Rhonabwy

hummm... While reading the latest

hummm... While reading the latest geek headlines, I came across this article at MIT Tech Review about embedded software that can control a system autonomously. Kinda neat.

Just got home, long day

Just got home, long day of traveling. Got a shitload of mail backed up. Also have a long blog entry I wrote while I was on the plane home...

2:44pm

Flying in the airplace from St. Louis to Minneapolis/St.Paul. Had a pretty good visit back to Columbia. Spent the week/weekend with family, about as you'd expect from a Thanksgiving vacation. We arrived Wednesday in the ungodly early AM. We'd taken a red-eye from Seattle and arrived in Minneapolis at 6:30am CST. We took the next flight from there to St. Louis, but ended up having to turn around in the air and head back to Minneapolis. Turns out there was a leak in the seal for the airplane. Not fatal, but man was that loud! I expect if we'd continued, the plane would have depressurized to some extent, and that would have freaked everyone out. Not to mention I would have been deaf.

So we finally arrived in St. Louis about 11am, and headed to Columbia after grabbing a bite to eat at Steak n' Shake.

John and Jeannette were able to come over for a visit later that evening, which was really cool. I was almost sure I'd miss Jeannette for her own traveling over Thanksgiving. Thursday was at my aunt's house (the usual, and wonderful) and Friday night we had dinner at Karen's folks' house. (is it OK to do the transitory possesive punctuation in English?) Last night (Friday) I even got to head over to Dan and Sarah's to play a big networked computer game with Dan and John. That was cool, even though I pretty much got my butt kicked.

I don't know - the vacation felt a little constrained, but then I think visiting Columbia will always feel a bit constrained. I just lived there far too long, so just visiting will always feel some sort of constraint on it. There isn't my house to go back to, the comfortable position at the University. Okay, so it wasn't so "comfortable" in the "Boy, I really enjoy my job!" sense, it was just comfortable because it was familiar. I knew the players, even if I knew they were dumbshits or idiots. Karen made a mention that we hadn't gotten out to eat at some of our favorite haunts.

The sun's going down over the left side of the plane (obviously, we're flying north). The sunset from 28,000 feet is pretty damn impressive. The reds are scattering out across a few higher clouds, and the ground is all clear. The sun's pretty much disappeared even as I write this - the clock on the computer says "2:56pm" - it's still set on Seattle time (it's almost 5 here locally). We'll be flying through the dark for the rest of our traveling.

So the games were fun. We played "Cossacks" and "Star Wars, Galatic Battlegrounds". I actually rather prefered Cossacks. The spectacle was excellent, and the gameplay was smooth. SWGB felt really jerky - sometimes way too fast, and sometimes things wouldn't respond. It was also really hard figuring out what was what - without ever having played either before, Cossacks was a lot more immediately available to me. Course, we got our butt's kicked in the game by the computer. The guy with the least experience (that would be me) was in the middle of the map and completely exposed to all d'bad guys. As soon as peacetime ended (we had an hour of gametime to gather resources and develop), I was pretty much overrun by two different armies. John did a good job defending me, and Dan was doing a good job working on his area, but in the end I didn't really contribute anything more than a speed bump, and somewhere in there, Dan missed a beat and an army ravaged his unprotected flank. John wasn't sure all was lost, but it was have taken us another 6 or 8 hours of gameplay to recover from the damage.

Haven't really spent any significant time with the laptop until this return trip. On the way down, I was desperately attempting to sleep. In the end, Karen and I really only got 3 hours, but at least we attempted. Also had the book Cyteen with me for the trip, so evenings I spent reading that instead of programming or writing.

Sarah swears she's continued writing, and I'm trying to convince her to make some of it public. She's currently running under the idea that she wanted to have 20 pages done before she made anything public. I told her at that rate, she'd just keep extending things out, and nothing would ever get public. Of course, I'm being sel - I want her to write and make it public. Partly to read what she's doing in terms of her litterary work, and partly to see if I can get her into blogging so I can keep up better with her life in Columbia.

Thanksgiving dinner was excellent, but painful. I'd had some port before dinner, and then a glass a wine, and by the time we got to actually eating, I had more alcohol than sense in my system. With which, I choose to ate far, far in excess of what I normally do, and I actually made myself sick. We got back to Karen's folks' house later that evening, and I was up until 3am with terrible indigestion. Fortunately, I refrained from idiocy on Friday night (terrific mexican food that Rudy whipped up), so I was just pleasantly full instead of groaning in pain for the majority of the night.

Karen and I just tried playing "A Bug's Life" on the DVD player in the iBook. The video was great, but we couldn't hear a damn thing over the airplane jet noise, and I only had one set of headphones. I'll need to figure out some headphone splitter thingy for watching movies while traveling with Karen. If it's just one of us, I think it'll work just fine.

One the particularly cool things about this vacation was getting some diaries back from restoration. Well, that mom got them back and I got to look at them. My great-great-grandfather kept diaries during his time in the civil war (I have his commisions hanging on my wall). These two diaries that I saw were written in beautiful copperplate script - no ruled lines, and amazingly straight. He was paymaster on the US Vessel of War "Orora". His writing is beautiful, but difficult to read straight off.

// arrived in Minneapolis and got onto the next plane
// on our way to Seattle....
// 5:35pm

I took a few pictures from the book, but I think I'd like to get some better images out of it by scanning the pages, and perhaps transcribing them as a sidebar. I have an image of him from a who's who book in Burlington, Iowa that I might be able to use for him as well. I'm not sure how many actual images we have of him otherwise in the family. Quite something to have some family history direct in that regard - personal diaries from the civil war.

We're on the plane to Seattle now - it's "foggy in Seattle" is what they're reporting for conditions there. We're in a boeing 757 for the flight with "more advanced landing capabilities", so they're also stating we shouldn't have any terrible delays in landing because of it. Three hour flight - we're maybe 20 or 30 minutes into it right now. Heading west at 35,000 feet, somewhere in the dark over Minnesota.

Karen and I traded in some frequent flyer miles to get bumped up to first class for this return flight (well, this and the previous flight both). It's been really nice. We had a couple of somewhat obnoxious kids in front of us on the last flight, but this time it's much quieter. There's a couple and their two children across from us - one of the boys was quite upset just a few minutes before takeoff. At first I thought he was just scared, but after eavesdropping for a minute or two, it became apparent that he was not scared, but frustrated to the point of tears at his "inability to draw". His mom, sitting next to him, was trying to be helpful, but she ended up really blowing it. Instead of dealing with his issue and his ability, she offered to draw the outline of the plane for him. While the boy seemed to think that was OK, it unfortunately progressed to her launching the small glass of red wine all over the kid - the cleanup of which caused much frustration for both of them. In the end, he didn't get to draw anything (Mom got a bit snippy with him when he was trying to get his pad of paper from her), he was a tad stained with red wine, and mom got pissed off and frustrated with her boy who was sobbing a bit about his drawing skills. She seemed to calm back down after a few minutes, but I thought it was somewhat unfortunate for the lad that she didn't just say "Give it a shot, you're doing fine." Maybe it's Karen's own background in art, and watching her teach all these people who are just sure they can't draw... when all they lack is confidence, a lesson or two, and a little practice.

Oh - it looks like we get little table clothes for our pull-down tray tables as well. And drinks are in glass - I didn't even think they allowed glass on a plane anymore.

I guess I'm not going to get much programming done on this trip back. I brought along the laptop to do some coden', but really I'm only writing in this little text file for later posting. I'm down to about 40% charge now - we had an hour in Minneapolis, but most of it was taken up with travel between gates and a very early boarding (35 minutes before take-off). I was hoping to recharge some, but that just didn't happen. I guess if I was a big "all the time" flying person, I might consider an extra battery. Doesn't seem worth it for the average flight though.

Byron pointed me to this

Byron pointed me to this really cool picture of the space shuttle launch:

Spent the evening cleaning. I

Spent the evening cleaning. I guess it was really about time - it'd been a while. I vacuumed, straightened, and "did" the kitchen while Karen took care of the studio, bedroom, final bits of laundry still left, and (bluch!) the bathroom. We've got a pretty good system worked out all in all.

Found out tonight that MU has implemented a VPN system for the school, using Cisco's tools. When I left everything seemed like it had to be Nortel. Of course, all the wireless gear was then Cisco - it was quite the little political ruckus there for a while on which vendor got chosen. Of course, MU doesn't have the greatest history of pickin' the winners. Heh. They wired the entire law school with Type9 cabling and Tokenring, just about the time everyone else decided it was dead and CAT5 with 10T Ethernet was finishing it's crushing blow to it's competition (that would be Tokenring).

Most of the servet work that Gus did, and I maintained for a little bit, appears to be hidden or completely gone. They've got some application servers running something new - but the one thing that they really seemed to miss was some style. I really enjoyed Gus' web application GUI style. Ah well.

Looks like I made the appropriate breakthrough's with MOKit this afternoon during the interminable set of meetings. I know I was at least somewhat obvious (in that I was playing with code instead of paying attention to the meeting), but I didn't care. Hurm. Still don't. :) Anyway, it was a stupid bug that was biting me on the MOKit stuff more than anything else, although I'm still not completely clued in on how to us NSRange. What's frustrating to me is that there's a whole set of class documentation for NSRange in java, but nothing for Objective-C. If it were there, it would be at: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/ObjC_classic/Classes/NSRange.html. I know in concept it's pretty simple to deal with, but I'm getting lost in the specific references and I don't exactly have any example code to work from.

I still think the Omni implementation is a cleaner implementation - the MOKit really feels (well, duh - cause it is) a shallow wrapper around Henry Spencer's regular expression C code. But... I'm gettin' there, and Mike Ferris was kind enough to reply to me, so I feel obligated to finish out learning how to use his code, and then post up an example (maybe at CocoaDev) to show the next person how to use it.

I got dragged in. Spent

I got dragged in. Spent the entire afternoon in meetings, ah... lovely meetings. That's where Things Get Done! Decisions Get Made!

Yeah, right.

So I took my little iBook with me. Popped open Project Builder and got something interesting done there at least. I've always mentally put "incorporating other folks Frameworks into your application" into that nebulous "I need to learn how to do that someday" category. Well, today was that day. And really, it wasn't too bad. There's two different places out there with discrete instructions on pulling this off: IncludingFrameworksInApplications, a wiki site, that references a tutorial article at Cocoa Dev Central. While not a super-cool drag it and it's done methodology, it's actually not very hard at all - just takes a second to grasp the concept and it's obvious from there.

It's very nice that there's a number of developer-driven tutorial sites out there for Objective-C. They're a pretty fantastic resource.

Heh. I'm supposed to be

Heh. I'm supposed to be in a meeting right now.

Spent most of the morning hiding in the machine room, doing a clean install of Linux on a rack-mount and getting Apache+PHP+MySQL installed. Nice way to burn the morning, and I actually got something done.

Doc Searls commented on Comdex

Doc Searls commented on Comdex and it's waning, but the best read I've seen on it is from The Register - I highly recommend a gander at this completely biased viewpoint.

Spent the evening over with

Spent the evening over with Nate, Leah and family. Leah's brothers are both in town, along with one wife and two kids (the other brother apparently isn't married). Nice folks, and the kids were pretty OK. I think Nate and Leah were pretty glad to see us, and we had a nice evening of Monsters, Inc. after dinner.

Back now, checking up on email, news, etc. Caught a tidbit at CNET on Alan Key getting hired by HP. I just hope that HP realizes that if it wants visionary products, it takes more than just hiring a smart guy. I'm actually very impressed with him, I just don't have much trust that his job at HP represents anything more than a boondoggle and showpiece. Kind of like a trophy wife. I hope not, but...

I should be sleeping. But

I should be sleeping. But I'm not. I had a terrible feeling I was in for this tonight. The cats are sleeping. Shoot, one of them is even snoring. Yeah, while lounged across my legs on the couch.

Well, the good news is I got some good coding research done. Ended up bagging a question and writing Mike Ferris to ask him how he'd suggest proceeding. I dunno, I guess I'd just prefer to use the MOKit stuff. The problem I can't figure out how to resolve is how to determine *how many* subexpressions there are in a given regular expression match . The omni stuff has that - subexpressionCount method...

Well, I'll give sleeping a shot, although I'm not feeling like it's going to be very successful.

Spent the (later) evening playing

Spent the (later) evening playing with regular expression Objective-C code. Trying, basically, to grok one of three methods to do some regular expression stuff in Objective-C. One: regex (3 & 7), Two: MOKit, Three: OFRegularExpression from OmniFoundation.

Well, not being versed in the lovliness of bit spinning and twidling, the last really made the most sense to me. (Ok, so I'm used to Apache's ORO classes - so sue me). MOKit looked pretty straightfoward as well, and was based on Henry Spencer's Regex work. The big drawback there? (like I'm about to hit it... Riiight) It apparently doesn't deal nicely with Unicode character sets. Shit, RegExp can be mind-bending anyway, let alone throwing in Unicode encoding...

Anyway, the Omni stuff makes the most sense to me right off the bat. Do sort of wish MOKit included a - (unsigned int)subexpressionCount; method - would make it a tad easier. Eh. There's also NSScanner in the Cocoa API's for doing some really simple matching, but I specifically wanted Regular Expression parsing.

Heh, now this is a

Heh, now this is a great article, courtesy of /. (yeah, I read that a lot. Don't post much there though. And I'm an asshole when I get moderator points to spend...)

In other news from my handy-dandy news aggregation service, there's been a report that computers are being used more in the home. I'm amused by everyone talking about "Microsoft's idea of the digital hub". (not referenced in that article - just an amusing sidenote from other articles I read earlier today). I guess that research was nice to have validated, but really- I think it's just the sort of "well, duh" statistics that can be obvious to anyone who isn't a corporate executive.

Just got back from a

Just got back from a bit of a walk. It's a beautiful night out there tonight - it was a clear sunny day, and tonight is a clear starry night. Even with the light polution of Seattle, you can see quite a number of stars. Orion was just rising his belt above the horizon when I came in. The only downside is that it was actually quite chilly out. Without the cloud cover to lock in the warmth, it flees pretty quickly. I wonder if this means we're in for a really foggy or rainy day tomorrow.

Spent some time quietly enjoying the atmosphere of El Diablo, but otherwise I was out wandering the neighborhood of Queen Anne.

For whatever reason, while I was walking home, I recalled some music from an LP that I've long since lost: Pinkworld. It was buy a group called Project P, came out in 1984. And nobody seems to have heard of it. I don't recommend a search on google for Pinkworld, unless you're looking for porn... I did find a fansite though. I guess I can still get that music if I'm willing to import it from Germany.

As a side note, I've been trying to figure out how I want to do remote "blogging" - basically, capturing the bloggin' ideas for writing when I have my laptop but am otherwise disconnected. James Duncan Davidson kindly pointed me to iBlog for MacOS X. I wouldn't call it a cross platform solution, but Soap Dog Studio (apparently Andre Garzia from Brazil) did create it with RealBasic, so there's no reason he couldn't port it pretty quick to Windows. Not that I need it - MacOS X works perfect for me. One really nice thing he's done - built in a text replacement engine so you can match patterns and autoreplace them with links. Something I've sort of wanted for quite some time...

As I walked past the radio towers, some leaves skittered in the wind and the street light above me went out. The street lights sort of blinking out (or on) around me seems to have happened ever since I got here. Makes me think either: A) I'm jinxed and a gremlin is fuckin' with me or B) they've got some freakishly sensitive light sensors all over the damn place on Queen Anne. Probably the later, but the former is sort of amusing to consider in this age of rationality. Well, mostly rationality - we do have WarMonger "Fuck Your Civil Rights" Dubya for a president. Not that I have an opinion on it. Really.

Ah... this is the movie

Ah... this is the movie I kept thinking about: Deterrence. Kevin Pollack, Timothy Hutton. One-stage film. Pressure cooker.

The point is, we need

The point is, we need to pay attention to what we believe and why we choose to believe it. Whose purposes are being served, and are they the same as our own? How do we wish to regard the authorities in our lives and which ones have we chosen for ourselves, and why?

Wow. Just got back from

Wow.

Just got back from visiting John and Sue, where we saw Glengarry GlenRoss. Freakin' amazing movie! If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's a hell of a pressure cooker movie, and the acting across the board is just incredible. It's sort of a 3 set movie, but man does it move.

Al Pacino was simply incredible, but all the acting was across the top. Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemon, Alec Baldwin. Wow. I'm still stunned just sitting here thinking about it. An of course, I know understand two lines that John used to use at work:

"What's my name? Fuck you! That's my name." er, uhm. I guess you have to see it. Kevin Spacey said "go to lunch" three times, in a row, and it not only worked - it was fantastic. The movie was just amazing. Humm. Makes more sense when you hear it...

My iBook has a fan!

My iBook has a fan!

I didn't know it had a fan, except that after I played Deep Trouble for about 15 minutes, it suddenly kicked on. I also noticed that the laptop was significantly warmer than I'd remembered it being. I guess pushin' pixels at 32bit, 1024x768 takes a little bit o' juice. Surprised the hell out of me - I didn't even know there was a fan in there!

Cool. So I just put

Cool. So I just put Flesh and machines : how robots will change us on hold at the library. Maybe I'll get it before we leave for Thanksgiving, maybe not. If not, it'll be here waiting for when I get back. The Industry Week article referenced it, and there was a short review on it in Ober's Wired by that maniac Ray Kurzweil.

The cool thing about Ray... whenever I think I've gone way off the deep edge into techno-babble and deep theoretical stuff, I can just hit his site and realize that he (and a bunch of others) have me beat hands down. There's some wacky shit out there. Not all of it is completely whacked, but it's all over the place.

Hey Cool! One of the

Hey Cool! One of the articles on Industry Week is about Rodney Brooks. I've been reading a number of his research papers lately, mostly because everybody and their mother appears to be referencing him as much as they do anyone else. If google were linked to just computer science AI papers, this guy would have the highest "authority" rating in the bunch!

Has O'Reilly lost it's touch?

Has O'Reilly lost it's touch?

Well, not completely, but they're not quite as hot as they used to be. Either that, or my memory favors them much more highly than it should. (yeah, I sometimes give away the end of the story early).

As I sit here looking at my cocoa programming books, the OReilly one is the last one that I'm aiming for. Now here's the really funny thing with that sentence - I have more than one OReilly cocoa programming book. I have both Building Cocoa Applications and Learning Cocoa. The first I bought back in May at, and the later I received as a part of attending the WWDC in 2001. If you haven't guessed, this last was a complete bomb. It was honestly no better than a cheap, super-basic online tutorial. To be fair, OReilly must have realized they fucked up with that, as they have a 2nd edition of it out, this time being significantly helped along by James Duncan Davidson, who (from all accounts, including his numerous articles) knows his shit pretty well.

Okay - so back to the topic at hand - the good stuff ain't coming from OReilly. Used to be, I expected that the de fa quality standard would be OReilly. But there for about 18 to 24 months, it just wasn't happening. The MySQL book that came out sucked. I found the one I finally wanted from New Riders. Shocking!

Okay - for Perl, they've got it hands down. Everyone else sucks there. Learning Perl and Programming Perl were my manuals to life in the geek world for ages. Mine are usually gathering dust now, however, as I usually need them at the office - mine are at home - so I snag and beat up someone else's copy.

The java books from OReilly have been sort of a mixed bag too - but then so has Java. Too many freakin' API's to make sense of in any sitting, some just fell by the wayside. Don't know much about the Python gig, as I've only really coursed across it sort of tangentially.

Maybe I'm just full of horse hockey. Just seems like they're not quite up to standards on some of their publications over the past year, but I'll willingly admit their "Cookbooks" for the various languages have simply kicked ass. Or maybe it's just right in line with how I tend to program things. Whichever, they're good.

What do you mean it's

What do you mean it's dark outside already. Damnit, I just started paying attention!

Actually, Karen and I had a pretty busy day - lots of errands and chores to get knocked out. Cat litter, key copying, dinner making, laundry cleaning, library book returning... god, there's more but at the moment I can't recall it all. Spent the morning basically in the car shuttling around and taking care of things. We did pick up a few bottles of beaujolais neveau (good lord, is that the proper spelling?). There's a little wine merchant down the road a touch (Queen Anne and Boston) - so that was one of the many stops.

Plenty of leftovers in the fridge - but the hell with that, I made a nice delicatta squash soup for dinner. We played Morrowind a tad after dinner, but not really very long. Not much else really happening tonight. More laundry, but that's sort of an ever-going thing for a day once we start it.

Have my copy of Cocoa Programming sitting here, calling to me for a little light reading and trying out of software ideas. I've heard that folks have received their copies of Cocoa Recipies for Mac OS X, which is an updated version of Bill Cheeseman's online Vermont Recipies. I'm going to pick up that book - but mostly to support Bill. He made his tutorials available earlier than anyone else really had any decent stuff out there, and did it for free. That, and he's a nice guy (met him at WWDC this last year).

Read Jipi and the paranoid

Read Jipi and the paranoid chip this evening. It was a fun piece.

I guess I don't really have anything brilliant to talk about. Didn't want to play video games, programming wasn't flowing, and reading scientific works on the net didn't appeal. Pooka's in my lap, vaguely keeping me pinned on the couch, so I figured writing was the next best thing.

I'm still thinking about switching things over to Movable Type, but I don't know if I wanna... you know, I could install it on the laptop, but then I'd be limited to the laptop for blogging (not that great a limitation, but still). I like having it on an Internet server, because that allows me to post from anywhere I have a net connection. I guess what I'd like to have is something that stores my comments and notes offline, and then sync's them into the blog. Guess if I want it, I'll just have to make it, huh?

Maybe I'll go brainstorm in my private logs... (Yeah, although I'm sure it seems like I post everything here, there's some stuff I keep to myself. Shocking, huh?)

Walking through fog really twists

Walking through fog really twists the world around. Coming home tonight, I caught the bus up to Boston and 4th Ave N, which left me walking some 8 blocks or so. As I walked through the fog, my vision was limited to about a block, unless there were lights. With the lights, you could see the brightness, but not really anything else. The really weird thing was that the pavement was dry... except under the trees. I'm more used to the pavement under trees being dry when everything else it wet - but not in fog.

Just spent the time to

Just spent the time to review all those slides Doc made while he was on the cruise. I think it primarily consisted of raiding his iPhoto application :) But they were good. There's some really interesting points in the second half of the slides that codify somewhat the thinking of commoditization, the net, and using your resources like chess pieces.

Makes me think: "Hey, I understand this, and clearly some large companies dont... There's got to be opportunity there". Now I just gotta find it...

Hey! What the hell happened

Hey! What the hell happened to Byron's server? I'm getting a "host not found" response on pings and http requests. Dernit - there goes my afternoon reading.

Caught an interesting little snippet called Jipi and Paranoid Chip, by Neal Stephenson. Haven't read it yet, but I've enjoyed Neal's writing in the past. Grabbed a copy down onto the iBook for later perusal - I do like that "webarchive" feature of IE, even though this particular piece didn't really need it. I did use it, however, for reviewing Doc Searl's talk from his Linux Lunacy cruise.

Today's been an interesting mixture of routine and complete knee jerk reactions. The accountant is still being bitchy, which looks to be somewhat problematic as I'll need to work with her soon. Then again, I'm working with our product manager, so maybe I can fawn off this stuff on him. In a normal environment, you wouldn't think this would be too much a problem - it's setting up a credit card payment services account. Maybe fraught with administrative red tape if you worked in a high bureaucracy zone, but otherwise pretty straightforward. Tell you one thing though, the technology certainly has come a ways - they're now providing a gateway service where they run all the transaction stuff for you, you just paste from HTML into your site. Fees are varying levels of skim over the central mandated from VISA and MC. Very nice setup... but then the last time I looked at this was 4 years ago, when CCVS was the thing (it's no longer even made) from RedHat.

I woke up this morning thinking: "What am I going to do today that I can say was genuinely useful and good". I'm having a hard time thinking of those things at the end of the day, and I leave depressed because of it. I look back on the day, and it's just "WTF? Whaddid I do that was beneficial to anyone?". Fortunately, today I've got a few items on that list. Annoyance because of the knee jerk short timeframe, but hey - that happens. Getting info and setup for this credit card transaction stuff was good. Troubleshot a data feed issue for the content team. Did a preflight check (hardware and software validation before an install) for a project coming up. Did up my status reports for an overview of the week's workflow. Authorized some spend to upgrade our viciously slow demo machine. Not too shabby.

It's interesting. I don't know

It's interesting. I don't know anything about Farscape, certainly never watched it. But this article at /. caught my eye - not for the content, but for what it represents. Do it yourself media - these folks are attempting a home-made media campaign, not unlike the "switchers" ads that Apple's done, to attempt to get a studio to keep this particular program on the air. Not sure it'll work - but the concept of individuals going out, doing their thing, and then pushing the media onto the mainline publishing networks is really interesting. And it's probably really scary to the studios - at least if they're paying attention.

Spent the evening at a

Spent the evening at a coffee shop. I knew I needed to eat dinner, but just couldn't figure out what I wanted. You know, one of those decision nights where you'd argue for hours with your spouse "No really, what do you want?". John and Sue joined me for a little bit there - they just returned from what appeared to be a very cool retreat. Dinner? Chili from Thriftway. Pretty darn good too.

I wish MacOS X had

I wish MacOS X had vmstat...

Speaking of karma, Microsoft

Speaking of karma, Microsoft is suggesting that it's entire security infrastructure is critically flawed. It's a good mistake too - /. has the story, as well as the detail to Microsoft Security Bulletin 02-065. Yeah, that's the one where they suggest that you remove Microsoft as a trusted code supplier.

The Washington Post is carrying an article on some "pure" research that has, to me, rather amazing implications. I'm sure some extreme righty will start shouting "they're playing GOD!", but I think the reality is something more fundamental - we're actually learning our own codes. Modelling biology... whoa, heavy stuff.

I've been reading a lot of AI related technical and research papers over the past couple of days. Lots of stuff is available on the topic, you just need to be able to wade through the hideous level of abstraction that gets slapped onto these things. Ingesting those thoughts, really getting to the meat of them, sometimes puts me in a wierd frame of mind. I was walking down to work yesterday (a beautiful clear day) and thinking about how one layered model would compare to our brains. For a while, I just stood there sort of stunned - standing on the sidewalk, about half-way down the hill. I just looked around, and I realized how intensely powerful our pattern recognition systems really were (our eyes). Fuckin' amazing. I closed them, so sort of change the perspective for a few, and just listened. For like five minutes, I just stood there while the reality of the intense efforts were shooting through me. I finally broke out of it, but it was a real epiphany. It's no wonder, to me know, why early AI researchers started with sight.

Oh - last tidbit for this morning. Saw an interesting character on the sidewalk today. Looked like he was straight out of a 1920's quartet: long grey wool coat, hair slicked back and parted in the middle, handlebar mustache. Sort of wobbled side to side as he walked - he was out walking a pug. It's an interesting jolt to see something so out of place in an environment so familar. You expect cops, suits, paddy wagons, and the occasional set of ex-con's grouped around in front of the building - not characters from the 1920's.

Okay, I'm a little less

Okay, I'm a little less pissed off at the entirety of accountants due to the reprehensible actions of one of them. It's sort of a question of representation. David Brin had an interesting concept along those lines in his Uplift War saga - where every sophont was a representative of the species.

Well, the iBook is a truly wonderful little thing. The screen is incredibly crisp, and the overall size is really small. I've been burning 802.11b bandwidth at home since 9:30 (maximum transfer bandwidth moving 250Mb of files from one machine to another) and the battery is just over half depleted. Wow - I didn't expect that I'd get this much time on it, but I really am. My older iBook would have been dead at two hours with heavy wireless usage. Did I mention the screen was incredibly crisp? Reading is a delight on this - antialias'd text, and you can really go. I was reading a Microsoft paper on DRM this evening with it - just paging down and reading it onscreen. I'm sure i'll still get the inevitable eye-fuzz after hours of it, but the resolution of the pixels on this is so much greater that I think it'll be significantly longer before they cease focusing.

I guess there's not too much more to report. Spent the evening reading random web sites (interpret as "vegging out") while my data transfered. I have some more computer science research papers stacked up to really dig into, but I didn't quite get the gumption to attack them tonight. Oh - and I'm still looking at Moveable Type as a potential blogger replacement for me.

I'm beginning to think that

I'm beginning to think that accountants should be shoved into a closet, handed a paper accounting tablet and a piece of charcoal, and given only bread and water for their lives.

I'm sure there's good ones out there. One's that aren't bitchy, mean spirited, and arrogant. Really, I'm sure!

I've been involved in a

I've been involved in a number of contract negotiations between large companies. It's fascinating looking at the psychology of this process. One thing that I've seen as a universal, is nobody wants to invoke "the lawyers", and great lengths of freakishness are often deployed to avoid "waking the dragon", the "evil pit of never-return phone-calls". Sometimes terms which aren't even favorable are agreed to - simply because the deal makers want to avoid having the lawyers review all the language again. What I'm not sure of is why. Is it a pain to explain to lawyers the details? Or does it just take freakin' forever to get a lawyer to actually do his stuff?

Dan came by looking for

Dan came by looking for Vas - lord knows where he's hiding right now. Ended up giving him a tour of the new iBook, which he immediately spotted, and followed that up with a rendition of using SSH port forwarding to access our internal bug trackin' database. It's funny - I would have thought he'd already known about the port forwarding thing, but apparently not. Since he's got Windows at home, I showed him how to use PuTTY to do the trick.

Conference call in 20 minutes.

Maybe I'll go get a coke from the fridge.

Grabbed lunch with some of

Grabbed lunch with some of the crew from work over at Golden Singha, this little thai joint around the corner and near a statue of Chief Seattle. Found out during lunch there's a wonderful, inexpensive way to get to Portland for a visit - the train. Apparently a $40 ticket will get you there and back - no driving hassles. :) The corridor between Seattle and Portland is marred by this terrible excuse for traffic flow around Tacoma and Olympia - it just sucks. Hit it at rush our, or a busy weekend, and you'll take 6 to 8 hours making what should be a 3 hour drive. Now the train... that sounds like an idea...

Finally!!!! Fuckin' about time!

Finally!!!! Fuckin' about time!

it. it.. what is it...

it.

it..

what is it...

it is! (the middle one: M8861LL/A)

Spent most of the evening getting things moved over, updated, etc. Downloaded all those documents that I always wish I had with me when I'm disconnected from the networks. Made sure to put a few games in there too, just in case...

Wooo! Working from home today.

Wooo!

Working from home today. It's nice sitting on the couch, drinking tea, and pushing pieces of data through the workflow through the system. The cats are not on me, for a change, instead curled up on the chair nearby, looking like strange yin and yang kitties.

Gots me a boatload of streams to reprocess, and they're not going terribly efficiently. That's something I need to actually work on today - making that game a tad more efficient. That and get the initial version of my servlet up - although I know I already have revisions after talking a few seconds with Clif.

The coolest news for today, though, is this.

Whoa. It's way late, and

Whoa.

It's way late, and I'm way tired. Just got back from Nate's place, where we re-wired his stereo setup into the cabinets all proper like. We didn't get the backchannel speakers set up for full surround, but that's about all we didn't do.

Gnite

fuck fuck fuck. Ever have

fuck fuck fuck.

Ever have those days when you feel completely overburdened? I'm sure it doesn't help that I still don't want to be here today, but the list is just growing sort of insanely. At least sisyphus could see an end to his task - even if the damn rock rolled down to do it again the next day.

CiteSeer is a wonderful resource.

CiteSeer is a wonderful resource. I've been doing some reading on research papers of late, and digging through bibliographies. Found two that would otherwise have been difficult to get: Cognitive Modeling: Knowledge, Reasoning and Planning for Intelligent Characters and Intelligence without Reason by John Funge and Rodney Brooks respectively. There's a couple I couldn't find easily because they were locked away in IEEE's proprietary digitial library (access with a fee), but those were thankfully relatively few.

The department of corrections is

The department of corrections is in our building - couple of floors from us. It makes for some interesting elevator rides upon occasion. Today, it was the "happy stoned ex-con". A quote from the fine musical Hair is relevant: Big Black Basketballs! - this guy was feeling great. Took him a few tries to his the floor on the elevator, and then he chose ours.

"Thanks!", I said, smiling. He looked happy, nodded and bounced around in the corner. As the doors opened on our floor, I stepped out and he followed, sort of doing that bouncy walk and vaguely missing all the walls in the process. As he swung around into the lobby, he sort of stopped suddenly: "Ooohh".

"Six", I said, smiling at him.

"Yo doggie..." I think he said as he back into the elevator and began pressing at the plate with the buttons.

I shook my head a little more, carded my way into the office, and came here to tell you about it.

Took the car in for

Took the car in for service before dawn today. 'Course, before dawn isn't that hard in Seattle, as it just means before 8am. I got up there at 6:45am - just had to shout that to the world: IT IS POSSIBLE FOR ME TO WAKE UP BEFORE 9AM!. Okay, I feel better now. Anyway, Carter Subaru is a pretty easy place to deal with, and I guess I'm looking at getting my car back some time later today. I wasn't sure how long this would take (some recall stuff and minor service), but I didn't expect it done in one day.

Didn't bring my iBook into work today, although I transfered up the servlet code I've been working on. I'll probably try and get Tomcat installed on one of our internal services box and get the initial implementation up. Lots more that I actually want to do with it, but the baseline is there and it's time to see what other folks think to get a cycle going.

The air quality, by the way, still sucks - but it's not as bad as Thursday afternoon or Friday. I stopped noticing the toxic fumes after about 5 minutes.

I'm just not thrilled about being here today. I'm jealous of David McCusker's excitement in being involved with a new project. Just sort of dragging, and it's only 9:30am. Maybe it's because I got up so early.

So we saw The Education

So we saw The Education of Randy Newman tonight. It was a really good show. I had thought I had an idea of the music that he's put out at some points, but I'm none the less left amazed at how prolific a songwriter he is, and spent various parts of the show thinking "Geezus! He wrote that too!?" All in all, it was a neat performance that I'm really glad Nate and Leah suggested we join them to attend.

Caught a few links from Hack the Planet, one of which pointed me to McCusker's prolific writing on this Chandler product. Damn, but he's spewin' ideas left and right! The other thing I caught there was a very MacOS X specific goody - a little bit of amusing coding called iPulse, which does system monitoring in a neat little modern art medallion. Even updates it's display in the dock properly. I'll play with it a little bit, and if I keep looking at it favorably, I'll probably go ahead and register it on the grounds that it's cool and I like what IconFary has done in the past (and continues to do).

Had to run out real

Had to run out real quick this afternoon, and as I was leaving the house I spied a segway! Ok, so it wasn't spying - the guy had the segway leaned over some nearby steps and was replacing the battery. I immediately blew off my destination for a few minutes and went over to see what this thing was all about. Turns out, this guy is reading water meters for the city, and they're using segway's to get around. He said the battery lasts about 4 hours up on Queen Anne (it's a bit hilly here - not like Frisco, but a hell of a lot more hilly than Columbia, MO). It also apparently recharges a bit when going downhill... It looked like a little pain to switch out the battery, but the guy doing it thought it was pretty OK. Three screws with a small torx driver (maybe T10 or T12 from the look of it) and he whipped a fresh battery out of a saddle bag, and away he went.

Actually, I missed him actually using it because Karen reminded me that we were supposed to be helping a friend at that moment, but I imagine that he just hopped back on it and rolled away. I don't know how much of a commercial success this thing will eventually be (seems kinda pricey for the average person to have one), but it really fit well with what this guy from the city was doing.

I'm sort of at a

I'm sort of at a loss today... not really sure why.

It's actually mostly clear outside, and wonderful temperature (a nice fall cool - you'd want a light jacket, but that's about it). Karen and I walked down to Tully's for a little coffee and baked goods - had a great conversation about some of my projects and interests.

Bouncing ideas off her has been great - allows me to refine them down more, hone off those rough edges. I realized while chatting that I keep trying to incorporate too much into any single project that I'm working on in my spare time. I need to get more ruthless and chop out the extraneous stuff to get on to being able to do anything. Sort of reminds me of what happened to a friend of mine at work - he kept getting so wrapped up in the big picture that he was slipping constantly on getting the details done, and the work was just completely stalling.

So we're going to some show this evening with Nate and Leah, but I don't really know much about it. In the meantime, I'm not sure what I want to be doing. My brain is going all over the place, thinking about this, that, and the other.

If I were to ever

If I were to ever start a company myself, there's a couple of things I would definitely do:

1) not buy Oracle databases unless a gun was put to my head. Maybe not even then.
2) not buy fancy speciality hardware vendor's renditions of your standard commodity PC. Speeds and efficiency should come from multiple machines, working in sync - not one big one, and not any single one.
3) Only buy machines with a full 3 year warranty. After 3 years, throw'em away (well, give them away actually, or use them until they break - but don't spend any staff time on that shit).

That's what I was thinking when I went to the COLO, rebooted a machine, and came home.

The cats are both sacked

The cats are both sacked out on me on the couch. Pooka is making periodic meeping sounds in response to my typing. In fact, he's currently slightly annoyed with me (one of the ears is back) for removing his pillow (my left arm) to actually type with both hands.

Karen's listening to A Wrinkle In Time on CD that she checked out from the Library. While I've been reading tonight, I've had half an ear listening myself. What I hadn't remembered was just how very dark that story could be.

Libraries are a really cool thing. But here's a question for you: If there's weren't such a thing as a public library today, do you think that the RIAA would ever conceive to allow it to come into existance? A place were an individual can steal the work by reading it - at no charge?!?! Worth a thought when you listen to them all (RIAA, recent hollywood studios, etc) blathering about how they're doomed and their industry is crashing because of piracy. Yeah, I guess you can tell where my sympathies lie, huh?

On an unrelated note, there's been quite the conversation thread on the cocoa-dev mailing list. The interesting tidbit was one of the participants (combatants?) posted as evidence a rather interesting link to an Apple job posting. It's interesting in that Apple is now rather (in)famous for not talking about what it's doing in the future, but there's at least some parts that are all out there in the job descriptions...

Interestingly, the extended topic on the dev list was about jobs - or the lack thereof - which has now sort of slided into complaints about what Apple has or hasn't done with technology it did or didn't develop. Yeah, generic bitch fest.

Okay - that "penn dutch"

Okay - that "penn dutch" recipie I got off the Internet? Yeah, whomever it was that wrote it must have been a fuckin' lush, cause the whiskey flavor is way, way strong. And I don't think all the alcohol cooked out either. Flavor's good, but whew! Man, is it strong.

In the meantime, I have once again determined that I prefer the texture of home cooked from scratch pumpkin pie over pumpkin pie with canned pumpkin. The canned stuff is smoother - homogenized (or however you spell that), and just not quite as interesting. I did one as a mixture of the two, and that helped it out, but the smoothness of the canned pumpkins almost makes the pie disappear.

They're marching north... package 1,

They're marching north...

package 1, package 2, and package 3.

Don't ever, ever trust a

Don't ever, ever trust a recipie. I've got more pumpkin pie filling than I know what to do with. And it's raining outside, so I don't particularly feel like heading over to the market to get more pie crusts.

damnit.

I'm down to the final

I'm down to the final bits on my servlet. Creating the "add" and "remove" functions weren't bad at all. It's the "edit" that's a real bitch. There's a whole lot of code that could be put in there - checking to see if values are different, etc. I'll probably shortcut it and just slam all the data right back into the database doing updates across the board. It can deal...

The bit that looks like it'll take a long time (as much as I'd care to spend on it anyway) is tweaking the UI. Ain't that always the case? I'm no brilliant web designer, but I don't want it to look completely like shit either. So I've taken a sort of minimalist approach, but the forms are still being pissy in their looks. It's funny, because after looking at earlier this evening, I'm very aware of the UI and what it does (and doesn't) do.

Man, I am just not

Man, I am just not having much luck with cooking tonight. Things are gettin' overdone and underdone all over the place. Dinner was equally a mix, and most recently I've been baking out sugar pumpkins to make into pies. (I do love a good pumpkin pie). Got a neat recipie that I've been wanting to try out, so I think I'll hop to and bake it up tomorrow morning.

Gus and Lynn have been

Gus and Lynn have been looking at Moveable Type for a new bloggin' mechanism on their sites. Gus wrote his own bloggin' thing (well, it's a lot more than a Blog) called "ja". So, I'm not sure he'll ever move to MT. Lynn, however, looks to be making the transition. After having looked at the tools, I've got to admit, it looks pretty damn nice.

Sooo. drop rhonabwy.blogspot.com and move it all back to mu.org? It's a possibility. One thing I'll need to figure out is how to get my prolific crap back out of Blogger. Since MT can be hosted at mu.org, I'd be able to whack out a huge amount more in the way of features. Not to mention, I could implement some of my own theories as brutal hacks into it should I feel so inclined.

Dan Bricklin has an interesting

Dan Bricklin has an interesting viewpoint on the recent TabletPC release. He's basically praising the implementation, and bringing up concrete reasons why it's useful to him, and what he perceives the platform to have in terms of value. Dan cofounded Slate Corporation, which was heavily involved in pen based computing in the early 90's. Anyway, interesting viewpoint if you're into that sort of thing.

There's a very nice table

There's a very nice table of the differences between the various Apple laptops available on MacObserver. I caught it yesterday, and looking over it again today, I'm pretty convinced where my choice would be.

I just gotta sell this little iBook I have now...

There seems to be a couple of nibbles at the office - I figure I'll firm it up by the end of next week, or move it on to eBay and see what I can get for it.

Continued to work on my

Continued to work on my servlet code - a few hours last night, a few hours this morning - and now a few more hours to boot. I suspect I would have been essentially completed if I'd used PHP right off the bat, and I've realized why: I'm creating an "object" layer in the midst of all the java so that it's 'easy' to use things. This abstracts out all the database queries and operations completely. If I just removed that layer, things would be tied together a lot more firmly, but they'd also be completed a lot quicker.

I was really testing any of my object layer code at all, except through the servlets. Only now, I'm having some problem and having to recompile the code, restart the servlet, log in, and issue the command is a taking a huge amount of time. The code/compile/run cycle isn't super-fast, which is annoying the shit outa me. Even still, I'm actually making excellent progress. Of course, now I'm going back and writing test code, which will make things take longer...

So it looks like David

So it looks like David McCusker has joined OSAF. I don't exactly recall when I started reading any of his blog entries, but it's been one of those periodically and when I think of it sorts of things. He worked at Apple, Netscape, and a couple of other places. Digging around in his website is a sure-fire recipe to finding all sorts of detailed and indepth discussion about databases, memory mapping, runtimes, and a variety of other way-the-fuck-over-my-head stuff that I glance at and think "Jeezus, that's way the fuck over my head!".

Today was sort of a mixed bag. I got some good work done on the servlets stuff I've been working on, mostly by spending the morning "disconnected" and working at Uptown Espresso (a fine little coffee shop which is basically across the street from my office). I returned from my self-enforced isolation about 10:30am, having made it to the point where I wanted a change of scenery and distance from all the baked goods summoning me from the counter. As I returned, I walked into the otherwise-completely-forgotten-about benefits update meeting. It was actually decent that I went, because I found out the corporate mailing that I received was, in fact, completely invalid for what I needed. I guess our site is remote enough from the mothership that we arrange our medical coverage through the WSA. Other aspects of that meeting were, uhm, shitty.

The usual thing, ya know: you're going to pay more, maybe get less, and it really doesn't matter to us that nobody in your organization (at least that we're going to admit to) has even received a basic cost of living pay increase in the past two years. Then we got into the "what is the paid-time-off" discussion, which basically sent about three thousand different mixed messages down the pipe. It couldn't be planned, but yet using it for a PTA meeting was acceptable. Going to talk with your personal banker was fine, but don't think about painting your living room. What the fuck, man? As soon as you walk into the realm of questioning your employees, you're done. Trust is fucked, and it all depends on trust.

A good friend of mine once stated: "Sick leave that expires if you don't use it is really an intelligence test. If you have any left at the end of the year, you've failed". I quoted that a lot today.

The other kicker of the day was some nimnutt apparently knocked over a bucket of paint thinner on the floor beneath us. The fumes were incredibly horrific, and sent a number of folks home. I was really spacy when Austin dragged me out to get coffee at 3pm. I don't know what those fuckers were thinking (yeah, I know they weren't), but I'm beginning to think it should be illegal to paint in a closed environment without ventilation. I was ready to add some ventilation with a shotgun actually. Good thing I didn't have one. Well, good for the landlord anyway.

If you didn't catch it on /., there's some truly incredible pictures of the Sun available from a swedish telescope/observatory. My favorite, just for the texture, is this great pic of the penumbra of good ole' Solaris.

I got a real kick

I got a real kick out of the first sentence in this article:

Ballmer's e-mail--seemingly calibrated to project humility following its favorable antitrust settlement--also was intended for public consumption.

What is it with news and Duh!?

So my otherwise lovely evening was slightly marred by a machine ceasing to think it existed at our COLO facility at 8:15pm. I really hate these nilihistic little fuckers. They got out to lunch, and then you got's to go running to wake them up. I'm also very glad that the rest of the Ops staff checks their email in the evening, because I got a note telling me that if I didn't see anything on the screen, it was cause the KVM switch was going and not the machine behind. Phew! I was really freaking out there for a while. Probably caused the machine quite a bit of trauma with multiple power cycles in short order (remember the phrase: 'Tigerboot')? Yeah, a few "IPL's" and everything was fine. heh.

This, on the hand, is

This, on the hand, is just fucking frightening. Excuse me- but the potential sentence does not fit the crime.

Wah? Ahhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Wah? Ahhh HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Another round win for the

Another round win for the Berkeley DB. Interestingly, they have a nice Java API to it as well as the traditional C and C++ libraries (and Perl, and Python, and...).

Conversation snippet for the day:

Conversation snippet for the day:

product manager:

"So what's the possibility of running Tomcat as our production web servers instead of Apache?"

production staff:

"Certainly possible - are you talking in addition to or replacing? I'm not sure how Tomcat will fare under loads that Apache would laugh at..."

product manager:

"It'd be nice to having it running with. Would they have to see the :8080 in the address if we didn't replace it"

production staff:

"Uh, yeah. Wait a sec - what are you wanting to accomplish here?"

product manager:

"well, basically I find it easier to maintain things in jsp pages rather than perl."

production staff:

*choke*, "Uh, sorry - say that again?"

Maybe there's just something here I don't understand...

Oh yeah. I spent another

Oh yeah. I spent another 90 minutes today on the servlet (heh, yes - after work, as I can't get any significant thinking done there). Seems to me that there's some easier ways to attack some of the problems that I'm facing when whippin' up my servlet implementations. Somehow, it takes way longer than I really expect to formalize the concepts that I have in my head down into code (in this case, for a servlet, but the general case is still there regardless of language or project). My first thought is that there should be some way to do this visually - I'm a very visual thinker, so diagrams and bastardized UML things little my notebooks when I'm working on a concept. Ages ago, I tried out and actually used Prograph for a while - it had some neat ideas, but frankly it took forever to really put anything together. And then reading complex code... oh my god, what a pain in the ass! I really did rather like the concept of a dataflow language though - turned some notions of what I was doing on their head. All in all, it wasn't a raving success. Maybe the interface just sucked, or maybe it's not a good way of doing things - hard to tell. But I'm left thinking that there's something obvious - some way of moving from my semantic map into code that surely must be more efficient than I'm doing today.

Bad bus karna. That's what

Bad bus karna. That's what I had tonight. I got out of the about a few minutes before 9pm. It's now 10:30pm as I start to write this, and I essentially just got home. So - notes.

Four guys from OmniGroup where there, showing off OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and OmniWeb. All very nice programs, but the most compelling to me is the OmniGraffle. Imagine Visio, except that it has the concept of graphs embedded into it (so once you connect things, it can rearrange them for you automatically - hierarchical or force-directed... Very nice feature...), costs $70, and only runs on MacOS X. Anyway, after doing a rather uncoordinated demo, they showed off a couple of the games they're porting.

Then there was a break for misc. dBug business, and we moved on to watching a guy named Chad demo Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements. He was also offering a discount that night for Adobe products, and after watching him demo out Photoshop Elements, I was hooked. I ordered it - got $30 off the retail price too.

I had secretly hoped that other Mac folks would bring their laptops or wireless gear and I'd see some network stuff show up. I really wanted to see Rendezvous doin' it's thing with iChat. Unfortunately, there appears to be two problems: the majority of the dBug membership doesn't drag around their laptops if they have them, and most of them seem pretty complacent to be running older versions of MacOS.... like MacOS 8.5! It's really frustrating in one sense - I really want to see the modern stuff doing it's cool shit, and all these folks are still babbling about MacOS 9, extensions, and all the crap that I've been hearing for the past two years. I swear - the biggest hurdle to seeing people move to MacOS X is the reticence of the older Macintosh community. That and they don't want to buy new machines. That old Performa PowerPC works just fine, thank you very much.

Well, aside from my despair at ever seeing Rendezvous and iChat doing anything cool together at a dBug meeting, the whole thing went pretty well. I didn't win anything with my 3 raffle tickets, but I tried. Chance at a couple of Tshirts (about the last damn thing I need), 1 each of the Omni programs, and 1 copy of Photoshop 7.

So on the excessively long trip home, I saw a few interesting things. Bad bus Karma does have it's interesting side effects. One lady had a cat on a leash that she was travelling with. When the bus arrived, the cat jumped up to her shoulder (yes, in one jump - mine would normally make it about to my waist and then climb the rest of the way!) and rode up there right onto the bus and never you mind. Cat seemed perfectly fine with it - it was enjoying playing with the leaves on the sidewalk in the rain.

When I started out, we were having a full fledge thunderstorm. That may not sound very impressive, but if you realized how very, very rare it was to even see lightning around Seattle, let alone hear thunder, you might be more impressed. So I was fortunate enough to have remembered my good rain jacket, but I still got pretty wet in the process. I'd mostly dried by the time I made it all the way home.

Enough about me - Karen had a terrific day today! She taught a class up at Northwest Sewing that was apparently received terrificly well. So well, in fact, that it caught the attention of the owner/manager of the store, and there's apparently some outstanding possibility of getting paid for demos and classes up there! (She was volunteering the class today). She was very excited, and called me at work to report it all to me. It's very cool - I know she's wanting to do something for some extra cash, and this would be a perfect match for her interests and skills.

Motion towards a transparent society?

Motion towards a transparent society?

Sheee-it. (wonder if the censor

Sheee-it. (wonder if the censor code that Byron uses complains about that)

So - two days back in the office, and I've written maybe maybe 12 lines of code. Work on that little servlet? WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Yeah, right. Doesn't look like tomorrow is going to be getting any better, either. Have a conference call at 11am that'll suck the life out of the middle of the day, and we'll attempt to go sign loan paperwork again tomorrow afternoon at 4pm. Turns out our banker was there on Monday, even if his offices were completely closed. Damnit. If we called him, we might have been able to hook up and get this all over with.

So tonight I'm heading out and going to a dBug meeting up in Fremont. OmniGroup and Adobe are doin' their thing, showing stuff off. There's even door prizes, so I'll go see if I can get a copy of Pshop 7.

Ugh. meeting hell. while ($meeting

Ugh.

meeting hell.

while ($meeting =~ /software quality process/) {
watch people babble(meetingroom);
if ($speaker == childishChurlAr) {
getAnnoyed();
}
sleep 600;
}

11:30pm and I'm finally free

11:30pm and I'm finally free of the book!!! I finished my sixth read of the thing, and it's still engrossing. I had some theory that I'd try to look at the structure of the words - how they were put together, how Cherryh does conversation, etc. Never got there - just got sucked in.

So now I'm doing a polite scan of a couple of IP addresses, looking for a likely candidate to send some email. No - not spam. Plenty of those, plus I got my own machines to annoy folks with if I so choose. Nope - this is to attempt, probably vainly, to encourage communications over technical solutions to issues at the office. Geez, but I wish everyone would stop looking at things as "attacks" and "theft" and "denial of service". Fuck, you think they'd have forgotten our roots, where we blew it a couple of dozen times, and with big services. But no - we're the mean heavies now.

Best quote from last week: "We're not an 800 pound gorilla, we're more like a 2oz shrimp!" Heh.

Karen crashed out earlier, although we had a few of those lovely (and very tasty) delicatta squash for dinner. Other than that, I've been ensconced in my book. Tonight, no coding. There's plenty left to do - but I'm more and more convinced that I won't be able to efficiently code up that stuff while I'm at the office (er, that is unless I hide from everyone). My day to day routine is just too effective at taking care of everyone else - it's almost pure interuptions. I commented to Vas that I was impressed he was able to code at work at all. He replied "So am I!".

Oh - it turns out I've learned a few tidbits about Tomcat over the weekend that even the local fanatics hadn't tracked. That felt kind of good - showing it off. Made things a hell of a lot easier in patching one of our internal tool servers with code too.

Dagnebbit! Went to Home Street's

Dagnebbit!

Went to Home Street's Bank's offices in downtown to sign some loan paperwork only to find out the Bank was closed (duh! Veteran's Day). Clearly the banker didn't remember today was Vet's day either. I'll have to call and set it up for tomorrow or later in the week...

Kind of an interesting thing.

Kind of an interesting thing. From the maker's of Kaliedascope (a MacOS UI tweakin' thing), comes... Konfabulator - a skinned JavaScript runtime for the MacOS X desktop. There's even a screenshot over on ResExcellence.

So one thing I've learned

So one thing I've learned this weekend - I have a hard time writing code for myself.

I can go like gangbusters for someone/something else (like a project for work, for example), but I have a hard time keeping myself on track for a project for myself. I jokingly said "I don't have a big enough ego", but Karen pointed out that many artists had very similiar problems with their work - and that a slightly-bigger-than-healthy ego often resolved those problems. I guess many artists (before they're successful, and many even still after) don't see their work as having value. She suggested I was probably having simiar doubts: that because it came from my own head, it didn't have as much value.

Eh - something to think about.

Wow. Okay, I'm back. A

Wow. Okay, I'm back. A flurry of email deluged down into my iBook when I spun it up in network range once again - some 233 messages that had backed up in some Cocoa development lists all spewed down this evening. I guess the 'clog' freed itself sometime last night from the looks of it.

So yesterday I drove up to Oak Harbor. Left Seattle proper at 11am or so, and arrived up there around 1pm. I had plenty of time to burn (I was supposed to meet Karen at the studio at 5pm for dinner), so I wandered around for a bit. In the little downtown area, I found my goal: a coffee shop, and as it happened, a really amazing toy shop. So I have a fondness for really good toy shops - some are just crappy "buy buy spend buy" shops... too many, in fact. But some, some few, have a real sense of "what's fun". I think I found one of those little places in Oak Harbor, WA - goes by the name Truly Magic Toys. Their website isn't much, but at least they have a map to their physical location. So I spent a few dollars there buying things that I thought would make good presents - and not just for kids. I restrained myself pretty well though.

So I ended up spending a total of five hours on Saturday, and another five hours on Sunday working on this project. Twelve hours was definitely way, way too short to estimate, even given a two hour "Oh shit" loss. I'm at thirteen and haven't yet completed things. I've cleared out most of the cobwebs on doing the development (remembering again why Gus kept passing Connections down to his objects from the servlets - and later whole 'connection' objects with all sorts of crap in 'em). I probably spent a good three or four hours just fucking around with the order in which I call things and where bits of code live - figuring out what bits I should pull off into methods, and when I actually really did want to send the headers for the web page.

Oh well - I've screwed my estimate, but at least it's a good learning experience for estimating!

Karen's course went fantastically well. She's now completely crashed out on the couch, but she clearly enjoyed the class and got a hell of a lot done. When we got home tonight, I fed the monsters (er, cats) and then took us off to Olympia Pizza to get some dinner. Had a pleasant Rigatoni with meat balls. It was nice - I like the flavor of their meat sauce (even if it does tend to be a bit thin), but the meatballs just weren't nearly as good as John and Sue's.

I spent far too much of this weekend trip up to Whidbey Island eating - so I only finished half of dinner. Looks like we have some nice leftovers...

Oh - and Karen got a hell of a shock when she came home. We'd ordered some delicatta squash from the CSA bulk food purchase at the end of the market basket subscription. Karen originally wanted 4 pounds of squash. They told her they were selling it by the squash - so she guessed (correctly) that each squash was about half a pound and told 'em "Ok, give me 8 then". Only I didn't know any of this when I picked it up, so bringing home 8 pounds of squash didn't seem terribly unreasonable. It sure takes up a lot of counterspace though - 16 of the buggers... Heh. It's good squash, so we won't have too much trouble eating it. Er, when we're not stuffed anyway. Most of the last couple of baskets have been longer term storage stuff anyway - lots of garlic, some potatoes, squash - etc. We're going to have plenty of veggies for quite some time....

I secretly suspect these are

I secretly suspect these are the only folks using Warchalking. The fad that wasn't... more in a bit.

shit shit shit. Somewhere in

shit shit shit.

Somewhere in using my iBook, I ran out of disk space. Let me tell you, Jaguar (MacOS X 10.2) gets pretty damn freaky when the disk is out of space! Internet Exploder reverted to it's baseline - all the preferences somehow got wiped, and (worse!) I lost a couple hours of work in an emacs buffer (one of the classes I was developing for this servlet). Darnit - there goes 2 hours of work right off the bat.

I suspect the disk space disappeared when I put the iBook to sleep and it wrote out the "memory state" to disk... Since I was running a lot of programs, it took a lot of space - like 250Mb of the 300 or so I have available. So - note to self. Quit out of emacs, shut down IE, and stop Tomcat before you slap the lid down on the iBook. Or get a bigger hard drive.

Wow! Two interesting mac-related articles

Wow! Two interesting mac-related articles on OReillyNet this evening. One on incorporating Rendezvous into Cocoa apps and the other: Speakable 'web services'.

This whole web services thing - man, what a cluster fuck. Everyone's callin' their shit "Web Services", and nobody is really delivering the shiz out to folks. It's like this neat idea, but I suspect the only folks that will really make use of it will be corporate coder types. Nobody else wants to offer web services, because it offers a service without the usual means (read: annoying fucking adverts) of monetizing that service. And I've got to admit, it'd have to be a pretty fuckin' awesome web service for me to pay a subscription fee for...

So I just got back

So I just got back from a little shopping and dinner. Pete's Pizza for a small pie, and a 2.4Ghz phone (Motorola - I refuse to buy an Atlinks model) at OfficeMax. The only thing I'm a little unhappy with on the phone is that it uses a NiCD battery - they're rather well known for problems with battery memory.

Saw a neat word pun

Saw a neat word pun in email this evening - wanted to pass it along.

advTHANKSance

Courtesy of John C. Randolph.

Been keeping busy trying to

Been keeping busy trying to complete this servlet thing for myself at work. Something I hadn't done in the past (which I'm doing now) is attempt to pay attention to how long it takes to actually get the whole thing done. It's interesting, because it's taking longer than I expected. So far, I've spent the better part of 12 hours setting up my machine to a level where I can do development on it. That's installing MySQL, phpMyAdmin, the java classes I'll need (such as the MySQL JDBC drivers and Ant), and Tomcat. Then I spent a good 4 hours figuring out what I wanted for pages and database schemas (more or less making a design - spread out over two days) and 6 hours (spread out over several days as well) relearning the basics and getting my baseline servlet code created, building, distributed into Tomcat, and verifying that it's working. I wouldn't have expected just under 3 days to get to where I am - I just take all that as a baseline on so many things.

So now I'm into the meat of the programming, which actually probably won't take that long. It's kind of funny, because while I'm developing these base classes I'll be using (yeah, I decided to go some of that route) I realized how many places were ripe for unit tests. I'm not doing them this time round - mostly because I didn't get JUnit installed and I don't want to spend the time to install and configure it for this project.

Interestingly, I think I could have knocked the perl side of this out (at least to the level I'm at now) in about half that time. Perhaps I should have gone that route... Oh well. It's not like I can't do it later as an experiment if I feel up to it (and still have the interest).

So - for my estimate - I think I have approximately 12 more hours to go to get this finished to the point I've specified in my design. I'm writing it down here to how far off my estimate will be when I'm done. I've always sucked at making estimates for myself... so this is a chance to see if I can make that better.

Just got back from the

Just got back from the afternoon at the last talk I intended to check out at OOPSLA. Bill was actually a pretty decent presenter and public speaker. I was impressed. Man, he sounds like a squeaky geek though.

So the talk wasn't really about Web Services except as a launching platform to talk about a bunch o' other shit - some of which was sort of interesting. He talked about tools they're using internally to do testing - and making the testing more efficient. Static analysis of code, test prioritization, etc. He made it all sound very mystical, but in fact I suspect it's pretty straightforward stuff that just needed to get done. It's unfortunate that he wasn't announcing any general purpose tools for his platform, but at least he's talking about what he's using. Then he rambled for a bit about how .NET was really web services, made the appropriate vocalizations about security, standards, and interoperability. None of that got any outright guffaw's from the crowd, but I heard a lot of snickers around me at various times. Then he did a little shpiel on the Tablet PC and had a fellow come up and demo the Ink software. That was sort of cool - in that he actually demoed the process of it identifying the words and doing the proper recognition. God knows if the writing to text recognition itself was any good (he didn't actually show that), but a lot of the identifying what was words was done very well. He wrapped it up and had some Q&A, and I thought the most interesting one was the last question.

A fellow who identified himself as a researcher at Sun asked "If you could make any radical technical change you wanted to, but didn't because you were held up by preconceived notions or previous hacks becoming ensconced in our computing culture, what would that be?" He started to go down the Tablet PC marketing line, then instead switched gears and talked about a single meta-store for information on a PC (which he's apparently pushing within MS) using XML, nested tables, and other fancy shit inside his SQL server. Like - combine the storage mechanisms for Email/Exchange, SQLServer, WebServer, Filesystem - all into one.It sounds like a really interesting concept - I'm curious to see how they pull it off when it's theoretically being released in another year or three.

So books are dangerous. I

So books are dangerous. I don't mean in the usual farenheit 451 sense, but in the I should have gone to sleep but didn't sense. The culprit? Hellburner, by CJ Cherryh. I've long been a fan of CJ Cherryh's science fiction, and this one caught me again last night to the tune of 2:30am. Oh well, I guess I really didn't need to get up that earlier after all.

Heh. yeah, yeah: Of course

Heh. yeah, yeah: Of course they're crying foul. Their shit stinks and they know it!

Talked with Karen for a

Talked with Karen for a while on the phone tonight. She's having a wonderful time at her conference in Oak Harbor. I'm really, really glad she decided to go for this. I'm wondering if she will want to take the entire City & Guild's coursework (equiv to an MFA) next...

Thought about just going to bed, but a bowl of ice cream sounded more interesting, and I'm not particularly tired yet. I left my iBook at work this evening (along with a backpack full of squash), just because it was a hell of a lot easier than toting both of those to the reception for OOPSLA at the EMP.

Speaking of OOPSLA, Bill G' is giving a talk there tomorrow. It's all about Web Services, and there hasn't been a shortage of jokes comparing this particular talk to a previous one he gave about how COM was going to take over the world. I'm actually very tempted to go see what it's about. More than anything else just to see how Bill is as a public speaker. I've had the Steve Jobs kool-aid, so it seems only fair.

So interestingly, I picked up the proceedings from OOPSLA today and flipped through them. I glanced around, checking to see if anything really struck my fancy. The funny thing was, and I didn't realize it until maybe an hour or two ago - the technical nature of those topics would have been way, way beyond me two years ago. It's funny, because I've been agonizing some of late about how I've regressed in my technical skills and hadn't really "gotten anything" out of my last couple of years. Well, duh - I clearly have. While I could have understood everything in those proceedings a couple of years ago, it wouldn't have been like just flipping through a book to see what was of interest. Sort of a pleasant epiphany there.

Made it back home -

Made it back home - wet night!

So I went on over the EMP, as it seemed foolish not to given the opportunity. But first - I hooked up one of the Xbox's at work to the video projer (it has the standard triple RCA video & sound in) and played a level or two of Halo. Dan wandered in while I was playing, and determined that we needed some additional controllers so we could play tournaments in the afternoons. Heh - cool! I hope he does it.

The EMP was pretty cool, but I think the person that would have enjoyed it the most would be Gus. It has a huge section devoted to Jimmy Hendrix, as well as several museum showcases for different kinds of music. Byron (with his background in drum corp) would also probably get into it, but if you're not into music (I mean big time), then it's probably not worth the admission. My admission was, thankfully, paid for - so I just got to enjoy it. Quite the banquet of food as well - a lot of pacific northwest goodies, including Salmon, smoked oysters, smoked scallops and more. Nice spread. I timed it exceptionally well too - got in just as they were opening the doors, so I had first dibs on an entire banquet table. And Yes, I did leave some behind. some.

My answering machine is completely fucked again. I've been messing with it, but it doesn't appear to make a difference. I'm just going to get a new one at this point, but finding the evening to go and actually get it has been problematic. I could have done it last night, but sushi and coffee just seemed to be a higher priority at the time. Tomorrow evening, I think.

Wow. It's past 5 already.

Wow. It's past 5 already. Damn, but the day slipped by fast. Spent most of the morning working on my servlet - screwing around with getting Ant running under MacOS X, then developing a build file. All this messin' about with getting a build working really takes some time! Also spent some time investigating some of the Jakarta Apache Commons stuff. In particular, I noticed that there was a Database Connection Pooling component. Although it looks like it obeys the all the proper CS stuff, it also looks way more complicated than I want to deal with for a simple servlet. So - fuck it, I just yanked out some old code and implemented a simple database connection pooling class.

Sort of begs the question I've been pondering - when do you do the "right thing" and build out all the object crap with the proper patterns and shit? I'm sure it's technically easier to extend for larger projects and stuff, but right now, for me, it seems like more work than is worth it.

Fixed a few pieces of workflow so that automatic processing can take place. I'd been pending that on some hardware rolling out, so now it's all ready to run. We'll see what the logs say after 5am tomorrow morning. I probably missed something, but I *think* we're in good shape.

Rainy and grey today. I've got a ticket to go to the EMP as a part of this OOPSLA thing, but I'm feeling kind of wiped out right now, and not really up to going. I took back our Market Basket (we're done for the season) and picked up our bulk order of Squash. Damn, but that's a lot of squish too! Got a backpack full of it.

So Ryan's got a little Sushi envy. Dude, there's tons of Sushi restaraunts around here. Got to CitySearch for Seattle and search for Sushi... Heh, yeah - I'm rubbing it in. Now I just gotta figure out what I'm doing for dinner...

Oh - and there's an amusing little article on /. about MacOS X being 'slow'.

Spent the evening on the

Spent the evening on the Ave. Thought about attending the OOPSLA talk entitled Onward! What's Next?, but the description just didn't offer me a whole lot of hope of learning something really interesting.

So instead, I ventured forth to see what I thought of Ototo Sushi (their own web page)- a relatively new sushi bar down at Queen Anne and Boston. I gotta say, that's pretty darn good sushi. I'm not sure it beat's

Then I headed over to Tully's, where I ensconced myself near the fire and whipped out the laptop to do some coding. It's hard to code at home right now, primarily for two reasons. One - I'm always connected to the net (double edged sword) and two: Pooka likes to lie across my arms, which makes extended typing difficult. Then he gets pissy (as he is right now) and squirms around a lot, kicking the keyboard and generally demanding more attention than I'm giving him.

Tully's closed up a few minutes ago, so I came on back here. Figured I'd write a little in my blog (that net connection ya' know), check my email, and see what's the latest on my news sites. Glad I did, actually, because MacNetJournal carried the story that OmniGraffle has been updated to 2.1. Great little graphics tool for drawing all sorts of weird stuff. That and a pen tablet... er, yeah, I'm dreaming again.

So I've been playing with

So I've been playing with servlets again, as I said earlier. Wrote a couple little "quickies" and remembered a whole bunch o' crap from what I did this a lot more frequently. On the drive back from Oak Harbor last night, I listened to a session (mp3 format) from the Game Developer's Conference of 2000 - Danny Hillis talking about game software development. One of the topics he proferred during the session was sort of basic, but that you forget - the play is, in it's essence, learning. So I figured i'd use that tack to break through some of my own mental barriers. Playing it is.

In the process of that playing, I picked up the latest release of Tomcat. Man, have they added a lot of stuff in there when I wasn't paying attention! There's a hell of a lot in there to catch up with, and I'm just not going to get it all in. So I'm picking and choosing the things that seem neat and have some impact on a little project I'm getting knocked out on the side (that hardware inventory thing). Yeah, I originally thought I'd do it with PHP, but decided to heed the advice of the locals and whip it out in Java. It'll be good for me to do that anyway.

Went to a talk at

Went to a talk at OOPSLA 2002 this afternoon. It was a panel discussion entitled "The Emperor's New Design" and worked out to be a pretty decent session. It was nice attending, not just for the topic at hand (when and where of doing software design, which has had some recent discussions at work - also problems encountered), but for the focus just on the art of programming. There's other sessions that look interesting, but I'm not compelled by their descriptions (even though I was by their titles). I headed over with Tony, and came back with Tony, Dan, and Jon - made for a nice afternoon out and thinking about things a little differently.

I spent the morning (after the usual set of 'oh shit' fixes and slight modifications) playing with servlets. Yes - the very thing I was railing about a few days ago. They're neat, and I've just gotten away from using them for too long to get things done. So I'm building up a database, putting a servlet in front, and even playing with JSP pages to some extent. Heh. I'm not doing a "proper" design or object model, and I'm not 100% sure that I should. It's hard to know, but I don't expect to be extending this little bit of coding and amusement. Jon would roundly decry my choice in this I suspect. Hard to know for sure, since I'm not going to tell him.

I debated wether or not

I debated wether or not to rant and rave about seattle politics here. I'm thinking I won't. But I'm frustrated with the local initiative results - they're rolling out pretty much 100% opposed to what I voted. We're looking at some bad, bad transportation headaches coming up... (and they thought it was bad now)

Back! The drive wasn't too

Back!

The drive wasn't too bad - maybe two hours each way. I got Karen up there by 5:30pm, and after getting her settled, we grabbed a quick bite to eat at a nearby (but not very good) restaurant. Drove back, and arrived here just a touch after 8pm - not bad all in all. 5 hours worth of road trip. Although it's very odd to be wandering around the house without Karen here.

It's going to be a

It's going to be a long day of driving today. I'm supposed to get home by 3pm so I can take Karen up to Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island. From everything I've heard, it's a 90 minute to 2 hour drive. Of course, I'm going to turn around once I've done that and drive right on back. Karen wants to be up there by 6pm for the start of her workshop. Yep, long day of road trip.

We brought up the beast of design reviews in our Engineering meeting today. The topic was decent, and intended for good (I think), but I'm not sure what my cohorts hoped to achieve with the discussion. Well, that's not true - they were trying to acheive some level of "let's get back on this track" sort of stuff, only I'm not sure the key problems that have currently caused a consensual ceasement of reviews have been resolved. I have a theory that it's the relatively argumentative nature of the group that's causing the core problem - the fact that a review gets personal quickly and in the end doesn't really end up being very beneficial. Arguing about the best way to accomplish something is cool, but devolving into shouting at each other about how they're wrong doesn't seem to be getting us there.

I asked a couple of friends if they do reviews, and the general report is that most people do post-mortems, but not really reviews. Timescales are short, requirements constantly changing, and reviews too cumbersome to set up and run to get it done in a timely fashion (yeah, I'm paraphrasing). The funny (or not so funny) part is that the post mortem's don't even nessecarily teach the lessons that need to get learned. We actually do very few post mortems, but have a pretty decent "bug catchin'" process. It's been evolved over the past two years, and I think pretty much works. It's an excellent lightweight system anyway. I'll be curious to see what comes of the "design review" process now.

Whipped out a couple of database tables on my own private MySQL database here at work. Starting to work on a little inventory tracking thing so we can track the upgrades to the machines we have. Er, shit. Just thought of something else I wanted to track in there too - kind of processor. Dernit. At least they don't have any data in 'em and I can drop and recreate them quickly...

Design review? Heh. I should. I don't know if I will though.

Now this is definitely workin'

Now this is definitely workin' both sides of the market. It's like someone making radar based speed deters, and then turning around and making the radar deters. Gotta love it!

Spent the evening chasing all

Spent the evening chasing all over Seattle - Karen's prepping for this cool workshop that starts basically tomorrow evening, and so she had a to-do list of places to hit. We headed up to Northgate to a sewing shop, grabbed dinner at this neat little terriyaki joint next door, and then went on to two (yes two) grocery trips. When we were checking out at the first grocery store (that would be Safeway on Queen Anne), we figured out that Karen left her backpack back at the terriyaki place.... So, yup, we drove right on back up there and picked it up. It was safe, but Karen was freakin' out a little bit anyway. Then we came back to Queen Anne and finished our shopping (Thiftway - they have different granola bars there as well as a better selection of juice-in-a-box packages).

Ah - so we're finally back now. That pretty much took up all the time between 5:30 and 9pm. I'm done "going out shopping" for a bit I think. At least I amused people in Thriftway. There was this cart in front of us that I needed to move, and since it would have been boring to simply move it, I had to include sound effects. Of course, I picked the standard "revving car" and "screeching tires" sound effects to make with me moving it across the isle and close to the other shopping baskets. The folks at the checkout counter were very amused.

/. pointed to a New

/. pointed to a New York Times on the new hurdles that Microsoft faces after the acceptance of the DOJ settlement. It's an fairly lucid piece of work, outlining the economic impact of open source software on Microsoft's business model. Interestingly, the meme that Joel Spolsky started (at least I think he started it) about < ahref="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html">Open Source being a commoditizing mechanism is the key concept in that piece. If you haven't read that work, and you're interested in economics and software, it's worth a gander.

On the Mac geek side of the world, MacCentral relayed that EasyDB framework has been released. The EasyDB framework is a nice addition to Coco