Declan’s Blog

Playing with the new app

This is Andrew.

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I am not a Mac head, but we’ve had some additions to the toy cache. The campus bookstore had a great deal on a 24″ iMac, with a rebate on an iPod. So Elaine got the big Mac and I got an iPod Touch. It’s a ton of fun!

Our newest arrival is an iPhone 3g that I got for work. It is even cooler than the Touch because it has a camera. I’ll have a lot of lower quality photos now, but it’s super convenient.

A couple complaints about the phone, that I’m sure I’ll get the whine about on the MacVeritas podcast soon:

Battery life - with 3g, wifi, and heavy use, don’t expect this thing to last more than 5 hours.

Charging change - this just kills me. The device won’t charge in my car now. Lots of discussion on the forums that Apple decided to drop the pins where most car systems charge the phone. I’m hoping there can be a firmware fix. If not, maybe my car device has a switch, or I can build a little wire switching dongle. Either way, shame on Apple for messing with this with no real warning.

Exchange email set up was a snap - but I think I’m missing some emails… It’s being a little flaky with the ActiveSync. More experience with the device is needed.

Calendar confusion - some recurring events that have canceled exceptions are showing up as valid meetings. I know this is complicated programming from the WirelessKnowledge days. Apple needs to get ahead of this or people will lose confidence in their data.

Apps crash a lot - and have to be reinstalled. AIM, Twinkle, and others just try to start, then go back to the home dock. I’ll even get an occasional reboot.

Other than that, the device is nice! It’s sleek, so it slips in and out of pockets nicely. So far it is way more resistant to scratches than my 60G iPod.

Now that I have the phone, I don’t know if I need the Touch. The girl wants it, but I might sell it and the cool Surefire flashlights I won and buy a proper lens for the camera.

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I can’t decide whether this is cool or obnoxious:

Five planes flying at high altitude in formation dot matrix printing the sky is geeky cool. Reading about insurance companies and bad radio djs in the sky is kind obnoxious.

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From www.skytypers.com:

Five aircraft flying at 10,000 FT. emitting biodegradable vapor "PUFFS" in a dot matrix pattern. These puffs are regulated by an onboard computer that controls the sequencing of the vapor to form the letters in the sky.
The average time to skytype a character, "The size of the empire state building," is only four seconds! The hang time for a eight mile long (25-30 characters) skyboard is three to seven minutes. That's a lot longer than a fifteen second TV commercial... or the average sign on the road read at 55 mph in 7 seconds!

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Way back in June, Robert McDonald, David Minor, Ardys Kozbial, Chris Jordan, and I taught a day long seminar on Data Grids in Libraries for LITA (Library & Information Technology Association) in Anaheim, CA as a pre-conference for ALA (American Library Association).

Anaheim = Disney, don’tcha know?

All of the images from the class:

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Those first few images are of a mystery device that was installed over my hotel room door. Never did figure out what it was. I’m not interesting enough to surveil…

The class was a lot of fun, especially because it was small and the attendees got really involved in asking questions.

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I’ve redesigned the look and feel of the blog, mainly so I could play with a widget-able WordPress template. The credit for the design is at the bottom of the page. The bridge picture at the top is the Tower Bridge in London. I took this picture back in April and am very happy with how it came out.

The new site has a lot of black, which seems kinda dark to me, but since I post so many pictures, black sets them off nicely.

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A few weeks ago, San Diego held its third BarCamp and Dan Tentler (@Viss) and Billy Marsh (@cannibal) made a mini-defcamp challenge. Gabe (@gebl), Holly (@pomopants), and I (@declan) won last year in about 2 hours, so Dan vowed to make this year’s challenge much harder.

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire!

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30!

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me…

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Here’s a very cool video about KPBS and the fire map they created during the October 2007 wildfires:

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Some days, this is what my job feel like:

found on boingboing

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I’m in London right now, actually in a north suburb called Watford. My aunt lives nearby.

I’ve come over for 2 weeks, the first at a work conference called Open Repositories in Southampton. This week I’m on vacation in London, first in Watford, then heading over to Gillingham in Kent tomorrow. I have some cousins there that I haven’t seen in 10 years. Should be a hoot!

Robert, Chuck, Christian, and Effy joined me at my aunt’s place and just left for home this morning. Part of me would like to be heading home too, but part of me is excited to see the cousins again.

Some random thoughts on the experience so far:

I followed some advice and forced myself to stay up one sleep cycle and acclimate to the local time, arriving at 8:15a and going to bed at a normal 10p. I think that was 36 hours of straight awake time as I couldn’t fall asleep sitting up on the plane. There were some slight hallucinations toward the end of the night, and 5 or 6 blackouts at the pub during dinner, but I awoke the next day fairly rested and ready to take on the conference.

I’d given myself plenty of time to get showered, dressed, and fed, until I discovered that the Jury’s hotel had run out of hot water. BigD don’t roll with the cold shower, so, thankfully, I’d showered the night before in an attempt to stay awake. I was afraid that this was just a normal English thing, but no, a boiler had failed. They got it fixed and there was normal hot water afterward.

The room felt spartan compared to similarly priced American hotels. No real flourishes, just a clean couple of beds and a spare bathroom. Nothing wrong with it, but no charm.

A lot of the toilets here have 2 flushing modes, whoosh and WHOOSH! The flush button is split in two. It takes some experimentation to see which setting does what. I saw something like it in Portland.

Wifi sucks. Well, bad implementation of it sucks. We are SO spoiled at UCSD with the ubiquitous nature of the wifi and how well it is managed. Southampton’s implementation is just… FAIL. Very frustrating, especially when we’d only have about an hour of overlap time with people back home actually being awake while we were online.

Free wifi is findable around town. I could get on fairly reliably within a 15 minute walk from the hotel, which sucked a bit. It was usually at a pub, which didn’t suck so much. The hotel offered wifi in the lobby, or wired access in the rooms, but it was 5 pounds for 4 hours, or 20 pounds for a day.

Speaking of pounds, the exchange rate is murderous. We’re getting less than 2:1. I’m trying not to think about it. But a decent dinner is $50USD. OUCH! Can we get out of Iraq, pls? kthxbai

I’ve visited my aunt before who, by the way, is actually not in the country at the moment but off in India or something, and the feeling this time is different. I’ve been trying to articulate it to myself, hence this long post, but I’m having trouble. Maybe it’s because I’m older, or have traveled more, or I’m jaded, but in the past this place always seemed more otherworldly to me. What does that mean…? I’m not sure I am not as struck by the differences this time as I have been in the past. I still notice all the things that seem odd to me - driving on the wrong side, different ways of saying “common” things like “way out”, the different currency. They just don’t glare like they used to.

Maybe it’s the internet… I’m not feeling so isolated because I touch base with Elaine and other friends in IM and IRC in real time almost every day, if I can find wifi. Maybe this is bad? Maybe there’s some need to separate to be able to fully appreciate a place. With the internet so ubiquitous, it’s difficult to separate though. In fact, it’s quite difficult to operate off the net altogether. I’ve used it to check trains, find restaurants and pubs, and to send back up mails to people I couldn’t find online or with the phone.

Maybe it’s because I came here in a work mode. I find myself skimming work email because it’s easy to do when I’m checking my personal stuff. Heck, some people send personal stuff to my work address. Half of the places we visited in London had a Library focus They were still cool though. Yesterday I saw one of the original Magna Cartas and a Gutenberg Bible.

Today I’m just bumming around Bushey and Watford, enjoying the calm after the other four people headed out. They were a very pleasant crew, but that was a small place to jam 5 people into Not to mention the one shower and the bout of black plague hitting some of them. Thank goodness, I haven’t gotten sick (/me knocks wood). I’ve got some tidying up to do at my aunt’s, then getting packed up for the visit East tomorrow.

I know this is a bit more rambly than my regular stuff, but hey, it’s a blog! I think I’m supposed to ramble. Ok, here’s one nice picture from last night:

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I took Erin with me to go to the San Diego Bloggers Meetup.

Dan Tentler was on hand to take pictures with his new light boxes:

She decided to wear a geek shirt to match my stylin’ MacVeritas shirt!

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