Scratch Paper

Today was our first time at Collet d’Allevard this season.

The snow was wet and getting soupy, at about 6 C when we left.

The girls were skiing with much more confidence than at the beginning of last season.

Last weekend I was in the US, and went to visit family in Asheville, North Carolina.

Went running at the Arboretum where fall colors were still impressive. We also went to see three waterfalls.

Safari still seems the best on the Mac, with Chrome for cross-platform use.

(Click the screenshot to get the full size version.)

With screens seeming to get wider, it surprises me how much extra vertical space many browsers use for the control area. The first impression with IE 8 (not shown) was that they wanted a third of my screen for their ads and other crap.

Next steps are maybe to allow you to hide the control area except on mouseover and to make it sticky with mouseover + click. Maybe that’s already doable, but just not self-evidently obvious to configure. Maybe it’s an awful suggestion.

Sebastien Najjar suggests putting control areas (docks, etc.) down the side of the screen.

This Sunday we went down to the lake for some fishing.

Lots of fall colors.

Unfortunately the fish were not biting much.

(Click for a larger photo. My phone camera’s not great, however.)

Tim’s exchange student from Esslingen was with us from last Monday until this morning. Sebastien – third from left – was very well behaved… a good influence on Timothee in fact.

Now the children have a 9-hour bus ride to return home. We may see Sebastien and his parents again this summer if they come to France for their vacation.

There’s one application on my computer that draws children like flies to honey. Whenever I open it up, I find scores of new pictures and movies.

One of the chief problems we notice with home videoconferencing is that the kids are more interested in their silly faces when they add effects than in actually talking to anyone at the other end.

People my age get lost just browsing around the web. The web is kind of like being in Borges’s infinite library, but instead of the shelves of unintelligible texts you have the equivalent of an endless series of magazines on dentist’s and hairdresser’s coffee tables.

Their generation is going to drop the print out from between the pictures.

View Larger Map

Looks like somebody zeroed in on the recycling bins when they captured the geolocation for Barraux, France.

Got home and played with the UShareSoft.com UShareBuilder, which is a fine way to put together minimal OS images with key extra packages. This one has an old OpenDS 1.2 (not 2.x as I first thought), on CentOS in /usr/local after the image is installed. OpenDS is already set up, just needs to be started and filled with data.

I switched the port to 1389, loaded Example.ldif, and forwarded through from the host where I’m running the image using VBoxManage:

VBoxManage setextradata "OpenDS in CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/OpenDS/Protocol" TCP
VBoxManage setextradata "OpenDS in CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/OpenDS/GuestPort" 1389
VBoxManage setextradata "OpenDS in CentOS" "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/OpenDS/HostPort" 1389

Searching seems to work okay.

marksimac:~ mark$ ldapsearch -x -p 1389 -h localhost -b dc=example,dc=com uid=bjensen

# extended LDIF
#
# LDAPv3
# base <dc=example,dc=com> with scope subtree
# filter: uid=bjensen
# requesting: ALL
#

# bjensen, People, example.com
dn: uid=bjensen,ou=People,dc=example,dc=com
objectClass: person
objectClass: organizationalPerson
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectClass: top
givenName: Barbara
uid: bjensen
cn: Barbara Jensen
cn: Babs Jensen
sn: Jensen
telephoneNumber: +1 408 555 1862
roomNumber: 0209
ou: Product Development
ou: People
l: Cupertino
mail: bjensen@example.com
facsimileTelephoneNumber: +1 408 555 1992

# search result
search: 2
result: 0 Success

# numResponses: 2
# numEntries: 1

My work phone is a Nokia E65, a phone for making calls. Some frills can be useful (camera for snapshotting whiteboards). Other frills are unusable (wireless IP, browser). Overall I would say the design is okay.

One design has me baffled. Could someone please explain to me the use case for the stealth alarm clock feature? (You set the alarm, expecting it to wake you at a time way to early to get up normally. And at the appointed time, the phone screen blinks silently. Ludo says you are supposed to use it to pretend you have a call so you can leave a meeting.)

Maybe the folks designing and developing this one were sleeping through the stealth alarm?

The sound is not quite as rich as the 7 1 setting on the old Ibanez pedal, but GarageBand automatically adjusts the ping pong echo speed in accordance with the tempo. Not sure how to adjust how the adjustment is made. (For example, to double-time the echo.)