I dream of rain

Tucked into a corner of western Delray Beach is Morikami Gardens, a transplant of Japanese Asthetics into the general daily bustle of South Florida.

I'll definitely be going back, when I can take a more leisurely path befitting the gardens' contemplative nature.

I was one of the 7,000 or so folks participating in the 2014 Mercedes-Benz Corporate 5K Run in Fourt Lauderdale -- as a walker. This is only the third time I've done something like this, and the last occured ten years ago.

I came in at a respectable 50:30, approximately 17 minutes per mile. My personal best was a little under 15 minutes per mile, but this wasn't bad given my utter lack of preparation!

I took some shots along the way, but this stitched panorama packed the most punch. It's my view of the holding pen about five minutes before the starting cannon.

[solomon@lunchbox sos]$ /home/sos/sos_6.30.p1_linux/bin/sos_export.pl
bash: /home/sos/sos_6.30.p1_linux/bin/sos_export.pl: /usr/bin/perl^M:   bad interpreter: No such file or directory

In other words, they shipped UNIX scripts with DOS line endings.

sigh

...I think it's fitting that this tool is called 'sos'.

This morning, my employer Sunrise Micro Devices emerged from stealth mode, meaning I can finally say what I've been up to the past ten months, and why I relocated.

In short, we're building a Bluetooth Smart (aka Bluetooth Low Energy) radio. That in of itself is not particularly newsworthy (though our power numbers are), but in a unique twist we are providing it as a licensable block that can be integrated into other silicon designs.

Our goal is to enable system-on-chip vendors, especially those without much radio/RF expertise, to add Bluetooth Smart connectivity to their ICs, drastically reducing their cost and time-to-market.

If this sounds familiar, it's the sort of model that ARM uses for their processors. As it turns out, ARM happens to be one of our investors.

• Official press release 1
• Official press release 2
• Early coverage at Gigaom

But that's enough horn tooting. What does this have to do with me?

If I look back over my career, it's steadily progressed to lower-and-lower-level software; In parallel I've also targeted progressively more resource-constrained systems. Having already made the jump to microcontrollers, the opportunity to be involved in new silicon bringup and move to a completely new radio platform was too good to pass up.

So, I'm responsible for SMD's software team, with no legacy designs or code keeping us from DoingThingsRight(tm). I'm getting to wear even more hats and help shape many aspects of this design, and it's proven to be quite an exciting adventure so far!

Incidentally, If working on very low-level software that will be embedded into a few billion or so devices sounds appealing, and you're open to living in the tropical paradise that is South Florida, drop me a line!

Down here in Delray Beach, I only have one viable option for Internet service -- Comcast. However, in order to get a static IP address and an unfiltered connection, I have to sign up for a business-class account. The priviledge of Comcast doing less work to provide me service costs about double the amount that of a roughly-equivalent residental connnection.

Meanwhile, the place I'm renting has a Home Owner's Association that includes basic cable. To get this, I have to sign up with Comcast Residential to get a cable converter box. Getting all of that set up was an ordeal in of itself, plus the DTA gives a cruddier picture than simply attaching an antenna to the TV, but I digress.

Every month, Comcast Business sends me two or three mailers that basically preach on about the benefits of getting TV and/or phone service through them.

Every month, Comcast Residential sends me two or three mailers that basically preach on about the benefits of getting High Speed Internet Access, phone service, and/or fancier TV packages.

At the same time, both bills I get in the mail (one of which is for $0.00) try to get me to switch to paperless billing because "it's good for the environment!"

Tell you what, Comcast: It would save far more trees if you stopped attempting to sell me services I don't want or already have, not to mention the direct savings of $2.50 in postage, which incidentally is about 2% of my monthly bill.

(As an aside, My bill with Comcast is about double what it was with Bright House back in Melbourne. For equivalent service. Isn't having no competition wonderful?)

I ran out of butter tonight. I feel so ashamed of myself. How could I let something like this happen?

(I'd intended to make two pineapple upside-down rum cakes, but had just enough butter for one.. Maybe tomorrow?)

(She was on stilts!)

I haven't posted any hula grrls in a while. Couldn't have had a better backdrop for this, though I wish I had some sort of reflector to fill in the foreground a bit..

...oops, I meant hippies.

All throughout the weekend, folks were asking me if I was "getting many good shots." I'd answer "I sure hope so," and genuinely mean it, as I really have no idea. Even the ones I could swear I totally nailed often turn out to be badly out of focus or something equally ruinous.

This weekend was no exception; if anything I felt that things were worse than usual -- And also typically, so far things have turned out not only better than expected, but there have been more than a dozen "damn, I took that?" images so far (and only half a dozen duds) out of the first eighty I've gone through.

Maybe I really do have some fraction of the talent that others keep claiming I possess? I really have no idea. I just try to capture what I see, and sometimes succeed.

...Expect lots of images to be posted over the coming days.

Lens hood wasn't locked properly, and it slipped straight down.

Ironically it was my attempt to save it that caused it to hit the running board/rail of the truck rather than the grass I had parked on.

Time to find out what Tokina's repair service is like...

Tonight I disposed of a couple of defective hard drives. I'd have personally preferred to put a a couple of large bullet holes through them instead, but for some reason ranges frown on such things.

Over the past month, there's been a push to get the Gutenprint codebase in shape for the long-overdue 5.2.10 release. This will be the first release incorporating the various CUPS backends I've written plus an expanded supported printer list.

This has resulted in a flury of bugfixes and improvements to the backends, including:

• Support for multi-page print jobs
• Sony UP-DR200 support
• Canon SELPHY CP790 support
• Vastly improved error detection and recovery for all Canon SELPHY models.
• Printjob pipelining support for the DNP DS40/DS80
• Support for the Citizen CX/CX-W/CY printers

The Citizen printer support deserves its own set of comments. It turns out that the DNP DS40/DS80/DSRX1 models are just rebadged Citizen CX/CX-W/CY models (down to the same USB IDs!) and they all use an indentical command language.

There are more Citizen models (CW-01, CW-02, OP900, OP900II) that have been rebadged by others too, and every single one of these supposedly supports the same command language as the CX/CX-W family. Most notably, Mitsubishi's CP3800 appears to be a rebadged CX-W.

I like it when things JustWork(tm)! Unfortunately, since I don't know the USB IDs for that second list of printers, I can't add them to the backend match list.

My interest in adding more printers to Gutenprint for the sake of it has waned somewhat, for several reasons -- First, my personal and professional printing needs are now well-met. Second, I have less free time to devote to such things. And finally, the norm for these dye-sublimation photo printers seems to be to require an intelligent backend, and I can't begin to write one without access to the particular printer.

The Mitsubishi CP3800, CP9550, and CP3020 series haven't been tested. The CP-D70/D707/K60 models are known to need a backend (and it's written!) but my original tester disappeared. (I've also started reverse-engineering the CP9600 spool file format, but that's on hold until after tax season..)

The Kodak 9810 and 8500 (itself a rebadged CP3020) also remain untested.

So, if anyone out there has access to one of these printers and is interested in helping improve their Linux support, speak up!

Similarly, if there's some other dye-sublimation photo printer you'd like to see working under Linux, we can probably help each other out. The recent Citizen/DNP and Shinko/Sinfonia additions/suppport were the result of such collaborations.

The software that powers my photo archive (aptly named Photo Organizer) hasn't seen much attention in the past few years or so. That's mostly because it does what I need with little fuss, and the other users either don't exist any more or are satisfied with what it is.

The other reason it hasn't seen much attention is that there's so much tecnhical debt in that codebase that all of the substantial feaures I have on my eventual to-do list require some major plumbing work.

So, the result is that in the past three or so years, development's slowed to a trickle of bugfixes. The notable exceptions are addition of a few more esoteric image formats, and updating the default themes to take advantage of now-common CSS3 constructs. Not exactly earth-shattering!

Last night, I finally sat down and added a major new feature, a (read-only) JSON-RPC interface that exposes the same sorts of information as the RSS feed generator.

My primary goal is to enable gnome-photos to directly interface with Photo Organizer, but this JSON-RPC interface will enable many more things. Unfortunately the data exported through the RPC API is far from complete, but I only see that improving as I figure out what to do with this thing.

The amazing Ginger Doss performing at an intimate house concert in Pinellas Park, FL.

Fresh peach cobbler mingling with the unmistable smell of newly-escaped magic smoke make for an interesting olfactory combination.

This time, the magic smoke escaped from a Kodak 805 photo printer, immediately after I flipped its power switch. If this sounds like a repeat, it's because it is.

I'm beginning to understand just why Kodak said the 805 wasn't intended to be a replacement for the 1400, despite its outwardly-identical appearance. The 805 just wasn't built particularly robustly.