Well, that's a rude awakening to come home to. Turns out my car battery was dead because someone popped the trunk (I left the driver's window down a bit too far - they just reached in, so no damage) and left the hatch on my Subaru wagon open for the better part of a week. It looked closed, but upon inspection I noticed that the same blighter had nicked four of my hammers - a 5lb hand sledge, a beaut 24oz framing hammer, and two geologists' style rock hammers (wicked pick heads). They didn't nick the other tools laying about in there, and didn't even have the decency to shut the hatch on the wagon!
So I've filed the formal report, and while the petty theft isn't hugely painful, it's damned annoying and not the sort of thing you want to find when you return home after a week on the east coast, ya know?
I'm sad about missing the hammers - they were somewhat expensive - but I'm more angry that they let me car battery go dead (rat bastards!) and a little worried that someone will use on of those geology hammers on something other than rocks. I don't expect that sort of thing to get recovered, but hey - you never know.
John was awesome and came over to jump-start my car at zero minutes notice, so I've spent the afternoon running around doing errands since my return. I'm now back home, feeling pretty worn out, and wondering how long I'll make it into the evening, given that I woke up at the equivilant of 3:30am this morning pacific coast time.
It seems that bad news is following fast, as my great aunt is in the hospital today too - she had congestive heart failure on the 20th and is currently scheduled up for massive bypass surgery. I have no idea what the prognosis is, other than they've moved her to Davenport where there are apparently some excellent cardiac surgeons.
what a week...
headed into D.C. ("the city" as it's apparently called around here) for dinner tonight and ate at a really nice ethopian place which I'm sure I will be completely unable to ever find again. It was sort of a long drive, and having now parked in D.C. I am thoroughly convinced that if you were to live in D.C., you would probably NOT want to own a car. Some of the cabbies were a bit agressive, but nothing like New York.
The food was good, the architecture incredibly diverse.
I'm still sporting the headache from this morning - just one that hung on all darn day with me. Blech! Now I'm winding down and scribbling a little in my blog from the hotel room while downloading updates for the Mac. iTunes, Quicktime, Airport, etc. Lots of stuff tonight.
Although it's early for Seattle, I'm bushed at this point after having fought a headache all day and ran my extrovert batteries down way, way low.
Oh - yeah. Got an email from a recruiter tonight. Know of anyone with SP2 experience (!!) that wants a multi-year contract in Fairbanks, Alaska? I've got to admit - it's strangely tempting...
sporting a headache today. I don't know why, but both the past times that I've flown out here (east coast), I end up waking up at like 6am local time. That's leaving me with relatively little sleep, and today it's taking it's toll on me in the form of a headache.
Sometimes eating well can make up for that lack of sleep, but it doesn't feel like that's working today.
Made it to virgina without much trouble. It always eats a darn day flying in this direction, but I guess that's really to be expected. The flight was pretty tame. Karen reports that I missed a lovely warm day in Seattle (temp in the 80's) - which I'm not overly heartbroken over. I prefer the cooler days to be completely honest.
It's almost midnight here now - so I'm going to try and get some sleep and start moving to east coast time.
With the end of the weekend, I'm feeling significantly better - although not fully healed. I'm hoping with all my might that the congestion I've had the past three days does not recurr tonight, leaving me to fly to Dulles tomorrow relatively free of annoyances. My ears will probably stuff up at some point in the whole damn thing, but I'm hoping that it won't be for long.
I watched Master and Commander this afternoon, as it's made it's way onto DVD and into the video stores. It was better on the big screen, but still a compelling flick and reminds me that I should check out Patrick OBrien's novels on the subject more thoroughly.
After I finished the movie, Karen and I wandered down to Queen Anne Ave to return the flick and take in some of the local ambience at El Diablo. It's one of those stunning nice evenings where the temperature is pleasantly cool, the stars are out, and walking to a coffee house for an evening is a luxury that you can get just from living in Seattle - so we took it. We happened upon Aaron there, who has a curiously dual life as a Visual Studio jack-of-all-trades (at least from what I can tell - his formal title is Program Manager) and a Macintosh shareware developer. Just type his name into Google and see what you find - it's pretty diverse.
After Aaron let us pester him for a while, and I demolished a wonderful mocha, we headed home. I've been working my way through The Confusion, and I'm a happy guy in that respect. I'm only half way through it, but Jack has reappeared sane and mostly safe, killed his love's arch enemy, she's found out about it, Bob has seen his arch enemy beaten to death with a stick by a monstrous Irishman, and the whole trilogy is moving quite along. Lord knows when I'll hear more of Daniel Waterhouse, who was a significant character in the first half of Quicksilver. It's really an interesting series of articles about economics and the wheels that they turn in ever spiraling complexities, set amongst some good old fashioned action adventure. Of course my favorite characters are the common (well - really uncommon) thugs that inhabit this interesting diversion from reality.
But I've stopped for the night on this novel, and I expect I'll haul it with me to Virginia tomorrow to occupy my time on the plane. It was that or continue fiddling with PyLucene - which has just enough strange twists of technology to be pretty damn elusive to me on determining how to use it effectively. (For those curious, PyLucene is OSA Foundation's interesting effort to make Lucene fast and effective for Chandler. In doing this, they've taken your standard 3.0 release of Lucene, used GCC 3.4 to compile that Java to C, implement headers, and wrap that all with SWIG to present a Pythonic interface in the form of a C module. Ah - and don't forget that they (OSAF's staff) have written out an extension to Lucene to enable the code to read from and write to a Sleepycat Berkeley DB for Java database - which was just about the point where I started puking when trying to pull this all into something in segments so that I could actually play with the damn thing to see how effective it actually was. It's that Sleepycat thing that just kicked me over the edge of complexity, and I haven't quiet recovered from it. I think I'm trying to re-do the complexity they've already wrought, but now I'm having to grok SWIG and extending Python with C to make any reasonable heads or tails of the whole process, all the while trying to get some grounding in what GCC 3.4 does with Java bytecode to render the whole darn thing into libraries. Yeah, I've got strange hobbies - it's just that fiddling with Lucene from Python is just so damn compelling... (and yes, before you start hollerin' at me - what about Lupy... I know it exists, as a half-finished port that's pretty darn slow all things considered. It's a neat project, but I'm aiming for a full win that someone has already proved is possible...)
Oh - and a question. Why the (*%*&%* does OSA regenerate an entire Python framework for OSX for their Chandler application? That seems just weird, but who am I to say. I figure there's a reason, even if I don't have a clue right now. Just plays havoc with the Makefiles... (or with me diverting them to my own purposes)
Spent yesterday plastered to the couch, half sleeping and half watching movies. This cold just sucks, although I'm feeling better today so I have half a hope of being able to fly tomorrow without too much trouble.
One of the movies from yesterday was really very good - so I had to write about it, of course. Second Hand Lions - hadn't seen it previously, and I'd seen it on the walls of the video store a couple of times we'd been in recently, so I finally rented it. Karen and I watched it last night (I hadn't really left the couch, you see) - and we both really enjoyed it. It was funny and enlightening, sad in some parts - just a really well done story and some excellent acting to back it up.
Spent the morning so far with my head under a sink, trying to sort out a plumbing problem - and it's time to call in the specialists. I can drop a trap and the usual home-maintenance stuff thanks to a few years living with a variety of interesting folks - one of which was my brother in law, who knew quite a bit about plumbing. But this one's beyond me - something clogged up in a stand pipe, so it'll take better tools than my plumber's wrench and a hand-snake to make it all work again.
I think it's back to the couch with me for a while now - feeling a little worn down after my plumbing adventures, so it's nap time and then a book.
since I'm feeling under the weather, and Karen's off at Oak Harbor today, I've holed myself up with a bunch of movies (some bad, some hopefully not) and a variety of crap and good stuff to eat. Figure this is a day for lurking on the couch and watching movies.
I've got a 15" powerbook with an Airport Extreme card and all the latest updates (including Airport 3.0.4 software). While transfering large files over wireless (afp://) to my desktop, I kept completely loosing the network. I tried to refresh the DHCP, but it never came back. The signal looked reasonable, but the only way I got the networking back was to reboot.
Happened four times to me this evening, until I finally decided that it would be quicker to re-download the 600Mb from the Internet than to fiddle with this network termination crap. Since then, I've been online for hours - surfing, reading email, kicking python, and inffectively fumbling my way around the insides of PyLucene (a subset of Chandler). The network's been strong as an ox.
I'm wondering now if it's the AFP:// stack that horked things up. Doesn't make complete sense, but who knows. I even went and looked through all the logfiles I could find on the box - nothin. Not a work. Not even a message about a failed DHCP renewal. Blech. Lord knows what it was. I'll stick to boring transports after this for my large filesets.
well, dagnebbit - I've caught the cold. I've not only caught the cold, but I'm flying to Virginia next week.
So now I'm thinking that friday night is going to be pretty darn boring at my house - sleeping. I've already started the massive infusions of vitamin C and zinc to ward off the worst of the effects. Might go find a sauna and see if I can steam out some of the ick as well. That's worked a little in the past to deal with this sort of thing. Blech! Not want I wanted to deal with.
Nathan and Leah introduced us to a place in the U District called Tubs which sounds like it has some nice comfy bits - steam sauna, hot tubs, etc.
Tonight's entry will hopefully amuse you, as it's me telling tales on myself, and some of the crazier things that I've done. I apologize to John Rucker for dragging his poor name through the mud, but he was rather involved...
Tonight I was walking home with Karen from a short grocery trip and saw some bagworms in a bush. Nothing amazing, as it's that "time of year" for the critters to be around, but it gave me flashbacks none the less. Let me set the stage... In Missouri, Karen and I owned a lovely large house at 400 West Broadway in Columbia. It's a beautiful Sear's kit house style home - nearly 3000 sq feet, in an older section of the Columbia neighborhoods. We had crab apple trees (probably still exist) along the side of the house facing Edgewood, and a very, very large Oak and Black Walnut tree in back - providing shade to the top of a 2 story house even through the missouri summers.
Well, bagworm season there is later in the spring - almost summer really. And one year we got a pretty good infection of them. We thought about pesticides, but we were growing a hefty garden out back at that same time, and we would have been spraying right over that area to get the little buggers... so we culled that out. I recalled my grandfather having burned out bagworms in the past in Iowa, so I thought that might be a viable method of getting rid of them.
And you know what - it worked great. Those crab apples were only 15' high at the top, so a steel rod (I happened to have a 10' section of 1/4" bar stock in the yard) and a burning rag made short work of those guys. We used plain ole grain alcohol on the rag, set it alight with a match, and had Karen watching over the burning remnants of bagworm as they fell out of the trees with a hose and one of those gun nozzle sprayers.
Somewhere about this time, John wandered by - somewhat excited about the option of wielding a 10' steel rod with a burning rag attached to the end, and offered to help. Well, that's a lot of weight to hold steady for long periods of time, so I took him up on it. In a matter of a half hour, we'd finished off the crabapple trees, but were sort of excited about our success and were ready for more challenges.
The more challenge in this case was that black walnut tree. It had some bagworms too, and although that tree had to be 50' high, there were some lower sections that we thought we might reach. At first, we got the "low hanging fruit" with a standard 6' step ladder. I was bracing it, and John weilding the brand of bagworm doom, now onto old socks that had been lit alight, as all the rags were burnt through. Somewhere in here, I think Bryan Roesslet happened by the house, although I don't recall why - probably heard or saw the spectacle taking place from Broadway, a fairly major thoroughfare in Columbia.
The reach extended. The rag was being roughly held to the end of the steel bar stock by bailing wire. I kept some on hand as well - it being useful in forging, which was why I had the bar stock too. Well, the next big batch of them suckers was out of John's reach, even with the 10' pole.
Yes, you can imagine what comes next. I did, indeed, have more than 1 10' section of square stock, and it wasn't long in coming that we'd suitably pressure locked two together, shimmed something like the top of a large sailing vessel's mast. This, of course, made the reach long, and the weight much heavier. Which also made the ladder, upon which John was standing, much less steady. But we, yes valiant bagworm burners we, were determined to get that last batch. So a new sock was tied and lit alight, as John wielded the stock into the air, the overall weight was more than it could easily structurally bear, so it bent. Not a lot, just slightly, but it then wobbled quite a bit. It's a darn good thing he was (and is) strong as a bear, because it was only sheer force of will that kept that burning sock from sort of wobbling right over onto the house. The downside was that Karen, still weilding the hose, was very, very aware of this burning sock nearing her domocile.
At last we (John really) managed to land that sucker right on the nest of bagworms. That was the moment that I will never really forget. You see, it wasn't a gentle prod, it was more a giagantic swing with some attempt at restraint which was inevitably doomed to failure at the end of approximately 17 feet of 1/4 square bar stock, bending and wobbling. The impact lit the bagworms on fire, as I stood nearly directly below, steadying the ladder with all my strength. I realized that the burst cluster of now burning worms was headed in the exact direction you'd expect - straight down on me - so I ducked my head, and got ready to suck up the blow of small burning fragments of insect hitting my head. Did I mention that about this point the structural integrity of the sock, wired to the end, gave way? It also attended the burning mass of bagworms downward.
It was about this time that I heard Karen shouting, but I didn't dare look up - as I knew burning doom was heading my way, and the ladder was severely overbalancing.
I'm sure, in retrospect, that I would have held the ladder steady. Held it steady, kept John on it, and some meager control of the wand of bar-stock doom with John, if only Karen hadn't decided that I was on fire and blasted John's backside and my head with the hose - pretty much timed exactly 1 second after the burning mass hit me.
Nobody was hurt, there wasn't a fire on anyone, I don't think I've ever seen Bryan laugh so hard in his life, and both John and I were wearing fairly injured faces while prone on the ground with the ladder splayed between us, sopping wet from a thorough hose dousing. (The iron stock landed in the yard, not really hitting anything, and all burning fragments of sock put out in short order).
So the next time you see bagworms in a tree, you can think of me and this story, and think "Dear god - how stupid were they?" and probably have a pretty accurate view of the world. Pretty funny though, huh?
I've been looking through the WWDC schedules that have been posted online, and it's troubling. Really troubling. I mean, there's all these different talks that I want to be at that are happening at the same darn time!!!
I mean, I know there's only so many days in the week to pull off this conference, and the titles don't say everything there is to say, and I wouldn't want fewer sessions... but 7 or 8 simultaneous sessions? Jeeze, just check out Wednesday AM... There's a lot of really cool stuff there.
Well, I suppose it's a good thing that attendees get DVD's, even if they're after the fact by a good few months.
I'm feeling particularly jazzed tonight, even though I've got a few sniffles as I relax on the couch this evening. I hit the weblogger meetup tonight and the place was packed. Apparently the "Democrats Meetup" was at the same time, and in the same location - and I've got to tell ya - they didn't even clean up their crap.
So Jake has the full list of the folks that attended and their blogs. I met Chad who writes truly extensive and detailed observations about Seattle from a recent import's perspectives. Finally had a chance to meet Ted and Julie Leung, as well as their three girls.
All in all, it was a really cool evening. Ted even let me harrangue him about PyLucene and what they were doing at OSAF.
Sorry if that's a terrible spoiler for you, but there you go. Tonight Nate and I headed out to the Cinerama to take in Kill Bill, Volume 2 in all it's 70mm glory.
In terms of film making, I prefered it to the first movie, and it was without a doubt a beautiful and well crafted ode to the kung-fu chop-sake movies. There was even a character that you don't often see in American kung-fu/martial arts flicks - the "retired master samurai" archetype, played by Michael Madsen. Maybe I don't have a perfect read on that character, but I made a match with some of Kirosawa's stuff in that respect, and I was awed by the acting and cutting of the film that highlighted the eyes so prominently in the flick - and the unexpected part that so caught my attention was that his held sorrow.
Saw some interesting preview's too. A few movies I'll have to go see, even if I just sneak out to a matinee so that nobody knows I went to see them, and a few that I'm going to relish for all the implicit bad-movie-ness that they are.
It took me a surprisingly long time to find this:
Yeah, I'm an RRD fanatic.
just now thinking about bed - so this is really a Monday post, even though it's on tuesday. Tuesday technically came almost an hour ago, as I write this - but I don't really care all that much, cause to me it's not really tuesday until I've gone to sleep or seen the sun rise.
Course, I normally have a lousy sense of what day it is anyway, so "being tuesday" doesn't have a terrific amount of meaning for me other than what things are typically scheduled on tuesday's at work, which is - very little.
Now tomorrow's tomorrow - wednesday - is the weblogger meetup, and that sounds fun and I'm looking forward to it.
I just hope Karen's feeling better, because right now she's really not. She's not burning a high fever, but she's not happy either (it's your standard aches and sniffles spring cold). I'm debating sleeping on the couch to avoid it, but I rather suspect that's a moot consideration. Regardless of what I do, I'm likely to catch it. I'm supposed to be flying next monday though, so the timing could really impressively suck if I come down with it.
Some time back, I remember hearing about KnowNow. I think it was Fred Sanchez who'd left Apple to go there or something. I can't quite remember, but I remember hearing about the company and when I last looked at the website, they were in some stealth mode and I couldn't find a darn thing on them other than market drabble.
Now I've caught a tidbit about them from Rand Anderson's blog that has me all intrigued. And now their website has a whole pile of interesting info about what they're doing. Kinda cool, actually. One of those "whuh... why didn't someone do this earlier?" things. Only I guess someone else had, just a little differently (it's called Jabber - at least from my 30 second overview of the concepts, it's pretty darn similiar).
So there's even an online PDF at Business Integration Journal that's sort of talking about the goodies there, and I've come to find out that KnowNow has open sourced some of the components of what it was doing into a kit at SourceForge called mod-pubsub (complete with it's own blog).
Anyway, some neat stuff - and I'm sure it'll keep me thinking for a while.
Now then, what's this QuickSilver thing and why does it rock more than LaunchBar? Looks like it had been a pretty open beta, and then something happened and now it's locked down... bummer.
The downside of getting a brand new tool (er, toy?) that you've been thinking about for the better part of six weeks is having it in your hand, and then going completely freakin' brain dumb with what the hell you want to do with it.
I am so constantly having this problem! I get these great ideas and theories going, start to do something manually (or the "hard way" - whatever), determine I need something else to make it easier and faster, and then when I get it - whammo! brain-lock. Idea's vanished, the potential for doing anything is just too staggering, and I sit numbly looking at the screen (or keyboard, or notebook, or whatever) and wonder what the hell I'd planned to do in the first place.
It's sort of like writer's block, only applied to other mediums of expression. And it is such a pain in the arse! I know a lot of the tricks of the trade to get around it (so to speak), but it's still infuriating. Just do a little bit. Just experiment a tad there. All the sneaky psychology self-out-think things to get you over that overwhelming hump of staring at a completely blank piece of paper (or it's equivilant, obviously).
Anecdotally, I recall hearing that japanese artists always made some imperfection in their canvas (or whatever) first thing - just to scratch the surface of that darned perfection and to let something flow. Ah, who knows - maybe that's complete BS. Karen's suffered bazillions of blocks, my mother (writer, painter, sculptor, any-else-that-she-thinks-of artist) has the same. They make it through it, I make it through it.
Doesn't mean it's any less of a pain in the butt though.
Well, I broke down and did it - bought MacroMedia's dreamweaver today (sorry steve). Wasn't cheap, but I think it makes sense for what I'm doing. I could hand-code all the web stuff, but I'm out of practice and my knowledge on the arcane realms of CSS and DHTML was never super-high, so something that will provide a boost in assistance and get me going quickly looked like just the thing. I really appreciate that you can twiddle the detail bits with it if you like - an advantage that early web page/site designing programs overlooked.
Also picked up a copy of the manual - dreamweaver mx 2004 demystified. You know, there was a day when the manuals were actually sold with the software. Ah well. At least this way I get my choice of manuals (there were several to choose from). It's funny, because I actually started with The Missing Manual: dreamweaver by OReilly, but I just didn't like it as well.
So now it's downloading updaters and installing them, and digging around in Macromedia's website to see what all can be seen, found, and used.
didn't make it to cocoa programming today at all. Ended up spending the later evening making my eyes blurry by wandering around the various depths of wxPython and SPE, which means I was really trying to burrow down into the (to me) convoluted depths of where Python is installed and lives on MacOS X.
I finally made some progress when I decided that having a cool python IDE just wasn't a priority for me right now, and if I wanted to see what it was about I should go to a platform that it's built for with binaries (read Linux or Windows) and not muck around with versioning and (apparently) quite recent updates to the whole wxPython namespace.
Still, it was a neat thing to fiddle with for an evening, and I learned a thing or three in the process, so I'm further ahead than when I started.
I read a fair bit of science fiction. A lot less than I used to, to be honest - and I think I've become a lot pickier too, but I still read a fair bit of SF. So it struck me the other day that computers in science fiction are really hard for me to believe from a suspension-of-disbelief sort of mode. Probably because I know too damn much about them.
Have you noticed (if you read SF), that when authors portray computing resources in SF, they talk about these agents that routinely invade other computers, taking or borrowing resources they need? Programs "living in the network" - things like that? It's always striking me that what they're describing is what most folks today would consider computer virii. And what's startling is not a cautionary tale about how this "could happen", but that it's assumed that it will happen - and that it will be a good thing. I get the idea of science fiction as a cautionary tale, but that really doesn't seem to be the way the game is being portrayed in this case.
Now part of my conciousness says don't be such a wet noodle, that it's perfectly feasible that they're talking about massively multiprocessor systems as home computers, with the whole kit wired in, and perhaps a few spare blade servers lurking about in the laundry room, dishwasher, etc. Commodity computing taken to the level of ad-nauseum, refrigerators on the network, etc. (Er, uh... guess that's not quite science fiction anymore, eh?) Now there is this concept of autonomous computing. And maybe after it's been deployed in the data centers for a decade, similiar concepts will filter down to whatever we'll have that passes for desktop and laptop computers.
Part of me wants to say, "But wait a second here..." Economic reality is that systems are commoditized for the purpose for which they're built. Today's homeowner has lots of microprocessors in their house - but none of them are connected, and we don't seem any closer to integrating computing into our homes (controlling the shades, light, heating, etc) than we were two or three decades ago. Desktop and laptop PC's continue to be monolithic systems, and the benefits of having multiple PC's to perform parallel or asynchronous processing the house aren't clearly available to my brain - at least not in a connected fashion. I'm not the "most connected" guy, but I've got stuff hooked together. Xbox, 3 desktops and 2 laptops in a home lan, wireless, one of those desktops hooked to the stereo - I'm not a slouch. But the systems don't work together easily unless they were built by the same manufacturer, and even then they can be quirky.
But hey, it's science fiction - right? Maybe I just need to lighten up. Instead I keep thinking "but they said it could happen..." and wondering how I can make it work, or when someone else will.
I was scanning blog entries from all the various folks I read on a regular basis, and Mary's entry from Friday caught my eye. Okay - so actually my name caught my eye, but it was still cool.
Several years back, I was bummed out at work with the chaos and freakishness that had been happening, and determined that we should have a completely informal, non-management supported party. Oh - and that it should happen on work time. Heh. So I arranged with a few friends to do exactly that - Eric and Mary being rather key in that whole gig, as they brought the gas grill. I brought a monstrous box of beef patties from lord knows what other thing I'd recently been involved in, and we took over a corner of the parking lot and just grilled up burgers. I think I sent a few folks in to seed the evil idea that I was giving away free food out in the parking lot, and pretty soon folks from all over were wandering over. Heh - I remember handing a loaded burger to a campus policement who'd rolled up through the passenger side window too.
So it was cool to see that Mary (or someone) has continued that tradition, even another block over in Peace Park. It's neat feeling that you started something good like that. I always rather thought the formal "IATS picnic" was rather forced, but maybe I just had a bad attitude about it. Doing a good company party is actually really hard, especially when your goal is to bring folks together and have fun.
Tonight's babble is about pens. Well, one brand of pen in specific: The Zebra Jimnie Gel Rollerball, Medium (A variety of purchase links can easily be found googling for 'zebra jimnie gel rollerball')
I picked up one of these things, figuring that I'd liked gel based rollerballs in the past, and this looked intriguing.
Well, I wouldn't recommend it. The pen has a lot of character, which is exactly what I didn't want from a gel based rollerball. I wanted a smooth, consistent line and stroke, with an easy paper feel. Instead I got something that has a LOT of character - varying line width with pressure, and it was very scratchy on the paper (various papers) to boot. The size and weight of the pen are fine, not great, but OK, but the feel is just rotten. I'm switching right back to a uniball for most of the "common" writing.
(yes, I still keep the journal with a fountain pen - smoothest thing going)
I've spent the better part of the evening doing something pretty rare these days - playing my Xbox. At work, we chilled out a friday afternoon with some Crimson Skies head-to-head and team dogfights. When I got home, Karen had headed off to Molbaks, so lacking anything particularly useful to do with my enthusiam for shooting things, I fired up Halo and blew away some aliens.
Just got done wiped up an infestation of aliens, was a little hungry, so it's time to stop and arrange some eats. At the moment, I'm snacking on a wonderful triple-cream cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, which I heartily recommend. I suspect they'll be a little hard to come by outside of the west coast, but it's tasty. The specifics of what I'm happily munching on is "Mt Tam". It's very smooth, and as soft as you could possibly want. It is a triple-cream after all...
Makes for a pretty good friday evening, if you ask me.
Not sure what the weekend plans are at the moment. I expect some lawn work is in order, at least grass cutting, but beyond that I don't think I have anything scheduled. I've been deep into fiddlin' with python of late, so I may break back out of that for a while and do some Cocoa work - the documentation tidbits on the revised ADC Reference Library and the details on Cocoa Bindings I just haven't sat down and played with, and that would be kind of nice to bring myself up to full rar'in speed before June and WWDC.
One of the things I've really noticed while playing with A9 is the way the queries are tacked into the URL instead of being a form field submitted via GET or POST. Kind of a different tactic, but pretty much exactly what you'd expect from Amazon folk who are probably (I'm guessing here) used to dealing with that style of interface from obidos and their encouragement of the REST style open interface architecture.
Makes me think that while REST looks like it's sort of a pain in the butt for doing some thigns (well, to me - that's just cause I've never really used it to understand how cool it could be), it's very well optimized to let your random J. coder acquire and use data as a query sort of mechanism.
Yeah, so thinking in that vein, what did you think I'd do - of course I opened up the source to a query result page to see what it detail I could pull from it. Kind of interesting. Here's a raw search result in the native HTML:
<div style="margin-bottom: 1em;" align="left">
<a href="/-/search/a9-redirect.jsp?url=http://www.pinkfloyd.net/&title=The+%26lt%3Bb%26gt%3BPink%26lt%3B%2Fb%26gt%3B+%26lt%3Bb%26gt%3BFloyd%26lt%3B%2Fb%26gt%3B+Fandom&token=5D7D47B0FDA5A468FC29C26F8C285D23&t=10821537910&qt=ws" class="r-a" isData="true">
The <b>Pink</b> <b>Floyd</b> Fandom
</a>
<br>The ultimate <b>Pink</b> <b>Floyd</b> site with the latest news as
well as pictures, reviews, lyrics, chat, links, and much more! <b>...</b> <br>
<span class="lastvisit">[ New ] </span>
<font class="r-url">http:/<wbr>/<wbr>www.pinkfloyd.net/<wbr> - 17k</font>
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So I'm really curious what the class="r-a" is all about...
Spent the evening pestering Nate tonight. Over dinner, he described this television show which apparently everyone else and their mothers are all aware of - The Apprentice. So, believe it or not, I'd actually never heard of it. After a wonderful low-carb dinner at an Italian joint in ballard (Soprano's, if you're curious), I thought Hey, I should see what this thing is all about.
So Nate and I retired to his place to watch a little TV, including the season finale of The Apprentice.
It was intriguing, addicting (as I find most TV, which I studiously avoid because I find it so addicting), and ultimately the most interesting because it brought up a bunch of questions that I turned around and focused on myself.
Oh, and I thought Donald Trump looked a bit stoogy, but I guess billionares can look pretty much however they damn well please.
Although I haven't been doing much with MySQL of late (other than piddly projects at home), I'm still jazzed to hear that they're releasing a clustered MySQL solution.
The press release bits are hootin' about 99.999% availability. It'll be interesting to see if it really hits three nines - but it's a neat idea. I'm wondering when they'll take the next step (it's always the "next" step, ain't it) and move into something that's providing computing on demand - systems that can reconfigure themselves to adapt to spikes in load, etc. IBM had some tech to do that at one time - mainframe style. And they're the ones really pushin' the autonomic computing gig with commodity components. It'll be interesting to see what, or if, they develop anything in that space. Heh, probably with DB2 instead.
I've been frequenting Starbucks lately - there's one that's opened up not two blocks from my office, so it's become the morning tradition. I'm holding back from the scones, muffins, and other goodies, but I keep up with my morning latte seattle tradition (Soy now). Anyway, this particular starbucks is so new that they're still pushin' large samples and treats in the mornings. That's sometimes hard to resist.
It was pretty funny this morning. Yesterday, I'd teased one of the barrista's a little by asking if I'd been in enough for them to remember what I ordered. They gave it a good try, but didn't remember. This morning when I walked, in the three ladies were all peering at Raymond asking what he was talking about, he didn't drink soy lattes. As I was stepping in the door, he said No, for him! and pointed to me. All three turned to me, so I grinned back and said "that would be lovely, thank you." Raymond had seen me walking past the windows to come in I guess. I better not change my order without warning them now...
Half the office is standing at the windows today, looking out onto Lake Union. We look right over the Center for Wooden Boats, with a lovely few.
One of those (or maybe another) boat capsized today - whole thing just went right over. Didn't take long for one person to notice, seeing as the police boat was out there and the King 5 helicopter was buzzing about overhead. The guys on the boat were pulled into another runabout, and they capsized boat towed to shore at the center. Looked like everything turned out OK.
Looks like Gus just recently found out about Excelsior. It's a neat bit o' code, that's for sure.
It's amazing how much knowledge is bundled up just into the XML format of an object. Implied knowledge that sometimes is just darn startling, ya know? I've seen some papers on this - implied taxonomy stuff, etc - but haven't spotted anything yet on how to really take advantage of it.
more and more keeps coming out for Mac articles at OReillyNet. This time it's an interesting review of FaceSpan (with nice examples) by Matt Neuburg. FaceSpan itself apparently has recently received a long-awaited update for MacOS X, and it's supposed to make knockin' out quick Apps even quicker if you're conversant with Applescript. I don't really have a sense of how much better/worse/easier/harder it is than messin' with XCode and it's Applescript Studio functionality. Maybe there's something there, maybe there isn't.
This is so funny. Tara has decided to make a font from her handwriting with Fontifier. The reason I think it's funny is because ages ago (like 10+ years), I had a friend who painstakingly twiddled bits on my Macintosh (a 512k Fat Mac) to encode his handwriting into a font. I kept it for years - may still even have a copy buried somewhere. It's not TrueType or anything pretty like that - just a bitmap at a single font size.
Now there's an application (a web application no less) that will encode your handwriting into a font. I'm not sure that I'll do it though. I have a distinctive handwriting and pleasant handwriting, but frankly it's become sloppier (or more personalized, depending on your viewpoint) over the past decade as I've become more accustomed to writing online with a keyboard than writing with a pen. It's starting to come back though - since John gave me a moleskine and I bought myself a gold-nib fountain pen like I'd promised myself several years ago. I'm nowhere near the skill I used to have with penmenship - when I could wip off several different styles of calligraphic alphabets without any thought. Guess I just let that one slip away...
Update: If you're interested in seeing the end results, check out Tara's sample. It's pretty impressive!
Maciej has posted an amusing read about PC Forum, where he describes in his usual eloquent terms what he felt and thought about attending the venerable C[ETI]O pseudo-geek conference. It's an amusing read if you're looking for something to keep your attention while riding the bus downtown tomorrow.
I also recently received a copy of the may issue of DDJ, and it has buried within it an intriguing article (that's available to the public) entitled A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools by Eugene Eric Kim. At first I read through it and didn't really get it. Yet another rant about RDF, XML, and the glory of taking an aspirin in the morning? But after letting it percolate in my brain for the day, I'm coming more to the conclusion that it's a useful rant.
I personally blew off a lot of the content, but I suspect that's because I already knew a fair bit about Doug Engelbart and the contributions he's made to what we consider "standard computing" today. In that vein, the essay/rant/article is really a thought piece on how we should be thinking strategically about software we develop today. I suspect corporate governance being what it is, it mostly won't happen except in a few places - but it's a direction in which to strive. And my own opinion is that it's a direction that some companies will continue to attempt to "embrace and extend" (ain't heard THAT one is while, have ya?) - because it ultimately poses a significant threat. The threat is the classic network effect. The joy of a plain text document - it's still readable after 20 years... Good luck reading a wordperfect document from just 7 years ago in the current brace of machines. Sorry, I'm diverging from my intent - the essay is about thinking in terms of using the networking benefits right from the very start, building it in at the baseline, instead of figuring out how to tack in those concepts later. Eh, stop listening to my babble and read it and let it percolate in your head. Maybe it's useless, maybe you'll get something from it.
Spent the evening at the Triple Door, enjoying Solas - an "irish" band more like Steeleye Span than the pure traditional bits.
I'd never been to that venue before, and I really enjoyed it. It was intimate and accessible, and sharing a booth/table with Nathan and Leah to enjoy the show was amazing. Good tunes, good evening.
Robert Jones has written an interesting article for OReilly entitled Planning for Disaster Recovery on LAMP Systems.
It's a pretty good overview of how he sets up installs for his code, perl CGI scripts and various system modifications. The article, however, is very definately from the coder's viewpoint. As someone who has set up a LOT of linux servers, sometimes "inheriting" the code and wierdness that someone else has lovingly (or insanely, depending on your mood) put together, you just don't have the time to get a good picture of all the details before you really need to have a good disaster recovery scenario worked out.
So if you've been stuck with a box, and told "It Can't Fail", but you know you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of rebuilding it form scratch without a week's time to investigate, I recommend checking out System Imager. It's a tradeoff game, without a doubt, but it's a damn handy one - especially if what you have to manage to is a service rather than specific data. System Imager lets you take a snapshot of a machine and clone it - exactly. You could use this to manage a network of 100+ test servers, or you could use this to make sure you could reproduce a machine onto bare hardware in a matter of minutes.
I originally learned about this beauty back at MU where we were very focused on providing high quality services and really, really short mean recovery time from failure. We had several boxen of all the same image, and with the imager running, we could restore a machine from bare metal to fully functioning application server in a matter of about 5 minutes. Consider how long that might take from tape... You pay for it in disk space, but if you have an app server or baseline platform that you need to be able to reproduce out - it's worth considering.
Today is Easter, at least by some folks reckoning. Karen was one of those folks, and she really wanted to celebrate easter this year with a dinner and some of the easter goodies (like an easter egg hunt, deviled eggs, etc). So that's pretty much what we did today. Strangely, celebrating a little bit of the easter holiday was a reaction to having missed the first evening of passover with Leah and Nathan. Something just sort of seemed missing this year, so we "had" an easter.
The morning was cleaning, Karen boiled up some eggs, and we had went shopping for a ham. We never dyed the eggs like we'd planned, as we were sidetracked by a trip to Whole Foods over in the U District. That's a wonderful, but rather dangerous, grocery - and we spent both a fair bit of time and a middlin' amount of cash buying this and that, most of which really didn't apply to anything to do with Easter, but was fun anyway.
Nathan joined us for the afternoon (he was with us on the ever-so-dangerous shopping trip), and we munched on salami and a lovely aged gouda we'd picked up at whole foods, all the while slowly working our way towards various dinner things. He already had evening plans (the sunday night poker game he hosts), but Leah was able to join us for dinner - so in the end we got to spend the day with both of them - albeit at different times. That was really nice. We even had an easter egg hunt (I hid them, Karen and Leah hunted them).
This evening, we followed it up with a movie that we just picked out at random - The Maldonado Miracle, which turned out to be a pretty good flick - both for an "easter" sort of thing, and just from a film point of view. It was originally made as a for-TV showtime movie in 2003, and is one of those better stories that ranges over a couple of different plots all fairly intertwined.
All in all, it's been a pretty good day - and I'm sorry it's about over. This has been, really, a pretty terrific weekend. The kind you just want to keep going for a long, long while.
Hey, check it - OReilly has implemented SSO for it's site/web properties. Okay, that's pretty neat. I'd worked that problem previously (as has Gus) - and it ain't a trivial problem.
The only downside that I current see is that even though the system recognizes me as being "logged in", it still displays a message at the top reading "Sign In/My Account", which makes me think that I'm probably not logged in, even though I am. It's them UI things...
Ah,
So I've found out why I couldn't make the WWDC ticket purchase yesterday - the credit card company thought someone was committing fraud with my card. I received a call this morning asking for a "call back", and they quickly took care of me. Nice to know that the credit really is there, and even if it's annoying, I'm glad they have systems like that in place.
So I've got my ticket and I'm on my way!
Heh. Now to look at those pre-conference workshops...
Heh. Cool. I've signed up for Carbon Programming (since I don't really know very much about those API's, not being a legacy Mac coder) and Effective Debugging and Optimization of Mac OS X Code (which just sounded like a nice thing to get some brains on)
It's a friday night, and I'm reflecting on the day. Just now, actually, read up some of the blogs that I try to keep track of. It's a strange day for blogs. Tara is bored and looking for stories. Jeff provided a whopper of a story - and I don't mean that he lied so much as it must have made a real whopper out of his day. tuplips are the photo of the day at Flipdingo and Tyd's blog note for today. Stace blasted out a layer of angst that I just can't imagine from her, since almost every time I see her she's smiles or I'm hearing about the last great thing she did for someone else. And Karen is talking about the good and bad in her job.
Quite a reflective friday night, all in all. Me? Well, dunno what to say really.
I tried to register for WWDC this year only to have my credit card refused. It's like 11pm at night, so there's nobody to really call to the make the transaction complete. I didn't need to get it done tonight, but I got the hotel reservations all nailed down this afternoon, so I was sort of looking forward to getting it all set out.
Work was work, with the good and the bad. The good was really good, the bad was it's usual level of "I can't believe how frustrating..." sort of thing. But let's focus on the good... I had a really good conversation with one of the folks that I work with. One of those heart-to-heart conversations that ranges over the gambit from small problems to big ones, listening and being listened too, and feeling like I not only made a difference but I made sure that he knew he made a difference too. That took about 45 minutes in the late afternoon, and frankly it was probably the single most productive and empowering things I'd done all week. Maybe in the past month too.
Karen and I picked up a trio of movies, and only watched one this evening: Cheaper by the Dozen, which was a cute movie - if not exactly the best I've ever seen. Cute, I think, is about all it rates. I'd frankly hoped for more from Steve Martin.
The news is wretched, although I saw a site in the paper that looked intriguing: Findory. It was in the PI today, and I got rather excited when I read the bit: Linden's news site, Findory.com, applies a similar concept of personalization to online news. In addition to letting a person search for news by keyword and subject, the site automatically remembers which news articles a person reads via the site and identifies other news articles likely to be of interest.
When I read that, I thought "Wow, I wonder if Karen's seen that!?". You see, she hates to read the news but can't really help herself. The reality of the war in Iraq is depressing as hell, and most of what the paper's call "news" is really something akin to written sensationalism and verbal masturbation. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of the news - although I keep track of it out of a sense of self-defense. Anyway, one time Karen asked me "Why can't they print just the happy news - you know, a speciality paper". I think she was disgruntled with the fact that I had geek news sites that I tracked the things of interest to me, where all she really had was "general news" sources. So when I saw the description, I thought "Hey..."
Now I haven't played with Findory all that much, but I hope it focuses a little more on personal interest than heuristically bagging me in with others of the same general archetype (ala Amazon) for common interests. I don't know Greg Linden, but I'm pleased he's taking a shot at the big boys with this one and wish him well in the endevours. Gotta love that a Seattle-ite is taking some names and making some splash with a search application. Course, four years ago I didn't know shit about search to be honest. But it's been a really good four years for learning what I know, don't know, and what the potentials are. Er, I do hope he figures out how to monetize that idea of his though - doesn't look like there's much in that mechanism there at the moment. (gimme a call Greg, if you want some ideas...)
Guess I had a fair bit to say after all.
Let me start off with the fact that I am not, in fact, feeling "euphoric" right now. None the less, I'm spending some random cycles this evening thinking about how to bottle euphoria (metaphorically speaking) for myself. And while I'm not feeling euphoric per se, I'm feeling a combination of things this evening, just as a result of the combined random bits of the day, that have left me really positive. And in this lovely isereness and sense of positive being, I can see a future time, and see clearly (all too clearly) back to past times, when I have been in a less than positive mental state.
That's leading me to think Hey, I'm in this great mental state - how can I preserve or even just remember it for later, when I'm not in this great mental place. Hence the bottling euphoria title for this babbling.
Karen and I talked about that for a while this evening too - or maybe I just sort of mused out loud and she appeared to be listening attentively and periodically nodding in what I perceived as agreement or thoughtfulness that wasn't just being sleepy and bored. She described a couple things - one was to write about it (which I'm vaguely doing now - although it's more of meta-writing about the topic, not the specifics which might engender a positive memory per se). Another was dance (yes, dance - not my cuppa' tea, but someone's I'm sure), and another was clothes. Anything, really, that you could do that would be emotionally intense. That intensity would hopefully impart some measure of connectedness that could be used to bring back the same mental state later. (sounds frighteningly like some of Minsky's Society of Mind stuff).
So what am I doing? Well, I think it's pretty obvious. I'm musing on how I might keep that feeling going, digging it around and pushing at it mentally, thinking about it and enjoying it - and writing about the musings here in my blog.
A little bit of geekdom tonight before I go off and write for a while - OReillyNet (yeah, I read there a lot) is hosting an article on Bloom Filters written by Maceij Ceglowski.
I started reading Maceij's stuff over a year ago - partly because he was an intriging blogger with a name I didn't know how to pronounce (I do now), but also partly because he was into search and did some really neat work with bringing some advanced search concepts to light for me.
He has this way of finding these interesting esoteric concepts and bringing them up in articles that just really resonate with me. Bloom filters is sort of like that. His work a year or two back on LSI was another real eye-opener for me.
Mark Pilgrim has a new article up on RSS/Atom and normalizing feed content that's a pretty good read if you're into that sort of technology, and was most interesting to me because of the nice collection of links all together.
Elsewhere on the OReilly Network site, Andy Oram has an article about P2P lessons for web services which really read out a lot more awkwardly than I'd expect from his past writings. It was sort of two articles roughly splashed together, and I didn't quite get the point he was trying to make in between all the words. I'll go try and grok it again later, but not right now.
Several search (and non-search) geeks are talking about "Google as a platform" - John Battelle, Danny Sullivan, and Kottke. This whole "mail search" thing is making big splashes all over the place, but I can't say I'm surprised at it. I think the need for a not-completely-crappy-search on email has been around for a while. Shoot - maybe I'll even find something once in a while now. (yeah, you can bet I'll sign up for gmail if they make it available - I don't give a crap about the email at google, I'll just be using it as a 1Gb personal information repository accessible anywhere on the Internet)
Microsoft is doing a really intriguing job of creating a new community/discussion site with their Channel 9 site. I do wish they would lay off the windows video uploads though, kinda annoying to me. Basically, if you're using a Mac, don't bother heading over there though. Wiki+Blog+whatever, it renders like crap on Safari.
Spent most of the evening playing with web pages, session management, and arguing with myself over reasonable methods of keeping state in all the usual methods of shoe-horning it into http transactions. Blech. I've become terribly spoiled with the elegant MVC pattern that exists in most GUI frameworks these days - so creating any sort of complex user interface in web pages just starts to stink for me. I do (I think) a reasonable job separating out the model from the presentation, but the controller/business logic layer just gets mashed all around in with design aspects and components. Yeah, I know you shouldn't do things like use php because they merge exactly those components. But I do - just like everyone else, because it's really darn fast to develop pages. It's also really *#!*!# hard to develop good user interface/pages with it too.
John (flipdingo) had a rather unfortunate lesson today on why you shouldn't put cola in the freezer. Er, more appropriately that lesson would be why you should remember to take cola OUT of the freezer before you leave for somewhere. Blech - what a mess!
It's the end of the day, and I'm getting ready to turn in for the night. Got a lot of good stuff done this evening, with almost none of it being in the "errands of life" kind of category. Kinda nice.
Nate and Leah are out of town for Passover, so I'm sorta missing them. I'm not jewish, but we've celebrated passover with them a couple of times, and strangely enough I miss not scamming off some of Leah's awesome (traditional) cooking this time of year. Shoot - if nothing else they're always having an amazing brisket.
Dinner tonight was a much simpler affair - a greek salad down at Pete's Pizza because neither Karen nor I particularly wanted to mess with cooking this evening. Could have been a decent evening for grilling really, but it didn't happen. Still have plenty to work on there though.
More dandelions bit the dust today too - just seemed to be a worthwhile thing to tackle when I came home. I was pretty out of it when I arrived at the house this evening, just all out of sorts with no particular reasoning behind it. Still not sure why, just was.
I noticed it was already making the rounds, but I thought I'd mention that Mike Beam has a new article up at O'Reilly MacDevCenter on the (relatively) new controller layer.
It's a nice intro tidbit (for those of you who haven't found it on the mailing list archives), with an XCode project file included.
This all follows on pretty quick behind the results of the MacDevCenter survey where Derrick wrote We've been churning away behind the scenes to line up new Cocoa content, and you'll see some stuff, including a guest appearing to write about the number-one-requested Cocoa topic, in April.. Guess that's the content, eh? Nice.
It's only one data point, but you know - it's completely believable. I caught this link to an Iraqi blogger from Aaron...
The BBC is saying we're considering reinforcements, and the US news is covering only brief "X people died fighting today" sorts of snippets.
I guess there's no telling what's really happening over there, although it's clear enough that something is heating up.
You know that feeling? Just everything that you sort of need to do as a part of just existing seems to be piling up in front of me. It's 9pm and I've really done nothing but the errands and nessecities that the day demands. Trash, grocery shopping, dinner, cleaning, etc.
Really, I've sort of given up on getting anything of my projects done tonight. I see in the iChat listings that Gus is "coden". I feel like I should be, but it ain't happening tonight. It's been "not happening" way too much lately.
Karen says that self recrimination when you get into this sort of thing is the worst possible place to be, so instead I'm trying (barely making it) to be cool about it and just work on what I can get myself to work. I'm also trying a new tactic of scheduling a few specific evenings a week to work on my own things. I used to have every night of the week booked when I lived in Missouri - getting together with this set of friends for a group dinner, gaming, or what-have-you. Now I don't really have any specific evening plans, and I find myself lost in procrastination and mental "dumb zones" or something. Maybe by saying "these nights are sacrosanct", I can get something nailed down and make more progress.
The funny thing is, I don't know if this all would be easier I didn't work at all. I suspect not, just because I see the self-control and organization that Karen pulls together to keep at her business (artwork, teaching, and publishing) during the day, and it seems like we're facing the same tribulations - just at different times of day.
Well - for now anyway, I'm off to spend some time with Karen and maybe we'll fiddle with a website design for her.
Both Karen and I are feeling very out of sorts today. It's been a quiet day for both of us - we'd originally planned on visiting rockeries to check out the various offerings for materials to include into a retaining wall - only to find out they weren't open on sundays. At all. Blech.
So instead we took a trip down towards Southcenter Mall and picked up a couple of bike helmets at the annual warehouse bike sale down there, spent some time doing the "bus around Seattle" thing while getting supplies at Office Depot, and grabbed a bite to eat in the midst there somewhere.
Through it all, though, we've been both really run down. Karen suspects it's the time change, and I've got at admit that it's probably a likely suspect. I've been dragging all day. For a while I thought I might just not have eaten enough, but I've just had some more food recently, so I don't think that's the case. Maybe it is just the time change - loosing an hour to the day.
Karen and I were chatted with a fellow traveling from New Zealand today. One of those bus stop chats where he started out asking some vague directions and a conversation somehow ensued. This fellow, who's name I never did get, was traveling on the cheap, and looking for a very inexpensive place to stay. His quote, which so stuck in my mind was "This trip is being powered on the smell of an oily rag". I chuckled - hadn't heard that one before. Maybe it's more common down under, but who knows.
Ok, that's really odd - what's happened to slashdot this weekend?
The name doesn't resolve, the DNS gets timeouts when trying to run down the addresses. SourceForge and OSDN doesn't come up either - someone hit them with a massive DoS attack or something?
I'm taking an intentional day off from keeping a low carb thing going, so I splurged myself this morning with a bagel and lox. Man, I love those flavors - smoked salmon, red onions, a few capers, cream cheese. Awesome. The only downside was that Noah's Bagels has stopped producing cracker peppercorn bagels (absolutely wonderful things for savory breakfasts).
I also grabbed a regular latte - which I haven't had in a while. I've been drinking soy latte's of late, both for the protein and because they generally have a lot less carbs. A side effect is that they're also somewhat sweeter in flavor - at least they cut the bitterness of espresso out quite a bit. I noticed it immediately when I started drinking the non-soy latte this morning. I thought Jeez, this thing is really bitter!...
My hands are a bit torn up at the moment - more dandelion fighting in the front yard. Half this past week my hamstrings have been really tight and somewhat sore from all the squating, digging, pulling, rending of roots, gnashing of teeth... oh wait, sorry - I got carried away there. From all the gardening, really.
I don't know why I've suddenly decided to call a vendetta down upon the little yeller flowers - I actually rather like 'em, but it's been soothing in a strange sort of way. Something halfway mindless and physical where I can let me brain sort of scope through the days thoughts or whatever. Of course, then there's the aspect of playing in the dirt, which is always sort of fun. Really, the only downsides so far have been a torn up hand (I lever against my fingers, which a frequently getting squished into pavement) and sore muscles from strange contortions I put myself into while crawling about the yard trying not to destroy Karen's flowers.
Andy Lee has released an update to AppKiDo, a great little "quick reference app" that provides all sorts of handy and quick to access details on the Cocoa Frameworks by presenting the built-in headers and info in a quick to access kinda way.
I've used AppKiDo and Accessorizer on and off with my programming, so I'm glad to see an update.
Did I mention he's making this freely available?
BoingBoing has a link to NewsMap - sort of like that MarketMap thing, except that it provides a 2D "map" of popular news stories (popular being defined by scraping Google News).
I'm really glad that people are continuing to press through new user interfaces to visualizing data. We are, in general, incredibly visual critters - in many ways I think you can transmit more data more effectively visually. I have a friend who really finds a lot of use for the Map of the Market - I'm not sure if the news visualization is as effective - but then I don't really use that information.
I've spent a lot of time at work making things 'visual' for diagnostics and monitoring efforts. No, not just the red light/green light bullshit that so many people think is good monitoring UI, and which some have described as the "control panel of a battleship". I want information - rich detail, and that is what is so good to display and process visually.
I can't quite tell if the Google email thing is an April Fool's thing or not.