Ended up being a long day today - much longer than I had any expectation for when I started it out at 7am this morning. I made it home around 9pm, not displeased in any way with what I and my team managed to get accomplished, but frustrated none the less with the effort that needed to be expended on very short notice.
So after a short period of reflection, reading email, and generally chillin' out a few minutes, I decided that tonight was a good night for a Tin Roof Sundae at the 5 Spot. Sometimes they make them better than others. Tonight, honestly, wasn't a fantastic night for the desert, but it hit the spot. They also have a "late night" menu which is available at 10pm and is pretty good. Not quite the same as a chili-mac at the Broadway Diner, but pretty good in it's own right.
In other news, I noticed that Gus has a set of del.icio.us bookmarks now. And since there's a really nice Cocoa/MacOS X client for the service and I've gotten pulled even deeper (can it be possible) into RSS feeds with Brent and Shiela's latest update of NNW... well, maybe it's time to try it out myself. So... http://del.icio.us/heckj
Hey, that's kinda cool - Apple is offering more space with their .Mac accounts now. I presume to keep somewhat apace with the Google/Yahoo offerings since they're giving that crap away for free.
From the Appler's:
We're excited to announce that your .Mac membership now comes with 250 MB of combined .Mac Mail and iDisk storage. And, in another move designed to make life easier as traffic grows heavier and files grow larger, we've increased the maximum email message size to 10 MB.
Looks like Michael McCracken is making some serious forward motion with Scons. At the moment, I'm up to my neck in getting some infrastructure nailed down at work, otherwise I'd be really tempted to see if I could change our make system into using Scons to get the work done...
As the day winds down to the end, I've got more energy than I'd have in a week (although it feels like much, much longer). I hope - I really hope - that I'm finally getting over this damn cold. I still have congestion and a runny nose, but I can deal with that. I thought I was at this point last tuesday, and then wednesday came around like a bag of lead shot to the back of the head and I was down again. I'd even thought that I was over any contagious period. Who knows, maybe I was, but the way it knocked me over late last week I didn't trust.
Which means I ended up turning down some really awesome invitations yesterday and today. And that sucked, but the last thing I wanted to do was give someone else this damn cold.
Of course, that doesn't apply to work. I got called in this evening to help out with some build and deployment bits when we found a few more really nasty critters lurking about. Ended up having a meeting there too which lasted an hour or so, maybe longer - but it was really worthwhile in that it broke open some things that needed breaking open. It was one of those meetings where it could have been all "heat" (as in flame wars), and no light - but it did a really good job of directing a lot of light from what started out as heat (a lot of frustration). I, of course, wanted even more light on the subject - but we at least got the discussion started.
Actually, the whole even this evening left me sort of charged and pumped up. I'm feeling good, and maybe just getting my energy levels back to normal is helping tremendously, but it's still feeling like a good day.
Karen is so funny when she's playing Alpha Centauri. Mostly, I just don't think of her as the ruthless type - but when she plays this game, her ruthlessness comes right out. It's a long running game, so I catch periodic glimpses of her while she's playing, and in those glimpses I hear things like "Hey, they attacked me! ... I'll have to wipe them out now." in this sort of surprise followed by steely determination. Ask an hour later, and yes, she had indeed wiped them out. Refocused all her attentions and resources in the game for the sole purpose to anilihating her enemy.
Ended the day watching a movie with Karen. Got home at a reasonable hour today, so we had a nice dinner and rented Big Fish, which I'd seen previously and loved - but Karen had never seen.
It's a wonderful flick, even if it tears me up at the end. Very cyclical, and if you can imagine a fable with the combined talents of one of the Cohen Brothers and Tim Burton - well, this is it.
My mother had this great Doberman Pincher - his name was Shermie. He was four years, and he died yesterday morning. They think it was his heart, but it's unclear exactly what happened. It wasn't anything traumatic to him - just a great sigh and he was gone. I'm glad there wasn't any pain with it. It's really sad - even if he always growled at me, he was a neat dog. I think he never really forgave me for setting down the rule of law on him one thanksgiving while Mom was away. I'm gunna miss that big lug.
On the other side of the doggy world, Rocky is recovering well. He's a sad not-quite-puppy-anymore, but he's healing up well. They took the staples out of his leg the other day, and the rod will stay in another month to six weeks. Pat and Bill are having to move his leg for him, which none of them like because it's hurting like the dickens. But he's mending, which is great.
Been a rough september for my doggie friends.
Woke up and checked my email to find a pretty cool tidbit that had been broadcast to a variety of development lists.
I'll reproduce it here, just to get all the detail out there:
Tuesday evenings are now geek nights at the University Village Apple Store (Seattle).
There will be a Cocoa special interest group to be held every other Tuesday. These will be interleaved with general Macintosh programming topics for the alternate Tuesdays.
The first meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 26th at 6:30 PM.
The exact nature of the meetings will be determined by the needs & experience of those who attend.
Although Apple is providing the space, this is not an Apple sponsored program, it is simply whatever we make of it.
If you would like to attend and/or can contribute to the content please eMail me at the special mailbox I set up for this series: (geeknights@earthlink.net)
-----
Because I have no idea of who will attend I am planning on starting out slowly, with plenty of Q&A / mingle time, hopefully some of you higher tech types will show up so we can quickly change over to a meatier program.
The tentative starting schedule (until the group decides to alter it) is:
October 26th - Organization meeting and general introductions
November 2nd - General, Navigating the Apple Site & Intro to Apples Tools, General Books & Publications
November 9th - Cocoa, Intro to XCode & Interface Builder, Hello world & getting started
November 16th - General, Mac OS X Architectural Overview
November 23rd - Cocoa, Objective C in two hours or less
November 30th - General, Bundles & Other Questions
December 7th - Cocoa, Views & Controls
December 14th - General, OSX Frameworks
January 4th - Cocoa, Delegates
January 11th - General, Alternate programming environments
Ironically, I noticed this article in the PI on blogging from Scoble's blog, not reading the PI...
After reading about Growl and Stakeout, I decided that I had to really make a go of using stakeout during an every-day work environment. It just so happened that while I was reasonably cognizant at work I'd been working on some python scripting, and I'd been doing "the right thing" by writing the tests up front, and filling in the code to fit.
That's a little tricky when I'm more used to scripting out the baseline functions as specific, and then generalizing from there - but I'm managing some measure of the combination - lego block building combined with writing tests before I knock a piece into a generalized method.
Anyway - back to the topic. Using stakeout. Worked beautifully, except not with SubEthaEdit, vi, or the emacs operating system layer. Just BBEdit. Turns out that michael had a great little tidbit on this. I'm quoting some email from Michael and his brother ("the emacs wizard") out of turn, but I thought it was useful if anyone wanted to use emacs with stakeout:
if I open foo.c in emacs, it doesn't just munge the existing
file; instead, it creates a new file, "#foo.c#", and unlinks the old
"foo.c" (replacing it, not updating it) when I do C-X C-S.
So the key to get it to work is to open it in emacs (or SEE maybe), make a change, save it, then start stakeout running.
Not insurmountable, definitely. Turns out that particular game doesn't work with SubEthaEdit though. So... for the time... I'm back to using BBEdit to edit my python hackery at the office. I'd been trying to use SubEthaEdit because it was so very, very easy to share a document with other folks quickly, but I'd rather have the bits that automagically run my unit tests for me.
And now? Well, now I'm about to take a nap - because the congestion is damned annoying and I couldn't even think straight about my python hackery at work, so I came home.
I'm getting over the cold, but the congestion is nasty. My ears are starting to plug up a bit, and I really hate that. There's pretty much nothing you can even really do about it. Made it to work today though, just took it slow and easy. Spent the day somewhere between Excel, email, and scripting out various gnuplot bits in shell. Not a bad day, considered my brain's gotta be running on 1/3 power at it's best right now.
I'm still submerged in my cold, only peeking out every now and then to check email, read a book, or change the sequence of music playing in iTunes in the background.
This sucks, but I sorta knew there'd be a price to pay for the stress of the past few months. It could have been worse though - we'd originally planned to be on a cruise at this time - so I could have come down with the cold on the first day of the cruise! Now wouldn't that have sucked bug time!
You know how when you've been under stress for weeks, months even, and it finally lets up? Say you finally get away to that vacation, or (in my case) accomplish that goal you've been struggling towards for months...
yeah, the cold caught me. It's come on like a freight train, and boy am I feeling it. All the aches, sneezing, runny nose, congestion - the works.
Good lord this sucks.
I did get my jamba juice breakfast - made it a "cold buster" even. I'll probably do the same tomorrow. Nothing like a megadose of vitamin C to try and reduce the effects. I also made the time to get to see Ghost In The Shell 2. If you liked the original, you'll probably like the second one too - although plan on needing to see it more than once to catch most of what's going on. Not unexpected in his flicks.
Spent the evening watching Babylon 5 on TV with Karen, and now she'd heading off to bed. I probably should be too, so I won't be far along behind her. We've made it to the end of season four -waiting for the next set of disks to come in from Netflix to finish that out, and (for the first time), really see season 5.
Oh - and I rented Fable from Blockbuster today because I was sort of curious about the game, and figured that I'd probably have a few hours to spend on that sort of thing today. It's definitely intriging, although I've only played through the earliest parts of the game and a few hours of it at that. Still, renting from blockbuster seems like a lot more effective way to decide if I'd like to buy the game than the demos or just going ahead and dropping the $50 or so it's costing in stores right now. I was actually a little surprised that they had it for rent since it was just released, but I gotta say - that's awfully nice.
What do I talk about tonight?
Well, not raindrops. It was raining earlier this evening - when I came home in fact, but it's quiet outside now. And the pavement is dry - a bus just went by the house and you can always hear the wet pavement sound of it rolling by. It's different than the dry pavement sound. At least they're electric - I'm very, very glad they're not using deisel busses up in the neighborhoods.
I could talk about wireless networks and networking I suppose. Or not.
I had a good day at work today. We accomplished a major milestone, and it just plain felt good to get it done and make it stick. Even managed an ad-hoc cheer and round of applause from everyone in the office with the announcement, which doesn't do anything to hurt the day, ya know?
Also have a little drainage in the sinus' today, which makes me a little worried that I'm courting a cold. John's apparently sick, and that's pretty much the last thing I'd want - for either him or myself. I think tomorrow will be a big vitamin C day. Hit Jamba Juice for breakfast, and get a mega-dose of vitamin C to start things off with.
Karen's going to be tied up for most of tomorrow, so I'll probably go see a movie. I've been sort of interested in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. It happens to be showing really close to home too - at the Uptown. And if that doesn't work out, there's always THX1138 at the Cinerama.
It's raining lightly tonight.
It's a wonderful sound. I've always loved it - the sound of rain falling around. On pavement, on trees and into leaves, onto the metal awning on the front porch. It's relaxing to me, as I guess it is to a lot of folks. And the quiet rains that aren't uncommon in Seattle are my favorite.
In fact, I actually (some say perversely) like rainy days. The summer rains in Missouri were strange aberations of nature - slightly cooling in an otherwise hideously warm climate. The wind before and after a good rainstorm there was refreshing. The day after, however, was usually worse - as the humidity altered physics and (I'm quite sure) made it to 110% quite often. But I think it was the fall rains in Great Britain - in the marches of Wales - that really convinced me that rain was not at all depressing. The stoic farmers around that area were always out in it, or the sun - seeming almost impervious to whatever weather might be. (It wasn't until a year or two later that I learned what a spring sleet storm was really all about - and there ain't NOBODY impervious to that. But a good cider or ale helps a hell of a lot.) And you just couldn't "stay in" when it rained there - or you'd never do anything or get anywhere. The rains there, like here in Seattle, weren't the violent crashing thunderstorms of the midwest. The were quiet, sometimes wetter then drizzle, sometimes not. "Liquid sunshine" is the phrase I've heard used here - it's appropriate. I learned what a lovely thing a wool sweater could be, even when it wasn't particularly cold - and the real benefit of an oilskin coat. And why you wear a hat (to keep the drizzle off your glasses). But I went out in it, and I enjoyed myself.
Maybe that was all just training to move to Seattle. Or maybe I moved to Seattle remembering that I dearly loved that temperate climate. Hard to say at this point.
For now, though, the raindrops have stopped - and the only sounds are the clicking of the keys as I'm working with the keyboard. Quieter now, when I stop typing altogether. The periodic drip as something built up falls over the edge of a sill or leaf and into a puddle newly formed. But quieter now.
Made it to the Meetup tonight, chatted with Tara, Samantha, Chas, and a variety of others for short bits. Stuck around for an hour or so, and then had to dash off to Northgate to pick up Karen from her teaching. We've more or less just meandered home through a quick dinner that wasn't really quick at all. Ah well.
As you might guess, I'm "suffering" from a bit of insomnia tonight. It's another one of those nights where I never expected to have it. At 11pm, I was a little tired, and I'd caught up on email, reading the news, etc. You know, basically about ready to hit the sack. Which I did.
And now I'm here, sitting on the couch and writing in my blog because I might as well do something instead of just lay there annoyed and sleepless.
We're in the midst of some heavy testing at work right now. Good stuff, making decent progress and all, but there's a hell of a lot to do. So as I laid there, quietly trying to sleep, I kept thinking of all the various test cases I should scribble down, and then arrange to have done. There's just not enough bloody time in the day to get everything done, but a few key ones (test cases) can cover a lot of territory. Then there's stupid things like thinking "Oh, I need to get a tape measure and some sidewalk chalk" that sort of float in around the corners.
Ironically, William Grosso is out asking for suggestions on what to use to track QA test cases that's open source. Because I'm probably a jerk, I usually read a request like this and think "Well, why don't you write something and make it Open Source...". He did point out Bugzilla Test Runner, which - if I had a few extra weeks around - I think I could use. I also spotted QAsync, which looks to be some java/python fusion for creating, maintaining, and automating test case running. Didn't see source for it, although it's freely downloadable and has it's own Yahoo Group associated with it.
I never realized, until today, that I could think that 6mm was freakin' huge and hideous.
Thank god it wasn't my kidney stone.
I've been reading Daily Wireless to keep up with industry scuttlebutt, and it's been a really interesting site. Today, I saw something I wish existed 10 years ago: the Wherify Wireless 'watch'. Of course, I would have locked it around a couple of administrator's wrists to know where they hell they were when I was looking for them, but the end result is surely something similiar.
Damn handy little things! And according the Daily Wireless, the same concept is spreading to other mechanisms.
I guess the concept of a leash is getting even more effective - and intrusive. I wonder when companies will start requiring these things for their 24x7 response staff.
spending the evening researching the measures on the ballot for tomorrow. One of the ballots is a state Supreme Court position - and now I'm firmly in the favor of Robert Alsdorf.
Why, do you ask? Well, his bio/writeup at the online voter's guide looked good, and then when Karen read out that he was the dude responsible for stepping on Tim Eyman's weenie with initiative I-695, I was instantly convinced he was the man for the job.
No - that's not because I had a instinctive reaction to ole' Timmy Eyman (Mr. horses-ass) - but because he both did that and had an exceptionally high rating from all sorts of folks involved in the circles of law.
There's also a rather tough choice on the ballot that looks to really fund some of the education initiatives. The downside is that it would increase our sales tax by 1%. Now, that's the most favorable tax in my mind, but that's still a pretty damn hefty boost. Karen and I don't have kids, but I tend to think that maybe this one's worth it. I'll be surprised, however, if it passes.
The whole Vote.WA.GOV website it really pretty damn good. Wish I'd known about it a few years ago - but then maybe it wasn't there a few years back.
Chillin' now in the evening - had a great dinner at the 5 Spot tonight (They're latest menu is "mississippi"). Spent the afternoon wondering about holly tree wood (what it'll take to split and work it), the odd house project (yes, the kitchen still needs work and I'm thinking of everything OTHER than that), and - to round off the weird set - wondered how I could add genetic programming to my list of "quick to use tools that solves a problem" set.
So you see, it's like this:
Friday at work, a guy gave a talk on genetic programming basics - the simple stuff, the conceptual bits, and then how to move it into a little more complex problem solving by replacing the simplest case with an algebraic grammar to do curve fitting. So I definitely "got" the intuitive leap to moving to a more complex grammar and the concept of trees instead of strings. So when Karen and I took a long walk around Greenlake (walking all the way around Greenlake is a long walk you see - 2.8 miles according to the Parks and Rec web site for Greenlake) this evening, I was pondering how much further into the abstractions and indirection I could take those concepts. Well, that and watching the people run and rollerblade around and the kid learning to ride his bike.
It's been a great weekend. Chillin' out, recovering and doing things that I don't normally do. Spending a lovely day with Karen for our anniversary, going to the Puyallup Fair, walking some blisters onto my feet at Greenlake... yeah - the whole lot.
With all this wonderful weekend, it's sort of a horrific reminder when I look at the news and see talk of Hurricane Ivan about the smash into Cuba, and it's track looks like it'll be stepping all over Florida - as if Florida didn't already have enough shelter and destruction problems. All told though, Florida has the US to back it up - the rest of the carribean is likely to be spending a fair bit of time recovering from this year's set of storms. Karen and I are planning on sending in a donation to the Red Cross - who are calling for donations and assistance in helping the folks who've just had the hand-of-god kind of splat from these storms. I remember them being in Missouri during the floods of 1993 and helping with the sandbagging of the small towns.
What's this all got to do with habits? Well, nothing I guess - except that this weekend really included nothing that was habitual with the exception of me writing in this blog. Now - please - don't faint. I know I've almost posted once a day for a full seven days. Heh - we'll see how Monday goes to see if I continue, eh?
And - and because I haven't said anything much about anything lately, let me throw in the obligatory bits. The new G5 iMac looks pretty cool, although I'm not sure I'll be going back to a desktop computer at home any time in the near future. If I did - this one might be where I'd go.
And Halo 2 is looking fantastic with some great online updates since Bungie/Microsoft has announced and made available the multiplayer game to a bunch of online game magazines. November 8th...
Karen and I have been spending the morning brainstorming - sometimes quietly, sometimes in a pretty animated fashion - about her artwork. She's thinking of some new things to do with mixed media and integrating bits and pieces of what we've learned over the past years of making books. She was starting with the sort of classic things - stab bindings, folios, accordion books. But I've been encouraging her to get a little more wacky. Like mixed media (cloth, paper, embellishment) pop-up books. Or tunnel books. Or book-like objects that fold out in a bunch of different ways, instead of ye olde standard left-side binding.
Willow trees, caves, mountain streams, and forests with trolls all came to mind, and passed out again in my wild streaming of ideas. Lord knows what she'll take from it, but as she's napping now I rather expect her subconcious is churning away on something that maybe I helped to inspire.
Heh - yeah. Me, a muse.. ain't that a humorous thing to consider?
I'm ending the day in a lovely fashion - browsing the web and sites I haven't read in ages. Karen's headed off to bed, but I'm not quite ready to sleep myself. We had a great day - checked out the Puyallup Fair and spent a wonderful evening quietly together.
The fair is unlike any other fair I've ever been to or seen - and I'm not a stranger to state fairs. I've seen the ones in Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa. But this - wow - was that different. We had a great time with the usual state fair bits - horses, produce, arts and crafts. We saw a bunch of draft horses drawing wagons, and the driving expertise was really impressive. I still think it's a shame we don't continue to use horses in that fashion, but I understand all the obvious reasons. Then there was the commercial sales things. I knew they were there, but didn't know how many and how pervasive they were. Of course we blew through almost all the cash we had without thinking about it, and managed to pick up a few gifts for the upcoming holidays as we did it. And, of course, there's the music. We saw a pretty impressive mandolin player - a wild mixture of bluegrass, country, classical, and rock. Yeah - really all over the place, and very talented.
So now I'm just chillin' and catching up on unread news.
Oh - and I'm wondering - is THX1138 worth seeing?
Tomorrow is my 11th anniversary. It's another anniversary as well, but I prefer to think of the day that I became married to Karen. It was a glorious day, and those around me will remember that I didn't stop grinning madly through the entire event - and beyond a few days as well.
The good news is that I've got the weekend free. Not what I was expecting a few days ago, but I'm certainly glad for it. Not sure what we'll do tomorrow, but it'll be something good.
One of the things that I got to do over this past labor day weekend was attend a Machine Gun Shoot at a range near Merlin, OR. They host it each memorial and labor day weekend, and we'd been down there a couple of times and missed it previously - well, not this time.
It was pretty cool seeing all the various automatic weapons getting fired - from an uzi, a Tommy Gun, a fully auto M16, to a vintage WWII german 50 cal machine gun. That was, without a doubt, the one I thought was the coolest. I'd seen pictures, heard stories, seen movies - but I'd never seen one fire in real life. I'm glad I did. And I never, ever, want to be on or near the receiving end of a slurry of rounds from one of those things.
Still, I'm glad I got to see it - with a mixture of fear and respect.
Rocky had surgery today in Springfield, OR - there's a specialist there that did some amazing work and Rocky looks like he'll be not only keeping his leg, but getting most of it's mobility and strength back. At least based on how the Doctor was talking about it all.
Don't know much more - just heard this last bit tonight. Springfield is a trip from Merlin, OR - where Pat and Bill live - so I expect it'll be infrequent between details and tidbits.
Damn, I looked away from the calendar and all of a sudden we're an entire freakin' week into September!
Well, Labor Day weekend was an excellent and well needed break from the day to day that I've got going right now. There was a definite downside to it though. Rocky, the wonderful white german shepard that lives with Pat and Bill down in Merlin, OR - broke his femur this weekend. In 12 places. And worst yet, we watched it happen.
He was streaking across the lawn, intent to show the neighbor dogs that his territory was NOT to be violated when he slipped in some mud cutting hard around to intercept them and slammed his leg into a tree. We heard a yelp and he was down. We ran to get him, and he was completely not using the leg. We didn't know then how bad the damage was...
We just heard today that he'd broken it in 12 places, but that he'd also made it through the night where he was really touch and go. He's limping around on three legs, and there's the good possibility that he'll have to loose that leg. Pat and Bill are taking him by a specialist this afternoon to see what can be repaired - and I've no doubt they'll do the very best thing they can.
This all happened at the very of the labor day weekend - basically yesterday afternoon - which is leaving a weird spectre hanging over the weekend and reducing the answer to "How was your weekend" to "Okay, I guess".
Sometimes an 802.11 network can just get crappy. There's lots of potential reasons, and the most frustrating thing is that it's really not very easy to see why it's happening. Too many packets flooding the same channel, good old fashioned RF interference, many more.
One I learned about today - don't leave a linksys wireless hub turned on while back to back with a Powerbook's screen. The antenna line up reasonably nicely, and the RF interference completely dominates the whole damn thing. Annoying.
So I'm poking around at some open source tools to try and get a sense of what's what and what's available. Found ntop and trafshow. There's always the venerable tcpdump and ethereal too. I'm sure there's still more out there.
I guess in a real sense, it's not a problem with getting data. It's a problem with how to intelligently use and understand that data. Heh. Probably another of my "understatement of the century" sorts of things.