I am a messy desk man. It gets pretty out of control sometimes, requiring a few hours to get it beat down into something more amenable to public health and morality. During a recent clean-up I found a note I had written in January, when my then-three-year-old daughter said a couple of very cute things in one day. The first was, “When I go to sleep at night, I have a movie in my eye.” Wonderfully self-aware, understandable, and cute. The second one requires some explanation, both from her and from me:

At dinner she said, “Now God is cold.”

She said this right after taking a drink of milk. I had to ask her what she meant, and she explained that God, who was “in her heart”–the same heart the milk had just passed on her way to her stomach, and eventually to her pee, as she was happy to explain–had now experienced a reduction in temperature. Note to armchair theologians: temperature is not a communicable attribute of God.

First of all, an admission: this is really cute. I can give the girl her due. She’s adorable. Innocent, after a fashion. Precious. Endearing.

But.

Maybe this does point out a minor problem with a certain children’s ministry to which my daughter was possibly exposed. (Note to readers who are IRL friends: she did not hear this at church.) Maybe the gospel was presented to a group of preschoolers that in a manner appropriate for older elementary students. Maybe the highly abstract language of “ask Jesus into your heart” is just a wee bit over the heads of quintessentially concrete-thinking little kids. Indeed, maybe kerygmatizing a room full of three-year-olds is not such a good idea after all.

You see, Reformed Baptists live in a muddle. Some of us have definite questions about the course our own ship is on, with some of the other crewmen in the Baptist Fleet passing out these things that vaguely resemble life vests, having the military jargon “Age Of Acc.” stenciled on them. Those same helpful sailors are paradoxically happy to help our little ones Ask Jesus Into Their Hearts as soon as they can speak, even though a toddler’s oath of allegiance to the Navy isn’t the most reliable elocutionary act in the history of the spoken word. To top it all off, the fleet’s regs don’t say a thing about young sailors who either haven’t sworn the oath or aren’t wearing that big, puffy, orange thing that we’re pretty sure is probably a flotation device of some kind. If they’re lost at sea, have we lost a fellow soldier, or just some passenger on the ship?

The H.M.S. Paedobaptist always seems to have one of its lifeboats in the wake of the U.S.S. Credo, ready to fish out jumpers and give them a lift to that neat, well-run, tightly disciplined ship in the nearby allied fleet. And without a doubt, there’s no other crew we’d rather put into port with than those guys on the Paedo. The other sailors from our fleet won’t ever have a drink with us (well, the older ones won’t), the Paedo guys seem to get our jokes more often, and they don’t wear as many of those goofy tee shirts as our shipmates do. They still expect their young seamen to swear fealty to the Navy when they’re old enough for it to make sense, but they never pretend that those garishly-colored down ski jackets are going to help any of the little ones float should they fall overboard. And about those young sailors: not all of the H.M.S. Padeo’s officers even agree on how to account for those who do fall in combat, but at least the whole ship agrees that they were assigned an official rank and serial number before the shooting started.

Still, enamored as some of the Credo sailors are of that tight ship with its well-written regs and orderly accounting for all hands, most of them continue to serve their own ship. Sure, those down jackets some of the guys keep talking about are absurd, but we still can’t get ourselves to take the plunge and swim for that other boat, despite having looked plaintively over that bow for many an evening. Well thought-out regulations are alluring, but we’ve been wrong before, and a system that is more inferential than necessary is potentially a recipe for being wrong again, or so we fear.

We are left, though, with some very odd training procedures for the youngest of our recruits. That, and with Sarah thinking that God can hear the pet cockatiel better when it sticks its head in her mouth and chirps. Too bad neither one of these ships really seems to be going in quite the right direction.

The good news is that these little sailors usually grow up, and the questions that apply in their youth become moot. We’ll get there, whether on one boat or the other.

Instapundit thinks IT outsourcing may be peaking. You’d never know it for the buzz it gets in the trade press, but then I guess American IT media organizations would do well to play it up, or at least give it plenty of attention.

Reader and real-life homie Adeodatus describes this post as “boring,” yet he also admitted reading it in its entirety. I think “morbidly fascinating” is more like it.

As it turns out, the IT community does not take its cues from me. I don’t know what best explains their continued obduracy, if not my marginal talent and divided attentions. I can only hope they get their act together before I lose patience and change careers.

Even so, the readers of Infoworld have shown remarkable progress towards the goal of recognizing my innate genius and rightful industry leadership. Attend:

Best Operating System
No, we don’t use Windows 2003 Server at work, but then nobody really does in production right now. We are, however, currently contemplating a shift from Windows to Linux (yes, probably RedHat 8.0) under my urging. That’s number two on the list.

Best Application Development and Integration Product
Macromedia Studio MX? Ooo-kay…. Note that we are number three on this list with IBM Eclipse. NetBeans, where art thou? Under 0.7%, looks like. (I think this phenomenon can be explained by the definition of this category, but I’m not sure about that.)

Best Application Server
I know what you’re thinking: Apache Jakarta is the name of a group of open-source Java projects, not an application server. Yes, yes, you’re right. Of course they mean Tomcat, the application server we use at work. Who’s your daddy?

Best Web Services Product
Why, yes, I agree. Which is why I chose Axis to host our web services.

Best Database
As a user of the number two product on this list, I do actually wonder what they mean by “best.” However, when considering the $300,000.00 entry cost of the top product on the list, and the $0.00 entry cost of the second product, I think the calculus comes into focus.

So we are in the top three in five out of fourteen readers’ choice categories–five out of six categories if you narrow the field to only those things that a company of our size would normally purchase. Which clearly shows recognition of my genius. Or my luck. Or my cheerful conformity to the will of the herd.

Anyone who wants to read a nice, long account of a star-less star party, read on. Those with more self-respect, come back later, and maybe I’ll have something interesting to say about a completely different topic.

Friday, July 25
19:15
Arrived! The location of the party was moved due to a small forest fire near bustling Foxpark. Apparently, due to prevailing winds, the smoke might have reduced sky transparency somewhat. The turn-off for the original site featured a poster and a pouch of photocopied maps and directions to the new site, which were amazingly unclear. I had to ask the firefighters stationed placidly at the nearby Incident Command Post/Little 600-sq. ft. Shack for help interpreting them, which they were happy to do with only low-grade patronization. Worse, the Cheyenne Astronomical Society web site made no mention of this change of venue this morning. [I was later to find that the party was called off as early as Wednesday morning, which also was not reflected online. Apparently their ISP is in the process of being acquired by another ISP, which somehow prevented them from functioning as much of an ISP.]

19:45
The tent is up, and it’s raining.

19:58
Did I mention rain? Yes, it’s raining alright. I hope it stops.

20:13
The rain is done, so I go for a walk around the park to scope out the…scopes. I’m pretty sure this field–a fairly oblong oval of several acres of grass, flanked by pine trees–is a parking area of various winter sports that go on in the area. Normal star-party fare: lots of Newtonians and Schmidt-Cassegrains in the 8″-12″ range, a few massive Dobsonians of 20″ and above.

20:35
Did I say the rain was done? Yes, it was, until I stepped out to have a walk and made it to the other end of the park. I am now very wet, and back in my truck. This is not looking good.

20:51
It occurs to me that even if this lets up, it will be quite humid on this field tonight, and dewy optics will be an issue. I hope my little heater is up to the task. The thermometer says 53.5°F outside, 68.6°F inside. And did I mention stuffy?

21:01
Too bad I set that tent up. I could still make it home around midnight tonight if I hadn’t unpacked at all, but I’m not about to go pack up in this! Still raining quite hard. I’m just going to hit the sack here in the truck, and decide what to do with the rest of the weekend tomorrow.

Saturday, July 26
7:50
Been dozing for the last two and half hours. I was up briefly at 1:30 this morning, when about half the sky was cloudless. The stars were brilliant, and the Milky Way looked about ready to cast shadows on the ground, but things were still not clear enough to take any pictures. I’m not sure whether to chance it for tonight, or just break camp now and salvage a part of a Saturday at home.

11:26
Alright, I’m staying. I’ve been doing some reading and walking around a bit, and even met a nearby camper with a solar filter. Ellsworth was kind enough to let me have a look. I saw a sunspot (which was small but showed great detail) and faculae, but no limb darkening. No prominences either, since this was not a hydrogen-alpha filter. Still, I don’t have a solar filter, so this is fun.

I’m going to go explore some of the four-wheel drive trails I saw on my way up here and find a spot to eat lunch. The scope is in the tent, and the rest of the stuff is in the shade. Things should be fine.

Oh yeah, the weather report scuttlebutt for tonight is not good. Some thunderheads are building to the northwest.

13:00
Been tooling around a bit. I took Forest Service road 517H and found a nice wooded area in which to set up my table and chair and eat. None of these trails are strictly four-wheel drive by my estimation; the extra clearance is nice in some cases, but I could have gotten where I am now in my old Mazda as much as my current Tacoma. The thing that strikes me about this forest is how much dead wood there is lying around! I don’t spend a lot of time in the woods, but I wonder if this is what logging proponents talk about when they argue for “thinning.” This place would burn like mad if it were drier and just had a little bit of encouragement.

13:17
Found a cool-looking remnant of a log cabin a few hundred feet up Forest Service road 517E. The timber doesn’t look frontier-age, and there are a few nails in it here and there that are round, not square. I’m not sure what date that implies, but this doesn’t look more than fifty years old to my untrained eye. And I shouldn’t say it’s a remnant of a log cabin proper; it looks more like somebody got about four or five logs high into building a cabin, then left.

15:10
Back at camp! It’s completely clouded over. I’m going to take a nap.

16:30
Woke from dozing to the sound of applause! Did I miss the raffle? I was sure they said 5:30!

18:10
It turned out that the applause was for the introduction of the featured speaker, a twenty-something engineer from Ball Aerospace, come to tell us about the Hubble Space telescope and future astronomy missions. Then a presentation of some local dark sky zoning issues, a raffle during which I won nothing, and thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen.

Now, dinner.

18:51
Dinner was prepared and eaten hastily. It was sprinkling the whole time, ready to let loose in another downpour at any bite. Broke camp quickly, got the truck packed up, and got inside before anything serious came down. I’m off! Gonna sleep at home tonight, since it’s more comfortable and no less amenable to dark-sky observing than this place.

We’ll try next year! Maybe drive the in-laws’ motor home and make a family weekend out of it.

The start party was, to put it mildly, rained out. More details to come, hopefully at lunch time. Work to do for now.

Half-day at work, busy weekend ahead. I’ll be heading up to Fox Park, Wyoming (not listed in Mapquest!) this weekend for the Weekend Under the Stars star party. I’ll be camping for two nights, hanging out with lots of other nerds, and not getting much sleep at all.

The main objective (’But wait!’ you say, wise guy that you are, ‘I thought you had a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector, which has a primary mirror, and not an objective’) will be long-exposure, wide-field photography of the summer milky way and a few other key star fields. I may take a few snaps of Mars, but film imaging of the planets in my equipment was never very satisfying; gonna have to go digital for that, I’m afraid.

A quick anecdote about buying the film for this trip: yesterday, I went to the South Broadway, Englewood, CO location of Wolf Camera to purchase a roll of film recommended for astronomical use. The emulsion is sensitive up at 654nm, which is the all-important hydrogen alpha emission line, without which photos of the summer Milky Way are just not worth it. (Most consumer films conk out after about 600nm, which is apparently red enough for everyday redness.) Anyway, the Camera Store Guy had to rummage around a bit for this particular film, so I made small talk, mistakenly mentioning that I would be using the film for astrophotography. The starving photograph-artist/college student quickly corrected me for wanting ISO 400 film, suggesting I should use something slower.

“Don’t you mean faster?” I asked. I didn’t want anything faster, because as you may already know, faster means grainier, and the trade-off at ISO 1000 and above for color emulsions is usually not worth it.

“No, you shouldn’t go above 100,” he replied. Sensing my incredulity/sudden thoughts that he was more or less incompetent, he asked the Smart Guy in the shop, who agreed wholeheartedly.

“Oh yeah,” the Expert Guy said. “You’ll get better colors, and you’ll be able to blow it up better if you get a shot you like.”

“But don’t I want something more light-sensitive?”

“It doesn’t matter, since you’re going to have the shutter open for 30, maybe 60 minutes anyway.” Wow, this guy is a photographic genius! One who has never spent all night motionless in a sleeping bag at 9000 ft. above sea level in 35°F weather making guiding corrections and trying to keep blood flowing in his fingers. If you think that doesn’t sound cold, try it sometime. You’d be surprised.

If you doubt me, check out an actual professional, the thumbwheel of whose shutter release I am not worthy to tighten. I have gleaned many helpful Photoshop insights from Jerry Lodriguss’ site, and have found nary a beautiful shot of his that was taken with anything less than ISO 400. And Jerry is a guy who could explain to the Wolf Camera professionals how it is this “film” stuff works, so I think I’m on fairly solid ground here.

So anyway, I have 36 exposures of this nice, red-sensitive, high-performance, ISO 400 Fuji film, and I’m ready to encourage a few photons to interact with the whole roll. I will of course post any worthwhile shots here, but it may be a couple of weeks by the time I have a chance to post-process them sufficiently for public consumption. I may also be keeping some notes during the weekend, which I’ll post with artificial times and dates upon my return.

Have a safe and enjoyable weekend! I will endeavor to do the same.

Some IT professionals fear becoming like the textile workers of the nineteenth century, displaced by permanently cheaper offshore labor. A roughly analogous trend is clearly underway, and whether increasing long-term demand for software developers can offset the export of American jobs to offshore IT shops remains to be seen.

This trend, however, is much more disturbing. I am disappointed that the test results didn’t include any open-source IDEs like Eclipse or NetBeans, but the subjects’ inability to cope with the popular commercial products was not enough of an encouragement to offset the grave concern that clearly faces domestic software developers if this trend continues. Clearly, lower-level tasks like scripting, administration, and maintenance are threatened. It may end up that higher-level functions like Enterprise Software Architect are the only ones that avoid being commoditized.

Scary times.

I got this fun link in a recent email from a friend. I suspect some of you may have gotten it already, but it is worth a visit if not.

As a teenager, I got this book for Christmas. It was based upon the entirely different premise of zooming in from the entire known universe to quarks in the nucleus of an atom in a skin cell on the hand of a man laying in a park in Chicago. The leaf-in-Florida thing of the online version just blows it, but you might still like it.

Here is a moderately helpful article on how to strengthen your passwords (link via the more-than-moderately helpful Woodstock Wire).

The article–which you should read in its entirety–contains a link to an online password security measuring tool from the Security Stats portal. I should note that I was alarmed that both the article and the tool seem to agree that making standard 1337 (pronounced “leet”) substitutions of numbers for letters (L1K3 TH15) will substantially increase password strength. I’m not so sure, having personally seen a password cracker rip through a Windows 2000 password file containing a otherwise weak, dictionary-attackable password that had been hardened in that fashion. And I am anything but good at this kind of thing.

Still, there’s some good advice, including this:

Organizations are rife with guest accounts, group accounts, accounts with no passwords, a lack of password expirations, passwords that can be easily guessed and opportunities to exploit technical weaknesses or perform social engineering. With all of these easy opportunities, computer accounts with good six-character passwords are only a trifle weaker than those with eight-character passwords. My point is that infosec professionals need to focus more on the compliance of good user-account hygiene than on the length of passwords.

Amen. Systems get hacked because unnecessary ports are open, known exploits are left unpatched, and stupidly insecure accounts (well-known default settings, empty passwords, etc.; not just mildly weak user passwords) are left active. It’s not necessarily your fault for using your dog’s name (unless you’re Rachel Lucas, whose dogs’ name is far too well known).

Another interesting note on the Commodore emulator: in addition to emulating the C64, it also emulates the C128 (which itself will emulate a C64), the Vic 20, and various Pet models. The reader should appreciate that the Vic 20 was your loving blogger’s very first computer, received for Christmas the morning after that wonderful Denver blizzard in 1982. I had spent the preceding months reading a book on BASIC programming I had ordered from the mafia/Scholastic Book Club at the beginning of the school year (more on those sometime, especially how homeschoolers are not, as you might have hoped, entirely deprived of this tradition).

That summer I wrote a program that would accept an input phrase and encode it in one of several very trivial ciphers I learned about in a book I read in fourth grade (Caesar’s cipher, railfence, etc). The next summer I wrote a mindless video game that made use of the joystick to guide a “nuclear technician” (a single pixel) to the core of a “reactor” (this big rectangle in the middle of the screen, which had to be erased a pixel at a time to avoid radioactive contamination) to avert a “meltdown” (there was a time limit). This was pretty simple stuff; I was dedicated to the task, but no child prodigy for being able to do it. What impresses me now, being able to run the Vic 20 emulator as a part of the VICE package, is that I did this on a screen that was only 22 columns wide. Amazing. I can’t believe how ugly that thing is, or how I ever looked at it for stuffy, second-floor, un-air-conditioned summer hours on end. I have a new appreciation for the tenacity of the boyhood me.

More old-skoo video gaming at the Berglund household. The Atari 2600-in-a-joystick I wrote about a few weeks ago ended up breaking on the first night, Circuit City didn’t have a replacement in stock that week, and I haven’t been back since to replace it. However, it was only the beginning.

You see, lately I have been listening to a CD that combines Handel’s Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music. Our wedding recessional was taken from the Water Music, which itself was used as the soundtrack in a certain game I played a lot of as a teenager: Pirates! by Sid Meier and Microprose. The music, combined with the recent exposure to old video games, got me thinking about how I might go about playing some more of that game today, absent the physical presence of the Commodore 128 of my adolescence.

Of course, you are thinking, a 1 MHz 6502 shouldn’t be a problem to emulate on today’s 1GHZ+ superscalar, RISC-like Pentium-class processors. And it turns out you’d be right.

The only Commodore emulator you’ll ever need can be found here. It’s a slight pain to set up, but it works like a champ, and can emulate a C64 at about 15x normal speed on my 1GHz Athlon. (This is bad for most game play, and can be ratcheted down to 100% or 200% speed as desired.) All of the C64 games you’ll ever need are found here. You are now, as they say, weapons free.

A quick note on the ethics of downloading these games: there is no indication that they have been released explicitly to the public domain, but to my knowledge they are all truly abandoned, and no one is trying to make money off of them anymore. I imagine a brash download site like this one would receive some attention if anyone actually cared. Sid Meier, call your office. Or, you know, don’t.

Every so often I get an opportunity to discuss copyright issues with the boy: a friend offers to copy a game for us, another friend runs a Game Boy Advance emulator on his PC with oodles of downloaded ROMs (so much cheaper than actually buying them!), a family member offers to rip a CD for us–so it’s not like we never get the chance to pinch any electronic media. But we have an understanding under this roof that property has owners, even digital property, and theft is bad. When it comes to these C64 games, you can set your own copyright comfort level, but I had a hard time believing any of the owners actually cared anymore. Their market is gone, their money is made, and now they can bask in the glow of a retro-computing nostalgia and the venue for father-son bonding their legacy can provide.

So go get your C64 on. Play Pirates. Lode Runner. Exploding Fist. Enjoy.

Java’s getting printf! I have been somewhat casually following the news on the upcoming J2SE 1.5 release, looking forward to generics, a decent collection iterator, and language-standard metadata, but printf? How could I have missed my old friend? Now old-time C programmers will again have some advantage in the Java world! Read this and despair, C-averse neophytes! (Scroll down to the last paragraph before the “Scalability and Performance” headline.)

The best thing about camping is that it feels so good when you stop.

Which is not to say that it’s actually painful. No, no; I enjoy it. It’s good to be hot during the day, cold at night, wet when it rains. It engenders a certain perspective to cook food on a fire, to take a bite of pancake and get a piece of gravel in your mouth as a part of the deal. To let your kids’ faces just be dirty all day long. To leave a little bit of grease on the dishes, because the effort required to remove the marginal film is too much to be worth it. To eat a lot, but actually to have worked up an appetite worthy of your indulgence.

Of course, this weekend was camping lite if ever there was any. The campground is actually a summer camp facility–it’s called Long Scraggy Ranch–with some camp sites attached. It has bathrooms, convenient water, nearby electrical outlets, a swimming pool. Normally my Sunday school class rents out the whole joint in the first or second weekend of June, cabins and tent sites alike, including even the luxuriously appointed “Round House,” with its industrial-scale kitchen, telephone, and ping-pong table. For a complex variety of social, economic, and political reasons, that that annual tradition didn’t happen this year, but a few hardy families pitched tents over this holiday weekend in defiance of the Great Long Scraggy Non-Trip of ‘03 and had a great time together. Nothing was all that difficult, and we still ate marshmallows and bratwurst buns out of plastic bags.

The really good news: there were no compound fractures. It turns out there was a near miss on Thursday evening, scant hours after the first family arrived and set up camp. One of their dual four-year-olds fell off a rock and did something visibly bad to his hand, so they promptly broke camp and returned to town for a visit to the emergency room. We got word from them the next day that it was nearly a compound fracture, and would require surgery this week. Apart from me being nettled a bit, that was the worst of the weekend.

We managed to achieve two of the planks in John Adams’ list of Independence Day prescriptions: bonfires and guns. Sadly, there were no parades, pomp, or illuminations, but campfires and firearms were had in abundance. Zach enjoyed shooting his bolt-action .22 rifle by himself for the first time. For the past four or five years, I had been telling him age ten was the minimum for shooting a gun without an adult holding it alongside him, really wanting to build this up as a major milestone in his childhood. I couldn’t take it anymore, though, and in fact he’s perfectly ready to fire that particular weapon. He did his dad proud: that apple core–his first target of the day–knows better now, and knew it on the first shot. I guess all those video games are good for something.

Camping with the family is good. After you get back home and unpack (and unpack and unpack), a shower and a shave is more appreciated than it was when you left. Making breakfast for the kids is more convenient. Air conditioning feels cooler. Sure, I can’t spend the morning hiking down the wash outside my house to a thirty-foot waterfall over huge granite boulders and be back by lunch, but my mattress is soft, my floor is dry, and church is ten minutes away. It’s okay here. It’s fun to get out, but even more fun to be home.