Rhonabwy

PyInjector

PyInjector is cool. Gus isn't so sure though...

Instructables

Neat site!

I just spotted it through a sort of convoluted reference of Make magazine, iPod video files, and Squid labs: Instructables. It's a sort of common-sharing site for how to make all sorts of neat and bizarre things. Kind of an interactive MAKE magazine with all kinds of content (i.e. not moderated).

Caffe Fiore

The coffee shop name has accents on the e's, but that's the new place on Queen Anne down at 3rd W and Galer.

They've apparently been open for 3 months (according to the Barrista), but I only heard of them quite recently. Doing some googling around (to see if they had a website), I found a reference to it in the Seattle MetroBlog.

Anyway, they make a pretty good Breve, and they have free wifi (with which I'm writing this entry). The house is actually pretty full at 11am (it's now 11:30), so I'm expecting they're doing pretty well here.

ping from 20 years ago

Oh dear lord, but it has been 20 years - since high school.

I got pinged by Keith Morrissey who saw my name online while hunting around for people to place at a job in northern California. He recognized my name and wrote me, and sure enough we were in the same high school class in Missouri. I couldn't place a face to save my life.

Apparently there was a 20 year reunion (I've long since lost track of that) not too long ago. He hadn't attended, but his commentary (via friends) was amusing. I expect I would fall into the "rotund" category.

Probably more shocking was they he had two daughters, one is 13 and the other 17. I can't even imagine...

new coffee house...

There is, yes, a new coffee house on Queen Anne. Over at 3rd West and Galer, it's a neat little organic coffee joint. Only they don't have any evening hours from what I can tell, and then close sometime prior to 6:45pm on monday evenings...

I don't know how a place expects to get known when they don't have any reasonable evening hours (at least in Seattle!!!) I tried to stop by, but it just wasn't happenin.

Would be nice if they posted some hours...

Movies and a lazy sunday

Didn't go out for movies this weekend, instead I pulled out the entire set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition) and have been working through them for the past few days. We just finished seeing it all again, so now I'm left without anything specific to do and not much energy to get me there.

I did finally get to sleep about 4:30am this morning. Blech. And I've been half-napping all afternoon (aside from watching the movies), but I'm a little afraid of having insomnia again tonight. The cold has a hold on me, so I'm not feeling so hot anyway.

a little sick, a little insomnia

I've been sleeping a lot this weekend, partially because I've been a little sick. Except that now (3am!) I'm not sleeping, and it sure would be nice to rectify that before dawn. I gave up laying on the couch or twitching in bed about 15 minutes ago and just decided to read and curl on the couch for a bit. A little hot tea rounds it out.

Maybe I should have made that a hot tody...

Watching the sun rise and set through google requests

Ensconced on the couch with my laptop and a couple of blankets, I'm out scanning around for post-thanksgiving reading, and I came across a reference to a research paper by Rob Pike (yeah, THAT Rob Pike) at Google Labs. The paper is on Sawzall, a mechanism for distributed analysis, which is pretty darn intriguing in and of itself. But the thing that I really wanted to share was the movie that is referenced from the paper - distribution of queries to Google through the day of August 13, 2003. Its an animated gif, so give it a chance to load.

Once it's rolling though, it's really cool.

Mmmmm. full.

Thanksgiving dinner came off well. The first one we've cooked, really, in years. Mostly we've always gone to other houses in the family and just help out there. This time, it was Nathan, Leah, Kirstin, and Gus.

The turkey came out reasonably well, the gravy worked nicely, and the whole spread was WAY more food than 6 people really needed. But that's thanksgiving, isn't it? Nathan brought an incredible sipping rum that I've been enjoying since midafternoon (slowly - I'm fortunately not trashed). I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with all the leftovers, except maybe eat myself sick this weekend. Oh - and the pumpkin pie came out pretty well too. Not my most amazing pie baking display, but tasty.

Now we have three more days to unwind and chill. I think a bunch of reading, and maybe a video game or two are in my near future. I do miss being around the rest of the family right now, but I should get to see them all at Christmas.

Thanksgiving!

Riding the bus home from work yesterday, the driver came on and said:

"The administrative rules forbid me from wishing every one of you a Happy Thanksgiving, instead suggesting 'Happy Holidays' or something else equally lame. However, if you wish my a Happy Thanksgiving, I may return the comment in kind."

heh.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tiger in a nutshell

Nope, not literally - this is a mac geek thing.

Got a copy of Mac OS X Tiger in a nutshell today, so in between baking, mixing, and stiring I took a look. I was actually disappointed not to see a reference to textutil in there, seeing as it came out new in Tiger. Even still, it's a pretty complete volume, and it has a great reference in there about Bash, Emacs and vi, which I thought was kinda cool.

I still use vi as a default "I need something now" command-line editor, but that is honestly a throwback to the days when it was the only thing reliably installed on machines. Anymore though, I go for TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit or SciTe (when on windows). I used to use BBEdit all the time, but I found I just didn't use all its features, so it wasn't worthwhile paying the upgrade fee. Their products definitely don't suck.

Back to the book. The vast majority of it is really a printed "man page" for all the command-line features available in there. It would have been sort of nice to get a little kick as to what was where - there are some things that are only 10.4, but they're not easy to spot.

Oh - and there's a section in the back on using XWindows programs with Tiger, but it really focuses on fink as the medium by which they expect you to install code. I've headed to preferring darwinports.

ginger bread and pumpkin pie

The pre-thanksgiving cooking has commenced!

Tonight is ginger bread and pumpkin pie prep. Gotta bake those pumpkins down first, although it looks like we won't be getting 6 pies out of this batch. I think the real pie baking will take place tomorrow morning (letting the pumpkin cool is critical), and I may have to go get more if I decide that a single pie isn't going to do it for us.

textutil

Mac command line stuff - did you know about textutil? I didn't - not until I read the article at OReilly this evening. That's a cool program!

(I already knew about tidy and opendiff)

ESS spec for sync and share

Normally I ignore the microsoft hype engine when it comes to that latest "open standard" that Microsoft is proposing, but this one caught my eye: SSE. It's really a pretty simple spec (GOOD!) on how to detail attributes for adding onto the basic RSS bits with some detail about what was added, when, and some data to enable you to check against the last time you synchronized to that feed.

While I've read through the spec, I haven't really sat down and sketched out how it all would/could work. Seems like for a basic concept of synchronizing really simple feed information bits, it'd be pretty worthwhile. It's not a pub/sub model, but for a simple polling mechanism, you can set up unidirectional or bidirectional flows pretty effectively.

I first read about it on Ray Ozzie's blog, which I subscribed to after I heard he had one now... just to see what rolled out on it.

Bitchen about Perforce

I'm watching through the Evening at Adler, and I just caught Wolf's anti-tag on Perforce. I never had any particular bitch with Perforce myself except the cost, so that was really intriguing to me.

So while I was hunting for Wolf's email address to write him and ask him what his bitch with Perforce was all about, I spotted that he'd just written it up on his blog.

Surreal

If today gets any more surreal, I'm going to scream.

Amusing Google Maps remix

Although I'm not hip on getting an XBox 360 immediately (I want to wait and see with this one, and the games aren't that compelling to me), this Google Maps remix of where inventory resides nearby is pretty cool.

Stargate Atlantis, not so good.

I was doing some walking last night and watched Stargate Atlantis off netflix. Hey, you know - it was science fiction, and it gives me something to do while I'm walking. As far as episodic science fiction goes, well - it's really not very good. Of course I'm comparing it to Firefly... But that just makes me even more annoyed that Fox cancelled that original series.

I didn't watch any episodes - just the pilot. But even still it was grossly predictable, and the characters really didn't seem to have much of an arc. Not really much development anywhere, that I could tell. Hopefully they did more character development in the series itself, but I suspect not.

Now this is amusing...

This is what happened when I went to the URL http://connect.apple.com this morning:

When I reloaded, the apple developer login page came up normally, but I've never seen an error page that read: "No Error".

debugging bindings

Michael McCracken has a delicious link that I thought was incredibly useful tonight, so I wanted to share: Troubleshooting Cocoa Bindings.

While the bindings are cool, debugging and troubleshooting when code is using it is a real pain. Yeah - almost like giving a cat antibiotics. This article doesn't explain it all, but at least it's a decent subset. And it's been around since August, so I've just missed it in the past.

Quote of the night

Amusing quote of the night:

"Our lasers use sharpened photons".

Or maybe ya had to be there.

Foggy nights and cat care

The past several nights have been pretty foggy in Seattle, at least around the top of Queen Anne and in the "higher" neighborhoods like Wallingford and Phinney Ridge. Its been sort of neat - the air has a vibrant chill and the light does really cool things.

Wormwood (our cat with the recent surgery - and yes, I named him) is doing quite a bit better, but we'd always wish for better still. He's not yet given in to opening his mouth to eat, so tomorrow is the telling day. If he's not eating or at least drinking by tomorrow by himself, then we'll need to get back to the vets to make sure he'll get enough fluids - one way or the other. I'm sure he won't care for that at all, so we're hoping he starts drinking a little tomorrow. In the meantime, he's being pretty cuddly and we're keeping a close eye on him.

antibiotics

For the record, giving a cat oral antibiotics that's just had mouth surgery is a pain in the butt.

And it smells bad when it's spewed back on you.

Sterling Engines

There's a neat article about the upcoming use of Sterling Engines to create some highly effecient solar energy conversion in the California desert. I first read about this some time back, and have since been quietly obsessed with the idea of using the external combustion engine (yes, that's correct and NOT a typo) in a huge variety of places. It only requires a thermal gradient - the really small ones will run off your palm (and do correspondingly little), but just THINK of the places where this could be really effective!

I don't know how much gradient is really needed to be effective, but if you could get some micro-power generation just from the difference between the ground temp and the air temp, that would be pretty darn cool!

Snow

With the pics from Crater Lake up there now, I'm reminded of something that I felt I needed to share for my own future embarrasment and reference.

When the snow you are standing is holding you, that doesn't mean that it's only a few inches deep, or that you don't need snowshoes. The snow, in fact, at the rim of Crater Lake was something like 4' deep. And my socks were wet for a good long while (but they were wool, so it was at least mitigated).

Wizards Island, Crater Lake

PB110032.JPG
Originally uploaded by Joseph Heck.

More pics to be found at my Crater Lake photo set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joseph_heck/sets/1370688/

Crater Lake

Karen and I just got back from a three-day weekend in southern Oregon, the highlight of which has to be proclaimed as seeing Crater Lake. Oh my lord, what a spectacular place that is. It was snowed in at the rim, so we got only a limited view, but it was truly incredible.

We drove down Friday to Pat and Bill's (Karen's aunt and uncle), who live near the town of Merlin, OR. That alone is pretty darn nice, but then we took saturday and spent it road tripping around to Crater Lake and a couple of really beautiful falls.

The pics are still in the camera, so some of those will just have to wait. And the drive home was (at you might expect) exhausting, so I'm hitting the sack.

All sorts of bits

We have an XCoders meeting tomorrow, where we're "dragging" Brent into the local spotlight again after his (relatively) recent transition back to a full time developer with the dudes from Newsgator. That ought to make for a good evening of chatting!

I've started playing again with a tablet PC - this time a Thinkpad X41, which I've got to say is a pretty nice piece of equipment. It has a good, compact design and it's not a lead brick to carry around everywhere. I've been interested to try out One Note, since I've been reading Chris Pratley's blog on and off for the past year or so.

And yes, of course I've been keeping track of the latest buzz from the folks in Redmond - the leaked internal memo from Gates, and the corresponding bits from Ray Ozzie are interesting reading. It is, to me, almost amusing that we're reading Microsoft say "Oh shit, let's make money from ADS!!!!". I mean - wasn't that the dream of all these dot-com crazies back in 1999?. Heh - and Google has just completely kicked their ass in that particular game too. Not that I'm writing them off, or that the game is even over - just that they succeeded where a LOT of other folks failed.

The most interesting piece in Ozzie's bit is his statement : The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”. Services are a whole new game here, and while they're reasonably decent at their services, I wouldn't claim MS is the leader. I'd love to say something really smarmy like "MS can't get it right", but I think the truth is they'll do a pretty darn good job at stabbing at it. If they can break out of this "lock in the MS technologies only" thing they have beating through their lifeblood, they might even get back to being amazing.

A Feast for Crows

Sitting on the doorstep when I made it home tonight was A Feast for Crows - a book I've been waiting for and not very patiently. I've had it on order for months through Amazon, so when the package arrived I was very confused as to what had come from Amazon.

But its here now!

See ya, gotta go read.

OLSR at Mindcamp

One of the neat experiments at Mindcamp has been talked about a bit - the Seattle Wireless Network put up (or attempted to put up) a rather large ad-hoc wireless network using OLSR. It's been commented on by others, so I'll just summarize by saying: "Neat experiment, didn't work for us".

I was very skeptical right off the bat, mostly because I saw a field of laptops that they were asking to all be tuned onto 1 ad-hoc mode channel. It's like asking 50 people to all start singing different songs in a small enclosed room. There's only so much bandwidth, and that sort of setup will just flood it. Its the biggest (IMO) problem with the mesh network thing - the technology isn't (yet) well set up to swing around and take advantage of side channels, so when you get enough devices into a smallish area, you just flood the area with noise and nobody can talk.

Now that I've proven how ooh-so-savvy I am about wireless tech (NOT!), this technology is really cool. I hadn't been aware of OLSR previously, and I'm really glad I am now - even though I'm not spending as much time with wireless technology as I used to. Open source, and it clearly works (albeit with problems like what we saw) - that is cool!

Presentations and the Zen Aesthetic

Presentations and the Zen Aesthetic is a great writeup about how presentations can be made to the essence of simplicity. I personally think it applies directly to a lot of other things, most recently including software design.

I'm sure some of my coworkers are sick of hearing me burst out "if you're not using it, delete it" when I take a gander at code, but I think it is the first step to refining and making something really elegant. When I was adding to UnitKit, Duncan was very patient with my blundering style and directed me to work with much more elegant solutions. More of that is needed, I think. I do the same thing with writing (well, obviously NOT here). Cram a bunch of stuff in as I think of it, and then go at it viciously with the paring knife. It always seems to come out much better.

Mind Camp - a few days later

Wow, so a whole bunch of people have dug around and written about Mind Camp.

Scoble, while taking the a pot-shot at Google, has some links if you're interested. If you want pics - check out Flikr with the tag mindcamp10.

I think Ted's writeup is the most complete, and captures the event pretty well. All sorts of tidbits that are clamoring around in my head, even now. Avi Bryant's Dabble DB was incredible (gus caught that too in his delicious links). There was another fellow there with Avi, and I feel terrible for not remembering his name. I do remember Todd Blanchard's ObjectiveCLIPS which was really cool, and in which I almost passed out from just being tired. Sunday morning was not the best time for sessions...

One of the most intriguing sessions that is still roaming around in my head was the first one I attended - where I accidentally nicked Buzz Bruggeman's chair while he was talking. We chatted a bit during and after that session on computers and augmentation of human capabilities, and some time late that night he wandered over to me and gave me a lovely Windows Longhorn jacket (very nice shell), for no reason that I could tell other than we'd had a good conversation and he thought it would fit me.

Update:

Avi wrote me - his partner in crime that afternoon was Andrew Catton, co-developer of Dabble and co-founder of Smallthought. I couldn't find a blog from Andrew, but he and Avi have been cited in a paper about explicit programming, so I'll leave it at that link.

Jarhead

Mindcamp is over, and it was really good. Very worthwhile, although I'm a bit tired after the whole thing.

So what do you do? Well, you follow it up with taking in Jarhead with a friend for a sunday afternoon matinee. Wow - that's a damn good movie. It hits close to home for me, as that whole piece of craziness was exploding while I was wandering around Europe after graduating from college. It was really heavily on my mind, but then I think it was really heavily on everyone's mind at the time.

It wasn't a big "blow 'em up" movie, but it was intensely personal and mad props go to Jake Gyllenhaal for his portrail of Swoff. I enjoyed him in Donnie Darko, and although I haven't seen him in the intevening roles, he's progressed very well as an actor.

There is a lot of chew on from the movie. Little tidbits are even now (hours later) coming back to poke and prod at my mind.

MindCamp

Getting... Sleepy...

MindCamp has been variously boring and really interesting, depending on the moment, discussion, and relative proximity to random happenings all around. I've got to say it is much more successful than I expected.

There's folks that I've written back and forth with over the past several years that I'd never met until tonight. Others that I'd worked with previously who I hadn't seen in a year or so. In general, it's been a huge diversity of folks and topics. Gus took off for the night, but I'm going to stick around and run through the night. The population definitely dropped off about 10pm - we had easily 150 earlier today, and as I'm writing this we're down to maybe 60 or 70 people scattered about several room and one really large room.

The most interesting topics today were augmentation (early in the morning) and visualization of language (late tonight) that really had diverse folks involved in them.

Not sure where I'm going to crash yet (lots of space, it's just getting a corner that I like at this point). I expect getting somewhere nailed down is the next order of business.

FreeBSD 6.0

Hmmm... FreeBSD 6.0 is hittin' the streets. Going to have to check this out...

Testing web apps (Python, Twill)

Michele Simionato has an article up at OReillyNet on testing web applications, focused mainly around python and Twill.

Twill is a neat little mini-language thing, and he mentions Selenium at the very end of the article. I wish he'd looked a little more into Selenium. The more I see of it, the more I think "Damn, that's a framework to really get to know and use" - at least for testing purposes. As we move more and more into using Javascript to push the envelope for web applications, getting a good system of testing that stuff is critically important (I hadn't a good clue on how to chase that very subject down 12 months ago), and the FIT-style display of tests and results is a very powerful mechanism.

Note - I haven't actually used Selenium yet, but I think its something I will before all is said and done.

DOn't ever

Don't ever spend the evening drinking with Sales guys. Especially if you're normally in engineering. They can drink FAR more than you can.

Note to self: you deserve whatever is coming your way tomorrow. Karen is a forgiving and amused soul to have put up with you tonight.