One year ago today: September 12, 2013, good-bye, Johnny Cash.
Five years ago today: September 12, 2009, music class.
Ten years ago today: September 12, 2004, who is Amy?
MORNING
Dork of the Day award goes to Richard "the Dick" Durbin of Illinois. He goes on record saying Burger King is refusing to "pay its fair share" to support our nation. Dick has one awful cute perception of what is fair. BK is making a very fair decision--to avoid the corruption, favoritism, waste, and god knows what else that politicians like Durbin have allowed the American system to sink into. He jumps on one company but ignores the big issues, like millions of illegals bleeding off the taxpayers. Where is his "concern" there?
BK, there is no shame abandoning a sinking ship when "wonderful-me" mouthpieces like Durbin are jamming the rudder. Oddly, except for his fantasies about taxation "supporting the nation", Durbin could probably pass for a half-normal Irish person, assuming there is such a thing. By the way, Dick, nice face-lift and hair transplant. 1944, was it?
Durbin is totally representative of the entrenched and corrupt politician that has taken over America. He does not want to solve any problems, he does not even want to admit any real problems exist. He just wants to talk. Endlessly. Durbin is part of the sickening bureaucratic establishment mind-set that is sooner or later going to result in a tough-guy getting elected in this country. It's happened every time before in history, you know. Then all the freeloaders and parasites like Durbin can kiss their asses good-bye. How many million of them?
NOON
Here, take a look at the interim protoype fastBike, is what we've begun to call it. Oh, its fast, at least 110 kph. The frame seen here looks funny because of the shock absorbers. Did I mention that last day? Yes, I did, and the bike sits up high because there is no weight on it. The two halves articulate, so the rider's weight takes it down to a regular shape. This will not be in the final design, but the rider will be close to seven feet in the air, similar to my Jamis.
I have three experiments or projects running simultaneously. One is our "drawbot", a new word here that belongs to the consist in the previous paragraph. You will soon learn more about that than you think. Hey, remember, the majority of my readers are here to learn a bit about matters they can't pursue on their own time. The second and third project is the sonars. They don't work yet, but I must eliminate the cable to the computer so the sensors can work anywhere.
Why is the sonar considered two projects? Complexity. Because, while connecting the sensor is a breeze, using it for something useful is not. I must get the sonar to display a current reading, which involves LCD (not LED) tech know-how, and also to record historical data for analysis. Last evening I ran 5,370 iterations before realizing the on-line coding was wrong. Anyway, the display and the storage are independently so complicated for the Arduino I keep them classified as separate operations. I'm confused enough, already.
It seems crazy, but programmers and power users are more stupid today than ten years ago. I'm not losing the term stupid loosely. I really mean they are stupid, as I'm seeing glitches and goof-ups not present since the early 70s when smart coders learned not to make dumb mistakes. It's a different kind of dumb unique to those educated beyond their mental capacity.
I can confirm that from trying to locate and download files. It should be the easiest thing to do on a hard drive and now they've gone and mucked that up. The people who design those sites lack the basics to an embarrassing degree. Worst offender? Some weird Arduino site called "github". No directions, no menus, and except for a word or two, the site seems unrelated to your search criteria. I'll ask Agt. M is there is some "new" method to download since there is plainly not anything that is improved.
Worse, downloads have become interactive, you cannot download the standalone file and install it later on your computer when you get off the Internet. Things really have gotten worse and I wonder when a reputable company will crop up. People would flock to such a place, but somehow the Internet attracts nothing but get-rich-quick artists. I attempted to install Java, not because it is a good product, but because other programs won't work without it. Like my Arduino IDE.
That's the kind of sh*t I'm talking about. The pinheads who build software these days purposely glom onto every new version without realizing the sole purpose of the "new" version is to make last weeks files incompatible. Such people never look ahead.
EVENING
Another impromptu club meeting at the donut shop, then to fix a flat screen TV. It was a loose ribbon cable. Mainly, we discussed the central processing of entire Arduinos and this is something I'd like to delve into for a few paragraphs. As far as we know, I said as far as we know, Billy, nobody else is using more than one Arduino per task. At no point do I say that I am the first or only person to do this. My thinking on that goes back to the 70s when I first heard of modular programming. I liked the concept, others said it would never work and I believed them. Hence, I missed a five year head start on the method. I won't make that mistake again with Arduino.
Most sensor input is analog so everyone else seems to ignore that all the output digital pins can be configured to accept digital input. And this suits the way my brain thinks. Now that we have a drawer full of Arduinos, we cannot ignore the fact such a project would put us miles ahead of Nova. Is that important? Yes, for bragging rights of course, but also for motivation. I can speak from experience what a total rush it is to be in a room of 150 people and be smarter than all of them put together.
I like a day off, just me, the teapot, and a box of deep fried fish fritters. Nothing on the radio, so I played documentaries on the flat screen, again concerning the Boer War. In an amazing way, it was hard to remember that I was not hearing about America today. Must we make every mistake in the book? Correction, in America, it is the politicians, not the people, who make 100% of the big mistakes. England did to the Boers and their gold exactly what the US is doing to the middle east and their oil. The sad part is where England had no gold, the US has lots of oil. But they are conserving it for themselves, the greedy bastards.
My stand on the casualties in the wars? I support the troops but not the commanders. No serious leader can say he is defending freedom. And I stop short of blind patriotic support because when you join the military, you volunteer to die. I say arbitrarily stop the war now, pull the troops out, and line them up along the Mexican border shoulder to shoulder for the next fifteen years.
What's in store for America? I read the [translated] accounts of the Boer soldiers as they inspected British trenches after battle. Like America now, the British had the most modern army, the newest weapons, the resources of an empire. The Boers were marksmen and hunters. Almost every British corpse had six or seven bullet holes in the head. The Brits won the war, but lost the Empire. The parallels are amazing. The Germans studied the results very closely.
ADDENDUM
When I say code is "bad", what I usually mean is it is inefficient. And such code slows down your processor as well as introduce likely error points. Tell you what, nothing works like an example. Here is the way a MicroSoft-minded programmer would write a loop that counts to ten.
for (int x=0; x<10; x++)
{
println x+1;
}
Here is the way I would code the same thing
int x = 1 for x = 1 to 10 print x x=x+1 next xWhich do you think is more readable and to the point? The "bad" code is asking for trouble, and the worst kind of it. For instance, it is not obvious the { and } marks are critical or even what they are there for. But the worst error is the low-grade intelllect of the programmer who declares a variable (the "x") inside a loop. In the first instance, the variable must be declared as an int (integer) every time the loop executes, gobbling up system resources. It works, but it is not a good solution.
As a treat if you are into it, here is a depiction of the Arduino install files being decompressed. If you look closely, you can see "jar" files. This is one of the reasons I call today's crop of programmers stupid. Jar files are asking for trouble. It stands for "java archive".
