Ones and Zeros

I spent a couple months working long hours recently writing neat new stuff in software. The resulting demo and presentation to the customer went well. So, my reward in that is to get to write more neat new stuff. (Be careful for what you wish.) I’m hoping, probably too optimistically, that this next round of software writing won’t be as schedule driven.

In a second category of neat new stuff, the new airplane battery works very nicely! On my post-maintenance check flight it started the engine swiftly and easily. No more just barely turning over and almost not working. We (the plane owners) are hoping this is near the end of the spate of expensive repairs this last six months. The last one (we hope) being the next item:

The third neat new item is delayed. The directional gyroscope is still on backorder, once again extended. This time we’re hoping we’ll get it near the end of the month. This is annoying as it’s really interrupting my IFR training! It will probably cost me some time to get back into the groove of things once my instructors and I can get going again. I’m considering a sim flight or two with the new sims that the flight school has.

My wife and I have purchased a new pop-up camper. It’s new to us at least. We’re cleaning it up and fixing it up. We’ll be camping where there’s no plug-in power. But, I have a problem. We’d like to run a couple fans, and perhaps have a reading light or two. Then, I will need power to run my laptop for iPhone programming (see below). So, I’m putting together a small (very small) off-the-grid solar power system. Only about 200 W/day, but that’ll be enough for our needs my calculations say. The panel and charge controller are ordered, I can get the battery locally. The fans are quiet 120 mm size computer vent fans, four of them. And the lighting is LED. Most of the wiring will be 12V DC, but I have a small inverter too. I’ll assemble this next week.

I spent last week at Apple’s World-Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. I’m under non-disclosure so there won’t be any really great news here. But rest assured that you’ll hear all about most of the news relatively soon. I’ve been to WWDC before a number of times, but not for a 3-4 years now. It was nice to be back in San Francisco. I like it there, but I’m really glad my wife and I don’t live there. Cities are too busy, too loud, and too concrete for my taste.

But the Bay Area is a real geek paradise. You can buy parts or scrap electronics, find up-to-date technical books in the local library, and have some really good bookstores around. Stanford and Berkeley are nearby and easy access, and your retired neighbor mowing his lawn down the street was probably instrumental in some key technology breakthrough that changed the world. He’ll have great stories, and you’ll be able to learn something there. So while the DC Metro region is a leading user of technology, the Bay Area is a leading generator of technology. It’s a whole different level.

I spent most of my time at WWDC learning how to program the iPhone. This is something I need to do for work, and something I’d like to learn for myself as well. I remember that years ago UNIX geeks would speculate when they’d get a real UNIX laptop. Well, the MacOSX-based MacBook Pros are UNIX laptops. (The most capable new one has a 3 GHz dual-core processor and comes with either 4 GBytes or 8 GBytes of memory.) And, the iPhone is Mach UNIX internally, so is a hand-held UNIX touchscreen computer. The new iPhone model has a compass and video camera too.

One of the things that keeps me going as a technologist, despite bad project schedules and other major annoyances, is the fascination of new ideas and new devices that were science fiction dreams not so long ago. In my career I started programming on a machine that had no boot ROM and only 4 K of memory and could only do 666,000 instructions per second. Now, I can walk into a store and buy a 8 GByte machine that’ll execute six instructions every 1 billionth of a second, about 9000 times faster. Or more if my code uses the graphics processor. The new machine has all sorts of other features like sound, color, and wireless networking for a start. It will last longer, have many fewer problems, doesn’t require a $350/month maintenance charge, and only costs 13% as much. (Prices adjusted for inflation to current values of course, I’m an economist too.) On top of that, these new MacOS laptops have 500 GByte disks, vs paper tape storage for the the DEC PDP-8 I started with.

So truly some neat & new stuff!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 08:23 and is filed under electronics, life, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.