28 December 2008

ICS700

Well one thing is done, due before then end of year, for the Civil Air Patrol Emergency Service rating, all CAP emg. service members must pass the ICS 700 online class, NIMS (National Incident Management System) Introduction.  After a couple hours of study and plenty of slides, I passed the test on my first attempt.

I know watching TV news it seems that there is not a plan when a disaster happens, but all those folks running around, actually are following a well thought out plan.  It is chaotic, and like with war, all plans work until they are in use, but there is a reason, and a big picture being managed.  All those responders are doing what they do to help people, and that is something we are all lucky to have. 

Now that reminds me, I need to make a donation to BackStoppers.

zero time, zero longitude

you never know what you will learn.

I have often wondered why UTM, and the 0 longitude were at Greenwich England.  I would have assumed Paris would be he center of time and space, considering they hold the official metric baseline objects (plus its the French)

Now I may have an answer, while maybe not correct, it does make sense to me.  All of this from watching History International's Engineering an Empire.

1. There is a great fire at Windsor Castle
2. The British rebuild the castle complex, and add a large clock.
3. The large clock, with its bell, Big Bend, have the requirement of only gaining or losing one second every twenty-four hour day.
4. To verify the accuracy, the time had to be telegraphed to the Greenwich observatory, which I would assume would validate the time, using the old sun over head trick.  Which after all is the definition of a  solar day.

Now add the following information

6. At this period of history, the Sun never set on the British Empire.  There were British colonies around the globe.
7. To control the empire, the British ran telegraph lines to the various parts of the world.
8. Within a couple of minutes, the clocks in all colonies could be synced to Big Bend, via telegraph.
9. When you compare your clock to someone else's, either could be correct, but if you can claim your clock is synced with the rest of the world, well your clock has a bit more "truth" to it.
10. The different clock problem is encountered often at this time in history by the need to sync time between places, just to keep the trains on time.  If you can provide a globally synced time, your trains can run on a schedule that works over great distances, including across international borders.

So the British end up setting the worlds' clocks.  Since time is really just a distance, when it comes to slicing the world into 360 degrees of longitude, why not put the zero mark where time is zero.

My question has an answer.  I live near -90 degrees of longitude, due to a fire in a place I have never been too.
well spent a day being moody about what I did not achieve in 2008.  Got tired of being around myself, so I know my family hated it.

Well 2008 is almost over, so to hell with it.  Onto 2009, so it is time to start thinking of goals, start to look forward.

Simply my goals so far include (in no particular order):

  • Stay employed
  • Take my GRE to get officially into the Purdue Master's program
  • Catch up on my Civil Air Patrol task, including the squadrons website and supply officer duties
  • Survive my daughter's eleven year

More to come.

Finally a note to VW, do you think you could possibly make the battery of a beetle even harder to change?

20 December 2008

bootcamp and vmware

vmware's vmfusion is something I like more and more.

Last night I installed bootcamp on the mac.  After a few minutes of freak'n out, here are some lessons learned. Maybe they will help some other fool, but then again who reads instructions.


  • When you are installing Windows, make sure you format the bootcamp created Windows partition, DO NOT leave it as is.  I did leave it alone and ended up looking at a non-system disk error after Windows tried to reboot.  Apple seems to suggest that FAT32, instead NTFS, so I took FAT32.
  • Don't register your version of Windows till the very end, after you install vmware tools, or you will be like me and on the phone explaining why you went thought the three installs your Windows installation disk allow.  But to give M$ there due, they were very nice helpful on the phone.
  • If a your are stuck with the Windows CD/DVD in the laptop drive.  Holding down the eject button on the keyboard while cycling the power will eventually eject the disk.  It may take a couple tries.
  • To get back to OSX, hold the "alt/option" key while cycling power.  It will give a boot choice.
  • That darn Windows boot chime can be upsetting when you having problems.
Once you have vmfusion installed, be a true geek and get you a couple virtual vm appliances with  linux distros.

17 December 2008

Panadora

Okay, okay, I am behind the times, but trying to catch up.

Just started using Pandora and well it rock.  Now I can listen to The Donna's and find other great music.   If you saw knew me, you'd be laughing if you thought I would be a Donna's fan, but why not.  I am too old and bitter to care.

For the few who do not know, Pandora is streaming radio service, in which your thumbs up or down helps it determine what song to play next.  So in theory if the more the music you like and rate the more you get. So far its pretty, so good.

Speaking of trying new things, (don't worry this is a "G" rated comment), at they office they are rolling out Office 2007, and I am surprised at the resistance.  Personally I think its cool (yes office can be cool) so I volunteered for a beta tester.  I can't imagine everyone not doing that.  I talked to the IT department this afternoon and said, "sure install it, no problem, worse case I have an excuse not to do anything for the rest of year".  I feel sorry for the IT department, its not an easy job, and I know they get lots more blame the complements.

You know its early but mark that clean desk calendar's last day of July as SysAdminDay .  They deserve it, plus if you tick them off they will block the pandora website.

11 December 2008

Python picture

 
just love this image, thanks to ars tech

A test geotagged entry

This blog is really just a test of the new geotagging option in the http://draft.blogger.com, I will make a longer blog entry later, when I am off the company's dime.

09 December 2008

new .mac

hmm, already behind in my blogging. Anway I am now a mac person, running a mac pro 15inch laptop at home. Kool. I have it up and running, with some important apps like matlab and firefox installed. Also have vmfusion running, with ubuntu image, so I am now trying to the mac and linux installs ready for use.

The mac is a bit different, but I think I am starting to get the hang of it. Well I should get back to what I have to do, at least its on linux at the office.

04 December 2008

P3K

Yeah Python 3000, time start ( ) my prints

.mac soon

I already twitted this, but I am just so happy that my new laptop is out of the factory and in the caring hands of FedEx. My time to switch is getting closer. This will be nice, pretty hardware, bsd based, running vmfusion so I can bounce between OS X, Windows, Red Hat, and Suse.

01 December 2008

dropbox

Well after having to go through all sorts of loops to get my homework off my old computer, I took it work on a thumb drive, since I wanted to print off the code. In a rush to get home, I left the darn thumb drive plugged into the computer.

Arg, okay, I have now signed up for DropBox and moving my gosh darn files to the freak'n cloud. Dropbox is nice as it has clients which work on windows, linxu, and mac (my new hardware, please apple ship it soon), as well as a web interface.

I have only pushed a couple files around, but it seems to do what I need. Thanks to LifeHacker for the comparison chart of on-line storage.

Now, I have to sort out how to get the inverse chi2 cdf inside of Numpy.  With that, I can do my error estimation and get this homework done.  I till have 24 hours, so I should be okay.



Moving to a mac

Well it was a ugly Sunday, my custom built PC tower decided it had enough. It now likes to restart whenever it feels like it, with very little warning.

So Santa is coming early, and I am switching to a mac. I'd like to give you a long list of why it is better then a PC, but its more likely that it has to do with geek cred more the technical attributes. Actually, I plan to run vmfusion, giving me a way to switch between mac, PC, and the true geek os, linux.

I though about buy a laptop and just installing linux on it, but decided there are some apps I use for school where linux could cause a headache. Someday I'll get an eee or similar, for that native linux feel.

With this crash, the big issue was rescuing my homework, due Tuesday. When I have more time, I plan to use my maddog external drive box, where I can place an internal drive within it and then an use it externally, then snarf up the other stuff.

While it sucks, I did learn a few things

(1) I have a wonderful wife for encouraging me to spend more and go mac, just because I wanted to. (I new this already, but its nice to know she has not changed).

(2) I lost access to MATLAB, but on the alt pc I am using, found that NumPy/Python/IPython can handle the work I need.

(3) Need to find a cloud storage solution besides just emailing zip files around. Not for everything, but for those few critical files. I'd like to find on where I could access the cloud drive just like any other drive. I know they are out there, just have to do some searching.

I just just it proves, you learn from good and bad. I just wish I could learn the problem in my General Least Square solution, for the homework due tomorrow.

27 November 2008

Wow, my second post, its the Thanksgiving Holiday in my part of the world, so I will probably take a break from blogging. :)

But before I go to family events, I would like to thank God and the universe, for

  • My wife, sole mate, love of my world.

  • My daughter, who shows me the wonder of the world, when seen through young eyes.

  • My parents and brother and sister and their families.

  • My inlaws who are supportive.

  • My employer, GeoEye, for the chance to write interesting code, learn new things, and hang out with smart people, while paying me to do it.

  • My friends, who get me through the day.

  • Google and their suite of software.

  • Guido van Rossum and the whole Python community for making programming fun.

  • Twitter for listen to the world, without getting up.

  • NPR, which does not talk down to me.

  • Steven Colbert, because of his fight against the bear invasion :-) (Mr. Colbert, do I win anything for mention you?)

  • and especially all those men and women who are now and have in past put themselves in harms way to give me this life.


On these days of thanks, please remember those who server, make a donation to the USO or other organization to help these kids out. They are doing it for you.

Happy Thanksgiving

welcome

Well, I decided to do this blog thing again, see if I can find enough information to keep it going. I guess this is 4th blog.  One work, but I stopped when I stopped working with its topic (PL/SQL).  Two withered away due to lack of posts.  So lets start the fourth.