Science and Art

2014-08-29. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1676.

My loyal readers might have noticed that I haven't written a blog post for a while despite the abundance of source material I could have used. There is a simple explanation for this: I am working on too many other projects just at the moment and have tended to spend time on those instead. Contrary to what you might think I do spend a reasonable amount of time researching, writing, and revising each blog post and they're not just tossed together in 5 minutes!

Most of what I am working on currently are programming projects which all seem to have become critical at the same time. But that doesn't really worry me because (and I'm sorry if this sounds really geeky) programming is fun. It's one of those rare creative activities which results in something which is actually useful (well, at least in most cases).

When I create a new system (and my current projects all involve web-based databases and apps written using PHP and MySQL) I like to create something which is easier to use, more reliable, faster, and just generally more elegant than the alternatives. There are some pretty impressive web-based systems out there now but there is a much greater number of truly terrible ones, so in general I just hope to raise the average a bit.

It's quite amusing using another person's web system and noticing all the design and functional errors they have made and smugly thinking "amateurs! my projects never suffer from that problem!" Of course, I shouldn't be too smart because every system has its faults.

As I have said in the past, programming is a great combination of art and science, or at least it should be because both are required to get the best outcome. The art component doesn't just involve superficial factors like graphics and typography, it is deeper than that and requires creation of a friendly, logical, and flexible user interaction. The science component should be obvious: programs must be technically correct, perform calculations accurately, but also more subtly be fault tolerant, easy to enhance, and interact with other systems properly.

All of this is not easy to achieve and I have made plenty of mistakes myself, so it is even better when something does magically come together in a positive way. And that description is significant because the way I work a project is an evolving, organic thing which often changes form and function as it progresses. I always have a plan, diagrams for the database structure, flow diagrams for the general functional flow of the program, and technical notes on how certain functions should be performed before I start coding, but by the time the project is finished all of these have changed.

And I am often asked to write technical documentation while I am creating a new system but that is useless because I change the details so often that it's better just to write that documentation when the project is complete.

When I look back at old projects I am sometimes amused at the naive techniques I used "back in the day" but more often I am quite amazed at some of the awesome, complex code and clever techniques I have used. It's not usually that I set out to write really clever, complex code, it's more that as more functions and features evolved the code became more and more impressive. But it is too easy in that situation to let things become convoluted and clumsy. In that case I toss that section out and start again. Sometimes my systems take a little bit longer to complete but they always work properly!

And that brings me to my last design philosophy. I don't re-use a lot of code, I rarely recycle libraries and classes, and I definitely avoid using other people's code. Also I don't use rapid prototyping tools and I don't use graphical tools to create markup code like HTML. No, it's all done "on the bare metal".

In fact that's not really true, or course. I was recently tidying up some shelves in my office and found some old machine code programs I wrote back on the 80s. Now that was really coding on the bare metal! Multiplying two numbers together was a big job in that environment (the 6502 had no multiply instruction) so PHP and hand-coded HTML are pure luxury compared with that!

Well that's enough talking about it, it's time to get back to doing it. I've got a nasty bit of database backup code to debug right now. Some sort of privileges error I think, time for some science and not so much art.

Low Flying

2012-04-12. Activities. Rating 3. ID 1377.

Last Sunday I did my usual biennial visit to the Warbirds Over Wanaka air show. I left about 7.30 in the morning and was there by about 10.30. Yes, I did a bit of "low flying" getting there (I won't mention my maximum speed here) and got my first speeding fine for about 2 years. But I just see the occasional speeding fine as an added cost of driving. I know other people who have been let off with a warning for doing more than I did, so the whole thing is just not fair! (See my other blog entries for similar experiences of "Fred".)

Once I got there I enjoyed the low flying of the various aircraft on display. I don't think the show was quite as good as some in the past but it was still well worth attending, even though a lot of what was shown I had already seen in past shows.

One of my favourite planes is the Hawker Hunter and that flew at the show. I also saw a few planes I hadn't seen before, such as the Avenger, Fokker D.VIII, Strikemaster, and Agusta 109 helicopter.

I did my usual photography, both still and video, and got some pretty brilliant photos (and I say that with all appropriate modesty). My report on the show, with photos, videos, and commentary is here.

It Worked!

2011-05-19. Activities. Rating 2. ID 1298.

I'm not going to comment on the pathetic excuse for a budget our (New Zealand) government had the temerity to release today. I'll think about it for a while and then comment. Maybe after that time I will have seen some merit in it, or more likely it will seem even worse than it does now!

No, in this entry I want to comment on something far more positive: how well my server transition went yesterday. For a few years now my main web server has been an old Power Mac G4 and I wanted to upgrade to something slightly more modern: a Power Mac G5 (yes, I did say it was only slightly more modern).

The problem is that my server runs 8 web sites, although only one is very substantial, and has many databases running in the background. There are also some custom configurations it requires to run. Of course I wanted the web sites to be down for the minimum amount of time during the transition. Oh, and to make things slightly more complicated I had to do all this in my spare time between doing "real work".

There was one factor on my side though: I was using Macs!

As you can probably tell from my triumphant tone (and the title of this blog) it worked really well! All of the web sites are running correctly. The databases (including this blogging system) are all running as expected, and the new system is significantly faster than the old one (although the upstream speed of my internet connection is still a bit slow for this purpose).

So I installed new hardware, a much more modern operating system, new versions of PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and the latest versions of all the web sites, plus I maintained the data (over a million records) from all of the databases with a total down time of about 2 minutes. And now, 24 hours later, I haven't found any problems.

So that's my happy computer story. On most days I encounter enough weird computer problems which I have to waste a lot of time to solve, so it's nice to win for a change!

Old Books

2011-04-22. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1289.

Over the years I have bought a lot of computer books. I've bought books about programming and other practical technical subjects, textbooks I used when I was a computer science student, and lots of magazines and other material about general computer subjects. They have been sitting on a bookshelf in our spare room and I haven't used any of them for years.

Today we needed to clear some space and I went through the books and realised that they were almost all useless. The hardware, the programming languages, the application programs, and most of the techniques have changed so much that practically none of the books were relevant any more.

Not only that but I don't use traditional books any more. All of my technical documentation, my reference material, and my user manuals are stored on my computer as PDFs and other formats. And my fiction books and magazines are on my iPad in electronic formats like EPUB. I really do seem to have made significant progress towards achieving a paperless life.

Some simple calculations show just how efficient computer storage really is. A 1 terabyte drive (not huge by modern standards) can store 1 million average size books. Sure, I agree that is just text (based on 2K per page and 500 pages per book) and graphics would require significantly more storage, but the basic principle is clear: one drive can store a lot more than the total knowledge of the ancient world found at the Great Library of Alexandria - and I currently have 10 drives!

When I was looking through the old material I realised that things have progressed greatly in most ways but I also realised there was a lot of older stuff which was actually really good and is either no longer available or has become unfashionable in some way.

One example is Hypercard, Apple's program which was extremely popular for making "stacks" which performed many varied tasks. Hypercard was a great fast development environment with a scripting language which was both easy to use and powerful. And while I'm on the subject of programming languages, I still think Pascal is better than C! But I never liked some of the other older languages much so the three programming manuals for COBOL I had never got much use!

I'm not sure whether electronic books are better than paper books from an environmental or sustainability perspective. I'm not sure whether ebooks are more natural or pleasant to use than paper books. But I am certain that ebooks are a lot easier to search and a lot easier to keep up to date. And they are certainly a lot easier to store!

I Have Nothing to Say

2010-04-12. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1183.

I have been writing this blog for a long time - since before most people even knew what a blog is in fact. My first blog entry was written over 7 years ago in April 2003. Since then I have written well over 1000 entries which are the equivalent of about 900 A4 pages of text. Then there's all the comments: over 2600 on my main blog (which I wrote about half of) plus many more on other blogging sites I publish the same information on.

So writing blog entries is a big commitment and one that I can't keep up with at all times. There are so many interesting issues I want to comment on: from new discoveries that our universe might be part of a multiverse to the (inaccurately reported) news that Richard Dawkins wants to arrest the Pope!

But I have been blogging less recently and that will probably continue for a while because I have so many other commitments which I need to use my spare time pursuing. I'm afraid that most of them are work related: web sites, databases, and other geeky computer stuff, but hopefully that will lessen as time passes and I might get back to the "glory days" of mid 2008 when I wrote something almost every day.

So really it's not that I've got nothing to say but more that I don't have time to say it. Or at least not in a reasonably lucid form which has been reasonably thoroughly checked and is backed up with at least a basic amount of research. So I'll get on with that work now and get back to the Pope being arrested later - hopefully in the near future.

Warbirds 2010

2010-04-05. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1181.

Yesterday I went to the Warbirds Over Wanaka air show. The show is run every second year (at Wanaka airport, Otago, New Zealand) and I attend most years (although I didn't go last time). As well as enjoying watching the aircraft (which is one of my interests) it's also a great opportunity to take some interesting photos, and photographing fast moving objects is usually quite challenging.

I took several hundred photos and quite a bit of standard definition and high definition video and I will use some of these in the report I will write for my web site. I already have reports for the same show in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2004, and 2006.

Originally the show specialised in World War II era aircraft but more recently there has been a much wider range displayed. In 2006 these ranged from the 1918 Bleriot capable of 70 kilometers per hour to the F-111 from the Australian Air Force which is capable of about 3000! An impressive change in just 50 years.

There's usually a rare fighter shown at each show. In the past there was a Messerschmitt Me 109, Polikarpov I-16s, a Hawker Hurricane, and the Russian Yak 3 and LA9. This year there was a Japanese Zero. There are also the more common P-51 Mustangs, Spitfires, Corsair and Kittyhawks which appear every year - yes, I know, I hate to to call the Spitfire "common"!

The Lithuanian aerobatics pilot Yurgis Kairys has made an appearance at several shows and he was there again this year flying a crazy and spectacular series of maneuvers in the aircraft he designed himself. That's always a highlight.

The RNZAF put on a good display (especially considering it doesn't even have a fighter wing any more) with its Seasprite and Iroquois helicopters, Orion and Hercules transport planes, its parachute team, and various other aircraft.

The New Zealand Air Force may lack spectacular fighters but Australia certainly doesn't. The RAAF sent 4 F/A-18 Hornets and they were just awesome! They flew in unexpectedly and they fly fast so they are well ahead of their sound. They just arrive without warning, fly over, then the sound hits you. On a fast, low pass over the airfield the sound is just indescribable.

My report on the show, including photos, sound and movies, will be on my web site (the airshow section is here) in the next week or two (it's hard to find time to work on this between other projects) so if you are interested in this sort of stuff stay tuned.

Dorky Dawkins?

2010-02-06. Activities. Rating 3. ID 1155.

Yesterday I was sitting in one of the cafes we have distributed around the campus of the university I work at writing some notes on Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, when an odd person came up to me and claimed: "he's a real dork you know". I enquired: "who do you mean, Richard Dawkins? What's the problem?" but by that time he had scuttled away.

So it seems that Dawkins' influence is significant with all kinds of different people. I have no idea what this particular individual's problem was - presumably he was some sort of religious freak who didn't like criticism of his beliefs - and its unfortunate I couldn't have got some more details. Actually, now that I think about it more, maybe its fortunate I didn't engage this person in debate because I suspect he might not have made much sense (so much for universities being the center for informed intellectual debate!)

Anyway, if you are interested in the subject, my brief summary of some of the highlights from the book (which is actually well written and very readable) is here. If you have any comments please leave them in the discussion system, but please make it a bit more consequential than an ad hominem attack on the author!

Another Week Off

2009-10-12. Activities. Rating 4. ID 1097.

For the second time in the last few weeks I have taken a few days off and disappeared away for a short break. This time it was Queenstown and I'm afraid we struck a second period of bad weather (just like the trip to Nelson at the beginning of the month). To make things worse I didn't have a reliable internet connection and not even 3G cell phone coverage, so I couldn't even connect at a decent speed through my iPhone.

Queenstown is a nice place to visit and we did manage to do our traditional trip on the gondola to the top of the hill and do a few runs on the luge there. We even experienced a few flakes of snow at the top although it wasn't really as cold as that might indicate.

Of course I had some computer work to do while I was there but most of the time we just relaxed. There was one aspect of the stay in Queenstown I want to discuss here though. The friend who provided the accommodation is a fundamentalist Christian and there is always a lot of religious material in the house we stay in as well as some new apologetics DVDs he wanted me to watch.

So I watched one of the DVDs which supposedly showed that evolution was untrue and bad for science. Naturally it was mostly nonsense although it was slightly more sophisticated than most of the material of that sort I have seen. When I read or watch this sort of stuff I usually make a few notes so that I can make a response but I thought why not this time put the critique of the DVD on-line. So I have started a new section of my web site for criticisms of this sort of material which will be available soon.

While I was doing this my 16 year old daughter decided she was going to read the Bible. None of my family are religious but, as I have said many times in the past, there's no harm in reading a religious book. I know that some religious families ban non-religious material and I would be just as bad if I didn't encourage curiosity about the Bible.

I am an atheist and frequently criticise the Bible but I really tried to encourage an open approach on this occasion. Even so, my daughter just couldn't believe what she was reading. Not surprisingly she started at the beginning and read the Old Testament stories like the creation myth, Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters, Abraham, etc.

The conclusion she reached was that the stories were quite fascinating to read (even if they are a bit violent and risque) but no one with any common sense would really believe they were true. If a teenager can see this then why can't the fundy Christians!

I did point out that there are hidden meanings behind the basic stories but when I had to explain what they were I realised that they are nothing particularly worthwhile. What's the story behind creation? Nothing. Its just an attempted explanation of the origin of the universe and life from a primitive tribe and, apart from its value as fiction (which is very little), there's no great hidden meaning there.

And the other stories are similar. They just seem to be on the same theme of being obedient to god or you (and a lot of innocents) will be killed. Not much of a message there really. And the stories all seem to have a lot more violence and sexual content than you would expect in a religious work!

Sure I agree that I'm only criticising the start of the Old Testament here and that there is a lot more worthwhile philosophy in the New Testament. But the NT is also awkward to read, and of very little literary or philosophical value in my opinion. Anyone genuinely interested in mythology, philosophy or literature would do a lot better to look elsewhere.

In the past some religious friends have accused me of deliberately turning my family against religion or even endangering their relationship with god (or something similar). In my defence I would say that I really do encourage them to explore these issues and think about it for themselves. I actually defended the Bible because my daughter's initial impression was that its a pile of crap. OK, it is in some ways, but read it as fun mythology or as an intriguing examination of the minds of the writers thousands of years ago and it becomes quite different.

As far as spoiling their relationship with God. Well I would expect most gods would be smart enough to notice that a person had been lead astray by someone like me and really if he decides to punish them with eternal torment because of that then he really isn't much of a god and deserves all the derision we can aim at him.

A Week Off

2009-10-01. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1093.

Yesterday I returned from a 5 day trip to Nelson and back (a distance of about 1600 kilometers). Nelson is a great holiday destination but on this occasion the reason for the visit was to collect a car for my daughter and to make some improvements to an accounting program I created for my mother-in-law - its very important to get that right!

Actually its just as well the main purpose wasn't a holiday because the weather was fairly terrible. Nelson has a reputation for having good weather (it generally has the highest sunshine hours in New Zealand) but on this occasion there was almost continuous heavy rain and fairly cool temperatures. It wasn't so good yesterday when we got back to Dunedin either but today the weather has returned to pleasant spring conditions.

I usually write a few blog entries even when I am away from home but on this occasion I didn't because I had a technical problem with my web site. I was horrified to receive an email (on my iPhone) as I was travelling north saying the web site couldn't be contacted. I didn't worry too much because sometimes there are problems with the links to the rest of the world and I expected it to fix itself fairly quickly.

Unfortunately it didn't and I diagnosed the fault as a problem with my ADSL router. That was locked inside the house and I was away for 5 days so my web server was unavailable for that long. This is not the standard of professionalism I usually have (my up-time is usually better than some real web hosting services) but I will rearrange my home network so the modem can be restarted from the basement (which is more accessible) so I can phone someone and ask them to fix things in the unlikely (I hope) event it happens again.

I hasten to point out that my good old reliable Mac servers kept running perfectly and they have had 100% uptime over the last few years they have been running. It was my modem (usually very reliable itself) which had got confused.

Knowing my servers were unavailable was a bit of a worry because I was constantly trying to think of a clever way to fix things by "remote control" but apart from that the trip was successful. We did have 2 pleasant breaks overnight at Hanmer Springs on the way to and from Nelson and sitting in the hot pools while admiring the mountain scenery tends to make you forget (temporarily at least) about technical issues like web server problems.

So it was back to work today with about 300 email messages to deal with and various other IT related problems to solve. Playing with computers is fun but sometimes I'd rather be back at Hanmer Springs. I particularly want to take my telescope up there some time because the night sky is just superb, although on this occasion the Moon and some light cloud would have made observing a bit of a waste of time.

Now that my daughter has a car we now have three at home. To make matters worse my wife has won a new car in a competition so we will have 4 tomorrow. It might be time to thin out the fleet a bit, I think!

We have already found a couple of enhancements which would be helpful in the accounting program so another visit to Nelson seems likely, but that won't be until Christmas. I do have a few more days off coming up soon for a short visit to Queenstown (yes, I have some computer work to do there too) so I really must re-arrange the network before that happens. Whether the servers are on or off line isn't exactly critical but I always think if you're going to run a web service you need to aim for the best reliability possible.

Computing Nirvana!

2009-07-26. Activities. Rating 3. ID 1060.

There was a real chance that today would have been the third day in a row that I hadn't written a blog entry! I try to miss only one day maximum, after two days I start to get a bit anxious. Three days without blogging would be a disaster!

So what has lead to this most unexpected lack of dedication on my part? Actually I have been involved with a couple of interesting projects recently which have used up so much time that I've not had a chance to write a blog entry.

The first was a programming project I am working on (in fact one I have been doing parts of here and there for about 6 months now). I got to the point in this project (which is a complex client/server web-based database system) where I needed to create graphs of the data so I decided to write a graphing module which uses Javascript and works in web browsers.

Making graphs is fun because they look pretty and users tend to react positively to them because of that. Its also a good demonstration of how its possible to do almost anything in a web browser now - things which could only be done in "real" programs in the past.

The other big thing which has been using up time is a science fair project I have been helping my son with (well actually I'm more than just helping but that's common enough with these things). The project is to test the power output and economy of batteries.

I set up a cool experimental system with a webcam capturing a time-lapse movie to monitor some torches we set up. Four torches sued four different types of battery and we monitored them for several days to day how long they would last.

I thought maybe 2 or 3 days would be enough so I set the time lapse to do a frame every 5 minutes for 5 days. After 5 days even the cheap batteries were still going strong so I had to start another set of 5 days. Eventually the torches went for more than a week. Its amazing how long even AAA batteries will power those high efficiency LEDs.

The second experiment was to test batteries in a high drain device. I thought a model RC car would be good for this so we decided to run one (an Aston Martin DB9 - you might as well have some class) around a 40 meter track I set up. The first batteries did about 25 laps and I thought the alkaline batteries might double that. Well the car took off like a rocket - twice as fast - and was still going 200 laps later. The more expensive alkalines powered the car for over 11 kilometers which took almost 2 hours to complete!

I stored the results, did the analysis, and drew the graphs using Numbers - Apple's new spreadsheet program - and it was so nice. So much easier to use than Excel although it still lacks some of Excel's advanced features. So I now use Pages instead of Word, KeyNote instead of PowerPoint, and Numbers insetad of Excel. So I'm completely free of badly designed Microsoft software. That's computing nirvana!

Yet Another New Toy

2009-06-19. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1037.

Every now and again I post an entry here talking about a new toy I have bought. For many years now (like about 30) I have been a serious amateur photographer. Technology moves on and its worth updating camera equipment every 2 or 3 years so now was the time to do it again.

In fact the time to do it was near the end of last year but my previous attempt at updating my camera went terribly wrong! As I have commented on in the past I am a great fan of on-line auction sites, mainly TradeMe, New Zealand's main (almost only) site.

Last year I bought a new camera and lens on TradeMe and paid up my NZ$2300 (good cameras aren't cheap) and patiently waited for the camera to arrive. After a few days it became obvious something was wrong and it turned out the whole thing was a scam run by a trader who is currently being prosecuted by police.

I have always used Canon cameras but that camera was a Nikon (a D90) which I chose because it had features Canon didn't have at the time. Since then Canon has introduced an even better (and cheaper) camera than the Nikon which I have also bought on TradeMe. As long as it turns up in the next few days I will be happy. Every day delay will be a cause of concern!

But really on-line auctions are fairly safe. I have bought thousands of dollars worth of gadgets on-line and only been ripped off once. It was unfortunate that the rip-off involved one of the most expensive items I bought though!

So what progress has digital photography made since my last camera? Well quite a lot actually. My previous camera was a Canon EOS 350D, an 8 megapixel digital SLR, and its still a very fine camera, even 3 years after I bought it. Its fast and reliable and can produce brilliant quality images.

The new camera (an EOS 500D) has a few advantages though. First, it has almost twice as many pixels (but I have never seen more pixels as necessarily critical). More importantly it has a high definition movie mode, live preview, better low light performance, a much bigger and better display, an image stabilised lens, and a few other enhancements.

Ironically this has given the dSLR feature parity with many compact cameras which have had most of those features (in some form) all along! But compact cameras really just can't compete for real photography. I had to use two of them (a Canon and a Kodak) recently and the speed, responsiveness, flexibility and quality was rubbish compared with even my old dSLR. In ideal conditions (plenty of light, slow moving objects, etc) they are OK but push the limits even slightly and they often don't work well at all.

A great example of the superiority of the SLR was an air show I took photos at a few years back. The previous show I had used a fairly advanced (at the time) compact camera (a Canon G6) and the photos were OK but lack of magnification (with just a 4x zoom), inferior performance at higher sensitivity settings, and slow general responsiveness meant none of my photos were that great.

When I used the SLR instead things were so much better. The speed meant all the aircraft were right in the middle of the frame instead of escaping out the front! And the long telephoto (equivalent 450mm) meant I could zoom right into the action, including shots of the pilots actually sitting in the aircraft.

So when the 500D turns up (it will this time because I have used a reliable trader) I expect that my photos will be even better, especially in low light, but also I should be able to create some nice high definition movies. They should look great on my plasma TV!

I do have a lot of expensive toys but at least I use them a lot. The previous camera had done 15,000 photos (Canon say the shutter is good for over 100,000) so it go a lot of work. I also upgraded my telephoto zoom lens which I had been using for 25 years. It still worked fine but I got the opportunity to do a minor upgrade for almost nothing so I took it.

I've owned a lot of Canon (film and digital) cameras over the years: An AL-1, an A-1, two T-90s (that's another story), and EOS-5, an EOS 350D and now the EOS 500D. They have all been brilliantly reliable and easy to use. If the 500D is up to this standard I will be happy enough! I'll do a review once I've used it for a few weeks.

House of Pain

2009-06-15. Activities. Rating 2. ID 1033.

On Saturday I went to Carisbrook (Dunedin's main sports ground, aka "the House of Pain") and watched the big rugby test between the All Blacks and France. Unfortunately the final score wasn't what we were really wanting but the experience was definitely worthwhile.

OK, so it cost $200 for the whole family and they weren't even great seats and there was a big pool of beer on the ground and people were peeing against the wall behind us and there was a fight going on at the end and the All Blacks lost, but apart from that it was great!

No matter what the bad points of the experience it still was a real experience more than watching the game on tv would ever be. And, of course, Dunedin provided some great weather and good ground conditions unlike Auckland where there would have been 6 inches of rain or Wellington where there would be a 100 knot wind (just joking).

It was the last big game at Carisbrook because Dunedin is building a new, modern, roofed stadium which will be ready for the next Rugby World Cup being played in New Zealand.

Many people here disagree with the idea of building the new stadium, mainly because they don't want to pay for it through their rates, but I have supported it because I think a smaller city like ours needs to move forward or be left behind.

But after this Carisbrook experience (and many others as well in the past) I do wonder whether it might have been better to modernise our existing ground. That way we could save some money and maintain the history and atmosphere of Carisbrook. On the other hand, the decision has been made, and there's no point in worrying about something which is inevitable.

I'm sure the new stadium will be nice and comfortable and provide great playing conditions in any weather but it will never be the same as the House of Pain!

Number 1000

2009-04-30. Activities. Rating 1. ID 1000.

According to my numbering system this is blog entry number 1000 - at least on my own blogging system (at blog.ojb.co.nz) but it will be lower than that on other blogs I post to. My first blog entry was just over 6 years ago on 2003-04-04 and I have spent a lot of time writing stuff since then. I have also just reached comment number 2000 on my own blog and I am close to posting tweet number 1000 on Twitter. My podcasting activity has almost stopped but I do have a plan to get that going again soon.

So what's my point? Well I often wonder whether the time I spend on these activities is really worth it. Its not that I would be doing something non-geeky if I didn't blog - I would be doing other similar stuff instead, like adding new pages to my web site - so its more a choice of which geeky activity I spend most time on.

I do find blogging quite valuable because I have to think about and research the topic I am discussing. I admit I don't spend a huge amount of time either researching or thinking, but that's just the nature of most blogs. I do hope that my blog is more realistic and better researched than most, but some of my political and religious opponents might not agree on that!

I use this blog to present opinions and I don't say anything here if I can't back it up with reasonable evidence, but I certainly don't aim for the same level of support as I have in the skepticism section of my web site, for example, where I have extensive footnotes and sources for its contents.

The text file which contains all of my blog entries is over 18,000 lines long which means its a similar size to a typical book, so maybe you could say I have written a book over the last few years. According to my hit counter (again, on my main blog site) the blog has been accessed about 1 million times since then, so you could also say that its a fairly well read book too! I should point out that a lot of those hits are from automated web services, but a good proportion are from real people!

The most disappointing aspect of my blogs is that they don't get enough comments. There is one person (who uses the name SBFL - and I thank him for his input over the last few years) who makes a lot of comments on my main blog and a few others who regularly comment on the others, but overall only a small proportion of visitors actually comment.

Considering the controversial nature of a lot of my topics I'm surprised more people don't feel as if they have to disagree and point out where I'm "wrong" in a comment. On the other hand the blog is like a record I write for myself, so the comments aren't really necessary. Sometimes I go back and read through some of the older entries and its interesting to remember the issues at different points in the past.

Why Do I Do It?

2009-04-23. Activities. Rating 1. ID 995.

I have been an IT professional and have created computer programs, web sites, and databases as a job for many years now (more years than I really want to remember) so you would think by now that I would know what is good practice and what isn't.

For example, you would think that making last minute changes to how a critical part of a program worked the day before it was due for installation for the user to test would be considered a bad idea, but yes, that's what I'm doing now!

When I'm working on a major project I often come up with "brilliant" ideas at the most unexpected times. I figure it will only take an hour or two to add that new feature so why not? Of course, it usually takes a lot longer than I initially figured, plus the new feature often has some weird and unexpected interaction with an existing function which stops working.

In the end the system usually ends up being better as a result of these great ideas because in most cases they generally are good ideas. But I know when I demo this system tomorrow there will be a few things which unexpectedly don't work.

But that's why this is a beta! The beta designation is an excuse for all sorts of poor functionality, slow performance, and missing features for other people's software so why shouldn't it be the same for mine!

Lame Blog Entries

2009-04-08. Activities. Rating 1. ID 984.

After a while blogging becomes addictive. When I surf the web, listen to the news, and read the newspaper I am always looking for topics which might be worth commenting on. Then I set aside half an hour during my lunch break, or sometimes later in the day, to actually write the blog entry. So far I have written almost 1000 entries, the equivalent of over 600 pages, so its almost like writing a book (at least in terms of the amount written although not necessarily in the quality).

When I get really involved with other interests I sometimes run out of time for blogging and spend it doing other things. For example I have been working on a programming project recently. When I really get involved with programming I work extra hours because I enjoy the creative and analytical process which is unique to programming.

Programming is fun because its a creative process which also involves analytical skills and results (hopefully) in something useful that people will actually use. I always enjoy finding people using one of my older programs because they still find it useful. Actually that can be a nuisance because the older programs can be hard to support. The current project I am working on is a replacement for one of my older programs re-written using modern web-based database techniques.

When I am doing general consulting and problem solving work I usually have a long enough lunch break that I have time to write material for my blog. Its hard to get too enthusiastic about fixing the latest Microsoft Office problem or installing the latest version of Acrobat. In those situations blogging is more important. But when a programming project starts going well and I have all sorts of brilliant ideas I want to develop then other tasks often don't get done.

So if you are wondering why a particular blog entry is so lame (like this one) then it should be obvious that I'm busy working on a programming project!

Cool Old Stuff

2008-06-30. Activities. Rating 1. ID 805.

In the near future my work office is going to have new heating installed and have new carpet laid. That means everything will have to be cleared out so the work can be done. If you have ever seen my office you will know this is a lot more scary than you might initially think. Not only are there 8 working computers in there, but there are also another 5 to 10 which are being stored or worked on. And there are piles of peripherals, CDs, manuals, and all sorts of other geeky stuff.

So I decided (well one of my more organised colleagues decided for me) that I should have a multi-phase clean up and get rid of some of the old stuff. Phase one involved throwing out about a hundred old empty software and hardware boxes. Phase 2 involved a lot of old computer equipment like 20 MB hard disks. Phase 3 involved about 10 old computers, such as Power Mac 6100s. And phase 4 (which occurred today) involved hundreds of old manuals.

Some of this stuff went back to the 1980s so, in computer terms, it was almost prehistoric. But it did make me realise how much cool stuff is no longer used. There were so many nice programs (which in some cases cost heaps at the time) which are now either completely dead or have faded into insignificance.

One of my favourites was Word Perfect, a very fast and efficient word processor for the Mac (and PC) which was killed by the dominance of Microsoft Word. Another was Quark XPress, a program which is still around but is almost irrelevant to me now because I now only publish material on-line instead of on paper. And then there was Fourth Dimension, a capable database manager which is irrelevant now because I have Unix tools (MySQL) which do the type of database functions I need much better.

But I also found user manuals and documentation for my own programming projects, I had forgotten how much cool stuff I had written in the early years of my programming career (about 25 years ago). Some of the programs were quite innovative for the time. For example, I wrote a cashbook program for the Apple III (yes, that's right) which used a windowing environment when the only other commercial window system at the time was the Lisa. And I wrote some nice assembly language code for the Apple II and ZX81 which made things happen really fast!

But the ultimate find was a stack of punch cards which represented my first serious computer program. I wrote it when I was a student for the University's Burroughs B6700 mainframe computer and it was a lunar lander program. This classic game requires the player to fire the lander's engines just the right amount to land it on the Moon. The Burroughs batch queue was only run once per day so each burn had to be submitted through a punch card and it could take many weeks to land the lander! Computer interactivity has moved on a bit since then!

As I said, I threw out hundreds of old manuals, literally over 100 kgs worth. I compared that with the documentation I now have on my computer's hard disk and I estimate I probably have several times more in the form of PDFs and text manuals now. So even away from the Internet I have access to many times as much data just on one small hard drive, and on the Internet I can get thousands of times as much.

I haven't used printed documentation for many years so I'm doing my bit for the dream of the paperless office. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have caught on with many of my colleagues - some of them still print emails! Maybe in a few more years computers will have advanced as much as they have since I used punch cards of the 6700. Maybe then the paperless idea will become a reality!

Doing the Right Thing

2008-05-16. Activities. Rating 1. ID 771.

How far should we go to do the right thing? Charitable and non-profit public service causes are important and deserve our support, but where does it end? The reason I ask these questions is a project I am currently involved with which is taking up a lot of my time and I must admit that last minute changes and problems are starting to become just a little bit concerning!

Its a charitable auction for the Otago Hospice and I'm the official "IT Guy" for the project. I have created a web site which displays the catalog and provides on-line bidding, I am working on a slideshow of the items to be auctioned, I am setting up several computers to allow bidding on items at the auction itself, and I have created a database to accept those bids.

The whole project is really fun and I'm not complaining about having to do it, but it is becoming a bit stressful because there are still changes happening in the catalog and the auction is tomorrow!

A while back the University I work for ran a course on managing stress. It was total nonsense, and they probably only did it to cover some legal obligation, but it was interesting to see different people's attitude to work stress. Most people were bitterly complaining about how tough their life was, but I just said something like: bring it on - you only know you are alive when you are in constant panic mode!

That's true to an extent. If everything works out well in the end (and I am confident it will) its going to be great to think we succeeded despite so many problems! Being in panic mode, changing code on live databases, and doing high risk hacks to make the data work are all part of the fun in working in IT.

I'm not saying that I would rather work this way than do things properly with plenty of time to design and test everything. Its more that trying to make something happen where many others would just say "it can't be done" is fun!

I'll report on how the whole event went on Sunday and maybe I won't be quite so positive then, but whatever happens its going to be interesting!

Virtual Photos

2008-05-04. Activities. Rating 1. ID 761.

For a while now I have had an idea I wanted to explore. The idea was to create an electronic photo frame. These are (usually small) LCD screens which can display photos stored in memory or on flash cards. The smaller ones are quite cheap to buy but they do tend to have lesser quality, smaller screens, lower capacity, and less functionality. So my challenge was to create something with a bigger screen, high capacity, and heaps of functionality. Oh yes, and it had to be free!

My first thought was to use a computer driving an LCD screen but there were two problems: the free computers were all too big and noisy, and I couldn't get a reasonable quality screen for free. Recently I solved these two problems. I have acquired an old 15" LCD monitor (most people want bigger ones now) and an old, broken PowerBook G4 laptop computer.

The computer has been given a rough time but its a Mac so it still mostly works, except the cracked case has destroyed the optical drive and cracked the built-in screen. But the Ethernet and external video are still fine so I just connected the screen and my local network and I can operate the computer with the case closed through screen sharing remotely from my main laptop. The old machine is currently running Mac OS X 10.2.8 but I will upgrade it to 10.3.9 once I get an external CD drive.

In the picture above you can see the screen sitting on my AV amplifier (eventually it will hang on the wall and then it won't block the amp's vents because the amp gets hot when I wind it up!) Between the amp and TV (at left) you can just see the cables sticking out of the old laptop which is just sitting sideways against the TV cabinet. The mouse won't be necessary once the remote screen sharing software is updated.

Currently the screen makes a high pitched whine when its cold and the computer makes a slight ticking sound as the hard disk operates, but these are usually almost inaudible, in fact the loudest noise in the room is a clock on the wall. I demand silence when listening to music (modern digital audio has huge dynamic range) so I will replace the screen, maybe use a flash drive instead of the hard disk, and lose the clock eventually.

So the whole thing is very simple but its stage two, which will be the software phase, where it should get more interesting (I'm mainly a software person - a programmer - so software is always the major part of the solution to me). Currently the photos reside on the PowerBook's local hard disk and just display using the built-in screen saver. There's plenty of space and I currently have 300 photos but I could easily expand this to 3000 or even 30,000 if I wanted to.

So the next step is to build a scripted system which displays photos based on a priority system, for a customisable time period, and also displays information like the date, time, temperature, weather forecast, latest news and sport headlines, etc, at certain intervals.

The easiest way to achieve this is through a shell script (Mac's run Unix so the full power of scripting is available) which would feed AppleScript events to a web browser in kiosk mode (probably iCab). As well as telling iCab to display photos the script could also pull information from the Internet and parse it for useful stuff like weather forecasts. Then I could use PHP scripts and Javascript to assemble custom pages which the browser could display (I love the way all the scripting systems on Macs can interact).

So that's the plan. I think it will be a useful information device because, unlike TV and computers, the screen will always be displaying information so it will be more a "push" system than a "pull" system like web browsers and TV. I'll report back in this blog when the next stage is complete!

A Month of It

2008-04-30. Activities. Rating 1. ID 759.

Just before the start of this month I started posting these blog entries at two extra social sites, both based in New Zealand, and I got a reasonable amount of feedback and interest from some posts. My blog entries have been consistently at or near the top at ShareMyNZ for example. So I thought: considering this newly found fame I owe it to my readers to create a blog post every day for the month.

And with this post I have succeeded! Yes, for the first time in my blogging career I have done a post every day for a month. My first blog entry ever was for April 2003 which was 5 years ago this month - so I have been blogging for a while. This is entry number 759 at my main site (other sites don't have every entry).

According to the logs my main blog (at blog.ojb.co.nz) has received about half a million hits. I don't think these are all people reading my postings because the site is visited by search engine crawlers and lots of other traffic which shouldn't really count, but even if only 10% are genuine I'm still fairly happy. My SpyMac blog has had 63,000 genuine visits, I don't have a count for Blogger or KiwiPulse, but ShareMyNZ has over 1300 visits and 90 comments in the one month I've been there.

So I guess the half hour I "waste" each day creating this stuff is worth it. Not only does it give me the opportunity to share my opinion and discuss it with others but it also makes me have a good look at the news and issues each day looking for a subject. I have actually changed my opinion or seen issues in a new way as a result of discussions in some posts so I think its a good reality check and a way to test ideas.

And I do try to cover a range of stuff, including local and international politics, religion, technology, news, and some of my own activities. For example, this month I covered subjects as diverse as: commemorating war, a drunk version of Darth Vader causing havoc, an anti-evolution movie, death caused by falling coconuts, the social responsibility of business, taking photos of astronomical objects, reading science fiction, and the historicity of Jesus! There's something for everyone!

My biggest disappointment is that so few people are prepared to share their thoughts, either for or against mine, by commenting. I know there are many visitors who don't comment and it would be nice to get more feedback. But the interactive web (I think that's what Web 2.0 is all about - no one seems to really know) hasn't caught on with a lot of people who still prefer just to browse. Fair enough, as long they have a think about the issues, that's all I ask!

Image Stacking

2008-04-28. Activities. Rating 1. ID 757.

I did some more astronomy tonight. I'm trying to get my astrophotography technique working a bit better. I'm trying a new technique called "image stacking" where you take many short exposures (I'm doing the tests with 10 exposures of 15 seconds each) and stack the resulting images together using specialised software. I just downloaded the latest version of "Keith's Image Stacker" for my Mac and it does a fairly good job.

Astrophotography isn't easy - even focussing on faint fuzzy blobs is a big challenge. And because the stars, nebulae, galaxies, etc are so faint you need to use long exposures which introduces more problems such as tracking the moving stars and allowing for reciprocity failure and noise in the film or sensor.

The longest exposure I have used is about 20 minutes, but some early astronomers used exposures of several days. Yes, they actually lined up the object, opened the camera shutter for a few hours, closed it again before the Sun rose and repeated the next night after sunset. The skill and precision required is just incredible.

I'm experimenting with photos of the Orion Nebula, which is one of the brighter objects in the sky. But its rapidly disappearing over the western horizon after sunset now, so I will need to swap to something else soon, maybe NGC 3372 (Eta Carinae), which is circumpolar here in southern New Zealand.

I think I have made a good decision buying a fairly modest size 8 inch (20 cm) Celestron because its so quick to set up. When I used bigger 'scopes there was always a major effort involved in dragging it outside and assembling the bits. The C8 is just small and light enough that I can carry the whole 'scope (with equatorial mount) outside without having to disassemble it first. So I do tend to use it a lot more and I'm getting more observing done than before.