Sorry I have not updated the post for some time. I have been out with a broken hip..The following is a description of my adventure.
Short Version - Fell going into Sports Bar on Oct. 30th to watch Steelers defeat New England. Broke Right Hip. October 31 Right Hip full replacement. Nov. 3 went to Faixfax Nursing Center for Physical Therapy. Returned to apartment Nov. 18th. Now walking with cane and other times without any assistance. Doing everything without a real problem. Jean has been awesome in getting me through this. She has fought all the paperwork battles and got me out of FNH. They wanted to keep me longer.
Longer Version - Fell going into Sports Bar on Oct. 30th to watch Pittsburgh Steelers defeat New England. Broke Right Hip. .Did not get to see the game, did not get dinner, or have any beer.
I was wearing my Steelers jacket. I am not sure that a New England fan did not trip me as the rumor that has been going around states.
October 31 Right Hip full replacement at Fairfax Hospital. The best food I had there were Ham Sandwiches. I had two regular meals that were over, over cooked vegetables and some unknown product that passed for meat. They had me up and walking on Nov. 1st. Not far since I had little strength do to the fact all I had for nourishment since Sunday was one ham sandwich. Everything else was jello and clear liquids. I became my obnoxious self and then they served me something they said passed for "good" food. I went back to ham sandwiches. Walked down the hall the morning of Nov 3rd.
Nov. 3rd I went to Faixfax Nursing Center for Physical Therapy. The time spent there was a real adventure. If all the event that happened there were in a book, they would have been humorous if they happened to someone else, but to me they were weird. You could never make up the events. I think I am going to write a play about my adventures. It would give Neil Simon competition for humor.
Like the florescent light above my bed which had a pull chain on it. An aide comes bouncing in and tells me he is "Joe COOL". Just push the button and he would be there. Later I pushed the button and he arrived. I asked him to turn off the light. He yanks on the pull chain and it comes off in his had. I had a light on all night. He never came back. The first 24 hours I had one good aide. Then they moved me to the Physical Therapy Floor. The did a good job on the PT, I got the message to do my exercises when I saw the Black Whips hanging on the wall.
Having played sports for so many years I had learned to play through pain. I always did the exercises without complaint. Then there were the 300 pound "Drama Queens" who put on a show when they had to do curls with a 2 pound weight. Their greatest exercise for the past 40 years was raising a fork of food to their mouth.Then there were the 90 pound elderly ladies who were doing their exercises without complaints, they wanted to go home.
Then there was my roommate. He was suppose to stay in his bed or wheelchair unless he was with an aide.There was this LOUD horn that would go off when he left either the bed or wheelchair. At night he would wander around the room or in the hall with a dipper or bare ass with the loud horn blowing. Not something I would wish for anybody to see. I remember one night the horn went off 7 times. Not much sleep that night. Not sure that he had an elevator that went all the way to the top. Finally he went home and I managed two night of sleep.
The food was better at FNC than at Fairfax Hospital. Often you had to look at the menu on the tray to determine what the meat was. They used the French method of preparing meat. Lots of sauces to hid the flavor of the meat.
I have to quote a friend of mine. "If a dietitian is involved do not eat it, a chef or cook it will be editable and may taste good".
Returned to apartment Nov. 18th. Jean helped me escape from FNC and brought me home. I live in a 4 year old condo where I have an elevator. I live on the top floor, (4th). Never had an elevator problem since I moved in.
I am sitting in her SUV while she gets Clarence and walks him. We did not want Clarence to get excited and soil the carpet. Meanwhile the FedEx man arrives to make a delivery. She returns to the SUV after a long wait and tells me the elevator is not working. She had ridden the elevator up to our floor and took Clarence back to the apartment. The FedEx man had gotten off earlier at the 3rd floor. She pushed the button nothing happens. Jean then then walks down the stairs and tells me the elevator is stuck between the 2nd and 3rd floor. I sat in the lobby till the Otis man got the elevator working 45 minutes later. We made sure he rode up with us and we did not get stuck.
Now walking with cane or now asistance. Doing everything with out a real problem. Had a 4 hour business meeting on Thursday with the VA. Could not have gone any better. We have a pilot project for sure. Now it is just paperwork and arriving at a dollar amount.
Jean has been awesome in getting me through this. She has fought all the paperwork battles and got me out of FNH. They wanted to keep me longer. She has battled the insurance companies and the doctors. Now when she talkes to them she has names and numbers and they do not know what to say but "yes" or answer the questions Then there was the doctors scheduler who hung up on Jean. Needless to say I was at the doctors office on Monday, not some time after Thanksgiving to get my stitches removed. If we were keeping score it would be Jean 20+ the others 0. These days you need someone to fight the battles for you while you are healing.
I will spare you the many other adventure that took place till I write my play.
David
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Sorry that I have been remiss in keeping the blog up to date. I have been very busy doing many interesting things. Among them going to see the family and having many relatives came to Ellwood City, PA for Tyler's graduation party. I will be making up for the absence with several rants in the coming days.
A new word for your vocabulary from Joann Broder:
Electile Dysfunction: the inability to become aroused over any of the choices for President put forth by either party for the 2012 year election.
Many thanks to Jack Ganssle for the following article from Embedded System Design's Embedded.com. I have read ESD from cover to cover for many years and have picked up some software ideas from their hardware articles.
Birthday week
Jack Ganssle
8/8/2011 11:29 AM EDT
Two hugely important inventions were introduced this week, 20 and 30 years ago. 
On August 12, 1981, thirty years ago this week, IBM introduced the PC, the machine that started putting computers in everyone’s hands.
Sure, long before the PC “personal computers” existed. 1977 saw the introduction of Tandy’s TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and Apple II computers. The Altair 8800 came even earlier. All sorts of CP/M machines populated the shelves of computer stores throughout the late 70s.
But IBM’s PC completely changed the equation. It wasn’t long before PC-architecture machines running DOS completely displaced the CP/M empire. The Z80 and 6502 machines gave way to 8088 and, later, x86 machines. Even to this day we live with that legacy. Apple has more money than the US Government, according to one report I heard, but their market share pales compared to PC-class machines. Linux and Apple OSes are vaguely popular, but Windows representing nearly 90% of desktop operating systems.
Less than a year later after the PC the first clones appeared. Compaq debuted their portable machine in November of 1982.
The original IBM PC ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz. A hard disk was not included, and even floppies were expensive options. The default configuration had 16 KB of RAM and required a user-supplied cassette tape for mass storage. Monitors were optional as the computer could drive a TV set.
I bought one as soon as they became available, though as I recall had to wait a couple of months since demand was so high. I believe the cost was about $7k (that’s about $17k in today’s dollars), though that included two floppies and 64KB of RAM.
In 1952 Howard Aiken said: “Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country.” Today there are over a billion in use world-wide, with another third or so of a billion being shipped each year.
Almost exactly a decade after the PC’s debut, on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the first public description of the world wide web on the Internet. The ideas were not new; hypertext links had been proposed long before. But the WWW was destined to be the implementation that shook the world.
Today there are over a trillion unique URLs and more than 100 million web sites exist. Berners-Lee had envisioned a web of connected documents, but the reality surely exceeds even his wildest dreams.
Early on a friend demonstrated the web to me. Though there were only a handful of sites available I was stunned, and within a few months had put up my first web page (which still exists, though now at URL http://www.ganssle.com/jack/ostar1.html). Though we had been using the “Internet” for some time, it was really only useful for techies who were willing to use arcane programs like gopher and text-based email clients. But the Web was clearly going to bring the average person online.
We’ve had the web only for twenty years; probably only for a decade has it been the universal resource we now depend on. Yet it’s hard to imagine how we functioned without it. There was a time when acquiring knowledge meant a trip to the library, when airline tickets were booked by specialists, when encyclopedias cost money – a lot of money.
Publishing was for folks who were recognized as authors, and opinions were expressed in a special section of a bit of foolscap known as the newspaper. Prior to the WWW distributors showered databooks on engineers. Now they’re all PDFs that are just a click away.
For my entire career I’ve heard engineers – always young engineers – complain that there were no new products to invent, no new killer ideas. The trillion URLs represent exactly zero percent of the infinite number of possible URLs, many of which could link to the Next Great Thing.
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
On August 12, 1981, thirty years ago this week, IBM introduced the PC, the machine that started putting computers in everyone’s hands.Sure, long before the PC “personal computers” existed. 1977 saw the introduction of Tandy’s TRS-80, the Commodore PET, and Apple II computers. The Altair 8800 came even earlier. All sorts of CP/M machines populated the shelves of computer stores throughout the late 70s.
But IBM’s PC completely changed the equation. It wasn’t long before PC-architecture machines running DOS completely displaced the CP/M empire. The Z80 and 6502 machines gave way to 8088 and, later, x86 machines. Even to this day we live with that legacy. Apple has more money than the US Government, according to one report I heard, but their market share pales compared to PC-class machines. Linux and Apple OSes are vaguely popular, but Windows representing nearly 90% of desktop operating systems.
Less than a year later after the PC the first clones appeared. Compaq debuted their portable machine in November of 1982.
The original IBM PC ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz. A hard disk was not included, and even floppies were expensive options. The default configuration had 16 KB of RAM and required a user-supplied cassette tape for mass storage. Monitors were optional as the computer could drive a TV set.
I bought one as soon as they became available, though as I recall had to wait a couple of months since demand was so high. I believe the cost was about $7k (that’s about $17k in today’s dollars), though that included two floppies and 64KB of RAM.
In 1952 Howard Aiken said: “Originally one thought that if there were a half dozen large computers in this country, hidden away in research laboratories, this would take care of all requirements we had throughout the country.” Today there are over a billion in use world-wide, with another third or so of a billion being shipped each year.
Almost exactly a decade after the PC’s debut, on August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee posted the first public description of the world wide web on the Internet. The ideas were not new; hypertext links had been proposed long before. But the WWW was destined to be the implementation that shook the world.
Today there are over a trillion unique URLs and more than 100 million web sites exist. Berners-Lee had envisioned a web of connected documents, but the reality surely exceeds even his wildest dreams.
Early on a friend demonstrated the web to me. Though there were only a handful of sites available I was stunned, and within a few months had put up my first web page (which still exists, though now at URL http://www.ganssle.com/jack/ostar1.html). Though we had been using the “Internet” for some time, it was really only useful for techies who were willing to use arcane programs like gopher and text-based email clients. But the Web was clearly going to bring the average person online.
We’ve had the web only for twenty years; probably only for a decade has it been the universal resource we now depend on. Yet it’s hard to imagine how we functioned without it. There was a time when acquiring knowledge meant a trip to the library, when airline tickets were booked by specialists, when encyclopedias cost money – a lot of money.
Publishing was for folks who were recognized as authors, and opinions were expressed in a special section of a bit of foolscap known as the newspaper. Prior to the WWW distributors showered databooks on engineers. Now they’re all PDFs that are just a click away.
For my entire career I’ve heard engineers – always young engineers – complain that there were no new products to invent, no new killer ideas. The trillion URLs represent exactly zero percent of the infinite number of possible URLs, many of which could link to the Next Great Thing.
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Worlds Fastest Computers
Any of the words top 500 computers can calculate, in a matter of hour or two, more than all the computers together, calculated in the first 50 years of computing. Think what the next 10, 20, 50, or 100 years will bring. Remember what has taken place in the first 65 years of flight. from the Wright Brothers to space travel.
The K computer's performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still under construction, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.Japan's ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place.
The latest iteration of the biannual list was released Monday at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.Unlike other recent supercomputers, the K computer doesn't use graphics processors or other accelerators. It uses the most power, but is also one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, according to Top500.org.
The supercomputer is installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe. When complete, it is intended to run at over 10 petaflops. This is the first time Japan has had the most powerful supercomputer since the country's Earth Simulator was surpassed by the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L and by Nasa's Columbia in November 2004.
For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved performance over 1 petaflop, although they are the only systems on the list that reach that level. The U.S. has five systems in the top 10; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.
The DOE's Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, is now in tenth place. The performance of computers on the list is measured using the Linpack benchmark, a set of routines that solve linear equations.
The last system on the new list was at position 262 six months ago, meaning almost 48 percent of the list has changed in the last six months -- and the turnover rate has steadily increased during the last few lists, according to Top500.org, which publishes the list. While performance at the top is advancing by leaps and bounds, movements lower down the list are more modest. The entry point for the top 100 increased to 88.92 teraflops from 75.76 teraflops six months ago.
IBM is the dominant manufacturer on the list with 213 systems in the Top 500, compared to Hewlett-Packard with 153. Intel continues to provide the processors for a majority of the systems on list, followed by AMD and IBM. Intel's Westmere processors are now used by 178 systems, up from 56 systems 6 months ago.
June 20, 2011 (IDG News Service) A Japanese computer has taken first place on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China's reign at the top after just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.
The latest iteration of the biannual list was released Monday at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.Unlike other recent supercomputers, the K computer doesn't use graphics processors or other accelerators. It uses the most power, but is also one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list, according to Top500.org.
The supercomputer is installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe. When complete, it is intended to run at over 10 petaflops. This is the first time Japan has had the most powerful supercomputer since the country's Earth Simulator was surpassed by the DOE's IBM BlueGene/L and by Nasa's Columbia in November 2004.
For the first time, all of the top 10 systems achieved performance over 1 petaflop, although they are the only systems on the list that reach that level. The U.S. has five systems in the top 10; Japan and China have two each, and France has one.
The DOE's Roadrunner, the first system to break the petaflop barrier in June 2008, is now in tenth place. The performance of computers on the list is measured using the Linpack benchmark, a set of routines that solve linear equations.
The last system on the new list was at position 262 six months ago, meaning almost 48 percent of the list has changed in the last six months -- and the turnover rate has steadily increased during the last few lists, according to Top500.org, which publishes the list. While performance at the top is advancing by leaps and bounds, movements lower down the list are more modest. The entry point for the top 100 increased to 88.92 teraflops from 75.76 teraflops six months ago.
IBM is the dominant manufacturer on the list with 213 systems in the Top 500, compared to Hewlett-Packard with 153. Intel continues to provide the processors for a majority of the systems on list, followed by AMD and IBM. Intel's Westmere processors are now used by 178 systems, up from 56 systems 6 months ago.
What was the first tape drive?
The following information came from various sources, I was not there.
Magnetic tape was first used for data storage in 1951. The tape device was called UNISERVO and was the main I/O device on the UNIVAC I computer. The effective transfer rate for the UNISERVO was about 7,200 characters per second. The tapes were metal and 1200 feet long (365 meters) and therefore very heavy. (50 pounds)The UNIVAC I delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau was the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although manufactured by Remington Rand, the machine often was mistakenly referred to as the "IBM UNIVAC." Remington Rand eventually sold 46 machines at more than $1 million each.F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer.
| Speed: | 1,905 operations per second |
| Input/output: | magnetic tape, unityper, printer |
| Memory size: | 1,000 12-digit words in delay lines |
| Memory type: | delay lines, magnetic tape |
| Technology: | serial vacuum tubes, delay lines, magnetic tape |
| Floor space: | 943 cubic feet |
| Cost: | F.O.B. factory $750,000 plus $185,000 for a high speed printer |
| Project leaders: | J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly |
Monday, June 20, 2011
100 years old (IBM - not me!)
The 16 of June 2011 IBM celebrated 100 years of being in business. Very few companies in the world have had that long a life. IBM's impact on civilization is endless. A person, any where in the world, and now in space has their life effected every day, many every minute of their life. The computer part of IBM has only been around for 65 years. No one can even guess what the next 100 years or even 10 years, what IBM and the computer industry will bring to civilization. There will be many great advancements and few other uses that will be regrettable. Can you think of anything electrical /mechanical, other than a electric pencil sharpener, that does not use a computer in it or is not, somewhere in its life been impacted by a computer.
The goal of this blog is to inform. There will items of history of the computer industry, thoughts and pontifications on the industry, COBOL and JAVA tips, new ideas, website you should visit, and answers to interesting questions. The advantage of being an Old Timer in this field is that you can criticize something and not worry about being fired. The worst that can happen is they will not read my blog any more.
Remember there is not much new in this industry that has not been available in some similar form for many years. Tape drives have been around for over 50 years. The first one's were mental tape weighing 50lbs for a reel of tape. Always remember that a new idea is just a repackaging of an old idea so that they can provide material to publish magazines or a have new salesman's selling point.
The latest is the Cloud. It is the old concept of time sharing combined with client/server methods.
Today's website of interest:
http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/films/wild_ducks.html
The goal of this blog is to inform. There will items of history of the computer industry, thoughts and pontifications on the industry, COBOL and JAVA tips, new ideas, website you should visit, and answers to interesting questions. The advantage of being an Old Timer in this field is that you can criticize something and not worry about being fired. The worst that can happen is they will not read my blog any more.
Remember there is not much new in this industry that has not been available in some similar form for many years. Tape drives have been around for over 50 years. The first one's were mental tape weighing 50lbs for a reel of tape. Always remember that a new idea is just a repackaging of an old idea so that they can provide material to publish magazines or a have new salesman's selling point.
The latest is the Cloud. It is the old concept of time sharing combined with client/server methods.
Today's website of interest:
http://www.ibm.com/ibm100/us/en/films/wild_ducks.html
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