Bright lights shining upwards obscures the stars...

Sexing the baby

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:40:23 GMT

Tuesday's the next ultrasound. Any guesses if it's a boy or girl?

LED lights

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:56:53 GMT

Anyone know if the LED lights are any good yet? I'm tired of CFLs burning out in less than a year for the cost and am switching back to incandescents for now. Replacing these things yearly can't be resulting in a net improvement for the environment.

Conversation

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:58:45 GMT

"Hi! We can schedule your MRI for tomorrow"

"Perfect! It's for a t-spine MRI with contrast covering T1-T6"

"No, no contrast."

"The order was specifically with contrast"

"Our radiologists said that it's not needed for a thoracic spine area, and we don't like injecting people with extra dyes"

"Perhaps the radiologists aren't aware that I have a small pile of titanium in my spine. My surgeon specifically requested these two scans in this configuration."

"Well, surgeons aren't often aware of the differences between the scans."

"My surgeon is the co-director of the spinal research institute at the UCSF. I'm pretty certain he knows what he's asking for."

*sigh*

Crap error messages

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:32:21 GMT

updated

When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator.

My most recent encounter with this was this morning with bzr (On my work laptop, so it's Windows):

C:\Users\jeffbailey\workspaces\webhack\Webhack>bzr push lp:~jbailey/webhack/trunk
Connected (version 2.0, client Twisted)
SSH C:\Users\jeffbailey/.ssh/id_rsa password:
Authentication (publickey) successful!
Secsh channel 1 opened.
bzr: ERROR: RemoteRepository(bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jbailey/webhack/trunk/.bzr/)
is not compatible with
CHKInventoryRepository('file:///C:/Users/jeffbailey/workspaces/webhack/Webhack/.bzr/repository/')
different rich-root support

Umm. What? Okay. I work for a search engine. So I fired up Yahoo!^WGoogle to figure out what the message could possibly mean. The top result is Bug 172360 in Launchpad:
"branching from rich-root to non-rich-root gives confusing errors"

Sounds perfect, until you see that the bug is marked as invalid.

Something got missed here. If your user says "I don't understand" - they are NEVER wrong. It doesn't matter if you think they should've understood. It doesn't matter that you think you explained it well enough. The user doesn't understand, so you lose. Actually, it's worse. *they* lose.

There are lots of other bugs leading up to how I got to where I was seeing this in the first place. But none of those are as important as the fact that the developers thought a user saying "I don't get it" wasn't worth the 30 seconds of adding the text "The best way to fix this is to run: bzr upgrade --default " + branch.url;

Update: Jelmer pointed out to me in a comment that it wasn't the devs who marked it as invalid, it was the submitter. He's reopened it. This just further supports the notion that users are insane and need hand-holding. =)

Karmic review

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 17:31:39 GMT

Angie has my old laptop that some might remember from a couple Ubuntu developer summits. Adam Conrad used to refer to it as the surfboard: a lovely 15" widescreen laptop. It's my test machine for Ubuntu updates and so far I'm loving Karmic. This machine has been continually upgraded since either Hoary or Breezy without a reinstall.

Jaunty was miserable. Bugs in the Intel drivers meant that DVD playing stopped working, sounds would occasionally lock up, and things were just painfully slow. Karmic to the rescue. I did the update at beta time like I usually do, and without any further effort:

* Flash just worked.
* DVD playing in totem just worked.
* Boot time was slightly quicker
* nethack-gnome continues to work (despite being removed from the archive a few releases ago)
* Suspend/resume continues to just work.
* Atheros wireless continues to just work with the free kernel drivers.

I then added the dev channel of Google Chrome, which imported all the Firefox bookmarks and started to remove some optional things that Angie doesn't use anymore and don't run well on the now 5 year-old laptop. I took out openoffice, a pile of -dev packages that were leftover from when I used to build glibc on this thing (This laptop had the Hurd running on it at one point... *g*), and then discovered the System->Admin->Package Cleanup (Or at least, it's called something like that, the laptop is in French) where I could start to remove unused packages. I did a few rounds of that, some apt-get autoremove. I took universe and multiverse out of the packages list and did some more removals, making sure to leave in things like deborphan and the gstreamer packages that are in universe and multiverse. Lastly, I did a round of deborphan to take out some pieces that were just hanging out.

As a final step I've updated to grub2. I don't have a separate /boot partition on this machine, so I haven't been brave enough to convert it to ext4 yet.

The boottime at this point still feels a little long for what this laptop does. While at Canonical, I played with some appliance configs and had from kernel load to running firefox in a dozen seconds or some. This laptop doesn't have anything I'd see as unusual for daemons - there's no mysqld, sshd, or anything unneeded like that. But to have everything Just Work(tm) at this stage is amazing.

Nice job. =)

update: Angie's asked me to figure out why the screen saver kicks in after 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes like it's set to. But still, if this is the worst that goes wrong with this release, then it's still a wild success already at Beta.

Home Media Server

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:35:26 GMT

I'm been wrestling with the idea of a home media server for a bit. Our home computing needs are pretty light, they only thing either of us really do outside of a web browser these days is ssh (me) or nethack (Angie). Outside of the laptop we have a pretty standard non-connected house. The only case where I'd really like to change this is music. We don't generally watch TV (and when we do, it's usually DVDs that we've actually purchased), but we do listen to a fair amount of music. The CDs tend to get scattered around the house and then mauled by our velociraptor offspring.

I looked at the Squeezebox, which would be perfect if it wouldn't mean replacing a whole bunch of perfectly good stereos with a whole bunch of nicer-than-we-need stereos.

The solution I've hit onto is this: a NAS with an FM transmitter on the site. The LineX one looks like it would do a nice job since it just acts as a USB speaker. The question then is figuring out if there's software or whatnot to drive such a thing.

What I think I want:

* 802.1n NAS with no moving parts. 2 64GB USB keys in a RAID-1 config would do the job nicely.
* Enough horsepower to play Oggs, MP3s and FLACs.
* Remote song selection through an Android app.

Anyone know if anything comes close to this? The best thing I can think of is perhaps Debian running on a Linksys NAS box. If I could get that far, then the software seems pretty straight forward if it doesn't exist in some form or other in the Debian archive already.

Google Shadow Government

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:00:02 GMT

There's a fabulous sign outside of the Googleplex:

Of course, perhaps I need to look a little more sinister:

But hey, at least citizens of Google, Inc. all have medical...

(Thanks to Oleg for the photos!)

CSS Spriting Tricks

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:21:19 GMT

For a project I'm having fun with, I have a tilemap that I want to use for sprites. Each tile is cleanly 16px by 16px.

Searching on the Interwebs, most people recommend making a background image and then using background-position in CSS to shift which image is being viewed.

There are a couple drawbacks to this:

1) You now have to put *something* in the element in order to make sure that it still exists on the page. So what usually happens here is a 10000px text-indent so that there's no chance that it will appear in the viewport.

2) You now have no option of scaling the image at all.

It turns out for option #2, there's some sort of magic scaling going into CSS3 called background-size, but it's not clear to me that it allow arbitrary aspect ratio changes.

I thought about it and came up with the following solution that seems to work well enough for me:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <style> .wh-mapelement-image { position: absolute; } .wh-mapelement-container { position: absolute; height: 16px; width: 16px; overflow: hidden; display: block; } </style> </head> <body> <div class="element-container"> <img src="foo.png" class="element-image" width="640" height"432"> </div> </body> </html>
A .wh-mapelement-container:hover can be added here with left:-16px top:-16px to give the rollover effect to the sprite.

But wait! THAT'S NOT ALL!

If I double the width and the height on the image link, I can also double the width and the height in the container. That way, the browser's image size manipulations will work as expected and I can see my 16x16 pixel sprite on this reasonable DPI screen.

Maybe Obama is the messiah...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:44:07 GMT

Apparently there are mobs of people with guns attending town halls to complain about health care in the US. I've often told people that they should ease up on Obama because he's not the messiah, but this is starting to sound quite familiar...

Overheard in our bathroom...

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:22:54 GMT

Leif's in the bath, Angie just took away the foam animals that Leif decided to eat.

Animals, animals.
You want the animals?
Yes
Are you going to eat the animals?
.. eat the animals.

Hmm.. I expected rebellion against veganism at 15. This seems a bit soon... ;)

When the two year-old is so much fun...

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:26:12 GMT

We took a wrong turn on the way to a birthday party last night and needed to make a u-turn. Angie yelled "Hang on" as we did the turn and Leif yelled "Exciting!" and clapped and laughed.

How cool is that? =)

Too close for comfort

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:16:04 GMT

Earlier today I got to witness Concrete falling off a building. Luckily I was on the other side of the street. But still, 10-15 metres away is closer than I'd like to be to such things.

I was pushing Leif in his stroller on the way home from daycare, saw a blur out of the corner of my eye and a loud bang. I heard someone yell "Someone call 911", so I did. My initial guess was a window mounted airconditioner, but I couldn't see an obvious space where one would be missing. The only interesting things I had to say to the 911 lady were the address, a rough description of the damage done to the glass, the fact that it was a thing not a person (lack of blood), and what people were yelling, since I couldn't see through the cars and trucks on the road.

According to the news article, the first 911 call was placed at 17h59. My cell phone log says 17h58. Perhaps I was the first one.

Taxes; Bixi

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:06:07 GMT

Finally filed our Quebec, Canada, California and US taxes today - two stops for local tax agencies and then the post office.

Another "How awesome is Montreal" moment: Biking downtown on a rental bike for which I pay ~$80CAD/year, going past cars that were stuck in traffic, past the jazz festival on a warm sunny day. Drop off the rental bike a stand, and walk the 2 or 3 blocks to the destination, pick it up to return.

Less than an hour of time to make up for work, all included.

Bixi takes a bit of getting used to since they don't have all the supply and demand quirks worked out, but I've been remarkably lucky with it.

Google Montreal

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:18:38 GMT

Heya! I've had people occasionally ask me what the Google office in Montreal is like. Usually pictures aren't allowed in Google offices, so it's nice to have a whole bunch in the Gazette:

http://communities.canada.com/montrealgazette/blogs/tech/archive/2009/06/26/a-visit-to-google-s-montreal-office.aspx

Composting!

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:09:40 GMT

We just signed up for Compost Montreal! I've been looking for something like this. We moved from Toronto just as they were getting Green Box curb-side pickup in. As vegans, almost all of our garbage is compostable food scraps (the rest being primarily diapers).

scjody had told us about the composter he got, which makes mixing the compost quite easy - but it has a $40 delivery charge and requires us to do something. And that plan has one critical flaw: We haven't done it yet. Week by week, we continue to toss out garbage instead of doing something.

Fixed.

If you have a guide from conscienceverte.ca (similar to those useless Entertainment Guides that band always makes you peddle in high school, but actually with things I want), it's 50% off the first month and the cost is $5/week. We just signed up for a year.

They apparently will also do corporate pickup downtown, so I'm going to try and pitch my work on signing up for it. Google Mountain View is starting to handle compost now, so hopefully other offices have budgets for it as well.

Recent Roll-Up

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:22:25 GMT

We're all doing well. Life's just insanely busy. Will try to post more than 140 character snippets to Facebook more often. =)

Random things from today...

In the playground...

Leif exploring a rope bridge:

From Public Leif Photos

Leif having less fear than auzure_skies would like:

From Public Leif Photos

In the news...

Overall, 37 per cent of teens in the survey said they were sexually active, but some didn't know how to define "sex."

"Very surprising to us was that many kids were unsure about whether they had had sex or not," said one of the study's authors, Sarah Flicker, a professor of environmental studies at York University.

(CBC)

Go figure, most people I know can't come up with a definition of sex that isn't penis-meets-vagina intercourse - and those are people who've been to Opus, UU churches, taken OWL and all ought to know better.

My favourite definition is still from Cheers, when they were talking about "When is it sex?" Norm replies: "When the first breast appears."

In defense of traditional marriage

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:25:55 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNiqfRyoAyA

(Thanks to Mark Hamilton for the link)

Stupid Locksmith

Thu, 14 May 2009 20:56:46 GMT

Our place has a fancy magical lock on the front door that has been sticking lately. We phoned the locksmith who put it in to discover that he apparently can't talk to us because we're not the registered owners of the lock.

Right - when we bought the place, we apparently don't automatically get the title to the locks on our front door. The former owners could phone at anytime and get into our place. If we were locked out in the middle of the night, he couldn't let us in.

Fuck that. Will replace the lock myself with a crowbar if I have to.

Mother's day

Sat, 02 May 2009 15:12:42 GMT

I subscribe to the iRobot mailing list for new products, discounts, etc. Today I got an email talking about great deals for mother's day. In case of you out there think this is a good idea, let's state this clearly:

This is not a good idea.

Giving someone a gift that reminds them of housework is a fast path to tears. Even if they're a geek. Just say no.

Language lessons

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:41:28 GMT

Through a program at work, I just got access to Rosetta Stone. I've been a bit worried that with a primarily English-speaking workplace and an English-speaking home that my French would stagnate. It turns out that my account has access to all the languages, not just French.

So which other language should I learn? For fun, I did the first lesson of Latin (got 81%) and Japanese (83%).

And now I'll have dreams of this voice going "Hoooah toe teh mah jusa".

Mmmm. and now I want juice.

Zzzzz...

Cuteness

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:02:32 GMT

This morning Leif and I were playing and I looked at him and said "I love..." and point at him. He looked up at me with bright eyes and said "DOUBLE-YOU!"

It's his favourite letter at the moment. =)

Suggestion for renaming of Karmic Koala

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:02:20 GMT

Dear Ubuntu Technical Committee,

Please consider the following proposal to both delay the 9.10 release slightly, and also to deviate the naming sequence slightly to use a previous letter that was skipped.

I propose that the next release of Ubuntu be 9.11, and be called "Bumbling Bush"

Sincerely Yours,
Jeff Bailey, Ubuntu Core Dev.

Creationism Museum

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:23:50 GMT

On our move down to California, Angie, Leif and I stopped by the Creationism Museum. I mentioned this a couple of Augusts ago. Unfortunately, I didn't want to post about it without having the pictures, and I've only just finally got around to uploading them. I suck, news at 11.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kaladron/CreationismMuseum

We went with Stephanie, and had a great time. We got there a bit late, so didn't get to see the floor show and stuff, but we did get a chance to see the exhibits. The people there were a little reminiscent of the TV show Circle Square, where the people were just a little too friendly, and blinked just a little too rarely.

How we heard about the creationism museum was from an Interview on CBC, where the guy who opened the museum talked about how they were trying to show a different interpretation of the results of archaelogical digs, and how they saw this as a religion, and that science is just another religion. We were a bit shocked when we got to the US to discover that the guy is somewhat less rational there, claiming that what they're doing is good pure science, etc.

The premise is an interesting one: They start with the literal truth of the bible and then interpret everything against that backdrop. The argument is a vaguely reasonable one: Scientists do this all the time using what they've learned in school. They've learned that the universe is billions of years old, and therefore will do carbon dating a certain way, etc. If you start with the bible saying that the universe is 6000-odd years old, then results wind up getting interpreted differently.

The key to most of how the world wound up the way it is is apparently tied up in two major events: First, the story with the apple (Sorry I'm a little light on details, I didn't grow up Christian) caused people to start eating meat and wearing clothes.

Aside of the moment, my in-laws have a great fridge magnet from restoringeden.org: "God's original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians"

The second big event was the great flood, which killed all the dinosaurs, caused turbulence, moved continents around, and some other stuff.

Amusingly enough, when looking for a link to the CBC review, I found a review of a complaint about the interview: http://www.cbc.ca/ombudsman/ombudsmanweb/39.htm

Anyhow, had a great time. Enjoy the photos. =)

A set of thoughts

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:30:25 GMT

Leif slept through most of the night most nights last week. Then was sick this week. We haven't got back to that space yet. I'd say "I have faith", but I think that's when god looks at the little Unitarian and chuckles to himself with an "aren't you cute".
Apparently I have thousands of photos that I hadn't uploaded. This is going to be more work than I thought.
What sucks is waking up at 4am not because Leif woke me up, but because I was hungry. Taking until 5 to figure this out. Until 5:30 to fall asleep, to have Leif wake me up at 6.
We get communauto tomorrow. I'm so excited! First trip: Ikea. And of all the exciting things I could want from there? I want kitchen knives. At 5, I put the margarine on the toast with the back of a fork.
I really hope I can get to the gym today.
In 4 minutes, I will wake Leif and Angie up and we'll start our day.

Showtime, synergy!

Citibank

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:18:42 GMT

Apparently Citibank doesn't even trust Citibank.

Citi Mastercard took my minimum monthly payment out of my account despite me having paid the account down to zero, so had to issue me a refund check. It's drawn on the Royal Bank of Canada.

Awesome. =)