Done Since 2018-09-30

[mdlbear]

The program I've been working on, which displays a rotating hypercube or other shape, is working nearly as well as the version I wrote in C about 30 years ago. This version, however, is in Javascript and runs in your browser. It still needs quite a bit of work on the user interface, and there are a couple of really weird things going on with simplexes (simplices? The regular 3-simplex is the tetrahedron; the 2-simplex is the equlateral triangle. Anyway...) follow the link to the current working version.

I've learned a few things:

• quite a bit more Javascript,
• that Javascript, in many ways, sucks even more than I expected,
• that that I can still concentrate on a program all day, every day for a week,
• that I'm still lousy at estimating,
• and that I really shouldn't try to do geometry in my head (though I did pretty well on the perspective transform, I think).

In other news, my trigger thumb is no longer triggering, meaning that the inflamation in the tendon has gone down. There are still quite a few residual aches and pains, probably caused mainly by under-use over the last month or two.

Down in the notes for Tuesday you'll find the practice questions I used with (nephew) j, and under Thursday you'll find a lot of rather inconclusive talk about the alleged Supermicro Hack. It's quite strange. Somebody's credibility is going to go through the floor, but whether it's Bloomberg or Apple+Amazon is not at all clear at the moment.

I really didn't want to be living in a dystopian SF underground comic book, but that's the way things are trending.

Notes & links:

0930Su
  * Up 5ish; W=198.8, S=5:13; shower, dishes (note:  I don't always note that stuff)
  % didn't use splint last night; no problems atm.  Some aching probably from disuse.
  @ lerna/lerna: A tool for managing JavaScript projects with multiple packages.
    lerna - npm
  @ Monorepos in the Wild – Markus Oberlehner – Medium
  % 12:40 some slight triggering led me to put the brace on for a little while; it hurts.
    maybe try the neoprene brace for a while.
  @ 4D Visualization
  @ Maths - Rotations in n Dimentions - Martin Baker

1001Mo
  * Up 5:30ish; W=199.6, S=5:59; 
  * Worked out the perspective transform.  Simpler if one controls the viewing angle.
  @ What do you need to do about Facebook security breach? | Kaspersky Lab blog      
  : apparently I'm still sending money to Peace Action West!

1002Tu
  * up 5:30ish; S=6:13;
  @ One Small Step for the Web… – Tim Berners-Lee – Medium [LJ]
    Inrupt
    Home | Solid basically a spec for storing
    personal data, and controlling access to it.  A server for it is called a "pod".
    solid/solid-spec: The Solid spec and architecture
    solid/solid: Solid - Re-decentralizing the web (project directory)
    " Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools
      for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data
      principles. Solid is modular and extensible. It relies as much as possible on
      existing W3C standards and protocols. "
  @ Portier - An email-based, passwordless authentication service
  * call j sometime between 11 and 2:
    practice questions for j, Monday or Tuesday.  addition, subtraction, multiplication,
    division of exponents; square and cube roots, scientific notation and operations
    involving it.
    <- Explain why numbers have two square roots but only one cube root
    <- what happens to the exponent of a number -- say 2^3, if you square it? cube it?
    <- what about multiplying, say, 5^2 by 5^3?
    <- what do you get when you _divide_ 5^2 by 5^3?
    <- What happens to exponents when you divide - 10^6/10^3
    <- what is 2^1?
    <- what would 2^0 be?  (hint - divide 2^1 by 2^1)
    <- what is 2^(1/2)?  (hint - multiply 2^(1/2) by itself)
    <- in general, what happens to the exponent when you raise a number to a power?
    <- what happens when you take the square root?  Cube root?
    <- can you express the square root of 2 with an exponent?
    <- what's 2*[2, 4, 8 16, 32]?  What power of 2 is 64?
    <- What's the square root of 64?  Cube root?  Sixth root?
    <- What's the square of 6?  6 is 2*3; what's 36?
    <- what's the square root of 4?  100?  400?
    <- a google is 1 followed by 100 zeros.  What's that in scientific notation?
    <- What's the square root of a google?  The square?
    <- what are the following numbers in ordinary notation:
       3.1x10^7  8.1x10^4
    <- How do you multiply numbers in scientific notation?  Divide?
       3x10^7 * 3x10^3, 3x10^7 * 9x10^3,  8.1x10^4 / 9*10^2.  
    <- How do you add or subtract numbers in scientific notation?
       3.2x10^7 + 4.1x10^6 
    -> a few real-time adjustments, but I'm pretty sure I got all the concepts across.
  * mostly work on hyperviewer - correctly generating and showing all figures now.

1003We
  * up 5:30ish; W=1972, S=6; cuddle
  * paid AMEX and car (which didn't actually need it, so it all went to principal rather
    than to the next month's payment as I expected.  Weird.)
  * perspective works; it's very noticable at 60 degrees.  Gotta get sliders and clock
    ticks going.  Probably that first.
  @ The Inner Ring - CS Lewis
  * go down to N's.  Take banana bread, mail
    Packed a light lunch of an apple, cheese, and a few slices of salami.  Worked well.
  % wore the neoprene brace most of the afternoon, but probably didn't really need it.
  * 1ish - cube rotates.  Needs controls, but it also may be time to think about putting
    it up on either GH, DH, or both.
  % 10ish sleepy

1004Th
  * Up 6:30ish; W=199.2, S=5:46;
  " QOTD: "My brain has way too many tabs open, four of them are frozen, and I have no
    idea where the music is coming from" (quoted from a T-shirt
    <https://www.zulily.com/p/black-too-many-tabs-open-tunic-322413-60104378.html> which
    one can't actually see without logging in.) "
  @ The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies - Bloomberg
    The China SuperMicro Hack: About That Bloomberg Report - Lawfare
    " That kind of pushback from those kinds of companies (or rather those kind of company
      lawyers) is a good reason to approach this story with a degree of skepticism until
      more information comes out. But keeping that in mind, the attack described in the
      article is actually plausible. "
    Supply Chain Security Speculation – the grugq – Medium
    " The real takeaway from this is that IPMI is a raging tire fire, BMCs are Satan
      spawn, and never ever expose IPMI interfaces to the Internet. Unless you want
      hackers, because thats how you get hackers. "
    Bloomberg Reports China Infiltrated the Supermicro Supply Chain We Investigate
    skeptical, largely because the US military is still using Supermicro boards.
    " First and foremost, I think we need to call for an immediate SEC investigation
      around anyone who has recently taken short positions or sold shares in Supermicro. "
  : Guy came by to measure for the shower door in the apt; we determined that there was no
    way a glass shower door would fit in that space.
  : apparently the batteries in Nova's UPS have failed.  Could replace with the one in the
    living room.
  * 3pm C MAC clinic (rescheduled from 0928)
  & C wants to use power chair tomorrow with landscapers.  Manhandled the stupid scooter
    out of the way, the power chair out, scooter back (way in the back); drove around
    enough to note that the grass is slippery; drove chair back.  Had to take the high
    metal threshold off in order to get the chair out.  Should have thought of that long
    ago -- it will help.  May cut through the 2x4 sill as well.
  @ Sans Forgetica designed to be hard to read,
    which is said to make things printed in it easier to remember.
    RMIT University | Melbourne | Australia (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
  * feed fish on Thursdays
  @ Learn Enough to Be Dangerous
    Really good set of beginner courses:  command line, text editors, git, html, rails.

1005Fr
  * up 4:30ish; W=200, S=5:56; 
  * 8am at Whidbey Performance PT with Devin
    -> yup; it's ok.  Still a bit of a nodule there, but it's not triggering.  If it
       starts again I know what to do.
  * SL: gin, onions, eggs, cottage cheese, olive bread, bacon, (red) cooking wine,
    almonds, lettuce, (from memory)
  * hyperviewer works mostly (simplex is broken again), but svg doesn't show up in the
    production build.
  @ Daring Fireball: Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’
    " One way or the other, there is more to come on this story, and the credibility of
      either Bloomberg, or Apple and Amazon, is going to take a significant hit. "
  @ What you need to know about the first-ever DNSSEC root key rollover on 2018-10-11
    Nova doesn't appear to have it set up.  Problem?  dns-root-data is installed and up to
    date, so we're okay.  Routers, with dnsmasq, may have problems.
  * 10~11 landscaper coming by

1006Sa
  * up 5:30ish; W=198.2, S=7:37;
  * after an entire day of testing, it turns out the ndarray does sleasy things with
    constructing functions out of strings, and it doesn't work in production, possibly
    because it gets sandboxed.  :P
  * working again, using home-built matrix and vector classes.  Could use some cleanup now
    that it's using a sane API; currently it's mostly using ndarray-alike shim functions