Categories
Insects Photography

At the Gardens

I have not been a frequent visitor to the Missouri Botanical Gardens this summer. I don’t care for the crowds the Gardens attracts during the “tourist season”. Though the number of people was still a healthy size yesterday, they also reflect the more easy going nature of the “off-season regulars”.

The Gardens seem especially nice this year. Everything was healthy, lush, and the proper color, most likely due to this being the wettest year on record (to date) for St. Louis.

Mum

bee on mum

It’s too early for the Monarchs; we should be seeing them in the next couple of weeks. However, there were plenty of Cabbage Whites and Painted Ladies.

Painted Lady

The only reason I knew the name of the small, white (and very hard to photograph) Cabbage White is because of an excellent resource for butterfly identification: Butterflies and Moths of North America. You can look up your state, see what butterflies have been spotted in what county and then click through for pictures and more detailed identification information.

Returning to the Garden, the water lilies are in full bloom, which means, of course, dragonflies.

Dragonfly on water lily

dragonfly on lily

Categories
JavaScript Political Writing

Finis

The draft for Learning JavaScript, second edition, has entered production, and that’s more or less it for my tech book writing career. I don’t want to say I’ll never write another tech book, because never is a long time. However, I have no intentions of writing another tech book in the foreseeable future.

I hope to revive my moribund tech contracting/consulting career, but first I need a break from spending so much time on the computer: walk in the woods; enjoy the fall color; watch the pretty birds; see if my legs still work. I have authored and co-authored 18 books in 12 years—a fact I’ve really felt it in the last few months. I’m tired.

Tired and stressed, with the latter primarily because of the US election. I don’t think I’ve ever been this stressed about an election. I’ve also never been more desperate for my candidate (Obama) to win. No, not even when Bush was running for the office in 2000 and 2004. Frankly— and I never thought the circumstances could ever get to the point where I would say this—I’d rather have another four years of Bush/Cheney, then have four years of McCain/Palin.

I don’t want to write too much about the election, specifically because of the stress. I also agree with Dave Rogers about Sarah Palin being used to draw attention away from Obama. Continuing to write about her only aids and abets her cause, as well as adds to my already overly uptight frame of mind.

I think what I’ll do is spend some time considering the election, take a deep breath, and write once more on the topic. In the meantime, I’ll post links to what others have written, as I struggle to re-establish an essential objectivity. After all, I want to live long enough to get that universal health insurance Obama will bring us.

Speaking of which, I have been getting into some debates, mainly about universal health care over at Blogher. It would be an understatement to say how disappointed I am in the so-called “libertarian” element in the US, right now.

Politics aside, my 18th book is on its way. Go book. Live long, and prosper.

Categories
Media

AppleTV and HD

I just finished Eureka, in HD, on my TV. The shows are expensive, yes, but they’re quite lovely. The show was free, as are several other shows in Apple’s rollout of HD quality TV shows to go along with the movies. I know that several Battlestar Galactica fans are going to be happy that the first show of this season is also free in HD.

NBC is back with iTunes. I had a feeling the companies would kiss and make up. You can still get the shows like Eureka and BG at Hulu, but the quality just doesn’t compare. I figure I save the bucks by not having cable, UVerse, or the like—I’ll just get my shows ala cart.

I was a little disappointed today that the Apple show didn’t roll out any new computers. I had my heart set on getting a decent deal on a late model iMac or Macbook Pro. Now, I’ll have to wait and see what Apple rolls out in the Spring, and make do with what I have.

I may be doing it wrong, but I didn’t like the iTunes “Genius” at all. It kept pushing songs at me to buy. To me, that’s an annoyance, not a feature.

My iPod is still working, so wasn’t interested in the rest of the show. Sacrilege! Not want the Apple eye and ear candy!? I must be tired. However, I am glad that Apple is finally taking some of the “green” stuff to heart.

I did get the Genius to output several playlists. I’ll load them into my iPod tomorrow, and see how it did. Still, the ads for songs to buy are irritating.

Per Dave in comments, recommendation sidebar can be collapsed out of view. Much better.

When you download one of the HD TV shows, you also get the SD quality show. I have to wonder if this isn’t a direct shot at Amazon, which provides both the larger show for your TV and a mobile device version. Regardless, it would be nice if Apple provided an option to turn this off.

It would also be nice if Apple provided Amazon’s digital media storage, so that you don’t have to keep copies of the movies and TVs on your own external drives.

Lastly, this forum thread states that the HD tv shows are only in 853×480 resolution, but that sounds like the SD show. I have noticed that you can’t seem to buy the HD quality shows directly via AppleTV, but only through iTunes. I haven’t checked today to see if this has changed.

I’m only interested in purchasing shows for two series, so I’m not going to be adding overly to Apple’s coffers by going hog wild on HD TV shows. Well, unless Dr. Who also comes out with HD quality.

And according to this thread there is confusion about which version a person is buying. I noticed that the AppleTV lineup doesn’t seem to be keeping pace with the new iTunes rollout.

It does seem like you can only get the HD shows on your iTunes, and then sync them up with the AppleTV. Rather a pain, that. That’s an unusually clunky move on Apple’s part. I wonder if this is a signal that Apple is becoming

Categories
Weather Writing

Storm surges

Luckily Gustav calmed down before landfall, because I don’t think the New Orleans levees would have held if the surge was 18 feet as originally predicted.

It’s important, now, for Nagin et al to let people back into the city as soon as possible. If the city management continues to keep the citizens out, but let the business owners in, the next time the city officials call for an evacuation, people are going to say, “No”. Frankly, I wouldn’t blame them.

Gustav is still not through giving, though. We in St. Louis are getting tropical depression warnings, as we expect the storm to drop 8 inches, or more, on us on Friday.

In the meantime…how about that Atlantic, eh? If McCain and Obama continue their practice to discontinue campaigning every time we get hit with a hurricane, this may be the quietest presidential race, ever.

But then there’s Sarah. I could wish that we would spend more time on issues important to women, than one specific woman and her family challenges. This election is too important to continue to get distracted by the Palin sideshow.

PS Can you tell I’m half way through my book edits, and feeling more than a wee bit irritable?

Categories
Browsers

Chromatic hyperbole

It would be impossible to miss the excitement over Google’s Chrome, though I would assume we would wait to actually see the product, first, before wetting our pants.

Yes, Google entering the browser marketplace is news, but some of the things I’ve been reading are, well, frankly asinine. For instance, Computerworld breathlessly writes, Google’s Chrome aims to kill Windows, make Web the OS of choice. A bit hard, wouldn’t you say, when Chrome requires Windows just to be able to run?

Let's kill off Windows with our Web OS.

Cool.

...later...

Well, Windows is dead.

That's great! 

*pause* 

Uh, where's Chrome?

Well, you see...

Do we also need to remember our concerns about Google? You know, the whole privacy thing? Or are we a modern day bunch of Pavlovian dogs, trained to drool on cue whenever Google is involved?

There are issues associated with this browser, babes. First of all, as great as it is that Google is using Webkit for its infrastructure, it’s also coming out with its own JavaScript engine. My first question is: is Google going to conform to standards? Or is it going to go its own little way, and just assume we’ll tag along? Then there’s the issue of the engine being multi-threaded—and here I thought Photoshop was going to be the only pig on my system.

My concerns aren’t just related to JS. As I read somewhere—who knows where—we can now see why Google is footing the bill for Ian Hickson to head up the HTML5 effort. However, now that Google is “one of the browser competitors”, how will this change the dynamic in all these standards groups? I’m not going to necessarily give HTML5 over to Google to define to its own Chrome standards. I imagine that some of the browser companies would feel the same.

And about those privacy concerns…exactly what kind of information is Google going to be collecting about us as we use the damn thing?

Frankly, I’m all for anything that weakens the abysmally tenacious hold IE6 and IE7 have on desktops, but I’m not sure yet another player in the field is what we need. Especially a player who, frankly, exhibits many of the same tendencies towards arrogance, as well as interest in complete dominance, as the company they supposedly “hate”. I can understand Google’s impatience with the other browser companies—but Google also has a tendency to act impulsively, and leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces.

As for web applications taking over the world, we’re just now starting to hit against issues of broadband caps, not to mention the problems we’ve had with centralized services recently. Does Twitter ring a bell with you folks? How about Amazon’s S3? GMail? In the last month, we’ve seen outages at a considerable number of centralized web services, and we haven’t even started putting our critical operations into “the cloud”.

Do you really want your business to hit a stand still because you’ve lost your internet connection, hit a broadband cap, or “the cloud” is not playing nicely at the moment? Seriously?

Look, yes. Get interested, yes. Peer around under the hood, and take it for a spin, most definitely yes. But get a grip–the web world as we know it hasn’t suddenly come to an end just because Google has decided it wants to play the browser game, too.

Downloaded. Installed. Works fast. Chrome doesn’t work on the Mac. Thanks to WebKit it does support XHTML and SVG. However, I’ve hit an odd rendering error for this page, which I don’t get with my nightly WebKit download.

Matt Cutts did respond to privacy concerns about Chrome, though I wish he wouldn’t categorize these concerns as being the paranoid ramblings of conspiracy theorists.