TTK Ciar's Journal: House!, Geekly Stuff, and Yet More Projects

House!, Geekly Stuff, and Yet More Projects

Touching on some other subjects: House!, cloning the sfgate site, dvm, and calc3.

Yay! The Escrow Has CLOSED!

Well, we finally did it! We are the proud owners of a house, with a key and everything! Cobalt and I are beside ourselves with joy and excitement. We've felt as though our lives were on haitus for these last few years, while we lived in this rental cottage and saved our pennies. The housing market kept going up as we saved, but with the market in a slump, and with considerable help from my parents (thanks, guys!) we've finally caught up with our dream.

For years, when cobalt or I talked about something we wanted to do, the talk would start with, "When we have our house, ..". Cobalt got really tired of that, so we amended it to "When we have our new life, ..", which added enough sarcasm to take the edge off the reality of our situation. We just haven't had the indoor space to do any of a number of things. The kitchen is too small to cook together, and there isn't room for a table on which to work leather, solder a circuit, fix gadgets, sew, or even draft a drawing. This rental has a huge yard (the largest yard we've ever had), but because it is a rental we're sharply limited in what we may do with it.

I have stubbornly tried working on various projects on the front porch, but it has been very frustrating having to unbox my tools and materials, work on them for a while, then box them back up and bring them back inside. The setup/teardown process eats half the time I should be using to get stuff done. Also, when it's even a bit windy outside, projects get bits of windborne dirt, pollen, leaves, and twigs stuck to them -- a big problem when glue, varnish, or bearings are involved!

Cobalt has been frustrated too. Most of her critters have been living in "slum" habitats for years now, and that's taken its toll on their health and on her enjoyment of them. It's one thing to have geckos living in a glass terrarium set out in the living room and filled with living plants, and quite another to have those geckos living in sterilite boxes stacked on shelves with paper towels for bedding.

Living here has taken its toll on our health as well. Because every single wall and every single corner is filled with "vertical storage" (bookshelves, cabinets, dressers, etc) to hold our critters and our stuff, it's very difficult to keep the cottage clean. Combine that with the entropic influence of four cats, two dogs, and a parrot, and the influx of dust kicked up outside by the chickens, and the windborne pollen endemic to Sonoma County, and this place can get really toxic very fast. My allergies kicked into high gear a few years ago, and I'm having to take singulair, nasonex, and loratadine to keep them under control. Cobalt's allergies have been starting to give her trouble, too, in the form of sinus headaches. She also gets so grossed out by the filth that she stops eating, and gets very depressed and agitated. We both do what we can to keep it clean, but it's not always enough .. in fact, it's often not enough. Like, almost all of the time, it's not enough.

The new house is going to be different. We are resolute in this. The living spaces will be kept sparsely-populated with furniture, to make cleaning easier, and we will keep work spaces separate from storage space, to keep our living and work areas roomy and free of clutter (and thus easy to keep clean, or at least that's the theory).

Having spaces in which to work will be such a blast! Cobalt and I have been huddling together over drawings of the house's floorspace, deciding who will use what, which spaces can usefully be shared, and what spaces will be purposed to what tasks. One room will have my drafting table and a workbench for small, "clean" projects (fiddling with computer hardware and repairing small appliances) and cobalt's sewing and crafts. Another will be my office, which will be a welcome change from my current "office" (consisting of one corner of the couch in the living room, with a bookshelf to my left and a 2'x2' "desk" which I share with the 1'x1' parrot's cage). We will share the garage for "dirty" projects (wood and metal work, mostly -- cutting, drilling, sanding, etc), and will set up a shed for the "very dirty" projects -- painting, varnishing, gluing, and welding.

There will need to be yet another space for another class of projects .. I hadn't told cobalt about all of the projects I wanted to do, and figured I'd better so we could plan for them and so it wouldn't come as a surprise to her when I got around to doing them. The turbine is a good example. I've been reading about turbine engines for the last few years. The concept seems to have a lot of untapped potential. For instance, the power generated by a turbine is influenced by many things, but is proportional to the rate of mass flowing through it. In a fuel- burning gas turbine, most of this mass is air. This necessarily means gas turbines are at their most effective (generating high power and torque for their volume) at extremely high speeds (since the only way to move a lot of air is with large and/or fast-moving blades), which dominates all other aspects of their design. Low mass, high strength, and thin blades are deemed absolutely necessary. Complex recuperators are used to squeeze as much power as possible out of the work the turbine produces, and the size and shape of air ramps, ducts, and compressors have to be carefully engineered to produce and manage high air flows and pressures.

Turbines can actually be extremely simple machines, and simple turbines can be made to work well at low speeds. Unfortunately low speed means low air flow, which means low mass flow, which means low power and torque production. I have some ideas on ways to remedy this problem, though, and would like to try them out. The new house has a fairly large property attached to it, and I was hoping to be able to set up a workshop out away from the house to work on the turbines and other similarly noisy/fiery things. Upon discussing it with cobalt, though, she'd much rather see this work done off the property altogether. We talked about perhaps finding someone else in the area who I could partner with to rent an offsite industrial space. Since my schedule really prevents me from spending a lot of time on my projects (just look at how long it takes me to write a simple journal entry!), we should be able to timeshare the space easily, without stepping on each others' toes. I'm totally game for that.

I would also like to set up a melting/molding rig for thermoplastics. Some amazing things have been published in the material engineering journals lately about plastic/ceramic composites, and I would like to see if I can reproduce the published effects using commodity (read: cheap) plastics and ceramic materials. Surface modification of ceramic granules will be necessary to replicate the described effects, so that will require some space, too, to set up a "pressure cooker" where chemicals can be introduced to granules under controlled (high) pressures and temperatures. The strength and other properties of a plastic/ceramic matrix depends not only on the properties of the plastic and the of the ceramic, but also on how and how well the two adhere to one another. Vinylesters and epoxies, for instance, tend to be pretty similar in most aspects, and their adhesion strength to aluminum oxide tends to be nearly the same, but since vinylesters bond with aluminum oxide near the ends of their polymer chains while epoxies bond near the middle, the vinylester/aluminum-oxide composite tends to have significantly higher resilience and compressive strength (since the granules are slightly more free to move at the ends of the chains, they can form up mutually supporting columns, like the aggregate in concrete).

Most commodity plastics will not adhere to ceramics very well at all. Polyethylene absolutely will not. Polyethylene terephthalate tends not to, but could be coaxed into it if the ceramic is given the appropriate surface modification. Surface modification is a matter of changing the exposed surfaces of the granules (either chemically or in their physical shape). "Sharper" surfaces have more surface area, and surface area is a linear factor in determining adhesion strength, so sharpening the granules' surfaces can improve adhesion some. The real gains are to be had by convincing things like cyanates, amines, or simple raw carbon to bond tightly with the granules' surfaces. Many plastics will then bond well with these intermediary chemical coatings. I look forward to finding out how easy it will be to produce these effects, and the effectiveness of the resulting composites.

Unfortunately, the house needs a lot of work before we can move in. We're meeting with a general contractor in a couple of days, and we anticipate it will be a couple of months before we can start lugging in our stuff and making it into a home (and a workshop, and a reptile habitat, and and and and ..!).

SFGate: Yeah, We Want To Do That

Switching gears a little, now that cobalt and I have quashed all doubts that YES, we are going to live right HERE for a while, and set down roots, we'd like to start work on a mutual project we've been talking about for years. Most denizens of California's bay area are familiar with the website sfgate.com. It provides a lot of handy information about local resources, news, and events. It's a fantastic site .. if you leave in or near the bay area. Unfortunately, content regarding our neck of the woods tends to be fairly sparse. Even when websites (like sfgate, yahoo local, or craigslist) have information about California's northern counties, it tends to be mixed up with an overwhelming volume of information about locales further south. Even the radio station I use to get traffic reports (KCBS) tends to cover "north bay" traffic very little. It would be really nice to have a site which focussed primarily on areas north of the bay area. So nice, in fact, that we're going to try to make it.

The site would be a mutual effort of myself, cobalt, and perhaps a few other people. We would try to gather and present information that someone would find useful if they were not already familiar with the area: restaurants, movie theaters, radio stations, local traffic patterns, and the like. Most of the information would be static (since that's easy to maintain), but we would also like to regularly add articles about local concerns (like the local economy, indian casinos, etc) and (especially!) reviews of restaurants and stores.

You'd think that Sonoma County would be rife with really good restaurants, since it relies on tourism for much of its income, and the place has a reputation for being posh and high-class, but really most of the restaurants here are terribly subpar. Cobalt and I keep trying new places, seeking to expand our small-but-growing list of places fit for dining. We've found a couple of italian places, some diners, a chinese joint, and two good mexican restaurants, but so far no good japanese food. We have to go to San Francisco to get decent sushi (Ichiraku, on the corner of 2nd and Geary, is our favorite "dive", though we also like Isobune in SF's japantown and Tsugaru in San Jose). We'll keep looking for a local place, though.

As we find places we like, they'll get reviewed and put on the site, along with our impressions and some standard metrics (for things like ambiance, price, variety, food quality, etc). Maybe it will catch on .. maybe not. But at the very least it'll be a place to organize our own interests. :-) A bit more work than pinning handwritten notes to the refrigerator door, perhaps, but more fun too.

A side rant -- why is the Bay Area called "Northern California" when it's located in the middle of the state? What do people call the 27 of California's 58 counties which lie north of "Northern California"? Oh that's right, they generally don't! Or they lump it into the Bay Area, despite its cultural, legal, and industrial differences. Maybe it's time to resurrect an old idea. It's not like the rest of the state would miss us anyway. "Huh? What? There's stuff between San Francisco and Oregon? *blank stare*" sums up most people's take on the subject.

Okay, mini-rant over.

On To Increasingly Geekly Topics

Calc3 (which I've blathered about quite a bit in my previous journal entry) is shaping up nicely. As I've found time, I've added more than four hundred lines of code to it (calc 2.5 is only 247 lines). The basic framework is nearly done. Another hundred lines or so and the essential functionality for the "perl calculator" mode should be there. Another hundred beyond that and I should have the "C calculator" mode working. The hooks are in place for the "sql" and "shell" modes, but I want to focus for now on getting the calculator modes running, so I can start actually using the thing in my day-to-day activities. The other functionality can wait, and I'll suffer in silence with tcsh, bash, and the mysql/pg clients.

One of the things I've often, *often*, often wished for, both in calc and in my shell, was a sharable history, so that I could work in one shell for a while, then switch to another shell session in a different window (perhaps running on an entirely different computer) but still have the other shell's history available for me to draw upon. Calc3 will have that, to a degree. I've written it such that every command gets appended to the history file in the user's home directory, and before evaluating a command Calc3 will look at the shared history file to see if new commands have been appended, and import new commands into its own history buffer. This at least gives me shared history on the same computer (or on multiple computers if they're using an NFS-shared /home, but right now none of the systems I use do that). Histories are heavily annotated with things like the pid of the contributing shell instance, the controlling tty, a timestamp, etc. Using tcsh most of my life has gotten me used to using the history file to audit my own activities, and this richer history format will enable me to do more of that. It will also make it possible for the user to specify subsets of the history to draw upon when performing a history-related operation (like, "!rm" -- should default to repeating the last command issued by the *current* shell that began with "rm", but the user should have the option of specifying that other shells' histories should be drawn from too).

Other features I've wanted for about a decade now are the ability to rearrange shell pipes after the processes being piped together have launched, and the un-unixy ability to daemonize commands by specifying that the last process's stdout should be piped to the first process' stdin, like thus:
# ssh bob@somehost | host_fiddler.pl |
.. which would pipe the stdout of ssh to host_fiddler.pl's stdin, and pipe host_fiddler's stdout to ssh's stdin. This could be attained without too much difficulty by having the shell fork() after the two processes have been created (and after their pids, fd's, etc have been pushed to the stack), and having the child process read from host_fiddler.pl's stdout and write to ssh's stdin in a loop (while also monitoring a "control" pipe to/from the parent process). And since the processes are "exposed" on the stack, manipulating them after they've been launched should be possible in ways not available under bash, tcsh, and zsh. Want to disconnect ssh from host_fiddler.pl and feed it your own keystrokes for a while before re-attaching them? Sure, why not! And if you modify host_fiddler.pl and want to use the new version without restarting the entire session, it should be easy to launch a new host_fiddler.pl process, detach ssh's stdin/stdout from the old process, attach them to the new process, and kill the old host_fiddler.pl process.

Yeah, Calc3 is going to be nice. 8-]

Flip-Flopping on DVM Yet Again

The first time I tried implementing DVM (my Distributed Virtual Machine, similar to PVM, the Parallel Virtual Machine), I tried making its messaging TCP-based. Then I switched to UDP because I wanted to take advantage of some of UDP's qualities and I thought connectionless messaging would be easier. Well, I've restarted my implementation yet again, using TCP as my transport layer. In the past I've implemented UDP-based protocols with more TCP-like reliability, and UDP-based protocols with authentication, and thought implementing a UDP-based protocol with reliability and authentication would be piece of cake. And it was! If your cake has big hard rocks baked into it. A few broken teeth later, I'm switching back to connection-based transport.

I was very eager to take advantage of UDP's ease of broadcast transmission, which is a handy way to get the same data to a bunch of different remote nodes without having to send the same data twice. The network switches take care of the retransmission for you, which removes one of the major bottlenecks in distributed systems scalability. I also wanted to use DVM as part of an ad-hoc network, in which it is the basic assumption that unreliability and a lack persistent connections is the common case (due to the limitations of the link layer and the supposed mobility of the communicating nodes). What I'm going to do instead is have DVM use UDP broadcast as a side-channel in a LAN environment for specific applications, and roll a completely different messaging framework for ad-hoc environments. Hopefully I can implement that as a light wrapper around DVM, or at least re-use some of DVM's code.

I'm eager to get something working. My systems will just have to continue using http-rpc and PVM in the meantime :-P

Okay, that's plenty of blather for now .. onwards and upwards!

-- TTK