Rhonabwy

reading the news

You know it's just not going well when you sit down to read the news, and the first thing you see is the details of charred american "contractors" (read mercenaries) being hung from a bridge and generally vilified in the country that we're "saving". Oh yeah. Good idea. Great thing we're there to save all that oil.

I just hope those guys made decent money before they died. That's all they got for it.

It's fucking disgusting. Our president has made such a hash of it, I don't know how we'll ever get out of it.

reading

So while I'm being pensive, I'm also doing some focused surfing tonight (as opposed to the mindless variety) - starting from the latest ramblings from Clay Shirky. In his latest bit (entitled Situated Software), he references an essay The Rise of ``Worse is Better'' by Richard Gabriel. It's an interesting essay, and worthy of a read - because I believe it applies to more than just the topic for which he originally wrote it. In fact, I actually see a few analogs between that essay and Chris Pratley's blogging about the inception of OneNote.

So the past few ramblings of Mr. Shirky have left me decidedly chilled toward his work, but this month (or quarter - whatever scale he publishes on) is a bit diffferent. It strikes a resonance with me, on a couple of different levels. I'm not sure he's got it all nailed down there, but there's an appealing "yeah" sort of feeling that I get when I read it - thinking that it made sense intuitively to me, as well as based on what I've seen people do in the technology game.

pensive

I've been particularly pensive over the past few weeks. Not getting much done in specific, as I find myself unwilling to really sit down at the keyboard much in the evening - other than a default sort of mindless web surfing. I'm not really sure what this is all about inside my head, other than I'm in a contemplative mode at the moment, more prone to navel gazing than usual right now.

It doesn't seem to be all the bad, except I feel bad about not getting more done on my personal projects than I have been. If I sit down, and start fiddling a little (or something like that) I get into it, but I think I've been lacking some essential balance between my geek-headspace-world and the more physical.

ah, dagnebbit

working away today and the hard drive just completely failed on my office desktop. Nothin', nada, zilch. It's dead. I got another machine, but it's not ready to go straight from scratch, so I'm spending the afternoon reinstalling Windows and all the sundry crap that goes along with it. From the looks of the installation rate, I think I'll be doing this well into tomorrow morning or afternoon as well.

I'm not hurting from a loss-of-files point of view - I didn't keep much of import on the desktop, but it does just blow a day of productivity to have your workstation change out from underneath you.

downtown Seattle sunset

Samantha took a lovely picture (at least I think it was Samatha - maybe it was Jeff) of downtown seattle looking towards it across the public pier with the sunset coloring a bunch of the buildings.

Don't really have anything brilliant to add - I just liked it.

Dan Wood did something really cool!

Dan Wood, creator of Watson did something amazingly cool this evening.

On the Cocoa-dev list, he posted that he is making available one, maybe more, DTS incident's with Apple Technical Support. The rules to getting it are set up to insure that the information gets shared with everyone. From his post:

DA ROOLZ:
- You need to have an account with apple developer connection that I can transfer the incident to
- You need to be an individual, a student, or a small business developer.
- You need to tell me what problem you're trying to solve so I know that it is not an easy question that can be answered by searching the archives here
- You will share your findings with the community by posting your question and the answers you get, so we all can benefit.
- Processed on a first-come, first-served basis.

I'm sure Apple is expecting that at least a fair number of these things will just expire naturally, but I think it's particularly cool that Dan is putting up some equity for the "common good" as it were to get some assistance to an indie or student developer who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford that detail of support.

Whoa, summer!

Just crawled out of bed, sweltering under the covers. Thought what the hell? and looking outside it's pretty clear that we've got a beautiful summer-ish day going on here. Karen says the party won't last, and that the rains are still coming for a while, but boy is it nice outside.

Had some bouts of insomnia last night that had me up and down all night, never really getting any decent sleep until 8am this morning. Figures.

(by the way, it's getting light WAY early now)

dandelions will die!

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

Another day of terrorizing the dandelions before I head out to get my hair cut. Tried to take the car to get it's oil changed, but the place I normally go is closed on Sundays. Forgot that...

So now I'm digging dirt out from under my fingernails, contemplating the purchase of an $400 piece of software, scoffing the latest from our President's desperate, lying mouth on the digital divide. (For the record, I don't think outsourcing is a bad thing economically for us (painful - not bad), but I do think most of President Bush's policies are!)

If I was really into website design, it'd probably be worth shelling out the $900 for the Studio package - but I've never done Flash work and I'm not sure I'm interested in it enough to throw cash at it before I start to seriously play. Seems like something that would easily eat hours and hours of time.

On related pricey purchases, Karen wants a copy of InDesign, which I'm tempted to say "go for it", even with a price tag of $700. She's been thinking about doing some publishing work, used to use PageMaker on a day-to-day business when she was at Legacy, and think could make some good use of the program. Of course, she also says that she doesn't need it, she's just excited about it - which I suppose is a credit to Adobe's marketing and the folks that made the code. She's going most of her day-to-day layout kinds of stuff (handouts, etc) with Illustrator right now - so I guess she's reasonably covered for the moment.

Oh - and back to the title at hand - I ended up with a pile of dandelions (and cat's ear) up to my knees from the front verge. The dead were piled at my feet, and I proclaimed myself victorious! That's about the point when Karen pointed out the hoards of dandelions roaming the backyard and side verge. So now I know how the roman's felt at the sacking of Rome around 600AD. Damn things just keep on coming.

grilling in the rain

Well, we don't do weather very well around here. The reports all said that this morning was going to be rainy, clearing this afternoon and evening - so Karen and I had planned to do a little grilling this evening for dinner.

Turns out that the weather was pretty much exactly opposite that - we had a lovely morning and afternoon, with the evening turning rainy.

I still managed to get the grill fired up between showers, the food cooked (even well, not way under done), and the grill mostly cooled again before the next set of showers started up.

It's spring. I know I should expect this. But I wanted to grill without worrying about the darn rain. Ah. Yeah. I do live in Seattle, heh?

Thai, Clouds, Speakeasy, Orkut

I have not been great about my diet this week, including this evening - but at least the food was tasty! In fact, I even managed to get some Thai tonight (panang curry, one of my favorites - with brown rice). I wasn't the only one hankerin' for a little thai food either, from the looks of my blog browsing this evening.

So really not too much to report from the day. It rained, but not as much as reported from Columbia, MO. It was a Seattle rain - which means you can pretty much ignore it. Okay, it was a little heavier than that today, but not much, ya know? I wore a hat to keep my glasses from getting speckled with drops and obscuring things horribly, and I enjoyed watching the low clouds sweep over the skies in their multitudes of tones and shapes.

I've been thinking a little about what I might write next, some article somewhere, but haven't yet really decided on any topic that "needs to get written". Usually, I can't get something out of my head once I start until I write it - so obviously nothing is really pounding at the door right now.

The words from a friend tonight is DELIGHTFUL (he specified all caps) - in regards to the ISP Speakeasy. Turns out they provided truly awesome service and support for Nathan, and he's singing their praises right now. He's migrating from another local DSL provider - and I've got to admit, I'm getting tempted to migrate to Speakeasy myself. Don't know that it would be any cheaper, but all reports of their service and quality have been outstandingly high.

Hmmm. Oh - and I finally hooked into Orkut and fiddled around a bit. Interesting - that's about it. I kept myself from spamming a bunch of my friends with that one (although if you're interested - tell me... No qualms about inviting someone who wants the link)

headache

Today went well and all, but I'm still roaming about the house, cleaning at the last minute of course, with a headache. Just a long day I guess.

I'm still learning the routes to my new office - nothing is yet ingrained in a pattern really. I generally love having Aurora Ave so close and on Queen Anne, but to be honest - at the moment I'm thinking it's a real pain in the butt. Getting from one side to the other from on top of Queen Anne is a really significant hurdle, so even though the office is closer than it's ever been before, I'm walking about the same distance because I have to circle around one side or the other to cross Aurora without playing Frogger. April 7th is the day the pedestrian overpass at Galer St. should go into action - that'll be nice.

Popped some aspirin, made some tea, fed the cats - all the normal evening stuff is moving right along. They still, amazingly, don't like the vacuum cleaner. Can't understand it. I was only trying to pick up a little extra fur...

Good lord

Reading my blog, you'd think "what's going on with Joe?, He's not writing consistently..."

Well, you'd probably be reasonably correct. Nothing specific really, just busy. Karen's in Victoria and having a wonderful time. I'm hangin' at home with the boys, one of whom currently has my left arm pinned to the table while he's cleaning himself. Ah, well - the things you do for your cats.

Had a great evening down on Queen Anne Ave with a couple of friends tonight. Had dinner at Pete's Pizza, and coffee afterwards at El Diablo. Just wandered home, so I don't think a whole lot is going to get accomplished here tonight. A couple of personal projects are languishing a bit this week, but I'm hoping that the next couple of weeks will continue to be rainy to encourage me to get more more bits knocked out and some baselines put together.

In a strange way, I'm still sort of on a euphoric high from my brainstorming this past sunday evening. It's not often I get such a burst of creativity, and I've been reflecting on it in my notebooks all week, scribbling down this thought and that - investigating (briefly) side ideas and implications from the original concept.

Finally!

Holy Cow!

I mean, they finally made a good hardware agreement. They who? E-Ink made a hardware agreement with Sony to publish an electronic book using the E-ink technology. A few more rounds of products and maybe I'll be able to actually use a laptop in direct sunlight.

Heh - my name in lights...

well, at least documentation. I was re-reading all the docs from James' UnitKit and realized only this evening that I was credited with poking him into some brilliant insight regarding the design - heh.

UnitKit

James Duncan Davidson has released the wonderful UnitKit - now at version 0.6.

It's a wonderful implementation of a unit testing framework - the best part being how well it integrates into XCode to provide good testing messages in the normal IDE process of warnings and errors on compile. The kit includes some sample projects and templates to enable unit testing in your projects.

So if you're coding for MacOS X, check it out.

Autonomic systems & user interfaces

A year ago, the IBM Systems Journal had a spring issue devoted to Autonomic Computing.

I've been particular interested in the research and ideas behind that topic for quite a while, so I periodically pick one of the articles out and read it. Well, tonight I found a real beauty: Dealing with ghosts: managing the user experience of autonomic computing by Daniel M. Russell, Paul P. Maglio, Rowan Dordick, Chalapathy Neti. (PDF from IBM Research Web Site)

I know it's popular to comment about how nobody but Microsoft has invested in research, but if you believe that - I recommend you read the IBM Systems Journal each quarter. That'll wake you up. Or put you to sleep, one of the two.

Anyway - the article is really interesting in that it explicitly lays out a bunch of rules of thumb and lessons learned about providing a good user experience for the autonomic computer experience. It's not a step-by-step guide, but it's really good input for anyone thinking of setting up an automated system that users will have to deal with. The really outline the details of how those systems can be frustrating, and what software designers should be thinking about in order to make them NOT frustrating.

AppleScript

I saw at Studio Log that one of the newer articles in the Apple Reference Library was one entitled Getting Started with AppleScript. It's a little embarrasing to admit that I've been "getting started" with it a good six or seven times now, and it's just never really stuck. I'm not sure why - the language isn't really all that complex (although it is really verbose), and the functionality that it enables is simply amazing (I'm still convinced that it's one of Apple's secret weapons and work to put at least minimal support for it into my Cocoa applications). Never the less, I always seem to be at a "getting started" point with it.

So this article is really more of a "where to go" kind of thing than an article on getting started itself - but still, it's got good links and looks to be useful for that sort of purpose.

retrospect on Saturday

Wow - I didn't write a thing yesterday. I must be getting distracted, because I checked my email a couple dozen times, so you think I would have put some of that day into a blog entry...

It was a pretty cool day, actually. Spent the morning running errands including the purchase of a set of fire extinguishers, a carbon monoxide/smoke detector, and some thank you gifts for some folks in north Queen Anne near SPU. Got that all settled out about 11:00am, and wandered over to Ray's Boathouse to have lunch with Leah on the deck out there. We wrapped up in wool blankets and had yummy food and chatted away the early afternoon until about 1pm.

That afternoon I went dandelion crazy and created a pile of weeds by yanking the little buggers out from all over the yard. Mostly it was dandelions, but I decided to proclaim war on the cat's ear too - those little rosettesof mutant dandelions that squeeze out all the grass around them. I didn't even come close to purging the lot of them, but I filled a 5 gallon bucket with weeds, so I figure I made a significant dent. Lord knows why I took a sudden hanking to the destructive side of gardening, but there you have it...

Spent the later part of the evening playing Go with Karen - working through the first part of the Learning Go book we got. The evening fell off pretty gracefully writing in my paper notebook into the evening as a I had a burst of inspiration that I didn't want to let falter.

In re-reading the notebook this morning, I'm not sure I captured everything from the inspiration, but I sure made a good hit at it. I wrote enough to rejigger my memory, if not the full set of euphoria that I had while I was thinking through the details of what I'd come up with. That whole inspiration thing is really pretty rare for me, so I'm glad I wrote about it when I did. When I woke up this morning, I tried to pick up where I left off and keep running with it, but my brain had sort of moved into specific focus with other things after a night's sleep, and current "hmm, how should I solve that..." sorts of problems kept working their way into my thoughts while I tried to recapture and rekindle the brainstorm I was having.

I do think I'm going to scour up some code and try some ideas out though. I've no idea if it'll have any long term benefits, but I suspect it will at least have some really interesting implications for some of the projects/problems I'm thinking about.

I don't know if I want to write about it in my blog or not though. It's one of those "ooh, it's mine" sort of ideas that's making me want to hoard it closely. I'm not sure if that's good or not, but I guess that's what I'm doing for the time being.

Hidalgo (warning, spoilers)

It's been out for a while, so I guess releasing a few spoilers is OK. Karen and I went to see Hidalgo today.

I really enjoyed the movie, and found out that my wife can curse like a sailor. Okay, so here's the deal - don't take someone who's really empathetic with horses to this flick. Karen about crawled out of her seat and on to my head during the scene in the desert where they draop Frank Hopkins and his horse (Hidalgo) into the pit with spears. She about flipped out seeing the spear run through his shoulder.

Then they let loose the leapords, and she's sitting there shouting "fuck... FUCK! NO!!" into the movie theatre. Tthat was sort of embarrasing, but you could tell she was really into the movie...

And she cried at the end when he released Hidalgo to go running with the wild mustage herd too.

Quite the adventuresome movie! It was a really good flick though, and Omar Sharif did a lovely job as the Shiek. It was certainly the trial of man and horse over quite a bit of adversity, and well set together.

privacy and identity

One the comments I heard at the Weblogger Meetup this past wednesday was some complaining that SixApart "wasn't doing crap" to deal with comment spam. Well, it's pretty clear they are now: TypeKey.

I see a pretty huge amount of potential in this one - simply because I wouldn't be surprised to see these folks really nail and solve one of those age-old problems - identity. Several of the core concepts are already there for a successful go... privacy and lack of restriction/cost in use.

various notes from tonight

At OReillyNet, Mitch Chapman has published a neat article on using python and it's MacOS X extensions to do some neat image manipulation in an article called Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics. I immediately pointed it out to Gus, since he's done a few things with CoreGraphics and Python on the Mac as well (messin' with PDF's).

I spent most of this evening going back through my notebooks (I have two paper notebooks that I write in alternately, depending on which I have handy at the moment). It was interesting reflecting back on the past 6 months, looking at what I accomplished, and how long some things have taken. I was taken aback at how long it took to do some of my personal projects, but after chatting with Karen I think I've at least rationalized it somewhat. Projects take time, that's all there is to it - and it's not like I can spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on them. Even though my irrational side says "You should be!" (yeah, maybe I'm a little obsessed...) My projects have been continuing on a line with various deviations to try things out, experiment with ideas, and then fallen back into something a tad more reasonable after experience and sanity won the days. 6 weeks of that time I completely lost to the holidays, including a wonderful visit by my Grandmother. We bought a property through there as well, easily accounting for another 3-4 weeks, and just last week I took off and unplugged after a particularly intense "work" project ate up 3-4 weeks. When you start counting up all the time that "life" took, it's no wonder that getting to where I am now took so long. Still, I look at what I have and think "Damn, that's so simple - any ole' monkey coulda knocked that out..."

Still, one of the remarkable things was how "on-track" I was from my original thoughts six months back. I've meandered and experimented, refined the ideas - but the core concepts are still clearly there and visible. I got some great feedback from Gus, and I'm hoping for more from some other friends as well. Even with my frustration of being slow, I figure persistence is the more valuable component - and getting good, critical feedback. I can learn and I'll get faster at the coding - I rather expect to. I've definitely been stretching my wings in some new areas, and the growth feels good. Well, when I'm not thinking about how long it took me to create something "simple".

scary robots

/. is hosting bit on Steve Grand's latest (and somewhat out there) project, which I can't help but admire to some level. Steve created the game Creatures quite a while back - one of the first games to really use genetic programming ideas in it, and as an essentially part of it.

Anyway, more recently he's taken on this AI project where he's getting down and dirty with some of the ideas of embodiment as essentially to AI with a project called Lucy. It's a truly frightening looking thing, which I find actually sort of repellent, but I admire the guy's spunk for making it happen.

erm, blech on LinuxMag

Crow, I'm eating crow.

So after praising Linux Magazine for generally having awesome content, the featured article was really not what I was hoping for/expecting. (It's about source code analysis tools) I was thinking they'd be showing off the details of some cool open-source project and how to use it to make your code better.

While it was detailed, it was really more about using coverity on the Linux kernel. Still, there were some other good tips, but it wasn't as full-fledged a "how-to" or "use this" kind of article that I'd come to expect from LinuxMag (the rest of the issue was pretty good though)

For anyone else interested in this topic, the article referenced the home page for Dawson Engler, who wrote a few interesting papers on static code analysis (check out his home page for references). I was hoping some of them would be immediately applicable to Java, but alas - it's not quite there yet. There is a sourceforge project called Smatch that appears to be working on implementing some of Dawson's work - haven't a clue how well (or poorly) it actually does though.

I do rather hope there's more tools for this sort of work.

keepin' an eye on the apps running on your machine

BBum has a neat post showing how to track what an application may be sending out to the internet without you knowing about it. It involves using Little Snitch to get a head's up about what happening, and then the low level tcpdump command to see all the details.

B.C. roadway

I couldn't even begin to tell you what road we were on - something heading out from Yarrow, B.C. heading east-ish.

(larger version of the image)

(by the way, MapQuest does a really shitty job with "Yarrow BC" - it comes up with Yarrow, MO - I had to manually dig around for the map linked above with their interface...)

local search and barbeque

Spent the evening over in Bellevue - at the Crossroads Mall. Karen had a hankerin' to go hang out at 1/2 price books for a while. so over we went. She didn't end up buying anything, but I did.

I picked up a copy of Linux Magazine (which I still hold as being a superior bit trade press over Linux Journal) and a book on playing Go.

What does this have to do with Local Search? Well, it's because I ate dinner at Jones Barbeque there at Crossroads, and I wanted to tell you about it. In particular, I had a half-slab of ribs this evening with their mild sauce, and really enjoyed it. Probably shouldn't have had that sauce, but it was better than noshing on a bag of french fries... And I didn't know where to find a link for this lovely new place - so I used Google's local search and it did a really fantastic job of coming up with a relevant hit. (It's does a fine job on hunting down El Diablo too!)

Anyway - made for a nice evening. Came home to find the recent copy of MacTech in the mailbox as well - so I've lots of reading to fiddle around with at this point.

flow

A snap from a creek near Yarrow, B.C.

meetup

I'm really glad I started going to these things, even if I don't make it regularly. We had a fun meetup this evening - I spent all of it talking with a small subset of the larger group, and didn't even meet some of the folk there.

I expect Jake will have a listing up of the folks attending later this evening or tomorrow. Maybe Anita as well - they're generally more organized about that sort of thing than I am.

Spoken Interface

I hope the recent announcement of Apple's Spoken Interface technology works as well as I hope it does. As an acccessibility advancement, it's critical (spent a fair bit of time years ago assisting folks with Dragon and other voice recognition systems for the disabled), but I think the real potential will be if it works well enough for just anyone to use it as they go along. The multi-modal input mechanisms for working with applications have tremendous possibilities for improving the interface.

Anyway, here's to hopin'...

tired, tired

For having a day end so beautifully yesterday, I'm exhausted today. Just didn't sleep well - my calves kept cramping last night. Then, for whatever reason which I certainly can't fathom, I woke up at 5:45am and was unable to get back to sleep. Now what's up with that?!?!

So I was in the office at 7am, and I'm thinking it's about time to head home for the day. Have a few errands this evening - including taking Karen up to Northgate for a class she's teaching, and then I was going to swing back down to Belltown to the blogger meetup this evening. I haven't been to one in a while, so it's gettin' about time. Heh...

It's one of those really wild days...

Today has been one of those really wild days. Days that rode really high and dropped really low. Fortunately, we're ending the day on the high side, and the low side was almost first off this AM, so we're definitely trending in the right direction.

Spent most of the evening with Nate, actually, brainstorming in a number of different directions, letting off some steam, and generally having what turned into a great evening.

So I'm not going to publish the really high or low points - sorry. But suffice that it's been a pretty wild day.

Wow!

So back in last October, I wrote up an article outline how to use Apple's SearchKit framework that came out with Panther. I submitted it for publication, and it was accepted - for which I was really excited.

I had absolutely NO idea that it was going to be the cover article on the Spring 2004 MacDeveloper Journal! Wow!

So it's "out" now, although I still haven't quite wrangled out the Zinio reader thingy. Wouldn't have been my personal choice of magazine format. Need to make a hardcopy for my archives, and to send to the family.

I learned a lot in writing this article - one item that I want to pass along - don't both formatting your content into HTML with color-coding and hyperlinks on the text - it just ain't worth it, cause it gets stripped out.

Anyway, I hope anyone interested in SearchKit will take a gander at the articles. Fraser Speirs wrote a great bit on SearchKit as well - it was really neat to see how well the two articles complemented each other.

out there ideas

This evening has been errand evening, sort of grounding things out again around the house after I'd been away. May sound strange to be "grounding things out around the house", but being away really screws up my routines - including the usual little things that you just gotta do around a house. You know - things like cleaning, taking out the trash, feeding the cats on time, etc.

So I got home and weeded out a few dandelions from the front yard, mowed a bit of the lawn, did some grocery shopping, and took out the trash for the evening. All those completely normal household things that I'd effectively excused myself from for the past week or so.

The trip out to Long Beach was good, but honestly not great. I'm still not 100% sure what I was looking for - maybe some place that didn't exist. It definitely suited the purpose of removing me from the constantly connected internet-information flow world, which I desperately needed. It's hard to be thinking about ephemeral connectivity and interactivity bits when everyone around you is involved in the mundane work of preping up a town for an upcoming tourist season. Which is exactly what was happening in Long Beach over last week.

It's not completely disconnected - one lady was talking about not being sure how much some vehicle was worth as a donation, and I overheard another suggest "Well, check on Ebay and see where they're listing those things...". The town isn't exactly outfitted for people to hang out during non-tourist season though - no coffee shop (I made do with a bakery that didn't seem inclined to pitch me out if I bought the periodic sandwich and didn't cause trouble with my paperback) or other places to really sit and just ponder your belly button. The beach was, of course, wonderful - but the place seemed sort of lacking for just being quiet.

Or maybe that's not what I was looking for at all. I wonder if I wasn't just looking for conversations that weren't the ones that involved me so intimately. New ideas, new thoughts, something different from the norm. The conversational capacity of a tourist in off-tourist season in a small town isn't exactly very high.

This all sort of leads around to a little note I wrote in my notebook while I was out there. Lamenting that I couldn't find a decent place to sit and read quietly, or have a latte other than a drive-through stand, I wrote "I can't really find a cloister here - I guess I could make one myself. That'd be some work".

And re-reading that page tonight, I was struck with one of those really "out there" ideas. What about the idea of putting together a retreat of sorts (I've always been fond of cloister's for their architectural environment). Something in a beautiful part of the country that's both "wired" (figuratively, I'd expect wireless would be the call of the day) and away from the rush. A retreat, or a training camp, or both. Some place where you could sit down and have a really intriguing conversation or just quietly sip a latte and read a bad science fiction novel. I don't really know of a place like that today, but the idea is very intriguing. Maybe it's not even really an "out there" idea, but it sort of feels like one to me at the moment.

singleton

In between all the other various things I've been doing, I've been slowly working my way through a paperback of science fiction short stories. Always did enjoy the genre.

Anyway, the one I finished this morning while on the bus to work was Singleton by Greg Egan, and I found that it's on the web as well. If you're looking for a read, it's an interesting story. I can't say exactly why I really liked this one, just that I did.

game theory

In the interest of keeping around a little light reading that completely blows me away, I picked up a book on game theory. I don't know quite why I decided that I was interested in game theory, other than I was curious what the background was behind all the mathematical models that have been being talked about over the past couple of years.

Well, whatever the reason, I find myself floundering in the basics of set theory and the mathematical notion used for describing these equations. Once I sort of pin down again what the darn things mean, I'm usually good for the concepts - it's just, well, been a while since I was exposed to the symbols used to describe the concepts in equations.

Driving

As if I hadn't received enough time behind the wheel of a car this past week, I spent most of yesterday and today driving again - this time to Yarrow, B.C. Karen wanted to attend an exhibition up there, so we headed up yesterday morning and then stayed the night at a B&B in the Fraser river valley before returning via backroads pretty much all the way down to Seattle.

The area up there is beautiful - and surprisingly this was my first foray into Canada since moving to Seattle three years ago! I still haven't been to Vancouver or Victoria, and yes - they're still on my "list" - but I have to say that I'd be pretty willing to go back to the Faser river valley (and the lovely little village of Yarrow) any time. The scenery was just beautiful.

unplugged...

Well, I'm not dead - as can now be evidenced by pics from my
"getting uplugged" trip. I started out just driving west, and ended up following the coast on Washington from Aberdeen to Long Beach - and ended up sticking around longbeach for a while.

My shortened storyline for you (click on the image to get the page):

i'm not dead

no, I'm not dead.

code reading

more geek stuff this evening - also looking at MacSlash this evening, I saw an article/entry asking "what's the best open source Cocoa code to look and learn from?".

Interestingly, I picked up a book on this very topic (Code Reading) from Borders over in Bellevue when I was listening to Vienna Teng. The book really goes into details about what to look for, and suggests code to use as examples from the FreeBSD kernel to GNU compilers to various Apache components. The comments in the article at MacSlash aren't really very good - the best list I'm aware of is at 'hyperjeff'. Now picking which is the best to learn from? Well, that's a bit harder and prone to religious wars...

Non-geek note - I picked up a copy of Vienna Teng's latest Warm Strangers today and got it signed. She was very gracious, and the place was packed with at least 200 people cramming in to hear her free concert. I'm really glad I caught a bit of her stuff on NPR that while back - she's a great one to add to my collection.

LinSpot

You know, I'm surprised that it took so long for me to spot this. linspot has obviously been out for a while, but I hadn't really clued onto it until I spotted it this evening on MacSlash (after a random question from Aaron at El Diablo, asking if I read MacSlash - which I hadn't until just about now for the past month)

Okay - but in the world of WiFi neat stuff, what I really want to see is some mesh networking code that enabled routing so that a bunch of people with iBooks at a conference can assist in the networking traffic with minimal efforts instead of crushing it underfoot, which seems to happen all to frequently.

And in case anyone thinks that's a heavy blast against the conference set up folks, I'd like to point out that I've heard of more top-notch debugging happening at conferences with WiFi networking (such as the Apple Firewall bug) than anywhere else - it's just a stress point on the system.

long day, but some interesting news...

Today was sort of "one of those days" that was just pre-destined to be a long day. Meetings from 11am pretty much straight through to 5pm. God, does that wear you out.

Still, there were some interesting news items out.

CNet is reporting that Macromedia is eyeing Linux in a bigger way. The interesting one to me was the article about Flash and AIM, which got a notice on Robb's blog. Of course, Macromedia isn't the only one to work a deal utilizing AIM... Still, taking a page from Jabber's world of presence - I can see the AIM protocol being a pretty reasonable low-level standard upon which to build for presence and messaging.

(I'm actually a huge fan of Jabber, even though I think the OSCAR protocol that AIM uses is perhaps a little better suited to doing some of the cool stuff I'm interested in using it for at home)

Core Wars

Does anyone else remember Core Wars? A neat game that started quite some time ago that I used to get myself a basics in the fun (and carnage) with assembly style programming. I actually didn't create redcode very often or play with it very long, but I was always intrigued with the idea.

Now I spotted the GotDotNet Terrarium Project, and that's the first thing I thought of. To be fair, it's doesn't appear to be a viciously agressive environment like CoreWars, and it's purpose is clearly to interact with a central agent environment set to encourage the use of remote RPC's and such with .Net programming. Frankly, it'd be a pretty awesome learning tool for students on of the .Net lingo's (C# would be my choice).

One of the folks on /. asked if this was the same idea as that ghosts thing, and I suspect he completely missed the point of the utility of a conversational agent. One is in a completely virtual environment, the other interacting with a completely solid environment. But maybe I misunderstood his comment...

ghosts...

Now here's an interesting project - /. is covering (and will soon hammer I expect) a project in Copenhagen that mixes up chatterbot technology (I think they're using AliceBot), WIFI, and some pervasive sensing mechanisms to provide "ambient intelligence".

I particularly like their concept of "tipping" a ghost, and if a particular rendition doesn't get enough use, it fades away.

end of the day

good lord, the day is almost completely over and I seemed to miss most of it...

Well, not really - but I do feel like I've sort of been floating through the day a bit today. The big project at work is fairly well completed, leaving only mop-up at this point. Today was the first day in ages that I haven't been out and out scrabbling to keep up with the load for weeks, so while it felt good, it also left me sort of floating and unfocused. I suspect it'll take a bit for me to recover from this project.

To that end, however, I have a plan. Not much of one, but it's a good one so far - I'm taking off three days next week and going somewhere. Haven't a clue where - maybe the coast on the other side of the peninsula, maybe down into Oregon on the coast of highway 101, or maybe making a complete right turn and heading somewhere into the cascades. Somewhere to get a little unplugged and very out of the environment I've been immersed in for weeks.

Now... how to choose the elusive location...

tiddlywinks? darts on a map? dowsing?

monday, monday

End of the day, and welcome to it.

It's been packed and I'm beat. Solid since I crawled out of bed this morning, I've been cramming stuff into the day. Completely missed lunch - just worked right through it getting a script that was bugging me nailed down. It wasn't hard per se - just the cycle of fix-run-debug was taking a fairly significant amount of time since it involved loading approximately 4 million records into a database. If I'd been smart, I would have worked with a smaller test set. Ah well.

This evening included such strange errands as more laundry, taking out the yard waste, bringing the yard waste back in because tomorrow is recycling, taking out the recycling, taking out the trash, and getting a new mattress. Can you guess which one ate up about 2 hours of my evening? Actually, the new mattress will be nice - I'm just being whiny about having such a full day.

So now I'm winding down - had some cocoa and have been flipping through a book I hadn't picked up in a couple of years: Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. That whole K-lines thing has been bugging me, but I'm not sure why.