Though I’ve designed a PC board for my own production using a toner-transfer etching resist and no holes drilled, I haven’t actually designed a board before for actual commercial production. It’s rather tedious getting everything right the first time, but I managed to make it work.

I was recently playing around with some of the smaller Cree LEDs which are designed for lighting use (in this case, the CLA1B-MKW-XD0F0E83 [pdf] — these are about 12 lumens) and I happened upon an idea for a simple but very useful project. It occurred to me that I would like a little bit of light in the cabinets and closet in our hallway at home without having to turn on an adjacent room light or the crappy wall-mounted light at night. I prototyped a neat little 1.5 volt driver using a Diodes Inc. (formerly Zetex) ZXSC380 [pdf] — this is a better alternative to that “joule thief” circuit that has been going around for some time — and decided that it was sufficient illumination for the purpose. It should provide about 20 hours of operation off a AAA alkaline battery too.

So, after hoping to be able to do something more clever with a low quiescent current and low-voltage hall effect sensor, I gave up and used a SPDT reed switch (the most expensive component in the whole thing at $2.89 each!) so that when a magnet is close to the board, which is mounted just inside of the top of the door opening, it turns off. I expect won’t have to change the battery for years. The magnet is a 1/4″ cylindrical magnet glued in a 1/4″ hole in the door with Gorilla Glue.

I was happy with the price and quality of PC boards from OSH Park, but I certainly wish there was a faster turnaround way to get PC boards made that was also cheap. I did the design with Eagle CAD, which I’d used before a few years ago — but not where I cared about all the layers (copper, drills, holes, solder mask, etc.) I could have gotten the silk screening done better for some of the parts I created outlines for, but it works.

Yes, it’s slightly crooked, and it only seems dim with the iPhone flash on.

I’m damned impressed with some of the LED lighting products out there — the better CRI warm white parts are indistinguishable from incandescent bulbs to me. The next thing I’m working on is a lightweight clip-on LED book light for reading in the dark without being too bright. Things are slightly complicated in that I intend to make it USB rechargable, and to make things mechanically neat, I plan to use the Atmel QTouch stuff for the on/off. This will also allow some tricky user-configurable brightness without a tiny trimmer pot, since I know my wife will want hers brighter than I’ll want mine.

Recently motivated out of curiosity, I and a coworker were benchmarking different approaches to determining if a hash is empty in Perl. Expanding on this a little I present these curious results. In summary, it seems that there are roughly two code paths we’re hitting here. One for if (scalar %hash) and if (%hash), and another for if (keys %hash), if (values %hash), if (scalar keys %hash), and if (scalar values %hash). The latter is much faster when you hit a non-empty hash. It feels somewhat unfortunate that the simplest approach is (approximately) slowest.

hash size: 0
                      Rate if_scalar  if if_values if_keys if_scalar_values if_scalar_keys
if_scalar        3125000/s        -- -3%      -21%    -23%             -24%           -24%
if               3205128/s        3%  --      -19%    -21%             -22%           -22%
if_values        3937008/s       26% 23%        --     -2%              -4%            -5%
if_keys          4032258/s       29% 26%        2%      --              -2%            -2%
if_scalar_values 4098361/s       31% 28%        4%      2%               --            -1%
if_scalar_keys   4132231/s       32% 29%        5%      2%               1%             --
hash size: 3
                      Rate if_scalar   if if_keys if_scalar_keys if_values if_scalar_values
if_scalar         967118/s        --  -1%    -86%           -87%      -87%             -88%
if                978474/s        1%   --    -86%           -86%      -87%             -88%
if_keys          7142857/s      639% 630%      --            -1%       -7%             -10%
if_scalar_keys   7246377/s      649% 641%      1%             --       -6%              -9%
if_values        7692308/s      695% 686%      8%             6%        --              -3%
if_scalar_values 7936508/s      721% 711%     11%            10%        3%               --
hash size: 500
                      Rate   if if_scalar if_scalar_values if_values if_scalar_keys if_keys
if                912409/s   --       -2%             -88%      -88%           -88%    -88%
if_scalar         927644/s   2%        --             -87%      -88%           -88%    -88%
if_scalar_values 7352941/s 706%      693%               --       -1%            -4%     -4%
if_values        7462687/s 718%      704%               1%        --            -3%     -3%
if_scalar_keys   7692308/s 743%      729%               5%        3%             --     -0%
if_keys          7692308/s 743%      729%               5%        3%             0%      --

From the script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw(cmpthese);

my %hash_empty = ();
my %hash_small = (1..6);
my %hash_large = (1..1000);

foreach my $ref (\%hash_empty, \%hash_small, \%hash_large) {
  print 'hash size: ' . scalar(keys(%$ref)) . "\n";
  cmpthese(5_000_000, {
    if => sub { if (%$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_scalar => sub { if (scalar %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_keys => sub { if (keys %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_values => sub { if (values %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_scalar_keys => sub { if (scalar keys %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_scalar_keys => sub { if (scalar keys %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
    if_scalar_values => sub { if (scalar values %$ref) { 1 } else { 0 } },
  });
}

I bought a window air conditioner from target.com, primarly because if I was told I could return it in a local store.

Last Friday (May 11) it arrived, and it was the right tracking number, but it was actually a microwave oven. Was busy with the new house last weekend and with our cat’s health problems (he’s doing much better now.)

So, this Friday (May 18), we decided to return it in the store nearby. Turns out, in this case, their claim that you can return it locally is a lie, they won’t do that if they shipped you the wrong item — and we confirmed this after calling their 800 number and requesting a return (which I’ll have to drop off at UPS sometime after labeling it.) To add insult to injury, the shipping label page doesn’t load completely (tried with multiple browsers/OSes), and we’re going to have to call them up again.

The one reason I chose them over Amazon, or a couple of much better online retailers for buying small appliances was that I was told I could return it in store, so this is why I will be telling everyone I know not to buy things online from Target. It seems that when “brick-and-mortar” retailers get into online retail, they do a very poor job of integrating both operations. This is somewhat understandable if you think about the business. However, as a customer, you either shouldn’t have to care about such things, or they should be explicit about all the common cases where the return in store is impossible. If they are really trying to provide some benefit over pure-online retailers, they’re failing at that.

(Edit: We finally did get a valid shipping label out of them, shipped it back, and I was credited. Ended up just buying the air conditioner from some random retailer that lists their stuff on Amazon.)

Moved my web stuff around, now this has IPv6.

I’ve become disillusioned with the constant churn of websites-controlled-by-other-entities which I’m somehow compelled to participate in. They’ve developed a very effective value proposition for introverts like me who are otherwise likely to lose contact with friends over time, but I really tire of it being a constant cycle of replacing one proprietary system with another. I know I tend to use Google Plus more than the others, but there are people I know who I’ve never seen on there. And then there’s the offensive way in which some of the most successful of these insist on “real” names. Not that I’m bothered by “sticky” identities with reputation, nor do I even mind using my “real” name that much, but it is quite a break with the traditional internet culture I value.

I’m toying with the idea of setting up my own Diaspora “pod”. They’re one of the first things since email and Jabber that gets the model somewhat right — not in the control of a single entity[*], based on a loose federation of independent agents. Part of what bothers me about the proprietary services is that I start to feel that I’ve left pieces of myself cluttered all over — kind of the disconcerting feeling you might have when you’ve left physical possessions behind in the real world.

[*] Okay, you can argue that the DNS is subject to some autocratic control, and you’re even largely right, though there are some workable proposals for decentralizing that (Namecoin, etc.)