Pizza
Is it weird to get a pizza just so you can have cold pizza for breakfast the next morning?
Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Wave to Barry!
Wow, this year's storm season has only just started today and it's already up to two named systems with Barry being announced by the NHC at 5 PM today.
From the 5 PM discussion:
DEEP CONVECTION HAS DEVELOPED NEAR THE CENTER DURING THE PAST HOUR AND THE STRONGEST WINDS ARE LOCATED NEAR THE CENTER...SUPPORTING A TROPICAL CLASSIFICATION. BARRY COULD RETAIN SOME NON-TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS. THE CYCLONE IS EMBEDDED WITHIN A STRONG SOUTHWESTERLY SHEAR AND IS HEADING TOWARD COOLER WATERS. THEREFORE...NO SIGNIFICANT STRENGTHENING IS INDICATED BEFORE IT REACHES THE COAST. BARRY SHOULD BECOME EXTRATROPICAL BETWEEN 24 AND 36 HOURS.
Are you ready?
Fedora 7
Installed Fedora 7 on the two computers sitting on my desk at work today.
I haven't had a chance to play with it much yet, but I like the new installation process using the Fedora Live CD. Only one CD image to download and burn as opposed to the 5 for FC 4-6. Of course that means you can't install all the packages you want initially, but they're easy enough to afterwards. The install goes much faster though. There's always the DVD image you can use too, which I'm sure is much more complete.
Unfortunately, I won't get to play with it a whole lot until after next week.
Soaker Saturday
Well, yesterday was a bit of a wash thanks to rain from Barry. At least the lawn got some much needed rain. Got pretty breezy last night too.
Judging from the latest radar images, it looks like the remnant of Barry is passing by now so there could be more rain in store for later today.
Linux desktop plunge
With Fedora 7, I decided to take the plunge and go Linux for my work desktop.
Should be a fun experiment. Already got printers added, email set up and connections to my other servers in place. About the only significant problems I'm anticipating are getting some of my spreadsheets converted over to OpenOffice. I think there are a few that use Excel-specific features that I'll have to work around. It's going to be a slow process that's just going to take some time.
I'm liking what I've got going so far.
Oooo, MT4
MT 4 is out a little earlier than I expected and is now open source no less (even more unexpected). I'm eagerly anticipating getting it running to kick some tires, but that will have to wait until next week when I get back. My new Fedora 7 desktop will make the perfect test platform too.
Star Trek meets LOLcats
Oh, this is too funny.
Ok, enough time wasted this morning. Time to get to work.
Found via Wil Wheaton
Off to SIIM 2007
In a few hours I'll be heading off to the SIIM 2007 meeting where I'll be giving my first conference talk ever!
Spent the last few months putting it together and the last few days reviewing and practicing it. Don't know what kind or how big of an audience will be there so I'm a little nervous. I'll probably spend most of the flight up there reviewing and going over the talk some more.
More later from the meeting.
Practice practice practice
Still practicing my talk for this afternoon. Thanks to much pumping up from my friend Jay who's been telling everybody at the meeting he sees, I'm feeling much pressure to make this a good one to live up to the hype. It's making me nervous. The morning sessions got skipped to get in more rehearsal time plus a few last minute tweaks to the talk.
Did take a little bit of time out to scout out the exhibit area. Saw a few neat things with some innovative mouse designs from a company called Contour Design. They'll be worth checking out in more detail later.
Anyway, back to practicing.
Newly inspired
I've been getting lots of ideas and inspiration to work on and investigate new things at the talks I've been going to at SIIM 2007.
My talk went well and seemed to be very well received. Had a few people come up to me afterwards to ask for copies of my talk, including one person who was going to use it as ammo to justify storage cost projections to his higher-ups. That's one of the things that makes you feel like your talk had an impact.
Off to another session, so maybe more later.
Back from SIIM
Thanks to flight delays, I got back from the meeting about an hour later than scheduled. It seems the more flying I do, the more annoyed at it I get. USAir's self check-in kiosks never work for me and timing for the flights always seems to leave me with 2 or 3 hour layovers. Maybe it's just the places I'm going.
Anyway, the meeting was very interesting with a big focus on informatics rather than just PACS and different implementations. There were a few talks about developing radiology ontologies and using them to develop semi-intelligent systems to help with diagnoses. There's a lot of datamining of radiology reports and journal articles that can be done to help radiologists, which is only just starting to be done at a few places. Sounds like really cool stuff.
A couple of talks about setting up big archive centers that kind of emphasized how far behind the medical field is with respect to technology. Learned about a lot of interesting sounding software that I'm looking forward to trying out at work.
The Rhode Island Convention Center where the meeting was held was a nice facility conveniently located near a bunch of hotels, although could have benefited from better WiFi coverage and more power outlets for us battery-impaired laptop users. There were power bars in the SIIM lounge, but it was too far away from the nearest hotspot to get anything more than a low signal. Maybe I just have a crappy wireless card in my 5150, but it seemed to me that the two WiFi hotspots in the building were pretty localized. If you weren't in visual range of the hotspot sign, you were pretty much out of luck.
SIIM 2007 talk
I thought I'd post the talk I have at SIIM 2007 for posterity and in case anybody else wanted to see it.
Impact of Various Imaging Modalities on PACS Archiving and Storage
This version has a few slides and graphs included that I took out of the version I presented because of time constraints.
Slow cooker roasting
For a slow cooker experiment (did I ever mention how much I love my slow cooker?), I thought I'd try roasting a chicken. Adapting a recipe from my Slow Cooker for Dummies book, I combined some jerk seasoning (Walkerswood is my favourite...it's seriously hot and a little bit goes a long long way), lime juice and garlic together and smeared it all over the chicken inside and out (make sure to get it under the skin). Left it in the fridge overnight and then in the morning, stuffed a few cloves of garlic inside and placed it into the slow cooker along with a half cup of chicken stock.
When I got home 8 hours later, I was greeted with the fragrant aroma of roasted jerk chicken (yum). After turning the cooker off and letting it cool a bit, I checked out the results.
There ended up being more liquid and fat coming off the chicken than I expected, so it turned into more of a braise than a roast. All the meat was falling off the bone, making disassembly a very easy job. The end result was very tasty though. I have a tendency to be a little heavy handed with the jerk seasoning, but this time I got it right. The chicken came out nice and tender, with just the right amount of spiciness. Very yummy, especially with a cold beer to cool things off when it gets too spicy hot.
Next time, remove the skin, skip the added liquid and try cooking it breast side down.
Moo dogs
Lately the dogs have taken to grazing on the grass in the back yard. I'm not sure if it's because it's getting long and they think it's fun to play with, or if they just have a grass munchy thing going on or what.
Usually they'll bite off a few blades (Nala likes to go after the seed stalks), munch away and then hack it up a few minutes later if it doesn't end up going all the way down (I guess it gets stuck in their throat and tickles it or something). Nala also likes to go after fallen leaves (maybe it's a crunch thing). Some days it's like I have a pair of small cows or goats.
I've heard some dogs will eat grass to make themselves throw up if they're not feeling well. This doesn't seem to be the case with Nala and Simba though. Judging from what I've read over on the Lab board, it seems like pretty normal (albeit odd) behaviour.
Maybe I should add some salad to their diet...
Linux transition phase 2
The move to Linux (Fedora 7) on my desktop at work is coming along nicely (much better once I remembered to punch a few holes in the firewall so I could establish NFS and Samba connections to various other computers). I've got calendaring and task lists going through Evolution. Still using Thunderbird for mail, although I might move that over to Evolution too.
One stumbling block I'm running into is that most of the spreadsheets I use for equipment testing have significant parts that break under OpenOffice, likely because they use functions that aren't implemented in OO. It's going to take a while to go through them all and figure out what functions are causing the problems and how to work around them.
One significant benefit is that I can test out things like software and config changes a lot easier from my desk before implementing on the server.
The IT folks are planning a move from Groupwise to MS Exchange and Outlook. Not sure how I'll deal with that when the switch happens. Just one more thing to work out.
A few things on the to-do list:
- Work out GPG integration with email
- Figure out why some apps aren't launching properly
- Database replication
- Fix my spreadsheets
Key lime pie to die for
I don't know why it's taken me so long to sample the offerings from Sublime, but today I finally got to try the key lime pie I've heard so many people rave about.
I have to say, it shattered all my expectations. It's not your traditional gelatin-set key lime pie. Oh no, it's much, much more. It's kind of frozen custard-y, not quite ice cream-y, not quite sherbet-y, but kind of almost all of them at the same time. Whatever it was, it was Y-U-M-M-Y.
It's my new favourite dessert. I've just been ruined for all other key lime pies now.
I can't wait to go back and try the key lime cheesecake.
And, as Jeff Allen points out, they don't just sell pies anymore. I was just there this morning browsing through the new offerings while I was waiting for the key lime pies I ordered to be boxed up. They have lots of neat local offerings like raw milk, local peaches, green peppers, bacon, beef and jams. All very tasty looking items.
Kind of reminds me of a local corner grocery store like my dad used to run when I was a kid. Only he didn't have desserts this good.
Kicking MovableType 4's wheels
Finally got around to getting MT4b2 up and running on the server. It's taken a few days for me to get the plugins copied over from the previous version and all the new default templates restored, but now everything seems to publish and work. I've got it running with a fairly plain default look right now.
There's a lot of stuff in MT4 to wrap my brain around. The default templates have a new structure that give it much more of a programming type feel. Most of the tags look pretty much the same, so I probably could have gone with the templates I'm currently using, but I wanted to start off fresh to check out the new templating structure. It's going to take a while for me to figure out, but it looks pretty cool. Very modular.
Not all the plugins I'm currently using are compatible with MT4, but none of the ones that don't work are vital, so I can wait until new versions come out. I'm really digging the new UI. It has kind of a Vox-y feel to it almost. Lots of new features to investigate and check out.
It's going to be fun to play with. MT4b3 should be coming out soon (tomorrow according to a recent email on the ProNet list). A little more testing and tweaking, and I think I might try switching over to the new version for some bleeding edge testing.
MT4b3 impressions
After futzing about with MT4 doing various things to see what I can break, I've got it settled down using my current set of templates. Everything seems to be working fine on the front end. There are still a few issues with the back end UI that need to be ironed out, and a few issues that I'm working through to figure out if it's a problem with MT or on my end.
Some of the things I've found so far:
- Display options settings in entry creation page don't stick. Also doesn't get settings from Preferences/Blog Settings/Entries (known bug)
- Preferences/Blog Settings/Entries: If I select All and then Save Changes, the selection reverts back to Custom.
- Basename text field is only one character wide
- JS dropdown menus drop down too quickly
- Would be nice if the publishing settings for a template could be set from the template listing page, rather than having to edit each template individually to set the publishing setting. i.e. Check the templates and select something like Dynamic or Static from the More actions dropdown
- Comments take a really long time to publish
- Name/email address fields don't go away when a user is signed into Typekey like they do with my MT3.35 blog
- Autosave kicks in even when nothing has been changed
Fedora Live USB?
I wonder if I can put the contents of the Fedora 7 LiveCD onto a USB drive and boot off it.
Now wouldn't that be cool. I'll have to search the interwebs to see if anybody has done it yet.
Update: I guess it can be done.
Now I'm going to have to get a USB thumb drive to try this out on.
Update 2: Got the LiveCD onto my 2 GB thumb drive. Tested it out and it's very cool Way faster than using a CD. The best part? I can still use the remaining 1.2 GB that's not taken up by the LiveCD stuff for porting things around. So cool.
My talk has been written about!
Woot!
There's an article over on Aunt Minnie about the talk I gave at SIIM.
Pretty good write-up I must say.
4 years of blogging!
Blogiversary #4 slipped by me this weekend while I was busy doing other non-Internety things. Where does the time go...
Sacrificial iPhone
AnandTech has a neat article showing off the guts and innards of an iPhone.
They did a pretty thorough dissection of the iPhone. I don't think all the king's horses and all the king's men will be able to put it back together again. At least as a working unit anyway.
Still not enough to get me to want a cell phone.