Sorry for the noise! We’re planning an exciting vacation in mid-February, and I want to be sure that I can blog from my iPad and post the occasional photo and things.
So here’s the obligatory photo test.
This is a snap I took of the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Mason in August. We went all over SF that day and had a great trip.
I got out today for the first time since this winter for a real hike — not just a quick walk with the dog, but something that takes more than half an hour and is worth bringing the camera.
I went out to Fall Creek, down in Felton; there’s some nice history along the trail there. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, this valley’s economy was driven by lumber and lime — much of early San Francisco was constructed with resources drawn from here. Anyway, up the Fall Creek trail are the remnants of old lime kilns and a limestone quarry run by I.X.L. Lime Company.
I started out to the lime kilns first; it’s about two kilometers from the parking lot up the South Fork of Fall Creek. The park was packed — I was hiking between a family taking visitors out and a bunch of families with small children.
Once at the lime kilns, I waited until the people had moved on and got some photos. The kilns are huge; they’d pile wood in the bottom and then the limestone over it, and it would apparently burn for days. It must have made an amazing amount of heat. Above the kilns you can see bits of the rail car system used to bring the limestone down to the kilns, although you have to look hard to find it.
Then I continued past the powder store and up the canyon to the barrel site, where the barrels for the lime were made. This is another couple kilometers from the site; I would assume — although I don’t know — that the primary reason for putting the cooperage where it was was because of the water power needed to run the sawmill, and the trees to cut for the wood for the barrels. There’s still a fair amount of old equipment, too.
Once there, I walked back along the North Fork of Fall Creek. Hiking along the creek is an interesting experience; the photos don’t really do it justice, but you’re usually sandwiched between canyon walls separated by tens of meters, with the trail sharing the bottom of the canyon with the creek. The creek’s eroded the base of the canyon and the trail quite a bit; there’s lots of places where you cross the creek, or have to trek up the canyon wall a few meters and back down because a shift in the creek has eroded the logical place for the trail.
I took quite a few photos, although none of them really capture the size of the trees or creek canyons. You can see them in my photo album.
Overall, a good day to be out!
I’ve been dabbling in Haskell since at least 2005, but I’ve never gained fluency. The reason is simple: I’ve never programmed anything of reasonable size in it. I use it a lot for little functional calculation programs, things like utilities for computing the great-circle distance between two points, stuff like that, but haven’t taken the plunge and done anything big enough to really push my understanding forward.
At the Day Job(tm) at Nokia, most of my work is still Qt, with an increasing amount of web technologies (WebGL/HTML 5/CSS/JavaScript) thrown in to visualize results from the research work being done. I feel like I’m stagnating though — I’m comfortable enough with all of those things that I can easily get the job done, and I’m not really learning anything new. Worse, most of the time I feel like I’m writing the same code over and over, parameterized in only a couple of dimensions.
I could lobby for Haskell at the office, but unfortunately that would probably go over like a French kisser at a family reunion — the team has settled on Matlab for prototyping, C++ for performance computation using OpenCV for its vision libraries, Python for data wrangling, and Mongo for databases, with WebGL/HTML 5/CSS/JavaScript and Python in front of the database for data visualization when our older Qt/C++ visualization stuff looks ragged around the edges. I played a part in this decision-making process, and stand by the advice I gave — we’re a cross-disciplinary team with clear objectives in both research and product development, and unfortunately there’s just not room for the hit that coming up to speed and moving all of our existing code to Haskell would take. Moreover, the teams where our code goes after we’re done with it would balk as well — they’re doing some really big compute stuff in Hadoop, and made their bed and will lie in it.
But that leaves me at loose ends; I spent some time working on a book project this winter that’s sort of stalled out (my fault, need to find a publisher and finish it), and looking to sink my teeth into Haskell again. And I think I’ve found the project. There’s a collection of documents from Quakers I want to collect and put in a database, first and foremost for me, but others may benefit as well. Slapping a web front end on the database makes for an easy UI to the database, and would scale well once I collect the data if I decide to share it with other people.
Enter Yesod, a Web framework written in Haskell. It looks to be stable and highly performant, and well-documented, too — some good Web tutorials, and even a book (which of course I’ve already ordered.)
So I’ve decided that rather than using a framework like I know a little about and knock together something in an evening, I’ll stretch a bit and do it in Yesod instead. Building a front end to the database for the data I want to collect in Yesod should get me past the baby steps of writing a few type classes and a bunch of simple functions, with the occasional higher-ordered function thrown in. And, once I get some data in the database, if I decide to open up the data to other users, it’ll need a more robust front end, which requires more bits of Haskell, I’m sure.
In the process, I’ll capture what I do on the project here. It doesn’t pertain to the last book I wrote, or the book before that, but hopefully it’ll be of use to others, and writing for an audience (no matter how small) always forces me to understand what I’m doing better than if I do it alone.
Expect a post or two a week, some weeks more, some weeks less, as time permits. I have some good chunks of time in the next couple weeks to get started, then I go on vacation for a bit — during which either I’ll post a lot less or a lot more, depending on how I feel about things.
I have always read a ridiculous amount. Sadly, in recent years as I’ve taken greater advantage of resources such as the Association for Computing Machinery‘s Digital Library, what that really means is that I print a lot.  There’s a definite advantage to paper; you can stick it in your bag, or put your feet up and lean back more so than with a laptop or desktop PC. At the same time, I don’t archive what I read on paper; I either make notes citing the papers I’ve read, or if the paper is really important to me, I archive a copy of the PDF itself. As a result, my professional reading workflow is one of researching, printing, reading, and recycling the results. This is a tremendous waste of paper.
While I’ve tried various ebook solutions on PDAs over the years, I’ve never been particularly happy with PDF handling on mobile devices. Â I’ve watched with interest the growing market for ebooks on devices including the Sony eReader and the Amazon Kindle, although until recently neither has had particularly good PDF handling either.
Last month I laid hands on a Sony eReader, and really liked what I saw. PDF presentation with later firmware in the PRS 505 is much improved over previous firmware releases, and both the PRS 505 and PRS 700 support Secure Digital cards. As USB devices, these products show up as a mass storage device when mounted on Mac OS X. As an added bonus, Kovid Goyal’s Calibre application supports both format translation and automatic harvesting of Web content from RSS feeds. I have to admit that it’s pretty spiffy to get up in the morning, grab the eReader from my desk and have the latest content from both The New York Times and The Economist at my fingertips. In conjunction with the large number of freely available books from Feedbooks, it’s a leisure reader’s dream.
Although the eReader’s appearance as a mass storage device in the Mac OS X Finder is useful, I quickly tired of downloading papers and manually copying them to the device. Intuitively, it seemed that what I wanted to be able to do was to treat the eReader as another printer.
Upon reflection, this idea is quite compelling. It doesn’t require me to change my work flow at all; moreover, there is something cool about the idea of an eInk device being directly accessible as a printer.
Continue reading Improving Interaction Between the Sony eReader and Mac OS X
Installing and configuring WordPress has been on my personal to-do list for an absurdly long amount of time. Back in February 2002, I started a personal blog on LiveJournal, which I kept up-to-date on an intermittent basis. I’d always planned on using it both as a professional soapbox and a personal journal, although it quickly became more of the latter than the former. In recent years, it’s largely lain fallow, a victim of benign neglect as I tackle professional writing and engineering commitments.
With the imminent publication of my latest book, Beginning Javaâ„¢ ME Platform (Beginning from Novice to Professional)
Hence, this blog.
I’m not certain what all I will post here, or how frequently I will post. You can certainly expect any updates or feedback on my books, of course, but I’m also planning on using this as a working notebook for other technical musings. I don’t have any plans to become a career blogger and make this a central part of my professional activities; to be frank I think there’s too much of that on the Internet already! Instead, I think this is going to fill a very narrow nice, with me posting the occasional update to a previous (probably paper) publication, various tips and tricks I’ve picked up in my engineering career, and possibly some engineering notes about things I’ve found difficult in the hopes that capturing it here will help others.
Thanks for stopping by!