called “core dumps” to this day because of core memory. Also it is common to refer to core dumps of dilithium and chockolatium.

  • Cubozoans

    “Box jellyfish, or cubozoans, are bizarre, highly poisonous predators (New Scientist, 8 November 2003, p 34). “These are fantastic creatures with 24 eyes, four parallel brains and 60 arseholes,” says Dan Nilsson, a vision expert from the University of Lund in Sweden.”

    So, cubozoans is another name for bubble-era web startups.

  • “I Dint Know Kats Were So Smart”

    Wow. This is a frickin’ Flowers for Algernon situation. Ripley the Cat has 622 Livejournal readers at this time. I have 45. Well, either the cat had intelligence enhancement or I am retarded. Or both.

    Maybe Tilde the Cat should guest-blog for a while. If she’ll refuse, I can ask Gary the Cat, my second never before mentioned in this blog cat.