Devauld.ca

This past week I was down south of the 49th in Chicago Illinois. The main purpose of the trip was to attend the US Python Conference.

The first three days of the conference were of the standard conference format. There was a mix of having incredibly intelligent people divulge how software should be made, people showing you their amazing projects, people that should practice delivering a talk in public and the sponsors who paid to be there tell us how good they are, and that they are in fact hiring. I was quite impressed with Resolver-1, a spreadsheet application developed using Iron Python where you can use Python functions, objects and generators to populate cell values. Pyglet was also an impressive talk, showing how people that it can in fact be easy to develop across several platforms. I was also enlightened to the existence of the Dojo Toolkit, and the very exiting Comet technology which I'm hoping to make use of in the future.

Following the formal talks, the conference turns into a programming haven, where anyone with an open source project can solicit programmers to help out on their project. The sprints take place all over the hotel and I can honestly say that quite a bit gets done. It is amazing how fast problems get solved when all the decision makers are in the room with you. Quite often intelligent debate breaks out, but regardless much progress is made.

The entire trip was not just all-work-and-no-play. We did make some ventures out for gastronomic delights: a night of some tasty sushi and a sampling of incredible steak were by far the highlights. We also made a trip into town to the Financial District and took in a great deal of the sights. We even managed to stumble across the Chicago version of the Anti-War protest. You can look at all my Chicago photos here.

All in all, it was a very productive trip, but the conference meant very long days, and it is never very restful to sleep in a foreign bed. I'm very glad to be home.

While starting my morning commute I noticed that someone had decided to decorate my fence with some spray paint. I first spotted the line on the gate by the shop, it's nebulous head making me wonder what was around the corner. I was sure one happy camper on the way to work today.

Speculation has ruled my mind today, trying to determine why someone would do this sort of thing. A prepubescent neanderthal that happened to walk by my house with a can of paint? Maybe an individual packing around a childish grudge and a mind so small that they can't grasp the futility of the act? I can be pretty sure it's not a property owning and tax paying Canadian.

Needless to say, I'm not excited about the work that has to be done in getting it off. I though of trying a paint thinner to see if I could essentially wash it off. Examining the carnage this evening, I found that the paint had worked it's way into the grain of the wood already. The stain that I used to make a beautiful wood grained fence offered no resistance to what likely is not a water based paint. It's going to be sanding and more staining in my future, because I don't really want to paint over the fence and hide the wood. Although that may change once I get to working on it.

Many moons ago, I used to Geocache with a Magellan Meridian Platnum. I fell in love with the sport, and used it to find new and exciting areas when I traveled overseas. It wasn't very long however when my e-bay purchase developed a sickness and could no longer run off batteries, requiring that it be tethered to some other sort of power. I did examine the guts of the receiver, and thought that I could fix it, but the delicate work scared me and never did end up being completed.

Recently I was looking into a new receiver. I had my choices narrowed to a couple when a friend of mine told me about what he thought of the Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. One afternoon I rolled down to GPS Central to examine the units they had in stock, and as soon as I saw the 60CSx fire up with the Topo map, I knew I was going to be making a purchase.

Handheld GPS units have come a very long way since my first purchase. A lot of the functionality that used to exist on the PC software is now built into the unit itself. The GPSMap is able to routefind, manage your Geocaches, create images from your current map as well as a plethora of other features I haven't even discovered yet. The unit is about half the size of my old one, has 3x the battery life and locks into your current location in seconds rather than minutes. The antenna is sensitive enough that I can now get a lock on my position inside my house, which no body even dreamed of when I purchased my Magellan.

The software and community around GPSs and Geocaching has changed a great deal since I last played in the genre. I guess the major improvements are the new free software tools like Google Earth, the availability of very neat and super accurate maps and how seamlessly everything integrates. For instance our little 4.9km Geocaching adventure on Sunday where we dug up GCN419, GCRQTP and GCMVDW could easily be ripped off the GPS and examined in Google Earth like so:

(Click for larger version)

The details really appeal to the geek in me, and I'm really stoked about getting back in the the Geocaching groove.

March 3 is election day in Alberta. Go out and vote