I finally had enough and wiped Ubuntu off of my computer at work, and now Gentoo is happily running.  Maybe I could have gotten Ubuntu to do what I wanted if I had spent more time with it, but I was sick of playing with it instead of getting work done.  To be fair to Ubuntu, maybe I’m just more familiar with how to do strange things with Gentoo.  Things like installing and using my open-source toolchain:

When there’s a slow news day, and no interesting disaster has taken place to make a good headline, you can always count on global climate change to fill in the gaps.  Yesterday we learned about  “natural wonders” that are being destroyed by climate change.  Of course, this is a press release from the World Wildlife Fund, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper and in fact not even issued by the IPCC.  I think the most interesting aspect of this article is the implied viewpoint that climate change can somehow be prevented.  WWF’s chief scientist said, “…more attention will have to be paid to adapting to change, not only trying to prevent it…”  In the controversy over whether or not humans are causing global warming, environmentalists seem to have forgotten that the global climate has been changing, all on its own, for millions of years.  Probably millions of species have been wiped out, and natural wonders destroyed, by past climate change long before humans came along.  The  “natural wonders” that are familiar to us exist because they happen to thrive in the particular climate conditions that occured in the past several thousand years–geologically speaking, a very short time.  When conditions change, nature will change.  Even if we can prevent one component of climate change that is caused by humans, the world will change, species will die out, and people will suffer.  Welcome to life on Earth–adapt or go extinct. On a side note: “…diplomats and scientists were negotiating the text of a 21-page summary of the full 1,572-page scientific report.”  Now that sounds like formula guaranteed to achieve accuracy and exclude bias. Also, now available for download: the executive summary of the 4th Report, 1st Working Group, from the International Panel on Climate Change.  Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for May to get the full report and see what it really says.

There’s a reason that the scientific community uses a peer-review process to validate publications.  Unfortunately, the “global warming” branch of climate science doesn’t operate this way.   Recently, excerpts of a report from the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were leaked to the press ahead of the release of the full report.  As usual, they released the most scandalous and exciting bits and left out all the qualifiers and complexity that make for good science but poor headlines.  In this case, “Australia will suffer more droughts, fires, floods and storms” and the “Great Barrier Reef will be devastated by 2030.”  We’re not supposed to ask how they came up with these predictions.  Further, with a report prepared by more than 2000 scientists and beaurocrats, nobody actually has to face consequences if their predictions don’t hold true. I wish I had time to get into the details of climate models and explain how these things work, and expose their strengths and weaknesses….

Challenges for this week: The set has been the same for over a month, so I had to come up with something to distinguish it from previous weeks. In addition, a couple of weeks ago our four Trackspots were transferred to another venue, leaving us with two Studiospots as the only intelligent lights. We have two more that have been backstage awaiting repairs for months. I’d like to see them back up and running, but we are a church, and if we’re using our budget to help poor people instead of fixing our lights, I’m okay with that. The first look is the one I used before the band went onstage. The next look was used when the band started playing an instrumental intro to the first song. The center screen showed an eye-candy video while the side screen showed announcements. Both Studiospots were set to white, with open gobo and a random effect so that their beams moved around the front of stage. Here they are shown hitting the drummer and guitar player. The first song was a continuation of the intro, so I used the same colors but brought up the front lights.  I used the red lights on the backdrop, and blue lights on the truss, to provide transitions in this song.  I was saving the movers for a later song… I used a totally different color to distinguish the next song, with two different looks. It was a cool day outside, so the air conditioner wasn’t running much and the haze hung in the air beautifully. I used the Lava gobo with a very slow rotation in the two Studiospots for this song. To provide transitions within the song, I moved the lights from the lead singer, to the backdrop, to the guitarist/drummer for a solo, and back to the singer. It doesn’t show up that well in the photos, but it was a nice effect. For the finale, I lit up the truss in the back. I used two basic looks (with the fixed lights) for the final song. The band continued to play an instrumental version while the audience greeted one another, so I dimmed the front lights for the third look. It doesn’t show up in the pictures, but I used the studiospots to hit the white draped fabric with a subtle rotating gobo effect. I like using the gobos on irregular surfaces where you can’t tell that it has a cheesy shape. Announcements and message. For the announcements, I pointed the studiospots across the stage to illuminate the backdrop with a deep blue/purple gobo. During most of the service, the stage is too brightly lit to achieve these highly saturated colors.

What an unusual pine tree! Who would have guessed that this is actually a giant antenna, cleverly disguised as a tree? I just hope that my taxpayer dollars weren’t used on this monstrosity.

I have a Motorola E815 cell phone.  This morning, I was reminded why it hasn’t been an entirely satisfying experience.  The E815 has excellent reception (on Verizon’s network) and lots of software features that work really well. Unfortunately the mechanical quality leaves a lot to be desired.  The E815’s weakness is the socket where the wall charger attaches.  My first E815 crashed as I was unplugging the charger.  I unplugged it and the phone rebooted.  This had happened several times before, but this time the phone got to a certain point in its boot cycle and rebooted again.  I couldn’t even turn it off using the end/power key–I had to remove the battery.  Fortunately there were about three weeks left on the warranty, and Verizon eventually got me a new one that worked (on the third try).  Last night, I plugged in my phone before bed and set the alarm.  Early this morning the alarm went off, so I opened the phone and hit the “end” key to shut it up.  The phone rebooted and came back to the alarm screen.  I unplugged it and hit “end” again, and it worked.  Moral of the story–be VERY careful when plugging/unplugging your E815 charger, and try not to do anything with the phone when it’s plugged in.  Also, sign up for Verizon’s free backup service to save your contacts in case the phone dies, and transfer your photos and ringtones to a micro-SD card.

The Dapper-to-Edgy upgrade was surprisingly smooth, once I figured out how to do it. Unfortunately, the new version overwrote my “/boot/grub/menu.lst” so I could not boot Windows. I have enough experience with Linux that this was a five-minute fix, but it could be pretty scary for an inexperienced person. Who knows what else got over-written and I just didn’t realize it. I was further disappointed to find out that the version of PIDA in Edgy is broken.

When it comes to Linux, I’m a Gentoo guy. Go ahead, make fun of me and call me a ricer. Then go try to do something difficult on Redhat or Ubuntu, and come back and tell me what you think. I needed a Linux development environment at work, so I took my Windows machine and added a Linux partition. Since Ubuntu has been getting a lot of good press, and I wanted something that would install fast, I tried Ubuntu. Specifically, I installed Kubuntu, because Linus Torvalds doesn’t use Gnome. It really did install quickly and everything worked great out of the box. I installed a number of packages, and they worked too! Too good to be true? Absolutely! It all started when I wanted to compile something. Silly me, I thought gcc was a basic part of a basic Linux installation…but no, that must be a Gentoo bias, so I installed gcc. Then I decided to install numpy, the latest numerical toolkit for Python. It’s been around for a couple of years as a beta, so I figured there must be an “unstable” build out there. Nope. To get numpy, you have to upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” to 6.10 “Edgy”. <sarcasm>Because it makes sense to upgrade gcc, KDE, Firefox, etc just to get a new Python package.</sarcasm> Now, go find instructions on how to upgrade the Ubuntu distribution. Then try those instructrions and realize that they won’t work at all for Kubuntu because the package managers are totally different. While you’re there, read the horror stories on the forums from people who followed the “official” upgrade instructions and ended up with less-than-functioning systems. FYI, the Kubuntu upgrade instructions are actually easy to find once you know where to look. Kubuntu 6.10 is installing right now, so tomorrow we’ll see how it went.

I got it working a while ago, but I haven’t had a chance to update my eager audience.  I built a simple simple simulation tool using this crazy combination of languages.  It’s a library written in C++ that uses the finite volume method to simulate diffusion in one dimenstion. What’s cool is that it’s designed to be called from Python using Boost.  Furthermore, it then uses Boost Bindings (not officially part of Boost) to call LAPACK (a Fortran library) to solve linear equations (as shown in a previous post).  It’s pretty cool that all this stuff actually works together.  Why did I do this?  Python is my favorite very-high-level language for doing scientific programming.  Compared to C++ or Fortran, it’s just so easy to do things in Python, like making plots or reading in an xml file.  I chose C++ for the numerical codes because it’s faster than Python and the Boost library connects the two.  I could have used Fortran, but the Python interfaces doesn’t seem to be as clean, probably because Fortran isn’t object-oriented.  Finally, since the reference implementation of LAPACK is still in Fortran, I just used the Boost bindings to call it.  I might switch to a native C++ linear algebra library if a clear leader emerges from the confusing alternatives that are available today.  More complaints on that later…