The ravings of a sane person.

The ravings of a sane person.

Josiah Carlson

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	[May. 6th, 2008\|11:05 pm]
This and my Canon camera's inability to be viewed as a writable drive letter in XP might actually give me a reason to keep the Vista laptop (it's got a SD card slot). Or maybe I'll just pick up a $20 reader. Either way, programming my camera sounds like fun :)
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[Apr. 30th, 2008|07:34 pm]

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surfing

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Managed to get into the water tonight, it had been too long. The waves were 3-5', and were breaking pretty close to shore.

During my attempts to paddle out, I saw some good surfers, one guy would even spin his board around and ride it backwards. I also caught some of the whitewater from the bigger stuff breaking farther out.

After fighting and getting rolled more times than I care to admit, even getting swept south almost to the rocks at Salt Creek, I managed to get past the break. Once out there, it was cloudy, a bit breezy, but beautiful. After a few failed attempts to pick up some moderate waves, and almost getting rolled by an easy 7' monster, I figured that getting in before getting hurt was probably the best idea. I decided to race the waves into shore, catching whitewater on my way in. I timed it reasonably well, didn't get rolled, and bodysurfed my board in.

I can't wait to move to the beach in the next month or two. Being able to get into the water at dawn on a whim is going to be awesome.

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It's not a great place to visit...so why live there?	[Apr. 26th, 2008\|09:10 am]
I look at maps a lot, and when I first saw The Palm Jumeriah I thought, "wow, nifty." Well, it turns out that the place isn't all that great, read more at The Guardian. Rays, crabs, and barracudas make the water essentially pretty scenery, and the 120 degree heat makes the area unbearable. Really, it begs the question: who would buy a home, sight unseen, in Dubai? Seriously. There are complaints from just about everyone who purchased one. Temperature? It's a desert. No trees? It's a desert. Come on people, invest a little in research and drive around the place before you drop millions on a place you don't even like and aren't going to be able to sell. You really want a nice place in a beautiful climate without all that BS for 3 million pounds (the apparent going rate for a house on the palm)? Hello! Florida, California, Hawaii, (maybe the gulf coast of Texas), half the islands in the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia, any non-war-torn island between Australia and China, ... I guess the cliche about a fool and his money applies directly in this case.
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	[Apr. 20th, 2008\|10:30 pm]
So...a friend that I haven't seen in about 10 years, that I have attempted to find a few times previously, found me through facebook on Wednesday. Some emails, a few expressions of "omfg it's been so long since I saw you", and I was on a plane to Phoenix for the weekend. A completely random kind of thing that I've never done before, but certainly an adventure. We spent the weekend talking about what we've been up to (school, hobbies, relationships, who we are still in contact with, ...), sitting by the pool, and relaxing. Aside from a few clouds on Saturday morning (that I was blamed for bringing ;) ), I had a great time. One of the reasons why I hadn't been able to find this friend is because they purposefully hid themselves from the goings on of the internet. About the only thing that I had wanted to do was to swing by the Love Sac outlet at AZ Mills to check out the Pillow Sac as a kind of mattress topper and/or bed replacement. According to the site, the dimensions are the size of a double mattress. However, going into the store, either they had an old version, or someone is lying, because it wasn't even as long as I am tall. Despite the Love Sac outlet's failure, the weekend was awesome. Good friend, met some other cool people, good conversation, fun. It has been decided that next time, they are coming out to visit me. Yay!
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[Apr. 12th, 2008|06:36 pm]

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surfing

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I got into the water again today. Took the roommate down to sit on the beach; he had never been to Salt Creek before. One of his friends was supposed to meet us there, but she wasn't feeling good. The waves weren't terrible, but there were so many people, and the really good break on the south end was cordoned off for a surfing competition.

There were a lot of young people out in the water. The public section was dominated by 10-16 year olds. There were actually a pair of maybe 13/14 year old girls in the public section that were awesome. I tried to let them take as many waves as they wanted, because I can't make as much out of the waves as they can. As we were leaving, one of them swapped her shortie (maybe 5 1/2 feet long, if that) for a classy looking longboard at least 7 1/2 feet. I'm sure she had a lot of fun with that.

After catching a couple (and not catching a bunch), I went into the shallows to work the whitewater. Easy to catch, easy to ride, a wave every couple minutes. Now all I need to do is to get good at catching the big waves. :)

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[Apr. 11th, 2008|08:54 pm]

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surfing

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Managed to get down to Salt Creek Beach a couple hours before the sun went down and did a bit of surfing. Surfline said 1-3 feet, and most of it was, but there were quite a few 5' sets. I left most of them to the more experienced people there, but picked one up on my way in for the evening (the sun was going down and the wind was getting cold).

Salt Creek is the best spot I've found so far. Even when it's small, it's a lot of fun.

I didn't realize how cold it was until I got home and the cold tap water felt warm. Maybe 2 hours in the water is a bit much right now.

Also, watching the sun go down while on the water is almost as awesome as watching it come up.

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Whee!	[Apr. 4th, 2008\|03:09 pm]
what I ride Originally uploaded by josiahcarlson Went up to Huntington this morning to ride the shorty (I took yesterday and today off because I needed a break), then stopped by the 5th Street Surf Shop and got a decent deal on an 8' that is almost identical to the board I learned on (also an 8' with the same shape from Pearson Arrow in Santa Cruz, though the one I learned on was blue; no fade). Because I couldn't wait, I took red for a ride just north of Huntington pier (which had some 2-4' with some 5'+ sets). It rides just like the board I learned on. Awesome. Thankfully, my current place as 8'8" ceilings, so I can stand it up in the corner behind my desk.
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[Apr. 1st, 2008|11:13 pm]

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pictures

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Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't find a link to make Picasa offer my shared photos easy to access by users without a gmail account. To bypass that, I've gone ahead and created a flickr account. Right now it only has my surf boards and a couple other pictures, but it will eventually become the home of those pictures that I want to make available to people.

You can go http://www.flickr.com/photos/chouyu_31/ to see them.

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not all navigation technologies are created equal	[Mar. 26th, 2008\|11:01 am]
In my job, I look at a lot of maps (part of my job is to work on routing and directions for our products). Our maps, Google's maps, Yahoo's maps, Microsoft's maps, ... The quality of map data from different vendors varies greatly, though I've only seen the data from two major vendors so far. There is one that I prefer, but perhaps that is due to familiarity. There has been idle chitchat around the water cooler about using free data and software from something like openstreetmap.org. This is not serious talk, there is zero chance in hell of us switching to such products, but we get some giggles here and there. One of the reasons why no one is taking the idea seriously is because of the quality of product. Firstly, the map data in certain areas is complete garbage; it's like a 5-year old with a set of crayons started drawing and said "this is my map". You only need to look at the area around Irvine and UCI in Google maps (with satellite images enabled to see how well things line up) and compare it with the osm.org stuff to see what I mean. Specifically look at the 73, the intersections with 73, etc. I would consider picking up a GPS unit and driving around to help (when I get my motorcycle), but I fear that such a hobby would begin to take up months of my life (just for the UCI area) due to the quality (or lack thereof) of the data that is already present. I think I'll pass. Those of you in Minnesota can also look at the Twin Cities area to notice that St. Paul isn't even listed as you zoom in. Wow, missing an entire city; the second city in the Twin Cities. What the crap? That people have actually written software to convert the osm format data to img format to be used by Garmin GPS navigation devices makes me want to cry. Pay for the $100 yearly updates people! Or use a product that doesn't need to be updated (VZ Navigator for Verizon cell phones, AAA Mobile for certain Sprint handsets, ...)! But when your data is crap, you can't expect anything worthwhile to come from routing on it. Even worse, the libraries and software are all written in Java to access the standard data storage system of MySQL (whose criticism I'll pass on expressing), which combine to make a practical cross-country routing system (with sub-1 second routes from LA to NYC) not possible. I could go on, but I won't. Those of you who like using GPS units and making maps: openstreetmap.org could use your help. For everyone else who just wants to use the data: stick with your commercial mobile navigation setup (telephone, garmin, tomtom, magellan, etc.).
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Neil Gaiman wins	[Mar. 21st, 2008\|08:31 pm]
Mirrormask is awesome. If you liked any of Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, or Pan's Labyrinth (which this movie seems like it is a combination of; even though Pan's Labyrinth came after), you will also enjoy Mirrormask. Though I think that Mirrormask is better than the other three.
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Adventures in hardware RAID, take 3	[Mar. 18th, 2008\|11:03 pm]
Using hardware RAID on the motherboard with a pair of SATA drives, coupled with a regular PATA drive for boot seems to work great. According to HD Tach, both drives read at 60-70 megs/second, with PATA bursting for 90 megs/second, and the raid bursting for 240 megs/second. I'm going to call this puppy done. Now I just need to copy everything over and install all of the software I want running. Like I said before, a new installation of XP is fast (about 20 seconds from BIOS to the hard drive done reading).
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Adventures in software RAID, take 2	[Mar. 18th, 2008\|08:54 am]
It seems that at some point, Windows XP really stopped liking to boot. When it didn't hang while scanning USB for floppy/cd rom drives, it would restart after hitting 'mup.sys' (thank you boot logging to the console). The advice available seemed to be generally lacking in anything except "try unplugging USB" or "try disabling cache to update your bios/patch your OS". I don't really know what to say about what went wrong, but I don't care, XP didn't work quite right. It seemed to choke after the first set of 3 updates after installing SP2. Before that, it worked. After that (and also after enabling the raid mirror), it didn't. Maybe it's RAID, maybe it's the patches, I don't know. In looking around, it seems that almost everything that supports 2k and XP also supports 2003, so I gave that a shot this morning. There was some silliness where 2003 decided it would add an entry to the 2k's boot.ini, making 2003's boot drive 'G', etc., but I'll disable the drive in the BIOS and reinstall this evening (it's maybe 30-40 minutes when I don't install drivers, etc.). RAID is definitely available in 2003, and any SATA card available at Fry's supports 2003. One interesting thing is that even after I installed the Intel chipset drivers, XP refused to copy disk to disk faster than 33 megs/second (this is using PATA and mirror building), suggesting that I don't have the correct drivers for enabling ATA/133 support on the motherboard (despite installing the drivers from Dell). I guess I'll have to go straight to Intel. Also, Windows XP does not actually support > 128 gig volumes from a slipstreamed SP2 installation CD; uck (2003 sees the full drive without issue). So far I have noticed that RAID is far more difficult to get working than it really should be.
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I had a dream...	[Mar. 17th, 2008\|08:46 pm]
...and that dream was to get a bunch of hard drives, connect them up via USB2, and do software RAID 5 in Windows 2000 Professional. I am attempting to do this with a handful of smaller hard drives that I have laying around initially to start it out. In order to do so, I would first need to connect them internally via PATA/SATA, make them dynamic disks, then make them a striped set. I don't have sufficient internal ports to make it happen (never mind power), and I am unsure as to whether or not I can get them working as dynamic disks, then make them part of a single volume later. If I were a Linux guy, I could attempt to use ZFS-fuse, but unfortunately all of my apps are Windows. I suppose I could go the Hackintosh route, use ZFS there, and view the volume in a Parallels instance...but that would be crazy. I could arguably use ZFS in linux inside a VirtualBox instance, then mount the volume locally via Samba, but again; insanity. I've looked into external boxes that are accessed via ethernet (SAN), USB2, and Firewire, but all are generally slow (25 megs/second) and expensive. Right now, it seems that my only real choices are: 1. Purchase 2 large USB drives, put data on one, and use MirrorFolder (or some equivalent for automatic backups) or cygwin + rsync for a local copy. 2. Pick up a selection of SATA drives (as many as I want/need), get an eSATA controller with sufficient ports, and use an eSATA -> SATA cable (up to 6 feet in length!) along with an external enclosure (I have a 4 bay external enclosure sitting in my storage unit) to power them, and hope W2k Pro does mirroring/striping. Overall, assuming W2k does mirroring/striping on drives (which I'm going to test later tonight with an install and a mirror on a pair of drives), then the eSATA-based solution will offer the best performance (probably close to 50M/second write, 100M/second read, versus about 12M/second write 24M/second read with USB2 and MirrorFolder), best price, most flexibility for future upgrades (add another controller, more drives, etc.), and best cooling of the drives themselves. Further, SMART reporting will work, and the SMART monitor that I use on Windows will also work (it doesn't work on many external USB drives). Cross your fingers for W2k mirroring to actually work (word on the net is that it doesn't). Technically, I also have a licensed version of Windows 2003 Server that I know supports software RAID 0, 1, and 5, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't support a large selection of the software I want to use. I also have a licensed copy of Windows XP Professional, and there are software hacks that claim to make it work. ... I'm just going to go for Windows XP Pro and the RAID hack. I've been meaning to switch my desktop to XP for a while now, and with more or less guaranteed support, it's hard to say no (like the surfboard ;) ). Update: It took me about 5 tries to override the Windows File Protection protected drivers, but these instructions worked for me in SP2. I guess I'm going to go for the SATA-based solution (whee!) Now all I need to do is to get the rest of my drivers installed. Update 2: If you are going to use a boot drive > 128 gigs, remember to slipstream your XP SP2, otherwise your boot drive will be limited to 128 gigs (XP lacks the ability to resize a dynamic drive that was originally a basic drive). Ah well, I wasn't planning on using that extra 60 gigs for anything anyways (except for maybe a temporary/swap drive; RAID 0 at the end of two disks for speed sounds sweet). Also, a freshly installed copy of XP is REALLY fast.
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my sticks	[Mar. 17th, 2008\|08:53 am]
September 2002, I found a surfboard on the beach made by Chris Kaysen of Kaysen Surf Designs. The "blog post" on my original web page that included the information has been lost to the annals of history (or the wayback machine), so I'll not repeat it here. Well, this past weekend I went by the Chris' shop down in San Juan Capistrano and asked about getting it fixed. He said that even if I were to get it fixed, it probably wouldn't be big enough for me unless I was really good. We chatted for a bit, and looked at the board to see what they used to do. He then pointed out some used boards that were quite reasonably priced. One caught my eye, and I couldn't say no. So I said yes. The yellow one is the one I found broken on the beach. The blue one is what I bought. It's 10 years old (2 years older than the other board), 6'4", and was well cared for. I can't wait for a spare day (or week) of good waves to get used to it. It needs a few dings repaired (I have a kit), and I need to wax it up, but it's going to be a lot of fun. I still need to pick up a selection of longer boards (7', 8', maybe 8'6") for the variety of rides, but that can wait for the summer ;). update: I forgot to mention that I also managed to get to the DMV to acquire my motorcycle endorsement. Whee!
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	[Mar. 12th, 2008\|09:14 am]
I'm not normally one to talk about music, being that I spent the better part of the last 5 or so years not listening to music voluntarily, but I've been getting back into it recently. One artist/band that has helped me get back into music is Michael Franti and Spearhead. gunn once told me how much Bob Marley helped her, and while I'm not typically a big reggae fan, Michael Franti does offer some nice grooves (it helps that Sly and Robbie are in Spearhead, who seem to be considered in the top 10 greatest reggae artists of all time). A few songs to take a look at by Michael Franti and/or Spearhead: Hello Bonjour East to the West Bomb the World Light Up Ya Lighter A huge thank you to K for turning me onto such a great group of artists. If you feel like something a bit more funky, Greazy Meal is also awesome, and from Minneapolis. Update: I've got too much Franti/Spearhead. Love Me Unique is also quite good.
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PyPE [Mar. 3rd, 2008|09:26 am]

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software

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At some point in the future, I presume I will have some free time. There are a few things I would like to do with PyPE so as to help support the tasks that I have been doing recently.

Among the changes that I'm planning on is to replace the hodge-podge of events/notifications with a unified architecture. Basically using wx.lib.pubsub (a publish/subscribe architecture) to handle event notifications and plugin callback processing.

I'm also looking to switch to a better scheduling system to handle little things like auto-refreshes (parsing/spell checking/etc.). Currently I use a wx.Timer() instance, but it seems as though over long periods of time, timers leak, and the Python process begins to take up more and more processor time. Because there are easy ways around wx.Timer() instances, I may as well exploit those.

I'm also looking to change the way I do widget layout. Some of you may be thinking, "finally, he's going to use XRC to define layout". No, I'm not. I'm going to be using an idea I had when Python 2.5's context managers were just being thought up; in-code hierarchy-based layout...

with Panel(name='toplevel') as p:
    with HorizontalSizer:
        add(Label('entry 1:'))
        add(SPACE)
        add(Text(name='entry'))

Only the plan is to do it without context managers (so it's Python 2.3+ compatible). Basically, you use all of the same stuff, but instead of using 'with', you use 'for'. The effect is that by using for p in Panel(name='toplevel'), p will leak into the surrounding scope. I'm not worried.

What's even better is that if I write the wrapper objects correctly, I get an automatic object hierarchy created (toplevel.entry in the above for the text box), as well as simple event bindings ( pub.subscribe('toplevel.entry.event', myfcn) ).

Some will say, but Josiah, that sounds *a lot* like MVC/MVP design! To that I say somewhat, only without the code ugly that typically follows MVC/MVP design. If I ever get around to actually making it happen, the code will actually be visually appealing.

Now all I need is a month of down time to make it happen.

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Status update / thought dump / I'm still alive	[Feb. 19th, 2008\|10:34 pm]
It's been a while since I updated publicly, so I suppose it's about time, eh? I'm still surfing whenever I can (weekends, rarely the freezing dawn patrol during the week), but the waves have been really strange recently; 4-6 foot every 20-30 seconds. Quite difficult to get out, but I have a secret: rather than using a crawl-like stroke, I use a double-handed breast-stroke, which gives me twice the water movement for every stroke, and I stroke just as often with both arms as everyone else does with one, resulting in about 4x the push. Oh, and the paddle gloves help too. It's a bit tiring, but I can get out in just about anything, and I can always float and recover or catch the whitewater by shore. Last weekend I rented a 10'4" monster of a board. I've been riding a friend's 8', which works great, but I wanted to see what a longboard was like. Getting up was a bit different. It had a single long fin rather than 3 shorter ones like the 8', but it just felt more 'squirrely'. Once I got up though, I rode that bad boy into the sand bar (literally, the fin caught on the sand, and I jumped off, but because of my forward momentum, I traveled farther than the leash had length, and ended up belly-flopping, heh). I couldn't really steer it, so I'll probably have to pick up my own 8' at some point. I'm going to have to rent an 8' just to see if I can notice any substantial difference between the different brands/types. I have gotten a chance to ride my friend's 6', and though it's neat, it lacks the buoyancy that I like in an 8' board. Since starting at NIM, I've not had a lot of time to do any personal software development, either for Python (there are some async socket patches that I've been trying to get in for like 9 months) or for PyPE (there are a few fixes and about a bazillion design changes that I'd like to get in), both because a general lack of time, as well as "I write software all day long, I don't want to do it when I get home." Maybe I'll have the time/drive to get into it after crunch is over. Similarly, I've not had the time to submit my two updated papers to a journal or conference. Maybe some weekend soon. When I first moved out to California, the DMV didn't take my motorcycle endorsement from Minnesota (which irked me), and I've been too lazy to really look into getting it again. Well, the guy in the cube across the aisle from me rides, we were talking, and he turned me on to a 2-day weekend class that gets you everything you need except for the written exam at the DMV. I've already done the equivalent class in Minnesota, but what the heck, it's been almost 12 years since I took it, and I don't currently have a motorcycle to do the riding test on (I hope to fix that in the coming year). I suppose that's about it for now. I'm hoping to get to the cities some time soon, but the way work is looking, I won't have the chance until around late March at the earliest. Just in time for the spring break rush :/ .
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	[Jan. 18th, 2008\|09:57 am]
39 degree air + 59 degree water + 7AM sunrise = damn beautiful + omfg cold Update: Regarding me being Minnesotan and being cold: mind you, my feet and body were warm (good boots and wetsuit), but my hands* and head were in and out of the water, thus were wet, and were in a constant 10 mph wind, causing more or less continuous evaporation. Wind-chill is one thing, wet wind-chill is yet another. Thanks to our friend chemistry, we know it takes more energy to evaporate salt water than regular water, resulting in more effective cooling of wet hands and head. Never mind the ocean spray, ... When it gets to be 40-50 degrees, I encourage all of you mocking Minnesotans to sit in the passenger seat of a car while a friend drives around with the window down at 10mph, while you spray one hand with a spray bottle (tap water will be fine for this experiment), ensuring a more or less constant wetness, for an hour. Alternatively, find a walk-in fridge, bring a fan and a spray bottle, and conduct the same experiment. If you don't have a spray bottle, you can bring a bowl of water and dip your hand in and out every few seconds to simulate me paddling, with a 1-2 minute rest every 2 minutes (out of the water in the wind). After doing either of these experiments, and not experiencing your hand being cold, please contact me then to call me a wimp. Until then, I stand by my claim that my hands and head were 'omfg cold', and will call all dissenting comments 'uninformed' ;) . Also, I know that at least two of the authors of comments are chemists, so should know how much energy it takes to evaporate water, and what that means to exposed flesh. * I do have webbed gloves, but they offer zero protection against the elements thanks to the 1/2mm fabric, causing my hands to stay wet all the time.
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	[Dec. 20th, 2007\|12:39 pm]
Some time between basketball on Saturday and spending time with friends on Sunday, I seem to have managed to break a rib about 2 inches below my collar bone, about 2 inches to the right of my center line. I know it wasn't during basketball because I was breathing pretty hard, and it didn't hurt then. It was aching a bit, then I had a friend push on it (thinking that maybe it was a muscle), when it audibly clicked. Ahh, my first broken bone. Unfortunately, it's in a position where I can't get my chest wrapped, it hurts to cough, sneeze, breathe deeply, and a host of other mundane things. On the upside, I have all of the paperwork to submit my dissertation, so I'm going to do that today. Otherwise, things are going pretty well, considering the context. I hope everyone enjoys their vacation, I'm going to be hanging out trying to get ahead on some work. Take care.
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some good news	[Dec. 11th, 2007\|06:35 pm]
Short story shorter, I passed my final oral examination for the phd. Now it's a matter of a few small corrections, getting it signed, paying the fee, and getting it submitted. Quite literally a matter of paperwork. Huzzah!
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