Mike's Page

Katie, we miss you

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-07-15T16:27:02Z

Katie Reider, 1978 - 2008

Katie is part of my family, and it hurts so much that her fight had to end this way.

Keep her singing in your heart.

Peace.

Links: Details, More of the Story, Beautiful Photos of Katie

Git is Fun

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-05-23T01:27:27Z

I was initially disappointed when it was announced that Ruby on Rails was moving its version control system from Subversion to Git. There's enough to keep up with in Rails that I didn't relish having to keep up with this as well. It wasn't so much that Rails was moving, but related code began to move too, so we're currently in this limbo where many plugins have both git and soon-to-be-deprecated SVN repositories, and it's just another detail to keep track of. Hopefully there will be tools to sort all this out soon.

I like my SVN GUI tools, but it turns out that git works pretty well on Windows under Cygwin, if you can live with the command line. It's certainly sufficient for cloning plugin repositories.

I could take or leave git by itself, but I love GitHub. They make it so easy to fork an existing project, make your own changes to it, and share it back with the world. Your changes can easily be pulled back into the original projects, too. I've been able to make a couple of small contributions to shoulda and acts_as_xapian.

So git is fun after all, and I'm looking forward to using it more; especially when the GUI tools show up.

Recent Paddling

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-04-16T02:49:57Z

I've been getting a little more kayaking in lately, mostly to new places. In February I paddled the South Fork Edisto River. In March I went on my first whitewater trip to the Lower Green in North Carolina. My 14.5' boat managed the Class II rapids and I stayed dry, but plenty of that was luck. Last week I did a jaunt along the Lake Greenwood shoreline and found Black Crowned Night Herons living in an inlet near my neighborhood. This past Saturday I paddled the Enoree River. It started with an hour of steady rain, but ended with quite pleasant weather. It's good to get out on the water!

Printer held Hostage by Ink Cartridge

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-04-08T00:57:03Z

I've had a Canon Pixma MX700 multifunction printer since the beginning of the year. I've been pretty happy with it. It's worked well for scanning, copying, faxing and printing. Until today. Today I needed to scan something, and was greeted with the following message when I turned it on:

U150 The following ink tank cannot be recognized.

The yellow cartridge was indicated. I though that it was an odd problem, but I didn't care for the moment, because I didn't want to print, just scan. But no button on the printer would bypass this error and let me scan.

I ended up calling Canon, and happily received a domestic phone rep. He had me try a couple things, but eventually decided that the yellow ink would need to be replaced. They would send me one free. I asked if there was any way to bypass the error so I could just scan, and he said there was not. If I wanted to use it today I would have to go out and buy a yellow ink cartridge. So after driving all the way across town and spending $16, I have my printer back...for now.

It seems like questionable design to cripple all the functions of the printer just because one color cartridge is faulty. A better failure mode would be to only prevent color printing. Black and white printing, and the other printer functions should still be usable. Hey Canon, how about updated firmware for this? Please?

Hiking Stevens Creek Heritage Preserve

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-04-05T03:03:51Z

Last week I took the boys for a hike. I decided on Steven's Creek Heritage Preserve, about an hour's drive south of here. In the past, I've enjoyed paddling and hiking Stevens Creek and its tributary Turkey Creek, so I figured this had to be a good destination (search the blog for 'Turkey' to see related posts). The DNR website notes that the preserve contains 15 rare plant species, so I wanted to check it out.

We got there around noon in fairly warm (for March - 78°F) and breezy weather. Soon we were geared up and on the trail. The early part of the trail was disappointing; we walked through a huge dry area of fallen pines. I'm not sure if this was storm damage or an attempt to down trees killed by pine beetles. The trail here was cleared by small earth movers and was soft. It would've been a mess if it was wet. Some of the trail work made the correct path unclear but we managed to not get lost.

We descended a bluff through the damaged trees and finally started seeing normal growth again. Soon we came upon a little feeder creek, and wildflowers were in bloom everywhere: purples, pinks, whites, and yellows, gently resting on a background of green. I would have loved to spend an hour photographing them all, but the boys were too busy to stop for such things. So I just enjoyed the view.

We walked along the base of a bluff with large rock faces, damp with moisture. If I were a botanist or just knew more about plants, I'd guess that some of the preserve's rare species would be found here. Someday I'd like to identify them, but for the day we were content to wander through a beautiful place.

Soon we were walking parallel to Stevens Creek. The trail never quite gets to the bank of the river. I was hoping there would be a good spot for lunch here, but there wasn't much to work with. The trail began climbing a hill away from the stream, so we settled for a fallen tree as our picnic table. The boys ate heartily and drank most of their juice and all of mine. Then we were ready to finish the hike up the bluff.

At the top it was dry and brown we had nice views of the other bluffs through the mostly bare trees. There were less fallen trees here. We ambled over a good flat trail. I saw my first dragonfly of the year, but it didn't wait to be photographed. Then I was startled to come around a bend and see a small, treaded, hydraulic digger staring us in the face. It was silent and no one was around. I figured we must be getting close to finishing the loop trail to be finding vehicles out there....

I was wrong: someone had driven that thing a heck of a long way up and down hills to get it there. It was hot and dry up on the hill, and the kids were starting to drag. As the trail began to descend, I realized we had yet to get off of this bluff and back to the starting bluff. We came upon the feeder creek again and had to begin the climb through the downed trees. Everyone was tired but we kept at it.

Finally we got up the hill and arrived back at our car. The boys had done great, and we made a well-deserved stop for ice cream on the way home. It sure beat sitting around the house.

More Info.

Rough Weather

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-03-16T02:45:17Z

A stormy day today! There were rain and thunderstorms on and off, all day, especially in the afternoon. Our neighborhood had several trees knocked down including some big pines in undeveloped lots. A tree came down in our backyard and smashed our earliest-flowering tree as it fell. But we came out pretty well compared to other folks in the upstate.

I made an ill-advised trip to pick up pizzas for a birthday party. The skies in Greenwood were spooky with some very low hanging dark clouds. Winds and hail came as I arrived at the pizza place. Finally it abated and I was able to get the food and drive home through some heavy rains.

It may be just me, but it seems that South Carolina's roads typically don't drain very well. It's been years since I lived in Ohio, but I don't recall dealing with water in the roads as much when I lived there.

The birthday party was late on account of the weather, and attendees got to enjoy another episode of rain and hail, but the party went well, all things considered. A big thanks to everyone who braved the storms to be here.

Determining Image File Types in Ruby

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-03-11T02:22:03Z

Today I came across a PNG file that had been uploaded from a browser with a .JPG extension and image/jpeg MIME type. It's too bad that MIME types are apparently unreliable when it comes to file uploads. I went looking for a way to determine the file type by actually reading the file. This is probably a solved problem, but I was unsuccessful Googling for the answer. I came up with the following Ruby method which decides the image file type using up to the first 10 bytes:

def image_type(file)

  case IO.read(file, 10)

    when /^GIF8/: 'gif'

    when /^\x89PNG/: 'png'

    when /^\xff\xd8\xff\xe0\x00\x10JFIF/: 'jpg'

    when /^\xff\xd8\xff\xe1(.*){2}Exif/: 'jpg'

  else 'unknown'

  end

end

This works well on a small set of test files (400+ from a browser temp files directory). Let me know if there's a case where this code doesn't work, or if there's a better solution in general.

Credit or Debit???

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2008-02-14T22:30:51Z

Please tell me why the credit/debit card producers cannot put a bit on their cards to let systems automatically determine if the card is a debit or credit card? What a waste of my time and the employee's time to ask me this question over and over again.

paddling.net Photo of the Week, part 2

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-12-18T16:16:17Z

If you've clicked-through from my photo on paddling.net, welcome! Click here to see a larger version.

Some other links that might interest you:

Writeup and more photos from the Minnesota trip where the kayak photo was taken
More of my photos on paddling.net
Paddling 70 miles of the Suwannee River
Palmetto Paddlers, the South Carolina paddling club I belong to

Happy holidays!

I'm in Rails

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-12-15T12:55:47Z

I've made a code contribution to Ruby on Rails. It was minor, but I'm glad I could help. See ticket 10435 and changeset 8386.

Supposed to get some rain today...keeping my fingers crossed.

Update 2007-12-17: Looks like my patch made it into Rails 2.0.2. And we did get that rain, but more would be good.

Update 2008-03-17: I managed to get another small patch committed. Go open source!

Heat Wave

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-12-10T13:13:22Z

"It was summer in December, blowing heat waves in my mind..."
— Colin Hay, Are You Lookin' At Me?

I think that line was meant to give you a feel for how unusual the southern hemisphere seasons must feel to those of us up "on top." But whether you've been below the equator or not, it hasn't been hard to get a feel for austral summer in South Carolina lately. It reminds me of being in Sydney in December years ago. Yesterday the temperatures here hit the mid 70s. I've seen that in December before in the years I've lived in SC. But I don't recall a December forecast like the one I saw this morning. Highs of 76°F for the next three days, then 72 and maybe some rain (please!) on Thursday, and then the cold rolls in on Friday, only a high of 67.

Having grown up north of here, I guess I have a mindset that it's supposed to be cold for the holidays. And usually it is somewhat cold in upstate SC for December. But it's hot out and we should be kayaking instead of Christmas shopping!

Formatting a Javascript Date for MySQL

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-12-08T13:59:50Z

I don't like to code in JavaScript, but that's the Ajax-y wave of the future. So I write it when I have to. This week I needed to format a Javascript date as a MySQL-style date like 2007-12-08.

JavaScript apparently doesn't have a nice date formatting function or even a generalized sprintf. Another Javascript quirk is that the Date.getMonth() function returns 0-11, while the getDate() function returns 1-31. I'm not sure what the designer was thinking on that one.

I came up with this function...feel free to use it in your code with or without credit:

function formatDate(date1) {

  return date1.getFullYear() + '-' +

    (date1.getMonth() < 9 ? '0' : '') + (date1.getMonth()+1) + '-' +

    (date1.getDate() < 10 ? '0' : '') + date1.getDate();

}

Comet Holmes

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-11-16T19:11:21Z

I've been reading about Comet 17P/Holmes on SpaceWeather. Last night I finally went out to have a look. Once I was out of range of our annoying streetlight and the neighbors' lighting, I was able to pick the comet out with the naked eye. It's just a smudge in the sky, but apparently that smudge is bigger than the sun.

I got my camera gear out and braved the cold to take a few photos. This one turned out OK. Now I just need a telescope and clock drive to take pictures like this.

Attack of the Beetles

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-11-13T19:13:57Z

The past couple days the Asian lady beetles have really been out in force. They are all over the outside of the house. At least they helped me find a gap in one of my window frames which I was able to close up. This is probably the most of these beetles that I've seen at one time...wonder if it has any connection to the drought. Perhaps they are flocking to my house exterior since there's a water source nearby.

The (Mostly) Dry Turkey Creek

nospam@example.com (Mike Boone) — 2007-10-20T01:58:58Z

Last week I took a few hours off and headed down to the Turkey Creek. I've kayaked down there twice and hiked trails a few times, but this time my goal was to hike the creekbed. The idea came to me the last time I paddled there, as it was hard to get good photos while the kayak was moving so quickly. I figured that with low water I could wade and take my time with the camera.

It takes a steady day or two of rainfall to get the Turkey Creek to the optimal 2-4 foot paddling level. As it has been ridiculously dry here in western South Carolina all summer and fall, I was sure that I'd be able to walk in the creek. I arrived at our standard put-in, just below the Key Bridge. Normally the water is around the bottom of the steps (like this). This time the water was almost completely gone; there was just a trickle in the middle of the creek, far from the steps. I thought I'd be in for a totally dry hike, but I was wrong. Not too far down-"stream", there were spots where the creek was full from bank to bank, but not really moving.

At the dry put-in I found several small pools, teeming with speedy water bugs. Didn't have much luck photographing them, but as I was doing it, nearby movement caught my eye and I spied a frog. It was an unusual brown color and fairly bumpy, but to me it looked more like a frog than a toad. It was a good photo subject, and from looking at my field guide at home, I think it was a cricket frog.

From here I decided to start slogging down the creek. The water was fairly warm and mostly shallow. In general it was clear enough to see the higher ground, but every once in a while I'd have to cross a dark, deeper section. I started out by telling myself I wouldn't get deeper than my knees. Getting those wet, I decided not to get the shorts in the water. But it wasn't long before the pantlegs were a little wet. I eventually decided to not go deeper than my waist in order to protect my camera backpack. A couple times the creek got so deep that I had to find a fallen tree trunk to wade across and balance with my hiking pole. But I was able to get about a third of a mile downstream without getting my shirt or the camera gear wet.

The creekbed alternated between rocks, gravel, and mud. The mud had trapped gases which got released as I walked, bubbles popping with lovely stagnant fragrances. Once I came across a nice section of what looked to be the same sort of jagged phyllite I saw last winter.

I didn't see a lot of wildlife while I was actively wading. It is noisier than kayaking and perhaps my element of surprise was diminished. I managed to see a few turtles, lots of fish confined to the shallow sections, and I heard plenty of birds. However, as I stopped to take a break on a gravel bar, I was treated to four deer crossing the creek in the distance. Wish I'd had the camera ready for it.

I stopped for lunch on another gravel bar. Most of the shoals were overgrown with vegetation, a testament to how long it had been since these bars were fully submerged. After I ate I watched a flycatcher in a tree and debated whether it would wait for me to put the telephoto lens on the camera. I decided to give it a try and of course the bird bailed just as I was ready. But that did prepare me to photograph the flash of yellow that appeared nearby in the same tree. The bird stayed just long enough for me to identify it as my first Hooded Warbler, but not long enough for me to get a decent photo. The blurry result resides at BirdSite for now. Still, it was great to see a new bird species out there in the middle of "nowhere."

I got a little sloppy on my return hike/wade. There were a couple deep sections where I couldn't remember exactly where I had come down, so I had to guess heading back up. At one section I was walking along a submerged tree trunk and slipped, soaking my shirt and getting the bottom of the backpack wet. Fortunately I had recovered without getting any of the lenses wet. Grateful, I resolved to be more careful for the rest of the walk.

I arrived back the steps in good order and headed back uphill. The last time I was here there was unfinished trail bridge just below the Key Bridge. It looked finished, so I hiked up to it and was able to walk out on it. It's in good shape for future hiking and mountain bike traffic.

And so ended my little adventure. It was interesting to travel the creek on foot, but I think I still prefer to paddle it!

Photo Album