Captain's Log Supplemental

So my mother calls me at work for something “Important” that probably fits in the 3/10 or 5/10 buckets, which is a blocking I/O event when you’re trying to debug code, eh? This is something anyone out of grade school should understand by now:

1. Walking in
• In addition to calling (see below), blocks visual input if face is turned to look at you.
2. Calling (E.g. phones, Skype calls, etc).
• Blocks other tasks requiring conversational or non-automated mental function.
• Suitable for urgent matters that demand a response time under five seconds.
• Signal and local state issues may get you ignored to /dev/voicemail.
3. Rolling conversations (E.g. from a desk away, over TeamSpeak, etc).
1. Blocks either tasks requiring conversational output (responding) and reading comprehension (listening).
2. Suitable for when a response time under 15 seconds is okay and you can repeat something.
4. Messaging (E.g. instant message, text/SMS message).
1. Suitable for when response time under 5 minutes is ideal but not urgent.
2. Temporarily blocks text output ON writing a response.
5. Electronic post (E.g. e-mail, forum PM, etc).
1. Suitable for when response time of 2-5 hours is okay.
2. Minimal obstruction when response is uneeded and notification can wait.
6. Snail Mail
1. When it involves something you can’t digitize.
2. Risk of being ignored is acceptable.

This week, I finally wrapped up an annoying bug that basically is a heisenbug at heart, that pretty much lead me to use shotgun debugging to trap the problem, and once I found it’s control flow, I stimulated it with something like this:

try {

    // block of code under test

} catch(ugh) {

    alert("I hate you!");

}

And gradually reduced the block size until I found where the code was, fixed it to not make Firefox 9.0.1 croak at the old code. Then I committed it and marked the bug accordingly in our tracker.

Then when I was shutting down to leave work, my team leader IM’s me….oopsie, it turns out that I forgot to remove my “Affection” for Mozilla before commiting! I’m really glad that my boss has a sense of humour, and I think I was laughing for at least 45 minutes……lol.

Now that I’ve got a dock for my ASUS Transformer Prime, and have had my tablet for a good while, I think I might do a review, perhaps even against the original Transformer, which has served me so well….even while being battle damaged so to speak, lol.

In that ever so fluctuating nature of my brain fluttering across wikipedia, from Android Police, to the Tata Nano, to wing mirrors, to various car and hydraulic topics, something occurred to me…

What if we could combine some type of dual purpose fluid that could serve as both an effective coolant, and as a suitable hydraulic fluid, and use a set of tubing to work it into a system where moving helps provide the circulation of coolant, and develop some kind of nanotubes that can be contracted, by having a computer control the application of electric current…

Thus, big ass robot moves by shocking some hoses, that in turn pump coolant around. I can’t help but wonder, if engineers have already tried this, in a bit, something smaller than and less robot like than a Mackie, but still suitable to prove it can be done. Like wise, I can’t help but wonder if after a golden age in engineering, could we also achieve some kind of hydro-electric power generation around this, that can be kept going, and just require something like a battery assisted jump start?

I’ve always had a bit of an interest in figuring out how to make giant mecha actually work >_>.