bohnsack.com

Greg Egan has a homepage.

The Germany photos are all processed. After I write a thing to easily edit photo descriptions and then after I add descriptions to the photos, I mean to to a bit of a travelogue here. I don't think that getting this done within the next two days is overly ambtious. Until then, here's proof of the journey:

Thankfully, I'm going to be working on some things from home for the next few weeks and then possibly doing a gig in Des Moines, so perhaps no travel for three weeks.

Yeah!

The torch has been passed...

The Hyperion Cantos (a series of science fiction books) has inspired me to read some Keats. John Keats plays a huge roll in Dan Simmon's Hyperion universe.
Keats the poet - whose name was writ in water - has a number of thing right on. One of which is:

"the excellence of every Art is its intensity"

Keats died when he was 25.

It's snowing in Ames!

Back from Frankfurt -> Chicago -> Minneapolis -> Ames. Pictures are being processed (699 of them). They should be all finished when I wake up.

Back in Franfurt after a week across Germany. Flight tomorrow at 14:00 something GMT plus 1 and back into Mineapolis at 6:00PMish central time 10/26.

I'm in a cheezy internet cafe. Look at the freaky keyboard: "Müncher Strasse". Wheee.

Over 500 pictures and (depending on my energy) a lot of words this weekend.

Back from Albuquerque via O'Hare (suddenly I have a strange feeling of that french word) and back home by noon. Still lots of work to finish this evening. If you have email in my queue waiting for a reply, I know about it... please be patient.

To the Fatherland on Friday.

New phrase: "Celebrate the eliteness". I have high hopes for this one. Seems quite elite.

Back in Ames from Albuquerque via Chiacgo O'Hare yesterday afternoon.

Albuquerque Airport and Sandias from my Wyndham hotel window:

Paperwork today. On the road back to Albuquerque at 6:30AM tomorrow morning.

Astronomy Picture of the Day. I check it out each day, you should too.

Progress watch:

Fall is clearly here in Iowa. Mowed the lawn yesterday for perhaps the last time this season. Visible frost on the back lawn this morning.

Check out http://www.appsmatrix.info/. This is a site for the performance results of real science applications on high performance computers that Andy Beatty is working on.

George at the labs was working on a calc homework problem today. I tried to help, but had difficulty doing it right away. Disapointed by not being able to quickly solve this easy problem, I've formalized its solution as a reminder of how easy it is to forget the things we have learned:

A gallery of the whole solution is here.

Got up a 4:00AM on Sat to go to the balloon fiesta. Spent yesterday and this morning working on a new database driven photo thingy. There are some features that I still want to put in, but its almost completely automatic and really pretty nice at this point. One command and a directory of images is all that is required to process images straight from the digital camera into hierarchies of pages like:

this, this, this, or even this (a subset of another group).

Now what I really want to do is provide the piece that processes the images as a web service, so that a small script or GUI can upload and process images from anywhere that has internet connectivity. Clearly I can do this now with a scp *.jpg bohnsack@bohnsack.com:/home/bohnsack/new_stuff ; ssh bohnsack@bohnsack.com ; cd new_stuff ; image_prep.pl new_group "this is a cool new group", but dragging images onto a publish-on-the-web script/program would be so much cooler.

The Ballon Fiesta was more impressive than I thought it would be. I took a lot of pictures. It's a non-stop photo-op.
You can click here for all of the photos. Here's a few of them:

I'll probably backfill the france and other sections of the weblog if I get time today, now that the photos thing is mostly stable from a URL API
perspective.

How many images (files) can live in one directory in an ext3 filesystem before performance sucks? Already shell globbing (mv *.jpg) fails to work with over 7000 files in new database photo system. I'll prob have to address this.

Really digging on Ken MacLeod in the second book a lot more than the first. My copy of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is pre-ordered.

Between xcat.org and bohnsack.com, this machine transfered around 26 GB of HTTP last month. See here and here. I had to disable the password protected mp3s I make available to friends today, because the site was slowing to a crawl and I couldn't get work done. mp3 access will be restored in the future when I can figure out how to put per day quotas or throttle access somehow. I'm trying to be nice, but I can't have my generosity bringing the site to its knees.

Working in Albuquerque this week. Going to stay the weekend for Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta and work here next week as well.