Moving innovations

The web and beyond was the title of the 10th SIGCHI.NL yearly conference. I've was involved with SIGCHI.NL since its inception, even being one of the signing ACM members needed to get the organization officially started. For a variety of reasons I've not been involved in the last few years, and in fact I had never been to one of the yearly conferences so far.

This year I did go because the topic is close to what we want to achieve with Winkwaves and because my co-worker Mark gave a presentation on our experiences with Wat vinden wij over. It was nice to come back into the community and catch up with a lot of friends from the years past. On the one hand it was like I never really left, but on the other hand many things also changed, most notably the fact that the community was vibrant and a good mix of old and young, also with more business-oriented people than I remembered from years past. It was good to 'come home' but also realize that the community had gone on and prospered with a lot of optimism about the future.

The program to me was only part of the attraction, as I'm always leaning more towards the community aspect, but certainly there were some good keynote speakers. Jared Spool kicked off with a good overview of web 2.0 aspects, with some good examples of past developments and good questions about web 2.0 that we need to solve. Sadly, Jesse James Garett's presentation was lacking in direction and punch. While everything he said was true it was not inspiring and missed out on making a point. The closing keynote by Steven Pemberton stressed the idea of making sure to design (web) standards also from a usability standpoint and to facilitate development of good services so that they would be easy and cheap to develop, and using some of those spare CPU cycles on everyone's desktop to make things easier to develop. He mentioned declarative programming languages as a possible way to make this happen. It reminded me of some of the constructs in Ruby on Rails where simple declarations (e.g. of a relation between two database tables) extends the class objects and makes available a whole set of methods to interact with the data based on this relation. Certainly a big time saver (provided what you do actually makes sense within the assumptions of the framework).

All my previous attempts at making my own bread sucked. Well, at least compared to the latest incarnations. Given that I’ve had quite positive feedback on previous attempts I’m now left to wonder: were people just polite? Truth to be said, whenever I had some of the old kind of bread left I’d toss it. Yesterday I happily ate it with some soup. I guess it’s not so much that my previous bread was good, but that supermarket bread in general is really bad.

But now I think I cracked it (a bit at least). The right ingredients and a good set of instructions make all the difference. Finally I’m making bread that is comparable to what I can buy in a good artisan baker’s shop!

Yesterday there was finally some respite from all the rain that has been falling in the last week, so I took the opportunity to continue my hike on the Grenslandpad. This time the path ran mostly through the Chaamse bossen, which gave some protection against the wind.

Again not so many pictures. My camera is slowly failing on me, in particular the batteries. I feel I'm getting closer and closer to buying a new one...

While I thought that I fixed my previous problems with my Foretrex it turned out that it was only a temporary measure. I think that my tinkering and prodding eventually fried the board in the loader clip-on module. In any case, the unit would no longer recharge or connect to the PC. Tired of dealing with it and annoyed I could not use the Foretrex anymore I ordered a new loading unit from Waypoint which promptly arrived in a week's time. Everything worked out of the box and I've been using the Foretrex again for some of the recent hikes. I hope that my problems were just a one-off and that the replacement bracket will hold out much longer.

XEmacs support in Gentoo is currently less than stellar due to lack of a maintainer. Looking at some of the ebuilds this situations has been going on for some time. Some of the XEmacs lisp packages have not been updated since 2003 and there are a bunch of bugs open for XEmacs-related issues.

I’m not sure I would like to become a maintainer for XEmacs in Gentoo. The process of becoming a Gentoo developer seems a bit convoluted and unclear, and I am also not sure that I can bring the commitment to do this for some time. But having a need for some of the updated packages and hating to see my efforts only being useful for myself I set up an overlay for updated XEmacs stuff. It can be accessed at
http://moving-innovations.com/svn/xemacs. So far I have only added the packages that I have installed myself. Maybe, if things work out well, I’ll also include other packages and an updated xemacs itself. Let me know if you think this is useful or if you have specific requests.

My last fews hikes where along the coast, but with the predicted hot weather and associated masses of people on the coast I was ready for a change of scenery, so I picked up the Grenslandpad along the border with Belgium. The weather turned out to be unseasonably hot, but with some wind blowing it was still very pleasant. Fortunately I only got a bit sunburned on my nose.

I only took some pictures at the Patersmoer. The rest of the hike was enjoyable but there was nothing that caught my eye.

Well, last week it was, anyway. And at the time I did read the article on the generally wonderful creating passionate users blog. While I tend to agree with the general sentiment, it has always been hard to actually act on it, even though that is the only thing that matters. This weekend I ended up watching a lot of uninteresting TV just for the sake of it, and at the end of the weekend I didn’t feel so good, both mentally and physically. Maybe pointing to the TV as one of the causes it too easy, but it sure does feel good.

So, I’ve now started to be much more serious about not watching so much TV. I do enjoy watching the odd show that is engaging or interesting, such as Lost or The lost world of Friese-Greene</a. It’s all the stuff that comes before or after it that sucks up time, energy, and attention that would be otherwise well spent. We’ll see how it goes, but at least today is a good start.

Finally had some time to go hiking again on the Dutch coastal path, this time from Haarlem to Santpoort through the dunes. A very nice area, although also very busy. In some of the higher parts the whine of car engines from the Zandvoort racetrack could be heard, and seeing the smoke stacks from Corus near IJmuiden also takes away some of the magic, but all in all a good hike. Didn’t take that many pictures because there were not so many specific things that were striking to me, and it became overcast quite quickly.

Just got back from what should have been a skiing trip. Instead I dislocated my shoulder after falling on the 2nd day of the week, with the first day being to windy to really ski. With my arm still in a sling typing is not too easy, but hopefully this will be remedied soon. In any case I still has a nice vacation, including a trip to the Olympics in Turin, but more about that when I’ve sorted the pictures.

Right now I’m studying the topic of dislocated shoulders, with a hospital appointment later this week. Obviously I’m collecting the sites on shoulders that I find on watvindenwijover.nl.

For some time now I have a Garmin Foretrex 201 GPS unit, mainly to have some fun while hiking and to have fun afterwards looking at the tracks we made. After some nine months of usage it is time to make up the balance. All in all I’m really pleased with the Foretrex, apart from one not so minor problem. It just works and doesn’t get in the way.

The Foretrex is small and simple so it wears easily on the wrist. I’ve found this to be really useful for quick glances while hiking more difficult parts of a track, where it would be a pain to get out a unit from a pocket. The Foretrex doesn’t handle downloadable maps, but that was never an issue for me anyway, I’d rather get the smaller size unit and carry a real map in addition to it. It does have all the other things that make a GPS unit useful: waypoints, routes, and tracks. Most of the displays can be customized so that it is easy to show all relevant information in one go.

The one problem that I have with the Foretrex is that it started to behave strangely after some 6 months of use. The unit was turned on, and could not be turned off. It seemed as if the power button was permanently engaged. After turning the unit in under warranty it was not really fixed. Garmin had loaded new software on the device, and the problem was not so apparent anymore, but it had not gone away completely and got worse over time again. Interestingly, it then switched to not being able to load at all instead of being turned on all the time. The breaking point for me came when I was on a hiking trip and could not load the unit at all.

The Foretrex comes with a special clamp with connectors for serial and power. The clamp can be taken off so that there are no exposed areas on the Foretrex which makes it resistant to water. Opening up the clamp revealed the problem. As can be seen in the more detailed photo below, the power connector (on the right) has a small pin that inserts into the plug at one end. Because of this quite a bit of pressure can be put on it when the plug is not inserted exactly right. The other side of the pin, visible in the photo, is soldered onto the board, but that is not a very strong connection. Indeed, making sure that the pin-end connects to the board at the right place makes my unit load without any problems. Moving it around makes the earlier symptoms very easy to reproduce. Looks like a bit of faulty engineering to me, but at least I am now able to load the unit again.