Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Greg Hewgill's LiveJournal:

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thursday, may 8, 2008
7:54 pm	antiphonetic alphabet The Antiphonetic Alphabet is sort of like the Phonetic Alphabet, only more confusing. Perhaps this should be called anacrophonic (see Acrophony). A Aegis B Bane C Czar D Djibouti E Eunuch F Feign G Gnome H Hour I Io J Juan K Knife L Lane M Mnemonic N Nguyen O Oedipus P Pneumonia Q Qatar R Rwanda S Sixths T Tchaikovsky U Urn V Vein W Why X Xylophone Y Yttrium Z Zero (6 Comments |Comment on this)
wednesday, may 7, 2008
7:22 pm	boutique job posting boards I'm looking for a list of, for lack of a better word, "boutique" job posting boards. I've already got jobs.joelonsoftware.com and jobs.thedailywtf.com (which seems a bit weak, as it appears to just syndicate job listings from hiddennetwork.com). There are also larger networks like Linkedin, which end up with a more targeted audience. What others do you know of? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
tuesday, april 29, 2008
11:19 pm	multitool geekery I just received a present from me to me: a Leatherman Skeletool CX. I ordered it from Amazon back in January I think, and with the production delays at Leatherman combined with the delays naturally introduced by the bovineone freight forwarding department (thanks cow!), it arrived here just a few days ago. Damn that's a sexy multitool. I think the two best things about it are: (1) the carabiner clip, and (2) the weight. The whole minimalist thing appeals to me, because I won't end up carrying around stuff I don't need. Just pliers, a knife, a screwdriver, and a clip that will clip to almost anything. I've been fascinated with pocket multitools ever since I saw a Gerber folding pliers sometime back in the 1980s. I'm glad Leatherman is providing me with an outlet for this bit of niche geekery. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
wednesday, april 23, 2008
8:54 am	Elwood Thomas Hewgill, 20 Aug 1915 - 22 Apr 2008 My grandfather passed away today. He suffered a severe stroke almost a week ago and hung on until today, but there was never any hope of recovery. His immediate family was at his side when he went peacefully. Elwood was a diesel mechanic by trade, taught himself to paint after retirement, and was always building a better machine to do stuff. He built a wood splitter that had a cutting station and a conical screw for splitting, powered by a self-contained engine and mounted on wheels with a trailer hitch. My family used to have a wood stove for heating, and we would go out into the forest to collect firewood, then use his splitting machine to process the wood into logs the right size for the stove. Elwood built and sold probably dozens of these machines, each one hand-made and better than the last one. As an artist he attended many demonstrations by other artists, and found that it was always difficult for more than a few people to see what the artist giving the demonstration was actually doing. To solve this problem, he built an artist demonstration station that had a workspace with a mirror mounted above it, so the entire audience could see what the artist was doing by looking up at the mirror. I believe the whole thing folded up into a reasonably compact size that was portable in a car. Many of Elwood's paintings were of buildings. Being of a technical mind and background, he strived for precision, especially in perspective. I remember one time he came over to our house without my grandmother, so he could work on a painting to present to her. The painting was of the church where they were married in Ontario, and he presented it to her as an anniversary gift. I remember one of the first things he did on the canvas was draw some lines of perspective and two vanishing points. Both my grandfathers' birthdays fell on the same day in the middle of summer, so they often celebrated together with a large gathering of extended families on both sides. My mother's father (Jack Young) was a Ph.D. chemist and professor of education, who trained nearly an entire generation of science teachers in the province of BC. In contrast, Elwood had only a high school education (if even that, he grew up working on a farm). Nevertheless, I clearly remember at one of those huge birthday gatherings that Jack said if he could confer an honorary Ph.D., he would give one to Elwood. Everybody knew he deserved it. The last time I saw my grandfather was just over two years ago, before Amy and I left for New Zealand. May he rest in peace. (Comment on this)
sunday, april 6, 2008
10:59 am	sunrise and sunset Daylight Saving time just ended today in New Zealand. At this latitude (43°S, about as far south as Portland is north), the the axial tilt of the earth has more effect on the sunrise and sunset times than where I've been living recently (35°N in California and 30°N in Texas). The variation is also important for me these days since I'm now cycling to and from work year round. In order to visualise the sunrise and sunset times over the course of a year, I used data from the USNO Sun or Moon Rise/Set Table for One Year service and the Google Chart API to create a sunrise/sunset graph with a correction for daylight saving time (click for a larger version): This visualisation neatly shows that daylight saving time tries to keep sunrise within about a two hour window (6am to 8am) while sunset is allowed to vary over four hours (5pm to 9pm) during the course of a year. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
saturday, april 5, 2008
8:10 pm	signal For moonwick, to improve his ratio. (Comment on this)
friday, april 4, 2008
7:21 am	facebook fail Looks like New Zealanders don't support Earth Hour, daylight savings, or Collapsing Cities. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
sunday, march 30, 2008
1:36 am	earth hour 2008 New Zealand was one of the first places on the planet to observe Earth Hour, an event where households are supposed to turn off their lights for one hour between 8pm and 9pm local time on 29 March 2008. This event is intended to raise awareness about carbon emissions and climate change. Not content to simply sit at home in the dark this evening, Amy and I went up on the hills south of the city armed with camera, tripod, chairs, dark chocolate, and hot lemonade. After being a bit distracted by a stunning sunset, we got the camera set up about 10 minutes later than I wanted, at 8:05pm. For the next hour, I took a one second exposure of the city about every minute. The idea was to see whether there was any visible effect on the city lights as Earth Hour came and went. I collected the 60 or so frames into a video, showing one per second. You can see the resulting Earth Hour 2008 video on YouTube. Be forewarned, however, that this may very well be the least engaging video on the internet. As far as I can tell, nothing interesting happened. Maybe people turned some lights off, maybe not, but it's impossible to tell. For all the noise that has been generated around this event, it sure was anticlimactic. Preemptive snarky comment reply: Yeah, we probably caused more carbon emissions driving up the hill than we would have if we'd stayed home and left our lights on. I suggested to Amy that we avoid that by riding our bicycles, but she wasn't having any of it. :) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
sunday, march 16, 2008
10:36 am	the tacos with international appeal The other day I set up a Google Alerts notification for "nuclear tacos", so I could watch people blogging about the fallout from last Monday's Nuclear Taco Night at SXSW 08. There have been a few amusing comments. The google alert drew my attention to my own entry two years ago where I had done a bunch of work to update my list of how to say "I like to eat nuclear tacos" in many different languages. Looking at the list now, it seems that my work then has been lost. Last year around this time, two unrelated events came together to conspire against the preservation of this list. First, my colo server had a hard drive crash and I wasn't able to recover the directory where that file lived. Second, my laptop was stolen. I had used UniRed, a good Unicode text editor for Windows, to edit the file and upload it to my server. Both the working and the published file were gone. This entry was originally intended to be a sad story of data loss, but as I was writing I found that archive.org has a copy as of 31 October 2006! Yay! I have restored the file in all its current glory. And I have better backups now. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
saturday, march 15, 2008
10:07 am	kiwi trivia So last night we were playing Cranium (a game of many things including trivia) with a bunch of people. We had: 3 Kiwis, 2 French, 2 Americans, and one each of Canadian, Brit, German, and Swede. (That sort of diversity seems typical for our circles of friends here.) The question that came up was: Which country was the earliest to have full women's suffrage? At this point everybody laughed because everybody knows the answer is going to be New Zealand. Everybody who lives here knows that, especially if you're originally from somewhere else! South Africa France Great Britain Tasmania We quickly realised that the although the question did not mention the earliest country, it could still be valid because the implication was "of these four choices, which was the earliest?" We quickly eliminated South Africa, and Tasmania (which as far as we knew was never actually a country). We chose Great Britain, but the "correct" answer according to the game was Tasmania! A brief look at an encyclopedia (the physical paper kind) during the game was unenlightening. When I got home I looked on wikipedia, and neither the History of Tasmania article nor the Women's suffrage article mentions anything of the sort. Tasmania was apparently never even a country, and furthermore didn't have full suffrage for men until 1900 (before that, only property owners had the right to vote). We figured that the game designers had just thought "oh, it was some island off the coast of Australia, must have been Tasmania!" without even bothering to look it up. It makes one wonder what other trivia they might have messed up. At least, we won't trust their grasp of New Zealand related trivia next time! (8 Comments |Comment on this)
wednesday, march 5, 2008
2:57 pm	the really hard way Amy entered a triathlon on Sunday in support of Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. She did really well, especially for her first actual triathlon, and I'm really proud of her. How well did she do? Well, you could look at the results page and try to find her in the Short Triathlon 30-39 age group. Except, you wouldn't find her there. Some sort of mistake managed to put her in the 50-59 (!) age group instead. Amy sent off a quick request to the event organisers asking to be moved to the proper category. After all, the people who pledged money to Hearing Dogs in her support might want to be able to find her in the results. But here's the response she got: Hi Amy I'am really sorry for the error I have made, but unfortunately I'am now unable to make any changes. I hope this will not put you off entering for the following year! My sincere apologies Michelle Unable to make any changes? What kind of excuse is that? Amy is requesting that they correct a factual error, not some dispute about timing or anything like that. But it appears that they're simply unwilling to consider any request to change the results. As an aside, let's have a quick look at how the results are published. At first glance, it looks like the results are reasonably formatted in tables on the results page. But if you look closer, you'll find that those tables are actually images. JPEG images, no less! The borders of each category seem to be each slightly different, as if somebody manually clipped them from screen snapshots of a spreadsheet or something. There is further evidence of this: If you look at the results for the Short 40-49 group, you'll see an image of an insertion point overlaying the name of participant 107! Also, on the full page that particular category stands out because it's somewhat narrower than the others, and also is a lot more blurry (as if the JPEG compression level were turned up too high). Another oddity is the Long Female 50-59 group, which is blurry for the first two participants and sharp for the third. How on earth does this happen? I thought perhaps they published the results as images in order to discourage search engines from finding people by name. However they helpfully publish a PDF version of the results that will be perfectly searchable by Google. Actually, it occurs to me that they might have taken screenshots of the PDF, saved as JPEG, and used those for the HTML version. In any case, it seems like they put far more work into it than necessary by choosing the really hard way. Given that, I can appreciate their reluctance to do it all over again, but a broken process is hardly an excuse for refusing to correct incorrect results. Not impressed. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
monday, march 3, 2008
1:03 pm	macbook update The tech at the Apple repair place finally observed my computer suddenly shutting down when on battery, after a couple of days of it not doing so. So, they've ordered a new battery for me which should be in this week. Hopefully, that will fix the problem. I also would like to buy AppleCare for my MacBook, because laptops are finicky and my first year is almost up. It costs NZ$479 from the Apple NZ store, or US$249 from the Apple US store. Now, US$249 is about NZ$320 at the current rate of exchange. A 50% markup is insane, especially for something that doesn't actually involve shipping any physical items. Can I buy AppleCare and pay for it in USD? Going through the Apple US store seems to get the web site all confused about address and phone number details for my credit card billing address (it wants US-formatted details). This seems silly. I don't mind paying for hardware insurance, just not at insanely inflated rates. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
tuesday, february 26, 2008
7:51 pm	long bays I've been doing more and more cycling over the past few weeks. My new route to work is twice as far (12 km one way) as my old one, so I've got to get used to doing longer runs daily. I've done the work route as a round trip, as well as various other longer runs to get myself ready. Today, a local community paper showed up which had a story about a couple of guys who are raising money to improve signage along some popular cycle routes. One of the important ones is called the Long Bays route, and is featured in the Festival of Cycling in early December. It's a 75 km (45 mi) loop around some hills south of Christchurch. It's got two major hill climbs and innumerable smaller ones. Out of curiosity more than anything else, I decided to do the Long Bays route today. I'd never done anything quite so long or with so many hills, but there's always a first time, right? My route [maps.google.com] almost exactly follows the route taken by the Festival of Cycling event (it's run anticlockwise). I did 76 km in 3:25 for an average speed of 22 km/h. I can do 30 on the flat, so those hills really killed me. And today, as soon as I rounded the bend at Motukarara, I was hit with a relentless headwind that just didn't let up until I reached the top of the hill just before Sumner. Nevertheless, having completed this, I'm pretty stoked! I'm nowhere near _fool territory, but this just shows that nothing is really out of reach. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
9:58 am	morning miscellanea It's been a busy morning! We were awoken this morning by the roar of a large jet overhead. By the time I found some pants and went outside, all I could recognise was four nacelled engines and a T-tail. With the help of my friends at Flightaware, we figured it was either a C-141 or a C-5. It was probably on its way back from Antarctica (since Christchurch is the base for those flights). Amy called me into the bathroom to help take care of a large spider—which turned out to be a White-tailed spider. White tails are relatively rare in the South Island, but they can leave a nasty bite (while they are apparently not venomous, the bacteria left behind when they bite often causes swelling or infection). They're the only dangerous spider around here, and of course they originally came from Australia. We got an early courier delivery of our re-soled Chacos! Even paying for overseas shipping both ways, it's still a great deal to re-sole Chacos instead of buying new ones. I finally accepted an offer of employment! I start in two weeks. While it's a lovely time of year to be out of work, I'm looking forward to getting back to a normal schedule. (Comment on this)
saturday, february 23, 2008
3:19 pm	oh, the irony Apparently Microsoft has published details on a huge number of their proprietary network protocols and extensions. This is a fantastic resource for anybody who needs to talk to Windows and isn't necessarily living in a completely Windows world. Anyway, while browsing through the list of protocols, I came across [MS-RMPR] Rights Management Services (RMS). I hope the real RMS appreciates the irony. (Comment on this)
friday, february 22, 2008
9:02 pm	sxsw showcasing music torrents Since 2005, I have supported the annual South by Southwest music festival by operating a "seed" for the BitTorrent files they have created. From 2005 through 2007, SXSW created the torrents themselves and hosted them on their own tracker. I learned that this year, for whatever reason they won't be doing that for us. So, I took matters into my own hands (after all, the songs are all available for download) and have created a torrent of the 2008 showcasing artists, which is one .mp3 file from 764 different artists. This year, it is almost 3.5 GB of new music, for free. SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents (I noticed that the torrents for 2007 and earlier are not currently working. I've emailed a contact at SXSW and we should get those restored soon, otherwise I'll find another way to make those available again.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
wednesday, february 20, 2008
11:10 am	macbook battery problems My nearly-year-old MacBook recently started having what seems to be battery issues, after installing the latest Tiger update (10.4.11). The other day I installed the updates with the mains power plugged in, and everything seemed fine. Then yesterday I removed the mains power and was running on battery for about half an hour. Suddenly, poof the screen went black and the computer was off (at the time the battery indicated about 4 hours remaining). It came up just fine while still on battery, so it didn't seem to be a complete discharge issue. Google quickly found for me a discussion thread about what seems to be this very issue. That thread pointed to the Apple MacBook Battery Update page which indicates that I may be able to get a new battery out of this. Meanwhile, I'm trying one of the other recommendations in that thread. The BatteryUpdater.bundle on my machine was at version 1.3. This may have been installed by the latest update; I have no way of telling. Anyway, I dragged it to the Trash, rebooted, emptied the trash, then ran System Update again which installed Battery Updater 1.2. I then switched to battery power for a while and sure enough, about half an hour later the machine spontaneously shut down. Finally, I reset the SMC and—cross fingers—I have been on battery for two hours without any shutdowns. Update: After nearly three hours, my MacBook shut down again. I'm going to pursue the battery replacement route. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
tuesday, february 19, 2008
7:53 pm	busy bees We have some lavender outside our front door that the bees simply love. We get both honey bees and bumblebees. Today they seemed especially busy, so I sat down with a camera and tried to shoot some macro action shots. Click on the photo to see some of the best ones. (Comment on this)
11:03 am	pydkim 0.1 release As promised yesterday, I've released pydkim 0.1 which is a Python library that does DKIM email signing and verification. If you have occasion to use this, feedback is appreciated! (Comment on this)
monday, february 18, 2008
10:35 am	dkim email signatures A while ago I wrote a DomainKeys module and set it up on my mail server. Since that time, DomainKeys has been superseded by DKIM, and my server crashed and I had to rebuild it, and I never set up the DomainKeys processing again. For a long time I've had an item on my todo list to implement a DKIM module for my mail server. This weekend, I decided to tackle that project. I dug up my old DomainKeys implementation, read (and reread) the DKIM specification, and started modifying my old code to do DKIM. One of the differences between DomainKeys and DKIM is that there are two signature algorithms supported: "rsa-sha1" and "rsa-sha256". I had been using POW (Python OpenSSL Wrappers) to do the hashing and RSA signatures for SHA1. However, POW seems to be really old (latest version released in 2001) and does not include SHA256 support. So, I turned to Python 2.5 which has a new hashlib module that supports several different modern hash algorithms. However, my mail server only had Python 2.4 installed. Rather than blindly upgrading Python on my production server and possibly breaking other things that depend on installed modules, I installed a similar FreeBSD 6.2 system under Parallels on my MacBook. I installed Python 2.4 from the ports system there, and then installed Python 2.5 at the same time. As it turns out, FreeBSD ports handles having two different versions of Python installed at the same time fairly seamlessly. It installes both /usr/local/bin/python2.4 and /usr/local/bin/python2.5 binaries with a hard link to the "default" version at /usr/local/bin/python. Installing 2.5 with an already installed 2.4 does not change the default version, so one must explicitly use the python2.5 when required. Installing Python modules from the ports system installs to the default Python installation unless the PYTHON_VERSION=python2.5 variable is set in the port make command line. (I'm mostly relating this part of the tale for my own benefit, for when I forget how to build Python ports for the correct version in the future.) After testing this on a virtual machine, I installed Python 2.5 on my production server and nothing broke. I could now use the hashlib module to calculate SHA256 hashes. However, I was still using the POW module for RSA signature calculation, and that operation does not support SHA256 either. (Part of the RSA signing operation uses information about which hash algorithm was used to create the hash being signed, to prevent a situation where somebody could use a weaker hash function to create a collision with a value produced by a stronger hash function.) Not only does POW not support SHA256, but the OpenSSL library installed in my FreeBSD system does not either. OpenSSL is part of the base system, and I did not want to try to go down that upgrade path today. After thinking about the problem for a bit and concluding "how hard could it be?", I decided to reimplement the portions of RSA signing and verification that I needed for DKIM. Python has good built-in large integer capability, so the fundamental "powmod" (modular exponentiation) operation was the easy part. I had to learn the details about technologies with obscure acronyms like ASN.1, PKCS#1, X.509, and so on. After poring over many documents which always have a habit of referring to the fundamental information contained in yet another document, I finally sorted out everything I need for both signing and verification to work. I also gained a much better understanding of how key management works in practice, which could become useful sometime. My DKIM code appears to work and is acceptable to both gmail.com and the (older) DKIM testing reflector. It's written in pure Python and its only nonstandard dependency is the dnspython library (for retrieving TXT records from DNS). I plan to release this code as a Python library once I clean it up a bit and write some documentation. (Comment on this)