Writings

Want!

The bright sun light throws it off a bit, but that's basically what the shelves will look like once they are done.  The painting portion of this adventure starts tonight.

Also, that's not barrel distortion, the shelves are built into a parallelogram part of the room with a 17 degree angle.

In between cutting lumber for this set of shelves, I managed to push the Where is Io source code up onto github.  The parts I wrote are under GPLv3, the parts that came from others are under their respective licenses.

The code is very rough.  It was enough to get me minimally to a release.  Lots of refactoring and optimizing required.

Today's progress after taking the day off of work.  That's the minimal amount of attached parts that I need to keep it the right shape.

Also, I am full of / covered in sawdust.

I just pushed Where is Io out to the Android market for the low low price of free.  The application presents a "spirograph" view of the 4 large moons of Jupiter over the next 96 hours, including an indicator on the current position.  There are details provided on each of the objects in the system.  Jupiter is just starting to come up in the early mornings, so over the next few months it should be handy.

You can download it directly here: Or check out the Where is Io page for more screen shots and information (screen shots skipped for this post, because I just put some up in the last post).

It will be a couple of weeks before the next release, as I've got a real world building project that has to get done, but rest assured this is just the beginning.

Pre-TED, I used to be able to sit through a boring lecture or presentation -- diligently taking notes while being sufficiently nourished by whatever small sliver of new insights or information the speaker could provide. I had patience, fortitude, and a long attention span for the bad presentation. TED has extinguished this valuable skill.

Joshua Kim makes a good point on his blog that TED has skewed our view of lectures.  I've seen this when talking with people about the various local technical lecture series.  There is a different quality that you get from being a participant in a lecture then just an observer, but there appears to be a lot of inertia against going out to a lecture because of what exists on TED.

I've made some more progress on what will be my first Android market application - "Where is Io".  I've learned a lot about sqlite performance on the phone, which isn't bad as long as you limit the number of database opens you do.  I'm also trying to make the interface more self explanatory to even those with less astronomy knowledge.  Here are the current screen shots:

I'm not going to explain anything else on the interface, but I would love questions / comments in the blog if this seems confusing.  My "must do" task list probably puts this at about 2 weeks away from publish into the market.  Fortunately, Jupiter is only just coming out of the Sun now (with a missing belt!) so as long as I get this out in the next month or so it will be useful to folks.

"For 40 years, we have worked tirelessly to ensure the health and safety of our natural environment," a visibly angered EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told reporters. "But this can only work when it's a give-and-take. If the environment won't even meet us halfway by regenerating a rain forest or two, or pumping out some clean air and water every once in a while, then what's the point of us trying?"

I love the Onion.

There have been a series of posts about Git in the last week over at The Reinvigorated Programmer. It's fascinating to watch someone come to terms with Git that's also a brilliant writer, and gets to the heart of the challenges so quickly. If you've ever struggled getting over that hump with Git, I encourage you to read the three posts, in order, and see if it helps you on your journey.

Act 1: Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way

Act 2: Still hatin’ on git: now with added Actual Reasons!

Act 3: You could have invented git (and maybe you already have!)

This whole mess is just heart breaking.   Lots more photos at The Big Picture.