November 27, 2012
I went up to Estes Park over Thanksgiving weekend with my family. While I was there I got a chance to take some pictures of the Elk heard in town right at sunset. They were mostly hanging out and grazing, but a couple of the males were sparring. Some of the picture are below, you can find the rest here.
October 17, 2012
Two years ago I wrote a blog post about Hiking with a DSLR. I had just recently moved to Colorado and was enjoying all the great hikes but struggling with how to take my camera with me in an unobtrusive but accessible manner. Since then I’ve tried a few new options and thought I would write an update.
My camera is a still the Nikon D300, and my primary hiking lens is the Nikkor 17-55 2.8.
First, I supported the Capture Kickstarter project. I ended up purchasing two of them and found they were a pretty good solution for smaller cameras. However, with my D300 and the 17-55 2.8 the camera and lens were just a bit too heavy for longer hikes. I ended up giving these to my Dad, who has a D40 with some reasonably sized lenses and it works great. I also like the Capture because the camera mount is Arca-Swiss compatible, so you can keep a single bracket on your camera and switch between the Capture and a tripod. The kickstarter is long over but you can find them at peakdesignltd.com
The original Cotton Carrier (vest) was an good solution, but the chest harness was pretty bulky. I certainly used it quite a bit, but something smaller and less obtrusive was appealing. I bought the holster and liked it, but it was better for casual walks than hiking. You really don’t want something bumping against your legs on a long hike.
I’d also found that over time I was slightly annoyed by the solution I came up with to put the Cotton Carrier hub on the camera. Here is what I wrote before:
July 16, 2012
There was a small wave of excitement on twitter this week about employee benefits. Specifically, FullContact announced Paid Paid vacation. Essentially, not only do they provide you with vacation time (ie Paid time off), but they will pay for your vacation itself, in the form of $7,500 ‘bonus’ in salary (taxable of course).
This is a great marketing, as it drove a lot of social media traffic to their business yesterday. I’m sure they yielded a lot of new applicants, and probably some new sales leads as well. Nicely done.
However, I will take a skeptics view of this and share how I see this from the business side.
July 12, 2012
As a customer and fan of Amazon, I’ve been watching the company grow and develop for a while. Based on my experiences and observations, I’ve come up with a picture of the not-so-distant future that I believe will (mostly) come to pass.
Today
Setting aside their thriving Cloud Computing business, Amazon primarily sells consumer goods and digital entertainment (E-Books, Songs, Movies, TV Shows, and Android Applications).
Amazon has created a strong incentive to purchase digital contents through their store. They offer hardware dedicated for e-books (the Kindle line) as well as a 7" Android tablet for apps, music, e-books, and video. However, they do not lock you into their platform. You can read an Amazon e-book on Android devices, iOS devices, and your computer. You can stream Amazon shows and movies to various set-top boxes. Compared to Apple or Google’s online offering, they have the most complete and consumable content available, usually for the lowest price.
For physical goods, they have created a similar draw. Their Amazon Prime program is a genius approach to lock in customers. For $79 a year, your entire household can have everything they order from Amazon* delivered 2nd day, FOR FREE. Couple this with the lack of Sales Tax, ordering something from Amazon is almost always cheaper, and usually more convenient than going to a retail store. If you are really in a hurry, you can pay $3.99 per item to have it delivered overnight.
This eliminates most comparison shopping by Amazon Prime customers. If you’ve paid the $79, and are ordering it online, you will almost always start with Amazon, and usually will not spent time and effort comparison shopping.
May 22, 2012
The year 2000 came and went, and the world went on. There were no horrific date rollover bugs, despite all the press. However, that doesn’t mean that date rollover issues do not exist.
I just debugged a date rollover issue. It manifested as follows:
Our application worked fine in our local environment (of course), but when we deployed to a customer’s server, the cookies didn’t work. We took a look at the HTTP Headers using Chrome, and everything seemed fine. But still they didn’t work.
However, when I took a close look at the headers in our test environment and the server environment, the issue jumped right out at me.
Here was the header from our local environment:
Set-Cookie:prop1=value1;Path=/ourapp;Expires=Mon, 10-Jun-2080 00:13:42 GMT
And on the customer’s server:
et-Cookie:prop1=value1; Expires=Sun, 09-Jun-80 23:59:24 GMT; Path=/ourapp
Do you see it? It is rather obvious.
It is a date roll-over issue.
The problem was caused when we set the cookie expiration date to Integer.MAX_VALUE. This resulted in a date some time in 2080. In our local environment, Jetty handles this properly and uses a long date format for the year.
However, the production server uses IBM WebSphere, and it takes a short cut. It simply renders 2080 as 80.
So the browser sees the date and discards it as expired. Apparently it doesn’t use the ‘context clue’ of Sun to determine which century the date is in…
By setting a realistic expiration date for the cookie, it works just fine.
We were distracted for a bit by IBM WebSphere adding: Cache-Control:no-cache=“set-cookie, set-cookie2” However in the end that seems to be unrelated.
Hope this can help someone else.
May 14, 2012
In a fast moving marketplace like Consumer Electronics, where your newest cellphone is out of date within a year and ancient after two, I thought it would be worthwhile celebrating some of the electronics that have served me well year after year.
Some of these are great investments because they are in a category that evolves more slowly. Others are examples where buying quality really pays off.
May 4, 2012
I got to sit on the bench and watch the Rapids pre-game warm-up on Saturday (April 26) for the game against Chivas USA. I took some pictures of the team warming up. You can see the full set here. Below are some of the highlights.
February 21, 2012
Normally, I would use a packet sniffer, such as WireShark (OS X and Windows) to look at the network traffic and debug the application.
However, for Android development I do my primary development on a physical Android device. It is faster, and provides a more realistic experience during development and debugging. However, since the network traffic is no longer going through my computer, WireShark doesn’t help.
To solve this, I use another program called Charles. Charles is a ‘Web Debugging Proxy Application’. In short, it is a tool similar to WireShark, that allows you to easily debug network traffic. Charles is a bit ‘higher level’ than WireShark, and provides a simpler view of the web requests to developers.
It also has a great feature, called Reverse Proxy. This allows you to setup your local computer as a proxy for web traffic. You can set it up as follows:
January 1, 2012
At the end of 2011 I set out on a bit of a new path professionally. I am very excited about the opportunity and so far it is living up to expectations.
So as we begin the new year, I thought I’d share a few pictures of the path ahead…
Sometimes the path ahead is flat and well traveled…
And sometimes you need to watch your footing…
It can be steep…
And it can take you through beautiful places…
Sometimes you can barely make out the next marker…
And sometimes, there appears to be no path at all, even when you know others have been here before…
But always, we must travel on. And remember, it’s the journey that counts, not the destination.
Best of luck to all in 2012.
See the Smugmug Gallery for larger versions and more pictures.
October 9, 2011
Saturday we had our first snow of the year in Golden. It was just enough snow to have a great snowy soccer game, but by the afternoon it was a nice sunny fall day.
After the storm passed, my family and I headed up Lookout Mountain Road to check out the snow, and on the way down I captured a quick shot of Downtown Denver illuminated by the sun peaking through the clouds, while the rest of the area was still in the shade.