Move Along, Please.

Hard times for everyone...

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:04:35 GMT

Two miles from my house.

dollhouse:dune

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:59:41 GMT

echo:paul
alpha:alia

question meme

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:24:59 GMT

Following the meme on mellymell's journal...

Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
Update your journal with the answers to the questions
Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

1. How long have you been doing origami a what made you decide to start?

This one is really easy. When I was 7, my family was in Plant City, FL for Christmas. I went to a mall with my mother and talked her into buying a gift for herself (from me). It was just a little crystal pendant from a jewelry kiosk.

The asian man who was working at the kiosk wrapped the small box and then folded a small origami crane to put on top as a bow. I was totally blown away. I had to know how to do that. About six months later, my great-grandparents gave us the book Reader's Digest Crafts and Hobbies: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creative Skills. It has about 5 pages of origami instructions, in addition to dozens of other crafts including, but not limited to, basket weaving, pottery, jewelry making, and stained glass.

Anyway, I learned those models and my parents eventually got me another book, Animal Origami for the Enthusiast (which some people call "Animal Origami for the Masochist", but I didn't know that at the time). It was much more challenging, so it took me more than a decade to figure out how to fold some of those models. Of course, by moderns complex standards, those models aren't too bad... anyway, that's how I got started, so it's been... 27 years.

2. Who is an author that most people probably haven't read but really should?

Well, a strict interpretation of "most" would probably make this question a bit lame... I could say Pirsig or Douglas Adams... But I'm going to go with James Burke. In particular, the book (or the show) Connections is a great set of journeys though history from an intuitive perspective.

There are other niche authors I like, but a lot of them are specific to origami or software development.

3. What country do you most want to visit and why?

Well, I'm torn between Japan and Germany, but in both cases due to specific events. There is an origami tour of Japan that I would love to go on someday. Likewise, in Essen, Germany every October they have a week long board game trade show called "Spiel" that is sort of the Mecca of board gaming.

4. If you were trapped on a dessert island, what three books would you want to have
with you?

This is a really hard question. I have a fairly good memory, so I don't tend to reread books and I'm hard pressed to think of a book that I would get a lot of value out of rereading. If I don't have a supply of paper, origami books probably wouldn't be very useful, either, so I would probably just go with three practical books about survival on a dessert island...

5. If you could completely define your own super power, what would it be and how would you use it?

This is probably a cop-out answer, but I would go with something like Molecule Man or Beyonder, the ability to manipulate matter on a molecular level with my mind. The reason that's not fair is that it means that I would be able to do whatever else I wanted to just using that ability... kind of cheating.

Anyway, I hope those answers are satisfactory. If not, I'll take the test again.

Gallacon Picutres

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:40:20 GMT

I recently found some pictures someone had taken at Gallacon, the anime convention at the public library, where I taught origami. There are a few of me and a few of the things I brought.

Bones

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:26:29 GMT

The show Bones had a bomb making character named Malachi on it recently. Creepy.

huzzah!

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:45:41 GMT

After six days without DSL service, due to an error that AT&T made with our line, and after about three hours of calls with tech support, we now have working internet service again.

My biggest irritation, besides the fact that AT&T broke it and took so long to fix it, is that they had to send me a new DSL modem when my current one was perfectly functional, but they no longer have the knowledge to configure it, so tech support gave up.

Granted, it is 7 years old and it is quite simple compared to the modern ones. Now I have this perfectly functional, but unsupported, piece of hardware. It makes me sad.

I'm 95% sure that I could get the old one to work if I tried right now, since the problem ended up being on the line side.

stupid google!

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 06:03:48 GMT

So, in another attempt to figure out my problem with the NumberPickerButton, I tried searching google with the following terms: android eclipse xml numberpickerbutton.

The first link had something like, "NumberPicker depends on NumberPickerButton. I have copied both, but when the code runs (or it tries to inflate the XML layout for my cloned", which I skimmed and clicked on the link because it sounded like my problem only to realize that it WAS my problem because it was my post from yesterday that was already indexed by google and the first (and only relevant) result on google.

Fan-tastic.

It reminds me of a recent (accurate) rant I read in a support forum. I was searching for the solution to a problem and one of the first links was someone asking a question about a similar problem to mine. The first few responses basically said, "it's easy to find the answer if you just search google for it".

Finally, someone posted a rant about the problem that happens when people answer that way: the "just search google to find the answer" threads end up being the top google results for the problem, making it difficult or impossible to find the actual solution that used to be the top google hit.

I'm not sure if this is a failing of google or a failure because people are too dependent on google to give them the information they want when they want it. I'm inclined to believe that it's both. google should be clever enough to down rate results that mention google too much, but people should also be willing to actually provide answers, or at least real links to answers, in addition to asking people to do a more diligent search in the first place.

Back to my original problem, it seems that the error only occurs in eclipse, when trying to expand the XML layout within the designer (or whatever the eclipse name for it is). I did try changing the name of the failing button, but that just changed the name of the classes in the error message, as one would expect.

The problem may be that the layout I'm cloning is now in the same project as the program I'm working on, so it's having trouble with references or something. I've seen similar things in Visual Studio, but usually only when the control is open for edit in one window while it's trying to render that control on a form in another window.

Not sure how to fix that, though. I tried closing all the windows, but it didn't change anything.

At this point I will probably ignore the problem for the time being, since it does run... it will just make it a little harder to tweak the layout of a couple of forms, but I think I have them close enough that it will be okay.

new android conundrum

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:27:21 GMT

So, there is no NumberPicker control in the Android SDK that is public. Conventional wisdom is to "clone and own" the code from the Android source.

That's all well and good, and so far I have copied the code and it seems to work... except... NumberPicker depends on NumberPickerButton. I have copied both, but when the code runs (or it tries to inflate the XML layout for my cloned version, I get a ClassCastException that says that NumberPickerButton cannot be cast to NumberPickerButton.

I'm really not sure why I'm getting this, but it's quite frustrating. The really weird and infuriating thing is that it seems to work, it just throws this exception and prevents the layout from being rendered in Eclipse.

DROOOIIIID

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:43:22 GMT

I've still been working off and on to add some more features to the program I'm writing for blessed_lunatic's android program. Last week I found a similar program someone released about six months ago, but it costs $3 and it lacks a crucial feature. It also sports <50 downloads and only one comment, so I doubt I'll be making much money if I decide to charge for my program.

Anyway, I realized over the past couple of days a few things I could do better, and I still have a pretty hefty feature list to work through, although I did prove out a big thing on including XML layouts within XML layouts that will make some of the activities much easier to build. Now if I could just find some clever ways to reuse the code that links the layouts to functions, I would be in really good shape.

Currently I'm having to "clone and own" an internal control that android uses for things like the date picker because they don't expose the number picker and I don't want to go out on a limb and call methods on it through reflection since they could, in theory, change in the future. I actually don't think that's a big risk, it's just not as pleasant to write code that way.

Running Eclipse on my laptop with 1GB of RAM while also trying to do... well, anything else, is kind of a drag, but I noticed Fry's had some RAM for cheap this weekend, so I should be upgraded to 2GB sometime in the next week. Happy birthday to me. Hopefully that will help. I have been thinking about doing that for about a year and a half now, but I'm cheap and lazy.

last night I had the strangest dream...

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:22:13 GMT

I don't really remember exactly how it started, but I was living out a zombie apocalypse. I only remember a little bit toward the end, when I was trying to make my way to a safe enclave where people were working on a solution and needed my help or something.

I remember getting there and finding a sign on the perimeter fence that said something like "no entry (except malachi)". I half remember having a surviving travel companion at that point, and telling them that that was me! But I also remember not having any surviving companions by that point, except my trusty dog, Torgo (who looked like a big dumb dog, kind of like Larry).

I had gotten separated from my dog when they let me in. I remember the compound being on a river. They brought me inside and showed me the lab they had set up. I was apparently the last great hope they had for a solution to the zombie problem.

Dream reality started to break down here, because I became a little more awake and started wondering how it was that the compound had power to run all the equipment, and I started trying to rationalize it.

I then remember seeing Torgo out on a board walk over the river, outside the compound. I could see a zombie headed for him from upstream, so I told him to run down toward where I had entered the compound, but when I ran down to the gate I found that there were zombies shambling toward it, so that wasn't a good place to be either. At this point I became aware of some kind of sewer/storm drain tunnel that ran from the river over to a pool, so I tell Torgo to go that way.

In my starting-to-wake-up-mind I imagine that there is some kind of Shelob-like spider infestation at the pool on the other end of that tunnel, so I start to think of how to deal with that problem, but as I'm starting to wake up I start to wonder about the futility and difficulty of the situation I have created for the poor dog, and I just wonder if there is a way to rewrite it or if it's going to end up like I Am Legend or something. At this point, though, I'm awake enough that it's not really a dream and it's not really interesting to think about, so I stop.

almost internet famous

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:07:58 GMT

A few years ago I downloaded a couple of videos of Vincent Floderer's origami from a web site associated with a now-defunct origami convention. A few years later, the web site hosting the videos disappeared. Because I didn't want the information to be lost, I uploaded the videos to youtube so that other people might find them of interest.

This morning a coworker emailed me because she thought I might be interested to know about an origami video that was linked to by makezine, who had found it through boingboing. She didn't realize at the time that it was, in fact, a video that I had uploaded to youtube.

As a result, the linked video got about 10,000 views yesterday, which is about 30% of the total views it has received in the two and a half years since I uploaded it. While I'm glad people are seeing and enjoying it, I am a bit frustrated by the comments on both linking sites that basically say that Floderer's work isn't origami simply because of the arbitrary rules and meaning they have in their heads about what origami means.

In the boingboing comments, oschene and Floderer himself both do a good job of trying to explain that there is no reason to dismiss the work as anything other than origami, but I think some people can be a little thick headed about changing their opinions. I guess it's like any other time when you discover that something that you have "learned" is incorrect or incomplete. It's not always easy to assimilate new information.

oschene has gone on to post his feelings about the issue on his site. I think it's an uphill battle that is probably somewhat lost, but progress is made by lots of little changes and we all have to do our part.

trip to the zoo

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 06:16:39 GMT

Last weekend we took a little family trip to the Nashville Zoo. It was a really nice day for it and I got some cool pictures.

These first few were taken with blessed_lunatic's new droid phone. They came out fairly well even though it was during the bad phase of the droid's auto-focus bug.

This is a hasty snap of a bee that had landed on my shirt (probably thinking it was a flower).

This was a more carefully planned picture of a yellow jacket. Because he had something sweet to munch on, he was a patient subject.

We met up with some friends and had lunch while we were there...

Ouida Mae really enjoyed watching the animals. I think her favorite thing was the reptile house with all the aquariums, but it was too dark in there to get good pictures of her.

The rest of the pictures were taken with my Canon A620. I shot a lot of them in RAW but only a few of them were very interesting to tone map, so I only did two of them that way.

"No, no... that's John Gray, Keeper of Barnacles." - C. Darwin

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:37:53 GMT

CHARLES DARWIN: Emma's a Unitarian, father. Hmm. Do you remember how grandfather described Unitarianism?

ROBERT DARWIN: A featherbed for falling Christians!

Between the Folds

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:11:53 GMT

The showing of Between the Folds today went very well. It was nice to see the documentary again, and the turnout was good. There were probably around 40 people at the reception, and I had some of my more-impressive-works-that-I-happened-to-have-on-hand on display.

I taught about 10 people the jumping frog and the crane in the scant half an hour of reception before the screening, and that went quite well, partly thanks to Joelle's help.

There were probably around 100 people who sat for the screening and most of them stayed for the panel after. I wish that had been a bit longer too, but the library opens at 2 and closes at 5 on Sunday, so they have to operate within those constraints. The questions and comments people had were interesting and it was fun to talk about something on which I am the local expert.

We also got 17 people signed up who expressed an interest in joining our origami club meetings. Since we only have three regulars now, even if only a few actually follow through it will be a big expansion.

So, all in all it was a great success. I hope the other showings around the country are met with as much interest and enthusiasm. I really need to pick up a copy of the DVD now.

Origami: Between the Folds

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:10:11 GMT

I will be teaching origami at the reception and I will be on the discussion panel this Sunday at the Nashville Public Library's screening of the origami documentary Between the Folds. It's at the main library branch at 2:30.

World Origami Days

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:46:18 GMT

I should have mentioned it earlier, but we're in the middle of World Origami Days. Celebrate as you see fit.

Ubuntu 9.10

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:15:02 GMT

I did the upgrade last night and it just completed... my laptop is still working so far... the download took a long time, I wasn't able to get full download speed...

Now I need to figure out of anything is broken.

android development

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:38:03 GMT

2 big disappointments so far.
1. Dates don't seem to be treated like first-class data types. This is a pain when planning to do a lot of date based calculations and operations.
2. sqlite. I just can't drink the flavor aid, here. Sure, I respect the idea that strict data typing in the database is exposing implementation details, but they are implementation details that I find useful sometimes. And maybe I'm just missing something somewhere, but I had to write this to get the number of weeks between two dates:

rtrim(rtrim(round((julianday('now') - julianday(mydate))/7), '0'), '.')

Even though mydate is stored as a date type column, I have to tell it to convert to julian days to do calculations (and that doesn't get into the hours I spent today figuring out that because I wasn't padding my day and month values with leading zeros, they weren't coming back out as dates that I could parse, but I digress.

The round was to try to get the integer value (I wanted truncate, but I couldn't find a native function for that). That worked great until I concatenated that with a string in the query, at which point it added ".0" to the end of all my numbers. That brings me to the two rtrims, to get rid of ".0" but not "0.0".

I mean, maybe I'm just going about things the wrong way. I am new to java, sqlite, and android development, so there is a good chance that I'm just not using the right functions (man with a hammer and all that), but that brings up another irritation. While there is decent documentation for the android platform, the sqlite documentation has been lacking. Basically, at best, it enumerates the functions but leaves a lot of the usage details to the imagination. Not fun when the only sqlite database you're using is running in an emulator that you haven't set up direct access to yet... I guess it would help if I set up sqlite on my machine for syntax testing or if I set up remote access to the database in the emulator... but again, I digress.

Anyway, it's interesting. I find trying to muddle my way through learning the simple stuff in a new language and environment a little frustrating, but I guess there is no avoiding that. So far I have done a few of the google tutorials, which were helpful, and now I'm working on implementing a simple version of an application for blessed_lunatic. It's going well, even if it's a little bit stop-and-go for some bits. Things that I think should be easy, like formatting a date, have been a little time consuming.

(an)droid on verizon, why it gives me hope

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:14:32 GMT

So, blessed_lunatic and I have been discussing cell phones and cell phone plans, which is timed nicely for the release of the droid phone. I just wanted to say that I think it's a big leap for verizon to have an android based phone since, historically, verizon has locked down the mobile phones they sell.

In the past, they have gone so far as to write their own firmware for otherwise standard phones (moto razr, for example) to not only control the look and feel, but to restrict the functionality (like disabling bluetooth object transfers to force people to buy music and ringtones, etc.)

However, they can't do that with android based phones. Sure, they can have specific apps not be available in their app store, but the underlying OS can be replaced or modified which means that they are choosing to be more open.

It also gave me a little thrill when, during The Simpsons, I saw the droiddoes ad that says, "iDon't support open development".

seriously?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:05:38 GMT

So, I was sick last week, but I was on antibiotics. I was mostly feeling better this week, but throughout yesterday I started feeling like my lungs were getting filled up with stuff. It started out subtle, but it got worse throughout the day... by the time I was trying to go to sleep, I couldn't. I've been having trouble sleeping this week, which is unusual.

Anyway, I woke up at least once every hour all night. I got up and tried to do something to help at 3 and 4, but... to no avail. By this morning I was feeling horrible, so I went to a walk-in clinic (my doctor's office didn't have any slots available). Since we were walk-in, it took forever to be seen, and then the service was slow. They tested me for flu (negative) and for strep (which was also done last week, also negative). They agreed that it sounds like I have diminished lung function... and a 102 temp.

I ended up getting a new antibiotic, two shots, a breathing treatment thing (vapor), bloodwork, and I got sent off for an xray. Basically it looks like I may have pneumonia again. Hopefully it won't take me too long to recover. I'm feeling slightly better, but I think that's due to the steroid shot. They said if I don't feel better tomorrow that I should come back.

This pretty much puts the kibosh on the various Halloween plans I had. Bleh.

bleh

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 23:16:34 GMT

Thursday I had a bit of a sore throat. Friday it was much, much worse. I went to the clinic and they said the quick strep test was negative but that I probably still had strep. They gave me some antibiotics and a steroid so I could feel well enough to teach origami at Gallacon today.

That went well, although they had decided to cut it down to a single hour of origami instead of two one hours sessions. Just as well.

Unfortunately for next year's MTAC, Tennessee Game Days is the same weekend as MTAC, so I probably won't be teaching origami at MTAC, given the reception the idea has gotten from the new programming director already.

In other news, if you have any interest in World of Goo and you don't already have it, I would recommend picking up a copy this weekend. They are running a pay-what-you-want special. It's a good little puzzle game and they have versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

blessed_lunatic has been thinking about new phones lately, since her battery won't hold a charge. The current situation is to wait until our contract runs out in the middle of next year and reevaluate our options from scratch, or just stay with Verizon (I hate Verizon) and let them subsidize a new phone early next year in exchange for a new two year contract.

One of my problems with Verizon is that their data plan is overpriced and is per-phone. I'm not willing to play $60/month extra just to have internet access on two phones. That's more than DSL! What a ripoff.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing more information about the droid phone, since it looks fairly interesting. I have to wonder if Verizon is turning over a new leaf in terms of phone openness or if they will try to hamstring the Android OS to keep people in check. I like the add I saw, knocking on what the iPhone doesn't do that droid will do. "iDon't allow open development" was particularly interesting to see on mainstream TV (The Simpsons).

All that said, I still really like my current Palm Centro. Sadly, it's the Last True Palm OS phone ever to be made. That makes me sad in a way, given how many nice programs were available for it. I estimate that it still has more software released for it than the "There's an app for that" iPhone.

I've been meaning to do a one year retrospective on my phone. I'm still very happy with it, even without internet access. I do wish it had wifi, but I can live without that. My most used apps are probably Keyring (password manager) and pFuel (miles per gallon tracker [my average for the last 16,885 miles is 36.92mpg]).

I also use profiles to manager how my phone rings automatically every day. That's one of my favorite under-the-radar apps that I would be sad to go without. (I hate it when someone's phone rings all the time at work and they aren't there to answer it... I don't want to be that guy.)
I also recently started to use TreoLauncher as my app manager and it works quite nicely and it let me add a "Don't Panic" background.

As far as the hardware goes, it has weathered quite well. There are a few places where the paint has scraped off, but on the whole it looks about like new. Thats' much better than can be said for blessed_lunatic's env2, which has the chrome peeling like mad, driving her nuts.

My battery also holds a charge for several days (I don't talk much), which is much better than blessed_lunatic's (we got the phones at the same time). In fact, we just ordered a replacement battery for her phone since it had become totally unreliable. The only battery trouble I can recall having was when I was in Canada, but I think that had to do with the fact that I was roaming so it was trying really hard to find a non-roaming tower, to no avail.

Jaunty upgrade notes

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:10:07 GMT

BackInTime works well, although I wish I could control when it archives things (daily is always at midnight, and my laptop isn't always on at midnight.
The FlashBlock FireFox plugin works now (before it just prevented flash from appearing at all).
VNC on my desktop did stop working correctly after the upgrade. Basically the mouse and keyboard inputs were being sent, but the screen would not update after initially connecting. I eventually found a thread that offered the workaround of running "metacity --replace", which fixed the problem to my satisfaction.
Restoring from suspend/sleep seems to be quite a bit faster on my laptop now.

do something good for your brain: learn to juggle

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:07:37 GMT

Learning to juggle grows brain networks for good (thanks baka_san)

This news doesn't surprise me. In fact, I imagine that most hobbies that require learning distinctly new things contribute to additional brain development, we just don't have research to back it up yet. In any event, it's got to be better than watching TV...

Gallacon: Animanga Festival

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:02:25 GMT

Later this month, the Nashville Public Library is hosting Gallacon: Animanga Festival, basically a small anime and manga festival for teens in the Nashville area. I'm teaching origami as part of it on Saturday, October 24th. (Check out thanks at the end of the link...)

Thoki Yenn models

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:17:32 GMT

These are both models designed by the late, great Thoki Yenn.

This is the dollar bill version of Thoki's Umuliusis Rectangulum. It requires six dollar bills.

And this is Thoki's DNA (double helix), folded from a sheet of A4 paper.