Steven Yi | Blog

Putrid Pete – Aerial Drone Footage

Steve — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 20:58:45 +0000

I took this aerial footage in September 2015 but finally got around to posting this online. This was taken at Putrid Pete’s Peak (aka – “P3”), just outside the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The trail is steep, but very accessible from I-90. It’s a relatively short hike at 3.4 miles one-way, but with some glute-firing altitude gain of 3,020 ft., topping out at 5,220 ft. elevation. My buddy John scrambled the ridge as I operated the drone; I was able to find a small 3′ x 3′ spot to launch and land the drone in the steep, rocky area. My favorite shot is at 0:52, where I was able to follow the ridge with the sun in front, creating a silhouette of the formation with Mt. Rainier in the background.

Shot with a GoPro Hero 4 Black mounted on a 3DR Solo drone.

aerial footage of Putrid Pete’s Peak, Snoqualmie Region WA

(adjust settings to view in hd)

Mazama – Drone Flyby & Landscapes

Steve — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 22:00:58 +0000

Mazama is my favorite small town in Washington State. Just east of Washington Pass it is often dry and shielded from bad weather from the west by the mountains, a stark contrast to the green of western Washington, and the Cascade Range that has mountains covered in snow year-round. If you look up while you drive towards town you’ll see the Goat Peak Lookout. At 7,000 ft. elevation it looks down the Methow Valley with amazing panoramic views.

The first time I was up there was in 2013 during my first (and only!) stint as a wedding photographer. My friends Matt and Emily had a private ceremony up there before celebrating with friends and family in town. On their wedding day gray skies threatened rain but we were blessed to have a bluebird day when we reached the top. The pictures below brought back good memories of that day.

aerial footage of Goat Mountain Lookout, Mazama WA

(adjust settings to view in hd)

Three years later I came back, this time with my drone to get aerial video footage using a GoPro Hero 4 Black mounted on a 3DR Solo drone. It was breezy at the lookout with 15 mph winds coming straight up and over the ridge, blowing mist and low-hanging clouds while the sun peeked out a few miles away. Despite the gimbal mount the footage is a little shaky from the wind buffeting the drone but I liked the way the clouds and mist created a moody atmosphere.

(click on images for larger version)

Enchantments 2016: Time-Lapse & Landscapes

Steve — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 19:14:58 +0000

In June we spent four days in the Enchantments to climb and capture images of the amazing scenery. Images and videos are of the photography-focused part of the trip. Our climb up the Stanley-Burgner route on Prusik Peak was a bit spicy and deserves its own special treatment in the near future.

time lapse of sunset, moon-rise, and sunrise with a gopro hero 4 black

(adjust settings to view in hd)

The hike into the core Enchantments is relatively short at just over 6 miles, but culminates with a butt-buster of epic proportions going up Aasgard Pass. In ¾ mile you gain 2,200’ in elevation on snow and a rough trail best described as slippery kitty litter. On our way up we were buffeted by 30+ mph winds, strong enough to make me lose my balance a few times while I trudged up the hill with over 60 lbs. of climbing, camping, and photography gear.

The first night was cold and windy, getting below freezing overnight. Low flying clouds and mist swept through our site, and I spent most of the night with the top of the tent nearly pressed against my face from the wind. Fortunately, the weather improved and we climbed the classic Stanley-Burgner route on Prusik Peak the next day. A late start, a slower party ahead of us, and getting slightly off-route resulted in a successful summit but didn’t get back to camp until 3:30a. I ate while lying down before going to sleep without feeling ashamed of myself.

After resting on day 3, we decided to get some sunset, sunrise, and time lapse photography. Hiking north from Isolation Lake took us to a high ridge above Aasgard Pass and we could see Colchuck Lake below us and a multitude of peaks around us. I was able to get some good images of Jim and the surrounding landscape as sunset approached with Dragontail Peak, Colchuck Peak, and Mt. Stuart behind him.

(click on images for larger version)

climber among the enchantments

rays of sun

looking down aasgard pass

I was also able to set up my GoPro to get night and time lapse photos of the sunset, moonrise, and sunrise. For the first time my night lapse results didn't results in thousands of pitch-black images. The time lapse video was stitched together with 1,600 images taken over eight hours. My luck taking night photos ran out when I used my Sony camera. In the dark I made the bonehead mistake of leaving on the lens cap, resulting in this fantastic image:

a beautiful night-time vista of the enchantments. too bad i forgot to remove the lens cap.

We did an open bivy on the ridge overnight, setting our sleeping bags on flattened patches of dirt left made by mountain goats. The breeze and chill kept me awake so I only ended up sleeping a few hours total. Every once in a while I got up to set a new camera position, but I was able to control the GoPro with my phone from the relative warmth of my sleeping bag in the dead of night. The moment the sun hit our faces we instantly forgot the cold and enjoyed the sunrise. We descended a short while later, returning to our base camp, packing up and heading home.

sunrise on glacier peak

enchantments sunrise

mt. stuart

colchuck lake from aasgard pass. high winds and ominous clouds whipped towards us.

the view from our campsite

our approach to prusik peak

the view from prusik on pitch 4 of the stanley-burgner route

Here's a map of our bivy location. You'll be able to see more of the terrain if you click on the satellite view.

Windows Azure and Reality of the Hybrid Cloud

Steve — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 05:18:24 +0000

Quick note – I left Red Hat back in December and joined Avanade where I now lead a team of product managers and engineers building software and cloud services across cloud computing, mobile solutions, and digital marketing.

Earlier this week I authored a post on Avanade’s corporate blog about the significance of Windows Azure’s general availability of IaaS virtual machines and virtual networking, and how it ushers in a new era of hybrid cloud computing that spans on-premises with public cloud.

You should also check out the Windows Azure announcement and Scott Guthrie’s in-depth technical post.

Dog Shows & Engagement Photos [PHOTO]

Steve — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:15:37 +0000

matt and emily at the boston botanical garden

Matt was one of the first friends I made on Boston. Ironically he had also moved to Boston from Seattle just a few months ahead of me and we’d never met even though we had mutual friends in the Seattle climbing community. We’ve climbed outdoors several times on rock and ice. Probably the funniest memory, worthy of its own post, is the time we bailed midway up a route because of rain that was forecast to come later in the day. Matt tweaked his back and we went back to town to eat breakfast. Matt ate in a semi-reclined position as the clouds broke and it became a glorious day at 10a. Due to Matt’s condition, climbing was out of the question and we wandered in town, eventually spending time at a dog show in the park. We laughed and cursed at our rotten luck. Pathetic!

Matt and Emily got engaged in October and I offered to take some photos to keep my skills fresh and try out more portrait work; most of my time up to this point was of landscapes and climbing. We headed to Boston Common on a fall day and walked around pond in Public Gardens. Teresa was a great assistant, shoo-ing people out of our shots and carrying our jackets on a brisk day.

I guess they liked them. They asked me to photograph their wedding ceremony in September. While I never relished the idea of moving to Boston I’ve made friendships and experienced things I never would have expected.

Braving Nemo [Photo]

Steve — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:37:04 +0000

Nemo hit Boston in early February, bringing over two feet of snow and gusts of wind over 50 mph. Teresa and I watched the snow come down for hours before it got dark. We decided to venture out. This was the first time I ever put on my mountaineering gear for a city walk, including goggles, and we trudged out onto the snow. The normally crowded streets were eerily quiet and devoid of the normal traffic with a city-wide driving ban for the night. The picture here is of Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, normally full of cars and pedestrians.

North Ledges Ice [Photo]

Steve — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 03:16:52 +0000

I took this picture January 2013 during one of the Appalachian Mountain Club ice outings. The area is normally a rock climbing destination but during the winter it transforms into columns of ice. I was fortunate to get the morning light that highlighted the color variations in the ice. Some route names in the area seem to be inspired by the color of the ice; the best example is probably ‘Snot Rocket‘. I have no earthly idea why.

Read Between the Lines [Photo]

Steve — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:53:23 +0000

devin on read between the lines, a WI4 route in north conway.

In February, Devin and I paired up for a great day of ice climbing in North Conway. I had completed my second ice lead – a 50m WI3 gully route and I was in a great mood. Devin wanted to challenge himself, too, so I belayed him up this challenging route and then followed him up. The beginning of the route had thin, chandeliered ice that broke easily and rained down on me as he made his way up. The first crux of the route is where I took this picture; Devin had to awkwardly pull to his left and work his way up and left to get to thicker ice before placing his first ice screw.

The next 20 feet was steep but predictable before hitting the second crux, requiring him to squeeze between an ice bulge and the bare rock, balancing with tools, and backstepping one foot to rest a crampon point on a small ledge. It then required making a committing move to clear the overhung ice bulge, trusting and fully weighting tool placements before working his feet up, clearing the bulge and continuing up before anchoring to some trees.

As I followed Devin to the ice bulge I was greeted by a steady drip and spray from up above that immediately froze to my helmet, glove, and tools. I was hesitant to change my hand position on the tools because the spray would immediately freeze and make the tools too slippery to handle. Even though I was on top-rope, the combination of the pump, the exposure, and freezing drip tested me mentally and I forced myself to breathe slowly and relax my grip. I could certainly climb it, but not ready to lead it yet.

I got to the top and congratulated Devin on the strong lead. I’m glad I was able to get a photo to remember a memorable experience.

Breaking Ice [Photo]

Steve — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:57:17 +0000

This winter I had the opportunity to go through the Appalachian Mountain Club’s ice climbing program. It was a great experience getting involved in the local climbing community, meet some great people, and also get some serious laps on ice to where I got enough confidence leading WI3 (a.k.a. – a difficulty rating just above “pansy-level”) by the end of the season.

The picture above is of Joe DiNardo, one of the many climbing friends I’ve made here on the east coast. Here he’s climbing in the North Ledges area of North Conway during one of the AMC ice climbing trips. On the way back to Boston we listened to three hours of house music. He drove, so I didn’t have much say in the matter.

Red Hat Enters Next Phase of Its Application Server Technology Strategy

Steve — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:22:37 +0000

The rapid change of technology and rise of cloud computing, mobile devices, and NoSQL is making us re-evaluate what a modern application server needs to provide for our customers and how developer tools and technologies need to evolve to meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs.

Today is an exciting day for us where we’re able to share where our middleware platform and projects are headed that will help lead us to an exciting future. There’s a press release; the content below provides more context. Mark Little, our engineering leader provides more insight in posts here and here.

Over the past few years we’ve observed these industry changes and received input from our engineers, our thriving, global community of JBoss AS developers, contributors, and our enterprise customers who use JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) for their mission-critical workloads.

To meet these needs we’re announcing an ambitious next phase for our application server strategy and the JBoss EAP application server, a technology collaboration with 10gen and their MongoDB database, and exciting changes to our community projects you can vote on.

The strategic roadmap for the JBoss EAP server has four key components:

Hybrid Clouds & Dynamic Service Fabric: The rise of cloud computing also calls for cloud-enabled application servers with a dynamic service fabric that supports public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. A significant step in this evolution is JBoss EAP operating in Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS), creating the industry’s first Java EE6 PaaS. Our goal is to also make sure JBoss EAP provides customers and developers with choice and application portability, and to prevent lock-in to proprietary platforms or cloud services. To support hybrid clouds, we plan on making advanced cloud features such as auto-scaling and auto-provisioning available to participate in multiple cloud configurations.

Mobility: In the mobile space, analysts predict the already impressive growth of mobile will only accelerate. Mobile has increased from roughly 4% of all web traffic at the end of 2010 to now exceeding 10% with mobile searches quadrupling since 2011. There are now more than 1.2 billion mobile web users worldwide. Through projects such as AeroGear, the roadmap for JBoss EAP focuses on providing solutions for native, hybrid and mobile web to an increasing number of computing devices and form factors beyond the traditional PC.

NoSQL: As NoSQL applications gain increasing adoption among major web and enterprise developers, NoSQL is quickly taking shape as a viable alternative to traditional RDMBS. Yet there’s currently little consistency in programming models to interact with that data. Like we’ve done with the Hibernate project to provide consistent data-access to relational databases, we want to provide consistent frameworks and standards to increase the scalability and reliability of Java and NoSQL solutions. To that end, we are partnering with 10gen, stewards of the leading NoSQL database, MongoDB, to develop these standards in the Hibernate OGM project.

Polyglot Computing: While Java continues to be the leading platform for application development, new languages and frameworks have arisen to address specific scenarios. While offering differing capabilities, each benefits by taking advantage of advanced management and scaling features of a cloud-enabled application server like the JBoss EAP server and the Java Virtual Machine. The roadmap for JBoss EAP ensures that developers have multiple choices of alternative architectures and languages available by running Spring Framework, Ruby via the jRuby and Torquebox projects, Clojure, Ceylon, and Scala among others.

Embracing What Works: With change come questions about reconciling the new with the old. While we aggressively pursue this brave new world of cloud, NoSQL, mobile and polyglot, our commitment to our community and customers dictate we not only continue supporting existing enterprise Java standards, but also drive new standards to provide a path for customers to migrate and adopt at their pace.

Finally, to signify this important milestone we’re asking for the community to vote on a new name for the core JBoss Application Server. We will continue to use the JBoss name for our commercial open-source product offering JBoss EAP, which will be made available to developers and customers, providing the rock-solid and cloud-scale application middleware platform that customers bet their businesses on. Details on how to participate and contribute your ideas are further down.

Some more details on how we’re approaching these changes are below:

Mainstream NoSQL & MongoDB

In the course of a few short years, we’ve witnessed a massive upswing in developer activity and the rise of new applications and tools that change the way developers bring their products to market. As the pace of innovation and market demands increase, flexibility and developer productivity are top-of-mind. Similarly, the rise of cloud computing has created new possibilities for developer agility and application scalability. Lastly, the amount of data created – structured, unstructured, and semi-structured – has continued to mushroom, giving rise to the new discipline of Big Data. The NoSQL movement – led by 10gen and its open-source database, MongoDB – has catalyzed these three trends, driven by adoption among everyday developers and Fortune 500 corporations alike.

The Hibernate project, the industry’s leading object-relational mapper (ORM), solved a significant data problem by providing a standardized interface for Java developers to interface with a variety of relational databases. Hibernate is the industry standard, used by millions of Java developers and has directly shaped Java standards around data access, notably the Java Persistence API (JPA).

Today, we’re announcing a partnership between the JBoss team at Red Hat and 10Gen to power the next generation of data-powered applications. We are collaborating closely on the next generation of Hibernate for NoSQL – what we’re calling Hibernate OGM – with 10gen given its leadership in the NoSQL space. Our joint goal is to make NoSQL a mainstream technology that all Java developers can leverage using their existing expertise, applying the principles that made Hibernate a success: standards and ease-of-use.

Hybrid Clouds, Portability, and Choice

At Red Hat Summit 2012 we announced the availability of JBoss EAP 6 on OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), creating the first enterprise Java PaaS in the industry. This combination reflects Red Hat’s vision for hybrid cloud deployment, offering users choice and preventing lock-in to proprietary infrastructures and cloud vendors.

We have a specific vision for how JBoss EAP can benefit developers and end users as the overall cloud computing market is expected to reach $100 billion by 2016 (IDC). The foundations of our cloud roadmap are centered on three principles:

Flexibility– offering choice in deployment models, whether it’s on-premise, virtualized or in a public or private cloud infrastructure.

Cloud portability without lock-in – empowering customers to migrate deployments to the cloud location and type of their choosing, offering choice and avoiding lock-in from proprietary offerings.

Spanning & connecting clouds – our customers are now running multiple cloud environments concurrently, dictating the need for flexible deployment and portability. Just as important is the need to connect and synchronize data across systems separated by differing cloud infrastructures, network boundaries and physical location.

Open Choice & Polyglot

Another significant change has been the rise of new languages and frameworks for application development. While offering differing capabilities, each benefits by coexisting together and taking advantage of advanced management and scaling features of a cloud-enabled application server like JBoss EAP. The JBoss EAP roadmap ensures that developers have multiple choices of alternative architectures and languages available by providing solutions integrations for Spring Framework, Ruby via the jRuby and Torquebox projects, Clojure, Ceylon, and Scala among others.

While we embrace this vision of polyglot programming, worldwide it’s estimated that Java has 9 million developers and continues to thrive and grow as one of the top platforms, as shown in the latest programing language rankings by RedMonk. We will continue to be a leader and advocate for standards in enterprise Java and have contributed to many of the standards that have made Java EE 6 lighter, simpler and more powerful. Standards such as Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) continue to be a cornerstone for effectively building applications with JBoss technologies and we’re committed to actively participating in evolving enterprise Java moving forward.

Embracing…and Driving the Standard

It’s essential to note that while our roadmap embraces this brave new world, our first commitment remains to our community of developers and customers. This means continuing to embrace and support industry standards. We will continue to avidly participate in standards bodies for Java and Java EE, and provide world-class support for applications written in today’s technology.

We will also drive the modernization of standards for tomorrow’s mainstream technologies. Our historical community participation has made things such as JPA, for standardized database access, and JAX-RS, for authoring web services, a standard part of the Java developer’s toolkit. Today’s investments in cloud, NoSQL, and mobile frameworks will continue ensuring computing remains open and non-proprietary, and benefits developers and end users.

A Change In Name

Finally, many of our customers and those in our community are still unaware there have been two faces of JBoss – our community projects and our product offerings with state of the art stability and security. There is a JBoss AS project, and a JBoss EAP product. Our community projects showcase our latest prototypes, innovation, and integration of our investments in cloud, NoSQL, and mobile frameworks. Our commercial open-source products provide the rock-solid and cloud-scale middleware platform that customers bet their businesses on.

Renaming the JBoss AS community project helps clarify the mission and goals of each. The JBoss name will continue to live on by representing our commercial open-source product offerings, and we are continuing work to increase its access and availability for developers.

With our ambitious roadmap ahead of us we realized that, like the technology industry overall, we are at an inflection point where embracing emergent technologies into our flagship product makes sense for our developers and customers.

So to mark this important milestone we are asking the community to help us rename the JBoss AS community project.

Knowing how important this is to our community, we want you to participate in this new mission by participating in an election to rename the core JBoss Application Server project. Members of the JBoss developer communities and Red Hat associates are invited to nominate names online between October 1 – 14, 2012.

The top nominated names, as decided by a panel of judges made up of Red Hat employees, will be presented for voting October 21 – November 1. The winning name will be announced November 12 during the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium.

For more information about the election, or to nominate a name for the final ballot, please visit http://www.jboss.org/vote

We hope you’re as excited as we are about our direction moving forward. To our community and customers – thank you for being on the journey with us!