Automobile Assembly

Fascinating 1936 Footage of Car Assembly Line
Robots, plastics and CNC machining get all the press these days, but the machinery for building cars has always been amazingly complicated.

WORX Quick Switch Driver Drill

WORX WX176 - Switchdriver Cordless Drill & Driver - english - www.worx.com
I don't know if this thing is any good or not, but it sure looks like a good idea. I have spent dozens of seconds, dozens, I'm telling you, changing from drill bits to screwdriver bits and back again in order to complete a project. Of course there are going to be times when you need three different bits and two is just not going to be enough. Too bad. Don't get roped into jobs like that. Stick with jobs where you only need two bits. Amazon is selling these driver-drills for $100.

Ever since the $50 bill became the new $20, a $100 is now like the first indication of serious money. Our housekeeper costs $100 every time she cleans the house. $100 almost covers groceries for a week, if being $30 short is 'covering', and you have don't have to buy any meat because you have some in the freezer. On the other hand $100 will buy gas for three cars. Thank Allah the Saudis hate the Iranians, otherwise gas might be $4 a gallon and gas for 3 cars would be $200.

Groot Beer

Groot Beer - Dutch for Great Bear

I'm reading The Shipping News and the sleepy little fishing village of Killick-Claw gets a visit from a very fancy sailing yacht, Hitler's own sailboat, if the stories are to be believed. The description of the boat is extremely detailed, which makes me think there might be such a boat floating around in the real world, and there is. Didn't belong to Hitler, not sure if Hitler even knew of it, but it is a World War 2 artifact, constructed in Holland, and it is very fancy. Witness the wood carving above the cabin entrance.

The story, or at least one version of it, can be found here.
More pictures here.

Boolean Operations

Gigabyte Intel H81 Mini ITX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboard GA-H81N

Ran into a problem with boolean operations using the Go programming language today. Program to demonstrate the problem can be found here. I'm just noting it here because where else can I put it? My Linux box rolled over and died the other day. I think the super fancy Gigabyte motherboard died. I ordered a replacment from the Amazon. Curious thing is an exact replacement is available, but at five times the price. And Gigabyte seems to be targeting big corporate customers, customers who are concerned about things like maintenance. The market must be fracturing more than I realized.

Characters

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky

Nokia - Bell Labs
Nokia - Bell Labs, The C Programming Langugage, AKA K & R, but nothing here
UTF-8 - Wikipedia
Strings, bytes, runes and characters in Go
The Unicode Consortium - OMG, they're talking about Emoji!

So the people were forced to come up with the bizarre convention of storing a FE FF at the beginning of every Unicode string; this is called a Unicode Byte Order Mark and if you are swapping your high and low bytes it will look like a FF FE and the person reading your string will know that they have to swap every other byte. Phew. Not every Unicode string in the wild has a byte order mark at the beginning.

Bits of code point	First code point	Last code point	Bytes in sequence	Byte 1	Byte 2	Byte 3	Byte 4	Byte 5	Byte 6
7	U+0000	U+007F	1	0xxxxxxx
11	U+0080	U+07FF	2	110xxxxx	10xxxxxx
16	U+0800	U+FFFF	3	1110xxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx
21	U+10000	U+1FFFFF	4	11110xxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx
The following sequences are not part of the UTF-8 standard, only part of the original proposal
26	U+200000	U+3FFFFFF	5	111110xx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx
31	U+4000000	U+7FFFFFFF	6	1111110x	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx	10xxxxxx

Here's a 'C' procedure from magaiti that will tell you how many bytes the next character occupies:

int get_mbchar_length(char lb) {
    if (( lb & 0xE0 ) == 0xC0 ) return 2;
    if (( lb & 0xF0 ) == 0xE0 ) return 3;
    if (( lb & 0xF8 ) == 0xF0 ) return 4;
    return 1;
}

For the Snake Encoding problem on Codingame dot com, I used unicode/utf8 as suggested by Rob Pike.

Coaling

Coaling the Pacific Mail S.S. "Siberia" at the fortified naval station of Nagasaki, Japan, 1904

The Atlantic Transport Line has the interesting history of this ship. This photo is from a stereograph. The "fortified naval station" is likely Sasebo Naval District:

Sasebo was a small fishing village until shortly after the start of the Meiji period. The Imperial Japanese Navy chose to build a naval base here based on its protected, deep-water harbor, geographic proximity to China and Korea, and the presence of nearby coal fields. The base, founded in 1886, became the major port for the Japanese navy in its operations in the First Sino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War, and remained a major naval base to the end of World War II. Along with the base facilities, the navy also constructed the Sasebo Naval Arsenal, which included major shipyards and repair facilities.

Via Posthip Scott.

Portland Eastside Ramble

Drove over to Portland's East side yesterday afternoon. First thing I noticed was this brand new fortress over by the airport:

FBI Portland Office

I swear it wasn't there last week. According to Google Earth, it's still not there.

First stop was IKEA, then Verizon, who directed us to Tech R Us for cell-phone repair. Smart phone glass replacement is going to take an hour, so we head over to Bearly Read Books. Okay, now we are heading into unexplored territiory. I have only been east of 205 maybe a half dozen times since we moved to Oregon. It's like a whole 'nother planet. Where downtown Portland is a tangled snarl of roads and bridges, the east side is a nice, flat, gird of asphalt streets. It was like being in foreign country.

Glendoveer Golf Course

On the way there we drive by Glendoveer Golf Course which looks like some kind of primeval fantasy land. Lush fields of green grass, which is what you expect on a golf course, but there was a also a forest of enormous trees. I've never seen anything like it.
    I did not see any golfers. Saw a few people with what looked like soccer balls. Evidently footgolf is now a thing.

Bearly Read Books

The place is totally crammed with books, almost all paperbacks. Aisles that in real stores lead to cross aisles that lead to more aisles are closed off here to provide more shelf space. The place is full of tiny little cul-de-sacs, each one devoted to a particular genre. Romance novels occupy an aisle that follows the walls and completely encircles everything else. Not surprising since they are the most read books in the world. Reminds me of the South American drug lord who was totally enamored of the Harlequin romances written by Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone.

The high point has to be the Janet Evanovich Altar. I really like Janet's books. I've read a couple and they are great fun. I didn't realize that she had a cult following in East Portland.

I picked up half a couple of books:

• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
• The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block
• Vendetta by Michael Dibdin
• The Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey

I've read books by Block and Dibdin before, they're pretty great. Dostoevsky and Harvey, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Portland Eastside Ramble

Heading home, I thought I would just follow Glisan (pronounced Gleason) Street west and see where it got me. After we had been driving for a while my wife noticed that we were driving by Providence Hospital, an East side Landmark that we visit annually. I was surprised, and then surprised that I was surprised because I knew Providence backed onto Glisan.