_Mark_

Hobbies

2008-04-07T05:31:59Z

p100-4051179
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin

One of the reasons I've stuck with smaller cameras instead of going DSLR is that I've felt that the really interesting pictures are more a result of opportunity than hardware - and having a camera always on hand has more value than the extremes of shooting range.

This shot demonstrates that :-) This juvenile hawk was under an evergreen bush on my front sidewalk; I was eating breakfast and saw a pair of cardinals come screaming out of a bush, saw some movement below, and realized suddenly "that's not a squirrel..."

(I am looking forward to the actual return of spring, but the birds in my yard seem convinced that it's already here :-)

Insert New Hobby Here (alternate title: I CAN HAS BOAT)

2007-10-22T04:09:48Z

I was reminded by catching up with people at the cider party that I haven't updated in rather a while... so:

Finally got ahold of a boat! Just a tiny little one, but it's enough to get me out on the calm bodies of water around here so I can get at the marshes and photograph things that I can't otherwise reach via land. (This will include the Sudbury River, which is often described as "a long narrow lake" by boaters looking for more excitement...) It's nice having an alternate mode of transportation that, including all safety gear, packs easily in the trunk of the Mini :-)

The improved "reach" of the little Olympus has really gotten me to shoot more. Significantly more. As in, about a hundred pictures a day (skewed towards the weekends, but I rarely take fewer than 25 pictures on a random weekday.) Passed the twelve thousand picture mark some time last week...

As usual, MetaCarta is hiring - my second "spinoff" (full time release engineer) is succeeding well enough that I'm spending more than half of my time actually coding now - but we are growing in many other areas, not just "stuff Mark used to do" :-) (And as you can see from flickr I've had my weekends free for rather a long time now...)

road trip! (mmm chocolate)

2007-09-23T03:34:27Z

p1020343
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin

Off to scenic New Hampshire... L. A. Burdick's original cafe/restaurant is in Walpole, NH (where Larry Burdick himself lives and works :-) Then off to a fun Suzanne Vega concert (even if she didn't play my favorite song, she made the fans in the audience pretty happy... sadly, it being a benefit concert, there seemed to be a lot of people who were there because it was the thing to do, and she seemed a little nervous about that. But she still has The Voice :-)

Hiring again!

2007-07-17T03:41:00Z

MetaCarta is growing and needs more engineers! Formal job descriptions are elsewhere, but my version of the details is behind the cut (since posting here has turned up people before...)

We're looking for a test engineer. This is a design and development position - repetition is for machines, humans just aren't that good at it, and we don't have enough of them anyway - you may write frameworks, specialized load generators, and reporting tools, as well as specific tests; we're young enough that you can influence test planning policy and standards. Emphasis is on system test (we ship an appliance, not code) and user-facing feature test. You should be comfortable with python, linux (especially debian), raw html, and http; good time management (because we will drown you otherwise :-) and on-line communications skill (especially finding useful information in engineer-written explanations.)

We're also looking for "general purpose" engineers. Comfort areas should include C++, scripting (we're python-centric, but can help you port from perl if needed), and linux (we're debian-centric, both product and infrastructure); systems experience important, database experience is interesting, good diagnostic skills are a must; familiarity with the legalities of working with both open and closed source software a plus; test development a plus since you will be writing your own test plans, and may be called upon to write tests as well (what engineer isn't? by the very of nature of code, you need more tests than code... it's one of the reasons we're not hiring merely coders :-) and it helps keep the engineers honest about the testing difficulty when they have to consider testing as part of any feature design.) Ability to estimate your own work is also useful (ie. enough experience that you can actually do that).

(Hmm, that's a lot of stuff. The capsule summary is probably "experienced and trying to become more so, obsessive enough to have dug deeply into things before instead of wondering about them, responsible enough to feel guilty when a bug comes in that you could have tested for up front" :-)

We're also looking for additional documentation people, which includes a lot of "figure it out yourself" skills, and ability to clearly explain systems that make the linux commandline look straightforward; also requires LaTeX familiarity (writer-level, not template-designer-ninja.)

Send me email at work if you're interested in any of these; if you include a resume, make it plain text - PDF is ok but will annoy me a little; any other binary format will be discarded unread :-)

European Vacation

2007-07-07T05:14:53Z

I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now...

Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-)

Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I *still* saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting *in* one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.)

Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.)

Birds and Snakes and Airplanes...

2007-05-20T07:35:16Z

New toy - Olympus SP-550UZ. 18x zoom. I'm now a lot closer to "if I can see it I can shoot it" while still having a camera that I can have on me most of the time... only two downsides: xD cards are evil and I've been enjoying it so much that I've been spending time with the camera that I probably should be spending on other things... I tried to read the first few chapters of RESTful Web Services, enjoyed the introduction, got a few pages in to chapter one - and then went for a 3 mile hike in the rain, and found it to be a better choice, simply due to finding this and this in the middle of nowhere. This is more than just new-toy-glow, I'm averaging 80 pictures a day and far more of them make it to flickr than before.

It was definitely worth not waiting for the Canon S5-IS (the announcement of which was why I was open to looking at a larger camera.) I've even changed some of my summer plans to be more photo-oriented (not entirely because of this, but it was a real influence.)

Great Meadows NWR turns out to be a pretty good place to watch planes going into Hanscom (BED) while also observing nature; the Piaggio "pusher" above is probably more unusual and distinctive than most of the critters I saw that day :-)

Even gloomy days can have adventures...

2007-05-04T03:13:38Z

Last weekend, it was raining... and had been raining for a long time... classic gloomy New England winter-isn't-quite-done spring weather (though the last weekend in April is pretty late in the year for this kind of thing.)

Saturday, stayed inside and hacked. Sunday, decided I'd had enough of this, it wasn't raining all that much and I should at least get out and have lunch. Did my usual trip over to Ice House Pond (got some good reflection pictures, a cloudy sky is interesting for that, but nothing exciting.) Couldn't get up the motivation to do one of the farther-away hikes, so I went over to Great Meadows instead, to see if it was less flooded. Turned out it was, and that meant I got pictures of a Blue Heron and some muskrats up close, along with a nesting goose. I think that was pretty successful, for a visit to an otherwise inaccessible park.

On the way home, I realized that there was still some light, and that it was gloomy and wet enough that the Old North Bridge, the biggest non-shopping tourist destination in Concord, would probably be empty, and that the bridge might be good for getting more wildlife pictures (I've seen ducks and turtles there before.) Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly empty and partly flooded. I waited out a brief "real" downpour, and headed in to the park. Lots of flooding, mostly geese in the river, not that many people around so I got some good angles on the bridge itself.

If you look carefully along the left edge of that picture, you'll see a person standing next to the Minuteman Statue. He saw me taking pictures, and walked over with a camcorder on a tripod, and said roughly "I'm shooting a music video - just a little thing to put up on youtube, I'm an aspiring country singer from Boston - could you take some shots of me with this?"

After pointing out that while I knew the equipment, I didn't actually have any real experience shooting video, I took the camera and did some angles, some zooming, some closeups... listening to the singing and the lyrics (mostly the word "despair" :-) he'd certainly chosen a suitable setting for it. I figured at least he'd be able to use some of the guitar-strumming closeups.

Turns out that, behold the power of modern video editing, a fair bit of it turned out to be useful (it's also up on the artists' own site.) Basically the entire section with him walking onto the bridge, up to the four-frame dancing insert (except for the little reflected-goose interlude) was my shooting.

Conclusions:

Depressing and gloomy days can still hold adventures

On days when only crazy people would go out - sometimes you find other interesting crazy people... :-)

Music videos have gotten a lot easier to produce...

Another Month

2007-04-22T07:27:33Z

dscn104-5918
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

The rain finally stopped and we had a perfect day for taking pictures of wildlife (see here, and surrounding pictures over on flickr.)

Work has been busy but much less stressful - we hired a sufficiently experienced release engineer that I've been able to "let go with both hands" and focus on long overdue design projects (a good reminder that I'm actually pretty good at those... if I can focus all of my attention on them; I really can't be doing anything else in parallel...)

Best Recent License Plate: N2D. (Took me about a quarter mile additional driving to realize that it could be NERD in I18N-speak :-)

Best Recent Music: soundtrack to Wicked, especially track 4.
("What is this feeling, so sudden and new...")

Best Recent Scientific Factoid: Canadian Geese exist in sweden, but the entire population is so inbred that DNA testing fails to be able to determine parentage.

Most Surreal Fortune Cookie (royal east, 2007-04-17): "Now is the time to make circles with
mints, do not haste any longer."

Våffeldagen!

2007-03-25T20:25:03Z

Don't forget, today is waffle day!

Mmmm Chocolate

2007-02-20T07:41:37Z

dscn104-4838
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

St. Ek-Chuah's day party went well; the fountain was a huge success, and turns out to be pretty easy to clean up after. Got to meet some new people, and see some old friends I only seem to see at this party, so I'd better keep having it :-)

Best thing to dip in the fountain: Stroopwaffles!
Worst thing to dip in the fountain: sharp cheddar
Most popular non-chocolate item: flex-shaft screwdriver
Most wrong use of chocolate: Hershey's white chocolate "confetti bar"
Biggest culinary oops: forgetting to put the 2lbs of ricotta in the ziti

Sleep would be good now...

Food Geekery

2007-02-17T06:48:42Z

Harold McGee has a weblog!

In his latest post he points out that there's a Google Book Search page for On Food And Cooking which can help find the many references to chocolate without having to thumb through the whole thing (not that that's a bad pastime, of course :-)

Work

2007-01-24T17:44:05Z

The new release engineer didn't work out, so either I need a new minion, or I need to figure out a way for us to do a lot less release engineering. ("custom appliance" isn't a solved problem yet, though it looks like rpath is trying...)

We're also hiring a "content manager", and still need a hardcore-systems "support" person.

Pendulum Clock Calibration?

2007-01-05T04:29:42Z

dscn101-4308
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

Any ideas how to calibrate one of these? This one is gaining at least 10 minutes a day. 8.01 is too long ago for me to remember the relationship between the mass on a pendulum and its period, but that is something that is adjustable here.

(I'm also pondering ways to automate it; right now it needs winding about once a week. But I don't want to modify it significantly...)

Huh, another patent...

2006-12-14T18:43:13Z

Apparently the owner of the wreckage of Arepa managed to flog through the third patent application this spring, so after 6 years, Patent 7,017,188 got issued, with my name on it. I'm pretty sure that was the last of the applications.

Other than the flashbacks from reading the attached drawings (RAFT, ARFSD, Activators... it looks like "Briq" got mangled into "brig" though) there isn't really anything useful to get out of this... other than the anecdotal point that every time I ego-surf a new search engine, I actually learn something, which I really didn't expect this time :-)

More Jobs!

2006-12-14T18:37:33Z

We're still trying to find a support engineer. This is tricky because so many people with support on their resumes are good at regurgitating training and (more usefully) "giving good phone" - our support people need to be able to diagnose complex systems issues, often over the phone (though you've got all the local systems you need to duplicate and root-cause the problem); work closely with engineering; figure out the system from manuals and stories - if you're motivated enough you can put time into *building* training programs, but we don't have formal training yet... customers are actually reasonably sophisticated early-adopter types, but the problems run from network/install issues, integration issues, all the way to linguistic questions. Talk to me directly, or email me at work...

My Next Car

2006-11-29T05:25:41Z

I've mentioned this before, but the Tesla Electric Sportscar has gotten a bunch of new press lately, reaffirming for me that, once they open the New York sales and service office and I can drive one home from there, that I'm getting one.

Paul Boutin (anyone here remember him? Media Lab dude in the late 80's, famous at the time for answering the question "What's the biggest technological challenge of the next decade?" with "There are only seventeen thousand three letter acronyms" :-) got a chance to test drive one, and wrote it up for Slate.

Wired has a Tesla photodismantlement - shots of the motor, batteries, and conventional parts.

An interesting he brings up in the article is shifting - like the electric Wrightspeed X1, there isn't any. The article points out something I'd never really understood before - "shifting" really is a kludge, an artifact not of driving, but of "primitive" internal combustion engines...

Things happen

2006-11-12T01:12:44Z

Missed October, but I have been writing - just not here. I finally got a technical blog together... or rather, turned my README files into blog entries (easier to code around than to change habits, of course :-) The RSS feed is here but there isn't yet a matching HTML page; the individual projects already have their own renderings (and individual feeds, if you only want the Rants page and not the rest of the coding projects.

Update: The RSS feed for everything is probably more interesting than just the python one, though it's still overall a highly technical space.

As part of putting the tech blog together, I realized that I'd actually managed to write code and prose combined at about half the rate expected from NaNoWriMo without particularly trying. There are threshholds of course and technical material is pretty much entirely unlike novel writing, but it does mean that if I ever getting around to writing a technical book, it's not unreasonable to get it started in a few months of spare time. (Not that I particularly want to write a book, though I have gotten a kick out of getting published in the past - but if there's ever (again) something I'm uniquely suited to write, I intend to do so. The time for a kerberos or zephyr book was about 10 years ago, though, and "Startup Infrastructure and Culture Building" is more of a howto or a "hire me to do this on the side while I'm solving hard engineering problems too", and it'll be kind of boring to read unless you're in the middle of putting something together... and most of the tools are changing in real time, especially if you're not paranoid and buy into using lightweight web1.9999 services instead of infrastructure.)

Hmm, I still haven't written up Iceland stories. There's a chance of another (shorter) trip to Iceland (or possibly Stockholm or even Rome) before the end of the year. And then there's this "Interesting python job in Stockholm" note that I just got (but it doesn't sound like short-term consulting so it's not a real option - it's just that usually, when I'm not looking, things like this don't fall in my lap, so it was a bit of a surprise. And one problem with being a "startup specialist" is that Europe (except perhaps for Ireland?) is startup-hostile, even with other reasons to spend time there.) Two words: "tiramisu shake" :-)

Derailment avoided

2006-09-19T05:53:09Z

I stumbled across this job description a week or two back. Firmware Engineer at Tesla Motors. My first thought was "ok, they're trying to be hip and advertise to joel's readership, that's kind of cool". Then I read the details...

You wouldn't know it from my current resume, but between my hobbies, my embedded work at Cygnus, and the deeper parts of my development upbringing (summary: when you start coding on an IMSAI front panel, anything higher level feels easy :-) I'm actually qualified for this job. Realizing this startled me. I'm sure that they'll have better candidates, of course, from people who actually do this for their careers... but I do interview well and if they're looking for enthusiasm too I might have a chance...

"The successful candidate will split their time between the auto shop and the office. Testing involves driving an electric sports car." That sounds like a huge amount of fun :-)

Of course, my current job is

interesting and challenging
filled with interesting people
makes a difference, potentially at world-scale
well-aligned with what I'm demonstrably good at
actually in New England

I think five years ago I'd have taken it, though...

One could however argue that electric sports cars lead to electric mundane cars and trucks, which leads to vast reductions in foreign oil dependency, which leads to a reduction in terrorism (or at least enables telling the middle east to sod off, which works as a first approximation) which makes it important in the longer run, while being mostly fun in the present. And it's not like California lacks interesting people (Tesla is right off El Camino in San Carlos, a little north of Palo Alto...)

In the end, I settled for writing a cover letter (and not sending it), and eagerly awaiting the car actually showing up on the market (unlike the T-zero which never really made it out of prototype and technology demonstrator mode.) I did also check on linkedin to see if I had any introduction shortcuts, and did, via an obvious-only-in-retrospect path.

So no major life derailment today! I'm sure this leads to an interesting mix of "aww" and "whew" reactions from the people in my life :-)

update 2006-09-27: The posting is gone; last I looked it had had over 1000 hits so I'm sure they filled it...

"There was supposed to be moon-shattering kaboom!"

2006-08-29T22:37:57Z

This weekend (currently late saturday night, but there's still a 7 hour window...)

http://www.zone-vx.com/alpo-smartimpact.html

http://slrea-smart1lunar-impact-project-ing.blogspot.com/

The SMART-1 solar-powered ion-engine probe ran out of Xenon (reaction mass) a while back, and completed its primary mission (engine demo :-)

Since it was going to impact the moon anyway, they've used the remaining hydrazine in the navigational thrusters to adjust its terminal orbit - so it will impact in a known place, throwing up a mass of dust that *should* be visible from earth... the second url has "where to look" details.

(I'm going to try to lashup my new camera to the telescope and do some practice shots later this week, but it's too cloudy tonight...)

Breaking Interplanetary News

2006-08-24T22:32:04Z

dscn110-1998
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

PLUTO REFUSES TO ABIDE BY IAU RESOLUTION;

U.S. MAY INITIATE SANCTIONS

(Just had to make sure people saw that :-) I'm still behind on posting iceland stories and stockholm stories...)

I'm baaack

2006-08-21T04:45:10Z

dscn112-2685
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

Lots of writeups to follow - for that matter, lots of pictures not yet sent to flickr, though a reasonable set of highlights are there.

Icelandair gets major points for Not Being Stupid in these trying times. I still want a transatlantic-capable yacht, though.

Waterfall!

2006-07-31T05:34:46Z

dscn103-1053
Originally uploaded by Mark Eichin.

Finally got to spend some time around a real waterfall, to get over the disappointment that "Danforth Falls" was. (It turns out that my reference for "standard waterfall", Kent Falls in Kent, CT, is the most impressive waterfall in the entire state, and probably outdoes everything in MA as well...)

More Cars...

2006-07-26T03:26:15Z

An electric-motor manufacturer has build a high performance Hybrid Mini Cooper - the QED (Quad Electric Drive), 65-80mpg on fuel, up to four hours on battery (70Ah 300V LiPoly, plus an 11Farad ultracapacitor) - does regenerative braking, 600-900 miles range, 150mph top speed (which is a good trick given that it is a motor per wheel and no gearing...) It is wall-chargable as well. Not a product line, but they are entertaining offers to build more...

On the SmartCar front, someone Greece built a SmartCar for the US market - by upgrading it to a V6 diesel and chassis from a Unimog, monster tires (2ft ground clearance), and otherwise offroading it, calling it the forFun2...

And back in the pure electric side of things, remember the Corbin Sparrow (popularly resurrected in the second Austin Powers movie)? Three wheeled motorcycle-licensed one-person vehicle, looks like a deformed jelly bean, two wheels in the front, went under a few years back... Turns out that you can actually buy an electric version called the NMG-1 ("No More Gas".) Only 30 miles range, 70mph - probably makes it an acceptable city runabout, actually....

Cameras, again

2006-07-24T02:05:34Z

So the Nikon Coolpix S4 lasted 2 months, almost exactly. It appears that the aperture (iris) is stuck at "pinhole" - not all the way shut, so it's been possible to take some pictures with second-long exposures, in daylight - not, in practice, actually useful.

I've asked around on dpreview in particular, to see if there are suggestions; this camera was the only one that came close to what I wanted (the only compromises were size and lens-ring, and having the 10x lens made the latter OK, as you can probably see from some of the pictures I've gotten out of it) but if it's this fragile, I'm not sure I want a second one.

One alternative (only 5x zoom, but "pistol grip" style) is the Sanyo Xacti CA6 which is about the same size, and can shoot 6MP stills while shooting video. However, it doesn't ship until some time in August, and I'll already be out of the country again...

edit 2006-07-25: gave in and got a second one, which I will treat more carefully, while looking into warranty and repair options for the first one. Turns out that taking pictures is important to me after all...

Electric Cars

2006-07-21T03:15:44Z

It looks like DaimlerChrysler is showing off a SmartCart fourTwoEV this week in London, for corporate pool lease only.

Tesla Motors, the Google-founder-backed electric sports car company, is actually showing off their Roadster - 0-60 in 4s, 250 mile range, "real car features" (not a stripped down shell like the ACPropulsion T-Zero, but using ACPropulsion's best-of-breed power control circuitry), convertible, built by Lotus, apparently priced somewhere between $80k and $150k.

The latter is... fascinating. Droolworthy, even. They're opening the New York sales and service center in late 2007, apparently, but you can get a look at them in California already.