Teleidoscope

Sun, Sep 30, 2007

Too Many Projects

Posted at 9:14 pm MDT to Technology

I've made a lot of progress on the CustomerPortal this weekend, though not quite as much as I had hoped. If I can get all of the main screens working in admin mode I'll load it onto the office server so the people who asked for this program can look at it and decide how they really want it to work. The requirements I've been working from are pretty vague.

I have bread rising in the kitchen.

The rest of the server parts should be here tomorrow. According to UPS, the combined shipping weight of the 4 packages is 38 + 26 + 3 + 3 = 70 pounds. Some of that is shipping materials. But probably not as much as one might hope. I have the desktop in the computer cleared for work space, and Shawn has promised to help me lower the beast to the floor once it is assembled...

And I have baked and pureed a Crimson Kabocha squash, dug out my Mom's pie crust recipe, and acquired Nanette's pumpkin pie filling recipe. I was going to try making a 'pumpkin' pie from the squash this evening, but the coding was on a roll and really needs to get to a good pausing point before I get too busy on the server, so the squash is in the fridge until tomorrow.

I have started to investigate some Linux kernel-related work (one of the things I plan to use the server for is kernel builds. I'm actually looking at working on some of the tools used in building the kernel.

And I would really like to work on one or another of my cross-stitch projects at some point.

And of course, there is the fiction writing. There is an annual challenge -- NaNoWriMo -- for writing 50,000 words of fiction in the month of November. I would need to drop all of my other projects (including blogging) to do that. I have finished one novel in my life (unsellable -- I may put it up on the website one of these days) which was more than twice the size of the NaNoWriMo goal, so I know that I can write that much. 50,000 publishers' words is 300,000 characters, so the goal is an average of 10,000 characters per day for the month. I tend to average 1200 to 1500 on this blog. I don't think it is possible to do NaNoWriMo and also have a life.

.

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Sat, Sep 29, 2007

Vegetable Topology

Posted at 5:27 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I sold squash at the market again today. Next week Nanette will be out of town, so I will probably stay home and play with my new computer.

At the end of the market day, I pack the unsold squash and pumpkins into logs and tubs. It can be a little tricky because the veggies must not be allowed to stab each other with their stems, and if they stick out above the topp of the lug at all, they will be damaged when the lugs are stacked.

And the squash are all sorts of lumpy shapes and sizes. Butternut squash, which are often very long with a lump at one end, are especially annoying to pack. Delicata are handy: they are rather like multicolored, slightly lumpy cucumbers, and fit nicely into various nooks and crannies.

I'm fairly good at filling the crates without wasting space. It's a little like a sort of three-dimensional Tetris game, but with time to fiddle with the packing. Today there were 10 filled crates and two partially filled tubs when I finished packing. (Tubs are slightly larger than crates, but not as strongly constructed. Squash are heavy.) This was more than I needed to pack on either of the past two Saturdays, but we were restocked with more squash halfway through the market.

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Fri, Sep 28, 2007

Portal

Posted at 5:06 pm MDT to Code

The package from Dallas (processors and video card) arrived on my porch at 10 AM. The packages from Memphis arrived at the Colorado terminal at 10:41, so they should be delivered Monday morning.

The package from California seems to have been strapped to a turtle: it hasn't reached Commerce City yet (5 pm). Maybe they are taking the scenic route.

It is probably just as well that the case, motherboard and power supply (some assembly required) have not arrived yet. This gives me some incentive to make some serious progress on the CustomerPortal program this weekend, so I'll be free to play with my new toys when they arrive next week.

I've been dinking around most of this week trying to get the login process to behave the way I think it should. I think I'm going to drop back to the mechanism I used in the IncentivePoints program, which is less elegant but doesn't chase its tail down a hole if someone clicks in an unexpected direction. Once I get the main functionality working I can play with the login stuff in phase 2.

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Thu, Sep 27, 2007

Tech Books

Posted at 11:37 pm MDT to Media

I went into the office briefly and stopped at Borders on the way home. I picked up two technical books, spending nearly $100.00. I don't buy as many technical books as I did a few years ago: on-line information is generally much more current, and technical books are too heavy and bulky to take with me when I am travelling.

But reference books are still useful when you may need to check a lot of related facts and flip back and forth between them. Computers don't really yet provide a functional equivalent of little slips of paper with notes on them stuck in as bookmarks in a reference book.

One book I picked up was MySQL in a Nutshell, which will be useful in setting up the database side of the CustomerPortal project. It's an O'Reilly book: according to the colophon, the animal on the cover is a pied kingfisher, the largest bird capable of a hover in still air.

The other book is Fedora 7 & RedHat Enterprise Linux: The Complete Reference. Not an O'Reiily book, so it doesn't have a totemic critter: The cover is just boring text.

This one is for the server project: it includes coverage of the tools used in setting up and monitoring modern enterprise-grade Linux servers. This way I won't need to have the laptop on the table where I am trying to set up the server so that I can look up settings and parameters. (Much safer not to overcrowd the work space with things that will break if they are dropped... or have things dropped on them.) I'll still supplement the text with a bit of Googling, but sometimes you just can't beat 972 pages of reference materials inscribed on a dead tree.

According to the tracker numbers, all of the pieces of the server have Commerce City, Colorado as their next stop. The 'from-vendor' package turns out to be coming from Dallas. The packages coming from Memphis have passed through Kansas City and Salina Kansas And the California package left form Baldwin Park CA.

Part of the server may arrive tomorrow, after all.

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Wed, Sep 26, 2007

Server Packages Are On Their Way

Posted at 10:56 pm MDT to Technology

When I ordered the server components, Newegg split it into two orders. The processors and video card in one order, and everything else in the other, even though one of the processors is part of a discount deal with the motherboard which is in the other order.

I now have the UPS tracker numbers for everything. The 'everything else' is divided into 3 packages.

The case is in a package by itself. This makes sense: it is large and heavy. This is a Detroit iron kind of a case: it gets some of its quiet from being solid enough not to vibrate: triple layer metal side-walls. More than 30 pounds empty, more than 35 pounds in its retail box and shipping materials, probably close to 40 as shipped through UPS.

The power supply, hard drives, mother board, cooler gunk and coolers are all together in one package.

And just the memory sticks and DVD burner are in the third package. They are being shipped from California, while the other two packages are coming from Memphis.

I wonder where the processors and video card are shipping from? Their package is listed as 'shipped from vendor', whatever that means.

Today is Wednesday and the shipping was supposed to be 3rd day UPS. I might have some of my new toys by the weekend, but Monday is probably more likely.

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Tue, Sep 25, 2007

Server Spec

Posted at 8:13 pm MDT to Technology

It's been a long time since I built a PC from parts. And most of th eparts I built Igor from have been obsolete for ages. But I 've been wanting a home server machine for a while, and I decided that I need to learn some of the high end hardware and admin. So I have specced out and ordered the parts for a serious enterprise grade machine with lots of redundancy and error correction and high availability components.

I will probably need to invest in a few more fans and drive cables, but most of the system is all in this one order. I may harvest a floppy drive from one of my old systems...

• Antec P140 Silver rolled steel case. No windows, no blinky lights. Just a clean metal case designed to be quiet and keep the parts insode cool.
• Antec 850 Watt ATX12V/EPS12V high efficiency power supply
• Tyan S2928 Dual ATX Motherboard
• 2 Dual Core AMD Opteron 2210 Processors
• 4 1 Gig sticks of DDR2 ECC Registered RAM, providing separate dual channel, error correcting ram for each processor, to allow a NUMA SMP configuration
• PNY NVS 285 video card (the official specs say it supports Linux)
• a Samsung 20X SATA DVD burner
• 4 Samsung 500Gb SATA Hard Drives -- this will be configured as a 1+0 RAID array, so it really isn't two Terabytes of available storage
• a tube of fancy Thermal compound for connecting the CPU Coolers to the procesors
• 2 Zalman 9500 CPU Coolers

The Newegg.com order page said it would take them a couple of days for them to fill the order, and it will be sent standard 3-day UPS, so everything should arrive some time next week.

I think I'll download Fedora 7 some time this week, to . I don't think I want to try to deal with NUMA SMP and RAID in Kubuntu's screwy admin environment.

In the meantime I need to think of a name for the new machine. My previous home machines' names were vlad, igor, soteris, xerxes, bast, ulysses, and thoth. And the current laptop is sophia. Since the new server will have two processors, I should find a mythological character with two heads ... or two faces, but Janus feels wrong. Maybe a pair of twins.

Something to think about while I wait for the hardware.

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Mon, Sep 24, 2007

Rainy Monday

Posted at 9:32 pm MDT to Weather

It started raining last night. It rained pretty steadily all day, with occasional thunder in mid-afternoon. And I don't think it has completely stopped yet.

This is strange weather for Colorado iin September. I was glad I didn't have to be out on the roads. The radio was reporting all sorts of problems.

I should bring in some firewood so it will be dry the next time it rains. This would have been a good day for a fire in the woodstove, to fight the dampness and gloom.

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Sun, Sep 23, 2007

Beauty and the Beast (TV 1987-89)

Posted at 12:22 pm MDT to Media

I can't watch subtitled anime while I'm coding (I can't multitask quite that well). So I'm watching the DVDs of the Beauty and the Beast TV show -- the Ron Perlman/Linda Hamilton series -- while I work on the Customer Portal software for the company website. I'm not bothering with season three, after Linda Hamilton left... killing off the heroine of a romance really doesn't work.

It's hard to believe it has already been 20 years...

It's hard to believe people actually thought the fashions in 1987 looked good.

It's worth watching again just for the costumes and sets in the underground world. And Ron Perlman's voice. I see from IMDB that Mr. Perlman has done a LOT of voice acting over the years in cartoons and video games, which is not surprising.

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Sat, Sep 22, 2007

Clients

Posted at 11:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I may not travel to Boston before the end of this contract. Until this week, the customer manager who was supposed to be signing off on my time sheets was not bothering to do so. And We have been informed that the soonest we will see any money, now that the timesheets are finally signed off, is the beginning of November, which is after the end of the contract.

Until we get paid for the work I did when I travelled to Boston in August, we don't have resources available for me to travel to Boston again.

We have constant problems getting our customers to pay us the money they owe anywhere close to on time. One reason for the company's existence is that it turns out we need a person working nearly full time just to get our customers to pay us.

We can't even borrow against our receivables to smooth out the cash flow. Even though all of actual clients are corporations, they make us bill through middle-man companies. Brokers who would deal with receivables from BigCorp are a lot less interested when the paperwork says we are owed the money from two guys from Mumbai working out of a Silicon Valley condo.

Yet I am sure the same people who don't mind delaying our payments would be outraged if their own paychecks and expense checks were delayed 6 or 8 weeks at the whim of the people who should be paying them. And even when they are not following the payments terms in the contracts we signed, they want us to live up to our side of the contract.

It is VERY annoying to have no money coming in, or expected any time soon, when I have been working steadily for more than a month. I think we need to propose non-payment penalties if the current folks want to extend the contract. (We won't get them. Big companies never agree to terms that would give us any leverage.) But we need to do something to give these arrogant bozos some incentive to actually live up to their side of the contracts.

I don't think pushing back on the next Boston trip is going be enough. I really hope some other job comes through for me for November even if the current lot wants to extend. I think they have lost their priority claim on my services.

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Fri, Sep 21, 2007

Velociraptor Feathers

Posted at 5:31 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Ooh, neat. According to Pharyngula, scientists have found some velociraptor bones with fine details preserved. They can see the places where 14 big feathers attached to each arm of the velociraptor.

So they didn't just have downy fuzz to keep warm, they had big heavy feathers that needed anchoring, too.

The big question now is: "What did they do with their big feathers?"

I vote for dancing like grouse.

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Thu, Sep 20, 2007

Virtualization

Posted at 9:19 pm MDT to Technology

My 'Windows" laptop is actually a VMWare virtual image on my Linux laptop. Today things got a bit silly. At one point I was logged into my laptop, then logged into the virtual Windows machine, which was connected by Remote Desktop to a Windows machine in my customer's lab (another login) which was running VMWare to provide the actual Windows image (yet another login) that I am going to set up and use for my testing.

It's a good thing that this laptop has a large screen: every layer of indirection wants its own max/min/close buttons, status bars and other controls. With enough layers of indirection, you could run out of screen real estate for actually doing stuff.

Tonight, I'm playing with my virtualization settings to try to get sound working in the virtualized images. For some reason, sound is not getting shared between the host and guest system. Everything else is working fine.

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Wed, Sep 19, 2007

Paving

Posted at 6:40 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I went out to the main road to get my mail this afternoon, and decided I did not need to run any other errands after all.

They are paving the paved road that goes by the border of my little neighborhood and have it closed down to a single lane in each direction. The road gets a fair amount of traffic around rush hour, so things are backed up pretty badly.

They are using actual asphalt this time, not just a layer of oil and sand. I think it had gotten past the point where chip-sealing was going to survive the next winter. When the actual road starts cracking and crumbling in fairly long strips, it's time to get serious.

They did the part of the road near Marshall, closer to the mountains, earlier in the summer. That stretch was so full of potholes and crumbled spots it wouldn't have survived the summer without repaving, much less the winter. It's also comparatively hilly and curvy -- not by New England standards, or the Colorado mountains, but by the standards of the flatter parts of Colorado Marshall Road has a fair amount of character where it actually approaches Marshall.

Tomorrow, I need to go out to the CRUG meeting. I'll have to allow time for the paving delays.

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Mon, Sep 17, 2007

MOFOS

Posted at 10:50 pm MDT to Current Events

Novell's litigation lawfirm is Morrison & Foerster www.mofo.com. They are switching in the special team for the SCO bankruptcy hearing tomorrow. Five attorneys (possibly in addition to others that are already registered for the Delaware courts). Two full partners, three associates. Four of them are bankruptcy specialists (including a member of the American Bar Association Bankruptcy and Chapter 11 Committee and the head of the Mofo New York office Business department, who has published articles on bankruptcy.

And the fifth member of the team has some interesting expertise:

Ms. Dyas earned her J.D. from the University of Texas Law School in 2002, and her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Her doctoral research analyzed the linguistic features of deception under oath in English and certain romance languages.

Lawyers with Attitude.

There are a bunch of people from the Groklaw readership attending the hearing tomorrow. This should be interesting.

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Backups

Posted at 5:07 pm MDT to Technology

I seem to be hearing about a lot of drive failures lately, so I decided to back up my laptop.

The backup tool I really like, KDar, is no longer supported on Kubuntu, but it was a front end to another tool, Dar, and I had exported the Dar scripts a couple of times last spring. So I was able to generate the backup file I wanted: 15 2Gig files: seven and a half DVDs worth.

Now I just need to finish burning the DVDs. (I'm on number 6).

I should probably look up how to restore from Dar files and throw that information on the last DVD, since there is plenty of space. Trying to look things up online with a dead computer turns into a chicken and egg situation.

I'm spoiled by broadband.

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Sun, Sep 16, 2007

Nanette's Birthday Party

Posted at 10:05 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette's birthday was Friday, which is picking day. And Saturday was Market, which leaves us all exhausted. So we celebrated today. About a half a dozen of her friends attended: Linda and Jan and Galen and Susan and Caroline and me, and we had a good time talking and eating. Chuck's friend Douglas was there for a while, too, and took part in the ceremonial singing and cake eating.

We did a lot of talking about Alton Brown and 'Good Eats' and various kinds of cooking that we are good at or hopeless at. (I can do breads and soups, Nanette is great at pies but hopeless at soups...Galen made a wonderful cake for the party).

I know and like all of the other ladies who were at the party. I know them all through Nanette, and seldom see them except when she is also present. It seems that in recent years Nanette has become more and more my primary social anchor outside work. All the travelling and long term re-locations have pretty much destroyed any opportunity for what little social life I used to have.

I haven't been to a science fiction convention in years, and I've lost touch with my SF and anime fandom friends. I'm hoping to re-connect with that part of my life a little by attending MileHiCon this year and worldcon next year.

I can't really count on being around anywhere for club meetings or classes. When I was in Minneapolis for 6 months I attended a book signing and took a needlework class... but then the contract ended in what would have been the middle of the second phase of the class, so it gave me some activities outside work, but not really social contacts.

I've lost touch with other friends and acquaintances over the years.

But Nanette and I have been friends for about 25 years now. She is my sister even though we are not blood relations. People who see us together often think we are real sisters.

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Sat, Sep 15, 2007

Winter Squash

Posted at 8:52 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

I sold squash at the Farmers Market today for 6 hours. Some summer squash: Zucchini and patty pans. But most was winter squash varieties: scarlet Kabocha, and buttercup kabocha, and spaghetti squash, and butternut squash, and acorn squash, and white acorn squash. Also pie pumpkins, which are technically a variety of winter squash. Two dollars a pound.

I put a lot of squash on the scales. I put a lot of individual squashes on the scales more than once: winter squashes tend to be both large and dense, and people got sticker shock and bailed when they found out the prices of the squash they initially selected.

And I think a lot of people don't realize the difference between pie pumpkins, which are meant to be eaten and have thick flesh and small hollows in the center, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins which are thin-fleshed and hollow.

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Fri, Sep 14, 2007

SCO Declares Bankruptcy

Posted at 8:14 pm MDT to Current Events

The trial in the SCO vs. Novell case was due take place (finally) on Monday. The main purpose was to determine how much money SCO owes Novell.

Today SCO declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which puts all court proceedings on hold. They didn't even mention Novell in their list of creditors, even though the expected judgemment is undoubtably the cause of the backruptcy action. The SCO/Novell court has already determined that SCO converted -- stole -- funds belonging to Novell. Possibly as much as twice the current value of the company. The trial Monday was supposed to determine the exact amount.

So there will be no trial in Salt Lake City next week. But I suspect that the motion practice will be flying fast and thick. And I suspect Judge Kimball out in Utah is pretty thoroughly annoyed. (If he wasn't already annoyed by SCO's shenanigans.)

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Thu, Sep 13, 2007

HTML::Template and CSS Files

Posted at 10:07 pm MDT to Code

The IncentivePoints application for the company website is now both functional and a partial visual match for the rest of the website.

It turns out that relative paths to CSS files don't work well with HTML::Template, but absolute paths are fine.

So I had to change

  <LINK REL=Stylesheet HREF="./site.css" TYPE=text/css>

to

 <LINK REL=Stylesheet 
 HREF="http://releaseteam.com/site.css" TYPE=text/css>

to get the web pages to see the css file.

This is not entirely surprising: HTML::Template is putting the pages together from files in several different directories, so it is questionable what the path is relative to. I was a little surprised that when Apache stopped complaining about not being able to find the CSS file, the generated html files still did not use the CSS.

Very odd.

But at least it is working now, and the displays are adequate.

I did some rather kludgey stuff to make my menus look good while still keeping them consistent with the standard formats in the CSS. I'll eventually fix that and clean up the CSS in the templates. For now, I just need to package everything up and copy it onto the office server, so the admins can start entering data.

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Wed, Sep 12, 2007

CSS and CGI::Application

Posted at 11:55 pm MDT to Code

I've got the functionality for IncentivePoints, and a good start at the data structures for CustomerPortal, which is turning out to want a much more complicated design than IncentivePoints, so it's a good thing I'm doing them in this order.

All I really need to do now on Incentive Points is get it to use the css file so it will match the look of the rest of the website. It's not being cooperative.

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Tue, Sep 11, 2007

Jo Walton Poems

Posted at 9:16 pm MDT to Media

A link in the comments on James Nicoll's LiveJournal led me to some poems that author Jo Walton posted on her LiveJournal.

The first one brought tears to my eyes. It's a librarian/bookworm thing.

Now I need to go write code, and wait for my cake to finish baking. (This is a multitasking evening.) I'm very close to finishing the functionality of the IncentivePoints thing.

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Mon, Sep 10, 2007

Heating Season

Posted at 4:44 pm MDT to Weather

This morning when I got up it was 60 degrees F in the house and about 40 outdoors. It was cold and rainy until well after noon, tough it is sunny (but still chilly) now. Today is the first day since the spring that I have had the HVAC system in Heat mode all day.

I got up in the middle of the night to put on warmer pajamas and jack up the thermostat on my waterbed, and I think I need to put the bed into its winter configuration: shake the feathers in the comforter back up to the top, add a blanket, check the waterbed heater...

If the heater is dead (the thermostat works, but I'm not sure about the heater coil), it may be nature's way of telling me I should move my thoughts about getting a new bed higher on the priority list. I would have to drain the waterbed most of the way in order to install a new heater, and the mattress is more than 25 years old and not likely to survive the process.

Today I'm going to make macaroni and cheese for supper. It's good cold weather food, and Food Network had a Mac and Cheese challenge yesterday, which put me in the mood. The winner of the challenge (and $10,000) was a chef from a Denver restaurant named "Mizuna" (which is a Japanese salad green we sell at the farmers' market). His winning specialty, from the menu at his restaurant, was lobster macaroni and cheese. Looked delicious.

Let's see...according to the on-line yellow pages Mizuna is at 225 E 7th Ave Denver, CO 80203-3504. So it's right downtown, where I hardly ever go. Oh, well, something to keep in mind for the next time I need to go downtown.

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Sun, Sep 09, 2007

Looking Back

Posted at 8:23 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

It has been 9 months since I left the apartment in Boston. I think my body and subconscious are just finally beginning to trust that I am home and safe. (being snowed in all winter didn't really help.

I think the house is beginning to believe it's a home again too. The problem with travelling so much when you live alone is that there is no one to keep the household running in the meantime. I still haven't thoroughly de-mousified the basement: it was disgusting enough cleaning out the main level. Gah.

From Mid-August 2004 to Memorial Day weekend 2005 I was in the Boston area, mostly in corporate housing.

I had surgery a few day after I got back, and took a couple of weeks to recover. Then I flew to Albuquerque every week (fly out Sunday fly home Friday) for a month or so, followed by 7 or 8 weeks of working remotely with Albuquerque while I had radiation treatments.

Then I flew to California every week for a month. Then Atlanta every week for a month.

Then, with breaks for the Christmas/New Year holidays, I flew to California every week to the end of April.

Drove to Boston again and lived in corporate housing until the weekend of Dec 8. 9 months ago.

I still get tired just thinking about being out of town that much.

I think if they offer me a gig that is full-time out of town again in corporate housing, I'm going to put my resume out. I'm too old for this shit.

And flying every week is going become impossible if the airports get any more stupid with their security theater.

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Sat, Sep 08, 2007

West Nile

Posted at 5:47 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

Nanette's husband had West Nile a few years ago. The disease did some damage to his central nervous system, then apparently went into remission.

That remission has apparently ended now. He is in very bad shape and spent the night in the hospital with what may be a West Nile-related meningitis. They are running tests, but not finding anything unexpected.

This is bad. They own a company in additon to their farm, and Chuck is the CEO and idea man. If his congitive capacities are permanently damaged, things will fall apart.

The CEO of my company is not in the best of health. I worry. Our other partner has basically abandoned us, and I don't really have the skills or personality to run the company myself. I can handle the administrative side of things but a lot of what our CEO does for the company involves his skill at networking and marketing, skill I completely lack. If there is such a thing as negative networking skills, I have them.

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Fri, Sep 07, 2007

Stuff

Posted at 11:25 pm MDT to Code

Note: author Madeleine L'Engle has died at the age of 88.

I'm making progress on the software I'm working on for the office. I'm hoping to have the IncentivePoints functionality done by the end of this weekend: I'm accessing the 4th table type now, and creating entries in it, and just need to clean up it's display formats and interactions with the other 3 tables.

The second program for the office should go a bit faster, since I'll be building on the development and problem-solving I've done for IncentivePoints. I've made a fair amount of progress on getting the perl modules that access MySQL and the HTML::Template and CGI::Application modules to talk to each other inthe ways that I need.

I need a break after that: working on software day (for my client) and night (for the office) is screwing up my sleep cycles. I'm not decompressing enough, I think.

I want to get back to some fiction writing, too. I just had to look up the last name of the viewpoint character in Techlands (the accounting department head, Demeter) because I couldn't remember it. Very annoying since he's been living in my head for months.

I may not blog much this weekend unless something really interesting comes up. I expect to be buried in code.

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Thu, Sep 06, 2007

ACLU

Posted at 4:30 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In the Patriot Act Congress created National Security Letters, which the FBI could use to demand information from ISPs, financial organizations, librarians, and others. There was no court supervision, and it included an automatic gag order, so that people who received these letters could not mention that they had received them, or even discuss the program.

A report that came out in March from the Inspector General of the Justice department found serious abuses by the FBI and reported that more than 143,000 NSLs were issued between 2003 and 2005.

Today NSLs were declared un-Constitutional by a Federal District court in a case brought by the ACLU on behalf of an NSL recipient who was referred to as John Doe because of the gag order. More court cases and various levels of appeals are ongoing.

I joined the ACLU, today. I gave them about enough to pay for 1 hour of a decent lawyer. (Note to self: this is not a tax deductible donation.)

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Wed, Sep 05, 2007

ISO and Microsoft

Posted at 9:59 pm MDT to Current Events

Microsoft has been trying to force approval by the ISO of a standard for online documents they proposed. They have been blatantly stuffing the ballot box, and got caught engaging in outright bribes.

For now, the ISO has refused to fast-track the proposed standard. (The vote was September 2nd.)

The final vote is in February. More sleaze is expected.

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Tue, Sep 04, 2007

More Robin

Posted at 10:01 pm MDT to Media

One of the speakers on the commentary tracks mentioned (during a scene of heavy drinking and the aftermath) that the cast and crew were very well rehearsed for such a scene. "Banned from every pub in Bristol".

About twelve or fifteen years ago there was a very small convention in Denver for fans of British SF and Fantasy television. It was held in January or February. I don't remember the name of the convention now, and it was never repeated (there were rumors of financial irregularities on the part of the organizer). The two special guests were Danny John-Jules ('Cat' on Red Dwarf) and Marc Ryan, who played the Saracen Nasir on Robin of Sherwood. (The character who was ripped off for the Morgan Freeman character in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves).

Both actors were wonderful speakers, especially when they were on stage at the same time. Apparently almost all British performers of their generation spent time (on their way up) working in the music halls on the various piers (Brighton and so on that were holiday destinations. So they had a great deal of experience in common. And very good timing.

I remember Marc Ryan mentioning the after-hours activities of the Robin of Sherwood cast and crew, though I don't remember many details after all this time. He did have an advantage of playing a very taciturn character (he had exactly one line in the first 6 episodes) so he didn't need to worry about learning (or forgetting) his lines.

One thing I remember that Marc Ryan said is that the reason Michael Praed's eyes always looked a bit odd was that he could not wear contact lenses, and his vision was very poor without his glasses. It didn't stop him from running around in the woods, doing many of his own stunts and doing sword fights and such, but apparently it occasionally made things ... interesting. I'm not sure which would be scarier: seeing what I was doing, or not being able to see it.

And I'm quite sure I wouldn't want to be a stunt man having a sword or quarterstaff fight with someone who can't really see what he is doing. Or what I'm doing.

One thing that has been mentioned in the commentary tracks and that really shows up now that I know to look for it: the extras in the crowd scenes aren't just people in costume standing around. The costumers and Assistant Directors provided names and character descriptions with all of the costumes, so the actors knew who they were and who their relatives were and what they did for a living and a little of their life history. So the people in the backgrounds of scenes are going about their lives and doing little meaningful things and reacting to each other, not just standing around. People buy and sell things in the markets and gossip with specific other people. There are communities on screen, not just bodies.

They also managed to have a lot of children on camera in non-speaking parts by encouraging the cast and crew to bring their kids to the sets and putting them into costume when an appropriate scene was being shot. This made the village demographics less peculiar.

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Mon, Sep 03, 2007

Robin of Sherwood

Posted at 1:53 pm MDT to Media

The first set of DVDs of 'Robin of Sherwood' turned up at BestBuy. It seems like yesterday that the shows were new, but the copyrights read 1983. These are the good episodes: all the ones with Michael Praed as Robin.

The DVDs lack some of the crystal clarity that we expect in newer shows but the stories and music (by Clannad) are still wonderful

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Sun, Sep 02, 2007

Company Website

Posted at 9:07 pm MDT to Code

I'm working on two new features for the company website, one for customers and one for employees. Both of them need account logins and profiles, and a number of other similar features, which is why I am working on them in parallel.

Once I get a function working in one place, I can replicate it in the other, and test both while I have the code fresh in mind.

One advantage of having Linux on my laptop is that I can have a full local Apache webserver right on this box. Speeds up the testing and troubleshooting enormously.

I hope to have a lot of it working by the end of this long weekend.

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Sat, Sep 01, 2007

Hugo Awards 2007

Posted at 8:14 pm MDT to Media

From the Hugo Awards website.

Best Novel: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge [Tor, 2006]

Best Novella: “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed [Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2006]

Best Novelette: “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald [Asimov’s July 2006]

Best Short Story: “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt [Asimov’s July 2006]

Best Related Non-Fiction Book: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon by Julie Phillips [St. Martin’s Press, 2006]

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro. Directed by Guillermo del Toro [Picturehouse]

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Who - “Girl in the Fireplace” (2006) Written by Steven Moffat. Directed by Euros Lyn [BBC Wales/BBC1]

Best Editor, Long Form: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Best Editor, Short Form: Gordon Van Gelder

Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola

Best Semiprozine: Locus ed. by Charles N. Brown, Kirsten Gong-Wong and Liza Groen Trombi

Best Fanzine: Science-Fiction Five-Yearly ed. by Lee Hoffman, Geri Sullivan, and Randy Byers

Best Fan Writer: Dave Langford

Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu

The winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, sponsored by Dell Magazines and administered on their behalf by the World Science Fiction Society, is:
Naomi Novik

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