AC and I went down to the Washington Monument grounds to try out the kite today, on a lovely sunny, breezy day. It took a few adjustments of the bridle to get the thing aloft, and the tail kept getting tangled up, but once I had it figured out it took up all of my line and was still pulling pretty hard. Quite a nice sense of accomplishment to see what began as a couple of rolls of nylon actually fly and not look half bad.
Fancy Stripes Cont.
I’ve made more progress on the Della Porta. The sail is now complete, after sewing each of the 16 panels to its neighbors, first with a 1/4″ straight seam on the back and then with a zig-zag stitch over the good side. I only had to use the seam ripper… oh, let’s call it less than a hundred times. On to step 3…
Fancy stripes
I started work on another kite this week. This time I’m following a plan, one of the howtos over on kitebuilder.com. Hopefully, my much improved sewing skills coupled with some RTFM-ing will lead to more success in this venture. The pattern is from a quilting block called ‘Fancy Stripes’ and should be about 3′ by 4′ when completed.
Grilled
I officially opened the 10 month grill season last weekend. The only thing worse than doing the propane exchange rigamarole at Home Depot: doing the exchange at Home Depot, getting handed an empty tank, looking at the guy funny but assuming he knows what he’s doing (after all that’s his job), going home to verify that yes, the new tank is empty, and going back to try to find someone who cares so you can finally take the new tank home and cook with it because it’s now 4pm and you haven’t had lunch yet.
One nice thing about amateur home cooking is that you can create that which you cannot find in a restaurant. In my case: I made fajitas with one of the several filet mignons in my freezer. You may say that is silly to use such an expensive cut of meat in place of a $3 flank steak in a cooking application where toughness really doesn’t matter, and you may be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the “file-tas” were damn good. Now I just need to figure out how to work bacon into that equation…
In flight
AC and I showed up on the mall to throngs of kite fanatics, their sails dotting the sky very much like a plague of locusts. In the stiff breeze, my kite lept to the sky…then went unstable, hit two people, and the kiteline yanked the grommet off. Still, it flew, and it wasn’t too bad for a first try given I learned a ton from the first stitch on. We spent the rest of the morning flying my two store-bought kites (toddlers love the spinner on my diamond kite), but already I’m contemplating my next hand-made.
Kite Day
For those that don’t know, Saturday marks the beginning of the Cherry Blossom festival, and consequently the annual Smithsonian Kite festival — always a blast. Last year I wanted to make a kite for the event, but never got around to it. So, last Sunday I opened up that roll of nylon sitting in the corner and got to work.
Last night, I bought a cheap sewing machine for the appliqué work necessary for the design (the obvious fractal). Clearly, home ec in middle school was worthless. I had to take apart the machine twice to remove big gobs of thread stuck therein, until I learned how the bobbin is supposed to be threaded. Then, tonight I went to work on the kite after some practice and proceeded to sew some really hideous seams.
So, I’ve decided this will be my “one to throw away,” though I still hope to have it in the sky this weekend. First I have to fix the hole I punched in the sail.
Hacking ReplayTV
A few weeks ago someone contacted me regarding my OMFS filesystem driver for the Rio Karma. His interest is in getting it working for ReplayTV to do who knows what. This is coming a bit full circle, as I discovered long ago that the RK and RTV use the same proprietary filesystem, and indeed the ReplayTV hackers of yore had documented nearly everything there is to know about the FS, without which I would’ve been lost writing the Linux kernel driver in the first place. Of course, there are some differences in the way the two devices do their thing.
I don’t own an RTV, but I like a challenge so I asked him to send me a dump of the first gig of the disk. One look and it is the crack-headedest thing I’ve seen in some time: somewhere along the way, their block layer must’ve moved from a big-endian to little-endian platform, without changing the code. OMFS is a 64-bit FS but the RTV block layer apparently works on 32 bits, so for example the 64-bit value 0x8877665544332211 gets written to disk as 0x5566778811223344. And it’s not just the metadata: *everything* is swapped. Filenames look like “tusCzimo..re” instead of “Customizer”. File data blocks are all swapped. Very odd.
Well, for a time I’ve been wanting to experiment with OMFS written in FUSE, so I took my userspace routines from omfsprogs and in the space of an hour or two had a read-only FUSE-based OMFS that did the necessary byte swapping to work with Replay’s file system.
The payoff is the text file that RTV developers apparently used in their version control process. I give you: ReplayTV “Token Haiku” (after the jump).
Continue reading “Hacking ReplayTV”
NCAAs
I used a complicated computer model to make bracket picks this year, and I’m 83.7% so far, which is good enough for 4th place in our office pool of eight (1 point off the 3-way tie for first). Ok, that part about the computer model was a lie but that would be cool wouldn’t it? Random guessing ftw!
Checklist
With 6.5 months to go, here’s the wedding planning update:
- Location – check
- Reception location & catering – check
- Photographer – check
- Hopefully non-cheesy DJ – check
- How to be married class – check
- Rehearsal dinner location – check
- Flowers – check
- Dress – check
- Craptacular wedding website – roger that!
Backed that thing up
I’ve had a lucky streak: even with the occasional hard drive failure I haven’t had any major data loss for a long time. But tempting fate all this time has become worrisome, so a couple of days ago I signed up for an account at rsync.net, a place that charges $1.60/GB/mo for network accessible hard drive space. This solves the problems I’ve always had with using my own disks or DVDs for backup: if it isn’t automatic I won’t do it, and it had better be offsite. As a bonus, they gave me half off for being open source developer. My setup detailed after the jump.