I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

It's a good thing I'm not on any of the several medications that react badly with Grapefruit juice, as it is one of my favorite drinks. However, something I cannot explain has happened: I can't get the stuff here in Wichita!

None of the stores at which I shop are carrying it anymore. I have some left over from my trip to California over the 4th, but that obviously won't last.

Since a statistical sampling of 1 isn't very valid, I'll throw this question out: what about anybody else, can you get it where you are?

Zogger, since you are a bit more plugged in to things agricultural than I, do you have any insights?

Also, the local stores no longer carry the "lots of pulp" versions of the Florida's Natural Orange Juice either.

Maybe the stuff isn't selling (while I buy a lot, obviously I don't buy enough to justify a store carrying it all by my little lonesome).

OK, I think I've been fair in trying out Alpha, but I just don't see it being useful - let me give you my use cases and see what you think:

Use case 1: I wanted to know the change in elevation from Moriarty, NM to Albuquerque, NM. OK, this should be easy for WA, right? "(elevation Moriarty, NM) - (elevation Albuquerque, NM)". Result? "I don't understand your question".

Use case 2: I wanted to know the energy of a red light photon in electron volts. "energy red light photon in eV". FAIL. OK, let's help it a bit: "energy 638nm photon in eV". FAIL.

The sad thing is that Use case 2 was answered by Google on the first question.

So, what was WA supposed to do for us again?

NOTE: "for us", not for "it's hype feeding creator."

I'm looking for a good source for some gears.

Background: I have several antennas on my tower, for various purposes (wideband receive, VHF omnidirectional, VHF directional, HF, etc.). I'd like to be able to switch those onto my radio as desired. Now, there are remote controlled antenna switching boxes out there, but:
1) Most of them are for HF only - not VHF. This is because
2) Most of them use relays to do the switching, and co-axial relays to switch VHF and UHF get VERY pricy.
3) Notwithstanding the use of cheaper HF only relays, most of those switch boxes are DAMN pricey.

Now, compare that with the cost of a simple antenna switch like an MFJ-1702. Simple, relatively inexpensive, good through UHF, good isolation, and not very expensive. However, it is a manual unit, so I'd either a) have to run down to the basement where all the feedlines enter the house and switch it there or b) run all the feedlines into my operating station.

What I want to do is set up a simple gear drive on an MFJ to select the antenna - I'm thinking something like a 3 inch diameter gear on the box, a 120 RPM or so gearbox and motor combination driving the gear, a couple of optical interruptors looking through holes in the gears to provide position sensing, and I should be able to make a switchbox that would do the job. Heck, done right I don't even think it would need much more than a couple of relays and transistors to control it - no microprocessor needed.

But I am having a time finding gears that would do - again, what I'd like would be a gear, preferably metal, about 3 inches in diameter. Anybody got any good sources?

"OK, Mr. Fox, you are applying for the 'Hen House Guard' position, is that correct?"

AP Sources: Obama wants Fed to be finance supercop

Unbelievable.

I am sure this would enrage the various neo-liberals on this board, save it is unlikely any of them are my fans.

The most "liberal" states are the least free.

Well, it looks like I will be able to get to Dayton Hamvention this year - at least for Friday and Saturday.

So, anybody who follows my Journal want to try to arrange a meet-up there?

VP Biden has stated he wants to see Amtrak get money as a part of the stimulus bill.

I agree with him on this - of the various things that are part of this "stimulus" bill, improving our passenger rail system seems to have a better than average probability of improving our nation's ability to be able to pay off the debt the stimulus bill represents - which I assert should be THE sole metric of whether something gets "stimulus" money or not: "Will spending this NOW help us pay it back LATER?"

However, I am cynical enough to wonder how much of the Amtrak stimulus will go for improvements in the areas nearer Washington, DC and Los Angeles, how much will go for improving the long distance rail service through "fly-over" country, and how much will go to helping create passenger rail service here in the unfashionably "red" states - such as helping re-instate the "Heartland Flyer".

I would love to see the AutoTrain service expanded to a cross-country run like the Southwest Chief, rather than just servicing the East Coast as it does now.

However, I am too addicted to oxygen to hold my breath until it happens.

First of all, I don't want this published to the frontpage...
Having said that, I have a quick question. I'm a Java guy that manages a few younger java guys. I have been asked to tech a .net guy that (according to his resume) has managed over 30 developers. How do I tech a guy like that? Do I just stick with OO/patterns questions? I know how to tech a java guy, but one that has more experience than me is a daunting task...

I used to say that the wonderful thing about the GNU software stack was that idea that you could design a brand-new microprocessor, implement a GCC and binutils backend for it, make a few changes to the Linux kernel, pull down the sources, do a "for * in packages; do TARGET=mytarget make all install; done" and have a working set of software for that new processor.

That may be the ideal. The reality - not so much.

Consider what ought to be a very simple case: Build binutils, GCC (C and C++), and glibc for the OMAP3 processor, so that you can cross-compile applications on your nice quad-core i7 CPU box and run them on your Beagleboard.

Ought to be a snap, right? Especially if you are running Debian Lenny on both your workstation and the Beagleboard, right? It ought to be just an "apt-get" away to get the crosscompile packages, no building required, right?

<sarcasm>
Come over to my house - after we do the install I'll show you the ocean view from the high-rises in downtown Wichita. The mountains are really breathtaking.
</sarcasm>
(For the US geographically impaired, look here.)

First of all, you cannot install the GCC cross-compiler for ARM, as the packages are busted right now. (In fairness, these packages are not in the main Debian repositories, but they are in the Embedded Debian repo).

OK, so, let's cross compile.

Building binutils and the first pass on GCC (C compiler only) is pretty straightforward.

Now, go look at all the articles/web pages/books on cross compiling, and you will see them usually pointing you toward ulibC, or other C libraries other than GLIBC. "Yes, so what? They are targeting small embedded systems and GLIBC is so large, plus there are the issues of licensing."

No, that's not the reason. The reason is that building GLIBC in a cross-compilation environment is well-nigh impossible.

First, there is the inconsistency on the cross-compilation setup itself. For binutils/GCC or just about any other package, you specify TARGET="your-target-arch" to say "Yes, I may be BUILDING on an x86, but I'm going to be RUNNING on an armel-linux-gnu". Not GLIBC - there you either specify HOST="your-target-arch", or better still you specify what compiler, linker, library archiver, such you want to use and GLIBC "figures it out itself" (because specifying several different but related pieces of information isn't error-prone or anything like that). Indeed, setting the TARGET= for glibc won't do ANYTHING (not even throw a warning that it won't work). Nice, guys. Way to be consistent.

Then there is the fact that as of glibc-2.7, even when you get that right it WON'T BUILD. You get the following errors:
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build/glibc/dlfcn/libdl.so.2', needed by `/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build/glibc/elf/sprof'. Stop.

Go ahead, search the web for that error (you'll want to strip out the "/USER/src/arm-linux-gnueabi/build" part as that is specific to where I am building it).

This problem has been around since 2000. This is not a problem that I alone am seeing. Do you see any solutions to the problem listed in that search? I don't.

This is a pretty severe issue. If you cannot build glibc, you cannot build the C++ compiler. You cannot link programs. You are dead in the water.

And don't bother asking on the crossgcc list. I've done so, and I got one basic response - "you can't do that".

Now, there is a tool called "crosstool" that purports to handle all the patching, hacking (in the pejorative sense) and general screwing around to allow you to build glibc. Pity it doesn't have support for the latest compiler and glibc.

Doesn't it say something when you have to have a tool that patches and generally fiddles about to make the glibc compile? Something like "THIS NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP!"?

"Oh, but GLIBC is *special* - it has to know about the kernel, and the C compiler, and lots of other things. It's going to be tricky to build." Tricky, yes - if there were GOOD, step by step instructions on how to build any given revision of GLIBC I could forgive that.

Search the Web - I've not found any.

OK, skip it. Like some of my college professors would say, "Assume the existence of the compiled library." So, let's cross compile some programs.

Nope. While many programs can be compiled on a wide range of architectures, they cannot be cross-compiled at all. They MUST be compiled on the same architecture as they are being built for.

Look at the Openembedded project. They way they purport to work around this is to have "recipes" that tell them how to build given programs - some get cross-compiles, many get compiled under qemu emulating the target processor.

(Not that I've been able to get Openembedded working, either. All my questions have been met with "Oh, the released version of the tool is busted - get the good version from Subversion" Of course, the Subversion version doesn't work either. And we won't talk about the fallacy "Fixed in $REVISION_CONTROL_SYSTEM := fixed" - that's a separate rant.)

Does it seem crazy to YOU to spend the time coming up with kludgey work-a-rounds for broken Makefiles? Why not simply identify the areas in the Makefiles that are making the broken assumption that the CPU that will run the code is substantially the same as the CPU building the code?

"oohhh, but that's *hard* - and some upstream package maintainers won't accept our patches because they don't feel it's important."

In my opinion, what needs to happen is that *somebody* - Redhat, Debian, Canonical, IBM, Google: I don't CARE who! - needs to make cross-compiling a priority. Imagine what would happen if Canonical said "OK, as of Limpid Llama no packages will be accepted for Ubuntu that don't cross-compile successfully for x86, ARM, PPC, MIPS, and x86-64. Just compiling ON those platforms is not enough - you HAVE to be able to cross-compile FOR those platforms from a different platform as well."

Consider the emerging non-x86 netbook market (which also will include things like the Dell asymmetric processor laptops with an OMAP and an x86) - do you REALLY want to have to build all of Debian on an OMAP just to get that platform supported? Shouldn't it be possible to do the builds on a nice many-core i7 box instead?

I think many of us who follow Free Software have fooled ourselves about the state of support for different architectures for far too long. I think that needs to change.

fyi - can't multiply cause of work, so I've become a twitter man... that's where I do my updating... if you twitter, my id is my last name...

Yeah, really.

Only took that organization like five years to see what the rest of the football world sees... 'bout time!

New job (back to consulting) and current client blocks 'social networks', so I may have to make my return here until the situation changes.

What really sucks is hurricane ike destroyed Cincinnati, and I've been without power at home since Sunday, so even if I wanted to blog on multiply, I can't...

Stay tuned, I suppose...

What happens when a Google camera vehicle needs a fill-up?
Google Gets Gas

There's an old comic that appeared in Dragon Magazine, of the DM to the players:
"... and that passage leads to the unfinished part of the dungeon you feel strangely compelled to avoid."

Sometimes you find that on web sites too. And what's more fun than finding such a site on Google?

I backed into a way to find some street level data that evidently is NOT yet linked into the main data base. Here's how to see some of it:

Follow this link - it will set up a route from one of the repeaters I maintain, just outside of Hutchinson, KS, to KCK. The important bit here is that one endpoint of the journey ends where there is a street view available.

Next, make sure you have the "street view" enabled.

Then, re-calculate the route. You should now have a camera icon at the first turn of the route. If you click it, you will be right outside the gate of the site. That's a 1400' tower, by the by, and my antennas are up at 1200'. Also, that road is a muthaphucker of a washboard - I feel sorry for the poor Googlites going down it.

You cannot zoom into the Hutchinson area and keep the street view yet - I'm guessing they are in the process of loading the data and linking it in, and haven't finished yet.

I've found quite a few areas that are in this "Schroedinger's Cat" state - it looks like there is going to be a drop soon.

Looking at the area around my house (no, I'm not giving a link) I've been able to data this sometime last fall (i.e. September to October, 2008).

(Google folks: If you read this, take US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater, and take US166 from Arkansas City to Riverton. We actually DO have scenic roads in Kansas, they just aren't the major ones.)