scottstuff : Older posts, page 4

Electronic Home Improvement

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:11:00 -0700

It’s been a big year for home improvements–I’ve painted two rooms, replaced the carpet in both, added a new light fixture, torn off a deck, and replaced a fence. Somehow, after all of that, I still feel behind–I need to re-do my back yard and add a new patio before The Dark and Cold sets in for the year.

Before that happens, though, I’m planning on spending some time updating the electronic side of the house. My home asterisk server is getting long in the tooth, and lately it’s been bouncing incoming phone calls. My config files are almost 3.5 years old, and the old thing’s getting kind of crufty, plus NuFone seems to be going through one of their annual crisises.

On top of that, my wife’s perpetually worried about our 4-year-old sneaking out of the house without us noticing–we’ve already caught her playing in the middle of the cul-de-sac once, and since she has no real fear of cars (or strangers, or getting lost), we’d like to add some sort of warning system to know when one of the exterior doors have been opened.

You know what they say–when all you have is a big pile of computer equipment and a credit card, then everything looks like an excuse to buy more hardware and write some code…

So, I have a small mountain of X10 and Insteon hardware due in later this week, and I’m going to set up door monitoring via a bunch of cheap RF door sensors. I’m planning on monitoring everything via Indigo running on an old Mac, and then announcing open doors via auto-answer on VoIP phones using Asterisk. Sounds easy enough, right? I can’t see any indication that anyone has ever done any Indigo-Asterisk integration work, but it doesn’t look all that hard. Along the way, I guess I’m going to have to completely re-write my Asterisk dial plan, because it’s really too crufty to live.

While I’m at it, I’m planning on adding a couple “smart” light switches, just to cut down on the number of basement and garage lights that get left on for days at a stretch. I figure they’ll pay for themselves, eventually…

Hopefully all of this’ll give me something to talk about at MindCamp this year.

Free to good home: rails-app-installer

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 07:20:00 -0700

I really should have done this nine months ago, but I just don’t have time to devote to my rails-app-installer project, and I’d love it if someone would volunteer to take it over.

This is the installer used in the Typo GEM; it’s designed to make it easy to turn any Rails app into an easily-installed GEM.

The code lives in Google Code; feel free to take a look around.

If you’re interested, then please either send me mail or let me know in person at OSCON this week.

OSCON

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:21:00 -0700

I just arrived in Portland for OSCON. I’ll be wandering around most of the week, but if anyone really wants to flag me down, either send me mail at scott@sigkill.org, or drop by the Google booth either Wednesday or Thursday morning.

Google Gears: Offline Support for AJAX Apps

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:01:00 -0700

I usually avoid promoting products that I’m paid to work with, but I just love this one: Google Gears. It’s an open-source, cross-browser (IE and Win/Mac/Linux FF for now) plugin that provides a bunch of enhancements for developers of AJAX apps. Most importantly, it lets you add offline support to your AJAX apps without requiring a rewrite or fork. You just replace your existing XMLHttpRequest calls with a wrapper and off you go. The wrapper’s designed to fail gracefully if the plugin’s not available, so one set of code will work for everyone–with or without the plugin, online or offline. Presumably someone will integrate this into Prototype and other JS frameworks shortly, making it easy for thousands of developers to build offline-enabled web apps.

That’s not all that Google Gears is good for; it also includes Javascript thread support and an in-browser SQL database. I’ll let you use your imagination on those.

I’ve been watching this develop for the past few months, and I’m really excited about it. I can’t wait to see how people integrate this into Rails and other frameworks.

SuperHappyDevHouse Vancouver

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:23:36 -0700

I can’t make it, but it looks like fun: SuperHappyDevHouse Vancouver this weekend.

Socialtext’ers are descending on Vancouver as part of their annual migration to meet, hack, and plan. They came up with the idea of bringing the Bay Area-based Super Happy Dev House to Vancouver.

Bryght is providing the venue and BBQ space at 1 Alexander Suite 400.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make it back up there for something this summer.

Grandpa

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 23:50:44 -0700

My maternal grandfather passed away this evening after a long fight with lung cancer.

When I saw him last week, it was clear that the end was near, but I’d hoped to be able to see him one more time.

Backyard Flowers

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 23:27:37 -0700

I spent most of today trying to catch up on the three weeks’ worth of yardwork that I’d missed while I was in California. I didn’t make all that much progress, but along the way I spotted a few photogenic wildflowers growing in the middle of my back lawn. I still don’t own a real macro lens, but I bought a Canon 500D close-up lens last month before my trip but never had a chance to use it. So took a break from the yard work, slapped it on the 100-400, grabbed a couple flashes, and headed out into the yard. Here’s my favorite:

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the pictures. The 100-400L plus 500D gives roughly 1:1 magnification at the long end, with way more working distance then I’d expected. It may actually be too long for this sort of photography–I kept having to back up to give myself more room between the lens and the flower, especially at the long end of the lens. Fortunately, my 7-year-old assistant was able to keep the light on the flowers, even as I kept backing further and further away. Good help is hard to find :-).

Focal Lengths

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:11:30 -0700

One of the things that I’ve wished for in Lightroom is a focal-length histogram. I’d love to be able to select a bunch of pictures and ask “which focal lengths did I use most often?” I mean, I know which lenses I use most often, but which focal lengths do I actually use?

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to do this outside of Lightroom. Just turn on XMP auto-exporting and then use the usual set of Unix tools to summarize a few thousand XML files. I used something like this:

  $ find . -name '*.xmp' | xargs grep -h 'exif:FocalLength' | 
      cut -d '>' -f2 | cut -d '/' -f1 | sort -n | uniq -c

That finds all of the .xmp files in the current directory (and subdirectories), extracts their exif:FocalLength lines, then extracts the actual focal length number, sorts them numerically, and then counts how many occurrences of each focal length it sees.

I ran this over all of the pictures that I took while on vacation, and found a couple interesting patterns. First, I usually shoot with lenses at either their short or long end; the middle of the range gets a lot less use. My most common focal lengths were

Focal Length (lens)	Number of shots
70mm (24-70 or 70-200)	846
400mm (100-400)	409
100mm (100-400)	312
200mm (70-200)	304
24mm (24-70)	291
85mm (85/1.8)	284

A graph is (as usual) a bit more informative:

I shoot a lot of pictures in the 24-100mm range. 70mm is the most common, but the 35, 45, 55, and 65mm lines are all pretty big. It looks like I use my 24-70mm lens in the middle of its range quite a bit, while my longer lenses mostly get used at their extremes.

Home at Last

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 15:48:20 -0700

After 15 days on the road, I’m finally back home. We drove down to San Diego for my sister-in-law’s wedding, and then drove back slowly, spending a couple days in Sequoia National Park along the way. I really enjoyed the park; after spending a week split between LA and San Diego, it was nice to get away from the crowds. Not that the park was completely empty–we saw 3 of these guys:

From a photographic standpoint, the trip was a success. I’m not going to claim that I produced any great art, but I enjoyed myself and gave my new 5D and 100-400 a workout. I feel like a photographer again, after months of almost no photography at all. I probably went a bit overboard this time–according to Lightroom, I shot almost 4,100 frames. Most of those were kids-at-Disneyland snapshots or wedding pictures, but there were a few that stood out for me:

Strangely, most of my favorite shots were birds; I’m not quite sure how that happened. I’ve never been big on birds before. I’ll post more details once I’ve finished unpacking, and once my last few pictures have finished uploading to Flickr.

Cheap Photoshop CS2 (and maybe CS3)

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:11:00 -0700

At $384 (plus shipping and tax), I think this is the cheapest way to buy a legitimate, non-educational copy of Photoshop this week:

Buy a Wacom tablet. Pretty much any current model will work, including the $85 Graphire 4x5.
Once it arrives, grab the Photoshop Elements 3 license key out of the box. Then follow the directions on store.adobe.com, and call Adobe Customer Service at 1-800-833-6687 to order Photoshop CS2 for $299. This only works for Wacom’s copies of PS Elements. The sales rep that I talked to had a hard time finding the deal in their database, but he did find it eventually. There is no expiration date listed.
Once CS2 arrives in the mail, call Adobe’s support line again and order your free upgrade to Photoshop CS3, as per Adobe’s CS3 FAQ. I can’t guarantee that this will work, but the Adobe phone sales guy that I talked to this morning claimed that the copy of CS2 that they’re sending me is eligible for the “I bought CS2 after CS3 was announced” free upgrade.

Enjoy.

Update (4/16): My copy of CS2 arrived successfully, so I registered it and called Adobe’s sales line. After almost an hour on hold, they took my credit card number and charged me $6 shipping to send me a copy of Photoshop CS3. Mission accomplished.

Update (4/25): CS3 arrived today as expected. So yes, you can buy a perfectly legal copy of Photoshop CS3 for under $400, over $250 off the usual price, and get a Wacom tablet for free.

InfoWorld cancels its print publication

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:14:32 -0700

Wow, apparently InfoWorld has decided to stop printing the paper edition, and focus entirely on their website.

It’s been a long time since I last saw a printed InfoWorld, but I had a subscription to it for years, starting in 1985 or so, and I remember looking forward to its arrival every week. I went through a phase where I was anxiously skimming through each issue to see if Apple had announced anything new and exciting the previous week. Compare that with the anxious coverage that stevenotes get today, and it should be pretty obvious why the paper version of InfoWorld was doomed–there’s really no point in reprinting week-old news anymore. I stopped reading it years ago, when I realized that the once-per-year phone call from their free subscription renewal people actually cost me more then the entire year’s subscription was worth.

Click, click

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:49:24 -0700

I was looking at my Flickr account last week and realized that I hadn’t taken any interesting pictures since October of last year. The only new addition to my account in five months was a roll of high school reunion pictures from 2000 that I’d found while cleaning my office. I’ve always had a hard time finding worthwhile subjects in the dead of winter around here–it’s cold, dark, and wet, and not in an interesting way, but five months without a single good shot is just depressing. I think I’m generally happier when I’m out taking pictures, so I’ve been taking a few steps to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.

The first thing that I fixed was my bad case of photographic constipation–I had gigs of older, unprocessed pictures piled up on a couple laptops and a flash card or two with no easy way to get them processed and posted. I didn’t really have a good place to keep all of my pictures, and the disorder was making it hard to create anything new. So, as part of my ongoing office cleaning project, I took my old 17” PowerBook, plugged it into a 300 GB FireWire drive and a 24” LCD, and dedicated it to photo processing. I haven’t finished uploading everything to Flickr yet, but I’ve organized a huge number of pictures.

Once that was fixed, I headed out and took a few pictures. Last week I spent a few hours taking helping my sister-in-law and one of her friends with their beauty school portfolios, and today I took both kids on a 2-mile hike through the Snohomish Estuary.

Today’s hike was kind of a special occasion for me–I’m planning on retiring my old Canon D60 tomorrow, after 5 years of faithful service. UPS says that my new 5D is due tomorrow afternoon. The D60 was an amazing camera when it first hit the market–it was the first consumer-priced DSLR with enough pixels to be truly useful. It takes great pictures, as long as your subject isn’t moving and you have lots of light. ISO 100 is clean and crisp, but noise is clearly visible even at ISO 200. By ISO 400 there’s very little shadow detail, and most of the shadows have weird color casts. I only use ISO 800 when I have no other choice. I’m looking forward to the 5D’s usable ISO 1600 and 3200, along with a modern autofocus system and all of the other little improvements that Canon’s made over the years.

I’ll have a couple days to break the 5D in, and then we’re taking off for San Diego for a family wedding. We’re planning on driving the slow road back, stopping in Death Valley and Yosemite, so I should have lots of opportunities to take pictures of non-cold, non-dark, non-wet subjects.

Headed for Gnomedex Again

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:49:00 -0700

Well, it looks like I’m going to be going to Gnomedex again this year. I had a good time last year, but I felt a bit out of place–I’m a programmer and a sysadmin, and I was surrounded by pundits and hyper-bloggers. I had a good time, though and work’s willing to pay this year, so I’m going back again. I’ll have to make sure that I actually give a business card to Scoble this time, though, to avoid a repeat of last year.

Mac mini kernel panic

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 22:35:00 -0800

My wife’s Mac mini (G4, 1.42 GHz) has been crashing several times per day lately, and I’m almost out of options. I think I’ve found an issue with Lacie Firewire drives and PPC Mac minis, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

The system in question is running OS X 10.4.8 with 1 GB of RAM. It boots off a Lacie mini Hard Drive & Hub. It’s been crashing with a kernel panic that looks about like this:

Mon Jan  8 22:06:24 2007
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x000E3DDC): vnode_writedone: numoutput < 0
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
  Backtrace:
     0x00095138 0x00095650 0x00026898 0x000E3DDC 0x000D8A24 0x2D8F2230 0x2D8E4FF4 0x2DFA4C80 
     0x2DFA7A38 0x2DFA7B38 0x2D7F1FFC 0x2D7F222C 0x2DA7727C 0x2DA776B8 0x2D9D2C6C 0x2D9D26EC 
     0x2D594A44 0x2D576040 0x2D575940 0x2D5E1AD4 0x2D5D1450 0x002D0B94 0x002CFA5C 0x000A9314 
  Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
     com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIReducedBlockCommandsDevice(1.4.9)@0x2dfa3000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(1.5)@0x2d8df000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily(1.4.9)@0x2d7ea000
     com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSerialBusProtocolTransport(1.4.4)@0x2da75000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily(1.4.9)@0x2d7ea000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSBP2(1.7.5)@0x2d9cf000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.2.5)@0x2d56c000
     com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireSBP2(1.7.5)@0x2d9cf000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.2.5)@0x2d56c000
     com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(1.5)@0x2d8df000
     com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily(1.4.9)@0x2d7ea000
     com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI(2.5.3)@0x2d5cb000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.7)@0x275f7000
        dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.2.5)@0x2d56c000
     com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily(2.2.5)@0x2d56c000
Proceeding back via exception chain:
   Exception state (sv=0x2762FA00)
      PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x00000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.8.0: Fri Sep  8 17:18:57 PDT 2006; root:xnu-792.12.6.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

The second line is the key; it’s crashing due to vnode_writedone: numoutput < 0. Searching for that error gives me 2 other people who have had the same problem, both within the last month. Both other cases involve PPC Mac minis and Lacie FW hard drives. This can’t be that new of a problem, because I’ve been suffering since August when I was running 10.4.7.

I’ve tried a number of fixes with no success. I’ve dusted out the mini, reseated the RAM, performed disk and permission repairs, re-installed the 10.4.8 combo updater, monkeyed with power saving settings, and removed all non-essential hardware, all without any success.

I just opened a ticket with Lacie. If anyone else is seeing similar problems, let me know and I’ll add it to the Lacie ticket.

My Dream Monitor

scott@sigkill.org (Scott Laird) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 11:28:38 -0800

Like most of the people I know, I spent at least 60 hours per week staring at text on a monitor. These days, I’m mostly using 24” Dell LCDs–3 at work and 1 at home. They’re nice, but I keep finding myself wishing I had something bigger, with more pixels. Unfortunately, today’s batch of 30” LCDs doesn’t quite cut it–they all require a dual-link DVI connector, and of the 5 devices that I’ve plugged into my LCDs lately, only 1 can drive a 30” screen at full resolution. Half of them won’t even plug in at all. I want something that I can use at a high resolution for computer work, and then fall back to HD or even lower to play games or watch movies.

It looks like Westinghouse is going to announce something cool at CES: a 52” 3840x2160 LCD TV at CES. My math says that the screen will be roughly 45.25”x25.5” at about 84 DPI. That’d make an awesome full-desk monitor, although the DPI’s a bit low and the corners would be difficult to use for anything that you needed to focus clearly on. Since it’s a TV, I can only assume that it’ll have The Mother of All Video Scaling Chips in it, so my Xbox 360 will still work with it, even if it’s only at 720p. Assuming that the computer side is about like the IBM/Viewsonic/Iiyama 3840x2400 displays that were on the market for $7,000 a couple years ago, it’d do around 25 Hz with a single dual-link DVI and 50-60 Hz with 2 dual-link connectors. I could probably live with that. Sure, there are a few shortcomings, but I’m sure I’d find a way to cope if someone felt the need to mail me one.

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