eichin

As the entire world has figured out (I've even seen a translation of the press release in what I think was Thai) MetaCarta has been acquired by Nokia. This is a positive, even rewarding, thing... Nokia brings lots of resources to the table, and is building a global geographic search service ( http://maps.ovi.com/ - no, you probably *haven't* heard of it, at least if you live in the US, but they do own NavTeq...) (ovi is Finnish for "door") and MetaCarta's team and technology will be an interesting and even important part of that.

Of course, the last time I worked for a company with more than 150 people was HP/Apollo, an experience which contributed somewhat to my working only for small startups for the last 18 years :-) But this is a new century, and the part of Nokia we're plugging in to seems to "get it" in ways that are unexpected for a large multinational with a somewhat diverse set of products... so we'll see how that goes.

Even before the acquisition, this has lead to more travel for me (a week in Berlin talking to their engineers and exploring the city, for starters.) Since we're working mostly with people in Berlin (not Espoo) there may be more of that in my future.

(On a related note: at this point, 3 of the 4 IP lawyers I've interacted with professionally are tall and blonde. That's not enough to extrapolate from, of course :-)

While I'm here - after seeing a poster session at Pycon (in Atlanta, mmm more travel, mmm ribs) about the Georgia Tech CS-through-python-and-robots curriculum, I picked up the textbook (and the toys :-) and started working through it, in order to finally put some structure to my robot-related flailing, aiming towards something more real than a magpie-like accumulation of robot hardware. We'll see how that goes; if nothing else, it's entirely non-work-related (Nokia owned Puma for a while, but got out of robotics altogether in the early 90's.)

On the photography side of things - Amazon had a very deep discount on the Canon Rebel XS just before Christmas, so I took the opportunity to see "just what is the deal with DSLRs anyway". My conclusions so far are that they're great for fast wildlife shooting (with an appropriately large lens - I'm staying on the edge of the slippery slope and only using the 18-55 kit lens and the widely recommended 55-250, which still disappoint me in terms of reach compared to the superzooms) and they're *wretched* for anything more casual than that - mirror noise makes them unsuitable for shooting at conferences or lectures, limited live-view makes them useless for shooting "drive by" when your attention is primarily on something other than the camera. I didn't bring the Rebel to Pycon (mostly indoor lectures, plus the hassle of airports, made the SX10IS a much better choice) but now that it is Spring (and I have taken 4400 shots with it) I am taking it out for bird and wildlife photography.

On the wildlife side, I recently saw my first red-bellied woodpecker http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4140871515/ and my first turkey vulture http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4299091075/ (which lead me to learn a new if somewhat archaic word, "feaking".) It's still more about making shiny pictures, for me, but "ooh I've never seen one of those before" is interesting too... as is "doesn't that bluebird http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4320304776/ know it's winter?"

One last bit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/sets/72157622977363009/ is my first "exhibition"! Small, ad-hoc, and amateur - after talking with the owner of the new coffeeshop in my building (Central Brew) about the photography I do (and the camera I *always* carry/wear) he asked if I wanted to put up some pictures. They've been up since January - I've actually been asked for some Spring pictures to replace them with, so I'll have to make some new choices - it's just nice to have some independent indication that maybe I'm getting the hang of this :-)

Latest hack - zephyr client. Hardcoded sender, recipient, and message, but a UI can come later :-) Mostly shows that UDP works outbound, but that's certainly a starting point. The question now is whether to inflict more krb4 code on the world (especially as MIT is finally "phasing it out") or to drop that and focus on building XMPP tools that support the pile of designed-but-not-implemented features that bring it close-enough-to-zephyr for me to seriously consider it...

As per a previous droolpost I picked up a 6630; it arrived today. Project for today - get amaretto (Python) installed, demonstrate at least basic "hit this page" functionality, and finish mining obra' s brain for applications and config info :-)

(I spent about an hour, yesterday, snow-blowing access to the house - and look, a cool box showed up! Maybe if I snowblow some more... Mmm, cargo cult shopping :-)

Powell's is running an essay contest. 300-750 words on What was your most memorable reading experience of the last ten years?

Ignoring the details of the contest, and focussing on the question, I read not quite as much as I'd like, yet more than most - and thus have a variety of memorable reading experiences. Breaking them down into categories,

Fiction - Cordelia's Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold. One of those casual pickups that drove me to - almost obsessively - hunt down everything else she's written, and not just in that world... the turns of phrase, the heroism, the nobility, the sense of great gifts requiring great usage. And on top of that it's fun space opera :-)

Technical - The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin. One of those "everything you know is wrong" books, comforting in that it both showed why some interfaces really are painful, and rational (not mystical!) ways to get on the right track. I have a reputation for building "interfaces that kill people" - the most extreme case involved a bug tracking system that convinced the company to spend thousands of dollars on Segue. Now I have the tools to identify what parts of that design were bad, and that's enough to make progress.

Online (yes, in fact, most of my reading material glows, and I'm actually absorbing words for more than 2/3 of my waking hours) the comments from various people on my Europython trip notes - which provided encouragement for me to do it again, and thus travel more...

Unsurprisingly, these are relatively recent - my reading has narrowed over time, and a 10 year window doesn't include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, or *shudder* Tale of Two Cities. (Memorable experiences aren't necessarily *good* ones....) For that matter, my reading of a particularly distinctive copy of Kahn's The Codebreakers was almost 15 years ago.

I'm not even reading Dive Into Python for inspiration - mostly for review, to decide if I'm going to hit other people on the head with it - though if I do ever write a book like this, I'm going to consider the approach: starting "hard" seems like it has potential for *efficient* teaching, if not particularly the friendliest style.