Rhonabwy

Lucky

I'm guessing that the folks from New Orleans aren't feeling so right now, but I'm pretty convinced that they're darned lucky.

The eye-wall of that storm missed them by all of twenty miles. If that eye had crossed over New Orleans? Well, nobody really knows what the hell would have happened, but the wind speeds and destructive power would have been significantly greater.

I read the papers, checked the news, and all over I saw pictures of some heavy flooding, blown out windows, and a collapsed brick wall or two. Frankly, that's a lot lighter than I thought they were going to get off when I realized that Katrina was heading their way this sunday.

I guess I better stop screwing around and get down there to visit the city before they aren't so lucky.

tracking right for New Orleans

New Orleans Smackdown

I wanted to go sailing today, so I checked the weather forecasts. Then I noticed that Weather Underground had some blogs, so I took a quick peek. Wow - I'd sorta missed that a monster was lurking in the gulf! It looks like New Orleans and the area south of there is about to get a vicious smackdown, potentially one of the worst we've ever seen. There was even a Hurricane prep tips.

I can't imagine one of those things swinging down into the sound - my lord.

UPDATE: I've just read that New Orleans is in a mandatory evacuation. I have no idea if they'll all get out in time.

All that nifty browser stuff

I've been thinking about what other folks have been calling Ajax as "All the nifty browser stuff". Since I never really got into learning javascript, or doing anything to manipulate the world inside the browser, it all pretty much shot over my head. But it keeps poppin' up. We are using it to do some "nifty browser stuff" at work, and it's getting embedded in all sorts of cool services, so I've been interested.

When I saw a reference to the book < a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/books/dhtml1/">DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, I decided to give it a go. It arrived a few days ago, and I just got to cracking it for a little light reading over dinner tonight. It is a really good book. The author does a really good job of laying it all out, annotating his comments and references, and basically making the book a quick read while still pushing a lot of good detail into it.

So if you're looking for an intro, because you've been paying attention to other things and want to catch up a bit (ahem, like me) - I recommend the book.

Video tour of Seattle

I found this on Make Blog tonight - it's a video tour of Seattle that incorporates pics, video and some of the Google Earth mapping/image thing.

Screencasting for Django

Hey, that's cool - the Django project is starting to do a little screencasting! Course, it's for a backward incompatible change to their source tree, which is a good place to really spread news fast and furious, but it's still cool.

Ran

I finally saw Kurosawa's Ran, and incredible retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear.

Not really much to say, other than "Wow"

Google talk, beers, and the center for Wooden Boats

The only relation really is this past evening.

So the alst first - I found out that Google has announced Google Talk, and it's using Jabber! Cool - so now I'm on that, as well as AIM, MSN, Y!, an original jabber account, and I think there's even an ICQ instance floating about out there somewhere.

In reverse order for the evening, I noticed the this morning and night have been bounded by a gibbous moon. This evening is was rising in the east, this morning it was a child's moon setting late in the west. Kinda neat.

Had a bite tonight with Jeremy, and a few beers, who's in Seattle and crashing for a short bit with Gus. He's looking good, still happy with his gig at IBM Global Services, and talking up a storm about Ruby. Heh.

And most cool of all - Karen and I finished out classes and checked out at the Center for Wooden Boats! Yep, we've graduated, and now we can rent out boats and head out for a sail on a whim! We each get 2 hours of "free sail" as a graduation present, and Vern, the 'man' at CWB repeated to us several times: "Come Sail!". If Jeremy was fanatic with Ruby, Vern's got everyone beat with his passion for sailing at CWB. And sail is exactly what I intend to do! We've been checked out on the Blanchards and the little El Toro's, but I still have my eye on taking out one of the gaff rigged new england cat boats! Soon... Soon enough.

felony charge for kids with iBooks

I am so trying to wrap my head around charging 13 high schoolers with felonies for hacking on their provided iBooks. I mean, really - come on. This is a crime worth a FELONY? Puhlease. I'm not saying that they're innocents, or that they should just get off - but jesus christ - a felony charge is going to carry around with these kids for years! Bruce has some decent commentary but the whole potential punishment is ludicrously and rediculously out of context for the crime.

Packethop

Wi-fi Planet has an article about PacketHop that really caught my attention today. Completely infrastructure free wireless network establishment for PC's and handhelds.

That's a particularly difficult problem, especially when you get into the realm of scaling it and maintaining really effective communications. I wish I could get a look "under the covers" on how they (if they) are accomplishing all that.

Looking for help at work : QA Engineer

We're looking for help at work - I'm hiring a QA (Software Test) Engineer for DocuSign, Inc. You can get the full job description if you're interested - and I'd love to get some referrals from any local bloggers. It is a great company, and an incredible opportunity. I have the job posted on Craigslist too - you know, working all the various avenues I can.

Nada and Alyx on their way back home

The week is over, and I'm winding down for the night. Nada and Alyx, friends from Chi-town, have been visiting here this past week, and I just got back from dropping them off at the airport. We had a lovely visit with them - and now clearly need to get out to visit folks in Chicago - Byron & Courtney included. Lord knows when that's going to happen, but at least we're thinking towards it.

Jeremy should be wandering into town before too much longer - a little break from signing his life away. Word is he's crashing with Gus and Kirsten up in Everett for a day or few.

Oh - and I finally got to see - a really excellent movie. I still have Ran waiting to be seen - it has all the hallmarks of a pretty incredible flick.

That's really about all the news. Another pretty hectic week is looming in front, so I should really get off the keyboard and see about getting some sleep.

Snoqualmie Falls

A couple of pics from our random wanderings yesterday:

Snoqualmie falls - from above, and below.

More on EVDB

Brian Dear is clearly a man who knows how to use search!

After my blog post last week about EVDB, I received a nice email this morning from Brian talking briefly about relevance, and his omission of talking about it in the interview. Basically, it's dearly important to them.

And he mentioned something that I know to be incredibly tricky - searching the future. You can set up a stored search called SmartCalendar and it will search the future of events to see what's coming up.

So, intriguing stuff.

Those seaplanes

Let me put this in really plain terms:

Those seaplanes that launch from Lake Union are really frightening when they're bearing on you, powered up, and pass so close that you get backspray from the prop.

This wasn't one of the Kenmore air guys - they are incredibly careful and cool. This was the "other group", a tan and white plane, that decided to thread between ourselves and another sailboat for a takeoff. I was jibing about, getting a little pinned towards the shore, when this craptacular pilot came roaring up. If I hadn't just kept the tiller hard over and spun in a tight little circle, I would have come out the jibe right into his path. The instructor tonight (Lee) was awesome, and we all did just fine, but I have never seen a plane from forward and that close while it was powered up. Big damn scary whirly blades of doom - headin' right for the boat I was piloting.

Other than that Mrs Lincoln, the play was fine.

I worked primarily on man overboard drills - and I was doing pretty reasonable at it, although sometimes the sheer amount of information got pretty flustering. I always got my floaty thing, and did a reasonable job of tacking, jibing, coming about, and keeping a decent line on the target. It's really not unlike docking, except for the rather unexpected part when the instructor pitches out the life preserver target and tells you "Man Overboard!". Oh - and having other helpful souls pick up the target while I bore off and around didn't help much either.

Damn that plane scared the crap out of me tonight. What the hell was that guy thinking, anyway? (Probably - "If I hurry, I can make it...")

evdb

I was listening to the IT Conversations interview with Brian Dear of EVDB today. It struck me as being a pretty similiar gambit to what we were doing at Singingfish, and something that I thought was really interesting is that the CEO didn't once mention anything about relevancy, even though the overall scope of EVDB appears to be search. It's probably not all that significant, but it sort of struck me as a rather interesting ommision.

Lost a little skin today

We had classes 3 and 4 of our sailing sessions at the Center for Wooden Boats today. Four hours of wonderful sailing. The first two (this morning) in very light and variable winds, but the second in a stronger breeze (3-6 knots) that was pretty steady.

The first lesson was mostly detail and discussion as we carefully moved about to keep the boat moving in almost no wind. Frank, our instructor, was a wealth of 40+ years of sailing on lakes and in the sound.

The second lesson was really putting us through our paces with tacking, jibing, and "round the pin" drills. Dave worked us hard, and even managed to get in a man-overboard drill. Both lessons were with Blanchard Jr's (26' boats), and we shot them all over the lake today.

I did end up loosing a little skin on my left wrist when we came in for a landing at the end of the second lesson. While jibing about in the small channel there, the main sheet slipped from it's clutch and shot out. Probably good - as I meant to loose power about that point as I came around to coast into the dock, but it was really uncontrolled and the line took off a couple layers of skin. So now I have some aloe and a massive bandaid holding it in place. Stung like a sunovabitch for a good 30 minutes, I'm sure a fair bit of that was just sweat on the wound. Didn't bleed (not that much skin was removed), but boy did that hurt. On either side I also have a pretty good rope burn. I was very happy that it didn't distract me too badly from the landing, and I made a beaut to the dock.

Versioning in XCode from Subversion

Great little writeup and script on using Subversion's version number with XCode

I lost my helicopter today

I lost my helicopter today. I hadn't played with it very much, because it was really susceptible to the wind. But today seemed pretty quite outside, and I had the saturday to myself, so it seemed like a good time.

I was flying it around the a nearby schoolyard when a couple of little girls and their father came over to see what it was about. The little girl seemed really excited to fly it, so I let her - and yeah, you can see it coming. Instead of releasing the trigger when it got up there, she just kept it on all the way. It did lazy circles around the yard, but ultimately disappeared high up (60' or so) into some sycamore trees across the street. 'Papa' started to climb to see if he could find it, but I don't think he even knew what tree it was in. I never did see it after it disappeared into the leaves.

I suspect the chances now of recovery are slim, but I'll keep my eyes open. Fall will be here before long, and if the rain hasn't trashed it by that time, it may come down this fall. I'm a little sad about loosing it, but I guess that is sort of bound to happen with flying remote control things that don't really have a lot of control. Especially when you hand the speed throttle to a 3 year old girl.

11 pairs of shoes

As I was cleaning the house this morning, I found that I had 11 pairs of shoes. Now when the hell did THAT happen? And only three of those are sandles!

I used to be a "the only shoes I own are work boots" kind of guy. Not much into anything else - sneakers, nice shoes, sandles - just a pair of those low leather work boots (with the steel tips over the toes). Now I don't even own a pair. Instead I find myself wearing sandles (not uncommon, either) or a pair of sneakers if the weather is little colder. I even have two different pairs of nice shoes for when I want to play dress up.

And if you're curious, I also have the habit of leaving my shoes all over the house. I tend to take them off when I get home, but not always by the door - so they end up in neat little pairs scattered through the living room, dining room, bedroom, and in the nook where I work on my desktop computer. But for now - they're all (except for one pair) locked away in the bedroom. Ah, the joys of 'cleaning house'.

Oh - but Karen beats me for neat shoes. She had a pair of golashes that look like milk cows - black and white, and little eyes and a nose painted on. The closest I get to that are a pair of bulldog slippers that I pad around in sometimes when it's really chilly. More so in Missouri than Seattle, but I still pull them out upon occasion.

Panos Greek Taverna

WOW! Karen and I have found this really great greek place, and it's just incredible: Panos Greek Taverna Kleftiko. I've known about it for a while, but we've just not taken the time to stop in and try it out. You'll spend a little more on their food (it won't be making cheap eats), but the flavors are just incredible and the atmosphere is great. I wouldn't recommend it on a really hot night - it's a small place, and I bet it gets COOKIN in there, but on any other average evening, it's wonderful.

Karen and I made a dinner of appetizers that included Kleftiko, Saganati, something with eggplant that I can't remember how to spell, Dolma's (greek spelling unknown to me) and pita. Oh - and I had a glass of retsina wine. Very, very tasty. A nice friday evening thing.

Retro tech

Even though it was discovered 200 years ago, I'm not sure you can call it retro tech (even though I did). This looks really cool - World's largest solar installation to use Stirling engine technology

Vendetta Online - a little different for MacTech

At the back of the latest MacTech magazine there's a one-pager on a game. The paraphrase from it was "Very similiar to Escape Velocity", and the URL: http://vendetta-online.com/.

Well, Escape Velocity is one of my all-time favorites, so I had to try it out. And in fact, it's really not at all like the game play of Escape Velocity, although it may be like the concept. Sort of an open-ended space that you fly around in first-person 3D like, and you can do all the escape velocity sorts of things - trade, fly missions, mine asteroids, shoot other ships. Oh - and it's multiplayer. Really multiplayer, although during my few times online, there haven't been many folks around.

They (Vendetta Online) has clients for Mac, Windows and Linux - and too their credit, they don't require the most honkin' heavy box in the world. I could play on my old 800MHz G3 iBook, even if it did immediately kick in the fan. They drive the game with a subscription model - pretty much the same as many other MMORPG's - and the cost is pretty reasonable ($9.99/mo). It's definitely not got the flash of some of the more prominent MMORPGS these days, but it's not as pricey either.

Ran into someone very helpful online today - user name was Masheean. Gave the whole kit a nice feel since he was trying to help me learn the ropes and such as it were. Definite plug for that. Flying the ships was a little strange, it'll take a while to really get the combat system, but I may just subscribe for a month or two. Not sure yet. In the meantime, I get 8 hours online as a trial free.

The only gripe I really have is the physics. I do rather wish they included momentum, but I can also understand how that might retard some gameplay in favor of realism.

Hiroshima

Sixty years ago today, we (the USA) dropped the nuke "in anger" on Hiroshima. For years in my childhood, I couldn't easily deal with the fear of nuclear weapons - so I researched them and all the details that I could find. Something to make the unknown a little more knowable.

I'm no longer as afraid as I once was of nuclear weapons. Maybe "ungodly respect" is the right term - I have no illusions about how safe or whatever a place would be after one went off. And the chances of a small, dirty nuke explosion are - in my estimation - higher now for the cities in the US and Europe than ever before. The sooner we're away from oil and the political thatch of thistles that we have oh so carefully sown planted, the better.

Now, I just think about the places and think what a waste. The area all around Chernobyl - wasteland. Nobody can use it. Nobody can ever even really stay there much - at best, just pass through. What a waste. What a terrible thing to do to the land.

So here is to respect and to the buddhist monks which are taking the flame back to the trinity test site to close the circle. I hope we never forget Hiroshima, and it's spectacularly horrific aftereffects. Hiroshima has rebuilt - at least they could. I think it will be a long wait before anything around Chernobyl can or does.

More Cocoa/Objective-C stuff

For the past couple of evenings, I've been marshalling up resources, calendars, and the like to plan out the fall for the XCoders group. I think we're going to have some neat presentations as we move out from working on the Hillegaas book and into specific technologies and details. In looking at the mailing list, we have 101 people on it, although quite a number of those folks don't attend the face to face meetings. Still, the mailing list is quietly active and I suspect somewhat useful.

Gus points to an interview with Frasier Speirs on a site I'd never heard of before: CocoaRadio. They're doing a podcast thing, so after some fighting with it, I've subscribed and I'll check out the interviews during my morning and evening commutes.

To top off the evening, I received my 'mighty mouse' and the latest edition of MacTech magazine. The mouse is quite an interesting critter, and I'm really liking using it. It's sort of weird/magic how it recognizes a right click versus left. I don't know what I think of the little scrolly ball thingy, but it looks like it could be pretty useful. Time will tell.

"mighty mouse"

Gus sent me a message this morning via IM: "Have you seen this: http://www.apple.com/mightymouse/". I was all confused, looked, and nearly fell out of my chair. Wow - a strange more-than-two button mouse from apple. So I did what any sane person would do - I bought one.

Should be here soon - it's shipped today and everything. Tracking doesn't show anything useful yet though.

In the meantime, I was impressed by the journalistic feat of Ars Technica getting a product review out the door for product that wasn't even twelve hours old.

A couple of IT conversations

Since iTunes has made it so easy, I've been using the podcasting stuff in there to put various IT Conversations onto my iPod for the commute to work. It's pretty good - I usually get a full 40 minutes of time to listen while I'm heading there or coming back. And today was a study in the sides that you can get. I listened to two sessions today: Hossein Eslambolchi from AT&T and Jamais Cascio from MeshForum.

They really couldn't have been more different. I really didn't care for Hossein's talk - it sounded like a very large corp CIO that didn't fundamentally get some of the changes that were happening around him, or if he did maybe that he didn't care other than how AT&T was going to harness it to make some moolah. I think he was really off the mark on a number of points. While I didn't agree 100% with the concepts in Jamais' talk Participatory Panopticon, it rang a lot of bells and he made really interesting and compelling arguments for a potential future that was a realization of "memory enhancers". It was really a big talk on "what if", where the "what if" was recording everything we see and hear each day to enable ourselves to have improved memories. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of projects being researched in this space right now. An always-on audio recorder - well, I can't imagine that is really all that far distant except for battery power limitations.

I had actually started into a third - Adam Bosworth at the 2005 MySQL convention, but was really only half-way through it when I got home and other things caught my attention. So far, so good though - interesting concepts.