Our neighbors had a holloween party today for the street, and the street pretty much all showed. It was the first time I'd met Megumi and John, as well as their daughters, and they're a blast.
Megumi has a website she runs called Go Feisty, which Karen tells me is her effort to introduce the concept of "feisty" to japanese women. I can't read a huge amount of that site, as it's in japanese, but I suppose that makes a huge amount of sense given that I'm not her target audience. It's a pretty cool site, for all that I can't read most of it.
Her husband John works at Microsoft and I didn't even begin to catch what he did in the crush of noise and jostling that a party embraces. He'd seen my wireless network though, so we briefly talked a little geek talk before he was swept away again into the party crush.
It's ironic that talking about technology is one of the few things that I can easily use as a stepping stone to conversations. Matt (another neighbor) is just brilliant at the small talk thing, as is Karen - and I find myself faltering all the time in those conversations. Ah well, I'll just have to find some time when there's not a monstrous party going on to drag our John and Megumi and chat with them in a little more relaxed environment.
Update: It turns out that a little Googlin' reveals why John was so conversant with wireless technology - he's actively involved in the 802.16 IEEE working group.
Lots of little code updates have been piling around my inbox recently. Kevin Callahan has updated Accessorizer - a great code-gen tool for when you're whacking out objects in Objective-C.
In the crypto world, the SSCrypto library picked up RSA public/private key encryption and decryption.
Bill Cheeseman updated his QSW_UUID Framework to version 1.2. Bill had a great description on his email, so I'll just repeat that here: This is a Cocoa framework wrapping the Core Foundation UUID API, with additional features. Version 1.2 adds proper implementations of the NSObject
protocol's -hash and -isEqual: methods, so that standard Cocoa collection
object methods will work as expected with arrays and dictionaries containing
QSWUuid objects.
And that's all in the past week!
On more local news, George has put up an intro about the XCoder Mac Programming SIG (yeah, I know it's not specifically Objective-C - that's just my primary interest in it), although I haven't seen many more folks join up other than those I know read this blog or to whom I specifically sent out invites. Ah well - I expect it'll get announced this Tuesday at our first "formal" (if you can call it formal) meeting at the University Village Apple Store.
It's really been getting me thinking about more publishing and teaching sorts of things - I wrote that article on SearchKit and haven't followed it up at all since June (that job thing has been pretty heavy). But I've managed to find the time to play with Growl, Michael McCracken's Stakeout (with Growl Support), and quite a bit of random python "get it smacked out scripts" and unix tools that could be useful to others (at least I'd like to think so).
I've been thinking about things to "present" that might be of interest to the group - and I've thought about the Growl/stakeout/Python coding combination and installing and using UnitKit, both of which I think would be interesting to folks. I'm fairly weak on the carbon API's, and having someone walk through wrapping a carbon (or other C api) in Objective-C would be a neat thing to see. I'm also thinking that a hands-on lab or sprint sort of session could be really cool - that mostly for my own benefit I guess, as I'd like to pair up with other Objective-C programmers and learn some tricks and share some of my own.
I had no idea that you could put linux on an iPod. I really shouldn't be surprised either, considering what I've been doing at work recently. It's an ARM processor under the covers, and there's even a site dedicated to this whole game: iPodLinux. I don't think I'll be doing this, as I'm pretty happy with how it all works now and don't really need to be developing anything more for it, but it's interesting.
It's a beautiful bright and sunny day in Seattle for All Hallow's Eve. This is probably our favorite "holiday", even if you don't get any vacation days for it from most workplaces. heh.
Yesterday was a complete joy, with some errands in the late morning, but otherwise completely focused on visiting with friends and playing games. Played on the Xbox on and off through the afternoon and evening, watching the Babylon 5 movie "River of Souls" in the evening with Karen, and then stayed up later than I probably should have playing Alpha Centauri on Karen's PC. Just a completely chilled out, havin' fun day.
There's various trick-or-treat things for kids happening around here today, which we may go check out or not. Not really sure as yet. Our neighbors have invited over the street (literally) for a halloween party this evening. Not sure what all our plans are right now. For the moment, we're engaged in the great "call all the family" ritual that happens periodically, and that'll take up a fair bit of time as we chat all around. So we'll see what happens thereafter.
I found myself with the entire Halloween weekend off from work, so I'm spending the day as productively as I can - shooting down enemy bombers. You see, while it's really Halloween weekend, you've got to plan effectively for the future. And in that case, it means visiting the family in Missouri over thanksgiving, where I hope to engage my brother in law in a variety of games, of couse including Halo 2.
While boning up on Halo, however, I can't neglect my flying and shooting skills, as one of Dan's favorites is Secret Weapons over Normandy, in which we find ourselves very well matched.
I'm just hoping there's a co-op mode in Halo2 like there was in Halo1 - because that's what I'm really looking forward to doing over Thanksgiving.
damn ... i can hardly type because I can't even focus my eyes. Happy birthday Leah! That cake was awesome, and the wine was way, way more than I needed!
Karen and I watched another Babylon 5 movies - Third Space. Afterwards, we talked about about aliens and why they're scary, and both agreed that HR Giger was one of the masters of visual fear. That sort of rear-brain, hardwired instinctual "AHHHHH!" fear that you get from some of the organic shapes that artists derive and put forth.
The evil baddies in Third Space sort of looked like giant flea's to me - with strange pointy tentacles. It wasn't horrifically scary to me - at least not compared with the terror I still remember from Alien and Aliens. Another impressive use is the weird techno-aliens from the Matrix - the "squiddies" as they were called. With all those insect eyes and tentacles.
I'm not sure what all constitutes the rear-brain reaction, but we definitely have it.
Scott Stevenson has written two articles at CocoaDevCentral that I heartily recommend: Cocoa Style for Objective-C: Part I and Cocoa Style for Objective-C: Part II.
It's well authored, and concisely nails down a lot of the concepts that a whole bunch of long-time Objective-C programmers talk about without having a reference to point towards. Now they've got one.
Thanks Scott!
I didn't hear about the latest iPod bits until relatively late this evening... so I've a question: With the iPod Photo, do you get to play breakout and parachute in color?
And no, (to answer Brent), I don't think I'll be getting one. Cute, but not compelling to me.
That previous post was the notes that I'd scrawled down from the first "XCoders" meeting. We're set to meet the first and third tuesday at the University Village Apple Store, and we're scouring around for places to meet on the 2nd and 4th tuesdays as well. It had been originally published as "geeknight", but George indicated that someone didn't want that name, so we pondered a few and ended up with "Xcoders". I imagine all the organizational components will be pretty flexible for a while to come yet.
We had a good turnout, with 21 total folks. A wide variety of people there too - some indie, some doing Mac programming professionally, and some coming from windows and just getting into the game. In fact, Scott Koon picked up his first apple computer (an iBook) in some 20 years tonight and then stuck around for the SIG. George Storm did the master minding behind the whole thing, and although the auditorium style wasn't really conducive to round-table Q&A, it was decent for a first meeting. There were a few folks from dBug there too, so we really had quite the cross section.
Somewhere in the midst of that meeting, I volunteered to set up a mailing list so we could have some level of organization other than George's email address. So that group's email address is xcoder@yahoogroups.com, it's home page at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xcoder. This group is different from the "Xcoders" group - a french group dedicated to Direct X programming (as far as I can tell)
Welcome to Xcoders
Topics:
1st Tuesday : General OSX
3rd Tuesday : General Frameworks, Getting started with XCode, getting started using Subversion
Somewhere in the future:
Cocoa: Binding/KVO
Using shark
Omni frameworks
Showing things with the debugger
WebObjects
Python & MacOS X
Open Source projects on MacOS X
Cross Platform Issues
developer.apple.com/events/techtalks -
Organizer: George Lawrence Storm
keencoyote@earthlink.net
geeksnight@earthlink.net
On a completely geeky note, I ran into the Pysical Computing website from a blog post by Rael Dornfest. Enticing damn stuff, and lurking around the corners fairly close to me these days. It reminded me that Steve Zeller's had the delcom USB chip drivers for MacOS X out back in 2002 - a fairly intriguing little USB driver chip that I've recently become much more familiar with than I'd ever imagined.
Yet another strange thing to want to dig around in a little more... Maybe I'll just pick up the book for a read.
Chillin the evening, and it's a nice one. Maybe 50 outside this evening, and it's been cool and wet outside - pretty much a classic fall afternoon and evening by any standard. And I love it.
Karen and I have been spending the evening quietly, and tomorrow I'm looking forward to a day without anything planned in it. I pretty much marched right on through the weekend, so I'm taking tomorrow completely off to regroup and recharge. No plans as yet, and not sure what I'm going to make of it. Well, mostly.
Tomorrow evening is the first Cocoa/Mac Programming SIG at the University Village Apple Store, which I'm definitely going to be attending with Aaron (of iRooster fame) tomorrow evening. So I guess I do have a plan - just not much of one before the evening though.
Part of me, however, is convinced that I need to bone back up on my Halo skills, as the next edition is going to be showing up really soon now.
Today was a prett good day all in all - got some good forward progress made on a lot of fronts, and it really felt like I managed to keep most everything firing on all cylinders. I guess you pretty much can't ask for more than that.
I haven't forsaken my years working in the realm of search, and I keep up with the industry as it stands or so. So I caught a link to the Google Desktop Proxy project (GDP) from John Battelle's searchBlog.
Now imagine, if you will, taking the GDP and using it to consolidate the search results between every desktop in an engineering group. All of a sudden, you might actually have a freakin' chance of finding the email and notes of how that little function actually worked and what the hell the design decisions where that went through email all those months ago - but that nobody wrote down.
Interestingly, I spotted the commentary from Kevin Burton on the GD application, and the comments in there mentioned the project Beagle - which is a Mono/C# Lucene based search engine for Linux, as well as AutoFocus Personal - a commercial game based on the same theories - with some interesting search result visualization components. And of course there's always Lookout - the search plugin for Outlook.
Even with all the activity in that area, there's plenty of places to see the search technologies enhance up - contextual mappings, identity recognition, and similiarity searches are still on the fringe of these games, and start to get right into the heart of how a personal search tool could get really optimized.
Karen and I are careening close to our first built in. We have a pantry area off the kitchen with a nook in it that was never really well used previously. During the whole kitchen remodel effort, Rudy (Karen's dad) knocked together the framing for some shelves to go back in there, with the idea that we'd tile the top and have some real usable space, including some counter-like area back there.
So today we hauled it up from the basement, deconstructed it enough to shove it into place, and did all that finish carpentry bits to meld the framing securely into place for the back of the pantry. Holes cut to pull electrical through, a shelf pinioned in there nicely, and the bits all fixed in place. We still need to face it, and are working to figure out what we're going to do for facing the front of the section where the tile will flatten the top out. I think a thin edge of wood is the current working idea. We'll tile the top with the remainder green granite tiles from the kitchen countertop, so it should look just lovely. Going to have some pine for facing, which will match the rest of the house (blocked out pine with a few rounded corners makes up the trim style).
We got all that done about 12:15pm, in time for me to run off and help Nate move some things around, and then it was off to work. I had no idea I'd be there as late as I did, and I probably should have kicked out earlier, but it worked out reasonably well. One of those days that just had all the looks of "two steps back" in the project we are pushing on. I think we managed to arrest it at one and a half steps back, heh.
Karen and I finally finished the whole series of Babylon 5 this past friday. Quite the run. Season 5 was a sort of weird season in terms of the story - the arc seemed incomplete and stuttered with it. We never did find out how the Drahk were ultimately dealt with, and what happened with the Psi-corp. The last episode was actually very hard to watch.
We've got a few of the made-for-TV movies now in the Netflix queue, so I spect we'll be watching those next.
Karen and I had dinner tonight with Nathan at my favorite Seattle sushi place: Maneki. It's been consistently high quality sushi at not completely unreasonable prices.
And tonight, I tried two completely new things. Uni and "shrimp heads". Uni, the the sushi illiterate, is sea urchin. I'd always been sort of shy about trying that one, as I'd had the texture described previously and frankly it hadn't been terribly appealing. But tonight was the time to try it, so I did. It wasn't my favorite of all the pieces, but it wasn't bad either. The texture still doesn't appeal to me all that much, but I've got to admit the flavor was really quite incredible, and very different from the majority of sushi and sashimi flavors you typically find.
The shrimp heads were exactly that - fried in tempura. Not something I'd go out of my way to order, but it was amusing to eat (Nathan enticed me by describing them as a 'potato chip') for the self-shock value if nothing else.
All in all, we made a good feast out of the whole thing, with really a rather large spectacle of food. Karen suggested that Nate and I should go get sushi together more often, so we didn't order so damn much food on those occasions when we did go get some. Probably a sane thing, not that it stopped us.
Earlier, we'd also gone to the "toy store". I'd had this plan to get Karen a flat panel display for her studio, but she seems pretty hesitant to let me throw the cash at it when she hadn't done a pile o' research on it. I relented in the end, but it was still fun wandering around the place. It's funny because at work they're all complaining about Fry's and how much it sucks in comparison to the SoCal versions. Which maybe it does - but that's OK, because it's SOOOO much more intriguing and interesting to me than Circuit City or Best Buy, which were the closest analogs I ever had to it.
Microsoft is advertising "5 Steps to improve your online security" - not very surprising. The really funny part is the pic that Gus noticed was a powerbook...
heh.
And don't blather that crap about the 'opener' malware nonsense. Dude got owned, it's a non-issue.
Great snap, Gus!!!
When I read a story in Wired like Humans Aren't So Complicated, I immediately think of Stephen Wolfram's monstrous tome A New Kind of Science. Cellular automata at the place where the concepts all kind of got their kick off.
So when I see a summary in the RSS feed of "New research reveals that humans have only about 25,000 genes instead of the 100,000 originally guessed. Researchers scratch their heads." my first thought is "well, it's better compressed than you thought, huh?". And then it goes from there to "I wonder what seventeenth level of indirection and emergent properties can swell up from a 4 letter alphabet in monstrous string..."
Somewhere over dinner, an idea triggered into my head that is just not leaving me alone. I'd brought up a question at work a day or two ago about a particularly hard problem to solve, and for some reason I think I have a reasonable concept of how it could be solved.
Now the trick is I'm not sure if it's feasible, so my brain has been engaged in overdrive thinking about ways to simulate the problem and then come up with algorithms to attempt to solve it.
Now the first wrong road I took was in thinking that I had a graph layout issue, simply because I wanted to visualize this darn thing as a graph. Brilliant me didn't quite clue in quickly that it wasn't a graph layout issue at all, but I spent a good few hours wildly diving into Graphviz, python graphlib. Somewhere, after I tried to go to bed and leave this behind for a while, I heard the siren call of "Joe, you left the track... come back from the forest..." and once again I was awake and thinking about how I could rapidly prototype this thing out.
Then I started thinking about getting something going in Objective-C (yes, purely as an excuse to use it for something again, since I've been either managing folks or purely in python-land) and thought about using NSCell. But this isn't really getting me anywhere but up later in the evening, so I figured I'd write about the whole kit and kaboodle and drink some tea. Then maybe I could chill out, stop obsessing about this stupid prototype idea thingy of mine, and get some sleep. I even looked around for peppermint tea, but I guess we don't have any in the house right now - so it's Cinnamon Apple Spice (decaf) tonight.
I've been reading a lot of code lately. No, not at work, just in general. I've been curious about bits and pieces, different open source projects and how they're accomplishing various things, so on.
What I'm seeing is that there's algorithm complexity, and then there's code complexity. And in a large number of "small projects" (where small is referring to the number of developers working on it), the developers have a tendency to engage in a shorthand that continues to befuddle me. It's not that I can't figure it out - macros, defines, and so forth - but it takes time and rather significant mental energy to grok the "culture" of a code base. It is like having to learn an API from scratch. For me, that means learning by reading and understanding examples, and then the second half of that process is doing and experimenting to validate what I've learned. What I usually describe as "playing around with it".
I also read books. Lots of them. I have a truly monstrous library of books - mixing topics from computers to art to medieval history. I've some beautiful rare one that are very old translations of writings. One I've been reading isn't really very old at all - Mastering Algorithms with C, published in 1999 by OReilly. And it's really a very spectacular book. Best of all, its code is clean and incredibly easy to read.
Knuth, I believe, was a big proponent of literate programming. I never got the straight scoop on that particular concept, but I suspect it's akin to being able to read a program like a story, rather than an obfuscated cooking recipe for cookies. And yes, the inevitable rhetorical question - why is it that we keep coding in these obfuscated cookie recipe styles?
I would advocate more for it, but frankly I don't tend to program that much. But I'm resolving that even the stupid little scripts that I whack out and leave lying about at work and other places will at least be literate and explain what they hell they're doing and why they're doing it in the comments if not the code.
It's not going to happen real quick. Maybe in the next few years, but not right now. Playing with the intel tablet PC, I have come to the conclusion that if I were the guy making product decisions at Apple, I'd yank that sucker too. I mean - yeah, I'd be keeping prototypes alive in house, with a few guys sequestered in the weird corners of build thirteen and a half (under the stairs, ya know) to poke around and try to figure out how to resolve some of the lingering performance questions - but where laptops just weren't ready in 1989, I think we're seeing about the same with tablets.
Now Microsoft is making a grand ole' show out of it, and I'm even downloading my trial copy of OneNote just to see how that whole kit puts together. (I've been keeping a quiet eye on Chris Pratley's blog for some time now) - but I still think it's really only for the heavy-duty geeks (read as "completely forgiving early adopters").
Gus is making VoodooPad 2.0 beta 1 available for more public consumption, and sent out a note about it earlier this evening.
Now the really fun part:
Customer Supplied Easter Eggs. Buy a copy of VoodooPad 2.0, and you
can have your own easter egg inserted into the next build of
VoodooPad. Impress your friends or a date. (visit
http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/serial/easteregg.cgi)
And I really want to know if that works for selling more copies!
not quite Sure whaT ( expecte0fnoM thTa
...
Okay, so writing in a blog with a tablet PC isn't as easy as you might think. So for the past couple of evenings, I've been working with it, trying to figure out if my imagination of what it could be matched at all with the reality of the device.
Gotta say, I'm impressed. I don't think it's ready for prime time, but it's WAY more ready for prime time than I actually expected. Some thoughts on it...
First, the darn thing is too heavy. Materials science and minaturization need to kick in some more before this is going to be ready to go. I've been working with it and attempting to hold it like I could a moleskine notebook or other paper tablet, and the weight is just too uncomfortable for very long.
Second, the heat. There's a boat-load of processing power churning away in there, and if I thought my iBook got hot... well, let me tell you. That sucker really warms you up if it's left in your lap. Thank goodness it's chilly right now!
The version I'm working with has a stylus that appears to be locationally tracked even while not touching the screen. So unlike a PDA pad, you can't fake it out with a fingernail. I mostly like it, but I'm really, really fussy about my pens... so for me it's a real turn off. The stylus is tiny and thin, making it very uncomfortable to hold and write it, and the little button thing on it (which is meant to be a mouse-like button) is just perfectly in the way. I haven't yet learned how to warp my writing so that it's easily recognized by the Ink code, but it's really pretty good at the basic guesses.
My biggest gripe is that I don't grok how to undo things that I've just written. I can't scratch it out, there's no obvious eraser, and I feel "stuck" into forcing the text to go forward, even when I can clearly see that I've made a mistake. That's a real strike against in my mind - and clearly a difficult user interface problem to solve given the technology constraints and interactions.
The last is performance. I'm pretty demanding of a laptop, but I find that I'm even more furiously demanding of a tablet PC. I want it fast, now, accurate with the pen tip (it's a little off, which is also frustrating), and instant response to when I draw. The processor isn't blazing desktop speeds, and that is exactly what I was expecting and hoping for.
Then again, I've been bogging down some of the tougher computers lately with my desktop computing regime at work too. Maybe that hoss G5 is what I need to do... alas, my cash for those critters when to the WWDC conference this year, so no upgrade right now.
Got a chance to finally, really, play with a tablet PC today. Well, more like this evening. Yeah - I should be going and getting some sleep or something, but I've always wanted to play with these things, so I'm doing it.
Then again, I'm writing this from my iBook, not that tablet - using the pen feels, ironically, akward. The handwriting recognition is actually quite good, but just using it in that form feels like trying to write on a postage stamp with a massive shipping marker.
And on a relatively unrelated topic from writing on a tablet PC, a friend at work passed along the link to Grace Hopper, and an incredible video of a talk she gave some years back, and still very wonderfully relevant. It's in Windows Media format - so I had to download it and auto-expand the thing, but then it plays just fine on the Mac too.
I've continued reading quite a bit on emergent systems lately. It's very related to some of the things I'm doing at work, and it's just a plain ole' intriguing field. I stalled on the Mandelbrot book, as it got really preachy and a bit over-opinionated from my perspective - in case you're keeping track.
But I found this place with a few abstracts that looked really intriguing. Ironically, the conclusion of the paragraphs in the introduction completely turned me off - The dynamics of current collaborative design processes are thus daunting, and have led to reduced design quality, long design cycles, and needlessly high costs.
You see, I just don't believe that it has to be that way. It can happen like that, but it doesn't always happen like that - and there are factors that can be used to avoid and adjust for systems falling significantly out of balance. It made me think of a friend who I worked with who was both repelled by and loved complex, non-linear systems. On one hand, he was fascinated by them, quietly encouraged them, and genuinely seemed fond of them as a tool. At the same time, when he was asked "when will you have XX done?" or "why did it do that?", he'd whip out the "unexpected emergent behavior" stick and start waving it around - in my mind because he was avoiding the fact that 1) he didn't know and 2) he didn't want to try and understand any of the complexity of the system. Now I can't say I completely blame him - I've kited off on some complexities myself upon occasion, but I found the reaction fascinating.
So now I'm looking around at the corners and edges of this beast and trying to figure out some aspects of it - like how do I determine aspects of quality out of such a system? Things that I'd like to measure are completely emergent properties and not nessecarily obvious from the starting rules. On the other hand, it's providing an excellent opportunity to lay down some potential for fitness functions and evolutionary tactics to determine a good fit. Something of a wild idea, and I haven't a clue how practical, but kind of interesting to consider in the free hours of the evening.
It's finally hit the streets, and it's really no surprise - you now can get Google on your desktop. For google, and their adword setup, it's a prime game. Increase the searches, pimp your adword goods (I'm actually a fan of adwords, so don't take 'pimp' to negatively), and provide a service all at the same time.
Course it's windows only, but I expect that the end results will be pretty darn powerful. Especially with Longhorn not being able to step up the search domain on the desktop that they had previously promised.
It does sorta make me want to take it apart to see what makes it tick though...
I received my DVD's from WWDC 2004 the other day, and finally had a chance to look them over last night. I had some concerns at the conference itself, because they didn't have cameras all over the place, and I had wondered what we were going to be getting.
In the end, though, I think they did a pretty reasonable job. There's some fully produced video bits, but mostly it's good views of the slides or video from the monitors during demos, with the soundtrack from the talk overlaid. I miss seeing more of the people, but it's all readable and understandable, and I think in the long run it had to have been less expensive to produce.
Karen made a really wonderful stir fry tonight, and we ate it was watching the presidential debates. Well, mostly I watched it - some times I was scanning online news sources as well, checking out what was happening in other parts of the world - although I expect a huge percentage of the USA was watching these debates... and it wouldn't surprise me if folks outside the USA were actively watching as well.
After the vile insomnia last night, I managed to pull my arse out of bed at and make it in to work at a reasonable hour, so I'm pretty happy with all that. I'm wiped out tonight, but that's to be expected really. Karen even woke up at 2am, so we chatted for a while last night too, which was kind of neat - as she was practically sound asleep when I got home from work at 9:30pm last night.
Tonight's a bit quieter - watching a little TV, scanning the news, and then listening to some tunes and hitting the sack is in my immediate plan.
It's another one of those insomnia nights. I'm definately seeing a correlation between stress and insomnia now. The past few days at work have been rather high pressure, and I think there's some sort of subconcious feedback loop that's kicking in and driving me.
The really dark side of all this is that I'm getting a hell of a lot of really excellent work done while I'm at work too. It's not like those days where you feel like you're not making any progress at all. I've been massively productive over the past few days - so you'd think I should be able to hit the sack and sleep like a baby. Heh. In that metaphor, I'm the cranky crying at 3am baby just to spite the world.
Hey Bob at Yahoo,
STOP PUTTING YOUR STUPID FUCKING ADS IN MY BLOG COMMENTS!
I'm just going to delete every one of them, and if you would come from the same damn IP address, I'd ban your ass in a second!
love,
me
Bet that headline caught your attention.
I was listening to the (terrific) interview with Steve Wozniak from Gnomedex4, and I couldn't help thinking "Dear God! If he'd done that in today's school system they'd arrest his ass and never show the key!" Listen to the interview - it's wonderful.
And if you didn't know, Woz is (or was) a prankster of the highest order. The "metronome as C4 in the locker" gag had me rolling as he told it, and I was listening to the story on iTunes.
But you know, it's really very disturbing to me that I thought he'd be labelled a terrorist in today's school yards. I don't think he's a terrorist, or that anyone doing the things he did should be labelled as such, but the current laws would certainly slap that stigma on someone today. And can you imagine the damage that would do to a high school kid that wasn't good enough to either not get caught or wriggle himself off the hook? That permanent stain on your records? That's just fucked up to me.
Ironically, Woz is one of the most vocal proponents for better education in the computer/internet elite. Most of the rest are babbling about this new thing, or that bright and shiny thing (which I very admittedly get caught up in), but Steve Wozniak has been staying the course with better and continuing math, science, and computer education.
As we were lurking about the peninsula this weekend, I was thinking about the same thing actually. Well, more like my train of thought was "What the hell would I do with myself if I lived out here?"
Answers included "A lot more hiking than I do now" and "maybe teaching at a school or community college". I don't have a heavy duty degree that most big places want for a professor, but I expect that I could do a better than average job at teaching and mentoring folks. Seeing as how it's one of the things I do now (although that aspect of any job isn't well publicized) and it's one of the things that I really enjoy. Shoot - if there was a little more moolah in teaching, I would have been there years ago. I learned, however, that teaching is either incredibly low paid, viciously political, or often times both.
Still, spending some time out in the natural beauty of the west coast makes you think about things a little differently.
Been offline and out of touch because Karen and I have been on an Olympic Road Trip. Nope - nope Greece, the Olympic Peninsula.
We staying Friday night at Lake Quinalt Lodge, which is a lovely lodge with a classic great room (much like Paradise Inn at Mt. Ranier). It was a rainy evening (and rainy day driving out), but being good northwest travelers, that didn't stop us a bit. Just made us wear a raincoat, or at least a ball cap, when heading out to the beach or on a short walk. On the way out there, we took the "northern route", which you can easily (and should) interpret as a 9 hour site-seeing road-trip along highway 101. We stopped in Sequim (pronounced "skwim") to walk out onto the Dungeness Spit - although we didn't do the five mile hike to the lighthouse. Didn't know the tide tables, and a reasonable rainstorm was actually happening at the moment, which makes you think twice about walking out along a long, narrow spit of land. We did, however, follow it up with a lunch of dungeness crab in Port Angeles, which was having it's annual crab festival this weekend.
Saturday we spent the morning looking at some of the champion trees around that area, and generally enjoying being in a temperate rain forest. If you've never been in a temperate rain forest, then head out there some time. The smell is indescribable - sweet, minty, fresh - it's just wonderful. Anyway, one of those champion trees we saw was the largest known sitka spruce - and boy is that sucker big! We also went out an saw the Western Red Cedar. I have pics - but they're buried in Karen's backpack at the moment, so they'll have to wait. We hoofed it back north saturday afternoon, not really having a plan, which doesn't actually turn out to work so well on the peninsula. After a long road trip out to Neah Bay, we saw the Makah Tribal Museum, but then didn't make it out to Cape Flattery because it was getting dark and the road had been longer and more winding than we'd expected. After a huried discussion, and much wild gesticulation in the car, we settled on going to the Sol Duc Resort for the night, arriving there about 8:30pm and generally being bushed.
Which leads to this morning, when we "took the recuperative waters", and my hair still smells of rotten eggs. Nice hot springs though! We followed that up with a 6 mile hike out to Sol Duc Falls, which were incredible. The only down side of that hike is that my feet really aren't used to closed toed shoes, and now both of my "pinky toes" have massive blisters on them from the hike to the falls and back. The rest of the day after that was a liesurely trip home, and now we're hanging out at home with our cats very happy we're here to provide them with someone to sit on.
Ned Batchelder makes available some nifty python code that does an equivilant of __LINE__ and __FILE__ in python using sys._getframe(). Thanks to Michael for throwing this out there...
And it's only fitting that I should abase myself and admit to terribly hackery tonight. In a fit of "I'm just going to get something working now damnit", I hacked up a very messy bit of python that is little more than terrible shell scripting wrapped in a layer of python indirection.
God, I just had to admit it. It's terrible. And I'll be fixing it on monday...
Got the call today - Apple managed to turn around my iBook with a new motherboard in it in less than a week! So I picked up my laptop this evening from the Apple Store in University Village and I've got it back home.
Thank goodness too - it was getting kind of desperate there for a little bit. God - how freakin' spoiled can you get? Just cause I had to walk into the other room to write in my weblog...
Bill Maxwell.
I don't know who you are, and I don't think I've ever even met you or spoken with you, but I wanted to thank you.
So, thanks! I appreciate the kind words.
Heard from the Apple Store today - looks like my laptop is going to get turned around sometime near the end of this week or the first couple of days of next week. Not bad, really - although it feels like an eternity.
In the meantime, I'm reading a little more, listening to more music, and going to Nathan and Leah's house-warming/predemolition party. What an absolutely beautiful space. The views... my, the views. And I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to paint John's house with a laser pointer from their top deck. I'm sure I can do it... I've no idea how much a cheapo laser pointer will disperse across 7 city blocks though.
Karen and I actually watched TV tonight a bit too - saw part of the Edwards/Cheney debate. I've got to say, I was impressed with Edwards rhetoric. I heard that some folks thought he'd blow it early on by getting all worked up at the beginning, but by the time I caught any of the words, he was wearing a calm demeanor and seemed pretty open with his conversational style. Cheney looked pissed off through most of it, although I appreciated his commentary on the gay marriage debate topic.
Karen was all excited by the news that the Xprize had been won yesterday. It was so neat - she was so excited that she was actually crying. I don't think she even really cared who won - more that someone had accomplished the dream of private spaceflight
Not much longer now - the 'septultimate' announcement from Bungie is out there. I can't wait, of course - and it's making heavy splashes in lots of media in prep for it's release.
The USGS is reporting that Mt. St. Helens is ready to do something interesting again. The Seattle Times is reporting that they're evacuating folks from that area now. Everyone's speculating on what will actually happen - the current article I'm reading is saying that it'll hurl "ash and rock more the five miles" - enough so that I expect we'll get even better pics from the guys at Panic.
You can get a decent view of the recent quake activit on the usgs earthquake map (red is 'just happened', blue is last day, yellow is last week).
Finally saw the movie Collateral last evening. I'd been meaning to see it for a while, as I was interested in seeing what Tom Cruise did with the movie. But in the end, it was Jamie Foxx that I came away most impressed with. Tom Cruise did a good job playing a sociopath/hit man in the movie, but to me the real gem of the movie was the intentional crucible from which Jamie Foxx was able to play out the transformation of his character "Max".
As I walked out of the movie, I thought "Wow - what a good job they did with that transformation". And it wasn't Cruise's character that did the transforming - what I originally expected - it was Foxx's. Heh - and Nathan made an amusing comment after the film "Cruise must be getting old - he died in that film". I tried to think back, but I couldn't think of any other films where he died in the storyline.
Hanging out at the Apple store, waiting for Carbon Copy Cloner to finish it's work. Turns out it's the motherboard/video problem that's plagued so many other iBooks. Just took mine a while longer to exhibit it. So it's off to get repaired, and I'm pretty sure that will mean vile withdrawl. It's not like I'm without a computer, but I've become very addicted to having a laptop.
On the flip side, I'm getting to play with (and write this) on the new iMac G5's, which are pretty cool looking. They apparently even have a wall mount, although I haven't a clue what you would do with the cables in that event. Nice box - it would definitely be a good choice in a limited space sort fo environment.
As I was finishing up submitting that last blog entry, and starting in on a second, my computer started doing something I've never seen on a Mac before - it just completely freaked out and crashed. The audio playing in the background started repeating, and then the screen started showing the lines across it that make you pretty sure some program somewhere has just started happily writing itself across the memory there.
I used the keyboard to reboot - only now the video won't come back on. I've another Mac in the house, so I could log in via SSH and see that it had all come back ok, but it also doesn't appear to want to sleep anymore.
I don't know what this all means, but it isn't looking too darn good. I've got a desktop - but damnit, even loosing the laptop for a little while to get a repair is really going to hurt. That's assuming that the repair is even economical... It's well out of warranty, being 18 months old, and since I didn't get Applecare on it while it was under it's initial warranty, I can't get it now. Oh Crap!
Well, you can bet I'll be at the Apple Store tomorrow morning when they open...
scrabbling is the word that comes to mind, although I'm not sure it's the best word - a description of how I program. The process of going about creating software to do something.
With python, I make heavy use of the interpreter. I first really became aware of it from Bill Bumgarner, when he talked about how to install the python readline module with MacOS X.
It started with the lines in a python startup file:
try:
import readline
except ImportError:
print "Module readline not available."
else:
import rlcompleter
readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")
That usefulness (and a relative lack of in-depth knowledge of the python libraries) quickly led me to a habit of whipping out that interpreter and just trying things out. I don't know if that is quite what someone means when they talk about sketching code or not. But it sort of feels like that. Especially when I'm not making anything really in-depth (just fast scripting stuff)...
So it's not too long when I find that I want to wrap bits of that sketching in a loop, or use it with map or something. At that point I'm starting to develop short method definitions. Now I like to keep using that interpreter, but the text editor gets whipped out so I can try things out, slightly tweak the method, without having to re-type the whole darn thing in again.
Why am I writing about this? Well, it feels like this process is getting unwieldy. I have an editor "scratchpad" open, sometimes open files when the script has grown to include object, open files with the unit tests to verify the methods of what I'm doing. And then there's the open terminal windows. Stakeout has reduced that by one I need to have visible, but I still have a terminal open with stakeout running. And I have a terminal open with the interactive scratch pad. And finally I have a terminal open where I've probably just invoked python -i some filename. That's 5 to 6 windows open, things popping around when I save a file (that gstakeout bit).
Is there a better way to be doing this?