Tue Jul 15 09:30:36 PDT 2003

Interesting weekend. I built a Delta-Conye (box/delta hybrid) kite this weekend. Building it wasn’t really that hard. Got some great instructions on KiteMongers

http://www.kitemonger.com/kiteplan/sbd/index.html

It actually was pretty fun and easy to put together. I had a lot of "help" from the cats while trying to work. I even got out the camera to try and dissuade them from helping me quite so much, but thye just kept on playing and making a mess of things. But I got some fun photos of them as well as some good photos of the kite in various stages of construction:

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/kite_building

Ran into a couple of problems when flying it:

First, the 1/4 inch wooden dowels aren’t sufficient for the cross spar in moderate wind. My first flight in the field by our house was going great, the kite was about 400ft and when I stopped it from going out further the high wind snapped the backspar. It then dropped moderatly quickly. I pulled it in as quickly as possible which probably kept it out of the powerlines, but I ended up with the kiteline over a corner of brush, trees and blackberry bushes. After finally retreiveing the kite and spending a lot of time that evening rewinding the kiteline. I found that we do have one kite store in Portland,

Paint The Sky Kites
828 NW 23rd Ave
Portland, OR 97210
503 222 5096

Unfortunately they don’t seem to be much of a kite-building shop, but they do have spars and such to repair the stunt kites they sell, so I got 3 0.20×48 fiberglass rods (all they had) for $1.85 a piece, so I bought all 3 that they had, which turned out to be a good thing.

Upon returning the sewing machine we cut the fiberglass rod to 36′ and got the kite up again, but crashed it into a lightpost and snapped the delta wing spar. So we pulled the wing spars out and replaced them both with the two remaining fiberglass spars.

Next flight we landed it on it’s side and shoved the spar through the pocket since I just used the ripstop nylon for the spar pockets instead of cordua or something stronger. So after sewing denim flaps to reenforce them and sanding the corners of the spar edges, back up it went again, and while it landed on the roof, it worked fine, but the wind just wasn’t consistent enough to keep it up enough for KAP.

In other news, Prismiq has released a "preview release" of their Linux server, so I’ve ordered one with a keyboard to start playing around with it. Laurie isn’t happy with the user interface on the Rio, so at a minimum it should be a decent Rio replacement. If things go well and I can get it working as a full DVR solution with either MythTV or freevo, I’ll buy one for upstairs (I even have a spare wireless card that should work).

I’ve really been enjoying the SciFi Stargate reruns on Mondays. There’s some really great comedy in some of them.

Thu Jul 10 18:54:29 PDT 2003

I may get to sell off Laurie’s old college fridge. Needed the dimentions for the potential buyer:

Internal Dimensions

side view:

14 deep on top
+————-+
| |
| |
| | 15 1/2 tall
| |
+—-+ |
| |
| |
+——–+
9 deep on bottom

Front view:

16 1/4 across
+————–+
| | | >—- freezer part is 6 1/4 tall by 8 in
| | |
| +—-| 15 1/2 tall
| |
| |
| |
| |
+————–+
A

The model seems to be a Kenmore 564.9931704

Update: the potential buyer found one at Lowe’s for $58. I guess ours isn’t acutally worth that much then…

Sat Jul 5 16:03:32 PDT 2003

Laurie and I went out the coast on Wednesday as we both had the day off. We tried flying her dad’s kite with the camera attached at Oceanside, but to say the least, it didn’t go well since the wind was strong, but gusting in multiple directions. We got it up for a few seconds at a time, but between the dual lines, gusty wind, long tail on the kite and the extra load of the camera it just wasn’t working. So we packed it up and went to get lunch in Tillamook.

We did learn a few useful things:

• Oceanside isn’t the best place to do it due to the cliffs causing swirling

System Message: WARNING/2 (<string>, line 7)

Bullet list ends without a blank line; unexpected unindent.

and unpredictable wind.
– A two-line stunt kite probably isn’t the best choice for a kite
– Recommendations to get the kite up, then attach the camera to the line now
sounds like a vastly superior way of doing things.
– The EZ Mega Cam by Ezonics has photo quality about like a inexpensive
disposable film camera. http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/KAP_1
– Ditching the camera into the sand probably isn’t very good for it and
cleaning it isn’t very easy.

Anyway, we had a fairly nice time the rest of the day. After lunch we went to Cape Lookout, walked along the beach, took some photos and after getting ice cream at the Tillamook Dairy we stopped at a couple of places along the Wilson river on our way back home and got some interesting photos.

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/July_3_2003_coast

On the evening of the 4th we hung out in the neighborhood. At the end our street there’s a bit of a field, which will get developed in a year or so I’m sure. But a number of our neighbors were out with their kids setting off fireworks and from the field we could just see the Hillsboro fireworks show over the tops of the trees. I tried playing with the manual exposure to photograph the fireworks and it turned out to be fairly easy. I got some good shots of the little ones. Unfortunately the big ones that were being set off at the Washington County Fairgrounds were a little too far away to get good photos of, but I got a couple of them as well.

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/2003-4th-fireworks

Mon Jun 30 17:10:21 PDT 2003

This weekend I managed to actually get the camera timer circuitry built and into the cheep $30 EZ Cam that I intend to use for some aerial kite photography. The design that James Gentles had up on his website over at:

http://www.gentles.milestonenet.co.uk/KAP/Pencam/pencam.htm

Was very helpful, except I couldn’t get it working with the diode in place. Fortuantely it works fine without it. I’ve got some photos from part of the construction and I’ll do a nice writeup on it sometime in the near future along with (hopefully) some really cool photos from the camera.

We got Laurie’s dad’s kite out and managed to get it into the air once or twice in a small field by the house on Sunday, but we couldn’t keep it in the air because of unreliable wind. But we did learn basically how to control it and how it sits in the air, so I’m fairly confident that we can attach the camera and give it a lift sometime when we can get some decent wind.

Another side effect of upgrading gallery to 1.3.4 was loosing a previous hack I had created that worked around a "Apache/PHP" bug that caused multiple copies of photos to be uploaded when doing the bulk uploads from a local directory. Fortunately with a little thinking I was able to put together a bit of code to work around the problem. Basically I create a hash of the filenames that have been processed and if an identically named file shows up, I skip processing it. Here’s the section of code that I modified slightly in save_photos.php to make it happy.

&gt;?php $didFileHash = Array(); while (sizeof($userfile)) {

$name = array_shift($userfile_name);
$file = array_shift($userfile);
if (!empty($usercaption) && is_array($usercaption)) {
$caption = removeTags(array_shift($usercaption));
}

$tag = ereg_replace(".*.([^.]*)$", "1", $name);
$tag = strtolower($tag);

if (($name) && ($didFileHash[$name] != 1)) {
processNewImage($file, $tag, $name, $caption, $setCaption);
}
$didFileHash[$name] = 1; }

Wed Jun 25 12:54:23 PDT 2003

So I upgraded gallery (http://gallery.sourceforge.net/) to 1.3.4 today in the hopes that it would provide easy offline album creation. Like for burning to a CD and such. Unfortunately, the install didn’t go as well as I had hoped. Ran into two basic problems. First, the configure script kept corrupting the config.php file. After a bit of tinkering I got that worked out, and found that I needed to update all the albums. Not too big of a deal, but you have to access each individually or as the admin acct there’s another page that allows you to do all of them. Unfortunately, I’ve go so many photos that it appears I exceeded some kind of 8Meg process size limit so I had to manually hit up about half the albumns before the admin process could fit everything in and automate the rest of it.

So now that it’s up and running correctly again, I naturally started trying to figure out how to get it to create offline content. It’s not as simple as I had hoped. Basically all they added was a mode to gallery that is toggled by accessing:

../gallery/?set_offline=true ../gallery/?set_offline=false

And then you can use wget or httrack to create an offline copy using commands of the form:

wget -r -k –html-extension "http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/?set_offline=true"

or httrack -%F "" -K0 "http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/falcon_cape/?set_offline=true" http://pooh.asric.com/albums

But in both cases they tend to pull down the entire gallery, which for me is currently around 2GB of space. Not exactly something that will fit easily on a CD. It’s unclear if there’s a clever way around this, but I’ve found a gallery forum thread on the topic and I’m asking the person who wrote the docs. Hopefully he (or she) will have some insight on how to approach the problem.

Wed Jun 4 11:12:00 PDT 2003

I’ve been pretty busy so I haven’t had much of a chance to post for a while. Our trip to Austin, Texas was lots of fun, but it took nearly a week to sort through the 250+ photos that we took and get them organized into something resembling a coherent gallery, but that’s done and looking decent now:

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/austin_2003

We also went hiking with Jason, Phebe and Ryan last Sunday out on the coast and are now realizing how out of shape we really are. It wasn’t really that long or hard of a hike (only around 5 miles total with moderate elevation change) but I’m still feeling it some in my legs when walking up the 4 flights of stairs to my cube at work. We did get a bunch of photos including a couple of interesting ones and one really cool one of wood texture from a huge tree that had fallen recently.

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/falcon_cape

We restarted Bible study last night which was really nice. Not quite as large of a group as we had hoped, but at least we have people showing up again. James surprised me with wanting to do the last lesson I had prepared in Acts that we never got to do. Unfortunately it was really rough since I hadn’t looked at my notes in over 2 months. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the Bible study up and running better than we have been. I’ve got some ideas on what it’s going to take to keep it going, but it’s not going to be real easy.

Wed May 14 09:38:26 PDT 2003

It seems a little strange, but googlebot appears to have stopped visiting the site on a regular basis, and it still appears to not be snagging the plan files. Very strange. So after looking at the access logs, I decided to write a small script that adds "areas changed in the past week" to the front page. Which actually makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, both the photos and plans areas can’t just be reported directly with a ‘find’ command, so I set up a small script to run find and collect the files and times and then convert stuff in the gallery to proper gallery URLs and stuff in the plans to proper showplan URLs. The script doesn’t really support anything else correctly at the moment, but I’ll fix that sometime in the future. I’ve got it running via cron right now so it isn’t completely up to date all the time as if I’d written it in php, but it’s probably sufficient for now. Long term I’d like to set up a CMS of some kind to simplify the site and actually make it look decent.

Wed May 7 09:49:32 PDT 2003

Well, after a lot of work last weekend, we got the raised garden beds built, filled in and planted with all kinds of good stuff. We ended up switching to 5×8 beds to get a little more room on the south end of the lot for a Fuji Apple tree. Construction was fairly easy, but I’m thinking I like the Weyerhaeuser product better than the LP. I ended up getting the stake material from Lowe’s in LO since the Home Depot in LO didn’t carry Trex (LP’s product). Weyerhaeuser has more wood in their product so it seems a bit stiffer and less rubbery that the Trex and I think it would be less likely to split. I had some issues with some of the screws splitting the Trex product when assembling the beds when the screw was around 1 inch away from the edge. Greater than 1-inch from edges and the product seemed to do OK, but driving the screws into this stuff was pretty hard, even with drilling fair-sized pilot holes.

We also got some of the other stuff in along with cleaning out the southwest corner of the lot. We took some photos:

http://pooh.asric.com/gallery/backyard

We still have a few things left to do, like planting the blueberry bushes and moving the dogwood north along the fence so we can put the new flowering (but non-fruiting) pear tree in it’s spot since we think it will make a better, i.e. bigger, shade tree.

This week is pretty long, but the weekend should be fun. I’m going to try and do the "May Day Project" on Saturday. It’s a project were lots of people take photos every hour of the day to give a "day in the life of" kind of feel from people all over the world. It sounds like fun, and we’ll probably be doing interesting stuff that day like the Turkana Goat Roast that Sarah is putting on for the Church.

http://www.sh1ft.org/mayday/

I’m a bit unhappy with the new CF cardreader that I got. It appears to be messing up the filesystem of CF cards when I try and read it using my linux box. More on that later.

Tue Apr 22 08:32:59 PDT 2003

So Laurie and I have been looking at putting some raised garden/flower beds into the back yard. Initially, my dad had found some nice stuff made of recycled materials at www.rrpm.com, but at close to $130 per bed (and we want three), that’s a bit high. Laurie’s dad used treated wood to prevent rot, but after reading the prominantly placed "Consumer Safety Information Sheet" on the treated lumber and learning that it contains chromated copper arsenate and the extensive handling instructions neither one of us felt comfortable with that solution either.

So we then started looking into composite wood/plastic decking materials. Home Depot has two kinds, a ultra-expensive kind and a cheep kind made by LP, and available in 2x6x(8/12/16) and Lowe’s has a similar product made by Weyerhaeuser. Both appear to be fully water/rot resistant but do bow a bit since they are a composite material, so we’ll have to stake them in a bit more securely than we might otherwise. The cost per linear foot is a bit high, but it’s significantly below the cost of purchasing the prefab beds from rrpm, around $45-60 per bed. Assembly appears fairly straightforward, I was thinking of using the "square baluster" parts (1x1x4) as spikes to keep the frame from bowing or moving. I’m thinking that may be overkill inretrospect. The deflection over a 4 foot range isn’t too bad for the LP material, and after dirt is added, I think it’s unlikely that they will be able to shift horizontally at all.

Sat Apr 12 19:18:24 PDT 2003

Well, I made a impulse purchase of a Sharp Zaurus 5500 when they first went on clearout sale. But this wasn’t such a good idea since Laurie then wanted to get a PDA, so we got here a Palm 500 for a good price at CompUSA and then using DualDate with my Palm III seemed like a much better idea since we both had the same handheld platform. Unfortunately, I’ve been having issues geting the two to talk over IR with each other. But bottom line is that I’ll be switching back to the PalmOS platform, even if I have to buy a 500 for myself, so selling the Zaurus on ebay seems like the right thing to do.

This is a ever-so-slightly used Sharp Zaurus 5500. Comes with everything that came in the original box. You can check out &gt;a href="http://sharpusa.com/products/showcase/0,1941,600-58-0,00.html"< Sharp’s Website&gt;/a< for additional information beyond the basics mentioned here. &gt;p< &gt;ul< &gt;li<Sharp’s clever integrated keyboard design allows easy data input without sacrificing space. Edit text or e-mail effortlessly with a standard QWERTY keyboard. &gt;li<CompactFlash and SD Expansion Slots

• Sharp combines the best of both worlds by offering two expansion slots. Two slots allow you to add two peripherals simultaneously such as a CompactFlash modem card and SD memory card. This seamless design makes upgrading easy and simpleMobile MultimediaSharp’s color LCD technology and high powered processor deliver top quality multimedia for all corporate and personal needs. The SL-5500 has a 3.5" 65,536 Color Reflective TFT Front-Lit Screen with 240 x 320 resolution for outstanding graphics and clarity, indoors or out. &gt;li< Stereo Headphone Jack – Listen to your favorite music or movie clips anytime, anywhere. &gt;li<Stylus and Touch Screen – In addition to the SL-5500 built-in QWERTY keyboard, the stylus and touch screen allows you to navigate through applications with ease. &gt;li< One-Touch Access allows you to instantly view calendar, address book, menu and e-mail with just one press of a button. &gt;li<Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery – Rechargeable and replaceable long-life battery and easy recharge. &gt;li<Linux&#174; and Java based architecture provides a powerful and open operating environment – allowing many Linux and Java developers to write applications for the SL-5500, and integrated into various enterprise environments. &gt;li<Qtopia and Intellisync for SL (synchronize with Outlook) PC Synchronization &gt;li< Voice Recorder with additional add on microphone &gt;li< Media Player: Supports MPEG-1, MP3 &gt;li< Help Browser &gt;li< Document Browser &gt;li< MS Word & Excel Compatibility &gt;li< Equiv. HTML 4.0 Web Browser &gt;li< Calendar, Address Book, To-Do, and Memo Information Manager &gt;li< Sound: Stereo headphone jack included, Audio input (mono), buzzer / alarm &gt;li< Serial/USB (via docking station port, IR port &gt;li< 64MB SDRAM 16MB FLASH ROM Memory &gt;/ul< &gt;p< Accessories Included:

&gt;ul< &gt;li< Docking Station (USB) &gt;li< AC Adapter and Power Cord &gt;li< Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery &gt;li< Stylus &gt;li< Display Protection Cover &gt;li< CF Slot Protection Card &gt;li< Software and Manual &gt;/ul< &gt;p< There’s lots of software and tools available for the Zaurus: &gt;ul< &gt;li<