I dream of rain

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.

One of the things I did during last weekend's trip back to Melbourne was a trip to the Indian River County shooting range.

Due to prolonged ammunition shortages I needed to restrict myself to only shooting what I could replace, Surprisingly, I was easily able to find everything except for .22LR, so it looked like a good time was soon to be had by all!

The first thing that came to mind when I was tossing my new purchases in the trunk of my car was "Hmm, I have almost enough ammunition here for a Kentucky wedding!"

So, in the interest of scientific progress, let me formally designate one KWU (Kentucky Wedding Unit) of ammunition to be precisely 750 rounds.

Oh, for those of you that wonder where I'm coming from with this, I point you at The Register and The Onion.

Of course, given that I have yet to achieve even a miliwheaton's worth of readers here, I don't expect the KWU will gain me much fame, but eh, science is a worthy goal in of itself.

If take a step back and examine the patterns in my life, perhaps the most prominent is that I tend towards isolation. There isn't a singular reason for this, but the result is that while I never did have many people in my day-to-day life, over time that number tends to dwindle.

This is true even before one considers the starting-all-over consequences of relocation. It's normally slow going, but six months into my most recent move, I've hardly made any effort to get out and connect with other people.

Oh, there have been many reasons for this, and some of them are even legitimate instances of life getting in the way, but the truth is that this peaceful, drama-free existance has been quite good for me; it's something that I've really needed after several years of extremely drama-filled relationships and repeatedly-self-destructing social circles of inbred fucktards.

That said, I genuinely do need a social life, because at this rate my cats will start talking back to me before much longer. Unfortunately, there's been this huge disconnect between what I've found down here so far and what I need; everyone seems to either have one foot in the cradle or one foot in the grave, with very little in between.

Perhaps this is because the ones in the middle, the ones who have their shit together, the ones who have the drive to make something of themselves... are already doing just that with a minumum amount of narcissistic fuss.

Still, it would be nice to meet some folks whose crazies are compatible with mine. They're definitely out there, but we don't make it easy!

Meanwhile, I remain isolated, save for the occasional trip back to Melbourne and these ramblings in cyberspace that hardly anyone reads anyway.

This is a view of the aptly-named Greens district of Dubai, taken from the 30th(or so) floor of a condo my friends were considering purchasing.

It's stitched from two dozen separate images, weighing in at 48Mpix, and printed at 200dpi would be a hair over eight feet wide. It still needs a bit more work to balance the exposure, but I'm moving on to see if any of the other potential panoramas will (ahem) pan out.

...You really don't want to know where these gloves have been.

It was a lovely sunrise over the gently-flowing river formerly known as American Circle in Western Delray Beach.

Last night, we received at least 14 inches of rain in about five hours. My garage had 2 inches of standing water, and water was lapping over the front step, about 4.5" deep. The driveway was even deeper -- I was able to paddle around in my kayak. (If my car had been parked in the street, it would have floated off!) The back yard fared worse; the large pond behind the house swelled to within two feet of my patio, perhaps half an inch from flooding me out completely.

But it could have been worse. Just north of here, Boynton Beach got over 18 inches of rain; they actually had to close a four-mile stretch of I95 because it was unnavigable. Two people died; one literally drove her car into a lake, and the other slipped and drowned when wading through waist-deep water.

In other news, my fever finally broke last night.