shimweasel

i’ve learnt to climb. The last few days have been all about clambering over set pieces, working out which cable to plug into where.
Not much actual strapping: Basheer & company are too good at that for me to bother even trying any more.

I’m off to another Ramadan tent tomorrow night - let’s see if I manage to find the last pics before I go to the next one.

(still sick, manfully ignoring my death-rattles.)

life is somewhat frantic lately. I’ve moved from being an expert doing difficult things to a newbie doing chumpy things: I’m in charge of a gang of electricians now, but my role is more or less an interpreter. Stephen tells me what he wants done, and I point the Indian electricians at the problem - the last three times I tried to actually do some work, Basheer looked at me with a funny grin, then undid all my work and redid it competently.

This rapidly becomes demoralising.

Still, Basheer is a major league gun, and I don’t take too much offence.

Today was mostly spent outside, clambering all over a set piece. I drank about 5 litres and sweated 10 - working outside in Qatar is a whole other experience. I’m also the least graceful climber they’ve ever seen, I think: while they jump and skip over the structure, I laboriously find my three points of contact. I’m always happy to provide entertainment.

Oh, for those keeping score: my tonsillitis is still intact, apparently. On some different meds now. They offered to rip them out at the hospital, but apparently the 1st of December is the first appointment I can get, which is the date of the opening ceremony - I suspect that I’ll be awake 20 hours a day round that time, so there doesn’t seem much chance of getting surgery recovery time. Till then, beer is my medication.

This is ridiculous. I post more about getting sick than I do about music or technology or girls or _anything_ that I actually like. I’ve got some illicit antibiotics and I’m seeing the doctor to get a medical certificate tomorrow.

I have some Ramadan tent photos and a heap of stuff to write about, but it’s hard to focus on anything that isn’t phlegm right now.

I hope you’re happy, Bean - I left a perfectly serviceable party to write this.

Anyway. It’s the beginning of Ramadan in Qatar at the moment. Ramadan starts at the beginning of the crescent moon in the ninth month of the year according to the Islamic calendar, rendering the dates more or less a matter of guesswork for Westerners.

Ramadan means a slew of restrictions. Muslims cannot eat or drink, even water, between dawn and dusk. Even for non-Muslims, eating in public is an offence. All the bars shut down, immodest clothing (ie, shorts or t-shirts) are forbidden, and you can’t buy food in daylight.

This all sounds a tad grim, but I’m enjoying it much more than I expected to, so far. While our canteen still operates, the food here is dismal enough that I don’t eat a lot during the day. The shops are empty, and as they’re staffed by Asians who are, by and large, not Muslims, there’s a strange sort of party atmosphere. The staff joke and laugh, and smile at you conspiratorially. The checkout chick even started flirting with me - I got a wink, which in this culture is equivalent to a leg-wrapping tackle-and-kiss.

The sole drawback so far is the crazy behaviour on the roads. Traffic is down, but I was almost taken out this morning by a Qatari who decided he couldn’t be bothered going all the way around the roundabout. I don’t look forward to riding in rush hour.

I’m hoping to go to a Ramadan tent at one of the hotels soon - apparently they’re pretty lavish affairs. I apologise for the lack of insight into Arabic culture, but they’re very hard people to get to know. One of the problems with having a culture which values hospitality highly is that people tend to be much more choosy as to who they consider friends.

Work continues on the opening ceremony. Some of my work will apparently be used in one of the major props - I can’t really talk about it, but it should be extremely cool.

I’m now at that magical state of ill health: sick enough that I can blow off work without a trace of guilt, but not so awful that I can’t tap out the occasional screed between naps and ascetic meals of bread and water. This is likely to be a bit of a mongrel of a post, as I couldn’t be bothered to separate tech from social from cultural - you’re just going to have to lump it.

As I mentioned, the code is done. The clever stuff I was hoping to do with automatic conversion of synchronous threads into asynchronous interrupt-driven code turned out to be more or less unnecessary: if we wanted to do a chase and a fade at the same time, or simultaneous chases on different channels, or if the timing needed to be more precise, it might be worth doing, but it seems that the straightforward one-thread-of-control model is going to be enough. Anyway, despite its simplicity, I’m rather proud of this system, both the Amida side and the Fat Controller, and all the things that I thought were just evidence of my obsessiveness turned out to be useful timesavers: one-click testing turns out to be very helpful for installing software on multiple Amidas as well as development. Thursday was consumed with learning how to solder, which was fascinating right up to the point that my iPod ran out of power. Still, I ought to be able to start fault-testing and repairing the Fat Controllers now, which should be interesting.

After an uncomfortable teething period (loose pedal, chain dropping off, etc), my bike seems to be behaving itself. It’s a one-speed mountain bike: I know how ridiculous that sounds, but in a country like Qatar, where you’re often coping with bad but flat roads, you don’t really need gears, and there’s enough dust and grit in the air that the thought of dealing with a cheap derailleur gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Invariably, I beat the bus in to work, and it’s amazing how much more independent you feel when you don’t always need to rely on other people for transport.

The shisha is also proving a hit. I’ve currently got lemon and coconut tobacco, although it seems to have gone walkabout… Matt Reason instructed me to find an affectation while I’m over here, and as growing a luxuriant beard and wearing a thobe seem to be out, the occasional indulgence in flavoured tobacco might be it.

Socially, things are looking up. I’ve been hanging out with the Georgetown uni people a lot more: I like the steelies a lot, but I can’t drink with them every night - they’d have to ship my liver home in Synrock. It’s also rather pleasant to be able to spend a night in, smoking the shisha, playing Password and listening to strange
people in monk’s costumes playing the recorder without feeling like a total nerd.

I have quite a few incredibly crappy pictures: I’m still relying on my cameraphone for the most part, which is grainier than muesli. Still, a few photos came out relatively unscathed:

Enough for today, or ‘halas’ as the Qatari say - it’s time for my warm milk and my rusk. Sala’am aleykum.

today, i was going to catch up on all the things i’ve done while i’ve been maintaining radio silence. however, i seem to have contracted a godawful case of gutrot, and the next 8 hours are earmarked for groaning quietly in my bed of pain. very quickly, though: i’m meeting heaps of people, i have a bike (yes mum, with lights), i bought a shisha, and i finished all the code and am working as a solder monkey. Film at 11.

Some small measure of success yesterday. The first time Fritz and I tried, the Fat Controller ran at an eighth of his advertised speed. (Clearly, working to rule.) For the next two days, I beat my head against the wall, trying to convince him his intransigence was unnecessary: I didn’t post anything in this period because anything I could possibly have said would have been an unappealing amalgam of swearing, crying and maudlin pleas for death. Finally, some kind soul on the picbasic.co.uk forums suggested we set the OSCCON register, and suddenly the sun came out. Everything worked.

So, naturally, the only way for this happy saga to end would be that the serial dongle we’re using to program the Fat Controllers blows up, with no spares in sight. I’m leaving it in Fritz’s lap for the moment - he’s the chiphead, I’m just a lowly software engineer.

In other news (because I do understand that none of you give a damn about my techie posts), I’ve found a judo club, but the training session starts an hour and a half before I finish work each day. I’ve also found someone who plays judo in my compound, but he’s working shifts, so we won’t be awake at compatible hours terribly often. Some days, I feel the God I don’t believe in is taunting me for my apostasy.

In other other news, while waiting to get my liquor licence ($400 deposit, if you can believe it), I met a lecturer from the Doha branch of Georgetown University. Brendan has been the consummate host - I’ve been given the tour of Doha, introductions to some people I don’t work with (!), and permission to swim in his compound’s pool, which has chillers that actually work, as well as waiters to bring you real coffee on demand. I’ve also visited “Ric’s Kountry Kitchen”, which is rumoured to have real bacon smuggled in from the American military base. The food’s ok, in a down-home American way. The coffee, however, is flat-out awful. I always thought Dad was exaggerating about how bad American coffee was, but it’s worse, if anything: if you load it up with milk and sugar, it sorta tastes like milky sugary hot water. I need drill sergeant coffee, the sort that’ll scream in my face and call me a pissant. This stuff is more like a guidance counsellor…

Respect to Steve Irwin: it’s a black armband day today. There’s something to be said for pushing fearless stupidity to its logical extreme, and to die from being stabbed in the chest by a stingray? That’s how a man goes out.

Power’s out to the DAGOC building, and as pigdog (the awful, awful Dell laptop) has a battery life of approximately 27 picoseconds, there’s not an awful lot I can do until it comes back on. Hence, blogging.

My current problem is that the Fat Controller is operating 8 times more slowly than it ought to. It has an 8MHz internal oscillator, allegedly, but if I pause for 1000 milliseconds, it takes 8 seconds to process it. This wouldn’t necessarily be a showstopper: the obvious hack would be to scale time intervals to an eighth of what you actually want. The snag is twofold:

1. Pulse Width Modulation is dependent on high-speed switching, both to look smooth and to get up to full brightness. (This is a common technique for getting a simple on-off light to simulate in-between brightness levels - if you want 10% brightness, you just have it on 10% of the time and off 90%. If you can’t switch fast, though, it’ll stay on too long at the low levels and not long enough at the high levels.)
2. Serial comms are very sensitive to timing: if it thinks it’s running at 9600 baud, but the world outside is passing by at 8 times normal speed, the little chip gets very confused.

I’m hacking around with asm to see if it’s a problem with the PicBasic compiler: will hopefully have an answer after lunch. This has all become somewhat urgent, as we thought this part of the problem was totally solved, and my boss is … somewhat worried, shall we say. Still, nothing like programming in a blind screaming panic to get the adrenaline pumping.

The Amidas are pretty much done now. I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning painstakingly loading support software onto eight fractious little machines, over a usbnet connection built, apparently, out of chewing gum and dry twigs.
It’s done now, thank Christ, and any further changes should be nothing more than cosmetic tweaks to an awesomely flexible and well-designed little program. (Oh, give me this one - I’m not often self-mythologising.) They can talk to each other via IR, or save their brains to a USB key, which ought to be more than enough for field use - I’m going to disregard Zawinski’s Law and leave the mail functionality out, at least for the moment.

The next challenge is to get the Fat Controllers to do the right thing. This is a bit trickier. It’s relatively easy to get them to execute straight-line code with the occasional busyloop pause for timing, but if you want them to control more than one channel at once, you have the choice of:

1. manually compiling it down to a straight loop, which gets complicated and unclear fast
2. using threads - not really an option on a system this small
3. writing an event queueing system and scheduling them asynchronously.
4. using control inversion to write it as threads, and writing a tool to automatically convert from the second form to the third.

Felix does the fourth approach rather well, letting you write it as threads and compiling it to the third form, but it doesn’t compile to anything I can use easily. I’m currently on the first approach, and hating it. The third or fourth might be doable, but either of them brings out something that lies hidden in the first approach: you really need an independent timing mechanism to get the lights firing at the appropriate times. This means learning a lot more about the Fat Controller chips than I had originally intended, but I’ve come this far - no point getting worried about getting my hands dirty now.

Here’s our little monster here. The picture’s not great, but you should be able to see a little picture in the bottom right corner - apparently this took longer to design than the board itself.

In other news, Da Boyz brought home a grand’s worth of booze yesterday.

Don’t ever drink with steelies. This won’t last them a fortnight.