Rhonabwy

blogging, studies...

The Seattle PI is carrying an interesting AP article on blogging tonight. Turns out that the "market share" of US Adults who have a blog is somewhere between 2% and 7% - which is actually a hell of a lot higher than I expected. Not surprisingly, most folks who have blogs don't update them very regularly.

I'd never really looked at the Pew Internet studies before - they're kind of interesting. I think I'll have to take a serious gander at them over the next couple of days - see what interesting tidbits I can dig up in there.

Dinner and a show

Karen and I went out for a stroll this evening, without really any plans of what to see or where to go. After an hour of wandering blocks in random directions, we found ourselves down at the Hilltop Ale House, and decided that maybe dinner was a pretty good idea. So in we went.

Didn't have any great preconceived notions, but it turns out we practically had the back room to ourselves with the Oscar's showing. So we had a lovely dinner (they made a pretty decent cioppino) and watched TV for about 90 minutes. When we finally decided to leave (a couple of "dads" had dropped in to the table next to us and were talking so loudly about little league baseball that we couldn't hear the TV anymore), we realized that we'd been in there for quite a while, and wandered on home.

The cats were a little annoyed with us when we got home, but I suppose that's not unreasonable as we usually feed them a few hours earlier than they got tonight.

videophone

I'm getting really, really tempted to do something I've never done before - a casemod.

Specifically, I'm thinking of getting an old ibook, shearing off the casing, buying an ISight, and plopping the whole kit into some custom-built thingy and mailing it all off to Dan, Sarah, and Sam. Looking at EBay, I might be able to get everything together (parts wise) for maybe $400. Then a little freakish modification and maybe another $50 in materials I'm hoping would get me to the point that I've got a "plug'n'play" videophone setup.

I've got an isight with my G4 tower, and I've used it to chat with Gus a couple of times. I really like the effect, and frankly I'd like to be able to have that exact setup with my family in Columbia. They've got PC's all over the place there - which doesn't exactly interact well with the iSight as it stands today. Hence the wild ideas for making a videophone setup and just mailing it to them.

I think the technology is pretty much here to enable that kind of functionality in a fairly robust way - although both sides really, really need to have at least a DSL connection to enable the connect.

Thinking about the costs, it would almost make more sense to enable this sort of thing across "the puddle" - either ocean. The savings against long distance phone calls would be tremendous, and would probably pay off the technology expense in a matter of months. And yeah, I'm implying that the costs aren't quite worth the insanity of buying this stuff for my family quite yet. Maybe in a couple of years - but lord knows where the technology is going, so maybe it'll just appear without me having to really do any work at all!

stumps

After a generally quiet morning and early afternoon (cleaning house, paying bills, the usual crap...) I decided to get outside and see what the final effect on the yard was really all about now that the stumps have been ground. There's a few chunks of large root still lurking about (most of which I've gathered up), and I moved a few of the holly tree stumps to on top of the garage.

Some of those suckers are definately a two-man job, but first priority will be getting Karen to move her day lillies (once again). They're right in track for hauling those stumps, and while I overloaded my own personal carrying capacity, I didn't want to be responsible for trampling down her flowers any worse than they already have been.

Our daffodils, by the way, have mostly survived unscathed from all this yard chaos, and are now opening up beautifully.

The weather outside is glorious - far, far better than I'd ever thought was going to be occuring today. We've got the windows all open, the cats are in the sills, and Karen's napping while I'm scribbling at this blog and listening to a little Bela Fleck. Good stuff - best thing Phil ever brought to the Help Desk all those years ago.

Computers in education, grand theories

On the way to pick Karen up from Tacoma last night, I was listening to NPR's science friday. (Yeah, the default dial in the car radio is tuned to KUOW, Seattle's NPR station). They were interviewing the folks that won the Draper award, and there was some really interesting commentary. It's a sad state of my own knowledge that I didn't really recognize most of the folks being interviewed - although one I did was Alan Kay. The thing that really struck me from the interview was the viewpoint that technology was abolutely, positively not racing along. That it, instead, crept with a horrific and terriblly frustrating slowness. And from the point of view of these fellows, I can really see what they were talking about.

Xerox Parc was definitely "the place and they day" for inventions, radical thoughts, and new ideas when it came to computers. So many inventions, so many ideas. Things they thought up 1985 didn't really hit sothe mainstream until 1995. Things that are still being thought up and developed are taking years to make it to market.

That's sort of ironic given some decisions in business I've heard about recently (the developer of OneNote) are "will the market still be there if we start building it now"?

Another one of the concepts thrown out that I thought was particularly interesting was the role of computers in education. A lady had called in and was almost apologetic in her complaint that she thought that computers, and specifically the graphical user interface, had "dumbed down" too much of society. The response from the fellows being interviewed was interesting, in that they (I thought) really laid out well the ideas that A) education was in general terribly underfunded, B) incredibly conservative and many excellent ciricullum had been developed and never used, and C) that many results of computers teaching children had, in fact, been incredibly successful - and that much of Xerox Parc's research had been focused on children and teaching with computers. Somewhere in there it was also brought out that the graphical user interface had originally been developed to help children understand computers, and specifically how to program.

Now I'm sitting here wondering what other grand theories have been developed, thought out, and never implemented that would beneficially use computers within society. What other interface mechanisms have been dreamed up into entirety that we could be using to enhance our own lives. These guys clearly had visions of how computers could be used to enhance our lives.

Greedy Algorithm

Got a bunch of things floating around in my head this morning, one of which was inspired by a short lunch conversation the other day - a greedy algorithm and game playing. I don't really know squat about formal game theory, but I guess I've had the usual sorts of introductions that you get from reading a lot and general education. Maybe more - but I haven't explicity researched it and learned all the formal terms. One of the folks heading to lunch was taking a class or working on a project where he was supposed to be creating a couple of simple games on a computer. He was brainstorming about what kind of game to create when the conversation turned from checkers to scrabble and they dived ever so briefly into the issue of algorithms to play that game.

A greedy algorithm works reasonably well against the super-basic opponent (such as me, at least with scrabble), but against someone well versed with vocabulary, it doesn't tend to be a successful way to play to win. That concept reverberated and bounced around in my head, eventually landing and linking up with the concepts of business accounting that seem to provide an overdrive to most of businesses today. Although I know the stock market, business, and such are not a zero sum game, and scrabble, checkers, etc. is - it still appears that most of the business thinking we have running today is running on a greedy algorithm, and in it's simplicity and over-focus on short term profits is going to be loosing to other opponents in the game.

Obviously the game of business is way more complicated than a clear points-based game of scrabble, but I can't help but think that our "group mind" of corporate intelligence isn't really very sophisticated. I wander back to ideas that a group is really composed of individuals, and how individuals have a tremendous impact on a group. I look at groups that I know pretty well and their dynamics, and I think I can pretty reasonably pick out components that drive some of the group actions. I don't always like them or agree with them, but they do seem to be causal, and to that effect at least predictable.

The question in my head is wether or not an individual (or even group of individuals) can provide the intelligence to lead a company in the game of business beyond the basic "greedy" algorithm. Clearly, that's possible in that there have been lots of startups that have done just that - taken a short term hit, and generally high risk, to get a concept off the ground and start moving forward. At some point in the growth of the company, the business ultimately moves "to the next level". Typically I think that means some rigidity gets introduced to provide some level of stability to the company - processes get defined, things work in the mostly the same way, and hopefully the thrashing that generally surrounds a startup mode business dies away and things become more streamlined. The metaphor that currently comes to mind is new growth on a rosemary plant - for quite some time it's all flexible and then at some point it starts forming a more woody, rigid stem.

I guess what I'm asking is - is this really a good thing? I suppose it supports increased growth taking advantage of whatever originally food source it's found - revenues if you like. And if it grows large enough, it has the stores of a large corporation to weather droughts, or tower above the competition. Maybe even to the point of laying out toxins in nearby soil like a black walnut (damn I love those walnuts too - a legacy of my grandmother) to discourage growth of competition in the nearby area.

(sorry about that - moved from board games to business to plant metaphors)

If there's a heavy climate shift though, these guys can't adapt. They can't change, and whatever disruption usually takes them all down. Maybe this is another analog to disruptive technologies (i.e. Clayton Christensen discourse).

So could a business be successful and not get rigid? I guess that depends on how you measure success. Currently growth and ever increasing revenues appears to be the measure of success, and I'm sure I'm not the first to wonder if that's really a good success criteria. It certainly drives most businesses on the public market. Okay - now I'm getting completely lost in my head with my own metaphors. Is a plant a good example of a business, or a species of a plant. What emulates a buyers shift from one product to another? Is the competition of plants within a species reasonably analogous to businesses all vying for the same market, or is that better displayed as a area of nutrients around which multiple species of plants compete. Argh. Ok, I give up on that trail of thought.

friday afternoon

Just the sound of it is nice, isn't it: Friday Afternoon. Sort of a chill time, wrapping up for the end of the week, and not quite worrying about anything coming down the road in the next week.

This afternoon was one of those particularly good "friday afternoon's". I think I spent most of it in easy conversation, chatting with a friend at work over coffee and enjoying the burst of afternoon sun that broke through this morning's cloud cover. Even when I'd gotten home, it was still sunny and with a cool breeze - it just felt good, you know?

Karen's off in Tacoma this evening, and I expect that at some point I'll be heading down there to pick her up, but I'm not quite sure when that time is going to be. She's got my cell phone, so she'll be calling at some point this evening. In the meantime, it's scrounge for dinner. Even though I had a great dinner out last night, I'm thinking about doing it again - but I'm not sure exactly where at this point.

Maybe take a book and do a little reading while I'm out too. Dunno exactly - I want to be home for Karen's call, so I best get to doing something about this all if I'm eating out tonight.

stuff

Reading through blogs this evening, and I noticed the both Phil and Mary were talking about "stuff".

I'm a master at the "stuff" thing myself, having piles of crap in the basement that I need to just cut and loose. Books, too - they're a deadly sin. At least when the stacks get tall enough to fall on your head. Karen is fantastic about doing the Library thing, and I'm slowly getting there. We still do re-read a lot of our favorite fiction, so I guess we're generally ahead of that game.

One thing that helped with the whole "my house is full of stuff" problem that we had in Missouri was moving to Seattle. Nothing like downsizing your house to half it's previous volume to encourage you to get rid of the kibble.

So what's with the damn conference badges? That's my worst bugaboo. I can think of no conceivable reason why I should be keeping the damn things, but they always lurk around long after the event has come and gone...

yum

This evening turned into an impromptu dinner with John and Sue at the Hilltop Ale House. They have a really terrific goat-cheese salad that I'm going to recommend. Had a little trouble with the "no bun" concept with my cheeseburger, but in the end it was all a fantastic dinner there. And awesome company, of course.

Spent a lot longer than we'd originally "planned" - Okay, so we hadn't planned squat except that we were hungry, it was 7pm, and we wanted to eat. So it worked out pretty well.

pics!

Starting off, we didn't get any distance shots looking at the whole effect of the hedge and holly tree. I'll look back through old pics sometime, but these will have to do without a proper "before" shot.

First, here's the side of the laurel hedge. You can spot the hour front door a bit behind, but it's not perfect for giving you decent scale. This sucker is, no kidding, ten feet thick.

A good portion of the hedge has already been snipped, so this is as close as we get to a "before" picture. The laurel hedge, holly tree, and a fellow working hard with a chainsaw to provide scale.

Now the hedge is gone, and the tree toppled. Karen said she didn't manage to see it actually fall, but once she heard the resounding thump, she ran outside to snap the pic.

finally, the end game. Tree removed, hedge down, looking at the side of our house (kinda plain, ain't it?) that had previously been hidden by that monster of a hedge. Karen says the afternoon light is amazingly different in the house. (I missed that today, not making it home until after dark). One of the big things I noticed was that I felt exposed when walking to the front door and unlocking it. Suddenly there was this big space to me left, which had previously been rather cloistered by the all the plant growth.

The stumps get ground out some time next week from what I hear, and after that there's not a whole lot of excuse for not starting the work to lay down a patio area. I guess a palette of pavers is somewhere in the future...

Cioppino

I have really taken to this stuff recently. It's pretty close on Atkins with low carbs (it's got some with the tomato and shellfish), and it's really darn tasty. Metropolitan Market has this little counter where you can scoop out a bowl and walk off with a reasonable dinner for $5. yummy!

dear lord, that's shocking!

dear lord, that's shocking! was what I thought when I rounded the corner to come home this evening, seeing the south east corner of my house and yard unobstructed by laurel hedge or holly tree.

Karen had said earlier that the yard actually felt smaller when the tree and hedge was removed, and I can see what she means. 10 feet across of low slope up to "grade" (our yard) really seems sort of small when you're looking at it as a low mound of earth.

We have plans (don't we all?) for putting in a supporting wall around part of the yard and raising the whole set to something reasonably level. Don't know if it'll be a dry stone wall (my favorite), one of those cement-stone-block lock in place sorts of things, or something different yet.

Regardless of what we do, it's sure changed the look of the house. (pics coming soon)

laurel hedge and holly tree

As I left this morning, the monstrous laurel hedge and holly tree were seeing the end. It's the first time I have had a live tree taken down that wasn't infected or diseased. I'm still feeling a little weird about that.

Watching the laurel hedge fall under the chainsaw for a bit was strange. That sucker is like 10 feet thick. We are going to have a HUGE amount of yard back after this is all done.

Karen's taking pics, so I'll try and have something up later this evening or tomorrow.

Another whidbey island drive night

Just got back from another road trip to Whidbey Island, this time to pick up Karen. Spent about an hour in traffic downtown though - it was hideous. I tried to hop on the express lanes heading north, only to have timed it such that I got caught behind this terrible bus accident on Highway 5 that just completely blocked the crap out of everything. (For the locals, I spent an entire hour getting from Mercer to Northgate - blech!)

So I'm back now, after a good six hour road trip. About five of it driving, and I'm ready to be settling out of the car for a bit. I don't mind the long road trips in terms of driving so much on longer scale trips, but these "go do something and come right back" things wear me down a bit.

time to ship and quality

Chuq has an interesting rant about management, corporate politics, internal computing staff, and how you're measured.

The story sounds like a fubar'd project - with names, dates, and mostly places concealed to protect the innocent and guilty alike. I've seen a few projects like this, but probably not as badly horked as Chuq seems to make it out to be.

Still, he's right about the "gotta ship by" date being critical to a huge number of companies. While they're slow as molasses in many respects, small slips will eat it up pretty quick.

stood up

I realized this evening that I have a major pet peeve: getting stood up.

No, I wasn't on some date while Karen's in Whidbey - I had planned a meeting for this afternoon at 5:30. I arrived early, because I like to be a bit overly punctual. At 6pm, I left. No call, no message on the answering machine at home, no word in email.

God damn, but that pisses me off. I'd provided TWO numbers - my home and cell. You'd think that a call could have been made, wouldn't you.

stunning day

It's a truly stunning and beautiful day up here today - the first whole weekend of gorgeous sun in quite a while. It's also completely paralyzing my ability to do anything indoors, and anything useful outdoors. I'm giving in though - I bought a paperback, and there's a sunny front porch waiting for me.

Vienna Teng

While I was driving back from Whidbey Island the other evening, I was listening to NPR. I don't recall exactly what show it was, but something that highlighted asian americans on the pacific coast.

Anyway, they started talking about this lady Vienna Teng and how her vocals were very much like Sarah McLachlan and some of the other singers. They had a snap of an interview with here (here's the NPR feature page if you're curious) and I was really intrigued.

Well, I found her website without too much trouble, and downloaded some of the tunes she made available there as MP3's. I really liked what I heard, so today I tried out the iTunes music store for the first time - picking up her album - Waking Hour.

The interview said she had a new album coming out here pretty quick: Warm Strangers. Turns out she's going to be in the neighborhood in a couple weeks (Mar 5&6) - doing a promo tour and selling her album around here. From that promo tour, she's going to be a very busy lady - next couple of days after that will be in Portland, then Minneapolis, Chicago, etc...

So - I think the comparison to Sarah was pretty good. She's not a clone by any stretch, but the melodies and feel of the tunes are very comparable.

Oh - the last note on this, which I caught from NPR... They seemed to think it was pretty incredible that she has previously also worked as a software engineer for Cisco. I guess it's not so surprising to me, although that's got to be quite a jump from coden' to singen'.

Bookmercial?

This guy is seriously whacked - but he's funny. I saw several people (including Gus) reference the why's (poignant) guide to ruby.

I've got a great little book on Ruby that I fiddled with for a while, before I turned some serious attention to python. It's a neat language, but if I don't stick to only a few languages at a time, I'll NEVER get the syntax crap straight.

Anyway, if you're looking for an afternoon flip-through-some-funny-web-pages, definitely check out this guys "Book" - it is really funny.

Chunky Bacon...

What do you mean it's still February?!

I got completely and thoroughly confused on dates today, I'm sure a side effect of being very head's down at work right now. I spent all day talking like next week was the last week of March - not February.. Ah, the fun.

I stumbled out of work a little late this evening. It looks like I'll put some time in over Saturday and then hopefully be "complete enough" that I can lay about and fiddle around on beaches or something on Sunday. Karen's up in Whidbey, so I've got plenty of time to burn in the office without a whole lot of responsibility at home.

Actually, I'm getting set to flee to the peninsula coast for a few days after this whole project is said and done. Don't know where yet - if it'll be the northwest coastal area near the Hoh rainforest, down at the kite flying beaches of Ocean Shores, WA, or maybe even further south and go piddling around the various Oregon Coast areas.

Whidbey

Back from Whidbey Island. It was a pretty decent drive tonight, although the traffic heading north out of Seattle at 6:30pm was expectedly sort of icky. There was a strange bit in there were the temperature dropped rather dramatically (10 degrees), then came back up a few miles later. Microclimates, I guess.

The drive back gave me some time to organize a few things in my head, so I've been online getting some things nailed down for the past 40 minutes or so. Good stuff, but the real resolution that I came to is that a training session I'd previously scheduled for tomorrow morning just sucks in terms of timing. Such is life - I'd probably never feel like there was a good time, so I might as well take the time hit now and get it over with.

Haven't had hardly a chance to play with anything for myself over the past few nights. Gus even posted some intriguing PDF manipulatin' Python code using PyObjC, and I haven't taken any time to play with that at all.

a little background tunes

Settled down into the house for the evening now, scrawling at email and playing that never-ending-catch-up that you can get into when deeply involved in intensive, long-reaching projects.

Put on some tunes tonight - fumbling towards ecstasy. Haven't listened to Sarah McLachlan in quite some time, and I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoyed her music and her voice.

It's nice and relaxing, a component that I'm needing a good bit right now.

Tomorrow evening I drive Karen up to Whidbey Island for her next class workshop. I think the ferry is definitely part of the plan - forced relaxation.

well damn

I pretty much completely space the weblogger meetup that is scheduled for this evening, so I won't be making it - even though I said I was. Sorry guys.

-joe

fax machines suck

I know they're supposed to be this incredible business boon, but I'm currently of the opinion that all fax machines, and specifically the one I'm attempting to use right now, suck. A lot.

The copier doesn't have a problem feeding in paper reams and copying them properly, but this piece of crap annoying little shit thing certainly does - so I'm standing here feeding in pages one to three at a time and hitting in the keys to make the call each and every time.

ARGH!!!!!!

WWDC

hmmmm...

WWDC early bird registration opened today. Now I've got to get serious about finding my little hoard of cash to make that work.

new book

Received my copy of Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming yesterday - a small brown box hiding from the rain in my doorway.

I flipped through it a little bit this morning on the way to work. Neat book, and it really goes back to the basics at the beginning. At first I thought "What the hell, I don't need that!" which was quickly tempered by "do I?". So I haven't really read deep into it, but a quick skim makes it look like the first "back to basics with C" chapters are good overviews of the usual C-stuff in a textbook like format, with a lot of specific tidbits about Apple hardware and the tweaks that you can make with gcc and coding.

At the moment I don't have a huge amount of time to really dig into it, but it looks like a nice month-long project to get a low-level refresher on the core C bits associated with Darwin and MacOS X.

sleep is avoiding me

wasn't feeling particularly perky tonight, so I thought I'd hit the sack a bit early and maybe catch up on some generally lost sleep. Only sleep is avoiding me and I've been staring at a dark ceiling for the past two hours, just about completely bored out of the my skull.

blah.

autonomic systems

Ok,

I'm under no illusions that most people find this sort of stuff utterly and completely boring, but I'm pretty excited to see what IBM throws out onto the table with their release of an autonomic toolset.

In particularly, I'm really curious as to which of about a bazillion choices they made on how to implement and integrate the concepts of the technology. There's a lot of ways to implement this sort of thing that requires a rather significant addition to "cognitive load". I'm hoping that they're wrapped up some goodies that make it all happen under the covers - so that it "just works". I'm not expecting miracles, but I'm still on my half-broken-down-crate-of-peaches soapbox about excessive complexity.

Part of this extends from the fear and loathing that most rational coders would get when looking at the original implementation of the SP2 control infrastructure. Yes, this is an arcane reference to an old operating system and product from IBM. I was, and still am, incredibly disappointed in the "what could have been" with the technology they had there, and they really fucked it all up. The good concepts have all been nicked, and are now mostly available in a decent beowulf cluster.

twilight zone

Got into the office this morning just before 9am, and it felt like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Jeez - I mean, the streets were dead, the building was locked - like someone had forgotten to turn on the "monday", if you know what I mean. Just really freaky...

So I finally found out it's president's day - which means kids all over the place are home from school today, which begins to explain the complete lack of pedestrian and street traffic I saw. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the office was a ghost town today - just following along this course all day.

Means I'll be able to get some good shit down, I hope.

bite me

That comment gave me a huge smile today.

In fact it was: biiiiiiiiiiiite me :) - a response to a particularly snotty note I'd sent one of my friends earlier this weekend. I'm not saying who or why though. Just cause.

Had a pretty nice day today. Been suffering a bit of the "sunday blah's", which has been wonderfully mitigated by being outside most of the day. Walked 18 holes of golf with Nathan, wandered down to coffee to visit with John and Sue. Still need to think about dinner, but the day has been really nice. A bit on the cool side for a spring day (i.e. definately a day to wear wool), but generally lovely.

After a terrific day on Friday, I know this coming week will be a crusher in terms of stress, so I'm fretting about it, naturally. Why wait, after all - might as well get started now when there's no real reason to fret at all. Being outside and pretty much unplugged all weekend helped.

Maybe I'll play with some more python this evening, or watch or movie, or read a book. Something more to keep my mind occupied, because it seems to be "an idle mind is the devil's work" for me right now.

a good day

It's been a good day, and frankly it's been a while.

Last night I was wigging out pretty bad from stress related to a particularly large project active at work right now. Almost, but not quite, to the point of insomnia.

Today, it's all floated away with a string of successes where "things just worked". It's always sweet when that happens, and today was particularly good. Without giving away any details, software components fired up and worked with very minimal tweaks, the proper accesses had all been granted, and some intial tests functioned not only well, but far exceeding expectations of performance.

Sweet.

I still think I'm going to try and completely unplug for the weekend, as next week looks to be a crush, but I'm not nearly as worried now. There's still a bazillion things that could go wrong, but it looks like it'll all be stuff that will be (relatively) easy to tweak and fix.

Update: And strangely, it was only reading my own blog entry that I realized that my "good day" happens to have fallen on Friday the 13th...

python accessors

Geek question:

While I've been happily fiddling around in Python, I've been using a variety of methods to deal with "stupid input" to methods on my classes. Normally, I wrap any sanity checking into accessor methods on an object, create the unit tests, and keep it all going from there. (yeah, java background).

Well that I sort of clued in that using the class attributes directly was really damn convenient, and a lot of example code that I've been thumbing through uses that methodology. Many of them don't test or sanity check the values shoved in - so I don't have a good example on how others are dealing with this problem.

The question buried in all this rambling is "What's the python way?" Do the python cognescenti create accessor methods on their classes when they need to check? Am I being excessively java-paranoid in this lovely dynamic typed world?

an example:

class fred:
 def __init__(self):
  self.name = ""

or something more paranoid:

class paranoidfred:
 def __init__(self):
  self._name = ""
 def name(self):
  return self._name
 def setName(self,newname):
  if (isinstance(newname,type("a"))):
   self._name = newname
  else:
   raise Exception, "sod off you dolt, that ain't a string"


I mean, obviously good ole' paranoid fred would work for that used-to-be-known-as-prince guy...

ideas?

Legacy Art and BookWorks

Legacy Art and BookWorks, Inc. is the name of the art gallery and book conservation shop that Karen set up almost 8 years ago with Jim Downey.

After a long, hard run at turning the corner into profitability, it's giving it up and shutting down. Karen and Jim tried a huge number of gambits, but the end result really seemed to be that Columbia, MO simply couldn't support a for-profit art gallery with any reasonable effectiveness. The Columbia Daily Tribune has an article, and there's another at the (student run) Digitial Missourian. I think the Trib's coverage and detail is probably the better of the two.

Karen left active participation in the gallery 2 1/2 years ago when she moved up to Seattle with me. I was actively involved in assisting there, although frankly I sucked with a cash register. I was pretty good at the grunt work and serving wine at the receptions though.

I still remember the "build it out" party we had almost 8 years exactly where we invited 20 of our closest friends to help tear out the remains of a bicycle shop and to rebuild the interior so that it would support a space for displaying art. It was a good time, although I frankly thought the sanding would never end (we did a fair bit of drywall work there).

The gallery will be open a while longer to get things into place for an orderly shutdown. Columbia is loosing a huge asset there, but I'm glad Jim is moving on. It was a hell of a run and a lot of good times (and some pretty shitty ones at times too when money was more-than-a-little tight). Well worth everything we invested in it.

mimicry is the sincerest form of compliment...

And so Gus get's a big kudo

battery

Yeah! My new iBook battery came in! Thank goodness - because I was getting sick of not being able to easily pick up the iBook and walk away from the power cord. It's now quietly charging over on the table.

experimental cooking

from the department of "well, if you'd thought about that first, you dork..."

So this morning I got all excited about that new hand mixer I bought and decided to whip the eggs up to quite a flurry before dropping it into a skillet for a little souffle-ish kinda thing.

I went simple, just four eggs, small bowl. Mixing went fine - no terrible catastrophe's there (definitely something that could have happened, but I kept the kitchen mostly clean during this component of the experiment).

So what I've learned is: bake the souffle. You see, it's a real pain in the ass to flip one of those suckers in a skillet. The extra air beat into the eggs makes things fluff up all purty, but it also effectively puts in an insulation layer of sorts. I needed consistent heat from top and bottom to make the whole thing cook through, and I didn't have it.

So - yes, I was stupid - I decided to attempt to flip that sucker. As it turns out, the top was still really, really liquid. I used my finest technique (which is still pretty rough compared to any reasonable cook) and the result was that sort of water-from-the-faucet-hitting-the-ladel-too-fast response. A geyer of completely uncooked and whipped to a froth egg immediately launched itself into one of those catenary arch curve, properly aimed so that most of the it hit me in the neck and right should, with the remaining continuing over my shoulder and some of it just spooging right on down into the burner.

That's really the exciting part of it all. After that it was some "oh damn, I should have thought that through..." and cleaning. What remaining in the skillet was actually pretty good, although not all perfectly fluffy. I frankly didn't expect anything resembling fluffy at all, given the need to flip the darn thing, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that I'd still managed to retain something there.

So next time - preheated oven and baking.

MacOS X 10.3.2 freezes

Now I'm getting suspicious...

Over the past few days, I've been seeing the periodic freeze of my laptop (iBook with MacOS X 10.3.2 on it). I resolved today to do a bit of diagnostics the next time it happened.

When it locks, it locks up good - no menu response, although the mouse cursor continues to track around the screen. From an external machine, I attempted to SSH in - no response. Looking more closely, I wasn't even getting pings back. Asking the finder for a "force quit" didn't do me any good - no response. The only response I managed to get was a forced reboot, which I always hate to do.

I wonder if the NSLookupd problem that the servers are experiencing are hitting the laptops and desktops with just client installed after that last security patch...

another programming book...

Even though I'm spending a lot of my spare time fiddling with python at the moment, I just bought another MacOS X programming book. I was sort of meaning to purchase it for quite a while, but frankly the original price ($95) was just a bit too steep for me.

Well, the price for Core Mac OS X And Unix Programming:
Master Darwin and the Core Technologies just dropped to $65, and that was enough to kick me over the edge. I saw the announcement in the latest ADC Newsletter. So that's kind of cool. I'm sure I be digging into all sorts of low level API strangeness when it arrives, completely occluding any other spare-time project work I will be fiddling with.

I might have a bug...

Woke up really late this morning - not terribly surprising, but I've been sleeping a hell of a lot more than usual lately. I'm wondering if I'm not fighting off some bug. Karen has sinusitis, and plenty of folks around me have had some level of ick, so it's entirely possible.

Last week I had a particularly rough day too - although I'm not really experiencing any other symptoms than tiredness.

Haven't worked on the computer pretty much all day - in fact, I didn't even touch email until 10 minutes ago, when I decided to sit down and do a little writing while Karen was fiddling with some soup creation process in the kitchen.

I spent most of the day riding the busses back and forth from downtown actually - well, most of my awake day anyway. I bought a hand mixer (mine's white, not fancy stainless) and a really nice food scale. The first to attempt some fancy egg cookin' experiments (souffle's) and the second just to make sure I have a clue about how much I'm actually eating (so far I've been overestimating, not underestimating).

The downside was that the first scale I brought home was whacked and wouldn't keep a stable weight count, regardless of what was or wasn't on it. So that meant a trip back downtown to return it and get another one. That was fine, although I was a little grumpy about it - only that I had a classic "bad bus day" on the way home. I missed the bus I wanted by 2 minutes, meaning I had to wait for 30 minutes for the next one, and then the bus driver was confused about her route and made us all hop off some 9 blocks from my house - when I should have been able to basically ride all the way home. That running slightly up-hill for two blocks trying to catch the bus made me think that maybe I've got a bug - as my lungs were terribly burning after that jaunt. On the plus (?) side I went from being tired to being incredibly pissed off.

Blowing off a half hour and letting myself cool down again seemed the better part of valour before returning home, so I grabbed a soda from the supermarket and did some people and dog watching on Queen Anne Avenue. I'm still half grumpy/cranky from the bus experience, but I'm continuing to chill out.

evening sky

Spent the evening down at the coffee shops. El Diablo had some really nice live jazz tonight, but it was a bit too loud for me in the enclosed space. That pushed me a little farther down towards Boston, where I tried out Tully's and Starbucks, and ended up lurking in Starbucks simply because I found one the big fluffy chairs in front of the fireplace open.

Once I dropped in, and opened my book - I was out for a while. Made for a really pleasant evening.

Walking home, it was clear that it had been raining, and that raincloud had moved off the immediately overhead sky and on to somewhere else. The pavement was wet, and the sky very, very clear. Looking up, the moon - just past full I guess - was lighting everything up. Right next to it was a planet shining brightly - didn't know what one.

Found out that you can tell wonderfully easily using Weather Underground's astronomy link. Saturn's also out there this evening, but in a different quadrant of the sky - one mostly obscured by light clouds this evening - or at least at the moment. Pretty cool.

dagnebit

Our hand mixer is gone. Dead.

As I had half the cupboards out and on the kitchen floor, looking for the darn thing, Karen finally informed me that she'd pitched it over Christmas because it's motor finally burned out.

Well, dagnebit.

So I made something closer to a frittata for dinner than a souffle... I just wasn't up to all the hand mixing without a little help to get "stiff peaks" from eggwhites. It was pretty tasty, but not what I'd been planning on.

Actually, the whole dinner mess became sort of befuddled when I looked up how many carbs where in mussels. darnit. That hangtown fry I had for lunch was really good, and I wanted a repeat - but I'll have to spread it out over a couple of days now.

a little detective work

Spent the afternoon doing a little hardware/software detective work with a friend. He has a Dell Inspirion laptop that he was replacing the hard drive in. That part he had all down, no problem - the problem was getting the old hard drive to mount via an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) interface into a new enclosure that he'd purchased to keep the old drive (still viable, just not very speedy) alive and useful.

Well, after much fiddling, including me bringing my own 2.5" laptop drive to the party, we determined a number of things.

1) The power drain on the firewire drive from the inspirion laptop was seriously heavy and caused a reboot we you "just plugged it in". We think this was because the power was through a secondary (ps2) port feed as the 1393 interface was a 4pin one...

2) The FAT32 filesystem is readable between macs and windows without issue. NTFS aint (my iBook couldn't do anything with it)

3) The Dell installed OS has something with it that a barebones install doesn't. Some driver, something - probably supporting their own custom 1394 interface card or such. We ended up figuring out that we could mount the NEW drive via firewire, with the old drive in the laptop, but not vice versa.

4) reassembling a clamshell iBook is a hell of a lot harder than disassembling it (well, I learned that on my own). It's back together and happy now though.

caucus

Tomorrow is the Caucus' in Seattle. Ought to be an interesting experience - never been to anything like this before. The joys of getting involved with politics in a state you didn't grow up in. So many things there that you just can't assume are true anymore...

Had a pretty good day today, settling down into the evening with watching a couple of movies. Nothing tremendous, just a nice quite evening on the couch.

My battery has apparently shipped from Apple, which is darned nice - as I'm sick of not having something to carry power from one wall switch to another. It's amazing how accustomed you can get to sleeping the laptop and just picking it back up on the other side. But right now - it's just 0% and steady.

New Cocoa Technology Evangelist

Cool!

Matthew Formica posted to the Cocoa-Dev list that he was Apple's new Cocoa & Developer Tools Technology Evangelist, as well as Developer Tooks Evangelist...

Chimoo Timer

I was scrambling around for a stopwatch today and found Chimoo Timer on VersionTracker.

It's a great little timer, although for my use I wish the space bar had been enabled as stop and start - I needed something to do "wall clock timing" of processes at work for some quick'n'dirty benchmarking. It worked pretty darn well...

well, I'm even more surprised now

damn, as I thought it was a pasty...

webserver on a laptop

Lots of people have talked about it, but I'm going to join the mob doing the same thing anyway.

It's unbelievably cool and effective to have your day to day desktop machine include unix under the covers, with MySQL, Perl, Python, PHP, and Apache already in place and running.

Last night I snagged the MySQLdb module for python, and pitched it onto my desktop and laptop. I already had phpMyAdmin installed and enabled with MySQL, and I'm having a blast.

The turnaround on trying something out when all the windows are on the same machine is just fantastic, and I'm making some great progress on some toys I've been meaning to move a little farther down the track for a while. I have my complete n-tier environment at my fingertips...

Fortunately, I've not been suffering from any pain with the last security update, but then I'm not running a copy of MacOS X Server at home either. I'd thought about it, but I don't really have the need for my home (at this point anyway - who knows in the future).

I'd been coding in java with eclipse up until a day ago - and I took a break to fiddle with the OS again. Now I'm wondering if some of that development wouldn't have been better done with python under Apache to prototype exactly what I was wanting - or even run it full bore. I'm finding that I'm getting more accomplished and more quickly. I honestly expect some of that is that I'm a bit behind in the technology of the servlets world, and frankly it's left me behind a bit. So now I have a learning curve there, and it's working far more quickly for me as I edit and test live python scripts. I don't have as deep of knowledge of the python libraries as I do of some of the (older anyway) java ones - so it's not all free and clear, but it feels a lot faster - which counts for a hell of a lot...

dark, again

Got home a little late this evening (didn't leave the office until 6:30pm), and it was already dark when I hit the streets. That's a real bummer sometimes - I'd been getting used to seeing a little sunlight on my way home these past few weeks. Come summer, it'll be light until nearly 10pm... in the meantime - well, we get the other side of living this far north of the equator.

In the meantime, Karen's off at the Northwest Garden and Flower Show, from which I'm supposed to retrieve here some time around 9pm. She loved the show last year, and I hope it's a repeat performance in quality for her. She's planning on heading there tomorrow as well - some seminars she was really interested in are happening then. (No, don't know which one - just that 'tomorrow' had 'more interesting' seminars).

personalized rss - how to provide securely

I've been fiddling around with some server bits, and I'm up against a quandry. I wonder if any of you have seen solutions that you liked, disliked, or created (I'll presume you generally like your own creations unless you say otherwise).

Here's the idea. I want to provide a personalized "rss" feed over the free-floating internet wilds. The data inside the feed probably isn't super-secret or anything, but I would expect the average person wouldn't want someone just randomly looking at their data. So how do you provide this with some reasonable security?

Some ideas so far:

1) ye olde "Security through Obscurity" - include some key as a variable on the http request for the feed that indicates what data should be provided. The back-side would have a mapping of key to person's data and would translate appropriately. Quick, easy, and nothing called secure.

2) userid/password - Yeah - NetNewsWire supports it: adding a userid/password pair for 'simple' http authentication. If I'm feeling particularly paranoid, offer the rss feed only over https - although to be honest I'm not sure if NetNewsWire supports that.

3) embed a crypted password in the URL. Ugly as all get out, and sort of frightening to my sense of cleanliness, but use an MD5 on a password and go ahead and send the MD5 hash across the wire as an argument on the http request URL. I suppose you could make this pretty and hide it from easy prying eyes with a POST request instead of a GET, but realistically it'll be a GET that you paste into NetNewsWire to keep abreast of your feed.

Anyone got some other ideas? comments?

A tad under the weather

Feeling a bit under the weather today, and no - that's not a reference to the low cloud ceiling which is common in Seattle this time of year. I won't go into those gory physical details, but suffice that I called in sick from work today to sleep in and see if I can kick whatever this is with a day of rest.

So far it's going along reasonably well - although it may be more appropriate to say I'm working from home than staying home sick. I did sleep in (quite late! It was glorious, although I feel like I lost most of a day) but I'm not really at full par either.

I made sure to get out to vote though. The walk felt good, I just took it easy. I stopped into El Diablo/Queen Anne Ave Books to relax for a bit again (strange how being sick makes walking just a few blocks quite the excercise) and read up on some recipies.

I'm thinking about trying a souffle, and while I was looking at recipies I realized that Scotch Eggs could be modified pretty easily to be completely low carb. I've never made a souffle before, but it sounds like an interesting challenge, and I think it would make for a bit of variety (which I'm currently lacking in my diet).

The last one that really appealed to me (I was looking in the egg section of a cookbook) was a hangtown fry, which I dearly love but usually eat alone (Karen really doesn't care for the flavor all that much).

Another plane (not plain) game

When I was back in Missouri for the wedding, Dan introduced me to Secret Weapons over Normandy, by LucasArts. Previous flying fun had just been with Crimson Skies - and I was sort of disappointed that they let you run into clif walls and such and just "bounce off". Well, not in this new one!

It doesn't have all the flying gizmo's that Crimson does, but the planes are a bit more "realistic" to fly (meaning damned difficult sometimes), and there's a lot more to pay attention to. Stalls can kill - as do running into things (Thank God!)

It's a neat game, and I've been playing it this evening for a few hours. I'm not sure it'll be a good work game (although there's a neat co-op mode), but it's definitely more of what I was hoping to see with a flying combat game than Crimson Skies. I've stopped now for a while - time to read up a few sites and take it easy. I've been sort of queasy since yesterday, and it hasn't gone away... bleh!

what the hell is a fugue anyway?

A friend online said that I sounded like I was in some mental fugue state. Ok, so I know it's some music term, but what the hell does that really mean anyway?

Closest I can tell is that I keep repeating back to the same ideas and thoughts again and again with only minor variations - stuck in some strange loop within a loop within a loop within a... yeah.

My attention span is quite decidedly short this evening, and I wish it wasn't so late on a sunday night that all the coffee shops were closed up. Yeah, I could go grab something at one of the late night dinner places - but I don't really need to eat anything after that monstrous feast at Nate and Leah's. More just feeling like I want to get out of the house and be doing something else for a while.

Strangely, I sort of wish that I could be somewhere relaxing and taking it easy. I guess I'm just still wound up a little tight inside. Work I suppose - it usually is. But I've been pretty good about not obsessing and checking my work email or looking at work status graphs over the weekend. As in only once each day. Ok, so that IS sad. And now tomorrow is a Monday and the whole routine basically starts over again, a week later. Maybe that's the fugue that I'm in.

Well, maybe I'll try hitting the sack and see how that goes.

Oh - found a definition of a fugue at WikiPedia.

ok, there's a problem here...

CNET has an article entitled Gates takes swipe at Apple, Linux security - which is mostly giving on overview of Gates comments about security while he was in London, getting knighted. But here's what I'm not getting:

"Everybody who had their software completely up-to-date (during the epidemics) was immune to those problems. But only 20 percent of our customers were, so obviously, we weren't doing enough."

and then

"Gates said "virtually all" Microsoft customers are now using automatic patching, but in the past, even this has proved problematic."

So does this mean that "virtually all" is equivilant to 20%? Either Matt Loney took something out of context (not impossible), or Gates is babbling shit again (also not impossible).

In the meantime, Microsoft is offering a bounty on the folks that wrote this latest thing which is clogging up my mailbox with crap. Not much of a bounty in my opinion, given Microsoft's hoard of cash and the continued damage to their illusion of a secure operating system. Still - I wish the damn thing would stop. Each day I'm deleting quite a pile of virus-infected mail on my "maybe insecure" Macintosh.

Suupa'bow

Yep, it's that sunday again - the mighty CommercialBowl game! We headed over to Nathan and Leah's for a party surrounding the game, and as usual it wasn't a problem if you blocked the game - but god forbid you block the commercials!

Actually, while there were some amusing ones, there weren't any really great ones to my mind. I still fondly recall the herding cats commercial that EDS did - I thought that was just fantastic. But actually, just watching the game on HDTV was pretty much worth a sit, and there was a tremendous abundance of food and great company to boot. It was sort of a cross between Leah and Nate's music oriented friends and the "poker crew", with a few extras (like myself and Karen) thrown in.

No, I'm not turning into a football fan, you don't need to worry on that account. Still, the game was pretty good - close and several turnovers. Not much else to really say about it. The smoked ribs sort of took my attention as much as the game.

nano-scare

John loaned me a new thriller to go absorb: Crawlers. It was a pretty decent read - I devoured it this afternoon and evening instead of doing anything "useful". I thought it was generally superior to the last nano-tech thriller I read - for which I now can't seem to call up the name. I thought it was by Clive Barker or Stephen King, but searching around for a few hits on Amazon or Google isn't really telling me anything...

Ahh - there we are - a little digging in the blog - it was Prey that I wrote about (self referential to a fault - hey, the news media can do it, so can I!) Wow - and that was nearly 14 months ago now.