I think there's a tenth lesson we get from rock climbing.  It means enough to me that I wrote it up over at david.dlma.com instead of here.  But I have at least one sometimes-rock-climbs friend here (megami !) , so I've mentioned it here for those of you who don't follow me elsewhere.

All the rock-climbing life lessons are good, and the video is short, compared to the other TED videos I've seen.

Rabbit, rabbit.

Yeah, I have this month covered already elsewhere.  But why not give LJ a little Leporidae leporidae love too?

Gah! There's way too much to do, and so little time. All I can do at the moment is document what I need to get done before vacation. And even then, I was torn between documenting it here, or at my new experimental Habari blog at david.dlma.com. What am I going to do with that blog? (I treat it like some people treat their Moleskines. It's too special to write on. That domain name is the most me, so I've been protecting it.)

Anyway, in no particular order, here's what I want to get done:

• Customize Twitter Friends Feed: I need to customize my twitter friends feed so that it won't spam my feed reader with @replies I don't care about. I need to set my preferences on a per-twitterer basis. I really enjoy all @replies from some of my friends, but not all.  Maybe I'll break down and find an app that already has the feature, but I prefer having just one place aggregate all the feed activity I'm interested in. [Edit: Biz is going to do this himself!]
• Make a Dictionary Popup: I loved the DQSD mwd popup definition result. But merriam-webster.com has a history of changing the layout of their page so that maintaining the mwd.xml search became onerous. It's time to replace that popup definition with one from aonaware. Here's the API call I'm most interested in: DefineInDict, with "gcide" for the dictId. [Edit: Completed!]
• iTunes library rsync with OpenTape: As originally hinted.

You've all certainly seen these before. Even if it's just for my own sake, below the cut are three videos that I simply adore.

They're "Bathtub IV" by Keith Loutit, "Marry Me" a YouTube video by TROPFEST, and "World Builder" by Bruce Branit. If you've got the time or the bandwidth, watch them in HD, it's worth it.

( Click through to view them... )

We're continuously fighting over the computers in my household, so the time seems ripe for another one. And I want it to be a netbook, an iPhone, or a Palm Pre. My hands are too big for the smallest Eee PCs, so I won't even go there. So here's what I've been doing.

I've been Osborning for the HD HP Mini 2140. (If you didn't click that "Osborning" link, it doesn't mean I've been biting the heads off of bats, it means I've been delaying purchasing products based on the promise of a future release.)

Looking into the HP Minis revealed something surprising to me. The Mini 1000 and 2140 are similar in many ways, but the unintuitive bit was this: The tinier 8.9" screen's resolution is 1024 x 600, but the larger 10.1" screen's resolution is only 1024 x 576.

What the hey? Based on what I saw at the store, I almost bought the one with the bigger screen! Because a bigger screen means a bigger screen, right? Not in this case.  That's why I was so happy to hear the rumor of the bigger screen on the HD HP Mini 2140, that puts that particular netbook back in the running.

In my despair, I began to look seriously at the Dell Inspiron Mini 12. (Larger than I'd want to carry around, but the bigger keyboard and screen would be appreciated.)

But then again, if I had a Palm Pre or an iPhone, I'd have a rich interface to the internet with me at all times. (Except I don't want to pay for their data plans or have to change carriers.)

Anyway, only a couple of days until I find out of the HD HP Mini 2140 is going to be real. But if I get it, would it arrive in time for my vacation?

Choices, choices.

• HD HP Mini 2140 - PRO: size, just right.  CON: sorta expensive
• Dell Mini 12 - PRO: size when considering screen and keyboard CON: size when considering storage, carrying
• Apple iPhone - PRO: ubiquity (good for software selection), same carrier. CON: data plan expense
• Palm Pre - PRO: keyboard, access to my favorite Palm apps.  CON: different carrier

Just wanted to express online my long-going contempt for experts-exchange.com for clogging up Google's search results with so much useless noise.

And I wanted to express my delight with stackoverflow.com, which has proven its worth and demonstrates it readily. I'm also delighted with the promise of hunch.com. It takes a little diving into at this early stage to really understand it, but it's apparent that it's an experiment worth trying. (This is how wikipedia felt way back when. I wasn't sure it'd really work, but I was glad somebody was giving it an honest effort.)

Yay for people helping people.

Hypothetically speaking (again), suppose you bought Bonnie Pink's beautiful ballad "Water Me" on iTunes.  No, wait, scratch that.  At Amazon.  No, wait, scratch that, too.  Neither place sells it.  Story of my life.

So you fly to Japan, buy a digital copy, and fly back.

They you decide that you want to sync your iTunes library with your OpenTape playlists -- Only to discover that OpenTape only plays the first few seconds then fails over to the next track.

Then, hypothetically, you'd transcode it in LAME (maybe in the Audacity GUI) form the original MP3 to another (arbitrarily lower bitrate) MP3.  You'd try the newly created file in OpenTape, and discover that it now works as expected.

Thank you, LAME!

Then, hypothetically, you'd also have to start looking into the best python-friendly way to manipulate tags (really, just copy them from the original to the transcoded one).  Maybe pytagger or pyid3lib?

Did I really not post this before? I've had to set this up multiple times, and it bites me every time.

In my household, the four of us share some computers, and we all have our own accounts on them. Some of us use Gmail and the Gmail notifier, and some of us don't.

The problem: Gmail notifier installs for all users, no exceptions. So the accounts that don't use Gmail still get the annoying login screen every time the computer boots up. No one should ever have to deal with a modal dialog that doesn't enrich their lives.

My workaround is this: Use RegEdit to tweak the GMail startup behavior.

Remove the individual value from HKLM's Run:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\"{<GMAIL'S GUID>}="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Gmail Notifier\\gnotify.exe"


And for every user that wants it, add it to their particular HKCU's Run:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\"{<GMAIL'S GUID>}="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Gmail Notifier\\gnotify.exe"

That should now disable the Gmail Notifier on the accounts that don't want it.

I've got an old home WDS system set up made up of two Linksys WRT54G gateways. It's awesome. I love Linksys for allowing the WRT54G to be "the first consumer-level network device that had its firmware source code released to satisfy the obligations of the GNU GPL."

The WRT54G wasn't configured to build a Wireless Distribution System, but the hardware was capable of it. I installed DD-WRT and followed an online recipe that gave me the configuration I needed:

• One gateway in the office upstairs for all the local devices and the wi-fi devices.
• One access point in the family room downstairs to extend the range of the network and for local (media) devices to speak to each other at high speed directly across the local switch, while still getting out to the internet when necessary.

This all worked great with my old DSL connection. But recently, we migrated from DSL to cable modem, and the new provider was Comcast. The Comcast technician came over to hook us up, but had a little trouble getting the computer online.

I had a sinking feeling that it was the WDS system I had in place. After a few early attempts, the service guy listened to me, and removed the WRT54G from the equation. Sure enough, when the cable modem was connected directly to the computer, the computer found the internet right away.

I was pretty upset that my WDS might not work anymore. I searched the web for terms that included DD-WRT and Arris and Comcast. Sure enough, half the hits I found indicated that the devices were simply incompatible. Wouldn't work.

But a few of the others suggested I set the local gateway to clone the computer's MAC address. That seemed like an advanced and bad thing to do, but if they were right, and Comcast had blacklisted the default MAC address that  DD-WRT uses, it was worth a try.

I navigate to the gateway's administration page expecting to have a lot of trouble, but it turns out to be really easy!


So I told the gateway to clone the PC's MAC address, crossed my fingers, and ... it worked!  It turns out Comcast was blacklisting the default MAC address the gateway uses!  W00T!  My home network is back in business.

... Until I upgrade to 802.11n.

(This is posted to add just another reference page on the net where a fix was found.  Hope it helps somebody.)

I've heard it said that a study was done to catalogue our greatest fears, and that the second greatest fear we have is death, while the greatest fear we have is speaking in public.

Let my experience this past weekend add a little colour to that.  I'd suggest that our modern three greatest fears may well be:

1. Speaking in public
2. Death
3. Loss of connectivity to the internet

This weekend we went down to Pasadena for a memorial for my Mother, who passed away last month.  (While it's imperative for a funeral to occur within a few days of the death, a memorial like this can occur later, to give family and friends a better chance to get together.)

The memorial was held in a church, and the opening words were provided by an Associate Minister.  I was responsible for the opening of the Community Eulogy.  (I write it in caps because that's how it felt.  Imposing.)

I'm not a public speaker.  I'm a typically introverted software developer.  So this wasn't to be an easy thing for me.  While I was wrestling with the way funerals and memorials manage to combine these two all-time favorite pastimes, death and public speaking, Charter Communication suffered an internet blackout for nearly the entire weekend.

Oh.  My.  God.

We were right in the middle of review cycles of my Mom's memorial program and music arrangements.  Staff from the church had been sending email back and forth with us, and they had the wrong phone number for dad.  We sent a correction just before we lost connectivity.  We weren't sure our outgoing email got through.

I was freaking out, thinking I'd broken my dad's computer, and I had precious little time to restore it.  I kept calling Charter every two hours the entire weekend, and the reply I always got was, "We can't help you until the outage that we are aware of in your area has been cleared."  So I really didn't know if the Charter blackout was the only problem, or if there was a problem local to dad's computer.

And how was I going to provide remote tech support to my dad if he can't get online before I go home?  I can't VNC in.  I'd have to walk him through everything blind, on the phone.  "The cable modem is the box with hopefully some green LEDs on it.  See a box like that?  Feel around behind it for a power swich, and if you don't feel that, try to determine which cable is the power cable.  Ready?..."  The prospect of having to do that was terrifying.

Sunday was to be a make-it-or-break-it day.  We were flying back on the last flight that night, after the memorial.

Everything came together.  The flower arrangements arrived where they were supposed to, when they were supposed to.  So did the food and wine.  The music was beautiful.  The memorial would have made Mom proud.  When we got back to Dad's apartment, the internet connection was back up.  Icing on the cake was that I even discovered how to open a safe that Mom had locked, and to which nobody knew the combination.

And the next day was Chinese New Year's.   We'd gotten all that accomplished before the end of the previous year.

Gung Hay Fot Choy!

Phew!

Installing PyGreSQL isn't trivial, especially on Dell computers.  Here's a recipe that worked for me and Python 2.5:

1. Download and install postgresql-8.3.5-2-windows.exe  (You shouldn't need the whole install.)
2. Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\lib to your PATH for libpq.dll.
3. Add C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.3\bin to your PATH for ssleay32.dll.
4. Hide System32's copy of LIBEAY32.dll  (If you're on a DELL, and that one is far smaller and older than the others.)
5. Download and install PyGreSQL-4.0.win32-py2.5.exe

And here's some explanation with accompanying error text so that people searching for a solution to this problem can find it.  Here's my experience:

Downloaded PyGreSQL first, before realizing it had dependencies to a postgresql install.  Got some nebulous ImportErrors when I tried to "import pg".

from _pg import *
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

Great.  What module?  Searching the web, I discovered I needed to install postgresql.  So I did, but I still got the error, even after updating the system's PATH variable.  (Note, sys.path and os.environ("PATH") are two different things.)  Eventually I discovered this great tip:

Try doing the failing import from the Python command line.  (Start->Python 2.5->Python (command line)).  Doing that will actually display a modal dialog that says exactly which dll could not be loaded.  Yay!

Finally, I got the LIBEAY32.dll error mentioned above, the exact text of which follows:

The ordinal 2821 could not be located in the dynamic link library LIBEAY32.dll

and once I hid the old LIBEAY32.dll, I got pg linking with the correct libraries, I was good to go.  Hope this helps somebody.

What are you doing tonight?  (And I might add that it's Saturday night.)

Me?  My wife is away, working.  (Poor her, there's a full moon tonight, and that bodes ill for the hospital.)  The children will be sleeping.  Should I pop in a video?  Play a game?  Read a book or graphic novel?  Program for fun?

No, yes.  Yes!  I'm gonna be programming, but not on any of my personal projects.  There's some data (hundreds of thousands of numbers) at work, and I know there's a story in there.  And the challenge of teasing that story from the numbers is irresistible.

Tonight, here's my scenario:  A CPU and disk almost always at 100% (one or the other).  Excel, python, statistical math, and scads of regular expressions.  This is totally going to be fun.  Especially seeing if I can figure out how to make Excel show me what I'm thinking of, and seeing what the numbers have to show me.

The knee is still visibly swollen, but I can walk again. It's wonderful. I'm climbing very easy climbs. The danger is mostly the landing after being lowered by your belayer. I've got an attentive belayer, and he's been babying me, just as I need it right now.

I should write more about climbing and displaced patellas, because the conventional wisdom I've been getting from doctors doesn't exactly line up with my experience. Let me just say this, from anecdotal experience of someone who's been climbing for 10 years after having severely displaced his patella, and with a subsequent tendency to repeat the injury:

• Climbing with deliberate, static moves is good exercise for strengthening the musculature around the patella.
• Drop-knee moves are dangerous. My kneecap has popped out doing that.
• Landing after being lowered is dangerous. My kneecap has popped out doing that, too.  Didn't even seem like a fast lower.
• Jumping down after bouldering is intuitively risky, but my kneecap has never popped out doing that.

Today is the Grand Opening of the new Milpitas Library. It's probably a zoo there right now.

But we went last week! It was awesome! It was actually open to the public all week, but really, most people assumed it wouldn't open until after the grand opening. I took the family there after work, and, boy, let me tell you, there's little better than a brand-new library that is full of books and empty of people.

We basically had the run of the place. I picked up a couple of graphic novels that I'd had my eye on, but was never interested in enough to buy. (One by Garth Ennis, the other drawn by Josh Howard.) The kids picked up about ten books each.

We explored the whole place. There were cabinets full of historical photos and artifacts. It was very cool to see Milpitas 100 years ago. Made me want to watch Deadwood again.

My mom passed away a few days before Christmas.

She had been sick, and we all had an opportunity to say goodbye.  There's comfort in that.  I flew down to be with my dad for a few days between Christmas and my birthday, to make some arrangements.  We're all heading down again soon.

Oh: I was going to write a post about my birthday along the lines of this:  I've finally arrived at the answer!  (That is, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.)  The actual answer, of course, is: Chop wood, carry water.

I flew back to my wife and kids, and I had the bright idea of going to the California Academy of Sciences on the Monday between Christmas and New Years, because a lot of people still have to work that day.

I wasn't the only one with that bright idea.  The CalAcademy employee controlling the lines outside said it was busier than it had been on the weekend.  The special member entrance line took hours to get through, just like the regular entrance.

Once we eventually got in, my wife asked, "You didn't park in a 2-hour zone, did you?"  Of course I had.  So I left, re-parked the car a long ways away and jogged back to queue up in the re-admission line.  On that way back, my foot twisted a little, and my kneecap fell out to the side.  (A "displaced patella".  Displaced patellas are painful.)

( Picture of my gross swollen knee inside... )

Evidently a ligament saw fit to tear off some bone when it couldn't bear the strain. This will put me out of commission for a few weeks. It's hard to say how much this sucks for someone who is supposed to be Daddy!

I limped back, and the CalAcademy was now only allowing people to enter when the same number of people left.  Cell phone reception inside the academy is awful, so my wife had to walk to a spot where she could make an outgoing call every half-hour to see how far along in the line I was.  I got in around lunchtime.

We did all get to see the planetarium show, and it was duly awesome.  (And Ai Otsuka's "Planetarium" was in the car on the way to the CalAcademy. I couldn't resist.)

On the way back from the CalAcademy an accident on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge brought traffic to a stop.  My son just about lost his mind with the hating of being stuck in traffic for what felt like an eternity.

Oh, there's more.  I can't bring myself to write it at this point.  I'm glad that that week is over.

Mou ichido: Bad Week Owari.

Yeah, I know that that subject text is hard to read. Blame it on the insomnia. I like the LiveJournal them "Expressive" by Jared MacPherson, but one thing that bugs me about it is that list items at the top of the post tend to overlap with the userpic.

Here's an example:


Yuck. A fix for it is the following Custom Stylesheet code:

.asset-body ol { list-style: decimal inside; }
.asset-body ul { list-style: disc inside; }

If you customize Expressive with the CSS above, then your journal won't have list bullets that overlap the user icon.  Here's a link to the corrected page in the picture above.

In case I need to update another computer with my Paint.NET plugins, here's a public note-to-self of the ones I have in my Effects directory:

• Feather.dll - From BoltBaitPack.  (Better than trying to Gaussian blur the edges of a layer)
• EoEffects.dll - Evan's Effects v1.0 by evanolds.  (Mirror and Quad Reshape.)
• Shape3D.dll - Shape3D by MKT.  (3D Mapping onto cube, sphere and cylinder.)
• EdHarvey.Effects.dll Ed Harvey Effects (Extract Channel and Noise Removal, as suggested here.)

Never got it, but have considered Reflection by dS810, which would compete with Water Reflection by MadJik.  Oh, but they're so Web2.0.

Also should seriously consider some selection based plugins like BoltBait's Selection Tools.

Maybe I should update my config page with this info...

I've got a new feature in my lifestream, but I don't know how to expose it. Currently, the lifestream entries look like this:


I like this look, because it's uncluttered. There are only two noticeable links when you hover over stuff. The text in the middle is a link to the original entry, and the little icon to the right takes you to my account at that site.

However, I decided it would be handy to be able to have lifestream pages that show only entries from livejournal, my family blog, delicious, or plurk, or any of the others.  I made it so.  Yay!  There they are!

But now the problem: From where should I put links to them? It's the same issue as with the lifestream legend. The lifestream legend is meant to be just a little table to help the reader know which services are being tracked. It's a handy thing, but it doesn't belong on the lifestream page. So I left it out.

But it seems like I should be able to put links to the filtered pages somewhere. Hopefully from the lifestream itself, because that's the handiest. But a new link from that page will hurt the current design. Here are some examples that would put the link just to the left of the little icon at the end:

I don't know what I should do.  In the picture above there's a picture of a funnel, which apparently is geek code for "filter."  Below that is an icon of a page with a green "go" arrow (from famfamfam), and below that is a down arrow unicode character.  Below that is a nebulous, mysterious box.  I'm not really pleased with any of these.  I like the feature, but just don't know how to expose it.

Do you have any ideas of what would look good?  Should I leave those links out of the lifestream and put them in from the legend?  Maybe I should change the link of the icon at the end to be to the filtered page instead of my account page at the remote service?
 
[Edit]  Currently, I changed the link of the icon at the end to point to the filtered page.  I'll see how that works.

There were little bursts of rain and sunshine this morning.  On my way to work I was lucky enough to be driving towards a double rainbow.  I took a quick picture from my phone while on the road.  The image doesn't really do it justice, but I wanted to share the photo anyway, because I thought the event was cool.

Today I got to attend a one-day class presented by Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantative Information.

What follows are completely random notes from the conference:

A conspicuously unmarked bus full of people followed my car into the parking lot.  I suspect they were Google employees.

I remembered to bring my pen, a UniBall Signo, but didn't bring anything to write on.  I figured the conference room would provide something.  But when I got there, I noticed that a lot of the other attendees brought their own stuff too, and more often then not, their stuff was Moleskines, iPhones, and UniBall pens, too!

For a second, I thought Tufte's laptop was an Apple MacBook Air, but upon closer inspection, it wasn't the Air.

Tufte is very sensitive to the effect caused by putting boxes around text.  He's against the optical clutter it causes, especially when the lines of the box are too close to anything else, and thus "activate" the negative space inbetween.  The lines can cause shimmer with the content they're trying to box.  He pointed out the box around the surgeons's warning on cigarette cartons, and also pointed out that putting the surgeon's warning in all caps did not make reading the warning any easier, it actually made it more difficult.  (Maybe, I'll have to think about that.)

Tufte is a fan of Gill Sans and Trebuchet.

Tufte does not dismiss the value of annotation and the written word.  Sometimes a few paragraphs are better than a chart.

He provided an anecdote about the dense tables and charts on the sporting page vs. a military presentation where the data was highly distilled for executive consumption.  He says that we really don't have to hide the details like they did in the military presentation.  We're perfectly capable of combing through somewhat dense data when it's presented effectively.

Tufte's aesthetic reminds me of Jakob Nielsen's, a little but.

Tufte's got a thing against the effect that Microsoft PowerPoint has had on data presentation in general.  He uses a PowerPoint presentation made by one of the manufacturers of the Space Shuttle Columbia as a prime example of the ill influences of PowerPoint.  I've got to find that presentation to see what he was talking about.  Should be at tufte.com, maybe.

Tufte may be something of a bibliophile, too.  He showed us a 1570 edition of Euclid's Elements and Galileo's Sunspots books.  They were pretty awesome.  Euclid's book had little pieces of paper glued to some of the pages where the reader was supposed to fold flaps up, to better visualize 3D geometry.

Tufte, as a publisher, pointed out how impressive it was that the 1570 edition of the book's glue still held, and didn't warp the page it was glued to.  The obverse side of the page was perfectly flat and normal.

He quoted "About Face": No matter how good your interface is, it'd be better if there was less of it.

He offered the following presentation guildelines:

1. Define the problem.
2. Show its relevance.  (Why the audience should care.)
3. Show the solution.

He also recommended showing up early, to resolve problems with the venue, or to socialize with the audience.  He did this.  He walked down the rows, asking about us and signing our books.  He also recommended finishing early.  He did this, too.  By two minutes.  He finished at 3:58.

Tufte won some points with me when I read his list of personal favorite writings:

• Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, et. al., A Pattern Language
• Robert Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants
• Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
• Italo Calvino novels
• Gore Vidal literary essays
• The Paris Review Interviews, Writers at Work (15 volumes)
• Paul Klee, Notebooks
• Richard P. Feynman, Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman, and What Do You Care What Other People Think?