Rhonabwy

Tiger Release Pool Winner

Nearly 10 months ago, I recorded a "beer conversation" with a pile of developers from WWDC on when Tiger would actually be released.

So I suppose it's only fair to say that Joe Pezzillo was the winner as he decreed "April 2005", but since he wasn't specific as to a date, I think it's only fair to point out that Mike Piatek-Jimenez (who put down May 15th) and Jim Gaynor (May 22, 2005) were just as close.

Gus Mueller undershot, Brent Simmons and Michael McCracken both overshot.

Not bad though. Makes me recall that comment about groups being smarter than individuals. If you'd averaged all those dates out, they'd come to be pretty darn close!

I'm bummed that I won't be making WWDC this year, but them's the breaks. It's a darned expensive conference and I can't really swing it every year. Next year might be equally bad, as my grandmother has a family reunion that summer around the june timeframe - so it could be some time before I'm there again. Still, I'd happily encourage anyone to go - it's an incredible conference.

fruit tree blossoms

The fallen bretheren of these guys litter the sidewalk like a cape, and the smell is incredible. I don't know if it's an apple, pear, or cherry tree - but it's prolific on it's flowers even if I can't recall what the fruit was.

The wipe

I didn't get my copy of Tiger yesterday because FedEx missed us being home. So this morning I was up at O:dark 30 and getting the address and details so that I could pick it up from the FedEx office down in the airport way industrial area just south of Seattle when they opened.

Like any good obsessive person, I was there long before they opened, listened to a little NPR and sipped on a coffee until the doors opened and the little gaggle of folks wanting their packages could get in. Most of the folks there got their packages right off - mine decided to be tricky and hide, apparently having been missed in a receive scan when the truck brought it back yesterday afternoon.

There was a really classic case of pissed-off at the office there too. Some lady was just irrationally annoyed with FedEx because they didn't leave a package unmarked at her door for her. The young man behind the counter made a pretty good rational argument, but it was clear she wasn't going to be listening. When they brought out some subset of packages and went back for more, she did what I thought of as "unthinkable". She rifled through the packages, found hers, and took off with it - with no signature or by your leave. I couldn't quite keep quiet and said "You know, you really should at least tell them you're taking the package", which only earned me a glare from the snotty bitch and sympathetic looks from others in the waiting area.

We told the agent when she came back, and she took it with good grace that some folks were just going to be pissy. But best of all, she'd had someone manually go through the packages destined for the 98109 zip code and found mine, so I had the good stuff and was ready to go.

I backed up all the machinery last night to the secondary hard drives, both the laptop and the desktop. And now I'm taking that really huge leap forward.

I have done the reinstall from scratch on the laptop - my every day working machine - and it's getting MacOS X 10.4 installed on it from scratch. I'm going to have a monstrous pile of software to reinstall, but I figure that I'll just get the critical bits and accumulate as I need rather than attempt to reinstall all the stuff I'd had on there previously. All the data is backed up on an external firewire (Carbon Copy Cloner!!!), so I can retrieve pretty much anything I need critically.

I've got a little Bela Fleck running as a soundtrack for myself in the background. The only thing currently lacking is my coffee isn't finished brewing yet.

detail

Haven't a clue what kind of flower this is, but it's in a vine-like form and hangs from a privacy fence near the house.

great XCoder meeting tonight

We had a great XCoder meeting tonight. We banged through Chapters 9 through 12 of the Hillegaas Book, and had maybe 14 folks attending the meeting, asking questions, and basically working together to help solve problems and get up to speed.

The after-the-meeting conversations were pretty good too - it took three of us 10 minutes to spot a vile typo error in some code, we all talked about WWDC and I encouraged Joe Jones (who's attending this year) to get to the Weblogger Dinner to shoot the )(&()@# and meet a whole pile of other Mac developers.

Overall, the meetings are feeling like they've got a good stable core and are coming together as a group that is really starting to all interact together.

why?

Why does the f5 key refresh all the views in various microsoft products, but you use f9 to "get new mail" in Outlook?

blew an afternoon with Nagios and RRD today

This afternoon was a frustrating one. I suppose they happen occasionally, but it's annoying.

I spent the afternoon tweaking and twiddling NagiosGraph to attempt to get it to read the parse data from Nagios 2.0, and it just didn't want to go smoothly. I've been having a terrible time trying to figure out why it doesn't seem to be getting invoked properly, fiddling back and forth with writing out the files directly, and then attempting to push them into the parse script - all pretty much without luck. I expected to have to do a little regular expression hackery, but I didn't even get to the point where I could map that into place, since the data just never seemed to flow quite the right direction.

At this point, I think I'll be only roughly using the nagiosgraph components since the "show" graphing component isn't flowing into the site either. I've written plenty of perl, python, and shell pushing data flow and RRD together. And I suspect that if I'd started there again, I might be running with something now. Ah well - I thought it was worth attempting to use a pre-built package. I was hoping to get in, set it up, and run back out without much effort of thought. Alas, it's not that smooth yet.

I had to bail on the whole Nagios graphing with RRD project this afternoon at 3pm to focus on some data mining tasks. That at least went reasonably smoothly - but then I guess it tends to do that when you've gotten something of a handle on the schema and how the data is related.

Another seattle rhodie

When I was viewing the picture I took of this one and cropping it down to show the single flower, I was amazed at the raw saturation of color that this guy provided to the camera.

RRDTool

One of my favorite tools available for graphing just got quite the site upgrade, as well as an advance to version 1.2! RRDTool

As of version 1.0.49 they started making available a windows precompiled binary, and when I went to get the latest version today, I noticed the 1.2 was released (it looks like) yesterday and the whole site has a revamp.

I'm not sure I care for the black on black layout, it's pretty hideous to read on Firefox/Win, but it's still kinda neat to see.

Sam

Karen just got back from a trip to Missouri, and brought with her some pictures of the family. This paticular picture is of my nephew Sam - the eldest of two nephews and a neice. And while he doesn't look like he has mischief in his eye in this picture, I believe that indeed Karen caught the formative moment of confusion, just before he figured out that he did indeed have a pretty good sized rock in his hand, and he could do something with it...

Hanging at El Diablo

During my sunday morning wanderings, of course I stopped at El Diablo to have a latte and peruse the Queen Anne Avenue Bookstore. Outside the patio from the two shops is a trellis that is covered with these and hanging down across the top. Right now it's beautiful, and later in the summer I suspect we'll get heavier foilage and a lovely shaded spot to sit, drink a little coffee, read some, and do that online computing stuff with the free wireless there.

Spring rhodies

Spent the morning wandering around Queen Anne, taking pictures of flowers. It was a terrific morning for it: bright, reasonably warm, and quiet.

Comments back on

Ok, I've turned comments back on. I'm sure this just means that here come the spammers, but we'll see how it goes.

Darnit, I wasn't that lucky

I mean, yeah - I pre-ordered it and all, but I didn't get my copy of MacOS X 10.4 early. Lucky sods.

Singingfish, Video Search

Heh. Now it (video search) is making the news.

Singingfish was about 6 years too early.

airport, last photo from hawaii

My final picture from our trip from Hawaii - at least for now.

The airport as we were leaving. This was the terminal, which was a delightful change from the usual sort of thing you see in Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, etc. Very open with the breeze blowing. The sun was setting as we arrived at the airport for the night flight back to Seattle. It's unfortunate that we couldn't get a reasonable picture, but it was on the other side of those walls and across the tarmac - so airport security had the walls constructively placed to block that side.

Firefox extension tutorial

While I was out looking around the internet late last night, I ran across this really cool tutorial on making extensions for Firefox. I guess it's been out a few months (not the core thing I tend to watch), but it certainly hasn't lost any relevance.

Now that I'm spending a WHOLE lot of time in Firefox and IE at work (yeah, I still favor Safari at home), I might have to try and put something together.

This isn't a wall

Amazingly, this bit of amazing drystone isn't a wall. It's the side of a platform. The platform was something like 40' wide and similiar long, and according to the site there were one huts and the like built up on top of it. So I'm a fiend for good drystone construction, and this is a beautiful example of it.

Outrigger

While the fiberglass outriggers were something like $12,000 new, I don't even want to think of the cost of one of the wood ones. I'm blanking on the name of the wood that they use for it, but it's a fairly popular carving wood. The outrigger here is kept like they used to be kept - the whole recreation another component of the place of refuge.

protected beach

As far as protected beaches go, this one is the most gentle and elegant I saw in all of the Big Island (Hawaii). It's at the "place of refuge", and was once part of the king's demense. Only the king and his procession could use this entry, and this was all his land. If you'd violated kapu and were heading for the place of refuge, you would be better served to swim in from the ocean - because until you were actually ON the place of refuge, you were fair game.

!KAPU

For a culture with an incredible bounty of resources at hand, the Hawaiians had quite the agressive culture and law system. Anything that was Kapu (forbidden) was punishable by death - and it got pretty harsh to hear tell through some of the natives.

But there was a chance, albeit a slim one. The place above is a restoration of the place of refuge. (more pics of the site coming in the next few days) If you could avoid death until you got yourself here, you were safe. They kept you for a day or two, the priests pardoned you, and you were free to return to your previous life - all past misdeeds forgiven.

Over the water

I know I've been keeping to posting just a single picture a day, but this one can't wait. We just downloaded the pictures from the Nikon, since Karen's heading out again for a little bit of traveling, and when I spotted it, I was just awestruck.

This was actually on the flight to Hawaii, as we cruised at altitude across the pacific ocean. The image itself is a link to a full sized version, suitable for cropping to be a desktop, etc.

Enjoy.

Photo copyright © Karen Williams, Skunk Hill Studio, 2005

A last shot of the King's demense

A last photo (for now) of the King's demense. You can see how it jutted out into the bay a little bit, fairly protected by the curve of the land. The drystone walling is much more clear in scale, and that wall was something like 3 to 4 feet thick going around. The inside of the area was sandy, over a built up base of a lava flow. Our hotel was immediately behind us and to the left, and behind the structure you can see some of the marina and open bay beyond.

Interestingly, to the right of this photo gets into private land pretty quick. Rumor has it of Seattle native Paul Allen... He's got a nice spread over there, including a private boat access area.

wire mesh, paper mache

Aside from fighting a nasty two-day-long headache and doing yardwork, I've been starting up a little personal art project.

I've been re-reading the book Physical Computing that I bought last year, intending to get a better understanding of working with microcontrollers and such. My original reason now lost (I moved jobs), the book is still compelling. There's a web site associated with the Physical Computing book which has some great pages on resources, code, and best of all an article on programming a microcontroller from MacOS X which is apparently now pretty doable thanks to a GCC based compiler for the AVR chips.

Erp, ungeek. Where this was supposed to be going is sort of the opposite of electronics. The project I have in mind is very simple animitronics, using info from the physical computing book to drive the motion. Simple things that spin, open, or whatever. A variation of a "powered pop-up book" is actually where my idea started.

Paper pop-up books are really cool, but they don't nessecarily have the structure that I was thinking of fiddling with. But I did recall something that did - Karen did some paper mache work a couple of years back, and I was really impressed with what you could build up to - both in strength and being very lightweight. It makes sense when you realize that it's basically composite technology at it roots. Just don't soak it in water...

Now I need to find some basic armature construction material. Turns out a very common material is wire mesh, which comes in more varieties than I ever imagined. Here I was thinking I'd just go buy some screening material from Home Depot, but now there's all these darn choices.

The King's 'House'

A better picture of the recreation of the King's private holdings. The most impressive architectural feat (aside from the carvings) was the stone platform. In this case, it was a massive dry-stone wall formed out of pieces of lava, holding itself together in the fine tradition of good drystone walls.

There were several examples of them as we wandered about. Some as walls, some as wide and deep platforms completely built up in mortarless construction.

figures of gods

The hotel we stayed at (King Kamehameha Kona Beach Hotel) had the interesting attribute of a restoration of the kings lodgings. Kona was, at one time long ago, his residence. The original was burned years ago, but the figures of the recreation were really interesting to me.

Black rock, white rock

It's not really white rock, of course - it's coral. Lots of it ends up on the shores of the rough coast of Hawaii. And one of the things that really struck me was that little bits of white coral were often used as a sort of grafiti. Huge signs, words, and whatnot would be spelled out in small bits of white coral against the black lava flows along the highways or down on the beaches.

as much time in the water as possible

Karen was determined to spend as much time in the water as possible. I was still sick (although determined to snorkel as much as possible), and Karen was just starting to come down with it, but she managed to way out-do me in staying in the water, watching the fish, paddling about.

Although the cruise itself offered snorkel gear, we had previously rented some very nice gear from Snorkel Bob's in Kona. They were really easy to work with, and gave you a great "no time share" overview of the goings on around Kona. Compared with getting hawked all the time for timeshares, that was incredibly refreshing.

Path of the gods

This is looking at the edge of Kealakekua Bay as we were coming up from the south. Above the bay are the sea cliffs that hold the remains of the kings of hawaii - sacred burial areas that are protected as well as pretty darned inaccessible.

Looking at those cliff walls makes it obvious why one of the only ways into the bay is by water. One of the roads that does lead down towards that area (accessible to the right looking at the picture) is called "Path of the gods" - although at the moment I don't recall the exact hawaiian name.

cool vendor

Awesome!

I'm part of a "Cool Vendor".

XCoder meeting

We had a fairly lightly attended XCoder meeting this evening - 8 folks showed up. Our peak for a regular meeting has been 22, and I think we're normally closer to 13 or 15 people. Not too bad for a new group still finding it's way.

The dBug resource center is working out very nicely as a location (I think). I know there were some complaints, and we lost a few people in the move, but all in all it's been a great location for me. Plenty of seating, not competing with a public audience, power and a wireless network for all attending can really make a difference.

This saturday we're going to have the programmers equivilant to a stich-n-bitch at the center. Work through some of the chapters of Aaron Hillegaas' great book and generally chew the fat for the afternoon. A good bit of geeking out - it'll be a good change of pace.

four new tires

Well, it turns out that my tires were a LOT more worn than I'd completely realized, so when I went in to get one flat fixed, I ended up with a lot more. Thank the wonders of credit in the modern society, as I now have four new tires and the car was ready to go at 10am.

I'd hoped to sort of sneak in and sneak out this morning, getting to work maybe a little late, but not really noticable. Well, with the car being worked on until 10am, THAT didn't work, so I just got in late and then turned around and worked a little late this evening and did some work from home to catch up all after the fact.

transparent jewel colored water

The water looking down into the marine preserve (Kealakekua Bay) from the back of the catamaran was just incredible. The tour itself was hosted through Fair Wind, and I'd easily recommend them if you're heading there yourself. There were very responsible tour guides, stressing the importance and care of the marine sanctuary, as well as generally very friendly hosts. Karen and I met several other folks on that cruise who said they'd been on other Fair Winds tours, and were back for another. High recommendation indeed.

We had a disposable underwater camera that we haven't yet had developed, so with any luck there will be some cool pictures I can post that either Karen or I took from underwater. Hopefully they came out - it's really rather hard to know when you're doing it. Masks, fins, and bouyancy all sort of combine to make shooting pictures with an underwater camera a sort of "point and hope" affair.

In the picture, you can see some lighter colored areas - that's all white sand, and there's not much of it there. Most of that entire area is just spectacular reef - the darker bits from this view. Such lovely water.

Capt Cook's Memorial

Nearly 5 days after visiting the volcano, we headed out on a snorkeling trip. One of the pay-for tours, we took a heavily customized powered catamaran around to Capt. Cook's memorial and marine preserve. We could have kayaked over, or swum the mile and a half - but that's really about it in terms of getting there as far as I know.

As we were swinging into the bay and the marine preserve, you could spot the Capt. Cook memorial. One of the few bits of "british soil" in the United States, and the spot where Capt. Cook permanently overstayed his welcome in the Hawaiian islands.

Just south of this area is the "Place of Refuge", which I'll write about later, and all along this coast we really found there to be pretty incredible snorkeling.

bridgestone tires in Seattle

Hmmm. For once, the local Google search sort of feels like it's let me down. I came home to a very flat tire, as it seems that somewhere I drove over a mucking huge screen and it's thoroughly embedded itself into my tire. So I need to get it repaired.

Anyone know of a place they really like to go?

Volcanic vents

On the same day that we visited the black sand beaches, we drove up to Volcano - the small village at the top of the active volcano crater. They have a great drive around the various caldera, and some hikes to overlook the area. We hopped out of the car at the caldera edge and headed over to these vents, misting and smoking in a very light, and somewhat chilly, drizzle. That's Karen, trying to be warmer than she was, standing out there. Beyond the vents to the left the whole thing drops away into the volcano caldera itself.

PSP - wireless personal electronics

One of the guys at work bought himself a PSP and was showing it off. He's primarily using it for watching video content while commuting on the bus, and I've got to say - it looks damn nice for doing just that. As a piece of portable, personal electronics, it's a damn impressive feller. It's fairly large, but well configured - and it's a bit of electronics that's made with the complete understanding that while you're using it, you'll be paying attention to it. We watched a little MPEG4 content that had been transcoded from lord knows what else, and the quality of the video was simply incredible.

You can sync and connect the thing up to a Mac or PC over USB, and it provides it's own memory space out as a disk - just like hooking in a CF card or memory stick. And most interestingly to me, it has 802.11b networking built in as it's primary networking mechanism. Now I'm desperate the NMAP the sucker over 802.11b to see what responds on ports and to start poking around with Ethereal and see what I can see. I'm also really curious as to what it's running underneath the covers. Sony's high gloss is terrific and hides most everything there, and I haven't really done the reading to find out what's underneath. A 333MHz XScale ARM processor, some decent memory, and some very impressive DSP chips - but that's the extent.

We're clearly still at a fairly early stage in the wireless networking protocols and functionality, but it's definitely getting airplay and thoughts on it - mesh networking may be driven more by devices like the PSP than any single other thing.

I'd looked at some of these gizmo's just before heading to Hawaii, but nothing really stood out for me, and video media isn't exactly my highest priority at home. Although - with MPEG4 video compression and netflix, I could watch quite a bit of video while I was traveling about... Eh, I'll wait a bit. Ultimately, it'll be some game that would sucker me in, not the video as the foremost. At $250, I expect they'll be selling quite well for quite some time.

apple tech notes reaching in some new directions

A couple of tech notes hit the streets today - I spotted them in the RSS feed from Apple. The first was a "yeah, gotta read that and see if they say anything new that's useful" - all about recommended memory allocation practices for MacOS X. The second was more interesting to me for the target of the article rather than anything specific. CFLite - Creating cross platfrom applications with Core Foundation and Open Source. CFLite is apparently a bit of cross-platform underpinnings that you can now happily compile in all sorts of places. But the intriguing bit was the examples given in the note were showing screen shots of cygwin...

A huge amount of Apple's underpinnings are open source, which lamentably I haven't really taken too much advantage of. But I suspect they're getting some more serious attention of late with articles like these, and with certain annoying functional bugs getting resolved (that would be the CFXMLCreateStringByEscapingEntities function in the CFXMLParser). That was seven annoying layers of screwed up for several revisions, and I must shamefully admit that I never even bothered to hunt it down myself and submit a patch due to my annoyance. Ah well, at least I filed a bug report.

techno grunge

Karen's taking a javascript class and tonight was her first night of the quarter (she missed the first class due to our vacation). I picked her up after class and asked her about it. She said that a number of the folks in the class were talking about "hitting the bars" after the class (it gets out about 9pm normally) and after some more conversation, decided to label about half of them with the term "techno grunge".

I'm sure it's prevelant in more places than Seattle, but as the home of grunge, it's amusingly local and I knew exactly what she was talking about straight off. I thought I'd google techno grunge, and I came up with some music references and a couple of pics from iStockPhoto. The pics looked like canvas painted with tar and then heavily worn, layering over some screen-like textured surface. The keywords associated were more amusing:

bleak blue cheerless color depressed dim dismal downcast dreary dusky evil form gloomy glum grid grids grunge heavy lugubrious melancholy moody morose murky mysterious of overcast patern paterns pattern patterns patturn patturns paturn paturns sad sinister sullen technical techno texture unhappy wicked

Hornbill

The black sand beach was really interesting. Essentially bits of lava ground fine, the most startling aspect of it was how darn hot it would get in the sun. I'd guess that is why the hornbill tortoise's loved it - there were two on the back in the area, with posted signs asking visitors to give them 15 feet clearance.

Most everyone was doign exactly that, and nobody was "messin' with em", which was really nice to see. They both slept through any motions I made, but one picked up his head and glanced at Karen as we were checking them out (from the 15 foot distance).

Had to walk pretty quickly over that sound barefoot, as it was getting really hot, but it encouraged you to jump into the water in very short order and get a little cooled off. We didn't come prepared to snorkel, but I heard tell that the area right outside this beach was a common haunting place of the tortoises and that if you snorkeled around in there, you were pretty likely to see at least one of them noshing on some kelp.

Sunday evening

This afternoon and evening has been wonderfully quiet. I caught an early matinee of Sin City and thought they did a pretty good job of the adaptation from the graphic novels.

The movie let out and I was wandering by 3pm, so I headed down to the Center for Wooden Boats ostensibly to look at what they had to offer for classes. It really doesn't take me long to get enthralled and spend 30 to 45 minutes just wandering around the area, looking at the boats, workshops, and watching the periodic sailing out on Lake Union. For whatever reason, I became terribly interested in the Beetle Cat they have docked there. It's a lovely wide little gaff rigged sailboat. A class was going on nearby, so I eavesdropped for a few minutes and later learned that it was the Docking Intensive workshop they had scheduled for this weekend. I've been thinking seriously of taking the SailNOW lessons sometime through this late spring and summer. It's been quite a while since I was out, and a course would do me well and maybe get me sailing a bit this summer. There was also a class on Historic Navigation that really caught my attention, but I already have plans for the session they're offering in May, so maybe I'll catch the November one.

By the time I was wandering home, it was nearly 4:30pm, so I stopped and picked up the makings for a Pork Risotto. Karen's been pretty down in the dregs with the remainder of whatever illness this is we've had, so I figured making dinner would be just the thing tonight. It turns out lovely, even if I didn't really follow the recipe at all. I really enjoyed making it though, so I'll have to do another risotto before too long and mix up something else to go with it. I did this last one with brown rice (which takes quite a bit longer than white to finish up), but I really enjoyed the effect.

I think the rest of the evening will have me back in my books, being a cat pillow and reading a bit.

The Pacific Ocean

The pacific ocean, and yeah, me. Proof that I was there! This was taken at one of the black sand beaches (yes, I'm standing on a lava flow - not black sand) on the south end of the island. The beach itself is over to the my right, and I'd wandered out on the lava to check out the tidepools. I'd also wandered out a bit farther than the surf would allow you to get without getting a tad damp, so some of the spray from the surf has pelted me down a bit.

View from the hotel room

A view from the hotel room. We stayed at the King Kamehameha Lodge - Kona Beach Hotel, in an ocean front room on the sixth (top) floor. The view was looking downwards and south at the small beach area "in front" of the hotel. There was a outrigger canoo club that practiced nightly from that beach, and you can see a pile of them getting ready. I spent more than one evening watching them paddle about and practice for races. Apparently one of those canoos (holds 5 folks) costs about $12,000 new. A bit more than I'd guessed.

To the left of the beach you can see a little of the marina that was next door. We never left on any excursions from the marina, but the snorkeling in that little area and across the marina was actually pretty darn good - large schools of hawaiian reef fish all over the place. Karen even spotted a humuhumunukunuku apua'a (hawaiian reef trigger fish - the state fish) in that little area.

Yes, I'm alive

The cats haven't eaten me - I'm alive. I've been sick for the past two weeks or so now, and very very unplugged.

Hawaii unplugged. Aside from the vile head cold, it was wonderful. I'll have some pics posted up before too long. In the mean time, it's sleeping around our house to get ourselves back up to snuff.