Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! My Boston Scientific BodyGuardian® MINI is here! Seven days of cardiac monitoring to confirm all is well, then no more Eliquis!
Category: Tech
Coffee, Darlin’
In early 1988 I was about to close on buying my first house1 and then get married, but I couldn’t take any time off from work. I needed to go on a business trip to install a medical laboratory system at a hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The plane’s approach into Baton Rouge was rough because of a snow storm. Yes, snow in Louisiana. The turbulence was strong enough that everybody applauded when we landed safely. That flight was the one and only time I ever needed to use a barf bag.
Driving from the airport to the hospital took me past the palatial estate of the now deceased televangelist con artist Jimmy Swaggart. Saying “con artist” after “televangelist” is, of course, redundant.
https://opplehouse.com/jimmy-swaggarts-home-a-complete-tour-of-the-ministers-private-estate/
The hospital was the field test site for my employer’s new, proprietary computer terminal. It cost significantly less than what customers would have had to pay for a PC in those days. I quickly found a problem that had been missed during development of the device. I called the lead developer to tell him the bad news, and I’ll always remember what he said. “Oh, damn. I forgot to double-buffer the UARTs!”2 Well, it was funny at the time. Guess you had to be there.
I had about a dozen of those terminals on hand to do what I needed to do that week, but they weren’t going to work as delivered. The developer scrambled to edit the firmware he had written for the device, and he pressed one of the other developers into service to burn enough PROMS3 with the updated code for my purposes that week.
That meant waiting for a Federal Express shipment that would bump out my schedule by a day, so I would return home on Saturday, rather than on Friday. I explained the situation to the lab manager, a very competent woman who doubled as a computer system supervisor.
To tell this story I must emphasize that she was very attractive, well-dressed, and not much older than myself. By “well-dressed” I mean “flattering” more than “conservative.” Her manner was totally professional, which made me wonder why her appearance was more about her being a woman than a manager.
Having some extra time on hand, I asked her about the system I was replacing. She said there were lab instruments the other software vendor had never been able to get interfaced. They had to laboriously transcribe results manually from the machines into computer terminals. Their technician from the instrument service company was there now, and could I see if there was something I could do? Sure.
Long story short, I got the instruments working on the competitor’s system to make the lab manager’s life easier until our system went online. She was very appreciative, and said her boss, the hospital’s CFO, wanted to meet with me. Okay.
We went in the CFO’s office. There were two leather chairs in front of his desk, and we sat down. He leaned back, and in a condescending Southern drawl he said, referring to the snow, “Well……….. it looks like y’all brought some of that Yankee weather down ‘heah’ with ya.” I chuckled and replied, “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“I hear y’all have a problem and are waitin’ on sumthin’ from Boston.” I was about to answer when he looked at the lab manager and told her, “Would ya git us some coffee, darlin’?” His tone implied, “Why haven’t you already offered to do this?”
As if a switch had been flicked, she smiled and said “of course.” She immediately stood up and headed for a coffee tray that had been set up in back of the office.
I couldn’t believe the sexist power trip I’d just heard and how she had responded so readily to it. I’d brought more than Boston’s winter weather with me, I’d come with a sense of propriety regarding how to address women. I said I’d get my own coffee and I followed her to the tray on the table in back of the office.
The rest of the meeting was polite and perfunctory. I explained the problem and I thanked him for his understanding and the hospital’s willingness to be the test site for the new product. She explained how I had gotten those lab instruments working on their soon-to-be-replaced system.
The next morning, waiting for the FedEx package so I could swap out the PROMs, I met with the manager in the hospital cafeteria. Nothing at all about her or the CFO gave me the slightest inkling they had any sort of a personal relationship, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d made overtures and been rejected. She simply seemed to be filling her subservient female role as she was expected to do, in both her dress and manner.
I tactfully commented that chief financial officers were usually the ones who made the final decision on computer system purchases. She took the hint and explained in a tone of weary acceptance, “I know how different it must seem to you here, but this isn’t Boston.” We understood each other, and we left it at that.
1 I had negotiated the final purchase price over the phone from a hotel room in Butler, PA, where I was installing a system at the same hospital where Trump was taken after the assassination attempt a year ago.
2 UART – Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter
3 PROMS – For Programmable Read-Only Memory, not the BBC summer music festival.
Hardcore Hardware
I posted this on the Lyrion Music Server community forum:
I never determined why my Squeezebox devices started falling off my Verizon G1100 (Quantum Gateway) Wifi network. The workaround was to install IOGEAR GWU637 Ethernet-to-802.11n Wifi adapters.
Recently, Verizon sent me a G3100 router. After switching over to that, the Touch and the three Radios worked for a few days, but then they started losing their assigned IP addresses and they couldn’t find the DHCP server to renew their leases. Recycling power on the IOGEAR adapters put them back online, but only temporarily.
I switched one of the Radios back to its native 802.11g Wifi and, unlike what happened with the G1100, it worked reliably. So I returned the other two Radios to their own Wifi. The Touch, however, is “unable to find the Wireless hardware.” From other reading I’ve done here, this is apparently caused by updating the Community Firmware while the Touch is on Ethernet.
I figured out what was breaking within DHCP, and the short answer is the G3100 doesn’t like the IOGEAR adapter having the IP address 192.168.1.254. The address is within the router’s DHCP scope, and there’s no way to exclude individual IP addresses from being handed out to clients. So two nodes on the network having the same IP address would be a possibility.
The solution is to take 192.168.1.254, the last IP address in the range, out of the router’s DHCP scope. Alternatively, changing the IOGEAR’s IP address to a localhost loopback, 127.0.0.1, also works. The Touch has stayed online long enough that I’m confident this is the fix. If it isn’t, I’ll have to do a follow-up. I won’t bother speculating on why this isn’t a problem with the G1100.
NOTE: The IP address is on the Touch, but the MAC address that’s needed for LAN communication comes from the adapter. So IOGEAR appears on the G3100’s active device list and the Touch is seen as enabled, but offline.
Platter Matters
The Platters on Disc
The Disk Platters
Until we have confirmation the Upjohn conversion was completed, Denro will continue to hold onto that data disk pack!
Byte Bros
Well, lookie here. Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich* arranged for a meetup between Bill Gates and Linux’s Linus Torvald, and there’s another legendary technology master, Dave Cutler. I’d say that Linus and Dave continue to be all about the tech, and Bill much less so.
* The impossibly youthful looking Russinovich has had an enviable career path. I first knew of him from his Windows Internals books. Russinovich began to independently develop a set of software utilities that he called Winternals and he published them on his Sysinternals website.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite
Sysinternals became such an impressive endeavor that Microsoft brought Russinovich on board and he’s now the CTO of its massive cloud server network, Azure.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2006/07/18/microsoft-acquires-winternals-software/
A few days ago I wrote about the risks of AI and the Large Language Model. Here’s Mark talking about LLM and the avoidance of Truthiness.
Data Mining Fool’s Gold
Part 1: For decades, tobacco companies claimed that smoking wasn’t harmful. Did they have proof? Of course not. Did the oil industry have any proof that it was safe to keep using lead as an additive in gasoline? Nope. The claimed health benefits of drinking red wine didn’t hold up to impartial scrutiny.
Do deniers of climate change have a valid point in their refusal to accept Al Gore’s inconvenient truth? No, they do not, yet they persist as if a few, isolated papers written by partisan cranks have enough weight to counter the conclusions of almost every climate expert. Using AI to amplify lies as if they are validated facts isn’t just a possibility, it’s already happening.
I don’t keep up with technology as much as I did when working in the business, but it appears the Hadoop big data project is no longer the next big thing. Now it’s the Large Language Model (LLM). The results generated by Artificial Intelligence searches follow the old truism, “garbage in, garbage out.”
Robots.txt: “A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site.”
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/intro
XML Sitemap: “A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.”
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/overview
LLM: “… a statistical language model, trained on a massive amount of data, that can be used to generate and translate text and other content…”
https://cloud.google.com/ai/llms
LLMS.txt: “A proposal to standardise [sp] on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help LLMs use a website at inference time.”
https://llmstxt.org/
Although robots.txt isn’t a mandatory file, it’s safe to say almost every website has one. Creating an XML Sitemap requires a bit more work. I didn’t have one until getting serious about fixing the crippling technical problem (resolved in December, 2021) that kept this place from appearing on Google and prevented WordPress from updating itself.
Do we need another method of optimizing web searches? LLMS.txt has the potential of being misused by intentionally manipulating the Large Language Model for AI in ways that could validate false or misleading data.
Bitcoin started the rush for Nvidia graphic processors that denied PC gamers their highest framerate FPS fun. Then AI further accelerated the demand for GPU’s. So both technologies are relying on the same class of hardware.
For all of the emphasis on blockchain conferring incontrovertible provenance of a Bitcoin’s digital token ownership, where is the assurance of provenance for AI’s “knowledge”? I wanted to put AI to a very small, innocuous and perhaps irrelevant test.
Intermission:
Part 2: A particular class of technology that I have been more actively keeping up with is video projectors.
TI’s DLP projector technology is ideal for movie theaters, where light loss must be minimal. Professional DLP projectors have three mirror array chips. 3LCD projectors are limited mostly to home and office use. They have, as the name implies, three LCD panels, one for each primary additive color, being red, green, and blue.
Home DLP projectors have a single chip. That means the colors must be projected sequentially. Although single-chip DLP has no convergence error like 3LCD, and its contrast ratio and black level are superior to 3LCD, for a long time there was no comparison between DLP’s relatively muted color output and 3LCD’s superior color quality.
A significant issue for me with single-chip DLP is the “rainbow effect.” Perhaps it’s due to my cataract replacement lenses, but I am extremely susceptible to the rainbow effect. As documented thirteen years ago, I was likewise affected by “phosphor lag” on plasma TV’s.
Triple laser, sometimes combined with LED, is a new way of generating color in single-chip DLP projectors. It eliminates the old, mechanical spinning color wheel. Triple laser is finding its place in short-throw projectors, a type of product that holds no interest for me.
The result with triple lasers compared to the old color wheel is outstanding color reproduction. But is the rainbow effect eliminated? Techmoan takes a while to bring it up in his review of the Nebula Cosmos 4K SE projector (not a short-throw model), but he gets there.
Two years ago I bought a similar product, the Epson Mini EF12, a 3LCD projector. Techmoan says the Nebula’s black level can’t compare with an OLED TV, but nothing can except for a still-working plasma TV. The native contrast for an inexpensive 3LCD projector like the EF12 may be only 400:1, whereas a comparable triple laser DLP could be 3500:1. (The ratings for JVC D-ILA high-end projectors start at 40,000:1.)*
The Nebula’s software settings are far more advanced than the limited controls on the Epson. As impressive as the Nebula projector is for the money, all I needed to hear Techmoan saying was, “The rainbow effect is sometimes noticeable on the projector.” No thanks.
The EF12 is my projector for casual viewing in the Pratt Cave. It isn’t suitable for dark scenes, because they appear very washed out. Cartoons and brightly lit news broadcasts look quite good, as do many YouTube videos, like the ones posted by Techmoan.
So what does all of this have to do with AI? Thanks to Techmoan I know DLP exhibits the rainbow effect, even with a triple laser. Now I want to know why that’s true. I used Chrome to search Google and specified AI Mode:
“why do triple laser dlp projectors have rainbow effect”
The explanation for the rainbow effect, that “the lasers themselves rapidly switch between the primary colors,” seems to come from some guy on Reddit. Is it correct? My little innocuous search reveals that a plausible answer has been obtained from an unknown source. All I know for certain is Techmoan can see the rainbow and he doesn’t mind it, but it would distract me to the point of getting a headache.
Part 3: AI definitely has a future in medicine. Although the risks for a patient can be great in the event of a mistake, there’s so much potential in AI to improve diagnosis and the quality of medical imaging. AI being able to sift through millions of confirmed cases — anonymously, presumably — could greatly improve the quality of care. For example, the symptoms of conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease and colon cancer wouldn’t be ignored or misdiagnosed by a relatively inexperienced physician who might otherwise be inclined to tell a patient, “you’re too young to have [disease name].”
AI used for partisan political purposes scares me, and it isn’t reassuring to know that it can be used effectively by both sides. The genie is out of the bottle, but be careful what you ask for. I say, “everybody slow down and take a breath.”
* To my surprise, Techmoan’s DLP projector has a rated contrast ratio of only 400:1.
