I dream of rain

That said, I suspect this bag will outlast the mount holding it to the ceiling.

I struggled with a caption for this one. This is the best of the worst.

    My wish before forfit
    Would be to thank you
    For smiling for me too,
    When even my smile was broken.

From Broken Smile

Faced with no getting-my-hands-dirty offline projects today, I decided to spend some time on various F/OSS projects that I've neglected as of late.

The morning started with a flurry CW1200 driver hacking; this time focusing on simplifying its interrupt handling. In the process I eliminated two more compile options and three bus-level virtual functions. As nice as it is to write code, it's even nicer when you delete it without any loss of functionality!

After that, I put my money where my mough was and wrote a systemd unit file for Photo Organizer's background workers. For years I've been using screen and a sudo-driven cmdline to fire them off, because I could never come up with a reliable (and portable) init script to do the trick. No longer. As an aside, systemd is brilliantly put together and worlds beyond anything that's come before. It JustWorks(tm).

Then I pulled out my notes and turned my attention to Gutenprint. The Kodak 1400's unexpected complications derailed my plans a bit, but there were still three related printers whose spool formats I'd decoded -- The Kodak 8500, the Mitsubishi CP3020D/DU/DE, and the Mitsubishi CP3020DA/DAE. They are now all supported by Gutenprint, and awaiting testing. The latter two are the ones I'm most concerned with, as I took a few liberties with the spool format.

Basically, the Mitsubishi-branded printers don't spool the data linearly into the printer; they basically write the color-interleaved data in backward chunks. Consequently, the printer can't start printing until all the data is received. To simplify things, I'm sending the data linearly in one big chunk. Hopefully it will work. We'll find out.

On that note, if there's someone out there with one or more of these printers, care to help out? Either by doing some test prints for me, or better yet, sending me the printers? :)

... and the day is far from over.

Wow, an actual outdoor shot for a change!

I've been really struggling lately with this daily photo thing. A good part of that is that I've been sick since the new year, but I've also had plenty of other things going on that keep me out of the creative mindset.

my heart swells at the prospect of being desired by someone desireable

It's the least impressive business end of my collection, but it is the most photogenic..

I managed to repeat #130/131. That last image should have been #138.

Oh, for a proper CMS.

These are part of the notes I took when reverse-engineering the communications protocol for the Kodak 1400 printer.

Computation notebooks make me happy.

Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:49:36 -0500 From: Jay Ronkonkoma <3ncryption1@gmail.com> To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: Thank You for your hard work

I'm a big fan of your work on Wireshark. I was wondering what else you had going on, what you were doing that was new, anything I could read would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if you have the time and inclination. please mail a postcard to my daughter Amanda. She would love to get a little post card from you. she is now 7 going on 15 if you know what I mean. I would appreciate it, and I know she would love it. If you don't I appreciate your time

Amanda Elia [[ address snipped ]] Ronkonkoma, NY 11779

Humbly,

Jay Elia

I can't help but think this a soliticitation for highly illegal activities, if you know what I mean.

It's also been something like six years since my last contribution to Wireshark, so it would seem someone's busy harvesting addresses from old commit logs or somesuch.

EDIT: I've reported this email to google via gmail's abuse form. Going to pass this on to the feds too, once I figure out how to do that.

EDIT2: I've reported this to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's hotline.

EDIT3: Many others have also received this email.

Continuing with my usual pattern, the shot I likes the most of this set was one of the accidents. The lighting is off, but the composition is bang on.

This is one of my reading stacks -- The papers on top are the Google Big Three (MapReduce/GFS/BigTable) papers. There are three other stacks on my desk -- one consisting mostly of photograpic greats, one of pure fiction, and a few reference texts on Computational Theory. Then there's the SF & Horror anthologies on on my Nook and the audiobooks queued up for driving. Oh, and the otherwise useless Laurell K. Hamilton book that elevates my monitor by a few inches.

As Thomas Jefferson so eloquently stated, "I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object."

This is why my shelves are creaking under the weight of ever more reference tomes. Even in this age of the internet, it's hard to argue with a the qualities of a well-edited pile of dead tree.

The visual design books have been responsible for the incremental improvements I've been making to my web presence and the eventual guerilla action on my employer's document templates. The computational theory books (and research papers) are loosely work-related. The photography books are for inspiration and technical know-how. The network books are so I can read up on the nitty-gritty details about IPv6 and to re-acquaint myself with the general state-of-the art.

Meanwhile, the fiction is to keep my brain from melting down from all this serious stuff and to remind me that there are worlds outside of my own.

...And Laurell K. Hamilton's books do indeed have a use. Well, two if you include kindling.

Nathan and I took my roommate's daughter out to the range. It was her first time firing anything other than an airsoft rifle, and her technique improved considerably over the course of the morning.

She's shooting my SR-22 here.

About a week ago a massive box was left on my doorstep containing a lightly-used Kodak 1400 large-format dye-sublimation printer. Lightly used to the grand total of a whopping 72 prints, according to the self-test page.

Unfortunately, my elation turned sour when I discovered that I couldn't just dump the raw spool file to the printer. Firing up a USB sniffer under WinXP, I discovered that the to-the-printer protocol bore little resemblance to the spool file -- even the image data itself used a different format. To top it all off, the printer needed intelligent buffering.

So, armed with the USB sniffer output, I heavily modified the spooler I wrote for the Canon SELPHY printers. Last night, I achieved success, and succesfully printed the WinXP test page I'd previously generated, but also an image printed using gutenprint.

The Kodak 805 printer that replaced this one probably needs a similar treatment (given that it uses the same spool file format) but unless someone sends me a printer (or cash) I won't be able to test that theory out.

I still have to generate another couple of test prints under WinXP to decode two remaining protocol options, but other than that, the Kodak 1400 printer is now usable under Linux!

Oh, this is the first image I printed on this thing via Gutenprint. I wish I could say it was something I took.

Did an OS upgrade on the laptop, which seems to have broken something in the bowels of nanoblogger, screwing up the calendar. I'll figure that out tomorrow..

Roommate's cat is looking a little less cracked out than usual.

It's also the only photo I shot today. Yay for filler. Not yay for massive allergy flareups.

I don't know how "microbatch" this stuff is when you can get it at Wally World now. Still, it's damn good stuff; I've used it off and on for more than a decade, usually by spiking other hot sauces!

Tonight I took apart two new so-called Kwikset SmartKey locks after I managed to screw them up in the re-keying process. I manually re-keyed them, and successfully got them back together. Unfortunately, I realized they'd have made for a great photo or three after I'd already put everything back together again..

So I took a photo of the one tool tool I used in the process. Nowhere near as interesting, I know..

Didn't accomplish what I set out to do, but it turned out rather interesting nonetheless.

There's probably all of $1.25 worth of ammunition in this shot.

Apparently I'm in hers.

Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.

-- Leo Tolstoy

For reasons known only to her, my roommate did a lot of prep work for tonight's meal while cuffed. Well, that's not quite true. She ended up doing the work cuffed because she wasn't able to get out of them like she thought. And I'll leave the rest of that thought train as an exercise to the reader.

The funny thing is that she was far calmer and collected when cuffed; she's normally rather harried in the kitchen -- she normally makes me nervous.

Nathan and I eventually stopped laughing long enough to remove the cuffs (post-bacon), after which I got busy making (very dirty) mashed potatoes and broccoli.

Dinner was lovely, but they are following it up with a game of Monotony, whoops, Monopooly, which I wanted no part of.

This morning, I submitted the third pass at the CW1200 WLAN driver to the linux-wireless list. The changelog is too long to list here, but the bulk of the changes were teased from a code dump that Sony released. It seems they went through much the same pain as I did, and of course none of the changes made it upstream.

Aside from the Sony changes, the single biggest change was a rebalancing of the tx/rx handling, so that it's now considerably fairer. Of course, there was the usual pile of small changes, including a fix for an OOPS triggered by the broken IBSS code. It's still broken, but at least it's not crashing anything now.

We'll see where v3 goes. Hopefully merged into linux-next, or barring that some meaningful feedback on what I need to do next.

In other news, Before the new year I added support to Gutenprint for the Kodak 9810 dyseub printer. None of the code's been committed yet, but there's no real rush. I'm now waiting on a Kodak 1400 printer to show up -- Once I've verified my core gutenprint changes are sound and that printer works, I'll commit everything, marking the untested models as experimental.

Then I'll tackle the Kodak 8500 and the Mitsubishi CP3020D/CP3020DA, not that I'll be able to test those either.. Afterwards, I'll see about the more modern Mitsubishi printers if I'm feeling so inclined.

I really need to start getting rid of this pile of Canon dyseub printers. Maybe four, instead of twelve. At least the incoming Kodak 1400 is a large-format model!

Taken at one of my happy places; a park just under a mile from my house.

This pond is feeling the effects of our low rainfall; what water is left is rapidly getting chocked with plants. On the other hand, the wood storks love this sort of muck, but once the scumm chokes off the light and oxygen, there won't be anything for the storks to eat.

I squeeed when I found out this observatory was located in Puerto Rico; For some reason I'd thought it was somewhere in South America. I found out from my placemat while waiting on what turned out to be a delicious slab of fried red snapper at a random seafood joint just south of Aguadilla along PR115.

At this point I had little idea what to do the next day (ie New Year's Eve) so it was easy enough to proclaim "I know what I'm doing in the morning!" As an added bonus, the drives to (and especially from) the observatory took me through some very fun roads indeed.

On my way back down to the vistor's parking lot, the little refreshment kisosk had Adele belting out the theme song to Skyfall as I passed. It was almost perfect, but I suppose Tina Turner's out of vogue these days.

It's not much to look at here, but the actual image is some fourteen times larger, at 14320x1705. It's taken from the tip of the Cabo Rojo peninsula on the extreme southwestern tip of Puerto Rico.

Anyone want a print?

Yeah, I forgot to stick a memory card back in the camera.

Bad Solomon.

I found this small hunk of granite in the sand on a beach near Rincon, Puerto Rico.

One of the tasks I got up to during my recent "vacation" was the first real hacking on the code powering my photo site in more than a year. This time, the changes are mostly cosmetic in nature. I've been removing javascript/DOM hacks in favor of CSS3 to style the buttons, checkboxes/selections.

The result is far simpler markup and faster page loads because there's no javascript rewriting the page on the fly. In fact, the only javascript present now is the code that inverts the image selection, and even that's far simpler because it just walks the list of checkboxes and toggles them.

I'm also giving attention to the layout and especially element spacing; trying to generally improve the intangible "feel" of the site through subtle tweaks that make things much more visually pleasing.

The goal here is to clean out as much legacy cruft as possible, so I can more easily make more complex (but necessary) UI changes. There are still too many tables used for layout/formatting; I'll be trying to eliminate those next.

I'm back to working on this thing for my sake, solving my own needs, making it into something I want to keep on using, and I must say it's a nice change. Yay for (useful) productivity!

This shot was an accident, but I liked it more than any of the others from this set, which didn't turn out so well. Actually they were downright lousy. C'est la vie.

Still, it's a sound idea, even if I didn't have the means (and/or skill) to execute upon it properly.

In other news, I've now been doing this daily photo thing for four months. I'm a third of the way through the year!

Back in September, I mounted a weather station to my house. It's now on its fourth set of batteries in as many months, a far cry from the claimed two-year *minimum* they're supposed to last.

The first set was an old (albeit unused) pair of Duracell Alkalines; the second was a new pair of Rayovac Alkaines, the third set was a pair of Energizer Advacned Lithiums, and the fourth set is another pair of the same.

The Lithiums lasted less than three weeks, when they're actually recommended by the manufacturer as the longest-lasting type to use.

We'll see how long this latest pair lasts.

I cleaned everyone else out in this game of Rummikub, with a nearly 200 point lead.

And I'm now finally caught up! Just need today's..

Still been sick. Saw this on the way home from work. Just seemed.. sad.

A bit of brain coral I found on a beach in Puerto Rico.

On the third night of my trip, I discovered a live .45ACP round in the bottom of my backpack. The backpack I carried onto the plane. The backpack that was screened by the TSA in Orlando.

Needless to say, I disposed of it before my return flight.

Watching this sunrise was the main reason for my random trip to Puerto Rico. This shot was taken from a little park next to Fajardo's ferry dock.

I wonder where I'll see my next year's sunrise?

Leaving the Aricibo Radio Observatory, I took a decidedly less direct route back through the mountains. It was a much prettier (not to mention considerably more spirited) drive. There weren't many places to safely stop, what with the blind corners and sheer dropoffs. I pulled into someone's driveway for this shot..

Punta Higuero is considered one of the finest surfing spots in the Caribbean. I hung out at the lighthouse park for a while, watching surfers do their thing off the shore of postcard-perfect beaches.

This lake was nestled in a valley at the end of a twisty curvy road that took me out of El Yunque National Forest.

I spent my first night in Fajardo, on the northeastern corner of the island. This was the view from my hotel room's balcony after I'd checked in.

Trying to find a place to stay that night made me realize how optimistic I'd been with my (lack of) trip planning, especially my desire to stay away from the major touristic areas.

Still, it set the tone for the days to come -- I never had more than half a day planned ahead of time, and often less than that. And through my circumnavigation of the island (mostly on back roads) I got to see more than I'd ever expected.

While waiting for a much-delayed flight back home, I picked up some sort of bug in the airport. It's left me rather blah. Combined that with a more frustrating than usual day at work... I'm feeling quite fried.

I'll catch up this weekend. Plenty of daily photo fodder, never fear.