We spent the day in the mountains with my folks, celebrating my dad's 70th birthday. seven-oh. We had an awesome day at their timeshare cabin at Banff Gate just outside of Canmore (not far from Banff). Got lots of great pics, and Evan had a blast.

The coolest thing about today was that dad wasn't supposed to make it to 70. He was diagnosed with a serious case of polymyositis in 1997 (?), and was given under a year to live. His body was digesting all protein in his system, slowly taking his internal organs apart and secreting the remains into his blood.

Over the years, I have taken several series of quick-and-dirty panorama photographs. No tripod. No careful alignment. Just snapping a series of shots at various angles at cool or memorable places. I've been hoping that the software would catch up and make it brain-dead simple and quick to make high quality panoramas. Autostitch has finally done that.

I've been playing with Autostitch for a while now, but just went back through the iPhoto archives and dragged 14 sets of panorama series, and fed them into Autostitch to see what came out. The results aren't consistently great (my older camera had lower res, and image quality was poorer), but they're pretty darned good.

I know my battery life is really sucking on my 3G iPod. I get JUST enough juice to commute home and back to work (a grand total of 1 hour of use) before having to plug it in for enough charge to repeat the cycle again. On the weekend, if I just leave it "off" without charging it, it will be completely dead on Monday morning (which makes D'Arcy grumpy on the bus on the way to campus).

For the Pachyderm project, we wanted a way to automatically update, build and deploy a WebObjects application and its supporting framework. The initial reaction was to just use a shell script, with xcodebuild running on the server to build the appropriate projects.

That didn't work for us, because our server is still running 10.3 (with the appropriate older XCode dev. kit), while we've moved on to 10.4 and XCode 2.1 for development- so our server can't understand the .xcodeproj files and barfs appropriately. Doh.

Yeah, I'm switching again.

I'd used Notational Velocity before, and really liked it, but switched to DevonThink PE to manage stuff that I don't necessarily want Google to find (password, bank account info, and random notes - code snippets and the like - that don't make sense being blogged)

I just tried the full DevonTHINK Professional edition, and while it's really nice, and has handy Dashboard widgets for easy access, it just struck me as a "heavy" application. Its interface is essentially a taxonomy, or a hierarchy of folders. That's cool, but you need to keep thinking about where to meaningfully store stuff.

Looks like our on-campus networks are being hammered by W32/IRCbot.worm - the Learning Commons webserver, Pachyderm, APOLLO, as well as the main U of C website are all being affected by terabytes of virus traffic taking over the network.

Even though our servers aren't running the Biggest Security Hole Known to Man, and are themselves quite safe, they don't have any bandwidth available due to the predominance of lesser boxes on the network.

I'm wondering if we should have a separate isolated network on campus for risky and untrusted machines, and just move all Windows machines onto that. We could then disconnect the whole lot of them when they get infested again (not if, but when).

Gizmodo linked to a new machinima talk show: This Spartan Life

If you've seen Red vs. Blue, or some of the similar movies made using "in game" videography from some games like Halo or Quake3, you'll know what machinima is.

But This Spartan Life takes it one step further - instead of being a scripted "in-game play" being acted out, it's a full-blown talk show. Complete with guests, interviews, cameramen and crew, perimeter security snipers, stray rocket fire from nearby newbies, and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers.

I've been really bad about updating the iPodder.org podcast directory educational category in a timely manner. Mostly because it's rather a huge PITA to manually update the .opml file - very carefully editing the xml in BBEdit, then validating using the just barely meaningful online OPML validator to make sure I didn't bork it.

I just downloaded Dave Winer's OPML Editor, and it makes the updates easy enough to make it not worth avoiding.

I just got the most bizarre email spam. Obviously it was triggered by some Google query, as some key words that show up in my Google referrals were used repeatedly in the email.

Um, Thanks? Sorry? Not really sure what kind of response Melanie was looking for, without providing a URL or anything...

Alan's got a rant-on about "reality" TV, and the impending doom of civilization as we know it.

I kinda agree, but don't think it will stop until we've seen the likes of "Switched At Birth" - a "reality" series where they swap babies between a rich family and a trailer park family, and follow the kids until adulthood. Fun and entertainment for all, watching the rich kid become a crack dealer, and the poor kid a socialite. Wheee!

I just found a new site in my referrer stats - someone trying to customize Mambo to have a Kubrick-based theme rather strongly inspired by my (and Cole's) tweaks to it. That's cool. Have at'er.

But, it's not cool to just go ahead and use the images directly off of my server. Sorry for being a jerk about it, but I don't feel the need to use part of my bandwidth allocation so you don't have to bother copying my files to your server to use them in your site... It's simple to do. I'm all for people exploring and experimenting with stuff, even/especially with my stuff - that's why it's online - but please host your own website rather than sneaking into my hosting package.

I was just chatting with Josh, and was mentioning that the Pachyderm server would be getting additional bandwidth allocated through to the commercial internet, thanks to campus IT.

I was searching for the spelling of a word to describe the price we were quoted. Couldn't remember if it had an "a" or an "o" in it, and Dictionary came through for me! The dictionary entry even included images that look like actual old-school dictionary woodcuts, likely directly from the Oxford dictionary (perhaps a live image linked from their website?). Regardless, it sure makes for a nice and polished dictionary/thesaurus app. It's the little things.