Perfection is a shy and elusive target, crawling ever further back into the crevice between measurement and asymptote, between real and ideal.
That having been said, the bike now feels 99.9% dialed-in. That only took, what, almost a year? (To be fair, the thing that took the longest was the drivetrain, and I made one costly mistake there, with cascading consequences. I suspect that I’ll turn the next one, whenever and whatever it might be, around much more quickly.)
With apologies to Ed Nather:
The most perfect checkin comment I ever saw
was a few years back, at Juniper.
An engineer named Dan,
not related to your humble scribe,
was making a fix
to the way the routing engines in a redundant system
resolved the question of which one was active
and which one was standing by.
Reading his one-line summation of his efforts,
I thought to myself:
Here is the essence of wisdom.
Here are words that might have sprung
from the pen of his countryman Machiavelli.
Do not declare yourself master until you have become master.
Neil Gaiman once said
That one of the hallmarks of good fiction
Is the way it leaves room for things to mean
More than they literally mean.
Which is true as far as it goes.
But it turns out to be true
of more than just fiction.
Over the years I’ve had frequent occasion
to appreciate the reminder
that prudence and humility
are so often one and the same.
Faisal offhandedly mentioned something called Aptana, which I’d never heard of before and promptly had to look up. It turns out to be an IDE for AJAX, but that is not the point.
The point is that when I glanced at the right column of the project’s homepage, some combination of carelessness, distraction, and excessive caffeine consumption tricked my brain into reading “Milestone Release” as “Millstone Release”, and I realized that I’d inadvertently stumbled upon an expression the software-development world has long been silently aching for.
That shitty build you only tossed over the fence to DevTest because management was breathing down your neck, and which causes you to spend more time fielding questions than it would have taken to fix the bugs? Millstone Release. That ill-starred 2.0 version that you began with bright eyes and pure intentions, but which was oozing a noxious trail of second-system effect by the time you managed to boot it out the door? Millstone Release.
“Millstone Release: Whether or not you drown instantly, you’ll be wearing it around your neck for the rest of your life.”
I’m off to ring the OED. Or at least see what’s involved in setting up a CafePress store.
One thing that confused me as I first poked around the edges of the DIY saber scene were the periodic references to “Graflex” and, less frequently, “Heiland”, such as on UltraSabers’ conversion page, which reads, in part: “We do not convert older Graflex/Heiland Flashgun sabers. We do know people who can help and can point you in the right direction.”
I’d never heard of either company. Who were they? Low-profile prop producers from the days before the ascendancy of Master Replicas? Not so much. It turns out that they’re makers of photographic equipment, and that the original props for Luke and Vader’s sabers were fabricated from the handles of professional flashguns. I don’t know why this surprised me so much: after all, I’d known for years that Han’s blaster was derived from a broom-handle Mauser, just as the Stormtroopers’ rifles were adapted from vintage-World-War-II Sterling submachine guns. “Everything old is new again”, indeed.
Luke’s hilt was made from a Graflex 3-Cell: you can see a beautifully detailed breakdown of the hilt and its construction, including differences between the A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back versions, here. (Note the addition of grommets near the base, and the replacement of the original control box’s LED-calculator-display lens with a chunk of card-edge connector from an HP-44 bus.)
It’s also worth noting that the distinctive S-curve shape at the top of the saber hilt, the portion referred to as the “emitter shroud”, has itself become known as a “Graflex curve” among saber enthusiasts. Given that it was, as far as I can tell, part of the original flashgun design, this seems entirely appropriate. (I’ll have more to say on the subject of the Graflex curve in a later post.)
Vader’s saber, meanwhile, seems to have been the subject of some historical controversy, or at least confusion. For a long time it was believed to be a Heiland Synchronar, but as is explained here, it turns out to have been a “Microflash” produced by Heiland’s British arm, Micro Precision Products, or MPP. (At least, the A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back versions were. By the time of Return of the Jedi, the original MPP prop had been either lost or stolen, and the prop department simply gave a Graflex the signature black-highlight treatment.)
Knowing all of this does not, fortunately, fill me with the urge to go out and track down ancient surplus camera parts for the very utmost in verisimilitude. Yet.
Via the ever-handy Good Morning Silicon Valley comes Says-It’s Official Seal Generator.
Once I saw that the gallery of iconography included a raised fist, I was pretty much obligated to use it for a rendition of something Greg said several years ago.
Given enough time, I might actually find something useful to do with it.
Recent acquisition of a hot-air rework station, and attendant attempts at surface-mount soldering, have taught me that, to paraphrase Frank Herbert, “God made SMD rework to train the faithful. One cannot go against the will of God.”
In truth, it’s more than a little gratifying once you start to get the hang of it. Spark Fun‘s excellent tutorials help quite a bit. But there’s a point, somewhere around the fifth time you’ve blown a component the approximate size of a fingernail clipping clean off the board, where you start to wonder whether maybe you wouldn’t be more fulfilled collecting stamps or something.
Things (I think) I’ve learned so far:
The fact that you’re working on a very small part does not automatically imply that you should use the small nozzle. The small nozzle produces faster airflow, which increases your odds of accidentally blowing a small part about.
Don’t overdo it when you dome a pad in preparation for soldering down a component. Soldering through-hole parts using an iron accustoms you to using lots of solder as you build joints. SMD is all about very thin layers of solder pulling components into place via surface tension. Excessively generous domes just get squished by your component’s lands, sending solder to places where odds are you didn’t want it.
If I succeed in my current rework attempt, I might actually attempt to build something new next.
Is it really so much to ask that if you want to work in the tech industry, you should be able to perform basic triage of a problem, identify the relevant aspects of your configuration or methodology, and synthesize a succinct summary of the preceding items? Apparently, yes. Certainly it seems to much to assume that your cow-orkers will possess these skills.
All I know is that if I get too many more bug reports of the “Wah! It doesn’t work!” variety, with no establishing context and no further detail, I’m going to hoist the black flag and start inflicting paper cuts with printed pages from “How to Ask Questions The Smart Way“.
I Can Has Cheezburger? is kind of like Cute Overload, only with “im in ur base“-style captions.
In particular, it has given us the Walrus Bucket Saga, reproduced here, as they say, “for your convenience”.
Personal favorites: “Miss Mah Bucket“, “I R Not Squeezy Toy“, and “Mah Camouflage iz Workin“.
Late, of course. I swear I don’t know how regular bloggers manage to keep up the volume.
Anyway, the weekend was mostly a ball, modulo getting hammered by something that could be a bug, but is likely as not just a bad case of seasonal allergies.
On Saturday, I attended the Maker Faire, where a tremendous amount of cool stuff was on display. TechShop had almost an entire hall — one of the smaller ones, but still — to itself, with a bunch of machines in operation. The laser engravers were almost hypnotic to watch, as their flying heads burned crisp, variable-depth designs into sheets of wood band by precise band.
The plasma-arc cutter, meanwhile, bordered on intimidating: I watched it cut copies of TechShop’s gear-wheel logo out of eighth-inch steel as easily as an X-Acto knife slices dolls out of paper. When I remarked how fast it was, the woman exhibiting it informed me with just a trace of glee that its top speed was considerably higher still.
I strongly suspect that I’ll become a TechShop member in the not-too-distant future.
I’d been eyeing the Make Controller Kit with an even mix of curiosity and desire for a while, but deterred by the long backlog from actually taking the plunge and ordering one. However, the sight of several dozen, stacked in unassuming cardboard boxes at the Maker Store, just waiting to be purchased, proved to be more than a match for my limited reserves of self-restraint.
It should come in handy as I ramp up on mucking around with DIY sabersmithy — I have some ideas involving sensors and color-modulated RGB LEDs that won’t get very far at all without some kind of microcontroller to tie the pieces together.
I also picked up a copy of Make Volume 10, which lays out plans for a so-called “brain machine” — also known as a “Sound and Light Machine”, or SLM — based on Limor (“Lady Ada“) Fried’s MiniPOV v3 kit. I’ve always been intrigued by SLMs, but put off by the high price tag. For less than $20, it’s hard to see going wrong.
Unfortunately, by about mid-afternoon I was congested enough to have trouble hearing through my right ear. After a failed attempt to sign up for the afternoon Ybox workshop, which was totally overbooked, I called it a day and headed home. I had a great time, though, and definitely plan to be back next year.
I rounded out the day doing some work on the sabers, mainly on the Luxeon conversion of my Darth Maul, which will be documented in greater detail later.
Things after that are a bit of a blur. I slept poorly, tossing and turning with my thoughts arace, probably owing to the stimulant effect of the decongestants I took too close to bedtime, and consequently spent most of the morning feeling groggy before collapsing back into an afternoon-spanning nap.
Still, all and all, a pretty good weekend.