“And as for the term community, by the way, as it’s used on the internet, you should examine that very carefully, because it’s almost being used in the way opposite to the usual meaning of community. Most people, when they talk about they’re joining a community on the internet mean they’ve joined with people of similar interests. Now the more traditional meaning of the word community is that these are people who do not have the same interests, but they must negotiate and accommodate their differences for the sake of social harmony. So, there’s almost the opposite meaning.”

Anyway, yesterday, within a day of getting a ScanGauge II, I discovered why my car (a ‘98 Accord) idles roughly sometimes when it’s half warmed up. I hooked it up and set it to display the most “interesting” sensor readings (manifold absolute pressure, intake air temperature, and water [coolant] temperature.) The next morning, I noticed that when it was misbehaving, it thought the coolant temperature was below 32F. Unlikely for an engine that’s been running 4 minutes! With any luck, I can get this out by just partially draining out the coolant and removing the sensor with a socket on an extension that lets me clear the distributor (which is very nearby.)

Tien got me a deep fryer for my birthday. I’d been wanting one for a long time but not sure if I really wanted to buy one. So, today I bought enough palm oil shortening (non-hydrogenated) and a couple sweet potatoes and made sweet potato fries. That was my first experience using a deep fryer and it worked out great. Tien also got me The Best Fryer Cookbook Ever. It is indeed a nice overview of things you can do with a deep fryer.

It’s a compelling enough book to get me off my ass and back into some running. This time, I’m going to stubbornly (if slowly) be doing it entirely with the Five Fingers. There is enough evidence out there that that extremely cushioning or extremely motion-controlling shoes we’ve all gravitated toward aren’t that healthy for us, since they basically dull the feedback mechanism that would have us adjust our running form to hit the ground more gently.

So, naturally, I ran about 6 blocks yesterday and my calves have been sore ever since. Not injured, just sore. I’m eager to continue working on it, at a gentle pace.

I’m going to try to post again soon and write about The Authenticity Hoax, another book I enjoyed this past week.

I recently finished reading The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison by John Emsley. It’s a fun book, if you like reading about such things as the historical use of toxic metals (and metalloids), both as medicines and as poisons. It’s really interesting how many had useful medical purposes, albeit with side effects that were often as bad as their benefits. (Typically, a lot of toxic heavy metal compounds are even more toxic against microorganisms than against humans, but not much.)

I’m currently reading You Are Not a Gadget by the decidedly-curmudgeonly Jaron Lanier. I’ll have more to say about it later, but I think he really has some important things to say about the prospects for culture in the modern world.

Also, I bought a single-tuner HD Homerun and a UHF TV antenna (there was an existing and unused satellite mount and a piece of coax routed in through the wall, so it was quite easy), and I set up the MythTV backend on my home fileserver. I’ve got it recording what little broadcast tv is worth watching.

I got engaged to Tien, though that was really only a question of when.

The time, or at least attention I had to devote to other activities was somewhat limited. I did a fair amount of gardening. I set up a 25 gallon aquarium with lots of plants, and now that the pH has stabilized, it’s doing very well.

I’m less impressed by mulching techniques and materials than most people seem to be. More on that in the future. Though, aside from being lazy, one possible reason not to mulch beds is that it may discourage ground-nesting bees. (See Mulch Madness, One More Deterrent To Beeing Successful).

In a dry climate, drip irrigation is the best thing ever. You can maintain good moisture levels without over and underwatering. You can avoid all the troubles of hitting plants too hard with water or disease related to having the tops of plants too moist. Just about the only thing it’s not good for is sprouting seeds, since you don’t get very even moisture levels at the very top of the soil.

Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates by Robert Kourik is a good book on the subject, though I pretty much figured it out on my own beforehand. It’s ideal to avoid lots of connections and just use lengths of tubing that have integral emitters. Also, use a good filter, regulator, and always use a backflow preventer.

Mizuna is just about the only salad green you’re going to grow in the hot dry summer here. Arugula will do okay, but it gets too bitter and bolts easily. Nasturtium is trivial to grow even in partial shade (though you get less flowers that way.)

Give zucchini and tomatoes ample water and lots of manure. As with any fruiting crop, don’t let the zucchini get too mature before picking, or it’ll start to slow down. One zucchini plant is enough for two people unless you really love zucchini. Zucchini (and many other fruiting annuals) need calcium. If they don’t have enough, you get blossom-end rot. With this somewhat alkaline soil, gypsum seems to work (and should help make the clay easier to work). In more acidic soil, dolomitic lime is the standard thing, from what I hear.

Sunflowers are easy once they got big enough to resist slug and snail attack. Growing pole beans up sunflowers works, but I’ll build a trellis next time to space the vines out better. Also, if you’re unlucky, the weight of the beans breaks the sunflower in half. (This is the “mammoth” sunflower I’m talking about — 7 feet tall even with shade for part of the day.)

As for slugs and snails, the baited iron phosphate granules (Sluggo is one brand) seems reasonably effective and is essentially harmless to people, pets, and plants in the quantity used. Sprinkle on plenty at least monthly. Most of the trouble I had was with small plants as they sprouted — once things like beans and sunflowers got bigger, they have reasonably snail-unfriendly surfaces. And the zucchini is downright pest-unfriendly — the stems give me a temporary rash on my arms, though callouses on the my fingers make them okay to handle that way.

This was all the stuff in the ground, which I find vastly more enjoyable for growing annuals, compared to fiddly containers. More on the container stuff next time…

Anyway, if I do this, it will be my first serious foray into Windows programming.

I’ve also done a fair amount of gardening lately. You can see more on Flickr. I’m really looking forward to getting that Canon 100mm macro lens so I can take more of the sort of photos of plants and bugs that I find interesting.

I plan to allocate a bit more of my time for writing, soon.

The new commute sucked. An hour each way by car, hour and a half by train (total, door-to-door).

So, after looking for a couple weeks, and hurriedly packing for a couple more, we moved at the end of February to a house in Sunnyvale. More space, and I’m only 2 miles from work. I can even walk to work in about 40 to 45 minutes, slowed down somewhat by the necessity of crossing the street excessively. We’re still unpacking.

Somewhat annoyingly, VMware uses the lowest-common-denominator Linux sound API, OSS. Unfortunately, OSS, as typically implemented, only allows one application to have the sound device open at once. This might have been a acceptable design in 1995, but it sucks today.

However, as many people mention in several places on the web, you can use the ALSA-OSS emulation layer to give you the benefits of ALSA (such as multiple applications opening the audio device at once) with VMware. Almost all of them involve modifying the script which starts vmware to LD_PRELOAD the libaoss.so library. However, this seems to not work in the latest versions, since there are multiple levels of shell scripts which start the actual binary, and some of them modify the LD_PRELOAD environment variable. As far as I can discern, the “right” way is to add this line to /etc/vmware/config :

preload = “/usr/lib/libaoss.so”

And now, sound works just fine for me in VMware.
(Note, I did have to “sudo apt-get install alsa-oss” beforehand.)

I’m slowly heading back to my FPGA project. I haven’t set up FPGA design software again, nor have I been mucking about in Verilog, however I’ve started to thinking about the implementation of a basic stack machine again. I’m a little disinterested in Forth lately, so I may just code up a quick assembler for it and see what strikes my fancy after that. At the moment, I’ve been scrawling some ideas on paper and thinking about how to best map about 19 instructions into a 16 bit word to minimize decoding logic.

More than ever, I believe that understanding how compilers work is among the most important practical topics in computer science, once you get beyond the basics. I’m glad I took a “Programming Languages and Compilers” course in college, but it was just an intro really. To really understand what’s going on and to really have the ability to make new tools when your tools are insufficient, this is a subject you can’t gloss over. (Steve Yegge has a great rant about this.)

Mostly, I’ve just been cranking out solutions to Project Euler problems and reading books in my spare time.