One year ago today: September 4, 2014, history of St. Nick.
Five years ago today: September 4, 2010, wouldn’t a hotel be cheaper?
Six years ago today: September 4, 2009, musical tags.
MORNING
Do you know what Palmyra is? Probably not, but that’s okay, the place certainly isn’t hurting anyone. It’s an ancient abandoned burial site in Syria. It’s copied from earlier Roman and Greek temple styles. But wait, it is offending the Islamic State (IS). So that is why they are dynamiting the best preserved of the ruins. Savages. That’ what they are. Savages.
So the press goes ballistic that Trump “stumbles” over some questions on foreign policy. Um, listen guys, isn’t it about time we had a president to cared less about foreign countries and more about our own? Who told you people a president who intends to pull our armed forces out of the ‘Stans has to know anything about those shitholes?
And you gotta love that “up yours” Trump delivered to this Hewitt and his “gotcha” questions. Trump said it right, I’ll find the people who deal with that later. Hewitt (whom I never heard or saw of before this morning) is one of those backward journalist types who thinks he can play one-up with people who have better things to do than memorize the names of current third-world jokers.
There are seven ways to trip up people studied in current American journalism schools. One of the top is this senseless tactic—asking the victim what his position is on some obscure issue and then implying if he doesn’t know that, then he is incompetent or doesn’t know anything. And you wonder why nobody in America trusts the press. Well, nobody with any brains, anyway. Trust me, if you must get your news from “television”, at least choose the BBC.
You gotta love the classic way he answered those idiotic questions. To paraphrase, “The names of these people don’t matter to anyone except a candidate who studied the topic anticipating such a fresh question. Believe me, once I get the job I’ll know more about it in the first 24 hours than you ever will.”
Down with conventional politics I say! All power to the Trumps of this nation.
NOON
I’m still inside, making chicken soup. I will never get tired of chicken soup. The fewer ingredients, the better, but don’t go nuts. And NPR in the background, reminding me that I am not the worst educated man in the country. I got a question for the media. Where in the hell were all these “deeply concerned” journalists and their loaded questions when the last bunch of presidents were running? Could it be the media has a hidden agenda to support the status quo? Let’s ask Ann Coulter about that.
Would you like a little modified corn starch with that? Maybe pass the Monsanto. I do not think I’ve had any Kraft products on my property in well over a year now. That’s too bad, because I liked Kraft Dinner back when it was real food. Before they screwed with it and morphed it into toxic waste. If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.
You know what is sad? Stupid Americans and their obsession with celebrity busts. The Bing headlines saying Taylor Swift arrested, Taylor Swift handcuffed, Taylor Swift in jail are all links to a story about a fan who tried to rush the stage. But in typical media fashion that is not what the headlines say. Did you know Swift if afraid that her celebrity status could very well result in her being framed for something.
And rightfully so. There can be no doubt there is a betting match going on between cops to see who can nail the biggest superstar. I pointed out decades ago that the cops are using traffic laws to target and bait public figures. Ask Mel Gibson, Justin Beiber, Martha Stewart, or pretty well anybody who does not have a “Police Athletic League” sticker on their window when they get pulled over.
NIGHT
Today, I made programming history, at least in terms of the Arduino. Yes, it works. I have a counter that displays a three digit display of a real number. It counts, but does not have to be programmed to count, just display up to three digits. This is triple the number ever published in Arduino history.
This blog does not support video, but I was able to take enough photos to catch two of the displays just as the numbers were changing. You should be able to see 268 and 324, proving at least that I did create the proper code to display three different numbers.
Without knowledge of what is being demonstrated, this seems trivial, even pointless. But what’s happened is a three digit counting display that does not use shift registers or analog to digital converters. These are “chips” that take digital output and convert the signals to “numbers” that humans recognize.
You’ve all seen these displays before, but there is a major difference. You would have been looking at three different displays grouped as one, that is, what is shown on the display has no connection to the underlying “count”. My display is the real McCoy, it is really, truly showing two “hundreds”, six “tens”, and eight “ones”. There is no electronic “translation” going on.
And this places me in the Arduino Hall of Fame. Nobody has gotten beyond one digit before. My code is modular and can easily be expanded to any number, but I chose three because that was tough enough. By nesting the loops, I got the number of lines of code down from 320 to just 18. (For programmers, that is the main loop code only, not counting intializations and declarations.)
For those who understand that C+ code demands a lot of useless overhead, that means I have this code working in probably less than ten meaningful lines. That, folks, is programming efficiency. No, I didn’t miss my calling. I’m much better at accounting than coding. Besides, accounting pays better and you don’t always have to come up with new ideas like this one.
What you see in these photos is the entire working apparatus. Notice no chips (integrated circuits) on the breadboard. All is controlled by the single Arduino Uno at bottom left. The entire working model is nothing but passive components, that is, completely operated only by command codes wired directly to the LED displays. No funny stuff, no shortcuts, no store-bought hardware, except the Arduino—but that was the very purpose of this exercise.
This may be the event that prompts me to purchase that long awaited good video camera. Another aspect that solidifies success for me over in California is that the few others who have gotten even on LED working have consistently been very poor teachers and even worse at documenting their work. At the other extreme, all my work, including the failures and blind alleys has been thoroughly cataloged, including times and dates. Trust me, there were points at which things were maddening.
It took approximately 56 hours to create and test this code after the initial concept was decided and I gave it the go-ahead. I’m making copies and sending it to all interested parties that I know, then I’m going out to a fancy coffee shop as a reward.
ADDENDUM
There are many different examples of multi-digit displays on-line, I make it clear that I do not dispute they work and produce the same end result. But the inherent problem in each instance is that they do not usually represent original thinking, and where they do, they are produced by professionals. Arduino is like sex, it is amateur fun and nobody really appreciates a professional in the same room.
There is even a four-digit display from Parallax (shown here), but it uses a library. And libraries are normally well beyond the ability of the hobbyist to produce. They are like a super-subroutine that does all the work for you, but using them often involves learning a specialized set of commands unique to that process. Not good, that is precisely the wrong route to go with programming and electronics, where the move should be toward standardization.
This Parallax model, if I’m reading the schematic diagram correctly, must work on the same principle that my does. But the code is not revealed, so one cannot even be sure it is Arduino commands behind the scenes. In any case, I did not see this Parallax example until AFTER I was finished my project.
Furthermore, without viewing that library, there is no way to tell if the Parallax model actually represents a number, or is just a modularized display. This is hard to understand, but a display that uses modular math to “strip out” each digit and display the digit independently is not the same as my system. You can usually tell a mod display when you see the code get concerned with MSD & LSD (most and least significant digit).
By contrast, in my code, the number displayed actually represents something real, in this case, the number of loops within the code – but it could be triggered by most any event. This means my invention could be connected to any source of 5 volt pulses and it will count in real time without any further need for programming or translation circuitry, where other counters must be commanded to count. The more lines of code, the more can go wrong.
My system uses no libraries, no shift registers, no binary to decimal or binary to 7-segment converters, and none of the code was downloaded or copied. I did the complete “think-through” of this entirely on my own. This is the important distinction. My system uses nothing but ordinary “Arduino” code, and is achieved completely by commands that are already familiar to all but the earliest beginners.
That is the accomplishment that is being paraded here. A complete start-to-finish original learning project. For that matter, my code uses only three Arduino commands. For(), digitalWrite(), and delay(), mind you in some fairly slick combinations. If it has been done before, I cannot find it.
Last Laugh
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