| The previous month is: |
brett's logjamFebruary 2007 |
The next month is: |
3 February 2007
Going to the Birds
My son is obsessed with Birds of Virginia, one of the field guides we keep around the house to identify the birds at our feeders. He takes it with him upstairs and tries to have us read it to him as he’s going to sleep; he points to the cardinal on the cover and then points outside, saying “ka-ka-ka”.
It’s really quite unnerving how interested in things he becomes.
Anyhow, it should really come as no surprise that we have to tell him all about the birds that are outside, which in turn causes both me and Merrystar to up our bird-spotting game. So, seen at the feeder this week:
- A big flock of red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) and common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula) muscled aside the normal complement of finches and juncos on Wednesday, when the snow started here in Williamsburg. Blackbirds are, of course, one of the first heralds of spring. They also ate all my sunflower seeds.
- There’s this one brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) who comes along every few days and joins the dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) in picking through the seeds on the ground. He’s a funny bird; Trip does a great impression of him, bobbing his head up and down.
- Speaking of my son’s bird impressions, he started patting the back of his head when Merrystar mentioned a woodpecker. That’s because there’s a female red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) who’s joined the finch-nuthatch-junco flock with a prominent red neck and head. (The top of her head is gray; that’s how we know she’s a she.) Merrystar and I were both more than a little surprised at this.
- Merrystar has probably the best sighting of the week: a Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus). I hope it’ll be back tomorrow; I have new seed to put out.
And flying right outside my office window, two sightings for me this week:
- A red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) buzzed by today. I’ve seen this one on three different days this week; he caught a mouse near the road while I was IMing with the home office, perched in one of the trees while Trip and I finished breakfast, and flew across the backyard at second-storey height this afternoon. The white with black spots makes this one easier to identify than some of the other raptors who have been by for a visit.
- A turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) scared the living bejabbers out of me on Wednesday when he flew right past my window, banking to show me what a 5-6 foot wingspan is really like. I’m lucky I was muted on my conference call. Holy crikey, let’s not do that again!
So that’s the birdwatching report for this week. No doubt I’ll wake up to calls of “dada, ka-ka-ka-ka” tomorrow morning and a toddler who insists upon feeding the birds before getting dressed. In the freezing cold.
I really do love that little boy.
4 February 2007
A Little Bit Jealous (of Ubuntu)
Merrystar’s finished restoring Tsiolkovsky to operating condition, having installed obscure dependencies required for 30-year-old astronomical software and restored data from the ill-fated HissyDrive backup fiasco.
And because of Ubuntu, it’s turned out much better than before. No, honest.
- The Windows XP side of Tsiolkovsky suffered chronic driver crashes from the on-board Centrino wireless card; only disabling the card and using a Netgear pc card stopped the computer from crashing. The drawback was, of course, that the power consumption was huge and battery life was cut in half, if not more. Ubuntu natively recognized and supported the Centrino A/B card, so we’re back up to the 6-8 hour battery life we were used to. (Yes, you read that right.)
- Speaking of power management, Ubuntu fully supports ACPI; hibernate and suspend work like they’re supposed to. Amazing!
- While some of the package managment is confusing (especially the contents of the devel packages, and what’s up with not including
make?)apt-getis vastly superior to SuSE’syast. Sorry, but it’s true.
- Gnome seems to be trying to integrate the best UI elements of Mac OS X and Windows XP (albeit without all the chrome of Tiger/Vista), and succeeds. How well? Good enough to convince a long-time KDE user to switch.
- System stability, good UI, and unix commands at the ready? You better believe that Merrystar never boots into Windows anymore. While there are a few reasons to keep the partition (Adobe Illustrator, for one, and some web-based tools that require IE), it sees little to no system time. Quite a change, actually.
So, I confess. I’ve grown a little bit jealous. I want a brown system! I want to see the OS that Just Works! I want to use it!
Oh, wait. I run Mac OS X and have all of that, minus the brown part. Okay, I really just want to tinker around with Linux again… but know better than to mess up Merrystar’s system this close to Valentine’s day. So I downloaded Xubuntu for PowerPC and ran it on Hithlum, instead. (I’ve long been interested in the XFCE window manager.)
It was nice: fast, UNIX-y, snappy. Not as nice as OS X, but I can now say I’ve gotten Linux to boot on my Mac without frying the system. I could get used to it. But then I remembered that I really didn’t need to do any of this. I have a perfectly good OS now, and I don’t need to go re-learn Linux ‘just because.’ Ubuntu is pretty simple and looks to be low-maintenance, so my technical support duties will likely be light now. Aside from helping to clean up the Windows partition — a reinstall may be in order, because, you know, the Registry doesn’t scale — I’m out of a job on that computer.
Bravo, Ubuntu. It Just Works, like it’s supposed to. Nicely done.
6 February 2007
Enterprise on iTunes
Just saw this while picking up the iTunes Free Music Tuesday songs: the first season of Enterprise is now on iTunes.

I’m actually looking forward to cherry-picking the episodes instead of getting the whole series - mixed in among the gems are some real turkeys. (And I’m willing to skip almost all of the third season, Twilight excepted.)
7 February 2007
The Great Backyard Bird Count
This year’s Great Backyard Bird Count will take place February 16th through 19th. From the website, participation is very simple:
- Plan to count birds for at least 15 minutes during February 16–19, 2007. Count birds at as many places and on as many days as you like—just keep a separate list of counts for each day and/or location.
- Count the greatest number of individuals of each species that you see together at any one time, and write it down.
- Enter your results on the Great Backyard Bird Count web site.
The program itself is a great example of participatory science. I’m a little more stymied by the cost to join Project FeederWatch; it’s a barrier to participation that is hard to explain away. I offer to perform labor for you, but you want me to pay to have it count?
It’s a headscratcher, I admit.
(Nonetheless, I will be counting birds the weekend after next for them. I do it anyway for free.)
8 February 2007
xscreensaver as your desktop?
Last night I stumbled upon BackLight, a free program for the Mac that allows you to pipe any screensaver into your desktop. While it’s not perfect (it’s a GL layer on top of the existing desktop, so there are issues with Exposé, for instance), it allows for some great effects. Want to run Matrix-style effects in the background while you work?
No problem. (GLMatrix is part of the xscreensaver package, now available for Macs, too.)
Don’t get me wrong; this is totally useless. Screensavers aren’t the most practical things. (When was the last monitor you owned seriously susceptible to burn-in? 1986?) But this is very cool eye-candy. This one goes in the ‘keep’ pile for now.
Updated: Found another way that doesn’t require an additional application:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &
Will try it out and see how it works.
When Good Hard Drives Go Bad
Here’s a question: what goes chirp, chirp, CRUNK, chrip chrip, crunk chirp?
If you guessed Tsiolkovsky’s hard drive, you’d be sadly correct.
First, the Ubuntu side gave us this wonderful message:
I think this is really quite an excellent way to put it: “…and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to risk your time and data upon it.” Good advice for a bad situation.
Then, tonight, the Windows side gave us this gem:
Less informative, but just as ominous.
(Fortunately, Tsiolkovsky is still under Panasonic’s excellent warranty. But only for six more weeks.)
11 February 2007
The Unknown Window
Merrystar and I have this huge framed poster hanging in our living room that we know nothing about. She picked it up in the Netherlands sometime in the late nineties. We don’t know the artist, or the name of the print, but would dearly love to find other works by this person.
If you know anything about this picture, please drop me a note or leave a comment on the linked Flickr page. Thanks!
13 February 2007
Things I Recommend
I was tinkering with this weblog and realized that it was seriously lacking in do-goodery. Like, it’s all well and good to know that my computers continue to interrupt my search for peace and quiet, but really — where’s the stuff that makes you go “that’s just what I was looking for!”
So, it’s time to balance karma. Here are some things I recommend, in no particular order:
- Whilst living in the City (Formerly Known As D.C.), I had the fortune to work with an excellent realtor, Rich Ragan, both as a buyer and a seller. He was really a pleasure to work with, and (if I ever lost my senses and decided to move back to Northern Virginia) I would happily use him again and recommend him to all my friends up there.
- The Westheimer (Houston) and 183 North (Austin) locations of Chuy’s. I spent many a lunch… and dinner… and breakfast, now that I think about it, there. They’re on the ‘must visit’ list when I go back to those cities.
- The Chrysalis Inn in Bellingham, Washington. Merrystar and I have had nothing but good times there. Honorable mention goes to the The Wickaninnish Inn, which is spectacular, but a little too far removed from used bookstores to be as much fun.
- The Cobb salads at The Thistle Cafe in Austin. Best one I’ve ever had. Unfortunately wonky hours. At the cafe, not the salad. What was I talking about again?
- Web hosting at Cornerhost. I’ve been using it since 2002 and have many compliments for the way Michal’s run his business.
- Quicksilver. Quite possibly the best application developed on the Macintosh, and definitely the hardest to explain. The only application that comes close is Preview. You know that feeling you got when you first discovered Mozilla (or Firefox, or Iceweasel, or whatever you’re using now?), and you got how great it was? The moment you grok Quicksilver is an order of magnitude cooler. You will pry Quicksilver out of my cold, dead hands.
- Panasonic’s Toughbook computers and customer support. Seriously, guys. You’ve sold yourself 3 toughbooks through my recommendations already, and I’ve not been disappointed yet. Great job with the service, which is unfortunately where Apple falls short.
- xkcd, a webcomic for the geeks among you. Consistently excellent, consistently stick figure-y.
(I suppose to balance this out, I should start a Things I Do Not Recommend list, too. Duly noted.)
Learn Along With Sesame
Just saw this in the iTunes Store: 4 free episodes of “Learn Along Of Sesame” are now available for download:

I am seriously running out of disk space here, people! Enough with the free stuff!
16 February 2007
Reminder: Count Your Birds!
Don’t forget: fill up your feeders, because the Great Backyard Bird Count is this weekend.
I’ve already seen a few new (to my backyard) species, like the Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) and a Common Grackle. Hopefully Merrystar’s Carolina Wren and my Brown Thrasher will make an appearance.
Friday Update: Made a quick sheet in excel to keep up. Carolina Wren has shown up.
Saturday Update: Brown Thrasher showed up, along with 2 (!) different kinds of hawks, a new kind of sparrow, and I figured out how to turn on the digital zoom on my new S3.
Also caught this Blue Heron in mid-flight while out on my walk today:
Sweet!
Sunday Update: Another new visitor today, this time a pair of Yellow-rumped Warblers (Dendroica coronata).
I’m still trying to get the hang of the new Canon S3’s super-zoom. I may have to take the screens off the windows — all the good shots are through the clear glass on the door.
17 February 2007
To Catch The Wind
Photos up from this morning’s walk through downtown Williamsburg.
19 February 2007
links for 2007-02-20
-
Quicksilver-lite for Windows. Replacement for RocketDock and AppRocket and the QuickLaunch bar and the Start menu and …
-
Ease into Mac development.
-
Using OS X to generate new passwords every week.
-
Skyy + snow + exercise ball
-
Edmund’s first take on the Spyder.
Bluebird Of Happiness
An Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) visits my neighbor’s garden.
(I am really starting to like the Canon S3, in case you hadn’t noticed.)
Insomnia-Ending Site Updates
Hey look, it’s another sleep-inducing metapost about site changes! Here’s what’s new:
- Get posts by email. While many of you read this through a feed reader, the main audience of this site actually tends more towards direct visits or email. Given the success of my son’s email newsletter, I’ve decided to offer the same service here via Feedburner. Emails are sent once a day; feel free to give it a try. (Link is at the top of the index, too.)
- Blog consolidation. The front page has undergone another revision (7.0, by my highly-inaccurate count) and several sections have been cordoned off for editing. The material will end up here, so you don’t have to keep hunting through various blogs: The Blue Lamp Cafe has already been merged, while Flotsam and Jetsam and The Bookdragon Tales will undergo some editing before joining the logjam. Other pages are being revised as time permits.
- logjam changes. I recently took the plunge and updated from the 2.x tree of Movable Type to 3.x, and have found a few features I like, like hierarchical categories. The global forwards/backwards pages are gone (they were seriously screwing with my PageRank) and the entry title code has been reworked.
- Quick sidebar, please. The sidebar to the left is an experiment with several services designed to share information: my Shared Google Reader pages, del.icio.us bookmarks, and flckr photos are the first additions. (I’m still undecided about this.)
- Integrated feeds. I’ve also added my del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos into the site feed. The bookmarks will probably take the place of most of the tidbits formerly posted in the web log, but for record-keeping I’ll have del.icio.us post them here under a separate category.
- … Well, almost. Unfortunately, Google Reader doesn’t have the same sort of integration yet with either Feedburner or sending digests via XML-RPC, so those articles will only be available via a separate feed. (This is probably a good thing: I’m worried about overloading the feed with too much noise as it is already. Please let me know if you think this is the case, or if I’m worrying too much.)
- Alternate Stylesheets: gimmicky, slow, gone. Based on some tracking pixels I dropped into the alternate stylesheets for this layout, they’re not getting used. White is nice. So those will probably disappear and make my
headcode block much simpler. Each page you view currently results in 13 file GETs before any images are requested, which results in slower page loads. Removing those file accesses will speed things up and make the logfiles pretty again.
- Plus la change… Many things are still the same: no comments, the archives run backwards from the rest of the internet, and I still spend too much time talking about computer drama.
What, you’re still awake after all that? Go to sleep!
20 February 2007
Funny, They Don't Fly Like Turkeys
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura), no relation to either Turkeys or Old-World Vultures.
22 February 2007
links for 2007-02-22
-
Significance of each number. Kelly, do not miss this!
-
Make your own cable shorteners.
Red-tailed Hawk
A juvenile light-morph Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) perches by Ironbound Road in Williamsburg. He flew down and got a snack by the roadside about a minute after this picture was taken.
23 February 2007
Okay, Enough With The Steeple Already
Yet another shot of the Bruton Parish Church steeple. Today they had the windows blacked out; a film crew was inside shooting for the upcoming John Adams miniseries.
links for 2007-02-23
-
On how *not* to build a presentation deck.
-
From Joel on Software. Good advice.
-
“Three cheers for the organization that says, “In order to keep prices low and traffic moving, we’re unable to discuss our policies with you. We’re very sorry if this inconveniences you.” It’s far better than the charade that so many large companies go th
-
Real-time representation of the earth on your desktop. Free.
-
If only it weren’t neon yellow rubber.
-
Via Jim.
-
(Requires X11, of course)
-
Presentation from 2005 that includes overview of S/MIME, PGP, GPG, MacGPG with focus on Mail.app.
-
If rsync ain’t your thing.
-
One of these years, they’ll get it right (probably when they take the $1 bill out of circulation, methinks.)
24 February 2007
links for 2007-02-24
-
Presentation from 2005 that includes overview of S/MIME, PGP, GPG, MacGPG with focus on Mail.app.
-
If rsync ain’t your thing.
-
One of these years, they’ll get it right (probably when they take the $1 bill out of circulation, methinks.)
-
On the use of pmset.
Nothing But Bluebirds
On our Saturday morning walk through Colonial Williamsburg, this Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) landed in a tree less than 4 meters away from me and Trip. He stayed there for about 10 seconds, and then flew off.
(I now understand the value of quick-drawing your camera.)
25 February 2007
Family Trek
links for 2007-02-25
-
Hardwood floor cleaners.
-
Ars Technica review.
26 February 2007
The Guns Of February
I dunno. You go out for your Saturday morning walk, someone leaves cannons in your way.
Life is like that sometimes.
links for 2007-02-26
-
Great work by Stuck In Customs.
-
The Go Fug Yourself girls liveblog the oscars. Far better than actually watching it.
27 February 2007
Come Out Wherever You Are
There’s an owl in this picture. Somewhere.
Yeah, Trip and I couldn’t find it, either.
(I confess: I love it how he goes oot oot oot whenever he thinks about owls.)
links for 2007-02-27
-
Toyota’s obsessive culture that got them where they are today.
-
“What if instead of ME going to fetch the BEER, the BEER came to ME?”
-
Nice. Verra nice.
-
(In original german.)
-
Not only does it lower the price point of a device, it lowers the support cost for Dell. Why was this so hard to do?
-
People are selfish taggers. And I like to breathe air.
-
Elevated cabinets, added to the wish list.
-
YAH’s already been in to have hers replaced, YJM is this week.
-
Holy moly! And all this time I thought it was Google Reader and all the AJAXy crud. Now that I’ve finally gotten off the Safari RSS reader, perhaps it’s time to go back to Camino. Or Lynx. Lynx is WAY fast.
-
On implementing and deploying FileVault across an enterprise.
-
On why Safari remains the preferred Mac browser, and why Camino matters.
28 February 2007
The Roost
And Just Think If They Were All Single Posts
I’d like to apologize for the automated links for 2007-02-28 post that will show up sometime later today. Tonight was a banner night for web surfing, as I tried to both catch up on my feeds and try out Camino’s speediness with some traditionally slow sites in Safari. Like, cough, Google Reader, which bogs down in Safari under the weight of the hundreds of posts I’m trying to process. For weeks I’ve wondered about the users who raved about its snappy response; the UI is well done — tap tap tap goes the spacebar with no clicky-clicky required — but after the first 20 articles I spend more time waiting for a response than actually reading.
(Most everyone reading this already knows that I can read really fast: really, really fast when the occasion calls for it. Scanning news is one of those things.)
Camino handled the load far better than Safari did, letting me page through posts quickly, if not as fast as I might like. There’s only so much one can do to cut through all the AJAXy overhead. I grow less fond of AJAX with each passing day. I may soon find myself using AJAX in the same way Merrystar uses Flash — avoid, disable, and enable only when absolutely required.
The only drawback with the Safari → Camino switch is an aesthetic one: small Helvetica type isn’t weighted as nicely in Gecko browsers as it is in Safari, particularly at the lighter weights and smaller sizes. (Sub-10pt italic seems particularly affected.) Also, the line height seems to be crowded in text blocks, so that words seem crowded in a paragraph. It’s very subtle, but I’m known to be picky about my fonts.
(The partial solution is a simple ⌘+ to increase the font size, which makes the web a nicer place to browse anyway. The line height is still awkward, but less distracting than before. It’s still not as good as Safari.)
I’m happy to say that Camino really is chugging along well, and I may keep Safari off the dock and in reserve for specialized tasks. But it’s probably too early to see if there’s a significant difference.
But, back to the apology. The downside of this web browsing is that I’ve been hitting my del.icio.us links pretty hard, and the next post is likely to be pretty big.
Hopefully, you’ll find something interesting in amidst it all.
links for 2007-02-28
-
Latest album is now available for free. Gutsy move.
-
Too… many… jokes…
-
Is anyone _really_ suprised? I mean, c’mon.
-
No browser required.
-
Going down?
-
Definitely worth the full read.
-
On finding the Autumn desktop picture (one of my favorites, too.)
-
I think I may go for the exercise ball, actually.
-
Top to bottom, left-to-right. Good advice.
-
From IBM, with an obvious agenda.
-
Discontinued incase bags, sleeves and whatnot.
-
Splat = Ruins. Truth is almost always better than fiction.
-
It’s ⌘, in case I forget again.
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Male Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) high above Colonial Williamsburg.
| The previous month is: |
This is: brett's logjam → February 2007. |
The next month is: |






























![[log]](/img/laptop.jpg)