Buying a car in the Bay Area?
It might be worth your effort to avoid these guys. I quite liked Toyota 101 in Redwood City though.
My first commuting crash
And gosh it was stupid. I was riding home last night, and suddenly I notice my shoe lace on the left hand side getting tighter, and tighter. I stop the bike ok, because if figure the shoe lace is trapped in some of the twirly bits of the bike (it was wrapped around the crank in fact, caught in between the pedal and the crank). How do you get off a bike though when one foot is stuck to the pedal? Well, my answer was to fall over. So, I'm not hurt, but I guess that counts as a crash. I suspect it's time for bike shoes without laces.
Herm. Arnie and the DMV
Heh, I'm studying for my drivers test tomorrow, and Arnie has written the introduction to the DMV book. It's kinda strange really.
Napa Valley
Peter, Jasmine (the newly wed Stills) and I went out to the Napa Valley yesterday. Napa Valley is a fairly famous winery area -- kinda like a Californian Barossa. After a very nice meal and the discovery that a wine area is much more fun in the summer, we gave up and headed home. Definitely a revisit in a couple of months though.
Configuring Asterisk
Andrew is playing with Engin and Asterisk. There seem to be plenty of software SIP phones packaged for Debian, so I recommend starting with one of those -- the debugging is a lot easier. Also, Nerd Vittles has had some excellent howtos recently.
New tyres
I ended up getting new tyres for the bike... I thought about getting airless tyres, but in the end just got random tyres from Mike's Bikes who came highly recommended on a mailing list at work, and seemed really nice. I got Specialised tyres randomly, and they're really good. I can't remember their name now (I'll look it up later), but they have a tall center section which makes them look and act like road tyres on hard surfaces, and a knobbly bit on the outer edges for loose surfaces. Overall, lower rolling resistance on the hard stuff, and they gripped really well on the soft. I like them a lot. Update: So, the tyres are Specialized 06 Crossroads, or at least that's what the packaging says.
Cool people I have met at work
The guys behind the PKD android project -- very cool in a geeky way. Jimmy Carter -- very cool in an unbreaking the world way. Oh, and apparently you're always a President, even if you're no longer in office, and you're meant to stand when a President enters the room. Oh, and clapping means "yes".
Done?
Well, given the book is now in stores, the figures online, and the sample code available, I think I am basically finished with the project (barring future editions, which may or may not happen depending on demand I suppose). So, if you have questions about the book, the process of writing an open source book, or ImageMagick, feel free to drop me a line at the magic ImageMagick alias and I will see what I can do.
PHP sample source code
This is the source code for the sample graphing code demonstrated in Chapter 11 of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide. This is a small PHP script which demonstrates how to use a stock background image and some images stacked on top of each other to make quite nice bar graphs for a fictional website. Extracted source Tarball Zip file
C sample source code
Chapter nine of ImageMagick, the Definitive Guide includes a C program which acts as an ImageMagick delegate. This means it demonstrates how to implement support for a new file format with ImageMagick. Extracted source Tarball Zip file