Ed

In Albuquerque. It's hard to breathe, hard to see. Smoke reducing visibility to about a half-mile. White pieces of ash swirling in the wind.

Going to bed. Up early tomorrow.

Letter to the Editor of the Los Alamos Monitor

I'm one of those people who stays in the left-hand lane on Diamond until the last moment. I don't do it because I'm in a hurry -- I'm not. I don't do it to be rude; in fact, I do it despite feeling so. It feels inconsiderate, impolite. It's stressful.

I do it to make the world a better place. Perhaps not for the few individuals who honk, yell, scream, tailgate, and shake their fists; but for everyone else a smooth last-minute zipper merge greatly reduces the overall amount of traffic. Think of the people turning right on Orange or the wasted left-hand space when the light turns red.

This is a town that respects science. Look up recent simulations on late merging; look up Tom Vanderbilt; and look up dissenting opinions (good luck filtering out the vitriol). Recognize that what feels right isn't always what is right. And... join me in the left-hand lane. I cannot promise that you'll feel good about it, nor can I promise that you'll get used to the feeling. But if enough of us do it we can take turns, and I'll sit in the right-hand lane and watch you pass and I will radiate gratitude.

Ed

PS I may never get used to the unpleasant feeling. But when someone loudly vents their rage, I do confess to experiencing a frisson of glee. I am not proud of that... but until I become a better person, thanks, angry people, for assuaging my guilt.

The Problem, seen when building mod_perl:

   Entering directory `.../mod_perl-1.31/Symbol'
   cp Symbol.pm ../blib/lib/Apache/Symbol.pm
   perl5.10.0 /path/to/xsubpp  -typemap .../ExtUtils/typemap Symbol.xs > Symbol.xsc && mv Symbol.xsc Symbol.c
   Can't locate loadable object for module Apache::Symbol in @INC (@INC contains: . $HOME/perl ...) at .../ExtUtils/ParseXS.pm line 8
   Compilation failed in require at [...]

Cause: perl is trying to use Symbol, but getting it from pwd.

Solution: clear $PERL5LIB, that is, delete it from your environment. At the very least, remove "." (dot).

   $ env -u PERL5LIB make

The Problem

'hg convert' on a checked-out CVS directory that points to a local CVS repository (same disk, not :pserver: or :ssh:) barfs:

$ hg convert /checkout/of/local/cvs/repository
assuming destination blahblah-hg
...
connecting to :local:/local/cvs/repository
Unknown command: `server'


CVS commands are:
...
(Specify the --help option for a list of other help options)
abort: server sucks

Solution: build cvs with server USE flag

Preferably by adding this /etc/portage/package.use :

dev-util/cvs            server

...and re-emerging cvs:

# emerge --ask --newuse cvs

Netflix considers me a long-term storage facility. So on my to-do list for the month, with all my expected free time, was making time to watch a movie. With less than 48 hours left of my free month, the moment was last night and the movie was Volver.

If I were a movie critic I would probably sum it up as:

  A tender tale of homicide, incest, deception, infidelity,
  ghosts, and second chances.

But I'm not a critic so I won't. Instead I'll point to the reason I rented the movie, a review at The Onion AV Club.

Problem:

   Argument "2.121_08" isn't numeric in subroutine entry at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/MLDBM/Serializer/Data/Dumper.pm line 5

Solution: You probably have -w in your hashbang line:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

Get rid of it. Replace it with use warnings;

For those of you Googling before buying: yes, it works! I've wanted a weather station for years. When I saw the La Crosse WS-2316 in Costco this weekend for $90, I couldn't resist buying it. The good news is, it works perfectly fine on Linux (2.6.22). The WS-2316 includes a USB-to-serial dongle which lsusb reports as:

  Bus 004 Device 005: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd 8-bit FIFO

The driver for that is ftdi_sio:

    Device Drivers -->
      USB Support  --->
        USB Serial Converter support --->
          USB FTDI Single Port Serial Driver (EXPERIMENTAL)

Here's a udev rule you might want:

   SUBSYSTEM=="tty", ATTRS{manufacturer}=="FTDI", SYMLINK="lacrosse", MODE="0666"

This creates a /dev/lacrosse symlink to the appropriate /dev/ttyUSBx. This is especially important if you have multiple USB-serial adapters. I put that in /etc/udev/rules.d/99-local.rules . That's for a Gentoo system; Debian and others may be different.

You can use Open2300 to talk to the station. Open2300 is clean, simple, elegant, well documented, and has a good API for writing your own tools. UPDATE: Oct 29: If you're a Perl person, try my new Device::LaCrosse::WS23xx

UPDATE: Oct 16: The honeymoon is over. I'm a little disappointed by the unit:

• Occasional bad data. Between 1-3 times a day, one of the data values is garbage. For instance, outside temperature goes to 136 or -20, or pressure goes to 4 or 40. This could be the Open2300 software, or the unit, or even the USB-to-serial adapter. I don't know, but it's frustrating.
• No Wind Averaging. Wind speed and direction are instantaneous values, whatever the sensor happens to be reading at the moment it is queried. If you log every 5 minutes, you don't get a sense of what's really going on. If you want to average, you need to hook up the wired connection (wireless only updates every 2 minutes), log wind speed/direction every 32 seconds, and make your own averages.
• Barometer doesn't work well at high altitude. The minimum pressure it handles is 22.44 inHg, which is about 29.70 inHg relative at our elevation (7200 feet). In other words, we're right near its limit. In practice, readings around and below 29.80 seem flaky.
• Poor display. The LCD display is poorly thought out. There's no way to see outside temperature and rainfall simultaneously, you need to push buttons until you get the desired reading. But time and date, which are pretty useless for those of us with clocks, are constantly displayed. In practice, I just fire up my web page instead of looking at the LCD.

You get what you pay for. At $90, this was still a good deal. More importantly, I can afford it while the $1,000 Davis remains a distant dream. I don't care that much about pressure or wind speed: what I care about is rain, and to a lesser degree temperature. So I hope the rain gauge works...

"In normal circumstances, people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world"

-- Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, as quoted in Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

"A million deaths is a statistic", but every death -- and life -- has its tale. Mary Doria Russell weaves a dark but rich tapestry quietly filled with not one but countless threads of grace.

The setting is Northern Italy during the Second World War. Russell picks up the disrupted lives of Jewish refugees escaping persecution and of the people who shelter them. Keeping a tight focus on a small number of individuals illustrates the beauty of each life, each thread. Russell's quiet matter-of-fact voice suffuses each tragedy with a significance that no other tone could match, each character with an almost palpable nobility that makes the pages feel alive. Through these few lives and deaths we begin to get a small sense of the unimaginable horror of WWII, of war itself.

"A Thread of Grace" is often brutal--not gory, but its simple everyday narration is merciless. This is a book that will haunt me.

The new Trima machines are a big success. The staff were so enthusiastic about them, and I can see why! I loved today's collection.

The machine has a large, friendly screen that can be angled toward the donor. Entering donor info is simple, as is deciding what to collect. Based on my previous platelet count, the ABQ office decided to draw two units of platelets and one RBC (just the red, not whole). So even though the new machines are much faster -- the first unit of platelets took only 50 minutes -- I still ended up spending a long time, and wasn't able to make the 10:15 Vinyasa class at Body.

The procedure itself was much better than the old Haemonetics. The cycle is 2 minutes draw, 30 seconds return, compared to 10/5 (or thereabouts) on the old machines. There's also no increased pressure on the cuff, and no need to stop squeezing. And no need to count cycles: the Trima's display shows the time left, as well as quantity of platelets/plasma/RBC collected. (Yes, I can look at the bags, but I don't have a feel for how full they need to be). Rocio's only complaint? "I don't have enough to do."

The new machines are on tour this month, on a trial basis for the mobile units. I hope they work out well: I really liked my experience today, and three units for the cost (time) of one certainly seems worthwhile.