The Soul of a New Machine

I just finished Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine”. I
thoroughly enjoyed it, reading all but the first chapter during my
flights from Pittsburgh to Oakland, CA. Actually, the first chapter
was my least favorite, and after reading it I put the book down for
several weeks before resuming. The book describes the creation of the
32-bit Eagle, backwards compatible with the 16-bit Eclipse, at Data
General Corporation during roughly 1978-1980. This project stands out
in the degree to which management isolated the engineering team from
the rest of the company and gave them a great deal of technical
freedom. This allowed the engineers to design and build what they
thought was a good machine. I do not say “great” machine because the
engineers worked under enormous time pressure, as has proven to be
typical of the industry. Still, as regular a participant in endeavors
for which panic-stricken is the best description of the schedule, this
book struck a chord with me. One of the main characters, Tom West,
sounds like a fascinating man. The prologue describes him as “a good
man in a storm”. I hope that people may someday say the same about
me.

2007 Dad Vail Regatta

I raced in the Dad Vail Regatta for the last time this past weekend in the Men’s Varsity Pair with Adam Suhy. Though the weather was not cooperative this season, we had some strong racing results. Here is a summarized version of our season:

Date	Race	Location	Result
March 24, 2007	Murphy Cup Regatta	Philadelphia, PA	Second to Pitt
April 1, 2007	UAA Championships	Pittsburgh, PA	Second to Washington University
April 14, 2007 - April 15, 2007	Knecht Cup	Camden, NJ	Second to University of Buffalo
April 21, 2007	Car-Du-Pitt	Pittsburgh, PA	Cancelled (weather)
April 28, 2007	Governer’s Cup Regatta	Charleston, WV	Cancelled (weather)
May 6, 2007	Mid Atlantic Championships	Fairfax, VA	First!
May 11, 2007 - May 12, 2007	Dad Vail Regatta	Philadelphia, PA	Third in our semi-final

By far the most exciting race was the Dad Vail, which is our national championship. It is arranged into heats, semi-finals, and finals, with 3 advancing from each heat, and two advancing from each semi-final, to create a six-boat final. We placed second in our heat to Georgia Tech, which was good enough to advance to semi-finals. Our heat was not an all-out effort.

Our semi-final was the most intense race I’ve ever rowed in. Here are the results for all three semi-finals from the Dad Vail webpage.

Men’s Varsity Pair - Semis 2 to Final
Evt	Lane 1	Lane 2	Lane 3	Lane 4	Lane 5	Lane 6	Start
116	Fordham 42 Place: 6 Time: 7:32.48	Carnegie Mellon 17 Place: 3 Time: 7:05.86	Boston College 7 Place: 5 Time: 7:31.2	Oklahoma City 78 Place: 2 Time: 7:05.72	Bowdoin 8 Place: 4 Time: 7:16.6	Iona 49 Place: 1 Time: 7:05.49	8:35
117	Florida Tech 40 Place: 6 Time: 8:06.18	Washington U.114 Place: 2 Time: 7:08.58	Temple 102 Place: 4 Time: 7:26.89	Buffalo 13 Place: 1 Time: 7:01.8	Cincinnati 25 Place: 5 Time: 7:32.62	Rollins 90 Place: 3 Time: 7:25.71	8:42
118	U. Rochester 89 Place: 6 Time: 7:34.5	Cal Long Beach 16 Place: 1 Time: 7:03.06	Toronto Miss 104 Place: 2 Time: 7:07.21	Georgia Tech 45 Place: 5 Time: 7:26.61	Grand Valley 47 Place: 4 Time: 7:19.74	Duquesne 37 Place: 3 Time: 7:07.64	8:49

You can see that we took third to Iona and Oklahoma City, with the sorted times being: 7:05.49, 7:05.72, and 7:05.86. That means we missed second place by 0.14 seconds (which would have been sufficient to advance), and first place by 0.37 seconds. Our time would have been good enough to advance in either of the other two semi finals. Also interesting is that Georgia Tech, who finished ahead of us in our heat, took 5th in their semi-final, and it was not a close race for them. Even more interesting is that Iona went on to take second place overall.

Thus, while it is disappointing that we did not advance to finals, we were a bit unlucky in the way the semi-finals stacked up, and I feel like we had one hell of a race and were definitely in there with the fastest boats.

Black screen in Windows XP SP2 guest after upgrade of Parallels from 3036 (beta) to 3188 (official)

After doing the upgrade of Parallels, my Windows XP SP2 guest stopped displaying anything on the screen. The trick is to boot into Safe Mode by holding Fn+F8 just after you power on your virtual machine. Select Safe Mode and then Install Parallels Tools once Windows has booted into Safe Mode.

VMware vs Parallels on OS X

The battle rages! I just installed VMware Fusion and it worked without a hitch. I downloaded a pre-installed Debian VM image and it worked great. I also just did an Ubuntu install into a Parallels VM and it went smoothly. This is one of those rare moments where I have two software options and both actually work! I should note that I paid money for Parallels, while VMware Fusion is free.

So far they’re both tied for first. Parallels is likely to emerge the winner because of its more integrated file sharing between the host and VM (I believe VMware workstation offers similar functionality) and because of Parallels’ “coherence” mode, where Windows apps appear to be OS X apps.

Still, this is cool.

FairUse4WM

… is pretty handy. Here is a site about it.

Serial port confusion

So there is an IDC header (two rows of pins) on the motherboard of one of my machines for a serial port. To make use of this, I need an IDC - DB9 adapter. It turns out these come in two flavors, depending on whether they’re aligned based on pin number of physical layout. Examples of each kind are here and here. Here is the pin numbering for each of the connectors:

IDC10:
1 3 5 7 9
2 4 6 8 10

DB9:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9

Wiring diagrams for each kind of alignment:

Physical alignment (aka DTK):

IDC10	DB9
1	1
2	6
3	2
4	7
5	3
6	8
7	4
8	9
9	5

One-to-one pin number alignment (aka EVEREX/APEX10):

IDC10	DB9
1	1
2	2
3	3
4	4
5	5
6	6
7	7
8	8
9	9

Other pages that discuss this issue are here, and here.

Learn another language!

I’m one of those ignorant Americans who only speaks English (if you don’t count C, Java, x86 assembly, …). The purpose of this post is to remind myself of the existence of free courses by the Foreign Services Institute. Supposedly, they are quite good.