_Mark_
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Below are the 15 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:
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03:11 am
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Continuing adventures
Since our last episode, I've upgraded cameras again - Canon finally came out with a 20x superzoom, and even after using the SP-550UZ and SP-570UZ for over a year, I'm still happier with the Canon UI. Also, Canon's autofocus algorithms work much better for me (I've gotten far more bird-in-tree shots without needing to resort to manual focus... only the catbird, and sometimes the cardinal, linger long enough for that to be worth the trouble :-)
More recently, that's gotten my shots of my first eagle (and eagle kit)  and closer to home, first moorhen and close shots of a tree swallow. (the latter was accessible because I'm still going out in  the Airis Kayak.)
I haven't entirely neglected my traditional hobbies - spent an afternoon touring the  Taza Chocolate factory in Somerville ("over by the junkyards and car shops" :-)
Went to Pycon in Chicago again this spring, but it looks like I didn't get around to posting those pictures; shooting 45 pictures/day (since 1 January - 55/day since 1 April, weather matters though the birdfeeders really helped this winter) it's sometimes difficult to keep up with the tagging - though maybe I have enough data to build a bird-recognizer now. (Working "near" NLP gives me a new appreciation for what computational modelling can do - heck, my camera can identify multiple human faces in a picture, and iPhoto (which I can't actually use) can match them... so it should be at least possible to do at the level of "hmm, you've got 300 heron pictures here, I bet this is another one"...)
Speaking of work, MetaCarta is still around; we've even got an open req (in Marketing, not engineering, sorry) and recent funding (as well as, of course, actual customers :-) Poking around on LinkedIn (while setting up my Google Profile) reminds me that I've been on this project for over 7 years now, which is an unusual level of attention span for me :-)
Tags: birds, chocolate, metacarta, photography, picture, scenery, travel, work
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01:18 am
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Derailment avoided
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...
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: car, hacking, work
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09:05 pm
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busy busy busy
Gee, I haven't posted in over a month. Time to fix that. As an excuse, work has been both captivating and busy, we've brought some cool new people on board, but there are some things we're still looking for. There's a particularly hard-to-fill windows/linux crossbreed position, which includes security responsibilities; we're also starting to look for someone who can take over my release engineering responsibilities, because they're a lot more well-defined than they used to be, and I'm getting some advanced research projects put on my plate (we're still working out the details of that one, but if Debian! Releng/sysadmin! scripting! Shipping Products! Attention to Detail! gets your attention, get in touch with me at work...)Got another chance to go to Magic Wings, which is less overwhelming when it isn't summer time, but is still impressive. (Probably still better to go on sunny days than cloudy ones, though.) The picture here is some random butterfly perched on the exit sign...
Tags: butterflies, metacarta, picture, work
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04:22 am
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"The highways and byways of the land..."
The month has been busy - not just with work (though it has been - and we're hiring again, will post jobs shortly) but with other parts of life. I've done more exploring in the last month than in the last two years, the convertible is both *way* cooler than I'd imagined it would be, it's also makes for a very relaxing ride - so I'm in better shape when I get to work and when I get home, and I actually look forward to the driving, and have done more exploration just because getting there would be fun. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a 60's era movie, just driving around and seeing the scenery because I can. Driving to Nova Scotia for a wedding was quite an adventure, as well as a beautiful event, and I want them to start running Catferry service to Hawaii and Europe too. Driving to Rockport (see the attached picture) was much calmer but also quite pleasant. I'm working on a list of further trips...
On the techie side, yes, codemonth is coming, as is IAP after that. I haven't sat down to play with Django yet, but the more I read the more impressed I get. Jam (from Perforce) is a very cool make and/or build-script replacement, now that I've finally clicked with it. I also haven't found a laptop that inspires me and that I can actually *get*, the IBM tablet has doubled in shipping time, a replacement mac from the current crop would be boring, and the Flybook is a bit risky as a linux platform.
The New Orleans disaster is kind of sad... I've been to New Orleans, and saw enough of the French Quarter to find it interesting - and now it's pretty much gone. It might be that it was exciting because it was ephemeral, but while hurricane risk has been present and real for a long time, it was a lot more ignorable than, for example, the Cold War, and I don't think it actually had that strong an influence. Ah well. At least it's a reminder to see things "now".
Tags: hacking, picture, travel, work
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05:57 pm
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Ergonomics Again
Another upgrade to a place I spend a lot of time seated...
Tags: car, picture, travel, work
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07:08 pm
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New Office!
While I was in Sweden, my office moved out from under me (this has happenned 3 times now :-) Only by about 5 blocks; now I have a view looking down on the central square fire station, which should add photo opportunities...
Tags: metacarta, picture, work
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05:19 pm
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New Toys All Around
So, a major debian release (which means more work for me, but it's already on the schedule :-), a major direction change for Apple (though the only "real" new toy out of that is the 3.6ghz P4 dev kit, not, say, a laptop) (and yes, my iPod (!) played the song listed above on my drive in, entirely at random :-) And Lenovo (the company that actually *makes* all of the ThinkPad laptops, and now owns the name too) had a webcast demo today of the ThinkPad X41 Tablet, probably the least-secret new-product ever, the FCC pictures have been out for months... and without a new mac laptop around the corner, the X41/Tablet and the upgraded FlyBook tablet-with-everything are both turning my head...
Current Mood:  amused
Current Music: "All about the Pentiums" - Weird Al Yankovic
Tags: debian, mac, metacarta, work
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12:18 pm
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Procrastination
So I took a day off from work to catch up on things (housecleaning, paperwork, wedding invitations, Mother's Day cards, that sort of thing...) and ended up doing some work-related hacking on our build system (we just switched over to Subversion, and are still shaking out some of the CVS dependencies.)
Combining that observation with a quote from Jesse's bio (I won't spoil it, you'll have to wait for the book :-) and some of the GTD stuff, and letting it rattle around for a bit, I realize that something in common with "hacker types" *isn't* that we don't procrastinate. If anything, we're worse about it. It's just that we procrastinate by doing things that other people would call "work"...
Current Mood: bemused
Tags: work
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03:30 pm
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Jobs!
Update 2005-03-11: We've hired some of these, but go to the MetaCarta web site for current descriptions anyway, we're certainly continuing to hire!
We've finally nailed down a bunch of job descriptions for engineering hires. Full descriptions inside lj-cuts.
( System Validation Developer )
( DB Engineer/Data Librarian )
( Linux/C++/Python/Java Developers )
( Windows/Linux Engineer )
( CMS Integration Engineer )
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: "Chain Gang" - The Pretenders
Tags: metacarta, work
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12:18 am
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Automation! (work related)
I just came across Pragmatic Project Automation, a book that both explains and justifies the rather aggressive build/release automation I do at work. I've taken this approach because I don't have *time* (or attention span) to do these repetitive jobs by hand, and really do believe that the based way to get something done the same way twice, reliably, is to have the computer do it... to the point that I have a "big-red-button" script that
- Checks out the current source tree in a reproducible way
- builds it into packages
- makes an install DVD from the packages
- loopback-mounts the ISO and exports it for net-install</ii>
- drives a keyAT serial-to-ps2 frob to reboot a machine and request that it PXE boot/install itself
- waits for it to come back up and runs the short version of our automated test harness
- summarizes the build failures
And as I write this I'm working on making it post the summary directly - I've been reading it an manually annotating it, but this gets it to other people's attention faster. Sound a little obsessive? (No, sounds a *lot* obsessive Yeah, yeah.) And I haven't even hooked in the KVM switch that'll let me take over the entire inventory of systems. What excites me about the book is primarily that it says "This is a good thing, and here's how to do more of it" - not that anyone's been dubious, of course - and secondarily that it comes up with *names* for the different aspects of what I'm doing already.
Now I just need to find someone else who takes it so completely to heart, is enthused about it, and has the skills to execute on it (ideally, advanced python fu, but *I've* only been doing python for 2 years, the reasoning and problem solving is much more important... ) and hire them. With the right associated skills, I could hire them immediately (because the open reqs are for other more specific needs) but for this alone, probably after the first of the year...
Current Mood: vindicated
Tags: metacarta, work
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06:52 pm
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"Take a cookie when they're passed"
The title comes from an essay about the founding/funding of Excite in the weblog of one of the founders. It's a more active way of saying "opportunity begets opportunity", or even "bias for action", but with better use of underlying meaning - if you visualize it, you think about passing them on/sharing, that cookies are good (it's not "take a brussel sprout" after all :-) things like that. It resonated well with me, about how actually pursuing things that fall into my lap (which I think contributes significantly to where I am today) is different from "not having any attention span to speak of".
mmmm, cookies.
Current Mood: thoughtful
Tags: meme, work
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12:27 am
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Grinding to a halt - a tale of laptop woe
There's something about Mondays.
Monday evening. Not much going on, dropped a friend off at the airport, had dinner, things are generally quiet. I've been "catching up" on a lot of my electronic lists and todos; went through a few hundred items from the first year of the current job, most of which were either fixed or no longer relevant, but got a good pile of questions to hunt down out of it. Caught up on a bunch of my reading (Robin Williams' "design for non-designers" is excellent, even if I'm embarassed to admit that one of the business card designs on the "don't do this, haven't you learned anything yet?" pages is almost exactly like the ones I designed for myself 7 or 8 years back), got 2/3 of the way through Dive Into Python (great book if you're already a programmer and want to read and/or fix someone else's code in a hurry. Beginners or the otherwise less brave may go splat, though: none of this "hello world" crap, the first example is a database client!) and decided to watch some videos of Chuck Moore's talks.
( More rambling... )
Current Mood: disrupted
Tags: code, mac, robots, social, work
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11:20 pm
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Reading
Powell's is running an essay contest. 300-750 words on What was your most memorable reading experience of the last ten years?
Ignoring the details of the contest, and focussing on the question, I read not quite as much as I'd like, yet more than most - and thus have a variety of memorable reading experiences. Breaking them down into categories,
Fiction - Cordelia's Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold. One of those casual pickups that drove me to - almost obsessively - hunt down everything else she's written, and not just in that world... the turns of phrase, the heroism, the nobility, the sense of great gifts requiring great usage. And on top of that it's fun space opera :-)
Technical - The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin. One of those "everything you know is wrong" books, comforting in that it both showed why some interfaces really are painful, and rational (not mystical!) ways to get on the right track. I have a reputation for building "interfaces that kill people" - the most extreme case involved a bug tracking system that convinced the company to spend thousands of dollars on Segue. Now I have the tools to identify what parts of that design were bad, and that's enough to make progress.
Online (yes, in fact, most of my reading material glows, and I'm actually absorbing words for more than 2/3 of my waking hours) the comments from various people on my Europython trip notes - which provided encouragement for me to do it again, and thus travel more...
Unsurprisingly, these are relatively recent - my reading has narrowed over time, and a 10 year window doesn't include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, or *shudder* Tale of Two Cities. (Memorable experiences aren't necessarily *good* ones....) For that matter, my reading of a particularly distinctive copy of Kahn's The Codebreakers was almost 15 years ago.
I'm not even reading Dive Into Python for inspiration - mostly for review, to decide if I'm going to hit other people on the head with it - though if I do ever write a book like this, I'm going to consider the approach: starting "hard" seems like it has potential for *efficient* teaching, if not particularly the friendliest style.
Tags: meme, python, work
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02:52 am
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Historical People
Just read that Brian Reid (bio) of alt.* and usenet-maps and Scribe, back-in-the-day, just got fired by Google (he was director of operations) and is now bringing an age discrimination suit.
When I read this, I was mostly surprised (and did some web searching to confirm) that it was the *same* Brian Reid, but the world really is that small. And google is "young", quoting the forbes article::
Just 2 percent of Google's roughly 1,900 employees are over 40 years old, according to the suit. The average age of Google's male workers was 29.7 years old and the average age of women was 28.4 years old when Reid left.
Tags: work
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06:12 pm
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Ooh, another patent...
(I'm also on Patent 6,374,402, which was issued in April 2002, the same week that the remnant of Arepa laid off the last batch of people...)
United States Patent 6,763,370
Schmeidler , et al. -- July 13, 2004
Method and apparatus for content protection in a secure content delivery system
Abstract
A system for secure delivery of on-demand content over broadband access networks utilizes of servers and security mechanisms to prevent client processes from accessing and executing content without authorization. A plurality of encrypted titles are stored on a content server coupled to the network. An access server also coupled to the network contains the network addresses of the titles and various keying and authorization data necessary to decrypt and execute a title. A client application executing on a user's local computer system is required to retrieve the address, keying and authorization data from the access server before retrieving a title from the content server and enabling execution of the title on a user's local computer system.
Inventors: Schmeidler; Yonah (Cambridge, MA); Atkins; Derek (Somerville, MA); Eichin; Mark W. (Somerville, MA); Rostcheck; David J. (Arlington, MA)
Assignee: Softricity, Inc. (Boston, MA)
Tags: work
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eichin's journal
