I see mainframes: a real life PDS container!

September 22, 2017 Mainframe , , , , , ,

I found a PDS container walking about my neighbourhood this morning:

 

Just like the mainframe version, you can put all sorts of stuff in this one.

A mainframe PDS (partitioned data set) is technically a different sort of container, as you can only put DATASETs (mainframe’ze for a file) in them. An example would be if you have two programs (loadmodules in mainframe’ze) both named PEETERJO, then you can create a two PDS datasets, each having a PEETERJO member, say:

PEETER.JOOT.IS.THE.BEST(PEETERJO)
PEETER.JOOT.IS.STILL.AWESOME(PEETERJO)

From these you could then choose which one you want your JCL script to execute with a STEPLIB statement like:

//A EXEC PGM=PEETERJO
//STEPLIB  DD DSN=PEETER.JOOT.IS.THE.BEST,DISP=SHR
//SYSOUT   DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSTERM  DD SYSOUT=*
//SYSABEND DD SYSOUT=*

This works around the global name space issue that you’d have with storing two different datasets, both with the name PEETERJO.

You can also put any file into a PDS, provided you are willing to have the PDS member name for that file be a 1-8 character string. The PDS is sort of the mainframe equivalent of a directory (the long strings of A.B.C.D.E DATASET names can also be viewed as a directory of sorts).

I’m not sure if you can put a PDS in a PDS. If that is possible, I also don’t know if a PDS member can be accessed as a PDS without first copying it out.

NATFA renegotiation

September 19, 2017 Incoherent ramblings , , ,

leadnow.ca is running a campaign to object to the NATFA secret tribunals, stating:

In just a few days, negotiators from the U.S., Mexico and Canada will converge on Ottawa for a critical round of NAFTA negotiations where sources are saying things are really going to heat up. [1]

Corporate lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail to preserve dangerous and extreme rules in NAFTA called “Investor State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS). ISDS gives corporations the power to sue our government for laws that protect our environment and our health.[2]

Time is running out to influence this deal, and unless we speak up in a big way, lobbyists could bully the Liberals into putting corporate profits ahead of the public interest.[3-4]

The government has opened an inbox to get the public’s input on what it should prioritize in negotiations — and almost 10 000 Leadnow members have already sent messages calling on decision-makers to strip ISDS from the deal. We want to hit at least 15 000 messages before meetings start on the weekend to let negotiators know that Canadians want toxic ISDS rules out of NAFTA. 

Peeter, will you help us up the ante against these toxic rules that let billionaire corporations sue Canada?

 

Their form letter explicitly names the secret corporate tribunals (ISDSs), something I knew existed, but didn’t know the name of:

“Dear Canada’s NAFTA negotiating team,

Modernizing NAFTA means standing up for democracy and fighting to remove its extreme, secretive, and anti-democratic Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) rules. No more corporate lawsuits that kneecap our democracies at the expense of the public good.

We know the corporate lobby and business elite are lobbying to keep ISDS intact. Please don’t cave into the corporate pressure. Put our democracy first. I’m calling on you to fight to remove toxic ISDS rules during NAFTA re-negotiations.”

While informative, their letter was a bit boring, so I wrote my own:

I understand that the NATFA negotiating team is probably populated with corporate shills, fighting to keep or augment the status quo.

This note is a quick exercise in futility, pretending that I have a place in the sham that we call democracy. A “free trade” agreement that is hundreds (probably thousands) of pages long, and was negotiated and now renegotiated in secret, that grants corporation effective control over the countries in the agreement is a travesty.  Unlike so many that fell for or still fall for the deliberately misleading label of “free trade”, I’d like to see NAFTA dissolved entirely.  I know that this is very improbable, and this note and any others that express a similar opinion are just headed for the trash, but I can still fantasize.

second experiment in screen recording

July 17, 2017 math and physics play , , , , ,

Here’s a second attempt at recording a blackboard style screen recording:

 

To handle the screen transitions, equivalent to clearing my small blackboard, I switched to using a black background and just moved the text as I filled things up.  This worked much better.  I still drew with mischief, and recorded with OBS, but then did a small post production edit in iMovie to remove a little bit of dead air and to edit out one particularly bad flub.

This talk covers the product of two vectors, defines the dot and wedge products, and shows how the 3D wedge product is related to the cross product.  I recorded some additional discussion of duality that I left out of this video, which was long enough without it.

experiment in screen recording: An introduction to Geometric Algebra.

July 14, 2017 math and physics play , , ,

I’ve been curious for a while what it would take to create lesson style screen recordings, and finally got around to trying one myself:

 

This is an introduction to Geometric (Clifford) algebra.  I briefly outline a geometrical interpretation of various products of unit vectors, rules for reducing products of unit vectors, and the axioms that justify those rules.

I made this recording using the OBS screen recorder, using a Mac, drawing with a Wacom tablet and using Mischief as my drawing application.  I have to find a way to do the screen clearing transitions more smoothly, as there are sizable dead time delays while I do the ‘File -> Import -> Recent -> …  ; Don’t save’ sequence in mischief to reload.  I also um and ah more than I like, something I think I could avoid if presenting this to a real live person.

quantum spin dreams

July 13, 2017 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

I woke up this morning with the perception that I had been dreaming about designing trinary computers and topics related to quantum spin for a large chunk of the night.   Why I would have been dreaming about this is not at all obvious.  I didn’t go to bed thinking about any scientific or computer engineering topics.

In my dream it seemed natural to use spin-1 quantum states to build a trinary clock signal for the microprocessor.  That basically means that the clock signal would be optical, since photons can have spin 1, 0 or -1.  However, what would it even mean to have a spin synchronized clock signal.  This would be a state that could be measured at any point on the microprocessor that has a time varying spin, but measurement of that spin would not alter the spin states of all the other photons in the clock signal?  If measurement of the signal at one point on the chip cannot perturb the overall clock signal, then there must be a large number of particles involved.  Also how could you prepare a stream of photons that you could measure the spin and know before hand what the observed spin state should be at any given point in time?  Is the spin state of any given photon not random when measured?

So, perhaps the clock signal is a complex entangled many-photon state?  Is there a mechanism to produce an entangled state for which the measured state at any point in time would be cyclic?  I haven’t even studied any aspects of quantum information theory, other than knowing that entangled states exist.  Perhaps questions like these are already well understood?

I also dreamed of a large clear glass-like window pane, in which all the spin-1 particles had their spins synchronized.  I guess this is a similar, but simpler version of the microchip spin synchronized clock signal, just not varying with time.  In my dream I wondered what the optical properties of “glass” would be if there was a large degree of spin synchronization.  Now, does glass even have any spin-1 particles?  Perhaps the window pane in my dream was built of some other material, like plastic or Star Trek like transparent aluminium.  Even supposing that it was possible to synchronize the spins in a large number of particles, the optical effects of doing so are not clear to me.  We do calculations of reflection and transparency in electromagnetism, but there the underlying nature of the transparency is treated as a black box, having to do with the electric and magnetic permittivity.  I understand transparency to be a bulk solid state quantum statistical mechanics phenomena, but  don’t really know enough to be able to, say, compute the optical properties of a given crystal lattice of some arbitrary material.  Understanding that has been a goal since I was a kid (perhaps since I saw “The voyage home” with my grandparents as a kid), but I haven’t gotten that far in my studies yet, or if I have, I haven’t put all the pieces together mentally.

In a metal, like aluminum, there would be many free electrons.  Perhaps the spin of those half-integer spin particles could be synchronized.  What would be the optical properties if that was done in a large sheet of material?  In stat-mech we did the calculations that related spin to magnetic moment, so there would surely be magnetic properties to such a spin synchronized surface.  It is kind of interesting that we have two so very different mechanisms for magnetism, one due to quantum half integer spin, and the other due to relativistic effects of observing electrons in motion.  There are surely some subtle ways these are related in quantum field theory, but I don’t know much of that topic either.

This purpose of this dream sequence really seems to be pointing out to me how little I know, in the big picture sense, about how electrodynamics and quantum mechanics fit together.