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I made mom a 132-piece maple and walnut end grain cutting board with a framed heart design. She had mentioned a week prior that she would like me to cut her out a 10" square board for her to cut vegetables on, and I decided to make something more pretty, like she makes her home. Now she won't use it. It's on a plate stand on the counter, being used as a decoration. She's also bringing it to holiday parties to show people what I made her. Moms...
Lots more in the Flickr set, of course, and I made a lengthy LumberJocks post on it, naturally. The latter contains several videos, including one from YouTube that wouldn't fit in Flickr's 1:30 limit.
Happy Holidays!
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Apparently it's a new hobby in Japan. I think we need a pool painted all black with some embedded LED stars.
MORE
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Here's an idea for speeding up everything on CSI, NCIS, and their many cousins and offspring:
alias zoom='zoom; enhance'
They never don't need to also enhance, unless the whole enhance thing is a gimmick to show off their algorithmic mastery, but I can't imagine them resorting to such cheap tricks.
Edit: Also, apparently my last post was my 1700th! This is my 1701st, as you may have been able to deduce.
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Here's how Matthew Kennedy describes his Lispy project:
Lispy is a library manager for Common Lisp, written in Common
Lisp. All of its dependencies except for GPG (with which signed maps
and releases are verified) are written in portable Common Lisp. With
this approach you should only need a Lisp implementation installed
to get started. The Lispy project has two goals:
- Implement an easy to use, portable library manager.
- Provide a wealth of ready to install libraries.
He just released version 0.5 yesterday, so if his goals sound good to you,
go give Lispy a
try.
Last year Jochen Schmidt wrote his impressions of Lispy, so check that out too.
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I arrived in Philadelphia to 18°F weather just as the sun set. There are snow banks everywhere, and it's extremely fluffy. I used the flight to design out pretty much every part of one of the very next things I want to make when I get home. I always bring graph paper on flights and say "I'm going to use the flight to design "____" where "____" is some part or whole of a recent idea. This is the first time I actually did it. I spent probably 2 hours immersed in it, and it made the flight go by very quickly. I also labored a bit over how to bore a 3/4" hole 2.5" deep in aluminum with any sort of accuracy. I think I have it solved, but I'll need a new bit for the mill.
Tomorrow I help fix Christmas lights which were torn asunder by a rogue snow plow. Friday we have dinner with a small subset of my stepdad's family at one of their places - always a serene and enjoyable evening. Presents will also be opened, and I'm excited to see if mom likes what I made her. It's a light present year. With the bad economy and a total lack of any kind of wishlist from either my stepdad or myself, mom decided not to go overboard. We'll see... She likes to surprise. Saturday we spend most of the day preparing for Sunday. Sunday is a party for about 25 of mom's family at our place, which will be loud and boisterous, not serene at all.
Bruno - our dog - was so happy to see me. He ran circles around me for several minutes. He remembers who gives the best behind-the-ear scratches :) Most flabbergastingly, I was sent out to climb over some ice and snow to bring in 3 loads of wood to BURN overnight. It's all good oak wood. They don't realize what a gold mine they're sitting on. I was also told to please stop examining the pieces for interesting figure and/or spalting, and just stack them by the fireplace already. These are for fuel. Not art. And now to bed. It's only 8:30PM my time, but I'm pooped!
Happy Holidays!Current Mood:  exhausted |
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Art Obrezan is a CL newbie, so what did he put together for some
practice? A MySQL
library that implements the protocol directly and has no
external dependencies. He even put together his own SHA1
implementation for the task. Nice job, Art!
It doesn't use ASDF because it's too formidable . It doesn't need to be,
just follow my
simple guide.
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I'm toying with a proof-of-concept web app for anonymizing pictures
by pixelizing them. Here's
an example. Can you figure out who the person in the picture is?
You can drag around the pixely part.
Without viewing source, can you guess how it works? I'll give you a
negative hint: no HTML canvas or plugins involved. Don't read the comments if you don't want to see a spoiler...
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My flight home to NJ from LA leaves in 12 hours. I'm mostly packed. I'll be back on January 4th.
This was a great week. I built 3 things in the shop, all out of my piles of scrap/unused lumber, and each of which would normally have taken me more than a week (i.e. months, or I'd never finish), but I was very focused. I'll have some pics of those soon, but one is a present for mom, and she gets email updates on my Flickr uploads, so it's not up yet.
I also cleaned up outside a lot, moving around logs, consolidating, waxing the ends of some so they won't split, battening down the hatches for any rogue rainstorms, and getting rid of the last of my backyard Eucalyptus branch piles. It's looking pretty clean out there*. One of the things I built was a rolling lathe stand, so now I have somewhere to start turning through the piles of wood and hopefully making some sellable items when I get back. Unfortunately, it's significantly too tall, so there's a bit of work left to do to reduce the height, but that gave me a further idea for enhancing its usability.
I cleaned the garage a lot, too. This is the first time in more than a year that I pretty much entirely cleared off and wiped down the back workbench, save for a box of rags and the bench grinder. It looked so nice. I was able to use the space then to finish building mom's gift, which came out pretty much perfectly. I managed to impress myself. I even recovered from one of my minor screwups. I'm committed upon my return to quickly building the handful of garage organizers I've meant to build all year, but have been too lazy to. Once they're made, things that simply have no home will at last be up and off my workspaces. That's critical. I thought of a lot of simple ideas for how to store the stuff that seems unstorable, or is always in the way, or multiplying.
Right now any time I want to do something, I have to move a bunch of things from one surface to another, all while navigating my way over piles of things on the floor. Just cleaning up a good chunk of the space had me moving through the projects so much more rapidly, and it was much less tiresome. I can actually see, and comprehend the other side now. It makes sense finally how to actually get it all cleaned up, with tangible, achievable steps. I'm loving the return of my long lost work ethic. Here's hoping it holds up beyond the holidays. It's my goal for 2010 to be extremely productive, and to stop wasting so much time.
I hope everyone has a great and safe holiday!
* relatively speaking ;)
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http://www.elbeno.com/blog/?p=657 The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway…
And I am driving through the neighbourhood when I see a woman standing outside her house. She’s blond, tanned, and “dressed” in a red bra, panties, and heels – you know, for Xmas. And her photographer friend is taking her Xmas photos.
Just another normal December day in greater Los Angeles. |
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Dec. 21st, 2009 @ 07:27 pm
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I kindda don't want to write this post. It makes me sad, and I don't like to be sad much. But NOT writing it isn't going to change anything, and maybe just saying it will help me let it go.
First you need to know that because I move from the kid's house to Jme's house weekend-to-weekdays, I carry everything important to me in a big bag-purse. This weekend I was at church with The McLandsborough - St. John's Cathedral, in downtown Denver - when his car got broken into, the window smashed and my bag (hidden under the seat, but not well enough) was taken. I had my cell phone, keys and wallet with me, but everything else is gone. In a way, my bag was my 'house': everything important, that someone might keep in a drawer, on the nightstand or a counter by the phone, I put in my bag so that I always have it. It's weird that I didn't realize before how important my bag was, but I'm hardly ever without it so of course I wouldn't miss it.
( Read more... )
I'm going to move on past this, but I don't mind admitting that right now my feelings are hurt and I'm sad.
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I tried out Mechanical Turk, and it's pretty neat.
When I got to the end of the task creation process, it showed a
window with realtime updates in it. That's neat. I wonder why
it's realtime? I thought it would be more of a batch process where
I'd come back and check it in a few days.
Instead, as I watched, people picked up and finished all 48 of my
tasks within a few minutes. The realtime nature was a surprise, and
pretty neat.
It was more expensive than I expected because I accidentally had
two workers perform each task, and I set the pay rate pretty
high. Even so, it was less than $10. I'm going to use this more in
the future and try to tune my requests a little better.
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I went caroling for charity tonight and it was awesomely random. Like most of the crazy ideas I get, it turned out not to be as scary as I anticipated but much more out-of-the-blue. Tonight involved:
Horridly cliche bad Christmas sweaters made worse (if such a thing is possible) by duct-taped-in blinking Christmas lights ("Is that a battery pack in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"); a girl in a miniskirt, bare legs, and totally tanked coming out to carol with us in 30 degree weather; a booklet of words to Christmas songs typed in impossible-to-read, gray-colored, 10 point font; a boy wearing a blinking red light-up Rudolph nose, a lucha libre (mexican wrestling) mask, and christmas-light festooned antlers over it all; beer from the wagon we took with us to hold the canned goods we were collecting; a girl wearing a red with white polka dot One Up Mushroom hat; no flashlights to see anything whatsoever we may have wanted to see or read; a man dressed as Santa, only with no beard; a crowded restaurant full of businessmen all staring at the ridiculously-attired people parading through the bar to get to the back room, where they shut the door between us because we were so loud; three carols sung over and over and over; many people in elf hats; some darn amazing artichoke dip; a girl in a Cindy Loo Hoo type pompom-festooned spiral hat; a red wagon decorated like a children's Christmas parade rejected float (rejected for being too likely to explode, a la Christmas Vacation); a man dressed entirely from red clothing purchased at Goodwill earlier that day; beer from random houses we caroled to ("Do these count as donate-able canned goods? No? Well I have a way to get rid of them then..."); knocking on random doors to ask for donations (in aforementioned One Up Mushroom hat); The Boss' rendition of 'Santa Clause is Coming to Town'.
Good stories today, friends. Thanks to those hearty souls who came with me and well-met to my new friends!
PS. Doing good feels good.
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Sometime a couple years back I brought a little deck of hastily created index cards - based on a trick I'd learned online - to a dinner with friends at The Cheesecake Factory (to mixed reviews). The 32 cards were numbered 0 to 31, and each had 5 holes punched across the top, registered to each other when stacked up. I had cut a slit from the edge to any hole that equated to a set bit in the 5-bits worth of holes at the top for each card's number. Shuffling them, I could insert a pin over and over through all of the holes from least to most significant bit, lifting out any cards where that bit was still a closed hole (i.e. "set") and moving them en masse to the front of the deck. By the last bit, they'd all be sorted in numerical order. If that was too confusing, see here.
I was reading up on Eucalyptus last night, as I am wont to do, and an identification method called "card sorting" was mentioned. I immediately thought back to those binarily sortable cards and went on a google hunt for some imagery. Turns out it's quite similar. Here's an example of the front with data points along top and bottom, and the back, with data points along the sides. These are the coolest things, even if you only get 84 data points at this card scale. Having a stack of these on a particular subject - Eucalyptus species in this case - is like having your own little real-world SQL database.
A common method to identifying species (in any category) is the dichotomous key. This - mimicking the hierarchical splits in standard taxonomy - is a series of choices between 2 or a few options, or a true/false option which creates a trail through traits to the final species, just like the game 20 Questions. The problem with dichotomous keys is that you don't get to choose the order of the divisions, nor skip choices along the way. For trees, the first question might be regarding leaf shape or border type, or something involving twigs, or even growth region/zone. The moment you can't answer a question, your trail dies. I've given up trying to use them, because I never know every answer. It'll ask "red or white flowers?" but it'll be outside of the season, so no flowers, or "are the anthers dichroic?" (which I made up, but sounds like stuff I don't know in some keys I've tried to use). I'm left each time with no answer/pathway to the final ID, and often not even to something like the proper family, as they don't seem to follow the taxonomic splits, but rather observational things that can be common across large scientific groupings. It's pointless.
The card method, in contrast, simply reduces the list by letting you instantly pull out of the stack all cards (and thus species) that satisfy one piece of information. It's like typing a word into the iTunes search box and culling anything that doesn't include that word. With just a few pieces of info, you can arrive at a greatly reduced deck to look through for the correct species. You can also add a new species with no sorting work. Just clip the right holes and throw it into the stack anywhere. It'll sort itself as needed later. I find myself intrigued to see what something like a Google search would look like using this method, and what kind of beast of a machine would be necessary to lift all of those cards.
I immediately wanted a stack of these to try out and carry around with me like a nerd. They are touted online as a great help in the field. However, then it occurred to me how much more useful and sensible a decent database app on an iPhone would be these days. You could just touch choices. Well, at least until an EMP goes off and ruins all electronics in your region. What then, gadget-lovers? Me and my cards will remember who made fun of us back before The Event. This post took a harsh turn right at the end.Current Mood:  impressed |
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I heard about three new Lisp-powered games this week.
First is a "silly geodefense clone
wannabe," Towers:
Next is David
O'Toole's 7-day roguelike Sanctuary:
And last is Andy Hefner's untitled space game:
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MCLIDE
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Dec. 17th, 2009 @ 10:08 am
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Terje Norderhaug wants you to know
about MCLIDE:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MCLIDE is a free open source Macintosh IDE for Lisp implementations
on any platform. It's a double-clickable, stand-alone development
environment that connects to a Lisp either locally or through the
network.
The first public beta of MCLIDE 1.0 is now available from:
http://mclide.in-progress.com
This version of MCLIDE works with Clozure CL (a.k.a. OpenMCL) and
Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) as target lisp implementations. Support
for a number of other lisp implementations on different platforms is
under development.
MCLIDEs user interface is based on the mature IDE of Macintosh Common
Lisp. It provides rich interactive development and debugging tools in
the form of dialogs interacting with the target Lisp.
MCLIDE provides a consistent developer experience regardless of the
Lisp. It can be used on the same computer as the Lisp system, or
target one or more Lisp implementations on other computers or
operating systems.
Special thanks to Peter Paine for substantial feedback and
suggestions. His involvement has been essential in moving MCLIDE
forward. Glen Foy has provided a lisp syntax styling utility as an
optional plug-in. MCLIDE has also benefitted from contributions by
Shannon Spires and Madhu, among others.
Follow the progress of MCLIDE at www.twitter.com/mclide
-- Terje Norderhaug
terje@in-progress.com
Check out the MCLIDE
screenshots for some Lispy eyecandy.
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I'll deep-link you to the important part. You can give up on it after the 12-movie trick ends a minute later. The rest of the 8 minutes is just explanation for some nerds on reddit who asked me about my multi-movie trickery.
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Posted using TxtLJ
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Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 04:23 pm
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Paris & I talking in the car as I back out of the driveway past Court's car and she yells out the garage door, "DON'T HIT MY CAR!!":
Me: Court's so bossy.
Paris: You slam into her car!
Me: Oh /fine/. I do that THREE TIMES and I'm a villian!
Paris: Yeeeah... I don't think you're learning.' |
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Here's a
part-time web job with a Lispy angle:
Requirements: Programming will consist of Javascript, CSS, and Ajax,
within a browser (DOM) environment; experience with all of these is
essential. Some familiarity with a Lisp-like language, such as Common
Lisp (preferred), Scheme, or Clojure essential. Ability to work
independently required. Physical location near Berkeley CA or Richmond
VA is desirable, but anywhere in the world is possible.
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Google's DNS impairs CDN performance. On both of my colo systems,
there are Akamai CDN caches within a few hops and under 3ms. With
Google DNS, it's around 10 hops and almost 30ms. Ouch.
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