Black Coffee (Deprecated)

HemaMaps Desert Explorer CD (pt 2)

Last week I wasted time trying to get this CD.

Expecting disappointment, I called back today, and found that their revisioning (which was only to revise the packaging, not the map data [different story than last time]) had been delayed several months. So they simply reproduced some of their current stock, so the CD is now available. I ordered it, it will be sent out tomorrow. Maybe I get it next week sometime?

At any rate, I'll now have some desert mapping to look at for trip planning.

Soooo two years ago

Barely amounts to a peep from Phillip at the end of his bombastic victory tour around North America. Sounds like a pyrric victory to me -- he crawled into his plastic/aluminum toilet-cum-time-capsule, pops out in LA six months later, with only the same tired, tired technology and found no one cared and things had moved merrily onwards.

From chrysalis or pupa to larvae, from larvae to moth; a transformation

http://140.99.36.40/

Aerial Platform Discussion (pt 2)

[from an email discussion with 31die]

Having an aerial platform really would be tremendous. I'm trying to
think of other ways to get something airborne.

How about with a winch, like they use to launch sailplanes? If you
use it to launch a glider holding a camera then it is a big & heavy
glider. If you use it to launch a kite, then the assumption is once
you get some good height there will be stable wind available.

How does a winch work?

Dirigible of some sort? This could actually be okay, assuming it is
not powered by a burner, but is lofted by helium or something. I
guess the problem becomes it will take a large volume of helium to
launch our apparatus, and when you retrieve the thing it seems dubious
that you'd be able to pump the helium out of the sack and back into a
storage tank.

Weather balloon? That might also be viable. I guess that is the same
as a dirigible -- with the advantage that it is meant to loft
instruments, will be more robust than some air sack we build by hand,
etc. I think they are all launched on helium.

Yeah, I have thought about this option before. But my idea was to supplement the kite's lift with a weather balloon connecting to the same point on the kite line that the upper arm of the kap bridle connects too. My thought was that this would reduce the apparent weight of the rig while allowing it to otherwise behave the same to the kite. I also thought it might provide sort of a buffering to the whole system and make it slightly less jerky. (though that might be uncompensated for by the wind blowing around this big fucking weather balloon)

But furthermore, this becomes less realistic when I point out something I read the other day. The USA basically holds some staggering fraction of the world's supply of helium. While it's available everywhere in the usa, apparently it is harder to come by elsewhere. I suppose you still must be able to get a cylinder of it for welding gas purposes in australia? In fact, if anywhere else has helium, it would probably be ore-rich Australia.

I was entertaining visions of a land cruiser racing across the outback with a 5-foot diameter weather balloon in behind the rear window, out of the wind as we drive on to the next site.

hmm. I wonder how sophisicated, expensive weather balloons are. I bet google knows... It tells us how many balloons per cylinder = f(ballon size, and cylinder size). It tells us how to fill a weather balloon. It tells us what to do if you find one (plus some manufacturer names) like Vaisala, VIZ, AIR. This site has tons of links to miniature hot air balloons, which I have built many times, and which I am being expressly forbidden from purchasing by my skeptical wife, but there may be some links to where to purchase weather balloons. It's getting late; I'll have to dig later. AH-HA! WE'RE IN! HERE THEY ARE!

*followup: there is also this odd site referring to pibal analysis.

Model rocket? They used to sell a rocket than had a tiny camera in
the nose cone. When the engine burnt out the rocket would start to
arc over in a parabola and the slight offset mass of the camera would
make it face the earth. I don't know what determined when the shutter
fires -- if they were clever they could detect the momentary
weightless at the very top of the parabola and hit it then. Of
course this has no video, etc.

hahahahhahahahaha I think Australia has sensitivites regarding open flame in the outback.

Ultralight?

Parasail?

Would be damn cool.

Enormously long pole?

I myself was wondering how interesting a perspective it would give our photos to have a 20' or 30' high pole to take photos from. What is the largest free-standing pole we could carry and deploy? My guess is pretty fucking high, especially because we'll have two landcruisers and winches to manhandle the columns. IP built a 80' high one from sewer pvc pipe. All it needs is some hole in the ground to fit into, and then hoist with a triangle.

Schadenfreude

DeletedDomain.com's search for ArsDigita

Displaying #1 - 10 (of 10 matching domains)

1 - arsdigita-dev.com (DELETED on 05-10-02)
2 - arsdigita-stage.com (DELETED on 05-10-02)
3 - arsdigitas.com (DELETED on 04-05-02)
4 - larsdigita.com (DELETED on 05-07-02)
5 - timarsdigital.com (DELETED on 06-04-02)
6 - arsdigita.net (DELETED on 05-16-02)
7 - arsdigita-dev.net (DELETED on 05-10-02)
8 - arsdigita-stage.net (DELETED on 05-10-02)
9 - arsdigita-dev.org (DELETED on 05-10-02)
10 - arsdigita-stage.org (DELETED on 05-10-02)

I am just waiting to see: "11 - arsdigita.com (DELETED on xxx)"

Volcanoes

I keep seeing footage on BBC of the frightening Mt Etna of Italy erupting. It looks incredibly cool. I now have the urge to sometime see an active volcano. I think there are quite a few in Indonesia, so they're not that difficult for me to get to.

It wasn't hard to find a volcanologist running tours in Indonesia, but $2500USD price tag is so staggeringly, laughably huge for any sort of trip through Indonesia, that this should be instantly out of the question. I have no idea what value-added John Seach could be providing to make these prices make sense. There are probably plenty of crummy tours, too.

Digital KAP?

If you read our kap changelog, you'll see the refinements are to provide video aiming system for our yashica t-5 point-and-shoot camera.

I'm sometimes disappointed with the camera because it suffers from vignetting. (not a specific fault of the t5 model in particular, it's a very good camera, but just a fundamental problem of most point-and-shoots that have a radial iris) My other complaint is that it's a fixed 50mm lens. 50mm is the same angle-of-view as a human. When the camera is two hundred feet up, 50mm field of vision is enormous and subjects on the ground are tiny. You don't use a 50mm camera to take landscapes (well... you might, but they suck). It might be nice to get different perspectives by using long lenses, more like a hawk's view, or even very wide lenses, like an airborne fish. None of that is possible with the t5.

We need the aiming to try to ensure that we don't fire off a roll of 36 shots, and have none of them be worth a damn. We mis-aim, there is too much motion, it's too dark, we're too high, too low, and on and on and on. There are endless reasons why kap photos often suck, and must have among the worst ratios of good photos:crap photos per roll. Additionally aggravating is that you don't get to see your results until well after your trip is over. I'd say so far our kite photos have only been perhaps 10-20% as pleasing as we'd have liked them to be.

Our video aiming system is rudimentary, insofar that the video requires an video camera, transmitter, power in addition to everything the camera/rc rig needs. The 2.4ghz transmitter is only marginally good enough -- often swinging or swaying out of range or out of the aim of the sensitive little antenna. It certainly helps our pictures, but it introduces its own problems, and isn't very refined. It takes the entire concentration of two people to run this setup.

So I was browsing some kap sites last night, and saw that the infamous Charles Benton is now using a digital camera. Now this guy truly does have a staggering library of excellent kap photos. No question about it. I always thought he was the purist -- sticking it out with 100ASA 35mm slide film and so on. That he was using, and raving about, a digital camera got me considering if this might be an angle for us to consider.

"Should we switch to using a digital camera instead of the 35mm yashica, perhaps even dumping the video aiming system, too?"

Well, only if two things are true:

1) that a digital kap rig can improve our chances of "getting the shot"
2) that the one-in-a-thousandth shot that is truly superior can be rendered as an art-quality image

What technical requirements would the rig and camera need in order to say "yes" to those questions?

a) We need some metric for the measure of image quality we need.
...How about, the image comes out w/ enough color and detail that it could be blown up to an 8x12" photo? {bigger?}

b) Dimensions and weight
...would be nice if various lenses were available?
...would be nice if it were <= weight of current system

c) Storage capacity
...if you could fire off enough photos, you could eliminate the need for a video aiming system entirely?
...IE: tradoff accuracy of a single photo for the chance to fire 100 unaimed photos instead?
...IE: tradeoff video-aiming-system weight for increased weight of better or varied lenses?

d) Kap-specific functionality the camera would need
...electronic firing, instead of a crude mechanical shutter finger
...do any cameras output an image signal that could be transmitted directly back to ground station ?
...IE: use the camera as an integrated system for both aiming and taking photos.

KAP Resources

Lots of KAP resources. And some other.

Blutig-Eldridge KAP Rig

KAP Changelog is coming home.

GoogleAnswers (with a freebie)

I feel like cancelling my question and just paying the 50c flat rate. However, I'm waiting for someone to bite and actually go, scan me the image, and set it up for ftp. ha ha ha!

Application Service Providers

It's a very nice idea that my software lies on someone else' server out there, being maintained and monitored by them, being quietly upgraded without me worrying about it, carefully stewarded, etc. But man, when it doesn't work, like it isn't tonight, it's really fucking irritating. Especially when the support infrastructure (bug tracker, yahoo users group, etc) are so woefully silent and slow. For the second time in a week I am unable to send over new posts from blogger to my karavshin.org server. I have verified that karavshin's ftp server is alive and well. It's blogger's problem, and there is nothing to be done about it, apparently.

Well, further urges me to switch to Moveable Type. At least when it doesn't work, I'll be able to investigate and fix it. Here I am just sitting helplessly.

Why does Blogger have such a QA problem? I think because it is a small shop. Consequently they do not have the maintenance staff to keep shit working well all the time, and secondly I get the sensation that they do not have a strong staging process for bringing changes online. Last week's ftp-problem somehow involved some code they were 'testing' out. WTF? Test it out somewhere it doesn't affect me. Hell's bells. I realize my $35 membership is a pittance, but still, there is basic support functionality I expect. At the very least status.blogger.com should have better diagnostic messages.

Hell. I just checked the yahoo group, and see someone posted the same problem I am facing.

When Google Answers

I'm more than happy to pay three dollars for this. I wasted three pounds sterling and twenty minutes tracking it myself, to no avail.

Our Outback 'Aerial Platform Requirements'

So we'd like to do kite aerial photography during our trip through the Outback. Of course, the wind is fickle, and at least several times we've been reduced to dragging the kite through the air with our 4x4 or Lincoln Continental. What if there was a better way? Not only could we get well-framed, sharp 35mm photos of ground subjects, but we could do live recon of the areas we were exploring? It sounds like our expedition has a serious aerial platform requirement!

One thought is always the trusty RC airplane. They come available in less-messy electric engine versions now, and of course people have fitted them with cameras. Plenty of people have investigated this technique. I would say, however, even with the simpler planes, they seem terribly difficult to fly in-general, let alone with purpose -- like flying as navigational outriders for our 4x4 convoy. What you really want is a big, slow, stable brute that can loiter over targets while you photograph or send back live video.

A really slow, stable platform is, of course, a helicopter. [ed: of course there are RC Airships as well. But don't bother the author because he is a very busy man.] Now if you thought flying an RC plane was hard, how about an RC helicopter? I knew a guy in university who had one. From what I could tell, flying the thing is basically impossible. I saw him once or twice "fly" it about 18 inches off the ground and then bounce back down. It didn't destroy itself only because there were enormous supplemental landing bars that prevented it from careening onto its side. It looked like a huge, expensive, frustrating pile of shit. At all other times it looked quite smart as a bookshelf trophy. But be clear... it never, ever flew.

Well, almost ten years later the New York Times talked about a new breed of helicopter machines that used sophisicated gyroscopes to make flying helicopters enormously easier.

The base model, the Draganflyer III, is a simple gyro-stablized indoor-outdoor helicopter. Reading about the $750USD machine almost immediately disqualifies it from field service. Flight time is 5minutes. It can't fly in wind > 5mph. It "generally" can lift the weight of a 2.4ghz wireless camera system (which is a trivial weight and trivial quality). The crash kits of blades and carbon rods are $150 and their wireless video system is another 200$. Definitely not suitable for hauling around a 35mm Yashica T5.

But Draganflyer offers what they promise to be the solution to your 'aerial platform requirements,' the Draganflyer Xpro. This monster is designed to carry one pound worth of video/camera gear. It's still strangled to about 5 minutes of flying time, which might be ok for a bit of Aerial Photography, but this will never be our drone outrider. One other problem is that the thing costs five-thousand dollars. Yes, $5,000. That is far beyond any fathomable impulse depth for me, especially since the thing isn't even ideal. Figure $5000USD = $9000 Australian. I think I could buy an awful lot of bush-pilot time for 9000$ in the Outback and probably get some very stunning photos, as one obvious alternative.

So, basically, I dunno. It appears that having a menagerie of kites for various wind conditions, and maybe spending some more resources miniaturizing the KAP Rig itself would be money much better spent in an effort to get good, sharp aerial photographs of the outback. Unless Draganflyer wants to donate me one of their monster machines, it's a dead option hovering. I think dirigibles are doomed by physics. The last option is to look into getting an rc plane outfitted with some gear. I think this is easily an order of magnitude more feasible than the helicopter, but probably still an awful lot of work. It's one more avenue to investigate, though.

Moving to a new Blog Platform?

A few days Iwas pondering how to add a series of new services to my website. Roger LosAngeles suggested I could switch to deru.net and get more functionality for a lower price. (Something on the order of $10/month or something ridiculous). So then my thoughts were on figuring out which tools I could use to get those services running, and whether Deru supported them (php or whatever). But then something else happened... blogger.com was hacked! It turned out to not be that serious, however my server & password ARE stored on blogger to allow straightforward publishing, so it was compromised. Lots of griping on Slashdot, of course, and people making noises about switching to RadioUserland or MoveableType.

Out of curiosity, I browsed around Moveable Type again. It's a more powerful package that runs on your own server. One of the best things about Blogger is that it is an application service that I can get to from any browser, anywhere. I wouldn't want to change that.

That's why Radio Userland is automatically disqualified. Although it can ftp-publish to my server, its basic engine is supposed to be sitting on my PC at home. That's no good if I want to post an article from my office during lunch, or post a trip log while I am in some third world country somewhere.

Moveable Type, however, is a perl/mySql package that has something called a 'bookmarklet' that allows you to post entries via web page anywhere.

As well, it provides commenting functionality directly in the software. They also created a categorization system for blog entries that can be incorporated into the archiving functionality. So for example, I could have a link to an archive of all my archives on choosing a car, choosing my blog technology, or only erotic balloon fiction.

It also internalizes mail-distribution of the blog, so I won't have to worry about setting up a gnu mailman mailing list system. On top of this it does all the standard content management system stuff that Blogger does.

The only noticeable deficiency I've seen is there is no email->blog functionality. Considering that Blogger's is still fucked up, I don't consider that I have this functionality now anyway. I do however imagine that maybe in the future I could get this functionality with Moveable Type -- either someone there writes it, or I try to hack it together myself. After all, this is just a typical mix of perl and MySql--not that much different than TCL and Oracle, right?

The 'price' of Moveable Type is negligible (a 20$ donation), so I am going to play around with it. One thing I need to investigate more, however, is making sure this Bookmarklet functionality is going to work as well as the blogger posting application does.

HymenWatch

Must announce that, as far as I can tell, my first random visitor has arrived at Black Coffee Blog, and actually sent me some feedback about mailing list engines. Congratulations, Mr. Jay Ricketts, of 'St Cecilia Was Here' blog for popping the Black Coffee Cherry.

Primary Sources

So it sounds like they arrested the father-son wacko 'sniper' team rampaging around Washington. Details are very sketchy right now, of course, but reports indicated Federals searching some weird Alabaman martial arts camp called, 'Ground Zero USA.' Sounds silly as hell. But that was all that was said about it. I was surpised no one tried Google. Believe it or not, Ground Zero, run by some weird British guy does have a website! It's definitely weird in the way that 'Patriot Groups' were werid back in the mid-nineties. But they were funny and dopey back then. Now that kind of stuff is just creepy.

Furthermore, Google returns another interesting result. A report (last july) that there were possible links indicating Al Quaeda terrorists trained at this facility! Don't worry, Mark D Yates, the unsung-hero/director of Ground Zero America issued a press release about this.

Anyway, I only point this out because running to Google was the first thing on my mind for background research, while it appeared that all the talking-head-journalists just stood around waiting from gems from Captain Moose. Lazy, stupid journalists.

BlogWatch

Rodney Tamblyn has a good-looking template for his blog -- simple, but sharp, and apparently robust. Among other things, he has an interesting set of links to Language Learning Resources.

ToolWatch

Hmmm. this might be a good first stop in sorting out a decade+ of email archives.... getting them into a universal format with Emailchemy. Sounds like it should be able to handle all the mail I'd have, except perhaps, old archives from my FidoNet days. The sooner I save my mail from the opaque Outlook files, the better.

zoe (pt 2)

...definitely a 'later' project... fucking thing requires that i reinstall java runtime... something i tossed out about six months ago.

What am I doing to myself? (pt 1)

I stumbled onto a blog link on Salon that talks about a beta-version project called Zoe, that Scott Rosenberg describes as: Google[ing] your e-mail stash, turning it into a permanently accessible, organized, useful, Web-formatted archive.

Sounds interesting, although probably mostly embarassing. If it is robust enough to handle my ancient email archives from 1990, 1991, etc, it could be pretty good, especially if it could manage to reconstruct the threading. There must be megabytes upon megabytes after more than a decade of me spewing.

His description is more useful than the somewhat rambling O'Reilly Column he refers to in his blog entry. Of course Zoe itself has a long explanation of the program too, which makes it sound potentially more captivating.

So that will be a project, not tonight, but maybe this weekend. If this works like it's claimed to, I'll have a lifetime of nuggets-from-the-past to entertain you with. At any rate, I've downloaded it. I'll see how it goes.

Server Upgrade?

There are a few other things I wish I could do on this site...
1) Distribute this blog via mailman (even better if I don't have to administer it... Is there a hosted one I can share from somewhere?)
2) Password lock-down of various pages
3) Have a commenting capability here that is reliable and robust. The offsite-style commenting servers all stink.
4) Be able to check page access logs.

Right now I have $9.95/month 'WebLite' service package from DomainMonger. It seems like a pretty good deal and I have no complaints about DomainMonger. However, now I am wondering if the Bronze or Silver support levels are worth getting.

//What do I get additional w/ Bronze? (20$/month)
a) FrontPage 2002 Extensions (what can I do with these? Better navigation, I think, but I don't know what more)
b) File Restore (hmmm... maybe worthwhile, although Blogger holds my blog, and FrontPage holds my static)
c) Complete Web Statistics (I guess this is logs)
d) Log Management (I guess this is deleting logs)
e) CGI FormMail (yuk)
f) Access to Log Files (hmmm, they keep beating this log horse)
g) "Support both NT & Unix" (no clue what this is? Do they mean I get a shell?)
h) Support for Realtime Credit Card Processing (if I run ecommerce, I'd probably use Yahoo Store)
i) CGI-BIN (does anyone use CGI for anything nowdays?)
j) PHP (does everyone use PHP nowdays?)
k) Free Shopping Cart (I assume this is some sort of ecommerce capability -- pass)

//What incremental services come from Silver? (30$/mth)
l) Database Manager (no idea what this is)
m) Active Server Pages (ASP) (How useful might this be? Can I do anything cool with it really?)
n) Cold Fusion Support (Sod Off)
o) Ad Server (I wouldn't torture you with ads)
p) MySQL (what can I do with a PHP/MySQL combo?)
q) Real Audio/Video Streaming (Curious what Ling and I get up to???)
r) MS Access (Hah. does ANYTHING use this? I guess maybe ASP pages might)
s) SSL (I'm not using ecommerce, so I guess this is irrelevant)

Dunno... Things to check out:
1) what software is available for all the things I listed as desired features
2) what extra capability do FrontPage Extensions provide?

(btw, I do love the way that FrontPage's immune system asks if it can purge any content on my site that wasn't generated/maintained by FrontPage. It's always requesting to kill this blog, for example.)

When Google Attacks

So thanks to crappy, old technology, a search for 'Karavshin' on Google gets pretty close to this site, although Google still hasn't scanned karavshin.org as far as I can tell (even though I did submit it to The Open Directory Project).

My Proud Lineage

I am proud to announce that I am a nephew of a Daughter of the American Revolution. In fact, I might go so far as to say I am a Most Favorite Nephew of a Daughter of the American Revolution, Mrs. Mary Farley, of Brookville, Pennsylvania.

Overview of GPS Technology

This is a quick introduction to how GPs technology works. It only takes about seven minutes to read. The last half is some boilerplate about Garmin products, but the first bit about the GPS Satellite network is sort of interesting.

I also remember discussing w/ my dad how the Garmin unit handles north (magnetic and true). This report says the unit just has its own little model of the magnetic fluctuations around the earth.

Hemamaps Desert Explorer

Wasted lunch hour today... Wanted to get the Hema Maps cd of their six desert tracks maps. I hunted down their distributor in Singapore, Mapco, and called them up. Sounded like I was calling the local fishmonger at the wet market, but the woman said that yes, they had it, and it was sold at both Borders and Kinokuniya. Then she hung up before I could ask another question.

So of course I hopped in a cab and went over at lunch time. And of course they didn't have it. When I talked to the folks at the information counter they had no record of it at all. They called the distributor themselves, who told them that 'no, they don't carry it and never have.' Great.

So I came back to the office and called Hema directly in Australia and started purchasing it over the phone. Almost finished the transaction before the woman remarks about the wrong product. When I tell her that I was looking for the CD Rom, she says, 'oh, no, that won't be ready for another two weeks--it's in re-production.' Groan again. I asked her, 'are you sure this is really "two weeks" or in two weeks it'll still be "two weeks", and I'll be in store for a WRX-repair-style wait?"

She checked around, and it sounded much more like six or eight weeks. They were updating the maps, packaging, everything. On one hand it's good -- I'll get a better product, on the other hand I won't be able to get it before Christmas unless I'm very lucky.

I guess in the meantime I'll continue my investigation of OziExplorer.

BlogSkin Circumcision

On some other, private, blogs I have running, I tried to find some other templates to use. Blogskins looks like a promising site. It enables people to upload their own blog templates to storage. Then others can preview, comment, and api-based download of them into their own blogs. I have spent probably two hours of my life screwing around with blog templates. My conclusion is that there isn't a single good, robust blog template anywhere.

Every single template I've used has failed at one point or another. The css-based sheets seem notoriously unreliable when I start putting in simple html of my own, like line items, italics, bolds or breaks. I don't even bother with many of the other ones because they have hard-fixed table widths or resolution requirements.

I guess the challenge is to write up a stronger CSS template which can handle simple html editing additions. Then you can stick that basic engine into your template, dressing it up with whatever colors and columns you want.

Check out blogskins... it's the only place you'll find code more brittle than the ArsDigita Bootcamp.

Exploring OziExplorer (part 1)

//Basic idea of what it is supposed to do

OziExplorer is a generalized system that allows you to import an arbitrary map image, which is then calibrated (georeferenced) so OziExplorer can use any pixel position on the map to determine the true geographic position. There are two more basic sets of functionality it provides. First it allows you to notate and measure the map. Secondly it communicates with your GPS to give you real-time positioning inside OziExplorer.

OziExplorer's distinction from other products is that it can import arbitrary maps. MapSource only works with the proprietary maps produced by Garmin. Consequently you have more options for getting mapping data to areas you want, and it also allows you to generate your own maps. This might not be as vital in the US, where MapSource has good coverage, but in Singapore, for instance, the World MapSource disk is anemic and useless. However, for example, I have this great satellite image of Singapore that presumably OziExplorer could consume and allow me to use with my GPS.

The immediate limitation I noticed for Garmin GPSs (I have a Garmin Etrex Vista) is that maps you create from scratch with OziExplorer cannot be uploaded into the GPS. So if you create a custom map, the only way to use it is to have a laptop with you receiving location data from the GPS, or by uploading just the waypoints and routes created on your custom map up to the GPS. The third work around is to buy a different brand of GPS that DOES allow it. There is no way to view the map you created on OziExplorer on the the Garmin GPS display. Thanks for another proprietary format, Garmin. (PROJECT-IDEA: People should investigate how to create their own basemaps that are Garmin-compatible, whether Garmin likes it or not.}

//Background
OziExplorer is written by one guy, with the intention of making a gps/mapping system for planning his 4wd trips. In some ways this might be good -- you stand a chance of being able to communicate with someone who knows something, rather than faceless MapSource and their abysmal technical support staff. On the other hand, writing software like this would require him to know a broad range of subjects in good depth. Since I haven't used the software yet, it's hard to say if he has succeeded.

In the 'About' section of his help file, he is quite straightforward about the philosophy of the software and his intentions. I respect that. The guy recognized a tool he needed, couldn't find the tool already, so he built it for himself. Fortunately for me, I need the same tool, too.

...coming in Part 2.... How well does it work, and is it up to the task?

Republished: Boilerplate Blog

I duly acknowledged yesterday that one of my blog subjects (my imminent LASIK eye surgery) was very garden-variety blog material, but that I felt obliged to mention it anyway. 31die provided me a much better version of this bit of boilerplate. I think it spares us all the ritual dance-discussion that surrounds this topic. After all, you'll probably have opportunity to discuss the very same thing at least a half-dozen times within the next twelve months.

Here goes:

[Describing] how bad your particular eyes were, how difficult your particular surgery, how miraculous your particular recovery, how amazing your particular doctor was, how great a sum you paid to insure the utmost quality, how much more amazing you are now at all vision-related tasks, etc.

Very efficient.

Focus on Alternatives

Reliable RogerAnswers suggested some other vehicles in lieu of the standard Ford Focii. A Ford 'SVT' model, as well as some Hondas, etc.

The SVT Focus is not available apparently. Honda Civics come in a few more varieties, however. I don't really know anything about these models, and I've never even sat in a Honda Civic. Even if they are better performers, I think I would insist on a Civic having the same quality interior as I found in the focus.

From the Automobile Association of Singapore new car buying guide, the available Hondas are:

Displacement ** Max. Power (BHP) ** Max. Torque (Nm/rpm) ** Top Speed (KPH) ** 0-100 KPH (SECS) ** Price **ARF ($)

CIVIC EXI (4DR) 1493 103 135 187 9.9 79,988
CIVIC EXI (4DR) (A) 1493 105 135 178 12.1 80,988
CIVIC VTI (4DR) 1493 115 139 191 9.2 82,988
CIVIC VTI (4DR) (A) 1493 115 139 186 10.5 83,988
CIVIC VTI-S (4DR) 1668 130 155 204 8.5 93,988
CIVIC VTI-S (4DR) (A) 1668 130 155 194 9.6 96,988

As a benchmark, the Ford Focus comes only with a 99bhp motor, and costs around $85,000.

For some reason I guess Toyota doesn't have anything in the hatchback domain.

Another option Roger suggested in what he terms the "Hot Hatch" segment was the Volkswagen Golf GTI. This model is available in Sinagpore, but it too expensive.

GOLF 1.6 (A) 1595 100 145 185 12.9 115,000
GOLF GTI 1781 150 210 216 8.5 125,000
GOLF V6 4MOTION 2792 204 270 235 7.1 155,000
GOLF VARIANT (A) 1595 100 145 185 13.7 118,000

(I won't drive a Renault.)

Searching for a mailing list service

In Blogger Pro there is a feature where Blogger can send an email copy of your blog posting to a single email address after you post-and-publish.

It would be nice to email this to an address that can then broadcast it to people who want to receive the email in digest or instant form, rather than having to check via the web, or rely on my RSS feed.

Can anyone recommend a decent, free service that can do this? I think Yahoo Groups is pretty lousy, frankly, and I hoped there would be a much lighter-weight alternative.

In fact, I would prefer if there was NOT a discussion component to the thing, lest irriating people respond to my blog postings, which are then inflicted on other readers of the blog. Basically it should be a lightweight, unidirectional mailing list service.

Bootlegger Turn

So my car saga did a 180 this weekend. I finally grew disgusted with the whole idea of getting a SUV. Buying a 'real' 4x4, like a Toyota Landcruiser or Land Rover is silly -- they're physically too big for Singapore. Parking is awful, price is awful, and Ling would hate to drive it. Buying a soft 4x4, like a CRV or RAV4 is stupid, they cost much more than a car, but they can't do much more than a car. At some point I told myself, "I don't want to pay $40,000 extra for a wimpy suv that I might take offroad in Malaysia five times per year, if I am very lucky."

So for the time being I am way off the market for SUVs and trucks. The whole idea has the same funk that many other bad ideas I've had in the past had, too. That smell is evidence that I am maximimizing way too far along one variable's axis, and ignoring a lot of other axes. I'm going to buy a simple, straightforward car.

At the same time that feeling moved in and kicked the SUV out, I starteed thinking that a Ford Focus would be a cool car. So on Monday I went over to the showroom and checked it out. Not much variety. They all have the same 1.6l engine. There is a hatchback, station wagon, and sedan. The sedan is a choice of manual or auto, while the wagon and hatch are both auto. There are no other options to choose from beside color. But boy, superficially it seemed like a nice car -- the interior, for the short time I sat in it, felt very nice. I'm a sucker for leather seats, and the control seemed very solid and high quality. There seemed to be a lot of legroom in both back and front seats. The sedan and wagon had more space, but the hatchback looks much nicer. The wagon looks dorky.

I didn't drive the car yet, and I have been stymied in my research. I believe the Focus in asia is at least somewhat different than in the US, so I have so far been unable to find decent reviews on the Asian-available version of the Focus. Google seems to have failed me a bit here.

I talked very briefly about price with the sales woman. Looked like their initial offer was about $85,000 for the hatchback. No idea how much they'll come off that price. For that price, I feel like buying a brand new one and not screwing around with used. I get an approximately $85,.000 interest-free car loan from my employer, so that makes it a bit cheaper. I'll plan on keeping it till our family grows, and then Ling can take it and I will buy something bigger if we need it.

Christmas is near

Wear them for the ones you love...

BuffoonWatch

"The public does not come from the same kind of a sophisticated sense of history and all the different things that I've been exposed to." -- Harry Belafonte on CNN's Larry King [10/15].

Chess History: Zavos (w) v Eldridge (b), Murrysville 1989

f4 e5 f3 Qh4(!)

An alternative to Garmin MapSource?

Garmin MapSource is very mediocre software, and there is lots to not like about it, including not only its poor design and operation, but the non-USA data sources are abysmal. To put it in perspective, I have their mapset for the USA/Hawaii/Alaska. It's three CDs, and very detailed. I have their world ex-USA, too. It's one cd. It's got basically nothing. The Singapore section is basically worthless.

The poor operation of the software we can curse, tolerate, and workaround. The lack of decent map data, however, is going to make our 4wd trip through the Australian Outback harder.

I have found a potential answer. A company called Hema Maps produces detailed Australian Desert Track maps. They've converted these to a single CD called the "Great Desert Tracks CD-ROM". I asked them what I can do with the cd. Turns out it is only a data source -- there is no viewing capability. The CD is to be read by a program called OziExplorer.

Checking the site out, it seems like an Australian version of MapSource. The website is somewhat tacky, and shouts out small-time-operation, but perhaps the software is built better than MapSource. I've just skimmed it superficially, but already I've found one alarming thing. It implies that their "map creation" (you can create your own map features) is unable to upload the maps you create to any Garmin GPS. I'd have to get more clarification on this. At any rate, we should investigate this program as an alternate to Garmin Mapsource.

This weekend perhaps I'll download their evaluation copies and see how they run. The software costs $75 and some sort of 3-d add-on costs an additional $25. I'm going to do myself the favor of reading the support groups and see what kind of complaints are coming out about the software. Maybe spare myself some headache if this thing turns out to be a piece of shit.

Of course, hopefully our need for this product will be mooted by the completion of The Eldie Pre-cog sub-metre terrain tracking and visualization system.

Photo Rankings

Got a decent ranking/view of my monk photo on photo.net. There are eight pictures there. As you go through each one, the numbers of ratings and pageviews declines from some 100+ views to < 40 views. I guess that means people are looking at them in a row and eventually get sick of the series halfway through.

This is intriguing for some unknown reason. No, not really. It appeals to my vanity.

Blogger Tech Support Getting Better

So I posted three problems to the new BloggerPro tech support ticket-tracker this weekend. By Monday they'd answered everything, and fixed two things.

First I complained that the insert hyperlinks ought to either by-default, or by a setting, set the anchor text to include "target="foo"" so that my third-party links opened up in a fresh window; I hate overwriting the Blogger. The Blogger guys disagreed, and said most people dislike that, but that if I wanted, I can always put a tag in my template, which will launch all links in that new window. I will try that out.

There was also a problem with my archives server root not working properly. Steve Jensen diagnosed, fixed, and verified the solution, instead of just telling me what the problem was. cool!

"The problem was that your archive template was hardcoded with
the wrong location for your front-page, linking to ./ instead of
to black-coffee.html.

I fixed that and regenerated your site. Since most browsers cache
javascript included documents, it took a few times of reloading
for my browser to recognize the changes but it's definitely fixed. "

Finally, this chronic email->blogger functionality. They requested some diagnostic data from me; that should help us be able to figure out why I am having these intermittencies.

Pretty good! And I got a bonus answer, too. He saw my complaint about extended characters in RSS and offered, "BTW, I also read your entry on RSS and escaping problems: With the new release of Blogger Pro coming up, you won't have to worry about encoding those characters, we'll do it automatically." Excellent...

Archiving Server Roots

There are some problems with the URLs being auto-generated for the archives and root. I've posted this problem to the blogger2 group on yahoo.

The basic problem is:

When I am looking at the 'current' version of my blog, the links to the previous months' archives are correct. An example is the September archives.

When I drilldown on that set of archives they show properly, but the new option, Current that reveals and is supposed to take me back to the current set of blog entries is wrong. It should be appending "black-coffee2002.html" to the end of the url. For some reason it does not.

Here are all my relative settings, which I believe are correct. Everything else works as it should...

BLOG URL "http://karavshin.org/blogs/black-coffee.html"
SERVER PATH "public/blogs/"
BLOG FILENAME "black-coffee.html"
ARCHIVE FREQUENCY "Monthly"
ARCHIVE PATH "/public/blogs/"
ARCHIVE FILENAME "black-coffee-archive.html"

What's wrong ?

Tire Kicking

Alone this weekend, and tending to goto bed at 5am and get up at noon, today I forced myself out of the house for some sun and interaction with other Humans. So I went out for some car tire-kicking. Sometime in the next three months I'm liable to buy a car, and since my search for a Mitsubishi Storm is unlikely to be successful, I figured I should look at alternatives.

First place I went was Turf City, Singapore. Turf City is the former Singapore Turf Club horse-racing track. When the horses moved to a new location, they kept the existing "facilities" and turned them into a MegaMart and lots of other little shops. You have no idea how inappropriate the architecture for underneath stadium bleachers is until you have wandered through the underneathy of stadium bleachers turned into a megamart and other little shops. At any rate, they converted the underground parking garage into subletted 3x6 parking space cubicles of used car dealers. Yes, it's as grim as you are envisioning. Block after block of undifferentiated dealerships pushing their nine cars, all lame sedans, to the few disinterested browsers. And the lighting is horrible. I can't think of a worse way to present a car. The salesmen are wretches, not even the corinthian lizards you deal with in the USA. Just poor uneducated young guys dressed in shorts and wife-beaters. Needless to say I bailed from that CarStalag quick.

I went out for a coffee and browsed the papers for a while. There really aren't that many options here. There are the Toyota CRV and Honda Rav-4's. There is the Toyota Harrier, which is the Lexus 300 imported from Japan, where it is not called a Lexus, just a Toyota Harrier. It's less expensive, but the same vehicle. I was browsing the classifieds and saw one company advertising four different LandRover "Freelanders." I was sort of curious about them. I've seen a few and they looked similar to CRVs or RAV4's, although they seemed very cramped-looking to me.

I called up the trader and he listed me some prices, all around 130,000$SGD (approx $72,000USD), which is not that much more expensive than the RAV4 or CRV (new). My thought was maybe they have more 4x4 functionality than the toyota and honda. Plus I was curious and bored, so I went out.

Actually, they were pretty nice. And when I crawled into them, they were remarkably spacious. The backseat was quite endurable. Ling could certainly ride there with no problem. Matt would probably be less miserable in the front, but there's only one Matt, so he can have the shotgun seat. The cargo area was decent-sized, and the back seat flips down and flops forward to provide quite a bit of space if it's just two people in the car. The engine options are 2.5V6 or a 1.8l 4cyl. Transmissions are either manual 5speed or automatic w/ tiptronic transmission. There was no locking differential. The only unique 4wd feature I noticed was a hill-descending mode button that did some computer control of braking, engine braking, and brake temperature. That would never, ever be used in Singapore, but presumably could be in Malaysia. I took it out for a test drive. Its full-time 4wd was about what you'd expect, sort of noisy tires (not as bad as the Escape or Trooper), ok steering. No more, no less than I'd expect. The car seemed pretty sound to me. The most significant baggage, beside the price, of LandRovers is their reputation for servicablility and expensive repairs.

The four models they had where:

2001 2.5l 5dr auto $138,000 *I test drove this*
2001 2.5l 3dr (slightly smaller backseat and a "soft top" (yuk)) auto $132,000
2000 1.8l 5dr manual 104,000$
1999 1.8l 5dr manual 94,000$

Interesting option; I'd certainly want to compare it with some other models. Their repair reputation is the most daunting issue to me.

Personality Test

Despite how awful photo.net looks, the person responsible came up with an nice looking personality test.

What was your answer?

Mine? (renroc dnah thgir reppu)

ShitWatch

I forgot what pieces of shit Arsdigita-based sites are. But I reminded myself again tonight when I tried to add some photos for critiquing on photo.net.

What a fucking chore... The page flow was awful. It seemed to take 4x as many pages/submits to get something done as it should. Plus they force this horrible structure on you to track the camera, lens, film you used to take any picture. The choices of equipment had grown into a thicket of confused synonyms. Was my camera the "EOS 3" the "eos-3" the "EOS 3" or the "EOS3" ? Same with the film, same with the lens. Groan.

Considering the amount of work necessary, it's not worth it. Especially when I sort of know to expect that a bunch of prickish kharma-whores are going to annoy me, and no one will say anything particularly useful or sage. Oh well.

PhotoWatch

I just published some photos I am pleased with that I took in Chengdu, China last week. More on the way in the next couple weeks.

Microsoft RSS Processing... YOU ARE LAME!

So on the council of RogerDoubleYou, I turned on Blogger's RSS functionality. It worked fine, and I moved on. As a followup, I added it Ling's China Trip blog too, so that he could enjoy it. As a touch-up, I added a snazzy button.

Anyway, as I checked to make sure everything was working nicely, I found that IE threw an error when loading the rss page. It was complaining that its XSL style sheet couldn't process some illegal character. After searching around a bit, I realized that it was bitching about the "degree" mark (the tiny little circle) special character. Once I replaced it with normal text, it was happy again.

How fucking lame. Should I bother worrying about special characters that would corrupt this XML?

CrankWatch

Art Bell Fan and his colloidal suspensions...

Bigger Zoom Lens Saga Continued

Nothing going on, so I browsed ebay for a bit looking for the Canon 100-400 lens. I think I would feel quite queasy about spending 1000$, even 500$, on eBay for anything, particularly a very sophisticated optical instrument. I don't see what the upside is in it. Camera lenses are a commodity, everyone knows what they're worth, so if someone is selling it "cheaper" there is definitely some other risk embedded in there... either it's a scam or it's damaged. Not worth it in any case.

Bigger Zoom Lens Saga

So back from China, I got most of my rolls developed, and I am quite happy with them. It was the perfect environment for me there... I always feel a bit weird about photographing random people in the street, even though they are great subjects. Here I could do it with relative impunity; the locals already think I'm weird, carrying a camera around doesn't make me that much weirder. Plus, the average street in Chengdu is about 100x more interesting than in Singapore or Berkeley.

So the whole time I was shooting, I felt like I couldn't fill up the photo with the subject quite as much as I wanted to. I was maxing out my 75-300mm lens, so the only thing to do is get closer, which is often either not possible or irksome from my bashfulness. I loathe photos where the people are a tiny fraction of the shot. More is better when the subject is concerned.

Well it turns out that my photos (to be posted this weekend earliest) had pretty good composition -- the subjects generally occupied enough of the frame. But I still cannot help but wonder how much having an extra 100mm of focal length would enable me to get better composition or bring more subject material into my sniper range of 50-100ft.

I have a Canon camera system, so I have to check out what lenses they offer. There aren't that many options. Lenses 500mm and up are absurdly expensive, plus they are prime lenses -- I'd lose out on anything inside of 500mm. So it looks like I don't have much choice other than the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6. By all accounts it is a good lens, even great, but the thing costs $2600SGD (something like $1450USD). Ouch. That is a huge amount of money for the marginal improvement (an extra 100mm of focal length, one or two stops of extra light, and electronic image stabilization).

So I'm a long way from getting a craving for this lens, principally because I don't know what the marginal benefit of it would be over my 450$ 75-300mm 4.5-5.6 would be. For that matter, I might not even be appreciating the marginal costs of adding an extra three pounds of weight to an already painfully heavy EOS3.

I could do some calculations for a first try -- figure out for a given size subject size as a percentage of a frame, how many extra feet of distance that would give me. But at the end of the day, I really need to use one before I can crave for it.

If I still lived in Berkeley it would be an extremely simple matter to just run into SF and rent one for a day or a week or whatever for a somewhat nominal sum. However in Singapore renting something like that is anathema. No one does it. The only place I found that would do it charged a ridiculous sum... sort of on the order of "if I rented this for two weeks, it would be cheaper to buy it." So I'm a bit boned. I don't know anyone who owns one that I can borrow, or else I will need to make increasingly blunt hints to my regular camera store that I want to try one.

But then if I like it enough to buy it, I might just buy it used from somewhere, which would be a bit weird after using the store's model. But screw it; we've spent a lot of money there over the last several years.

Anyway, at this point it just seems like daydreaming-out-loud, and after I do it enough, it'll blow over, like so many other things. After all, even my earliest craving need, the Earth Ball, passed eventually. (I hadn't recalled that old chestnut in more than twenty years before it popped out of nowhere to me yesterday. {i was reflecting on my stomach feeling like it was the size of one}),

CreepyDutchGuyWatch

So I am sitting at the window of this coffee place checking the internet. Outside is a tall, typically Dutch guy smoking a cigarette and speaking very loudly, very angrily into the earpiece of his handphone. Only as I look closer, there is no handphone anywhere near him. And I look even closer there isn't even anyone else outside.

SlashdotWatch

This is terribly funny: Some lunatic setting off large sodium-water explosions.

MedicalWatch

Touching the skin of a peach causes a terrible electrical shocking in my lips, and to a lesser degree my hands. This is well-established, and reasonably well-known.

Since I've been sick with some crappy stomach bug I picked up in China, and haven't had coffee in nearly a week, I had to content myself with a cup of tea today after lunch. I totally forgot the one other substance in nature that sends the same enormous electrical shocking through my hands -- wet tea bags. It irritates my nerves so bad I cannot bear to touch one for more than a fleeting second. And after having done so, I have aftershocks for twenty minutes -- more if I reflect one how unpleasant the sensation was.

I have always had this problem, it's just that I was more consumed by peaches, than english tea, because I was living in San Francisco and had ready access to Peets Coffee.

Fucked Up Titles

The fucked-up titles you may be seeing "<$BlogItemTitle$>-Value" are a function of Blogger doing some code revision, thus I am forced to use one of their alternative systems which doesn't support title. At any rate this will be cleared away hopefully in a day's time. Turds.

For a fuller explanation, here is the excerpt:

When you get -Value tacked onto a bloggerTag, that means you are using it in a context where it doesn't have any meaning. If you have it inside (and you're on pro2 that knows Title, rather than pro1 which only knows Subject), then the only other way I can think of to get that would be to have the whole container outside of (where it doesn't have any meaning), or inside a second (you're only allowed one, so a second set ends up not being interpreted).

(in this case I am publishing from pro1.blogger.com, instead of pro2.blogger.com.

True History of the Kelly Gang

During my trip to China I became engrossed with the paperback novel True History of the Kelly Gang. Without question it's the most gripping and intense book I've read since Yukio Mishima' Sea of Fertility
series and the most imaginative books since I read Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (until I found out that the book is at least partially grounded in a real 'Ned Kelly'. Regardless, the form of the book is still enormously creative)

In short, it's a fictional journal of Ned Kelly, an Irish-immigrant outlaw in southeastern Australia in the late 1800's. The whole 'journal' structure is executed very well. And hanging throughout is a terrible sense of foreboding, given the book's prologue, that becomes more and more intense the more you read about, and like Kelly.

I recommend it enthusiastically. But I don't want to discuss it too much because reading all the lame reviews in Salon and pretentious discussion on Amazon, I'd be afraid I'd just drive you away further. The book is really good, really gripping, and really unique. I'll leave it at that. (plus you can buy it in paperback, so it's cheap)

Altitude Drugs

Tien-Lee got a prescription to Acetazolam and Tien-Ling got a prescription to Diamox. Both are similar mountain-sickness medications/preventatives.

Adding Google to this blog

Here is one story on how to provide sitewide search using Google. Here's another. I will implement this next week after I get back from China.