Chaos Server

oPod Away to Cut Podcast Cord

2012-05-12T23:44:00.001-07:00

So if you want to cut the cord, you can. - Scott Forstall

I wrote a little app called "oPod Away" because I love podcasts and I often travel which takes me away from my personal computer which is what my iPhone syncs with. Apple has been slowly making it easier and easier to use an iOS device without any need to connect it to a computer, but they are not there yet. One of the areas where they are failing is with podcast syncing. When I am traveling and not near my personal computer how do I get my latest and greatest podcasts onto my iPhone? The internet tells me I should be using Skitcher to solve this problem, but it doesn't have 100% of my podcasts and anything less than 100% is not enough.
I wrote server-side "oPod Away" a few years ago as a server-side Perl script that ran on my home server. The point was to go through my complete podcast OPML, pull down all the RSS feeds, and then show me the last updated stamp for each. So when I was on the road I could just open on the page, see what's been updated, and then tap on it to go over the iTunes Store on my phone and download. It works great - takes abou 30 seconds to run.

Since HTML5 is all the rage these days I decided to re-write the program using HTML5 and do it all client side. Sound great? I quickly ran into the problem of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. When I used XmlHttpRequest on a page on my server to pull the podcast RSS feed it would cause an origin error. I tried to think through creative solutions to this problem like using Yahoo Pipes, but wasn't able to get something like. I ended up throwing up a very simple proxy on Google App Engine. So now the whole application is written in HTML5 and can run on the phone. It takes about 3 seconds for a refresh and I can get my podcasts where ever I go.

Graphic Novels

2012-04-18T23:14:00.000-07:00

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films. - Alan Moore

My frugality was my only defense against becoming a comic book collector growing up. Almost every week my brother would go to Tower Records to look at music. I was completely uninterested in spending money on music and would wonder to the neighboring Comics and Comics to look through the shelves. I looked. I was interested. I read. I barely bought anything while I was there. It seemed like the kind of thing I would get sucked into spending money on every week and I just didn't want to do that. I bought a few random X-Men comics that interested me and I own the TMNT graphics novels, but that's it. In college I received the start of The Sandman as well as Watchmen. I loved them, but better to received the fully bound and completed graphic novel as a gift than to get sucked into some model where I need to spend money every week or month to get another issue.
I listen to a podcast called The Incomparable which has a bunch of people who share my tastes in movies, music, TV, books and other cultural things. Sometimes they do a "comic book club" and talk about comic books. Last year they talked through Ex Machina and Y:The Last Man. Since I agree with most of their opinions of entertainment, I got and read both of those series. I thought Ex Machine was good and I absolutely loved Y:The Last Man. Loved it! You should read it. It was awesome.
Ever since then I have been patiently awaiting the group to do another comic book club and recommend more graphic novels to me. They have failed me! FAILED ME! I took a quick recommendation from a friend to read We3, but it was fast over. That got me thinking that instead of trusting random strangers from the wired (who have great taste), I should call out to my friends whose opinions I trust and demand they provide recommendations. I present them to you now. Read on!

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (from Gabe)
Saga (from Damian)
Fables (from Chris)
Lieutenant Blueberry (from Chris)
Forming (from Chris)
Sleeper (from Chris)
All Star Superman (from Chris)
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (from Chris)

iPhone and Conference Call

2012-04-16T17:32:00.001-07:00

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it. - Tom Hanks

I wrote an app to scratch an itch. I have this annoying little problem at work that my colleagues like to send me meeting invites that including a conference call number in a mode that makes it very hard for me to use. Prior to iOS5, if they put the phone number into the location field in the invite the iPhone would not let me tap it to call it, copy/paste it, or do anything useful with it. I worked hard to train my colleagues to put the phone number both in the location field and in the body of the meeting invite.
After iOS5 came out, the location field became a place where text was tappable to make calls or copy/paste, but many of my coworkers don't include the conference call number in a way where it will dial both the phone number and then the conference call entry code. For a while it was okay, where I could temporarily memorize the 6-digit entry code and then tap the number, but working recently switched to a new teleconference system that has a 10-digit entry code. I'll admit that I cannot temporarily memorize 10-digits.

I fixed this with a trivial little web app. Behold conference dialer! It has two text inputs - one for the phone number to be dialed and one for the entry code for the conference call. This way, when I get a meeting invite where the dialing is not properly formatted for the iPhone to recognize, I just copy-paste the phone number, copy-paste the entry code and hit the dial button. Simple. Elegant.

I added some local session HTML5 stuff so that it will remember the last number and entry code you had filled in. I was thinking about maybe having it remember the last 10 numbers you called or some such. We'll see where it takes me.

The Air Filter PEBKAC

2012-04-14T10:00:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I find it helpful to be reminded that while I am expensively educated, I am not always smart. - Unknown Stanford Student

When I got an apartment in Sacramento a couple of years ago it tended to smell a little bit like cigarette smoke. The building owner smoked, and while he assured me he never smoked in the apartment, he did like to smoke on the patio outside and in his office which shared a wall (and I assume shared the ventilation system). My mother was kind enough to get me a super power HEPA filter machine and I would constantly run it to try and keep the air clean and beautiful.
I've probably had it for two years now, and we run it every night to create white noise and keep the air clean. Mrs.Chaos has been having a few respiratory problems in the morning and I thought, "ya know, I've never changed the HEPA filter in this thing. So it's probably useful, and might be doing more harm than good." I pulled down some new filters and opened up the device to put them in only to discover that I am an idiot. Inside the machine the actual filters were wrapped in plastic - and therefore had not been doing ANYTHING for the years I have owned it. I have had a very expensive fan.
I remember when I got the thing I read the instructions and it clearly said in the instructions, "remove all plastic before use." So I did remove all the plastic attached to the outside covering up the intake, the exhaust, the buttons, etc. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I needed to open it up and remove plastic from the internal filters. Why would you do this? There are already filters on the intake and exhaust? I mean, at least you should have packaged the filters separately from the device and made me put them in! Whatever. Sometimes I am stupid, and I guess it's useful to be reminded of that from time to time.

What's on Your TV?

2012-04-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

They say the truth will set you free, but sometimes, not telling the truth can make you lots of money. - Christopher Elliott

When we got a house in late 2010 we weren't expecting have any kind of television other than the really old tube that Mrs.Chaos had, but as part of my family's dumping of extra stuff on us, I inherited my brother's ancient 50" plasma high definition television. It's a gorgeous Pioneer, but I call it ancient because it doesn't have any HDMI connections on it - just a combination of component and composite inputs.
We're true cord cutters - with no cable, satellite or even Netflix or Hulu+. Originally all we had hooked up was a Nintendo Wii and a first generation Apple TV. The AppleTV took a lot of curation to get it working as I was constantly re-encoding things to the proper format and adding them onto iTunes on the server. I did it - but boy am I lazy.
Not longer after, to my surprise, our mortgage company gave us a Bluray player and Google sent me a Logitech Revue. Both were HDMI, so I had the Bluray passthrough the GoogleTV's HDMI-passthru ports and then I bought a nice little HDMI-to-component. I ended up replacing my first generation AppleTV with the GoogleTV because GoogleTV let me stream off my computer using a DLNA server (MediaLink from Nullriver) in all sorts of formats without re-encoding or adding it into some content management system - I sure like having a nice cleanly formatted directory structure that's defined using a context free grammar. I had high hopes that the GoogleTV web browser would let me watch NBC.com and other stuff. Unfortunately we cannot watch any of the TV websites. They are all blocked by the networks for somewhat confusing reasons.
When GoogleTV finally got around to upgrading from the bizarre original OS to using Honeycomb and including the Google Play store things got better! I was able to download a player (GTVBox) which allowed me to load straight of my SMB shares - and that includes loading off my Drobo which hangs as an AirDisk. Additionally GTVBox lets me do AirPlay video - so I can play videos off my iPhone, iPad, etc. I sure wish I could do screen mirroring!
So what does the future hold for me? I don't know! When Mountain Lion comes out this summer and I'm able to screen share directly from my Desktop Mac it seems like I'll finally replace the GoogleTV with an AppleTV. Unless some wiley GoogleTV developer creates an app that supports AirMirroring. Get on it guys!

Book Club: The Night Circus

2012-04-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream. - Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)

As we prepared to host bookclub a few months ago I had to put together a list of four books for people to vote on. I had a variety of methods to select the books, but one of the books I put on the voting list I found by looking at the New York Times best seller list. We didn't pick the book at the time, but one of the other members saw the description with excitement and read the book for extra credit.
This past month was her turn to host book club and the book was selected. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. A book about two aged magicians who pick apprentices and bind them against each other in competition. The venue of the latest round of competition was the Night Circus (Le Cirque des Rêves).
I really enjoy books about magic where the practitioners are called magicians (not wizards, mages, spell casters, ...) and I was really impressed with the magic as being truly magical an a fanciful, mysterious and imaginative way. It is such a wonderful contrast to the very pedestrian magic of the Harry Potter series in which the take on the magical world is similar to the Flinstone's take on the stone age world: take all the things modern man uses technology for and mindlessly replace it with a boring magical equivalent that has a latin-y word associated with it. This is not the magic of The Night Circus where there are cloud mazes, stories in bottles and gardens made entirely of ice. The magic is almost real. Almost.
The book was also full of little touches. One of the characters was the tarot card reader of the circus and she would often flip a few cards as part of other activities going on. I was intrigued that the author rarely explained what the cards meant. She just matter-of-factly described a card flipped as the querent, the card that covers and the card that crosses, and then provided no interpretation. I read tarot quite a lot during the end of high school and start of college and have a decent memory of the major arcana. I was constantly impressed. The author, clearly understanding tarot, would lay out major plot themes with the cards and leave the foreshadowing available only to someone who understand what the meant or maybe bothered to look it up. The Hanging Man, crossed by Temperance. Yes, I can see what lies in your future.
Fun read. Though, I think in the grand scheme of things, you should wait for the movie. Though I know it won't be, I would sure like to see Tim Burton do this with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. That would be quite a show.

The theme of the book, two magicians of different philosophies battling over which philosophy is better, reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Overall I preferred Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but it falls victim to the problem of being an amazing five-hundred page book trapped in one-thousand pages. I remember during the second half of the book as I was devouring it, reading and anticipating and excited, that I kept saying to myself "now remember when you recommend this book to other how incredibly bored you were by it for the first half. Don't forget how incredibly bored by it you were for the first half." So fair warning that if you are up someone who can read giant volumes, this book is amazing - once you finish it. Definitely if you're a voracious reader, go for this one.

The Plague

2012-04-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. - Lauren Bacall

Tuesday, March 27th, the plague struck. It started simple. A sore throat struck in the evening and I just figured it was not going to be a big deal. I drank a lot of water and went to bed at a reasonable time that night.
Wednesday, March 28th, was a punch in the face and the gut. I woke up, if it could be called waking, feeling like a cement truck had parked on top of me. My throat continued to burn and my head throbbed. I decided the only acceptable option was to go comatose. Which I proceeded to do for the duration of the day.
Thursday, March 29th, was a minor improvement. I think the cement truck had pulled forward a little bit. The sore throat ravaged on, the headache remained, but the crushing exhaustion had lifted. Then the headache got worse. Then the headache got worse. Then the headache got worse. I was hit with a full force cluster headache. It had been a long time since I've had one of those either - but there it was, the sense that some mysterious force was grabbing on to both of my eyeballs and squeezing as hard as it could. It was tortuous. I took pain killers along with medicinal caffeine to try and break out of it, but it didn't solve it.
Friday brought the treat of a cough. So far my symptoms had only been a sore throat and exhaustion, the cough was new. And combining a cough with a sore throat is not a pretty thing. So yeah, Friday was pretty bad.
Saturday brought massive amounts of nasal congestion. It felt like every day a new symptom was being added onto the pile. The older symptoms weren't clearing up I was just slowly going down hill. I thought the exhaustion was getting better, but the four hour nap on Saturday may have shown otherwise.
Sunday. What new symptom was left? Sore throat? Check. Headaches? Check. Cough? Check. Nasal congestion / runny nose? Check. Well, the obvious guess would be fever, but thankfully no. Instead I got an ear infection. Yep, an ear infection, because I am apparently 10 years old again.
So on Monday I went straight on in to the doctor who gave me delicious delicious antibiotics and by Tuesday afternoon I was feeling "a little better." Sure, maybe it's placebo, but I will take it!

Korean Market

2012-02-27T23:51:00.000-08:00

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure - Michel De Montaigne

Mrs.Chaos has always been excited about Korean food. After we went to Korea she knew what it was like in it's original form for delicious Bulgogi and Kalbi. We headed over to the Korean market in Sacramento and she was in heaven! So we got all sorts of delicious marinades... mmm... Also we got beats like ribs and "pork butts" for delicious Korean BBQ.

Fruits and Translucent Openings

2012-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

After all, just one virus on a computer is one too many. - Glenn Turner

I've been on a multi-year kick to watch all of the old Doctor Who episodes that my Doctor Who friends have told us we need to watch. I have a lot of friends and there is a lot of classic Doctor Who so the list is long and many of the episodes are not yet available on DVD. Yet I have this one very special friend, "huh? Oh, yeah, I can give you all of the 80's Doctor Who not available on DVD. I have old CDRs of them from VHS transfers."
Modern Apple computers have very picky SuperDrives inside of them. If you take a CDR that was burned over ten years ago and stick into a modern Apple there is about a 50/50 chance the computer will actually be able to read the disc. Instead the computer will swallow it whole and hold onto it refusing to eject it. Eject button? No. Disk Utility eject? No. Command line eject? No. In fact the only way to get a swallowed disc out was to reboot the computer and hold down the eject button. Disc released!

I also have an external SuperDrive for the MacBook Air I no longer own and so I thought maybe I would have better luck with it. After inserting the disc into it I had no better time reading it, but even the reboot while holding down eject trick didn't eject it. To be fair, that SuperDrive is only supposed to work with a MacBook Air, but if that is the case, why did it agree to swallow a disc never to release it?
The only solution was to head down to the Apple Store at the mall and make use of one of their floor models. This seems simple enough, but the moment you pull a DVD drive out of your pocket and plug it into one of their floors models things get a little dicey. Immediately one of the floor people swooped in on me and asked what I was doing. I explained, "I have a stuck disc and I don't own a MacBook Air, so I just need to use this to eject the disc." They nodded and walked off. The disc didn't mount and Disk Utility eject wasn't working so I was just going to reboot and be done when a different employee swooped in on me to ask what I was doing. I explained, "I have a stuck disc and I don't own a MacBook Air, so I just need to reboot and eject the disc." "Sorry, we don't want you to reboot the floor models out here. You need to make a genius appointment. I can help you with that!" I sighed heavily as she began to look up appointments for me on the calendar. "Well, it looks like the soonest we can help you is tomorrow night." "Really, I just need to reboot. It will take 30 seconds."
A third Apple Store employee across the way overheard the discussion and decided he could help out. "What seems to be the problem?" At this point, I wasn't being my happy bubbly self and was starting to get terse. "The disc is stuck. I don't own a MacBook Air. I need to reboot to eject it." "Well, instead, why don't you open up Safari and the do a Google search for how to get out an unstuck di..." Cutting him off, "I just need to reboot. I've already looked it up." He got a little annoyed back at me. "Look, I was just trying to help you think creatively so you didn't have to come back tomorrow." It wasn't very Applely.
Quickly stopping the conversation before it came to fisticuffs employee #2 gingerly said, "Yeah, so the best I can do is same time tomorrow night. Does that work for you?" "No. Really, it's 30 seconds. I just need to reboot. I'll find a friend or something who can actually be helpful." She paused, clearly centering herself and evoking all of her Apple training. Somewhere deep inside she must have remembered the "We're Awesome" policy and said, "come with me." She took me back to the Genius Bar and interrupted one of the Genius, "hi. This man has a stuck disc and says he just needs to have in a laptop when it reboots and that it will take thirty seconds, can you help?"
"Sure thing!" he pulls a MacBook Air out from under the counter, sticks in my drive, boots it holding down the trackpad and continues to consult with the customer he is helping. Thirty seconds later my disc ejects, I bow to him and leave. They're not kidding about the geniuses being at the bar. Apparently the staff walking around are not.

Not related to fruit, but related to windows, my dad gave me a call the next morning about a computer issue he was having. If you are your parent's tech support, you will understand the gripping fear that overwhelms you as something like this is relayed to you. "So I got a weird e-mail from your sister sent to a bunch of people and it had a link of something she wanted me to check out. I opened up the link but then a window popped up saying my Content.exe was infected and it needed to download an update to fix it. So I downloaded that update and I started to run Setup.exe and it said it was from an untrusted publisher and..." Children of the world are gripped in fear over what the next sentence will be "...I decided I should call you about it." !!! "Say no! Close it all down! Offer a sacrifice to the computer gods and then run your virus scanner." While it amazes me how red flag after red flag was just bypassed during this process, it was heart warming to see that at least one of the last checks was enough to stop it. (I love you dad!)

I know I know... I grew up in this world and I am a trained professional in this industry. The other one that happens to me a lot from both parents and from friends is when my fancy mail program decides to put a fancy attachment onto the message (ATT00008.dat or smime.p7s) and I get the response, "How do I open your attachment? I tried double clicking on it and opening it in Word but I can't seem to figure it out." To which I say, "why are you trying to open a strange attachment you don't recognize that I have made no mention of in the message? You should just assume it is junk or a virus and move on." Though, to this date, I don't think I've ever sent either a virus. As far as I know, I haven't been infected with a virus since the early 80's when everyone traded disks with each other without using any protection.

Book Club: Let the Great World Spin

2012-02-15T17:46:00.001-08:00

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope. - Philippe Petit

Book club finished up reading "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann and had our nearly-monthly meeting last Friday. The book? Pretty good. I really enjoyed reading (and by reading, I mean listening on Audible) it as it spanned a bunch of different stories in NYC that intertwine with one another. One of the central stories that bound things together was that of Philippe Petit doing a tight rope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in NYC. When I first started reading the book I assumed that the story of the high wire routine was fictional, like all the other stories in the book. Later I learned that it was a historical event. In fact, there is a documentary "Man on Wire" that has interviews with everyone involved. The movie was awesome.
The other stories in the book were fiction, but good fiction. There are even a few stories on about computer scientists and phreakers that I thought were basically accurate. That is hard to do and I was impressed by it.
Of course, the other part of book club is just about the company. Everyone else is a group of friends that met in grad school - and we are connected because Mrs.Chaos worked with some of them. They are such a different group of friends from what I am used to from college - where everyone I know works in technology, all of them do jobs for the state of California (more or less).

Equipment Failure

2012-02-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport. - Fridtjof Nansen

Every year my company makes a pilgrimage from the office on the peninsula to Tahoe for a ski trip. I've gone nearly every year, though not skied all of them. This year was looking to be interesting and different. The last few years that I've gone skiing there has been a beginner in my group, either a friend, or a coworker or Mrs.Chaos. This year Mrs.Chaos' school schedule got in the way of making the trip and most of the coworkers I am good friends with have moved on to other places. I had coworkers going, but many are from India and its their first time in the snow or they are on the exec team and so have do nothing but play in the snow all winter of the double black diamond runs. It was going to end up being me going solo.

This year we've gotten the long summer and there wasn't a winter. There hasn't been snow in Tahoe the entire season and the roads have been open and relaxed. We bought chains for the car in December in case we needed them for a trip through the mountains, but had never opened the box--because of that 'no snow' thing.

On Sunday it was raining in Sacramento and I checked the weather report. Still no chain requirements by Sunday night. Monday's forecast was "chance of light snow." So went to bed warm and cozy and woke up early to discover it raining and see that there were chain requirements to make it to Kirkwood. That's okay, right? Light snow and we had the chains we bought back in December! So I jumped on the road at 7am excited for a good ski day and maybe a chance of a little powder.

They started requiring chains at the second spot where they do that sort of thing and I pulled over and put on the chains. I've only put chains on a car one other time way back in college. I'm no expert, but they sure looked loose to me. But then I thought, "well I'm no expert, and the guy at AutoZone came out and looked at the car and then gave us chains, and he probably knew what he was doing." But they sure did look loose. So I crept forward a little bit just to see they had a good bite. One of the chains just flopped right off the wheel. Flop.

Well, that's not supposed to happen and that confirmed my nagging suspicion: "I am smarter than the dude who works at AutoZone." At this point it's only 8:30am. I threw the chains in the trunk, took the exit, and headed back towards Sacramento to my father's house to see if I could borrow his SUV. The gods were good to me (Note: "Game of Thrones" reference, not paganism) and he was home and the car was in working order. So I tossed all my stuff into the car and headed back up.

The road was rough and it kept going into and out of chain requirements. Luckily for me I had a 4WD with snow tires so there was no need to keep switching the chains on and off, but it made traffic slow and I didn't get to the mountain until 11:30am and didn't get on the slope until 12pm. As I was leaving the lodge for my first run I pulled my goggles over my head and *crack*. A small little crack appeared in them. It didn't seem like too big of a deal. Then I thought, "well I could just get my sunglasses which are... in the car sitting in father's garage. /sigh." So I jumped onto the slope and started going. There was fresh snow falling the whole time and it was beautiful.

I did my warmup run and had a great time and then jumped on the high-speed quad for the top of the mountain. That's how I was trained--do one warmup and then go to the top of the mountain. Yet once I reached the top I realized the only paths down were black diamond. There was a time in life when I would proudly boast, "I'm not concerned about my ability to get down any hill. Some I just can't do very gracefully." Looking over the top of that black diamond, 10-years since I could call myself a skier, I would not make that boast. Thankfully knowing how to get down a tough hill is more intellect than muscle and I worked my way down without my fanfare but also without much difficulty.

Except it was warm enough that the snow wasn't staying frozen. It was melting. Are my gloves waterproof? Not so much. Each chair lift ride up I'm getting coated in snow and my gloves are getting wet through to my fingers. At least my jacket was fine? Nope - the zipper kept separating on the bottom side and I would have to unzip the whole thing and struggle through the mismatched separated part and then re-zip it. All the while my googles were slowly falling apart more and more. Every time I got off the ski lift the operators would say, "dude you goggles are broken." "I know, they just broke." "That's dangerous you need to get off the mountain." It looked far worse than it was. They were holding together pretty well with my hat and the back side of the mountain opened up so I was struggling to make it over there. *crack* My goggles disintegrated on me. I did my best to mold them into a semi-solid state and made a break for the lodge--making it there without any kind of problem. A quick check at the ski shop to learn that a new set of goggles was going to runme $120-$160 and I decided it was time to be done for the day. But golly-gee, those goggles look awesome!

The car got snowed on - but not that much. I think that's just business as usual.

Museum Day

2012-02-05T14:50:00.000-08:00

I was everything, patriarch, priest, father and judge. - John Sutter

I really love Sacramento and like most people, I spend less time indulging in the city as I wish that I did. It's the standard thought that people have who move to cities as and adult, "you know, I never go and see the local sites." I was somewhat lucky to be a kid in this town and be able to go see Sutter's Fort, the Crocker Art Gallery, the Zoo, Safety Town, and dozens of other places on various field trips growing up.
As and adult, I don't indulge that much in the history of this place and all the nooks and crannies around town. Sacramento has an annual museum day where it opens up all state city and state museums for free entry to encourage us to get out and enjoy the town.
Mrs.Chaos and I went downtown to see Sutter's Fort. We part in front of the fort almost every weekend when we go swing dancing, but she had never been inside and I hadn't been there since I was in a grade school. Of course, for a place that hasn't changed in hundreds of years, it hasn't changed much in the past few decades. It was still fun to see and I really enjoyed reading all the history - especially about what a really good man Sutter was.
There were cannons in all four corners of the fort and it was heavily fortified for attack. Yet, no one thinks it ever was attacked. Perhaps it was because Sutter let any travelers come in and stay and share in the meals without paying him. Perhaps it was because he entered into trade business with the Indians instead of trying to swindle or convert them. It was nice that least his early years at the fort seemed happy and prosperous.
One of the quotes from an interview late in life had the historian saying something like, "though he was swindled and cheated out of most of what he had built in California he remains a man full of smiles and complimentary of all the kindness around him." I think some dust in my eye made me a little tearful as I read it.

Sutter's Fort

I say - whether you live in Sacramento or some other town - take some time to visit some historic spots or museums or whatever. It's cool. Ya know?

Welcome Back Random Photo

2011-12-29T17:10:00.000-08:00

Expert means that you know more than anyone you need to talk to about the subject. - Timothy Ferriss

In the before time, the long, long ago, my website was statically put together on my computer and then uploaded to Lycos for hosting. To make my life easier I moved it the main story handling to blogger and all the hosting over to GoDaddy. As part of the transition I knew there would be a loss of some functionality, but that generally everything would be easier, faster and all around better.
One of the losses in the transition was the "random photo" widget I had running in the header of my website. When I clicked "published" in my old system, it would run a perl file that would find all pictures and build a giant static javascript file that could randomly select and load one. With the most, all of my photos are now hosted in Picasa and I can't do that. So I just let it go. Or so I thought.
But one particular friend (hi Timmy!) told me that I was not allowed to do that! He asked (demanded?) that I fix the random photo display on my website. Since he might name his firstborn child after me, I felt like I needed to figure it out. I have! It works! Let me tell you how!
I am using JQuery and Picasa Web APIs to do it and it wasn't that hard! Wasn't that hard at all with a grand total of 30-lines of javascript that would be a lot more compact if I wanted it to be.
One call to get total number of photos in the album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/username/albumid/albumId?alt=json&max-results=0&fields=openSearch:totalResults
Generate a random number between 1 and the result and then one more call to pull back the URLs for that image.
https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/username/albumid/albumId?alt=json&max-results=1&start-index="+showPhoto
Then you get a random photo!

Falling Behind on Content Consumption

2011-12-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

Where you are is not really different than any other place you could be. - Dennis Kas

Over the past few years I've basically had all the time I once spent reading be slowly replaced with other activities. For a long time I was always reading three books at a time. One book in my backpack for use on the train to work, on flights, at coffee shops, etc. One book next to my bed to read for a little while before going to sleep. One book on my Palm Pilot that I could read when in didn't have the others around: waiting for meetings, standing in line for something, etc.
For the past many years I've always had my iPhone on me and I've slowly migrated away from having a written book towards having podcasts and audiobooks. I veraciously consume these while I'm cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, commuting in my car and copy-pasting spreadsheets at work. Over this Christmas, I'm on vacation with Mrs.Chaos' family and have been spending nearly all my time talking with the family and playing with the nieces and the nephew. Often the nieces are playing make-believe while I'm sitting in the room and it would be the perfect opportunity to read a book on my phone, but I don't have one. I just have audio and that doesn't work as well. I am being constantly asked questions and it's just too tough to pause the audio, ask them to repeat, answer the question and then start it again. Reading is great; it automatically pauses when I look away. So my list just keeps getting longer and longer.

Fourth Annual Graham Cracker Shacks

2011-12-19T13:08:00.000-08:00

Sharing tea with a fascinating stranger is one of life's true delights. - Iroh (Avatar)

We tend to have two big parties every year. The first party is my birthday, obviously a tradition that I have held for many decades. The other big party is the annual graham cracker shack party which originated with Mrs.Chaos. This year we were a little worried because we invited more than fifty people and we were sure we had enough space for everyone to work! A total of twenty-three people showed up throughout the evening and it was fantastic.
It was also the most diverse group of friends we've gathered that included my usual suspects, people from swing dancing and people from the book club we joined half way through the year (did I mention we're in a book club now?).
Some year we should start presenting awards for things like: most professional looking, most creative, most geeky, etc. Not this year. A few standouts:
1) The Farm. Obviously planned, Meghan brought colored frosting for the red barn and frosted mini-wheats to make hay barrels.

Graham Cracker Shack - The Farm

2) The Tower of Babel -or- the Jenga Tower. Built so high that the teddy graham people started talking other languages. The creator learned that our second year someone had made a seven story tall tower and needed to beat it.

Graham Cracker Shack - Tower of Babel

3) A Prius and a Snowspeeder - proving graham crackers build more than houses.

Graham Cracker Prius

Graham Cracker Snowspeeder

Something I found amazing was at the end of the night, my gang of usual suspects had gone home to bed. These are the people I expect to stick around until 1am or 2am discussing the finer points of playing Ticket to Ride or Dominion. Instead they turned into pumpkins, and the newer groups of dancers and readers stuck around for the final picture. And.... video fly through.

Download Video: MP4

2011 in Review

2011-12-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Work hard, be kind and amazing things will happen. - Conan O'Brien

Another year is coming to an end. What amazing year. This is the first year end video where I actually have videos taken during the year I want to include. This technology thing is crazy!

Download Video: MP4

No Shave November

2011-12-06T22:19:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless - boys and women - and I am neither one. - Someone Silly

So ends the season of no-shave-november. Though I've grown a beard before, I've never participated in the month. One of my friends start the month by shaving his face and head and made me jealous. I reminded Mrs.Chaos that when we first met I was sporting a fancy beard which made me look older and wiser and she agreed to let me go the month without shaving (much).
It was not as easy as it might have been. It turns out that Mrs.Chaos didn't like the scratch of the beard and so mid-month it turned into "No Shave / No Kiss" November for me. It was an unintended consequence and it took a lot of extra mid-month negotiation with my wife about letting me finish.
It's now over, I have returned to being clean shaven, and so ends what is likely to be the last no-shave November I will ever have the pleasure of participating in.
I have tried to embed an HTML5 video player and use the HTML5 video tags for the below video. Will it work in the page in the RSS feed? I really have no clue. But I needed to do this test in preparation for my upcoming year-end video.

Download Video:
MP4

Thanksgiving Travels

2011-12-03T22:32:00.000-08:00

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice. - Meister Eckhart

Mrs.Chaos and I have are sharing our family traditions during the holiday season. Our system, pioneered by her family, is to have one year with an in-laws Thanksgiving and an outlaws Christmas followed by the next year with the outlaws Thanksgiving and the in-laws Christmas. This year is my family's turn for the Thanksgiving and then her family's turn for Christmas.
The two families have a very different feel for the holiday season. Her family tradition has everyone gather together at her parent's house and just casually relax and hang out for the season. There are games played, television watched, movies seen, meals shared, ATVs ridden, and all sorts of things. It's long and relaxed and filled with togetherness.
My tradition is to cram in as many family events as possible in as short of a time as possible. So I spend the holidays seeing my mother's side of the family, my father's side of the family, events with friends, etc. Just a lot of little events.
How did that translate this thanksgiving?

Wednesday - hanging out my male cousins and their girlfriends until 5am.
Thursday - Thanksgiving with my mother's family.
Friday - Lunch with my grandparents, followed by swing dancing.
Saturday - Relax.
Sunday - Thanksgiving Leftovers with my father's family.

It'll be interesting as the future unfolds for our own family and we combines the traditions to make our own--as well as throw in a few of our own. Bulgogi soup for Thanksgiving? Why that does sound lovely

Happy thanksgiving! I'm thankful for having more friends and family than I know what to do with.

And here is the picture of three of the four men of similar genetic descent. My older brother was busy living on the east coast.

Attending Winterjam

2011-11-20T20:55:00.000-08:00

Research has shown that people who volunteer often live longer. - Allen Klein

When Mrs.Chaos and I got married in May, we told our guests that in lieu of a tradition present, we would be very happy for them to contribute to Holt International. Holt is a wonderful organization that makes a difference in the lives of children around the world. The Holt team reached out to people in Sacramento to help sign up sponsors for children at Winterjam this weekend and Ashley and I jumped on board.
As part of the volunteer opportunity we got to watch the festivities at the Powerbalance Pavilion (sigh Arco Arena). I'm pretty confident it's my first time at a christian rock festival. It was a fun opportunity. The first band was pretty crazy--shaved head rockers screaming at the top of their lungs with various fire effects blasting in the background. I felt like I was at a death metal concert. Rock on? The final band of the night was Newsboys and it was the only band that had songs I recognized--songs that are played at my church. They had, by far, the best show. The most impressive part was when all the musicians raised up over the audience on platforms moved by giant cranes. The drummer's platform raised and leaned completely forward so that he was completely perpendicular to how he should be playing and then his platform rotated in place. I tried to take a picture but he was too backlit to get anything.
I also strikes me as weird how common place it is to take photos and videos at concerts. When I started going to concerts they would eject you for taking picture, but I think these days, everyone just accepts that the audience is going to take photos and videos on their phone.

During intermission we did our work for Holt. This specific calling was trying to raise money for children who have been relinquished by their parents but have not yet been adopted. It's a good calling. Pay $30 a month to provide for one child for a few months to a few years. You get a nicely monthly update on how the child is doing until the time they are adopted into a family. Then your commitment is over or your move on to the next child. Mrs.Chaos and I each got four children sponsored for at least a month--hopefully for the long run.

To do our part we sponsored our own little boy. I know how under-the-covers all the money goes into one large pot and Holt allocates it as they need, but we'll get monthly updates on the little tyke until he gets adopted and then we'll move on to the next. We picked a male in Korea because during out time there visiting with Molly Holt we learned that in Korea boys are much harder to get adopted than girls. Because of the way inheritance laws work, families who are struggling to have a child will adopt girls so that if they do have a boy, the inheritance goes to the genetic child.

Don't Get Confused

2011-11-16T23:21:00.000-08:00

My moustache was insured for 13 million. - John Newcombe

I'm participating in no-shave November. You will see an update about it with photos and-or-videos at the end of the month, when it is done. Since I only go into the office every other week - the first week of November I was just looking a little stubbly. When I came in this week I had a nice beard going. Lots coworkers comments on my participation in "movember."
Then I have a moral imperative to correct them because movember and no-shave november are separate events with their own history, philosophy and rules. I know this, because it is my job to know this. Movember originated from Australia in 1999 as an event where men grow mustaches to raise awareness for various men's health issues. The idea being that a mustache is out of fashion, so if you grow one people will comment on it and that will give you an opportunity to talk about prostate cancer and other topics. Movember has specific rules on what constitutes a mustache and you shall not violate it! No-shave November is not originated in discussion of men's health, and is merely an expression to the joy of facial hair. You are allowed to grow whatever form of facial hair you want. It is encouraged to truly not shave, but it makes allowances that some people need to look respective for their job. I am one of those people.
The more you know.

The Gods Were Good to Me

2011-11-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

Every dogma has its day. - Anthony Burgess

In the standard office morning chitchat someone asked about the quality of my long commute to the office. Depending on traffic and accidents and weather the drive can take between two hours and four hours. I found myself responding, "the gods were good to me. It only took a little over two hours." I was surprised with the response, coming out of instinct and not out of thought or an attempt to make reference. I've been reading Game of Thrones and when I'm really spending a lot of time in a good book, I get into a zone of quoting the book. You may have noticed that winter is coming; I've been pointing it out to people a lot. Hear me roar.
Not every book I read has the effect on me, because not every book I read has the same strength of voice. The first time I caught myself brainwashed by the linguistics of a book was high school when I started to doublethink about how plus good a book ass. These days, even if I don't fully grok why it affects me, I hope to earn at least some whuffie for the references from my droogs. If all of these things fall on dead ears, well, so it goes.

War on Texts

2011-11-14T20:55:00.000-08:00

It's no wonder that SMS texting alone is a 100 Billion dollar a year industry! - Sam

I'm currently engaged in a war on text, or a passive resistance against texts. When I upgraded to the new iPhone AT&T demanded that I give up my reasonable 200 messages a month plan and get an unlimited plan. Based on the number of txts I use, it was more cost effective to cancel. At the $0.20 per text message I am paying roughly $1,500 a kilobyte for data if sent over text message. Lovely, huh?
How can I live my life without text messages? I am working hard to advocate people to use alternate methods. As an Apple fanboy, I first encourage everyone to buy an iPhone with iOS5 on it. Apple's latest system checks if the other person is using an iPhone and if they are it sends the message through "iMessages" using the data connection. If my phone tells me the other person doesn't have iMessages I think through my other options.
I have a Google Voice account - and I can send SMS messages from that account and it goes out just like an SMS and people can response to it and I can get it in Google Voice application over normal data. In theory, if I were just trying to avoid paying for texts this would be the logical alternative. This is probably what I would be doing if AT&T fired the first shot by trying to force me into an unlimited plan. Since they want to take my money I want to take theirs by convincing all of my friends to stop using text messages and more importantly stop giving AT&T money. To do this means I can't be sending txts to people I know are paying for plans.
The tool I use depends on the person I am trying to communicate with. My three techniques are Facebook Messenger, G+ Messenger or Twitter Direct Message. So if you're getting one of these types of messages from me, now you know why. I'm fighting The Man.
I haven't engaged the nuclear option yet. It's possible to actually tell AT&T to put SMS block on your account so that it's impossible to receive txt messages. I've thought about it - but I'm still going to be willing to receive TXTs from you, just don't expect to get one in response from me.

Winter is Coming

2011-11-09T19:02:00.000-08:00

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. - Andrew Wyeth

Did daylight saving time just happen? I think it's dark by the time I'm done with work and that is sad. It makes it more difficult to do yard work after money earning work, because it's dark. Today when I know that Mrs. Chaos has class late, it was pitch black and I expected her home soon only to realize that it was around 6pm. It's sad really.

Though I like the winter with a chance to turn on the fireplace and get some hot cocoa and have comfy-cozy time. We have really cool fall trees in the yard as well as their colors are changing from summer green to fall red.

Hallow's Eve

2011-11-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

In my days as a bachelor I enjoyed celebrating halloween through the traditional method of locking the door, turning off all the lights, and being extremely quiet hoping that everyone would assume I wasn't home and just pass by my house. NO MORE! Now that I am an old married man living in a respectable neighborhood full of families, I am overwhelmed by the desire to put out jack-o-laterns, turn on the porch lights and hand out bunches of candy to the adorable neighborhood kids while movies are playing on the TV and dominoes are on the table. For the record, I won both games of dominos that we played. Though Mrs. Chaos still usually beats me at cribbage.
I even brushed off my Harry Potter costume to wear. It is my second time wearing this particular costume, but I've been told that I get to wear at least five more times and probably six! The last time I will split in time number seven (part 1) and then the year after it will be the number seven (part 2). Sound like a plan?

All Moved In--Digitally Speaking

2011-10-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

You know what I didn't want to spend [my time] on? hand-coding html and tweaking software settings. It's sad, and I'll probably lose a 3d20 geek points for saying it, but those days are way, way behind me. - Wil Wheaton

The foundation is settled under my new digital home and I'm doing some work to make it feel nice and cozy. For good or for bad I've moved off the scripts and duct tape that was used to hold the site together and to publish it out. Now I'm using a nice standard cloud service. For a long time the TextWranger extensions, shell scripts, AppleScripts, ant build scripts, and all the other crazy handwritten workflow was a lot of fun for me to put together and managed. I loved tweaking it, improving it, fixing it, and just the general churn of it. But over the last couple years it started to get in the way. My computer systems were updating faster than I had free time to make things work again. So this new change to a system where someone else is in charge is for the better.
When I first started playing with computers in high school I was beyond excited to be buying a new video card or sound card, mess with the jumpers, make sure the latest drivers were installed or even search the BBSes for third party drivers that were better than the original ones. I spent weeks getting OS/2 to run with the sound drivers, having Windows 3.1 running underneath it with its own sound and video drivers and all so that I could play Myst. I found the weeks of reading and posting in USENET and fiddling with INI settings and the registry far more fun than I found actually playing Myst. I never did beat it.
In college I had my machine setup to triple boot across OS/2, Windows NT and Linux running native StarOffice on each with a common HPFS data drive where all my documents were stored. I could sync my Palm in any of the OSes against that data. It was awesome! I probably had to reformat one of the OS partitions every other week, but I loved it. It was great. I even spent a week gutting my old Intel 486 and replacing it with a new Cyrix Pentium chip, new motherboard, and all that good stuff.
It was in the early 2000's after I was done with school and out in the working world when all of that just started to get in the way. I knew that I could do it, but it had become mundane; it had become the stuff of childhood. I started to buy laptops that were exactly what I want and just stick to a single OS. In 2004 I got my first Mac laptop, and Apple completely bought into this new philosophy I had. No more mucking around. When you wanted to upgrade you just threw the computer out and bought a new one (note: my original Mac laptop is sitting in the closest behind me happily running OSX Server and being the media and web server of my home).
I think I've reached that point in my website. Creating all the technical machinery to build the pages, format them for iPhone or convert them to an RSS feed, is just becoming mundane and the thing of childhood. I'm at the point where I would rather the technology just get out of the way and take a back seat to letting me write. I hope you'll come along for the ride.