Ubuntu Ape

So, I’m leaving Slate Group, where I’ve been working for the past year on their new business site The Big Money. I’m moving on to Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, to work on their Online Services team developing Ubuntu One.

It will be good to get back to Python as my primary language of choice, to be a part of a fully-distributed workforce[1] again, and to be working with newer, more cutting-edge technologies.

[1] Anyone in a partially-distributed work environment would do well to read The Pond. It struck painfully close to home for me. At Slate Group, I often felt like The Remote Guy™, working from home, while my colleagues shared the office in Arlington. At Socialtext, all the devs were remote, so everyone felt pressure to communicate clearly and timely.

Check Your Brand Upside Down

Target’s new brand, ‘up&up’ looks like a great retooling of their old, bland bulls-eye packaging.

I grabbed some baby wipes off the shelf, but upside down, and my first thought was, “Who’d call it ‘down and down’?”

Be careful how that new brand or logo looks when you can’t guarantee how it’s seen.

Taking Pictures of the Night Sky

Beginning Astrophotography

My friend Joe has a telescope. When we’d go over to his house for dinner, he’d take us out in the back yard and we’d look at the moon, or Jupiter or Saturn if they were out. We’d check out the Pleiades or Orion’s belt, and I’d get all shivery thinking back to grade school and the ridiculous National Geographic coffee table book Our Universe. Now, though, he has two daughters and less room, which means I get to play foster home to his telescope. I like photography so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I wanted to merge these two. I had no illusions that I’d be coming up with shots to rival the Hubble Telescope:

But I figured I could at least get better shots than with my 200mm lens alone:

For me, it was a matter of getting a few accessories for my D300 and my borrowed Orion telescope. The instructions that come with the adapter are minimal, since it works with many models. The telescope I have is completely manual, so all focusing is done by hand, and it takes a bit of work to overcome the shake. In addition, the camera body is considerably heavier than a single eyepiece, and the SkyQuest’s springs aren’t always the strongest, especially when aimed nearer the horizon. Choosing the right eyepiece for the job isn’t exactly intuitive, either. For telescopes, smaller numbers do not translate to wider angle of view. The Luna Shard photos on Flickr were taken with a 10mm eyepiece. I have a few shots of the entire moon that were taken with a 25mm eyepiece.

With these shards all together, I’d stitch up a complete photo, David Hockney-style, using an application called DoubleTake.

Tips

• Aim high. With the camera body attached, you’ll be putting more weight on the viewing area than it is probably rated for, and it will pull the telescope down.

• Additionally, city light pollution is problematic for anything but the brightest bodies in the night sky, and rules out most anything near the horizon. So if you can, head out to the country and let the telescope acclimatize for a while before shooting.

• Experiment with your camera’s settings. I found quite a lot of conflicting advice online for proper settings for ISO and shutter speed, and remember: aperture won’t help you here, as there isn’t one to adjust.

Shopping List

Here are some things you’ll need if you want to get into amateur astrophotography:

• A camera. I use my Nikon D300. One incredibly useful feature on it is the Live View mode, where the LCD monitor on the back becomes a giant viewfinder. Not good for fast action shots, but for relatively stable subjects, it works perfectly, and lets you keep the telescope and camera a bit steadier when focusing.

  Nikon D300 DX 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)

• A T-ring. This is an intermediary attachment that couples the adapter’s threads to your camera body’s bayonet mount.

  Orion T-ring, Nikon or Orion T-Ring, Canon EOS (including Digital Rebel)

• An adapter. I went with the variable adapter to get the widest range of motion to work with a wide variety of eyepieces. Joe lent me two eyepieces, a 10mm and a 25mm.

  Orion 1.25” Variable Camera Adapter

• A telescope. This is the same telescope I’m using. There are more modern versions that include electronically controlled bases and the like that would probably help keep the telescope steady, as well.

  Orion SkyQuest XT8 Classic Dobsonian Telescope

Twitter Is My New Newsreader

Twitter has just about replaced my newsreader.

Most of the people whose feeds I subscribe to, I also follow on Twitter. Many of them link to their blogs, often with a title (which acts as primary filter). And I also see many people link to posts of interest that I’d normally find in my newsreader anyway.

I just launched NNW, and I’d already read most of the posts directly on the web.

Catching Up to the Past

John Siracusa on e-books:

Overall, there’s definitely an “all of this has happened before” vibe, perhaps even with a hint of “all of this will happen again,” if I’m feeling pessimistic. It’s almost as if those first attempts to get the e-book market off the ground never happened.

On a more personal level, it’s like Peanut Press never happened, which partially explains the defiance and resentment with which I began this article. For those of us who were ground up in the unforgiving gears of the market during that first, hopeful go at getting e-books into the hands of the masses, seeing it all unfold again, in much the same way, and with no apparent understanding of the past, is bittersweet at best. It’s not so much that we’re morbidly dwelling on what might have been, but rather, we’re disappointed that so few have learned from our mistakes. After all, you have to be aware of history before you can learn from it.

This particular quote resonated with me in terms of content management systems. The best CMS I ever worked on was the custom solution we built for boston.com. It’s still running today, almost 8 years later, and the systems I’ve been working on lately still have a long way to go to reach that level of features and flexibility.

Offensive? Me?

I got this letter and a set of replacement plates in the mail today:

Dear Mr. Bir,

Thank you for participating in our personalize [sic] license plate program. We mistakenly issued you a personalized license plate [Ed. note: URBNAPE] that was in violation of our Personalized Plate Issuance Guidelines. Because so many personalized license plates are reviewed and issued daily, errors are sometimes made.

Our policy is not to issue any personalized plates that may contain any combination of characters that in any way carries a connotation that may be reasonably seen by a person viewing a license plate as socially, racially, or ethnically offensive or disparaging. I understand you may have grown fond of your personalized plates but because they are in violation of our guidelines, you must return them in the enclosed prepaid envelope within 30 days. Here are your new passenger plates, BLAH BLAH, along with the registration card and decals for your vehicle.

If you do not feel your personalized plates are in violation and strongly oppose relinquishing them, you may appeal this decision by submitting a written request to conduct an informal administrative proceeding, also include a statement as to why your plates are not in violation of our Guidelines as stated above. The administrative proceeding will provide an opportunity for you and the Agency to present evidence and argument as to why the personalized plates do or do not meet the Guidelines. If you wish to request an appeal, send your request to DMV Special License Plates, P.O. Box 26668, Room 519, Richmond, VA 23261-6668 and please include your daytime telephone number.

Yes, I might appeal that, but I might just let it slide. After all, Amber drives the car with those plates, and maybe she’s tired of being my billboard. I’ve got other personalized plates on the Land Cruiser. Hopefully no one finds ZACS TOY offensive.

If I do appeal, there are a few pieces of evidence I could submit:

• This website
• My Flickr account
• My Twitter account
• Every-single-online-social-whoozit-I-can-register-urbanape-with account

Ridiculous.

CocoaHeads Richmond

The inaugural meeting was a great success. We had an iPhone heavy contingent. Four iPhone devs, two recent Cocoa converts, and me.

• Jeff Rock developed Tumblrette, the app I’m using to write this.
• John Maddox developed Summizer and Streaks.
• Eddie Wilson developed Snow Reports and Streaks.
• Mike Schrag does secret things with WebObjects, and developed Color.
• Jon Lumpkin is a .Net developer for the county of Henrico.
• Jamie Pinkham is a .Net developer for Ironworks.

Since it was our first meeting, we skipped a formal presentation and discussed what we hoped to get out of a group about Cocoa. Everyone felt strongly that we wanted to not be the smartest one around, constantly acting as mentor to the rest of the group. I think we’ve got enough variation and expertise between the seven of us that someone will always be able to teach the rest of us something. Heck, I’m the only one with desktop app experience.

So, I’m looking forward to re monthly meetings. I only wish I’d known earlier that Richmond had a group of like-minded developers.

Anna

Yesterday was the first anniversary of my adoption of Anna Banana (later rebadged “The Yellow Peril”), a 1976 Toyota Land Cruiser. If you didn’t know me, you might think she was a pre-midlife crisis. If you knew me, you know I’ve wanted one since at least my Sophomore year at college. She’s in incredible shape for a piece of machinery nearly as old as I am. She’d easily be a daily driver, if I didn’t work from home.

I drove down to Raleigh last year with my best friend to check her out. I’d been hunting FJ40s on craigslists from Florida to Maine and as far West as West Virginia. She was in better shape than I’d been hoping for. Good frames are hard to come by, especially on the East Coast. We do have our love affair with road salt. Still, she checked out with only minor body trouble: rust in all the usual places. A few months after I bought her, I needed to swap out the primary clutch cylinder. That’s the last mechanical thing I’ve had to do.

In the Spring, Matt and I took our rigs camping in George Washington National Forest in western Virginia. It was like I had let Anna off her leash. She ran lightly over mud roads and climbed rocks and back roads and splashed through creeks like a puppy. I’m sad to report that she outlived her camping companion, a truck two decades her junior. RIP, Fred.

In a fit of financial bravado, I bought her with one of those ubiquitous credit card checks. With no interest until January of 2009, it seemed like a steal. Today, almost a month early, I paid her off. One more debt stone off my back. She still purrs like a kitten, provided I give here enough choke and time. Tonight, she brought home our Christmas tree. The first one to grace our house since 2001, the year we moved in.

Anna belongs to a class of machine that is close to my heart: Simple and pure, understandable by one person, reparable in the field. Chairs, pencil sharpeners, trucks. Not too clever, just rugged and dependable.

Some day, I’ll convince Amber to let me bolt a carseat to the bed of Anna, and Lex can go places with me that the Jetta couldn’t dream of reaching. Until then, it’ll still be by own private adventure every time I crank her up.

Save the Yestertech

Long ago, I grew up like lots of geeks currently in their mid-30’s: with an Apple and a Commodore. Unlike a lot of geeks, I had an Apple IIgs and a Commodore SX-64. Still have the SX-64, actually (and it’s for sale).

I used to spend the requisite (inordinate) amount of time playing games or writing little programs in Basic with my best friend. And I accumulated quite a stack of 5.25” floppy disks for my trouble.

Fast forward to nowadays. The SX-64 is sitting lonely in my office. I have replaced its magnificence with an emulator, Power64. Many of my personal disks, though, remain out of reach. Oh, I know there are schematics online, and even little dangly bits you can buy for exhorbitant prices that let you attach your 1541 to a PC’s parallel port. You can probably even get a parallel-to-USB adapter and maybe even get them to a Mac. But I don’t have a 1541, so the disks also just sit here, lonely. When I scanned them in on a whim, it occurred to me that the resulting image files were larger than the disks they were pictures of. Which led me to this fun thought: steganographically embed the contents of the disk image into the actual image of the disk. Make it a true disk image.

We need a service, not unlike the CDs-to-iPod ripping or photos-to-CD scanning: You send your old floppies to them, and they’ve got all the yestertech to deal with migration, and they send you back emulator-compatible disk images, steganographically embedded into scanned pictures of the actual disk. Somebody get on that quick, because I don’t have the time.

Update: Dave Dribin points me at RetroFloppy, whose tagline “Don’t let your old data die.” could have been the title of this post.