Category: Activities

Bald Eagles!

It’s rare for me to get my second paddle of the season so quickly after the first (first was Sunday, second was today, Wednesday), but the weather cooperated and today was chicken wing day in the cafeteria so I wasn’t hungry when I got home, so away I went.

The creek was quite deserted by other boats, except for one flat bottom dinghy that two guys were fishing from. I’ve seen carp mating in that area, so that’s probably what they were after.

Considering that Sunday I saw almost no wildlife except geese, today was a bonanza day. I saw male red-winged blackbirds staking out their territories, several kingfishers patrolling their sections of the river (and raising their crests in alarm when I got too close), a few pairs of ducks, and I finally saw the famous Irondequoit Creek bald eagles. I rounded a corner and saw two soaring birds, one quite high and one just above the ridge line, nd immediately said “oh, turkey vultures”, but then the lower one spread his stunning white tail and I noticed that the head was bright white as well. I never did make out for sure if the higher one was a bald eagle as well, but I think it was. One thing that impressed me was that while it was soaring, it seemed to be moving back and forth much faster than a turkey vulture does. Maybe it’s anti-vulture prejudice, but it just seemed more, I don’t know, purposeful or something.

I also saw a crow or raven down fairly low, but he flew away rapidly as I got near so I didn’t get a good look. There were very distinct primary feathers curling up at the tips, which I think means it was a raven.

I went a little bit further than I did on Sunday, and I wasn’t as tired when I reached the weir, probably because I paced myself better. Probably just as well, because on the way home there were two stretches where I was paddling into a very strong wind. My weather widget says that the winds at the airport are 21G33 knots, or 24 to 33 mph, which I can easily believe. And when the wind is blowing in my face like that, my old canoe trip instincts say “paddle as hard as you can for the lee of the upwind shore, and don’t rest until you get there”, so that’s what I do.

And it just gets worse

On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.

So now I’m caught in a vice – I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.

I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.

First paddle of the season

Well, I got out earlier than last season, but not as early as the previous year. The sun was shining, the air was warm (just a little over 60, I think), the water was freezing cold. All in all, a great day to be out. And obviously I wasn’t the only one, because the creek was crowded with boats, some who looked like they knew what they were doing, some who obviously didn’t. Three teenagers in a canoe lurching from bank to bank with no clue what they were doing (sort of a “sub-prime” canoe), a large gaggle of kayaks coming downstream together, a guy with his feet up on top of his kayak deck and a fishing rod between his feet, people in spiffy paddling jackets and wet suits, and people in t-shirts and shorts.

I wore my wet suit because I knew the water would be cold and I didn’t want to get cold legs on the bottom of the boat, nor did I want to get hypothermia if I tipped. I had planned to only go as far as the weir so I wouldn’t overdo it. But in hindsight I probably should have turned back sooner – I was tired and my elbows were sore by the time I got there. And when I turned back, there was a strong wind in my face countering any assist I was getting from the current.

The weir was impassible – the smaller gaps were jammed with debris, so all the water was flowing through the middle channel, and there was about a foot and a half or two foot drop there. I bet it would have been fun to paddle down, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to try paddling up it. I wasn’t even going to try portaging around it so I could shoot it. I just looked at it and said “no f-ing way”. There were a couple of people fishing the eddy below it. So avoiding the lines, I did an eddy turn and turned down stream. I was glad to see that the big mud flat that had sprung up last year just downstream of the weir had submerged again. Hopefully the spring run-off will scour the stream bed a bit deeper this year so it won’t re-emerge in the lower water season.

Not much wildlife in the marsh yet, except some sparrows and lots and lots of Canada geese. Most of the geese looked like they were getting ready to nest, but there was one on a dead tree that lies on its side in the middle of the creek who was playing dead as I splashed by. I wonder if she had eggs? Last year I noticed that a goose had tried to lay eggs on a semi-flat spot on that tree, but most of them had rolled down into a crack, and I guess she’d abandoned the nest. I hope she has better luck this year.

Oh, that’s not good

I got an email from one of the sysadmins at NCF saying that the news directory has run out of space. After poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that:

  • cron jobs, including the nightly expire job, haven’t run since March 18th
  • I haven’t been receiving emails sent to the NCF news account, possibly for even longer than that, which is why I didn’t notice when the system throttled 3 days ago. Normally newswatcher sends these emails which I have forwarded to SMS so I don’t miss them.

The sysadmin wonders if the cron jobs not running has anything to do with the DST change. The machine is ancient, and running an ancient version of Solaris.

Of course, the fact that I didn’t notice the lack of the daily news admin email in my morning scan-and-delete folder isn’t good, either.

This could work

I probably shouldn’t give too many details, but I’ve been in talks with a certain freeware developer over developing a flight planning application for a web connected hand-held device. (Anybody who knows anything about me can probably guess the developer and the device.)

My part would be a server app that would respond to requests for data from the device and send new data or updates. Nothing too different than what I’ve been doing before, but one of the things we’ve been talking about is managing “areas”. His concept was that if the user entered an id that wasn’t on the device already, my server would send the device a whole “area”, and the device would keep track of what areas it had in memory already, when they were last updated, and would occasionally request updates of the areas it knew. He thought that each area could be a whole country. The first thing that struck me about that is that if the point you asked for was in the US, you could be asking for thousands of waypoints (70,584 in the current database). That could take a long, long time on an Edge network. Then we discussed maybe breaking it down by state or province in the US and Canada.

But the thing is, I used to be a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) programmer. I know there are better ways. At first I started looking around for the HHCode algorithm since I worked with Herman Varma and the Oracle guys implementing the original Oracle “Spatial Data Option”, until that scumbag Jim Rawlings screwed me out of three months pay. But I can’t find the source code anywhere.

So my next idea was a modified quad tree. Basically, when populating the database, I made a “rectangle” that incorporates the whole world and start adding points. When I hit a threshold, I subdivide that “rectangle” into 4 equal sub-rectangles, and move the points into whichever rectangle they belong to. This means that where points are sparse, the rectangles are large, and where they are dense, the rectangles are small. That way I’ve got some consistency in the size of the file to be sent to the device, and I’m not wasting people’s time sending the 19 waypoints in Wake Island, say, as an individual file.

I’ve been experimenting today with PostGIS, which is an extension to Postgresql which adds some very efficient geographic query tools. The program I wrote to take the data from my old MySQL database and put it into the PostGIS database while building these quad cells runs pretty fast. Surprisingly fast, even. PostGIS is pretty capable. Too bad the manual for it sucks rocks.

One thing that I keep forgetting is how much faster computers are now than when I was doing GIS for a living. I keep expecting things to take hours when they end up taking minutes, because the last time I did this sort of thing I was using a 40MHz SPARC and now I’m using a dual core 1.86GHz Intel Core2 Duo, and I’ve got more RAM at my disposal now than I had hard drive space back then.

Anyway, mostly I’m writing this because I’m really enjoying working with GIS-type stuff again. I wish I could do it full time again.