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A while back, I was speculating about getting a new camera. I finally gave up using the S30 with the broken screen and decided to act. Although I showed some recent system-administration-confererence-action shots, indoor snapshots are never as much fun.

So when we decided to go see the visiting reindeers—from central Oregon apparently—at the San Francisco Zoo, the camera went along for the ride. One of the guests of honour:

Note the ground-scraping horn extending well over the left brow.

Nathaniel thought the reindeer were cool and kept trying to pass through the outer fence to get a closer look:

Next up was seeing the bears, but the playground is a mandatory stop on this route:

Since our trip to San Diego, Ben has been very interested in the state of the Alaskan Brown Bear at that zoo. If the bear’s blogging I don’t know about it, but I was able to convince Ben that seeing the young grizzlies get larger was just as interesting—and they are getting bigger:

Down the way, at the spectacled bear grotto, I noticed some writing on a railing:

The bear dens were built by the WPA, so this railing’s Bethlehem Steel parentage is not surprising. (Apparently, these grottos and the other WPA-built exhibits are some of the earliest “barless” zoo exhibits in the world. I’ve noticed that children’s books often render cagebar zoo displays, even when written many years after such displays were common.)

On the way out, we noticed the otters were enjoying a light lunch:

One tip with electronic viewfinder cameras: turn off the review period to make the camera feel faster. (It is often set to about 2 seconds.) For outdoor shots, where the flash isn’t a factor, you’ll be much less likely to miss a good photo.

I ordered an additional drive for our long running Series 1 Tivo last week from one of the firms that specializes in such things. The drive “marriage” didn’t go well, and the unit was stuck at the Green Screen of Death—and, since these upgrades are supposed to just work, I didn’t have a backup. Scrambling through various forums searching made it clear that finding a software image was unlikely, but also pointed to a solution: PTVupgrade’s InstantCake.

InstantCake is a CD-based program that, if you reconfigure a PC such that the CD-ROM boots as the primary IDE and the drive or drives for your TiVo are on the secondary IDE, will format the drives and install the necessary software to operate your TiVo. For most PCs now, this procedure is at matter of swapping cables around and waiting for a little bit. You’ll lose all your programs and settings, but it means that you can pick any pair of drives as replacements. (Remember that the Series 1 can’t use more than 137GB of its drives, so going past 160GB is pointless.) And you can restore regardless of whether you have a drive or not; you have a read-only image on stable media.

Highly recommended.

[ T: TiVo ]

By the way, Dina went to Fairbanks a few weeks ago, enjoyed the chilly contrast with Bay Area weather, and had a productive and fun visit. And, to keep karmic scales in balance, I caught a nasty cold for reminding her of the low low temperatures she could expect.

Nathaniel has keen vision; we often see mourning doves on the power and telephone lines that pass by the front of our house and he is happy to point them out. And occasionally, a raucous crow will perch in one of the nearby trees or atop a pole shouldering the local lines. But a couple of weekends ago, he was quite insistent about the novelty of the bird upon the pole’s top:

A good catch: this was the first Merlin I had seen in any of the neighbourhoods we’ve lived in. (I once watched a red-tailed hawk eat a dead pigeon on a corner ledge of MPK17 a few years back, while I waited for a printout one Saturday.)

The little raptor was good enough to stay in place long enough for us to take pictures from a couple of points with a couple of cameras. The above, the best of the lot, was taken with our camcorder (Canon Optura 200) in photo mode—the 10 × optical zoom was essential, and it’s still not a great shot.

So both Dan Price and Ben Rockwood have asked again and again and again for Audacity, a free audio editor, to be ported to Solaris. A reasonable challenge. After a bit of fiddling and some decisions, I have a functional version of Audacity 1.2.3. Whether or not this will result in me issuing podcasts, mixes, or mashups is presently unknown, but decreasingly likely in that order.

This build does not have input support for MP3 or Ogg. You will have to use tools like sox or oggdec to convert those formats to WAV. Outputs to those formats should work, but I’ve mostly been testing with Ogg.

I thought I had notes on the port, but I can’t find them. So, from memory, here’s the rough idea:

• Use blastwave.org for pre-packaged libaries where possible.
• Use g++ because Audacity seems to use specific features of this C++ implementation.
• Build your own Motif wxwidgets library using g++, because there isn’t a common C++ ABI on Solaris.
• Drop in the Solaris-specific pieces from a recent version of the PortAudio library, use that as the primary sound option, and make a few edits for header file issues.
• Get the run paths right.

Download

• Audacity-1.2.3 [5.10 i86pc, 10M]

Please don’t decoralize the link, or I’ll have to take the binary down.

Installation

This build of Audacity 1.2.3 relies on you using blastwave.org for a collection of libraries. I assume you have a working version of pkg-get.

1. Get required libraries.

   # pkg-get -i libvorbis libogg libmad libid3tag gcc3corert gcc3g++rt
   

   You may also want lame, sox, and vorbistools for audio transcoding.
2. Download package.
3. Uncompress and install.

   # gunzip SLUGaudacity.pkg.gz
   # pkgadd -d SLUGaudacity.pkg
   [Interactive questions.  The dependencies against the Blastwave packages will be checked.]
   

4. Audacity is now installed as /opt/SLUGaudacity/bin/audacity. You will probably want to make a symbolic link from a more usual place in your path.

Have fun!

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris Audacity Blastwave ]

It’s a balmy 9°F (-13°C) tonight in Fairbanks, although with windchill it feels like -6°F (-21°C). Why one would be naked and outdoors to verify that measurement is beyond me.

The current temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska is again -6°F, or -21°C.

The current temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska is -6°F, or -21°C.

I’m still a bit woozy from a late night disk recovery at home which kept me up until about 4am Wednesday morning, but I thought I would point out two items in an old area of interest of mine: theoretical physics.

First, Physics Today has devoted a special issue to Hans Bethe. Bethe’s range and impact on physics is astounding to me: his 1967 Nobel prize for determining the nuclear reactions that result in the burning of stars came after many contributions to atomic and nuclear physics, roles at both the MIT Radiation Lab and Los Alamos during the Second World War, and important calculations for statistical physics. Oh, and he performed the first theoretical calculation of the Lamb shift, which validated the idea of quantum electrodynamics. The series of articles by friends and colleagues is excellent and, if you can grab a copy, definitely worth a read. (The site doesn’t have it, on first glance.)

Reading the practical scenarios where Bethe connected theory to a problem at hand, and then kept going, I wonder if Bethe might have been a better role model than my graduate school choice of Lev Landau, the 1962 Nobel winner in Physics (for the theory of superfluid helium, among other contributions). Of course, Landau’s preferred working style involved reclining upon his couch, which is a fundamental contribution I still hope to emulate.

The other item is that an old graduate school friend of mine, Mark Trodden, is, with a group of other—I’ll say young—theoretical physicists, writing a focussed-on-science-but-still-popular blog entitled Cosmic Variance. These are smart folks and, since we all can’t be research scientists, it’s a treat to get a chance to see some distinct intellectual viewpoints. Check it out.

(Maybe if I end up with another involuntary late night of repairs and resyncing, I’ll have a look around and see who else from school is blogging actively. Or just melancholily ruminate on lapsing and relapsing between engineering and science (which is why, when I confessed to dilettantism, I was being quite honest).)

I went to a nice dinner a couple of weeks ago, to celebrate a couple friends’ visit to the Bay Area. The restaurant offered some tasting menus, so the more adventurous indulged in the six course offering, with a variety of tastes and textures. In line with current trends, flavoured foams accented between a quarter and a third of the different dishes served. It turns out some people really aren’t interested in eating foam.

At one point in the meal, a waiter positioned a peculiar spoon at my side, which looked something like this:

The lobster turned out to be in the form of a purée or a bisque (but not a foam), so the bowl of the spoon was needed and the notch only useful for artful dribbling. Notched spoons were also provided for the dessert course, but no other mysterious utensils were manifested that night.

I can see late nights ahead: there’s a lot of writing to do for work, and enough daytime interruptions and meetings to stop me from proceeding swiftly. Happily for those idle enough to read this blog, this new phase of sleep deprivation means the completion of assorted partial entries—and the release of the various pieces of code I’ve written/salvaged/jury-rigged over the summer. (For instance, I’ve got an unfinished book review of an overview of professional poker started over two years ago: since then, poker became hot, went mainstream, and then sold out (or maybe that was Bravo). Better to finish, or to have a running joke about the “poker book review”?)

Like RSVP, the CBC’s High Hat is another well-executed card game implemented in Flash. What’s interesting about High Hat is that it looks like a good candidate for playing with a physical deck as well. Maybe a good alternative to hours of War with Ben during the coming rainy winter here.

Recommended.