Archive for March 2007
http://www.inciweb.org/incident/415/
Look in the “pictures” section of the web page. There’s a few pictures of me and other pictures taken by my friend Nathan Nichols.
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“Another thing that we saw in 1968 was a tiny 1″ square first flat panel display down at the University of Illinois. We realized it was going to be a matter of years until you could put all the electronics found in the Flex Machine on the back of a flat panel display, which I later came to call the Dynabook. Back in 1968 when I made this cardboard model I thought of it as the machine of the future and started thinking about what would it be like for millions of people to have one of these machines. As we got deeper into the design, we realized that we wanted to dynamically simulate and extend.
And so the metaphor became the pencil. What would it be like to have something like this as extent in the world as pencil and paper. Could people actually use it? And the answer in 1968 and the early 1970s was no. So one of the ways I started thinking about answering the question, since we failed at designing for adults. And I remembered a wonderful phrase of Marshall McLuhan. He said, I don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish. The idea is if you are immersed in a context you can’t even see it. So we decided to follow Seymour Papert’s lead and instead of trying to design for adults we would try and see what this Dynabook of the future would be like for children and then maybe hope some of it would spill over into the adult world. So children were an absolutely critical factor here.
From a memo I wrote to Xerox in 1971: Though the Dynabook will have considerable local storage and will do most computing locally, it will spend a large percentage of its time hooked to various large, global information utilities which will permit communication with others of ideas, data, working models, as well as the daily chit-chat that organizations need in order to function. The communications link will be by private and public wires and by packet radio. Dynabooks will also be used as servers in the information utilities. They will have enough power to be entirely shaped by software.”
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Engineering Support has kindly increased the number of terminal server connections available to us, we should no longer have any problems (we went from 2 seats to 500). Try to run with less than 100 threads to be fair to the grad students.
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will be tailored for individual affiliates.
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http://www.inciweb.org/incident/377/
Last summer (2006) the first fire I went on was the Black Crater Fire in Sisters, OR. I saw tree torching on the second day, so I knew it had to be a serious fire. I remember the fire being mentioned on the local news, but i’m not sure if most people knew how close it was to Sisters. InciWeb says it was 4 miles away, but later on in the fire it could have been closer. Actually, I was on the burnout fireline that, as I was told, saved the town. The town was very close to being evacuated. We almost moved our base camp.
Our camp was based at Sisters High School in its grassy baseball fields. As the fire came closer ash began to float onto the top of our tents. You could easily see the large plume of smoke in the distance. We were one of the first crews to get to the school. I’m glad we got to choose our tent spots before the sudden rush of crews started arriving daily.
The terrain I was working in courtesy of InciWeb:
Terrain Difficulty - Extreme. Steep slopes, limited access and dead standing timber.
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Miles to hike daily: 2 to 3 one way to the top of a ridgeline on a hill. The hike was on a trail uphill. We would have to stop at least a couple of times on the way to rest. Eventually, at the top was a pumpkin (orange water tank) and other cache when the USFS was able to put it there. The fire was burning on the left side of us.
For the first few days it was far down to the hill to the west of us, but it was steadily creeping up. Our job was to draw a line in the sand at the ridgeline, not exactly the easiest place to work. It was steep enough to where you could lose your balance, fall down the hill, and no one could really catch you, save for a tree. I remember we had to clear out a buffer zone at least some length from the top of the ridgeline. In one section you could see helicoptors dip into a pond far away and come back flying over your head. A great vista was in the background.
I can’t remember if we created our own burnout or not, but when the fire came it was hitting some pretty tall trees standing next to us. We had to keep a very close eye on the tops of trees for any sign of burning. The smoke headed uphill (where we were) and was quite unpleasant. Intense moments happened when fire tried to creep past the fireline we were guarding. If it got past our line and got to the otherside, our mission failed. It did not.
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I just added a feature to the database form. It allows you to enter any SQL command and it will execute that command on the database you are viewing. One quirk with it is that once you execute the command all of the fields on the form go blank and you have to click the “Connect” button again. I should fix this later. But once you look at the info again you will see what your command has done! Note: I should disallow people to enter a “DROP” command for security reasons. This is a good idea. You do NOT need to put a semicolon at the end of the command.
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Database finally connects to comp x. Need to populate SQL tables and add SQL statements to project. Add regular expressions.
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