I'm on my way back from camping this weekend. Sitting here in the Pittsburgh airport, it's sort of odd having the trappings of modern society all around me again, having spent the last 4 days and three nights sleeping in a tent (on the ground, no air mattress), and hiking through knee-high grass several times a day to socialize and get food.

There's much to talk about, all sorts of geeky interesting things to go on about camping, food, waste, economy of living, and social interactions, but for now I'm just going to enjoy the air conditioning and modern plumbing.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Life. Don't talk to me about life.
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

There are times when I want to take an axe to Eclipse. Today's particular grief is due to the XML editor. There are numerous faults with it (one of the biggest is that it 'captures' the control-pgup and control-pgdn keys into local tabs, so if you have an XML file open, and you use the keystrokes to navigate through your files, when you switch tabs to an XML file, the only way you can view a different file is to click on it), but todays stabbity-stab comes from the validator.

Eclipse shows you errors and warnings in realtime. Usually, they're fairly accurate. Today I was editing a struts.xml file, and was getting a validation warning. When Eclipse senses a problem with the XML (based on it's DTD), it tells you "this XML file fails the DTD validation".

But it doesn't tell you where.

This completely baffles me. "Somewhere in the following several hundred lines of XML code, there's a problem. But I won't tell you where or what it is."

Off to the W3.org Validation service. I fed the XML file into it, and lo! A detailed description of the problem, and where it was:

Line 26, Column 39:
document type does not allow element "include" here.

<include file="struts-editevent.xml"/></code>

Was that really that difficult?

Gnar.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Programming-fu
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

Or maybe it's just New Englanders.

Shall we run down the list here?

1) Big ass SUV.
2) Parked as annoyingly as possible (I suppose they could have gone diagonal and covered 3 spots)
3) Bike rack that sticks a good 3.5 feet out into the lot (empty)

Understanding that at one point I actually owned a Suburban just like this, I think I can safely say I at least had some clue how to park it.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

It's no secret I've been a huge fan of the One Laptop per Child project. After all, I contributed to the Give One Get One project, and obtained a unit for my son Zach, which meant a child elsewhere in the world received a laptop as well.

Following this success, and watching Zach teach himself Python and learn basic programming skills using Scratch, I found myself wanting to do more to support OLPC. I don't have bottomless resources to throw at the project, but I still wanted to contribute somehow.

After getting to know some of the project folks, and after some back and forth, I was admitted to the OLPC Support crew, and now am an official OLPC Support Volunteer.

What this means is when I have some spare time, I log into the support system and answer questions from folks all over the world about OLPC, the laptops, and the applications. I'm a volunteer, so I'm not paid, but I feel that I'm giving something to the community. I can answer questions and communicate clearly, there are people who need help. For the most part, these are people who, like me, feel the OLPC project is important, and are willing to contribute to it, and get a unit of their own to boot. I'm proud to help them out as much as I can.

In 4 days, I've handled about 38 problems. That's 38 people who are a little better off with their machines than they were before.

This is one of the few true volunteer organizations I've ever committed myself to. I've always given financially to causes I believe in, but when it comes to manning booths or spending weekends "lending a hand", it's usually been isolated to things like SF and gaming conventions.

This is bigger. This is important. This means something.

And I'm helping it be successful.

It feels good.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: OLPC
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

I'm signal boosting this message a bit. Our cohousing group (collectively Sawyer Hill Ecovillage, consisting of my group, Mosaic Commons and a second community, Camelot Cohousing) have just completed the state-mandated lottery for offering our affordable units to qualified buyers under the 40b Affordable Housing law. Because we did not have a full slate of applicants, the process is now thrown open to anyone who qualifies within the 40b limits.

If you've been interested in our project, and have held off because of the daunting numbers, now may be a perfect time to look into it. These units are being offered on a first come, first served basis.

We have 40b units available priced between $136k and $176k

The 40b limitations are:

• Income limits between $46k/year and $76k/year, depending on number of family members.
  
• Assets no more than $75k
  

Note there are a variety of exceptions for seniors, single parents, etc. See this web page for details.

We also still have a few market rate units for those families
who don't meet the limits for the affordable units, so come
check us out: http://www.sawyerhill.org.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!

Category: Life. Don't talk to me about life.

Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

Poll #1220985 Picturepraise... Reactionary? Or justified?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Question for photographers. Or folks with opinions. Or clickypeople. Whatever. You spend a fair amount of time trying to understand your equipment. You investing in capable hardware, learn the technology, and learn the theory behind composition, lighting, and all the variables in setting up a shot. Personally, you note the quality of your images are improving. Someone comes along and sees your pictures, they simply comment "Gosh that's a nice camera." What reaction is valid?

Going to see Wall-E tonight at the AMC Framingham theater. Show time is 6:15pm Call or txt me at 978 239 5902 or just show up! :)

This past weekend I was up with the Fam in Maine doing our traditional July 4th joy. A lot of fun to be had - the weather cooperated (not too hot, not too cold), we got some good time on boats and ate gobs of food.

Thursday night we went to Sanford, ME, as we usually do, and saw the fireworks show there, alongside probably 5000 other people all camped around a lake. As always, it was a great show.

This time I decided to try and photograph it. For the camera geeks, I used my 50mm lens, F-stop all the way open to 1.8. ISO was wobbling around, but I settled down to a very low 200. I was worried it wouldn't be fast enough, but with a 1/15th second shutter speed, it worked out fine.

The gaping F-stop meant my depth of field was measured in feet, even 300ft away from my subject (the fireworks themselves). I could not autofocus for obvious reasons, so with a lot of experimentation, I found "All the way out, backed off about 10th of a turn" seemed to be the 'sweet spot' for focus.

As usual for these sorts of shoots, I shot a LOT. 320+ images for 1/2 hr show (filled my 1gig memory card). From that, I ended up with less than 50 useable images.

I may take a handful and postprocess further into a nice gallery, but this was a good first attempt. The one thing I didn't expect was the reflection you can see in some of the brighter images. What I'm guessing it is is the image reflected onto the UV filter off my primary lens. I should have thought to remove that filter for such bright shots, but that's the joy of experimenting, eh?

Anyway, enjoy!

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

About 3.5 years ago I changed my web surfing habits and went totally into "RSS Aggregator" mode. Initially I was using the Sage RSS reader, a Firefox plugin. It worked well, and with Google Browser Sync I was able to sync my views. Or so I thought.

The syncing of my feeds never actually worked too well, so if I finished reading articles on one machine, when I sat down at the other, I couldn't be sure if the '18 new articles' really meant 18 new articles. Also, Google Browser Sync is being end of lifed, so I need to find an alternative.

For a while, I switched to using Akregrator for KDE. All in all, I found it a fantastic tool, very fast, easy to use, and well integrated into KDE. Alas, I don't always sit at my desktop machine, and really started pining for a way to stay synced on my feeds while out and about, while still being able to read at home.

After denying the inevitable for so long, I'm now working with Google Reader, which appears to do everything I need in an RSS aggregator, and is not localized to one specific machine. I'm slowly migrating my vast array of feeds (somewhere around 200) into it, and organizing them into folders by subject.

So far, I'm reasonably happy with it. It works, it's fast, it's ubiquitous, and, well, it's Google. I have some real issues with how Google is overly dependent on their AJAX magic to get things done, though Reader doesn't seem to too overboard with it (unlike, say, something like Picasaweb, which I loathe).

I'll give it a few weeks and see how well I like it. Fortunately, it hasn't required a major investment in time or configuration to set up. About an hour of basic twiddling and I'm up and running. Stay tuned!

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )

I was gone all weekend on a wonderful camping trip, hence the radio silence. Today I'm back in the saddle, and faced with an annoying situation with my home setup.

I've come to the conclusion 'yawl' just can't cut it as a development host. I had no idea that Pentium 4 CPU's were such garbage. A 2.26 ghz machine isn't fast enough to do serious work in Eclipse.

Most of my development is done on 'clipper', but alas it's a Windows machine (it can't help it, it was born that way). I wanted to start fiddling with CONGO (v2.0) via Konqueror, and hit upon running up ye ole VNC viewer on 'yawl', and just 'moving' the Eclipse environment onto yawl's desktop.

Lo, it worked remarkably well. Clipper's monitor is powered down, and I have an Eclipse environment on my Linux KDE desktop, but actually powered by the Windows dual core laptop next to it. I could overlap a Konqueror browse window and flip between it normally, and keyboard interaction was snappy and useful.

It's not quite like having a local Eclipse install, but it's mighty close. It gives me a feel for what it's like for folks having big vmware server installations, and other less fortunate folks dealing with the variety of RDP based solutions, and being able to just pop into an existing running machine and work with it directly.

Really though, I should have a faster desktop machine. Alas, that'll have to wait, it's pretty low on the budget tree nowadays. And, in case anyone is curious, that is in fact a snapshot of CONGO v2 running in a pure Java environment - screens and back end all running within a Tomcat server. Sure it looks identical to CONGO v1, but that's by choice. Quick port to Struts + JSP, then enhance and refactor. Progress is being made.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!

Category: Programming-fu

Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )