Coders Edge

Please no cold calls from so-called headhunters who do not have a job but just want to mark down the contact and probably collect a bounty. I don't know.

There is a tell that the false ones do: when you ask them, robot voice (it really is too) to say who they are they ask again if it is [your name] (or at least my name, maybe I am the only guy who ever has this happen to him?)

I guess they could say something like," you know. [my first name], I was reading your blog, Coders Edge, and your ruminations on Robotics engineering when it was actually really run by actual engineers." Oh, how I could have fun if they were my English student and I was an English professor at a school. I'd run it through them, that lance of my fussy fuss. Thankfully for them I am not such a professor, nor are they my students.

fork and merge

consider the following fantasy fork-n-merge

SuperTuxWebKart

it's not a video game it's a cube collective. I can see it now: the spawn of ten thousand websites idea of mine can go like this: every single little square of a graphic that shows up as the face of a building on any of the supertuxkart levels could each be a feed from a website, and a full browser. How? Well, it would be a browswer in that it would show a current snap of the forward face of that page, probably don't want a full simubot dork-enabled dork-snot snark-inserter there too (though I am sure that some sadist is thinking about it right now and cutting code to do it even as I am here imagining the horrer of such a person who would do such a thing.

There is a city at night level that will give you a good idea of what I mean. You should put yourself into artists-view (I won't make it easy for you, if you don't know how to do it and you can't figure it out by websearching it yourself, you prob aren't reallying going to fork and merge these two items.

War Stories of my life as a Robotics Engineer

I've got some new things I would like to accomplish for my site. I know now what it is that I need to do and it seems like it won't even take that long.

"Give me an estimate" always made me think "you know, the time I spend doing that I could be half way done with whatever I've been tasked. I was always a guy who jumped in and started swiming. Or, if they thought it was that, sometimes I'd show them the easy way around, like solving bugs with an emulator and actually using the thing for what it was designed to do, and making very short work of the problem in the meantime. There is a joy in the single memory system that has a small custom footprint. When all of the items of memory are all with a small array, a block, you can copy the whole block, and then, when you get to the toerh side of it where the thing is needing to be restored, you just copy it all back. Using this kind of method I quickly overcame exceptionally vexing algorithmic bugs of a pick-n-place robot.

Without such a clear concept of the small field of things that represents the whole world of the problem space, the ability to 'snap shot' states of the robot does not exist in any meaningful way.

For robots that don't have fixed places to go to, robots that don't rely on needing to know the exact position of things, it might not matter so much to be able to reproduce the exact set of assumptions that leads to a failure state. But for robots that need to be exceptional in their precision it is.

The way that I worked around the issue was by deciding that through put was the better thing. Any so called error that could be solved by lowering through put assumptions and still resulted in mission success should never be reported to anyone, not clients, not customers, nor printed out on a giant old-school printout, the word ERROR in giant bold font for twenty thousand lines. There was no ERROR. It should have said TOCB: "Tech on Cigarette break".

So it became my rule that the term ERROR be so banned from any log. There are no errors, really, just new obstacles. So instead of ERROR I suggested that we just say "OPERATOR attention needed."

The guy who did all of this was a programmer from a far away land. He really had only one term for anomaly, and that was ERROR. Maybe, because of where he was from, a place that had been ruled as a socialist tyranny, where th government violated all the rules and ideals of Socialism to replace it with a corrupt two class system of Party or not party.

In any case I also solved other problems by changing the pick-n-place algorithms to not halt on a collision determination, but, instead, to rework the assumptions and lower the through put of the product. It's a little bit complicated to explain what I did except to say that using one finger one can always get one product (there were wafers) and pull it out of a boat. At least one will always work so the boat can always be emptied, only thing is that it happened slowly.

But, in addition to doing this I modeled all of the moves determining that they would all be safe before I ever had a robot go pick up a wafer. And that way if they were not safe I just lowered throughput. I also included a secret log that none of the users knew about except for us developer guys (and gals, Lilly Karlin worked with me, a superb Robot engineer) knew about. If the through put needed to be lowered it logged it there (it was a really cool new thing at the time: Flash Eprom that we could get back from them!) From that I would be able to monitor if my algorithm was actually working. Because I also reworked the algorithm all the way to make sure that it did calculate correctly.

Of course, when you are doing actual production, the idea that there is a guarantee is kind of ridiculous because it either does or it does not. And since the robots would never again, ever, halt in the middle of a load like they used to, which probably saved people millions when I think about it, I felt that it was important that the idea that there was an error, or that it was ever an error, for real, just needed to be done away with. There are no errors of the machine. It's either the programmer or the technician at the boxes. No need to say that there is an error, it is all good. If everyone goes home safely and the day has been productive, and even if the through put is just a little bit less, that is not an error. It is an opportunity for improving the product.

After that I had a run-in with the CEO by telling him that the Internet was the thing (I didn't say it like I' was lord Hamlet) and that we were an Networking company and we should let everyone have the Internet. He wanted to fire me that week, I heard later.

That company was absorbed. It is now no longer and their equipment is considered to be not worth repairing.

at Urge Central you will find an image collage.

Dec 3, 2013

Bootstrap js

This very easy to use framework makes layout a breeze! here is a link to a sample page utilzing the bootstrap framework. Well, it isn't much, and the links don't do anything. It is just to show how easy bootstrap is to use.

Here is another bootstrap page, with some animated graphics.

Supertuxkart 0.8.1!

Supertuxkart 0.8.1! It's not much different from the 0.8. Some of the items are different, like the turbo powerups are blue now. That's cool. It was very easy to build it just by following their directions. I was playing the game almost as soon as it was done compiling. One hitch: when you run it with out installing it you need to be in the correct directory in order for it to work. Basically at the root of the build.

I haven't learned how to build a track for the game, but I do sometimes change the graphics. I have all of the new graphics here, so I used some of it for one of the levels. It's not hard to do it. I copied it and renamed it, and put references to it where it needed to be so now I have two 'museum' levels, one with my special graphics.

I did discover some cool stuff to do with Supertuxkart 0.8.1 (which has just been released, by the way). There is an 'artist's mode' that I did not know existed. Also, by using this mode, I can have the kart consume as many power ups as I would like. I't is sort of an ultimate cheat level. the game is rich in the way that it works. Some of the levels are far more detailed than others. All of them are far too short.

I love the idea of taking elevation data and crafting tracks like that. It seems as though that shouldn't be too hard to generate. I actually thought of that idea over 15 years ago by telling my friends that I knew that, someday, we would play with tracks that were just the same as what is in the real world. I am sure I am not the first one to think of this idea.

Some of the levels being more detailed, I decided to go and explore in places where the game, when you don't play in 'artist's mode, won't let you go otherwise. I also shut off an 'invisible wall' on one track by just removing the file in question that was the invisible wall (I don't like invisible walls). The wall was no longer there. And then, well, then it was obvious to me why the wall had been there in the first place. The reason: because without it if one gets too close to the edge one falls right off and over it. The old version: you smack into the invisible wall. You don't careen over.

I played the new soccer level (by myself) which was cute. I went to artist level on the city at night level. There is a cool thing with all of the buildings being really really tall. You can fly off to the tops of them and land on them. It makes me think we would make a race track that only goes along the tops of buildings. There would be no railings. Falling is always a posibility.

I modded the skyline level, calling that Railtrail Skyline. It would be cool to have a level that would be a skyline/city at night level where one would race along the streets, but then also race all the way along the sky, and then get back by hopping down the buildings one at a time. Is there any way to 'merge levels' so to speak? If you put the skyline level way up high above the city at night level you could just copy all the files together, I am guess, if the invisible wall was so easy to remove. It must be just as easy to add new things just by adding them. Of course, if the models intersect, it might be a little bit confusing to play the game, if not impossible.

And as far as artist mode goes, why switch back? The new Supertux level is significantly harder (thank the upgrade for that, I suppose) that I can not, and have not, won a single race in the Supertux mode. If you crash and die even once it leaves you way far behind. Commonly the other karts are dogging behind you at the end of 8 or so laps even in on a large track, which doesn't often happen in the 'expert' level.

I guess they changed the axis orientation of the tracks so that the coordinates of the old versions of tracks are 90 degrees askew of the old game (it might be some other value, say 180). And so on some of hte levels the karts are in places where the game checks for it, and it finds that the kart is in a bad place, and it doesn't start the game. It actually kicks you out of the game all the way! Kind of annoying. Anywho, the 'artist' level takes away that annoyance, and you can still play the game without a hitch (and fly around, and barrage the opponents with an endless and carpel tunnel inducing endless stream. It's really kind of cool They all bounce and arch off and do their thing, and it makes kind of a pretty sound. Or how about endless powerups? Don't do it! You'll hurt your thumb. I suppose map it to a keyboard key and just leave a piece of lead on it and the barrage will just keep going.

So in Artist mode I play the level with the problem with the karts being in bad starting locations. Some of them end up underneath the track. So throughout the game play they constantly die and are regenerated over and over. They progress backwards as their kart is placed further back everytime they die. Little flying hawk rises from the road and then the kart dies again. If it ever found a place that was not below the track it might have a chance and not die again

Also interesting is that when the kart starts too high it falls from the sky at the start.

There is a lot more that can be done with this software than just a racing game. The formats for the save models do not seem to have a readily available way to translate them into something that blender can use. There is a blitz3D company that will sell you an 80 dollar tool. That isn't really a lot of money to be able to have a starting point with which to create a new track. But, I suppose, open source and all that, the stuff is probably not provided by the developers of the game because they would really like the formats that they use to be unencumbered. They can provide the xport tool and not the import one. That will spawn people to use the software available. People to whom 70 dollars is a lot of money.

task chairs

I am still loving the chair. I have been much more productive since I got it. I am not sure if it is due to the chair or just bad weather.

Fedora 20

Soon and the upgrade craziness begins again. There was one upgrade cycle that sucked a real real lot and almost made me decide to use something else. They seem to have gotten it better. And in all honesty: running the old version of Grub seems a little bit brain dead. The reason I had so much trouble? I didn't read that there was that one more step in the installation of grub2 that I needed to do by hand. After I figured that out I was good to go. In anycase the new Fedora is soon and I will be upgrading.

I'm looking for work. The only people who call are jerky guys who can't speak in a dialect that I understand. They are calling from Montevideo for a job in Taipai. The guy, himself, sounds like he originated from some place even farther away than that.

And then, you know the tell is that they do this word soup thing with items from your resume. So if you did automation sequencing and photo-voltaic experiments, in unrelated jobs, they will tell you they are looking for photo-volaic robots for sequencing music. huh?

A friend of mine, who goes on about stuff like he knows, says that 'everyone knows' that those kinds of headhunters don't really have any jobs for us. And that he doesn't even bother to talk to that ethnicity of headhunter. I make a point of trying to see if any of them are real, and would actually hire an American who doesn't come from the same place that they do becuase I don't ever hear that they do. They don't seem to ever hire Americans. I'm not supposed to say this but it seems very true. It is as if they have to say that they talked to an out of work American who could fill the job, and actually doesn't want it, before they can just go hire their cousins and friends from back home.

Do they put on the thick accent intentionally? The say to their bosses in a the deadpan New Jersey accent "I can't find an American Engineer to take these positions. We will have to, oh shoot, hire my cut rate friends from my parent's country." Next scene, with the thickest and most rediculous parody of their 'back home' accent they are talking to an American engineer. As liltting and ununderstandible as possible.

Oh, come on, it can't really be like that, can it?

My latest Resume. some demos.

my antique mirror

 Software Metal
 If it can't be broke
 you won't be either