Robot Dreams

Going back to the beginning... We where staying in the expensive side of the island. Not that there is anything non-expensive in any of the Hawai'i islands, but Kailua-Kona is the vacation, resort, multi-million dollar locale. It's also where the political center of the island has been before the U.S.A. came along and swallowed up the islands. Strictly speaking on the second day there, since we arrived late afternoon Wednesday, we did some errands and walked around town. What better way to start this set of photos than with the terribly numerous, and yet very hard to find, gecko's of Hawai'i.

A few days ago I got back from a week vacation to Hawai'i, the island and state. This is the second time to the state, last time going to Kauai. And this time I had the better planning and preparation to avoid the malfunctioning camera incident that hit me when I went to Kauai. There isn't much to say about Hawai'i other than if you have a very short list of places to visit before you die, put it on your list. Now since I took a lot of pictures, 447 just on my digital puny camera, it took a few days (5) to just process them into a shape I could post 138 of those. And obviously it's going to take some time to blog about them all. But if you are impatient you can find them all on the photo section of my home pages. The only warning about this set of images, is that they are big, so stretch your browser window as much as you can to really enjoy the views. So a big aloha, from the bottom of Honaunau Bay, to you and keep on reading to see the rest of the photos...

When someone asks what it means to design a building to fit it's surroundings. This is the example I would show them.

Just a quick update since I've been silent for some time now. Usual stuff is going on, which essentially means a bunch of stuff at once. Most recently John and I took a trip to Toronto to attend part of the C++ Committee meeting being held at the IBM campus. We drove from Chicago, up around Detroit, and across to Toronto. Well, OK, John did all the driving and I did most of the navigation. Since this is the first I attend such a meeting I mostly listened, being clueless as to the details of what was going on. But the conversations during lunch and dinner where highly informative and fun. As usual I took pictures, but I don't have much time to post them right now... For now here's a stitched panorama of the Toronto skyline from the point of view of the Centre Island.

And no you aren't seeing double, Toronto seems fond of erecting buildings in pairs. 

OK, this post is a bit late since it's now day N+2, but I had some catching up to do before having enough free time to post pictures. Overall the conference was a success, or at least the attendees where happy. Putting Erin on the spot again... Many thanks go to her for putting up with a bunch of unruly programmers while managing to keep the C8H10N4O2 flowing.

Here we are a day before the end of BoostCon07, and I finally have time to post new pictures. It's been a busy and exciting few days. This has got to be the most talking I've done ever. What better way to start, than with the entrance to the Flug Forum building:

Tomorrow will be a long day with some morning sessions, lunch, the drive to Denver, and on to the flight to Chicago. Enjoy the small sampling of the pictures, and see you all on the Boost lists.

For those who are interested in C++, and in particular Boost C++ Libraries, BoostCon 2007 is approaching quickly. The conference is the week of May 13th. And early, as in reduced price, registration ends this week. I'll be going to both enjoy the Aspen scenery and to learn about new stuff going on in the C++ world. I'll even be running a session for engineering the testing system for Boost. If you can't be bothered to grace us with your presence. perhaps you know someone else who might be, so go tell them about it!

Right before I left on vacation for Kauai I replaced my phone service. There came a point that I could not receive phone calls while sitting at home, and I've had only a cell phone for years now. To put it mildly Cingular's claims about network coverage doesn't cover the customers that got swallowed up by their ATT wireless purchase. So I switched to T-mobile, for a lower price, more minutes, new international phone, and now I get a full signal at home

Why I came to use my phone for some pictures in this trip is simple... I didn't have time, I'm the kind of person who packs in the last 5 minutes if possible, to test if my SLR camera was working. So I try and use it for the first time in the helicopter tour we took, and it doesn't work. It just decides to rewind every roll of film I put in it. Anyway here are some of the resulting phone pictures from the trip...

• We tried doing a small hike to a pair of waterfalls, we only managed to see one of them after getting lost, and along the way we had some interesting spectators.

• One of the first things we did was to scoped out some of the local beaches and parks. The first one we visited was Ke'e Beach at the end of the road entering the Ha'ena State Park. None of us that went are really beach persons, John and I where more interested in the snorkeling, of which I'll post pictures eventually.

• The town we stayed in, Princeville, was once part of a plantation as much of Kaua'i was. At this point it is mostly resorts and vacation homes. But across the Kuhio highway, an overrated term since it's only the speed limit not the size that seems to change, is a lookout point with a view of the Taro Farms and of the start of the mountain range behind it.

• And stragely, on the last day, we took a stroll down to the beach at the end of the street in Princeville. The Puu Poa Beach is at the bottom of the cliff on which stands the Princeville Hotel. The image in this case is an arrangement of three phone pictures taken from the same spot.
  

Shortly before I went on vacation to Kaua'i North Shore, Princeville Google started it's second Summer of Code foray. Like usual I can't resist making suggestions and put together a very short page in the Boost Wiki with two project ideas, the first two Boost.Build ones. Like the proverbial snowball rolling down, many other people added ideas. And at some point, one day past the deadline, Boost was accepted into the SoC. And right before I left for Hawaii, I joined the mentor list for Boost SoC projects. So here I am in vacation, having fun, except for the part of loosing my wallet at the beach, and the Boost SoC wheels keep grinding.

So I come back a week later, one week ago now, and a few thousand emails of all kinds have accumulated (yes I got more than 3000 emails in one week). After quickly parsing a small percentage of the email, I go look at how the Boost SoC applications from students and find 130 still active applications to go through (44 of them had already been tossed out by the other mentors). Yikes I would have never expected so many students wanting to do work for Boost. As it turns out Boost is one of the top projects in the SoC, in terms of number of submissions. So here I am, late at night evaluating more applications. In this case for 2D Geometry Computation, and I've already gone through and evaluated the Boost.Build related ones (turns out there where a small number of those), and the ones for a Generic Tree Container.

I have my own theories as to why students would gravitate to wanting to work on Boost libraries. But I'd like to hear from others, since I haven't been a student for a long time now. What drives students to Boost and C++?

PS. I'll get around to posting the pictures, mostly underwater ones, from the vacation soon.

I made it back from Lake Tahoe in one piece. This was one of the few times that the travel was a real pain. Leaving from Ohare, Chicago, I managed to get delays in both directions. And given the propensity of Chicago weather it was for totally different weather phenomenon. On the way out, I was trapped Sunday night by a thunderstorm and tornado watch. Not that I don't mind the delays most of the time but two aspects of this one made it really painful.

First I was caught in the plane, so I was delayed for 3 hours inside the plane which was in line to take off in the middle of the taxi ways. Second, that delay put me arriving at Reno at 12:30am, and what's so special about that time? That's the exact time the last shuttle bus from Reno to Lake Tahoe was leaving. So I'm in the plane thinking that I'll have to stay overnight in Reno to wait for the first morning bus, yuck. As luck would have it the arrival was at 12:10am, so instead I was jogging through the Reno airport to catch that bus. I made it with 2 minutes to spare

Second on the way back in on Thursday afternoon, the pilots where nice enough to attempt to speed things up and try and get to Ohare before the weather would arrive and cause delays. And what weather would that be, perhaps another thunderstorm, after all it's almost Spring. No such luck for me, instead it was in the form of a snowstorm in the 4 to 6 inch range. So in the span of 3 days the weather goes from Spring to Winter and I catch both transitions.

And now for something completely different... As a form of relaxation I tend to write code in languages I usually don't use for work. This weekend I took up doing a bit of Python to try and get the Boost BuildBot operational again. And what could be so hard about that? After all it should be as easy as downloading and doing the usual configure stuff. Well I'm not the kind of person to be satisfied with the operation of much of the software out there, and hence my gravitation toward the Boost group. So my challenge for the weekend was to figure out how to use BuildBot without installing it.