Global Reset

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For my labor day holiday this year I went on my first ocean scuba trip. Up until this point, Erik and I have only been diving at the local lakes. Not that I’m a stranger to the ocean… I spent a lot of my childhood snorkeling around in Key Largo. This is the first time I was able to visit the stuff that lives >30ft down though. Just like my last two ski trips, I have written (or am working on) a more detailed log of the whole adventure. You can catch all the gory details on my Scuba Log - Key Largo 2006 page.


If you just want to skip to the pictures, I put plenty of them up in my Key Largo 2006 photoset on Flickr. Also, Dirk got some great video footage of us exploring the USS Spiegel Grove that I posted on YouTube.

Nicole and I have successfully switched from renting an apartment from a landlord to renting a house directly from a bank. In some circles, this is referred to as home ownership. I hear that when you rent directly from the bank, you have to pay your own maintenance costs but there might be some ‘equity’ left over at the end. We are looking forward to this ‘equity’, if it every shows it head.

Now comes the job of transplanting everything we own…

From April 5th thru April 10th, Erik and I joined the North Texas Skiers on their trip to Winter Park, CO. The trip is a pretty good deal, costing only $339 for 4 nights lodging (dinner and breakfast buffet included) and transportation (on a sleeper bus). Just like for our Snowbird trip earlier this year, I wrote a short novel describing all of the major events I want to remember. If you have a lot of spare time and don’t mind my below-average narration skills, you can read my full ski log for Winter Park. Honestly, you can just skip that and get all the important stuff from my pictures.

The best part about skiing with the North Texas Skiers was all the great advice we got. Some of the skiers on the trip had about 30 years of ski experience on us, so they had a lot of advice to pass on. * James coached us with the same tips he’d gotten from a recent mogul lesson. Improved my edging remarkably. * Joe told us about “pivot turns” and how to use them to keep out of the crud. He also convinced me that I need to get an edge sharpener, even for my rental skis. * Patti convinced me to try skiboards (the short skis, used without poles) on my next trip. She claims that it’s much easier for her to do harder runs with them. * Richard sold me on the importance of having a custom boot insole made for better ski stability. If you don’t have an even foot pressure on the bottom of your boot, you are creating pivot points for the ski to wiggle underneath you.

Despite a pretty rough bus ride (in both directions), it was a fun trip. We ended up with 8 inches of fresh powder on our second day, so you can’t complain about the skiing. I’ll likely just try the shorter bus runs next year (Taos is only 9 hours) and see how that works out for us.

Just got back from our 4th annual ski trip. We went to Snowbird mountain resort near Salt Lake City, Utah. We had a fantastic ski vacation. I’ll have lots of pictures and video available soon (once Erik stops holding them hostage). In the meantime, I wrote up a short novel describing nearly every major event of the trip. I wished I’d done this for every ski trip we’ve done, just for my own edification. I don’t expect anyone (not even my friends) to read the whole thing, so here are some highlights:

• Nicole and Erik got attacked by Mormon proselytizers at the Mormon Temple Square Visitor’s Center.
• Nicole and I skied a lot of fresh powder, going off-trail whenever possible.
• I convinced Erik and Nicole to join me on a very intimidating black diamond run, which was quite an accomplishment.
• Nicole got a great video of me crashing a jump I did off a little snow ramp.
• The Mineral Basin ski area (the backside of Snowbird) is one of the most beautiful ski areas I’ve seen. The bowls of snow seem to go on forever.

Here is my full Ski Log for Snowbird 2006. I’ll post a link to the pictures and videos as soon as I free them from Erik’s tyrannical hold.

Update: The complete Snowbird 2006 photoset is up on flickr. Working on converting the video to a reasonable distribution size.

Update: Loaded the video of me crasing a jump on Ourmedia.org, which is very slow. I uploaded it to Google Video as well, but it hasn’t been verified yet. When it’s uploaded there, I think I’ll try embedding the player in the full ski log. Until then, try watching it on my ourmedia page.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment in Chris’ blog post about how he tried to ruin his laptop with a bottle of water. For your convenience, here’s my relevant addition to his story where I tried to ruin my delicate Apple hardware…

Last weekend, Nicole was using my brand new Mac Mini. Of course, that also means she was using my almost brand new Dell 2005fpw 20” lcd… Not to mention my mostly new wireless keyboard. And, she was drinking coffee while doing this. So, I’m playing fetch with the dog downstairs. The way our apt is laid out, we have a second floor with a sort of balcony over the living room which is where my mac mini lives. I decide to give the dog a good challenge by tossing his toy over the balcony edge to where Nicole is sitting. Nothing but net… The toy went straight into the coffeee, splashing coffee everywhere. Keyboard was the worst hit, but I did actually get a big splash on the Mac Mini. It looks like it’s going to survive, but I have a nice brown stain on the felt in the slot loader to remind me of what an idiot I am. I think I got the keyboard back to a good state, though if the N sticks on me again, I’ll have to buy a new one. Can’t tolerate sticky keys, you know…

Today, thanks to a remnant of that mess, I learned a couple of things about my Mac Mini…

1. Dried coffee is like hardened cement when placed between my computer desk and the rubber bottom of the Mac Mini and will, in most circumstances, require an actual chisel to separate the two.
2. That little power cord in the back slips out of the Mac Mini like a frightened, greased pig at the county fair.
3. Mac OSX does not berate you for improper shutdown of your system, unlike Windows XP.

That third point is an interesting one to me. I’m very familiar with recovery on Windows, given that prior to WinXP crashes were quite frequent… I’m sure Mac OSX must have some sort of method for recovering orphaned files and, perhaps, booting into a safe mode if I installed something which hosed the boot process… I need to add that to my “to research” list…

Technorati Tags: MacMini, MacOSX

I have to make a correction to my previous post. I said that application developers get “easy” access to basically add Spotlight search capabilities “for free”.

“Easy” and “for free” did not take into account the energy said developer would have to expend to learn Cocoa (Apple’s version of Microsoft MFC). As odd as MFC was in terms of some of the design choices, at least it’s back-end was in the very popular C++. Apple’s code-behind is Objective-C.

My GUI development (which, btw, has always been terrible as I really have only an Engineer’s eye) has moved beyond the Cocoa/MFC style, where I actually prefer to create my UI at runtime (changing it up as appropriate). I’m referring to Java Swing style or the newer Microsoft .NET visual designers. I use a visual designer to get a grasp of the initial layout, and then use code to manipulate the layout based on runtime properties. This could explain why my GUI’s always look like crap. :)

If anyone knows of any good references on Cocoa (from a .NET/Java user’s perspective), I’d appreciate it. Although there are wrapper interfaces available from .NET and Java, you still have to understand Cocoa before you can use these and you still have to use XCode/InterfaceBuilder to layout your GUI (and all of it’s events/actions) ahead of time.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacMini, MacOSX

I’m a Mac zealot.

It didn’t take long. It’s funny thinking about how I’d refer to “those mac users” as being in a cult. Seriously… I would stress that the whole platform was based around a quasi-religious cult. Now I’ve learned that there is a such thing as a “rational cult”. People are fanatical about it because it is good. I am in the cult… That isn’t to say I’ve pledged blind devotion to the Mac (well to the Mac Mini, running OSX 10.4, so we’re very clear what I am not pledging my devotion to), because it has certain quirks that frustrate me. And most of that can be fixed if I put a little code behind my bitching. For example, Mac users seem to not care much about the “path” of files. When I’m browsing in Finder, it is more difficult than it should be to find the full path of the current folder. Apparently, this information is not important to most Mac users. Also, when I execute a file search for a file which appears in many different locations, it doesn’t show the me the location of each file (the information I was actually after).

The annoyances I’ve found are far overshadowed by the features and (mostly) by the integration of those features with each other. Let’s take Spotlight as a great example. The first time I tried it, I gave it a “meh”. I thought it was the same thing as the desktop search that I had already been using on Windows. And, I guess that’d be true if the only facet of Spotlight was the handy magnifying glass in the upper corner of your screen… i.e. It would be the same if it were not integrated into every single damn application. Okay, well, not every application but most of them. It’s an API that application developers get for free.. A free, fast, indexed search for all of your applications. Know how GMail searches your email so fast? Yeah, Apple’s Mail.App does that, thanks to Spotlight. And every application can use Spotlight to filter it’s own files. Spotlight’s scope, in a sense, is limited to the context in which it is run (at least from the desktop user’s perspective, developer’s may not find it so easy.. I don’t know about that yet, but I will).

Sure, you can point your WinXP’s desktop search app to a specific subfolder and think you are getting the same thing. But until you try it for yourself, until you see how much it simplifies common file usage scenarios in every application you run, you may remain a member of the ignorant non-cult.

Another aspect of Spotlight that blew me away is the smart folder. Say you build a spotlight query that goes something like: “every folder whose contents are >1gigabyte ordered by size”. This gives you a quick idea of where all of your diskspace is disappearing to. Now, you can save that query as a “Smart Folder,” immediately retrievable with just a click. From the Finder, it looks like any other folder, except that it’s contents are dynamically determined by the query. Smart Folders are a feature that I’ve loved in Outlook XP, but that is the only place I’ve been able to use them until now. Smart Folders are another one of those things that all of your applications get for free, so I can use them anywhere. I know that iTunes has always had a smart playlist, which is an implementation (available on WinXP) of this exact concept. Imagine all of your apps with that kind of feature!

Now, faithful reader who has held on this long, imagine you have opened up your Control Panel on Windows (System Preferences on Apple) and you forget which one of the myriad icons before you has the necessary option to adjust your keyboard repeat rate (just for example). With Spotlight, you just start typing, something like “keyboard” or “repeat rate”. Just beneath the search dialog box, you’ll get a list of results which matched. But a cool aesthetic feature is that Spotlight has highlighted the most relevant icon with a spotlight! The whole control panel is cast in a shadow, and a circle of light highlights potential matches. The stronger the match, the brighter the beam.

That’s just one feature, people.. I could go on forever about how much I love that one feature, and never tell you about Automator or Dashboard. Much less Quicksilver. Or how Spotlight, Quicksilver, Automator, iChat, iPhoto (etc,etc) are all integrated so well together.

Fair warning: If you see me walking down the hall towards you.. You had better run if you don’t want me to try and convert you to a Mac.

A whitepaper of mine that explains how the recent SHA-1 attacks from the Chinese research team don’t affect DalSemi’s SHA-1 devices was just published.

Whitepaper 9: Are SHA-1 Devices Still Secure?

After I got the edits on my original doc back from our publishing group, I realized that I have no freaking idea how to use indefinite pronouns. Or, at least, I use them in technical writing the same way I use them in conversation. E.g., I just used “them” twice in the last sentence. Apparently, that can be confusing in technical writing. If the subject is not in your usual conversational lingo, like it is in mine, it was apparently impossible to follow what I meant by “it”, “them”, “those”, etc… I had to re-write a large chunk of the document, in most cases restructuring paragraphs so that indefinite pronouns weren’t necessary. For example, I changed this:

“When reading from the SHA-1 memory devices, it responds with a MAC…”

To this:

“During a read operation, the SHA-1 memory devices respond with a MAC…”

Overall, I think the readability of the whitepaper increased greatly when I got rid of most of the indefinite pronouns. I’ll probably keep the original whitepaper I wrote and the editor’s comments right next to my monitor when I work on my next application note or whitepaper.

My darling wife has started her own blog.

AnalyticGal: What this is all about.
My goal for this blog site, at least in the short term, is to provide interesting information and helpful hints to all those interested in Microsoft .NET. I want to post about hurdles we’ve overcome whose solutions exist nowhere else on the web. So, some of the information will probably be pretty esoteric.

I convinced her that she had collected enough cumulative advice for moving from a C++/COM/ActiveX solution to a .NET one that she should share some of that on the web. It will serve as a good reference for her to look back on and possibly act as good resume fodder for her next job. I need to be blogging more for much the same reasons. If nothing else, it will help me tone up my written communication skills…

In the future, I hope to see Nicole blogging about the stuff she’ll be learning at school. She just joined the Master’s program at UTD. She’ll be studying in the Applied Cognition and Neuroscience program (I believe). Her first class, which begins in a few weeks, will be Computer Vision. I’m sure she’ll have lots of interesting things to blog about from that class.