"... the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest"

“. . . the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.”
  --Mary Shelley
 
Being slightly addicted to the Frankenstein mythos, I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of Frankenstein(2004)* starring (to use the term loosely) William Hurt (disguised as a Old German Professor) and Donald Sutherland (pretty much as Donald Sutherland).
It was pretty close to the bottom of the barrel. They opted to ignore the cinematic Frankenstein, and adhere to the book,or at least those parts of the book you could glean from five minutes with Coles Notes.

Entirely missing the main plot of responsibility and Victor Frankenstein's general moral crappiness, they pasted in a lifeless romance and too much time significantly focusing on carvings of Christ.
Apparently they had learned nothing from watching Dracula 2000(2000)**

Also they killed two dogs on screen, a bad move when you consider how many dog lovers watch movies. Quick fact: Even Darth Vader killed no dogs onscreen.

The Creature was a tad emo, but the only person worth watching in the entire flick. Played by Luke Goss, who as played Prince Peeved from Hellboy 2.  He blew Robert de Niro's Frankenstein out of the water, who was my gold standard for 'realistic' Creatures: Karloff, of course tops the list of the 'unrealistic'.

I would like to see a 'realistic' version of Frankenstein done where they didn't crib sets and scenes from half-assed Jane Austen clones.
But they again. I'd like to see a version of Frankenstein as filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, maybe on that set with the huge roof beams.

Or better yet, a version of Frankenstein where Percy Blysshe Shelley played Victor Frankenstein, and Byron the Creature; and poor overshadowed Polidori as Clerval.***
It wouldn't be true to form, but it would be damned interesting.




* Not to be confused with the other Frankenstein(2004), Frankenstein(1994), Frankenstein(2007), Frankenstein(1992),  Frankenstein(1984), Frankenstein(1987), and of course, Frankenstein(1931).
EDIT: Also, Frankenstein(1910), which I managed to forget.

**Not to be confused with...oh, you get the picture.

***Under no circumstances would Mary be  Elizabeth. That would be way to obvious. Professor Krempe, perhaps.

If you wanted it to stop leaking, you'd have put a ring upon it.

I think that with the possible exception of certain obscure fetishists, nobody experiences frustration like a home handyman. Today has degenerated into a living nightmare, with the added relish that this torment was entirely self inflicted.
Nobody dragged me from my comfortable chair and reduced me to a groveling filthy wreck in the ruin of my back hallway, the situation worsening with each moment.
No tormenter to curse. Just some sort of plot engineered by Edgar Allen Poe, updated for the 21st century by me, myself, and I.
 
...after some cogitation, I am of the opinion, that the mission critical tool-a Pex ring compressor- is marginally bent, by whatever thousands of an inch that would allow it to appear alright,and yet be entirely nonfunctional, which is something like some people I have had the misfortune to meet, but have always been lucky enough to not have to work with, or depend upon.
Unlike this tool.
Bah.


Edit: I found this table of crimp ring diameters and pulled out my micrometer
PEX Ring Crimped Diameters
Pipe Size :            3/8”          1/2"         3/4"         1”
Min. diameter     0.580”     0.700”     0.945”     1.175”
Max. diameter     0.595”     0.715”     0.960”     1.190”

Crimper was coming in at .7223" rather than .715", which I probably would have spotted earlier if the damned Go/No Go gauge hadn't gone AWOL. Padded the crimper with ~8 thou of paper and re-crimped.
Leak is gone. Now to re-engineer the crimper, I guess.

Also thinking about it, the last time I used the crimper I was doing some decidedly non-standard crimping,and I believe this is the predictable result.

The Singularity will toast my toast

Until a few hours ago, I was the unknowing owner of a dual-core toaster.
A year ago, I picked up a quad-slice Oster toaster, model number TSSTRT4SST (ToaSTeRToasts4SliceStainlessSteel ? Why 2 's''s in 'toaster'?).
It cost my $2 at the local Salvation Army, and I bought it only because it had wide slice apertures, and the false hope of a 'bagel' button.
I certainly got more than two dollars worth of misery out of it.

I'd like to think that it was just because it was second hand, and that my mate's often repeated snarl of 'Its worn-out' was true...but how does a toaster wear out? Mechanically it was fine, all the elements worked.
It was just a poor toaster, so when Liz got a new toaster for Christmas(Not the same model or company, I might add), I tossed the Oster onto the scavenge box, and took it apart this morning.

Like most modern crap,it contained a processor- the ABOV MC80F0604D. Or rather, it had two of them.
Now the specs for the MC80F0604D look half-decent: its clock speed is three times the PC I started with, so many years ago, and its nicely equipped with I/O. In fact, of the 20 pins on the uC, only 12 were in use.
It looks as though they created the four slice toaster by simply doubling the internals. One uC runs the right hand slots, and the other the left. This immediately brings to mind the North American F-82 Twin Mustang, a plane I always wanted to model, but, like the USS New Jersey, has always remained out of my grasp.

What is even nicer is that each uC is mounted on its own playing-card sized PCB, with a nice 5 pin header supplying power, and three pins of I/O. The PCB has three push-buttons, two LED's, and a potentiometer.
There are solder pads for two more switches.
It looks like a little dev board. Its so cute! If the MC80F0604D's Flash memory is acessable, I just took apart a two dollar toaster and scored two handy microcontrollers.*

ABOV offers the usual PDF datasheet, and a free IDE/Compiler. The IDE looks clunky, and is actimng worse, but IDE's are always twitchy and moody around me.
I can't find any example circuit diagrams though, or any examples of homebrew programmers. Not so good.

As a final note, the toaster achieves the AC voltage step-down without a switching regulator or a transformer, by depending on the 10 ohm, 1400Watt resistance element to drop the voltage to ~12 volts.

This is (possibly) clever, although I didn't put an oscilloscope on Vdd to see how ugly the supply is - ABOV boasts some clever power conditioning/tolerance circuitry on the chip, and I suspect it was put to the test.
The scary part is that the power supply goes  wallplug --->element--->switch--->wall plug. They break the neutral!   (Didn't pay enough attention. They break Line, and Neutral)  there is a 175degree thermal fuse on the line in, but ...
Metal case isn't grounded either. Actually, it couldn't be. If it was, a short from the elements to the case would be a wide-open arc flash, rather than a silent killer for the man who has one hand on the toaster, and the other on, say the kitchen stove.

 I am a little annoyed that I din't find this sooner, for I would have modded the whole damn toaster, and sent it in for the Hackaday contest. Hold the 'Bagel' button down, and it blinks HACKADAY in baudot, perhaps. I'd try to install a TCP/IP styack and connect it to the Internet, but that idea is definately passe, if only because its so old.

 I'm putting the boards away for now, but I will be pulling them out to act as the brains for something. If anyone has any schematics that show a MC80F0604D being programmed, I'd really appreciate a shout.



*If I can't then I still scored two pots and two thermistors, which is about $3 in parts, so I'm actually coming ahead.

Sigil of the Times

Its the 21st Century.
I'm working by the light of Light Emitting Diodes carving millenia-old alphabets into gypsum with sharpened sticks in order to make a signet ring that will be used to stamp a signature into paintings made with modern artificial dyes -- that gorgeous quinacridone gold!--mixed with an acrylic binder and spread on cotton canvas...

We are our tools; I am the product of my ancestors, and  my tools stretch back through my predecessors to that fateful day when Hand chipped stone to find Purpose.

Technology.
Gotta love it.

The Buzz and Chatter of Busy Motherboards

This  paper on acoustic sideband decryption attacks reminds me of working on my old 8088 and 286 systems. I've always liked ambient music, and pre-WinAmp, that was supplied by a battered boombox tuned to any of the available FM rock and roll stations. One of my favorite stations was on a frequnecy that was favored by the computers radio-noise; it would override a stastion with a chatter and rumble that was quite distinctive. I could hear RAM acesses as quite distinctive tones.

The interesting part, now that I think about it, was that a system with a clock speed of 4.77 Mhz was generating radio interference somewhere between 98 and 104 Mhz - all my favorite radio stations lying in that bandwidth. Perhaps it was actually being picked up by the radio circuitry after demodulation, as a amplitude-modulated wave affecting a poorly shielded amplifier circuit?

The more I think about it, the more curious I become. I have a box of 8088 motherboards tucked away, I wonder if I have all the other parts around to get one up and running? It would only have to boot, to run some basic tests - the POST RAM check should demonstrate the interference.

Spawn

Had an interesting fault on a winXP system yesterday. After opening any program from the Desktop, clicking anywhere inside that program's window spawned a new copy of that program rather than performing the desired action. Behavior went away after reboot. I'm guessing that the pointer for WM_MOUSEACTIVATE got corrupted?
This would be an annoying prank if readily replicable.

'In Russia, the 'x' 'y'es you"

Perhaps one could increase the number of pagehits for a given blog by engineering oneself onto Big Brother watchlists?
How often would the NSA actually scan a blog? What about all the other secret police?
If this could be monetized - perhaps with some sort of ad revenue,  I may have hit on my next* Get-Rich-Quick scheme.
Now consider that non-human(but non-alien**) traffic is reputed to exceed human traffic on the Net.
The right sort of 'advertisement' would attract them for monetization. After all, what non-human bot is more well funded than the silicon intelligences of the  NSA?
I feel like a plant that has just realized that if it forms flowers in a certain way, creatures of another entire nature will come and do all the hard work of pollination. This may be the biggest thing since Ogilvy's Eyepatch.

*Hopefully more successful than the self-stirring sugar cube.

**Also, no elves.

Numeric derangements

I started the morning by writing a sharp screed on the two kinds of numbers, but have managed to convince myself it sounds dangerously like a tinfoil hat talking. So I'm pressing DEL on the whole thing, beyond this remark:

There are numbers for counting, and a different kind of numbers for measuring. Superficially they are similar, but so are octopi and squid *.

I always assumed that using measuring-type numbers for arrays and pointers in C  rather than counting-type numbers was an example of the original programmers just not thinking hard enough about the problem.
The subtleties of numeric conversions are often ignored : consider how many smart people think that  0.9999...infinity !=1 .
But while tooling around the Net, I found this which has changed my opinion. They did think about it, they just picked the wrong type of numbers.

I'd like to say its moot, and I'll never forget that arrays start in position 0, but hey, I would have said that about initializing my variables, too. At least until yesterday.


* And most days I'd rather fight the former rather than the latter, but I'll eat either.

The Simple Art of the Asinine

I've made my share of mistakes programming in C... no, let me re-phrase that. I make my share of mistakes programming in anything, but there was one mistake I thought I'd never make.
Any book on C programming will mention it, almost always in the baby-steps beginning chapters, and my eyes have glided without pause over a thousand variations on the warning: Thou shalt initialize thy variables before use.

Heh, heh, heh.

Pride cometh before a fall, and banana skins before a slipped disk.

int x,y=300;

int radius=20;

blah blah blah many lines of code;

circle(x,y,radius);

I have the habit when knocking together a quick utility, of sketching it out in pseudocode, and than rewriting it to get all the little syntax details ironed out. As the astute could guess, the variables were Cartesian, and rather than getting my circle oriented in the viewport at 300,300, I get  x = 2,004,365 , y = 300.

My display is high resolution compared to the 40-line Zenith monochrome I started on, but this circle is a little off the display. 

Lesson learned?  

Not sure if its: 

•  Time to stop pseudocoding, at least in the same file as the source code, or
•  If I have no compile-time errors, remember that C compilers have their wicked ways, or 
• Did I even plug the damn machine in before flipping the 'Go' switch?

I could have called this post Return(FAIL), except if I'd even had a error message, (maybe) I would have seen the light quicker?

Doctor Monologue and the Unsurprisingly Sinister Dwarf

Dracula Vs Frankenstein - the Lon Chaney version - is not really any more coherent than its titular cousin. But it does feature the most useless Dracula I have ever encountered. Honestly, you could have replaced him with the Count from Sesame Street:  it might have made his monologue a little more boring but not by much.
It was even stranger because he was a ringer for Dr. Furter* except without the crossdressing. Pity, crossdressing might  have made the movie more entertaining.
This should be the Mega Shark Vs. Crocosaurus matchup of the sixties. Instead we get Doctor Monologue and the Nefarious Dwarf Versus the Sensible Hippies/Beatniks.

Somehow less chilling than the billing promised.


The story does continue the tradition of Dr. Frankenstein involved in irrelevant research, and I did get to watch Lon Chaney imitate the Monster from 'Daughter of Frankenstein' , rather than anything Karloff-y**, but it was too bad they left his head in the oven until it melted.


* Rocky Horror Picture Show. Did I actually have to footnote this?
**Frankenstein's Monsters hate to bend their elbows or knees. Cheap servos?

"...I had the blood of Reptilicus on my hands..."

"...I had the blood of Reptilicus on my hands..."

Plot? The Copenhagen Tourist Board does a commercial for the city featuring Godzilla, King of the Tundra.
Complete with nightclub singer doing a nice little jingle about the wonders of the city.
Camera pans over stark wasteland to reveal drilling rig made of 1x3's and string that is drilling in the jungle. No wait, its the tundra, and they are drilling through permafrost. And blood. Not frozen blood, just blood.
Cut to Akvarium, and its not, I'm afraid, a pre-Hyborian kingdom.

Godzilla awakens hungry to crush the screaming hordes beneath his scaly feet - no wait, its not Godzilla, its Godzilla's Dragon-ish cousin Reptilicus , who must now trash Copenhagen because his front limbs are rigid and unmoving. Presumably his rear legs work, because he does seem capable of locomotion, what with traveling from aquarium to seashore  and  then to anywhere else they can bluescreen him.

They put some effort into making the monster visibly drool, but then never moved its front feet, which were held in a awkward position. Not as bad stop motion as the Giant Killer Robot of Feminine Death out of Starcrash, but really, what movie is going to live up to Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione ?
(I'm not going to go into why Starcrash is the greatest SF movie ever filmed, and possibly the finest that could ever be made, because I haven't seen Gravity yet.(And stop telling me that the physics in Gravity are riddled with errors: I am not six years old, I know its a movie, and hence, not real.)

Why do I get the impression that the frozen tail knocks the professor out and then opens the fridge door to defrost itself, using mental powers? 

Why is the 'full scientific powers of the United Nations' apparently the beautiful Miss Miller, who arrives before the advent of Reptilicus? And why is she from UNESCO?



Now if I had to regenerate myself from my tail tip because of pesky humans, and mature to my full strength in a locked aquarium next to invisible electric eels,* I'd be pretty cranky too, especially if the eels got out and were zapping me every time I moved. And if I had done all this during a thunderstorm**, and I had only been fed through a IV line since my last meal several million years ago, maybe I would eat the professor (unless he was just a professor med særlige opgaver). Its not like I'd be able to eat the slightly bizarre daughters without choking on their puffy skirts that really clashed with the stark laboratory setting.

And was the Danish Army involved in shooting that film, a la Transformers? (Watch the mighty Danes combat Reptilicus, and then pop down to your nearest recruiting station and sign up?)
And why was the main solider an American brigadier general? I mean, not why in plot sense, but why in writing sense? Why bother? Why not a Danish general? They must have generals of some sort, even back in the 1960's, they had generals.
Now the Danish army and navy fights Reptilicus so efficiently and thoroughly, that you'd almost think they had warplans drawn up and filed under R for Reptilicus.

'That area! Has it been sectored?" 

"Yes!"

So many questions, so little movie.

*I can't see them - is it just because the poor copy I watched, or is the glass aquarium the security guard/handyman/comic relief/village idiot soaks his hands in actually empty? And why am I reminded of Bender Rodriguez's electricity addiction while watching that scene?

**Which only made the eels madder.

Assignment (word starting in T)

Los Monstruos del Terror, AKA Dracula vs Frankenstein AKA Assignment Terror*
is a disappointment. Audacious premise, promising opening. A good laboratory** and a lunatic plot.
Its unfortunately spoiled by being:
~Third part of a trilogy, assuming you've seen them all, which I have not;
~Wooden Acting and dialog ...but not wooden enough to be any good;
~An obsession with strapping girls into the Chair of Torment, and then spending more time monologing than tormenting. The Chair of Torment was nowhere near as cool as the Wheel of Torment in Deathstalker IV, and fades in comparison to the finest example in cinema: the Machine from Princess Bride.

" Beautiful isn't it? It took me half a lifetime to invent it. I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. Presently I'm writing the definitive work on the subject, so I want you to be totally honest with me on how the machine makes you feel. This being our first try, I'll use the lowest setting...As you know, the concept of the suction pump is centuries old. Really that's all this is except that instead of sucking water, I'm sucking life... I've just sucked one year of your life away. I might one day go as high as five, but I really don't know what that would do to you. So, let's just start with what we have. What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?" -- Count Rugen

This film needed way more than thirty seconds of gogo dancers to rescue it, but I did like the idea of the Book of Monsters.

*Probably should have been called Assignment Terrible.

**European film makers usually get the set details right.

"... That artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected.” — Edmund Carpenter.

Which makes me think of Lester Dent.
Now if I mention Doc Savage, my friends get a certain look in their eyes. Because they really can't see why I enjoy the books, and they suspect that if I talk about them long enough, they too, may become infected and zombie-like.

 Lester Dent wrote around 4.5 million words on the subject of Doc Savage. All were written at speed, all were written to sell to an audience of limited scope, and for a throw-away, disposable medium. Here today, gone tomorrow. But mixed into that output is some interesting art, and it is that thin vein of gold that fascinates me.

I could live without the obvious plot twists, the femme fatales, Monk's head injuries -- in fact I usually ignore them. The bigger story about a Renaissance man who's life is changed by his father's murder, is explored behind the maze of mysterious deaths and dashing gangsters.
Its a familiar concept to us now -- thank you Bruce Wayne -- but unlike Batman's psychotic reaction, Savage's PTSD manifests itself differently. In solving mysteries, he tries to rationalize the universe, and by extension his own life. The surgeon he might have become, fades. Early, groundbreaking work in nuclear physics are ignored by the world at large. A genius originally feted and consulted is gradually marginalized by a larger world of politics and progress.

 Dent does not emphasis these ideas. He was writing for a market, and getting thousands of words down every day was the important part.
But he does talk to himself, and the words are there, and the astute reader can maybe string them together, and so much more interesting plot surfaces.