Rhonabwy

EARLY ALPHA SignalStrenth

Wanna see this crazy thing I'm doing? There's a super-early alpha version of SignalStrength available at http://www.rhonabwy.com/code/SignalStrength.sit.gz. No icon, preferences don't work, no support for multiple wireless networks or external wireless cards. Airport only, just cause that's what I got the code for...

PGP

Well, I went ahead and purchased PGP 8.0. I'd downloaded the free version, but the integration work they did seemed really worth it to me... And besides, I wanted to support them as a company.

I thought about just using GPG, which is pretty good and free. In the end I decided that I might whip out a GPG key for use, but I wanted to support PGP to attempt to keep some cashflow going for that company. Maybe I'm just becoming more sensitive to supporting (relatively independent) software companies.

Oh - the key, should you be so inclined:

it's for my mac.com account - shoot, just import it and you'll see if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Riding the bus

You want some stories to tell?

Ride the bus to work.

Today's been a beautiful morning. I woke up a little late, but the sky was clear and the sun was shining right in the bedroom window - or at least that golden glow that get's so bright, even if it's not direct sunlight. High wispy clouds, the Cascades are even more clear than they were yesterday, and no ceiling. The Olympics are obscured by one of those walls of low clouds that has a sharp definition, somewhere to the west over the sound.

So I'd snagged a coffee at Tully's this AM, down at Queen Anne and Boston. While I was there, a lady in a wheel chair rolled up. Not uncommon there, and I've seen her plenty of times before - both on the bus route and up in the neighborhood. I think she lives somewhere along Boston around 4th Ave N.

Then she does something utterly unexpected. Maybe it's a bias on my part, but I just don't expect to see someone who's in a motorized wheelchair to get up out of that wheel chair, turn around, and start rearranging things. I mean, she wasn't bouncing around, and fiddling and tidying things up like some hyperactive homosexual hairdresser, but she was definitely up and out, and mobile.

That's all sort of run of the mill strangeness, up until the point that she starts telling me stories, having resettled back into her personal motorized coach. She started talking a little about her vision (I had just seen another bus roll by, and caught it's number from a reflection in a window across the street). And pretty soon she's telling me about how she'd been healed several times for her catarachts, how the power of god had made her a few inches taller one time, and how she really wanted to be healed to get out of the wheelchair, except that she wasn't sure she was ready to give it up.

Yep.

I think I'll just stop there with the story. There's more, plenty more - but here's where I'll end it for the day.

Oh good lord...

It's been another one of those "I meant to do something really neat but didn't" nights. At this point, I've given up on trying to get anything meaningful done with SignalStrength - that next little project I've been working on. Instead what'd I do? I read all sorts of web pages, read through lots of tidbits that were supplied by NetNewsWire, and installed BBum's nifty little hack for using Python in ProjectBuilder.

I've never really gotten deep into Python, although I must admit it's getting more tempting the farther I go. I still have a bitch of a time with the object syntax in Perl, and code my perl like I'm writing in Perl 4 (I know, that just dated me). But I liked Perl version 4, and got all flustered and stuff with Perl 5. All that object stuff just didn't work for me, so I turned to Java for that sort of code. That and it was a hell of a lot easier to install Oracle JDBC drivers with a small java application than it was to install DBD::Oracle. Don't believe me? You try it.

I've been doing more reading lately on this whole Web Services craze. There's a double truckload of books on SOAP and variations of the theme at Barnes and Noble (and a tempting little thing on PHP&MySQL web app development - I resisted). Saw the OReilly book on codin' with Struts. I didn't even realize they had a book on that. All these languages, so little time. I should really stop screwing around with all these variations and just dig a bit into one language, but it's really against my nature. I see python doing this web xml thingy, and then I remember some of that freaky secret ninja perl code from my early days of CGI coding, and I think how it would be kinda neat to mix the two, only have it return these nice objects of DOM trees and stuff. Yeah - like I'm all flighty and have it mixed up inside the ole' braincase.

Ah... so I know the solution to the "gettin' something done" problem at least. Cut the connectivity. I'll head down to a coffee shop here in the next couple of days to make some more progress and maybe get the baseline signal strength graphin' app up and running beyond my "eventually you'll run out of memory with that algorithm" current version.

Murphy?

I don't think this is Murphy...

Could be wrong though. Have been before.

Who might this be?

Gus calls it the Panoramic Stranger.

Bellevue/Redmond

Spent the last couple of hours over in the Bellevue/Redmond neck of the woods. I wanted to get out of the house and go someplace different, so Karen suggested that we head over to Overlake and gander around a bit. We ended up lurking in the Barnes and Noble up on 156th and NE 8th for a couple of hours. Bought a new hardback by DeLint: Tapping the Dream Tree. It's a collection of his short stories, and they're typically a fun sort of story, albiet sometimes quite dark.

It was sort of odd going back there tonight, in a neat way. I've become very stay-at-home-at-night over the past several months, and when I was back lurking about Bellevue and Redmond areas, I recalled that when I first came to Seattle I was constantly out exploring that area. (Course, I lived a lot closer to there too - right at 140th and Lake Hills Expressway).

Updated that template

Dan Gillmor updated his site to http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/, so I updated my template to match. Sorry for anyone that tweaks...

Janitor Joe

I've joked in the past about my job as "Chief Janitor", but today has felt a lot more in that realm than many in the past. Spent the entire day doing data mining, analysis, and making proposals for changes based on what I found (as opposed to what I expected to find).

I mean, it like wasn't anything horrifically traumatic, but more and more my job seems to consist of issuing queries, perhaps refining those queries, and then processing based on the results.

Earlier today I was wishing I had more talent with cartooning - I was going to make a little image of me sweeping around piles of 1's and 0's, splitting them around, pushing them this way and that. Maybe polishing a set of some of them, and sweeping another bunch into a bin.

Oh well - you'll just have to use your imagination.

16 downloads for REtry!

WooHoo!

I'm all the way up to 16 downloads! :) Ok, so it's big for me. I haven't heard from anyone yet though, so I haven't a clue what they think of the code.

A couple from Japan, various ISP's listed, one from Switzerland, and one even from NYU. Neat!

What is RSS?

Neat!

I picked up a link a What is RSS from Brent @ Ranchero, and then went and looked up Mark Pilgrim's blog - DiveIntoMark t see what he had to say.

I used to read it pretty regularly - another Mac fan, way big into Python, and a pretty knowledgeable dude to boot. Anyway, he's got himself a fairly large regular readership, and apparently one of the is an editor at O'Reilly, who asked him to write a monthly column for their XML online 'zine.

Well, his first column in there is well done. It's a good overview of RSS and it's convoluted history, including some practical bits like validating an RSS feed, giving some examples, and waxing enthusiastic about it's potential uses.

The Two Towers

I've been wanting to go see it, so Karen and I have been planning to let the "crowds" die down a bit first. Only I've really underestimated the size of these crowds!

All the tickets are sold out through next monday! That's tickets at the Cinerama, but really - were else would be good enough to see it?

Wait, that's not quite true. There are, at the moment, apparently some tickets still available for the 12:15am showing on Saturday, Dec 21 - that would be a friday night midnight showing...

I'm debating the merits of getting some tickets online for Monday's matinee showing...

Clouds in Seattle

As I headed out the door this morning to walk into work, I glanced up to read the sky. Drizzle coming soon? Clear, cold? Windy?

The skies above read a fairly uniform grey-blue softness, slowly undulating in texture and color. And ended very abruptly above the horizon. It's a trait of the clouds around here that always stands out to me.

I'm used to seeing fronts swing across the midwest, sometimes in the well demarked lines of high clouds, and sometimes in thunderheads anvil'ing up across the skies.

But out here, the mountains and ocean give it a very different feel. What would normally be an "overcast" day, ends above the horizon and creates a sort of lid on the sky. Underneath that lid is incredible visibility. It was slightly breezy this morning, and from my street you can see directly across to both the cascades and the olympics (it helps that we're on top of a muckin' big hill). Both were crystal clear, and looking across at the north cascades actually made me feel a little colder. A light breeze was blowing from the west, and you could easily make out the partially snow covered peaks and crags. The greens were severely muted, making it seem very chilly.

As I made it to the south face of Queen Anne, that cap of clouds extended out way south. All of downtown was well beneath it (sometimes it isn't, which is a different effect entirely) - shooting down to Mt. Ranier. The top of the mountain was hidden in the ceiling, but the base stood out behind the background of downtown, dominating the view as much as it always does.

I loose the view as I descend Queen Anne, so by the time I'm walking through downtown to my office, I can't see anything of the cascades of Mt. Ranier. Periodically, to the west, I can see down the streets and out into the sound - it's clear there as well, with an easy view over to Bainbridge Island.

A bet a ferry view of Ranier with this cloud cover would be really cool.

Mozilla, Chimera, and bookmarks

I'm using Chimera at home quite a bit. It's a MacOS X front-end specific browser using the gecko (read mozilla) engine.

And boy, I've got to tell you, the concept of bookmarking a set of tabs is incredibly useful!

So I've got a few pages that don't easily show on RSS feeds, so I can't just suck them into my aggregator. Instead, I've got them all bookmarked together as a "tabs bookmark" in Chimera. When I tap the bookmark, multiple tabs all open up and load their pages. Talk about convenient!

IBM 3494 Tape Robot

Don't tell me. I already know. Your life simply would not be complete without this stunning visual representation of an IBM 3494 Tape Robot.

All for you Brand. Tamer of the beast.

cookies and a headache

youch. so I'm fighting a bit of a headache tonight. Karen is, while I'm lurking about on the couch with my cat, making cookies. Quite the combination.

Actually, Karen's been going to town with the cookies. Spice cookies, shortbread, biscotti... She said she wasn't going to go overboard this year - thank god, based on what she's made so far. I mean, really - there's only TWO of us in this house. Well, two of us who eat cookies.

Wednesday's are quiet days

quiet days.

maintenance days. Most of the internal systems are unavailable because of backups, maintenance processing, etc. Sometimes it seems so odd to me that all these unix systems are running these various "batch maintenance" jobs that I had previously only associated with IBM's ole 'Big Iron' that took up most of our datacenter floor while I was a student at MU.

These days, I'd guess it's columns and columns of those cheap-shit blue racks that are made in that small town south of St. Louis. In those racks, lots of x86 commodity gear. Probably one from each vendor anymore - HP/Compaq, Dell, IBM...

Ryan related that they're finally shutting down the ole' SP2 from the datacenter. IBM did a lot of really good things with Unix and servers, but the SP2 wasn't one of in my opinion. Damned difficult to run, prone to freakishness because it was a cobble system, no matter what you called it. DCE never worked very well, was too damn complex, and nobody (well, pratically nobody) adopted it. I recall when we wanted to implement Kerberos5 on those boxes, the whole DCE and Kerberos4 infrastructure that it relied on instantly became a huge pain in the ass to deal with. Even years after we had ADSM and the whole imaging framework of the SP2, we were still using sysback (one of the finest backup products IBM has ever made for their systems) to clone machines, restore them in emergency situations, etc. It had this really great feature of being able to reload the whole kit and kaboodle from 8mm tape and a server - very much like SystemImager does with a CD and an image server today. Hell of a lot more robust than the SP2 imaging thing too.

Heh. I found a pic of the two SP2 frames we ended out with. I imagine the floor looks very different from this anymore, but here's the pic anyway.

Full body RSS/RDF feeds

Okay, I've gone ahead and done it. I switched the RSS and RDF feeds of this site to use the full body text that is in the normal entries. If you use an aggregator, woo hoo!! Makes it easier for you.

The change itself is quite easy. In the MT template for the index.xml and index.rdf, switch the word MTEntryExcerpt to MTEntryBody. That's it!

FBI & libraries...

Caught this link of technically legal signs that a library might be able to post regarding the FBI visiting libraries and asking for individual's reading lists. Courtesy of BoingBoing.

Hmmmm. Monster?

Well, I take it from John's blog entry that I wasn't the only individual to accuse him of lying to small children.

Today's Epiphany

So I guess this will really tell you something about me, if you didn't already know. Basically, I run with an established concept that if my gut says that someone is intelligent, I assume they're more intelligent than I am and will generally know more about whatever topic than I do. That's, by the way, far from correct - I just have an incredibly high barrier before I feel like I "know" something, and I have a much lower barrier for almost everyone else. The down side of this little quirk of mine is that is occasionally leaves me with a lack of self-confidence on a specific issue. That is, until I've really thoroughly grok'd it, or at least matched wits with someone else who I view as 'knowledgeable on the topic' and won. Yeah, competitive in a weird way.

That's all really just background though. The epiphany (here comes the resounding DUH! from the peanut gallery) is that a huge number of engineers at my office are really, amazingly incredibly bad at listening. Why is this such an epiphany you ask? Glad you did.

So there's this sort of history that I've never really reconciled around some of the engineers.

But first, more background: They're bright, really really bright, folks. Like any other human being, they each have their different personality quirks, faults, and strengths. One's a hacker-quick-get-it-the-fuck-out-the-door sort of personality, and that person leaves a lot of things open that shouldn't be (read BUGS). Another is incredibly methodically and thorough, and one of the most pessimistic schedulers I've ever met, and for whatever reason - simply refuses to trust that anyone else has done something "correctly". There's more - I've built my own little catalogue of quirks, drawbacks, and strengths. When I'd slap folks together to accomplish something, I'd always try very hard to match up strengths and personalities and avoid the combinations that would lead to eventual conflagrations. (It's something I picked up from Randy Wiemer at MU some time back - there's "build your team", getting who you can when you can, and then there's "work with what you have" - it requires a balance)

So even though this crew is bright, they'd often resolve themselves into this incredible arguments where they were in violent agreement. And not listening to each other. These arguments always bugged me, and I could easily enough see what they'd gotten themselves in to, but mostly I didn't spend the emotional energy stepping into the fray and trying to get the settled down.

Here's where my part really comes in. Since I never did this, whenever I'd assert something about the system, a detail, or whatever, I very rarely got an acknowledgement that I was correct. Often enough, the response would be "You're wrong", with little or zero evidence to back it up. Since I viewed these other folks are intelligent and competant, I took it at face value and stopped examining it, assuming I was incorrect. Sometimes, I would later figure out that I was correct. But like as not, it just wouldn't come up again because I'd back off, let someone else "be the expert" and didn't really have any skin in the game. This also did some low-level "i can't see it myself" damage to my self-confidence about my knowledge the system, the code, etc.

So the epiphany came when I had resolved a solution to a perplexing little bug that I encountered. I determined a solution, and figured out a method of going about fixing it - a plan of attack. Well, it's involved. It involves a whole hell of a lot database inserting and updating to smoothly make a transition to a correct function. So.. I brought it out to Vas to double-check my brain pan and make sure I was on the right track. Now any conversation of this nature will instantly assume grander proportions because we're all in cubes and you can hear everything. And everyone (just being pretty much who they are) who wanted to jump into the fray did so. So I proposed my solution, and quickly got back the "You're wrong". After only two iterations of "yes", "no", "yes!", "no!", I dropped it out and was about to back away. Only this time, I didn't. I was just damn sure I was right this time, and it was annoying me that I was getting this "You're wrong" bullshit when I wasn't.

"So where does this fail?", I asked. I guess because a recent organizational change has put me in a position where being able to get some coding done to keep things moving became imperative. After a few more digging down sentences, it became clear that I was correct. Not happy with simply knowing it myself: "So I was correct in how this will work. It would work, right?"

"Yes, you were right about that. But..." and he continued on, relatively oblivious to my win. So I pulled a Tony... pitched my arms straight up, "score!". I think he might have been a tad irked, but really he was more interested in continuing to make his point about how correct his idea was, so he continued.

After that, I listened, acknowledged his point, and went on. Didn't really matter (he did have a very good point, BTW).

So after that, I sort of realized that this method of interacting was really fairly endemic to the whole group. Everyone would shrug off everyone else claims to make their own. And I finally made that connection. Not a group to have a relatively weak self confidence around, that's for sure.

But knowing is making a real difference for me. I'm looking back, and realizing how many times I've been right but just not pushed the point. Maybe if I were more of an asshole, or an egomaniac, I would have done better with that. Don't know.

Sorry that's all so long winded. Anyway, that was my epiphany today.

Question of the day

What is Byron ranting about. Gus thinks he was hacked maybe. I'm currently pondering the possibility of turett's syndrome.

IM patent...

Don't know how this is going to fall out, but it appears that someone noticed that AOL has been granted an IM patent.

Patent 6449344 is a beautifully vague patent, in that sort of way of things.

It'll be interesting to see if AOL presses it's claims against Yahoo, MSN, and Jabber.

Spirited Away wins award

Very cool. Spirited Away was named Best Animated Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

I really enjoyed the flick and Hayao Miyazaki's style. Although everyone is saying "it's Disney", it isn't. It's Studio Ghibli's, and those Disney jerks are just distributing it. I don't think they even know how to make good animated films anymore. Pixar and places like Ghibli's are saving their animated reputations.

(Oh - that above site is purely in Japanese and the IE browser doesn't render it so well, even with the fonts installed. An english page about Studio Ghibli resides at http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Flats/4933/ghibli.html)

They know more than you think...

It's raining lightly in Seattle. I got up from the desk for a while, stretch the legs and all that, and decided to look around through the large plate glass window behind me. Across the street I can the face and top edge of a rather large apartment complex, and the intersection of 4th Ave and Bell. The apartment complex building has one of those large flat roofs, and at the very corner of that roof a crow was sitting.

He was perched there right at the corner, overlooking the whole intersection. Sort of like a gargoyle, except that he moved periodically. Still, he (I'm just assuming it was a he based on some sexist motif of later actions, which I'll describe shortly) was crouched over, sort of hunched over. Looking this way and that, looking out as much as down from what I could see.

Then it all changed. And I knew. I know that they know. Now I just have to keep them from finding out that I Know.

He turned around (here's the sexist bias), and put his tail right over the edge. And let go - right down onto the corner, narrowly missing a pedestrian. That alone wouldn't have convinced. Except that he turned around and looked down!

"Damn, missed again", I was sure I heard. Through the plate glass window and across a noisy downtown street.

They know.

They know more than you think...

Brin, Tolkien, and the age of enlightenment

/. had the link that pointed me towards Salon, and then on towards David Brin's site, where he's written a very thought provoking article entitled We Hobbits are a Merry Folk...
...an incautious and heretical re-appraisal of J.R.R.Tolkien (part2, part3).

It provides an interesting twist on the romantic notions - and a tweaking of an old story that you'd almost sort of expect from another story-teller. It's worth a read - either the short one at Salon, or the longer one at his home page.

What to write...

I'll blame Lynn, of course. Didn't really think of anything to write about tonight. Also didn't spend the evening pouring through web pages or digging around in email, links, and the net. Just spent it reading - got some magazines with some interesting articles, and just read.

Had a really good evening - a couple of friends over earlier, and then quiet from there. A little grilled chese sandwiches and soup for dinner. Karen's been working on a Christmas Tree skirt - this huge quilting project - and it's getting close to completion. We were both tired this evening, so I convinced her to stop attempting to get it all done in one last crazy push and just relax for the evening. She did, and I suspect was happier for it.

I'd have more to write, I suppose, except that I'm unspired.

update to MySQL

new version of MySQL is out: MySQL 3.23.54a... guess it's been out for a couple of days, really. Fixes a number of security flaws and bugs and stuff. The mothership sent out a notification about it recommending that everyone using it switch to the company standard database. I thought that was pretty funny...

Like it's really hard to upgrade MySQL with an RPM. And ever so much more expensive...

-joe

Argosy Christmas Cruise

So tonight was the Argosy Christmas Cruise. A bunch of folks go out in the Argosy (a local ferry/tourship) and do this like four hour cruise with music and stuff. They also have things at night on various beaches - tonight was at Golden Gardens. There was supposed to be a bonfire and a girl's choir and bunch of cool lit-up christmas'y boats and stuff.

Well, it was raining on the beach, so i expected the turnout would be kind of light. It was... We got there and the bonfire wasn't really catching - we supposed because they didn't cover the wood during the day so the whole stack was sort of wet. A couple of flares later, and the huge mound of pallets still wasn't really cookin' or anything. When the argosy ship arrived, it was really loud. Turns out the girl's choir was on board, and they were blasting it from speakers on board across the water. Those poor people must have been deaf by the time the whole thing was done.

But the funniest and absolute best part of the evening was when the Argosy rolled up near the beach at Golden Gardens. So let me set the scene a little.

The Argosy isn't the only boat out there. It's the brightest, but it really wasn't even the most impressively lit. There were a good six or seven sailboats decked out in lights (sailboats make nice christmas shapes with the guy wires heading to the top of the mast) and a power boat nicely lit up. So the Argosy arrives, and it starts blasting this sort of greeting announcement:
"Welcome to the... blah -blah, I can't remember this part Please don't come between the Argosy and the shore so that the participants can gather the full spectacle of the event".

Karen started giggling immediately, and John and I guffawed. The arrogance of that announcement and it's sort of sureal nature in a Christmas gig was just amazing. It made the entire evening!

It was actually pretty neat. The lights on the ships were cool, and the bonfire did get going, although not the huge blaze that John and I had sort of hoped might get going. We bailed on it after about 30 or 45 minutes and went and got some coffee and chatted for the rest of the evening.

rain, interspersed with occasion sun showers

The morning was lovely, and the day has darkened and gone back to rain. It's not terribly steady rain - Karen and I went out for a walk earlier that only splatted against us half the time, and just now coming back from a little pizza we didn't feel nary a drop.

Karen's been bustin' through very Christmas presents she's been making. She's down to the last one. Tomorrow is "sending the presents out" day, so I'll be taking her down to the mailing place in the car tomorrow morning before I head to work to get everything out the door. While she's been doing that, I've been cleaning house and doing laundry. All those good "you don't wanna do them but gotta" sorts of things.

Read a bit today too, except that I seem to have the attention span of a flea today, so that didn't really work out well. I didn't even try to do any programming.

The UMBC AgentNews is out, so I checked that out. Had an interesting EE Times article linked in there: Darpa puts thought into cognitive computing, which sort of reviews one of the proposals's on DARPA's website: the gist: "An Enduring, Personalized, Cognitive Assistant (EPCA)." I must admit, while I'm sort of excited that DARPA is pitching some cash into the AI research pool, this proposal reads like an AI wetdream.

brain hack

Do you think that music is a form of hacking the brain?

Be careful what you ask for?

A wired article on the internet turning it's collective attention on John Poindexter. A tad bit of a frightening example of a transparent society

a quiet night

It's a pretty quiet evening here in Seattle. The rain here has continued pretty much unabated since morning, and after doing a little reading and goofing around in the kitchen with something vaguely related to dinner, I wasn't too excited about venturing forth into the wet Seattle landscape for something to do.

Wandered around the house, and finally decided to settle myself down and just do some writing... so here I am: writing.

I started this log as a result of a book on creativity actually. Karen had received a copy of The Artist's Way from my mother as a Christmas present two years ago. It has a series of things that they have you do - sort of "force you to open up your mind" things. One of them in writing in a book every morning - an excercise called "morning pages". Another of them, which I thought was delightfully perverse, was "don't read anything for a week". Karen did that, actually. I was surprised at how hard it was do to that for just a day, let alone an entire week!

Anyway, The Artist's Way is really focused on artists (surprise), but it found a following in lots of folks looking to open up that creative valve a little more. A secondary book came out a little later, called The Artist's Way at Work which sort of refocused things to people being creative in the work environment. So we have copies of both of these two somewhere in the house.

Sort of strange how this log has changed since I began writing. It's a diary of my days, and my periodic rants, for quite a ways back. In some ways, I wish I'd started it even further back, now that I'm doing it. I don't really go re-read what I've got in here, but it's an interesting bit of history and I'm making sure to keep it safe with backups.

One of the strangest side effects has been me writing for "an audience". Yes, that's you. I think almost all the folks at my office have no idea I write online, or that it sometimes relates fairly pointedly to events at work. John (who had been my boss) found out, and keeps fairly close tabs on it still. You guys in Missouri are still readin' it - I get the occasional email from Ryan, Gus, and John regarding things I write in here. Dave Hakanson read it upon occasion, at least from what I saw in his blog. Byron reads it - I think like me reading everyone else's blog - to keep up on what's going on in each other's lives. (YES RYAN, YOU STILL DON'T POST ENOUGH!). Bryan used to read it upon occasion, but I'm not sure he does anymore.

There was a sort of unfortunate incident about a year back to MU that really shut down the flow of thoughts though - a number of folks got the "talk" about writing about work. I find it ironic in that exceptionally dark way that a public institution was actively encouraging folks to censor their words. Spin is everywhere, and so very many people are convinced spin is critical to their lives. Who knows, maybe I'm full of shit and it really is. Hey - I was an engineering student in college, so shoot me for not finding all that much reward in generating piles of creative bullshit.

I continue to write about events at work as they pertain to me, but I'm actually very careful about some things. Since this isn't a private diary or such, I'm careful not to name names when I'm really fraggin' some asshole. I'm also careful not to release information about our actual work projects and functions. So be it - I like the audience, I'll live with the restrictions. It's not like I curb my opinions on people because of it. :-)

more

New Books!

I got a couple of new books in today: A Whack on the Side of the Head and Cocoa Recipes for MacOS X. I've been waiting to get the second book for a while - I wanted to break over the "super saving" shipping thing from Amazon, and when a friend recommended the Whack book, I figured it was time.

The "Whack" book is about how to be more creative. It's a pretty light read, with some decent methods in there. It's not quite as intensive as some of the books Karen's used in the past, but it's pretty good.

Cocoa Recipes was one of those books that I wanted to get, as much for the content as to support the author. Bill Cheeseman wrote it out and made it available for free on the internet quite some time ago. As he was learning Cocoa, he wrote out these recipes that walked you through making simple applications and trying out all the features. The early documentation for Cocoa was so incredibly shitty that this was really the only reasonable stuff around that I could find to teach myself with. I met Bill at the last WWDC and got my chance to thank him, and that's when I heard that his book was coming out courtesy of Peach Pit Press. So I resolved that I'd get it back then.

One of the coolest things about this book is a topic table of contents right after the "normal" one - it outlines where all the topics are covered within the book - like an index, except more specific to topics in programming cocoa. There's an index too, but this interior index looks a lot more helpful. A tad thicker than Aaron's book, but not quite as gargantuan as the Stepwise crew's book.

We didn't come in last

It was close though. Not terribly surprising - our crew wasn't a well oiled machine, and you're certainly not going to win any races when you're in that state. I'd guess we were about as out of practice as everyone else though, because we mostly kept with the pack in terms of speed and timing.

So first, the weather report: 48 degrees, winds 10 to 30 knots (peaked at 30, mostly was around 15), waves anywhere between 2 and 6 feet. Rain was on and off, nothing like the downpour that apparently hit north seattle around 3pm. Light rain to nothing, varying over the course of the race.

We "started" the race at 11am (we were out there at 10am) and the race lasted until 2:30pm. So it was a fair bit of time. We did reasonably well on the upwind leg (strangely, the entire first leg was upwind, which is unusual for our regattas), only really blowing it after rounding the mark. The "mark" in this case was blakely rock (won't mean much if you're not from around here and familiar with the puget sound). We got down there on a wild sort of track, chasing way out into the sound. Once around, we attempted to put up the spinnaker. That was probably not the best idea. We might have been able to make it work, but the time we spent screwing with it ended up blowing minutes for us on the race.

First, a tweaker popped off. Not unusual in high winds. The next time is "blew up" - the "pop-apart" casing just became fragments. Each of these occurances changes the wind dynamics of the sail, and most specifically incurs sort of bone wagglin' "jar" throughout the boat as the sail jumps forward a couple of feet and then snaps hard on the line. We kept trying to fly it though. It was, to be honest, the most disorganized and chaotic time on the boat. Finally, while Luther was trimming the active sheet (a lot of work, especially in heavy winds) the hasp on the end of the line just snapped out. We all felt the boat suddenly shift course 10 degrees and slow down as the active sheet went slack in Luther's grasp (he fell back into the cockpit with this occurance, mostly on Larry's shins). At the same time, you could see (if you were looking in that direction, it happened kinda fast) the end of the line which had been attached fly in a sort of twirling pattern high and to the rear of the boat. I was manning the guy (it connects to the end of the spinnaker with the pole) watching Luther get up and say "That's it. Bring er' down!". So we spent the next 3 minutes screwing around with trying to bring down the spinnaker and get the jib back up.

When we got everything up again, we drove "wing and wing" on back north. (That's with the mainsail off to one side and the jib off to the other). It's not a terribly stable configuration, because any twirl left or right (such as you get when surfing down a wave or getting a heavy gust of wind) causes one of the sails to collapse and attempt to be on the other side. We tied out the boom to keep our skulls in tact, but the jib kept collapsing... So Luther and I traded off being a human "whisker pole" - holding the end of the jib out to catch the wind. It means you end up getting buffeted a bit, but it's not too bad otherwise.

Like I said at the beginning, we weren't the last across the finish line, but we were way, way behind the main pack. Most of the time we lost was in a relatively quiet area screwing around with the spinnaker. You need a really well oiled team to deal with the crazed occurances like lines snapping off in any sort of efficient manner, and we just didn't have it.

The most fun of the day was the gust of 30kt winds that came across the fleet while we were heading down to the first mark. One boat didn't let out her main at all, which caused her to get shifted about 60 degrees off course as the wind & keel combination basically forced the boat "up" (it's called getting headed up). We ourselves got headed up, but not quite as badly. The decking was at around 45 degrees, water was running over the gunwale. I was, at the time, attempting to smooth out the bottom of the jib over the life lines. I ended up just sitting down into the whole mess racing past me and hanging on until the gust ended. I just couldn't lift myself out of that mess with the combination of drag of the water and a steeply tilting wet deck.

We were all geared up for the weather, so nobody got terribly chilled to the bone or anything. Wet, yes, but we stayed warm. Well, mostly warm. My hands got kinda chilly there for a while.

All in all, it was a good race and I'm really, really glad we went. I wish we could have had our "summer crew" for the race, but overall we worked out pretty well together. Dave and Dave did foredeck and pit, which are generally solitary positions. Luther and I have trimmed together for over a year, so that went pretty smoothly. Larry was tactician and was supposed to be working the mast. I don't care for Larry all that much, so I won't say what I think he did, but I didn't see him as being terribly effective, and he never really did work the mast at all. I wouldn't mind working with both Dave's again the future - they were pretty cool folks.

REtry screenshot

Seemed unfair that I had a screenshot up of my alpha stuff, but not something that's actually working... so here's a screenshot of REtry in action, if you're curious.

SignalStrength

A little screen shot of my next application. I'd still like to do more with REtry, but it's at least working the way I want it to. SignalStrength brings back a graph of the "signal strength" of my 802.11b wireless card - which I really missed when it didn't reappear in MacOS X.

The open text area with the greyed out section displays the name of the network to which you're attached. I'm still thinking about the interface, but my first rev is going to display the signal and noise strengths together. Above, I just have the signal strength being displayed.

This project is my learning experience for setting, getting, and saving preferences, as well as a little drawing fun.

As I go through doing these little projects in ProjectBuilder, I keep finding the built-in help mechanisms for Cocoa lacking, so I've turned to CocoaBrowser and AppKido to get the details on what I'm looking for. One thing I wish one of the two of them would do: show the inhereted methods that are available... I miss that from some of the java browser functions I've had.

Sailboat Race Tomorrow!

Tomorrow will be the first time in MONTHS that I've been back on the Manta Ray for a race. Man, am I going to be rusty! The last chance I had was back in September, when I took the weekend to go to Karen's cousin's wedding in California. That weekend, they had a collision with another boat. Since then, repairs have taken place, insurance adjusters have come and gone, and we're ready to go again. They took her out a couple of weeks back for the first time in over two months themselves. Now it's my turn.

We don't have the "regular" crew for tomorrow, which I find unfortunate. Understandable though - even for Seattle it's a little odd in terms of time of year for racing. So we'll all be rusty and the crew isn't one that's worked together all summer tuning themselves into a team. I'm supposed to be at the boat by 10am at the latest.

I've checked out all my foul weather gear and pulled everything together. This time of year is when that stuff is absolutely critical - not just for comfort, but for safety. Tomorrow's forecast at least shows that we should have some good motion:

from NOAA for Seattle:

PZZ135-141030-
PUGET SOUND AND HOOD CANAL
830 PM PST FRI DEC 13 2002

SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY

TONIGHT
SE WIND 10 TO 15 KT RISING TO 25 KT. WIND WAVES 1 OR
2 FT BUILDING TO 3 OR 4 FT. RAIN.

SAT
SE WIND 15 TO 25 KT. WIND WAVES 2 TO 4 FT. RAIN.

SAT NIGHT
S WIND 20 TO 30 KT. WIND WAVES 3 TO 5 FT. RAIN.

So... looks like 2 to 4 ft waves and variable winds up to 25 knots. Ought to be a LOT of movement. Sounds cool! (Don't mind that Small Craft Advisory - we'd go out in a gale too...)

Oh yeah - if you want to see what things are looking like moment of tomorrow, check out this page of Ferry Weather - it tracks the wind speeds as the ferry's cross and generates this dynamic map. It's what we always check before we head out to see what's happenin' in the sound before we're there.

Making christmas presents

Even though I spent some time shopping today, this evening was dedicated to making a number of presents for various folks in the family. Since they possibly read this blog, I won't say what we made.

The rest of the evening has been spent doing some more programming (jeezus, It seems have so much to learn sometimes!) and snaggin' a little leftover chinese for dinner.

7am conference calls

suck!

but then, what do you expect. I actually got up to try and make this one, only to have the call center on the other side of the atlantic hang up on me three times in a row. A sign you say?

I took it as one.

There's this really neat little shop down near Pike's Place Market called the Crumpet Shop. They serve fresh crumpets, english teas, etc. So... after my sign, that's where I went. Let me tell you, a bowl of oat groats with steamed milk and brown sugar is quite the thing to get you going. It's somewhat like oatmeal, only not as pasty. And boy does it warm you up! I was sweating underneath the sweatshirt, vest, and rainjacket and had to shuck a couple of layers after that.

Did a little Christmas shopping down at the market, got some of the usual seattle schlock, and some really cool things too. In the end, I shopped for maybe 3 or 4 hours, most of it wandering around and desperately trying to not knock stuff off tightly packed shop shelves with my backpack. Poor choice for walking around in shops, but it made things easier to carry...

Now I'm home again, doing a little work from here. Readin' database entries, submitting things for reprocessing, and cruisin' the odd bit of code to try and get a plan on how to fix a particularly insidious problem I found the other day.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

I never quite got over my interest here, so since I found a copy of Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig, I've been reading it.

It's a very good introdury text, and frankly I wish I'd gotten my hands on this one earlier. There's a lot of things that are explained up front and in a straightforward manner right off the bat without dumbing them down. So far I've just been scanning the book, but I think it's worth a more serious read through, chapter by chapter. It's not a book you'd do a whole lot of coding from (at least, on your own), but it's definitely a good one for getting the concepts.

Oh - it's worth noting - there's a 2nd edition apparently hitting the streets sometime this month.

Subversive activities

Compiling out Subversion tonight. I guess the combination of all the processor usage tipped the heat indicator over some threshhold because the internal fan came on in my otherwise dead-silent iBook. Scarred me (and the cat) for a second, but I quickly realized what it was.

Gus got the bug for Subversion the other day, so I think we're going to try it out and see how it works for us. I'm now exceptionally familiar with CVS (supporting 10 to 20 developers on CVS will do that to ya), so it'll be really interesting to see what it does better and worse.

Anti Hollywood Bullshit

I'll copy that same Doc for a moment, posting up three links to Anti-Hollywood propoganda, er, I mean outright lies and bullshit.

A speech by Courtney Love
An essay by Janis Ian
and most recently, Tim OReilly's fireback essay: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution, published yesterday. It's a decent article, with a lot of Capt. Obvious stuff that is probably good to have written down. Oh - and if you're like me, here's a link to the all-in-one-html-page version for easy reading (er, I mean printing) - I really dislike those "click here for the next page" things on web pages, with more ads sprawled everywhere you go. Annoys me. Kind of like television, which I don't watch anymore.

SuperNova writeup

Doc has his latest "suit watch" up that contains a more crafted writeup of the Supernova conference he attended. It's an OK writeup, but I prefered his raw notes on his Blog. He's got such an incredible slant toward the power of an individual writing that I have a hard time really believing it. Too much slant for me, but good reading none the less.

REtry in japan!

Whoa!

Someone downloaded REtry from Japan. Jeez, I hope he does english, because I didn't do *anything* to check to see how it handled Unicode...

It's straight out of Henry Spencer's library, which has some support, but... I didn't test anything.

(That puts me up to 9 downloads!)

Cocoa Object Library

Steven Frank asked around yesterday about any good "cocoa object libraries". He didn't care for any of the answers - or more specifically, he was looking for something just a tad different. There's several stores of data out there, but he's really looking for a CPAN for Cocoa. So... like any of us I guess, he decided he's scratch his own itch and created one.

I'm a little concerned that it's Wiki, just because trolls do seem to come along and screw them up given half a chance. People are also going to have to learn about it - although he's filled in some already. Eh... if you're into Objective-C/Cocoa programming, check out his Object Library - maybe add an entry...

tired...

tired, way tired.

my sleep's been really screwed up lately. Slept 14 hours the night before last, going to be at 7:30pm and waking up at 9:30am the next morning (that's really unusual for me). I'm not sure if I'm coming down with something or not, but I'm back to feeling really drained. I don't have a huge amount of energy to spare on things right now, and I can tell my defenses are going up quickly whenever anyone comes and asks me one of those leading passive/agressive question (you know, the kind that are like: "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?").

Flurries of action going on at work, movement left and light, up and down. God knows where it's all going. Dan advised me to regard it with a little more abstraction and I'd be happier. He right, I would. I'm just not so sure I'm good at that level of abstraction. I'm workin' on it though.

Hardware review of a TabletPC

/. had the link to Anandtech's review of a TabletPC. A good read for all the detail, if you're into hardware reviews.

Christmas Cards and Coden

Well, most of the evening was taken up with doing the Christmas cards. Karen and I each had a stack, and I ripped through them as fast as possible. Even still, with short kitsy messages, I had cramps in my hand when the 90 minute run was over and we'd exhausted the address book.

Somewhere a little before and after, I started really working on my next little MacOS X application: Signal Strength. MacOS 9 had this really neat little program that graphed out the signal strength from an 802.11b wireless card (well, the airport card to be specific). It disappeared with MacOS X, and I always wanted something like that again.

Then I found MacStumbler, which had a nice reverse engineering bit on the airport card, including some code (C and ObjectiveC) that used it. So that's becoming the basis for SignalStrength. This will be cool for the couple of new places it'll force me to stretch: creating new Nibs and loading them dynamically (ain't done that before, although I hear it's pretty easy) and getting into the Cocoa drawing facilities. (One of the missing items in the Cocoa toolkits are a good free/BSD licensed graphing framework).

I'm not getting there very fast, but I've at least roughed out the UI I'm hoping to use, and started knocking out the basic internal framework in an AppController class. Going to use a custom NSView for the drawing, but I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to do it all yet.

The Bells of Dublin

I'm sitting here listening to The Bells of Dublin, a fine Christmas CD if there ever was one.

I went looking to a link for the lyrics to The St Stephen's Day Murder, and found this segment, which I'd like to share with you because I find it highly amusing on this holiday eve:

And you have two sisters who's name it was Christmas, and one was named Dawn of course the other one was named Eve. I wonder if they grew up hating the season, the goodwill that lasts till the Feast of St. Stephen. For that is the time to eat, drink and be merry, till the beer is all spilled and the whisky has flowed, and the whole family tree you neglected to bury, are feeding their faces until they explode. They'll be laughter and tears over tea and the beers mixed up with that drink made from Gurdis, cause it's all we got left as they draw their last breath, and it's nice for the kids, as you finally get rid of them, in the St. Stephen's Day murders!

Uncle is gargling a heart breaking air, while the babe in his arms pulls out all that remains of his hair, and were not drunk enough yet to dare criticize the great big hippertie he's about to baptize. With his gin flavoured whispers and kisses of sherry his best kringeled shirt slung out over the shot while the lights from the Christmas tree blow up the tele, his face closes in like an old cold pork chop, and the carcass of the beast left over from the feast may still be found haunt in the kitchen, and their life in it yet we may live to regret when the ones that we poisoned stop twitching. They'll be laughter and tears over tea and the beers mixed up with that drink made from Gurdis, cause it's all we got left as they draw their last breath, and it's nice for the kids, as you finally get rid of them, RID OF THEM!, in the St. Stephen's Day murders!

SourceForge Enterprise Edition

I was kinda dissin' on SourceForge Enterprise Edition the other day. I still think it's a lot for the money you shell out, but I have to admit it's impressed me. A unified view of projects, tasks, bugs, etc. is really damn handy. With our internal stuff, we have separate setups for CVS, a web-interface (ViewCVS), and Bugzilla.

Strangely, some folks get really worked up about having something assigned to them called a "Bug". SourceForge has dealt with this by calling all these items "trackers", and has several of them. Each project has a "tracker" for bugs, feature requests, support requests, and patches. And you can add trackers for anything. We overload Bugzilla and just use it for everything. Really - it's just a mechanism to track the status of something - a nice diary and history to an issue.

Now (in my opinion) SourceForge's UI needs a little work. Things are not in the places you'd expect them to be, and to really use SourceForge, you'll need to have an explicit maintainer who's familiar with the ways of Unix & SSH. Specifically, they don't have a Web interface for setting up SSH keys for developers. Heh. While I don't have any problem using SSH with keys, explaining how to play that game to some windows developers with WinCVS and Putty has been quite tricky.

The project management work also has some nice features. Overall it definitely has some really nice qualities to it... but I think the single biggest win is that it combines them all into one place. I hadn't realized how helpful that really is.

The database is down...

It's wednesday. The database is down. Most of the bugs I need to fix and things I need to do revolve around the database being available... So I can query it, intimidate it, and ultimately bend it my my unimaginable will... (mwaa hah hah haaa!)

But it's down. Even I don't kick databases when they're down, so I've found other things to amuse myself with. In the most recent case, by running Matt Neuburg's Memory Stick program. It has a setting which allows you to play a little song when the system hits a pageOut.

So... what do you think I did? I ran every program I could find on the hard drive to get that sucker sounding like a gieger counter next to a piece of refined plutonium. Well, the sound was a "bell", so I had to screw with it to get that little "tick" sound, but it didn't take all that long to completely abuse my laptop into using all 640Mb. Heh.

12 paper sacks = 1 free bagel

I eat lunch very commonly at SID's. It stands for "Seattle Italian Deli", although honestly the only thing Italian about it is that they serve some pasta. But I don't go there for the pasta - they make sandwiches right there, and have good soups.

So I'm usually getting food to go, and eating it at my desk. I, for whatever reason, just started collecting all those paper bags I get and had quite a stack of 'em. Instead of just pitching them, I took them back to SID's. "Hey, you guys want these?"

I got smiles all around, and "We love you!". And a free bagel with lunch.

Well, I guess I'll keep collecting those paper sacks.

Isolations

Gus sent me this link (http://overstated.net/media/kraftwerk-dancer.wmv) to these guys doing this isolation dancing. You know, the robot walks and stuff. Well, since I was listening to a conference call anyway, I checked it out. The second guy is really pretty darn good at isolations!

Things you really don't want to hear...

But are all too common. In my case, in today's (bi-monthly) conference call.

"Upper management has made it known that..."
"Yes, we want that done immediately. We expect it'll be ready for review by the end of next quarter..."
"We'll be traveling out to your sites to review the wording of this form..."

GetRight/4.5d

So I'm actually watching the access logs for www.rhonabwy.com to check on the downloads for REtry. (I'm up to 5!).

But I noticed something really freaky: a referpage labelled "GetRight/4.5d". The same IP address appears to have just downloaded REtry directly too - Windows box, using Mozilla (or at least the Gecko engine). Hurm, looks like it's a Download manager for them Winder's boxen. Wonder why it downloaded twice... Maybe he got cut-off or something in download. Heh. I hope this guy realizes that it's MacOS X code.

Along the lines of REtry, Aram Greenman announced a new regular expression package for MacOS X - based on the PCRE library and available under BSD license. I don't know if it even handles Unicode at all - but then MOKit disclaims support even though there's some basic support in there (thank you Henry Spencer!)

The sky is falling!

Microprocessor sales are falling, significantly. The money backing ever increasing speed for PC's is dwindling, and now Andy Moore is stating that Moore's Law is coming to an end.

I was always sort of interested in the relative rates of these things - comparing them with the pricing, to see what's going where. I recently to Gilder's Law: "bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power."

The thing I didn't immediately get is why this hadn't translated to decreasing costs for things like DSL. There's sort of a baseline price that I've experienced for the past 6 years with DSL. And I've come to the conclusion that it's because that particular market has a very high cost of entry, and you're not just paying for bandwidth by the bucket. If you had a Colocation facility, I could see where your costs for bandwidth might have reasonably decreased... but the cost of the components to "get you to that bandwidth" (the routers and such) hasn't really decreased.

I have, however, seen this "bandwidth" grow inside the computers, although not at 3x the compute power.

This "law" seems pretty counterintuitive to me.

I am not a number!

I'm so there!

Squash curried beef in pumpkin bowls

That's what Karen has named dinner. I didn't have a name for it, so I asked her to come up with one. Her first attempt was Pumpkin Delight... Yeah, sounded like some really terrifying you'd find at a roadside diner in western Nebraska.

It was pretty good too.

Working from home

I worked from home today, taking it easy and spending most of the day drinking tea and using the laptop on the dining room table. I stayed up horrifically late last night reading Prey. It was a fun read - pretty quick. Sure read like there was a plan to see it made into a movie... to the point that you could even guess at what the special effects would look like. A CG geek's dream for that sort of thing (CG as computer graphics).

I spent most of the day working with Perl, which I haven't done in quite some time. Whipping out little scripts to access and read data from our internal schemas... lots of DBI work. Quite some time ago, I sort of moved from Perl to Java for the DBI stuff simply because JDBC was a hell of a lot easier to install - I didn't need a client installation of Oracle on the box if I wanted to just scrape from rows from a table and plop them on a screen. But for whatever reason, Java seems to be a slippery slope with me. I think because we do so very much of it at work with production code. I feel like I really should do all the proper work around the code (unit tests, documentation, etc), even when it's just brutal hack stuff to get something quickly done. So with perl, I feel a little more free to be cowboy with the code.

I did, however, resist the urge to latch some of this hacky-code of mine into an apache CGI to allow me to make web requests for this stuff. Tempting... tempting... we'll see how much demand I have for more of the same investigative work.

Just finished making dinner - it's baking in the over for 30 or so minutes more. I haven't the slightest idea what the hell I made - it didn't even start with a recipe this time. Hope it's good.

3 downloads!

Cool!

I've got three downloads of REtry today! My entry at Stepwise/softrak has gone live. I sorta hope one of them communicates with me to let me know what they think of it.

Then again, if they think it sucks, then maybe I don't want to hear. :-)

Cocoa in Seattle

Yeah, I know I said I was having tea tonight. While reading through the backlog of email from the cocoa-dev list, I noticed that a Mr. Jake Repp was talking about a new cocoa SIG website. The interesting tidbit is that it's hosted in lovely Seattle. Well, I guess more accurately, hosted in Bellevue - at least that's the guess I have from the traceroute. I guess I'll have to add Jake to my "Seattleites" list...

Tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches

They really make a nice dinner. That is, in fact, what Karen and I had this evening. It's lightly raining out here (take notice Gus - it means potential snow for your visit after Christmas) - has been most of the day I guess. I lost track somewhere today - I got to work, head-down, and when I pulled up for air about 1pm, it was lightly raining. Well, someone from Missouri would call it drizzling, but I guess I have a new appreciation for the finer grains between mist and a light shower. Comes with livin' in Seattle I guess.

So the house is pretty quiet, with the holiday lights on and various albums of Christmas music playing through. It makes a really nice environment to read, which is what I've been doing most of the evening. I have Prey, but haven't cracked it yet. Instead, I had a pile of magazines that I really wanted to sift through for interesting nuggets. Found some interesting tidbits, but nothing really earth shattering.

The house is starting to cool down now, and I've got yet another SQL query running in a terminal background. I guess I'll be up for a while yet - I'm not feeling very tired and I kept Karen up quite a bit last night with some insomnia. I'm not eager to go wake her up this evening, as she's still fighting some low-order malaise that includes a recurring headache. Since the house it getting cooler, I grabbed a cup of tea for my scouring of the web for it's latest tidbits and ideas.

More geeky-stuff next...

Prey

Borrowed John's copy of Prey for a read. I really like the front-jacket "buy me now!" text, it's really amusing:

"It has been programmed as a predator. It is evolving swiftly, becoming more deadly with each passing hour. Every attempt to destroy it has failed. And we are the prey."

Can't beat that! A nano-plague of distributed intelligent evilness. Neal Stephenson beat him to the punch with The Diamond Age, but I'm looking forward to the read.

Doc and the Supernova conference

Doc Searls is logging the Supernova Conference. The gig appears to be all about decentralization, and there's a variety of interesting notes in there. Apparently, there's even a group blog of the event, although I find Doc's notes pretty succinct. Seems to be a popular topic, but then I'm reading a Blog Zealot's advocacy of "Power to the People, Marty" (sorry, can't help the sneakers reference).

There's some large names wildly prognosticating up there (sounds obscene, doesn't it?) They're certainly covering the gambit - wireless, anti-RIAA sorts of noise, and digital democracy.

a SPACE!!!

Gus found the problem I was having with getting Help to work correctly with REtry. A space. Damnit. In the editor, you can't see the space because of the nice GUI. When gus looked at the embedded property file list (info.plist) he spotted it immediately:

<key>CFBundleHelpBookName </key>
<string>REtry Online Help</string>

should have been

<key>CFBundleHelpBookName</key>
<string>REtry Online Help</string>

That one space at the end of "CFBundleHelpBookName" made all the difference.

So now all I have to do is whip up them help files....

Code, Help Files, and databases

Well, I'm up past midnight again. There's a surprise. :-)

In the corner of my iBook's screen, I've got a little script telling me how many fields in a database have been updated. I've got a little "surgical fix" going on for a problem at work, and so far I've whacked out 1/5th of the fields I'll need to hit. It's not the fastest, and it sure isn't the prettiest solution, but it's working. I started thinking about it again tonight (the problem, which I left hanging on Friday) and since I figure I'll be in late tomorrow anyway, I might as well crank up my fix and let 'er rip overnight.

I've been banging around on REtry trying to get the built in help functionality working. I'm really not sure why it's not functioning. I appear to be getting all the files put in the right places, the plist files (preference dictionaries) all set correctly. It's really hard to tell - I just keep getting "Help isn't available for REtry". I think it's time to work on something else for a while, because continueing to beat my head on this one isn't providing any solutions.

So I'm going to release REtry with source (like, after I get the damn help file stuff working, and update it to use Mike Ferris' MOKit from SourceForge). I've got another quick application that I'm going to build next. Maybe I'll see if I can do a little shareware on that one. Well, I have to actually build it first, but I'm feeling pretty jazzed about it now that I've actually completed REtry.

Doing all the little things for an application takes up a surprising amount of time. I'm once again duly impressed with Brent's NetNewsWire. He's really done a fantastic job of integrating help, his website's layout, and the application's UI together.

REtry

Well, tonight I finally made all the breakthroughs needed to get REtry [MacOS X application, download (dmg.gz)] to an acceptable state. I thought about announcing it to the world, but I want to redo my website before I invite the crush of the world from VersionTracker down on it. It's time for a makeover anyway, with the new domain name...

I'm having some trouble getting the embedded help working, even with the notes from several online articles and countless web pages. Not sure why it's not working, so I'll just have to mess with it later.

When I've got a few more pieces added in, I'm planning on releasing the source along with the application. What license, what license...

iTunes Christmas

So... we like, don't have a stereo. We have some great speakers, but we don't have the bits in between: like a tuner, amp, cd player, etc. Karen and I just play music individually, usually from our computers. We've ripped down our entire CD collection, and that suits us pretty well.

Well, it did. The request today was to get christmas music really going in the living room. Hrm - that's not quite as easy. But... it's doable. My desktop computer is just on the other side of the wall from the entertainment armoire, and there was this old bit of coax just roughly stuck through the wall. A 3/4" drill bit and a few minutes later, and the hole was enlarged and I ran a little cable through from my computer.

I was going to just put some computer speakers up on the back of the armoire, but then I recalled that we had a wave radio that both puts out very nice sound and has an easily converted AUX input. So... my desktop is now connected to the wave radio.

A special playlist later, and we've got 14.3 consecutive hours (that's 271 soungs) of christmas music ready to go. (Yeah, we've got a LOT of christmas music!) It's currently playing Plus bele que flor by the Anonymous 4.

Christmas Tree

Well, when you get a Christmas tree and you bring it inside, first thing you really need to do is let it get settled. In this case, that means letting the cats understand that they have the greatest new toy in the world to play with.

Afterwards, you do a little clipping of the low branches. Well, I wouldn't, but Karen insists that's a critical aspect. My personal favorite is hanging the lights through the tree. Since we placed it in the corner, I made sure to really get the backs well lit up too - so it'll look good from the sidewalk.

The finished product!

Nephew Sam

Finally snagged pictures from Thanksgiving. I'm convinced that Sam's daddy (my brother in law: Dan) doesn't know how to hold him. Here - see the proof.

Here's Dan holding him:

Here's me holding him (differently):

He looks much happier with me. Really. He likes being held like a sack of potatoes!

Depth of field

It ain't much tonight, that's for darn sure.

After the movies, I got up to check around, look outside and such. We'd purchased this cute little christmas tree down at Queen Anne Ave earlier today, and they suggested hosing it down and leaving it outside with the stump in a bucket overnight. Apparently cleans it up and makes it a bit happier too. Although I don't know how happy a tree that's just been severed at the base of it's trunk can be...

Anyway, as I looked outside to check on the tree, I noticed a certain amount of grey fade to the world. It's foggy like pea soup out there! At midnight! It's been sort of "in a cloud" all day - the clouds have been low and there's been light haze scattered across downtown, Queen Anne, and Capitol Hill most of the day. But wow - tonight's really out there for fog.

Never expected we'd be getting San Francisco weather, but it sure does feel like it. Quite a bite to the air out there too. Glad I'm safe and curled up inside. It's nothing like the ice-storm in the northeast, but still - fog at 40 degrees or less will certainly let you know it's there...