At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project.  I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had.  On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review it as well.  I expected it to be spartan like FreeBSD, but it appears that Sun has learned a lot from the Linux community.  It booted up to this grub screen:

A bit more complicated than it should have been.  That’s really the lesson here.  In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries.  The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong.  The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did.  And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work.  It appears not to be downloading the updates.  I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on.  No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.

Every once in a while, while reading Wikipedia to try and figure out why some show from my childhood isn’t available on DVD, I read that music rights are holding back the DVD.  I understand that these shows were created back before DVDs and, therefore, some kind of weird legal loophole is keeping the tv show rights holders from using the music.  But I think that whoever owns the music should just let it be used!  Why?  Because it can end up leading to music sales for the music rights holder.  This wasn’t the case in the bad old days of records and CDs.  But now that the viewer can just buy any song he/she wants, the music rights holder is just losing money for no reason.  Recent example:  Danielle is currently working her way through the Nip/Tuck DVDs.  After watching the season four finale, she searched around the Internet to find the song and then bought it off Amazon.

Today I worked on a python program to create a graph of the views of all my photos in my 365 Project set. Here’s the result:  (click for full size)

[caption id=“attachment_2937” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“365 Project Views Graph”] [/caption]

I was curious how they stacked up and I wanted to see if I could detect any patterns.  Except for a few outliers, they’re mostly below 50 views per photo.  I also expected to see more views after I started adding my photos to more 365 photo groups, but this is not the case.  There do appear to be clusters of views.  In other words, one highly viewed photo seemed to lift the ones by it.  That one huge outlier is my photo making fun of causes of the swine flu. The other big one is my Heroin Chic photo, no surprises there.  It was fun to create this and I learned a new python module.  Also, even though it probably took me a bit more time to program than to do it manually, it will now automatically generate whenever I want, and that’s worth the time it took.

Kids at Christmas are awesome! Nearly every present that Anthony, Alex, and Lizzie got received a loud, “This is the best present ever! This is all I ever wanted!”

My mom usually sets this up under the tree (although never this elaborately). By moving it to a table in the living room she was able to do a really amazing job. Also kudos to Denny who helped her with the landscaping.

What is it that intrigues us about rusty cars?  On flickr there are hundreds, if not thousands, of such photos.  I also see them in books.  I think it’s partly because of the colours, partly because it reminds us of our own mortality, and perhaps partly leftover cultural hatred of machines.

Another hard bird to photograph.  The blue jays are in my yard even less often than the cardinals.  And they run away at the slightest move by me.  But, once again, patience paid off.

Dealing with the snow by being inactive as possible.

Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal.  With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed.  These guys are really skittish.  If I come outside when I see them, they run away.  So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo.  This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly.  I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.