Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary Rotating Header Image

April, 2016:

What Coding Starvation Does to You

Apr 30th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

I haven’t done any programming in so long I’m starting to hallucinate. Here is today’s hallucination. Lor’ help me, I would have written the whole thing if I hadn’t already read somewhere that counting syllables in arbitrary words is hard.

Open Dictionary text file; 
Create new output text file;

WHILE NOT EOF(Dictionary) DO 
  BEGIN 
    REPEAT 
      Readln(Dictionary,WordEntry) 
    UNTIL WordIsNoun(WordEntry); 
    ParseOutWord(WordEntry,WordItself); 
    If CountSyllables(WordItself) = 1 THEN 
      BEGIN 
        Capitalize(WordItself); 
        Writeln(OutputFile, WordItself+'y Mc'+ 
                WordItself+'face') 
      END 
  END;

Close dictionary file; 
Close output file;

Sad Puppies 4 and the Doomsday Slate

Apr 26th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
12 comments

SP4 Logo 500 Wid.jpg

Earlier today I sensed a great disturbance in the Internet, as though millions of heads had suddenly exploded in anguish. Oh, wait–today was Hugo Nominations day! So I took a quick look around, and…

…the Puppies had done it again.

I would try to analyze the numbers here, but the folks over at Chaos Horizon have already done it for us. Check back there over the next few days; I suspect a lot more analysis is coming.

My first insight: Only novels get any respect in the SFF universe these days. 3,695 people nominated in the Best Novel category. The next category down only got 2,904 nominations (Dramatic Presentation, Long Form) with ever-slimmer pickins’ after that. Barely a thousand people nominated for the Best Fan Artist category.

The really good news is that there were 4,032 nominating ballots cast, roughly twice what Sasquan got last year. It’s impossible to tell where those new people came from, but whatever their provenance, I’ll bet MidAmericon II isn’t complaining about all that delicious money. That was the idea, after all: The subtitle of Sad Puppies 4 is “The Embiggening.” I was not alone last year in suggesting that the only thing really wrong with the Hugo Awards is that almost nobody participates. 4,000 ballots sound like a lot, but when you consider that 100,000+ people routinely attend events like DragonCon and ComiCon, the Hugos start to look like a rounding error. If 25,000 people registered for Worldcon, and 20,000 nominated, there wouldn’t be enough logs in the Western Hemisphere to roll any single faction to victory.

By my counts (starting with a nice tally on Breitbart) only ten nominees out of a total of eighty were not on one of the Puppy ballots. 70 of 80 is 87%. Obviously, a lot of those 87% were just really good people and works that probably would have been on the ballot anyway. However, one must consider finalists like the TV cartoon show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and (egad) “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle. The works are real, and not hoaxes (though I had to check on Chuck Tingle to be sure) but the nominations sound to me like shows of force.

Which brings us to the Big Ugly: Which Puppy list was the most influential? Another count from the Breitbart results tells me that 61 out of the 80 nominees were on the Rabid Puppies list. 76%. 36 out of the 80 (45%) were on the Sad Puppies list. I grinned to see that, as much as the Puppies claim to loathe Mike Glyer and his fanzine File 770, both are on the final ballot–and both were on the Puppies lists. Anybody with an IQ greater than 17 knows what’s up with that: Last year’s tactic of voting against anything on the Puppy lists will be…complicated…in 2016.

What the anti-Puppies seem to be saying is that they’ll kiss off 2016 and bide their time, confident that E Pluribus Hugo will be added to Worldcon rules next year, and the Puppies will henceforth be out of luck. I’m not going to explain EPH here, though I’m willing to give the new rules a fair chance, knowing that they will be analyzed to death by people way better at number crunching than I. (I doubt I’m alone in thinking that changing the rules after you get your butt whipped sounds, well, weak-king-ish.)

The problem is this: The Puppies may not dominate the ballot in years to come, but one particular slate just might. Nothing in EPH makes the No Award slate difficult to use. (As I suggested earlier, having several anti-Puppy favorites on the Puppy lists will indeed make it a little tricky.) Last year the anti-Puppies encouraged their followers to vote a slate of one–No Award–against any category dominated by the Puppies. It worked: Five categories were reduced to irrelevance via the No Award slate. I suspect it’s going to happen again this year.

What happens in the wake of EPH? Well, c’mon. Do you honestly think Vox Day won’t use No Award too? He’s said straight out that he intends to burn down the Hugo Awards. Last year the APs pretty much did it for him, but if he can get his recs into three quarters of the slots, he can burn down as many categories as he wants via No Award. This isn’t the place to get into all the usual fistfights about Vox and where he gets his power and why we all need to condemn him. (That’s been done to death.) This is the place to realize that what one side can do, the other side can too.

It’s a mess, eh? Well, I have an audacious suggestion: Change the Hugo rules again so that No Award is outlawed. If EPH works as designed, the APs won’t need No Award. And if No Award is outlawed, somebody like Vox can’t use it.

No Award is The Doomsday Slate. Unless it’s outlawed, people on one side or another will use it until there’s nothing left of the Hugo Awards. Think hard now: Is that really what you want?

Shoveling Heavy Metal

Apr 25th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

I literally didn’t know that it was Earth Day until the metal recycler guy thrust a bright green T-shirt in my hands. I had just sold them $77 worth of metal, and on Earth Day they were giving away T-shirts. He invited us to stay for their free Earth Day barbecue, but I had to decline: I was still shoveling.

I missed Earth Day mostly because I was shoveling. That morning I had shoveled close to 300 pounds of metal into the back of the Durango. About 30 pounds of that was bronze and copper, and another 100 or so was aluminum. The rest was iron and steel.

My scrap metal collection is legendary; why did I let so much of it get away? Easy: I dumped the stuff that wasn’t likely to be useful. Chunks of pure copper don’t machine well. Brass is way better–I wasn’t giving away any brass. The bronze was a sort of special case. Carol’s dad had given me several husky bronze Acme-threaded bearing brackets that once gripped a lead screw from some very large but long-dead surface grinder. Each one was bigger than my fist. I’d been staring at them (and carting them from state to state) since the early 1980s, and never came up with a use for them. In the cause of The Duntemann Ensmallening, I decided to trade them in for something much more useful: cash.

Ditto the aluminum, most of which consisted of aluminum grinding wheels from very large but (probably) long-dead surface grinders. The largest were 24″ in diameter and 5/8″ thick. All had once had a coating of fine diamond abrasive on their edges, suitable for the grinding of carbide dies, which was what Carol’s dad did for a living. When the diamond coating got thin at any spot along the edge, the wheel was swapped out for a new one and scrapped.

He gave me a lot of them.

I did keep a few, and I have used a couple in the last 35 years, especially the smaller, 8″ diameter ones. The rest of the aluminum pile was odd stuff I’d picked up cheap at hamfests in the 42 years I’ve been going to hamfests. As for the steel, well, it consisted of odd and generally rusty chunks that used to be frames for chairs, lamp base weights, a beat-to-hell surface plate, and several 3′ lengths of badly galvanized (and now corroding) 1″ threaded rod that I no longer remember obtaining at all. 1″ threaded rod is stock at Artie’s Ace Hardware in Phoenix, and I don’t have to scrub the rust off of theirs. Out it went.

I’m probably due for another Advil. There’s a hard deadline for emptying the garage utterly: On May 4 the jackhammers will show up to take out our crumbling garage slab. Much of what I will be doing between now and then will be shoveling. Tomorrow I’ll shovel a load of ancient computers, computer accessories, dead cordless phones, ratty computer speakers, and cables (RCA / VGA / parallel etc) into the car to take up to Best Buy for recycling. I still have to Craigslist my small workbench and figure out how to con somebody into taking a middling list of dead or limping radio gear, including my Kenwood TS-520S (blew out its balanced modulator) a WWII Navy MAB receiver, condition unknown, and a Heathkit HW-22A that’s immaculate but may or may not work. (I bought it cheap at an estate sale, sans cables.) Most regretted may be my Hammarlund HQ-145X general-coverage receiver, which was my SWL radio in college and later my Novice receiver. It always had a few quirks, and probably has a couple of bad tubes, as it doesn’t bring much in anymore. (I haven’t had it opened up in 30 years or so.) Alas, the Hammarlund is enormous, and does nothing that my IC-736 doesn’t already do, in a third the space. I’ll miss it, I guess. But that’s what an Ensmallening is all about.

I’m going to ask $75 for the whole pile and see what happens. I could probably have gotten more for them by selling each item individually, but it would be a bad use of my time, considering all the shoveling that still has to be done.

I may try to foist a few things off on my hapless partygoers at our nerd party next Saturday. We still have a Midcentury Modern steel stepstool, decorated with drips of every color known to Sherwin Williams, and a “flying saucer” charcoal grill from the ’50s. Beyond that, what’s left is lumber scraps and useless crap that’s going out on the curb this Wednesday, if I can force myself to keep shoveling.

No ifs. Shovel I must, and shovel I will, until the Ensmallening is done.

By Request: A 30-Year-Old Manuscript Page

Apr 16th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Whew. Took another 30-odd pounds of paper up 14 feet of stairs and out to the garage, and I’m catching my breath again. This is turning out to be weight training with a vengeance.

Anyway. Reader Vince asked (in the comments under my entry of April 14, 2016) if I could post a page from the manuscript of my 1986 book, Complete Turbo Pascal, Second Edition, which turned up while purging the collection in our furnace room. I chose a page at random just now, slapped it on the scanner, and there you go. It’s mostly readable, even at 500 pixels wide, because it was good-quality output from my first laser printer. The page number means nothing. Each chapter was its own file, with page numbers starting from 1.

Keep in mind that this was a book focused on the IBM PC and (egad) Z80 CP/M. In other words, this was a book about getting things done. I acknowledged the pure spirit of completely portable Pascal–and then dynamited it into the next county.

It’s interesting to me, as a writer, how the conventions for writing book-length nonfiction have changed in the last 30 years. When I wrote my chapters for Learning Computer Architecture with the Raspberry Pi two or three years ago, we agreed to work in a common word processor format (.docx) using comments, and applying paragraph and header styles to the text as we went. The chapters looked like printed book pages even while they were being written. Thirty years ago, we wrote in whatever word processor we wanted, and then sent a huge big pile of paper to the publisher. I don’t think I sent actual files to a publisher until the first edition of my assembly book in 1989–and I sent the files on 5″ floppy disks through the mail after sending that big pile of paper!

By the way, my Raspberry Pi book is still a live project, and I sent back my second chapter of six yesterday after author review of copyedits. Beyond that, I can’t tell you much, especially when I think it might actually hit print.

Ahh. Breathing normally again. Time to lug another boxful out to the garage.

Flickr : , ,

Odd Lots

Apr 15th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
13 comments

The Duntemann Ensmallening Continues

Apr 14th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

As I lugged box after box from our furnace room up All Those Stairs (people who have been to our Colorado house known of which I speak) it wasn’t just the boxes that were heavy. These were boxes of computer books and magazines, and all of them went into our recycle can for next week’s pickup. With each tip of a box into the recycle can, my heart grew heavier. These were not somebody else’s DOS programming books. Uh-uh. These were copies of Degunking Windows, Degunking Your PC, Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses, Jeff Duntemann’s Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide, and Assembly Language Step By Step, 2E (2000).

Lots of them.

When an author writes a book, the publisher typically sends him one or more boxes of books without charge. I’ve been a published tech book author since mid-1985. Do the math. Ok, sure, I no longer have box quantities of Complete Turbo Pascal. However, I do have the printed manuscript for Complete Turbo Pascal 2E (1986) in a monsteroso 3-ring binder. (See above.) The damned thing is 4″ thick. That book was work. And if I recall (I no longer have it) the printed manuscript for Borland Pascal 7 From Square One was in two binders, each 3″ thick. I also found the original submission manuscript for Pascal from Square One with Pascal/MT+, from mid-1984. That manuscript was sold, but the publisher prevailed upon me to rewrite it for another Pascal compiler whose name you’d know. (Alas, they changed the title on me. But they’re dead, and I’m still alive, so I win. And there will be a Lazarus from Square One someday.) Do I keep these manuscripts? I still have the word processor files on disk, though I’m not entirely sure about the Pascal/MT+ ones. It’s another ten or twelve pounds of paper, and I freely admit I haven’t looked at either binder since we moved to Colorado in 2003. So I guess they have to go.

How heavy can your heart get before it collapses into a black (red?) hole?

I know a lot of you have been through one or more ensmallenings of your own, because you’ve told me. A couple of you have offered me your complete runs of PC Techniques/VDM. I already have five or six copies of all sixty issues. I’m keeping a full set. The others will feed the can as soon as I catch my breath enough to lug them up the stairs. (I’m not writing this entry because I have time on my hands…)

A lot of other odd stuff has come to light: My original Rio MP3 player, year unknown. A box of 3.5″ floppies. My father’s medium-format Graflex camera. My own trusty but now useless Nikon film SLR. What’s to become of it? The Rio is scrap, as is Carol’s final-generation APS film camera. My SLR is probably not worth much anymore. About my dad’s Graflex I have no idea. I’ll probably keep them both for the time being. A great deal of other stuff is going out on the curb. The concrete people are replacing the garage slab on May 4, and the garage has to be dead-empty by then. What needs to be kept from the garage collection has to come down to the furnace room, which means gobloads of other stuff must exit the furnace room first, and forever.

Man, this is work. And work at 6600 feet, at that.

You’ve heard me say this before, though I’ve forgotten who said it originally: Not everything from your past belongs in your future. Keep everything that reminds you of your past, and you end up turning into a museum that only you ever enter…

…if you ever actually do.

Time’s up. Another load or six needs to go up the stairs. They say it gets easier after the first twenty loads. I guess I’ll find out.

A Grand Ride North, and a New Grand Champion

Apr 12th, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Dash Jeff Carol Tarryall 2016-cropped-500w.jpg

We’re back in Colorado Springs, and sooner than we thought, too. A day came early last week when we realized that we had pretty much gotten everything done that we expected to while wintering over. Furthermore, there was a big dog show in Denver on April 9-10. Dash’s coat was in pretty good shape. The weather forecast looked marvelous throughout the West. (Sorry about the East Coast, guys.) So we looked at each other, nodded, and started throwing things into the Durango.

It’s 835 miles, all of it Interstate, and we’ve done it many times by now. We did well enough to stop for an afternoon in Albuquerque, to visit with a friend of ours who has Dash’s brother, Charlie. As we had all four of the Pack with us, and Sherry has two Bichons of her own (both boys) it turned into a backyard Bichon party very quickly. There was much running around and squirting-of-things, which is all any (male) Bichon would ask of a party. Everybody slept really well that night, not least of whom were the two of us.

We got into the Springs Thursday night, turned on the water, and got a decent night’s sleep. We dropped everybody but Dash off at Gramdma Jimi’s the next morning, and headed up to Denver for the show. Most of our Bichon Club friends were there, and nine Bichons were entered. Dash won Best of Breed for the Owner Handled category both days. This meant that he would represent the breed in the Group competition. As its name implies, the Non-Sporting Group is a kind of none-of-the-above category containing breeds including the Poodle, Shiba Inu, Dalmatian, Boston Terrier, Keeshond, and others that aren’t good fits in any of the other groups. I’ve often wondered why the Dalmatian isn’t in the Working Group, and why the Boston Terrier–sheesh–isn’t in the Terrier Group. Doubtless there are historical issues, all of which have long been forgotten.

No matter. Dash looked about as good as he ever does, thanks to a foot bath and a great deal of fussing by Carol. On Saturday he took Third Place in the Non-Sporting Group for owner/handled dogs, and on Sunday he took Second Place, ditto. We took home two very fancy ribbons, and–more important–a large number of points. Dash won 45 owner-handled points at the show, which gives him 225 owner-handled points overall. This makes him the #2 owner-handled Bichon in the country right now. Given that the #1 Bichon has only 350 owner-handled points, it’s actually a contest. (The photo above is by Patrina Walters Odette, and used with permission. Thanks, Patrina!)

But more than that, the additional points make Dash a Grand Champion. Championships in dog showing are a little like dans in karate: There is an ascending hierarchy of championships, based on an entirely different tally of Grand Championship points. Dash made Champion a couple of years ago. The Phoenix Project slowed us down; there wasn’t a lot of showing going on in 2015. However, Dash has done so well in the few shows we’ve entered that he accumulated 25 Grand Championship points and took Grand Champion this past weekend. The next step is Bronze Grand Championship, which requires 100 Grand Championship Points. This is four times what Dash has now, but we may give it a shot. Beyond that are Silver Grand Championship (200 points), Gold Grand Championship (400 points) and Platinum Grand Championship (800 points.) Whew. That’s a whole lotta brushing, on both Dash’s and Carol’s ends of the brush. Let’s see how life unfolds for the next couple of years.

And unfolding it is. We now have the task of getting the Colorado house ready to sell. This means sifting, sorting, selling and/or giving away a lot of stuff, and shipping the rest down to Phoenix. It was necessary (if maybe a little unnerving) to dump two boxes of my books into the recycle bin. I have a couple of pristine copies of Degunking Your PC and Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses…do I need a whole publisher’s box of both? It’s going to be harder with my assembly book and my Wi-Fi book, but downsizing means…cutting down the size of your stuff. As people who have been here know, we have a lot of stuff.

So the downsizing continues. More as it happens. Anybody want some plywood?

Odd Lots

Apr 1st, 2016
by Jeff Duntemann.
10 comments