Rhonabwy

sore throat

damnit, everything was going lovely today, and then around noon I started getting a sore throat. I really don't need to be getting sick again.

I got into work early today, so I took off early too - time to sack out on the couch and drink a cold buster from Jamba Juice.

tree farm

I was going through my photo's tonight, playing with Keynote and using them as backgrounds... Anyway, I found this photo that I'd taken on a "get the hell out of dodge" trip this past summer through the Olympic Penninsula. Thought it was neat, so here it is for y'all to see.

displaying code in Keynote

Anyone have any recommendations on displaying code in a Keynote presentation?

I'm putting some pieces/parts together, and trying to figure out what's a reasonable amount of code to splat onto a screen. That, and should I go to the trouble of figuring out a mechanism to syntax highlight it?

UPDATE: It turns out that if you copy syntax highlighted code from XCode (1.5 at least) and paste it into Keynote, it comes across fully styled. Upscale the font size, convert it to another font if you need, and you're good to go.

Course, if you don't like the XCode syntax highlighting, you're SOL for this technique - but it's good enough for me.

Pages acknowledgement

I picked up a copy of iWork '05 today - I've been meaning to get Keynote for a while, and it finally seemed like it was about time, as I'm getting into giving more presentations and teaching some of late.

So I was piddling around with Pages, and pulled up Acknowledgements, under the "About Pages" menu. Glancing, in there, I saw the sort of thing you'd expect - LGPL, apache, etc sorts of code usage acknowledgements. But one in particular caught my eye:

Kurt Revis – (SNDisclosableView/SNDisclosureButton) Copyright (c) 2002, Kurt Revis. All rights reserved.

Kurt posted SNDisclosalbeView through his website quite some time back. And now it's getting actively used in some Apple code. The really cool thing (to me) is that this is showing a definite break from years past when Apple had a significant case of "not invented here" syndrome, and seemed to be reproducing everything and anything they needed. I know there's effectively a whole new catch of engineers at Apple these days, and pretty much everyone I know that works there is way open to all sorts of ideas. I'm just really glad to see it making it through all the way to the end products.

CruiseControl + UnitKit working!

Yes!

And now without some terrible stupidity on my part. So it turns out that after all that blathering, reading, and painful digging around with XSL turned out to not really be needed - other than to the extent that I realized that I'd mimic'd the JUnit test output closely enough that the XSL should indeed have been working.

Which then led me to realize that I didn't have any unit tests on the particular example that I'd been building with CruiseControl. DOH! I'd been playing with some example code "ZNExample" and had just completely glossed over the fact that I was firing off CruiseControl on seperate projects. Dagnebit.

That led to me quickly slapping in a unit test, realizing that I couldn't easily build the unit tests with the 10.2.7 cross compile SDK because they didn't clue into Objective-C exception handling, and then finally that CruiseControl was barfing on doing the CVS updates. It knew it needed to, but wasn't doing them correctly (the logging wasn't so hot from CruiseControl on that topic...) After an "grumble grumble ..." manual CVS update, I triggered the build - and "BAM" - unit test are now reporting.

I think I'll want to dork with the XSL for the unit testing results after all, because I want some of the detail that UnitKit provides and gets glossed over, but that should be relatively quick to drop into place.

In messing around with getting UnitKit to do the XML output, I tried an initial tact that blew up on me, and I think I'd like to try and dig into that a little more with James to figure out why it sucked so much. Seemed like it would work well - only it led to some nasty hangs. And I need to pass back the code so others can take advantage of the XML output for whatever they deem useful.

ps: the image was snapped with Gus' really awesome Flysketch application.

learning XSL

I took a little time this evening to do some reading on XSL to get myself up to speed. My 'reading material' is an XML pocket reference published in 1999, so it's tad out of date - but it provided a basic idea of what it was all about and how it would work.

My first thought it really kind of snotty:

The whole concept reads like someone who was infatuated by lisp and recursive constructs couldn't quite bring themselves to use parantheses anymore, and replaced them all with an excess of angle brackets, colons, and quotation marks.

In reality, it means that the whole concept is a wild set of recursive list operations on lists sort of concept. Ironically, the first kind of programming like that I ever did was MU* code ways back. I'm not brilliant at recursive functions and list processing, but I can muddle my way through it.

Now to dig back into the XSL for cruisecontrol to see what I can nail down and understand about getting the merge functionality to work for my new xml formated results from UnitKit.

Sushi at Shiki

Aunt Pat's in town today - both she and Karen attended a PNNAG workshop for most of the afternoon. They're heading up to Victoria tomorrow, but this evening was all of us visiting. Pat was in the mood for sushi this evening (YEAH!!!), so we have Shiki a try for dinner. It was good sushi, although the real value there is clearly on the lunch menu. Still, they had outstanding sushi this evening.

UnitKit and XML Output

After much amusing hackery, and more than one wrong turn, I now have some mods to the UnitKit source code that enables it to dump it's testing results into an XML file.

Now the trick to get that coolness into CruiseControl appears to be this little issue of me not groking XSL... I made the UnitKit xml output mimic the JUnit xml output - but apparently not quite closely enough. And after reading through the CC Wiki, it's clear that what I'm missing is just knocking together my own custom XSL file to do the magic.

It's some good steps in the right direction... and in between learning XSL, I guess I'll try and do some reading on the details and depths of CruiseControl to get a better sense of how that all goes together. With any luck, I'll be able to pull the whole kit together and give out some reasonably simple instructions for those folks looking to do continuous integration on MacOS X with XCode.

deriving meaning from statistical computations of language

Interesting article in New Scientist entitled Google's search for meaning. The gist is that a couple o' scientists have managed to do a little automatic "meaning" discovery using Google searches. They have a pre-print online available if you're curious about the gory details.

The Devil Made Me Do It

Ah dagnebbit,

In between dinner and doing a little overdue grocery shopping, I've been trying to prep out a presentation that I'm hoping to give this tuesday to the XCoder's group - "Unit Testing with UnitKit".

Only I can't quite figure out how I want to present the material.

It lends itself to a hands-on demonstration, but we won't really be equiped all that well for it at the Apple Store. Many folks have (and bring) laptops, but it doesn't mean all by any stretch. The next step back is a lecture/demo kind of thing where my laptop's video is being sprayed on the big screen for all to see. I've collected a nice bit of notes for doing exactly that, only there's the details and examples of actually writing code that I really want to both show people and make available for them to try out and use.

So now I'm lurking ever closer to the devil's own primary tool of complete soul corruption: PowerPoint. Yes, I've been reading Uncle Screwtape's letters again - so I'm actually thinking of slapping out "a deck" for use doing this presentation.

Woohoo!!!

Yeah!

Nate and Leah have done it! They've sold their place!

That means they're on track to move into our neighborhood, and ever so soon they'll be only a few blocks away from us.

Happy Birthday Ben

I don't know if you're still reading this blog or not, but if you are -

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BEN!

(Ben is my brother, currently a chef gracing Denver with his culinary delights, and now officially another year older!)

Mini mania

WOOT!

We've got Byron in the MacOS X club now!

the light

As I left work today, I noticed the light.

It was 5pm, which is earlier than I normally leave, and it was striking to me because it was still light outside. Now it was mostly on the "dusk" side of things, but it was bright enough that it was clearly early dusk, and the various streetlights and things hadn't kicked on.

Made me think "Yep, headed back towards the long days now". Being this far north, the summers are gloriously (and sometimes exhaustingly) long days, and the winter has long, long nights and terrible short days. There is always that point when I really notice the direction changing and swinging the other way. Today was the day for swinging back towards summer.

a wrapper Ant build file for XCode

For the google machine:

Here's a copy of the really stupidly simple and naive build.xml file that I used with Ant so that I could get CruiseControl to drive my XCode project builds.

So, without further ado, here tis:

<project name="XCodeExample" default="build" basedir=".">
    <description>
        wrapper build file around an XCode project
    </description>

  <target name="build" description="build the project" >
    <exec executable="xcodebuild">
      <arg value="-alltargets" />
      <arg value="build" />
    </exec>
  </target>

  <target name="clean" description="clean up" >
    <exec executable="xcodebuild">
      <arg value="-alltargets" />
      <arg value="clean" />
    </exec>
  </target>
</project>

Tack this sucker into your XCode project directory, and Ant should be able to take care of the rest for you.

Video Search, by Google

Video Search, ala Google.
Nough said.

Shiki

Caught lunch at Shiki today - it was pretty darn good. They had a nice Unagi bowl that really did the trick for me. They also had an "Assorted Sushi" lunch plate that was quite the platter of food for $12. If you're lurking around the lower parts of Queen Anne and looking for a bite, try it out sometime.

Success! ... well, sorta

In getting myself all prep'd for this Intro to Cocoa Programming Workshop, I found myself digging into tangents that I hadn't in quite a while.

After reviewing everything I could find on "making the most of XCode and Interface Builder" sessions from this past WWDC, I started thinking about all the little things that aren't covered in those sessions. Like unit testing. Like automated/nightly builds. And yes, indeedy, that led me down the primrose path to downloading CruiseControl. That's all to be blamed on Mike Clark and his bleepin' little video of CC in action.

Well, after scurrying around for a bit with all that good stuff, I wrapped a commandline build invocation for XCode in an Ant build.xml file, and now I've managed to invoke the whole darn thing from CruiseControl. I know that Mike's already done all this good stuff, but I just had to pound through it anyway. Who knows, maybe I'll do a session at the XCoder's group on using CruiseControl to drive nightly builds.

Why all this nightly build stuff? Well, it came from wanting to take the output of UnitKit (which I am going to do a session on), combine that with the goodies of CruiseControl, and get to some combined automated build goodness with XCode where I wasn't hacking up some crazy assed script to make it all work.

Of course, hacking up that crazy assed script probably would have taken me MUCH less time, but then why do something the easy way? Like I told Byron all those years ago - it's about "Inspired Laziness".

Now I just have to:

1) figure out why CruiseControl's CVS update command is barfing on me, or just bag that whole thing and switch my example to Subversion.
2) work in the reporting mechanisms and html output.
3) determine some magical way to transform the UnitKit output into some XML spitballs, suitable for CruiseControl's XSL reporting mechanations. I'm thinking that maybe extending UnitKit and sending the updates to James might be the way to go.
4) See if I can actually make some cohesive demo or instructive session out of the whole darn thing once I have something actually working that doesn't look like crap.

If your name is john...

In between hacking on code that doesn't need it and screwing around with CruiseControl this evening, I've been doing my usual evening blog reading.

I've been reading Barlow's blog for a while now, just because he's usually kicking up something interesting. And tonight, my takeaway is "If your name is John, you probably speak english."

Now that's completely and utterly unfair to the real content of his latest missive to the web, but that's OK. I think it's interesting that he's reaffirming a sense of conversation from Skype, when the conversation has really been rolling across borders for years. The "global village" came 'round and smacked me ages ago when I was still using Bitnet (please, allow me to hideously date myself). It was while MU was still on Bitnet, and figuring out that the Arpanet/Internet was actually happening that I made an aquaintence in Sydney, Australia simply because of a common interest in Prograph. I've since lost track of him, but the concept that anyone can connect to anywhere really came home to me with that.

So what's so freakin' awesome about a couple of random asian dialers on VoIP?

things I saw today (large page)

These critters were hangin' at the Woodland Park Zoo this morning:

And after we spent a few hours at the zoo, we headed out to Winslow on the ferry - just to really get away for a bit. The ride out was a bit hazy, but coming home this evening had a really spectacular view of the skyline. It's a link to a larger view

mac tablet rumor addiction

like so many others, I'm addicted to rumors of Apple making a tablet PC.

The latest round I caught from Scoble this evening - The Register talks about a filed design trademark.

Ah yes, the blush of addiction. God knows what I'd do with it, but I want one anyway. I didn't even care for the ruggedized tablet PC's that I had a chance to play with earlier. hmmm.

clearsilver and trac

For the google machine -

There's a great page at the Trac website on Installing Trac for various OS's, including MacOS X.

Now there's a little update that should be mentioned in there - Clearsilver version 0.9.13 doesn't work all nicely - the directions were written for 0.9.12... So download that version when you start going through all this good stuff.

And yeah - since it was a Wiki - I added the edit myself. So now I've got myself a Trac session going! Permissions where a little wacky on the box, but I did that damage to myself by wildly hacking stuff into place and not really planning it through.

subversion and trac

Dorking with installing subversion (finally!) on my desktop at home, and then digging around into all the crazy little bits to install Trac. All this has led me down the merry path of hacking around on Apache configuration files, and fiddling with Fink.

I seem to be momentarily stuck at getting ClearSilver installed, as the installation is blowing chunks when it comes to dealing with Ruby - a side dependency that isn't really even in the critical path. Gotta love those dependency trees (GAG!)

I've been way, way tempted to just go steal a win32 box from somewhere, slap Debian on it, and have trac install itself, since it has a debian package these days. Guess that shows that I've been living with Debian for the past year or more, huh? The real answer is for me to do the work to slap trac into the Fink ports, or maybe even DarwinPorts so that others don't have to go through all this crazy shit to get things installed.

Heh. if I was really hardcore, I'd be reinstalling FreeBSD on the ancient pentium box lurking in the basement and putting it all in place on there. Alas, I've become a weak punk when it comes to hacking systems together with FreeBSD.

Well, back to watching the compiles happily scrawl across the open terminal window...

ACM

On the non-blowing-up side of things, I decided to join the ACM. I received a discount offer in the mail, I'd been thinking about it on and off for nearly four years, so I figured it would be worth a shot.

The piece that really kicked it into place was the ACM Portal - the Digital Library that has the huge research back end, and the online books that are available. It's not like getting an "anything you want" access to Safari's online book system, which was the best I'd ever seen - but it's a decent coverage.

Xbox live

Got online tonight with XBox live and finally found Dan to play a little with him. Ended up being a reasonably even match between us, but whenever we got into a larger group setting, I just got my ass handed to me. I'm definitely not "twitch ready" for those larger scale shoot-em-up games.

I was really disappointed to find out we couldn't "co-op" a game across the Internet. That was everything I'd hoped for in XBox live. I suppose without that it was still fun, but I just felt so incompetant at the game that I was hard pressed to figure out how I could get my feet set again at tackling some of the large group games.

Neal Stephenson's latest

Tonight I finally finished Neal Stephenson's latest work - The System Of The World, the third volume in his Baroque trilogy.

Lord knows what we can expect next from him, but I hope he gets a reasonable break and relaxation after this monumental writing effort. While I enjoyed the latest and final book in the trilogy, I still prefer some of his earlier work (Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age) as my favorites.

I must now embarrass myself

A friend (who once lived in Missouri) forwarded me an email that's basically along the lines of "You know you're from Missouri when..."

So I must now embarrass myself by reposting it here. I do wish I had the "You know you're from Seattle when..." that I saw a couple of years ago. It was equally disturbing, and brilliant, at defining the local ambience and culture that seeps into folks who live in an area.

By the way, I disagree with item #9, but then I'm the odd man out on that point.

Growing Up in Missouri...

1. You've never met any celebrities.

2. Everyone you know has been on a "Float Trip".

3. "Vacation" means driving to Silver Dollar City, Worlds of Fun or Six Flags.

4. You've seen all the biggest bands ten years AFTER they were popular.

5. You measure distance in minutes rather than miles. For example, "Well, Webb City's only 20 minutes away."

6. Down south to you means Arkansas.

7. The phrase "I'm going to the Lake this weekend" only means one thing.

8. You know several people who have hit a deer.

9. You think Missouri is spelled with an "ah" at the end.

10. Your school classes were canceled because of cold.

11. You know what "Party Cove" is.

12. Your school classes were canceled because of heat.

13. You instinctively ask someone you've just met, "What High School did you go to?"

14. You've had to switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day.

15. You think ethanol makes your truck "run a lot better."

16. You know what's knee-high by the Fourth of July.

17. You see people wear bib overalls at funerals.

18. You see a car running in the parking lot at the store with no one in it, no matter what time of the year.

19. You know in your heart that Mizzou can beat Nebraska in football.

20. You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition. Example: "Where's my coat at?"

21. All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, or grain.

22. You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.

23. You think of the major four food groups as beef, pork, beer, and Jell-O salad with marshmallows.

24. You carry jumper cables in your car and know that everyone else should.

25. You went to skating parties as a kid.

26. You only own three spices: salt, pepper, and ketchup.

27. You design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.

28. You think sexy lingerie is tube socks and a flannel nightie.

29. The local paper covers national and international headlines on one page, but requires six pages for sports.

30. You think I-44 is spelled and pronounced "farty-far." (St. Louis only)

31. You'll pay for your kids to go to college unless they want to go to KU.

32. You think that "deer season" is a National Holiday.

33. You know that Concordia is halfway between Kansas City and Columbia, and Columbia is halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City, and the Warrenton Outlet Mall is halfway between Columbia and St. Louis.

34. You can't think of anything better than sitting on the porch in the middle of the summer during a thunderstorm.

35. You know which leaves make good toilet paper.

36. You've said, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity."

37. You know all four seasons: Almost Summer, Summer, Still Summer and Football.

38. You know if another Missourian is from the Boot-heel, Ozarks, Eastern, Middle or Western Missouri soon as they open their mouth.

39. You know that Harry S. Truman, Walt Disney and Mark Twain are all from Missouri.

40. You failed World Geography in school because you thought Cuba, Versailles, California, Nevada, Houston, Cabool, Louisiana, Springfield, and Mexico were cities in Missouri. (And they are!)

41. You think a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor.

42. You know what "HOME OF THE THROWED ROLL" means.

43. You actually get this and forward it to all your Missouri friends.

*spang!!!!*

That's the only way I could figure out to represent a "clash of a cymbal", which completes the drum roll.

Today I put in my two weeks notice at CoCo Communications. I've been there since June 1st, starting up, staffing up and managing the build, quality assurance and release team. Yesterday evening I accepted an offer that was just far too good to even consider passing up. If you get a chance to work with these folks, well - they're a darned smart group of folks, and I recommend taking the opportunity if you can.

For the moment, I'll refrain from saying where I'm heading.

I do hope that CoCo's web site will improve with their description of what they're doing - but to be honest, it's a bit tricky to describe. It is an awesome technology that I honestly believe will have a market shattering impact when it hits the public markets. It has been amazing to watch it grow from barely demoable pile of code to a seriously functional product that has people's jaws dropping. And it's been really cool to get my hands deep into the bleeding edges of networking and communications technologies. I even got to bounce more than a few signals off satellites! The best part was giving an impromptu demo - I loved watching people's faces when it became clear to them what problems we had just demonstrated as solved.

As of January 7th, I'll be commuting a bit further to work, as the new office location is in the downtown core, but on the flip side I can take a route 4 bus directly there. It is another startup, and the folks I've met have been both fantastic and gracious. I am incredibly excited to be joining this new team.

Cocoa Programming for MacOS X

Received my copy of Cocoa Programming for MacOS X, 2nd Edition in the mail today. Yeah!!!

drum roll please....

How do you type a drum roll?

Byron?

tired, but I can't quite sleep

I'm tired, but I can't quite sleep yet. I've got some reading, but I'm avoiding it for the fear that it will suck me in and I'll be up much later than I'd like tonight. Tomorrow looks to be a pretty busy and full day, and I think I won't even be catching up with Karen until well into tomorrow night - maybe 9pm.

While I can't quite sleep, the cats are doing a good job of it - both sprawled over me while I'm typing here.

Did a little code reading this evening - digging into the source of Cocoalicious for amusements sake. Buzz had some neat tidbits tucked away in there.

Also been re-watching some of the programs from the 2004 WWDC and thinking about how to best share this knowledge to folks who are just getting their toes wet with Cocoa and Objective-C.

And the strangest thing today - got a call from the Museum Director in Edmonds, Washington. Turns out they found a cell phone - and the last number it had dialed was my cell phone. As it happens, that's my mother's cell phone - who lost it over Christmas. The director was a wonderful lady who went to great lengths to get it back to us, and had apparently tried to work through ATT Wireless (now Cingular) who have now made a rather firm and distinct impression on me for being completely unwilling to help this lady return the cell phone.

Mom has since found a new one, and re-established her service, but it's damned annoying that this could have been found and the money saved, except that Cingular doesn't have anything in place to help customers get back their lost phones. The only thing they appear to offer is a mechanism to suspend the phone service. I'm sure Mom's not the first, nor will be the last, to loose an expensive piece of hardware like that. Not quite sure how to resolve that sort of thing either.

Still, the phone is now on it's way back to us (service has been disabled) - so a huge and wonderful thank you to the Director of the Historical museum in Edmonds, Washington.

Intro programming workshop

That Intro to MacOS X Programming Workshop that we're doing? Yeah, well - I just figured out that one of the items we're going to try and touch on in the workshop is one I haven't played much with yet - Bindings.

It's not hard, and in fact other programmers who've worked with it liken it to what I was learning metalwork - "Don't play with the gold - you'll love it". The obvious downside being expense in that case - requiring 10.3 or better in the case of bindings.

So after digging through my books, scanning online articles, and all that other good crap, I decided to pick up a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 2nd Edition. It covers a bit of bindings, and I've loved the 1st edition to death, so getting an updated, non-dog-eared copy would be kinda nice. Not that it will remain pristine for long...

Yeah, just what I really needed - another book. Guess you can't have too many programming books though. At least that's my theory.

Introduction to Macintosh OS X and Cocoa Programming Workshop

In a few weeks, I'll be teaching a little workshop with George Storm and Joseph Jones - our "Introduction to Macintosh OS X and Cocoa Programming Workshop", which is focused on getting folks a hands-on with Xcode. We might be charging a small fee to help offset costs of providing the space - $15 or so. Something really minimal. It's open to anyone interested and in the area (area being rather loosely defined). If you're thinking you might like to attend, send George an email so we have an accurate count.

UPDATE:

All the details are available on the XCoder yahoo group email list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xcoder/message/140

Oh - and it will be a dBug.

The Aviator (spoilers warning)

Karen, Leah, Nate, and I took in The Aviator yesterday. We'd been meaning to do so for a week or more, just hadn't done it.

Damn, that was an intense movie.

Even though it's cranking through the ratings, it wasn't a movie I cared for much. As a caveat, I don't really know crap about the history of Howard Hughes. I was really there to see a glorified version of the playboy/aviator that had created the "Spruce Goose". What I got was a 3 hour movie that really ground down into the mental illness that looked like extreme obsessive-compulsive disorder. Coming out of that movie I just felt stunned and beaten.

We recovered with a cider and a burger at Hale's Ales, but even at the end of the evening it was leaving a bit of a miasma on me. I think a better choice would have been Shi mian mai fu (House of Flying Daggers), but I didn't think Karen would want to see that at all.

Now *thats* a sunday

There's still half of it left, but the first half has made it excellent.

Karen and I have now moved to truly accomplished sloths, and didn't get up until almost noon today. Even though I've done this a few weekends in a row, I'm clearly making up for lost time, because each time I do it feels like "Damn, haven't done that in a LONG time!!!"

On one hand, you're loosing out on a lot of hours of your weekend by sleeping in. On the other, it's incredibly relaxing when there's no major plans. And this weekend, there are/were no major plans.

early, early

Got up early, early today to give Nick a lift to the airport - so now he's away for his month's leave/vacation in Missouri. It was fun having him here, although I need to convince Karen that 2 pounds of fresh salmon may be a bit much for 3 people. I shouldn't complain - there's only a smidge leftover (both Nick and I really enjoyed it).

After I got back from SeaTac, I plopped back in bed for a while and got up about a half hour ago. Fiddlnig and doing miscellaneous stuff for the moment, I think I'll take Karen up to her last edition of "Quilt Club" (a group she's been teaching) shortly after noon. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure what I'm really doing today.

I've recently come to learn that my iPod's battery life is about shot. I get maybe 90 minutes now, which is a bummer compared to the 8 hours or so I originally go. Apple is apparently offering replacements for $105.95, which is a lot cheaper than getting a brand new iPod. I've got one of the older 20Gb iPods, the current version of which is roughly $300. And now there's the 40Gb version ($400), although I don't have that much music. I could back up my entire laptop with it though... *cough* Wow.

I've been intrigued by Trac recently, and keep thinking I'd like to set it up and try using it, but haven't quite done it yet. Maybe not this weekend though, sort of feels like an XBox and movie weekend to me.

Lt. Okamura

We have Nick staying with us tonight - the "Lt. Okamura". He's on a month's leave from a tour in Korea and heading back to Columbia in another day or two. He took a "space available" flight from Korea, and ended up in Seattle near mid-day.

So he's been chillin' this afternoon, trying to stay awake and get back onto US timezones. I suspect he's been up for nearly 24 hours straight now. He's currently happily involved in a game of Halo 2, which seems to be a pretty good end to an evening.

Lovely evening

It is a little late for posting, but here tis anyway.

Tonight has been a lovely evening. I got two different sets of wonderful news from really great friends, neither of which I think are appropriate to post, but it's cool none the less. The combination just put me into a high for the evening.

The Mac Mini has generated a number of emails to me from friends and acquantences that have been thinking about maybe getting a Mac but couldn't quite figure the spring to move in. The price tag on this thing is absolutely killer - it's going to have a huge set of people moving into the Mac market segment, I'm convinced.

I don't know or care much about the iPod Shuffle - doesn't really appeal to me - but it's a neat idea I suppose. Guess I'm just not the market audience on that one. I am noticing that my old iPod just doesn't have the battery juice it used to though. Damn shame. Still a great device - just means I have to keep it powered in some fashion these days now.

I've taken to fiddling with QuickSilver again. Not sure I've quite grokked all the speed enhancements from it yet, but damn that keyboard interface is powerful.

Karen's become completely entranced with her web design class, and she's going out of her way to implement all her assignments in strict xhtml and get all the pages to validate. Phew! Now that's dedication. She's really enjoying getting back into the web design bits again - especially now that she has some new eyes and background in non-digital media arts.

Heard from Linda Okamura (a friend from MU) today too. Her son is a First Lieutenant in the Air Force, and will be streaming through Seattle tomorrow on his way back from Korea. There's a chance he'll be in Seattle overnight, so we might get to touch base with him again and visit, which would be fun. I haven't seen Nick since before he graduated from college.

And finally, I've been doing some generic wandering about looking at the variations between all sorts of common test gear out there - SilkTest, TestDirector/WinRunner, Rational Test, and EggPlant. Lots of choices, lots of verbiage, and none of them are really attacking some of the areas I need to dig into. I would have thought this area would have more software in it, but the Segue, Rational and Mercury folks really seem to have the whole market sewn up. Not even many open source tools out there - some, but relatively young.

Apple-y bits

Saw that Apple announced a new site - IT Pro. A quick glance gave me the impression that it could be a useful site - if nothing else than it provided a quick link to a document on using MacOS X integrated with Active Directory. It also had an article in intrusion detection with open source tools - worth a gander, but I haven't read it myself yet.

Then there's the weird announcement that Apple is pushing back it's call to the faithful until tomorrow at 6pm. Okay, hmmm...

James does a little speculatin', along with a bunch of others - it's the frenzy time. I think I'll actually be passing this time - I'm too caught up in doodling with Gus' latest cool toy: FlySketch. Not that I'm doing anything useful with it right now, but it's damned amusing. Passed on the good word to Jeni, who does our internal graphic design and documentation at work - figured she might find it really handy. I think she signed up for the Beta...

Vincenzo's

Traffic outside tonight was just freakin' hideous this evening. Karen said there was a fatality accident on the Alaskan Way Viaduct today that shut down southbound access, and you could really tell. Everything was packed, and the busses were all running really late. So in all that chaos, Karen and I decided that we should not cook at home tonight and I met her at the top of the hill to try out Vincenzo's Gourmet Pasta and Pizza. Hadn't been there before, and it'd been on our list, so we tried it out.

They have a pretty good carbonara (it has bacon!) - a little different from what I'm used to, but still tasty. The prices were pretty reasonable for on-top the hill (not cheap eats, but good - $10 a plate or so), and it was fun going somewhere new. We stuck with the pasta tonight, although they also have pizza, hot sandwichs, and calzones. Course, if we wanted Calzones, we'd have gone to Pete's...

The thing that really stood out was when I paid the bill - the little credit card receipt had 15%, 18%, and 20% tips already precalculated for me. Damn, if that ain't a handy thing. Why the hell hasn't someone done that before!

Christmas decor is all done

Tonight was the night to take out the Christmas tree for the curbside pickup, so it's the end of Christmas decor in the house as well. It's all down - only one ornament lost. Not bad.

The house always looks a little empty after Christmas, just doesn't have all the festive bits up that you can really get used to. I'm sure I won't notice in another few weeks, but right now it feels pretty bare.

Oh - and for the folks who know our prediliction of ignoring the wreath on our door until May day, it's gone too - Karen took it all apart and everything's packed away.

we got our snow

Well, we got our snow.

Something startled me awake at 7am this morning (one of our cats making a leap and missing - I heard the "THUNK"), and when I went into the kitchen to feed them, I noticed the neighbor's roof had a fine 2" of snow mounded up on it. So I woke Karen and told her to look outside...

I went back to bed, only getting back up now- although migrating from the bed to the couch could hardly be considered "getting up" in some places. I've had a bit of a relapse this weekend. Saturday was pretty rough. I'm feeling better today, but I've been sleeping and reading all weekend and absolutely nothing else.

Ranchero Socks!

OOoh! ooh!

I want some of those Ranchero Socks!

smiling from success

After a bite to eat, Karen and I went into her studio so that I could show her the wily ways of FTP. After starting to walk her through the absolutely most difficult method, I realized that XP probably included an FTP client built into Internet Explorer (or something) - so that quickly became a non-issue as she started wildly copying around her homework.

She's taking this class on basic web design, and it was so neat to watch her get excited and tap away at her pages as she validated them with W3C's xhtml validator. She did two pages in strict xhtml, and one in transitional. Nothing fancy, kind of your typical homework pages, but the joy of the accomplishment was wonderful to watch.

Return of the King

Karen and I watched the second half of Return of the King this evening. We'd started the first half yesterday, before we each ran off in our different directions for the evening. Curling up on the couch, eating some leftovers, and finishing the movie made for a wonderful evening.

The dramatic scope of the movie, and it's impact, always leave me a little dazed. Not sure what it is - but it's sort of the calm, weary feeling you get when you sit down after a really long hike that's not been so very strenuous as much as a continuous level of effort so long that you're kind of numbed to it all. And there's plenty of things I should be doing. Big things, little things. And right now I'm just sitting here scribling away in this blog and being relaxed.

I got the extended version (of course), and it was neat to see the new scenes that had been added. The whole movie was extended by 50 minutes, and think for the most part that was 50 useful minutes to the story. I was especially pleased to see that they'd included scenes of Eowyn and Faramir healing together after the battle at Minas Tirith. I'd felt that was sort of lacking from the theatre releases. I still wish they hadn't killed Saruman outright, but dealt with him more like the book did - a last vestige of the assault on Middle Earth. Shoot - that would have added a whole nother hour to the movie at that rate I expect.

So now I think a book is in order - to finish off the evening curled up on the couch.

XCoder meeting

I'm back from the XCoder meeting. It went pretty darn well. The slides from Julian's talk are up on the XCoder yahoo groups site - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xcoder/files/AccessorTalk.pdf.

One of the neat things I'd been looking forward to was seeing how Julian used Accessorizer - a service tool built to help code creation. The projector at the Apple Store was kaput, however, so instead we spent some time screwing around to figure that out before we had Julian push out the PDF of his slides to everyone in the group over a public share on his laptop. And that project being kaput also nixed the demo component of the talk - kind of a bummer.

Towards the tail end of the meeting, we were all brainstorming on potential alternate locations. Ideally, it would be a place where we could plop down laptops, maybe even have some network connectivity, and if it was really awesome, be nearby to some relatively quiet joint where you could grab some pub food and a brew. We're having one of the folks in the group check out a space on the east side for our Saturday gig - it's looking like it'll be the third or fourth saturday. That gig is a ~ 6 hour, no cost, hands-on intro to programming with XCode, Interface Builder and the Cocoa API's. Still haven't nailed it all down, but it's in progress.

As it was, we retired to The RAM - a sports bar in U Village. I wasn't spectacularly pleased with their heffeweizen (far too sweet), and it was loud and hard to hold a conversation, especially for me - prone to fits of hacking and suffering from laryngitis. But on the good side, it was social time.

I got some good suggestions for alternate locations from a friend, so now I just need to do some legwork and see what's available and what's not.

good sleep

It's a wonderful feeling to wake up in the late morning after a really good sleep. It's been nearly two weeks since this cold started, and I haven't been sleeping really well - until last night. For whatever reason, I finally hunkered down and really slept. I didn't wake up until 11am, and I've just wandered back in from grabbing a bite down on Queen Anne Ave.

Karen's first day of class looks to have gone very well, although she's still fighting her version of this cold. The class looks to be a heavy overview of CSS followed by a month of various tidbits, vaguely forming around javascript and DHTML. I'm really rather tempted to read her class notes along with her - if nothing else than to put a little more rigor behind my vague stabs at learning CSS. Yes, true to form, my CSS is typically hacking around with other people's work to see how it's been done, and then variatons on the theme. That method gets things done quick (well, mostly) but it doesn't give you a good broad background on how the technology works.

Oh - and received my final Christmas gift bit - the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD (yep, extended edition). Thinknig about seeing it today, if I can squeeze it in between Karen's nap and heading out to the XCoder meeting this evening. Julian Vrieslander is going to be giving a presentation on using accessors in Cocoa and doing a demonstration of Accessorizer. Should be interesting.

I've continued to think about doing a presentation there myself, but haven't really initiated anything with follow-through. In december, I was thinking of giving an overview of UnitKit, although it was just as tempting to give a show and tell on using Growl and Stakeout that I found pretty darn handy while doing python hackery on my iBook.

Heh, of course all of this may just be an excuse to buy Keynote. I despise Powerpoint, mostly because of it's ubiquity and horrific mis-use in large corporations.

lasagna

Lasagna for dinner tonight, courtesy of Olympia Pizza, because both Karen and I feel like crap and don't want to cook and don't want to go out. Fortunately, they deliver. And it should be here about 20 minutes from now...

Heading back to work today wasn't as hard for me as it was for others - I was already rolling with the new year's work. Did sort of take a while to get kickin' though. The coughing seemed better last night, but I'm just not shaking this thing very well.

Which leads to me taking tomorrow off. Not even quite sure what I'm going to do tomorrow, other than sleep in and maybe go to the XCoder meeting tomorrow evening. Karen's first day of classes is tommorow (and she's excited about hitting the books again), so I expect I'll have a fair bit of the day to myself. Maybe I'll get the Xbox live stuff all hooked up - I still need to work out the networking bits for it so I don't have to hook up my laptop as a wireless bridge each time I want to play.

I ran through the Netflix queue yesterday, so I'm out of movies too - although I'm tempted to go rent the last Lord of the Rings flick and maybe watch that tomorrow. I've got my copy coming from Amazon, but I'm not expecting it here until the end of the week or so.

Next week ought to be good for Mac geekery and watching - all sorts of rumors are floating about, from the sub-$500 Macintosh to some office suite kinda thing. Oh - and since when does NPR start tracking rumors for the Macintosh? Heard them talking about the whole sub-$500 Mac. That's quite somethin, ain't it?

later that afternoon

Karen and I did go look at the mountains. Not as clear as at 8am, but still very pretty. This is from Queen Anne, overlooking the puget sound.

An odd holiday weekend

So it turned out to be a pretty odd holiday weekend these past few days. We'd originally scheduled to have thursday through today off, go goofing around Seattle, maybe see some sights.

As it turns out, I ended up working through a lot of the holiday. The cool thing was Mom and Karen joined me at the office all afternoon yesterday and this past friday evening. It was really nice to have them around where I could chat with them and visit between bouts of work that rolled in like slow waves.

I wouldn't have wished working this weekend on anyone, let alone myself or the other folks who nailed in some serious time to make things work, but since I was there, it was nice to be able to visit. Mom's gone home now - so I would have missed her last couple of days here completely if they hadn't come a visitin' at the office.

Beautiful Day, wonderful sendoff

We took Mom down to the airport today for her flight back home. It was an easy drive, and the streets were all fairly quiet. But the absolutely best thing was the weather. The skies are all clear today (and cold - it dropped to 30 last night), and the scenery was unbelievable. The cascades were backlight with the morning light, and the Olympics were highlighted in oranges and yellows reflecting off a thin cover of snow at the lower altitudes, and glittering into the icecaps at the peaks. Just incredible.

And the mountain made it's presence today - I don't think it's been out from behind clouds all Christmas, but today it was backlight by the morning sun, with just a wisp of clouds cuffing the peak.

I'd originally planned to just come home and sleep for a while, but it's just SO pretty outside that I'm really tempted to drag Karen out into the cold and maybe make her ride the ferry over to Bainbridge just to see the views.

Scientific American

Nathan turned me on to this month's issue of Scientific American, which has a pile of interesting articles. Quantum Cryptography is one, but the one that really caught my eye is one on attentive computing.

Anyone, thanks Nathan! It is a neat issue!

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year!

We ended up staying inside during the new year turnover last night - the rain seemed just a little over much for us. We heard the fireworks though, and a lot of happy revellers jumping around the school yard near our house.