Category Archives: Uncategorized

antennas, scanners, and satellites

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On programming, beauty, and stating the obvious:

riney: C# though… i dunno, i’ve always disliked it for aesthetic reasons
beeland: eh, my only formal programming training was about a decade ago in ANSI C
beeland: so it made a good starting point
riney: yeah… there’s nothing monstrously wrong with it… it’s just hard to write really slick, elegant code in it
riney: same thing i feel when i read Objective C code
beeland: I can agree with that, its focused on “solutions” rather than real freestanding monolithic structures
riney it’s fifty billion DelegateThingybobInterfaceReceiverControllers…. very verbose feeling
riney: Java has that problem too but you can avoid it with a degree of care
beeland: hehe, i had the same reaction when i first was it
beeland: OhMyGodWhatTheFuckIsThisMethodDoing(ToThisOtherThing, WhenDoesItEverEnd);
riney: i am rather in love with Ruby at the moment, just for the free-flowyness of it
riney: i’m really sounding like a code snob at this point
beeland: might have to check that out. for my “hack around” stuff I have stuck to perl for the last 4 or 5 years
beeland: mostly just data transformation stuff
riney: but it has so many nice things… the string functions alone are tear-jerking. and blocks…..sigh
beeland: Riney
beeland: You need to get laid.
riney: lol
riney: yeah……that’s going on my blog

little by little, the night comes around

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My command-line knowledge is pretty passable, but sometimes I screw up in hilarious ways.


imogen:~ riney$ mkdir flonk
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the first file" > flonk/1.txt
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the second file" > flonk/2.txt
imogen:~ riney$ echo "I am the third file" > flonk/3.txt
imogen:~ riney$ cd flonk
imogen:flonk riney$ ls
1.txt 2.txt 3.txt
imogen:flonk riney$ tar czvf * foo.tgz
2.txt
3.txt
tar: foo.tgz: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
imogen:flonk riney$ mkdir 1 2 3
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 1.txt 1
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 2.txt 2
imogen:flonk riney$ mv 3.txt 3
imogen:flonk riney$ cd 1
imogen:1 riney$ tar xzvf 1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
imogen:1 riney$ cat 2.txt
I am the second file
imogen:1 riney$ cd ..
imogen:flonk riney$ cd 2
imogen:2 riney$ tar xzvf 2.txt

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
imogen:2 riney$ cat 2.txt
I am the second file

everything will turn out alright

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Local radio has been getting progressively worse. One of the three remaining decent stations, 100.5, recently converted to a contemporary Christian format. Unfortunately, I can’t stand contemporary Christian music.

Dear God,

The new radio station here in Charleston is called His Radio, so I figured you’d be the one to speak to about it. Why is your radio station, and, by extension, most modern music that bears your name, so terrible?

Sincerely,

John Riney, music-loving heathern

So I figured I’d cough up the extra tenner a month for a music-only XM subscription. My car has the receiver in it and all, so it took five minutes to sign up and get it activated. “It will take 2-3 hours for your subscription to be updated.” Okay! So I did this last night and went to bed.

I awoke this morning, went out to the car to drive to work, and cranked up the satellite. Well, where I previously had one channel, “Preview”, I now had ten. And one of them was all Elvis. So I had nine. I paid for seventy-something. I didn’t want to unlock my house again, so I pulled out my iPhone, logged into their site, and saw a button for “Transmit Update”. I mashed that. It said to leave the radio on, it would take a few minutes. I grumbled a bit. “I gave these tools TEN DOLLARS. And I have to wait for their stupid service to kick on?”

Then I thought about what I had just done. I used my pocket-sized Internet access terminal to make an encrypted connection over a nearly-ubiquitous wireless communications network to a company, who, in turn, routed my request to a ground station, up to a pair of SATELLITES IN GEOSTATIONARY ORBIT, who then beamed a signal down to THE SATELLITE RECEIVER IN MY CAR. I shut up and quit grumbling then, because I realized I LIVED IN THE FUCKING FUTURE.

After about ten minutes, the audio hitched for a second and resumed, all seventy-odd channels enabled. The first song? “Don’t Worry, Baby”, one of my very favorites.

i want you to notice what you’ve been missing

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Sigh… must not avoid blog. Spent too much time getting it working! The last couple weeks have mostly been a heavily caffeinated fog of work. I’ve been in a pretty lousy mood about things that *aren’t* work, but I am getting a bunch of stuff done.

Discovery went up today. That was really pretty, although I didn’t get to go out to the beach to watch it. The weather was way too crappy.

Went to see Flood Empty Lakes at the Tavern Friday night. They’re a new local band, with a guy I used to work with at CSU on bass. Really good – instrumental, progressive synth-heavy space-rock, with a nice heavy edge that shines through from time to time.

Oh, this was funny. Saturday night, I went out to Wild Wing Mt. Pleasant with Jason and Brian for a St. Patrick’s Day pint. Jason had brought a surplus of holiday-themed trinkets; green beads, a knit hat with shamrocks on it, and my personal favorite, his “beer goggles” – actual glasses with little beer mugs that go over your eyes. A blonde girl approached us, well into her celebratory cups, and struck up conversation. She quickly asked for, and was granted, the wearing of the beer goggles. Attempting to play off the obvious pun, I asked her, “Well? Do they work? Do I look any better?”

“No,” she said, matter-of-factly.

I’ve had the worst luck with blondes lately. Non-blondes as well.

hotel, motel

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Listened to my dad’s copy of Rubber Soul, which sounds *great* after a bit of cleaning. I’d heard that the original mono mixes were superior to the CD re-releases… yep. Definitely true. When the sitar kicks in on “Norweigian Wood”, I audibly gasped. Yep! Vinyl from 1966 demolishes the nice clean CD. I’m also running through “Rapper’s Delight” from Sugarhill Gang, which I found at a antique store for a buck or two. Outstanding…

I also think the people on the Interwebsnets were right about the Ortofon 2M cartridge needing several hours of break-in time. I think the sound is starting to smooth out a bit. (I’m on “Adore” from the Pumpkins now – a mono mix, rare for modern albums. “Ava Adore” is full of new things to listen to that weren’t obvious on the CD mix…)

Going back a few more years, I was pleased to learn that the date of the earliest replayable recorded sound has been pushed back a few decades. Some folks at the Laurence Berkeley National Labs analyzed an image created by a gentleman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. His invention, a device known as a phonautograph, etched sound waves onto paper, coated in lampblack and wrapped around a ceramic cylinder. Scott de Martinville did not conceive of the notion that the squiggles in the fine carbon could be played back – rather, he considered the device strictly for the purpose of converting sound into imagery for later study. Somehow, amazingly, one of his smoke-covered “phonautograms” survived, and was scanned and converted into a usable waveform by the LBNL scientists, resulting in 10 comprehensible seconds of Au Clair de la Lune, sung by a girl in 1860. I find the existence of such a recording simultaneously heartwarming and terrifying.

the life that we once knew

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Some observations:

* As previously Twittered, I’m having a hell of a time getting used to the humidity, or more accurately, the lack thereof. Being so used to inhaling the moist soup that passes for air in Charleston, my sinuses feel like they’ve been spraypainted.

* Went to dinner at Chris and Jennifer’s place with the team last night, which was great. Their kids are adorable. My “Taboo” skizzles are strong.

* I’m apparently wearing a magical shirt today. Under sunlight or fluorescent, it appears light green. Pistachio, if I were forced to name the shade. But on street level, in front of our building, it appears blue. I’m guessing that reflecting off all the skyscraper glass has an odd effect on the temperature of the ambient light.

* Sat at the hotel bar last night next to an older gentleman (upper 60s) and his twentysomething sugar babe/hooker. He talked about business, she talked about college. They left soon after. MORAL OF THE STORY: Damn, I gotta hurry up and make some money by the time I’m 60. Ha ha, only serious.

brain. intermittent.

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Okay, so that whole reCAPTCHA thing didn’t work worth a crap. Hopefully comments are functional again, with antispam via Akismet.

So today I hopped a plane to Dallas to go to MileMeter headquarters for a week. Super awesome. In Charleston, the guy at the gate asked me to help carry a car seat out to the tarmac for a woman traveling along with a little baby. “Sure,” I said, lifting it up. “Where’s it go?”

“To the same plane,” he replied. Well, I pretty much assumed *that*, dingbat…

Here’s a couple pictures Doug and I took in the office – more soon.

IMG_1118 IMG_1119 IMG_1120 IMG_1121 IMG_1122 IMG_1123 IMG_1124 IMG_1129 IMG_1130 IMG_1131 IMG_1132 IMG_1133 IMG_1134 IMG_1125 IMG_1126 IMG_1128

I’ll be going to bed now… been up rather long…

“read this” “AAAGH”

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Stupid spammers. It hasn’t been up all that long, but ol’ blog V2 has already been beset by annoying amounts of Viagra and medical transcriptionist spammage. I’ve enabled reCAPTCHA on the comment field, which ought to throw some ice water on their collective spam-boners.

I get to go to Dallas next week and meet the head office… fairly excited about that.

Oh, and in agonizingly tragic news, I think I’m becoming allergic to beer. I have one, and I get a tremendous headache. What. The. Eff.

OS X software recommendations

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My former boss asked me for some suggestions for OS X tools. The entire list got a bit long for a twitter reply, so here they are:

Productivity

  • Microsoft Office 2008 For Mac
    Yep, you’ve got to pay for it. Yep, it’s actually really good. It’s from a different team, not the apparently drunken monkeys that put together the Windows office product. OpenOffice *just* released native Mac support, and it’s pretty bad. I’m hopeful it will improve in a few revisions. NeoOffice is acceptable in a pinch, but it’s not exactly a smooth experience.
  • Mail.app.
    I’d really like to give the nod to Thunderbird here, as I like the way it looks and handles much better, but at least in my environment, hitting a handful of IMAP servers, it just doesn’t hold up. Folders don’t get updated, deleting messages takes a few agonizing seconds per, it’s just not pretty.
  • Safari and Firefox (split decision)
    For web development, Firefox plus the Firebug and HTML Validator plugins are utterly crucial. I can’t imagine doing AJAX development without them. Wait, I can, because I did, and it sucked. But Firefox still hasn’t gotten over that get-wedged-up-and-die thing it started doing a few revisions ago, so it’s Safari for day-to-day browsing.

Communication

Tools

  • Parallels, because everybody still needs to run Windows apps from time to time.
  • Textmate for text editing, duh
  • Acorn for light image editing. It’s not Photoshop, and that’s intentional. Does the basics, and does them well.
  • SimplyBurns
    This is for the basic sort of CD burning/copying operations that the OS should do out of the box.
  • DigitalColor Meter lets you find out the color of any pixel on the screen – very handy. It comes with the OS, but you’ll have to search for it.