post 889

2.1 Hobbs hours in a 172GA on Sunday; first flight with a passenger, and he brought a film camera along.  KBED to KSFM and back, including interaction with Boston approach control and the free-for-all surrounding a busy uncontrolled field.  Much more complex / better practice than heading West toward Worcester.

Put the motorcycle back on the road this morning, and legally at that.  No trace of the “stall after cutting the throttle to idle” behavior I was seeing last season; perhaps that was all related to marginal battery charge?  Put 4+ gallons of fresh gas in it and took a meandering route to work; good tires, good brakes, no surprises.  Missed the comfort of the car, frankly, but it felt great to be relying on a simpler machine, whose internals are all closer to the surface, for which I hold a clean title.

Parked in the sun, on the roof of the work garage.  Looked out over the industrial end of the Riverside T station.  Can’t wait for our son to arrive.

vicariously live out your hillbilliest automotive technology fantasy

by watching this youtube video

like so many of my other posts, via autoblog

tragic small plane crash in palo alto

All souls lost; they were engineers at Tesla Motors.  Gut wrenching.

It gets worse:

…the Cessna 310 aircraft was owned by 56-year-old Doug Bourn, who worked as a senior electrical engineer at the electric car company, and he was indeed piloting the aircraft when it went down.

The other two passengers have been identified as Andrew Ingram, 31, of Palo Alto, an electrical engineer; and Brian M. Finn, 42, of East Palo Alto; a senior manager of interactive electronics. Finn reportedly lived with his one-year-old daughter just two blocks from where the plane went down in East Palo Alto.

via , update via

ouch

via Coyote, regarding Obama admnstrtn’s tacit agreement with warrantless location tracking of all Americans who use a cell phone (and, you know, all the executive power grabbing he inherited from Bush after complaining about it on the compaign trail):

If we had wanted populist economic machinations combined with limitations on individual liberties, we could have voted for Pat Buchanan.

Not to be all “wake up, sheeple!” but…you know…wake up, sheeple?

woot, ouch, huh

Early this morning, Brian at his eponymous garage diagnosed (and fixed!) the noise coming from my car’s left front wheel area…using no parts and $40 worth of labor.  To put that in perspective, my prior attempt to fix this was a $600-ish CV axle replacement.

The actual culprit: a slight bend in my left front wheel.  Under the right loads and angular conditions, the bent wheel edge was making contact with the tin mounting bracket for the brake line.  The high tech solution: move the bracket a little further out of the way.  Voila.

You’re not going to believe this, but I half-called it.

After the axle was replaced, and the problem hadn’t gone away, my other trusted mechanic put the car up on his lift for us to stare at.  I immediately pointed at the gap between the wheel and that brake line mounting bracket and said “does that look too close to you?”  There is no good explanation for this, and after looking closely at the same area on the other side of the car, I had to admit I didn’t see a qualitative difference in the gap distance.  And with no real sense of how much wheels actually flex under load, I could only turn the rim a full revolution (as my trusted mechanic had) and agree that it wasn’t contacting the bracket or anything else.  We even looked for signs of wear in that area, which would highlight any areas that were making contact, but didn’t see any.  This morning, Brian reported that he did spot signs of such wear on the wheel.

Brian (also an SCCA racer, with associated standards and tastes) also mentioned that while stylish, my stock wheels kind of suck.  Better (read, $$$) wheels would a) suffer less damage per unit pothole force, and b) would flex much less under load.  If my front brakes were smaller, I could also move to a smaller wheel / higher-sidewall tire combo.  But they aren’t, so I can’t.

Anyway, whatever.  Noise gone; improbable g-force commuting is back on the menu!

sorry, but your princess is in another castle

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset

The article linked above (currently being held as a “best of breed” expression in the space) breathlessly warns us that every closed computing platform just is a bad thing because it discourages tinkering.  Tinkering, say these purists of the hacking-as-learning school, is the Prime Mover of all true technical mastery.  And if a closed computing platform is a commercial success, that will only make it less likely that companies will build non-closed computing platforms in the future.  So you see, it’s (like, totally) up to us (quirky Apple-wielding hipster underdogs) to save the future of computing (and therefore Earth, and its princesses!) from the evil invention-killing corporations.

Let me just go ahead and concur with the idea that the path to true tech mastery is paved with the salt left by the evaporating sweat of tinkerers.  Fair enough.

But if you’re going to write an article like the one linked above, you should be prepared to answer the following:

1. Most technology doesn’t come from the factory with a “don’t worry, I’m a hacker and take full responsibility for the consequences of my mistakes” switch that gives every end user full exposure to, and full control over, the internals of that technology.  Is that really just because the producers of technology are mean meanies who don’t want kids to learn stuff or have any fun, or are subject to litigation via over-paternalistic public safety regulations, or are greed-stricken harvesters of IP?
2. “People deserve the opportunity to learn by themselves, from the ground up, by tinkering” is a statement (call it A).  “People deserve a free, stable, fully-documented software development tool chain for every computer they buy” is a different statement (call it B).  Explain why “A implies B” is true.  Now explain why “A implies not-B” is false.
3. Explain why your responses to [2] should be compelling to a man who first gained fame and success after building a new computing platform from scratch in his garage.

How’s the view from sugar heaven?

on the Apple tablet computer

First, a brief summary of the net’s current (factual) criticisms:

• It still doesn’t allow you to run more than one application at a time (i.e. “no multitasking”).
• Mobile Safari web browser still doesn’t support Adobe Flash.
• No high-resolution (5MP) camera for photos.
• No front-facing camera for video conferencing.
• It can’t make phone calls.
• It doesn’t do anything one can’t do more completely with a different (often cheaper) device.
• It’s locked to the App Store in the same way that the iPhone is.

All of those things are true, and one should not underestimate how disappointed some people have been by that list.  In lieu of a complicated editorial, with a lot of blue-sky predictions about what Apple (or developers) may or may not do with this thing in the future, I’ll present one statement and two lists.

The statement:

The Apple iPad is a new mobile computing platform, for a space whose past iterations have brought real money to exactly no one, in the entire history of the computing industry.

List #1, potential criticisms of any new mobile computing platform that no one (that I’ve heard) is making about the iPad:

• The battery life isn’t good enough.
• The processor isn’t fast enough.
• The wi-fi networking isn’t fast enough.
• The 3G networking is too expensive.
• The keyboard isn’t good enough for real blogging or business-class email.
• It’s unstable and insecure.
• The barrier to entry for native software development is too high.

List #2, things that I believe Apple believes about their business, and their mobile platform customer/developer bases:

• The first devices in this platform should attenuate the obvious risk we’re taking.
• Consistent behavior and performance inside each application is more important than the speed with which one can switch between applications, or use applications in concert with one another.
• Our customers have real cameras for real photos, and phones for shitty photos.  We needn’t raise the risk and cost of our hardware to give them a “moderately shitty photo” option.
• Lack of video conferencing is not a deal breaker for anything that isn’t a “real” computer.
• We make and successfully market a touchscreen phone.  Neither our customers nor our investors need an Apple-branded competitor in the phone space.
• Ongoing cost of 3G network access is a dominant component of lifetime mobile device cost, and (given competent marketing) can therefore be a dominant driver of device choice.  We are competent at marketing.
• As long as our hardware is standardized and Android hardware is not, we will continue to kick Android’s ass.

The iPad may not ultimately be successful.  But it is the product of strong, calculating leadership and business acumen.  Whether it succeeds or fails, the market will learn things from this experiment that no other company could teach it.

automotive engineering pr0n

fascinating Inside Line “suspension walk-around” of the Ford SVT Raptor pickup truck

accountability (updated 1/21)

1. rhetorical
2. private
3. gym’d 3 times so far, twice this week (M+W); starting stronglifts 5×5 regime (UPDATE: T+Th this week so far.)
   
4. poor available metrics, also subject to spin and wishful thinking.  actionable metrics not publishable.
5. 0 hours of piano so far.  Probably need more specific goal than “total duration” here.
6. DJ’d jg’s post-new-years party with kage. 0 hours additional practice so far.
   
7. 0 flight hours this month. (UPDATE: Scheduled an instructor-supervised flight in a G1000-equipped C172 for this weekend, 1/23.)
   
8. 0 photographs so far this year. Ricoh GR Digital III? Nikon FM with 55mm f2.8 plus film scanner?
9. 0 hours on music production practice so far.
10. No moving violations or tickets, had front strut mounts replaced, getting left front axle assembly and rear brakes fixed. (UPDATE: Rear brake rotors and pads have arrived; still waiting on the CV axle from Raxles™.)
    
11. Got some new pants that fit.  Got an arguably-bad haircut but better than nothing. (UPDATE: Ordered more pants that fit.)
    

Android vs. iPhone OS

This, quoting Google’s developer site for Android, succinctly explains why iPhone OS development is going to remain more popular than Android development for the foreseeable future:

Emulator Skins

The downloadable platform includes a set of emulator skins that you can use for modeling your application in different screen sizes and resolutions. The emulator skins are:

• QVGA (240×320, low density, small screen)
• WQVGA (240×400, low density, normal screen)
• FWQVGA (240×432, low density, normal screen)
• HVGA (320×480, medium density, normal screen)
• WVGA800 (480×800, high density, normal screen)
• WVGA854 (480×854 high density, normal screen)

Testing UI is a pain. Testing UI with automatic animation features is more of a pain. Testing UI with automatic animation features on SIX DIFFERENT SCREENS is…more trouble than it’s worth.