The Geekess

My new blog is now live at http://sarah.thesharps.us. Comments are enabled, and you can add the RSS feed at http://sarah.thesharps.us//index.rss.

neurophyre, care to make a syndicated feed? I personally like my new blog's layout better, but if my friends still want to track me through LJ, they're welcome to.

I've been slightly side-tracked from my quest to host my own blog by the search for a good calendar and todo list application. It is still sort of relevant, because I'd like to embed my calendar in my blog. It's really useful to point family members to a web calendar and say, "You pick a free night for us to have dinner."

My current setup is just not working. I've been keeping my todo list and events in a plain text file in a git repository. I usually only check the file when I'm adding a new task or event. This means I'm suddenly faced with the mountain of undone tasks during a (usually) stressful moment. It's no wonder I've slowly started avoiding looking at that file at all. I need something pretty that I can bear to look at every morning.

I'd like to have a nice GUI to display my calendar and todo list, and a way to do offline edits for both. A way to publish my calendar on the web and keep some events private is a must.

I've found a partial solution with Google Calendar + Sunbird + GCalDaemon + Remember the Milk. As of today, I can view and edit my Google Calendar with Sunbird, and I can view my Remember the Milk (RTM) todo lists in Sunbird. The only thing lacking is the support to edit my RTM todo lists in Sunbird, both online and offline.

Screenshots of the integrated goodness:



Having separate work and personal todo lists is wonderful because I can hide the tasks by unclicking the RTM calendar that they're associated with. Now I won't think about putting out the garbage when I really should be figuring out how to use the signing-party package to sign Matthew Wilcox and James Perkins' GPG keys.



The public side of my Google Calendar can be found via html here or via ical here. Please don't stalk me.

( Technical details )

Remaining improvements
The only thing that is less than ideal in this entire setup is not being able to edit my task list in Sunbird. GCalDaemon has an open syncing API, and Remember the Milk has an open web API. The only thing that needs to be done is put the two together. People have been talking about this since January 2008, but no one has done it, as far as I can tell. Fixing this involves Java and web API, which is the only reason I'm not jumping right into hacking it together.

I'll try the RTM web interface and see how awful it is to use two programs to edit my tasks. I might even try the Gnome-based RTM editor (as long as I don't have to switch to Gnome from KDE). I'll let you know how it works out in a couple weeks. Hopefully this combination of software will make me more productive, and less likely to worry about my todo list.

Livejournal's recent decision to stop offering Ad-free blogs to new users has only made me more confident in my decision to switch to hosting my own blog.

I asked around about blogging software at the last planning meeting for the Linux Plumber's Student mini-conference. Jen (Andy Grover's wife) had just done some blogging consulting. She said she hates Drupal because it's too bloated and hard to install, and she also didn't like Wordpress for various reasons. She recommended I look at Six Apart's Movable Type and PyBlosxom, which is written in Python. I'm leaning away from Movable Type because it's not free as in beer. Plus I'd like to get as far away from livejournal and six apart as possible.

This morning I briefly looked at PyBlosxom. My first instinct was to find blogs that use PyBlosxom and see if they were totally ugly. The PyBlosxom website has a list of blogs that use PyBlosxom, so I perused that. There was the normal mix of simple, cluttered, and crazy layouts, but I did find several blogs that looked really nice. The fact that good layouts exist, and that most of the blogs didn't look too awful, gives me some hope that I could get PyBlosxom to do what I want. You can look at my delicious bookmarks that are tagged with PyBlosxom to see the blogs I liked. I particularly like the eye candy on this blog.

Later I'll start looking at the technical details. Someone mentioned there were Markdown plugins, which is a big plus for me. Markdown is perfect for turning simply formated text into clean HTML. It also allows a user to embed HTML in their original text, which is great for those HTML control freaks. ;) It's the best wiki syntax I've run across.

I'll post more about PyBlosxom later. Maybe I'll actually make to the Beer 'n Blog this Friday and come away with more blogging software recommendations.

My big presentation went well yesterday. I presented to all the managers in my group and Imad. (Imad runs the Open Source Technology Center (OTC) and is my manager's manager's boss.) My manager said that he didn't think anyone was bored, and it was the right level of technical detail. Go me! It was my first real exposure since I joined OTC in August. Now it's over, and I can relax and get back to hacking.

Right now I'm sitting in the Tao of Tea, drinking wonderful organic tea and hacking. We really need to have a Linux Coffee Shop Day again.

I got sexy new reading glasses today. For the past couple of weeks, I've developed headaches after staring at my computer all day. I feel fine today, and I can tell that my eyes aren't straining to focus. As an added bonus, I can shrink the fonts on all my applications. Yay for more code per square inch!

I bought a new bike. :D I'm so excited because it's my first new bike in 8 years. My previous new bike was a Target-special that my parents bought when I got too tall for the bike that had training wheels. My new bike is a Jamis Coda, which is a hybrid with 24-speeds, a steel frame, quick releases on the tires, and holes in the frame for a front rack, back rack, and fenders. (Wow, I just rattled that off the top of my head. I'm becoming such a bike geek.)

My new bike should be great for commuting back and forth, and ok for biking trips this summer. I want to do a weekend trip to down the Columbia River Gorge, and a week-long trip down the Oregon Coast. I also want to participate in pedalpalooza this June and go on more bike rides with the Portland bike groups. Deepak wants to do a bike ride down to a penguin themed bar somewhere south. Should be fun!

I saw a hummingbird for the first time this year. I heard that distinctive short chirp, and looked up to see a blur of wings in the willow tree. Spring is here! Time to start my tomato seeds. :)

Today, I got the OK from Mike to build a tiered garden in the front lawn. Here's some pics of my plan:



Blue represents usable land and green is my proposed garden. The right border is slanted because that's where the gas line comes in. (I had the utility locater service come in and mark up the front lawn.)

The garden will have two tiers, with room in the middle in case I need to kneel between the beds.



I didn't get the perspective quite right, but you get the idea.

I'm so excited! I've wanted to have a real garden for years. Jamey and I will be renting from Mike for at least another two years, and it makes me less antsy to get a house if I can grow something.

Next step: digging a trench to find out how deep the upper tier needs to be. Then I can create a bill of materials and see how much this project is going to cost.

Today I decided to try a new bike route from Washington Park to Sunset Transit Center. I got really lost:

( Details of my lovely morning )

I got to work about an hour later than I normally do. That isn't too bad, considering webwalking.com says that my route was 11 miles long.

It was a tiring morning. On the bright side, the bike route from Washington Park Max Station to Sunset TC is pretty fun (now that I actually know where I'm going). It's mostly downhill, or on low-traffic streets. I think I'll try it again on Monday.

I started to explain to my sister how to calculate her grade in a class she was having trouble in, and then I realized it was semi-complicated. It's a very important skill to know when you need to drop a class to protect your GPA, and it's not one they teach you in Freshman Inquiry.

( How to calculate your current grade )

( How to save your grade )

For all my geeky friends, markdown rules. Livejournal was generating awful bulleted lists because it was automatically inserting paragraph tags in the middle of them. So I just typed that up in vim, with simple indented lists (starting with a dash) and ran it through markdown to get clean html. Now if only I could have an automated way of editing the markdown and regenerating the html. I'm certainly not going to get that from Livejournal. Yet another thing to look for in blogging software.

The video from my talk is up. I'm disappointed that they didn't show my slides in the video, but man did I rock! I think that was the best speech I've given yet. I hope that talking about the Portland State Aerospace Society in front of 750 Portlanders will lure people to a PSAS meeting.

(Yes, 750 people. They hit the fire code limit and had to start turning people away.)

I met some cool people at Ignite Portland. I saw some women I had previously met at a pdx geekchix lunch. One of them told me to check out Code 'n Splode, a group of (mostly women) programmers who get together to talk about whatever they're working on. I met a guy (Justin maybe?) who told me about beer and blog, a newly formed group that meets every Friday at the Lucky Lab to talk about blogging.

I've been thinking that maybe I've outgrown livejournal. I'd just rather have control over my blog style, Ads, and content than let livejournal handle that. I love my LJ friends, but I'm not connecting with the local Portland geek community. Justin argued that it's better to join a social networking site and host your own blog than let the blog site decide your audience. I would probably host my blog on Jamey's domain (http://thesharps.us) and have an RSS feed for it.

Speaking of blogs, PSAS needs one! I had someone say, "Oh, yeah, I'll check out the website, maybe subscribe to the RSS feed if it has one." I think we talked about having a news page with an RSS feed, but it was never implemented. It would be cool to have each team have a blog, and have it feed into the news page. It would be cooler if we could have a git post-hook for automatically sending out an email to the teams list when the blog is updated. I know it would be helpful for me! Half the time I don't know what the airframe team is up to.

Justin also said that he might be able to make the PSAS wiki look prettier. It's just ugly. Plus our front page looks stale. *sigh*

Last week, I heard that my presentation proposal for Ignite Portland 2 was accepted. The idea is that you present your passion in 5 minutes with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

I was originally going to do a standard (if very compressed) introduction to the Portland State Aerospace Society. Where we started, what the different teams are, and what does open source, open hardware, and an open community mean. However, I think my proposal was interpreted a little differently. The quote from the Oregonian Living section is "An electronics guru will describe how to build a rocket."

I had originally thought that my audience would be a little less technical, and wouldn't be interested in the details of actually *making* a rocket that would go into space. Of course, I thought the video of the talk at Ignite Seattle on the multi-person pogo stick was pretty awesome.

So, should I go more technical? The audience and the Oregonian seems to expect me to. This is a pretty geeky audience. Blah, I've got to get the slides done before tomorrow, so I'd better make my mind up fast.

Coupleness News

Yesterday our six-month wedding anniversary. It's been a good six months with Jamey. :)

My family gave us our first (new) Christmas ornaments today. (Jamey's dad gave us his Christmas decorations when he moved to Illinois.) We received some red and white glass bulbs and a glass snowman that says "Our first Christmas". It feels odd to say this is our "first Christmas", as if our last four Christmases as a couple doesn't count.

Christmas 2007

Christmas was good. We spent the day with my family in Rainier. My friend David happened to be in Rainier to visit his parents, so he stopped by for a chat. I haven't seen him since the wedding because we've both been so busy with work. Christmas is a good excuse to pick up communications with people I've lost touch with.

Jamey and I both received lot of Christmas gifts. My favorite Christmas gifts were a Japanese tea set and arm warmers for cold weather biking. Jamey decided to find a wacky USB device to give me. He passed up the USB pole dancer and the humping dog at Fry's Electronics. Instead he bought me a USB Hello Kitty that is supposed to light and move as you type on your keyboard.

The rub is that it probably doesn't work under Linux and it's up to me to write a driver. ;) The box doesn't have a Windows logo on it, so it's probably not a certified Windows driver. That makes it likely that it will pretend to be a HID device. Yet another entry for the unusual HID device list. I predict much reverse engineering, possibly with a Windows laptop and USB snoop, or a Linux laptop with qemu and usbmon. It will be a fun challenge, and a cute set of patches.

Thoughts on Future Christmases

Jamey and I had a big discussion about Christmas a couple days ago. Jamey doesn't like all the expectations around Christmas, and hates letting people down. He says he doesn't need all the presents he gets. I personally don't like all the commercialism around Christmas. I like giving gifts, but I wouldn't mind only getting a few special gifts each year. We both agreed that we love the smell of christmas trees, but having a big christmas tree with just a few gifts below it would look silly.

So I thought up a solution for our problem. I plan on buying a pine or fir seedling from the Portland Nursery. I'll keep it in a container and trim it back every year so it says small. (The Portland Nursery website lists the pine species that will grow well in containers and how much they grow, so I don't get stuck with something that will get out of hand.) When Christmas comes, we'll bring the tree in for three days and decorate it. If Mike doesn't trust it on his nice hardwood floors, we'll keep it outside for the first couple years.

I just found byCycle's portland bike route planner. It's built with open source tools. :) I wish they would integrate the planner into Google maps, or put their bike path layer into Google custom maps. It would be awesome to have that bike routes layer and the Trimet layer when I'm looking up addresses of houses for sale.

I'm "window shopping" for houses right now. Jamey and I probably won't have enough money for a down payment for about 2 years, but we've I've been looking anyway. I've been using Google housing to search for houses around the east side MAX blue line. When the weather is not too rainy, Jamey and I have been riding our bicycles around SE to get a feel for the neighborhoods.

Bikes have become very important to us lately. Jamey bikes to work most days, and I ride into work when the weather's nice or I need to leave work before the Intel MAX shuttle starts in the evening. We don't own a car, and have resisted hints from both our families that we need/should want one. That might change when we buy a house, but I'd like to try sticking with Flexcar, Trimet, and bikes.

I have no less than three interesting USB projects at work, and I've lost two pounds since I started going to the gym a month and a half ago.

Plus it's a three day week. Yay! Jamey and I are having two Thanksgiving dinners. On Thursday, we'll celebrate with his family and on Friday we'll celebrate with my family. I'll have to pace myself. I hope I don't get sick of turkey. It's not my favorite part of the Thanksgiving food selection. My favorite Thanksgiving foods are (in order): cranberry sauce, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and sparkling cider. My sister agrees with me on this. She couldn't wait for Thanksgiving, so she bought some cranberry sauce and ate it. Out of the can. With a spoon. Seriously.

I cannot keep a balanced checkbook. I think it's the interest. Or maybe the fact that I can't do simple addition. Calculus, yes. Arithmetic, no. This seems to be a common problem with software hackers.

OMG. Mike is making strawberry pie. I just got back from the gym and I haven't had dinner yet. In fact, I can't even start making dinner until Mike is done simmering the filling. Absolute torture!

*Edit* It was so worth the wait. ^_^

This book had such promise. Oscar, a boy from the early 1900s, writes a story beginning in which the fields of wheat around his house turn into the sea. He looks out his window, only to find the sea at his doorstep. Oscar rows away into the night, leaving behind his composition books and his family. 100 years later, his great-niece discovers his books and sets out to find him.

The book was very unique, but the plot was painfully obvious at times. Some authors seem to think that middle readers need more hints to follow the plot line. The ending also leaves something to be desired. The author tries to make it better by having the characters say, "Some book endings feel like beings," but the ending felt incomplete and not well thought-out. I had hoped that some of the characters would go on to more adventurous things, but in the end everyone was stuck in Iowa. There was some character development along the way, but the adults in the book seemed to grow more than the children.

In conclusion, I give the book a B+ for novel ideas, and a B- for following through with those ideas.

About two months ago, Jamey and bought two Nokia e70 cellphones to test Jamey's grand VOIP experiment. The experiment is partially a success, but it's hard to tell because our phones suck.

( The lowlights )

On the bright side, we've only spent about five bucks in the last two months on calls.

Of course, with the phone being as buggy as it is, we might have to buy new phones. It's a bummer. The OpenMoko is coming out in December, but that's going to be around $600 each. I'd rather wait a few months to see if the OpenMoko will be buggy too. Of course, if it is, we can just debug it, since it's open source. I'm sure the OpenMoko community will be more responsive than Nokia about releasing firmware updates. (Nokia did release an update in May for our phone's software, but our model is not included in the update. Go Nokia!)

I got my cast cut off today! My wrists and knuckles are stiff and sore, but at least I can type with two hands again. :D Unfortunately, after approximately 3 hours of typing, my wrist is getting sore. The doctor showed me how to stretch my knuckles, but didn't comment on wrist exercises. Jamey has shown me several from Aikido; I might try them tomorrow.

My bone will take about 2-3 months to fully heal. In that time, I'm not supposed to lift weights. It's kind of a catch 22; the doctor said my hand will let me know when I've picked up something heavy, but at that point I've already picked it up... So far I can pick up a tall starbucks coffee, but a wet towel is painful.

It's ok for me to swim, jog, and do exercise that doesn't involve punching things. :) The doctor did mention he didn't want me to ride a bike, since I'm more likely to fall in the rain. I think that means I'm done biking until winter is over, since I probably won't want to bike in December.

Ah, well. It's been a learning experience. There's two things a cast is good for: cracking peanuts and filing nails.

I'm way behind on my book reviews, so here is the first of about four.

Title: The Art of Detection
Author: Laurie R. King
Genre: Mystery
Page Count: 492
Total Page Count: 2,585

This is the first King book to feature Detective Martinelli in seven years. The book interweaves the murder investigation of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic with a surprising similar murder from a manuscript purported to be written by Arthur Canon Doyle. Unfortunately, the manuscript ends up taking over the book. Martinelli ends up reading the story for nearly half the book. I feel like the only way King could get her publisher to print this book was to tie it into her Holmes/Russell series. It also felt like a farewell to Martinelli and her family: Martinelli marries her partner, and walks off into the sunset to raise their daughter. Don't get me wrong, I liked the ending. I was just pissed that Martinelli was pushed out of her own story by Holmes.

In a week I'll have my cast removed. I think I'll probably need some stress ball therapy before I can go back to typing all day. I'm not sure if the bones are all healed by now. I can't tell if my occasional dull aches are because of my fracture, or if my muscles simply ache from not being used.

I had a dream last night that I got my cast wet and the soggy mess was falling off my arm. I really don't want to pay for a new cast, so I always carry my rain jacket. What a pain on these wonderful, sunny days. I wish I could go bike riding. :-/