Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 12
Beach, Surfing, and a New Camera
For the past couple days I’ve been heading down to the beach to take pictures of the sunset with my new Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I’ve really been having fun with this camera, and I’m learning a lot (especially how to estimate settings—I’ve been trying to force myself to use full manual controls for most of my pictures, and my eyeballing skills have much improved). I also got the chance to try surfing this evening, but I didn’t get any pictures of that.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 11
Baldy, Part II
I intended to climb San Gorgonio this past weekend, but couldn’t because my intended trail was closed due to “bear issues” (direct quote from the ranger). I ended up hiking Baldy again, this time with my friend Kevin from work. We went up the same way as I went last time, but we were both pretty tired and ended up going down via the ski area (and one helpful lift ride) to hitch a ride back to our car. The weather was unpleasantly hot, and is making me rethink my plans to do more hiking this summer. It was also crowded; Baldy’s proximity to millions of people makes it a very popular mountain. I’ve only included a few pictures because they were kind of uninspiring after Mount Rainier.
First Thoughts on Scala
Over the past week or so I’ve been looking into the Scala programming language. If you aren’t familiar with it, Scala is one of a group of new-ish languages including Groovy, Clojure, and Nice (as well as new implementations of preexisting languages like Jython, JRuby, and Rhino) that run on the JVM (either interpreted or compiled to Java bytecode). Over perhaps the past decade the JVM has been increasingly seen as an attractive target platform for language development for several reasons:
- Implementation in Java instead of C
- Features like garbage collection, portability, and a huge standard library come for free
- Languages benefit from advances and optimizations in the JVM
(This is part of a trend pointed out as Prediction #4 in a list of 10 predictions about software Steve Yegge made about 5 years ago.) In fact, targeting a virtual machine has almost become the only way to implement new, fancy languages with reasonable performance, portability, and implementation time.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 10
Burroughs Mountain, Mount Rainier National Park
For my second (and last) whole day in Seattle, I went hiking with four other friends. We went to Mount Rainier National Park, and hiked the three peaks of Burroughs Mountain, directly adjacent to Mount Rainier itself. It was a fun hike, with lots of snow left from the winter and unbelievable views of Rainier. The weather was also wonderful; it was warm the whole day, but with lots of very interesting clouds that made for great photography opportunities. I also got to introduce my friends to the joys of glissading; the trail to the third peak of Burroughs Mountain was entirely on snowpack, so coming down was fast and fun.
I took more than 400 pictures during the 8-mile hike, the majority of which were profiles of Mount Rainier itself. I’ve tried to pick out the best ones, but I had a hard time limiting myself.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 9
Fireworks at Gas Works Park
This weekend I traveled to Seattle to visit some Rice friends who are interning/working there. We went to Gas Works Park to watch the fireworks show over Lake Union. It was extremely crowded, with thousands of people carpeting the grass for acres. We managed to get right to the water, and I set up my tripod directly in front of the fireworks barge (although there were some unfortunate bushes right in front of me). A lot of these pictures were taken with my friend Kevin’s Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3.
Playing around with CHDK
I own a Canon Powershot A540, and I’ve been putting it through its paces this summer. There are a few ways in which I’ve sort of hit the limits of its capabilities; for example, I can’t do the typical slow-shutter-speed waterfall photographs because the aperture only goes down to f/8 (although I could probably hack it with a makeshift ND filter or something). Interestingly, the capabilities of these cameras are in part set by the firmware, and so there is an open-source firmware enhancement project called CHDK which aims to both unlock the full featureset of the hardware and augment it with more featureful software.
Dark and Disquieting Portents
Have you noticed an increase in the margin on the left side of the Google search results page recently? My coworker started noticing it yesterday, but I thought it was just him. Then I noticed it when I got home, and saw it mentioned on Twitter as well. The weird thing is the platforms where it shows up. My friend first started noticing it with Firefox 3.5 on Windows. I noticed it at home with Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu, and on this Windows machine I see the effect with Chrome, but not Firefox 3.5 or IE 7:
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 8
San Jacinto Peak
My latest mountain conquest is San Jacinto Peak, east of Los Angeles and just to the west of Palm Springs. It is an impressive mountain, rising up from land not much above sea level, and the views from the top can be spectacular, if the smog isn’t too bad. San Jacinto is the highest peak of the San Jacinto Mountains and the second highest point in southern California. I climbed it on Saturday with my dad, on the Devil’s Slide trail starting near Idyllwild. This is a moderate hike of about 15 miles, with around 4500 feet of gain. I found it to be an uninspiring trail with only mediocre views until the very top.