The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Rants

And kvetching, too

  • Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve: Failure & Aggravation

    This Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve feeds water into our furnace, provides an overpressure relief, and prevents heating loop water from re-entering the potable water supply.

    Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve
    Watts 9D-M3 Backflow Preventer Valve

    The vertical pipe leads downward near the floor, underneath which sits the small plastic bucket I provided to catch the occasional drip. Recently we had an all-hands scramble to soak up a pool of water spreading across the floor from the overflowing bucket, across the aisle, and below the shafts-and-rods-and-tubes-and-pipes storage rack. Evidently the occasional drip became a steady drip while we weren’t watching; not a catastrophic flood, but far more water than we want on the floor.

    This is the inlet valve, which is basically a flapper. You can’t see the fine cracks around the central mount, but they’re all over the inner half of the ring.

    Watts 9D-M3 - Inlet valve
    Watts 9D-M3 – Inlet valve

    And this is the outlet valve, which has pretty much disintegrated. Note the outer rim peeled back under my thumb:

    Watts 9D-M3 - Outlet valve
    Watts 9D-M3 – Outlet valve

    A complete new valve is $40, in stock and ready for pickup at Lowe’s, but all I really needed was the failed rubber flapper valves, which they don’t carry. A few minutes of searching reveals the Watts 0886011 Repair Kit, which has all of the interior parts.

    Pop Quiz: How much does the repair kit cost?

    Answer: Starts at $38 plus shipping and goes up from there. Cheap aftermarket kits run $20 and up, but they’re all out of stock.

    Now that, party people, is the sort of thing that ticks me right off.

    Perhaps the local HVAC / plumbing supply stores have such kits in stock? To quote: “They may exist, but we don’t have them.”

    I don’t see any way to homebrew new flapper valves, so it’s off to Lowe’s we go…

    It would seem to me that these things shouldn’t fail after a mere decade of service. I thought that about the CdS flame sensor that crapped out in the middle of a sub-zero January cold snap while I was at Cabin Fever some years ago, too.

  • Website Pwnage

    Despite the fact that nobody bothers to crack your web passwords, as it’s easier for them to crack the entire server and scoop out everyone’s personally sensitive bits like so much caviar, all websites remind / require you to pick strong passwords. So, when I registered myself on a high-value website, I did what I always do: ask my password-generation program for a dollop of entropy.

    It came up with something along the lines of:

    Gmaz78fb'd]

    You can see where this is going, right?

    Pressing Submit (which always makes me whisper Inshallah with a bad accent) produced:

    The mumble.com website is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

    Little Bobby Tables rides again!

    [Yes, pwnage.]

  • Early Compact Fluorescent Bulb Failure

    Early CFL Bulb Failure
    Early CFL Bulb Failure

    Being that sort of bear, I tend to make notations like this. Sometimes I’m delighted the next time the inscription sees the light of day and sometimes it ticks me right off…

    Much of the energy-saving advantage of CFL bulbs comes from their touted long life. I’d say a year isn’t nearly long enough to reap any benefits…

    There is certainly a warranty on the bulb, if only I’d:

    • saved the empty package and
    • had the original receipt and
    • be willing to call a presumably toll-free number and
    • go through whatever hassle they impose to swap the bulb

    They know none of us will get very far down that checklist…

    FWIW, the box of smaller CFL bulbs on the shelf says they have a two-year warranty “in normal residential service of 3 hours per day”. I’m sure the number of starts factors into it, too.

  • Rant: Software Testing

    I admit to having expectations, perhaps unreasonable expectations, about what should transpire after filing a bug report with a software project large enough to have a bug tracking system.

    • Acknowledge the report right away, lest it appear nobody cares.
    • Figure out what else you need to know; I give good bug report, but if you need more, ask now.
    • Triage, set, and meet a due date, lest your development process appear shambolic.
    • When we outsiders become the software testers, keep us in the loop.

    My experience shows that the larger and better-funded the organization, the less productive will be any given report: individual problems get lost in the noise. Firefox, Ubuntu, and the late OpenOffice serve as cautionary tales; their forums may help, but submitting a problem report doesn’t increase the likelihood of getting a timely fix.

    I cut one-horse open-source operations considerable slack, although they rarely need any. For example, a recent OpenSCAD problem produced turnaround time measured in hours, including a completely new source file cooked up by a bystander and the lead developer polishing it off a sleep cycle later. That was on Christmas Eve, from on vacation, in a low-bandwidth zone, evidently through an iDingus.

    Perhaps I’m more sensitive to software quality assurance than most folks, but for good reason.

    Quite some years ago, my esteemed wife earned an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for testing a major component of a major OS. They don’t hand those tchotchkes out lightly and rarely for anything other than development. She had skip-leveled(*) to her umpteenth-level manager: “IBM must not ship this product. It does not work. It is an embarrassment. I will not concur with any decision to ship.”

    The thing eventually shipped, half a year behind schedule, after the developers produced code that passed her test suite and she signed off on the results. Word has it that blood ran ankle-deep in the corridors toward the end.

    If you should ever encounter someone in need of a software-testing team leader who doesn’t take crap from anybody, let me know. She’ll definitely require considerable inducement to drag her back into the field, away from her gardens and quilting…

    So, anyway, we know a bit about software testing and verification and QC in these parts.

    Selah.

    (*) Old-school IBM jargon for walking around several levels of obstructive management to meet with a Big Shot in the corner office. Might not happen in the New IBM, alas.

  • Comment Spam: Industrial Sabotoge?

    A new trend in the comment spam load that you don’t see involves a concerted attempt to post irrelevant comments with links to obviously junk websites. The URLs vary, but each site’s links cross-connect it with its peers in weird ways that recycle the few real pages of content (such as it is). However, every page of every website included a specific company’s contact information at the bottom, which is truly weird; usually junk websites have no identifying marks.

    Generally I ignore such crap, but after discarding several dozen such comments over the course of a week, I called the company’s phone number and, amazingly, spoke to an actual person. It’s impossible to determine honesty over the phone, but he certainly sounded like a real human who’s busy running a small company and who has no idea what’s going down.

    Perhaps his internet marketing company has gone mad?

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, that series of spam comments stopped immediately after I hung up the phone. I’ll never know the end of the story, even though we all know the motivation: money changes everything.

    The last time this sort of thing happened, I also talked to a pleasant voice who observed that it could well be an unscrupulous competitor (or a hired “internet marketing” company) trying to smear their good name. There’s no way to confirm or deny such a claim, of course.

    For what it’s worth, Akismet reports these statistics since Day Zero of this blog, back in December 2008:

    • 42,143 total spam
    • 1,982 total ham
    • 225 missed spam
    • 10 false positives
    • 99.47% accuracy rate

    It’s currently killing over 150 spam comments every day, leaving only a dozen or so for me to flush. The lure of easy money seems irresistible, so there’s no hope of a letup.

  • Credit Card Services: Payback

    If you have a landline telephone number, you’ve probably been robo-called by “Rachael” from “Credit Card Services” with an offer to lower your credit card rates. She gives you two options:

    • Press 1 to speak with a live operator
    • Press 3 (or, sometimes, 2) to prevent further calls

    I presume you’ve discovered that pressing 3 has no effect.

    Credit Card Services is obviously a scam:

    • We’re on the FTC Do-Not-Call Registry
    • We don’t have a pre-existing business relationship with CCS
    • They use a robo-dialer
    • Pressing 3 (or whatever) doesn’t discontinue the calls
    • Their caller ID is spoofed

    Rather than get mad, play along. CCS obviously preys on suckers willing to read off their credit card information to total strangers, so you can retaliate by stringing them along as far as possible, thus increasing their cost-per-sucker. Admittedly, their “agents” are (at best) minimum-wage slaves, which means you’re messing with their income stream, but after the first few months it becomes pretty obvious that the calls will never stop and you may as well roll with the punch.

    Suggested topics, all presented in a slow monotone with long pauses:

    • Making sure they’re not associated with any of your credit cards (they aren’t)
    • Understanding whether they’re offering a loan to pay off your cards (they lie)
    • Asking for a callback number in case the call gets dropped (it’ll be a junk number)

    They expect a minimum $4k account balance with the usual usurious credit card rates. Getting them to admit any of that requires carefully paced inquiry, because their script requires getting my balance before they devote any more time to me. I haven’t fed them any (totally bogus) numbers yet, but that may be the only way to get beyond the preliminaries.

    Topics I’ll investigate in upcoming calls:

    • Their current interest rate
    • The repayment schedule
    • What they hold as collateral
    • How’s the weather where they are (it’ll be terrible here, for sure)

    Thus far, I’ve discovered that any mention of these topics produces an instant disconnect:

    • Why pressing 3 does not discontinue further calls
    • Inquiring about their company mailing address
    • Asking to speak with a supervisor
    • Whether lying to strangers all day affects their personal relationships

    My record so far is 3:05 from picking up the phone, which includes the recorded message and a bit of hold music.

  • HP-48GX Calculator Disassembly: Case Rivets

    The keyboard on my trusty HP 48GX calculator finally deteriorated to the point of unusability, so I tore the thing apart following the useful instructions there. The warning about applying force to the rivets that hold the case halves together gives you not the faintest concept of how much force is actually required to pry the mumble thing apart at the battery compartment; I finally invoked force majeure with a chisel scraper…

    HP-48GX case rivets
    HP-48GX case rivets

    I expected the calculator would not survive this operation and I wasn’t disappointed.

    An HP 50g is now in hand. Here in late 2011 I’d expect HP’s top-of-the-line RPN calculator to sport a crisp high-resolution display, but noooo the low-contrast 131×80 LCD seems teleported directly from the latter part of the last millennium. The manuals are PDFs, which is OK, but their content is far inferior to the HP 48GX manuals. In particular, the editing / proofreading is terrible. I infer that the HP calculator division can barely fog a mirror and is on advanced life support; HP’s diverting all their money to, uh, executive buyouts or some other non-productive purpose.

    The fact that HP sells new-manufacture HP 15C calculators doesn’t crank my tractor, even though I lived and died by one for many years. A one-line 7-segment display doesn’t cut it any more, even if the new machinery inside allegedly runs like a bat out of hell.

    My HP 16C, now, that one you’ll pry out of my cold, dead hands. At one point in the dim past, I’d programmed the Mandelbrot iteration into it to provide bit-for-bit verification of the 8051 firmware for the Mandelbrot Engine array processor I did for Circuit Cellar: slow, but perfect. That calculator has a low duty cycle these days, but when I need it, I need it bad.