Arcana in the Information Age

Mushrooms

2011-11-25T16:09:00.001-05:00

Little mushrooms in my parents' flower bed.

2nd Anniversary

2011-10-11T19:07:00.001-04:00

For our second anniversary, Tracy and I went to southern Pennsylvania to kayak, hike and sightsee. We left Charlottesville around 1500 on Friday the 7th and drove 231 from Madison through Sperryville to Front Royal before picking up 81 — a beautiful way to go. We stayed in a bed and breakfast in Chambersburg that night and the next; here's a panorama of our room:

It was a neat, old house. The stairway leading up to our room (which was on the third floor) was pretty wild:

The first day (Saturday), we decided we'd go and kayak on Raystown Lake. It's a big lake, though, with plenty of power boats, so we thought we'd kayak on the river that feeds the lake. We went to Warrior's Path State Park to put in:

The water was moving so fast, though, that we only made about 200 ft upstream before we got to a "rapid" where the water was moving so fast we were unable to make any headway at all. We tried twice to get up it, failed, and floated back to the launch to pull the kayak back out of the water. From there, we headed up the lake to Aitch, where there was a launch in a no-wake section of the lake. The photo at the top of this post shows a view of the hills over the launch; the photo below shows the pier next to the launch:

Near the pier we spotted a grey heron who, surprisingly, let us get close enough that I got nearly a full-frame photo of it with my 105mm lens:

From there, we drove to the visitor's center for the lake, got a recommendation for dinner (which was only so-so), and then went back to the B&B to crash.

The next morning, we drove out from Chambersburg to Caledonia State Park. There's a little water there, but only a very little water, so we decided to hike the Ramble Trail:

It was a very easy walk, and very pretty. There were a couple of picturesque bridges, like this one:

I took a picture of Tracy from that bridge with my iPhone; the HDR messed up, yielding a very cool, painterly effect:

After our hike, we drove over to Sachs Covered Bridge, which is near Gettysburg. Tracy took us on beautiful back roads whenever we went anywhere. The scenery was varied, but this gives a good sense of the colors and the winding roads:

The Sachs Covered Bridge predates the Civil War and was restored in the 1990s.

It was pretty cool — especially inside: all the wood that went into supporting it was fairly impressive.

From the bridge, we went into Gettysburg, which was swarming with people (and traffic). We spent some time getting oriented and finally ended up at the Dobbin House for a very late lunch (after waiting an hour for a table). The food was good; it was a touristy place with servers dressed in period clothes and such. But that food was good, which is what mattered.

Gettysburg is far prettier than I imagined; the photo above gives a pretty good feel for what the battlefields look like. We drove on a portion of the "Auto Tour" (a clever double entendre, since you drive it and do the tour without a guide); there were cannons lining the roadside pointed out over the battlefields:

It strikes me as a little funny how picturesque we find cannons when we see them in these battlefields. I'm not sure we really associate them with weapons of war anymore. I don't think I do, at any rate.

The park service has erected an observation tower on the western side of the southern battlefields; it's quite tall and a fair climb to the top:

The tower provides a commanding view of the battlefields:

The countryside to the west of the battlefields is also beautiful:

We left Gettysburg around 1700 and headed to Codorus State Park to camp for the night. They have a section of the campground that's just for tent campers (no RVs) and more rugged than their other sites (no electricity). Compared to backpacking, though, it's luxurious: you drive up to it; it has a picnic table; and it has a fire ring with grill.

The next morning, we kayaked on the lake (the above was our fourth attempt at the panorama, which is why neither of us are smiling — we'd given up expecting it to work); the launch was just a little down from our campsite. From there, we drove home by way of Warrenton.

Jane's Butte

2010-08-12T14:41:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, the weather that had improved on Monday held, and we were able to ride up to the top of Jane's Butte.

Jane's Butte dominates the view to the northwest of Homestead on the ranch and, for that reason, is iconic for those of us who have been to the O RO as guests. Riding to the top is one of my favorite rides and one I've done each of the three times I've been out on the ranch.

It also affords a great view across the Baca Float and into the western side of the ranch.

The top is juniper and century plants and grass - the horses sometimes climb up there on their own in search of food. We didn't see any this time, though. Just the horses we rode.

It's also a great place to shoot portraits, since the backdrop is so dramatic. We got Charlotte:

Jack:

Daniel (and Raven):

And I like taking pictures of the dried out stalks of the century plants. You can see the moon in this one:

Up close, it looks like this:

Monkeytown Panoramas

2010-08-07T13:14:00.003-04:00

Here are the promised panoramas from Monkeytown Canyon. The shot above is a 180º panorama looking North; the shot below is a 90º panorama looking South-West towards where I took the northern shot.

Zarry's Ride

2010-08-07T13:13:00.002-04:00

A very large composite of the shots that made up Zarry's bronc ride. Well worth viewing at full size.

Monkeytown Canyon

2010-08-06T11:07:00.004-04:00

On Tuesday afternoon, we drove to the northwest corner of the Baca Float to Monkeytown Canyon. We parked at the southern end and walked out to the cliffs. I snapped this but also took some panoramas that I will post once I stitch them in Photoshop.

From there we drove around and into the canyon. The pasture there is where the working horses (the cowboys' horses) go on "vacation," as A Jane calls it.

Despite all the rain around Homestead and other parts of the ranch we visited, it was pretty dry down in Monkeytown. We found the horses. Two were under a tree by the car. The sorrel was fine, but the brown was lame in his front right foot. Jack said it was badly infected, which is not good news for the horse or the cowboy he's assigned to.

From there, we left the O RO and drove onto a neighboring ranch to get back into the part of Monkeytown pictured at the top. There, A Jane showed us petroglyphs that she said were 1000 years old:

Cowpunchers Reunion

2010-08-06T10:37:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, we drove from the ranch to Williams for the Cowpunchers Reunion Rodeo. In spite of the rain we'd had, we managed to make it both there and back. It's worth saying that because of how much mud rain in this part of the country makes - and most of the roads are dirt this far out. Check out the back of the Suburban - that's dirt, not paint, and it's not just a thin layer, either.

The reunion rodeo was great fun. The arena was a sea of mud, but the rain held off while the events ran. The participants are working cowpunchers, rather than rodeo professionals, so things are a little different, a little less extreme, and a lot more "real."

The first event was a wild horse race. Unbroken horses were released from the bucking chutes under the announcer's box. Teams of three cowboys tried to saddle and ride a horse over to a barrel on the left of the stands.

The horses came out, the men grabbed at them, and promptly got pulled through the mud.

It wasn't pretty. But a few of the teams managed the saddle and managed the ride. Not very quickly, but they got it done.

The shear muddiness was astonishing.

After that, they dallied calves. A calf was released from a chute on the left side of the arena and a mounted cowboy rods the calf down and roped it.

He then dallied the rope around his saddle horn (wrapped it, rather than putting a slip-knot around the horn), dismounted, ran over to it, literally picked it up off the ground, and body-slammed it down in the mud.

Then he tied three of its feet together and his time was called. The fastest managed it in just over 14 seconds.

Then they had steer riding. Kids - under 12 years old - rode bucking steers. A couple of them were quite good at it. One got stepped on, but ended up being alright.

After the steer riding, they had an event called ribbon roping. A cowboy roped the head of a calf and his wife, girlfriend, or daughter ran to the roped calf, pulled a ribbon off of its tail, and ran back across a line to stop the timer. Three of the girls were daughters and were maybe 6 years old. They had a mugger who tackled the calf to hold it still while they went for the ribbon.

After that, they had the first round of bronco riding. Broncos make for dramatic pictures - especially when cowboys are crashing into the mud.

Here's one of the cowboys from the O RO in his way off the bronco. He got fouled on his way out of the chute - his knee hit the post and it knocked him off balance. He held on for several seconds, but each time the bronc bucked, it knocked him further off balance. Then he lost the rope and went over the bronc's head. He could have called for a re-ride, but was too shook up to think about it until it was too late.

I won't put all of the bronco pictures in this post, but you should click through on one of them to Picasa and see the lot of them. Tracy took the majority - we both got some great shots.

Between the two sections of bronco riding, they had wild cow milking. A cow was released from the shoot on the left, a cowboy ran it down and roped it.

Two other cowboys on the team then ran to the roped cow. One of them mugged it: grabbed horn and hugged the cow's head to his chest.

The other attempted to get a little milk into a container he was holding. He then ran to a circle chalked in the mud to stop the timer. It was quite amusing to watch.

After that were some lower-key team roping events (one roped the head, another the hind feet) and the rodeo wrapped up.

Broken Links

2010-08-04T13:03:00.001-04:00

Sorry about the broken links. BlogPress apparently doesn't post transactionally and moreover doesn't tell you when posting fails. I will have to fix the broken links when I have a computer, I'm afraid.

I also had a post completely vanish. Fortunately it was short.

Rock formations on Mount Hope

2010-07-31T21:34:00.001-04:00

Snapped these on the way down. A storm was blowing in.

AZ Sunset

2010-07-31T21:30:00.002-04:00

Sunset over the hill separating Homestead from Headquarters, taken on our first night at the ranch.

An earlier shot, reflected in the pool.

Climbing Mount Hope

2010-07-31T21:24:00.002-04:00

Two years ago Tracy and I tried to climb Mount Hope - but weren't able to make it to the top: I picked a lousy route and we ran out of water. This time, we tried again.

We parked in about the same spot - a good long way from the base of the northern face of the mountain. You can get an idea of the distance from the picture above. There are no trails - we just pick a direction that looks good. The route we took went past some cool rock formations - still far from the base of the mountain.

From there the route ran around clumps of junipers until the ground started to slope up. We walked up the slope to the pine tree in the upper right of the photo, then to the right of the tree.

After that, things became much more difficult. The scrub forced us to either walk straight up the mountain or left and down. Left was good - down not so much. We zigzagged up and over along the base of the cliffs on the right-hand peak until we actually met the cliffs. The going was very steep.

The cliffs were manageable on the edges, so I went that way. Tracy bushwhacked to the left of the cliffs, not wanting to climb them.

But we made it to the top. The views were spectacular - but with all the rain, it was actually a little hazy. Fairly rare for high desert!

More later. These are original iPhone 4 pictures. No retouching.

Quick Test from the Ranch

2010-07-31T19:23:00.001-04:00

Just a quick post to test BlogPress since I have signal. Here's a shot of Mount Hope:

More to come later!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Crabtree Falls

2010-07-25T10:14:00.005-04:00

Charlotte Vanverdeghem is visiting us from France this week and next. Next week we'll be at the O RO Ranch (expect photos when we return!) but for now, we're hanging out at home and doing stuff in the area. Yesterday, we braved the near 100º temperatures and hiked Crabtree Falls. Here's a photo of the lower portion of the falls. I'd taken my tripod in the car so I could shoot the falls with the neutral density, but some wiseguy told me there wasn't any water. And I believed him, since it was and had been so hot. This is handheld at 1/10 second; still has nice motion blur, even without the multi-second exposures possible with the ND and tripod. No good for pixel peeping, but plenty good at lower resolutions.

Here's another picture of the lower falls, with Charlotte in the foreground. Another handheld 1/10 second exposure - Charlotte held nice and still for me.

At one of our breaks, I caught her taking a picture. She was on top of a rock and I was below her shooting up. Despite the angle, it looks natural, and the angle generated fantastic fore- and background blur. No Photoshopping here - this is straight from the lens (with minor color correction).

It was hot, but there was a decent breeze near the water, which the trail followed pretty closely. So in spite of the heat, we pressed on and made it to the top. There, we had lunch and enjoyed the view before heading back. It was hazy, which was too bad, but the view from the summit was still impressive.

Tracy, however, refused to smile when I took a picture of her and Charlotte.

iPhone 4 Camera

2010-06-28T23:04:00.002-04:00

Got an iPhone 4 last week - wonderful device. The antenna problem referenced around on the 'Net is real, which is a shame; I expect Apple will recall to fix it. Nevertheless, it's truly worth seeing if you've not seen it yet.

Tracy and I went for a walk this evening. It was sprinkling, which was okay, as it's been really hot lately. On the way home, though, the rain stopped and clouds broke up. There was a gorgeous rainbow framed by the pale orange of the sunset on the clouds to the East. All I had was my iPhone 4 on hand, but I got some very respectable pictures.

These are with no post-processing at all. The brightest part of the rainbow blew out in orange and red, which was a pity, but still, the lighter bits came out well.

The biggest problem I ran into shooting these was the lack of exposure control. Or, more precisely, the lack of an exposure lock. I'm so used to being able to tell my 5D to meter here and take the picture there; the iPhone doesn't give you that. So the framing wasn't quite what I wanted.

But I have to agree with whomever first said that the best camera is the one you have with you. I'd have never gotten the rainbow nor these gorgeous pictures of the layered clouds bottom-lit by the sun: by the time we got to our street, the colors had already all faded.

Bike Updates

2010-03-08T20:16:00.003-05:00

We got my bike back together yesterday; here's a picture I took this afternoon of it all put together. No pictures of me on it at the moment - I'll need to get Tracy to take some tomorrow.

I rode to work today, which was fun and a little terrifying at the same time. It's a lot like learning to drive a car again. Or, even better, like learning to drive a manual when you've been driving for a bit but only automatics. There's a lot of trying to make sure you're doing the right thing at the same time as being safe.

Tracy went to Goochland today to pick up her aunt's bike to borrow for a bit until her dad's bike is fixed. So now we both have bikes! Here's Tracy sitting on the bike before she rode it up and down our street a handful of times.

Then we drove over to Barron together, paused there ('cause we'd gotten separated), and then drove along Hydraulic to Four Seasons and back home again. So basically around a short-ish loop. It was fun and enough for Tracy for this evening. We hope to do Free Union Road early Saturday morning (so there won't be many people out and we can go nice and slow).

"New" Bike

2010-03-05T12:50:00.004-05:00

Tracy and I got our motorcycle licenses two weekends ago. And last weekend, I looked at and made an offer on a used 2004 Yamaha R6. We picked it up on Monday. Also on Monday, a coworker lent me his tilt-shift lens to play with; he's planning to sell it back to B&H Photo/Video because he doesn't use it very much. Which means you not only get to see some pictures of my "new" bike, you also get to see some examples of what you can do with a tilt-shift lens.

The bike is in great shape - if you're talking about the engine & drivetrain. The electrics are a bit of mess, however. It was used as a race bike, so the engine is new-ish (rebuilt a couple of years ago), the clutch is new, the chain is new, the brake rotors and pads are new.... You get the idea. But since it was used as a race bike, things like proper headlight operation and turn signals weren't terribly important. And it's missing its horn (or so it seems). So even though we've ridden it up and down the street a couple of times, we can't even get it inspected yet (because it would insta-fail).

So we took off the cowl assembly yesterday so I can a) sand down and repaint the rusty stay (iron-looking tree-like thing at bottom right) and replace the bit of the wiring harness that sits up in the cowl (because it would seem that the relay for the headlights is bad, at least). I got an extra wiring harness for the bike, so swapping in a new bit of that is "easy" (as in, I don't have to buy it). Here a picture of the disassembled cowl assembly:

That picture was taken with the tilt shift lens tilted so that I could "lay the focal plane down" across the table. With normal lenses, the focal plane is always parallel to the sensor. This works great if you're taking a picture of a person, or a bunch of people standing side-by-side, but poorly if you've array stuff on a table and want to take a picture from any other angle than straight down. But tilting the lens, the focal plane is tilted relative to the sensor, allowing all the pieces on the table to be in focus. For comparison, here's the same mess of pieces taken straight on (no tilt):

Now, because these images are so small (low-resolution), the difference isn't terribly noticeable. To make the effect clearer, I pulled out two details in each image: the first is of the tach (at the bottom center of the image) and the second is of the cowl, below and including the "nose" where the windshield comes to a point. Here they are not tilted (straight-on):

The lack-of-focus on the cowl is pretty clear. But check out what happens when the lens is tilted:

Now both bits of the image are in sharp focus. Pretty cool.

As for the rest of the bike, it doesn't look like much at the moment, since the plastics (fairings) are all pulled off so we could get to the electrics (there are turn signals in the back, too, after all). I'll post some pictures when everything is cleaned up and put back together. I'm hoping it won't take too long!

Third Snow

2010-02-07T13:17:00.005-05:00

So I completely missed blogging about the first huge (for Virginia) snow we got this winter. It fell on the 19th of December and, across 36 hours, dumped some 18-20 inches of snow. That's a lot for here. Then, last weekend (the end of January), we got 10 inches. This weekend, we got some 12-15 inches. If it had been colder (it was right above freezing during most of the snowfall), I'm sure we would have gotten more.

At the top of the entry is a panorama from the my patio door. Above is a panorama from my front door. The branches down on the left are the top of my thundercloud plum. I'll probably have to take it out; there's not much left now. The other branches are bits off of the white pines on that side of the house. I think it's time to take them out, too. Below is a 360-degree panorama taken on the street. Photoshop insisted on making the across-the-street-neighbor's house the center; I didn't feel like arguing with it.

We took a walk this morning, after finishing clearing in front of the car (we'd kept up with the snowfall, so that wasn't too bad, except for when the plow came by). The cherries by the dance studio on Commonwealth Rd looked about like they do when in bloom:

Here they are in a panorama with some more of Commonwealth Rd; Westfield Rd is in the center of the image:

David and Tracy had a mini-snowball fight back off the road. Tracy threw the first snowball:

David, of course, had to get her back:

He then decided that jumping into the snow would be great fun:

We walked over to the park near my work. It was easy going on part of the track, where lots of people had smoothed it down. But off the beaten track it was significantly more work. Here's Tracy, on the nice track:

D.C. Honeymoon

2009-10-06T21:38:00.004-04:00

We took a short honeymoon to D.C. after our wedding to see Cavalia and to get out of the house for a short while.

My goal with this picture was to use the ND filter to turn the sprinklers to mist. It didn't work (they're too regular) but it did remove the people walking around outside the Capitol.

Another photo with the ND, both to remove the people and to smooth out the surface of the duck pond.

A sleepy duck. She didn't care how close I got, so I was able to frame her pretty tightly. Great detail on this photo.

Tracy said this duck was doing yoga. I love how much light there seems to be on the purple stripe on her wing. It's as if it's translucent and backlit.

Fountains in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. After this we started going into the museums and by the time we came out, we were so hungry, we weren't at all interested in trying to take pictures!

Married!

2009-10-06T21:33:00.002-04:00

Tracy and I got married on Saturday! Pictures are showing up all over the place; we (of course!) don't have any of our own, but I can point you here where you can access the various collections people are putting up (including those of our photographer).

The wedding helps to explain some of my silence. Things have been really busy since I last posted.

Curious Choice of Words

2009-04-29T10:54:00.003-04:00

In RNC Chairman Michael Steele's email, he had this to say of Arlen Specter:

Arlen Specter committed a purely political and self-serving act today. He simply believes he has a better chance of saving his political hide and his job as a Democrat. He loves the title of Senator more than he loves the party--and the principles--that elected him and nurtured him.

That last line strikes me as curious. As I understand it, it was the people of Pennsylvania who elected Specter. Not the Republican Party. So if switching parties allows him the chance to continue to serve his constituents, didn't he act in their best interest as well as his own?

Picture in Picture

2009-03-17T20:01:00.003-04:00

Check this out: a picture of my ceiling as reflected in the eye of a baby.

Birds and Glass Doors

2009-03-17T19:46:00.007-04:00

Birds and Glass Doors don't get along very well. In fact, despite all the complaints you hear about windmills eating birds, more birds die annually from collisions with glass patio doors than they do from encounters with windmills (try this Google search).

On Sunday, one of the girl house finches that lives near my yard (and frequents my feeders) hit the door to my deck. [Edit: no, that's not a house finch. It's the Canadian cousin of the Gold Finch that's been hanging around here lately due to lack of food in Canada from the droughts last year. Don't remember it's name. I'll ask again at Wild Birds and post back. Given how colorful the Canadian finches aren't, it may even be a boy.] Hard. So hard that I expected to see her dead when I looked outside. But she wasn't dead — she was just stunned. Really stunned. So I scooped her up and set her on my table and got my camera and took some pictures with the macro extension. The light was lousy, but the results were still pretty good. I shot these at 400 ISO at about f6.3 — that was the best aperture I could manage with the lousy light. Getting really close to something with a macro means significant depth of field is needed to keep the subject in focus, so that why the focal plane seems so narrow.

Here's a close up of her eye; you can see the lattice pattern of the table reflected in the lower part of her iris:

Another close up, of her beak, with a lot of perspective:

Here's a close up of her tail feathers; on the full image, you can see a lot of detail:

The story ends well, too. We were going to put her in a rag-lined pot so she'd stay warm, but before we could move her, she flew away and landed on a tree near the back of my yard.

P.S. The long hiatus was due mostly to being busy, but also to having little that wasn't mundane to talk to about. Seemed better to be silent than post boring stuff.

2008-10-29T08:36:00.002-04:00

Today, I joined the 21st century and created a profile on a social networking site (LinkedIn). I've resisted for a number of years, but the thought that I might be able to recruit through LinkedIn was enough motivation.

On Auto Save

2008-10-27T14:49:00.003-04:00

I was just coding up something Eclipse for work and decided I wanted to pop a dialog to ask the user "Do you want to save?" I did a quick Google search to see if I could find the name of dialog I wanted - and instead, ran across this blog post. The author, in a nutshell, through the post and his subsequent comments, argues that asking the user to save is a bad thing and, instead, your program should always be saving - but in such a way that it is possible to roll back the changes.

At first blush, that seems like a really good idea. If the program is always saving, you never need to worry about losing your work, so you never need to stop and think "now I want to save" - and hence can't forget to do it. Likewise, if you discover that you've been going down the wrong path, you can always step back and reverse your changes (just undo until you get back to where you would have preferred to be). Presumably, the program will even reload your undo history when you reload a given document.

Here's the problem. "Save" does more than just commit a set of recent changes to non-volatile storage. It's also an expression of intent that means "and now I've made a meaningful set of changes to which I want to be able to return (in the event of a crash, etc.)." In some circumstances, these two things are equivalent (or very nearly so). For instance, when I'm typing a blog, I might periodically be saving my entry because, after all, any change I've made is meaningful. Sure, I might decide later to back up, but there's no problem if basically every change I make is saved.

This is simply not true in all circumstances. Imagine, instead, a database application with hundreds (or thousands or millions) of users, all of whom are working on pieces of a single, centralized data store. Anne opens a form to edit an entry in one of the records on the database. As she makes changes, she effectively breaks things - while updating field 1 but not having had a chance to update fields 2 and 3, the entry is now in an inconsistent state: its data no longer makes sense and should not - or cannot - be committed back to the database. If it were committed (if the database allowed it), Bob might see some of Anne's changes but not all of them and he might either be thoroughly confused, or take some incorrect action based on the inconsistent data.

Save, then, becomes the mechanism by which Anne says "And now my data is consistent and should be visible to all users of this database." Likewise, should Anne try to close the form through which she is editing the entry, the software well and truly should ask her "are you sure you don't want to save those changes?" Here, save is a clear expression of intent and cannot be serviced with auto save plus versioning.

One final thought: it's tempting to say that the software should ensure that Anne cannot make changes to any entry and in so doing put that entry in an inconsistent state - even temporarily. But that assumes that there is some mechanism by which the software can "guess" at reasonable or correct values for all related fields when any one of them is changed. In the case of a set of related dates (Earliest Launch Time, Latest Launch Time, Preferred Launch Time), this is easily handled. In general, simple solutions cannot be found: when updating code, for instance, how is the software supposed to guess at a correct set of actions to take in response to an arbitrary line being updated? Anne must make the changes she had in mind and then signal to the software that now her changes should be committed and thus should be visible to all users.

Presidential-Campaign Lying: Inexcusable

2008-10-08T09:29:00.006-04:00

Last night, the second of the three Presidential Debates for 2008 aired. Like the first debate, there were no fireworks, no home runs, and no real difference was made in the campaign. I only recall one truly excellent answer (given by McCain on whether or not Russia would once again be an "Evil Empire"); there was much prevarication and demagoguery.

There was also a lot of lying. Several times during the night, one candidate would say, "John McCain's/Barack Obama's plan for health care/taxes/etc. does X, while my plan does Y." To which the other candidate would say, "Barack Obama's/John McCain's plan for health care/taxes/etc. does U while my plan does W." Clearly, one of them was not telling the truth or was distorting it. Most likely, both of them were, basically, lying.

This is inexcusable. For a whole host of reasons. In our day-to-day dealings with people, we demand, even if we don't always expect, honesty. We demand it of our children, we demand it of our friends, we demand it of our spouses. Honesty is prized. Why, then, do we tolerate it from our politicians? I hear people say all the time that they cannot/do not trust politicians. Political untruths have become a given and, even worse, are viewed as acceptable. Shown a bald-faced lie by one candidate or another, people merely shrug, rather than express indignation.

In past decades, politicians could get away with lying on the campaign trail and lying to audiences in televised, national debates. There was no effective way to fact check candidates' statements as they were being uttered and, even if it was known that a bald-faced lie had been uttered, no effective way to push that information out to the masses.

Today, televised lying should be impossible. With the Internet at our fingertips and the vast pool of knowledge shared by bloggers and the main-stream media, any falsehood uttered by a candidate should be immediately flagged and highlighted; posted in prominent places for all to see. It is truly ridiculous that the majority of Americans simply don't know when they've just been fed a lie.

Here's what I envision. In the next Presidential election, at every event a candidate attends, groups dedicated to fact checking political statements (like FactCheck.org) show up with fast Internet connections and massive screens and, in real-time, fact check the candidate's (or candidates') statements.

Imagine, in a debate format: John McCain claims that his idea to write down mortgages with government money is a new idea, all his own and, immediately, over his head, appears the fact check:

McCain proposed to write down the amount owed by over-mortgaged homeowners and claimed the idea as his own: “It’s my proposal, it's not Sen. Obama's proposal, it's not President Bush's proposal.” But the idea isn’t new. Obama had endorsed something similar two weeks earlier, and authority for the treasury secretary to grant such relief was included in the recently passed $700 billion financial rescue package.
(source: FactCheck.org)

Likewise, Barack Obama states that his health-care plan would lower premiums and, immediately, over his head, appears the fact check:

Obama said his health care plan would lower insurance premiums by up to $2,500 a year. Experts we’ve consulted see little evidence such savings would materialize.
(source: FactCheck.org)

It wouldn't take long for candidates to figure out that lying in such a context is absolutely useless and only serves to clearly paint them, in the eyes of the public, as the mockery of statesmanship they have already become.

Let's face it. In 2008, with the amount of information we have at our fingertips, that candidates can mislead voters through misrepresentation, mangled facts, and outright lies is simply inexcusable. It's about time someone threw this kind of nonsense under the bus.

TIME for Progress?

2008-09-17T09:47:00.006-04:00

Sometimes progress is bad. Take, for instance, the redesign of TIME's website Time.com.

Time.com is where I typically go for my news. They're less sensational than I found CNN to be and their articles are of a significantly higher caliber, since the writers produce simultaneously for print and web media. Unlike CNN, the articles are not updated throughout the day, so you don't get nonsensical duplicated sentences nor references to some official whose name is never situated (with a profession or a locale or anything) because that sentence was clipped on an update. The articles hold together and feel professional.

What I liked about the old Time.com was that you could quickly scan the homepage and see what was new - and thus quickly make decisions about what was worth reading. The slideshow of 5 featured articles was great. I could watch that and have a good idea what was what without even drilling down and reading the articles. The list of "new" stuff to the right of the slideshow was similarly accessible.

All that changed on Monday. The slideshow is gone, and the 5 featured articles are now 3 - only the first of which gets a picture. The "new" stuff section ("Latest Headlines") is smaller and no longer indicates when an article comes from the Associated Press rather than TIME's staff (AP writers don't have a clue what to do with English grammar, so I often eschew reading their reports). The layout is borderline garish. Design things to gripe about:

In the first screenful of the site there are:
- 7 different font sizes;
- 2 different font colors;
- 2 different font faces; and
- 4 different font weights (counting italic as a weight, which is technically incorrect).
There are 5 different sizes of photos - these appear in all columns.

The three columns are the same width, but you wouldn't know it to look at them because the elements they contain vary in size so much.

Each chunk in each column is of a height unrelated to those in the adjacent columns. There's never a place you can draw a line all the way across the page and feel like you've moved into a new section. Hence it looks like a disorganized mess.

There's even a chunk that spans two columns, seemingly without any good reason. (That's the "New in Brief" chunk.) That forces a huge mess of white space below the featured article chunk. Ugly.

This is all with an ad blocker running, I should say - I can't imagine how bad it must look if you can actually see the ads.

Why do I mention all of this? Because the cacophony, which looks like something a kindergartner would produce, makes it nearly impossible to scan the page to see what's new and worth reading. I see it and my immediate reaction is "yuck!" I want to navigate away from the page. Kind of like I walk into Hecht's and want to run back out the door. Too much visual clutter. The old design may have looked - well - old, but at least it conveyed information in a way that was clear and concise and without excessive visual clutter.

Here's an opinion that matches mine, from a design professional. Here is one that disagrees (from another design professional). Obviously, some of this is subjective. But the fact that I thought for a moment that the CSS didn't load when I opened the page for the first time on Monday (because it looked so disorganized) should clue someone in that something is wrong with the site.

"Proof" that the new design makes me miss things: until I saw Austin Ramzy's blog post this morning about the milk scandal in China, I never knew that he'd posted an article on the same yesterday. That's kind of important to have been lost in the clutter on a redesigned website.

I wish they'd asked for feedback, first.

[Update] Two and a half weeks after the redesign of the front page and the main article pages, the new design still hasn't been pushed out to all of the sections of the site. Just click on the Elections section and see how it differs! Ridiculous.

The Alien Frigate

2008-09-05T16:16:00.006-04:00

I finished modeling the Alien Frigate (the aforementioned big ship in my basement) and decided that it would be easer and better to just take pictures of the thing rather than try to organize all of the sections of it so I could get good renderings. So here it is, as a bunch of photographs rather than renderings.

The first picture shows the frigate "assembled," that is, as a ship, with all of its sections attached. It's huge, heavy, but surprisingly rigid. It has over 1300 pieces and is 26" by 29" by 6.6". It requires two hands to hold comfortably, but is nevertheless swooshable. You don't, however, get the feeling that it would be particularly nimble in a fight, so I included a couple of turreted guns (immediately above) to help fend off smaller ships. Woe to any foe who crosses in front of it - this thing is armed to the teeth.

Once landed, the frigate breaks down into the central structure plus four smaller ships: the half-saucers that flank the rear turrets assemble into a classic "flying saucer;" the drone, shown in an early post, is a combination of the port gun pod and the wing pods; the last two ships are LEGO's Warp-Wing Fighters which I modified so that the rear detaches. The pod/array on top of the central section opens to reveal another turret, a communications array, and a seat for an operator.

The flying saucer itself contains two guys and a little car, making it perfect for exploration. It's surprisingly fun to fly the thing around and even more fun to pull it apart, open it up, and transform each half of it into a little base. Because the tops open completely, it's easy to get to and put stuff inside the saucer.

Here's the rendering I did from the finished model. This is just the central section of the frigate (without all of the other sections attached). I like the color selection better on the rendering - not being constrained by what's in my collection and being able to think over the colors more carefully, I biased the overall scheme more towards gray. Seems more in keeping with the UFO theme.

The Alien Drone

2008-09-01T12:36:00.005-04:00

There's the actual model for the drone that is part of the very large ship in my basement I mentioned in this post. The rendering is below. There are some important differences, which is why I wanted to post the photograph. Most striking, I think, is that not only are the translucent pieces the wrong color but also that the renderer completely fails to handle the internal transmission of light that causes the edge-on view of those pieces to appear brighter than their surroundings. In other words, from a certain angle, those pieces seem to glow.

As near as I can tell, this is a property of the fluorescent dye that is used in those pieces. You see a similar effect with the fluorescent orange LEGO pieces. There doesn't appear to be a way to specify to POV-Ray that a material is fluorescent. Likely as not, that's because they don't have any support for handling materials like that in the renderer: ray tracing is basically an enormous collection of hacks that attempts to take geometry and material specifications and turn out photo-realistic images. There's no such thing as a physically accurate ray tracer, so correct fluorescence would by necessity be a hack. Which is a pity, 'cause the fluorescent green LEGO pieces look really cool, in my opinion.

The other thing that's obviously missing from the rendering is the artwork on the printed pieces. That's because LDraw hasn't updated its part library in several years and many of the newer pieces (including the printed pieces from the UFO Series) are missing. Actually, many printed pieces from many of the themes are missing.

An Alien Fleet

2008-08-31T18:04:00.004-04:00

I love LEGOs. I loved them as a kid, "got over them" in middle school, and now as an adult (sort of) love them again. There's something about the flexibility/creativity without the coordination of, say, sketching that I find appealing. 3D modeling made simple if you. And when you're done, you have something that you can swoosh around and make fun sound effects with. What's not to love?

In case you didn't know, there is a whole online community devoted to LEGO CAD (Computer Assisted Design): LDraw is probably the best place to start, although LEGO does have an offering that they call LDD. The trouble with LDD is that it has only a tiny subset of all the pieces that LEGO has ever made. The cool thing about LDD is that not only is the interface super intuitive (try it - you'll be amazed) but after you build something you really like, you can (as long as you use the right subset of their already small part library) order your model from LEGO and they'll print instructions and ship you your model in a box. Really cool idea. If ever they had their complete part library available, LDD would be an amazing tool to use.

But they don't, so if you want to play around with LEGO CAD, I recommend LDraw + MLCad (only available on Windows; runs under wine and darwine). There are some offerings for the Mac, but they're not nearly as good as MLCad in terms of function or ease of use.

I've been fascinated by the Alien-themed LEGO sets for a while - probably since they came out, though that happened in middle school when I wasn't playing with LEGOs anymore. In particular, I really like the saucer pieces, though I've found them a challenge to incorporate into my models. Here are some "sets" I've designed in the past couple of weeks that I think are pretty cool. I've got one more in the computer that I remain unhappy with (it's a huge ship with several thousand pieces) and one more in my basement that I built out of physical bricks that I need to model in the computer. That latter will show up here in a bit, I hope. In the meantime, here are some sets I've built and modeled or just modeled; all of the "pictures" are renderings with POV-Ray using L3P and the LGEO part library (that link seems to be broken - don't know what to tell you).

The above is the first I built. Tracy gave me the inspiration for it, by snapping together some wings and some little saucer pieces. I rounded it out and made it a practical model. I call it Alien Runabout. It's relatively straightforward with no surprises, though I think it looks pretty cool.

This is the third model I built. David designed the basic layout and I finished it out. The pods above the wing/saucers were tricky; the front of the ship is heavily inspired by the Warp Wing Fighter, though it is not identical. I had hoped to make it possible to dock the Runabout on top of this ship, but couldn't find an elegant way to do it. Anywhere from 3-5 men (or aliens) can fit in this ship. I call it the Alien Gunboat.

I thought this one up while I was in bed one morning trying to convince myself to get up. It's bizarre because I took two saucer "tops" and stuck them together side-by-side. This one was completely modeled - I've not (yet) built it (I'd have to take apart a couple of my current models to do it). Here it is from a different angle:

I call this one the Alien Scoutpod. It's a Scoutpod because it's not actually a complete ship. Two of these join together to form a "complete" ship - which is rather fun. Here's what it looks like when two of these are joined:

This one I call the Alien Scoutship. It's a bit weird, too, because the guys are sitting sideways (no, they're not in the rendering - you didn't miss anything). I figure the ship has gravity like the Millennium Falcon's quad-laser turrets so that both of the guys feel like they're sitting normally. The structure onto which the two pods join looks like this:

If you have enough imagination, you can see that this core structure is, in fact, a drone that can fly off on scouting missions of its own while the two pods are off running around. Or, one of the pods can mate with the drone to form a more powerful sub-ship while one of the pods scouts. Flexibility like this, I've discovered, makes LEGO creations more fun to play with, in addition to just being cool. Here's a final view of the Scoutship, more from the top:

I'll see about getting the ship in my basement modeled up this week so I can post it. It's enormous, so it'll take a good bit of time.

The iPhone 3G: A Hate-Love Relationship

2008-08-29T12:34:00.007-04:00

My advice, in a nutshell: if you don't own an iPhone, don't buy one.

In a word, the iPhone sucks. No, really. I'm not kidding. The platform is buggy, unstable, hella slow at email over 3G or EDGE, and totally violates the Principle of Least Astonishment in many, many, many circumstances. Mail doesn't have junk mail filters (no kidding). Safari has no ad blocker. Safari doesn't cache web pages (meaning they completely reload when you go forward or backward). The Calendar program randomly assigns colors to your iCal calendars when you import them, unless you follow this strategy to hack around the problem. There is no Java support. There is no Flash support. Frequently, I cannot get published procedures for moving data to and from the phone to work (such as getting photos on the iPhone to sync to a folder or to Aperture automatically - though the reverse works fine). And Apple maintains far too much control over the application distribution process than it ought (including being able to remotely disable a user's application).

On the flip side, the thing is a rockin' iPod with amazing video quality for such a small device. Full-frame motion is liquid smooth, sound is good, and subtitles appear reasonably large on the screen, enabling me to watch foreign media at the gym without difficulty. Similarly, the phone itself is great. Comfortable, clear (on both ends of the call), with by far the best interface for placing calls I've ever seen. That aspect works exactly like it should. Visual voicemail is revolutionary - especially as someone who hates having to check voicemails because of the amount of extra time it takes to dial in, listen through the prompts, weed past voicemails (in order) to get to one you want to listen to again.... Many of the third-party apps are wonderful, truly giving the device the potential it should have had at launch last year.

The above reasons are why, even though I say don't get one, I won't be able to get rid of the thing. It's a hate-love relationship. I hated it first (and still do, about daily), but I love it enough that I can't let go.

If you're a glutton for punishment, the rest of the post details my dislikes about the phone. Where applicable, I'll point out workarounds for things I've noticed (so that this is more than a rant).

Instability. Let go of any doubts. The machine is a computer. That will make this paragraph a bit easier to swallow. Like a computer, the longer you use the thing, the more failures and crashes you'll see. Yes, crashes. No kidding. On an iPhone, a crash manifests in two ways: 1) the app you're using vanishes and the home screen reappears and 2) the phone locks up for a while (iBrick) and then restarts. (1) is the most frequent, as you'd hope, but (2) has happened to me.

From all reports I've seen, this is not the fault of the app designers in most cases. I believe it: the Settings application (think System Preferences on a Mac, or Control Panel on Windows) crashed on me while I was viewing information about the device (such as the number of videos or songs on it). Repeatedly. As did Mail. And Safari. Note that those are not 3rd party apps.

Like a "real" computer, the solution is to restart the thing. No kidding. I do this about daily now. As soon as an app crashes, I restart the machine. Which takes a while (just like a real computer!) but fixes the problem.

Steve has said that Apple knows about this and will be fixing it in September. I'm hopeful, but not terribly optimistic.

Slow Email. If you've never used an iPhone, you'll like be appalled by how long it takes the device to connect to a mail server to check for new messages. Over both EDGE and 3G I've seen the thing take upwards of a minute just to connect - i.e., before it starts pulling down data. And that's when I have full signal strength. Now, reports out there indicate that slow speeds have more to do with carriers than the phone. But I've abandoned checking email and pulled up Safari to see if it's a systemic problem rather than something local to Mail and had no trouble retrieving web pages - which makes me think this is a Mail-related issue. I can only guess at the cause, so I won't bother recording my guesses here. Just be forewarned: pulling email is hella slow on the iPhone right now.

The Principle of Least Astonishment. Far too often, the iPhone does something that just doesn't make any sense to me at all. The iPhone Calendar color issue (below) is one such example. So is the lack of junk-mail filtering.

Calendar Colors. I have 5 calendars in iCal: one for work, one for home, one for travel, and two that "belong" to Tracy (so I can keep track of what she's up to and not bug her while she's in class). My work calendar is green, home is blue, and travel is orange. They've been that way for - well, for as long as I've used iCal, which is about 4 years now. So you can imagine my astonishment when I synced my calendars to my phone for the first time and saw that a telecon I had listed under Work was red. I immediately thought the phone was trying to tell me I'd missed the meeting or something (which was not true). It was only when I backed up a level to look at all of my calendars that I discovered the thing had assigned red to my work calendar, orange to home, and blue to travel. I was so shocked, I figured I must have done something wrong. I still cannot fathom what Apple was thinking in not ensuring that when transferring calendars from iCal on a Mac to an iPhone using iTunes (not the complete chain of Apple software/hardware) the colors didn't map. Honestly. Who thought that was a good idea? That's something I'd expect out of Redmond! The kind of thing that makes me ask, "Do these guys use the software they write!?"

The workaround, is equally worthy of Microsoft: you have to remove all of the calendars from your iPhone and add them back one by one in a specific order to get the colors you desire. This is an Apple product for heaven's sake. Say it with me: "What were they thinking?"

Junk Mail Filtering. Mail on the iPhone does not filter junk mail. No, I'm not making this up. (At time of writing, that Google search returns 1.6 million pages.) Your only option for not seeing junk mail on your iPhone is to use server-side mail filtering. And if your email service doesn't give it to you, you're out of luck. Let's say it again: "What were they thinking?!"

All of the published workarounds involve either setting up server-side filtering (not an option for most people, since most people don't host their own email server) or routing everything to Gmail and letting Gmail do filtering for you. The latter is a good idea, unless you're a professional. In that case (in my case), your company likely doesn't want you taking company property (your email) and sending it to Google for archiving and caching. Which isn't terribly surprising (though I'm trying to convince my company to allow that).

No Mark as Read. While you can delete (and even multi-delete) email messages on the iPhone, you can't mark messages as read. This may not sound like a big deal, but it is. It means that if you're on the road and you get 20 email messages from your POP server that you don't want to deal with, you can't take away the 20 on your Mail icon on the phone. You actually have to download each message one-at-a-time (by "reading" it) in order to take away the "new" flag. This is just silly. Especially if you POP your email from multiple machines (i.e. a Mac and an iPhone): you have to "read' the message in both places. This just doesn't make sense.

Implicit in this is that the first time you POP email from an account onto your iPhone, it will present you with 50 marked-as-new old messages. And since you can't "Select All," even multi-delete is painful. You just have to either check all of them, one-at-a-time and then delete them all or read through all of the messages to clear the "new" flag. Ridiculous.

No Java and No Flash. Now, in a way, no Flash on the iPhone might be viewed as a good thing. It means any Flash-based ads won't play, which limits a lot of annoyance while browsing. On the other hand, many sites make heavy use of Flash to deliver content to users: without Flash, they are entirely crippled. This is dumb on Apple's part. So is the lack of Java. There's a lot of useful stuff out there that runs on Java - and Java is a popular development language for getting cheap, powerful apps built.

Which might be why it's missing. Apple is quite insistent (as always) on maintaining as much control over what's going on as possible. The folks who built Adium have an interesting take on Apple's NDAs surrounding the iPhone SDK. Basically, because of the way Apple treats information in the SDK related the iPhone, anything developed under the GPL can't be ported to the iPhone because it would entail public release of information in the SDK. This is both dumb and bad for business: it will reduce the number of applications ported to the iPhone which, in turn, will turn people off of the iPhone and onto phones based on Google's Android OS.

Too Much Apple Control. The above discussion segues nicely into this one. Apple has far too much control over the application distribution and installation process. Even to the point of remotely disabling an application you have installed on your phone. This is ridiculous. I like Apple and all, but I for sure don't want them to mess around with applications I've put on my phone.

The App Store, as convenient as it is, has other problems. 3rd party apps intended to de-cripple your phone have been killed by Apple: Netshare, for instance, was pulled by Apple because it (apparently) allowed you to sidestep and asinine restriction on iPhone use placed by AT&T. AT&T, from all reports, does not allow you to use your iPhone as a modem through which your computer can access the Internet. This is silly, since you're paying $30 for the data plan with the phone. But AT&T wants you to have to pay extra for that. So they (apparently) made Apple take it down.

Quite frankly, I don't care at all about violating AT&T contracts. If they're silly enough to impose ridiculous restrictions on the use of their network, I'll do what I must to circumvent said restrictions. Since I cannot get service through my iPhone through another carrier, it's not as though I can take my business elsewhere. So what infuriates me is Apple playing party to AT&T's greed and assisting in the (typical in the cellphone world) crippling of a product.

No External Keyboard. Here's a thought. You've got an iPhone - a device with a good screen, a good OS, a good amount of memory. Why not hook up a keyboard and take notes on the thing in meetings, so you don't have to lug around your laptop?

Because you can't hook up a keyboard. At all. Period. Not through bluetooth. Not through the Dock connector. Say it again with me: "What were they thinking?" Palm and Handspring have had this forever. It works great. Why did Apple miss the boat here? No one seems to know. (Oh - and if you see the MacWorld article about the Macally keyboard for the iPhone, do note that it's vaporware.)

Turn-by-Turn Navigation. As of this writing, there is no turn-by-turn navigation for the iPhone. You have Google maps, you have a GPS, but no nav that's useable while you're driving. It sounds like a sick joke, but it's not. It's just not there. Honestly, how could they launch the product without that? It just gives their competitors more advantages over them in the marketplace. TomTom has hinted at a release for the iPhone, but there's nothing there now. (Note that this claim that the phone is incapable of turn-by-turn nav is total and complete drivel and is not to be believed at all.)

Safari. Sucks. There are numerous problems with Safari on the iPhone. The first one you'll likely run into is that Safari doesn't remember zoom level between page loads. This is horrible when viewing a site like Time.com (not mobile.time.com, note). I set up the zoom level to fit the text of the article across the screen and comfortably read the page. But as soon as I go back, or click next in a multi-page article, the zoom level is reset and I have to do it all over again. Now maybe this is a good thing if you jump to a different site: you might not want the same zoom level. But when browsing within a site, it should at least be an option.

Which is a problem in and of itself. There are no options. No preferences. Well, none to speak of. All you have control over is JavaScript, Plug-ins, Pop-up Blocking (at least that's not missing), cookies, and your search engine. Nothing else. No default zoom level. No default page to load. No caching behavior. No "what should I do if you browse onto something that offers a mobile site."

Those last two are big for me. I don't want to reload a page completely if I back up. When is that ever the right thing to do by default? Especially on a mobile device with a low-bandwith connection? Last night, I accidentally clicked the wrong link from a page. I hit cancel. I hit back. And waited 2 minutes while the page I had (barely) left reloaded. Just so I could zoom in and click on the correct link. Do Apple engineers only use their iPhones on campus where they have free, fast wifi? Is that even possible?

And how about mobile versions of sites. I don't want to see time.com's mobile site. I just don't. I want to view the same site that I see at my desk on my computer. And why not? Isn't that one of the selling points of Safari on the iPhone (at least, according to Apple)? But if I click on the link to Time's homepage, it redirects me to the mobile version. Every. Time. And then I have to click on another link (after the page has loaded enough that I can see it) to take me back to what I wanted in the first place. A bookmark solves that problem for Time, but I still have to go through the same rigamarole on any other site that offers a mobile version. Really. What where they thinking?

And finally. No ad blocking. I know - there's no ad blocking on Safari on the Mac. Why would I expect it on the iPhone? Well, there is ad blocking for Safari on the Mac. It's a plug in, and it's called PithHelmet and it works great. If you're not using it, you should be. Unless you like ads? But back to my point: ads suck. They suck up bandwidth and they're irritating. I suppose it's not surprising that Apple doesn't provide it by default. But it is surprising that the SDK doesn't give you the power to extend Safari in such a way that you can do ad blocking. (Of course, if you could, Apple would likely pull the app with that too-much power they have.) Currently, the only way to get ad blocking in Safari on the iPhone is to Jailbreak your iPhone.

Jailbreak. Ridiculously, Jailbreaking is still a highly desirable activity if you own an iPhone. You'd think Apple would have fixed that in their updates, but as I've chronicled, they haven't.

I've not Jailbroken my phone yet, so I'll hold off on going into detail on that in this post.

Conclusion. The legacy of Apple products - or the legacy that Apple has assumed for itself - is that they just work. This is woefully untrue of the iPhone. You could easily push back against my post and point out that none of this is even applicable to any other phone, so Apple has obviously accomplished a lot. You'd be right: they have. It's an amazing device. But my push back is this: I shouldn't have to search for the things I like about it. But I do. If you ask me to name 5 things I love about the iPhone, I'll choke after 3. But if you ask me to name 5 things I hate about it, I'll give you ten in no time.

That's not the way things should be. Technology should just work. The iPhone doesn't. It's yet another Almost product from Apple. And I'm getting rather tired of those.

The iPhone 3G: A Lesson in Frustration

2008-07-14T18:58:00.002-04:00

If you check out Apple's website today (it sometimes changes on Tuesdays, so I won't speculate on what it will show tomorrow), you'll see, in big letters: "It's here. The new iPhone 3G." Which is a lie. It's not here. Not anymore, anyway. From the tales I keep hearing from AT&T, the iPhone 3G is gone. Completely sold out. In less than 3 days. According to the salesperson at the AT&T store, Apple has told them that they grossly underestimated demand. He said it in a tone as if to say: "Duh — you didn't figure it would be a hot item?"

Which is my thought exactly. I mean, really? Dropping the price $200 and adding a slew of new features, combined with Apple's typical hype of any new product, and they didn't expect mad demand? Either they were asleep, there were real, honest supply problems (and Apple's covering it with a "we underestimated demand" story), or this is a marketing gimmick: make it look like there's huge demand by constricting supply.

Except that Apple sold over one million iPhones over the weekend (according to various reports I've seen on the 'Net). That's a lot of iPhones, any way you cut it. Which makes me wonder: how much of a marketing gimmick did they think they needed? And wouldn't it have been nice to say "We sold over 2 million iPhones!" or "We sold over 3 million iPhones!" instead?

Perhaps it was intentional — to restrict the number of people who'd be trying to turn the thing on over the weekend. As it was, Apple's servers melted under the demand, and many people referred to their machine as the iBrick. Go Apple.

But actually, I digress. As it turns out, not only is the iPhone not here, it's also unattainable for a good many people. No, I don't mean people whose budgets won't allow them to purchase the device. I mean current AT&T customers. See, if you're an AT&T customer (already), then you only get to upgrade your phone (at the price everyone thinks of when they talk about phones) every so often (1.5 years, I think). And guess what? A great many people aren't amongst those. Indeed, anyone who bought an original iPhone can't upgrade to the iPhone 3G for the advertised $199. 2 year contract nothing. You simply don't have an option: either shell out $399, or wait until it's time to upgrade.

And no one's bothered to make that clear, anywhere. Well, I suppose that's not true. If you go to AT&T's site and look under current AT&T customer you can check your upgrade eligibility. They require your phone number (which you likely know) and your password (which I certainly don't know).... But it's not exactly screaming at you: "Beware! You might not be eligible!"

Need I mention that I'm not eligible?

All I can say is that I'm really, really, really glad I didn't wait in line for 2 (or 3 or 4) hours on Friday, Saturday, or this morning, only to get to the counter and discover that I can either a) go home sad, without an iPhone or b) shell out an extra $200 to get the thing now. Perhaps that's why they did it? So people (like me) would get up there and, stuck between a rock and a hard place, would shell out the extra dough only to regret it later? It'd have been really hard, after that kind of wait, to walk away.

So I'm stuck. I could open a new line and get the phone now, but it doesn't take much in the way of math skills to figure out that you'd be better off shelling out the $200. Besides, I'd have to have a new phone number, which would be an enormous pain.

I hope to get my phone on August 11th, when I'm eligible. At least I don't have to wait a year (or more)!

Truly Persistent QuickLook

2008-07-14T09:13:00.004-04:00

I love the QuickLook feature in Apple's OS X Leopard (10.5.x). It's a great way to just see what's in a file without having to wait and first launch whichever app is associated with that particular file type. It's also great if someone sends you an Office document and you happen not to have Office (or iWork) on your machine. For instance, as long as there aren't lots of equations or important macros in a file, you can often view the contents of the document better with QuickLook than in, say, TextEdit, for Word files. And if it's an Excel or PowerPoint file, QuickLook may be your only option.

But there's one limitation of QuickLook that's been driving me crazy. As soon as you switch away from Finder (to another application), which is to say, as soon as Finder loses focus, the QuickLook window disappears. What I wanted was truly persistent QuickLook. There are a couple of hits on Google if you enter "persistent QuickLook" - but they only tell you to use Cmd+Y.... And that suffers from the same limitation as using the space bar to invoke QuickLook — at least, as near as I can tell.

Practically, this means that you can't view the Word (or Excel or Powerpoint) document while you type text into another program. Which is irritating, and, as far as I was concerned, rendered QuickLook very nearly useless — or at least, pretty much broken. I wanted QuickLook on the left, and TextEdit (or OmniOutliner or Pages, etc.) on the right, so I could transcribe the one to the other. I found myself frequently PDF'ing the source file so I could actually keep it up for reference while I worked.

Fortunately, there is a way to make the QuickLook window not disappear on you. You can invoke QuickLook from the command line, using qlmanage (man qlmanage for details). Irritatingly (though perhaps arguably correct behavior), qlmanage doesn't exit until the QuickLook window it summons has been closed — but we can get around that with a little dancing and a call to nohup. Here's how I do it:

nohup qlmanage -p "/path/to/file" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

This will bring up a QuickLook preview of the specified file, return you your prompt immediately, and suppress all of the output typically generated by nohup (both the "Appending output to nohup.out" message and the actual output that is typically appended).

Of course, you don't really want to have to open Terminal and type in that string every time you want a persistent QuickLook of a file. Neither do I. Automator comes to the rescue, and gives you the rest of the solution.

In Automator, make a new Workflow for which "Get Selected Finder Items" is the first step and "Run Shell Script" the second. In "Run Shell Script", change "Pass Input" from "as stdin" to "as arguments." Then, delete the template text Automator helpfully provides you with in the "Run Shell Script" box and replace it with:

nohup qlmanage -p "$@" > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Then select "Save As Plug-in..." from the File menu. Automator, again helpfully, offers to build you a Plug-in for Finder — which is exactly what you want. Name it something descriptive (I called mine "Persistent QuickLook" and click Save.

Now, open a Finder window, right-click on something, select "More..."->"Automator"->"Persistent QuickLook" (or whatever you named it), wait a couple of seconds, and — voilà! you have a QuickLook preview of whatever you clicked that doesn't go away. That's a bit more work than merely hitting the space bar (and it takes a bit of time to open, which is a pity), but at least the QuickLook window won't disappear when Finder loses focus.

At the Beach

2008-07-10T09:51:00.007-04:00

From Saturday to Wednesday morning, Tracy and I joined mom and dad and David and mom's brothers and sister and their families at Litchfield Beach, near Pawley's Island, South Carolina. There were great waves in the mornings, this year - much better than I remember from some years past, where it seemed we'd wait a long time between rides. Tracy wasn't a huge fan of being in the water, but with Patrick's 200mm lens on her dad's camera body (which offers a 1.6x FOVCF, yielding a lens effectively 320mm) she got some great pictures.

Twice in the four mornings we had at the beach we rose before the sun and watched the sun rise. On both days it was cloudy; the first day had fairly lousy light, but the light on the second day was marvelous. The picture at the end of this post is a sunrise Tracy captured with her dad's camera and Patrick's lens. The image is as shot - no post processing has been applied.

Waiting for the sun to do something exciting, we camped a sand-crab hole. I grabbed this picture (and several like it) using Patrick's lens. The clarity of Canon's L-series lenses continues to astonish me.

Walking up the beach after watching the sunrise, we came upon another crab, beached and likely dying - at any rate, he wasn't in any hurry to move. I got this picture, below, and then scooped him up in a shoe and tossed him in the water.

There were lots of butterflies just on the other side of the dunes, frequenting some of the bushes in the yards of the beach houses. Tracy snapped this picture, below, as we were walking back one afternoon.

I also took this mailbox, which was covered in a long moss. Dad was fascinated by it: just a simple, white plastic mailbox on a painted wooden pole that was almost covered on one side with moss.

Light in the evening favored the sea-oats and the dunes. The filter had fogged from being washed in the cold house and then being transported into the afternoon heat; the effect was an extremely soft background for this picture.

On our last evening, we were digging for coquinas (donax variabilis) when Tracy found a live conch, buried in the sand. We pulled it out, constructed a tide pool of sorts for it, and set it there to watch it come out of its shell. I took several pictures, but none showed off the animal as well as I'd have liked. A tank would have been better, as the conch wouldn't have buried itself and I could have gotten level with it, thus showing more than mostly its shell. For this picture, we put the animal on its back, so to speak, so it had to reach quite a ways to grip the sand and invert itself.

We didn't manage any pictures of fireworks this year; the family shot of fire works the night after we left (we stayed only for part of the week). Near our house, though, was a tree lit from below. The effect was stunning, so I took this picture.

It was a good break from work for both of us; it was nice to spend time with my family too. Both of us returned home well rested - and for me, anyway, my photographic batteries have been recharged.

Still Here

2008-05-26T15:34:00.002-04:00

Just really busy. But here are some recent photos I've taken. This one is of Tracy's Jefferson Cup. It's silver plated - and was really tarnished when I took this picture. She's since polished it and it looks, well, like it ought. But much less interesting.

This is of a bird I found in my house when I came home one day. A bit alarming, to open the door and hear something tapping on the inside of your windows.

Finally, an iris that bloomed a few weeks ago, in the morning sun.

Curb Appeal

2008-05-05T11:43:00.004-04:00

If there's one thing my house really lacks, it's curb appeal. It's a great little house, but there's not much to sell it as such from the road. I put in a bed along the front deck last year - that did a lot to help. But last week, Tracy, David and I put in another bed, right up next to the road.

The first step was removing the grass. That we did over the course of the last week and a half, a little bit at a time. We cut it off and carted it to the backyard, where we set it down as sod. Then we built up a retaining wall of sorts, since the yard slopes down from the street. Having built the wall, we got a truckload of manure and tilled it in to level off the bed (more or less).

On Saturday, finally having prepared the bed, we got flowers. We spent a while designing the bed - only to find out that most of the plants we'd planned on either weren't available or had already bloomed (and hence would be rather silly to put in right now). So we got recommendations on annuals (mostly) and brought home a good mess of plants. We laid them out, and then spent a good while putting them in. Here's the iris-side of the garden, from above(-ish):

The middle row of plants is a butterfly bush, a foxglove, 4 heliotropes in a box, and another foxglove. This part of the garden gets a good deal of sun, so we put the sun-loving plants on this side. There are marigolds, million-gold, heliotropes, some plant with purple-veined leaves who's name I'll have to look up, and petunias. There's also a red-flowering plant that's not blossomed, yet. Along the path (lower left in the picture) there are some impatiens mixed with the million-golds.

On the other side of the path we have more shade-tolerant plants: coleus in the middle (of different varieties) and million-gold and impatiens bordering. The Japanese maple I had in a pot on my deck is in the upper-right corner (barely visible) - it was right unhappy being on my deck, it would seem, so I'm hoping it'll like the new location better.

Taxation is not Stealing

2008-04-24T09:33:00.004-04:00

Over here, FSK makes the assertion that taxation is stealing and that, in voting to authorize taxes, you and I (assuming you, the reader, haven't voted against all candidates who have authorized taxes) have conspired to steal from him. Here is my response, which I posted as a comment on his blog. ~~It remains to be seen if he authorizes it.~~ He authorized the comment, without comment of his own.

A logical argument is formed by taking one or more hypotheses, transforming them with the operations provided by logic, and producing a conclusion. Such an argument is sound if 1) the operations performed are valid and 2) the hypotheses are sound.

In your argument, you assumed quite a number of hypotheses - only one of which you state explicitly: "Suppose you believe you do not have the right to steal from me." More important the unstated hypothesis: "And further assume that taxation is stealing."

There seems to be some variance amongst dictionary definitions of the word "steal," but a fairly common theme is the illegality of the action, as in the entry in Wiktionary which states: "To illegally, or without the owner's permission, take possession of something by surreptitiously taking or carrying it away." Of course, "illegally" implies a legal framework, which, in the United States of America, permits the government to levy taxes upon residents of the country in order to provide its inhabitants with services. Since, moreover, the organization of our government permits the majority of its enfranchised citizens to vote on such issues, the laws are, by a perhaps circular definition, just.

If that argument is not entirely satisfying, consider an analogy. Your landlord does not steal from you when he or she comes to collect your rent. Rather, he or she receives his or her due for the services provided - namely lodging and whatever other services were specified in the contract you both signed at the commencement of the lease. Should you at some point decide that the rent is no longer acceptable, you have a simple, completely legal recourse: you can move elsewhere.

It is thus with taxes in a town, county, state, or country. If you find yourself at odds with the overwhelming majority who have voted to authorize the current system of taxation you can (in addition to lobbying for change) emigrate. That you will be hard-pressed to find a country on this planet in which there are no taxes suggests that your view of the - not illegality, clearly, but perhaps immorality? - of taxes is not universally shared.

Speedball

2008-04-14T11:41:00.006-04:00

On Sunday, we got an introduction to Speedball. It was crazy - and it was a lot of fun. Unlike woodsball, speedball is played on a field with soft, air-filled bunkers. The field is relatively small and the games are short - in the pro leagues, they're limited to some 5-7 minutes; none of our games lasted more than a couple of minutes.

Hearing about speedball, I figured it would be sort of boring. It's not. While true that you have a big cushy bunker for protection, your lack of knowledge about how the game is progressing while you're hiding there limits the feeling of safety you have. You have to look around and keep scanning the field, so someone doesn't come up behind you.

The shortness of the games also means that if (or when) you get shot out, you're not waiting a long time to play again. Which is good. 'Cause I got shot many times off the break (before I ever made it to my bunker).

It was a lot of fun, but hard on muscles I don't usually use: I'm rather sore today. All that crouching and tension....

They'll play again in a couple of weeks - but I'll be out of town. Next time, perhaps.

My Turn

2008-03-20T10:34:00.000-04:00

A couple of textures, à la Tracy - but these are mine:

We washed and waxed our cars over the weekend - a brief cloudburst showered Tracy's car with water droplets. It seemed an interesting texture, so I took a couple of pictures.

This last one is heavily cropped - yet another time I wish I had a good macro.

Short Hike

2008-03-13T10:39:00.002-04:00

With the longer days, it's easier now to go on short hikes in the evenings after work. On Tuesday, Tracy and I went over to Chris Green to walk the border of the lake. We'd seen the trail from the boats, but never actually hiked over there. It was more a stroll than a hike, really, but was pretty. I borrowed David's camera and she borrowed mine - here are a few of the pictures we took.

Something's missing in this picture, sadly. It lacks the dreaminess of the spot and doesn't quite capture my original interest in the way the stream bed seemed to make a figure 8 - perhaps because you can only really see the bottom of the 8 here in the photo. It's even worse in black and white - too little contrast and too much uniformity of light.

Both of us like to look for small things - a reason we both would like to have a good macro lens. The lichen on the sticks caught our fancy - both of us shot several pictures of it. I ended up liking Tracy's pictures far more than mine - one of hers is shown above.

I shot this with David's camera. It has a feature called "Color Accent" that renders a scene in black and white except for one color value (plus or minus some built-in tolerance). It's surprisingly fun to use - fun especially because it's simple. It is, of course, the sort of thing one could do in post-processing using Photoshop, but having it right there on the camera means that you don't have to wait and don't have to wonder (as much) what the effect will be. I cranked the contrast and the saturation on this one. I like the boldness of the sudden green amidst the black and white.

This, surprisingly, is a beaver-gnawed stump - not some crude, unfinished sculpture (which it rather looks like to me). Again, Tracy's shots of this were much better than mine: the angle she chose makes the stump more dramatic and mysterious.

Something drew me to these seed pods - I took many pictures of them. The light was low and to get the aperture I wanted (for depth of field), I had to work pretty hard at keeping the camera steady. Overall, I managed to keep the sharpness good, but I suspect between asking the camera to focus and actually releasing the shutter, I frequently moved toward or away from my subject: the focal plane isn't ever quite where I would have liked it to be. Perhaps I'll go back with a tripod and try again.

Winter Flowers

2008-03-07T10:39:00.003-05:00

In case the post below didn't do much for you, here are a couple of pictures of winter "flowers" we took on a hike a few weeks ago.

New Markers

2008-03-07T08:52:00.003-05:00

This is old news, really, but until this week (when the laptop came), I was still really slow to post pictures. Things are moving a little faster, now.

A couple of weeks ago, Tracy and I bid on a whole slew of paintball markers on eBay. We had it in mind that bidding on used markers would be a cost-effective way to get our own equipment - so we could stop renting.

Here's what we got: 3 Spyders, all of them a couple of generations old: a Flash, an Xtra, and a Shutter. Here's the Flash:

The pity was, the Flash and the Shutter both leaked when we got them. A couple of trips to the paintball store fixed that (I tore them down, but couldn't identify any certain problems - all they really needed was replaced O-rings). It didn't cost much, either, except in effort and time. Here's the Xtra:

But effort and time do mean something, and, at the end of the day, they're not super markers. We only spent $50 on each of them (cost plus repairs), but still.... I won't buy any more used paintball equipment. Now that I have what I have, it's worth more to save up and buy new, I figure. Of course, at the moment, I need to improve my game enough to warrant a new marker - and I've a feeling that's a long way off. Here's the Shutter:

So what do I have my eyes set on right now? This guy, with a Freak barrel and the Full Freak kit:

Replacing the Old Jalopy

2008-03-05T11:05:00.006-05:00

At last, I've replaced my Hackintosh - which in many ways is exactly like an old jalopy - with a shiny new MacBook Pro. All I can say is that it's been well worth the wait. The new machine is fast, quiet, cool, has excellent battery life, and a breathtaking screen. Here are some pictures of the "unpacking ceremony" I shot with David's camera. The machine arrived on Monday morning.

The box. I didn't notice that the flash was set to fire before I took the picture, or I'd have turned it off. I'm glad I didn't, though - I like the effect. I also like the barreling effect from the small lens at close distance to the subject. Both technical flaws that I think improve the overall effect.

Inside the box. The styrofoam Apple uses to pack the machines looks cool, I think. Too bad there isn't something useful that could be done with it. For the time being, I've saved the box and the shipping carton in case I decide to sell the machine in a year.

Under the styrofoam. It's a bit like peeling an onion - layer after layer. Especially since there was yet another box surrounding the one in the first picture....

The laptop, on top of the box.

And opened, on the bar. I got the glossy screen, after liking the same on David and Tracy's MacBooks. I feared at first, when Tracy bought hers nearly two years ago, that the glare would be horrible.... But it's not, and the color saturation and the deepness of the blacks makes any small glare completely worth it - for me, anyway. My 24" panel has the normal matte finish, so if color precision is required, I'll just hook the laptop up to that, rather than proofing on the built-in display.

That's all for now. I installed Windows XP Home (I've not yet convinced myself it's worth it to buy Professional for $199, since I already had a copy of XP Home) this morning using Boot Camp and will try out VMWare Fusion later today. I will say this, though: the I/O performance of the machine compared to my desktop is staggering. Aperture loads up photos at least twice as fast from the Apple-provided 5400 rpm disk.

The Demise of Big-Box Brick & Mortar

2008-03-04T09:27:00.005-05:00

Permit me to rant for a bit - I don't do it very often on my blog.

Big-box brick and mortar is dead. Not for everyone, perhaps, but for me, at least. With soaring gas prices and the convenience, selection, and price available on the Internet, there's no longer any clear mission for big-box brick and mortar. It has failed in the four business areas that previously validated its existence.

First of all, convenience (or the "now" factor). Here's what I mean: why would you buy something in the store, rather than online? Well, perhaps because you need it soon. Like now, for instance. You can't wait to have the thing shipped overnight, or could, but don't want to pay the exorbitant cost of overnight shipping. So you drive to the store to get what you want. It's sensible. Moreover, what you want is a little less common than a box of Kleenex, so you head to a big-box retailer to look for it. The trouble is, of course, that they don't have it either. In fact, none of the big boxes in your town do. So after wasting nearly an hour hitting up several big stores, you end up at home, discouraged, buying the thing off the Internet after all.

This has happened to me numerous times. I wanted, on two separate occasions, a 2.5 inch SATA hard-disk drive enclosure and a 3.5 inch, 250GB hard disk. Best Buy would sell me a PATA enclosure or a 500GB or 750GB hard disk, but not the SATA enclosure or the smaller disk - and I had no reason for another massive disk for my purpose. It would have been a waste of space and money. Circuit City, after declaring when I checked their inventory on the 'Net that they carried the disk, didn't have it after all. WalMart came up short - I didn't even bother with Kmart. All four have permanently lost my business for electronic goods: why bother shopping there, when they don't have the selection that should mark big box retail?

So not only have they failed in convenience, but also in selection (which, along with price, is what typically differentiates big-box retail from smaller outfits). That's two business areas down. How about the other two?

For a while, we've been trying to get our hands on a copy of National Treasure (the first one) to rent and watch (I'll buy the Blu-ray boxed set when Disney completes the series - more cost effective). Blockbuster in town (there are four of them) is worthless. Their selection is so poor, it's effectively limited to games and new releases. They don't even stock up on movies that have a sequel in the theater - which is a pretty obvious thing to do, really. So in desperation, I checked out Hollywood Video. To my surprise, they had it in stock! So I grabbed the movie and got in line to check it out. It was Friday night - there were lots of people in the store.... And only two people working registers.

After standing in line for 15 minutes (no joke) while one of the sales clerks failed to check out a single customer (he called his supervisor - who was on the other register - over for no fewer than three overrides and rebooted his machine once in the middle of the transaction), I gave up and left. I wanted to turn around and shout "Not only did you lose my business tonight, but I will never, ever walk into another Hollywood Video to rent a movie. Ever."

And why should I? After seeing a lack of service like that? And considering their lack of price competitiveness against online services like Netflix? People might complain that on the Internet the service is poor - but it sure beats the lack of service one finds in big-box retail. Rarely have I run into a truly knowledgeable salesperson. Rarely - if ever - have I seen prices that compete with those on the 'Net. It's insanity.

Contrast those experiences with the experience we've had at our local paintball store. It's a small shop. There's not a lot of selection and rarely are there other customers in the store. But the guy behind the counter knows his stuff. He's passionate about the sport. He'll give advice, suggest products, and tell you when you don't need to buy something. He can order whatever you need or want that he doesn't have, and his prices are competitive with those on the 'Net. Perhaps slightly higher, but it's worth it to continue the business relationship with someone who offers free labor fixing damaged equipment.

Big-box brick and mortar may have squeezed out a lot of local, small shops, but the Internet may largely do the same to big-box brick and mortar. And, who knows? When the impersonal shopping experience afforded by the Internet is contrasted against the "good old days" of local stores, we may just see them reemerge. I could handle that.

Paintball

2008-02-03T20:49:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, all of our paintball planning came together, and we went out to Jason's hunting plot in Madison to play. And it was awesome. We rented 5 markers, I brought mine, James brought his and one he borrowed, we took 7,750 paintballs, ten 12oz. CO2 canisters, three 20oz CO2 canisters, and masks for seven people. Oh, and it was awesome. Did I say that? Here's just part of the gear:

Since it had rained heavily the day before, we hiked our gear the last part of the way in to Jason's cabin: the road is primitive and we didn't want to tear it up. Once we got everything in (only took one trip), we went over safety, loaded some lousy paint, and chrono'd the markers. As it turned out, we needn't have worried much. All but one of the markers were shooting well under 285 fps; I think the one that clocked over 300 maxed out around 310. I'm checking Matt's, here.

My marker didn't seem to want to shoot any faster than 250 when I checked it. But later in the day it read just north of 285. Doesn't really give me a lot of confidence the precision of the adjustments I made: the markers seem to be so sensitive to a whole host of variables that influence their muzzle velocity.

Checking out Brian's marker, while James and Matt watch. Tracy was behind the camera; never did think to take it from her and get a picture of her. Oh well.

I don't have any pictures of the games, of course: I wasn't willing to risk the camera getting hit by paintballs. James had a helmet cam he uses for bike riding; don't know yet how the video he took came out. Could be awesome. We'll see.

The games were awesome. We ran around in the woods for a good four hours, not counting breaking for lunch and chrono'ing the markers before we started. Tracy and I were both exhausted when we got home, but it was a good kind of tired. Similar to after a hard day of skiing. Definitely something we want to do again!

At the end of the day, we had a good bit of paint left over. Balls in unopened bags we saved; the rest we used for target practice. Mike is shooting James' marker here, playing with the electronic trigger.

James' marker was chopping balls - either that, or they were breaking in his barrel because his barrel was so dirty by the end of the day. I had him load up with balls and just blow through a bunch of them so I could get this photo: the launched ball disintegrating just after it exits the barrel. No Photoshop - that's the real thing.

We're hoping for more paintball in the not-too-distant future - and we're hoping for more people. Seems likely; we'll see.

Complete

2008-01-31T09:38:00.000-05:00

I have finished it: the largest LEGO set ever produced (by LEGO - certainly bigger things have been built from LEGOs). And it's amazing.

I actually finished it on Saturday, but this week has been really busy, so I've not gotten a chance to get the photos online until now. But here they are: pictures I took of it right after I put on the last pieces.

It's astonishingly huge and really very imposing to see in real life. The pictures don't really do it justice (though they are cool): the full effect isn't clear until you actually see it. It's one thing to have an intellectual understanding of how big it is and another to have it spread out in front of you.

One of the most impressive things about it is that it's built entirely out of "stock" LEGOs - by which I mean that, aside from a couple of printed pieces (the radar dish and a couple of 2x2 round tiles), all of the pieces are found in other sets. The combined effect is no less stunning, and it means that should I ever scrap the thing, I could easily incorporate the pieces into my own creations.

The other really impressive thing is the degree to which the parts of the ship don't come together at right angles. Which, if you've ever played with LEGOs, is by and large the only way the pieces fit together. You can get other angles by skipping studs and using hinges, but for the most part, right angles are all you've got. There are precious few right angles on the Millennium Falcon.

And there's so much detail. You can literally pore over the thing and keep finding detail. Even having put it together (and put all that detail in place) I'm still amazed at the effect produced. Totally worth the time to put all those pieces in place.

Since Han and Chewie are always working on the Falcon, I took some pictures of them tinkering.

Here's Han and Luke guarding the ramp. Luke still has his father's lightsaber, it would appear.

Since the Falcon is built to minifig scale, everyone fits in the cockpit:

You can even see Luke manning the top quad laser turret:

The only problem I've run into with having such a massive, imposing model is what to do with it. For the moment, I've solved that problem by bringing it in to work. Not sure how long I'll want to keep it here, though: it takes up a lot of space, even if I don't have it sitting on my desk (it's on top of a bookshelf next to my desk). But my coworkers have enjoyed seeing it. And what's the point of a model, if not to share it with other people?

I might see about a glass display case or build a glass-topped coffee table for the den and install the thing under the glass. But that'll be a lot of work (and money) in and of itself. Later, perhaps.

Textures

2008-01-23T14:51:00.001-05:00

This post actually isn't about me. It's about Tracy. Or, rather, about her photos. Some of my photos I think are pretty original, but Tracy is far better than I at getting (what I consider to be) truly original photos. Perhaps it's because she's not afraid to point the camera at just about anything. Like this picture. Can you guess what it is?

If you said "a horse with a muddy mane" then you're far cooler than I. I like this photo for its texture - that's a recurring theme for the pictures I'm showing here, in fact. It's not entirely sharp, but that's okay, really - it heightens the sense of mystery in what you're looking at.

Here's another one - this one is a little easier:

This is a fence at sunrise with frost on it. I like the way the frost highlights the grain in the wood; the sunrise leaking through the far line of fence is interesting, too.

This one is a little wilder:

It's the rolled lip of a wheelbarrow with frost on it. I like this picture for the depth of field even more than the texture, I think: it's wild the way only a narrow slice of the frost in in focus. What really fascinates me is the way the in-focus parts of the barrow don't line up: the top of the lip is in focus further left than the roll. It makes sense, since that top of the lip is actually further back than the roll, but it's still surprising when you see it.

How about this one:

It's frost on the windshield of the "Mule," a diesel-powered four-wheeler thing with a dump-truck-like bed in the back. You can just make out the word "Mule" through the frost - but only just, because the sunlight striking the frost blew out (saturated the sensor). I like the blown-out frost, though, for some reason.

Given the previous picture, can you place this one:

It's a post supporting the roof of the mule. I like the frost patterns on it - and the subtle play of color as light is scattered at the boundary of frost and air.

Continuing the frost theme:

This is frost on the sill of a window in one of the stalls. For this shot, more than any of these others, I wish she'd had access to a macro lens (I don't have one - it's competing for the "next lens I will buy" spot): the frost is just incredible.

I've often wanted to get a similar picture: sometimes, when there's rain before a frost, you see frozen mud form the most fantastic little structures. Like crystal towers topped with dirt. It's hard to describe and I've never had a camera when I've noticed them. This reminds me of that, for some reason.

Finally:

Frost on the seat of the mule. Again, I really like the depth of field - the narrowness of the in-focus image adds mystery to the whole.

Splat

2008-01-21T07:39:00.000-05:00

While we're still not quite set to run a game of "outlaw" paintball (not at an official field) with folks from work, James and I are a lot closer. We still lack a chronograph to check the muzzle velocity of the markers, but we should get that taken care of by the end of this week. And on Saturday, we went over to Jason's deer-hunting patch of 32 acres in Madison and scoped things out. Our consensus was that the games will be awesome.

We brought along our markers to shoot at trees and get a feel for how well they were shooting. That was surprisingly fun, and we blew through a lot of paint (close to 500 rounds, each). It was chilly, so we were fairly bundled; there was still snow on the ground from earlier in the week.

Shooting at trees, James' marker was far more accurate than mine, which was rather depressing. He'd said that the paint he bought was "better," according to the guy who sold it to him, than some of the other stuff at the store - and only moderately more expensive. I borrowed a handful of balls and shot them with my marker - the difference in accuracy was staggering. Clearly it's worth it to buy "better" paint - I could actually hit my mark most of the time with his paint.

Tracy shot some, too - and enjoyed it enough that she's almost convinced she wants to come and play with us.

We might go play as early as this Saturday - hope to post details after it happens.

Half-Baked

2008-01-20T11:24:00.000-05:00

Increasingly, Apple seems to be putting out products that feel incomplete. My previous rant about the MacBook Air serves as an example - a likely forward-thinking idea that's just too early and too unfinished to gain widespread praise. Mac OS X Leopard is another good example. Consider the user interface of Leopard:

This is a composite of screen captures from windows of 3 different Apple-produced applications. The Finder (the background window), Mail (in the upper-right corner), and iTunes. All three applications have a different toolbar (note the extreme difference between Finder and Mail; Finder and iTunes differ mostly in the shape of the toolbar buttons). Mail and iTunes have a different-looking table: note the selected column in iTunes is a matte, bluish color whereas in Mail, it's a transparent, liquid-looking graphite. (Incidentally, though I didn't show it, Finder mimics Mail's table look and feel and not iTunes'.) iTunes and Finder have different scroll bars: the iTunes scroll bar is again a matte bluish whereas in Finder, it's that liquid, transparent graphite again. I could give more examples (like in Finder, you can collapse groups in the sidebar; you can't in iTunes), but you can probably find your own. And it's totally hit or miss as to which look-and-feel you'll get using the machine. Preview share's Mail's toolbar style; Safari shares that of Finder. While in Finder there's a gemstone on the upper-right of the window to hide the toolbar (and the sidebar), in Safari, you have to go through the menus to hide the toolbar.

It's true that Leopard is an improvement over Panther and Tiger - both of which had a dreadful mix of the brushed-metal look and feel and the older, Aqua look and feel developed for the original incarnation of the OS. But still. If Apple was going to clean things up and move back to a unified look and feel, why couldn't they finish the job?

Here's another thing that bugs me. In Tiger (and previously), PPP and VPN connections were handled through a little application called Internet Connect. In Leopard, Internet Connect has been removed and its functions have been integrated into System Preferences' Network preference pane. A good decision (though it took a few minutes to find where they'd moved), since it means that all network connections can be managed from the same place.

But Apple did a half-baked job here, as well. If your VPN connection breaks, or your password is incorrect, the dialog box that is raised shows up with "Internet Connect" in the title and the Internet Connect icon to the left of the error message. Hello? It's almost worse than useless, since it doesn't give the user the correct context to address the problem. The first time I saw it I was completely confused as to why Internet Connect, a no-longer-existent application was raising a dialog box. Then when I read the message, I realized it was merely an example of a lousy job migrating the functionality into System Preferences.

A friend of mine who uses Windows once remarked that you know you've got a really good OS when you start complaining about the UI. I suppose there's something to that. Overall, OS X (Leopard included) is still very solid, very nice piece of software - one to which Windows Vista can't even hold a candle. Nevertheless, I expect more from Apple - namely that they take their time on their releases so they can actually get them right.

Miss!

2008-01-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

Listen. Hear that? Yeah, that: the whooshing sound. It's the sound of Apple missing. And how appropriate that they named the new machine "MacBook Air."

For $600 more than a MacBook, you can now get a computer with: 1) less processing power, 2) no optical drive (hence no way to install software unless you have another Mac in your house or want to shell out $100 for the external drive), 3) no firewire, one USB, no audio in, and yet-another-different DVI dongle (called micro DVI - mini wasn't small enough), 4) an even slower hard disk than is typically in a laptop - unless you shell out the $999 for the 64GB solid-state disk.

The rationale? It's .4 inches thinner (at its thickest) and 2 lbs lighter. Yay. 'Cause 2 lbs in my bag is actually noticeable.

Don't worry - I've seen all the arguments on both sides. You know, the ones that talk about who the machine is meant for (people who already have a computer and want maximal portability, etc.). I simply reject those arguments. I mean - who cares? Less than half an inch and 2 pounds? For $600? Not to mention the crippled features?

Oh - but it has a multitouch trackpad! Honestly. Who cares? A nice ui touch, but not worth paying for.

The black keyboard is ugly, the bevel surrounding the monitor is still way too fat (similar to the MacBook), the backlit keyboard is a clever gimmick that's been around since the PowerBook 15"....

But here's the biggest miss Apple managed with this machine: no docking station. If you know anyone with an IBM (or even an ultraportable Dell), you've probably seen - and appreciated - the docking station. And Apple left it out - again (or still).

A big miss for Apple at an incomprehensible price.

Photos of Opportunity

2008-01-12T12:13:00.001-05:00

There's a tree up by the airport, an incredibly old and massive oak, that I've wanted to photograph for quite some time. When they did all the recent road construction up there, they were careful to preserve the tree, remarkably enough - for nearly a year, it was surrounded by one of those blaze-orange fences construction crews sometimes put up.

On my way home for Christmas, I decided to head out past the airport. I had the camera in the back of the car, of course, and just as I neared the oak I realized I'd come at precisely the time of day at which I had previously determined the oak would be best lit. It had rained all day, and only just cleared up - it was a perfect opportunity.

So I pulled over and spent a good ten minutes walking around snapping pictures of the tree. Framing it was hard: I wanted to be back away from it, so the viewer would get a good feel for its size, but at the same time, I wanted it to fill the frame as much as possible. And there are towers behind it with racks of lights on them to help pilots line up with the runway during night landings - I could only do some much to cut them out in the framing. Later, I'll see what I can do in Photoshop to clean them up: I really want the tree all by itself.

And then, before I went back to the car, I turned around and saw the fog and clouds framing the mountains.

In Progress

2008-01-10T08:58:00.000-05:00

Lookit: I'm almost done with the Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon.

I got this thing back in November (it's one of the limited first edition, that comes numbered - I was tempted to buy two and save one new-in-the-box in my attic to resell in 5 years (likely for 100% profit) but couldn't justify the up-front cost). I've not worked on it compulsively, and happily, I still have building left to do (as you can see).

It's massive - over three feet long and about two feet wide. I've not weighed it, but I expect it's around 10 pounds. There's over 5000 pieces - true, many of them are small, but still.... There's a lot of plastic there - and a lot of detail. I didn't take the time to get lots of detail shots (those will come later, when I'm finished), but I assure you that there's a lot of detail. It's great.

The only problem is that I have no idea what I'll do with it when I'm done building it. It's really too big to just have sitting around, and besides.... I'm not one to display model-type things. I'd be tempted to take it to work and display it there (at least people would see it) but it's just too big. I mean, it'd eat up about half of my desk!

I've also been working on getting my paintball marker (a second-hand Spyder Compact 2000) ready for an outlaw game we've been trying to get together with some guys at work (waiting on a cronograph, so we don't end up shooting with dangerous velocities). It's missing an O-ring (should be one on the dark-gray piece below the bolt), so it's still in pieces; still trying to find the O-ring so I can finish oiling it and put it back together.

Reblogging

2008-01-10T08:53:00.000-05:00

I find New Year's resolutions to be silly: if you want to change something about yourself, why wait until the new year? Weren't you overweight last year? Lazy last year? Mean to your children/spouse/etc. last year? So why didn't you change then? Why does the idea of it being a New Year make change seem so much important - or so much more attainable?

So this is not a New Year's resolution: I intend to pay a bit more attention to my blog. As in, actually update it from time to time, rather than only once every several months. Shortly, as in, next week, I hope to have a new laptop - that might help a bit ('cause more of the stuff I care about will be centralized in one place, making things like posting pictures so I can blog about them easier). As poor I am at planning ahead (e.g. putting up pictures ahead of time so I can blog about them), that little change should make a difference.

We'll see. At any rate, I'm not making promises. I just realized yesterday that I rather miss blogging: it's nice to be able to look at something I've written, and to have pictures I've picked out somewhere I can point to.

A post with content follows.

Java 1.6 for OS X

2007-11-20T11:16:00.000-05:00

There are hundreds of thousands of pages on the 'Net right now by angry people who want to see Apple put Java 1.6 back into Leopard. I'm one of them. But rather than waste bandwidth rehashing the issues, I'll simply register my complaint: without Java 1.6 on the Mac, I can't use the Mac for Java development for projects I have going on at work. It's that simple and it's totally unacceptable. Way to go Apple: congrats on pissing off hundreds of thousands of loyal customers. Great marketing decision - especially in refusing to make an official statement regarding Java 1.6.

Here's making my voice heard: 13949712720901forosx

No Excuses

2007-11-20T11:14:00.000-05:00

Really. There aren't any excuses for my silence. I've done cool things (white water rafting, biking, kayaking), bought cool things (the Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon), designed cool things (Lego ships on my computers), taken cool pictures.... I've just not made the time to post. I hope to change that over the next months, but making promises to that effect seems silly, right now.

An Air Show

2007-09-10T11:20:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, Tracy, who was on vacation in Virginia Beach with her family, called me to say that there was an air show going on at NAS Oceana. I love airplanes, particularly military airplanes, and the noise of fighter jets always excites me. So I checked with David when he got back from work and we decided we'd head over to the show on Sunday. It's a long drive, but I figured it would be worth it.

It was worth it. Aside from the pictures (nearly all of which were taken by Tracy - I looked at the planes through my binoculars), it was just a lot of fun being there. And the noise was great. My only real disappointment in the whole thing was in myself: I forgot to bring suntan lotion and all of us got burned - though David was burned the worst. The weather was odd: cloudy for a few minutes, clear for a few more; it downpoured for about a minute, and then the sun came out. The low ceiling (at times) canceled some events and postponed others. The first jet we saw fly (up close) was the F-15E Strike Eagle. The first picture shows the F-15 with the F-22 Raptor, a P-51 Mustang, and the swept-wing F-86 Sabre. The second shows the F-15 just after takeoff, on full afterburner. I've seen the Eagle fly before: I was at NASA LaRC for a summer, and the pilots from LAFB flew their Eagles overhead nearly every day. It was a great demo: low to the ground with many high-angle-of-attack (AoA) turns; there was so much moisture in the air that nearly every high-AoA maneuver resulted in fantastic condensation patterns above the wing (these are examples of Prandtl-Glauert condensation: the extreme pressure drop over the wing surface knocks water vapor out of suspension, causing temporary condensation). That's not white paint on the top of the wing - it's condensation.

But the real draw, for me, was a chance to see the F-22 Raptor fly. Langely AFB didn't yet have the Raptor, when I was there, and it's an amazing machine, both aesthetically and technologically. Where the Eagle impressed me by getting off the runway in 2000 feet, the Raptor floored me by lifting off after just 1000 feet. It barely seemed as though it was moving when the pilot rotated, pulled up the landing gear, and put it into a steep climb. The low ceiling prevented the Raptor from executing any high-altitude maneuvers, but I count that as a Good Thing: it kept the aircraft closer to its spectators.

In order maintain its stealthy profile, the Raptor carries its weapons internally: doors open (exposing the weapons to radar detection) just before a weapon is deployed. As part of the demonstration, the pilot banked the aircraft and cycled the weapon bay doors. You can see quite well where the weapons are mounted, in this picture. Here's another beauty shot of the Raptor, you can see (barely) the shockwaves from the afterburner:

Some of the most extreme edge-of-the envelop, high-AoA flying they demonstrated was by the F/A-18E Super Hornet. Both times they flew it, it had cleared off, so they weren't limited in how high they could fly by the low ceiling of clouds. The most impressive maneuver (to my untrained eye) was a high-speed pass over the landing strip followed by a sudden transition to nearly vertical flight. The noise it made in that maneuver was phenomenal - so was the condensation off the wings. The picture at right gives just a hint of what I mean - we never got a picture of it closer to the ground.

The last event was a demonstration by the Blue Angels: impressive formation flying and high-precision maneuvers. They were really pretty, but after seeing some of the very-high-AoA maneuvers we'd seen all day, it was less impressive than it would have been had we only seen the Blue Angels. Still, we got several good photos of the formation flights. Below is one of my favorites.

The Right Tool (Suite et Fin)

2007-09-10T11:06:00.000-04:00

Sadly, the real problem with not having the right tools on hand is that it makes me rather inclined not to do the work that the tool calls for. Such was the case with the panoramas. I still hope to have them done, someday, but it's looking like it won't be now.

The Right Tool

2007-08-22T11:18:00.000-04:00

You might be wondering why I've not posted anything new from the trip to the O RO Ranch in the past couple of days. There are several reasons.

Over the weekend, I bought 4 new doors to replace the same number upstairs in my house. The house came with ugly, unpainted luan doors - just flat, plain, boring doors. The front door, however, is in a colonial-paneled style - much nicer. I replaced the closet door in the living room to match (it's right by the front door - the dissimilarity was jarring) a while back and have planned ever since to do the rest of the doors upstairs. Tracy and I worked on those over the weekend: I cut holes for the door handles while she counter-sunk the hinges for me - with a chisel, since I don't have a router. All well and good; time consuming, but not difficult.

But the frames aren't true anymore: the house has settled since it was built. I planned on that, and bought a sander so I could sand down the doors and make them fit. What I didn't plan on was how much reshaping I'd have to do: the closet door mostly fit - I was able to do that bit of sanding by hand. But some of these doors (or frames, really) need more than a millimeter of adjustment. With the little 1/4 sheet sander I got and 60-grit sandpaper, that doesn't seem to be possible: I've sanded for over an hour on one of the better fitting doors (the door to my room) and it still doesn't fit. I just don't have the right tool.

Fortunately, Tracy's dad is going to loan me a 21-inch belt sander. That ought to do the trick and will be easier to use (for me) than a table saw (which I neither have nor know how to use).

The other reason for the delay stems from my frustration in assembling nice panoramas to post and discuss. I did the Monkeytown panorama by hand, in Photoshop. It looks good, but it was time consuming. Spending that amount of time assembling 2 photos isn't too bad; some of my panoramas have 10 photos. Lining all of those up would take serious time.

Canon has software that'll automate the merger (PhotoStitch). It's easy to use and fast. But it's not terribly good at lining things up. Decent, but not great. And it doesn't let you tweak its merger after (or before) it does its thing. What's more, on my Hackintosh, it fails with an OS error whenever it tries to save anything. Frustrating.

Photoshop offers a more powerful automated merging solution. It lets you do more work tweaking the setup and even tries (and typically fails, in my experience) to figure out in what order and how the photos should line up. Even when it fails to line them up, you can hold its hand and show it how it ought to align the photos. It's harder to use, is very, very slow, but produces better results. Better, but still not great - I can achieve much better doing it by hand (sadly!).

The crux of the problem, though, is this: I want the output as a photo, sure; but what I really want is a QuickTime VR. That's how you really want to look at a panorama - especially those as wide as some of the ones I've taken. But Photoshop won't make them, QuickTime Pro won't let me make them, and the authoring software I demoed I can't make heads or tails of: when I tried to use it, the result was a panorama that was really bad looking, like I'd zoomed way out, or something. Canon's software will make them, but it won't let me import an already-pieced-together panorama for conversion to QuickTime VR (it complains that the aspect ratio is too great - you're limited to 10:1).

Okay, I thought, I'll just chop up the tiff I exported from Photoshop and have the Canon stuff use that. Nope. Even though the images were perfect for merging, PhotoStitch managed to botch it. Can't figure out why, but it did.

Again - I don't seem to have the right tool (or tools).

My current plan is this: manually merge the photos in Photoshop so that I can ensure they're correctly lined up and look as good as possible (I shot them all with a polarizer (a big mistake) so all of them have an annoying luminance gradient I have to deal with). Then, chop them into pieces. At the edge of each of the pieces, I'll attach a large grid or target or something of the sort that should make it dead obvious for the Canon software how the photos fit together. Then I'll use PhotoStitch to export a QuickTime VR. It'll be a pain, but I'm hoping for good results.

And, hopefully, in a couple of days you'll find some high-quality panoramas of the ranch on here to explore.

The Cliff Dives

2007-08-20T10:50:00.002-04:00

On our second day at the O RO Ranch, Tracy and I went with Jack and Daniel to the Cliff Dives - a particular spot in a canyon on the ranch's southern border. You can see the cliffs (and the falls) in the photo above - they're in the lower-right-hand middle of the photo: that flat, brown-and-white patch in the green of the gorge between the canyon walls; it's easier to view if you follow the link over to Picasa.

Our descent to the Dives followed the fold in the canyon visible in the photo at top, stretching from the lower-left-hand corner to roughly below the cliffs; from there, we turned to our left and scrambled up the photo frame to the cliffs. The photo at right shows us on the "trail" - really, it was a rarely-flowing, rapidly-falling stream down from the plateau to the canyon floor that ran over large volcanic boulders. The terrain was difficult, but manageable. The morning was cool - that helped a lot: in spite of the coolness, we were hot by the time we'd made it halfway down the stream bed.

The vistas were gorgeous, both looking out across the canyon, as in this photo, as well as looking back up the way we had just come. Although one of the more beautiful spots on the ranch, it's remoteness and the difficulty of the hike make it rarely frequented. Jack guessed that (not counting Native Americans), we were among 10-20 people who had ever hiked down to that spot. Impossible to prove, but an impressive claim, nonetheless. And one did feel the isolation of the spot - much more strongly than I've experienced in the mountains around here.

Halfway down the stream bed, we came to a large slab of lava rock that had collected pools of water, either from the recent rains or the receding water from the stream bed (still audible in some places, deep under the rocks). The disks in the water in this photo are bubbles - not eggs of some sort, but simple air bubbles. Some combination of heating from the sun and trapped air in the porous rock must have caused the bubbles to form. In the direct sunlight, the effect was quite stunning, particularly with the golden background provided by the algae that had formed in the bottom of the pool. We saw only a couple of these pools - it struck me as odd that there were so few. Perhaps the conditions for them to form are fairly specific?

Down at the cliffs, it was almost like another world. With the constant availability of water, large deciduous trees (maples and the like) were in evidence - we never saw those up on the plains. The falls were gorgeous. The top of the cliff (just at the upper right of the frame) must be some 60 feet high - it was from there that Jack and Daniel jumped into the pool below (though they didn't dive from that height). We've pictures of them jumping - frozen in mid air and just as they hit the water; I'm going to try to composite a time history of a jump together and post that, so you can see the whole jump in one picture. Should be interesting.

Due to the variability in water level at the base of the cliffs (it had quite recently flooded some three or four feet higher than the level at which we saw it), the roots of some of the trees were magnificently twisted and exposed. This picture shows one of my favorites, just across from the flow of water exiting the pool at the base of the cliffs. Just off-frame, to the left, is another fall, shown below, fed by the flow. These photos made lugging my tripod down (and up!) the canyon wall well worth it (though actually, the lenses and camera bodies I carried weighed more than the tripod). A friend loaned my his Canon backpack (and a really nice lens) which made carrying everything possible (and even fairly comfortable). I highly recommend a good, compartmentalized pack if you're going to lug your camera on hikes!

The cliffs for which the spot is named are really just one set in a series of cliffs and falls that range from that point down the canyon floor. We didn't explore in that direction, but I did walk back far enough to take a photo of this second set of falls. The tree roots in the previous photo are just off frame in the upper middle, and the falls from the first photo are in the background at the top-right of the frame. There was no jumping from this cliff, by the way: the pool at the base of the fall is quite small - too small a target to make in a jump, even if were it deep enough.

We stayed down at the falls for most of the day and hiked some up stream - all the way to a fork in the canyon wall. (Jack boldly declared we were the first humans to ever set foot in that part of the ranch - I tend to think some Native Americans or Cowboys from time past have been there - but who knows? It was remote country, and not easily reached.) Before leaving we stood in front of the tripod and I got a picture of the four of us. Not sure what I did wrong, but the trees behind us are in focus, where we are not. I might have forgotten to turn autofocus back on....

On the way out, I took this picture - a better look at the canyon, since the sun was at my back. It's unfortunate that scale can't be easily conveyed in a photo such as this - the canyon is vast and imposing when you're there, but just looks... bland in a photo.

Ranch Flora

2007-08-16T07:40:00.001-04:00

When most people hear "Arizona," they probably think of cacti and desert - a friend of mine calls it "kitty-litter land," in reference to a remark uttered by a Briton upon landing in the southwest: "It's wall-to-wall kitty litter!" While Phoenix certainly fits this description, the area around Prescott is much prettier with much more varied vegetation.

That said, there are right many cacti. Of particular note is the century plant, which abounds on the ranch. If you've never seen one of these things up close, it's hard to imagine just how tough they are: they say that if you step on one, the central spike will drive through the bottom of your shoe. I can believe it - these things look like they ought to be soft, but are rock-hard. Indeed, they're something of a problem on the ranch. While the cattle and horses typically avoid the plants, either may step on one when a mounted cowboy is chasing a cow - and the results are disastrous. Not only are those spines sharp, but they also secrete an enzyme that enters the puncture and significantly retards healing. Not nice at all.

And, unsurprisingly, they spread. After the plant reaches maturity, they send up colossal stalks topped with flowers that develop seed pods. These several-meter-tall, bamboo-like stalks enable the plant to scatter seeds over a fair distance - not too far, but far enough. The result, after time, is large patches of century plants, amongst which the cattle and horses can't graze, around which a periphery of smaller plants hide amongst rocks, as though lying in wait for the unsuspecting horse or cow. Or person. The ranch handymen try to get to the stalks early in development with machetes, lopping them off before they can go to seed - but there are so many of them over so much land, it's just not possible to get them all.

Another troublesome plant is the ubiquitous juniper. While not as dangerous as the century plant, the juniper causes problems by drawing an enormous amount of moisture out of the ground - moisture that, then, can't be used by the grass. As a result, around the base of nearly every older juniper is a bare patch of ground, where the grass has died out. In isolation, this effect isn't terribly problematic - but like all plants, the juniper spreads. After time, they can take over acres of field - and that's acres that can't be used for grazing. But they are pretty, in a wild sort of way. The action of the wind and dryness and, often, survived lightening strikes seems to carve them into fantastic shapes. And on a hike on a hot day, the shade under their branches is most welcome.

There are also right many wildflowers on the ranch. Perhaps not so many as you see in the East - but then, we were there in summer, and even in the East, there are many fewer wildflowers in summer as compared to spring. Yellows and oranges seemed the most common colors, but there were blues and purples as well, and whites. The terrain and elevation on the ranch is so varied, as is the ready availability of water, that a huge variety of plants are represented. These flowers came from the dryer, higher elevations, where we spent most of our time on the ranch.

What Trucks are Meant For

2007-08-16T00:01:00.001-04:00

The trip to the O RO Ranch was awesome. More details will follow in posts throughout the rest of the week; many pictures will show up too - Tracy and I took 2290 (many duplicates). The process of weeding through all of those will take some time.

But for a first post, I thought I'd go with a rather humorous subject.

The ranch encompasses 235,000 acres of gorgeous, wild, rugged terrain. Roads on the ranch, by and large, are primitive and rough - unlike anything most people on the East Coast (at least) would ever think to associate with the term "road." Frequently washed out, rocky, muddy when it rains, and criss-crossed by streams of variable depth and width, even 4x4 trucks can't make it through, some of the time. After heading out to one of the vistas on the ranch, a recent visitor from the East Coast remarked "I didn't know cars could do that!"

Surprisingly enough, that's what 4x4 trucks are meant to do: haul heavy cargo over rugged terrain. As opposed to, say, being prettily painted, cut down, and made to run on smooth-paved roads with performance tires.

P.S. I know the title's bad grammar. But hey.... We're talking about big, beefy trucks here. Grammar's got no place.

Foretaste

2007-08-15T11:07:00.002-04:00

Still haven't had time to get together all the pictures I want to blog about from my trip to the O RO Ranch - but they're coming, never fear. In the meantime, here's a little taste of what's to come: Monkey Town Canyon, from a distance.

St. Mary's Falls

2007-07-30T07:30:00.000-04:00

This weekend, David, Tracy and I took a backpacking trip to St. Mary's Falls, in St. Mary's Wilderness, off the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Appalachian Mountains. There was forecast of storms, and as we drove down the parkway, rain was falling, but we had borrowed the backpacks (we're buying the equipment incrementally, to try to keep costs down), we felt like we ought to use them since we had them. Pressing on was a good decision: not a drop fell on us.

It was Tracy's first time backpacking (though she'd camped before), and since David and I hadn't backpacked for three or four years, we decided to take it easy and do an overnight trip. We headed out Saturday afternoon, got the parking area about 5:00, and headed out in warm, sunny weather. It's a rugged trail - difficult in several places, with a pack on - mostly due to damage caused during the floods following Hurricane Katrina. It's not steep, though, and follows the bed of the stream all the way up to the falls, crossing and recrossing several times. And all along the way, there are small falls, many of them very pretty.

We reached the falls after about two and a quarter hours. It was getting late, the light was fast fading, and there was a couple playing in the water, so we continued on past the falls (following the advice we were given) to search for a campsite. The first one we happened upon had been taken by a couple that started just before us, so we pressed further upstream and found an even better spot at the top of some shallow falls, with a wide pool at their base. Though you can't see it in this picture, the site is above and to the left of the left-most fall. We hurriedly set up the tent, got the stove set up, started a fire in the fire pit, and ate our dinner (chicken fajitas with a chocolate mole sauce!). After washing everything up, we sat around fire for a bit and ate s'mores, before turning in.

Next morning, after a breakfast of pancakes beside the warmth of our rejuvenated fire, we set off to take photos of the prettiest of the falls that we had seen the evening before. I had my new neutral density filter with me, which is used in all but one of the pictures of falls shown here. It works great, but is far too dark (it transmits 0.1% of incoming light - that is, it makes things 1000x darker) for early-to-mid-morning light: the camera doesn't get enough light to let you frame the picture, focus, or use the auto-exposure - I ended up doing a lot of guess and check for exposures. Along the way back to the "main" falls, we happened upon this rattlesnake (which I was nearly on top of before actually seeing for what it was). He was sleepy and, though coiled, wasn't rattling or looking particularly aggressive, so I cautiously set up the tripod and took several pictures.

We spent probably half and hour at the falls, taking pictures - it was still too early for anyone else to be there - before heading back to eat a snack of fried eggs, wash up, and pack up to head out. Clouds rolled in, keeping things cool for our hike back to the car, which was nice, but still it didn't rain on us. We're looking forward to going back - and hopefully when the stream is higher and the falls more magnificent!

Falls

2007-07-25T09:19:00.000-04:00

The weather has been glorious for the past week, so Tracy and David and I drove up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and hiked down to White Rock Gap Falls.

Well, it's nice to put it that way. Actually, on Saturday, Tracy and I went by ourselves in search of the falls, didn't have a map, and completely missed them. We followed trails on the wrong side of the mountain, in fact. But on Sunday, we did have a map (makes a big difference) and the hike was pleasant, short, and easy. The trail actually passes above the falls before making a big loop around to come again to the base of the falls: there are some short (~30-50ft) cliffs bordering the falls that the trail circumnavigates, rather than descending over. If you're brave and careful, you should be able to easily make it down the cliffs and save time.

I bought a new tripod, since the one I had wasn't rigid enough to make me happy when using it. Quantaray, not terribly expensive, but rated for 11lbs, not heavy itself, and quite stable. I didn't have a neutral density filter when I took these pictures (I've one on the way, now), but it was dark enough that I could get nice long exposure times with the lens stopped down to f22 - some 15 seconds for the photo above and some 30 seconds for the photo at left.

We hope to go back sometime after there's been some actual rain. It's dry here, and the falls are low - just trickles, really. You'll be seeing those photos after it happens.

Beach Report

2007-07-25T09:10:00.000-04:00

I promised a post from my trip to the beach, so here it is. Sadly, there wasn't a lot to actually say about the trip to the beach. Nothing extraordinary happened (which can be viewed as a good thing, I suppose). It was a good week, but long - surprising for a vacation.

I took some photos, mostly of the sunrise at the beach and one sunset from the deck of one of our houses (an example of which is shown here). Sunrise/sunset photos have always eluded me, for some reason - I think there's something about the treatment of light during those conditions that I just don't understand. I tried, this time, to take each event at multiple exposure levels, with the idea of doing a by-hand high-dynamic-range composition. It seems unlikely that I'll actually allocate the time to do that (especially given the generally poor quality of the photos I took), but I at least have that option. Too often in the past I've thought "I wish I had multiple exposures for this!" and didn't, so this time I made sure of it.

Blink and It's Gone

2007-06-29T13:03:00.000-04:00

It's like that. You blink and a month has gone past. Incredible.

From my last post to the middle of June, I was busy writing a proposal for a recent set of DoD Small-Business Innovative Research (SBIR) solicitations. It was the first proposal I had spearheaded (I'd contributed to one before, but the level of involvement there was significantly less) and it was in an area outside of my usual stomping grounds. So there was a lot of work to be done there. I'm pleased with what we submitted, however: it has great potential to make a real, solid research contribution and is also practical for near-term application. I'll find out if it's funded in October (at which point I can even share more details!).

The week after that was a lot of scrambling on projects that had been shoved aside during the proposaling. I had my annual performance review (my first ever). I caught up on stuff around the house.

This past week, I've been slamming another project as hard as I can: it was funded a month and a week out from its due date, when we initially planned for a two-month effort. Furthermore, I've two weeks of vacation planned in that time slot, so I basically have 3 weeks to complete the effort. If you consider that I have 2 other projects, neither of which I can drop completely.... Bottom line: I was given 2 weeks to complete the bulk of the work; after that, I'm in a supervisory role, delegating tasks out to other people and doing minor tweaking on the product.

But: vacation. Next weekend (July 6th) I head to Litchfield Beach, SC for a week with my family. Expect pictures and news after I get back. Then, on August 4th, Tracy and I leave for the O RO Ranch for 10 days. Again, pictures and news will follow.

And I expect to post and such between now and then. But then again, I never expected to take a month break from posting.

New!

2007-05-28T07:39:00.000-04:00

The long hiatus doesn't actually mean cool stuff stopped happening. It actually means that I went from being generally bored at work (on account of having little to do) to being very, very busy. I am now on 3 projects plus spearheading a SBIR (Small-Business Innovative Research) proposal for the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense). It's been busy. Not that busy is bad - it's much, much better than sitting around bored.

I did, however, do cool stuff. For instance, I went to Little Washington (also known as Washington, VA, and the home of one of the best restaurants in the world) with my family and took some mediocre photos (example above). No, we didn't eat at the Inn. That was three weekends ago.I went kayaking a bunch two weekends ago with various people. That was fun and the weather was spectacular. And this past weekend, I built a new rack for my tandem kayak and modded and moved the rack my dad and I had built for the other boats. Check out the picture of my setup.

And I bought a helicopter. I'd been toying with the idea, voiced it on Friday, did some research with a friend of mine who flies helicopters (big little ones - on the order of several feet and able to lift several pounds) and discovered 1) they are far from simple to get set up and 2) they are quite expensive. 1 is because they're aimed at hobbyists and therefore come in as many pieces as is possible. The battery's separate from the cell balancer which is separate from the temperature probe/protection circuit which is separate from the charger; the servos and the receiver and the transmitter might be packaged together, but need not be, and anyhow each typically uses a special battery that needs a special charger; the chassis might or might not include main and tail rotor blades, the engine is separate.... You get the idea. Lots of pieces. Lots of money. Great once you have a setup, 'cause you can grow it a piece or two at a time. And great when you crash, 'cause you can easily replace whatever's broken. But daunting for someone who wants to start. And more expensive than if I bought another polyurethane boat.

So I bought a little one. A really little one. Like 8 oz. kind of really little. And it was much, much cheaper than the alternative (cost less than the transmitter I was looking at) and came in a box with everything I needed. And I'm really, really bad at flying it and have crashed a lot and, consequently, am really, really glad I got a cheap one. Oh - and this one has coaxial counter-rotating blades and hence is supposed to be easier to fly than a single-rotor heli with a tail rotor.

But it's fun. Lots of fun.

Oh Deer

2007-05-11T13:03:00.000-04:00

Kayaking Wednesday evening, Tracy and I paused next to a small island to try to take a picture of a rather shy bird. Just as we were about to turn and continue downstream, the deer that we had seen on the island leapt out from cover and jumped through the shallow water to shore. Since I already had my camera in my hands, I took as many pictures as I could, as fast as I could.

The settings weren't really right for action (the shutter speed was really too slow) and we were rather far away, but still, they came out better than I'd expected.

Hoooooome Improvement

2007-05-08T11:11:00.000-04:00

Home improvement projects always get stretched out, somehow. You think: oh, it won't take long to do X but when you sit down to actually do it, it takes sooo much longer.

On Sunday, we went to Lowe's to get a new bow saw. The idea was to work in the back yard (since it was sunny and cool) and clear out some of the underbrush. While we were there, I thought: we should pick up the new faucet for the kitchen sink I wanted and also get the new shower head for the bathroom. So we did. Then when we got home, I thought: it would be fun to go ahead and put the faucet in.

So it began.

The first bump was in getting the old faucet off. I didn't have any fixed wrenches, and the adjustable couldn't reach the nut that needed to come off. So I called a coworker who lives around the corner and borrowed his. With his wrenches we got the old faucet off.

Then we discovered that the brass nut that needed to go on the new faucet wasn't threaded. No kidding: the nut was smooth on the inside. So we took the faucet back to Lowe's and got a new one (along with a set of wrenches, so I wouldn't have to borrow in the future).

Then, after installing the new faucet, we discovered that the metal flex hoses that ran from the shutoff to the faucet leads weren't long enough. So David and I went back to Lowe's. And had to call Tracy and ask what the correct size was. She measured both apertures and said they were half-inch. We got the hoses, picked up the garbage disposal I wanted (since we were already under the sink, why not?), and returned home.

Then we discovered that the hose was too big on the bottom to screw onto the shutoff. So Tracy and David went back to Lowe's to get the 3/8 inch to 1/2 inch hose. I, in the meantime, took off the old disposal and removed its mount (since the mount differed from the mount for the new disposal).

When they returned, they discovered that the 3/8 inch wouldn't even fit over the shutoff. The 1/2 inch fit, but the nut part that screws on was too big. So Tracy and I went back to Lowe's while David stayed at home (in case we needed to call and ask for measurements). We discovered that there are different kinds of 1/2 inch connectors; we needed the OD to FIP hose. We got those and returned home. Oh - and Lowe's was closing as we left.

The new hoses fit; our troubles seemed to be over. While Tracy completed the install of the faucet (she basically did the whole job herself - she's awesome), I finished installing the new mount for the new disposal. The new faucet is quite nice: has a built-in sprayer head (which was why I got it) and looks really slick. The picture's a bit dark, but you get the idea.

Once I finished installing the mount for the disposal, wired it up, and tested to make sure the wiring was correct, I lifted it into place. Or tried to. It wouldn't fit. I thought I would die. It had never occurred to me to measure under the sink and ensure that the unit would actually fit there: I'd just assumed that it would (even though it was vastly larger than the previous unit).

At this point, it was 9:00, dinner was ready (I'd been making it in parallel with all the other work), and we were all exhausted. We ate, decided to call it a night, and went to bed. I kid you not: I dreamt of garbage disposals for most of the night.

In the morning, I decided to take another look at it - just to see if maybe I'd missed something in being so tired the night before. Turned out I had: it was the handle for the shutoff for the hot water that was in the way. Reversing the handle allowed it to fit, after I routed the drain pipe to the side (rather than down). Tracy came in time to see me sit the thing on the mount - we were all pleased it would work after all (I was sooo not looking forward to removing the new mount and reinstalling the old one).

In order to get it plumbed, I had to go to Lowe's (again) and buy another angle connector, but this time, I had a good enough idea of what I needed that I only had to make one trip. Bought a hacksaw, so I could cut some of the pipe to the right size, and then plumbed the thing. It's much, much more solid than the plumbing for the old unit (which would vibrate the pipes loose, dumping water under my sink about once a month). Here's a picture of the finished install.

The really great thing is that, while the old unit was noisy and relatively ineffective, this one not only does a great job grinding up food, it's so quiet you can barely hear it over the running water. And the motor and grinding chamber is isolated from the housing and mount by rubber bushings, so it effectively doesn't cause any vibrations at all. Really slick. It's InSinkErator's Evolution Excel, in case you're curious.

The moral of this story (for those who like finding morals) is: when in doubt, buy everything. Lowe's has a great return policy: they take the item and give you your money back. Would have saved a great many trips had we just bought all of the possible hoses and taken them back next time we went to the store.

The National Cathedral Flower Show

2007-05-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

It's a yearly tradition for my family to head up to DC to the National Cathedral for its annual flower show. So Tracy, mom, dad, my aunt, my parents' two Bichons Frises, and I drove up on Friday after the traffic had died down (mostly) - David had to work that day.

One of the neatest things about the show, in my mind, is that the Cathedral is used in much the same way that cathedrals were used in the middle ages: as meeting places and fairgrounds. The smells are amazing: all kinds of fair food is there (funnel cakes, hot dogs, fried portabella mushrooms), and cinnamon almonds (which smell much better than they taste). People pack into the roads around the Cathedral, booths are set up all over the place, there's selling, buying, eating, singing, people watching people, ... It's grand. Mom and Dad look at one such booth in this picture; Ravel peeks around a stroller.

The dogs were a big hit again this year, too, which makes it all the more fun (for some reason). There were fewer people than last year (since it was a Friday - last year we went on Saturday), but even so, we got several requests by kids to pet the dogs. All the smells drive the dogs crazy: they nose all over the ground, at the air, at the booths, trying to figure out where the food is. In all, they're very well behaved - but they are funny to watch. Especially since they're so energetic. Here's a picture of Tracy holding Rousell, in front of the west door. Tracy's posing - Rousell was far too busy.

After lunch, Tracy and I decided to do the tower climb. Dad and I did it last year and enjoyed it; mom's far too afraid of heights to be interested in attempting it. The tour starts in the crypt and mounts about halfway up the crossing tower, the the change-ringing chamber. From the crypt to the change-ringing chamber is 330-odd steps - and we climbed them all. It's not so bad, really: you get to take a couple of breaks along the way. And it wasn't hot at all, so that made it all the easier. They certainly do discourage older people from attempting the climb, however. It also gets claustrophobic in the first part of the climb: starting from the crypt, we ascended a spiral staircase in the wall next to the south door, all the way to the gallery above the south door. From there, we crossed over top of the southern part of the transept to the base of the tower atop the transept crossing. That first stage of the tower is just a big, empty room, necessary to lift the first open chamber (that is, chamber with open arches to the outside, so sound can get out) over the level of the roofs atop the nave, transept, and choir.

After mounting a rather dizzying set of spiral stairs that climb about a story and a half, we found ourselves in the first part of the crossing tower you can see from the ground. This chamber holds the Cathedral's carillon. Last year, someone was playing a recital on the carillon while we were standing next to it; this year, it was silent, which was a pleasant change: even when you have your fingers stuffed in your ears, it's still really, really loud.

From that chamber, we mounted to a level called the "Change-Ringing Chamber." This chamber, which has windows (and air conditioning) contains the ropes for the Cathedral bells. There are ten bells in all; the National Change Ringers ring the bells after service each Sunday and for special occasions. There's also space for the ringers to hang out, eat, study, etc. And they get to take the elevator up; they don't have to climb all 330-odd steps just to play the bells. I've a picture of that room, but forgot to post it. Look for it later today.

From the change-ringing chamber, we descended the same two sets of spiral stairs we'd ascended, and then walked across the north side of the transept vaults to the gallery above the north door. We climbed down the stairs inside the walls (as we'd ascended on the the south side); this time, rather than taking the stairs all the way to the crypt level, we stopped first on the catwalk above the balcony and then on the balcony above the south door. I've always wanted to follow the catwalk all the way around the nave (and transept and choir), but they don't let us do that. You can almost see in the picture: there's not much railing there. They're likely afraid they'd get sued.

A Case of the Nerves

2007-04-30T12:00:00.000-04:00

This morning I went to dump some pictures I'd taken over the weekend into Aperture. While the software was starting up, it popped up a dialog and asked me if I wanted to rebuild my projects. Having never seen this before (and since I don't like to let software do things with important files unless I know what's going on), I told it to wait and do it later. But when Aperture opened, all of my projects were red and clicking on one of them yielded a dialog warning me that the project would be recovered.

At that point, I sort of panicked, quit Aperture, and rebooted my machine. Recovered? From what? They all worked fine last time I used the software! Once the machine rebooted, I started duplicating Aperture's photo library: before it starts making changes to my photo library, I want to make sure I can at least get back to where I am at the moment! Since the library's currently 36GB, I had to leave for work before it finished.

In parallel, I ordered a 500GB My Book external hard disk from Western Digital (not my first choice in hard disk drives, but my favorite online store didn't seem to have any Hitachi drives in external enclosures). It's been a looong time since I backed up my Aperture photo library - and this morning's oddness has given me a case of the nerves. Since the disk in that machine hosting my library is only 250GB, the external will have more than ample space to back everything up. It'll also give me something to host Apple's Time Machine whenever Leopard comes out (and I get around to having a machine that can run it - at the moment, I've a Dell Dimension running Tiger; a "Hackintosh").

At any rate, firing up Aperture after lunch did reveal that it had somehow forgotten about all of my projects. But it was able to rediscover them in the library, apparently without any loss. I'll check it over more carefully later, to be sure, before discarding the backup - but it's nice to think I didn't lose anything.

Containers!

2007-04-29T08:23:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, David and I went over to a nursery close to our house and bought a bunch of plants. For a couple of years now, I've really wanted to put together some attractive containers. Last year, I managed to let the spring slip by without doing anything about it (possibly because I was looking for jobs at that time). But this year, we actually got the stuff, and I planted several this afternoon.

The centerpiece is a mixture of spike, coleus, marigold, sweet potato vine, and basket grass. I've had the pot they're in for over a year, but it's been empty until now. It needs full sun (actually, they all do) which should be okay once I get some of the trees in the back yard removed (I have an estimate scheduled on Tuesday).

The other containers are simpler (with fewer plants) and basically hold the leftovers from my trip to the nursery. I went with a list, but it's somewhat overwhelming to stare at tables covered with little plants and then try to imagine four or five of them sitting together in a container. Especially since the ones you plan to put together are all on opposite sides of the place! This container has coleus for height and focal point, verbena to fill up the middle, and licorice as a trailer.

The biggest "mistake" that I made was to get lots of single plants, rather than four packs. In my big container, that worked out okay; for the others, it meant that I could only put a few plants together. Two of my coleus were quite large. In this container, I set a large, mostly-green coleus against the purple/white/green of basket grass.

Not Quite There, Still

2007-04-28T20:44:00.000-04:00

My prints came from WHCC on Friday, as expected, and I redid the picture I posted earlier. In addition, I did the one shown at right. Neither of them came out as I hoped, though. The rotary trimmer I'd picked up at Staples proved not to be accurate enough for my purposes: there was too much play in the cutter head to ensure an absolutely straight cut. Which was really frustrating (but at least I could return it for a full refund). My measurements were also too imprecise to achieve the near-perfection I'd hoped for - they were also inaccurate. I failed to realize until after I was done cutting that a) the picture was bigger than the matte and b) the matte was not cut so that the same amount of space was on each side of each opening.

It then occurred to me that framers deal with these kinds of cuts all the time: when they cut mattes. Not only that, their cuts are extremely precise and extremely straight. So I looked online to see how expensive matte cutters are. I found this one, which looked pretty good - but it's $229. That's a lot of money - especially since, after making the cuts, I'd still have to put it in a frame. And that's one of the cheaper ones. The professional ones that frame shops use seem to cost in the $1,000 - $2,000 range (largely because they're huge, so they can handle really big mattes). If I knew it would do what I wanted and if I thought I'd use it a lot, I'd invest in it.... But knowing nothing, I'm quite reluctant.

So I visited a local frame shop and talked to the people there. I took along my pictures (the one in this post and the one in the previous post) and explained what I wanted to do. They wouldn't let me use their matte cutter (not a big surprise) but they did say that they could mount my picture on a matte (something that I don't know how to do correctly, anyway) and make the cut for $8.50 (for an 11x14). I nodded and said that it would take a lot of those for me to justify the cost of a matte cutter.

Not only that, but the cost to have them then finish the job (actually frame it up) would total $23 + the cost of the frame (which would depend one what I wanted). Clearly, it's more lucrative for me to have them do the work than worry about it myself.

But the best part of the trip was when the guy at the frame shop said he really liked the effect and that he'd never seen anything like it before. Means I may have hit on something original. That would be awesome.

Not Too Shabby

2007-04-26T11:31:00.000-04:00

Well, the aphids must not have done too much damage: my irises bloomed (before I got around to doing anything about the pests) and they look lovely. None of the non-purples irises I got from a friend last fall bloomed this year - hopefully next year they will. Some of the purple ones I moved the year before did bloom, however, so I'm fairly confident the transplants will bloom.

And in this picture, my lens was razor sharp. No cleaning or anything in the meantime - and no tripod for this picture. Just f6.3 and a high shutter speed. I suppose I was seeing quantum/saturation effects from the long exposure time and/or vibration even through the tripod. Since my lens's IS doesn't have a tripod-sensing mode, I turn it off on the tripod (as recommended). Perhaps I should leave it on, anyway, and see what happens.

Picture in Picture

2007-04-25T15:51:00.000-04:00

Got a new set of prints back from WHCC yesterday, amongst which was the base print for the framed bit of art you see here. The frame is a double matte with about 1/4 of an inch (in depth) between the outer and inner matte. Over the outer matte, I have the "border" of the picture in the center of frame - but in black and white. Thus transforming the otherwise rather uninteresting outer matte (which is quite large, as you can see) into a muted continuation of the subject of the photo.

I think it's quite a clever idea and plan to build a small, 5-10 piece show around the idea, to be displayed at a local shop. In figuring out the technique (and equipment) needed to precisely cut the middle out of the border, I made a serious mistake (cut too far on the bottom right), so this is merely a prototype. I've got another print of the photo on the way, along with a different photo, set up in the same style. Those prints should arrive on Friday - I'll post my results when I have them.

Avoiding VPNs with SSH and Curl

2007-04-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

All of the VPN clients I've used have an annoying habit of rebuilding my routing tables so that all traffic passes through the VPN, as opposed to target-network-specific traffic (by which I mean traffic destined for the network to which I've established the VPN connection). This can of course be fixed by manually rebuilding routing tables after the VPN connection is established: the default route (through the VPN) is reset to the gateway previously serving default traffic; usually, VPN clients add a specific route for the target network anyway, so no further change is needed.

But there is a good reason VPN clients route all traffic through the VPN. Frequently, the target network has permissions to access stuff out on the web that your host network might not. For instance, universities and libraries often maintain IP-pool-based subscriptions to online digital libraries. So, sitting on the university network, you can access material on the ACM or IEEE website; at home, you cannot. Since all traffic goes through the VPN, when you have established a connection to the university, you can access those materials.

Of course, that slows down all of your Internet browsing, since all requests and replies must pass through the VPN. Futhermore, it means that all of your data is passing through the target network - something you may not want, for privacy reasons. Hence the routing-table fix mentioned above.

So here's a way to get around all that. It assumes you have an account on machine in the target network, that said machine is accessible from the Internet, and that said machine runs SSH and has curl installed. Similarly to using SSH to move things, you can use SSH to fetch Internet resources that from within the target network, sans VPN.

ssh -l name host "curl address" > local_file

will do the trick. "name" is your account name on the machine "host," and "address" is the URL of the resource you want to access from within the target network; "local_file" is the name of the file on your local machine in which the fetched resource will be saved.

Not only does this let you grab things as if you were within the target network avoiding the time-consuming VPN connect/disconnect, it does so without placing any temporary files on the remote machine "host." And, since curl prints its status information to STDERR, you get to see your download's progress, even as curl saves the file to your local disk.

Lunch Niche

2007-04-24T09:48:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend, Matt L. and John B. built our picnic table! It looks great - even better up close, in person, than in the photo. They really paid a lot of attention to detail. Each of the boards has been sanded so there are no sharp corners.... It's great. Can't wait to try it out!

Quite an Adventure

2007-04-23T09:44:00.000-04:00

The success of our trip on Saturday (no - you didn't miss something; I didn't write about it) convinced Tracy and me that we needed to take David with us on Sunday and do it again; since he was working Saturday, he couldn't come along. So after church and grocery shopping, we made up a nice picnic (potato salad, cole slaw, and stuff for sandwiches), got everything together, and hit the river.

Well, that's what I'd like to say. The reality is somewhat less glamorous (and less direct). First, we had to spend nearly an hour and a half working out the cars and such: drop off the boats, drive (in two cars) to the take-out point, drop off my car, drive back to the boats. In midday traffic on a weekend - and a particularly lovely weekend - that takes a loooong time. Then we had to carry everything from Tracy's car to the boats (which I'd locked to the guardrail alongside the gravel road), carry the boats to the water, and grease up (so we wouldn't turn into cooked lobsters).

And then we hit the water. We put in just after the dam (that creates the reservoir on which we usually paddle). There was a rapid right alongside where we put in, which makes for an exciting start to the trip. You can see the rapid and the dam in the first photo, above; those rocks at the right of the rapid actually mark where we put in. In the second photo, David waits amongst the rocks for us to get into our boat (and me to stop taking photos!). That was by no means the last rapid for us, that day: the photo at right shows another of the roughly 10 we had to navigate.

The real adventure came right about the middle of the trip. Tracy and I were in a rapid and thought we could maneuver around a large rock in front of us. We paddled hard to the left, and the boat obligingly turned to the left.... And side-slipped directly onto the rock we were attempting to avoid. At which point water poured over the upstream side of the boat (port) and the boat listed hard to port. And filled with water. And became quite firmly wedged. So we had to climb out of the boat, into the icy, fast-moving water, and try to figure out how to dislodge the boat. It took both of us lifting/sliding the back end off the rocks before the water finally did the rest of the work and floated the boat downstream. In the meantime, my camera (in its box) had floated out and sailed down the rapid, as had my water bottle, Tracy's water bottle, her shoes, and some of the food for our picnic (the bread and the chips).

And now that the boat was free, we had another problem: it was at the bottom of the rapid, and we were in the middle of it. We walked down the rapid as hurriedly as we could, but it's hard in icy, deep, fast-moving water to move quickly! Fortunately, David was able to not only rescue all of our gear (save Tracy's water bottle, which was small and easily missed) but also corral our boat (after it had rolled over) on a beach. Tracy and I were so far from where the boat ended up that we had to walk (in my case) and swim (in hers) to shore and then run along the top of the riverbank, down to where the boat ended up. Save for that one loss (we never found the bottle), the incident was without lasting harm. We drained the boat, verified that the chips and bread weren't waterlogged, and continued along our way, looking for a place to eat: an incident like that is not only tiring, it makes you hungry!

Not far from our near-disaster, we found a likely spot and pulled the boats up on a sandy beach. The picture at left and below were taken on that beach. Our food was still cold, and since the bread and chips were still dry, we had a regular feast. As cold as we all were (David had had to get out of his boat to help me drain the tandem), it was pleasant to sit in the sun.

We brought blankets, too, so we spread those on the soft sand and stretched out and dozed for a while - probably an hour, at least. That was really nice, and well earned (I think), after the work we'd done recovering the boat. A group of canoers passed, in that time, but otherwise it was completely peaceful: the sun, the breeze, the water, and the birds - not even many insects, since it's still so early in the year.

From there, the trip was basically uneventful - which was nice - save for a little water taken in on nearly every rapid we went over. The tandem is nice and handles well, and even claims it can go in Class 2 whitewater, but it's definitely not designed to keep its occupants dry in whitewater! The sides are so low that it's quite easy for water to spill into the boat. It's also quite difficult to maneuver in whitewater - but that could be a reflection on the skill of its occupants.

We did see a couple of interesting trees on the way to the takeout point. The first, above, is one of many trees growing along the riverbank that have had their roots exposed by the erosion of the bank. That one was the most fantastic, I thought; I'd seen it on Saturday and was glad to have my camera with me to get several pictures of it. In the larger version (linked from the picture), you can see that the base of the trunk is elevated above the ground: I could probably crawl under that tree. The second, at right, is a tree root (but for what tree, I never saw) that has defined a stream-bed feeding into the river. The water falls along the root and follows its curve into the river - very interesting.

Oh - I suppose there was one more adventure: right before we reached the takeout point, in the last rapid, one of my shoes (which I'd foolishly set on top of the back of the boat - not tied down) fell off. It was only after we'd pulled up onto shore that Tracy noticed it was gone. I had to jump in David's boat and paddle as fast as I could to catch it - at the bottom of the next rapid. And then, I had to climb said rapid to return to the takeout point. Which I had just enough energy left to manage.

Quite an adventure.

A Box for my Camera

2007-04-23T08:28:00.000-04:00

You've probably noticed that I've not posted any pictures from kayaking trips, recently. That's because, the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of having my kit in the boat with me, unprotected. And since we've been on rivers lately, rather than small, sheltered lakes, I've really not wanted to risk damage to it.

So I bought a box for my camera: a Pelican 1450, as I mentioned in this post. It came on Saturday, while Tracy and I were out on the Rivana River. It's shown, to the right, with my camera and flash snugly encased in foam; the big open spot there is for the EF 70-200 f2.8L IS USM (that I don't own yet). It's pretty massive and very, very solid feeling. I figure with all that foam around the camera, I could drop it off my deck and not have to worry about something getting broken. But I'm not going to test that theory - no sense in pushing my luck. It does float, however, which is a Very Good Thing™: means that if it falls overboard, it'll float on down the river, rather than sinking to the bottom (which would be a Very Bad Thing™).

Especially nice - and unexpected - is that I can leave the lens on the camera, in the box (as you can see in the picture). When I was working out the dimensions in Visio, I thought I was going to have to keep all the components separate. As I discovered while using the camera, yesterday (post to come, soon), it's really nice to be able to open the box and pull the camera right out, ready to shoot.

Aphids and Lens Clarity

2007-04-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

The weather finally decided to clear off last night, and this morning the sun was out. A pleasant change after the past week of gloom! So I grabbed my camera and wandered out to the iris bed around my mailbox. They've not opened yet (but they're budding) and in the morning light they look quite lovely. So I set up the tripod and snapped a few pictures.

Only to discover two things. First, that I have aphids on my irises! You can see them pretty clearly in the picture to the right (if you click on it and look at the full-size image in my gallery). I'll have to either find some ladybugs to drop on that bed or get a reasonable insecticide to kill them off. Don't like using insecticides much, but somehow it seems much simpler than dealing with ladybugs (mom got some a few years back - they were a pain to "deploy"). They're kinda cool looking bugs (aphids) but I don't want them on my plants!

Second, that none of my pictures came out sharp. I rather expected that, on a tripod and on a calm day, with a shutter speed of 125 and an aperture of f8, using a remote switch, my pictures would be sharp. But they weren't. You can see the lack of sharpness if you click on the picture above. (The picture to the left is scaled down more from its original size, so it's harder to see the lack of sharpness.) But the one above looks like it's out of focus - but with the enhanced depth of field in shooting at f8, any mistake in focus acquisition should have been compensated. And I look several (and made the camera refocus several times). One at least should have hit!

I've noticed similar, recently, when shooting with the lens stopped down to f22. But that was a picture of a tree, taken at some distance from the subject. I thought it odd but when I opened the lens up to f9, sharpness returned. Wide open the lens is quite sharp, and usually sharpness and aperture increase directly: the more stopped down the lens is, the sharper is it. At least, that's what I remember reading. I should also mention that when I first got the lens, I was blown away by its sharpness. It's a Canon EF 24-105 F4L IS USM - a very high-quality lens.

The lens doesn't seems dirty, either. But I plan to remove the filter and shoot something at various f-stops and various shutter speeds to see if perhaps it is interference from the filter. It's a high-quality filter.... Really shouldn't be reducing the sharpness of the lens. I'll report on that when I have results.

An Excellent Article

2007-04-19T10:13:00.000-04:00

Time Magazine today has this article in response to the shootings at Va Tech. I post it here partly because it's a thought-provoking reflection on the probable mental makeup of a mass killer but mostly because, in many places, it's exceedingly well-written.

As to any comments on the shootings themselves, I will continue to observe my self-imposed silence. There is already far too much analysis being thrown about. I will say this though: hindsight is always 20/20 vision.

A More Successful Trip

2007-04-18T09:27:00.000-04:00

David, Tracy and I went on a much more successful kayaking trip last night. We dropped Tracy's car off at the takeout point and put in at the same place as our previous trip, but this time headed downstream rather than upstream. David had a box for his phone (which survived being thoroughly soaked!), wallet and keys, we had extra towels and clothes in dry bags, and all wore our life jackets. As such, there were no incidents: it was a nice, calm paddle, and nice that it could be a one-way trip.

Ironically, the reason we'd not been wearing our life jackets was because we assumed they'd be uncomfortable. I mean, I spent good money on them, tried them on in the store, and they were fairly comfortable. But having had those horrible orange things they make you wear at lake parks when I was a kid, I maintained this image of life jackets as, well, horrible orange things. These, once seated and comfortable in the boat, were barely noticeable. They certainly didn't interfere with movement nor put unpleasant pressure anywhere. And it was nice to know that if someone flipped, they'd have something to buoy them until they got their wits about them. So we'll keep wearing them - which is nice, really. Saves room in the boats for gear, since we don't have to stow the jackets.

I also ordered a box for my camera, yesterday, a Pelican 1450 case with pick-n-pluck foam. Laid out all the bits of my camera kit in Visio (dreadful tool - MS should be shot for what they did to it) and ensured that there'd be an inch of foam between each piece and the sides of the case. Even left enough room for the lens I want (but don't have): the EF 70-200 F2.8L IS USM. Looked at smaller boxes, but those weren't deep enough, or had so much extra space that I didn't gain anything by not allocating space for the lens I don't have. So now I have planned growth potential. Once the box comes, I'll be able to haul the camera around with me and not worry about it getting damaged. The only downside is that it's not exactly going to be fast access.... But good protection seemed better than fast access. And I'm not really sure how I'd have managed both, anyway.

Never Quite the Right Tool

2007-04-17T08:51:00.000-04:00

I not only work in a cross-platform environment (though barely); I'm a cross-platform computer user. Not really by choice, mind you: if I ruled the world, we'd all be using Macs (in spite of the great respect I have for Linux). But I don't rule the world and we don't all use Macs and at work I have a PC and not a Mac.

The good thing about this, I suppose, is that it's driven me to discover new and (often) nicer ways of doing things. Well, not nicer, I suppose, 'cause the software I used on the Mac was really, really nice. But better for not only cross platform use, but also multi-computer use. Since my work machine is at work, when I want to work at home, I'd either have to VPN to work and get my files, or mail them ahead before leaving. Or use web-based services and just know that everything's accessible everywhere. Which is what I do.

But the web-based services require a web browser for access. And that means that most of my work is actually being done in my browser, rather than elsewhere. Which makes my browser about the most important tool I use, outside of the work-specific tools I have on my work machine. And that means that I want a really awesome browser.

Here's the problem: my favorite browser in the world, OmniWeb, only runs on a Mac. Moreover, while it's a truly amazing browser (for many reasons too subtle to talk about - you'd have to use it and experience the niceness), and while it passes the ACID2 test, it doesn't support all of the scripting features that Google uses for its services. Sure, the Google services all work in OmniWeb, but you lose the rich-text-like editing capability. Which means you have to type the HTML out by hand. Which is slow and irritating, though not show stopping.

So I use Firefox at work. And now at home, too, often, since it plays so much more nicely with the Google services. And Firefox is a great browser - it even has a better ad blocker than OmniWeb.

It would be really nice if the two could somehow be married. Probably, since Firefox is open source and has such a flexible API, it'd be easier to merge the subtle nice things from OmniWeb into Firefox. But in the meantime, I'm stuck with two tools for the same job, both of which had nice points, and neither of which actually fits quite right.

A Cold and Wet Revision

2007-04-15T08:08:00.000-04:00

It appears I need to revise Aiello's Gear-Uselessness Principle.

On Friday, David, Tracy and I met David at Barrack's Road Shopping Center so we could get a jump-start on kayaking that evening. Since we were out that way, we decided to hit the upper part of the Rivanna River rather than one of the lake parks.

We put in at Reas Ford Road, and paddled upriver, planning to return to the car with the current. It was a gorgeous evening - I wished I had my camera, but the river was high and I wasn't able to find a hard box for my camera. All the BRMS had were small hard boxes: big enough for a couple of cell phones and a wallet and keys, but not for a camera as large as mine. I'd gotten one of the small boxes, anyhow, along with a bilge pump and a signal mirror before meeting David. So Tracy and I put our phones in the box, along with my wallet and keys. Mostly for fun, since I'd just bought the box.

But back to the beauty. That part of the river is really lovely. Nothing built up along the banks, just a couple of large homes, but those are pretty high up from the water and well shielded by trees. The river was running pretty fast, but not so fast that it was unpleasant to paddle upstream.

Just before we turned around, we happened upon a couple of rapids. Not "OMG look at those huge, roaring rapids," but some pretty fast-moving water. We decided to climb them before we turned around, 'cause we figured it'd be pretty much fun to paddle back down them.

We got up the first one with no difficulty, caught our breath, and started up the next one. Tracy and I, in the tandem, were in front; David was coming along behind us.

Then we heard this big splash, and David calling for help. His boat had turned sideways to the water (his boat is fairly keeled - great for tracking, not great for fighting rapids: too much leverage for the water) and gotten pushed over. So he was in the water, clinging to his boat like a rat to a piece of driftwood as the current carried his boat back down the rapid.

We turned our boat around as fast as we could and paddled over to him. I threw him the dry bag that had our towels, a sweatshirt, and a spare jacket so he could hold that to float, rather than the boat ('cause it's hard to get a good grip on wet plastic). Then I tossed him a life jacket so he could shrug into it, just to be on the safe side (no, we weren't wearing them). But about that point, it was shallow enough again that he could get his feet under him, so neither proved necessary. Note that that lack of necessity translated into forgetfulness: as soon as he stood up, he rather let them float on down the river in the current.

But we let them go, and focused on getting David's boat dry so we could get him back into it. I fiddled with the bilge pump a bit: it moves a lot of water (about as much as a garden hose, I'd say) but quickly decided it wasn't going to move the water fast enough to be of much use; not with the shore so close, anyhow. So Tracy and I removed our shoes and socks, rolled up our jeans, and dragged his boat into shallower water where we could manage to roll it and start draining it. Didn't take too long; much more efficient than trying to pump the boat dry: that boat only has a rear bulkhead, so when it takes in water, it takes in a lot of water.

Now would probably be a good time to mention that it was only around 50º F outside at the time. And the water was glacially cold (not literally, of course, but boy did it feel like it!). It was also about this time that David realized his (brand new) cell phone was in his pants pocket. Instant regret for not having purchased two hard boxes when I was at BRMS!

Up on shore, I had David strip off his two wet shirts and rub his chest a bit while I rubbed his back (remember that I'd thrown the dry bad with the towels and extra shirts and it was now floating down the river!) to try to get him a little warmer and dryer. I took off my outermost shirt, a long-sleeve knit, and Tracy took off the jacket she was wearing so David could have those. Nothing could be done about his soaked jeans or shoes, but at least his chest would be warm that way.

He'd also (naturally) let go of his paddle when his boat flipped, so when we got back into the boats (that water was soooo cold for bare feet!) we pulled out the spare paddle and gave it to him. Then we chased back down the river to get the gear.

Fortunately, the gear hadn't gone far. Also fortunately, the dry bag had done what it was supposed to and kept the towels and spare clothes dry, despite being dunked in the water and floated down the river. We tossed one of the towels to David, so he could take off his soaked shoes and socks and dry his feet, and used the other to dry off our feet so we could put our socks and shoes back on. That made things much for comfortable for us, at least, but since David didn't have extra socks or shoes, I doubt it was a huge improvement for him.

We fished out his paddle, took the spare back from him, and continued back to the car. With the current in our favor, we made good time. We got the boats out and back on the car without further incident - which was good: we'd all had about enough of adventure for one evening!

But back to the title of the post. A lot of our gear actually did come in handy. We needed the spare paddle, so David could control his boat (and we could both paddle ours). We needed the towels to dry off. We needed the spare clothing, so none of us would get wet. We didn't actually use the bilge pump, but I was still comforted knowing it was there: had he flipped somewhere else, we might have had to use it, since I doubt we could have pulled his boat onto the front of ours to drain it (though I plan to practice that and other recovery techniques once it warms up a bit).

Perhaps the reason the Principle failed to hold on Friday was because the relative badness of the outcome was so high. I mean, David got cold. And so did we, though it was nothing in comparison. And perhaps my lack of forethought in throwing away the towels and spare clothes as a floatation device had something to do with it.

Or perhaps it was the badness of soaking his phone (so much so that the external display was waterlogged, with a nice air bubble on top of it, making it rather like a level) due to a missing hard box.

Whatever it was, we needed most of our gear this time around! And I think we learned quite a bit from the experience. For instance, I learned that I need to think a bit more carefully before throwing things for floatation. I mean, sure, in a life-or-death situation, it's better to throw away your towels than let someone drown. But he wasn't in that dire of straights at the time, and I certainly could have taken the extra 10 seconds to dig grab the life jacket instead. It would also have been better had the dry bag been tied to our boat. It's got a D-ring for that purpose - I should really put it to use.

And having done this once, I want to practice it several times (in warmer weather) so that next time a boat flips, we'll be more efficient and skilled at recovering the boat. We spent far to long floundering about in the water trying different things, before actually making progress in draining his boat and getting out of the water. Had the water truly been cold - like near-freezing kind of cold - David would have been in trouble by then. Not that I plan on us being in water that cold, but preparation, as this incident demonstrated, is a Good Thing™.

Aiello's Gear-Uselessness Principle

2007-04-13T09:43:00.000-04:00

If you're not familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it can be summarized thus: looking at something, to figure out where it is, makes it go faster; measuring the speed of something doesn't tell you where it is. Thus you can never know both where something is and how fast it is moving with infinite precision and accuracy.

Gear behaves in a startlingly similar way. If you take a piece of equipment with you, you effectively guarantee that it will not be needed - and therefore will be useless to you. If you don't take it with you, you are sure to arrive in a situation in which it will be helpful (if not necessary). Something about the inclusion/exclusion of the piece of equipment alters its necessity, just as observing something alters its speed.

I hereby name this "Aiello's Gear-Uselessness Principle" under the (unresearched) claim that I am the first to postulate it thus.

Here's an example. Yesterday, Tracy and I took the tandem up Ivy Creek (David decided he didn't want to go along). It had rained the day before, so we were confident we'd get further up the creek than previously. I also decided that, since the water was going to be high and flowing faster, there was a better-than-average chance of mishap (i.e., flipping the boat), so I opted not to take my camera (I've still not gotten a dry case for it, and my dry bags very clearly state that they are not dry enough to entrust precision electronic devices to their seals). And it was cloudy when we left, so I figured I'd not have much light for it, anyway.

Of course, when we got there, there were no clouds. It was sunny, windy, and basically gloriously beautiful. The redbuds and dogwoods were blooming along the banks of the creek. We followed a tributary a ways that, normally, isn't navigable in our boats - it was especially pretty. And then, on the way back (we got further up the creek than previously, but several fallen trees blocked us, and we didn't feel like carrying the boat past them), we saw a beaver.

Now, seeing beavers isn't terribly unusual. What was unusual is that this one let us pass within four feet of him, while he chewed on a stick and watched us. It was incredible: they're generally very skittish. I don't think I've been closer than 20 feet or so from them.

And I didn't have my camera. It was dark then, and my lens isn't terrible fast (f4), but still. I could have cranked the ISO speed and taken them in. Ah well. Perhaps next time.

Of course, next time, the gear-uselessness principle will kick in again, and there won't be anything worth shooting.

Negative Ten Kay?

2007-04-12T12:19:00.000-04:00

So I have a Java version of the game Bejeweled on my cell phone. It's entertaining, so I play it whenever I have a handful of minutes of nothing else going on and when I'd rather not be thinking too hard. Searching for matches on a grid of gems is a great way to derail my train(s) of thought. It's especially nice because my phone will suspend the JVM when you close the lid (it's a flip phone), allowing the game to be resumed at a later point.

I've scored pretty high on the game, and with Tracy playing whenever I let her, we've managed to rack up some impressive scores. I got 31k on an untimed game, before running out of moves. She scored some 48k on a timed game that I took over, pushing that score to some 55k before running out of time.

So, having scored some 52k, what do you think I saw when I fired up a fresh game of Bejeweled this morning?

If you guessed -10k, then you're right on! Props for figuring out my weird title.

"Okay, so how in the world did 52k become -10k?" you ask.

Actually, it's pretty simple. The largest number you can store in 16 bits is 65535 - that's 2^16 - 1. If you want negative numbers, you have to halve that, and get 32767. To be precise, in 16 bits, you can store [-32768, 32767]. All well and good.

The trick is, in 2s-complement arithmetic (which is what the adders in modern microprocessors use), if you have the largest positive number and add one to it, instead of the data value saturating, it wraps around. So 32767 + 1 = -32768, not 32768. Convenient at the logic level; horrible in terms of intuitive results.

So what's a programmer to do? Well, you can use a larger integer - say, a 32-bit integer, rather than a 16-bit integer. That raises the maximum signed value from 32767 to some 2 billion: 2147483647. So why didn't they do that? Well, likely the phone doesn't have support for 32-bit integers: it may very well be a 16-bit machine. So instead they should have used unsigned numbers, thus making the max score 65535, and checked for overflow on every addition, saturating the score to 65535. And probably ending the game with a big banner saying: "You win because we were too lazy to emulate 32-bit arithmetic in software on this platform!"

But here's the real gripe. In the game, I saw that my score was topping 50k. Clearly, at that point, they were using the unsigned (non-negative) 16-bit number - the one that would let them store values up to 65535. Now why on earth would they write that number out (or read it back in) as a 16-bit signed number? What kind of moron does that? And what kind of complete idiot writes a game in which it is so easy to score over 35k and doesn't consider whether or not the storage he's allocated for the score is adequate? Obviously the type of moron who's writing cell-phone games for a living.

Ridiculous.

"Type theory. Do you have it? Can I have it? Reward!"

A Sucker for Melted Cheese

2007-04-12T12:04:00.000-04:00

It's just not fair. Today, for lunch, I have marinated tofu, rice, and peanut satay sauce. It's good stuff. I made it myself (the sauce and the marinade and the rice, not the actual tofu). And I was all in the mood for Asian food (convenient, since that's my lunch. But it's all over. I walked into the kitchen to get some water for my tea and smelled melted cheese cooking in the toaster oven. On someone's pizza.

Now, pizza's just not that good. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not good. But that's not the point. The point is, I'm a sucker for melted cheese. Doesn't matter what I have in mind to eat, the smell of melted cheese will change my taste-mood.

So I'm delaying my lunch and hoping my taste buds will realign. Thinking peanut-satayey thoughts.

Darn coworkers and their conspiracy to ruin my lunch. It's enough to make me quit work and become a tomato-raising hermit. With a large stash of melted cheese, of course.

Spell Check

2007-04-11T11:25:00.000-04:00

Quite a while ago, Tony was working on my computer and got really irritated because, as he was filling out forms on the internet, the computer wasn't checking his spelling. He searched around for a little while and couldn't figure out how to turn it on. Well, this morning, I figured it out and he said he wanted me to write it on his blog. It's nothing exciting, but, since he asked and I like him a lot, I agreed. So, here it is:

This is working on a Mac, of course. Seeing as I don't have a Windows machine in front of me, I can't tell you how or if it works there or not. Right click on a word (for those of you who don't know how to do this with a one-button mouse, hold down your control key while clicking) and you'll see a choice in the list that says "Spelling." Put your cursor over that and a new list will come up. One of the options is "Check Spelling as You Type." Make sure that is clicked and you're good to go.

Wedged Repositories

2007-04-10T12:58:00.000-04:00

I administer a Fedora Core 6 machine at work. Logged in today and told it to update itself ("yum update"). Checked back a few minutes ago and discovered that yum hadn't made any progress. So I killed off yum, poked around, and discovered that cron had spawned countless instances of this funny rpmq process - one of which was running at 100% on a CPU (I have cores in that machine) and had been running for - well - a long time. Like days. So I killed all of them off, and tried yum again. Still no luck.

Poking around, I found a post on the 'Net that suggested the right thing to do was to delete all of the "__db.00*" files sitting under /var/lib/rpm. That did the trick - unwedged the repository that rpm and yum manage - but I've still no idea why rpmq started dying by falling into an infinite loop. Will have to keep my eyes on that machine for a bit.

Have I ever mentioned my lack of fondness for computers? Yeah. It's a love-hate relationship. On most platforms, it gravitates more to hate than love.

Names Are Like Titles

2007-04-10T09:18:00.000-04:00

A good name is everything. Well, alright, not quite everything. But they sure are a lot.

For instance: in digital systems, there is a failure condition known as the Byzantine Generals Problem. (Rather than explaining it in any detail, I'll trust you to look it up on Wikipedia.) It turns out that it is a real problem, it really does happen in real systems, and the consequences of ignoring these types of failures can be quite severe. But it's got the dumbest name. Not because the name doesn't adequately describe the fault scenario - it does. No, because when you try to talk to a manager about it, it's instant confusion. "Wait a minute, here.... Treacherous lieutenants? How can computer components lie? This must be nonsense!" And so on. "Asymmetric faulty" is a much better term (though less cool sounding): it captures the essence of what happens and doesn't require you to imagine that computers are actively trying to be mischevious (or treacherous). I blame L. Lamport for it, since he first described the situation (with others) in this paper.

Here's another one for you. Ribbit. Go ahead. Guess what that is (before clicking on the link!). Give up? It's an add-in to Word and PowerPoint that allows you to enter equations in LaTeX syntax. Imagine trying to get your company to front the money for this tool.

"Hey boss, I'd like you to buy a new tool and suggest that other members in the company give it a try."

"Really? What's it called?"

"Ribbit."

"...."

Yeah. That'd go over real well. And while I'm griping, "LaTeX" isn't such a hot name, either. "Oh - that rubbery stuff?" Yeah. Another Lamport invention, I might add. Oh yeah - and Ribbit's tagline is "Even better than the real thing." Whatever that means.

I should not leave you with the impression that I am the King of Names, however. I'm rotten at coming up with good names - just as I'm rotten at coming up with good titles. But knowing that, I'd for sure get some advice before trying to market my next great product, theoretical contribution, etc. And I understand why people pay so much money for good marketing.

Low-Power Lunch

2007-04-09T10:05:00.000-04:00

A few of us at work have decided to go in together on a picnic table. There are nice plantings and such around our building, and the road that runs past here isn't too noisy. But at the moment, there's nowhere nice to sit outside and read papers or have lunch. So we're going to create such a place.

Picnic tables are surprisingly inexpensive - only around $100, if you get one made out of wood. Divided among several people, that's a small price to pay for a spot to sit and eat lunch on nice days. Pictures soon to follow.

An April Snowshower

2007-04-07T13:02:00.000-04:00

Snow in April is odd in this part of Virginia. I quite scoffed at the reports of snow and figured that, even if it would snow, it certainly wouldn't stick. I was wrong. I awoke this morning to snow on the ground and in the trees, a clear blue sky, and sunlight over all. So I trotted out the camera and the tripod and took pictures of some of the springtime plants with snow on their buds and leaves. At left is the Japanese maple that sits on my deck with icy snow over its leaves. It makes a pretty picture; I'm hoping there won't be any damage. Fortunately, though I didn't believe in the snow, I did believe in the cold and made sure to get in my warmer-natured plants. They at least will be unaffected.

While the trees had snow and the leaves covering the ground in the wooded part of my yard had snow, the grass in my backyard did not. Almost a pity: I've hostas coming up in beds in the back yard, and I thought those would look really cool with snow on them. But there was no such luck. The redbud in the front, however, did have snow; one of the pictures I took of it (detail shown here and in the linked gallery) is spectacular. I'll be printing that one, shortly, and hanging it somewhere.

On-the-Water Photography

2007-04-07T11:51:00.000-04:00

I've been taking my camera along on our recent kayak trips. Here are some of the photos I've taken. You can see more in my web album over at Picasa.

Most of these are from a recent excursion to Beaver Creek Lake Park. This past Monday, we packed a picnic and paddled for most of the afternoon. The weather was glorious. During the winter season, the county doesn't charge admission to the lake parks. Great for us: we're still willing to kayak in cool weather, and the free admission is certainly appreciated.

There are gads of turtles in the lakes. They can nearly always be counted on to sun themselves on just about anything protruding from the water. The bigger ones seem to be rather afraid of anything approaching them: as soon as we start heading over to them, they tend to jump in the water. The smaller ones, however, will sit it out for quite a while. T suggested that the bigger ones are scardy-cats, while the little ones are braver. I suggested that she had confused cause and effect: perhaps the big ones are big because they are fearful. In any case, this turtle sat still enough for me to get a really nice shot of him. And T held the boat steady enough that the photo came out nice and sharp.

Rounding a bend in one of the creeks that feeds the lake, we came upon an osprey perched high in one of the trees in front of us. T slowly steered the boat toward the bird, while I readied my camera and started taking pictures. The best were after the bird launched from the branch, like this one. Made me wish for a bigger lens, but even if I could afford a supertelephoto, I'm not sure I'd take it out in the boat.... As it is I worry a bit about my camera body and my day-to-day lens. Gotta get a good dry bag and attach floatation devices to it.

Shortly after we saw the osprey, we stopped for a picnic. T climbed out of the boat nearly where I took this picture. I stayed in an paddled around to the far side of the rock. There, an outcropping jutted out just inches over the water. I ran the side of the boat under the outcropping, lifted out the cooler, and the change in displacement was enough to wedge the boat against the rock. I hopped out, the boat tried to float even higher, and it was stuck fast. David's boat we ran up on shore a bit.

During the picnic, the osprey stayed in another tree just across the lake from us, only about 50 yards away, or so. I hoped that he would fly back to the tree from which he'd flown when I snapped the pictures of him, but he didn't. More's the pity - taking the images from land, they might have been a little sharper. And from that angle, the lighting would have been more favorable. Next time, perhaps.

After the picnic, we explored the other arm of the lake. Wasn't much wildlife (aside from some Canadian geese, which I rather discount), but we ran up the creek on that side of the lake and had a good time. David got stuck quite a few times, and probably gave himself quite a workout getting unstuck. It was funny to watch him paddling all out and staying place. He ended up hopping out and walking his boat several times. On our way back to the car, though, I spotted a white egret among the reeds, through some trees before we rounded a bend in the creek. I readied my camera, and just as we came around the bend, it took flight. There was a fisherman just outside the frame of the photo - perhaps he spooked the bird. In any case, I got three pictures; this was the best.

The Collapse of the Cognitive Economy

2007-04-06T13:41:00.000-04:00

So what would you do if you met an extra-terrestrial being? In the middle of the day, let's say, to take the fear factor out of it (or at least suppress it). Wave? Smile? Start talking? Gesture to objects?

Think about it. All of those responses assume a base of common knowledge or phenomenological familiarity. Body language is out; spoken language is out. Is a smile a smile, or a snarl? After all, most terrestrial animals bare their teeth as a warning, not a gesture of friendship. Is a wave threatening or inviting? How would you form a basis for communication? How would you communicate non-hostile intentions? Express intelligence? Beat out prime numbers on a nearby tree trunk? That assumes the being opposite you can see or hear.

Without the cognitive economy we rely on for communication, communication seems extremely difficult, at best.

The best answer I can come up with requires another person. Play act a friendly greeting, with all the typical words and body language. Then play act a hostile greeting, with play-acted violence. Then repeat the friendly greeting. Then initiate the friendly greeting with the extra-terrestrial. Perhaps in that way, you could show the difference between friendly greetings and hostile greetings and thereby communicate the friendly nature of the greeting before actually turning it on the alien.

But who knows if that would work? I'm sure others have considered this, but it seems an interesting question.

Using SSH to Move Things

2007-04-06T12:38:00.000-04:00

It comes up every once in a while that you want to make a tarball of something but can't, because the machine hosting the files you want to tar doesn't have enough space. Or, you want to copy some big mess of files across the network, but want to transmit them compressed, to speed up the transfer, without having to first tar and compress them, then copy them, and then uncompress them, and then remember to delete the tarball on the source machine.

In either case - and in other cases - it's ideal to be able to accomplish the migration in swell foop (fell swoop). SSH comes to the rescue. The command:

ssh -l   tar c[j|z]O  | tar x[j|z]

will do the trick nicely.

It works because you can give SSH a command after specifying the host IP, and SSH will login, execute the command, and logout when it's done. Any output to STDOUT or STDERR will be routed to the machine making the call to SSH, so you can pipe or redirect that output just as you would had the remote command originated on the local machine.

So in the above command, we use ssh to log into machine ''ip'' with username ''name'' and ask tar to create an archive of ''path'', sending output to STDOUT. The "[j|z]" bit will allow you to simultaneously bzip2 (j) or gzip (z) the tarball, as it is created, before it appears on STDOUT. On the other side of the pipe, we ask tar to expand the input it reads from STDIN; if we have used "j" or "z", we need to give it to tar here, too.

This is particularly elegant if the account on the remote (source) machine has an authorized key for the account on the local (destination) machine. In that case, you don't have to enter a password or do anything other than issue the command.

You can move all sorts of things this way, not just tarballs. Any program that can write its output to STDOUT and read input from STDIN can be used this way. I've used a similar incantation to move Subversion repositories from one machine to another and even to block-by-block copy the low-level contents of one hard disk to another, across the network.

Protecting Grep

2007-04-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

So here's some real Arcana for you. This comes from the UNIX family of spells - some of the most-difficult-to-master magic out there.

Grep seems to need protection when it's used to process directory information, as in:

ls /some/path | grep -e [some pattern]

This code may work differently if "/some/path" is a full path to the folder rather than ".". Issuing

env -i ls /some/path | grep -e [some pattern]

appears to solve the problem.

Who knows why grep needs it. Took me quite a while to figure out the solution to the problem, too. Which has resulted in a new bit of core UNIX lore, for me: when in doubt, blow away your environment with env prior to issuing your command.

Services, Ownership, and the Rise of an Empire

2007-04-06T09:30:00.000-04:00

I recall several years ago - around 2000 - a professor told me of Microsoft's plans to make Office a web service. No longer would people actually buy and install Word, etc.; rather, they would subscribe to an online Office service and edit their documents online.

I scoffed at the idea. No way, I thought, would anyone want that kind of model of software. I based my reasoning on the resultant lack of ownership and also on a profound distrust for Microsoft: with my documents on their servers, what was to prevent them for reading my information? "But," you say, "why would they care about your information?" Not mine, perhaps, but Lockheed Martin's? Dell's? IBM's? You see my point. What's "proprietary" if the company that makes your word processor can read your documents right off their servers?

Of course, as yet, Microsoft has not succeeded in migrating Office to a web service. But Google has introduced something along those lines. And, while our core productivity applications might not yet be services, so much of the rest of our tools are. Like email: GMail, Yahoo!, etc. Like Blogger. Like Picassa. Like Flicker. Like MySpace and Twitter. You get my point. Sure, all of those are free, but they're still web services. And if you'd told me in 2000 that would happen, I'd not have believed you. Proof of my naivety? Perhaps. Or proof of the radical pace of technological and sociological change (in response to the change of technology).

It doesn't bother me, anymore, that I don't "own" my email service or my blogging service. Not sure why, but it doesn't. Perhaps it's the convenience. For some time, I tossed my own photo library in php and MySQL; more and more, I'm thinking of using something like Picasa to share my photos over the 'Net. So much easier than maintaining my own thing, finding my own hosting, etc. Sure, I have the technical skills to do it.... But I'm a bad computer nerd: by the end of each day, the thought of interacting with a computer is rather unappealing. Certainly the thought of doing anything "computer sciency" is unappealing. Designing, implementing, and maintaining a website counts, in my mind.

Something else has happened with the rise of Internet services: the rise of a new (or several new) empires. Just as Microsoft generated synergy for its products by releasing a Microsoft version of everything, Google is building itself an Internet empire based on an ever-increasing collection of services. GMail. Google Documents. Google Analytics. Google AdSense. Google AdWords. Google Calendar. Blogger. Picasa. All the Google search tools. I'm sure I'm missing others.

It's daunting. And they're all free. If I stop and think about it, it's a bit unnerving, this spiraling increase in Google's presence on the web (as if their search engine wasn't enough presence on its own!).

And then there's Apple. Which struggled for so long. With Mac OS X, they gained a superior OS with a vastly superior user experience. They've always had excellent hardware (excepting, perhaps, the early iMacs). And then came the iPod. And iTunes. And iTunes Video with TV shows. And now iTunes Movies. And now the Apple TV. And now the iPhone. The rise of another empire - in multimedia rather than web services - based on the synergy of related products. Sony should ph34r Apple's power - perhaps not yet, but they'd better be looking down the road: I see only Apple dominance there. (Naivety, again?) And no complaints (yet), as Apple's done a better-than-average job of not taking advantage of its placement, just as Google has. Though I'm sure some would disagree, I point out that both are committed to open standards. (Yeah, FairPlay DRM is not open - but Jobs defended that quite well in this essay.)

Now here's a thought: imagine a merger between Apple and Google. Google's technical expertise in Internet services, distributed computing and file storage, ....; Apple's decades of experience in design and user interfaces. Currently, they have (mostly) non-overlapping technologies. Together, well, I foresee the potential for some amazing innovation.

And then we could watch Microsoft run for the hills. That's a nice thought, I must say.

Visibility

2007-04-05T12:39:00.000-04:00

It strikes me: I have this blog; is anyone looking at it?

Probably not, since I've not advertised it to even my friends (except for T - but she doesn't count 'cause she's an author). Still, I find myself wondering if anyone's coming and looking at it. Or, more precisely, if anyone will come around and look at it. From all appearances, Blogger doesn't have any feature that lets you see how many views your blog has generated. Nor (even more useful) how many views from distinct IP addresses on a daily basis.

So: please leave me a comment if you stop by and read something. Nothing fancy. Just to say hello. I'll be glad to learn you were here.

[Edit] I'd still like to have you mention that you stopped by, but T pointed out that there are clever counters you can install. She's so smart! *jealous* More on counters and stuff later.... [/Edit]

Our Adventures in a Tandem Kayak

2007-04-05T11:13:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Tony, his brother David, and I took two of his boats out for a paddle. We had his new tandem kayak and a single-seater. (David, of course, got to be lonely.) As we started out, Tony wondered aloud about the fact that we always head out into the wind and when we come back, we seem to be either paddling into the wind (again) or there is no wind.

We paddled up the creek for quite a while before we started having to watch where we were putting the boat. Of course, the makeup under the water made the current (which was strong at that point) harder to fight. Shortly before Tony and I turned around, David decided that he'd stop and wait for us to come back. Tony and I made it around a bend and over some logs, only to find out that there was nowhere for our boat to go. So we turned around, gathered David, and headed back to the launch point.

Titles

2007-04-05T09:58:00.000-04:00

So have you ever tried to come up with a creative title for a blog? I suppose if you blog already, you've done it.... Otherwise, I challenge you to come up with something creative and applicable (!) in a short span of time. Especially difficult is coming up with a good, applicable, spur-of-the-moment title when you just initiated the new-blog process and had given no thought whatsoever to the (obvious) eventuality of title creation.

Yeah. That's what I had to do.

Nevertheless, it's an apt title, given my background and profession. No, I'm not an IT person; I'm a Software Engineer. There's a difference: IT people live lives even more filled with bits of arcane knowledge. But we still have lots to deal with.

"Wait!" you say. "Arcane knowledge? What are you talking about? Are you some sort of occult member?"

No, I'm not. Pull open your dictionary and look up "arcane" and you'll see that.... Well, here, I'll do it for you: "arcane: understood by only a few; obscure." Think about it. That aptly describes the finer points of computers, does it not? I for sure think so and I know more about computers than the average person.

So is this blog going to be all about computer lore? No. I'd drive myself crazy. It'll be about whatever I feel like writing. But it needed a title, and I figure titles should be applicable. How applicable? Well, I'll post some computer lore, if for no other reason than to earn the title.