Blog: 2007-07

Rainy Saturday on the Boston Esplanade and Photo Hoarding

After a heavy rain Saturday afternoon, I went out for a walk towards the Boston Esplanade with my camera, to take advantage of the post-rain light. Since I've gotten serious about photography, I've mostly been keeping my photos to myself, with the idea of waiting til I could post a decent professional-grade portfolio. That's no fun, however, so for a while I'm going to try blogging my urban images as I take them, and without worrying much about post-processing...

A man dedicated to his craft was sitting on the grass and painting.

When I reached the Hatch Shell, they were setting up for an outdoor concert sponsored by a local "oldies" radio station, so I decided to stop and see if I could get some interesting shots of the crew.

The sky began to sprinkle on the people who were already camped out, waiting for the concert. A man caught raindrops on his tongue.

Then it began to rain more heavily on the concertgoers. One man cheered the rain on this humid day, and later he said that rain now meant no rain during the concert. A well-prepared man was not as emotive.

I was quickly soaked to the skin, and could no longer dry my unsealed camera, so I headed back home without getting captions. After getting over the bridge to Kendall Square, in the middle of the thunderstorm, a manhole cover in front of One Cambridge Center was rattling loudly, as water pressure from below, presumably from a storm drain or sewer, kept forcing it up.

Google StreetView Spotted in Cambridge, MA

Early this Sunday morning, I went jogging for the first time in years. This event might have been commemorated by a Google StreetView surveillance vehicle in Area Four.

This particular vehicle was a silver sedan, with the distinctive Google StreetView appendage jutting up proudly.

Had I not been intent to resume jogging this morning, I would've spent a couple hours stalking the wily Googlecar with my camera. And perhaps seeing how ubiquitous I could be about Cambridge in their StreetView images.

IKEAification Continues with MALM

On the heels of my recent IKEA KLIPPAN acquisition, I picked up exactly the IKEA dresser I wanted: IKEA MALM 6-drawer with birch veneer finish.

This one was a used one in excellent condition. Picked up for $50, which is roughly 1/6 of what IKEA would have charged to deliver a new one.

The cost savings does not factor in the sweat equity. However, I did get atypically admiring looks from attractive women in the process of hauling IKEA MALM home with a hand truck (I am imagining them thinking "He is so desirably strong and sweaty, and, thinking pragmatically, a good provider with excellent taste in varieties of laminated particleboard") so I won't account for the sweat as a cost of the dresser.

My Homie, Ben Affleck

I bumped into Ben Affleck, as we were both taking walks through my neighborhood shortly after dawn Thursday morning. (It's my 'hood now, buddy.)

Cambridge (Mass., USA) is infested with famous academics, including some famous popularly, but we don't have many film stars.

Debian FSCK=yes

A colleague and I were speculating as to how the incident at a certain colo facility in San Francisco could result in so many crucial services still being down.

Did someone hit the Big Red Button? I recalled that, when I helped manage a large Sun network early in my career, even planned power outages with proper shutdowns resulted in, IIRC, a 1% or 2% failure rate in hosts, due to the stresses of booting (often Quantum 105 stiction). Or was it possible that the powering-up wasn't staggered well enough, and their internal infrastructure couldn't deal with the spike from hundreds of power-hungry servers spinning up at once?

My first favorite theory involved an employee who in the end just wanted to be loved, and a too-convenient fire axe.

My new favorite theory was that a hundred dotcom IT technicians was still camped out in a line that snaked around the block of the data center, each waiting to get in to answer y to fsck prompts for innocuous filesystem repairs on hundreds of consoles.

This led my colleague to remark that one of his own servers still prompts for fsck at boot. I thought Linux distros weren't quite so cautious about that anymore, so I poked around with grep after Google was unhelpful, and found that indeed Debian still doesn't pass -y to fsck by default.

The change is to edit /etc/default/rcS to replace:

FSCKFIX=no

with:

FSCKFIX=yes

I've just made this change to one of my servers for which I don't have easy console access. I've not yet decided whether to make this change part of my standard config.

Replacing the LCD Display of Canon Digital IXUS i Zoom

I recently replaced the LCD display of a Canon Digital IXUS i Zoom (aka Canon PowerShot SD30). I could not find LCD replacement instructions on the Web for this particular model, and the details of this particular model differed significantly from those similar models for which I could find instructions. So here's a few notes for the benefit of future Web searchers...

After the LCD in a friend's camera cracked, she took the initiative to obtain a replacement LCD via eBay (for approximately $50, I believe). She then asked me to help her install it, handed the parts to me, and quickly left the room to do other things. Not one to turn down the opportunity to impress a cute woman with my techie virility, I whipped out my tools and set to it.

Here's a crude summary of what I did:

1. Gathered a work light, jeweler's screwdrivers, small longnose pliers, razor blade, and lens blower.

2. Removed battery and memory card from camera.

3. Took a sheet of paper, diagrammed the camera case with screw positions, and put loops of tape corresponding to each screw position.

4. Removed each of the external screws, putting them on the appropriate tape loops, one by one.

5. Removed the rear half of the shell.

6. Took a second sheet of paper, and made diagram and tape loops for the internal screws I thought I'd be removing.

7. Removed the screws holding the LCD bracket in place, and carefully eased the bracket loose, but not wrenching it away from the camera, since it was still attached by two ribbon cables.

8. Detached the LCD ribbon cable. After some careful experimenting, I found that the black portion of the LCD connector flips up, hinged on the white portion. Careful, because this connector is mounted on a flimsy film material itself, not on a PCB -- break it, and the camera might as well be tossed. (I'd previously only seen sockets for this kind of connection have a sliding portion, or simply let the ribbon push in. I would've figured it out quicker, had I been able to find my magnifier, or had I used one of my digital cameras to get a magnified image.)

9. Used small slotted jeweler's drivers and razor blade to undo the clips holding the LCD to the bracket. I had to compare the replacement part side-by-side with the existing assembly to determine exactly what needed to be removed. I was careful not to scratch the white backing (which I assumed was either a light reflector or some electroluminescent material).

10. Used the lens blower on both the white backing and on the LCD, to remove all visible dust. Inserted the LCD into the bracket, using razor blade to help ease it in to the clips. Again, I was careful not to scratch the white backing.

11. Inserted the ribbon cable into the connector, and flipped the black portion of the connector down to seal the connection.

12. Used razor blade to remove the adhesive gasket-like black rectangle framing the old LCD, then applied it to the new LCD.

13. Held battery in camera and verified that LCD now worked, then removed battery again.

14. Eased the LCD bracket back into the camera, and screwed it back on.

15. Screwed back half of shell on.

16. Accepted glory and accolades.

Incidentally, this is the second time her LCD needed to be replaced. The first time a light drop cracked the LCD, she paid for Canon to replace it. The second time, I suggested she consider asking Canon to replace it for free, since I was surprised the LCD would break so easily.

Dabbling with Macs, TrackPoint Keyboard on iMac G3, and RatShack

In between various projects the last couple weeks, I've spent some time playing around with Apple Macs. This is the first I've spent significant time with a Mac since the original Macintosh (actually, the 512K one, I think) over 20 years ago.

Having done some time as a user interface researcher, I've been curious about the Mac OS X GUI, and finally got an excuse to try it out when I inherited a discarded 600MHz G3 Snow White iMac. A good cleaning, extra RAM, firmware update, and OS reinstall later, and it works great. Expecting my new iMac to be more exotic than practical, I christened her alessandra (Ambrosio).

So far, I'm liking Mac OS X well enough that I wouldn't mind switching from Linux for workstation things, were the Mac not a famously closed and proprietary platform. Considering the amount of Free stuff I like to do, it doesn't make sense to switch to a platform where I'd end up contributing for free to the lock-in of a decidedly non-Free platform. (I'm speaking of personal/home computers, not whatever I use for paid work at jobs.)

Besides, for me to switch to Macs, the PowerBook would have to lose that terrible touchpad interface and sprout a TrackPoint. I did find that the iMac works with a TrackPoint keyboard, using a French version of the IBM TrackPoint USB keyboard that I picked up cheap on eBay. I don't yet have the TrackPoint working as well as it should -- even with the Tracking Speed preference set to the maximum, the response is slow and jerky, especially when compared side-by-side with Linux on my IBM ThinkPad T42. I'll look more for add-on software to tweak the speed and acceleration of the TrackPoint.

My life tends toward feast-or-famine dynamics, and this extends to my relationship with Macs as well: last night, I inherited a second discarded slot-load G3 iMac. This one is needs a bit more work, and I've ordered a new NVRAM/PMU battery. I can tell you that I've repaired literally dozens of discarded broken PCs without ever having to poke at the motherboard with a DMM. Who said that Macs were user-friendly. :)

I ordered the battery mail-order, since I found that 'Electrode Hut' wanted $18. The price-gouging might answer a question posed recently by The Onion:

FORT WORTH, TX -- Despite having been on the job for nine months, RadioShack CEO Julian Day said Monday that he still has "no idea" how the home electronics store manages to stay open.

—The Onion, "Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business," The Onion, 2007-04-23

Boston Restaurant Week

Boston Restaurant Week is plural: August 5th through 10th, and August 12th through 17th.

You Know What I Did This Summer

Late last night I finished painting the kitchen. It was previously a few varieties off-white, most of which had been in place for over a decade. Now it's semigloss white on the tiles and moulding, and Yellow Rose on the paneling. With some of the leftover paint, I also rehabilitated the genuine retro metal kitchen cabinet (and used a wire brush to whisk away the oxidation on the handles).

Also accomplished during my vacation this last six weeks: got my archive of 30,000 photos into shape, moved to new servers, converted my email setup to Thunderbird (including contact database), repaired half a dozen computers, assembled my studio lighting, finally went to the trouble to get physical therapy for an old knee sprain, and started learning Python.

Keeping my priorities in proper perspective, I spent the bulk of the time patriotically doing my part for foreign relations.

I'll resume consulting shortly.