It’s a strange feeling… 7 years is a long time, and I’ve forgot how it feels to leave a lot of routines, colleagues, habits… I feel a knot on my stomach (but it could be for skipping breakfast) and a strange chill on the back of my head.

Monday will be different, in a lot of ways for better, but I’m sure I’ll miss some people…

The album’s version is richer and faster

From Freakonomics:

…
No doubt alcohol and crack cocaine fit that description well. In Becker’s view, however, there is something even more addictive than substances:people.

He’s so right…

From Coding Horror:

The longer you write programs and the older you get, eventually you come to realize that in order to truly succeed, you have to write programs that can be understood by both the computer and your fellow programmers.

That’s a very good piece of wisdom. I’ve been following Jeff’s blog for some months now, and I think most of his posts are very interesting, in a “programmish” kind of way. I find this one in particular very good, being a programmer for 14 years I’ve seen a lot of colleagues, specially new ones fresh out of college to program in a very academic kind of way, full of semantic tricks and always trying to use cutting edge technology. Frequently their code is apparently good, but in time serious flaws begin to surface, from simple things like not checking a string for null, to slightly bigger problems, for instance the realisation on the eve of launch that that person has completely missed the purpose of every aspect of the transaction control framework that we were using, down to the point where the freshly built pages were completely useless unless you followed a very specific navigation path.

However, what really cought my attention was the next paragraph:

Of all the cruel tricks in software engineering, this has to be the cruelest. Most of us entered this field because the machines are so much more logical than people.

Where he links to a post titled In Programming, One Is The Loneliest Number, from where I extract the following quote:

Like many programmers, I was drawn to computers as a child because I was an introvert. The world of computers– that calm, rational oasis of ones and zeros– seemed so much more inviting than the irrational, unexplainable world of people and social interactions with no clear right and wrong. Computers weren’t better than people, exactly, but they were sure one heck of a lot easier to understand.

Well, I’m not sure about me, but I’m reasonable sure of the “introvert” and “unexplainable world of people and social interactions” and completely identify myself with this view. Sometimes I joke with my friends to not let their children play with computers too much, because this is an hell of a life that no one should be forced to have, but at least I do understand what the compiler is trying to accomplish… well, maybe not when I’m with C#…

And now, back to the calm, rational oasis of ones and zeros…

Yesterday I went to the observatory for another night of observing with Doctor and the Kid. I had planned to capture data for a light curve of Wasp-1 but clouds in the beginning of the night, and the usual delays that always happen made me change my mind and I ended up with a night of technical refinements, mainly a much needed polar alignment on the system. As usual, PAM dribbled me a bit for an hour or so, but I eventually managed to get a plate solve from it (plate solve on Maxim was trivial for a long time) and a session of measure-adjust-refine occupied my time while D&K tried to adjust the GM-8 that apparently had taken a bump. After some tweaking I looked for a target to test for alignment, and ended up doing a little more than half and hour on asteroid 9 Metis. Looking at the first and last frames from the sequence showed some movement in RA, so I went back and spent more time trying to further improve polar alignment. At the end of the night I had and error of less than 6 arcmin in azimuth, and less then 4 in elevation. Not good, but the observatory is not ready yet, and the odds of someone giving it a bump while doing some maintenance work are not slim, so I shutdown the pier at 4 am and 20 minutes later I was inside the sleeping bag.

By 8h40m I was tired of being awake trying to rest (insomnia has been frequent lately) and went back to the observatory to check the equipment. Doctor and Kid left later in the night, and everything was parked and covered in dew, so I opened the roof and let the equipment dry for a bit. It was a sunny morning with blue sky, nothing like the cloudy and boring day before, and I sat on some stairs to think for a bit, while getting some sun.

Eventually the Kid got up, and together with the Engineer (that had arrived late the previous night) we went for a coffee and a bit of talking, before raising our sleeves and get some work done, mainly electric work related with the UPS system on the observatory, and some cable management to avoid a rats nest. All went smoothly without much notice, with the exception of some excess energy that “blessed” my hand, kindly provided by the friendly chinese that manufactured a power strip with the live blue wire connected to the earth contact… Too bad it didn’t light me up.

This time we packed early, had lunch by 2pm, returning home after it with a brief stop for another coffee. 

Another weekend, another Sunday…

From code.flickr:

A few weeks ago we released a version of the Flickr site tailored specifically for the iPhone. Developing this site was very different from any other project I’ve worked on; there seems to be a new set of frontend rules for developing high-end mobile sites. A lot of the current best practices get thrown out the window in the quest for minimum page weight and fastest load times over slow cellular connections.

Here are a few of the lessons we learned (sometimes painfully) while developing this site.

Interesting details to pay attention…

Some cropping… some levels… some de-saturation… some Massive Attack on what remained of my lunch break. The slowly moving water lacks punch, and the orange tints on the ground don’t reflect the chilly wind that was blowing on the beach.

It was a good end of day, after a good coffee with JC and friend. The beach was almost empty, when I arrived with the sun still above the horizon a couple was taking shots of themselves on a nearby rock, and a guy was walking his dog. I left around 18h15, freezing and planning for a hot tea when I got home…

Last sunday I grabbed my tripod and camera, and went for a shoot… a 5 minute fast processing on a frame is the result for now…