Oct 25, 2007
Traditional Portland weather
It might have been bright and sunny this afternoon, but it was bone-chillingly cold and foggy this morning. When the 7:55 bus to downtown reached the Ross Island bridge, the view of the Ross Island Sand & Gravel ready-mix plant looked like this:
But by the time the bus reached the other side of the river the sun was already starting to shine on the houses up at the top of Tualatin Mountain, and by 1pm the day had settled in to being a brilliantly sunny (so sunny that even with the pentax dialed down to f22, 1/4000th second the sunlight was still washing most of my photos out,) but cold, fall day.
Green/Yellow in action
Yellow streetcar, yellow leaves.
Waiting for the light on SW 4th.
At lunch(ish), I took the bus downtown to buy a new pair of boots, and by happy coincidence the bus route takes me right by the downtown trolley line. And green/yellow rolled up just as my bus drove up to the streetcar crossing. I'd flipped the camera into raw mode this morning, and it does seem to make a difference to let iPhoto do the conversion from tiff(ish) to jpg instead of having the *istDS do the conversion, and it does seem like it's a slightly better image (at the cost of being ~10mb instead of ~3mb per image.)
Oct 24, 2007
New Code! (somewhat fewer security violations than before! edition)
After writing my cron replacement last week, I've been tweaking it to be a little more paranoid about how it works. I've gone through and tweaked it so that it builds a brand new environment and doesn't accidentally carry the daemon environment around with it (the existance of the daemon environment isn't that much of a bother on pell, but if I run it on a machine infested with gnuware, there are an amazing number of environment variables that can fuck you up just by existing); I've tweaked the sleeping code so that it tries to always run jobs at 30 seconds past the hour; and I've spent a lot of time doing and redoing and redoing the runjob code so I can start postoffice from cron without leaving a cron zombie staggering around.
0.8 has been running for a couple of days now without intervention, and it hasn't either starred in a remake of Dawn of the Dead or done a firefox and grown massively without bound (that's not the worst thing about firefox, of course; now that Chateau Chaos has become a Mac house we've discovered that macos firefox has the annoying featurette of going catatonic if you make the mistake of leaving it running for more than about 72 hours. About all that firefox has going for it now is adblock, and as soon as a good adblock replacement is written for safari I'm going to hurl, with great force, firefox out the window. But I digress.) It still doesn't support the traditional /etc/cron.allow and /etc/cron.deny files, but I'm still trying to decide if I want to restrict cron access and, if so, whether it's better to do it with Yet Another control file, group access, or some as-yet-undefined control mechanism.
But, anyway, cron still works for me (not a guarantee it will work for you; at work I've got a couple of raging fires where new code that I tested and verified that it worked doesn't work for other people. Grrrr) and that makes it good enough to be New Code!
Oct 23, 2007
New Code!
As I've been working on cron, I've been slowly commenting up the code as I follow the case of the mysterious zombie children, and this makes it difficult to figure out how much code bloat there is versus commentary bloat. I looked around online to see what I could find, and couldn't find anything that looked simple and/or written in C. So I wrote a quick and dirty version that runs cpp and picks out the code lines that belong to the module I'm trying to count.
It's painfully naive (if a macro expands into multiple lines, they're counted, and code that's #ifdeffed out isn't counted,) but it gives me a better idea of the amount of codebloat than wc gives me.
And it's got a manpage! Which makes it a perfect candidate to be listed as New Code!
Oct 22, 2007
A sunny fall day in Portland
In the afternoon, I walk from work to the last bus stop before the Ross Island bridge. It's been cold and cloudy for the past few days, but today was one of those bright sunny fall days with almost no clouds in the sky, and the views from the west side of the Willamette were spectacular. There's a lot of clutter around the view towards Mount Hood, but if you're at the Ross Island bus stop, it's possible to get a nice picture of one of the local stratovolcanoes framed by trees and the clutter of the city (this is only temporary; the people who own Zidell Marine have got a US$100 or so million dollar measure 37 claim against the City of Portland (for what, I'm not sure; possibly they're trying to put a line of condos right along the shore and the west short walking path would interfere with their plan$) and I'm sure that's going to be followed by replacing the shipyard with a couple of barkingly hideous but very profitable condominium towers. So enjoy the view while you can, because it's not going to be too long before the west approaches of the Ross Island bridge are going to be in a canyon between skyscrapers.)
For mass transit, the Lathe-of-Heavenish aerial tramway isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but I still have my camera at the ready when I'm walking near it. North and South are still new enough so they look very nice on a bright sunny afternoon, so I'm glad I didn't miss the chance of talking a picture as they swept by each other this afternoon.
Oct 21, 2007
Cute baby pictures of the day
We all went to Silas's friend Tucker's birthday party today, and while the bears were messing around I snuck around to take pictures of them.
Russell has had enough of my photo habit, so he tries to hide his face when I've got a camera aimed at him. But he can't help peek over his shoulder every now and then, so if I'm sneaky enough I can get a picture while he peeks.
Silas, on the other hand, has not become jaded yet, so I don't have to sneak. Today I had the lensbaby on my Pentax when Silas was sitting on the front hood of the car, and he spotted me in mid-picturetaking. Click click!
Project of the day (a miracle of science edition)
About 4 years ago, we were up at SCRAP and I spotted a pile of 18" square woolen fabric scraps, thought that they'd be nice to have around so I could use them for hypothetical future projects, and brought them home for the projects pile. Projects with fabric require sewing, and I didn't have a sewing machine, so they lingered in the warehouse while I worked on various other projects around them.
Last spring, my ex-stepmother-in-law offered me her Singer Centennial Featherweight, which had been retired since she'd gotten a much more sophisticated modern sewing machine. I eagerly accepted, and when it got here I set to work.
... and snapped off the needle.
I had a junker sewing machine lying around (a yard sale prize), so I pulled the needle off that, plopped it into the sewing machine, fired it up, and snapped off the needle again.
Sigh.
I packed up the sewing machine, put it out of the way, put sewing needles on my shopping list, and immediately forgot about it until this spring, when I was reminded of it by running across three more machine needles at, you guessed it, SCRAP. I bought those needles, brought them home, and foolishly dropped them into my workshop in the basement, where they immediately vanished and did not resurface until I cleaned it out this summer.
When I found them again, I'd stacked up a bunch of projects which I wanted to get done before fighting with the sewing machine, so I didn't actually get around to setting up the sewing machine again until this afternoon.
I set it up, dropped one of the new needles in, fired the machine up, and the needle snapped after the third stitch. Well, that won't do; I pulled the bobbin mechanism apart, cleaned all of the thread debris (from the previous two attempts) out, put a drop of light machine oil on the bobbin needlerace, and carefully hand-rotated the stitcher until it stopped jamming against the (second) needle on the exit ramp.
This time it worked and successfully completed a sewing test (the best: "what is it?" Me: "Um, it's got cats on it"), so I went over to the project bin for something more substantial, and discovered the forlorn pile of woolen fabric from scene 1.
10 minutes of sewing, 5 minutes of stuffing (I had some poly stuffing left over from a previous upholstering project, and it was just barely enough to stuff this pillow), and another 10 minutes to sew up the hole I had to leave so I could stuff the thing, and *poof* a rustic pillow that will be just the thing for our summer camp (provided we ever build it.) And I've still got enough of this fabric to make 5 or 6 more pillows.
Oct 20, 2007
The Llewellyn Pumpkin Patch
Every fall, the Llewellyn Foundation sets up a pumpkin patch to raise money for Llewellyn school, which by happy coincidence happens to be the school that the bears attend. For the past three years, the best has been part of the foundation, and does some of the work for the pumpkin patch. My contributions are fairly minimal; they use the lemonade stand I built for the bears as their sales booth, and I hover around for the afternoon making sure the bears don't light themselves on fire.
It's a pretty boring afternoon for me, but the bears love it; they spend 4 hours charging around with their friends and can only be pried away when their friends have been dragged away, one by one, by their parents.
Oct 19, 2007
Friday Dust Mite Blogging™
As you sow so shall you reap
[money] "would have to come from programs. That's 30 new Cub Scout packs, or 800 needy kids going to our summer camp"
Gosh, that's horrible. What's the problem?
The city [of Philadelphia] has decided that the Boy Scouts chapter here must pay fair-market rent of $200,000 a year for its city-owned headquarters
Wow, that's a lot of money. Have you always been paying this, and it's just now become a problem?
he organization's Cradle of Liberty Council, which currently pays $1 a year in rent, must pay the increased amount to remain in its downtown building past May 31, Fairmount Park Commission president Robert N.C. Nix said Wednesday.
So this is recent. Why would Philadelphia suddenly decide to crank up your rent?
City officials say they cannot legally rent taxpayer-owned property for a nominal sum to a private organization that discriminates.
Oh, yes, there is that tiny little detail. Refresh my memory here; who exactly does the Boy Scouts discriminate against?
The Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that Scouts, as a private group, have a First Amendment right to bar gays from membership.
I'm going to grant the deceptively named Cradle of Liberty Council the benefit of the doubt here, because they did attempt to circumvent the homophobic regulations that the “National Council” of the American version of the Hitler Youth put in here. But when the leadership told them that they had to be bigots, the Cradle of Liberty Council had the option of telling the Boy Scouts to go fuck themselves.
They didn't, so now they've got to pay the rent.
And they'll get not a drop of sympathy from me.
--quotes from an Associated Press article, via Joe. My. God..