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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Why do businesses fail to innovate?

quorten

2019-10-11

Categories: tour-de-force  
Tags: tour-de-force  

Humans are creatures of habit, which makes innovation difficult for them. Now, what about businesses? Surely there is a similar dynamic going on which is why businesses fail to innovate and reach their demise. Well, often times in the business world, especially in the big business world, the picture is much more complicated. Often times, a business literally has the future on “the tip of their tongue,” they have an internal research department that presents the next big thing right up to upper management on a silver platter, but they fail to act on that knowledge and thus reach their demise.

The list of how big businesses failed to innovate and why is jaw-dropping with suspense, with countless classics like how Kodak failed to take hold of the digital photography revolution despite being the literal inventor of it.

Read on →

Humans are creatures of habit

quorten

2019-10-10

Categories: inven-sys   tour-de-force  
Tags: inven-sys   tour-de-force  

So, I’ve been thinking about many things, and trying to answer this question. Why does innovation take so long? Why does the consumer sector generally lag behind the state-of-the-art of technology, with the exception of entertainment? I have lots more to say on this subject, with more in context to the particular questions, but for now, I wanted to highlight the overaching point and observation: Humans are creatures of habit. Often times humans can fail to take advantage of innovation simply out of habit.

So, what does the Internet have to say about this? A lot. Here I highlight just a few relevant articles.

20191007/DuckDuckGo humans are creatures of habit
20191007/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creatures-habit/200907/we-are-creatures-habit
20191007/http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/why-change-is-so-hard-the-power-of-habit-in-the-human-brain-0317155
20191007/http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/why-people-change-and-some-dont-0526144

On the flip-side, humans are also creatures of adaptation. And although for most people, adaptation is relatively slow, all that was needed was a tiny bit for humans to change the world, and that’s how we got to where we are today.

Wow, and I read this, and it sounds so unusual. Asking family members to help with habit changes for exercise? That doesn’t happen around me, chances are things are the same for you too.

20191010/http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/think-change-is-difficult-its-all-in-your-head-0917135

Get hard disk metadata on GNU/Linux

quorten

2019-10-05

Categories: unix  
Tags: unix  

After playing around with SCSI INQUIRY on a classic Macintosh, I became aware of an important omission of mine when doing backups and hardware inventories on newer PCs. Who was the hard disk drive vendor? What was the model number, serial number, and other SMART metadata associated with the drive itself, rather than just the disk controller? Ah, yes, surely GNU/Linux systems have some easy commands for retreiving this information, and indeed they do.

sudo hdparm -I
sudo lshw -class disk -class storage
sudo smartctl -d ata -a -i /dev/sda

Please note that smartd/smartctl is not installed by default on many modern Debian/Ubuntu-based systems. Which means likewise, you may have trouble finding that utility on historic systems too.

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

20191005/DuckDuckGo linux show hard disk info
20191005/https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/find-hard-disk-hardware-specs-on-linux/
20191006/https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/monitoring-hard-disk-health-with-smartd-under-linux-or-unix-operating-systems.html

Bargain bin, inferior good, and shovelware

quorten

2019-09-30

Categories: inven-sys   computer-history  
Tags: inven-sys   computer-history  

Bargain bin… ah yes, a common terminology, but what does Wikipedia have to say about it? Why is it a “bin” rather than something more organized?

20190930/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargain_bin

Well, well, that I do not quite know about, other than the fact that it is common to just put it in a bin. I guess what makes it so is the store owner’s sense of urgency simply to get rid of the stock as quickly as possible, under the false guise that eschewing the little effort required to organize is a significant time saver. Which, as those of us who know better, isn’t. Well, that’s all I can say. It’s a common human trend to do things that way, regardless of the logic of doing so.

But, what is really interesting: “inferior good.” This is a good which those of higher income buy less of, rather than buying more of as would be predicted by their aptitude to spend more money. As a consequence, inferior goods come to be associated with the lower class, while the opposite, superior goods, are associated with the upper class.

20190930/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good

Even more interesting, the Giffen good. Even as the price of an inferior good goes up, people of the lower class will purchase more of it.

Read on →

Mystery of the lost hard drive company

quorten

2019-09-29

Categories: mac-classic   computer-history  
Tags: mac-classic   computer-history  

When I was exporting a full disk image from my Macintosh SE, I noticed something very interesting about the 40 MiB internal hard disk drive. It wasn’t as I was expecting it to be. First, some background information on hard disks for classic Macintoshes. To access a hard drive on the block-level, a classic Macintosh doesn’t really provide any layer of abstraction; rather, it merely provides a set of convenience routines called the SCSI Manager. Essentially, you have to build up your own SCSI requests and parse out the SCSI responses, and the SCSI Manager’s sole role is to provide helper functions for sending requests and receiving responses.

So, as I previously stated, I had to learn the SCSI protocol to make my Macintosh hard disk image. As part of this process, I was sending the SCSI INQUIRY command to get basic information on the disk drives. Here I saw that (1) the hard drive wasn’t actually an Apple 40 MB Internal Hard Disk because it had more blocks than the official specification, and (2) the third party hard drive vendor was Quantum. Wow, now that’s a hard drive company that I’ve never heard of before because they no longer exist in the modern era.

<~– more –>

SCSI ID: 0
Direct access block device.
Peripheral device connected or unknown.
Reserved = 0x00
SCSI version = 0x02
Response data format = 0x01
VendorID: QUANTUM 
ProductID: CTS40S          
Revision: 4.07
lbasize = 82332, blksize = 512

Well, looking around, I was able to find more information on Wikipedia. Quantum Corporation once was a very formidable hard drive vendor, but they ended up selling their hard drive business sector to Maxtor in the early 2000s. Ah, now that’s a familiar name in the modern hard drive business, they’re still around. Alas, as it turns out, they exist in brand name only. They too were bought by Seagate in the late 2000s.

20190929/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Corporation
20190930/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxtor

Upon further analysis of the INQUIRY data, I was able to determine more specific information about the drive model. “Quantum ProDrive ELS 40” is the full official name. I even found the official manual for the hard drive… well, actually only a very close analog. Or maybe there was just one manual for the whole family, but the meaning of “ELS” is lost upon me. Looks like the “hub” source of the online manuals is bitsavers.org. Ah yes, a venerable website for vintage computing.

20191006/DuckDuckGo QUANTUM CTS40S 4.07
20191006/http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/apple/scsi/apple_scsi_ident.txt
20191006/https://www.manualslib.com/products/Quantum-Prodrive-40s-3735137.html
20191006/DuckDuckGo quantum prodrive ELS 80
20191006/https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_quantumQuaroductManualJun88_6537414

Wow, even through all the buyouts and mergers, Seagate has continued the legacy by continuing to host relevant documentation.

20191006/https://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/maxtor/en_us/documentation/quantum_jumper_settings/prodrive_jumpers.pdf

And oh, wow, what risky extents some are willing to go through to bring a stuck Quantum drive back to life. Looks like that patented AIRLOCK arm locking mechanism is prone to locking a bit too well, and that such is fairly common with the older drives.

20191006/https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Quantum-ProDrive-ELS-Repair-Insert-Fix-your-classic-Macintosh-hard-drive-/253950486931

Clever tricks with electronics and EOMA68

quorten

2019-09-29

Categories: raspberry-pi  
Tags: raspberry-pi  

Yes, yes, it’s been a while, does EOMA68 have any updates? Oh, yes it does, and very interesting ones that that. First of all, there is still evidence of people “complaining” about the slow progress of EOMA68. By all means, this is due to the thin budget that the project is operating on. But, because of this, the project does publish some useful tips and tricks for working with advanced, modern electronics on a low budget.

The first trick, dealing with cheap printed circuit boards. The edges of a cheap printed circuit board are not precisely machined. There are tiny burrs on the edges that will inhibit proper insertion of edge-mounted components, such as an edge-mounted mini/micro HDMI connector. But, luckily there is a simple and cheap remedy for this issue. Take an Xacto knife and rub away on the edges where precise fitting is needed. This will cut away the burs that are 0.01 mm in size, and tada! Your micro HDMI connector will fit.

20190929/https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/report-back-from-factory-on-hdmi

Read on →

Lessons learned on house logs, a tour of common human weaknesses and limitations on human ability to attain ideals

quorten

2019-09-28

Categories: inven-sys   home-network  
Tags: inven-sys   home-network  

So, I tried an experiment to improve communications around my house by the use of a very simple and dumb web application to allow folks to post notifications when they make changes to common things, like eating a meal, bringing groceries into the kitchen, starting the dishwasher, taking the trash out, etc. It was aptly named “House logs for dummies!” What did I learn? A lot.

First of all, let’s discuss teams versus groups. What’s the difference? A team has shared responsibilities and shared outcomes across all members, whereas a group has independent responsibilities and outcomes. Also, both a team and a group must have three or more members. With only two members, a the operating dynamics of a “duet” are quite different. Additionally, teams and groups have their advantages and disadvantages, a team is not necessarily superior to a group. And, guess what? A family need not operate as a team, operating as a “group,” possibly with one “duet” (the parents) suffices.

Groups and teams, of course, have differing communication dynamics. Suffice it to say, the communications of a team need to be more extensive and intensive to satisfy the requirements of a team, that they can succeed when they have a shared fate, and thus they need to communicate enough to effectively perform as one. And that’s where things start to pull apart.

Read on →

Run Jenkins build step in a subdirectory

quorten

2019-09-27

Categories: jenkins  
Tags: jenkins  

How do you run a Jenkins build step in a subdirectory? Easy, just use this block statement.

dir("your-subdir") {
  // Your build steps to execute in subdir...
}

20190927/DuckDuckGo jenkins current working directory
20190927/DuckDuckGo jenkinsfile change workspace during execution
20190927/DuckDuckGo jenkinsfile workspace subdirectory
20190927/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51540060/how-to-access-subdirectory-inside-of-jenkins-workspace

Ruby `map` is now preferred over Ruby `collect`

quorten

2019-09-27

Categories: ruby  
Tags: ruby  

Ruby map is now preferred over Ruby collect. The name of the post says it all. Here is the style guide. Be forewarned that web search engine results have a tendency to point you to a lot of the older documentation that recommends otherwise. A common problem with Ruby.

20190927/https://rubystyle.guide/#map-find-select-reduce-size