PowerOn Computer Recycling

25 October 2010 in Miscellaneous | Permalink

I recently decided it was time for a computer upgrade. What, though, to do with the old computer? I had two, actually: a laptop and a desktop system, to be replaced with a single better laptop and an external display.

I usually turn to eBay for selling used technology, but while perusing the online Apple store for new equipment, I noticed an offer for recycling your old computer equipment, handled by a company called PowerOn. It appeared that by going this route I might get a few dozen dollars less than I would if I sold to someone on eBay, but I really liked the notion of the old computer being professionally serviced and prepared for resale.

All I had to do to get things started was fill in information about the computers and estimate their condition based on a few criteria. A couple of simple web forms and about a week later, I had two prepaid shipping boxes delivered to my house, into which I carefully placed my old computers (both with totally erased hard drives), and dropped them off at a nearby FedEx pickup location. I had forgotten just how heavy that G5 PowerMac was…

About a week after this, I received email notification that my computers had been inspected by PowerOn staff, and deemed to be in worse condition than I had estimated in the web forms, and accordingly were offering me a little less money than estimated originally on the web forms. No big deal; assuming their evaluations were correct, I could now not sell the machines myself in good conscious without repairing them, which I really didn’t want to bother doing, so it still made sense to me to let PowerOn handle refurbishing and reselling the computers.

All in all, I found it to be a good experience. If your goal is maximum financial return on your computer hardware, this probably isn’t the best option for you, but if you’re willing to accept a little less money in exchange for letting someone else handle the details of resale (and if you’re willing to accept your money in the form of Apple store gift cards) then PowerOn recycling may be a great choice.

(Some computers are so utterly ancient and worthless on the resale market, such as laptops from 2005, that PowerOn might not be able to offer you any money whatsoever, but they can still properly recycle your computer, which would be a better option than letting it slowly decay in a trash dump.)

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A Compiler Bug

10 October 2010 in Software Engineering | Permalink

I was converting an avionics subsystem from Ada to C. It was a client application that had to talk to an Ada server, sending and receiving rather huge chunks of data, large, deeply nested, intricate structure types. The C structure type had to match the Ada type exactly, or else it wouldn’t work.

I got it working fine on our desktop simulation, but running on the actual hardware it was consistently off. After extensive testing, I realized that it was a bug in the compiler for the target hardware, such that a very particular type of structure (something like, {int, char, float}) was being packed incorrectly, resulting in a 2-byte pad that shouldn’t be there. If I reordered the structure elements, it was fine, but that particular grouping and order refused to work correctly.

It was GCC, so we could fix the compiler ourselves, right? Not very practically, as, for avionics systems the compiler has to be thoroughly qualified for avionics use, and changes equal requalification. I “fixed” it by storing the float as an array of characters, converting it to and from a real float type as we needed to use the data value.

Trivial, perhaps, but I was very excited to resolve the problem, after spending days barking up wrong trees. One usually expects that the problem is not in the compiler…

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Decluttering Reference Books

29 September 2010 in Miscellaneous | Permalink

I enjoy reading. I enjoy books, and journals, and bookstores, and libraries. Recently I’ve been feeling that my personal book collection is becoming cluttered: many books acquired that I no longer have interest in, and insufficient space in which to put books that I am interested in. What can you do with books that you no longer wish to hold on to?

Some books may have a reasonable resale value, and could be sold either online or locally. Other books quickly depreciate in value, and it seems that my own book clutter consists mainly of this latter sort: old reference materials, descriptions of specific obsolete technologies, etc. Books that not only do I no longer have use for, but that nobody living in the same time continuum with me would have any use for either. Perhaps I could take these books to a used bookstore, or to a library, or to some other donations center, but they are effectively worthless.

The Berkeley Heights Public Library addresses this concept, concluding that “essentially, if you don’t recycle your old books that are unusable, unsalable, unwanted, obsolete; you are passing on the job to someone else who will recycle them.”

Even if I am presently stuck with a pile of obsolete books that I can’t do anything useful with, it makes me consider my future book purchase plans: is there anything that I can do to reduce future book clutter?

The world wide web is rightly viewed as a great source of information, but it’s not a great source of all information. If you wish to study topics in-depth, web searches often turn up lacking, and you really still need to use books. Fortunately though, the web is outstanding as a source of encyclopedia-style reference material, making it a fine replacement for the sorts of books that easily become obsolete.

To wit, while a couple of decades ago buying things like encyclopedias in physical book form made good sense, it really isn’t useful any more. Before buying a new book, it would be good to consider if the contents of the book is something that is readily available via the web or not. Sometimes, even content available via the web is more easily consumed in book form, but if the content is so available, we should very carefully consider how much we need a printed & bound copy before spending money and taking up shelf space.

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Food Portion Sizes

23 September 2010 in Miscellaneous | Permalink

I offered to pick up some “Chinese food” for some colleagues visiting the United States from China. They didn’t recognize anything on the menu, and ended up ordering the “house special”, with grilled chicken, vegetables, and rice. Reasonably healthy, from the looks of it. About an hour after getting our food, I noticed that they had not finished eating what they ordered, and I asked if it was all right.

“This is too much food for us; we can’t eat it all!” they explained.

“It’s too much for us too,” I assured them, “but we eat it all anyway.”

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