Rhonabwy

Seattle

Long day of traveling, and I'm pretty bushed, so this isn't going to be all that long.

We left Burlington, Iowa at 10am this morning, and arrived in Seattle about 10pm. 11pm saw us at our house, but it was still a pretty grueling day. It's about a 4 hour drive down to St. Louis, where we were flying from, and then a little switch-a-roo with some cars and on to the airport. We spent about three hours in the terminal, and the flight is just under four hours... that's pretty much the day.

It's hard to believe my grandmother is 90 years old. Born on Jun 28, 1913. Multiple wars and the great depression. Really puts some things into perspective. Makes me wonder, in a sort of morbid fascination, what hideous things I'll be living through. So far, nothing to compare with the depression or World War II - well, at least that's explicitly impinging itself onto my brain.

I'm glad we got out there, although I didn't get as much done as I thought I would. I don't know why I think I will - it seems almost foolish in retrospect. I got some stuff accomplished, but just not what I expected.

The weather even cooperated pretty well. Peaked up at 90 today on the drive home with the usual (80%+) humidity, but the air conditioning took the worst of the brunt of things. But mostly the weather was cool. And coming back to Seattle, it actually feels about as humid outside tonight as it did in Iowa - so it must have just recently rained or something.

Iowa

It's 1:21am and I'm not sleeping at all. Actually, it feels like
11:20pm since I'm still really on Seattle time and currently sitting
in the midwest. Burlington, Iowa to be exact. Yeah, I'm writing this
now, and I guess I'll post it up later. Something to do while I can't
sleep anyway.

Spent the day driving across Missouri. It's been a while since I drove
for hours quietly, just watching the countryside flow by. It was
actually pretty cool outside today - between 70 and 80 all day - and
muggy as per norm - 82% humidity. I've definitely gotten used to less
humid environments.

As I drove, the green of the trees and grass were familiar and yet
foreign. I've been in Seattle for two years, and already the forests
of Missouri and Iowa seem a tad strange to me. It's very different -
thick undergrowth, few pines, and generally pretty heavy on the
hardwoods. All kinds of decidous trees. And limestone. Don't know
what really attracts me to it, but I really like the limestone.

Thinking about limestone, I think about some of the things I've
always wanted to build. Halls and buildings, limestone walls. A trip
to Europe as a young boy included a cruise down the rhine river
valley. If there's something to get a kid hooked on castles, well -
by god that's it. I've been fascinated with them ever since. I even
spent a good several months wandering the hills and valleys of North
Wales, finding every hill fort, roman ruin, and castle that I could
in the northlands there. And I've always wanted to build one, or
something like it, of my own.

The archways of stone, the cloisters, and the solid walls have always
appealed to me. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stone construction. I
know it's damned expensive to do anymore, but I still dream about
it. To have a great hall, to have a keep.

I walked the walls of Harlech (back when you still could) and I think
of what that would be like in a winter storm on the west coast of
Washington. It's one of the things that appeals to me so much about
the pacific northwest - it's incredible climate affinity with the
british isles. It's not identical, of course, but it's a hell of a
lot closer than the great inland plains, fields, and forests of the
midwest.

I sometimes wonder if I could wrangle to build something like
that. Even something similiar. When Karen and I first got together,
some 12 years ago, we'd dreamed of creating a place where we could
help maintain the lost arts. We were both heavily focused and
interested in the medieval arts at the time - everything from cooking
and sewing to woodworking, architecture, and metalwork. We'd dreamed
and schemed and planned on how we'd create this artist's colony thing
focused on just the Ars Medieval. No business plan, nothing so
strange as cash in hand, or experience and knowledge of running a
business. Instead, my other love of computing and computers proved to
be as powerful as the love of the medieval arts, and far more
lucrative. So our lives turned a different direction. In looking
back, I'm not sure the midwest ever would have supported what we had
hoped and dreamed of accomplishing. For one thing, the folks in the
midwest are just far too practical.

I suppose it would be possible still, but the lack of funds to create
such a thing would definitely hold us back. Not to mention the little
tidbit of loving where we're living now, and that tiny little detail
of having a job that wouldn't exactly let me spend the hours and days
nessecary to actually create such a place.

None the less, it lurks in my mind - coming back up at strange times
like driving across Missouri. A Motte and bailey which could expand
as the needs arose. An Inn, maybe - like a hostel. A central
hall. The climate of the pacific northwest would be a wonderful,
wonderful complement. To work, it would have to be broader than a
focus on the medieval arts I think, and less specific on the
architecture I'd originally dreamed. There's certainly a place for an
artists' retreat, although I'm not sure I'm personally ready to build
one. And I don't think I would really ever want to give up on my love
of building things in the realm of computing. The building materials
are a hell of a lot cheaper, for one thing. But the joy of building,
the craftsmanship of it, is just the same.

Maybe one day I'll have my tower overlooking the waters to the
west. Or walls upon which I can walk while looking out into the
storms raging in from the pacific. Maybe they'll just stay in my
dreams too.

while I'm waiting...

my buddy Google and I have been scouring the web looking for ad-hoc commentary and reports from WWDC. I'm lurking in all the lists and such, waiting to here or see more specific feedback on the project builder replacement: Xcode. There's two pages at Apple detailing it: one on the marketing side, one on the developer side.

They both detail out a bunch of features I've been waiting to see: predictive compiling, code completion, code symbol recognition and search. And they upped the ante with some I never expected: compile farms, fix and continue, smart groups/symbol sensing. With any luck, they'll be expanding the ideas into complete support for code refaring (which I've come to really, really appreciate). Shoot, just the pre-parsing of the source to understand what's a method, variable, etc. enough to do code completion is a huge, huge step forward. Scanning through the ProjectBuilder mailing list archive, I did find this mail from Godfrey DiGiorgi that detailed out some thing.

You can tell it's got a new UI as well - I didn't really have a problem with the old one, but some of the folks on Cocoa-dev certainly did. As long as I can still develop effectively on my iBook, I'll be happy.

There's a tiny comment on the developer page about Interface Builder 2.3.3 - that it "fixes bugs and adds some features for Cocoa and Carbon". I'd love to know what.

waiting waiting

today i'm waiting.

i do little things, but I've been asked "to be available", so I'm not digging in to anything heavy. I wander around the office, clearly reducing other folks productivity. that's ok. I'm just waiting.

played with some python CGI modules for a while

i'm waiting again

dug into the some of the recent technical articles about Longhorn

i'm waiting again

it's amazing how long the day gets when you're just waiting.

Monday, monday

Monday, and it's well into the afternoon.

Had a great weekend actually. Saturday consisted of wandering around the Fremont Solstice Parade and Festival, stopping by Queen Anne Ave Books to pick up a copy of the latest Harry Potter book, and then spending the majority of the afternoon and evening deep into a book (Karen was reading the Harry Potter novel - I was reading another book that Leah had left for us). We both stayed up way too late, but it was really nice for "recharging the batteries".

Last night we worked around the house and had Nathan over for a light dinner. Leah couldn't make it because she wasn't feeling well, but we had a good time regardless.

This morning was spent over in the U Village area at a sport's bar and grill watching the WWDC Keynote over their satelite TV. I'm sure just about everyone else in the MacOS dev community is already talking about it, but I'm going to too because there are some really cool things coming down the pike.

The UI feature which Apple is called "Expose" is going to be really, really big. In terms of functionality, I think it could easily surpass the virtual desktop mechanism that I'd gotten used to with X11. Speaking of X11, it's going to be embedded in the next rev, along with a host of other really impressive features. The updates iDisk which acts as a sync-direry between multiple machines and the ".Mac" disk-in-the-sky stuff, an updated Mail.app (thank god!), fast user switching (which XP has had for a while)... it's going to be a good update. Compelling.

But the most exciting thing for me was really the short preview of Xcode - which I guess is the new name for project builder. I'm really, really wishing I could be at the session down there this afternoon to get all the details and see it up close. They've implemented a lot of the stuff I've been hoping to see for quite a while. (compile as you type, enough static analysis to search for method names, etc). And then they tacked in some stuff I never expected: the capability for compile farms, and dynamically linking in new code while debugging. In terms of just coding productivity, this looks like it's going to be really, really hot. And, finally, it's faster too. They said they were working on that last year, and it looks like they've made some significant progress. Gus notices that detail more than me, but it'll still be fantastic to have.

A nice evening

Got home a little later than I'd originally planned, but the evening has been absolutely fantastic.

Karen was making this incredible salad from the Market Basket food, and after a light dinner (well, relatively speaking to what I've been eating elsewhere), we decided to get out of the house and wander down to grab a coffee or something on Queen Anne Ave.

So we're sitting in El Diablo, which recently rennovated itself, and John and Sue wander by. I tried to wave them off, but they weren't having it, so we were able to visit them for a while at the coffee shop. It probably would have been easier to hear without the live music, but I guess that's part of the ambiance you just sort of expect. John even got up and shut the door which was letting smoke in and bothering Karen.

So now we're back at home and the cats are demanding attention. Wormwood is wandering back and forth across the couch from Karen to myself and back, thinking that neither of us is quite acceptable in the 'providing attention' department.

Oh well - we're sitting here with our laptops, each surfing a little bit and digging around for information. The wonders of wireless...

thud

I took the day off work today, trying to take it easy. Turned out to kind of be one of those days where you just end up going "thud" - sitting down hard, sort of worn out and trying to figure out what the fuck happened.

We picked up our first market basket today though, which was pretty cool. Lots of interesting veggies, which I intend to make short work of. I evening took some time tonight to run out and get extra goodies to make a killer chef's salad and pieces for the fixin's for a greek salad. Looks like a salad kinda weekend.

Nate and Leah use a butcher down at the market and swear that the meat there is always extrodinarily good. I slipped in to check it out this afternoon, but they were packed. Even still, they had some made-in-the-store sausages that looked intriguing, and had some of the finest looking pork chops I've seen in quite a while. Definitely going to have to stop back in there when we're ready to pitch together our next roast or a couple of steaks.

As I sit here quietly, tapping away at the keyboard, I've just realized that it's started to rain. That'll be nice - it was getting awfully dry around here.

I'm sure it's all over everyone else blog and stuff, but I have to point out the article on genetically engineered glowing going on sale in Taiwan. I don't quite know what to think. On one hand, they sound really neat. On the other, releasing these guys into the biosystem on accident could have some really profound effects. Maybe not the glowing ones, but the idea that we're fucking in a strategic way with a balanced system... yeah, small effects and all that.

subtle invasion of identity

After Scoble talked up this "rockin new version" of MSN Messenger on his weblog, I spent part of the morning trying to check it out.

It was damn frustrating too, because Microsoft really didn't perform well on the release. The site was supposed to be live at 11am, but it was either dead or just hideously unresponsive until something like 2pm in the afternoon. So much for a great release... BTW - Apple uses Akamai for these things. Maybe Microsoft should consider the same...

Anyway, the new "features" weren't anything that really tripped my triggger. Lots of custom-responsive stuff that was all an opt-in sort of setup - like news, gimme's and whatever through the client. It's now integrated with file sharing, webcam's, and audio transmission as well as some "blackboard" type goodies - like viewing a website with another person or playing a game together.

But the thing that really struck me was how all these tidbits, interesting and compelling to someone I'm sure, are all leveraging the use of the passport ID system. I don't know why, but it really seemed to cement the idea that Microsoft was presenting the world with this identity mechanism, using it internally (and now through their clients), and extending it through-out all their systems to the point that it will be ubiquitous in no time at all (if it isn't already).

racing on the puget sound

yeah, I know - 12:15am is conceivably a bit late for a post about the evening, but you're gettin' it anyway.

Tonight we were back out on the boat. For the first day in like 20 it was cloudy and cool all day. The evening threatened even some light rain, and the winds (previously non-existant) had picked up to a peak of 20 knots just before we start racing.

Now it's been about 5 weeks since we were all out on the boat, most of that time it's been in drydock with Jen and JR working to completely refinish the boat's bottom to this mirror-polished finish. Lots and lots of work went into it - I ended up dropping in some 20 hours of labor over the course of the five weeks, reasonably similiar for everyone else on the crew except Jen and JR who put in scads more (they're the owners after all).

One of our crew flaked out at the last minute, so we were shorthanded this evening. Shorthanded and, frankly, a little rusty on all the details. Most of the race went very well, although I have no idea where we finished in relation to everyone else. Not first, not last, somewhere in between. I had a good run with the spinnaker, which was actually pretty tricky as the winds had died down to under 5 knots and were shifting through 90 or 100 degrees in direction. That's sort of havoc to your spinnaker, but I kept it filled pretty well and we made a good 4 knots headway throughout.

I can't say I'm extrodinarily pleased with the race, but I'm not unhappy either. There's still unresolved tension between the owners on how the boat is handled, and they're a might confused on why Tony and I think that perhaps just having scads of practice isn't really going to benefit us. JR and I had a long conversation yesterday evening at work that started out with "what do you think about having more practices - Tony thinks it won't help", but quickly segway'd into a frank but not harsh conversation about where I though the real issues were and some gentle suggestions on how they might be solved. I didn't see any of them really enacted today, so I'm not quite sure what I think. I don't know if he didn't listen, didn't hear, didn't do anything yet, or didn't care. We'll see I guess.

The teamwork on the boat tonight was quite good, it should be noted. Even short handed, Dave (a really nice fellow that works at WindWorks at Shillshole Marina), Tony, Jen, JR, and I pulled together a nice set of mechanics in the actual racing, with really only a few flubs. The race itself was two long legs, so we only raised and dropped the spinnaker once. The roundings (usually a damn tricky part) and transitions were really, really well done. In fact, aside from having another hand on a few lines making things faster, I don't think it really could have been any smoother.

I didn't feel any difference with this new "boat bottom", but I guess the effects were more apparent when you watched us from another boat. Talking with Jeff and Dave from Rhumb Runner afterwards at the yacht club, they definitely noticed the smoothness of the boat and the fact that we could maintain speed much better with less wind. Nice to know.

Perl Objects

Just saw a new book on OReilly's Safari this morning: Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules.

Personally, I never really progressed into the world of object oriented Perl (yeah, I still write perl scripts like it's just perl 4, where I started with it). For object oriented stuff, I write in Java, Objective-C, or more recently Python. Still, I keep needing to use Perl, just because it's quick and I know it. And there's incredible libraries out there. Knowing the object mechanisms better would probably make something of a difference, so I suspect I'll make some time between other things and see if I can get at least a thorough skimming of this book done.

In the meantime, I'm happily coming up to speed pretty quickly with Python, and really enjoying it. Gus has been great in helping me with the CGI and object stuff, so it's moving even faster. Readline support in the interactive python makes things incredibly fast to develop - that and the help() method.

Scoble and Slashdot

So I've been keeping an eye on Scoble's weblog - a recent evangelist for Microsoft. And today he got slashdotted. What's really amusing is his posting of various comments from Slashdot - worth reading.

Also worth noting that Tom's Hardware reviewing it. I guess this is the new "it's really a database" filesystem that's causing such upheaval within the various MS products. Haven't read the review, but I suspect that's next this evening.

yeah, yeah

i know there were multiple postings. I've cleaned 'em up.

Hydra 1.1

Those german code monkey's have up and released a new version of Hydra - version 1.1. A neat little application that I really enjoyed playing with. I haven't actually used it in a collaborative manner, but maybe...

Anyway, it's up'd a rev and added a number of new features, mostly the responder tag set of "hydra://" and integration with project builder. Timed nice to sit in before WWDC, which features full WIFI (as opposed to Sun ONE btw) - they even have a pre-made note template.

Speaking of WWDC, it's starting in 6 days. I can't make it this year - wish I could. Maybe next year, but the finances this year just can't swing it. While digging around in one of my notepads, I saw a note from the 2002 WWDC I made. It was right around May 5th. I guess next year's WWDC will be back in early May, so I can plan for it...

Well, it turns out that the keynote from WWDC will be broadcast through the apple stores, and in talking with Loren from our local one, it appears this gig is going to start at 10am there. Looks like next monday morning I'll be in Bellevue...

quiet but impressive news

Surprisingly, I caught up with this detail from the Seattle PI:

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates, claimed preliminary success in a hitherto secret project to enable computers to answer questions they've never seen before, and to state their reasoning.

So it turns out that there's a page for this here SEKRET PROJEK: Project Halo. I'd love to make fun of it, but it's really pretty damn impressive. Actually, one of the most interesting tidbits I really took away from the reports is that CYC didn't make the cut. And this is head-down right into their game since 1990-something. Instead, it looks like the California braincases at SRI did the magic feat. I'd never even heard of the guys from Germany, but you can bet they were slouches based on who they were competing with.

I think one of the most compelling things about all this is the research and results were made public.

Duh

Duh with a capital "D":

Can you imagine it? If a company - wait, get this - treats their IT infrastructure as a PART OF THE BUSINESS, they get better value!

Whoa.

CNET, what the fuck are you doing? Some of these news items are thinly disguised editorials and idiocy commentary. Are you going back to thinking your audience is all executive types?

end of the energy

three o-clock and I'm wiped out.

I did eat lunch, although it was a little late. I'm just sort of mentally numb from the flurry of code, documentation, and ad-hoc requests today. That little "code archeaology" project had been pushed forward to the point that it was ready to be released so that our production folks can twiddle it and see what they think about the reported improved performance this will achieve. Mostly, that meant that I needed to sit down and knock out some documentation on how to actually run the damn thing.

The fella that did the original work on it seemed to wake up last week and realized I'm modified quite a bit of the code, added documentation through out, added unit tests, and had generally been active in it. He was suitably embarrased when he called me over to "explain what I broke", and it turned out that 3 of the 4 items where bugfixes that I'd made.

So today he put forth a touch more code to help push this thing along. No unit tests, no real internal code documentation. The code changes weren't really all that dramatic to have even needed unit tests, but it would have been nice to see that he'd engaged and was playing the game with the rest of the team (that "team" would be me).

So now I'm just sittin' back, reading some RSS feeds (not much particularly noteworthy going across the feeds today), and drinking a coke. I thought about pulling up Eclipse and continuing on with some additional unit tests for that code archeaology project, but I just can't raise the enthusiasm for it at the moment.

crazy morning

Got to work pretty well this morning, and it all came a crashin' down. One of those mondays, ya know?

Actually, my feet are really, really sore. I wore some sandles to the beach last night (Golden Gardens) and got some sand in them. I thought I'd washed them off pretty well, but after walking to work in them, it's clear I've missed some of the sand. Well, not now - it's all gone now - but in the meantime it's worn down the pads of my feet in a sort of sandpaper painful way.

But once I'd pitched the sandles into the corner, I was much happier. Then the requests started to descend. I guess Jon made a small mistake in a java class that he needed hot-patched, I got pestered to zip off a copy of a CVS repository that I'm not supposed to be managing and send it off in email, an intern couldn't get into her cvs enlistment because she handn't set the proper environment variable, etc. You know, nothing really hard - just eats up all your morning before you really get anything done.

So it's damn near noon, and I've completely forgotten what I'd been planning on doing this morning. Maybe over lunch I'll have a chance to sit back and figure out what I had been planning to attack this AM.

On a more geeky note, I ran into an interesting data structure the other night that confused the snot outa me for a while. It was a "one-shot" stream object, only it took me a while to clue into that. The basic idea is that there's a stream source that generates these token objects, and then there's this pile of potential objects that can sit in between and filter and/or modify that stream of tokens as they go. Well, in diagnosing a stupid bug I made, I was printing out the tokens to see how they're gotten mangled or where they were. Turns out, one you've issued the sequence that iterates through the tokens, it's done. So I spent a few hours trying to figure that out, and in the end you simply had to reinstantiate the whole series of objects to use it again. Made some amount of sense once I'd figured that out, but it really confused me in the meantime.

I dunno - for some reason I'm just more used to objects that I can invoke some iterator thingy on, and each time I invoke the iterator it starts spewing out whatever details it has. This one shot thing - confused me. :-) Who knows, it's probably just a more efficient representation of it.

Hey! It's Sunday...

Check that out - it's Sunday already!

I spent most of the past day or so hopped up on way, way to much caffiene. Somewhere in there, I crashed and lost part of my saturday. Got a lot of good stuff done first, but then whammo - I was out.

Been fiddling around with CSS a bit, trying to get a handle on the whole darn thing. For an environment that was never built for specific page layouts, they're doing a damn good job of allowing someone to nail it all down with CSS.

Had some Tuna for dinner tonight, which was a really pleasant change. I didn't really quite want Salmon, but sounded good. I'm still wailin' along on this weight-loss thing, which can sometimes be really darn difficult when the potatoes and bread look as good as they do at Chinooks (really treat seafood place down by erman's wharf that KLA boycotts cause they were assholes to her).

Spent part of the evening catching up on folk's blogs. Johnny's in Germany, sounds like he's having a good time. Seems to be the season for travelling abroad. Mary's been putting out a few fires at MU from the sounds of it. If you don't know her - well, let's just say that I'm completely NOT surprised that she has an incredibly detailed knowledge of the data in the institutional systems at MU.

Somewhere in the past day or so, I spent some time checking out Java.net, which really sort of feels like a collaborative swag at the 'community sites' sort of thing that Microsoft does for it's languages. I'm not quite sure what it really has to offer, oh, say SourceForge - but maybe it'll be better or something. Who knows. I went ahead and registered with it, but I haven't seen anything really compelling with the site yet. Maybe the whole "Blog" and "Wiki" integration thing will be hip - hard to say. I do find it somewhat amusing that they're using Bugzilla there...

I am really curious what Gosling is doing with that Jackpot project of his - but it's not open and/or hosted at Java.net that I can tell. It'll be interesting to see what actually comes of it. It had gotten enough airplay recently that I thought there might be something available with it, but I haven't found it if it is.

trucks

Yesterday was a blur, and today I'm feeling vaguely reminiscent of having been run over by a truck. It's like - you know, completely unfair. I've been working my ass off this week, I didn't even go drinking last night, and now I'm feeling like someone kicked the shit out of me. Blech.

My multiple languages buffer is about completely full too. I've now completely confused the syntax for Python, Perl, Objective-C, and Java into one terrible mishmash in my head, where I can't write any of them without incurring terrible compiler wrath for syntax errors. square brackets, dots, semicolons, triple quotes. I'm like mentally doomed today. Thank god Lisp isn't in there too - or the parentheses might kill me.

Somewhere in the midst of yesterday I did get to see Finding Nemo, the latest from Pixar (NOT DISNEY - Disney can't make an animated feature film to save their lives right now - Pixar is the only thing keeping them creatively afloat.) That was fun. They have just nailed seagulls. Exactly.

VoodooPad is too inexpensive!

If you've got a Mac and you're possibly interested in a little utility pad, I highly recommend VoodooPad by Gus. Especially right now when he hasn't clued in that he's pricing it way, way, way to low. It's available for $10 right now.

It was good when he started it - a hypertext writing tool really. A desktop version of a Wiki - one of the original concepts of TBL, straight out collobarative editing. Well, this isn't so collaborative, because it's a single person desktop app, but it's still good.

And he's got all sorts of interesting tidbits supported in there - like Inkwell, exporting to your flavor of data (no lockin there!), and my absolute favorite: script execution from within a pad (you can see an example of python in his screenshots.

I haven't quite figured out why Gus hasn't raised the price. I've even started calling him names... yeah, other than "Gus".

that StatCVS thing...

That StatCVS code that I mentioned - man, is that nice. I generated up graphs and reports on the CVS pools are work this morning, and then turned it to private projects and such this afternoon.

I even snagged the latest Jakarta-Lucene CVS enlistment to see how that looked:

But I think my absolute favorite feature is the ability to easily scan the commits. I've tried the "getting it in email" routine, RSS feeds, and a couple other variants. This is, by far, the best for me.

Signal to noise ratio

One of the lists I'm one (and a reason I'm still with it) has an incredibly high signal to noise ratio. It's just got a hell of a lot of good content - all kinds.

The most recent tidbit (aside from a flurry of email about some nutcase in Bangkok who can't hardly write, let alone thing) that I found to be really darn useful is StatCVS. We use CVS at work, although we've made some choices regarding our development process that effectively nullifies the benefits of having authors in CVS. Regardless, I think I'm going to yank this sucker up and try it out on the CVS repository and see what I can see with it. I expect it'll be quite illuminating.

Another scattershot night

The eyes are starting to fuzz out, and I've a long way I want to go yet.

Damnit.

It's been one of those scattershot days. I feel really positive about it today - feels like I've made progress on about a hundred and five different fronts. Didn't make much forward progress, but a little bit over everywhere (hence the scattershot). Best of all, I finally pinned down the python readline tab completion stuff that had been eluding me for the past two days and making my life a pain. For your benefit:


try:
    import readline
except ImportError:
    print "Module readline not available."
else:
    import rlcompleter
    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")


Thank you Gus, BBum and Peter Norvig.

Got a nice hefty textbook in the mail today - I'm all excited to get into reading it. Only I don't think my eyes are going to put up with much more reading tonight. dernit.

lack of focus

Well, from talking about hyperfocus some time last week, it seems that today is "lack of focus" or maybe "flutterfocus". As in I can't seem to keep my mind on track with anything for more than about 30 minutes.

Why the sudden ADD? Who knows. I'll tell ya though, it's damn annoying.

I spent most of the afternoon bouncing from computer to computer in the house (yeah, there's like 3) trying to settle myself down and do some work. No such luck.

Now at 10pm, I'm just sitting here and writing a bit, enjoying the last bits of dusk and a cool breeze out of the west. There's still a little bit of daylight brightening the horizon, but it's pretty much the end of the sunset. This morning started out chilly (well, chilly compared to the recent spate of 80+ degrees), but the afternoon and evening were again crystal clear, cool breezes, and brilliantly sunny. I guess we actually hit a high of something like 95 in the past couple of days - I'm not surprised. Today was significantly cooler though - even felt like I could open up the windows and shades in the afternoon this time - when normally that's when the sun is really beating down.

Not much news for the rest of the day - just back to reading and writing I guess.

Pics from Jeremy at Byron's Wedding

I've got some great friends! I couldn't make it out to Byron's shindig and wedding celebration (oh yeah, and wedding) in Columbia this weekend, so when I got back into the house this afternoon I found two pictures from Jeremy via some cell-phone-camera combo thingy.

Never thought I'd find those very nifty, but I sure did enjoy getting these pics:

That's Ryan, and Gus left to right respectively. And then there's the "geek wedding cake":

Byron: Hope it's a great day for you, and wish you the very best!

UPDATE: Speaking of, it seems I received a third picture - of the man himself:

programming and cooking?

Yes, I ate breakfast.

But I'm sort of amused at my own habits where I'm drawing an analogy between cooking and programming. Basically, if you want to have a clean kitchen - ask me to cook in it. Cooking in a messy, cluttered, or dirty kitchen drives me up a wall. Well - there's some amount of clutter I can deal with (we have a small kitchen right now), but I need to have room to work, ya know?

So this morning, I'm tacking in a feature to some code, but some of the pieces are a bit messy... There's a statistics object that's being wildly utilized by accessing it's member variables directly, and it's bugging me. So instead of just throwing in the code to add in this feature (which relies on accessing the statistics container object), I've gone and cleaned it up, added in the proper accessor methods, etc. Dunno why, but I've become a stickler for fully encapsulating objects in a large code base. Otherwise, it sort of seems to me to be a waste to even have them as seperate objects.

(yeah, all java coding today)

freakish weather

Yeah, even by Seattle standards. Normally it's cool, getting a tad dry by this time of year, but really not very changeable. 70's is normal.

It's 85 deg. outside, and very windy. Kinda dry, but quite warm. Tomorrow is supposed to be record breaking, peaking out over the 90's. I think we're do for a pretty serious windstorm once the cool alaskan air swings back down here. Thank god for the sound, or we'd all be baking in our shells.

Like almost nobody has air conditioning around Seattle - you just don't typically need it.

We have the house all outfitted for the weather - windows open a night, bringing in the cool, and then shut with shades drawn in the afternoon, when our western exposure generally cooks us. I wouldn't be surprised if ended up sacking out in front of some of those western facing windows this evening, suckin' in the cool breeze on our daybed after 10pm or so tonight.

Oh - grabbed the latest OmniWeb beta tonight. Pretty speedy, and very nicely implemented. Definitely a nice refresh. Oh - and it renders http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/ properly, where Safari doesn't right now. Don't know why - I'm not that conversant with CSS.

Score for Gus!

Yeah!!!!

Score for Gus with a mention of his mighty personal Wiki application: VoodooPad.

Tablet PC Question for the world

Anyone have one?

Can you read the screen in direct sunlight? I mean, not like "almost", but "really"?

Blog survey

That was interesting. I got this email that I thought was complete spam at first into my inbox today. Turns out a student at Buffalo is doing some research for a capstone project on blogs and how they effect purchasing decisions. Lauren has an interesting blog herself - and I'm curious how she categorized it in her own taxonomy.

Ya know...

Microsoft is clearly both pissed off and somewhat scared at the threat of Linux to it's environment, but I think in the end it'll be the best thing that ever happened to them.

Ever since they effectively squished the WordPerfect market, their product has gone downhill in terms of real functionality for the user. Competition was driving the innovation and effort to make things really fit in, really work. That hasn't existed, in any significant form, for several years. (yeah yeah, we all know they're a monopoly, even a convicted monopolist). OpenOffice - well, if it can bring some scare back into the Microsoft crowd - and Linux for the OS and Server set, then thank god!

The funny effects of naive clustering

The funny effects of naive clustering show up all to often at Amazon, where no single monkey could ever hope to keep track of the implications of the simple rules (or even complex rules) that generate the recommendations. A beautiful example is listed on Chuq's blog.

Slashdot

Slashdot has picked up the article on Haystack and the commments are pretty funny. They definitely don't get it. Given that Timothy was the one that posted it, I rather expect to see if reposted as a completely new story in about 2 weeks...

graphical programming languages and UI

Jeremy just pointed me to Martin Fowler's commentary on UML Modes. Interestingly, one of the comments on his bliki (I guess that's a variant of Wiki - er, here's his definition) brought something home:

At UmlAsProgrammingLanguage he writes:

I don't believe that graphical programming will succeed just because it's graphical. Indeed I've seen (and worked with) several graphical programming environments that failed - primarily because it was slower to use than writing code.

The first thing that sprang into my head is "Well, duh - that's because drawing with a mouse sucks!" Which immediately made me wonder if the UI wasn't sort of already handicapped. Pen based computing only really happened in niche markets, so must of us are using a mouse and a keyboard. Makes me wonder what would happen if you implementing a programming UI for a TabletPC...

WASTE, AOL, etc.

WASTE, a P2P encrypted filesharing system was pulled from Nullsoft's web site a few days back. So, now there's some new news and tidbits there. First, CNet is reporting that Nullsoft founder says he's had it with AOL. Uhm. Lessee... big surprise?

Ray Ozzie has some commentary on why he thinks it might have been pulled for export crypto restrictions, but Wes Felter isn't buying it. Given that AOL is tightly coupled with media creation and distribution, and P2P code is pretty much the devil incarnate to that crowd... well, let's say that I have my own ideas why it was yanked.

Betcha it's still out there in IRCland though...

iSync

So it turns out that this newest release of iSync supports my relatively new cell phone (and it's funny that the top link in Google for "Motorola v60i (TDMA)" isn't Motorola's site). It looks like that $2 cable is selling for about $25, so I guess I'll swing by Westlake and local ATT Wireless store and see if I can pick one up. Definitely worth it if I don't have to program all that shit into my phone.

Odd situation

You know, it's sort of an odd situation when you're checking in code and are questioned about it's base design - and you didn't design it.

That's sort of what happened today. I was tacking in some functionality that got missed (rather important) to this code archeology project. I grabbed another guy to review the code checkin with me, just to make sure I wasn't doing anything terrifically stupid. As he was looking over my changes, he said "Well, wasn't this in there before?"

"No. The object was created, but it wasn't hooked up - it's functionality was never used"

"Well, how about feature S, or feature D? Those in there?"

"Uh, no. Not that I can tell."

"Uhm. But those are really important features..."

"Yeah, I think so too."

"Shouldn't they be in there before the code is released?"

"Well, I'm just knock'n down as I find them - the code just wasn't ever really completed."

Note that I wasn't even ready to release the code - just adding in the next feature that was missed previously - but I think it suddenly became apparent to my cohort how much was left to be done.

pictures and code

Can you tell I'm avoiding my code archeaology project for the afternoon? I put in a fix this morning that ended up being very simple - objects had been created and functioned properly, but just never hooked into the flow of data.

Makes me wonder if the dataflow visualization stuff that Prograph really excelled at wouldn't have provided more insight into what I was accomplishing. I'm also beginning to think that the mixture of written code and pictures that represent that code (in objects and/or dataflow) is really something that could be attacked at the development time with a UI. There's already some nifty things in the UI realm of code development - static code analysis is becoming more common, and editors like Eclipse and Visual Studio slap up a summary list, coded with it's own little icons, of methods, variables, etc. I wonder if there's a good way to merge the design of composition through pictures and code creation.

Oh - and I wonder if you could apply this to Unit tests? I wonder if it would even be a good idea.

Salmon

It's particularly good, and fairly expensive, right now. I bought some last night for Karen and myself - found it at $11 a pound. That's quite a bit more than chicken... None the less, it was a great meal. And I think Karen really enjoyed being able to relax and putter while I created the dinner. Lately it's been typically the opposite.

So while I'm talking about food, let me remind any of you out there using microwave egg poachers that it's a really, really good idea to puncture the yolk of the egg before you fire up the microwaves. Fortunately, the little plastic poacher thingy I bought this past weekend contains the egg reasonably well, otherwise I would have had splattered egg all over the inside of my microwave.

So with all that food stuff, I'm not sure what I'm going to do for dinner tonight. I still have a fair bit of beef and sausage pieces lying about - maybe I'll make some fajita kinda of mix. Definitely need to stop by the grocery to pick up lettuce for it.

misc monday night stuff

Chuq's got a nice comment on his blog, that I unfortunately expect will not really change the way anyone does business. You know, it's just that whole business as a cost only thing that ultimately drives the actions of companies to brutally take advantage of everything and anything they can.

Gus pointed out that Buzz Anderson posted his experiment with enabling scripting into a Cocoa app. I immediately went and downloaded it, but I haven't dug into yet.

Why? Because I got my birthday present! I even found some errata (minor stuff - on page 517 in the appendix there's a minor typo that would indicate the a few really awesome books that should have been published by O'Reilly were so - but in fact they were published by a wide variety of other folks. Yeah, already submitted it. Can't even believe I spotted that. I must be in, like, nitpic mode or something. So that is making up my light reading for the evening - Cocoa in a Nutshell. Pretty well put together - nicely done.

Turns out that Karen has a classic case of "fluid on the middle ear". Her hearing is all way out of whack, and everything sounds really, really loud to her. She flinched when I shut the microwave door this morning, so we made an appointment with the Doc right then and there. Now she's on various decongestants, but it'll take a while to fully heal - I guess basically because it takes quite a while for the fluid to reabsorb into the body.

monday, monday...

Karen's home! She got back last night all jazzed from her conference and completely exhausted at the same time. I had a nice chef's salad all ready to go, so for a complete change I fixed dinner for her.

Last night sort of wound down a nice weekend. Talked with a buddy of mine in Texas for a couple hours, generally catching up and stuff. He's doing well, but I can't imagine being around place where the temp is already breaking 101.

So today I'm gettin' back to the grind. Perl coding, Oracle SQL to_char() function reading, and other miscellaneous tidbits to figure out how to generate some automatic reports. I caught a link from Wes Felter's blog that looks like it would be exceptionally useful for some of this report scripting that I'm doing: Ploticus - sort of a souped up version of GNUPlot that has all sorts of handing graphing and visualization pieces that can be plugged and used. No, I'm not integrating them - right now I'm just doing the plugins for simple machine to machine data transfer stuff.

And it's made the rounds in the various blogs, but it's worth pointing out again in case you hadn't heard of it: MIT's Haystack project has released some code. Functions best on Win2K with Java (ain't THAT a hoot!), but there's apparently a release for Linux with GTK libraries as well. It's a neat idea and certainly an excellent project to be digging around in. They (the MIT folks) are happily blurring the lines of code and data with this "love child" of Python and RDF called Adenine (PDF of Adenine documentation - yes, Adenine like the amino acid). According to their site, a large portion of the code is actually written in this new Adenine lingo. So it's something I definitely want to yank down and play with. Early reports indicate that it's a very polished research project - much better UI than expected. Looking at the papers published, I'm not suprised - UI was clearly one of the key aspects they were researching. Of course, I should be vilifying them for NOT having a release for MacOS X, but I guess I'm just not up to it today.

Well, lookee there boys...

Jeremy finally got himself a blog.. Make sure and welcome him an all - and bitch 'em out good if he slacks in posting.

Junglescan

Well that's sort of interesting. I was reading JDD's blog and noticed his comment about setting up a JungleScan for Cocoa in a Nutshell at Amazon. I guess it's a bit of interesting web-service/data-mining kind of application, scanning Amazon to see what the ranking, sales, etc of any given sale thing is. Pretty cool. I guess I contributed some, since I ordered my copy from Amazon.

Speaking of JDD, Gus reported that he got to meet him and buy him a beer while he was speaking in St. Louis. If only Gus hadn't left his girlfriend waiting at the airport for him to pick her up....

weight

I've been overweight since college. One of the things I learned very early on in college was hyperfocus. Interestingly, it wasn't really until about my 4th year of college (I was there for 5 years) that I really understood and learned how to learn. If that sounds strange to you, well maybe you haven't learned how to learn. Well, more appropriately I learned how to take advantage of "how I learn" to get things done faster and with a lot less frustration. And yes, I suck at standardized tests.

Anyway, the point, which I just happily lost, was that I've been overweight for a long time. Too long. A little over a week ago was my 36th birthday, and a conversation I had with my father really pounding things into me. I need to be dropping this extra weight, or I'm going to be facing some really, really serious problems in about 20 years. My phsyiology, as it happens, has a propensity for having veins that diverge and reconnect a bit more frequently and in smaller sizes in the brain. What this means is that I'm genetically more susceptible to strokes. My father had one - and frankly he was damn lucky to have survived. It was bad. And he has recovered exceptionally well. So I've got a few things going for me - even though I'm overweight, I also have low blood pressure (don't know why - I seem to get pissed off often enough). So that helps quite a bit. But this weight thing - well, between weight induced diabetes (I absolutely despise needles) and the increase propensity for strokes in overweight men - it's time to fix the damn problem.

So last monday I started into the induction phase of an Atkins diet. I did Atkins once before, but fell off the wagon after about 6 months. My goal, at the moment, is to take advantage of the summer vegetarianism that Karen and I inflict on ourselves to support loosing the weight and dropping my metabolic level so that it thinks that something a lot less than where I am is normal. Oh, and yes - I'll continue to eat meats - we'll just have so damn much food from the CSA Market Basket that shopping will be a pretty minimal experience for a while, and we won't be going out to eat much.

The initial results are very promising. Some time around wednesday or thursday, I'm going to need to determine if I keep myself on induction longer than two weeks. It's a pretty damn strict diet, but at least I get to eat lots of Bacon (which I otherwise help myself back from). My goal is to get my weight down to 200, and keep it there. Even that is probably high for my height, but it's a hell of a lot better than carrying around the extra poundage I do now. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to wear items on my hip - like a cell phone. I probably won't, because of my clutzy habit of running into walls and stuff when I'm not paying attention (watches die around me), but it would be nice to just be able to.

By the way, pan seared salmon and fresh, lightly steamed asparagus is a pretty damn good meal.