flaxen.blog

SlimDXControl 1.0.0 released!

2011-02-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

I've just released the first version of SlimDXControl on CodePlex:

SlimDXControl is a WPF control that wraps the complexity of managing a D3DImage for you. You just have to implement the actual DirectX rendering pieces you care about -- no messing about with device management or IsFrontBufferAvailableChanged or window resizing events.

D3DImage is a Microsoft-supplied WPF control that allows to embed DirectX/D3D9 graphics into a WPF application. Unfortunately, but necessarily, to use D3DImage you need to write quite a bit of code on the application side that is completely foreign to many WPF developers. Yes, you can find several good articles on the web on how to use D3DImage – from which I have learned much, thank you! -- but they are largely blogs or sample code snippets. The project is designed to be a standalone control, supported and maintained, that you can directly use in your code today.

It's seems fully functional and stable to me, but we'll call it a beta release until we get some feedback.

WPF 1, WinForms 0

2011-01-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

From the .NET Reflector folks:

We've also taken the opportunity to start using WPF for UI development, which has frankly been a godsend. The learning curve is practically vertical but, I kid you not, it's just a far better world. Really. Stop using WinForms. Now. Why are you still using it?

Nice.

libLAS 1.6 beta release

2011-01-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

Hobu announced the release of libLAS 1.6.0b4 today, for which Flaxen Geo contributed some work to bridge liblas over to Martin Isenburg's laszip format.

-mpg

Goodbye, Outlook -- Hello, Thunderbird

2011-01-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

I spent WAY too much time today trying to get my world stabilized for email, contacts, calendaring, and tasks lists.

Outlook 2010 is, of course, what I really want and need -- but it just doesn't work with Gmail. Read this post, then read all the comments posted on it about how bad the performance is. I tried, I really tried -- I wanted it to work, I really did -- but it's just too painfully slow to sync. Major bummer. And using Gmail as my mail host is not negotiable. So maybe I'll try again with Outlook 201x, but for now it's off the table. And so began the long slog to build up an alternative ecosystem.

My requirements:

I need to have mail, contacts, calendar, and tasks
I must be able to sync these between the web, my (Windows) laptop, and my iPhone
My Windows client must be very robust and stable, as I'll live in it all day long.
Gmail must be the hub for storing all my mail, and ideally the hub for {contacts,calendar,tasks}

The only client that seems to be fully featured and robust enough for everyday usage under Windows is Thunderbird. It has email, contacts, calendaring, and tasks -- so now was just a matter of configuring everything to sync up to the web and over to the iPhone.

Mail

For the web access, Gmail rocks -- 'nuff said.

For Windows, Thunderbird syncs very easily with gmail via imap (and performance is just fine). The "Mailbox Alert" extension adds an Outlook-like notifier in the lower right -- would be nice to have a delete button on the notify popup, but that's pretty minor.

The iPhone syncs nicely too, although I've noticed some cases where mail deleted in Tbird might not be getting deleted on the phone -- still investigating that one.

Contacts

Gmail maintains a reasonable database. Web interface is kinda klunky, but, I don’t use the web for contacts much anyway.

Thunderbird syncs with Google via the "gContactSync" extension. There are some problems here, though: you can only reliably get name, email address, and phone number back and forth. So I'm going to use Tbird to store all full contact info, and let Gmail just store what it can.

Phone: syncs up via the Google Sync app process. What gmail has is less than what Tbird stores, and I don’t quite grok the different calendar lists the phone shows me, but it appears to now have all the basic info for all the contacts.

Calendar

On the web, I'm not too fond of Google's calendaring system, but for a web-based interface it's okay -- and, again, I don't do much calendar work on the web.

On the laptop, Thunderbird supports calendaring via the "Lightning" extension plus the "Provider Extension for Google". This all syncs up with the GOOG pretty well.

Phone: here again, Google Sync pulls everything in.

Tasks

And here's where things fall apart. Tbird/Lightning supports tasks just fine, and Google has something too, but as of this writing, there is no way to sync the two -- the problem is allegedly on Google's end, so maybe we'll see this eventually. For now I'm using Tbird's tasks directly, with no syncing to anywhere; no having my task list on my phone might get irritating, but we'll try it and see.

Side note: Both systems have this notion that tasks are somehow philosophically related to their calendaring systems. I don't like that much, and since the two wouldn't sync anyway I looked around for alternatives. Remember the Milk (RTM) is the leading candidate, and does offer lots of syncing and integration, but I found it to be just a little too barebones even for me.

Additional side note: the iPhone has native apps for calendaring, mail, and contacts -- but no native task list app. In my Outlook days I used a couple different task apps which sync'd with my corporate Exchange server, but they were never as good as a native Apple-designed task list app would be.

Conclusion

Goodbye, Outlook -- I'll try you again when you have your next major release, but for now you're being replaced. It took all this kit to do it though: Thunderbird, Google Sync, and four Tbird extensions.

-mpg

Update (11 Jan 2011) - Google Sync for mail is no good: messages that have been deleted (via Tbird) do not disappear from the phone's inbox. Long-standing known bug, apparently. So now we're back to iPhone's "normal" gmail connection, which doesn't sync contacts, but we can do that via iTunes (only syncs when connected, but I can live with that I guess). Outlook, I miss you so.

MG4 Whitepaper published

2010-11-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

My white paper on LizardTech's MrSID/MG4 has now been posted. (It's an uncredited piece, alas.)

Ads?

2010-11-19T10:08:00.000-08:00

I've just enabled Google ads on this blog. I may regret it -- we'll have to see how intrusive it feels.

Update (11 Jan 2011) - Removed them. Low-traffic blog means little revenue, and it looked really annoying. (But it was worth it to watch what sort of ads were selected for display...)

Flaxen Comes Alive (A New Beginning)

2010-11-19T09:55:00.000-08:00

After 11 long years at LizardTech, the time has come to move on -- my last day as a Lizard will be December 31st.

Which means of course that now I get to do something new, and so with a lot of encouragement from a lot of good people I know, I've gone ahead taken the plunge... I have at long last set up my own consulting shop: Flaxen Geo Consulting, specializing in the emerging area that lies at the intersection of geospatial technology, open source software, and C#/.NET.

Watch this space for more news in the coming weeks.

-mpg

That Sort of Book

2010-10-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

From today's NYT, a review of "A Week at the Airport" by Alain de Botton:

There’s a funny, revealing moment in Alain de Botton’s new book, “A Week at the Airport,” when he discovers that the largest bookstore at Heathrow Airport, in London, does not stock his books. He decides to have a conversation with Manishankar, the shop’s manager, about what else might be available.
“I explained,” Mr. de Botton writes, “that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
Manishankar, confused, wonders if Mr. de Botton might want a magazine instead.

If pressed, I would admit that I have no idea who Alian de Botton is and that I probably don't read That Sort of Book anyway. But if the book holds up to the first three paragraphs of the review, I'm in.

Control-Alt-Delete for your Telly

2010-05-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

So on the way in to work this morning I read the following bit in Stephen Seow's book "Designing and Engineering Time" (page 28), discussing users' perceptions of reliability and stability of products:

A television set, for example, does not come with a reset or refresh button for the end user because it is regarded as an appliance that just works.

That's from 2008; well and good. But then not six hours later, over lunch, I read in the NY Times that Google is partnering up with makers of television sets so that

Devices running Google TV will also be able to run applications written for Android phones, and will feature Google's Chrome web browser, which would allow consumers to surf the web from their television sets.

Yup.

A nickel says your next telly will indeed be sporting a reset button.

NYT: The secret to a happy workplace

2010-03-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

Nice:

As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.... I asked him how he thought I did that. “I’m sure you treat them well,” he replied.

“That’s half of it,” I said. “Do you know what the other half is?”

He didn’t have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

I’m not.

-mpg

1st Annual Bainbridge Mapping Party

2010-03-25T15:36:00.000-07:00

Great mapping party by the CUGOS gang last weekend -- full post here.

And in sports news today...

2009-12-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

From today's NYTimes:

N.F.L. Sets New Guidelines on Concussions

A new rule will bar pro football players who show major signs of head injuries from returning to games. [...]

Wait -- what?

They're just now figuring this out?

And they have to make a rule about it?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

2009-12-03T08:19:00.001-08:00

From Scott Berkun, on the use of animations in PowerPoint:

Animations are almost always a distraction If I’m telling a story you care about, I don’t need to animate a thing, the story animates enough. When you asked your spouse to marry you, did you need flyouts and animations? No. The content was interesting enough all on its own.

'Nuff said.

Chickens in the NYT

2009-08-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

See, I told you -- everybody's doing it now.

In September, she began selling some of the eggs and started keeping track of her income and expenses. [...] She has taken in $457 from egg sales and spent $428, mostly on feed. That left $29 in the Mason jar where she keeps her earnings, to spend the next time she buys feed. But that accounting does not include [...] the $1,500 she spent converting the old shed in her yard to a henhouse.

Emphasis added. Welcome to the club.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

2009-08-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

GeoWeb trip report published here.

Building the Run

2009-06-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

Thumb, toe, and pride having sufficiently healed, the "run" was built in late May /early June.

A few 4x4 posts were sunk in concrete to form the south (front) wall. They were capped with a spanning 4x4, on top of which some long 2x4 rafters were laid across to the rafters of the coop roof.

Our spec called for serious anti-predation measures, so the top, bottom, and sides are all covered with "hardware cloth" -- essentially a more highly evolved form of chicken wire which uses something like 10 gauge wire to for 1/2" meshing.

View of east side:

View of west side:
(Note custom Straw Bale Holding Bin in background at right.)

Architectural detail of uprights, spanning beam, rafters, and meshing:
(Yes, still a lot of trim and finish work to do on the mesh.)

Detail of door and latch to the run:

Distance view of east side - this is what the neighbors see:

Distance view of above - this is what we see from the living room:

And as a final touch, one more anti-predation measure:

Still needs some days of trim work and painting, but it's fully functional and in production use at this point. And the gals will soon be old enough to start laying, so we'll also have to get to building the nesting box to go inside the coop.

Building the Coop

2009-06-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

The coop was built over a period of several weeks, roughly March and April.

The foundation consists of concrete blocks supporting a couple 4x4's. Laid on top of those is a simple 2x4 framed floor system.

The four walls are also framed out with 2x4's. The floor and walls were built to exacting spec up in the garage and then carried down to the job site where they were "raised", a la barns of yore, by me and the kids. The flooring itself is just plywood.

Architectural details of note in the wall frames include openings for: a human-sized door and chicken-sized hatch (front / south), a medium sized window (side / east), a hatch for cleaning and sweeping stuff out (side / west), and a large area to accomodate a 4-wide nesting box. (The clean-out hatch can be seen in the above picture at Nathaniel's feet.)

The walls are just plywood nailed to the framing.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the construction process between the completion of the framing and the final painting. You can sort of see below, though, that I added a shingled roof (on top of some rafter 2x4s, at a suitably rakish angle), some reasonably nice-looking trim here and there, and a full door. The window hatch is screened, and all the hatches are hinged and latched.

The interior of the coop is just bare studs for now, plus a perching beam and hanging feeders. An extension cord is built in, so that I can "plug in" the coop (via extension cord to house) for powering the heat lamp in the winter and a sound system for approriately egg-inducing Muzak.

It was about at this stage I broke my thumb and toe, resulting in work being suspended for some weeks.

A warning

2009-06-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

I can't say I wasn't warned:

'Oh, but isn't it just a simple chicken coop?' you might ask. Noooooooooo, my friends, never fool yourself into thinking the construction of a chicken coop is anything less than time consuming to the point of obsession...

At some point in the middle of the construction, you'll realize that you could have built a whole room onto your house for the amount of time and money spent. Forget about your children's college education -- unless, of course, they want to start selling eggs now to save up for college later...

She said it would be fun... that we could gather up some of the extra lumber we had lying about and nail it all together---that it would cost next to nothing. But after I used up the lumber I had, I still only had one wall completed. There was no turning back. We started hitting the lumber yard. Hard. It was like we couldn't stay away. I started dreaming about it at night...

A man walks into his dining room...

2009-06-09T14:29:00.001-07:00

One day I came home to find flock baby chicks had taken up residence in the dining room.

Sure, they were cute and all. Fuzzy little cheeping things. What's not to like?

But I knew they would grow -- the kids were bound to start feeding these McNuggets, and then where would I be? Not eating in my dining room anymore, that's for sure.

No, no, she said.

You need to build us a Chicken Coop, she said.

A Chicken Coop?, I asked.

Sure, I replied.

I'm an engineer.

I own a chop saw.

Of course I can make a Chicken Coop.

I mean, how hard could it be?

It'd have to be a bit stylish, of course.

Something with plenty of room.

Something the neighbors wouldn't object to.

Ha, I said.

I'll get right on it, I said.

Couple of Saturdays, a bunch of two-by-fours, some old screening.

Ha, I said again.

I'll get right on it, I said.

And baby makes three!

2009-05-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

(Three kids, that is. There's five of us total now, counting the adults too. Sixteen all told, if you count the cat, the fish, and the chickens.)

Abigail Rose Gerlek was born 30 May 2009 at 4:45pm, measuring 9 pounds 11 ounces and 20 inches.

Mother and Child both now at home and doing well.

Yet one more NYT piece on the New Economy

2009-01-06T16:45:00.000-08:00

From the NYT, natch:

As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with five million Americans now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a subprime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers and contributed to excess inventories.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T13:42:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from the Ancestral Whiting Farm, Hidden Springs, Idaho!

-mpg, kmg, meg, nrg, and tbdg

Another Zoom blog post today

2008-12-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

This one is from the ImTech file.

The DJIA declined, plummeted, cratered, ...

2008-11-25T09:26:00.000-08:00

More inspired economics writing from the NYT.

14+ years of comp.risks

2008-11-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

I've only posted to comp.risks a few times, but my first post was in 1994 which means I've been following that list for at least 14 years. Yow.

This was my favorite post, a quote that has still stuck with me over the years since Y2K.

I do what the voices tell me to

2008-11-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

From the latest comp.risks:

On the evening of 10 Nov 2008, a man's car got stuck on the Metro-North
tracks in Bedford Hills, N.Y. in Westchester County because he said his GPS
told him to make an immediate right turn.  Police blamed Jose Silva's
overdependence on GPS.  He was cited for driving on the tracks and not
obeying signs.  Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said, "You don't
turn onto train tracks. Even if there are little voices in your head telling
you to do so. If the GPS told you to drive off a cliff, would you drive off
a cliff?"

A bit of common sense -- thank you, Ms. Anders.

Nearest Book Meme

2008-11-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

Okay, okay, everyone else is doing it, so I will too:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I have on my desk two books, pretty much equally close to me: "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10" and "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach", both by Frank Luna.

From the D10 book:

"In addition, we discuss the intrinsic clip function, which enables us to mask out certain parts of an image; this can be used to implement fences and gates, for example."

and from the D9 book:

"The D3DX library provides the following function to compute a plane given three points on the plane: [prototype of D3DXPlaneFromPoints]."

No, I'm not doing any game programming, I'm just trying learn how to do 3D graphics and use my GPU -- using D3DImage, natch. (Turns out D3DImage only supports D9, not D10, so I had to go buy the older edition too.)

Good books, by the way: mathematics is not glossed over, but kept to the required essentials; good mix of theory and practice; reasonable examples; diagrams & pictures not so good in the D9 edition but much improved for D10. Much better than the other books on the subject, which tend to the pulpy "How to be a GAME PROGRAMMER in 21 days!!!" dreck. In fact, Luna could drop the word "game" from the title with very little content change, but I suspect his publisher would object.

What the election really meant

2008-11-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

From today's NYT op-ed pages, Gail Collins on the meaning of Tuesday's election:

"Now American children are going to grow up unaware that there’s anything novel in an African-American president or a woman running for the White House."

I like that.

Latest LizardTech blog post

2008-10-14T12:52:00.000-07:00

My latest post on the LizardTech blog is about using PInvoke/Interop for our C++ SDK.

JP2 on Ice

2008-09-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a BBC technology podcast on the flight down to Atlanta for the OGC TC meeting, and there was a piece about tracking icebergs in the Antarctic. I was half-asleep as they said something about needing to compress data since they have poor bandwidth down there, when suddenly I was wide-awake as they said they were using JPEG 2000 -- and with geospatial extensions!

Subsequent investigation showed they're not using GMLJP2, but still...

Text version of story here.

Nonstandard economic meta-indicators

2008-09-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

From a piece by David Leonhardt in the NYT:

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

(Emphasis mine.)

"Bluffer's Guide" published

2008-09-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

The September issue of GeoWorld magazine contains another piece by me and my favorite coauthor. I've not yet seen the actual copy, so I'm not sure what they finally titled it, but our internal working title was "A Bluffer's Guide to Image Compression".

Will provide link if/when available.

Cafe Retornym

2008-08-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Is "drip coffee" a retronym?

Outsourcing 2.0

2008-08-22T08:03:00.001-07:00

CodyB over at Mission Mountain Tech has a project going which uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to do feature extraction from geospatial imagery, and as a Friend of Cody I've had the good fortune to be able to present a talk on this project a few times now (GeoWeb, CUGOS, etc). [slides now published]

Satish from ESRI termed this "outsourcing for the Web 2.0 generation" and I've been using that as a tagline for the idea of using (some might say exploiting) human capital for projects that any right-thinking engineer would immediately assume should be automated. In Cody's case, finding swimming pools in Dallas.

This morning I stumbled across an article on the Pandora "radio station" which pays (living, breathing, human) musicians to process their music selections -- as opposed to, say, last.fm which uses a social network graph.

I'm now on the hunt for other cutting edge projects and services that have humans in the loop.

WPF and C# notes

2008-08-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

I've been learning C# and the .NET framework and WPF in the background lately -- most recently reimplementing "jiffy", my JPEG 2000 dump utility.

Some random notes as I climb the learning curve:

Petzold's book really disappointed me. These two quotes from an Amazon reviewer sum it up nicely: "I prefer sample applications to be shorter in order to illustrate the point. I found myself wading through code listings that had very little to do with what I thought the lesson was about" and "I felt that the explanations spent more time on how the sample application worked as opposed to going over the WPF technology that was supposed to be covered by the sample". I'm not looking for a dumbed-down version, no, but some screen shots or diagrams, please! Anyway, Sells' book is the one I've been toting around with me.
Liberty's C# book is a good intro (I've rarely gone wrong with an O'Reilly title), but doesn't go deep enough for an ex-compiler wonk. I need Books Two and Three, probably a C# language reference and a Framework reference.
A small thank you to John Skeet and his utility classes -- I'm using the EndianBinaryReader. (suggestion: namespace his classes a bit more, e.g. from MiscUtil.* to Skeet.MiscUtil.*).
Thanks also go to John Stewien for his multi-select tree control. (That behaviour really should be part of the framework itself.)
ObservableCollection seems to live in WindowsBase.dll. At least I wasn't the only one stuck on that.
Cold-start app startup times are waayy painful. I've seen a few blog posts on this topic, I try some of the ideas myself at some point.
Building produces lines in the output pane of the form: "C:\WINDOWS\...\Csc.exe /noconfig /nowarn:1701,1702 /errorreport:prompt ..." Alas, using F4 to cycle through the compilation errors line by line always "hits" this line. Why is that? Can I omit that line somehow as a build/config option? (F4 is able to skip other kinds of lines, like "Compile complete -- 2 errors ...")
Refactoring is nice. More kinds, please!
"AddReference..." takes a long time to open the dialog. Why?

GeoWeb 2008

2008-08-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Abbreviated trip report over on the LTI blog.

Gartner's Seven Grand Challenges

2008-08-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

In this month's CACM, there's a short piece highlighting the "seven IT grand challenges that, if met, will have a profound economic, scientific, and societal impacts" according to Gartner.

manual recharge of wireless devices
parallel programming
non-tactile, natural computing interfaces
speech translation
reliable long-term digital storage
increase programmer productivity by 100-fold [CAMC got this wrong, they said "100%"]
identify the financial consequences of IT investments

My knee-jerk reactions are:

2 and 4 definitely.
1 and 3 and 6 maybe.
5 is a good problem to solve, yeah, but I'm not sure if it meets what I think of as Grand.
7 is probably not on the right list. How is this different from, say, understanding where my marketing dollars go?

Rebirth of CACM

2008-08-01T07:22:00.000-07:00

CACM is apparently trying to reincarnate itself, and so they sent me a free copy this week; this is probably related to the demise of Queue. CACM is trying to appeal to a "diverse mix of researchers, practitioners, and educators" -- well, okay, so that matches my profile at about (0.20, 1.0, 0.20), given my nonpracticing interest in research and CS higher education.

And I must admit, the articles I skimmed were really pretty good. I was a little dismayed to see Yet Another Interview With Knuth, but it was actually a nice behind-the-scenes approach. And the ISCA review made me more than a bit nostaligc.

But for $100/year membership? Probably not, I've no real need to join ACM, do I? If they had a magazine-only rate, that might be appealing.

GeoExpress 7 SDK now available

2008-06-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Another of my LizardTech blog posts.

Tiles and precincts and progression orders, oh my!

2008-05-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

A post by me on the LizardTech blog.

FogBugz - It’s smart and it helps us get things done

2008-04-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

One of my occasional posts to the LizardTech blog.

Michael P. Gerlek dons the editor hat

2008-03-07T13:55:00.000-08:00

A post about me (blush) on the LizardTech blog.

Happy 2nd Birthday, OSGeo!

2008-02-15T13:57:00.000-08:00

A Happy Birthday post on the LizardTech blog.

Ring ring

2007-10-31T16:48:00.000-07:00

"Hell is other people's ringtones."

(quoted from Wired)

It's a harsh world for QA engineers, apparently

2007-02-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

During a phone screen the other day, a QA candidate expressed to me some degree of shock and amazement that, upon finding a bug, he would be able to "talk to the engineer and maybe look at some code" to try and understand the issue.

I'm probably just hopeless naive, I know, but I in turn expressed some degree of shock and amazement that any functional and productive team in 2007 would do it any other way.

From all the QA candidates I've talked to, I'm getting the clear impression that the working conditions for QA engineers and testers are pretty bleak. A lot of them do sprint after sprint for faceless contracting agencies, many of them are kept in isolated testing farms away from the "real" engineers doing the "real" work, some are given insufficient resources to test with, and a few have even told me that they feel the data the collect and report up is not considered of significant value to the project.

Sheesh.

Advice for job seekers

2007-02-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

I'm doing some hiring right now and am having the dubious pleasure of plowing through a lot of resumes and doing a lot of phone screens. As always, Joel Spolsky has lots of useful things to say on the topic, but let me offer a few additional suggestions to the would-be job seeker.

Put your complete contact info on the resume. Name, address, email address, phone number, lat/lon, and whatever else you can supply me. You might have written a truly masterful cover letter, but it got dropped when the HR department just sent me a PDF copy of your actual resume. Sorry, but them's the breaks. Burden's on you.

When I find a resume I like, I email the candidate to set up a phone screen. We will agree on a date and time, and then I will call you at that time. This means you need to be waiting by the phone and ready to talk when I call. If you're not available for some reason, fine -- things do happen, I understand -- but the burden is on you to send me a note ASAP and explain and reschedule. I'm not going to spend my time hunting you down.

When we talk on the phone, one of the first things I'm going to say is "have you had a chance to look at our website and see what we do here?" If you say "no", you're down one strike and we haven't even gotten to your experience or skills yet. If you say "yes" and then show no comprehension about what you've read, you're also down one strike. I'd much rather have you say "yes, but I'm not familiar with the Mugwump market and so I wonder if you can explain to me what your FrobNitz product actually can do for me" -- that's great, let's have a dialog, no problem. But don't try to bluff.

A new market for JP2

2007-02-24T13:48:00.000-08:00

I reproduce the following item, verbatim, which was picked up on one of my Google Alerts from some random website:

Techdepot.com LTB Audio Systems, Inc. today announced that their popular, award winning, True 5.1 Surround Sound USB Headphone of details; eradicates JPEG/JPEG 2000 compression artifacts; sharpens and corrects edges without overshooting and noise

Huh?

The Toyota Way

2007-02-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

From a recent New York Times magazine article on Toyota and The Toyota Way, on their approach to designing the new Tundra pickup truck:

When I spoke not long ago with the Tundra’s chief engineer, Yuichiro Obu, and its project manager, Mark Schrage, both of whom work in Ann Arbor, they characterized their research for the Tundra as quite unlike what was done for the Sienna. For starters, designing a full-size pickup truck for the American worker is more complex than designing a van for a soccer mom. The way a farmer uses a truck is different from the way a construction worker does; preferences in Texas (for two-wheel drive) differ from those in Montana (for four-wheel drive). Truck drivers have diverse needs in terms of horsepower and torque, since they carry different payloads on different terrain. They also have variable needs when it comes to cab size (seating between two and five people) and fuel economy (depending on the length of a commute). In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver. Finally, they made archaeological visits to truck graveyards in Michigan, where they poked around the rusting hulks of pickups and saw what parts had lasted. With so many retired trucks in one place, they also gained a better sense of how trucks had evolved over the past 30 years — becoming larger, more varied, more luxurious — and where they might go next.

Excellent.

NGA endorsement of JPIP

2007-02-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

NGA's latest missive on GEOINT standards specifically calls out "A Promising Standards Application -- JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol (JPIP)" (see page 15).

[note they seemed to have inadvertently chopped the last paragraph right as they were getting into the good OGC bits, oh well]

iPhone, at last

2007-01-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

Everyone else is blogging about it, so I might as well too. I'm just as susceptible as the next guy to a bit of techno-lust now and again.

I hereby apologize to all those back in November who told me not to get a new Windows laptop and also those who suggested I wait a bit for getting a new cell phone. I'm looking on my new HP laptop and Motorola phone with deep regret this afternoon.

The iPhone looks to runs universal binaries, so one oughtta be able to view both .sid and .jp2 files pretty easily.

But no GPS, though. Bummer -- almost perfect, but not quite.

...Hmm, what about that mandatory FCC E911 cell-tower-location stuff? Can we hijack that? With what sort of accuracy?

test

2006-12-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

Hi, Mom.