Jeff Barr’s Blog

• TeachStreet Blog: TeachStreet Comes to P-Town - The Official Announcement! - “TeachStreet, the first free website dedicated to helping teachers and students connect with one another at the neighborhood level, today announced that it has opened its virtual doors to the residents of Portland, Oregon. Just as Powell’s is renowned for its extensive collection of books, residents in and around the Rose City will now be one click away from discovering more than 25,000 classes, instructors, and schools currently available on TeachStreet.“
• Tom Raftery: Do You Telework? - “Personally, I love working out of home and at this point I’d find it very hard to going back to working from a central office. Working from home means I can be far more productive. I can (and often do) stay working on long after the typical 9-5 workday.“

• fq(x) Community - Articles - Tons of light reading for my upcoming summer vacation.

• Robert Reich: The Heart of the Economic Mess - “The long-term answer is for us to invest in the productivity of our working people — enabling families to afford health insurance and have access to good schools and higher education — while also rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in the clean energy technologies of the future.“
• CNN Money: Let’s Make America Thrifty Again - “Tufano and Princeton’s Daniel Schneider have proposed adding a line to tax forms so you could get part of your refund back in bonds. Aside from the convenience, this would send a signal that Uncle Sam thinks saving is a good thing to do with your refund.“

• Virtual White: A Bridge Between Second Life and Opensim Grids - “Today is a historic day indeed the opening of a public bridge between the Second Life Preview Grid and the Opensim Grids who choose to participate.“
• Nancy Duarte: Tips for Remote Presenters - “High stakes communication is handled best with everyone in the same room. But we all know with gas prices going up, and spending going down, it’s likely that your critical proposal will end up being communicated via an online presentation. So how do you make the most of it and connect with your audience?” - Via Sara Peyton.
• Charles Hugh Smith: An Empire of Debt - “Right now, Bernanke and Paulson and Congress and the rest of the power elite have the shock paddles frantically pressed to the chest of the American financial system, hitting the erratic heart of our Debt Empire with shock after shock, hoping and praying the debt bubble of the past 25 years can somehow be extended. “
• Kippie Friedkin: Second Life Viewer Cheatsheet - “My gift to you, fellow Second Life® Residents, is version 1.0 of my new project, a Second Life® Viewer Cheatsheet. It contains all the keyboard shortcuts of which I am currently aware.“

• Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Milky Way Over Ontario - “Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. Such was the case earlier this month over Ontario, Canada, when part of a spectacular sky also became visible in a reflection off a lake.“
• New York Times: The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - “The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?“
• 47 Hats: Stop Stealing - “Letting email/IM/twitter/browser run full bore during the periods of the day you are supposed to be creating something is exactly as stupid and criminal as driving a car while on your cell while texting while watching a dvd player. Someone is going to get hurt, and you’ll be to blame.“
• Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder - “The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware open source utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install Windows from your registry. It allows you to print or save your keys for safekeeping.“
• Hub2: - “Hub2 seeks to enable local neighborhoods to participate more meaningfully in the design and development of their own public spaces. Residents engage in a process that employs 3D tools and problem-solving techniques to articulate a common vision reflecting the participants’ values.“

• Adam Frisby: Prototyping with OpenSim: Testing out Amazon S3 as a Grid-Mode Asset Server - “The price is right, and the solution is fully programmable via a convenient web API, so it’s snuck itself into all sorts of places. What I’d like to experiment here is using it as a complete grid asset server, for those who haven’t toyed much with the OpenSim asset server under the hood - it’s effectively a webserver with two supported operations: “PUT” and “GET” - funnily enough this overlaps nicely with any network accessible storage system, S3 included.“
• Web Worker Daily: 5 Ways to Rescue an Unproductive Day - “5. Take the day off. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the work just won’t flow. If you’ve got the flexibility, just give up and let it wait for tomorrow.“
• Brian Aker: Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” - “Have you ever wanted to know what would happen if you had taken a different direction?“

Well, I thought that the Wordpress import had gone smoothly last week. Turns out that I had run it several times until I understood how the process worked. Between each run I would empty out the database tables, so that I’d start from scratch each time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t reset the MySQL “autoincrement” counter for each of the tables. This led to the reassignment of Post IDs which resulted in a number of broken links.

I just cleaned out the tables using the truncate command (which does reset the counter) and then imported the data file again. I had to regenerate the blog posts which I had written after I had generated the data file and I may have used the wrong dates in the titles. Apologies for any duplicates.

Of course I should really use named links instead of numbers and I’ll make this change soon.

• Cloud Security: Collaboration in the Cloud, Virtual Worlds and the Hacker Mindset - “Sorry boss, someone hijacked my avatar and now I’m stuck on this desert island for who knows how long!“
• Michael Thumann: Hacking Second Life - “During the analysis process no inventory data was discovered, all sensitive data is stored in the central database, but at least automatic some tasks looks feasible because of the integrated scripting language LSL.“
• The Economist: Twin Twisters - “As Fannie and Freddie show, regulators are easily captured and outwitted. The best controls are transparency and competition. When possible the government needs to stand back. Sadly, it failed to do so in the American mortgage market.“
• ThinkBalm: At Microsoft, Cost Of Virtual Events About 1/3 The Cost Of Traditional Events - “About 150 people (avatars) registered for the launch event in Second Life and Microsoft wound up with 220 actual participants – nearly a 150% attendance rate. This doesn’t include the estimated more than 270 avatars that just dropped into the event for a small portion of it.“
• Skeptic Report: Things Creationists Hate - “The main objects of my satire, for so it is intended, are the young-Earth, biblical-literalist types, although other generations of creationists may detect some of their views skewered here also.“

• Chris Pirillo: Gnomedex Initial Speaker Line-up Announcement - “What’s happening at Gnomedex 8.0 this year? Well, apart from a growing list of notable attendees…“
• Thomas Tan: How High Leverage Has Brought Down the Whole Banking Industry - “Why should the whole society have to pay for the bad decision of a few banks at the down side, but never be allowed to participate at the up side?“

• The Fresh Air Fund - “The Fresh Air Fund has provided free summer vacations to New York City children from disadvantaged communities since 1877. This is your summer to help!“
• Seattle: Steve Coast presents OpenStreetMap.org - “Come hear how OpenStreetMap is changing the mapping world and learn what made 46,000 people get involved in this initiative. This event is open to Microsoft and non-Microsoft employees alike. “
• jQuery Sparklines - “This jQuery plugin generates sparklines (small inline charts) directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. “
• Successful Soul: Warren Buffet’s 7 Secrets for Living a Happy and Simple Life - “I just naturally want to do things that make sense. In my personal life too, I don’t care what other rich people are doing. I don’t want a 405 foot boat just because someone else has a 400 foot boat.“
• Iotop - “Iotop is a Python program with a top like UI used to show of behalf of which process is the I/O going on. “
• Danny Choo: Stormtrooper Portal - “The Empire rolls you. ” Watch the video!

My wife and a couple of the kids are in Peru this week for a short visit with her father. They spent a couple of days in Lima and are heading to Cusco today. Her dad lives in a city called

Lamay, about an hour outside of Cusco. Here’s a picture of Machu Picchu from a trip that we took in 2001:

I’m taking most of the week off of work, taking care of 101 little things around the house — car maintenance, yard work, and so forth.

I’m also working to move some of my web sites over to a couple of Amazon EC2 instances. In fact, this very blog is now hosted on EC2.

I spent a couple of hours (on and off) loading up a bunch of Yum packages, editing configuration files, and browsing through logs in order to get Wordpress up and running. In the past I

have always configured and compiled Apache, MySQL and the other big parts myself. This time I simply installed packages. It was much easier, once I figured out where to find everything.

I spent more time than I should have trying to move my blog to the new machine. I dutifully dumped the database and created a tar file of the uploads directory, and then imported those by

hand, only to find that some of the entries were messed up due to a character encoding issue. It turned out that the Import and Export features worked just fine. In fact, the import operation even copied the images from the old site to the new.

• Bill Burnham: Fannie Mae’s Golden Goose: A Lesson In Moral Hazard - “Beneath the seeming calm, the seeds for Fannie’s distress were now firmly planted. Fannie’s drive to lower underwriting standards had created a pool of mortgage debt with a much higher level of embedded moral hazard risk as well as good old fashioned credit risk. Fannie’s purchases of mortgage securities were so large that it was getting increasingly difficult to feed the golden goose enough food. “

• Hamilton Linden: IBM and Linden Lab Interoperability Announcement - “This is a historic day for Second Life, and for virtual worlds in general. IBM and Linden Lab have announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking the first time an avatar has moved from one virtual world to another.“
• Brian White: Google’s New Virtual World Lively - “Well it’s official Google has invited themselves to the virtual world party with Lively. Here are some early press links to explore along with thoughts from some of the technology leaders in the space.“

• Programmable Web: Making Faces to Make Sense of Biomedical Data - “he ethnicity and gender of the face is selected at random for visual interest - you can turn this feature off if you so choose.The age of a face correlates with the publication date of the paper. Younger faces are more recent papers.A smile means that the paper has been cited more times than expected (based on its age). Larger smiles mean more citations.A frown means that the paper has been cited far less than you might expect.The raised eyebrows correlate with the impact factor (sort of - actually the Eigenfactor) of the journal in which the paper was published. “
• UK Guardian: Your Life Will Be Flashed Before Your Eyes - “Prototype contact lenses that include LEDs and circuits could become a tiny personal display“

• Don Lancaster: Guru’s Lair - “One major difference between “haves” and “have nots” these days simply lies in how much math they use and understand.“
• Lifehacker: Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools - “On Tuesday we asked you to share your favorite Windows maintenance tools, and today we’re back with the five most popular answers.“
• Will Green: ZFS Tutorial Part 1 - “In this tutorial I hope to give you a brief overview of ZFS and show you how to manage ZFS pools, the foundation of ZF“, and also Part 2.
• Neelakanth Nadgir: Improving Filesort Performance in MySQL - “A pictorial way of looking at this is shown below. Width of the box is proportional to time taken to execute the function, and height is the stack depth. Move the mouse over the image to see more details.“
• Neelakanth Nadgir: Visualizing Callgraphs via Dtrace and Ruby - “I wrote a simple ruby script to post process the allfrom.d output and generate a SVG image. The advantage of using SVG is that you can use javascript to provide added functionality. For example, you can hover your mouse over any block to see the name of the function and its elapsed time. Similarly, you could add support for Zoom and Pan.“

Last week I was trying to write a complex post for the AWS blog. I was referring to a number of other blog posts and pages and spent way too much time flipping back and forth between tabs.

On a whim I searched for “Firefox split browser” and found Hiroshi Shimoda’s Split Browser Extension. Using this extension I can see more than one page at a time, making it easier for me to write and reducing the cognitive load on my aging brain.

There are a number of helpful context and dropdown menu options to split the existing screen to the top, left, right, or bottom. Once split, the new area can have its own set of tabs. Tabs can be turned in to split screens, and vice versa.

My new link blogging methodology works as follows. First I open up tabs for the items in the post as part of my morning reading. Then I open up Wordpress in a split area, and link-blog away. There’s some kind of weird focus-stealing going on when Wordpress auto-saves, but I’ll figure out a way around that. Here’s what it looks like:

• Show Us a Better Way: What Would You Create With Public Onformation? - “The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.“
• The Daily Galaxy: Hot Tech to Watch for the Next Four Years - “The lifespan of technology is such that it’s hard enough to buy a computer that will last you more than three years, let alone be state of the art after 6 months.“
• Phil801: Living With Leukemia: Going Bald at Age 2 - “Her hair has been shedding like crazy lately and tonight we decided it was time to shave it - she had big bald patches all over and was starting to look pretty ragged. Not only that, but every time we picked her up we would come away covered in hair! “
• Boing Boing: Death and Taxes, and a Boing Boing Story - “Sales from the poster now support me and my family, and I have sold thousands of posters to schools and concerned citizens, even 40 members of congress. I have been in magazines, art galleries, and national television. Last month I was on the Martha Stewart Show to talk about the poster and taxes, it was surreal.“

This fall my son Andy will move across Lake Washington so that he’s closer to the University of Washington. He’ll be living in a room of a rental house where my other son Stephen is already a tenant.

Andy is a very accomplished pianist and piano teacher and he decided that he needed a piano for his new place. We have a perfectly good upright piano at home, but Andy wanted to upgrade to a baby grand. After scouring Craigslist for several weeks he found a nice Kohler & Campbell at a home in nearby Bellevue:

We agreed to purchase it and Andy made the arrangements for the piano mover. He chose The Piano and Organ Moving Company, the ones with the imaginative slogan “We are our name.”

Pianos aren’t the easiest things to move. They are delicate, unbalanced, heavy, and valuable. This particular model weighs over 800 lbs. You need a lot of strength, balanced with a light touch, to move a piano. This particular piano was at the top of a 22-step cascade of steps.

Here’s how things transpired. First, they laid thick padding over the steps:

Next, they wrapped the piano in a form-fitting cloth:

This little dolly was a crucial part of the moving process. It is a basically a snowboard resting on a frame with 4 heavy duty wheels. The board is not attached to the frame.

Next, the largest of the movers lifted up his corner of the piano while one of his associates removed the leg. Then they gently set down one edge on the dolly, which of course tipped to one side. Then, in one incredible move, they lifted up the other end of the piano while slowly bringing the other end of the dolly back to the floor. So this 800 pound piano was moving on two axes at once, carefully managed and under the full control of the movers. Professionals can make the toughest jobs seem easy, routine, and risk-free!

The piano was then strapped down to the dolly and it was ready to go:

Next, they simply rolled the piano out the front door and slid it down the padding in a carefully managed fashion. The mover at the top had a strap around his shoulders, allowing him to lift the piano with his legs and his back. The one on the bottom did a lot of the heavy lifting, while the one in the middle made sure that everything was lining up as they went down the stairs.

Andy was a bit apprehensive as they started to move down the steps:

It took less than 5 minutes for them to get the piano down the steps! After that they strapped it in with care, closed up the truck, and headed to Seattle:

My battery ran out at about that point, and I headed back to the office.

And that’s how you move an 800 pound piano!

• UK Telegraph: Stephen Hawking’s Explosive New Theory - “They argued the universe began in just about every way imaginable (and perhaps even some that are not). Out of this profusion of beginnings, like a blend of a God’s eye view of every conceivable kind of creation, the vast majority of the baby universes withered away to leave the mature cosmos that we can see today.“

The summer is finally upon us, and I thought it would be fun to list some of our favorite local activities here in Sammamish (we’re the city to the east of Redmond).

First, there are some great farmer’s markets. We love these because the produce is bright and fresh, as are the flowers.

• The Redmond Saturday Market takes place adjacent to Redmond Town Center, May through October of each year.
• The Sammamish Farmer’s Market takes place on Wednesdays at the Sammamish Commons in the middle of the Sammamish Plateau, late May through early October. It just started this year but from what I hear it is going well.
• The Issaquah Farmer’s Market is held in the Pickering Barn near Costco. Runs mid-April through mid-October each year.
• The Kirkland Wednesday Market takes place on Wednesdays, April through October, in the middle of Kirkland.

Next, a few fun summer events:

• We went to our first Fremont Solstice Parade yesterday. This is the place to go in Seattle to see the fun, fringe part of our community, including the famous naked cyclists.
• The Movies at Marymoor are great. The movies are projected on a large, inflatable screen. Bring chairs and blankets; it gets cold when the sun goes down.
• Fourth of July at Gasworks Park is a lot of fun. The best plan is to take a blanket, get there early in the day, and take it easy. If you don’t want to go all the way to Seattle, the Family 4th in Bellevue is a worthwhile alternative.
• The Redmond Derby Days celebrates Redmond’s status as the bicycle capital of the country.
• SeaFair is the month-long water and sea celebration, topped off (at least for us) by the air show at the beginning of August, featuring the Blue Angels.
• Bumbershoot, our local music festival, takes place at the end of summer on the grounds of Seattle Center.

These are my personal favorites. What are yours?