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Review: Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk

Feb 20th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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Triage is a harsh mistress. I started out in computing with the CDP1802, a microprocessor designed for embedded systems work (it was used on the Viking Landers!) and for all the software I've used and the code I've written since then, I miss poking wires in breadboard holes and hitting the trigger of a wire-wrap gun. There's only so many hours in a life, and embedded work has not made the cut.

That may change. Embedded systems tinkering is easier now. Much easier, and for a couple of reasons: 1) The processors themselves can be had on small boards with appropriate I/O connectors; you don't have to fool with loose chips anymore. 2) Development software is better, mostly because now there is development software. In 1976 I literally had to write binary code by hand. (F8 FF A2… Yes, yes, I know, barefoot and uphill both ways. But if you think I'm exaggerating, you simply weren't there.) And, the point of the current discussion, 3) there are books like Making Things Talk, by Tom Igoe. Wow.

The first time I saw the cover I was confused: It shows a stuffed monkey and the completely inane blurb, “Projects and ideas to create talking objects from anything.” I literally thought it was about fooling with speech synthesizers. But no: It's about networking embedded systems modules with technologies including Ethernet, USB, Bluetooth, and Zigbee. The microprocessor modules under discussion are the Atmel AVR-based Arduinos, augmented by a host of sensor modules and connectivity modules that can be breadboarded on the same 0.1″ spacing blocks we used to use in 1976. In a sense, we now have modules the way other people have chips. (And in saying so I am indeed just boasting.) We can raise our consciousness to the level of connecting functional blocks rather than individual inverters and logic gates. That is a very big win.

The book is patient (as good tutorials must be) and begins with probably the finest introduction to low-level networking that I have ever seen. If you are a software developer you will understand it; if you have no experience whatsoever in networking or programming, you may have some trouble. A good prerequisite text would be Tom Igoe's 2004 Physical Computing (written with Dan O'Sullivan) which focuses on the older Basic Stamp modules and their close relatives. Physical Computing introduces both electronics and programming to a degree that Making Things Talk cannot. That said, Making Things Talk presents examples using a Java-derivative programming environment called Processing, which is free and open source and much gentler conceptually than programming in raw Java or, merciful God help us, C. (Pascal would be gentler still, but as we all know, Pascal is a kiddie language that cannot accomplish anything useful. You must believe this. A C programmer said it. QED.)

Once the essential groundwork is done, the book teaches through projects, good projects that are mostly fun and in many cases even useful. The book explains how RFID tags work and how to read them, and how to read 2-D barcodes with a Web cam. The most fascinating projects are those that involve physical location sensing, using modules that perform infrared ranging, ultrasonic ranging, GPS, and “digital compass” modules, all of which made the robot guy within me itch like hell. We didn't have stuff like that thirty years ago.

Although it doesn't get a huge amount of coverage in the book, the XBee module (which implements a Zigbee data radio system) fascinates me: It's basically jelly-bean logic implementing a short-range mesh network, and I intuit that hobby robots of the future may well consist of swarms of semi-independent functional blocks knit together coherently through the Zigbee network protocols, under the control of a multicore master processor. And damn, I would love to build something like that.

Anyway. Here are a few additional observations on the book:

  • It has at least process color on most pages, with beautifully shot full-color photos on many of them.
  • The technical figures are abundant and very well done.
  • The type is very small, the margins narrow. This 425-page book would have been a 600-page book back in the 90s. My guess is that O'Reilly wanted to the keep page count down because of all the costly interior color. Note to my age cohort: Prepare to squint, or go get yer readers.
  • There is far less discussion on debugging than I'd like. Coding is easy—as is plugging jumper wires into breadboard blocks. But when something doesn't work the way it should, where do you start? The book is mostly silent on that crucial point.
  • In general, the book probably covers a little too much ground, and doesn't go for quite enough depth. Zigbee is subtle, and its subtler features are not explored here. This may not be a completely fair criticism, but it supports my conviction that you must be a journeyman embedded systems type to really get the most from this book, as a lot of the blanks you must fill in yourself.

Don't let any of that stop you: If you have some clue about embedded systems modules and want to learn embedded systems-level data communications, there is nothing like this book anywhere. And if I do decide to go back to embedded systems tinkering, this will be the book that pushes me over the edge. Not yet—I have a rocket or two to finish and a few other things to do—but soon, soon.

Highly recommended.

The Revenge of the Classics

Feb 9th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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I've lived such an overstuffed life for so many years that I'd almost forgotten a psychology that was a very big part of my youth: Sniffing around for “just something to read.” I'm a very deliberate reader these days because I don't have a lot of completely uncommitted time. I have a reading buffer of 50-100 books on hand here, all of which were chosen because they touch on one of my interests or another. (My library as a whole contains somewhere around 2500 books, down from 3000 before we left Arizona.) I never have to cast about at random for just something to read.

For many people, reading is an even bigger part of their lives, believe it or not. (Maybe fewer than we'd like, but they're out there.) These people are driving the ebook industry right now, and I've noticed a phenomenon few others have commented on: the explosion of interest in out-of-copyright books by people who might not have been slobbering Dickens or Jane Austen fans in the past. At numerous sites online, people are uploading ebook versions of many classic texts. I follow Mobileread, which now has about 3,800 free ebooks online for download, the bulk of them pre-1923 works, some well-known (they have Dickens' complete works now) and some pretty obscure, like the Scottish Psalter of 1650. Mobileread is interesting because people are creating versions in the popular small-screen ebook reader formats like Ebookwise, MobiPocket and BBeB rather than raw text—nor formats used primarily on PCs, like PDF and MS Reader.

I continue to boggle at people reading Thackeray on their cellphones, but boggle or no boggle, it's being done. The classics are coming back. I can't entirely explain it, but I have some hunches:

  • Many of these ebook editions are beautifully done. The Dickens canon is the work of one man named Harry in the UK, and they include some of the nice old 19th Century woodcut illustrations plus color covers where those were available. (Oliver Twist, yes. Martin Chuzzlewit, no.) They are not shot full of OCR errors and gaps like some of the stuff I've downloaded from other places, including the venerable Project Gutenberg.
  • They are free and they are easy to get. There are no hurdles to jump, nothing to sign up for, no money to lay out, and no DRM to drop sand in the gears of the experience.
  • There are no ethical issues involved in obtaining them or passing them on. I still think people are basically honest, and they do consider the rights of copyright holders.
  • They're classics because they have withstood the test of time. They're good.

The classics have always been available in bookstores, of course, at prices comparable to those of newly published books. But if you're shopping for something to read on the train going in to work because it's a dead hour coming and going, it's hard to beat free, especially if free is easy and involves no pokes from the conscience.

What we're seeing here might as well be called open-source literature. It's being done by volunteer labor, including people who are drawing new artwork and contributing it without copyright claims. It's significant because people writing new ebooks have to take into account that the total available number of reader-hours in the audience is finite, and the friction involved in obtaining and reading the classics is now approaching zero. Like Linux, it will take a while yet for the well-formatted library of classic ebooks to mature, but like Linux, they will eventually become a competitive force to reckon with.

And wow, dare we hope that the premodern will put a fat boot up the ass of the postmodern? A lot of those “dead white males” must be grinning about now.

Carl & Jerry Volume 5 Is Out!

Feb 7th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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This one took a lot longer than I had hoped—and certainly longer than the seething two weeks I spent on Volume 4—but the fifth and final volume of Carl & Jerry: Their Complete Adventures is now complete, uploaded, and available on Lulu.com. This has been my major spare-time project for well over a year, and I scratched my head now and then as to why it was taking so much time and energy. Well, here's why: It required 989 pages in five separate books to print the 263,232 words and 311 illustrations in the 119 stories. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot.

But it's done. I'm extremely happy with the way it all turned out, and the fan mail has been very encouraging. The only complaint I've seen is one chap moaning that, “You mean, there's only 119 stories?” Yup. I wish there were more too; Carl & Jerry are sui generis. The only thing even remotely similar is Bertrand Brimley's Mad Scientists Club, all books of which (fortunately) are still in print, in nice new editions with all the original Charles Geer pencil sketches and watercolors. Somewhere further on the fringes are Tom Swift, Jr and the Danny Dunn books, but the fact remains that Carl & Jerry were talking about real technology, not Repelatrons and antigravity paint. Read the stories and you will learn a few things, albeit things that were first-run between 1954 and 1964.

I added a few things to Volume 5. One is a schematic published a few months after the story of Carl & Jerry's primordial beambot, “The Lightning Bug,” from a Popular Electronics reader who built his own Lightning Bug. That's one of my top 5 all-time favorite Carl & Jerry yarns, and I've posted a free PDF containing it. It's unusual in that if you want to build your own, the circuit is right there and ready to go.

One thing that added some time to the task was a topic index that ran to 19 pages. People have written me to ask, “What was the Carl & Jerry story where the crook was getting away in an iceboat?” All they remembered was the iceboat. That's just the way human memory works; quirky is too kind a word for it. So I went through all 119 stories and built an alphabetical topic index, including any memory tag I could think of for each story. If you want to look up all the stories about Carl's dog Bosco, it's there. If you want to know which story saw the boys build a proton precession magnetometer, it's there. Skunks figured significantly in two stories, so flip to “Skunk” and there they are. Ditto Norma, Mr. Gruber, radio-controlled models, sonar, fishing, smoke signals, Morse code, car thieves, and on and on. Dare you not to find a story you remember there.

Finally, I added two new stories, written today in 2008 and not forty-five years ago. One is by George Ewing WA8WTE, who actually built the gadget in the story he wrote, way long ago at Michigan Tech, about the same time that Carl & Jerry were at fictional Parvoo University. It's basically about building a seismometer from a broken pinball machine, and it's beautifully done. The other story is my own, and I borrowed a gimmick from Arthur C. Clarke as way to explain how reflecting telescopes work. Both are tall tales, but that's what John T. Frye was offering back in the 60s, and both stories are authentically tall, done very much in Frye's own style.

And so it's done. Here's the link to my Lulu storefront where all five books may be purchased. Many thanks to Michael Covington, for putting the bug in my ear back in August 2006, and to Pete Albrecht, who taught me how to un-halftone the illos. (He also did quite a few of them for me.) Also, thanks to Doug Faunt N6TQS who sent me the last few issues that I didn't have and somehow just couldn't nail on eBay.

And now it's on to other things. Writing, of course, and putting together the two collections of my short SF that I've been promising for years. And FreePascal from Square One. Plenty to do here; all I need now is the time to do it.

Recent Reading

Feb 6th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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I haven't reviewed many books lately, but that isn't because I haven't been reading. I read quite a bit, if not as much as I often wish I had time for. If I don't review a book here, it's generally for one of these reasons:

  1. Reviewing books is difficult to do well, and my time/energy is committed to other things;
  2. The books I read are sometimes so vanishingly narrow in interest that I doubt anyone would care what I thought of them;
  3. The books are so-so and I can't bring myself to spend time describing them.

This third point is the most interesting of the three. A really bad book I might mention to save you time and money. But what about a so-so book? Is it worth any effort at all?

This applies to wine as well as books. I try a lot of wine and like only some of it. The things I like I mention here, especially if they're unconventional. (Generally this means not dry.) I've mentioned a few wines that I loathe, like the unfathomably awful Sweet Walter from the incomprehensible Bully Hill Vineyards in upstate New York. But something like Taylor Sauterne is difficult to describe, as it has so little character I'm not sure what to say. It's not quite tasteless—just mostly tasteless. (It's certainly nothing like the other sauternes I've had in the past. But then again, it's an $8 twist-cap wine.)

So today I'm going to mention a few of the books I've read recently, including the odd things that I expect no one among my readership to be interested in. I won't spend a lot of space on any of them.

  • The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. (2006) Probably the best of the current batch, it is nonetheless extremely uneven. Gut-splitting hilarious in places, it also has long runs of very boring stuff, and occasional departures that suggest anger that the author can't quite express. Misses more than it hits. Borrow it maybe, and when things get boring, skip to the next chapter.
  • Ghosts and Poltergeists by Herbert Thurston, S. J. (1954, and now out of copyright) A deadpan description of, well, ghosts and poltergeists from around the world and across centuries of time. Competently written but dry; if you want a diverting read in similar turf, try Colin Wilson's Poltergeist.
  • The Polish National Catholic Church by Paul Fox (undated, probably 1957ish) A self-description of the PNCC for prospective converts. Nice little book, with some interior color. Includes church history, its constitution, liturgy, and directory of parishes. Best concise description of the church at its peak that I've seen.
  • Who Really Cares? by Arthur C. Brooks (2007) Reviewing this book will only get me beaten up, but it reads well and provides loads of research that I'm not entirely sure I understand the same way that the author does. His conclusion: Political conservatives are less selfish than liberals, who are in turn less selfish than independents. My conclusion: It's down in the noise. Try again, dood.
  • The Fall of the Dynasties by Edmond Taylor. (1963; may be out of copyright) 300-level European history text that I read to try and understand WWI. Eye-crossingly dense, but he covers all the bases and I think I now have a grip on what destroyed Europe in 1914: Itself. What Europe is best at. Surprise!
  • Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz. (2004) Almost worth a review, and not a total waste of time, but the author describes more than he explains, and I put the book down having gained a great deal of information but not a lot of insight.
  • Every Knee Shall Bow: The Case for Christian Universalism by Thomas Allin and Mark T. Chamberlain. (2005) Covers ground well-covered in other books on this topic, and doesn't add much that I haven't seen. Confines itself to scriptural argument, and doesn't go after more gnarly philosophical questions like, How can eternal punishment for finite transgression be just?
  • Original Blessing by Matthew Fox. (1983) A muddy-headed challenge to the Augustinian heresy that changed original sin to original guilt. Fox makes me nuts sometimes, but here and there he goes places nobody else wants to go. He's willing to condemn Augustine of Hippo, something no one else (except me) is willing to do. I honestly don't know what to think about this book, which will be incomprehensible to anyone without a fair grounding in Christian theology.
  • Complexification by John L. Casti. (1994) Awful, but not so awful I wanted to waste the energy required to throw it at the wall. Maybe a smarter guy could grasp what's there. Or maybe there's nothing there to grasp. Pass.

Note also that I cruise a lot of computer books, but I haven't sat down to read one cover-to-cover in years. I haven't mentioned any of those here, good or bad. I also occasionally pull out books I've already read and reread a few chapters to clarify some question that's been haunting my mind. I haven't mentioned those here either, but that's actually a growing slice of my reading time, and an interesting phenomenon all by itself that I should take up again at some point.

That will have to do for now. I know I've read a few other things in the last couple of months, but they made such a light impression I don't recall what they were, which says something right there.

US Copyright’s “Weird Window”

Jan 26th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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US copyright terms are more complex than they should be—everybody seems to agree on that but Big Media. Here's a nice short summary that I have presented before. What's interesting is what happens in a sort of weird window between 1923 and 1963. Books published in that window bearing a legal copyright notice may or may not still be within copyright. The key is whether the copyright was explicitly renewed by the rightsholder. No renewal, and the book passed into the public domain after its initial 28 years of copyright, which would be no later than 1991.

Most books from that period that we even moderately successful financially have been renewed, but I've found a fair number of reasonably interesting books that were not. Most of the books I used in my researches into the fourth dimension in high school were either pre-1923 or never renewed: Coxeter's Regular Polytopes, Manning's Geometry of the Fourth Dimension and The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained, Somerville's An Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions. All are now in the public domain, and all are available from (surprise!) Dover Books in print editions, but I would certainly like to see them become nicely reset PDFs and not simply holographs. (My copy of Coxeter fell apart back in 1970.)

A lot of old electronics and amateur radio books were never renewed. All the Frank C. Jones amateur radio books that I have (great tube-era construction stuff!) have expired, and they were beautifully done. The late Don Stoner's New Sideband Handbook from 1958 is now out of copyright, as is Radio for the Millions. A lot of these old titles are now available from Lindsay Books.

As I've mentioned in other places, a lot of classic SF has expired, including most of E. E. Doc Smith's work, and much of H. Beam Piper. All of the Skylark books except for Skylark Duquesne (published shortly before the author's death in 1965 and thus outside the window) have expired, as have all of the Lensman books except for Gray Lensman and Children of the Lens. None of the Ace Double short novels I've checked have shown up for renewal, including Chandler's The Rim Gods and Lin Carter's Destination Saturn. Both of those could stand republishing; most of the other Ace Double entries I have are best forgotten. (It may be that the components of Ace Doubles were treated differently from a copyright standpoint; this would be useful to know. I'm looking into it.)

Nothing written solely by the Jesuit Herbert Thurston has been renewed, and his book Ghosts and Poltergeists is actually good sleepytime reading. (I'm still trying to obtain The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, which of all his books has the best rep. The bookstores I order it from keep selling it to somebody else before I get there.) The New Dictionary of Thoughts is a decent book of quotations, well-organized by subject, and now expired. Max Freedom Long's pre-1964 books on Hawaiian religion and magic were not renewed, nor were Carl & Jerry author John T. Frye's two books on radio repair. Ditto Glenn's Theodicy and Broderick's Concise Catholic Dictionary, along with Jessie Pegis' A Practical Catholic Dictionary. The slightly peculiar Benziger Brothers' My Everyday Missal from 1948 (with print I can't imagine anyone could read in a badly lit church) does not appear in the renewal records. Ditto My Sunday Missal from Fr. Joseph Stedman (1942) and St. Joseph Sunday Missal from Catholic Book Publishing (1962). In fact, most of the odd little prayer books I've gathered over the years either have no copyright notice or were never renewed.

And that's just the stuff from my own library. When I come across a book published in the Weird Window, I often check the renewal records to see if it's expired. There's a nice lookup page here, though the lawyers always caution that it's possible for there to be errors. I suppose. Nonetheless, there's a lot of room for the release of these titles as ebooks, or their reissue in print via POD. The public domain does not begin in 1922 and go back from there.

My 2008 Publishing Plan File

Jan 24th, 2008
by Jeff Duntemann.
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This oral surgery business has set me back on a number of projects (no, scratch that; all of them!) but things get a little better every day and I'm hard at work again on several fronts. The fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry is getting close to finished. I'm now doing the topic index, which is an interesting concept. I regularly get messages from guys who ask me, “Hey, Jeff, what was the Carl and Jerry story where they set up a talking skull for a haunted house?” That's all they remember: The talking skull. So there will be an index entry like the following:

Skull
November 1959: V11 #5 Book 3 p.81 “The Ghost Talks”
On Halloween, Selsyn motors and a glowing skull haunt a house for Norma's sorority.

The topic index will have entries like Iceboat, Dogs, Kidnapers, Bootleggers, Capacity-operated relays, RC models, Telemetry, Tesla coil, Norma, Mr. Gruber, Theremin, Ultrasonics, and so on. I already have a complete chronological index on the Web here, but I wanted to make the search possible by topic, and if all you remember is that the boys were fooling with a police speed radar unit, you can look up Radar and see both stories (there were two) in which police speed radar figures significantly. After the index is done, I have two “new” Carl and Jerry stories to typeset and then it should be finished. I'm hoping to have it available by February 10.

With Carl and Jerry in the can, my next major push will be to get two anthologies of my own SF out there on Lulu and as ebooks. The two volumes will be:

  • Souls in Silicon, including all my SF featuring any sort of artificial intelligence, plus a significant excerpt from The Cunning Blood; and
  • Firejammer!, which will contain all the rest of my published SF plus the title novella, which has never seen print and, given its 27,000-word length, is unlikely to in traditional markets.

Unlike my earlier Lulu publications, these two will get ISBNs and be available on Amazon. I also intend to make them available on the Kindle. Most of the material has already been typeset, and a lot of the remaining effort will go into things like finding art for the covers. I'm hoping to get these both out by midyear; Souls in Silicon may happen sooner.

In loose moments I've been recasting the 1993 print edition of Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal, and will release an initial volume as a free ebook sometime in late summer. As FreePascal was designed to be compatible with Borland Pascal 7, this should work. The ebook will be free, but I will offer an inexpensive printed edition with a color cover on Lulu. The first volume will cover the basic concepts of programming, installation of FreePascal on several platforms, the use of the console window IDE, and the core Pascal language. Much of the book is now obsolete, and it doesn't really cover OOP beyond the basic idea, so if additional volumes happen they'll take a fair bit of work and won't be out until 2009. I'm also considering adapting my portions of The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer for Lazarus, but that won't likely be this year either.

Toward the end of the year I may release a third Old Catholic history title, which will be a compendium of several shorter items from journals published between 1875 and 1900.

Note well that this is a publishing plan file; I still intend to do a fair bit of writing and will continue to shop my material to traditional markets. I hope to finish Old Catholics and make some headway on The Molten Flesh—and if I can't get traction there, I will go back to Ten Gentle Opportunities. Shorter items may pop up at any time; writing is a messy business. But you knew that. I hope.

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