Archive for July, 2005

Canon has launched a site devoted to introducing you to the joys of using a Digital SLR camera. Of course, the site uses Canon cameras throughout, but the terminology and demonstrations are equally applicable to any brand of camera.

Overall, it is an excellent collection of hints, tips, and definitions. I flipped through it this morning and learned quite a bit. In particular, the site does an excellent job of demonstrating how a particular control– a variable– changes the specific look of a picture through the use of interactive or comparative studies.

It is rife with totally campy illustrations combined with the occasional bit of ’70s fashion sense. That they used ’70s derived fashions should come as no real surprise as clothing from that era contains lots of shag like textures that are great for demonstrating depth of field, aperture settings, and the like. There are even a couple of vaguely intro-to-porn-shoot like compositions — blonde in dark clothes on a black leather couch, for example.

Pictured to the left is the bloom of what I believe to be California Thistle. It is a common plant in California and the blooms are really quite exquisite, if a bit threatening looking.

John Randolph mentioned that the Purple Thistle to the left is likely a species imported from Eurasia. He may be right. As it turns out there, are two species of Purple Thistle common to California and they are very difficult to differentiate. There is Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare ) which is the non-native invasive species and California thistle (Cirsium occidentale var. californicum). Of course, there are a bunch of otherspecies, too.

Since I originally wrote this post, we took a hike at Castle Rock State Park. That link will take you to the state park’s home page. But this (both JPG and PDF links on this page) is the best map I could find (and an incredible map, at that!) Absolutely spectacular hike that is worthy of its own post. While on that hike, we ran across a handful of Red Thistle like the one pictured to the right.

Roger and I found that particular thistle plant while walking on Mt. Eden Trail (it is at the bottom right of this PDF map).

While hiking near Stevens Creek Resevoir (also on the map), we also found several Yellow Star Thistle plants. The flowers make the purple thistle seem almost friendly. Those are some seriously menacing spikes!

Unfortunately, the Yellow Thistle is an invasive species that was imported from Europe.

At this point in the season, California is typically very dry. This season is about average. Hiking is quite interesting because most of the plants have already bloomed and are dead. However, there are many species that have optimized their growth such that they bloom during the dry season. Thistle is one of the larger flowers, but there are a bunch of really really tiny flowers that also show up, too. I’m still trying to figure out how to take a good picture of flowers that are tiny.

NSCalendarDate and NSDate make it generally trivial to work with dates, times, time zones, and all that rot. At least, they make it easier than just about any other date/time classes I have run into.

Still, there are a handful of operations that are non-obvious. At least, non-obvious to me.

One, in particular, is answering the question of “how many days between this day and that day?”. The obvious answer is to grab the time interval between the two dates and divide by the number of seconds in a day. The problem is that a date object stores a date and time. If the two dates represent, say, morning on one date and afternoon on the other, the difference in days between will be off by one.

The math is correct, but our perception of “days between” has nothing to do with the time of day between the two days. Capturing perception in an API is hard.

For example, most people consider tomorrow one day away even if it is 8pm today.

My first pass at implementing a solution was to derive calendar dates locked to midnight for the two dates and do the math. And it doesn’t work with generic NSDate instances.

Instead, a bit of basic math solves the problem nicely. The following is for calculating the # of days between a “due date” and “today”.

    int dueDateTimeInterval = (int) [[self valueForKey:@"dueDate"] timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];
    int nowTimeInterval = (int) [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];

    int clampedDueDate = dueDateTimeInterval - (dueDateTimeInterval % SECONDS_IN_A_DAY);
    int clampedNowTimeInterval = nowTimeInterval - (nowTimeInterval % SECONDS_IN_A_DAY);

    return (clampedDueDate - clampedNowTimeInterval) / SECONDS_IN_A_DAY;

Works for me for the cases I test. If I have made a silly mistake, I’m sure it will be made known shortly after this post hits the weblog.

PyObjC 1.3.7 has been released.

It includes:

• Initial port to Mac OS X for Intel
• Xcode 2.1 compatibility
• Support for SenTestingKit and SecurityFoundation frameworks
• Complete wrappers for DiscRecording framework
• … a handful of other bug fixes …

Full details can be found in the NEWS file.

We have an amazing farmer’s market within a few miles of our house. The market has incredible produce and fruits, as expected. It also features a booth selling incredible fresh bread, one that does baked desserts, another with organic eggs, and yet another with the most amazing grass fed beef I have had.

There is also an excellent fishmonger. He catches fish from the pacific during the week and shows up at the farmer’s market with his catch plus some other random fish to fill out the menu.

When a salmon is cleaned, there is a little strip of flesh along the belly that is often thrown away or not generally sold as it is relatively fatty and is of a different consistency than the rest of the salmon steak.

It also happens to be the most amazingly tender hunk of flesh from the fish. Very delicate, a little bit fatty, and very flavorful. And, surprisingly, very cheap. Usually, $5/lbs or less.

Tonight, I marinated three salmon belly strips in a combination of peanut oil, soy sauce, spicy bbq sauce, jamaican curry powder, and a little salt/pepper. Then, on to the grill they went for about 5 or so minutes. Skin side down.

Then, I heated a cast iron skillet and tossed a fresh flour tortilla into it. 15 seconds on one side, flip, melt some cheese on the other until the pan side of the tortilla is toasted and the whole thing is slightly crispy.

Toss the tortilla on a plate, throw some grilled salmon belly on top of the melted cheese and add some fresh salad greens (the tangy spring greens, not any boring old lettuce) on top. Fold the whole thing up into a taco like shape and enjoy.

Wow. Best quesadilla (damn kay-sa-dill-a) ever.

Roger and I headed out to a random trail to do some hiking today. He is quite the trooper as we hiked back nearly a mile back while climbing something like 200 or 300 feet over the course of the hike.

It is a bit late in the season to run into many wildflowers, but we still saw a few that were quite beautiful. Along the nearby Stevens Canyon Road, there were hillsides covered in purple California Poppies. They were fading, but still quite spectacular.

The first picture on this post is actually a “weed” (only a weed because I didn’t plant it) that is growing along our driveway. It is a spectacular flower and the plant, itself, is a pretty neat looking clump of grass-like growth with all those flower stalks sticking out.

The second picture is of a flower that we saw quite commonly once we got above “poison oak” altitude on our hike. On both sides of the lower part of the trail, the ground cover was thick with poison oak and ferns. Interesting juxtaposition. Once we hit a certain altitude, the poison oak and ferns fell away to be replaced by more grass like growth and lots of the pictured flower. Reminds me of very yellow popcorn, for some reason.

We only saw one instance of the purple flower and it was close to the trail head, just below where the poison oak/ferns started. It was actually in the trail. The individual flowers are tiny — about 2x or 3x the size of the head of a pin. I still haven’t figured out how to cajole the camera into taking a really sharp picture of such a subject.

The flowers have this incredibly striking purple color. From a distance of more than a couple of feet, it is like seeing little purple stars against the brown background of the dry California hillside.

In any case, I would like to know the species of these plants as I would gladly add them to my yard or, at least, a close relative that is compatible with our valley climate.

Fun hike. Going to do something like it again tomorrow.