Art and Corn Dogs

Posted on 30 September, 2003 by steevithak

I seem to have fallen into a groove of only posting news updates once a month so I guess it’s about time to sum up the exciting events of September. Let’s see…

Susan and I went to the Joan Mitchell exhibit at “The Modern“, the new
Ft. Worth museum. Mitchell is by no means my favorite artist but it was very interesting that you could look at what appeared to be just a big Jackson-Pollock-like mess of colors on a white background and get the impression of a city or snow-covered trees and then find out 1) that the other people standing around got the same impression and 2) that the fine print on the plaque describing the painting confirmed your impression and she had actually painted what you thought she’d painted. You can find a few samples on Google Image Search.

We also made an early visit to the State Fair of Texas. We usually don’t make it until October but managed to get there on Monday, Sep 29th this year. I think that’s a first for us. And going on a week day is always considerably less crowded than weekends. All the usual things were seen and done. Eating corn dogs and tornado potatoes, checking out all the new concept cars in the automotive exhibits, watching the bizarre variety of farm animals being prepped for contests, the weird craft exhibits. One of the high points this year has to be the very nice rendition of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) created from a toilet seat and assorted plubming components. A few things were missing this year though; no butter sculpture, no shooting Bin Laden with a paintball gun contest. And while we didn’t take in the Birds of the World show this year we did check out the nifty Texas Garden Railway that was added to the Texas Discovery Garden Center.

Otherwise, most of my time seems to have been spent on work-related things. I didn’t manage to get some time in working on robots.net and the robotics category reorganization project at ODP. The data dumps from ODP have started showing UTF-8 errors again but there’s a good chance the source of the errors has been found and will be fixed soon. Meanwhile, the webcam situation at the DPRG lab is improving. We’ve run a camserv relay live at the last couple of RBNOs with good results. Hopefully we’ll have the second camera online soon.

Stuff That Happened in April

Posted on 30 April, 2003 by steevithak

It’s been a busy month but I can’t let the month get away without posting at least one news update! A lot of my time lately has been sucked up helping a variety of local groups with computer issues.

Susan completed an update of the website for the Frisco Association for the Arts. It looks a bit more artsy than the old, interim site. We’re just starting some work on the Arts of Collin County site but it’s got a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time.

I also helped set up my first foal cam recently. Barry Jordan has a couple of horses out at his ranch and wanted a webcam so everyone could watch the birth of a foal that was due this month. He’s limited to a dial-up link and MS Windows so it presented a number of challenges. Barry and Eric Yundt (both fellow DPRG members) had been working on it for a while and they actually did 99% of the work but I got drafted to help out and provided a windows binary of wget that solved the last remaining roadblock to getting the image from the webcam to the windows box and then up to the server. The dial-up link limits the refresh rate of the image but it’s still kinda cool.

Speaking of DPRG stuff, I’ve been spending a good bit of time helping get the new DPRG computer lab up to speed. Using a couple of Linksys routers I picked up on eBay, we’ve now got high-speed Internet access. I’ve got a Red Hat 7.3 box set up to act as the LAN server and it’s also going to host development environments for several of the microcontrollers commonly used in the group. So far, I’ve built GCC cross-compilers for the Atmel AVR and Motorola 68k chips. I’ve also installed Pete Gray’s Linux port of Small-C for New Micros’ IsoPod (these are really cool little boards). More to come as I get time.

I upgraded my workstation at the office to Red Hat 9 a couple of weeks ago and was pleased with the results. It really should have been called 8.1 as it seems very much like 8.0 but without a lot of the bugs. The GUI looks great; anti-aliased fonts, professional looking icons, I can run the occasional KDE program without it looking all goofy like it did on previous versions of Gnome. Overall it looks way better than Windows XP but not as good as OS X (yet).

After a week or so of playing with 9 on my workstation, I got brave enough to upgrade one of our servers this week. The biggest problem I ran into on the server was that wu-ftpd is gone and there was no explanation of why or what replaced it. There was just no ftp service, no wu-ftp entry in the xinetd directory, and RPM -q indicated wu-ftpd wasn’t installed. I eventually found that vsftpd replaced it but isn’t running by default. My initial impression is that vsftpd is a piece of junk. The first problem is that it has some sort of problem running under xinetd so you have to run it as daemon. Once I got it running, I started getting complaints that it was corrupting files. A little investigation revealed that vsftpd pretends to support ASCII transfer mode but really ignores ASCII mode requests and just sends everything in binary mode resulting in corrupted text files. After a bit of poking around, I found a setting in the config file that turns off this bizarre behaviour. I suppose it was the frequent security issues with wu-ftpd that prompted Red Hat to make the switch but I’d much prefer they’d picked something else to switch to (and it would have been nice if they could mention this sort of drastic change in the documentation somewhere).

Surgery Day for my Sinuses

Posted on 2 March, 2003 by steevithak

Susan and I showed up at the hospital outpatient area Friday morning at 8:30am. For 15 minutes or so, I signed permission and disclaimer forms. Then we were given a map showing the route to the outpatient waiting area. We sat there watching TV for another 15 minutes. Then, about 9:00am a nurse escorted me to a private room while Susan stayed behind. I had to strip and put on one of those crazy hosptial gowns that were designed to fit some non-human species of creature. I also got a little pair of blue hospital slippers; essentially socks with little diamond-shaped, rubber traction areas stuck on the bottom.

Then I waited. And waited. At one point a phone began ringing loudly. After a little investigation, I discovered the ringing phone to be one of several phones underneath one of the two beds. It rang for a good five minutes. (I’ve noticed that anywhere you go in a hospital, phones are ringing but no one ever answers them). I went back to waiting.

About 9:40am, a couple of nurses showed up and started in with all sorts of preparations and testing. One of them went through a list of questions about my medical history and had me sign more disclaimers while the other took two blood samples, my blood pressure, temperature, an EKG, and finally a urine sample. Interestingly, neither of them had any idea why I was there or what sort of procedure I was going to get. They gave me a Vioxx tablet (a heavy duty pain killer) and then griped that I drank too much water to swallow it. This progressed into a more general complaint that I wasn’t supposed to drink any water for 12 hours prior to surgery. I said I’d been told not to eat any food for 12 hours, but nobody said anything about water. They said water was food and I said it wasn’t. I convinced them I hadn’t had much water and they eventually dropped the matter and left me alone again.

10 minutes later a nurse showed up with Susan in tow. I gave Susan a bag with my clothes and turned over my glasses to her. Then she was sent to a different waiting area (the “day surgery waiting area”). I was taken to a surgery prep room. The nurse who escorted me there asked what I was in for (I still hadn’t run into anyone who knew what sort of surgery I was supposed to have – very reassuring). When I told her I was having sinus surgery, she started telling me how brave I was because sinus surgery was unbelievably painful and she would never let anyone do surgery on her nose because she didn’t think she’d be able to bear the pain. Great… I told her it couldn’t be too bad if I was getting general anesthesia; I shouldn’t feel anything. Yeah, but wait until after you wake up, she said.

Crazy light show

Once in the prep room, the anesthesiologist showed up and started hooking up all sorts of tubes and hardware to my bed. Eventually she stuck a needle in my arm and gave me some sort of drug that she said would relax me. Wow, the drug hit me pretty quick. I don’t know if I was any more relaxed but I spent the next 10 minutes or so trying to adjust the vertical hold on my vision because my feet and the rest of the room were slowly revolving around my head. Things started getting a bit fuzzy here but the doctor showed up briefly and talked to me while the room rotated. He said he’d done more than 1500 of these procedures and never had any problems. Many of the patients he did were “revisions” – that is, he was correcting screwed up procedures done by other doctors. I asked him how my condition rated among the 1500 or so he’d seen. He said it was definitely going to be one of the more memorable ones he’d done. I lay there a while longer watching a clock precede my feet up the opposite wall and over the top of my head. It was about 10:45am.

The room had slowed from complete revolutions to simply bouncing up and down several feet when two nurses came in, got my bed and rolled it down a series of corridors and through some operating room doors. The anethesiologist was waiting and said, “you may feel a slight burning sensation” as she adjusted something outside my range of vision. I asked something to the effect of, “so this is it, I’m going out now?”. I don’t recall an answer…but about that time I ceased to exist.

There followed some disjointed memories of lying in a bed with various people standing over me. At one point a nurse was asking if I was feeling okay…someone was asking me if I had any relatives waiting for me at the hospital…it was about 4pm…the doctor was telling me that my sinuses were as totally screwed up as he thought from the CT scans and that they’d sent stuff off to the lab for testing to see if it was baterial or fungal…Susan and someone else were standing over the bed talking about pharamcies and how I was taking a long time to wake up.

Susan apparently decided to go to a nearby pharamcy to pick up some of my drugs while I continued to phase in and out of reality. Eventually, she was over my bed again and I seemed to be going through about 15 minute cycles of relative coherence and unconsciousness. During one of my waking cycles, I decided we’d better get out while we could and convinced Susan I was ready to go. I don’t remember much after that but we did eventually make it home where I slept for quite a few more hours.

Ending the day in the ER

The good news is that I’d awakened several hours later at home and was not in much pain at all. I felt a bit like someone had punched me in the nose. I also had a vast array of drugs to take. Zyrtec, liquibid, prednesone, augmentin, amoxil, hydrocodone, and some sort of nasal spray. Now for those who haven’t been reading my weblog and don’t know me, I should preface the following by telling you that I suffered from reflux fairly badly some years ago and have some scarring and strictures in my esophagus that cause it to be a bit narrow. My esophagus was dialated to about 6mm and for all practical purposes works fine again. However, I can’t swallow things larger than 6mm, obviously.

An 875mg Augmentin is 21mm long, 10mm wide, and 7mm thick. It’s a big pill. There is no way it’s going to fit down a 6mm esophagus. This would have been perfectly obvious to me any other time so I suppose I was still spaced out from anesthesia. I popped one of those in my mouth and swallowed it. Big mistake. There are two major tight spots – one at the top and one at the sphincter where the esophagus attaches to the stomach. The pill hit the strictures at the top and I knew instantly I was in trouble. After some major gagging, it moved passed the top strictures and was now in the middle section of my esophagus. Having something stuck there is both fairly painful and debilitating – your brain sort of shuts off and you get tunnel vision and go into some sort survival mode where all your awarness is focused on trying to swallow.

I told Susan it wasn’t going down and wasn’t going to come up now that it had passed the halfway mark. And I knew from past experience that the pain was going to be fairly intense when it hit the sphincter. We decided help would be, well, helpful, at this point and Susan called 911. An ambulance showed up fairly quickly and dragged me off to the Irving hospital ER. They had looked at the Augmentin pills at the house and were fairly impressed that anyone could swallow what they termed “those horse pills”. Most of the ambulance trip was spent trying to explain that my nose bleed had nothing to do with the problem at hand and that the pill was stuck because of scar tissue from reflux. One of the ambulance guys spent the whole trip trying to figure out how to spell my name.

I then had to explain all the same stuff to the ER staff. This was not the busy ER you see on TV. This was a big empty ER with a lot of bored doctors and nurses hanging around. They didn’t really seem to have much of an idea what to do with me other than stand around, watch, and tell each other that I’d swallowed a really big pill.

All this time the pill had been slowly moving down my esophagus and finally hit the sphincter. There were several moments of really intense pain and I had a couple of stomach convulsions and then… nothing. I told them that I thought the pill had made it into my stomach. I asked for some water so I could test my theory by trying to swallow. And, indeed, all was okay again. It tooks us another half hour to get out of the ER and back home. I got a replacement prescription for the Augmentin – they don’t have pills small enough to swallow, so I ended up getting a liquid version that tastes pretty nasty instead.

Despite my ER adventure, I’ve spent the last two days resting and actually feel pretty good now.

Post-Christmas MIG Shopping

Posted on 26 December, 2002 by steevithak

Another Christmas has come and gone. A few of us gathered at my sister Linda’s house and joined her family for Christmas day. The usual sorts of holiday activities occured – food, games, lots of talking, and helping the kiddos assemble a few toys. And we made some calls to those who couldn’t (or didn’t wish to) come.

We decided to take today and tomorrow off work as well. Today we visited a few of the antique malls on highway 80 near Forney and saw everything from an antique Russian MIG to a Jeanette Cube cup and saucer that Susan had actually been looking for. We brought the cup and saucer home with us but left the MIG – it had too many rivets.

I closed an eBay transaction today that has been pending for some time. I’ve been searching for a particular Canon FD macro lens for nearly a year. Earlier this month I finally found one in good condition and managed to nab it at the right price on eBay. Unfortunately, the seller was located in Guam which was hit by a major typhoon within hours of my winning the auction. After a few days the seller did manage to get an email through saying they had no power, no water, no public services of any kind (including mail), so no lens. This week, however, the seller made it to California and is shipping all his eBay stuff from there. So by this time next week I may finally have my new lens to play with.

State Fair and a Mondrian Exhibit

Posted on 28 October, 2002 by steevithak

Wow, October is almost gone and I haven’t posted any news yet. October is the month of the Texas State Fair and we spent a day there this year as usual. Rather than brave the crowds on the weekend, we took a day off from work and went on a Wednesday. Otherwise, last year’s account pretty much sums it up. We also took some time out to go to the Modrian exhibit at the Kimbell. The only other stop for this exhibit will be in Paris but it’s well worth going out of your way for if you get the chance.

Work on the GCC Linux to MCORE cross-compiler is coming along ever so slowly. I’ve been blowing too much time playing with my new DMOZ editor privileges, perhaps. Work on the mod_virgule codebase merge is behind too but I hope to start working on that again in November. Posting Robot news and working on the DPRG site have been taking up a lot of my time too. And on top of all that there’s the usual paying work that eats up most of my time.

But I’m still here, still alive, and still hacking.

Sousa, Meat Paddles, and Clones

Posted on 7 July, 2002 by steevithak

I’d better catch up on news before I start falling too far behind. For the 4th this year, Susan and I went to a an event up in Frisco. It was held at the Hall Office Park near the Texas Sculpture Garden. We saw the best fireworks we’ve seen in quite a few years. Prior to the fireworks we wandered around and marvelled at the size of the event – 20,000 people or something like that. And we listened to a short set of music played by Three Dog Night, an old 70’s era rock band hired for the event. A couple of the tunes sounded vaguely familiar but it wasn’t exactly Sousa-quality 4th of July music. Based on the last few years experience, the best music is to be heard at the Irving event held in Williams Square – where an actual orchestra plays Sousa marches the way God intended.

Meanwhile, mod_virgule development has started up again now that Gary is back on the job. My patch to make Raph’s new diary rating stuff configurable and fix a segfault caused by the new locking code made it into the latest release. More importantly, Gary has completed enough of the merges to completely eliminate one of the mod_virgule forks. Advogato and Badvogato can run off the same code now. We’ve still got some work to do before I’ll be able to get robots.net running on the main code base but hopefully that’s not too far away.

We also saw a couple of movies over the weekend. The Bourne Identity was fairly interesting. The only weird thing was the sound effect used during the fights. Rather than using traditional meat-paddles to get a realist fist into flesh sound, they came up with what sound like someone whacking a piece of plywood with a hammer. So every time there’s a fist-fight, it sounds like the characters are hollow and made of wood. I guess somebody thought it sounded cool. Probably the same people who add those totally unrealistic gunfire noises to movies.

Men in Black II was next on the list. The reviews are pretty much dead on. It’s fairly entertaining but not nearly as good as the first one. They only had about a 30 minute story and somehow managed to pad it out to 90 minutes. And annoyingly, almost all the good stuff was shown in the trailers and ads so there are really no surprises when you see the movie. The Peter Graves cameo was inventive though.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it previously but we’ve now seen Attack of the Clones at both a traditional film theater and one of the new digital theaters. Bits of it looked better all-digital but other bits, like close-ups of the few live actors, looked better after film transfer. I’d like to see a real film at both to get a better comparison. ATOC is 99% computer animation so it’s kind of hard to judge how badly the lower resolution of the digital theaters is going to affect the quality of movies that are shot on film. As for ATOC itself, I wrote a lengthy review and then deleted it. Too many reviews and nobody really cares anyway I think. Basically it’s another Star Wars sequel. Like the rest of them, they don’t live up to the original and like episode 1 most of it has that animated look that makes you feel like you’re watching a cartoon rather than a real movie.