Rhonabwy

The "Gus" bet

Well, looks like the bet with Gus is out in the open.. I haven't nailed down airline tickets, but that is one of the many things on the plate for this week. Since I've been traveling by airline so much over the past two weeks, I have to admit I'm not super thrilled at giving the nasty buggers more money right now.

Okay, they do things fine most of the time - but there's plenty about airline travel that annoys me and isn't customer focused worth a damn. 27 days until WWDC though.... That's gunna be awesome.

I think I've got a pretty safe bet with InstantMessage.framework not coming public at WWDC, but I guess we'll see. You can bet we'll both be digging apart any software we get el pronto to determine who's buying the beer that evening.

Back in Seattle

We're back in Seattle, back home. The flight was on time (yeah!!!) and really very uneventful. FolkLife is keeping traffic busy near the base of the hill, but it wasn't very hard for the dude driving the shuttle to navigate through everything. That cats are both desperately happy to see us, and are demanding attention in the usual way - walking on us and pouncing upon us when we sit down.

The grass needs cutting, but I'm bushed so I think that's going to hold until an evening coming up in the next day or two. I hit the grocery store just a second ago as well - we're better stocked than I thought we were, so now we've plenty to eat in the fridge.

Time for a shower and to start running through all the paper mail that's collected...

getting ready to get back home

Ben's recovering extremely well. He's annoyed with the itching, is getting around with only a slight limp when he's getting tired, and clearly has more energy even today (with little sleep last night, as we stayed up watching war movies until all hours) than the day before.

We walked around the annual Denver Art Fair this morning, had a barbeque at Tom's place this evening (I can't even begin to spell Tom's last name - it's pronounced like "coke-meyer"), and at this point we're all generally bushed. I've been staying at Ben's place all weekend so far, but tonight I'm back at the hotel with Karen. Ben has a neat apartment in Capitol Hill (the Denver version), but it'll be nice to sleep in a bed instead of on the couch.

The biggest thing I've noticed about Denver while visiting is how very flat it is. I expected the arid climate, and the very slight shortness of breath from the elevation. But for whatever reason, I just didn't quite get that we were in high prarie, and not "right in the mountains". Beautiful sunset tonight over the "front range" though (the foothills just to the west of Denver).

I'm ready to get back and get crackin' on the new job. With Ben cured and out of significant danger in his recovery, my brain's sort of naturally changing right back to Seattle and the upcoming challenges with the new place.

So with that, I'm hittin' the sack. Yeah, this early.

Denver

Spent the day taking it pretty easy with Ben. We slept in a bit, and then spent the day working on his PC. Turns out he had a really old hand-made PC that was on the fritz, so after some various family consultations. we decided that he should bag the old thing and we'll get him a new one.

So after a day of fiddling around, he's got himself a new HP desktop and we're online with it. We just finished getting all the pieces downloaded, and watching a few movies while Windows does all it's updating.

pain in the..

The process that Ben underwent to correct the heart problems involved 5 sheaths and then various catheter like probes going through veins and arteries. I had absolutely no idea, until this afternoon, how painful it was to remove those sheaths. From 1:30pm to 2:15pm I stuck with him (for the entire process), and that was kinda rough.

The part that sucked was having to put direct pressure on the veins after the sheath was removed. Since they've punctured the vein, the direct pressure is what they use to let the vein heal itself from a puncture. For his juglar and the two femoral veins, it took only 5 minutes of pressure. Yep, I said only. To Ben, it seemed something more like 5 years, as the pressure was in an area where it was already darn sore. Since they also went into the femoral artery, that one was the last, and biggest. Just after the juglar (that was first), they gave him a shot of demerol. They gave him another hit between the two juglar veins, and I was really glad he was half-doped to the gills. That femoral artery one- the dude ended up holding heavy pressure there for something like 15 minutes. Ben held up like a trooper, by which I mean he sweared, cursed, faded in and out of conciousness, and lost the entire contents of his stomach, but didn't diss the dude causing him the pain and followed instructions pretty darn well through it all.

When all was said and done, he fell unconcious (thankfully!) and slept in the demoral haze for a good 2 or two and a half hours. When he started to come to again, he was in better spirits. We moved to a different room for the later part of the evening about 5pm. It's about 6:30 now, and he's zonked again. Mom and Karen are wrapped in books, and I'm writing here. Somewhere around 8:15 is when he can sit up and even stand up - it's 6 hours of mandatory bedrest (without moving, which I'm understanding is an incredibly pain - but at least not painful) with an arterial catheter.

We're not sure if he's coming home this evening or not - I think technically he could after 8:15, but there's some benefits to letting him rest out the night with some light sedatives here in the hospital. Of course, that means finding our way back to the hotel from the hospital, which I'm pretty sure I couldn't do without serious directions and assistance, as this is my first time in Denver, and I was hardly awake for the trip here this morning.

He's doing great!

Just after I finished the last entry, Dr. Kim came in and told us that Ben came through the procedure beautifully and that they've cured him of the WPW syndrome! They had to go up through the femoral artery, which means a longer time to be quiet afterwards to allow that puncture to heal, but he's doing great.

Okay, so actually he's in a lot of pain and drugged to the gills, but he's alive and recovering well!

Denver, waiting...

The hospital in Denver where my brother is having the surgery has some access! So I'm using it. He's being treated for Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) Syndrome. The surgical solution involved a number of pace-maker like probes inserted through the major veins to reach his heart and induce tahycardia (way too fast heartbeats). They then make this map, using some pretty sophisticated bits to make a map of the nerves around the heart, where things are connected, and differences from the normal. Then they use a final probe - this one for burning - to burn out the pathways that are triggering the tachycardia.

He's in the procedure now. It started about 9:30am (Denver time) and takes typically two to four hours. He's got a local anesthetic - I didn't realize they needed him awake for some of this, but apparently thats common as well. He's also drugged up with something they refered to "twilight" - some narcotic type thing with an amnesiac effect. He'll be under the effects from that one for a good day more or so.

Today is the day...

Today's the last day at Singingfish. Or more appropriately, it was my last day at Singingfish. I'm home now, turning around and packing up (lightly) for a trip to Denver over Memorial Day weekend. Nope, I'm not skying or headin' into the mountains - my brother is about to undergo heart surgery, so we're heading out there to be with him. I don't know all the medical details, but it's not an uncommon procedure, and he's landed some good docs to take care of him during this process. Should be in Friday morning and out friday afternoon. It's an orthoscopic procedure (is that the right word?) - so it's pretty low impact in terms of raw body trauma. Anything to help as far as I'm concerned.

Had my exit interview with AOL this morning, and was honest in both the positive and negative bits. I wasn't sure about even saying anything negative, but they specifically asked about it (good for them). Haven't a clue if they'll do anything beneficial with it. For my friends there, I hope so. Working with the AOL Search and Directional Media team was really very cool - there's some smart folks up there and it was really worthwhile to work with them, even short term.

Had a lovely going away lunch at I Love Sushi, which was fun - and yes, there's soy sauce stains on my shirt now. There always is after sushi, I think it's just the nature of the beast. I got a nice going away present - an album filled pages created by all the folks still in Singingfish, which was amusing, irreverant, obscene, and thoroughly enjoyable. Ironically, the page which made me laugh the most was a sheet of paper with a printout of a failed CVS connection - repeated over 20 times. It's the weird things that make you laugh I guess. Although, outside of the album, the "hacked front page" of Singingfish was a masterpiece, with the fingerprints of Ted Diamond all over it. (I couldn't find a better link for him - if you ever get a chance to work with him, it's WAY worth it) Don't know how long that link will last, so enjoy it while you can. It's complete with sound effects...

Since I've been around search geek's for the past 3 1/2 years, I don't know that I'll ever get it out of my blood.

Now it's on to secure wireless communications and networking! Woohoo!!!

wet morning

Jeeze, it's a wet morning. We dodged tornadoes and thunderstorm cells in Missouri while running from one family member to another, and it almost seems like they've followed us back out here.

Actually, the thunderstorms were way more of a pleasure than a problem. I miss the big rolling thunder that you can get on the "eastern plains" (more like rolling hills with lots of trees) that make up mid Missouri and eastern Iowa. We got to enjoy a few as we visited my grandmother, as well as catch a load of frog croaking that evening. The humidity, not surprisingly, kicked my butt. I'm a wimp when it comes to warm sticky temperatures, and even more so now that I've lived in the pacific northwest for the past three-plus years. A temperature of seventy-five and eighty percent humidity used to be pleasantly cool. Not anymore.

I think my grandmother fair to froze herself trying to keep Karen and I comfortable. She was wearing sweats almost the entire time we were there, and when I was wearing shorts and a tshirt, she was bundled in a jacket. For all that, my spry 91 year old grandmother is doing really well - although debating the merits of maintaining her own house, as she's getting sick of the responsibility for things like cutting the grass and such. Course, I got sick of that before I even owned a house, but there you go. Her sister (Louise) came to visit as well - 3 weeks ago she had quintuple bypass surgery. She was hobbling around, but looked pretty good too - especially for having had her chest cracked open just three weeks ago. She said her leg hurt worse than anything else (where they took the vein - looked like a giant zipper of cuts up her leg). Needless to say, I'm hoping I picked up a fair number of their genes. My grandmother was lounging over the side of an easy chair - in a position that I'd more often expect from a college student. Not what you'd expect from someone 91 years old. I hope I'm that spry at that age. Shit, I hope I make it to that age!

So for all the folks in Mid-Mo that I completely passed as I ripped through town - sorry. As usual, the trip was lightning fast and I didn't spend more than a day in any one place. I have vowed, however, to skip the fucking red-eye flights for visiting family. I spent that first afternoon crashed out in the in-law's basement. Blech. I suspect there'll be more flights back to Mid-Mo later this year. There's Gus's wedding coming up, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Doesn't help Ryan that much, but I'll just have to catch up with him when he's settled a little more at Yahoo

back

Hello world, I'm back. Well, at least for a little bit.

Just got back from a flash tour visiting the family in Missouri and Iowa, and everyone's doing well. Legacy's last day has come and gone, and we stepped in there for the artist's pick-up-your-stuff party as well. Strange to think it's just under eight years since we started that gig with Jim. Wild. They had a lovely porter there...

Oh, and it seems that I've passed my birthday in there too - the family in Missouri had a neat birthday cake and completely ignored my protests of gifts and gave me some anyway, which were (are) cool. Nicest presents this year are the nephew (a very tiny Aiden) and a new job.

offline for a bit...

Fair warning - I'm heading offline for a bit (Ryan, this means I'm not dead) - unplugging and getting out for a bit. I figure the "unplugging" will be pretty damn important with my new job starting up in just 10 days or so. Like any new position, I expect it'll be intensely interesting, and that I'll be obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else for at least a little while. At the moment, however, I'm free to unplug and unwind, so it seems advisable.

I'm unravelling a lot of the processes and details for which the current job relies upon me. We'll see - there's never a perfect time to leave, so I expect there'll be the expected burps and bumps. I'm trying to be a good guy and minimize those. Heh - if I wasn't, I wouldn't even be going to work this week and next.

But man, let me tell you - I am so looking forward to moving into an organization that is actively moving forward, wants my talents, and is willing to invest in the future. Makes all the difference in the world, all the difference.

slow morning for me

One of those mornings where it's just trudging through things. My stomach is upset, probably because I ate a lot of crap last night, and it's making itself well known. Karen even suggested that I stay home today, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do that.

evenin'

Went to the May Weblogger meetup (even if I didn't get named by Jake) and chatted for a bit. Karen met me down there, and immediately disputed that this group was other than a group of geeky guys since Anita was the only women in the meetup at that time. Oh well. After chatting for a short bit, we took off to grab a bite to eat.

Ended up at Mama's Mexican Kitchen, which I hadn't eaten at in quite some time, mostly because my office moved from 4th and Battery to Dexter and Aloha. It was fun - it's not the most awesome mexican food ever, but it doesn't suck and we enjoyed it.

We finally made it back home around 9:30pm or so, and have been aimlessly wandering about the house since then, paying attention to the cats, catching up on reading, and yawning thinking that we should just go to bed and catch up on sleep.

Pooka, you see, had me up a bit early this morning. 4:30am to be specific. The crazed carnivore (really, I keep telling him he's a carnivore) decided that the graham crackers that karen left on the back of the couch smelled really, really good - and with only a little effort he could get at them and enjoy tasty graham cracker goodness. Well, that effort included dragging the box to the floor, dragging out a hastily wrapped bundle of crackers, and he was working on opening that bundle (to loud crinkle noises which is what woke me) when I caught up with him in the living room. Oh sure, he's all innocent and stuff now...

Cometa is dying

It's been all over the news that Cometa is dying - and I'm not surprised. They asked for a huge amount of information to just sign up and use the wireless services in coffee shops, and I simply didn't feel comfortable giving them all the information when I just wanted an hour of connect.

If it'd been less intrusive, I would have gone for it a couple of times. Maybe not enough to make a difference, but if others felt the same way as I - well, maybe it would have made a difference. It is (was) a self provisioning service that was just not what it needed to be.

XGrid part 2 article

Drew and OReilly have posted the second part of the Integrating XGrid into Cocoa article on the MacDevCenter site. This digs right on down into Objective-C and wraps command-line submission with the NSTask class to make the magic happen.

I don't expect this will be hugely applicable to a lot of problems, but for the ones where it's embarrasingly parallel, it'll be fantastic.

subdued

I guess I'm rather the opposite of subdued lately. Karen is claiming that it's because of the new job coming up. I hadn't noticed, myself - but if she's claiming I'm a bit more chipper and outspoken, then I probably am...

So today we were at the chiropractor's office getting an adjustment, and right when Dr. Sarah was about to adjust Karen's upper back, I said "Hasan Chop!". You know - it just reminded me of that bug's bunny and daffy duck cartoon. They both bust out laughing, which was apparently somewhat ineffective for getting adjusted. Ah well.

sunlight

Woke up at the way early hour (for me) of 6:30am, with sunlight streaming through the bedroom window and smackin' me right in the face. I thought about trying to duck it under my pillow, but that just wasn't happening this morning for whatever reason, so instead I found myself squinting at the sunlight and very, very awake. Correspondingly, I'm now lurking about at work, where the place is a ghost town. You just shouldn't expect motion or movement before 8am in a shop where folks work with computers, at least as far as I've ever been able to tell.

Now the sun is creeping across my desk, heading for the monitor faces, which will soon be reduced to a whitish glare if I don't do something like pull the shades - which I hate doing on an otherwise beautiful morning. Maybe I'll just let'm glare and go sprawl on the deck and watch Lake Union.

little green men

Check it out!

The Coding Monkeys have released SubEthaEdit 2.0! The little blue men are now little green men, along with a host of new features. It also looks like they're finally thinking about selling it for commercial use - and good for them (although I suspect a number of commercial users will actually claim they're using it for non-commercial purposes).

A tidbit about this that Aaron might be interested in: they've also published the "mode" specifications, so you can hack in your own syntax highlighting specifications. Pretty sweet.

I think those BBEdit guys may have some serious competition here. (Although to be fair, Bare Bones seems to be focused on HTML development, where SubEthaEdit isn't)

nephew

I apparently have a new nephew - Aidan Anthony, who popped out this morning to a total weight of 6 pounds, 1oz at 19 and 3/4 inches long. Yeap, smaller than my cats.

Troy

Caught the matinee of Troy. I thought they did a pretty good job with it, although it wasn't as tragic in the end as the original story. I was rather glad they spared us pitching Hector's baby son from the ramparts...

I thought Brian Cox did a thoroughly wonderful and despicable job portraying the role of Agamemnon. Brad Pitt was a decent Achilles, although it just didn't quite fit for me in that role. Not sure why, he was certainly fit and moved well through the combat - but it just didn't work for me.

After I got back from the flick, Karen and I headed out to watch the sunset at Golden Gardens, which was beautiful. Quiet evening, quiet breeze, and a little picnic dinner.

Came back and played Halo a little more this evening after all that, but my heart wasn't really into it and the aliens were kicking my butt pretty effectively, so I've bailed on video games for the rest of the evening at this point.

Weekend

I'm being a homebody today, playing Halo a bit and otherwise having a quiet day at home. Yesterday I spent moving about all day, really not doing anything near or about computers all day. Took in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and really enjoyed it. It was a very different role for Jim Carey, and I think he did a tremendous job with it. He's not the kind of guy you associate with bookish, closed off individuals who find it hard to communicate, but that's what he played - and quite admirably.

Thinking about seeing Troy today or maybe early this next week. I know it's gotten poor reviews, but I "gotta see it" for the special effects and massive battle scenes. There's even a matinee left in the afternoon if I wanted to head out for it...

moving on

You know, it's sort of strange moving from one job to another. This time I'm not hauling myself across the United States to do it, but there's still some pretty significant mental leaps to make in the process. There's disengaging from the previous position - with it's responsibilities, concerns, and accepted norms. Coming up, there will be the work to get engaged with the new position (fortunately, getting engaged with something new is the least of my troubles, since I take to that all to well). There's also the reflection time - looking back and thinking about what the past position did and didn't do, what you wanted, what you got, what you didn't get, and what you're glad you missed.

It's funny to me that unfortunate experiences (that would be the "icky things" in other parlance) are the ones that stick so well in memory. I guess we're hard wired to avoid situations that cause us emotional pain or just uncomfortableness. Or maybe I'm just hardwired that way. I thought seriously about writing about some of those times, figuring of the folks involved none would really be very relevant anymore - and maybe there was more than a bit of just plain ole spitefulness left in me, wanting to lash out and leave nasty words on the Internet for all to see about a jerk or two. But what I really have to say that is relevant to the world at large (or at least my readers - whoever reads this stuff) is not that someone was a jerk, or abused this or that position, or did icky nasty things. I think the relevant message is that again I've learned what not to do, from someone else example. And I really hope I can take that with me and use that knowledge and experience positively.

Being the "old hand" in an organization carries with it a significant burden of responsibilities. It means, implicitly, having authority. In small companies, you can become an "old hand" pretty darn quick. In three years, as damn near one of the last hires, I became and moved through being a critical lynchpin in my current/previous job. I still carry with me the willingness to make serious "executive" decisions, and to do things that other folks would tend to ask "is that allowed?" before doing. The good news is I don't think I fucked that up too much. Oh yeah, I made a few mistakes. Everyone does, but my correct calls have been much more prevelant and significant than not. Or maybe I was just really good at hiding the fact that I had to restore the CVS repository from backup a couple of times.

A while ago I ordered our entire production system shut down because of an issue I thought I spotted. The thing that strikes me now is that nobody even questioned it - they just shut it down and then came asking "What's wrong?". That's testament to trust and goodwill in an organization. I built it up, and I used it, and I think excercising it upon occasion made it even stronger.

I've seen other folks excercise that style of authority in all the wrong ways. A good friend likened it to a bank account. Good deeds are like a karmic deposit, screw ups are withdrawls. Being a lead, or manager, or any other position of authority in a company carries with it the ability to make larger withdrawls, as well as larger deposits (this last blather being my addition to his metaphor).
I saw a guy keep a fairly significant negative balance and never appear to quite realize it, acknowledge that he was heavily in karmic debt, or even deal with the issues that developed from that status. I know it's strange, but I see those kinds of actions and fear that somehow, somewhere, I'll do the same and never quite clue in that I'm doing it.

Okay, so I actually think this fellow was of malicious intent instead of stupid (a fine point of ground that I've spent hours arguing with friends about) - and I don't have a fear of suddenly generating malicious intent, but I do have a fear of not recognizing myself being "stupid". Probably too much fear, to be honest, as I'm sure that keeps me more middle of the road than I would benefit from. Unless, of course, I've had two glasses of hard cider and a rum and coke, in which case I'm likely to speak my mind pretty darn directly. Er, I also try not to drink at work much either...

Okay, so what I want to say is "be aware of your actions". And I'm saying it to myself as much as any of you. It's way, way easier said than done, but try. Try hard. Inconsideration is one of the most hurtful, negative things I've seen in my jobs. And it's not like it's unique to the geek industry. Listen to what other people are saying, give it consideration, just listen. Maybe that's just a side factor of the personalities involved with technology or the "geek culture", but it just seems like there's not as much 'listening' and 'consideration' happening there as there could (and should) be.

So that's my babble for the night.

getting acquired by AOL

So here's a topic that not a whole lot of folks have heard positive news about - getting acquired by AOL.

Singingfish was recently acquired by AOL (recently being last November). Everyone's heard moaning and bitching from various spots on the Internet about how it sucked working for AOL from the Netscape, and later WinAMP perspective. Now I'm not going to tell you they were wrong, or liars, or any of that crap - because I don't think they were. But I've had a much different perspective, which I think is worth sharing.

So most of the time that I've been with Singingfish, we were owned by Thomson. I don't really have anything positive to say about that company, so I'll leave it at that. When AOL acquired us, it was my belief that we were about shut down. I mean that pretty seriously - I'd been out looking for work, and the writing was (to me) more than written on the wall - it'd be chiseled in granite. So AOL picked us up, and they kept all the internal positions that we already had. I was stunned. I didn't think that would ever happen, but it did. So for the past 6 months, I've been picking my jaw up off the floor at a lot of things that have happened in this transition.

Now first off, it's not all flowers. AOL is a large company that is clearly trying to turn an oil tanker sized ship around in the mouth of a small river. That causes some strange, and to my mind, stupid things to happen - but they're turning. If they weren't - well... it'd suck even worse for AOL staff in a few years. But I've got to say, the folks within AOL that I've worked with have been damn near universally helpful, incredibly friendly, and very open. And that, to be honest, was the very last thing I expected. I expected to be told "this is the way it shall be", but that was the last thing we got.

In many ways, this transition was the impetus to get some serious looking going. I was going to have to re-invent my position one way or the other. You see, AOL doesn't exactly need a "director of operations" in Seattle, WA. They have some awesome operational facilities - all on the other side of the country. To their credit, I received the space and time to really reach around and figure out what I wanted to do. And frankly, it wasn't even a sure thing that I was going to leave.

So AOL picking up Singingfish - well, that was damn near the best thing that ever happened to Fish in my opinion.

Oh - and if you're looking for streaming media, Singingfish is pretty damn good at that too.

Asta La Vista, Fishies!

The big news:

I've accepted a position at CoCo Communications, starting June 1. So it's "So Long, and thanks for all the fish" to Singingfish, the best streaming media search engine out there. (Yeah, it's far superior to Google when it comes to finding streams - and don't EVEN talk about Altavista having decent quality when compared to us).

So I've had a great run at Singingfish - my introduction to lovely Seattle. I wouldn't recommend ever working for a large french corporation myself, although large media congolomerates have actually been pretty good. I think I'm a bit happier with smaller companies myself.

I'm sure I'll have more thoughts to share later - right now it's the flurry and emotional bomb of making this transition. Course, I don't have to move across the country this time, which is really damned nice. So that's a little easier at least.

Microsoft

I attended the dBug meeting this evening at Microsoft's campus, and had a pretty good time. A couple of MS product managers gave a nice shpiel on Mac Office 2004, which has some nice feature additions. A couple I thought were really awesome, and a few I just groaned at (there's apparently a new charting wizard, but I'm bettin' they still don't do the surface plot I was hopin' for).

One thing that really struck me was how adverserial a large number of those folks attending were. Some where asking good questions, but some were just sniping and being denegrating, which was really freakin' embarrassing actually. The PM's did a good job shrugging off the snipes, which makes me think they're all to used it to - but I hope it was just natural talent instead.

Entourage in particular had some cool features - specifically the Project Center bits. I'd be curious to know if they had that as a cross platform feature, or if it tied into something like the dreaded (hearsay, but one I believe) Sharepoint Server to enable that nice sharing and organization functionality across platforms.

But you know what I use most from Microsoft on the Mac? Nope, ain't Word or Excel - it's Remote Desktop Connection (also done by the Mac BU), and I've got to say it's a pretty sweet bit of code. It's simple, straightforward, and I love the functionality it gains me to use bits and pieces cross platform. Ultimately, I find it a hell of a lot more useful than many other things.

Oh - and if you've never been to Microsoft's campus - it's really incredibly maintained. I used to think of it as a college or university style campus, but frankly it's a hell of a lot prettier than that.

Dooley is a Yahoo!!!

Super congrats go to Mr Ryan Dooley, who's recently accepted a position at Yahoo! in their Production Engineering group. For those outside of the giant Y! machine, that's the group that came over from the Inktomi purchase that drives quite a bit of their search world. Very cool.

Collector's edition?

Whoa, so I guess I'm in line to get myself a "Collector's Edition" of Halo 2 when it comes out! I'd reserved a copy of Halo2 at Gamestop earlier this year - have the stub sitting in front of my PC actually, waiting for that day... (now it's known as November 9th)

Guess I know what I'll be doing over Thanksgiving, eh?

where's that code running anyway?

Chuck Toporek is blogging about distributed apps on the Mac, quoting the ever reliable (cough), but highly amusing Think Secret. (yeah, it's one of those things - I'm addicted to Mac rumor sites)

But the step from Rendezvous (ZeroConf for you purists out there) from autonomous distribution of computing tasks using some enhanced tech is not a far step from what Apple is already providing - and it's a sure bet they're taking a relatively complex task and making it easier. I suspect that where Microsoft has made this easier as well, they're doing it with a bit more security in place so that it's not a virus that's running on your machine, corrupting files or sending me spy-ware info. (That's probably not entirely fair, but hey - this is a blog, and I don't need to be fair) Xgrid is a perfect example, focused specifically on the scientific computing arena.

And their high end line of video and audio production software makes darn good sense. They all have some sense of heavy duty rendering tasks, and the cross-over line where there's enough bandwidth to transport the pre and post products of that rendering is probably here in most offices. They've already got some sense of this working on Code development (not as 'awesome' as distributed video rendering, but darn cool none the less, it's built into XCode with the assistance of distcc).

Where next? Ah, that's some amusing idle speculation...

Update: Well, that's pretty cool. On the same day as my idle speculation, Drew McCormack gets an article on using XGrid in Cocoa applications published on OReillyNet. And I just now realized he has some articles also up there on data visualization... gotta go read those tomorrow...

November 9th

T-too-many-days and counting..

November 9th - Halo 2

swimming in data

Nature of the day, I guess - I'm swimming in data. Queries pending and updating on a screen in front of me while I attend to all the usual day to day stuff.

I do wish, sometimes, that I had some better tools available to monitor and track the flow of all this information. It's like getting crushed under email, except all the data is much more specific. That does help - as it's more easily filtered, but it also means there can be a pretty heavy "cognitive load" to make sure you've got the right sense of what you're tracking and what a change actually means...

I'm wondering where, or if, there's a generalized solution to this sort of problem. There's things like Crystal Reports and Business Objects, but they all continue to require the same sort of in-depth "grok the data" to really get effective information out of it all. I guess it's just a prequisite of doing data mining.

Oh - and I'm still wishing for more effective 3D data information tools. Not even sure how I'd do it myself, just wishing there was something there that didn't cost a fortune or take a huge amount of time to start looking at info.

heading to the Microsoft campus on Wednesday

Finally catching up with email, news, and all that crap from earlier in the week, and caught that the next dBug meeting will be at the Microsoft Campus this wednesday. They're apparently going to go over Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac, which I've got to say I'm at least curious about, even if MS Word currently frustrates the bejeesus out of me, and I was flat out annoyed with the idea that Excel could do a 3D surface plot, only to find out it couldn't and I needed to go to something else for that...

Yeah, I can whine all I like, but I still use the product - so there you go.

Speaking of Microsoft, Aaron has redone his weblog (one of them) into MovableType 3, and complained a bit about the lack of XCode documentation as well. Course, I'm not even sure how one would go about creating a new editor type with XCode. I know there's some places to hack syntax highlighting, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.

Using SearchKit

Cool!

In the crush of new documentation that's flowing out of Apple, there's a section entitled Introduction to Adding Search to Your Application. (PDF)

Glancing through it, they do a wonderful job. It doesn't contain any sample code (like my article in MacDevJournal did), but it's a beautiful overview including a wonderful and lengthy introduction to all the concepts. Oh - and fair warning, it's labelled as "preliminary". It's still WAY worthwhile though, if you're looking to add search to your Mac application.

big green egg

I'm not even making it to blogging anything today, because I spent the day out hootin' and hollerin' and causin' trouble with Nate today. Originally, we'd planned to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but became sidetracked... Instead I think you could say we spent the entire afternoon acquiring and then playing with a Big Green Egg. Go to the link - it's got a crazy name. It's a big damn ceramic smoker/grill that works really, really well. Brats, Burgers, and Ribs.

Yeah - I had LOTS of meat today, and it was all really wonderful. I don't recall if the smoke wood was apple or pear, but it was really nice and I've got a lovely stack of ribs in the fridge right now even after having thoroughly stuffed myself.

Tomorrow I pick up my sweetie, which will be really nice - I've missed having her around at home to pester with inane things, and most especially to be the sacrificial victim to feed the cats at O-dark thirty in the morning. Ah well - at they've been getting fed, even if I'm not as regular and perfectly on time for arranging it all (Karen is).

looking at info...

I suppose it's more appropriately termed "data" - as information would suggestion that there was already some level of analysis that had been performed to put the data into context.

Anyway, I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning working through the effort of getting a visual representation of some rather complex info. I'm used to dealing with 2D data - some counter or gauge over time, and multiple sets of those. I use RRDtool to generate up graphs on a regular basis so that I can assess the status of a rather complex system in a few seconds of glance. Reading columns of numbers on a page takes much, much longer - and frankly I know I won't be good at doing that on a regular basis. Give me a visual representation, and I will check it very frequently.

So just recently I wanted to look at some information across 3 dimensions (well, 4 actually) - two of them date based, relating to a counter, and then multiple sets of these.

You know what? It's a pain to get a decent 3D data plot! I'm sure I'm not saying anything new to those of you who've tried. That surface plot thing in Excel? Don't even freakin' bother. Waste of 2 hours to figure it out. I ended up using GNUplot, although I'm hear to tell you - it takes quite a while to get all that detail set up. It was made a little worse in that the data wasn't cartesian by default - so I had to fiddle around with a sparse matrix to generate the X,Y coordinate pairs for a plot.

So it worked out reasonably in the end, but I realized that it's really, really time consuming to get a nice pretty view of data in 3 dimensions. There's nothing that I've found that half autogenerates all the pretty stuff like RRD, and what I really found is that I wanted to be able to fiddle a lot more with the view - angles, scaling, limits and such - than I ever do with 2D data. Plenty of tool sets appear to be out there - but nothing super easy to use yet.

six ways from sunday

according to my calculations, that's somewhere around Saturday at noon - which I'm looking forward to, as I don't have any specific plans for Saturday - only the potential for a matinee of some form. I won't pick Karen up from Oak Harbor and bring her back down here until Sunday...

I thought I'd sleep in a little this morning, coming into work a little late since I'd previously planned to work late this evening. Well - that didn't happen. The boys (my two cats) decided to do a tag-team wakeup which involved various noises, tapping me gently on the face (claws only slightly extended), and performing the ritual "I'm Hungry Feed Me or I'll Start A Catfight" dance upon my back. Somewhere in the midst of all that, they also kicked off a few items from the countertop in the Kitchen, probably just because they could.

So I was up far earlier than I'd planned, and just came on into the office.

Now I'm fiddling with a few perl scripts, and teasing apart some code to parse an Apache weblog. I'm sure this has been written about three million times already, but here I am doing it again. I'm tempted to just do it in Python this time, simply to expand my knowledge of regular expressions with that language - I know it pretty thoroughly from a Perl5 syntax, but just haven't used it actively in python.

Not much else to report. Light winds out across Lake Union, sunny with hazy skies and pleasant on the deck. Can't see the laptop's screen out in the sunlight, or I'd be out there for the duration...

new kid on the block

Congrats to Dave and Leonie on the late little bugger they have now cradled in their arms. Gus gave me the head's up, and I spect Dave will have slack-cam images of Dave V2 up before too long.

Ostrich

Karen's back up in Oak Harbor this evening - just landed back at home from the evening drive up there and back, dropping her off with her various accoutre'stuff for her 5 day workshop.

We made pretty good time up there - just over two hours with rain and 6pm rush hour traffic (rush hour north traffic from downtown Seattle hasn't been too bad of late). Since I didn't need to make a jarring rush home, we went out to dinner in Oak Harbor where they had, of all things, ostrich.

Now I've never had ostrich meat before, so of course I had to try it. And I'm here to tell you, it's pretty damn good. It's finer grained than beef, but is otherwise mostly similiar to that. More so than pork, chicken, or fish. It's not at all like any other fowl meat I've had to be honest. Sort of like shark steaks aren't really like cod.

I don't recall the place specifically, other than it was the restaurant right next to the "Old Holland" hotel on the north end of Highway 20 heading down through Oak Harbor. It wasn't exactly cheap, but they fixed it beautifully (one of those places that pays attention to presentation as well as flavor) and I'd happily go back there - if not often.

blast it

When I fatfinger somethin' I do it good. Today, I nuked 3 years worth of data in approximately 10 seconds. Control-C just didn't get fast enough. ARGH!

Fortunately, the disk has backups - but now I've got to go admit my terrible wrongdoing and get the data restored.

dagnebit.

tunes and a cool breeze

Sunday evening is rolling in all quiet and peaceful. It's been a pretty good day, with some errands this morning and then a very nice afternoon - a little fiddling here, a little fiddling there, but mostly just quietly sitting and enjoying the cool breeze flowing through the house on a sunny afternoon with the windows open. Still have then cracked a bit, actually - the breeze feels very nice. Earlier, I was listening to Dave Nachmanoff, and this evening I've switched to Vienna Teng. It's been a good afternoon and evening for just being - no plans, no requirements. I could probably use a few more days like this, but I'll take what I can get - tomorrow is back to work and back to the race of everyday.

Karen found a copy of Daniel Key Moran's Emerald Eyes at the Library, so that got read between yesterday and today as well. I hadn't read it in ages - I have a copy of The Long Run - but his earlier book was a bit harder to find. A good read to hit again, although both Karen and I think that The Long Run is far superior.

Somewhere over this past week, the latest MacTech magazine came in - haven't yet sat down and really coursed through it. Nothing in the index really jumped out at me from this one. In general Mac programmer geek-news though, there's an article on Cocoa Bindings available at Cocoa Dev Central. The mailing list archives at Mamasam are falling away in usefulness to me as they remain un-updated since February. Some folks on the lists have been talking about making a local search of the same data. Can't blame the fellow doing Mamasam - I'm sure it's expensive. Donations won't even begin to cut it for providing the service I'd guess.

All that aside, the breeze feels pretty darn good tonight. And the tunes really add to it all. Don't really want to go to sleep - it would mean the end of the day after all.

teddy

Teddy is the name of the dog that belongs to Claude and Mary Anne. They and their girls used to be our next door neighbors. They've recently just moved back into the the neighborhood and now live an entire block away. They have two girls - Bridgette and Kate - and this dog - Teddy. I don't know what kind of dog Teddy is, something like a collie only smaller and shorter. He's very even tempered, a very friendly fellow.

The reason I mentioned Teddy is that he has a very interesting haircut, courtesy of Bridgette, as of yesterday. She's definitely got the "length reduction" thing down with cutting hair, but not how to make those smooth layering cuts that you generally think of with most haircuts. Teddy looks, well, a bit odd.

He's still happy though. Although I think he was a little nervous when I was hanging Kate from her ankles - he was barkin' up a storm at that point. He moved from the verge where I landed her (gently) and quieted down once she was on the ground.

dead batteries

Nope, not the car (this time). Nor the D-cell batteries in my stolen maglite (yeah, the buggers took that too), nor my laptops. The dead batteries are my "extrovert batteries" right now.

I've spent the day buried in a book, letting them recover a bit, and it's clear that I'm going to need more time than I've given it so far. The past week in Virginia was fine, excepting that it took a lot out of me. Personality wise, I'm not a pure introvert, or really anywhere close to it - generally, I'm a pretty social person, but right now all I want to do is hole up and hide.

Of course, that's not likely to happen, as the usual plethora of things are conspiring to demand time from me. Today was actually pretty good in terms of downtime, but there's lots of work to do and the month looks like it's going to be a pretty busy one.

Beltaine

Oh - and happy Beltaine

the political process

Karen is off being part of the caucus' today. Originally she was just going as an alternate, but she just called and it appears that she's been "seated", so I guess she's officially a part of this caucus and maybe into the next one.

To be honest, I'll have to wait to hear from her to really understand all the ramifications of what she's been involved with. From my point of view, though, it's a much more up-front-and-personal interaction with state and federal politics, which is kinda cool even if I don't quite understand everything from where I'm sitting right now.

So what am I doing? the usual crap - cleaning house, ripping a few CD's that we missed ages ago, thinking about what I should for food, etc. I slept through until 11am this morning, which I desperately needed after a week of short sleep from being on the east coast.