Busy with on-call duties earlier this week, recovered Saturday.

Bryce Lewis died at this intersection on 9/7/2007:

The crash site, an intersection that sees 30,000 cars a day, is notoriously dangerous for cyclists ("scary as shit," one Point 83 poster called it). Although Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) spokesman Gregg Hirakawa says SDOT has no specific records indicating that the intersection of Eastlake and Fuhrman avenues is more dangerous than other trouble spots. (SDOT doesn't keep crash statistics by intersection.) "This is a major connection [for cyclists], and it needs improvement," says David Hiller, advocacy director for the Cascade Bicycle Club.

Update: Councilmember Jan Drago (chair, Transportation Committee) and Grace Crunican (Director of the Seattle Department of Transportation) are the most appropriate contacts to voice concern over this intersection.

Technorati Tags: cycle

(As an aside, learning how to ask smart questions can help avoid time wasted over an “it doesn’t work” exchange.)

Level 52 is tricky the second time through, and requires cutting corners to reach the falling enemy in time. The third time through, a different strategy is required, as the enemy is now too fast to reach in time. Instead, one must dig to get past the upper two enemies, then fall into the usual pattern.

Curtains fall at level 357, where the now twice sped enemy always intercepts one before crossing the first ladder (only eight bits were allocated for the level counter, as following level 256, it wraps, hence level 101 being displayed):

Note: lode_runner1.po on the Asimov Apple //e archive is corrupt at level 130-something. I am using lode_runner.do.gz. If paranoid, advance through the levels with control+U or control+6 to confirm the levels look right.

Next, Championship Lode Runner.

Do not much like Polaroid film. To be fair, I am using a Holgaroid back to a Holga. Peeves: loading the film is tricky, though worse is extracting the film for exposure, as the paper pull tabs risk breaking, leaving the film stranded, and the ninth exposure usually pulls the tenth out along with it. Another problem: odd streaks down the film, which appear to line up with the pull tab paper: somehow this is getting compressed against the film through the rollers?

Film quality excellent, with a deep glossy black, though getting the exposure right was very tricky, as the Holgaroid metered nothing like my DSLR measured. A incident light meter should give better readings, but I do not own one.

Digital or regular film photography, combined with post processing and glossy printing, while slower, should produce similar effects. I could see using Polaroid to take test shots for medium or large format needs. However! Given that Polaroid is going the way of the Dodo, best to avoid the resulting high film prices until and if an instant film market emerges following 2009.

The Company

“Dire financial straits notwithstanding, Polaroid paid senior executives and directors a total of $6.3 million in bonuses, consulting fees, and lump-sum pension payouts in the months before the [bankruptcy] filing. Payments included $1.7 million in incentive comp to former CEO DiCamillo, while former CFO Judy Boynton got $300,000 in severance, a $510,000 stock award, and a $638,000 lump-sum pension payout. (Boynton, now the CFO of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, is listed as an unsecured creditor, for an additional severance of $600,000 she is still owed.)”

“Polaroid retirees had feared the results of a sale to OEP, and that fear was justified. After June 28, the company's cash balance plan was terminated and handed over to the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., meaning many retirees had their pension payments slashed. Employees on long-term disability received letters informing them that they would not be hired by the new company and that their benefits were being terminated. Indeed, the Massachusetts attorney general's office had difficulty convincing OEP, as owner of the new Polaroid, to sponsor the retirees' supplemental Medicare plan, even though that sponsorship costs nothing except time spent keeping the books.”

    — What’s Wrong with This Picture?

• Dubliners
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Based on conversations with our Dublin staff, Dublin is very much so not the town James Joyce wrote about.

if ( $line =~ m/^ { $/x ) { $rule_target[-1]->[-1]->{_subrules} = []; push @rule_target, $rule_target[-1]->[-1]->{_subrules}; }

First, consider instead providing an Object Oriented interface, thus hiding the Big Blob. However, this may defeat a “well, I’m just trying to mangle X into Y, not waste time with class struggles” coding effort. Whether OO makes sense depends on the project. A standalone data conversion script probably does not justify OO. Code that other code will use, or a service interface, especially one used by other groups or users, will likely benefit from OO.

Secondly, Big Blobs could be a solution looking for a problem. The coder knows how to parse data into the blob, then iterate over the mess, but never considers whether a blob should have been used.

my %big_blob = load_from_file($filename); upload_to_database(\%big_blob);

In many cases, the entirety of data need not be loaded into memory, and instead only the minimum necessary data retained in memory before acting on it:

while <$fh> { my %line_data; # ... parse line into line_data hash # upload line_data contents to database $db->... } continue { if ($. % 1000) { $db->commit(); } }

This method scales better, as it no longer is bound by memory, and will not require DB_File or refactoring should the data set exceed available memory. The question: “do I really need to parse all the data to memory, or is there a more efficient solution?” will help prevent inappropriate use of Big Blobs.

Technorati Tags: Perl

No, not Visio. Visio drives me batty. I use OmniGraffle, except at work.

Graph

Graphjam.

Technorati Tags: chart

# run just past the top of the hour # as many other things run then 7 * * * * rsync -e ssh -az --delete /source desthost:/dest

However, this solution has a major edge case that can bring down the system. Worse, simplistic attempts to fix this fault can result in rsync not running.

Technorati Tags: cron

1. Thou shalt grok Unicode!
2. Unicode-processing issues in Perl and how to cope with it

More Unicode.

Technorati Tags: characters, utf8

• NWS Seattle
• Pacific NorthWest MM5 Weather Forecasts (neato technical detail)
• Hour-by-hour precipitation
• Column-integrated cloud water

The Japanese Garden in Seattle offers several photography sessions each year. These let you use a tripod and other gear not normally permitted in the garden. Well worth the money, as there were only three other photographers, and the weather mostly cooperated. Most useful lenses were the 18-70 kit zoom and 105mm macro.

This photo required six bars of chocolate, three vertical on each side. There is a lego roof keeping the bars vertical, between two boxed sets of the Tale of Genji (Seidensticker and Tyler). The only lighting is from a desk lamp, the direct shine of which being masked off from the camera by shirts and chess boards. The Ferrero Rocher (picked up pretty much at random from the store; I had no idea how large the central chocolate should have been) rests atop a book case, and the background is a cork board. A polarizer was used, though I set it when the chocolate was wrapped, not unwrapped, so that might have been adjusted better. Had trouble lining the camera up square with the opening, which ball heads make difficult. May want to pickup a head that allows finer adjustment.

Technorati Tags: chocolate