Sean’s Mental Walkabout

Through dave hansen’s blog I found the CHDK project, which creates custom Canon camera firmware that adds a lot of features to existing cameras. While I’ve only had this loaded for a day, I’m really psyched with the results so far.

It immediately meant that I got RAW support, an OSD battery sensor showing % left, exposure settings, and this zebra mode thing that let’s you know when you’ve maxed out the CCD, and where specifically is the issue. The procedure to add it is pretty simple, and it’s breathed new life into my SD500, which has seen a lot of good days with me.

I get really excited when devices evolve and improve after you have them. My Logitech Harmony Remote, XBMC on my old xbox, and now my Canon camera all fall under that heading. This also guaruntees that I’ll only buy Canon cameras that support this in the future. This kind of freedom is hard to give up.

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A friend of mine pointed me at Live Maps last night, which is basically microsoft’s google maps. It looks basically exactly like google maps, so I wasn’t sure why he sent me there.

Then he said “Find your house, and click Bird’s Eye view.”

Ok. The results are impressive. It’s a lot higher res than the aerial, and more current. I wish they told you the date o nthis things, as I’d find it facinating. I have some ideas by what’s laying around in our yard that this is late March / Early April last year.

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API - SmugMug Wiki
SmugMug made a really great policy decision. They published an API and stated “Anyone building something for the SmugMug? API gets a lifetime free Pro account.”

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Will your next meeting pass the “blizzard goggles” test? - (37signals)
I need to start doing this a lot more. Meetings suck off way to much actual productive time.

Obama/Clinton support visualizer that rocks - (37signals)
Ok, I’ll stop linking in 37 signals blog posts soon, but it’s impressive how much good stuff is in this backlog. This is a brilliant visualization tool.

Workplace Experiments - (37signals)
It’s reasons like this that while everyone wants to become google, google wants to become 37signals (and I really wish I still had that graphic around somewhere).

Cooking For Engineers - Step by Step Recipes and Food for the Analytically Minded
The cook charts are just amazing. I’m going to have to check out a few more things on here.

“You have to treat your employees like customers” - (37signals)
In an era where most of a companies actual resource is it’s people, this hits the nail on the head

Dunning-Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think that they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.”

Public Speaker - ActiveWiki
Seriously? Active worlds users only get to hear the 50 closest people to them?

Phusion Passenger™ 2.0 RC 1 and Ruby Enterprise Edition released « Phusion Corporate Blog
Interesting, they also support django now. Passenger is definitely a great piece of software.

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When I got home tonight, things seemed a bit off, and I couldn’t figure it out to begin with. Pretty soon I realized that a lot of electronics were acting up. While a hard power reset fixed some of them, others (like our satellite receiver) didn’t recover so well. Given the storm we’d had, I decided to have a look around for a tree that had been struck. While I was out there, I noticed that one of our satellite dishes seemed to have bits hanging off of it. I know there was hail around here today so it could have been that instead.

After some resets, and digging, the comprehensive list of broken items in the house is listed below:

• Dish Network Receiver - HDMI is toast, and even over the RF to the TV downstairs it appears that it’s getting no satellite signals
• 5 port gigE switch - plug it in and no lights come on and it just gets hot
• 2 ports in the other 5 port gigE switch - 1 port that is now dead was the Dish Receiver port
• the WAN port on my FIOS router
• the gigE port on my desktop

I had another 10/100 card to throw in the desktop, and it’s back up now. Playing port plugging got enough bits working downstairs. My openwrt router came up like a champ and got me back on the internet. So the damage amounts to about $100 worth of stuff I need to replace, plus whatever the story turns out to be with Dish (who is coming out of Thursday to do the service call). I’ll try to get some pictures up on the damage, and I really should get up on the roof to see if there is any other damage up there, but that’s going to require a day of not rain.

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CHDK in Brief - CHDK Wiki
Seriously cool. I’m going to need to check this out on my digital camera soon.

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Routes — text Overview — Bike Hudson Valley
Nice new list of bike routes around here

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Dutchess County Trails — Project Schedule
A little slower than I’d like, but it does mean that by next summer the section near us should be open.

Delicious Synchronization Script for wordpress
Finally found something that will do the delicious posts, and include the merged tagging. Important now that I killed off categories on my blog.

iBanjo » Blog Archive » Programmer Insecurity
Really good points. While I’m not sure I agree with all his distributed version control issues, they are some valid points worth considering.

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Susan is off at the farm right now picking our strawberry allocation for the week. The amounts get set daily, but it looks like due to the heat and fast rate of ripening, she’ll probably come back with a quart of the best tasting strawberries I’ve ever had.

Secor’s also just opened for early picking yesterday. We didn’t pick strawberries there last year, though we did pick 15 lbs of blueberries, which managed to last us the whole winter (we’ve still got a bunch we need to use up now). Susan’s pretty excited on hitting them up this weekend to get enough to jam and freeze.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Beacon Sloop Club does their Strawberry festival this Sunday. Hippies, strawberry short cake, chocolate covered strawberries, and strawberry shakes, always a good time. Susan and I ended up at the strawberry festival on our 2nd weekend of dating (6 years ago), so it has a special place in our hearts. Or maybe it’s just that Susan likes chocolate dipped strawberries so much.

And, the piece de resistance, is that we just got both an ice cream maker, and the ben & jerry’s ice cream book. There is nothing I love more than freshly made strawberry icecream with freshly picked strawberries. Our french vanilla experiment of last weekend went ok, but now that I’ve got my B&J book again (I had one in college when we made liquid nitrogen icecream), I’m much more excited for the output.

Update: Susan returned, the successful strawberry hunter, with 3 QUARTS, as the farm now has a policy where you can pay to pick extra quarts. Soooooooooo good on my cereal right now!

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The beginning of my summer of popular non-fiction was started with Blink, on audio, that I finished a few weeks ago. Blink is about the way we make a lot of decisions at an unconscious level, some times for good, some times for bad. While I’d heard the “rss version” (i.e. the 1 paragraph synopsis), the book, as always, is way more nuanced than that. I’d highly recommend this book to others.

One of the things I found most interesting about Blink was changes done in police departments to prevent mistakes. It turns out, that once our heart rate goes above 145 beats per minute, we start to loose both rational thinking and motor coordination. Many of the police abuses in the last decade have come at the end of a high speed pursuit, which drives up adrenaline rates, and puts the people whose job it is to defend us into a state where their judgment is largely stripped away by biological constraints. It turns out that by banning high speed chases, and making officiers ride alone, so they need to stop and call for backup before approaching a scene, rates of mistakes and abuse go way down. It’s a simple structural change in the organization that benefits us all.

There are also great sections in there about reading faces, instinct over information overload in millitary war games, and the subtle biases that kept women out of many key roles in classical music until an unrelated circumstance caused blind auditions to be instituted. So many go things in this book, definitely check it out if you get a chance.

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