Monthly Archives: May 2007

What We’ve Got Coming

Family, ,

097-john-birthday-cropped.jpg

That was me on my first birthday.

You might need to view the large version to see that yes indeed, I was very intent on that fire and probably would have loved to touch it.

Now, Jacob is about 8 months old right now.

I have every reason to believe that if I were to set a lit candle in front of him, he would not focus on it and reach one finger towards it. No, I’m sure he would focus on it and lunge for it with at least two hands. Possibly so suddenly that we’d have trouble keeping him back.

This sure does keep us on our toes.

I also have no doubt that Jacob’s first birthday cake will wind up looking like mine did:

096-john-birthday-cake-cropped

Debian Developers 7 Years Ago

Debian

Today while looking for something else, I stumbled across a DVD with the “last archive” of my old personal website. On it were a number of photos from the 2000 Annual Linux Conference in Atlanta, and the Debian developers that were there. These were posted in public for several years.

I’ve now posted all of them on flickr, preserving the original captions.

Here’s the obligatory sample:

20001018-01-06.jpg

That’s Joey Hess, using what I think was his Vaio. Most acrobatic keyboardist ever. Probably the only person that could write Perl with one hand comfortably.

What else can you see? The best of show award that Debian won that is now in my basement due to a complicated series of events, the Debian machines that were being shown off at the show, Sean Perry and Manoj, the photo with long-term corrupted caption, and of course, numerous shots of Branden.

I know the size stinks. It was scanned at a web resolution for 2000. I do still have the negatives somewhere and will post the rest of them, in higher res, when I find them.

Click here to view the full set.

Real-World Haskell

General, ,

Today, Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart, and I are announcing a new book we’re working on with O’Reilly: Real-World Haskell. I’m excited about the book and about working with Bryan and Don on this project.

O’Reilly has agreed to publish this book under a Creative Commons license! We plan to post drafts of chapters incrementally at the book’s website, seeking feedback from readers and reviewers as we go.

Haskell makes a great practical parsing and scripting language, but this aspect of it has been under-documented. I look forward to helping change that!

Predictability

Outdoors

One of the things about living in the country is that there isn’t all that much predictability. You can have your water supply disrupted by ants, sewage issues, power supply problems, etc.

But today was a new one that disrupted my morning commute.

It wasn’t mud, or harvest.

No, it was traffic. On our driveway, just a few feet in front of our front door.

img_2068c

Takes only one of those standing on the driveway to make a traffic jam.

Threshing Days

General,

img_4375.jpg

This is a steam-powered tractor, which I photographed last August at my hometown’s annual festival, Threshing Days. It is a massive thing, full of detail, noise, and action.

Threshing Days (see earlier articles about it) brings people in from across the country. The town’s usual population of 600 multiplies for this.

The engine pictured here was being used for a threshing demonstration, which was how wheat was processed before combines were invented. A big flywheel on the engine was connected to a large belt, which powered the threshing machine. That machine separated the wheat like a modern combine does, but was supplied by farmers dumping wheat onto it.

img_4365.jpg

Result of that radar image

Outdoors, , ,

A couple of days ago, I posted a radar image.

The above photo is the result of that (and a following) storm.

It’s the muddy road at the end of our driveway. Your guess as to which road is the driveway.

Here’s another road near us:

img_2053.jpg

Cliff also has some photos from this same storm system.