Gumstix

I picked these up a few months ago, you can get a lot more info at gumstix.com and gumstix.org. They are an embedded Linux development kit, the parts are basically what you would see in an average PDA (sans LCD) broken out into separate boards which you can plug together in different combinations. The individual pieces are fairly inexpensive but when you get a bunch of them, well, it costs about the same as the PDA.



From left to right:

gumstix connex 400 - 400Mhz Intel XScale PXA255, 64MB SDRAM, 4MB flash. This board is fairly useless on its own as it has no peripheral connectors or wireless, you plug it into the other boards you want to use. There is a version with bluetooth on the board which I did not get. It has a 60 pin connector pictured and a 92 pin connector on the back. Reset button on upper right of board.

audiostix AC-97 - audio board, stereo in/out, power and USB client connection

etherstix - 10-100baseT wired ethernet and power.

cfstix - CompactFlash card slot and power, you can plug a CompactFlash wireless card into it to get wireless.

tweener - This gives you a serial port connection and power. I used it once to configure the ethernet board and then just put the board on the local network.

breakout-gs - This gives you easier soldering access to a lot of the XScale pins, mainly for an LCD. Also has USB client plug and power.

The XScale is a system on a chip, so these boards really have very little on them aside from bringing CPU pins out to usable connectors and any support components needed to do that.

You can only use the boards in particular combinations, for example the wired ethernet and ComplactFlash boards both use the 92 pin connector so you can only use one at a time. gumstix has a board which has both CompactFlash and wired ethernet on it, so if you wanted both you just get another board to do it.

These setups look pretty flimsy just plugged together, the boards have holes in them so you can screw standoffs in and make it physically stable.



This is the CPU board sandwiched between the ethernet and audio boards.



This is the CPU board sandwiched between the ethernet and breakout boards.



This is the CPU board with the tweener and breakout board attached.

I bought this to educate myself on the XScale, embedded Linux and get my soldering skills back. The first thing you learn is that when they mean Linux, they mean Linux, not GNU/Linux. It is a fairly sparse setup, kernel and lightweight command line tools take up most of the 4MB flash. Fortunately they have ssh on flash by default so it was pretty easy to get a board combo on the net and login.

All source is available through a Subversion repository, nice. There is a ton of other software to pick and choose from. Fortunately you can NFS mount more disk space, or get a system with more memory.

Xcode and gcc_select

My work style is such that I typically work on a given project for a few weeks at a time, when my ideas have been satisfied I usually switch to another project for a few weeks, and so on. I switch OS's and machines too, so I have a little mental warm up time between projects and there is always that "duh period" when getting back into a different work environment. Sometimes the "duh period" is good, it forces you to clean up a project such that it does not depend on your mental state in order to be used, you hit a newbie problem because you forgot what you were doing and you go and clean it up.

I had been working on a cross compiling version of gcc, for whatever reason it needed to be compiled with gcc 3.3. On the advice of some instructions floating around I used the command gcc_select to set the compiler version to 3.3 instead of 4.0. The bothersome thing about this command is that it requires root to run and sets the default gcc version for the whole system. Ah, who cares, this is the only project I am working on that I compile from the command line, so it didn't seem like a big deal. All my other projects are done in Xcode which has it's own compiler selection system, right? wrong.

So today I started working on one of my OS X apps which I compile as a Universal Binary with gcc 4.0, or so I thought. I cleaned the project and started a rebuild and the rebuild died. Uh, staring at the build log the first thing I noticed was that it couldn't exec ccobj1, weird, my thoughts instantly turned to "did something get deleted?". Then the second thing I noticed was that it was using gcc-3.3. Uh "did I change something in the project and forget about it?", nope. My SDK was set correctly for building universals. I looked at the build rules and the system default was gcc 3.3, 3.3 doesn't support -arch i386 on my machine and the compiler was dying as one would expect.The first thought was to add build rules which explicitly said 4.0, but something else was going on.

Then I remembered gcc_select, switched it back to 4.0, restarted Xcode and everything was back proper.

This seemed like weird behavior to me, there is so much in Xcode to specify exactly what is going on, yet this command which is for all intents and purposes unrelated to Xcode projects affects which compiler is used. Xcode knows how to run different versions of gcc, the universal SDK needs 4.0, yet it went and used 3.3 by gcc_select's request.

Hopefully I remember that the project that requires gcc 3.3 requires gcc 3.3, or I'll have another one of those "duh period"s. Let's hope this doesn't go on indefinitely.

30 years ago this month

Intel's Robert Noyce on the cover of Business Week March 1, 1976



Intel's then status




Quote from AMD



Some things haven't changed, the usual lineup of crappy American cars

The Kodak Brownie

(This post could also be considered a Safari bug report, as none of the versions of Safari (2.0.3 (417.8) included) I have display the scaled images properly, works fine in Firefox)

I ran across one of these recently, the Kodak Brownie Number 2 Model A, introduced 1904



They are basically worthless, available on eBay somewhat readily for a couple bucks plus shipping. The lens retracts into the body and the door snaps shut, making for a portable little box.

It has a universal 1/4" tripod mount on it, on the bottom and side. Interesting that this standard has lasted so long, even on today's small digital cameras there is this relatively huge amount of space taken up by the standard tripod mount. I wonder how old this standard is, the web as usual is useless for figuring out such things.

The new v570 has a sort of retro resemblance to the Brownie, I don't know if this is intentional, inspired by car manufacturers, or just coincidence, a lot of things are box shaped after all.



While researching the Brownie I found that there was a stereo version released in 1905



The v570 has two lenses, too bad they didn't mount them horizontally and add a stereo image option, that'd be kind of cool.

Apple's new Boston store in the Back Bay hits first snag

World reknown architect Frank Gehry designed the renovation of what is now the Virgin Megastore in Boston at the corner of Massachusetts Ave and Newbury St.



Unfortunately I can't find a full picture of the store to illustrate my post better, but it is an early Gehry design and very sedate. The building is fairly plain, a tall box with some awning like things popping out at the bottom and top. It is a very prominent retail space in Boston and is at the edge of the Back Bay.

The interesting thing about the building is that it has a large corner at the top taken out and what appears to be a plain shelf like area which is big enough to fit a car. If you weren't thinking about it you wouldn't even notice it.

The design originally called for a large tea bag to be put there, a symbol of the Boston Tea Party. A little amusing but nothing too outrageous considering the simplicity of the building. Well, the Back Bay Architectural Commission shot down the plan and the tea bag was never installed. So to this day the shelf sits empty.

Cut to today and Apple is planning to put a new store in Boston on Boylston St, at the edge of the Back Bay. I assume this will be a big prominent store and up to Apple's usual standards. The Boston Globe reports on Apple's progress so far.

Apple's proposal to raze site worries Back Bay panel

Copy Cop is a low budget copy shop and they typically occupy pretty dreadful looking retail spaces. The Fidelity office is low key and fits in architecturally, they are also a powerhouse company in Boston so pushing things through was probably a little easier.

Well, I wish Apple luck in their endeavour to put a store in the historic Back Bay area. They probably won't be able to have Gehry work on the job, he just got done giving the Back Bay a big middle finger across the river.

MIT's Stata Center

Prediction: Apple to announce Conroe/Merom based Power Mac G5 replacement at WWDC

Yesterday I was reading this article at Anandtech about Intel putting the smackdown on AMD on the desktop and they mention that the processor wont ship for another 6 months. Then today I read this article about how the WWDC is delayed until August.

Put two and two together.

Modern furniture disasters, the LC2 sofa

If I had a big office in a big tower with a big waiting room I would furnish it with the Le Corbusier LC2 petite sofa. I would make those who wanted to deal with me wait in the waiting room for hours, their choice, stand on a hard concrete floor or sit in an LC2 sofa. By the time they see me, they would be so defeated by the waiting room that they would succumb to my every whim. A modernist torture chamber designed by Le Corbusier himself.



The LC2 club chair of an earlier post barely passes as seating because its one redeeming quality is that it has sides, sides which just barely support and embrace you, just enough to make you feel like you aren't about to slide onto the floor.

The LC2 sofa has sides, sides which are very far apart, sides which abandon the person seated, you can only use one side at a time, so you lean on it and slowly slide off the sofa. If you don't slide, the cushion underneath you slides out. There is nothing to hold onto as the sofa slowly tells you that you are not welcome to sit on it. The backbreaking low back, the horribly firm seats and the failure of any part of the sofa to hold you in place. It rejects all but perhaps its creator, for nothing is worthy of sitting on it.

Shortly after first getting this sofa a house guest decided to sleep on the floor instead of this sofa. I tried to sit in it myself, but found the firmness of the foam infuriating. I stripped the leather off, stabbed the foam repeatedly with a large long knife in hopes of somehow breaking down the insane firmness. Yes, this is true, and no it did not work.

Since I don't have a big office in a big tower, if you have to wait outside my office and find yourself in an LC2 sofa, it's not because I am trying to break your spirit. It's because it looks cool and no one in my house wants it here.

Emma on the other hand has already had her spirit broken, she isn't allowed to go to the bathroom in the house, chew up pillows anymore or sleep on the bed, so she doesn't mind sleeping on the LC2 sofa, but sometimes she prefers a set of stairs.

Modern furniture disasters, the Wagenfeld lamp

Bauhaus, the epitomy of modern design. You can't talk about modern design without Bauhaus entering the conversation early. Even people who don't know what they are talking about when it comes to modern design will name drop Bauhaus. There, I just did it myself.

My first encounter with Bauhaus was actually the band, some people in my college dorm of long ago kept listening to the Bauhaus rendition of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust". They would listen to the song, over, and over, and over, and over. I really got sick of it, and them, it was an omen that I did not see before me.

Jump to my Foolish Period of buying "modern" items, and we have the Wagenfeld lamp.



"Impeccably crafted of clear and opaline glass, and nickel-plated metal, this lamp's balanced proportions adhere strictly to the original Bauhaus design. Each lamp is numbered and certified with the Bauhaus logo. Accommodates up to 75-watt bulb (not included)."

An icon of modernism in the form of lighting. Represented at MoMA and sold at their online store for a Bauhaus students tuition, $795. $715 if you're a member, I joined just to buy the lamp. Of course!

Unfortunately this lamp only takes a 75-watt bulb, because you really need a 300-400 watt bulb to effectively get light out of it. This is probably one of the poorest pieces of lighting since the whale oil lamp. The opaline glass globe effectively blocks the vast majority of light coming out of the bulb and even in the darkest of rooms it is only a night light. Wagenfeld joins Le Corbusier and the Eameses in the special group of futurists who saw a world of small people, because only a very small person at a very small table with this lamp very near to them could see by its light as it lights up a very small area.

The construction leaves much to be desired , the globe sits on an outer ring of metal which is connected by a few small radial pieces of metal to a center ring, which in turn sits around the bulb socket, tightened in place by a couple screws. The problem is that the screws are merely there for tension and do a terrible job at it. The whole top has a tendency to shift around under the lightest pressure and tilts, rendering this piece of modern design cockeyed.

The whole center of the piece is assembled in a stack and held together at the ends with some screws, this also has a tendency to shift around, looking like a stack of blocks built by a two year old instead of the "impeccably crafted" piece of lighting it is supposed to be.

The coup de grace for this piece is the pull switch, a string with a metal ball at the end. As expected, you pull the string, the light goes on or off. You then let go of the string and the metal ball bounces off the glass center shaft, the aural effect is unpleasant at best.

This small lamp which lit a very small area was wrapped in very small plastic bubbles and put in a not so small box. In a fit of sanity, I dumped this lamp on eBay. Perhaps the buyer in New York City lives in a very small apartment and the small amount of light will add a small amount of joy to a very small room. The lamp turned out to be a better investment than many high tech stocks I purchased around the same time, for while I am not claiming a capital gain for it, it did return a small amount of cash.

Modern furniture disasters, Herman Miller Eames walnut stool

You can't be interested in modern design without running into the Eames, Ray and Charles, Charles and Ray, the husband and wife team who brought us a myriad of furnishings made of bent plywood. And if you've ever looked anywhere other than La-Z-Boy, who incidentally are actually starting to make some cool stuff, for furniture you've heard of Herman Miller. Put two powerhouses of modern design together and what do you get? Another piece of overpriced crap.

The Eames walnut stools, sold by Herman Miller for a mere $750, each.



"Made of solid walnut, these 15-inch-high stools can be used anywhere and are beautifully versatile. Besides being places to sit, they also serve as low tables, display surfaces or simply objects to be admired."

I have three of these, what the fuck was I thinking.

First of all, these are not a solid piece of walnut which is turned. They are made up of many smaller pieces glued together and actually have air voids inside of them at the joints. Do we say plywood is "solid" wood, no, do we say particle board is "solid" wood, no, these are not "solid" wood. They are composites of wood, glue, and worst of all, air.

Second, they are generally useless as tables, both the top and bottom are concave, you put a drink on it and you instantly start worrying about it falling over. Books? Well, unless you put big books on it, your book pile can't go very high. Maybe a single copy of Powers Of Ten. I know my bank account was reduced by a few powers of ten.

As a stool, well, they work, you can actually sit on it, too bad 15 inches is not very high, maybe LeCorbusier and the Eames think the future is full of small people.

I actually like to use things I buy, so I have been using these stools for 6 years or so, during the six years, two of them have come apart, like so:



For 750 bucks you'd think Herman Miller could spring for some more glue. The first one came apart pretty early in the game, after only a year or so. The second one came apart recently and is now in the basement aka The Shop. I will dump some wood glue on the surfaces which should have been glued to begin with, pile on a set of Britannica's and it will be better than new.

The joining of these two pieces just irritates the hell out of me. The pins are set correctly in the smaller piece, but the holes in the larger piece are drilled twice in increasing size, so only the tips of the pins can be effectively glued. After some use they simply give way and the whole piece pops off.

How does such poor construction last for so long? These things were designed over 50 years ago. Have they only recently started making them this way? Have all the stools that came before gone unused, mere showpieces? Are the owners too embarassed to admit they wasted a lot of money on a piece of junk?

Unfortunately Emma doesn't fit on the Eames stool, if she could she would, don't worry, we have more of her in the queue.

Oh yes, I have an Aeron, it's in the queue also.