Monthly Archives: August 2005

Fetch me a Ten-Story Fork

Idiots

The Space Shuttle Discovery made it down safely. This is a good thing for many reasons, the very least of which is that I won’t look like a ghoulish little shit for writing what follows.

Immediately after Discovery‘s launch, NASA announced that it was grounding the fleet until such time as it could be assured that the falling-foam problem, already thought to be fixed, really was fixed. Make no mistake: I applaud the administrators who made the doubtless-difficult decision to give astronaut safety a higher priority than public relations, and I don’t mean to kick them while they’re down.

But this seems like a good time to cast a critical and unforgiving eye upon the Shuttle program as a whole. I mean, we’re talking about a launch vehicle that was designed more than a quarter-century ago, and has killed an appreciable fraction of its highly-trained passengers. It never worked that well to begin with: it can only get up to Low Earth Orbit, for one thing, and therefore needs an additional booster to launch most satellites and probes.

As ‘reusable’ launch vehicles go, it winds up throwing a goodly amount of material away. The main fuel tank — source of the falling foam that doomed Columbia — burns up the atmosphere and is thus a complete write-off. The solid-rocket boosters are nominally recoverable, but at such expense that it wouldn’t be significantly more expense to build new ones every time. (They disassemble into segments for transport after recovery; the gap between segments is supposed to be sealed by O-rings — the infamous O-rings that hardened in the cold and allowed a jet of flame from the SRBs to lance into Challenger‘s main fuel tank, destroying the entire vehicle.)

All of this is very old news.

It’s fashionable again these days to whine and piss and moan the old refrain that America is losing its competetive edge, that all the good jobs are going overseas, and so on ad nauseam. So let’s do something about it. Let’s put our heads together, let’s loosen the purse strings — and for fuck’s sake, someone please promise Burt Rutan free drinks or whatever the hell it is he likes, if that’s what it takes to get him to join the huddle — and let’s design and build something truly audacious, so that we can finally send the Shuttle off to its well-earned retirement.

Serious Profession

Books

Neil Gaiman has a new book coming out next month, Anansi Boys. (Judging from the title, it could be set in the same universe as American Gods. Or it could be a differet beast entirely. I’m sure I could find out, but that would be peeking.) At any rate, I hadn’t known this was coming, and am excited about it.

The audiobook will be read by Gaiman’s friend and sometime collaborator, the blisteringly funny Lenny Henry — the man who brought Gareth Blackstock, the title character from “Chef!“, to such memorable life. I hadn’t had a clue this was coming, and I’m ecstatic about it.

Henry has a beautiful voice: rich, resonant, and mellifluous all at once. To hear it reading Gaiman’s evocative prose should be an absolute treat. If the audiobook version is, as I expect, unabridged, its release will likely mark the first time I favor an audiobook over its print counterpart.

But see what Neil has to say about it, and judge for yourself.

Hate Sink: Epilogue

Hardware

It turns out that the Notorious K.R.I.D. had a work-supplied, Pentium-4-based Dell system with a noisy, rattling heat-sink fan that was slowly driving him nuts.

Blame for this rests solely and squarely with Dell: their standard practice since time immemorial has been to equip their machines with a large, semi-passive CPU heatsink, place an exhaust fan on the back of the machine, and connect the two with a plastic shroud. In theory, this is a better approach than the standard one involving a fan blowing air onto the heat sink: Dell’s approach draws air over the heat sink and then ejects it from the machine, rather than running the risk of simply recycling the same ever-hotter air. It would be a better approach in practice, too, if Dell would only find some way of turning the shroud into something other than a bullhorn to amplify the fan’s roar.

So we set about removing the Dell heat sink, and replacing it with the infamous PIPE101. This process was surprisingly complicated, and involved a number of unexpected discoveries.

  1. The thermal tape which Dell uses as an interface between the CPU and heatsink is surprisingly sticky. Sticky enough, at least, to pull the CPU right out of the locked ZIF socket. I didn’t know that was possible. Miraculously, none of the pins were bent.
  2. Dell, in keeping with its tradition of reinventing perfectly good wheels whenever possible, used a non-standard retaining bracket for the heatsink. Bastards.
  3. Mercifully, they didn’t have the inclination or the opportunity to deviate from the standard spacing for the heatsink-bracket retention holes. Consequently there was hope that if we could track down a spare Socket 478 heatsink-retention bracket, we’d be in business. Thanks to the ever-helpful folks at BlueBonePC, we obtained one.
  4. This was when we discovered that while the spacing on the holes is standard, the placement of certain capacitors near the CPU is not; a standard heatsink-retention bracket will not fit without modification. Dirk promptly supplied the neecessary modification by clipping out part of our bracket, in a way that didn’t seem to compromise its function. (Bastards!)
  5. The rest of the installation went relatively smoothly. The PIPE101 fit into the available space with room to spare, and Thermaltake’s approach to Socket 478 retention proved far less squirrelly than their take on Socket 939. Of course, it was only after I’d installed heatsink and fan that I realized I’d forgotten the backing plate on the other side of the motherboard, but never mind. I was even able to remove the heatsink without simultaneously extracting the CPU this time.

We then attached an exhaust fan to the back of the case through means so crude you really don’t want to know about them — I have only one word to say on the matter: “wingnuts” — reconnected the machine, and fired it up. Miraculously, it booted despite the astounding amounts of abuse and vendor-unapproved handling to which we had subjected it.

At last report, it is running strong, but silent. Dirk is happy, and so am I, to have found a suitable home for the heatsink at last.

(I’m also happy in no small measure because Dirk reciprocated by expertly tuning up my bike, from out-of-true wheel to balky front derailleur to slow leak in front tire. He also replaced my despised toe-clip pedals with a pair of Speedplay Frogs which he sold to me at friend prices, and with which I have rapidly fallen in love. Better than just do all these things for me and present a fait accompli at the end, he let me observe every step, so that I have half a chance of doing for myself in future.)

Angry With Flavor

Comics

I have no idea what Megagamerz is all about. Well, almost no idea. I’m pretty sure that Jon Rosenberg, of Goats fame, is in one way or another responsible for this supposed brainchild of Diablo the Satanic Chicken.

Actually, I suspect that the whole point is to be about nothing at all. In that, it reminds me strongly of Jerkcity, only with snappier writing, more Dada, and substantially less homoeroticism.