TL;DR: On average, cable is now doing better than DSL (and fiber rules if you can get it).

I must say from living in hotels around the states since June that it is my distinct impression that everyone and their brother is watching Netflix or streaming something or the other after dinner (thanks Steve!). It’s sort of like trying to use the at&t 3G network in San Francisco during commute hours. Not that that really has anything to do with this report other than to imply, ‘more work still needed.’

This probe again implies sophisticated near-line-rate DPI technology, coupled with a system that is aimed directly at Tor, using code that actually speaks the Tor protocol.

Xcode 4.1 Customization

After downloading the “Install Xcode” application from the App Store, if you want to customize the Xcode 4.1 installation, you want to double-click “Contents/Resources/Xcode.mpkg” inside the installer bundle and not the “Install Xcode” application itself. I’m just after the compilers and don’t need the iPhone software kits (5GB) and the meta-meta installer just installs everything. It would be nice if option-double-click were to just run the embedded .mpkg but blade-guards now seem to be permanently engaged, perhaps with good reason for most apps.

The /Application directory (along with /System) now has a “0: group:everyone deny delete” ACE, which prevents you from moving anything out of those directories. So once you’ve installed Xcode from the .mpkg and want to delete the “Install Xcode” application from /Applications, you can’t just drag it to the trash in the Finder. The Finder now offers to make an Alias for you when it notices you can’t actually delete it, which is nice, but not particularly helpful in this case. I just opened a terminal window, did a “sudo mv /Applications/Install\ Xcode.app ~/Desktop/”, and then dealt with it from there.

System Voices

Under “System Preferences” > “Speech” > “Text to Speech” > “System Voice” > “Customize…”, you can choose a bunch of new voices to download.

Text Auto-Correction

You’ll probably want to turn off text auto-correction in “System Preferences” > “Languages & Text” > “Correct spelling automatically”.

Mission Control / Spaces

I understand wanting to simplify the Desktop layout grid so that it’s linear, which makes the Mission Control layout easier, but I wish they hadn’t removed the drag-and-drop ability to move application windows between Desktops. You can still drag-and-drop the applications from the bottom portion of the display, but not from the little mini windows in the Desktops themselves. For that matter, you can’t rearrange them in the bottom either, just move them between desktops. I much preferred Spaces behavior here.

Also, if you previously had applications bound to particular Spaces, the UI controls for this moved. You now have to Control-click on the Dock icon > “Options” > “Assign to” to manage these bindings.

Who could have predicted, eh?

Update: looking at just the data since 1991 and California Home Sale Price Medians by County and City.

http://trac.sacrideo.us/wg/attachment/wiki/WikiStart/r7rs-draft-1.pdf

The first lawsuit (Ciolino) claims that certain HP inkjet printers used “low on ink” messaging technology to indicate that replacement of a cartridge is needed when the cartridge is not empty and is capable of additional printing, and that this technology confused customers into prematurely replacing their inkjet cartridges.

The second lawsuit (Rich) claims that certain HP color inkjet printers used color ink in addition to black ink when printing black text and images without disclosing this to consumers and without providing consumers with the option of disabling this feature, that HP misrepresented and/or failed to disclose the actual page yield for the products at issue (including the true basis for the page yield and cost per page information provided to consumers), and that HP failed to disclose its use of color ink when printing black in connection with stating its page yields.

The third lawsuit (Blennis) claims that HP designed certain inkjet printers and cartridges to shut down on an undisclosed expiration date, and that at this point consumers are prevented from using any ink remaining in the expired cartridge and from using all of the printer’s functions until the expired cartridge is replaced.

HP denies all these claims. The Court did not rule in favor of either party. Instead, the parties agreed to a Proposed Settlement in order to avoid the expense and risks of continuing the lawsuit.

Evil or outsourced, you decide. More here.

If you want to bind it to a key, here’s how I did it. Add the following to your .emacs:

(defun insert-euro ()
  "Insert a Euro currency symbol in utf-8."
  (interactive)
  (ucs-insert #x20ac))

(global-set-key [(meta @)] 'insert-euro)

That binds it to Meta-@ (which matches OS X’s Option-@ binding, assuming Option is Meta).

NB: I also use the following to enable utf-8 by default (some of this could be redundant or stale):

(prefer-coding-system       'utf-8)
(set-default-coding-systems 'utf-8)
(set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
(set-language-environment   "utf-8")

That said, there are a bunch of irritations that are worth noting.  First, the power button’s moved to a function key in the top row of the keyboard.  It was already annoying that there was a dedicated Eject key on a laptop that doesn’t have any removable media, the new SD slot notwithstanding, but now we’ve lost another key to the power key.  As a minor consolation, at least it’s smart enough not to bring up the shutdown dialog if you accidentally hit it, since it’s right above the delete key.  (It does still function to bring up this dialog, but it requires a slight delay.)

Second (and third), the keyboard backlighting and ambient light sensor that controlled the screen brightness have gone missing, and while I sometimes battled with the keyboard backlighting (it was on too much), I still miss it overall.  Lack of an ambient light sensor is just plain annoying.

Finally, the nice rubber feet that used to keep the MacBook Air solidly gripping any polished surface have been replaced by cheap plastic and it slides all over the place now.  This one’s possibly the most annoying since there’s absolutely no way you can justify this change in terms of battery life, performance, or cost.  And it’s noticeably worse than all previous Apple laptops which have always had grippy feet and especially bad given how little the MacBook Air weighs.

So overall, I’m extremely happy with this laptop’s performance and yet it simultaneously feels like a cheap knock-off of its former self.  But man is it fast.

There’s really no fix for this.  Web services need to migrate from using cookies to cache authentication to something that’s secure, like TLS.  In the mean time, you probably should clear all of your cookies before using public WiFi, less you accidentally browse a site you’d normally be logged in to.  And you obviously should not log into any site you care about in public unless that site supports full-time TLS.  By full-time TLS, I mean that it uses https:// all the time.  Many sites use https:// for the initial login, but then switch to http:// for subsequent traffic.  Such sites are vulnerable too.

Update: for those using Firefox (and capable of configuring a SOCKS proxy), check this out.

Then there’s a quite brutal appraisal of Nokia’s prospects – based on the Ovi Developer Day in London. After promising “no PowerPoints”, the audiences were subjected to hours of them, for example. No developers who attended were using a Nokia phone – but Nokia didn’t furnish them with a prototype N8, as is the custom at other developer events.

Yooo, peep this out! I got 112 after about a weeeeeek of trying to beat this fking quiz – lol if you can beat me, ill put up 15 bucks

Again, my apologies. For the record, I use generated password that are both strong (10-12 completely random characters, including digits), so I’m reasonable sure no one guessed my password. They could have snooped it on the wire or perhaps Facebook compromised it via their new third-party API, which is about when this all started. In any case, I have for the third time initiated the 14 day timer to permanently delete my account.

The first time this failed because I had a stored cookie in the browser on my iPad that allowed cnn.com to login via the new third-party API which apparently cancelled the pending delete (not that I realized it at the time). Moral of the story: make sure you delete all of your Facebook cookies on all browsers on all of the machines you use or else any of them can cause your delete request to be cancelled. And note that this can happen if you visit any of Facebook’s 20,000+ partner sites, in other words, even if you never actually visit Facebook again. Nice, eh?

The second time, I don’t really know why it failed. In retrospect, I never received an email from Facebook saying that my account was scheduled for deletion, though I remember seeing the 14 day blurb in the pop-up dialog. Perhaps it’s for the same reason that Facebook keeps periodically telling me my email address is invalid and asking me “reconfirm” it, which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. There’s nothing wrong with my email address, never has been. But maybe it was in that state when I did the delete and maybe Facebook decided to ignore the delete because it didn’t think my email address was valid and couldn’t send me the delete conformation. Pure speculation here. In any case, 14+ days went by and the delete did not occur.

This time, I did receive this email confirmation:

Hi Derrell,

We have received a request to permanently delete your account. Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days.

If you did not request to permanently delete your account, please login to Facebook to cancel this request:

http://www.facebook.com/login.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Update: I have been asked to reconsider digital suicide.

I did indeed carry though with attempting to delete my Facebook account. Of course I have no way of telling that it’s actually been deleted. I’ve received no email from Facebook regarding the attempted deletion at any point.

However, if you received something from me today that looks like this:

Derrell invited you to “Free IPhone 4G Event!!!!” today. Ken Key, Anne Smith, and 25 other friends are also invited.

Derrell says, “check this out it’s working”.

Event: Free IPhone 4G Event!!!!
Start Time: Today, June 18 at 12:10am
End Time: Monday, June 21 at 3:20am

To see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=119787668064609&mid=28604d5G32e885cdG4f40b65G7&n_m=smith.david.t%40gmail.com

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

___
Find people from your Gmail address book on Facebook! Go to: http://www.facebook.com/find-friends/?ref=email

This message was intended for smith.david.t@gmail.com. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click on the link below to unsubscribe.

http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=8a2595&u=854099405&mid=28604d5G32e885cdG4f40b65G7

Facebook’s offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.

…it’s not from me and presumably these links are somehow malicious. if these did indeed come from Facebook, I’d say they have a very serious virus on their hands because I have not logged into Facebook in a long time now.

After trying in vain to get ahold of an iPad 3G I finally gave up and just bought a WiFi version instead. I wasn’t going to use the 3G initially anyway but I did sort of want the real GPS. However, an iPad in the hand is worth precision geo-location apparently.

So far, I love it. It’s hard to quantify but it seems a much more personal device. On the downside, I am looking forward to the upcoming multitasking support; that, and for various apps to get the iPad treatment. I was under no illusion that this was anything but a prototype but I’m finding it far more satisfying than I was expecting. The on screen keyboard is not quite up to snuff but it is useable, much more so than the keyboard on the iPhone. If you squint and just type as if it were a real keyboard it works shockingly well.

I still think the iPad is a little small on the other hand I wouldn’t want this to weigh any more than it already does. As others have noted, it’s a little heavy but being too light is also a problem. I think this is about right. It’s just surprisingly pleasant to use.

Facebook’s latest “Like” rollout is the last straw and I’m going to stop posting here soon and delete my account. This change allows tens of thousands of third-party web sites to access my personal Facebook information. Just what bits, I’m not completely sure and frankly, I don’t care. The only solution to this is to delete all of my Facebook cookies after every session, something that’s simple to configure in Firefox but not in Safari.

The problem is that I can control who I’m friends with in Facebook, but I can’t control who Facebook partners with. And given Facebook’s abysmal record of security, I have no faith that they’ve properly secured their APIs such that only those sites they’ve actually partnered with can access my information. Simply put, CNN has no business knowing who my friends are. This privacy model is critically flawed and has become Facebook’s core business model. I choose not to play anymore.

To permanently delete your Facebook account, go here. Note that Facebook also offers Account Deactivation. That feature does nothing to remove your information and you should assume that third-party sites will continue to have access to your information even though your account is deactivated. Nuking it from orbit is the only way to be sure.

I will happily sign up on the next social site that actually respects my privacy.

And worry we did. The current’s strong and we were on a flood. The docks are parallel, so you can only (easily) dock on half of them. We’d not been able to reach Weech’s on the VHF so we were just hoping that the one public marina that’s deep enough for us would also have space for 40′. We were elated to find them completely empty and with that worry out of the way, just had to remember how to turn around and dock into the current. The only other time we’d done this was at Norfolk and that actually worked out pretty well, but the crew was mentally recovering from a minor docking “incident” back at Sampson’s Cay and was generally dreading everything having to do with tying 12 ton boats to sticks and concrete. Fortunately, as soon as we turned into the current and slowed below a knot, the fearful crew recovered well enough to hand the lines to the two friendly guys from the marina office who’d seen us coming and had rushed out to help us in. There was much rejoicing.

Since we’d cleared customs back in George Town, we didn’t have to worry about that and by the time we got the boat secured and washed down (yeah, fresh water!), it was coming up on lunch time. In the same way that our opinion of George Town improved on the return visit, so had our view of Alice Town, and we were actually looking forward to lunch at this greasy spoon diner called CJ’s. If this place were located anywhere in the Mission, they’d have a line out the door. I’m not sure if it was the unhealthy but tasty burgers or the air-conditioning, but we were reminiscing about both as we walked out of the marina and started down the dirt road towards town.

But we were having a hard time finding it. We remembered it being down some sort of alley on the other side of the street but we weren’t seeing it. After turning around, we finally spotted the red and white sign, “CJ’s Deli –>”. And then the people. And then the smoldering pile of ruins that was once CJ’s Deli. It had burned to the ground. Two days ago. In the middle of the night. Arson, everyone was talking. The guys back at the marina weaved a story around a prostitute and a disgruntled, bible-thumping patron, but that was just the most colorful tale we heard. There was also talk about the FBI coming over to investigate, but that seemed rather unlikely to say the least. A tragedy for Bimini’s residents and visitors alike, there isn’t any other place to eat lunch in Alice Town right now.

Fortunately there is another place to eat dinner – a place called, “End of the World Bar”. With sand for floor, they offer a jukebox, cold beer, plentiful mosquitoes, and thoroughly mediocre pizza. But it’s off the boat and you don’t have to clean up, so as sunset approached, we closed up the boat and headed off for dinner. We were pleased to see it still standing, much less so that its doors were locked tight. Closed a few months ago, the marina guys explained. Business been really bad this year. No kidding. We could count on two hands the number of other sailboats we’ve seen since leaving Miami six months ago. This place should be packed with sailboats on the Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South, but wasn’t. And wasn’t likely to be from what we could tell. But we didn’t try to explain that to the guys in the marina, we just mostly shook our heads with disbelief that everything that had made Bimini fun to stop at was now relegated to the tattered pages of last year’s Explorer Charts.

There was one other boat anchored in the harbor (avoiding dockage fees) and it turned out that they’d departed George Town the same morning we had. In fact, it turned out we’d seen them anchored off the Chat ‘n Chill all week. They turned out to be a nice retired couple who spend their year alternating between cruising up and down the Bahamas and wintering back home in Colorado. They were just finishing up their season and looking forward to returning home for ski season. As we were the only four people there, we ended up eating together and shared tales over what food the kitchen could scrounge up. Seems you need to put in a dinner order ahead of time to ensure that someone goes and catches the fish you want to eat and we hadn’t had the foresight to do that. Our dining companions, having been here before, did. So while they enjoyed delicious grilled mahi, we pretended to nibble on fried chicken and Bahamian mac’n cheese and mostly just kept pestering the waitress for more Kalik.

The rest of the front passed the next day and we bided our time planning a two night all-the-way-to Port Everglades passage, and perhaps most importantly, restocking our ice and loading up on duty-free rum. The crew was threatening mutiny if the rum were ever to run out.

We awoke to sunny skies and almost no wind, perfect for getting off a dock! We motored out past beautiful Cay after Cay of Bahamas loveliness and turned NW. We’d cross the Tongue of the Ocean and hit the Grand Bahamas bank around midnight. The wind was supposed to give us a broad reach most of the way and it did for a couple hours anyway. Then it died off before picking up again lamely off our stern. So down go the sails and on goes the motor. It’s unpleasant and rolly, but we had no temperament left for running with the preventer out all night. As it turned out, that night passed rather lazily with us alternating between trying to find wind and firing up the engine every few hours. It’s so much more pleasant to be sailing, all things considered. However we’d long ago agreed that we’d motor all the way back if that’s what it takes.

We spent the next day on the banks enjoying our last full day of blue water sailing. We took a lot of pictures, consumed a lot of rum drinks, and avoided the engine as much as possible. Unfortunately, what we failed to do was check the weather again. The nominal reason being that we have to power down all the electronics and the engine to use the SSB and in between trying to find the wind, we just never got around to it. And so it came to pass that around midnight we were just rounding Bimini about 1 NM from the east wall of the Gulf Stream.

The wind picked up and we were making close to 7 knots. We were booking, but the wind wasn’t from the S as predicted (three days ago back at Sampson), it was more SE to ESE, plus there wasn’t suppose to be any wind in the first place. We’d expected to have to motor the rest of the way. The seas were way up with waves already cresting above the cockpit. It wasn’t really that bad, but it wasn’t at all what we were expecting. It took us about 1.5 NM to figure out that we weren’t up for this, whatever this was, so we made the call to abort to Bimini. Of course by now we were solidly in the Gulf Stream.

We were still under sail and heading in the wrong direction. So we tacked. What we should have done was jibe. This became obvious as we blew the tack. Fortunately we were able to take down our sails in near record time (for us), but not before we were pushed another 1-2 NM to the N. Though only 3 NM from Bimini, it took us the rest of the evening to actually get there. The quickest path for a boat of our speed is to take almost a 90 degree vector out of the stream and then motor north along the shore. It was nearly 4am when we were ready to drop anchor. The first two attempts didn’t catch but we finally snagged the third attempt. We were very relieved given that the seas had continued to build all night and we were now in a good 5-7′ chop and given that we were having a phenomenally hard time coming up with anything resembling a credible Plan B.

We headed down below and spent the next couple of hours waiting for dawn and throwing your basic temper tantrum. It seems like we just cannot catch a break. We motored all the way to the Turks and we’re having to motor almost all of the way back. Weather never seems to be as forecast. We’re tired of being too cold or too hot; we’re tired of being scared shitless or bored out of our minds as the only two choices. And people do this for fun?

Needless to say, it’s way too choppy to get any sleep. All praise to Fortuna, the rosy fingers of dawn ought be breaking in but a few short hours. Then we get to attempt the harbor entrance. The fun never stops.

George Town is about as good as it gets for cruising. There’s a dinghy dock at Exuma Market with free Reverse Osmosis water, as pointed out to us quite enthusiastically on the docks by this half-naked guy with tattoos and long side-burns from Texas, “free RO, man!” He looked a little weathered. We asked him how long he’d been in George Town? His answer? “Five months.” Yikes! Five days was about our limit. Five months? Free RO!

Even the Shell station has a dinghy dock and most importantly, a public trash bin! We thought the whole place was a dump the first time through here but we’ve come around to appreciate its charms.

After leaving George Town on Monday, we sailed up to Galliot Cut and left the big bad Atlantic for the protected banks of the Exumas Island chain. The timing was just right, we had high tide when we left George Town and slack tide at the cut. We anchored behind Galliot Cay on Monday night and then sailed north to Sampson Cay on Tuesday, a beam reach the whole way, unfortunately straight into the current. A struggle to keep 5 knots, but overall, a very pleasant day of sailing.

We’re leaving Sampson today for Port Everglades, about a 48 hour passage up the Tongue of the Ocean, across the Great Bahamas bank, past Bimini, and across the Gulf Stream to Ft. Lauderdale. The forecast is for very boring weather the next three days, which is great for getting across the Gulf Stream, but maybe not so hot for sailing.

The entrance here was quite stunning. Blue water and white sand cays in every direction, pure eye candy. The marina itself has a bunch of nurse sharks and rays swimming around and lots of tasty looking fish. Tiff declared that the mouth-to-head ratio was exceeded and refused to dive the prop or check on the zincs. Understandable.

Time to down some iced Illy coffee, pack up the boat, buy some ice, and point NNW or so.

Leaving our boat for 10 weeks didn’t yield too many surprises. We found 2 cans of tonic water exploded due to heat (or shaking?) A wet shelf in the quarter berth and subsequent white mold on the outside of the doors in the room; this was due to the refrigerator working but creating condensation where the copper tubing runs from the compressor from the stern of the boat to the refrigerator. Good news the refrigerator stayed working, bad on the condensation. Two of our dock lines worked their tails into the water, so there must have been a few really windy days. And we had some locals fishing off the back of our boat, since we had a fish hook embedded in one of our lines and a few weights on deck and wrapped around the far dock line. Otherwise, all looked like we left it. And, well, actually, the top decks looked cleaner than we left them!

The two local twenty-year olds, Jonah and Joseph, were here within an hour of our arrival looking for work giving our hull a scrub. It looked like it needed it, in just the 10 weeks of sitting, so we had a deal. I had asked them to put a black garbage bag over our prop before we left, with a great deal of confusion from them as to why. And we got to see the results of our experiment, which worked! The bag was covered with 1″ mussels and all sorts of growth and the propeller stayed clean with no water current flowing by it. Nice!

Wrapping our ‘outdoor’ bronze Masterlocks in CRC and then plastic wrap before we left kept them from corroding, so they also opened easily.

The sun is taking its toll. Our decks are ready for another waxing and the small pull lines on the lifelines are crumbling to green dust in our hands. The permanent marker numbers on our dinghy are half faded and ready for a new round.

I think you could call a boat a life of tinkering. 15,000 projects with anywhere from 0 to 10 hours of energy to do them.

We’ve been over to the Tiki Hut restaurant and chatted with the folks there. The Nikki Hotel was foreclosed, and many of the hotels closed for 1 to 3 months just as we left at the beginning of August. Since some of the other restaurants also closed, they were happy to still be doing adequate business. A number of the hotels that are open have 1/2 price rooms until December 15th, and the Aggressor II dive boat is still leaving here from the Turtle Cove Marina every week. The marina is less than 1/4 full at the moment, but it was 1/2 full when we left. So, it is still feeling really deserted.

2 more weeks of hurricane season. NOAA charts show most of the activity comes from the Gulf of Mexico and heads north at this time of year, so here’s to hoping that El Nino chases all our storms away. They sound optimistic that there won’t be another named storm this year. Wind shear love!

We’ve waited for Hurricane Ida to work her way through the gulf and decide where she was headed. Waited for the crazy waves that she built up all along the East Coast that reached all the way to us. And now have a high pressure system parked over us with no winds. A cold front passed through and actually dropped the temperatures down, so today is the first day in the islands we were able to use the oven. With nothing better to do, that meant baking some bagels. For a first try at bagel baking, it went well enough, we have about 6 out of the 12 that actually look and taste like a bagel. The other six were, well, stuck to the rising tray and sort of elongated into the boiling water.

Maybe we will get out of here on Wednesday. If the wind and the waves align (sort of like a stars and moon alignment, but more practical).

In this post, someone at dalke scientific recently decided to compare Pike’s Go performance of 100,000 “goroutines” for a sieve that adds one at each stage to equivalent code in another language. The results show a decided edge to Stackless Python, whatever that is. I’m not a Pythonista, so I can only guess.

Okay, let’s play! Here’s a straightforward translation into Termite Scheme:

(define ngoroutines 100000)

(define (f)
  (let* ((next (?))
         (sum (?)))
    (! next (+ sum 1))))

(define (ready-pool)
  (define first #f)
  (define last #f)
  (let loop ((i 0))
    (if (< i ngoroutines)
        (let ((pid (spawn f)))
          (if (not first)
              (set! first pid)
              (! last pid))
          (set! last pid)
          (loop (+ i 1)))))
  (values first last))

(define (main)
  (call-with-values
      (lambda () (ready-pool))
    (lambda (first last)
      (! last (self))
      (! first 0)                  ; bang!
      (?))))

(time (begin
         (display (main))
         (newline)))

First let's look at Go, as the reference, on this 1.6 Ghz MacBook Air (Go source from dalke's blog):

fluffy:502% 6g goroutines.go
fluffy:503% 6l -o goroutines goroutines.6
fluffy:504% time ./goroutines
100000

real 0m1.651s
user 0m0.962s
sys  0m0.678s

Okay, I never said this was a fast machine. And now let's look at Termite (compiled):

fluffy552% gsc -exe goroutines.scm
fluffy553% ./goroutines
100000
(time (begin (display (main)) (newline)))
    944 ms real time
    943 ms cpu time (719 user, 224 system)
    9 collections accounting for 517 ms real time (436 user, 81 system)
    238845832 bytes allocated
    45581 minor faults
    no major faults

Not bad. Now let's try this in the interpreter:

> (load "goroutines.scm")
100000
(time (begin (display (main)) (newline)))
    1235 ms real time
    1234 ms cpu time (943 user, 291 system)
    9 collections accounting for 578 ms real time (471 user, 107 system)
    292280640 bytes allocated
    57227 minor faults
    no major faults
"/Users/ddp/src/scm/goroutines.scm"
> (load "goroutines.scm")
100000
(time (begin (display (main)) (newline)))
    903 ms real time
    902 ms cpu time (740 user, 162 system)
    2 collections accounting for 341 ms real time (293 user, 48 system)
    291419952 bytes allocated
    20806 minor faults
    no major faults
"/Users/ddp/src/scm/goroutines.scm"

Love that cache.

To be fair, Go is a full coroutine whereas Termite's only running a thunk. OTOH, Termite has richer message passing semantics overall, including pattern matching on receive. Nonetheless, I'm not particularly impressed by Go's threading performance either. This may be solving a problem that needs solving at Google, but it doesn't seem like the breakthrough Pike made it out to be in his Tech Talk. Quite frankly I'd much rather have slow compiles and correct, fast, output myself.

Well, at least Go's smaller:

fluffy:512% ls -la goroutines
-rwxr-xr-x  1 ddp  staff  683073 Nov 15 17:28 goroutines
fluffy:513% ls -la ~/src/scm/goroutines
-rwxr-xr-x  1 ddp  staff  4967528 Nov 15 17:14 /Users/ddp/src/scm/goroutines

Interested in commenting? Go here.

The watermaker: the salinity probe failure message keeps going off (usually in the middle of the night). Oh, and the pressure pump doesn’t always engage. When we get to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, we’ll get it straightened out and replace probably both those items. OceanLink may not have been an authorized dealer to actually install our watermaker (for precisely these reasons?), but at the moment, we’re leaving that to Spectra to determine.

And despite what it feels like (AccuWeather says 91 with real feel of 109 degrees), it can still look jealously pretty. (So, never believe the pictures people show you!)

Because in all honesty, someone has to dinghy over to the customs office after an overnight of pounding in winds that skipped up to 27 knots while your partner decided that bringing in the genoa was a good idea at 3AM in the morning and well, as the novice sailors that you are, you realize that the furling drum is jammed, and well, an hour later, you wrap an unattended genoa sheet around a starboard stanchion and a cleat (an amazing twist that would be ever so hard to replicate) and then with a great deal of pull, bend your stanchion to 45 degrees (only people up at 4AM would understand why that exactly occurred). We got it all sorted out, but… well, we just wanted to say that pictures lie… well, even this one…. it looks so benign this small stanchion break:

Despite the 90 degree swelter, we still have Clyde (the mosquito) and his 5 girlfriends with us on the boat, but the Caicos aren’t too bad, since they haven’t had much rain yet. And, of course, Fred (the fly), he’s always along with us, as well.

You could even glance back at the Exuma Sea Park photos and think it was heaven…

… but actually, these pictures lie, the office was closed, we were getting snippy with each other, and the cute little yellow birds sit on all day long on an extremely poisonous plant called, get this… Poisonwood (the porch offered up a nice botanical placard to inform us of why Derrell’s knee was burning). Ah, truly a delight.

But, if you are into birding… the list could be interesting.

So, for sailing the Bahamas, pictures are in, eye candy abounds… and our only advice to anyone thinking of doing this, is either… go buy a hot tub and a grill and enjoy life, or if you must do this, at least sail it on-season. It’s friggin’ hot out here.

June 10 – We left Miami for a night Gulf Stream passage, not much to say about it other than the seas were flat and well, so was the wind, so a-motor-sailing-we-go. The moon was out, only two or three cargo ships, so overall an easy passage. We ended up anchored out on the Bimini banks waiting for sunrise and had a surreal first view of the swimming pool clear water that the Bahamas offers. There’s big fish down there!

June 11-12 – Alice Town; We cleared customs in Alice Town on Bimini Island. A cute place, not much happening, but they have airy outdoor bars and a greasy spoon diner CJ’s Deli that fed us some hamburgers and Tiff’s first ever conch fritters, with a big side of air conditioning. We saw the high season sport fishermen careening around with too much testosterone on top of their gigantic ‘Tuna Towers of Terror’. Saw a spotted eagle ray swim under our boat in the harbor, along with all sorts of coral fish. The stripped tuna carcasses that end up back in the water on the weekends from the waddling gold jewelry laden fishermen are a big draw for the harbor fish. And the water was reading 88 degrees in the harbor! Dang, that’s getting near hot tub temperatures!

June 13 – Great Banks; We anchored out on the Great Banks with no land in sight, in a whopping 12 feet of clear water and went snorkeling. No current, no waves, no wind.

June 14 – Chub Cay; Not much of a birthday for Derrell, but we sweltered through a quick baked chocolate rum birthday cake. Anchored out with no one else around and tested out setting out a Bahamian moor with two anchors. Morning rolled around and we were over our second anchor, so we still have some work to do there.

June 15-16 – Nassau; Missed a serious thunderstorm in the distance that gave us a lightening show. Came through the main harbor channel and passed a Disney cruise ship on one side that could have fit most of the town in it and the Atlantis casino complex on the other that also could have fit the entire town in its rooms. Nassau looked small after that. We grabbed an early lunch at the Poop Deck restaurant (sometimes you have to be brave), and spent a small fortune for a fine dinner of Island Conch, peas and rice, and fried plantains. Derrell opted for some Mahi-Mahi, which was the better choice upon later review of the grease content of the battered conch (think fried calamari). And a mixed drink called a Goombay Smash (think canned pineapple juice). We found the small shopping center and ran some errands, restocked fresh vegetables and bought one can of Vita Malt and another of jelly Coconut juice. The Vita Malt was 720 kilojoules of what tasted like raw wort from a home brew experiment gone horribly wrong. The jelly juice is supposed to be mixed with Gin and condensed milk but that sounds too offensive to try.

June 17-18 – Allan’s Cay; A nice hop over from Nassau without getting near a coral head. We checked out the prehistoric iguanas and watched the Nassau cruise ship speed boats come in to check them out as well. Other than the twice a day 15 minutes that the crazed tourists landed on the island, the stop was relaxing.

June 19-20 – Norman’s Cay; We anchored in a channel full of current that just about caused mutiny on the sailboat by both parties and would have left an unattended boat in the harbor. Something about anchoring on low tide and having the current changing WHILE you are anchoring can really throw a monkey wrench into a relationship. ‘What do you mean you headed the boat into the current? Bah! You didn’t drop the anchor right, you idiot, bring it up again!’ Anyhow, we’re still on the boat. We checked out the island’s airstrip restaurant, met the restaurant’s 6 dogs (well at least 5 of them), met a Norwegian bar tender who was on his way back to Norway for solstice tomorrow, and bought a $5 bag of ice. Woo! Iced coffee in the morning! And we made a try at making English Muffins, they were lacking some depth of flavor, but since cooked on the stovetop, were better than trying to fire up the stove inside of a sweltering boat.

June 21-23 – Exuma Park; We are currently hunkered down waiting for the 20-30 knot winds to die down and are happy to be securely tied to a mooring buoy. Two major lightning storms passed overhead last night, so even on the buoy, it was an up every few hours sort of evening. At least the clouds today are keeping the temperature in the boat below 92 degrees! (We are certain that we’ve lost our minds, probably from heat exhaustion. Summer, who’s idea was that again?) A seaplane or two came through the mooring buoys, which sort of gives you a start when you poke your head up from below to see what that really odd engine noise is.

Alright, we’re putting away the tools, washing up, packing up, and getting ready to ship out again.

The full exploration of Coconut Grove is complete. Okay, that was really accomplished in just a few days, but we did sit at Scotty’s through more than a few afternoon thunderstorm downpours, and meet the local half-grown cat chasing its tail. And we saw why turquoise and pink seem so quintessentially Miami. The skies are different than New England, and that seems to bode well with the french touristas. And, Derrell became an Island Tycoon after finding a pair of cheap, slightly broken sunglasses, now if someone loses a Panama hat, he’ll be in full style.

We’ve waited at the City Hall bus stop for many hours waiting for the “no-longer-free-since-October-last-year-but-we-can’t-be-bothered-to-update-any-of-the-bus-stop-signs-and-even-our-government-pages-show-the-wrong-schedule-and-fares-so-good-luck-figuring-out-when-we-run” buses. And contemplated the city hall, which was a Pan American World Airways modern Clipper seaplane terminal. And we had time to contemplate the crazy stacking of motorboats at Dinner Key. They have them 4-5 stories tall and bring them down with a fork lift when the owners want to take them out for a spin in the bay. A strange and not very stable business, but it seems to work for the local denizens.

We did a few tasks when the weather was below 88 degrees and not raining:
- Climbed the mast for the first time
- Discovered our 400 lbs of batteries shifted due to Cay Electronics not sanding off the paint on the fiberglass before applying epoxy to the brace bar
- Patched a few more rips in our UV cover on our sail
- Got the crankshaft/pedal repaired on our bike (Revolution is a great bike shop, and Montague sent us a replacement crankshaft for free.)
- Rented a car (walking 2 blocks from the bus stop to the rental agency, in an out-of-nowhere thunderstorm made us look like dripping drowned rats), found a Tex-Mex taco stand (not bad), provisioned at a Chinese/Vietnamese grocery store (Lucky’s) and then promptly showed up 20 minutes after the propane refill place sent their guy home at 4 pm. Figured we’d drive north (not taking into account Friday, or the fact that Miami started express lanes with signs ever few feet threatening you that if you stay on the highway, you will receive a $100 fine, no cash accepted), and thus, instead took the next big exit and ended up in Miami Beach for a stupidly expensive Italian pizza meal that arrived on a postage stamp of a table with everything arriving at once and nowhere to place even a glass of water. The pizza was good, but the stupidity of the service was truly astounding, even to our jaded opinion of the tourist restaurant scenes on this planet. Ah, the Paris-Hilton days! (They do have a ton of small dressed up dogs out for walks in Miami Beach, for our entertainment, and those short woofy things were competing for the glitz spotlight with their overly manicured owners. Gold twinkly shoes for all!)

And the local Fresh Market had some Quayle spelling for us along with their Whole Food style pricing…

The most disturbing aspect of our stay, though, was the Goombay festival. A Bahamas celebration, low key, extremely loud music blared out, and basically on par with the San Francisco Carnival festival in the Mission… but.. for the.. Orwellian 1984 aspect of the police presence. How did they come up with this?! They had police towers every other block all down the single street over-lording over the trinket selling, food vending (somewhat bored) looking neighborhood. Freaky, I tell you.. hey, buddy, lets go celebrate our Bahamian roots… but just don’t look up at the flak jacketed police! Remember to smile and Have Fun!!

And one last thought for anyone that watches TV these days (what’s that?), they were filming the Burn Notice series in the empty conference center at the marina and we had a few moments waiting at the bus stop watching them precariously leaning out of a mini-van to film the actors driving along the road in Porsches and backing up what little traffic there was in the area. Hey, maybe we ended up in the background of the show? Strike 1 minute off of our 15 minutes of fame! Woo! Gotta get those cheap Tom Cruise/Panamanian Dictator sunglasses back on Derrell!

The above shot shows the 52-story Vehicle Assembly Building (center) and Launch Complex 39A (left) with Atlantis and 39B (right) with Endeavour. It was taken from right outside the safety zone, about 10NM out. Atlantis is planned to launch on May 11th to service the Hubble Space Telescope and because the orbital logistics don’t allow it to reach the International Space Station (ISS) should something go wrong, the contingency plans call for Endeavour to be ready to launch. Otherwise, Endeavour is headed to the ISS sometime around June 13th to deliver a Japanese research laboratory. This is probably the last time two shuttles will be on the pads at the same time.

Launch Complex 39A (Atlantis):

Launch Complex 39B (Endeavour):

The white balls hold the ~900,000 gallons of liquid oxygen (LOX) and ~850,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (LH2) that are burned by the Space Shuttle Main Engines during launch. The elevated tower holds 300,000 gallons of water used for sound suppression during main engine ignition and the three tall towers are a lightning-supression system.

Two more launch pads were planned during Apollo, but never built. These pads are going to be converted to launch the manned and unmanned variants of the follow-on to the Shuttle, Ares, which is slated to launch in 2013, not that anyone really believes that schedule.

It must have been quite the sight to have been off the Cape for the launch of a Saturn V. My parents tried to take me to Kennedy Space Center to see the launch of Apollo 15 but for whatever reason we arrived during the Mission and subsequently most of the complex was not open to visitors. So close…

Reference: here.