A plague of capacitors

On Passover, one of the rituals is the recitation of the 10 plagues visited upon the Egyptians.  Next year, I'm going to add one more: the capacitor plague.

What? Capacitors?

That's right.  Electrolytic Capacitors.  They are a plague of my life (OK, probably not the ancient Egyptians).

Yesterday I took my ASUS motherboard from the first PC I ever built to the recycling depot.  Why?  Because it died on me one night.   And when I looked inside, it was obvious: All the electrolytic capacitors had popped!  No wonder the SCSI port had died months earier...  I should add that all I did was move my disk to another PC that was standing by and I was back in service.

And today, I just repaired the converter box that allows us to receive television "over the air".  I had to replace 5 capacitors.  Now, what's interesting about this repair is that the capacitors didn't pop --- they just lost one of their electrical properties.  In other words, no outside signs of abuse, just failure.

I also repaired my Dell LCD display for the same reason.  And I've had other power supplies die for this reason.  And not to mention our HP inkjet printer: it kept reporting a strange error code.  Eventually I found a web post that stated it was the electrolytic capacitors.  Let me add that at this point I was at the end of my rope: what did I have to lose?  So, I took the printer apart and lo-and-behold, there they were --- standing there with their tops popped off.  Replaced and it's worked since then.

So, you might ask, why is this the cause of our increasing electronic junk pile?  The answer lies in several places.  First, there  was a rumor years ago that a foreign capacitor company stole the formula but made a mistake.  Second, designers of consumer products cut corners, so they specify cheap parts with low temperature bounds and so the parts literally fry.

Whatever the cause, it causes me nothing but consternation and vexation!

Memories of Joe Condon

Although completely unnoticed by the press, Joe Condon died recently.  I want to remember Joe in print: Joe was an important mentor of mine when I was at Bell Labs.  He knew an incredible amount about hardware design... And as well he should, since he was a physicist.  He always looked at design problems through physics.  He came from an illustrious family (his father, E.U. Condon was very important to 20th century physics).  So, Joe's most important lesson to me was that engineering problems can be reduced to physics.  And if you could reason about electrons and their (sometimes) irrational behavior, then you could find the problem in your circuit.

I can't remember all he taught me, but I do remember the time he found a power ground short in a wirewrap board by using a voltmeter and looking at the voltage drops.  I also recall how he helped me to find a catastrophic bug.  Tom Killian and I had invited Yamaha over to Murray Hill to see our multiprocessor synthesizer.  We moved the machine to the conference room --- and it died.  We couldn't figure it out.  I took it back to the lab and it was still failing.  Joe told me to use the Tektronix 2467B (what a 'scope, microchannel plate, 400 MHz, etc).  He told me to turn up the intensity and look.  Sure enough, there were glitches on a signal line.  He then advised me to add a terminator, which I did (the reasoning was that this was due to an impedance mismatch between logic families).  It worked.

When I first met Joe he was a smoker.  His teeth were stained and he had a fierce coffee habit.  In fact, when the first espresso machine arrived in Murray Hill, Joe was instrumental in getting it to work.  The deal was that the management refused to pay for the machine, but agreed to pay for coffee for a year.  So, a small consortium was founded and they arranged to buy a machine (as I recall, Alan Berenbaum asked his local coffee shop for help).  So, when the machine arrived, every coffee drinker was in a powerful hurry to get it up and running.  But, it used "house water".  So, this required plumbing ... and a plumber.  No body was going to wait for the work order.  Joe took charge and together with Tom (another physicist), they just connected it to the water line (soldering with a torch, etc...).  The end of the story is that management realized that the espresso machine was a huge draw (that's how I met many 1122 acoustics labs types) and agreed to pay for coffee.

So, Joe did eventually quit the tobacco habit: he went on vacation to Hilton Head with the express purpose of quitting.  Joe often had a smile on his face and he would always ask me what I was up to.  When I was maintaining the CAD system we would exchange thoughts on what was needed and what was in the infinite future.  When the labs split into Lucent and AT&T Labs, Joe went to AT&T.  I saw him there a few times but I lost track of him over the years.

He was always kind to me (which I appreciated in the aggressive atmosphere of the labs) and he took time to explain any and everything down to the last detail.  Even now, when I am thinking about a circuit, I think: "What would Joe tell me to do?".  The answer, as always, is "think physics!".

Cassoulet and me

Mark Bittman's recent post on Cassoulet hits a highly resonant note with me. As many people know, I prepare Cassoulet once a year (I dub it "Cassoulet-fest"). This celebration of meat and beans can only reasonably be prepared in winter. I consider it one of the high points of rustic French cooking because not only does it have that rustic "stick to your ribs" quality, but it also demonstrates how various cooking techniques (confit, braised meats, sausage making, etc.) combine to form a harmonious whole.

I use the recipe from Julia Child's masterpiece "Mastering the Art". My copy was given to me by my friends and colleagues at Bell Labs when I was recuperating from back surgery. I used to read it in bed as I waited to heal. The recipe itself is somewhat long and involved, but not complicated. Julia, in her humorous style used the phrase with the subtitle "Order of Battle" --- but that overstates the case and I suspect frightens many off this very hearty and savory dish.

Let's start with confit. I used to buy this from D'Artagnan at about $10 a "pop" (thigh and drumstick). The conventional recipe uses a kind of Catch-22. You're supposed to confit the duck in a pot of duck fat. But you're supposed to use the leftover duck fat from your last confit! The new style recipe is to use Olive Oil to partial cover the meat and then slow roast (and I mean slow, as in 200-225 F). So, not only do you control the cooking, you save money. Big time money.

Next: the beans. Of course, one can buy the French white beans. When we lived in NJ, I bought the beans and also saucisson d'ail from the famed Balducci's at 6th Ave. and 9th. (Conveniently right around the corner from the PATH station). But today I just buy a two pound bag of Great Northern Beans (a wonderful bean) and deal with the sausage question myself.

And, speaking of sausages: You can, of course, use any one you find. I don't personally feel the need to use sausages. Julia has a delightful subrecipe for garlicky pork patties on the cassoulet page. I've made these numerous times. But if I'm feeling lazy, I just don't bother, particularly if I'm making the roast pork loin.

What makes Julia's recipe so nice (in my opinion) is the use of lamb. She slowly braises the lamb in a tomato white wine sauce. The result, when combined with the beans, is nothing short of delightful. The real fun of course is the "assemblage": the layering of beans and meats until both are gone. Then, top it off with the juices, cover with the breadcrumbs and away you go.

I've occasionally produced that wonderful crust, but I'm content just to pull my Paderno pot out of the oven to see the parsleyed browned breadcrumbs on top. Then pull the cork on a bottle of red from Southern France (Rhone, Languedoc...) and inhale the fragrant vapors. Who can resist?

John McCarthy

I wanted to write down a few remembrances of JMC: He was colloquially known at SAIL as just "J M C", not John, not Professor McCarthy. He was at the lab daily and often at night -- his office was in the front of the building. When I first started "flirting" with the AI lab during high school, I was afraid he'd toss me to the curb if he would discover that I was just a high school student. But I believe he just didn't care. In fact, the lab machine would allow you to create an account just by logging in.

When I worked for the computer music project, I saw him often. My most salient memory is when he came into my office (I shared with Bill Gosper and Mike Farmwald) to ask about the radical left poster next to my desk. He wanted to know if I believed whatever was on the poster. I didn't, but I liked the sort of visual style. He said, "OK, I just wanted to know" and walked away. (For those who don't know, JMC took a decidedly right wing turn during the 1970s. Given the background of his parents, that's a remarkable trend).

I can't really separate the contributions of JMC and Les Earnest towards the ultra cool working environment of the AI Lab. To this day, I don't know whether it was the fact that I was fresh out of college or whether it was just a cool place that made the AI lab so special. One must acknowledge that JMC approved of the computer music people coming in over night to use the machine. Without this approval, would computer music have progressed so fast? John Chowning and company depended on this largesse.

McCarthy's contributions to computer science are well known and don't bear repeating. But I'd like to mention two of them in particular: The first is timesharing. As I understand it, the reason the PDP-1 could timeshare was that the drum (not disk, drum) had the ability to read and write simultaneously. So, when the current running user was swapped out, the entire memory was written to the disk while the next user was read in! Second, Markoff's obituary in the Times points out that McCarthy invented Garbage Collection of memory. What a concept!

JMC clearly had a potent vision of that was possible with computers: he sponsored research in AI but also sponsored the system research that would propagate from the lab. So, while we remember McCarthy and Lisp, we should also remember his creation of the Stanford AI Lab and all that came forth from that place.

Dennis and language design

I hadn't intended on writing this entry until Rick Floyd posted about Dennis Ritchie's fine and sparing taste. This brought to mind the influences of language design on C and (by extension) C's influence on further languages.

C's history is well known: it is descended from 'B', which is completely unknown. However, we can look at BCPL. BCPL is a descendant of CPL, which was designed by none other than Christopher Stratchey (talk about an illustrious family, the Stratcheys are amazing). A look at CPL is illuminating: if you know BCPL, then you can see the providence right there. For an example, see his checkers program by Peter Norvig's.

However, CPL was less real than BCPL. BCPL was designed by Martin Richards at Cambridge in 1967. It had a number of interesting features: First, it was designed to be portable over different machine architectures. Second, it's fundamental data type was the machine word. For an assembly language programmer like myself, this was heaven: I could write algorithms and imagine the assembly. Furthermore, the structure construct included both words and bits --- thereby providing an immediate mapping to the machine architecture (device drivers and other machine dependent code). BCPL was the first language for the Alto (which is where I learned it).

So, back to C. What did Dennis to do Ken's version of BCPL? Well, the first thing you have to know about Ken is that he codes fast ... And I think he hates to type. Ever wonder why the Unix kernel has so many short names? Blame Ken. So, then Dennis had to create a spare notation to match. But I think the most noteworthy change was going from words to data types. C goes away from the machine dependent side by incorporating types of Algol 60 lore --- except not making the mistake of calling floats reals. Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention how C imported bits of the PDP-11 assembler syntax: Ever wonder why autoincrement is ++? Don't. But perhaps the key innovation was the use of the address and de-address operators (& and *). Now you can talk about pointers.

C has undergone many changes since I first learned it at Berkeley reading the Sixth Edition Code. But since I already knew BCPL, it was an easy move. Let me add that I've always loved the for statement in C (even though as a language guy, I know you shouldn't really have more than one way to say something). When you see a for loop used to traverse a list, then you know that's clever.

It's interesting that people mention Java as a descendant of C. If anything, from my perspective, Java is the anti-C. It's way more verbose and eliminates pointers. There are of course many other changes but C is pretty far from Java in my book. And then there's C++, C# and Objective C. They all include the name 'C'...

I wanted to add a personal note about Dennis: He was very private. I certainly knew very little about him during my time in 1127. I do remember when I first got there and a bunch of us were going out to dinner. I stopped by to ask Dennis if he wanted to go. He politely declined. When I reported this to my companions, they said "Sure, Dennis always eats at home with his parents". That's the kind of guy Dennis was. Nice, quiet ... and clever.

(Late) Impressions of New Zealand

I had hoped to get this entry started earlier (that is, before my impressions bleach into whiteness). Better late than never.

First things first: The flight is long (13 hours), but the newer in-flight entertainment systems are really quite fun. I worked my way through just some of the very large music catalog and watched two movies. And, against all advice, I did have a glass of wine with the hope that it would enable sleep in spite of being in steerage. I managed to get about 5 hours each way --- That was enough to make the first day bearable.

Auckland is built on volcanic hills and has only a few bridges. If you're going to walk all over town then it's going to build muscle and cardiovascular conditioning. My slogan for the city is "British Past, Asian Future". All over the city you hear different asian languages --- particularly Japanese and Chinese. Many of the menial jobs are now done by the Chinese. Even the chippie shops are run by the chinese (note: in Edinburgh, they are run by the Italians and Turks).

Architecturally, I wouldn't say that Auckland is that interesting, except for the indigenous bungalow style. There are a collection of repurposed buildings from the 1930s but unfortunately the new awnings damage the impression. But it was fun walking all over the city checking out the flora and fauna. One day we took a ferry to Davenport (just a short hop). From the top of this extinct volcano we had a very nice view of the city and harbor.

I kept looking for bakeries that produced something other than puffy white bread. I was unsuccessful. Other food expeditions were more successful: the Dim Sum was excellent and we had a wide choice of various asian cuisines. Food in NZ isn't cheap so while I'd hoped to give modern NZ cuisine a try, I would only succeed once in the trip (at a winery no less).

From Auckland, we rented a Toyota and proceeded to the volcanic center of NZ: Rotorua. As Americans, we take many things for granted. One of them is our National Park System. Imagine if you had to pay a commercial operator for every geological wonder in the US! In NZ, that's almost the case (the volcanic mountains are National Parks).

The volcanic landscape of NZ is spread out (the crust is thin and you don't know when magma will escape). But the overall impression is that Yellowstone is a good approximation --- except the state owns it instead of private parties.

The ecology of NZ is varied: In the grazing areas, I got the impression that the landscape had been radically altered by the western settlers. One could imagine dense vegetation but instead it was mainly fields of grass and cows (not as many sheep as I expected). Forests were clearcut down to the road. And, the introduction of various mammals including the opposum have been deadly to the local flora and fauna (Kiwis are killed by non-native mammals, esp. dogs and ferrets). And interestingly enough, it was the Maori who introduced rats into NZ. The Maori are relative recent immigrants to NZ: only a few thousands years since they navigated eastward from Polynesia.

Max Mathews

I am overdue writing about Max. Max' recent demise at the "hands" of Community Acquired Pneumonia leaves Computer Music without its founder. Max (incredibly) conceived of computer generated music in the 1950s --- a time when computing a single sample of sound could take forever. At Bell Labs he rose through the ranks to become the director of the acoustics center --- all the while maintaining his lab in a tiny space off the spine of Building 1.

Max was a unique individual. He had this very distinctive craggy voice and a very bald head. He was extremely enthusiastic and supportive of all efforts with computer generated sound. While at the Labs, I wrote a "Studio Report" with Max on Computer Music at Bell Labs. At that particular point, he had moved into the construction of interfaces and away from synthesis. He was working on the Radio Baton --- as the New York Times obituary pointed out, presaged the Wii and all other gesture based controllers.

I should point out that Max conceived of music synthesis assisted by computer languages in the early 1960s. He started with Music I and eventually it became Music V. One can not underestimate the effect of this concept and implementation. At Stanford, this became Music 10 and was used by the composers when one second of sound required one hour of computation. It was rewritten as cmusic and the lineage of "unit generators" continues to this day.

What made Max so important was that he was decades ahead. He had what I consider to be spectacular forward vision: he could see what technology could do for the arts long before it became even possible. Max encouraged this interaction personally by inviting guests to his lab (both scientists and artists). His early work with Jean-Claude Risset showed how analysis and synthesis of acoustic instruments could be done with computers. His fundamental contributions to the start-up of IRCAM are also not to be ignored.

Even in his "retirement", Max continued to teach and encourage at CCRMA at Stanford. I have no doubt that this leaves a void in the CCRMA environment and in the world of Computer Music.