This year looks like it'll be a pretty heavy travel year, just like last year. Personal travel will be way down, but I still expect to be spending a lot of time in airports this year.

I've been thinking that I'd like to have a list of all the airports that I've traveled through for the year. Mostly this is because I'll be in an airport thinking "This looks familiar, but when was I here?" or "I know I've been through this airport, but nothing looks familiar." A case in point is the Colorado Springs airport -- it didn't click for me until I was out in their bizarre rental car lot. (As an aside, it reminds me a lot of Reno, but without the slot machines.)

So I thought I'd put this little placeholder article here. I'll update it as the year progresses, and it'll expire once the new year comes.

I'm going to count each transit separately. For example, if I'm transferring through a hub, that counts as 1, since I never leave it. An end point will count as 2, once for when I arrive and once for when I depart. This would be complicated by one-day in-airport meetings, but that's not how I roll.

Totals:
DIA (Denver International): 5
AUS (Austin Bergstrom): 4
COS (Colorado Springs): 2
PDX (Portland International): 6
OAK (Oakland): 1
SJC (San Jose): 1

January:
DIA: 3
AUS: 2
COS: 2
PDX: 2

March:
PDX: 2
OAK (Oakland): 1
SJC (San Jose): 1

April:
PDX: 2
DIA: 2
AUS: 2

June:
PDX: 3
BOS (Boston Logan): 2
YVR (Vancouver, BC): 1
YYZ (Toronto, ON): 1
YQB (Quebec, QB): 1

July:
PDX: 1
YVR: 1
YYZ: 1
YQB: 1

August: NONE!

September: NONE! (The meeting was moved to coincide with vacation I'd planned to avoid said meeting.)

October:
PDX: 2
LAX (Los Angeles International): 1
IAD (Washington Dulles): 1
DCA (Washington Reagan): 1
DIA: 1

November: NONE!

December (planned):
PDX: 3
LAS (Las Vegas): 2
LAX: 1
NRT: 1 (vacation! woo hoo!)

If you're building stuff that links to libxml2 on Windows, and you get linker warnings like

warning LNK4217: locally defined symbol _xmlFree imported in function _eat_my_shorts

all that means is that you're probably linking with libxml2_a.lib and you didn't build your program with LIBXML_STATIC defined. So when you include the header files, all of the libxml2 functions get marked as "__declspec(dllimport) extern" instead of just "extern".

There you go, search engines. Hope this helps.

You can go back to sleep, since you probably don't care about installing any kind of Solaris on any kind of system that doesn't have a monitor. But if you do...

If you've been following OpenSolaris at all, you know they've totally re-thought the packaging system. Anything, after all, would on balance be better than the SysVr4 package crapola that Solaris has had since forever. (#1: No, I do not consider SunOS 4.x to be "Solaris 1"; #2: Maybe there is one thing that would be worse, and that's the "no package system", akin to what MacOS X has.) But none of the existing systems (RPM, Debian, installp, etc) were good enough, so we get a whole new one.

They've got some interesting ideas. One is that every package you'll ever need to install will be in a network-based repository. Want a package in a file? Sorry. Don't have network access to a repository? Sorry. I'm sure there's a way to get around this; the CD installer does it for sure. There's very little documentation, though and I haven't read through the source code. (We love Python, now, BTW... pass it along.) Overall, it's not too bad, except for the package server requirement. Guess what else you can't (officially) do? That's right... copy a package from one repo to another. I'm sure it's possible, but AFAIK there isn't a tool that enables it. I'm going to write one, I think.

They also decided to "re-think" JumpStart (which is the Solaris way of doing remote installs). This is less sensical to me, since JumpStart was already pretty good. But never mind that, it's new and shiny and "better". (Sorry... I forgot to save all the mailing list references. They're probably around if you search for them.)

My main problem with both new things is that they are both "no scripting allowed" zones. The reasoning goes something like "All post-install scripting (whether for packages or systems) exists to hack around deficiencies in those systems. Therefore if we correct the deficiencies in those systems, there will be no need for these hackish scripts. Thus we resolve to correct all the deficiencies and will allow no scripting."

This is a fine aspiration, but is not actually achievable, since it's impossible to foresee unforeseeable deficiencies. This has come up on several of the OpenSolaris mailing lists, and usually goes something like this:

Cust: I need scripting for installs.
Sol: Why do you need it? Be specific.
Cust: I need to do the following things:

Then (talking about system installs):
Sol: Do you really NEED to do those things, or just want them? If we let you script, it will destroy the purity of our system. Why don't you make a package that installs a service that will run the script on first boot?
Cust: Well, for one thing that'll require an extra reboot, and this fully loaded M9000-64 takes two hours to do that. So I'd like to avoid that if possible. Also, how are we supposed to work around bugs in Solaris that keep the first boot from even happening?
Sol: ...

OR (talking about package installs)
Sol: Point #3 is a bug in the software you're trying to install. You should fix it.
Cust: Uh, the software is all of GNOME. What about the other points?
Sol: Your package could install a service that runs the script.
Cust: There are going to be lots of services then, if each package needs to make a service to run its post-install scripts.
Sol: Most packages won't need post-install scripts, since the packaging system will be perfect. Look, it even has an action to create users!
Cust: ...

There are several problems that I can see:
1. The Solaris developers have a HUGE bias toward laptop/workstation. Witness the fact that the only way to do an install that does not require a monitor attached to the system is to do a remote install. That's also the only way to install a SPARC system, period.
2. The AI developers have read the JumpStart manuals and understand how it works, but do not understand how it's actually used for large installations. A small example: To set the hostname on an installed system with AI, you have to have a specific system configuration manifest registered in the install service for the installation you're going to do. Two hundred systems to install? Two hundred manifests that differ only in the smallest detail. Contrast this with JumpStart where you _could_ run add_install_client 200 times, but you probably won't because there are MUCH easier ways to accomplish that particular goal. And the hostname can be set based on what comes out of the naming service for the IP address you've given it. (If you want.)
3. Computer Science syndrome. I, too, once suffered from this. It's the preference to strive for the unattainable perfectly beautiful system rather than make one that's slightly less beautiful but works. This often manifests as "Not Invented Here" disease.

Personally, I think this stuff will be pretty good about 3 years after it makes its way into real Solaris. (Yes, OpenSolaris is "real", but big shops (from whence the big bucks come) don't use it.) My reasoning is:
- 2 years to REALLY convince the Solaris developers that their beautiful but inadequate system is hindering adoption by large customers
- 1 year to fix the problems (i.e. uglify the systems slightly)

I got lucky... I have 277 systems to install. I thought 264 of them would be running OpenSolaris, but it turns out only 64 will. So I'll just SSH to each one to run the finish script that I wrote to complete the installation. Yes, it's there to work around deficiencies in the installation process.

If there are any Solaris devs listening (there might be... those guys are like Kibo), here's a list of installer deficiencies I'm working around, though I doubt it'll make much difference:

1. Adding user SSH keys and setting up host keys -- saving them if they're new, replacing them if they've been previously archived. It's annoying when the host keys change every time you do an install.


2. Setting up NIS (domain, IP addresses of servers, etc)


3. Setting up netmasks


4. Converting to static IP (Network Automagic is nice for your laptop, but not for my server)


5. Fixing the GRUB menu (none of my systems have monitors). I know there's a fixed bug for this, but it didn't make 2009.06 and those are the only repo bits I can get.


6. Setting up resolv.conf (the DHCP server won't provide the ndots options, for example)


7. Setting up the name service switch to use files, NIS, and DNS (where appropriate)


8. Populating /etc/user_attr, so that the people who will actually admin the system can be root


9. Disabling graphical login (see #5 re: no monitor)


10. Setting the hostname based on the system IP address (I know I can do this within the current AI framework, but it's WAY too much work. Besides, I have to work around all these other problems anyway...)


Now I know (intellectually) that I could achieve #9 by using a site profile for SMF, but that's a one-liner in the script and I'm in a real hurry to get these systems installed and running. I'll learn all about SMF profiles some other time...

Mamoru Oshii wrote the script and screenplay for the new Miyamoto Musashi movie from Production I.G.: 宮本武蔵-双剣に馳せる夢-. The article I'm about to mention has this translated as "Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai". Maybe that's the official translation, but it's really more like the "Dream of the Two Swords".

Whatever. akibanana.com has an uncredited, very cut down version of an interview posted at animeanime.jp.

I haven't read the original interview yet in its entirety because it's three pages long and it's in Japanese. (Japanese is hard, but not as hard as you've heard.) I just read enough of it to figure out that the English interview is a translation of parts of it. Or maybe it's not, and the interviewer just asked exactly the same questions in exactly the same order and Oshii gave extremely shortened versions of his original answers. Yeah, right...

One interesting thing about this movie is that Oshii wrote it but didn't direct it. It's not in the English version, but Oshii says that Ishikawa (the producer) forbade him from directing it, saying that if Oshii directed it'd just end up really complicated. You think?

I'm not so interested in Musashi myself (I already played the video game), but I am interested in seeing Oshii's hate for his audience filtered through another director. Depending on how Nishikubo directs, I think the result could end up being really good. I'm especially interested because Oshii claims that not only did they not talk after he turned the script over, but that he hasn't seen any of the movie yet. "Not even 1 cut," is pretty much exactly what he said.

Anyway, enjoy if you're into that.

I started buying comics in 1985 or so. It was probably 1986 when I started "collecting" them. I never really stopped, though evidently I scaled back a lot in 1989 or so. I say "evidently" because I don't really remember a lot from then.

Today I have around 1,864 comic books and trade paperbacks. That's the number that are in boxes, anyway... The graphic novels that can stand on their own in the bookcases don't count. Here's what they all look like:



These 1,864 comic books weigh a total of 285.2 lbs, or 129.6 kg. That's including the boxes, bags, and in some cases backing boards. And that's okay, because I didn't figure this out so that I could know the average weight of my comic books. No, I'm more interested in knowing how much dead weight I've been moving around for the last 16 years. Prior to the summer of 1993, they lived with my parents.


Since the summer of 1993, I have moved 11 times, and they've come along each time. Now, it's not like I haven't been accumulating comics in the intervening years, so it's only for the last 3 or 4 moves that I've moved the full weight. The first time there was probably only around 122 lbs or so; I kept pretty meticulous records at least for the first few years. A database I recovered from an old floppy covered up to early 1989 and had around 800 records, and that's what I'm basing this calculation on.

I digress!

The point, friends, is that I am seriously tired of lugging these around. Really, I'd planned to do this in 1997, but only got to the point of alphabetizing them and integrating new additions. Then they went back in the boxes for nearly 12 years.

In early January we got snowed in for a week or so and I used that opportunity to go through them all and not only reorganize them but also figure out which ones I really wanted to keep. It turns out that there are only 112 of them:



It's only about 20 lbs. I'm planning on losing that much weight, so I figure it'll all even out. And since I'm not really accumulating any more (a different, as-yet-untold story), it should be okay for quite a long time.

That of course means that there are 1,752 books (265 lbs) which I want to get rid of. I want to sell them to you. Or maybe give them to you. I'm not trying to recoup my "investment" -- I gave that stupid idea up a long time ago. That would be pretty tough, anyway. Because I've been pretty into indies for a long time, a conservative estimate of my total outlay for these is $3,263.92; I'll be lucky if I can get 1/10th of that back.

I've done enough research to know that the vast majority of these books are totally worthless. So offers that might normally be insulting will be happily considered. I'd like to not lose money on the packaging, but if I do lose a little it's no big deal. (Certainly not compared with what I've already lost.) I mostly don't want to turn them back into pulp, when there are others who might enjoy them as they are.

So here's the deal: You make me an offer on whatever books you want. It's strictly first-come first-served. If I can get more by sending them off to an on-line seller like mycomicshop.com, I'll let you know and you can change your offer however you want. You choose your shipping method, I'll box everything up and let you know what the total will be. Once I have it, I'll mail the books off.

If you've got friends who like to collect comic books, please tell them too! I don't want to restrict this to just my close, personal intarweb friends.

I do want to keep this from dragging on forever, though, so offers need to be in by 1 June 2009. After that I'll take the unsold books and send whichever ones have nonzero value to the Faceless On-Line Comic Book Buyer and take the rest to a local comic shop.

Now then, the lists! I had no luck getting StarOffice to turn my spreadsheet into a nice text file, so what I've got is

• PDF:comics_to_sell.pdf and


• CSV: comics_to_sell.csv (in case you want to slice-n-dice).
  

Back when I was keeping my meticulous records, I graded them too. If there's a grade, it's probably pretty accurate. If there's not, you can assume it's near mint. Basically, the lives of my comics go something like:

1. Get purchased new


2. Get read once


3. Get bagged


4. Get stored in a nice, dark box, never to see the light of day again

Okay, that last is a little bit of an exaggeration... Most of them have been out of their boxes at least twice. But really, they're in good shape. If you disagree, I'll trade you back your money for my book, and I'll pay the shipping. Obviously this is an opportunity for me to get screwed out of a lot of money, but I hope that by dealing with my friends (and their friends) that I'll be able to avoid that.

You can either reply to this post (not recommended) or send e-mail to bc at headgear.org.

Thanks!

The other day I got an email from one of my friends with just this line:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/business/economy/27portland.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

It's really irritating that this link takes me to the "you have to register" page, but if I put the title into Google, the first hit is for the full text of the first page of article on the Times' site. WTF? At least that lets me know that it's interesting enough to go hit up bugmenot for a temporary password...

... Or not. I guess bugmenot is trying to monetize their user base as well, though as usual they cloak it in "In order to ensure a better user experience..." I might be a little more inclined to register if they'd quit BSing me and just come out and say "We have to make money to support this service, and you're a part of it." Likewise, NYTimes. By the way, I don't consider more unsolicited email a "better user experience".

Anyway, instead I found and used this automatic registration generator.

I think I'm now a very rich 41-year old Samoan.

One interesting thing about the article itself -- they quoted the president of Umpqua Bank talking about the difficulty of finding qualified borrowers. I read an article earlier this week about Umpqua possibly giving back the $214 million they got from the TARP fund because of the stigma attached with accepting it. Evidently they're fully capitalized and don't need it. Good for them.

I thought this quote was interesting:

But in recent months, Portland has devolved into a symbol of much that is wrong. Housing prices have fallen more than 14 percent since May 2007, according to the S.& P./Case-Shiller index.

It's my selfish hope that housing prices fall further and don't find a bottom until around 2012, when I expect to have returned to the USA. But what's more interesting is what they don't mention -- there are only 6 cities in the "main index" of 20 cities where the decline has been less. (Maybe 5; it looks like Portland may tie with Boston.) And in the cities where it's worse, it's much worse. Of course, much ink has already been spilled about Phoenix and the others already, so maybe they're just working their way down the list.

Anyway, check this post on Calculated Risk out.

Yeah, things are bad, but are they really a lot worse here than anywhere else in the country? It probably depends a lot on whether you have a job or not.

I imagine it's analogous to this true-life story... I had an operation in 2003 to correct a deviated septum. After the operation I had some fluid accumulate under the skin there. As my doctor told me, "Well, this is really rare. It only happens in about 2% of cases, but of course from your standpoint it's 100%." (Incidentally, the solution to the problem was for the doctor to stick a syringe in there and suck it out. It hurt so badly I broke out in a cold sweat.)

So yeah, a 9.8% unemployment rate is bad; definitely worse than some other areas. But employment itself is binary... I am not 9.8% unemployed. For me it's either 0% or 100%. And until it's 100%, I'm probably not going to feel like things are especially bad here. Of course, if I do become unemployed it's probably not going to matter too much where it happens ‐ wherever that is is going to be a BAD PLACE as far as I'm concerned!


I have learned something from all these articles about people holding off spending (cars, appliances, vacations, etc) because of the economy and the economy being bad because people aren't spending. And that is just that I and my family have been a drag on the economy for going on 3 years now.

Sorry, everyone.

This is nearly two weeks old now, but I liked the result I got:

You Are a Mint Chocolate Cupcake

You are whimsical and quite quirky. You are unlike any other person you know. You are drawn to similarly offbeat people from all walks of life. You are like a cupcake because you're unique and expressive. You have a refreshing take on the world. You're often surprising... even to yourself.

But let's be clear about this -- I rarely surprise myself, though it would be great if I did.

Also, this is the last of my open posting tabs, so I'll probably be quiet for a while now.

ZFS is great, at least from a management standpoint.

For those who haven't heard before, this is a story about the server that I and several of my friends share. It's an X2200M2 running Solaris 10 update 3 (with current patches). Originally it had two 750GB disks. We run the SVM to mirror the root partitions (since it was only with the latest patchset that ZFS boot is supported), and put the remaining space in a mirrored ZFS pool.

Things went really well until one of the drives failed. Unfortunately it only failed enough to make the service times absolutely awful (many retries and timeouts per successful operation), but not enough that the system would just ignore it. So I asked for the drive to be pulled. It was, and after a reboot things worked fine. Before the reboot, we still got the long service times. I'm inclined to blame the crappy SATA controller on the motherboard.

In the last couple of years, 1TB disks have gotten really cheap; they're roughly 1/3 the price of the 750GB disks that went in there the first time. I looked on-line and it looks like a zpool will automatically expand if you replace all of its disks with larger ones. So two 1TB disks were purchased. The bad one was replaced, and things synced up again.

So far, no problem. But now it's time to replace the boot disk. No problem, right? Everything's mirrored and GRUB is set up on the second disk, so we'll just pull the first disk and boot off the second for a bit.

Here's something you may already know: X2200 are teh suck. What you may not know is that it is not possible to set them to boot from the second disk. The BIOS won't allow it to be selected. (UPDATE: I hear that on newer ones you can. But on ours, even with the latest BIOS that'll fit in its 512KB flash, it's no go.) What's more, while there's no electrical damage if you pull a disk, the system does not deal with it well. In fact, it doesn't notice, and disk accesses slow to a crawl as each access attempt to the now-removed disk times out. So, panic reboot time.

Here's a little hint... even when things are bad, DO NOT interrupt the "rebuilding the boot archive" process. As you might expect, that can (and for me, did) render the system unbootable. Best is to update the archive manually after applying patches, so the next time you reboot you don't have to do that.

Anyway, a little maintenance boot with the Solaris DVD and all is well. Physically swapped the disk, and the system boots. Yay, right?

No. ZFS is a little confused. It works, but the status output is less than sensical:

   pool: pool
  state: DEGRADED
[...]
         mirror    ONLINE       0     0     0
           c1d0s6  UNAVAILABLE  0     0     0
           c1d0s6  ONLINE       0     0     0

No problem, right? Just pop the new disk in and it'll rebuild, right?

The new disk was duly popped in, partitioned, and... nothing.

The ZFS docs say that you can replace a disk, but I was leery of saying something like

 zfs replace pool c1d0s6 c2d0s6

I mean, will it be smart enough to replace the failed one? You'd think so, and I'd hope so, but I'm not so naive as to assume that's the way it is. My friend suggests that we make it a hot spare. I do that, and sure enough it starts resilvering immediately. BUT! Once it's done all is not as well as it could be. There's data integrity, sure, but I find to my horror that the pool can no longer be scrubbed. A request to scrub the pool is treated as a request to resilver, which on a mirrored ZFS pool which is in sync basically means "do nothing".

Not being able to scrub the cheap-ass SATA disks does not allow me to have the warm fuzzy feeling that I normally associate with having data redundancy.

It also looks like reads are no longer round-robin; the hot spare is excluded, which means that reads are now half as fast as they were before. That's not to say they're unacceptably slow, but it's noticeable sometimes. So I thought I'd un-do the hot spare and take my chances with the 'zfs replace'. So I tried to use 'zfs remove' to get rid of the hot spare disk. That didn't happen -- you can only remove hot spare disks that aren't in use. WTF?! At this point I'm getting tired of messing with it, so I decide to just leave it alone for a while.

But hey, at least now both of the disks are 1TB, so the pool should at least be bigger now. But, wait... it's not! WTF? That was the whole point of this exercise!

At this point you're probably thinking that ZFS doesn't sound so r0xx0r. That's what I was thinking too.

But you know, we had the data redundancy, so I thought I'd just wait until I was in the area (it's in San Francisco) and could lay hands on the system myself.

I did it this weekend. After backing everything up (via zfs send/receive) to another system, I went back and CAREFULLY re-read the ZFS man page. Oh, you don't "remove" a disk from a pool (that's for hot spares), you "detach" a disk from a pool. Sure enough, I was able to 'zfs detach' the hot spare disk. And hey! Now that the hot spare isn't in use any more, I can 'zfs remove' it. Hooray! Then a quick 'zfs replace' (the one I was afraid to try before), and it starts to resilver.

The pool still isn't expanded, but at this point I don't care. We were living in 750GB without trouble, and we can continue. We'll get the big pool once we switch to OpenSolaris next year, when our Solaris support contract expires. In the meantime, everything's okay.

But looking through my logwatch output this morning, I see that some filesystems are saying that they've got 340+GB free, when it should be only around 140GB. And hey:

 % zpool list
 NAME   SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
 pool   884G   524G   360G    59%  ONLINE  -

Hooray! The expansion happened after the resilvering was done!

In retrospect this is pretty obvious; when we were sparing a 750GB disk with a 1TB disk, ZFS was expecting a 750GB disk to come back some day. Duh.


Functionally, I really like how ZFS works. The interface could be a little better; I don't see much difference between "removing" and "detaching" a disk. Likewise, when do you "add" vs "attach"? Of course, this is where STUDYING the man page comes in handy.

These goinks aside, I like ZFS. And now there's more play space. :)

There's a really good article at Scientific Blogging about the history of Irish soda bread.

It has a really good comparison of the rising mechanisms in traditional bread and soda bread. I found it really interesting.

BTW, when I was in Boy Scouts we called the bastible a "dutch oven". We mostly used ours to make really killer cobbler out of canned biscuits and pie filling. Yum.

I'm going to get one of those when I have a yard where I can build a fire pit. Then we'll spend summer evenings grilling dinner and baking dessert. Those will be the days...

I've finally started assembling the more than 78 (!) panoramas I took while in Japan last year.

The Norwegian was smart, and assembled his daily using Hugin. (Note: Not pronounced "huggin'".)

I played with it too, but a combination of factors made me stop using it. Probably the main thing I didn't like is that to stitch photos from my DSLR I had to convert all the RAW images to JPEG. Then I found a series that it just wouldn't handle; I was going to have to do that one manually. That came pretty early on (in Fukuoka, IIRC) and made me wonder about the viability of the plan in general. But what really nailed it is when it took over two hours (that's nearly a full battery charge, running both cores at full speed) to stitch one set, and then it failed.

So I kept taking panoramas, but not stitching them at the time.

Now, four months later, I am finally putting them together. About a year ago my dad gave us an old Windows version of Photoshop CS, and we cross-graded to CS3 for Mac. watanukisuki uses it usually. I thought about just using her installation, but my computer has twice as much memory and a faster CPU, so I decided to install it on mine. Well, longish story short -- the Mac CS3 doesn't recognize the Windows CS serial number as valid for upgrade. So I'm using it on the "30-day trial". This is actually probably a Good Thing, as it provides incentive for me to get these done.

I really need that incentive now... Until I started this post, I hadn't counted how many I had. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Anyway, Photoshop generally does a pretty good job. Good enough that I don't feel like spending a lot of time tweaking each one. I'm saving the originals so that I can edit them later if I want, but first I want to see which ones are worth spending time on.

In the small, fit-the-whole-thing-on-your-screen size, they generally all look okay. There are of course some that I took with my SD800 where the exposures differ wildly, and that shows up, but when things are pretty close they get blended nicely. At least I think so, looking at my uncalibrated screen through non-artist eyes.

But if you zoom in, you can usually find spots where parallax errors cause discontinuities in straight lines. For the big landscapes it's generally not a problem, but as I was unaware of the problem (and its solution), I did not restrict myself in any way when taking the shots.

So so far I'm not as pleased as I'd hoped I'd be with the results. I do really like making panoramas; at some point you'll get to see a photo of my 500 foot mutant rubber chicken. That was a happy accident, and I don't want to rely on them.

I'll probably get some specialized equipment. Before, I'd looked at things like Really Right Stuff's nodal slides, but I didn't understand that I needed one. Besides, they're expensive! The MPR-CL II, which is what I'll probably get, is $140! And that doesn't include mounting plates and other stuff that's necessary to use it.

I just have to decide if being really happy with making good panoramas is worth that much money. This stuff is also heavy. The slide plus a panning clamp weighs more than a pound! I'm losing weight right now, but that doesn't mean I want to add it back in metal.

Right now I don't know for sure if it's going to be worth it in terms of either money or weight -- I've only stitched about half of my panoramas so far. By the time I'm finished I think I'll know for sure whether I want to pay the money (and weight), or whether I'll just stick to landscapes with no foreground elements.

I probably won't be able to stick with just landscapes... Some of the interior panoramas I've shot are my favorites, even with the parallax artifacts.

Assuming I do pony up for the equipment, there's still the small detail of finding a lens' optical center or nodal point. It's different for each lens, and the manufacturers generally don't tell you where it is. And in a zoom lens, like the 18-200mm that I usually shoot with on my DSLR, the point probably varies depending on how the focal length is set. What a pain!

It turns out that determining that point might not be too difficult. While I was researching this phenomenon, I came across this really nice tutorial (PDF) on how to determine the nodal point using just a simple grid. Even if you're not interested in the technique, take a look at the sample panoramas on the last page; in the one where the grid lines are ghosting, the point of rotation of the camera was only off from the optical center of the lens by 10mm. 10mm!

Except for ones that I took using my tripod (the minority, by far), all of mine were taken by me rotating my body. So that's probably around 160mm in the best case. If I'm using the SD800 and composing using the LCD display, it's going to be even more than that!

I guess I should be thankful that they're coming out as well as they are.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this and asked if I wrote it:



Nope. But I sure wish I had. Especially the entry for Missing White Girl Syndrome. I also like the one for Dangerous Playgrounditis (DP) a lot.

A LOT!

I've now seen several of these "literal videos". It all started last fall when a friend's friend sent him a link to the literal version of Ah-Ha's Take On Me.

Luckily for me, we were traveling together at the time and he shared. From then on saying "pipe wrench fight" was likely to get giggles if not laughs, and singing it in a falsetto guaranteed nearly tear-inducing laughter. Everything came to a stop until it was possible to breathe again.

Earlier today a different friend sent me a link to the same treatment of Billy Idol's White Wedding, a song which I kind of like even when it's not being literally described. Its comedic impact is lessened by the long stretches without lyrics -- for example, the motorcycle ridden through the church's stained-glass window doesn't get a mention, and the ass-shaking backup singers(?) are similarly left without comment.

Anyway, from there I followed a link to the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge. As the original poster said, who said it had to be all about the '80s?

Well, this came out right after I started college, when I was heavily into Rush and "Weird" Al Yankovic. I didn't have to drive, and I didn't have a portable radio, so I missed out on hearing it there. My friends were almost all more musically and culturally impoverished than I was, so I never heard it off the radio either.

In fact, my first exposure to the song was "Weird" Al's Bedrock Anthem. After hearing that I sought out the originals and enjoyed them a little, but not as much as the derivative work.

Having established my anti-authority regarding the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I'll cement it further by saying that I also liked the literal version better than the original.

In fact, when someone mentions the RHCP, I immediately think of The Big Lebowski. Yep, you got it -- because Flea played one of the Nihilists.

Speaking of RCHP, I really like the Richard Cheese version of Suck My Kiss. It's on the Lounge Against the Machine album, which is one of his early ones (so scroll down).

I just read this at Scientific Blogging. You should read the article, since the details are actually in there, but the comic is what made me laugh...



I'm definitely going to try this when it gets warmer. (Yeast don't like to do their thing at 62 degrees F, which is the internal temperature of the house about half the time. The other half it's about 66.)

And I haven't even written about the bacon yet! BACON!

The Japanese seem to love limited-availability goods. Or at least if they don't, the companies that make products for them think they do.

They've got seasonal, regional, and seasonal and regional beers.

But do they really like the limited availability, or just the idea that it might be limited? And are their companies really happy about limiting the market for their goods?

I don't think so...

Here's a photo I took. One item of note is my GPS, with the screen clearly showing our position in Fukuoka, which is at the north end of the island of Kyushu. Look for the white triangle.

The other item is the can of "Sapporo Classic", which is pretty decent, but not as good as some of the other brews from the Sapporo Brewery. The interesting thing about this can is what it says in red characters across the top of the can:

北海道限定
That's read "ほっかいどうげんてい" and literally means "Available only in Hokkaido".



Hokkaido is so far away that it's not even on the GPS screen. Either this beer suffered a grievous routing error, or the whole "limited item" thing is just a schtick to keep the rubes buying.

I really wish that Sapporo's Napolin soda were available outside of Hokkaido. But from what I can gather at the brewery that's more an issue of raw material shortage. And in that case, I guess it pays (more) to keep your homies happy.

I saw this over on Mutantfrog Travelogue.

Here's mine:



Head: 精密機械 (せいみつきかい) Precision instrument

Mouth: 独り言が多い (ひとりごとがおおい) Often talks to himself

Heart: めったに開かない (めったにひらかない) Rarely opens up

Hand: じっとしられない Can't keep still

Overall: 苦より楽　(くよりらく) Prefers pleasure over pain

There's an entry form at the bottom where you can enter your blood type and name and get your own. It's been pretty busy this morning, but trying a reload will eventually bring success.

Sorry for the too-literal translation. I'm sure that a couple of the items are proverbs and as such probably have better (more idiomatic) translations, but I still think it's basically correct.

Remember these?



Maybe you didn't get the memo, but as of 20 January 2009 they are to be replaced by these:



Sorry it's really hard to see, but it says "Thank You" at the bottom. The conditions for this shot were really bad -- I was shooting from inside my car against the sun, and I had to do it quickly because we were just waiting to leave a Wal-Mart parking lot, and the only thing keeping the loyal comrade ahead of me from going was the traffic on the street we were turning on to.

I wanted to find a proper image of this as well as a source, but alas, I couldn't.

Of course, the "Colorado Native" sticker is only mandatory for Colorado natives, and you're allowed to put it on any make of vehicle, though a Chevy is indeed most appropriate.

This was taken in Colorado Springs.

Why is it always more dangerous in the western suburbs? Hint: it's not necessarily the people, though they don't help.

Today "wintry mix" was forecast, so I took the unusual step of watching the local weather (4 channels' worth!) before I came to work. Without exception, they all reported that the temps were above freezing both in Portland and on the west side.

I went outside and sure enough, there was some snow on my bike cover, but it was pretty slushy. Reasoning that if there was liquid water on my ultra-thin bike cover that there would not be solid water on the roads, I set off.

Streets in my neighborhood were wet (that's normal) but otherwise fine. I went over the Ross Island Bridge, which as you can see (if you'll just click the link) is very long and very high up, and not only was it not windy, it was also not slippery.

Even the trip over the western hills was uneventful. I did notice the snow cover on the side of the road increasing, and the sort of light mist which made everything blurry even immediately after wiping my face shield was annoying, but it wasn't especially bad or anything. At one point I put my foot down to see if the road was slippery. It wasn't.

When I got to the NW 185th Ave. bridge over highway 26 and found that it was clear (even dry, where the cars hadn't been running) I began to relax.

WRONG!

I got onto NW Evergreen Parkway, and things were going swimmingly for a while. There's a slight bend that crosses a bridge over a stream, and as I went over that I noticed some unusual wiggling. I was already going more slowly than usual, because the road looked strange. I put my foot down and it glided over the road surface.

At that point I knew I was riding on ice, and I turned my entire attention to riding smoothly. Too much (maybe any) front brake and the front might tuck, which would take me right down. Having the rear slide isn't as big a deal; it's much more controllable. And that's good, since as a single the KLR-650 has a lot of engine braking.

Thankfully that bend is the last one before I get to work, and because it was still pretty early (6:45) the traffic was very light. I pulled up into the turn lane put the old pontoons down and glided to a stop. It's on a slight incline, so I didn't know if I'd be able to get going again, but it was no problem.

So I grannied down the block and into the parking lot. The parking lot was much icier than the street... No surprise there, I suppose, but HOW DID THEY FREEZE IF THE TEMPS WERE ABOVE FREEZING?

That's what I'm really irritated about. I'm traveling at about the time when the lowest temps happen, it's supposedly above freezing, and the roads are frozen. You know that means that it wasn't just below freezing, but had been for quite a while.

The short of it is that I'm going to have to re-evaluate my sources for weather information.

I have a bunch of frequent flyer miles that will expire early next year, so I'm thinking about going back to Japan in December. Thinking about going to Japan inevitably leads me to think about the exchange rate, as that plays the largest role in how expensive a trip like that is. I read this article in the Financial Times recently, and it gave me some hope.

Before I get to the content of the article, a little meta-talk about accessing the article. My company's library has a deal set up with FT whereby I can access all of their articles for free, without registration, as long as the request is originating from a company IP address. This is quite convenient during the week, but on the weekend I tend to just mark all articles as read in my RSS reader because I don't feel like either a) registering or b) firing up the VPN to read a web page.

In my RSS reader, the link to the article above is

   http://traxfer.ft.com/cms/s/0/2f806ff6-fda3-11dd-932e-000077b07658.html?o=%2Frss%2Fmarkets%2Fcurrencies

That eventually redirects to the article (leading paragraph only) and an invitation to register. I was all prepared to do either a) or b) above, but I thought first to ask Google. I just searched for the title of the article, and it was (as expected) the first hit. The many other hits did not explain the issues at hand nearly as well, so I resolved to register and snip various parts of the article for you. Imagine my surprise when I found that the link in the Google search results was the full article! Okay, you can stop imagining now.

Anyway, on to the article itself.

Evidently one of the reasons that the yen has been so strong lately (the ¥/$ ratio declining) is that investors have considered it a safe haven. The thinking goes that if you buy yen, you won't get much appreciation, but the risk is low and you probably won't lose any money either. I'm sure 18zulu could explain this much better than I could (since he actually understands it), but my impression is that this was the basis of the "carry trade", which was one of the things that kept demand for the yen up, which kept the prices high.

But FT notes:

Analysts said that the sharp contraction in the Japanese economy announced earier in the week had shaken confidence in the currency, which has risen sharply in recent months amid a wave of global deleveraging.

IOW, maybe the yen isn't so safe as an investment any more. Also:

Alan Ruskin, strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital, said it appeared that investors were increasingly shifting to the dollar as a haven from the current financial turmoil.

Hooray! Fewer people buying yen => lower demand => lower prices relative to the dollar.

Ruskin again:

"The currency world looks to have rotated another notch, with the dollar for now, the lesser currency evil."

Hooray again! If the dollar wasn't the lesser evil, then there's a chance that the dollar and the yen would both decline and their relative prices would remain the same. I mean, I don't care if the dollar and the yen are both strong against the Euro -- I need the dollar to be strong against the yen!

And if you look at this Google Finance graph, you'll see that indeed, the yen is trending weaker against the dollar.

December's still a long way away, and a lot of things can happen in the intervening months, but I'm hoping that this trend will continue at least to the point that there's parity (or close) between the yen and the penny. I've read articles that said that expecting ¥118/$ to be normal was insane. I hope that ¥105/$ isn't.

Note: I still haven't started on the interview.

I woke up thinking about this (don't know why), so I thought I'd share.

In the fall of 1994 I was well upon my way to getting a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Sciences (the capitalization is to make it seem more impressive... for now) from the University of Texas at Austin. At the time the B.S. program required 10 hours of a foreign language, which at U.T. you could get by taking two semesters. I'd fulfilled my requirements in 1991 by testing out of a semester of German and then taking another semester. I really liked German (I'd taken three years in high school) and I actually took more before stopping. The only reason I stopped is that one semester there was only one section of the next class I needed to take, and it conflicted with a course that was required for my degree. German lost. If it hadn't, you'd probably still be reading this post, but the language and dates would be different.

My roommate for my first two years at U.T. was studying Japanese, because he was an otaku before most people had even heard of the word "anime". Anyway, he studied five hours every night for this class. I'm not kidding -- "five hours" isn't just some unreasonably long time I thought up to impress upon you the fact that he spent a lot of time studying Japanese. It was literally five hours per night. His grades also weren't that good.

Even if I'd been so inclined (and I wasn't), I resolved that I would never study Japanese. Who wants to learn something that difficult? German was easy.

After quitting German, I had a break from foreign languages for about a year. I'd be more specific than that, but I don't have a copy of my transcript or grade reports handy. Anyway, let's just say that in 1993 I took no foreign language classes.

In 1992 and 1993, though, I was busy being otakunized. I'd always loved cartoons, and now I loved Japanese cartoons too. The next natural step is to study Japanese, right? Ah, but remember my resolution from two paragraphs ago? I wasn't about to do that.

Except that 1993 was also the year that I moved off-campus. I shared an apartment with a fencing buddy who was also (though I did not know it at the time), a HUGE Robotech fanboy. He also had a very nice collection of fansub tapes, and in fact it was his copy of the first Patlabor movie that got me interested in Patlabor. During that time I took an informal Japanese conversation class with some of my other newly-otakunized friends. It was fun, and not at all scary.

My new roommate was also taking Japanese, and was a semester or so ahead of my previous roommate. But unlike my previous roommate, he didn't spend five hours a night studying. After many nights spent discussing it, I finally decided that I would start taking Japanese for credit. In the spring of 1994, that's just what I did.

You know what? It was easy. I later spent some time talking to my previous roommate to figure out what had been going on. By this time, he'd gotten passing grades for the first two semesters, which was all he really needed for his degree, and he'd quit taking it. Knowing as I did now that each day's classwork consisted of a list of vocabulary words and a short dialogue incorporating them, I wanted to know what he'd been spending five hours studying. It turns out that he'd been writing the dialogs out in romaji and memorizing the dialogs phonetically.

Now, the teachers didn't require a regurgitation of the dialog as written in the book. As long as you got close and could demonstrate that you knew the vocab words and how they were used, you were golden. The secret for me was to starting doing everything in hiragana as soon as I could, and to memorize the words (and the sequences of the words), not the sounds of the sentences, for the dialogs.

I really liked Japanese. Some of the features of Japanese grammar really appeal to the programmer in me. They're regular, in many cases modular, and modifiers almost always precede what they modify.

My roommate found out about a summer study-abroad program at Obirin University in Machida. It wasn't too expensive (~$1000 plus airfare, IIRC), and we decided to go. It was tough on my folks -- my dad sold a vehicle to pay for it. This was also a big decision for me, since I had exactly one semester under my belt. I signed up for the second semester during the first summer session which would finish just a week or so before I left. But let me tell you, even with two whole semesters done, I had no illusions about how good my Japanese was. I was worried. Not as worried as I might have been, though, because supposedly the eldest son in my host family spoke English. More on that some other time...

Anyway, I did my six week study abroad and loved it. It turns out that my host family effectively spoke no English, and that was a huge help for me. It was also really frustrating at times, but overall it really helped me improve greatly.

So in the fall of 1994, I came back all jazzed up about learning Japanese, so I trotted over to the offices of the Dean of the College of Natural Science and I asked them if I could double major in Japanese. "No, sorry, the College of Natural Sciences doesn't do double majors." Only slightly daunted, I pressed on. "What about a minor?" "No, we don't do minors either," came the reply. "If you want, you could have a concentration in Japanese, though." Aha! Finally something! I eagerly asked what a "concentration" was. "Well, a concentration is when you take a lot of classes in the other subject." Super! And it shows up on my diploma? "No..." On my transcript? "Yes, it does show up on your transcript as you having taken the classes."

So in other words, a "concentration" is work that is neither noted and nor acknowledged by the College. If someone really cares, they can read your whole transcript and notice that you took a lot of classes in some other subject.

I fell into despair. Sort of, but not really.

At the time I'd just gotten a new supervisor at work, and he was turning about to be really bad. Not in an overbearing, micromanaging way -- his main fault was that he was an academic and wanted to move us off a system that worked (well!) onto something written in his pet environment/programming language of Oberon. Having had enough of that nonsense, I happened across a job posting on the internal CS newsgroup. It was for an internship at IBM. I called, interviewed, and got the job.

It was full-time, so academically 1995 was a lost year. At the time I thought I'd be getting credit towards my CS degree for it, but there were some requirements that I failed to meet (like asking the College of Natural Sciences for permission, or checking in every three months), so I ended up not getting any credit at all.

In the fall of 1995, I'd had about enough of the IBM job and decided I'd go back to school the next spring. Looking through the course catalog, I noticed that I didn't need too many more classes to get a B.A. in Japanese. That led to a brilliant flash of inspiration -- perhaps I'd been asking the wrong question! I trotted back over to the Dean's office, and this time I asked...

"So can I get another degree concurrently with my CS degree?"

The answer: "Sure, as long as it's not another Bachelor of Science degree, and as long as it's not in the College of Natural Sciences." Hooray! I'd broken the code! They wouldn't let me do a double major, but they didn't mind if I wanted to get a B.A. from the College of Liberal Arts. Why, oh why, did I not think to ask that the first time?

In 1996 I got back into things full-time. I went back on the Obirin program again in the summer, but this time my home stay was with the family of the head of the English Literature department at Obirin. He'd taught at UNC and the whole family had lived in North Carolina while he was doing it, so I didn't get to practice my Japanese much at home. :( It was still a good experience, though -- as "the old guy" on the trip, all of the public speaking duties fell to me, so I busted out with my bad Japanese at an elementary school (thanking the principal for showing us around), at one of the Obon festivals in Sagamihara (thanking everyone for showing us how to dance and letting us bang on their drums), at a ladies center in Sagamihara (thanking them for showing us how to make gyoza and do calligraphy), and probably some other times I'm forgetting now. That was also good practice, not so much in terms of improving my faculty with the language (nobody ever corrected me), but rather helping me get over my fear of speaking incorrectly. A lot more communication happens when you make an effort rather than just staying silent.

Things were bubbling along nicely; I'd graduate in December 1996 with my B.S. in CS, and then a few semesters later with my B.A. in Japanese. The hold up in the Japanese degree wasn't the Japanese courses, it was the Asian Studies classes that I needed for my minor.

I liked Asian Studies. In particular, the Introduction to Non-Western Philosophies class introduced me to Wing-Tsit Chan's A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy. (As an aside, that book is only relatively recently back in print; I waited about 10 years for it to be available somewhere other than the university library.)

I liked Asian Studies, but I didn't really want to hang around an extra semester or two taking just that, so I hit upon another brilliant idea. I would ask to switch my minor to Computer Science. I obviously had enough hours, and at the required levels. So I headed over to the Office of the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts to ask. "Oh, wow... I don't know if you can do that. I think you probably can, but you'd have to get the Dean's permission first."

Well, the short of it is that the Dean was a very understanding lady. The request was certainly unusual, but she didn't hesitate to say yes. And that is how, in the spring of 1997, I became the first person to ever graduate with a degree from the College of Liberal Arts with a minor in Computer Science.

What should I be doing now, instead of writing this? Translating an interview. But that's hard, and it's tickling the procrastination centers in my brain...

RetroThing has a post today about Racing the Beam: Inside the Atari 2600.

I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be out until the end of March; I saw it at Powell's Technical Books on Monday. I spent a few minutes looking through it -- it looks really interesting! It wasn't until a few years ago that I came to fully appreciate the extreme level of skill required to write games for a 2600, and this book explains about all that and more.

I'd have bought it, but

1. I don't need a hardcover for $22.95; I just want the pages, and


2. I'm not buying any books until I finish reading the ones I've got.

But if I happen to see it at the library...