Jamcleat » current events

Indiana News

cbcalvin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:49:29 +0000

Giving Tree

My brother in Muncie Indiana has completed participation in a project at the Muncie Childrens Museum. For the last year he has been a “consultant/ finish carpenter” for a Ball State Architecture design- build class(es) project. The Tot Spot child activity area for children ages 0-5 was conceived, designed, and constructed by students under the guidance of architecture professor Pamela Harwood. For David, it has been both challenging and rewarding working with the students as they designed, modified and finally built each of the 6 areas. Each area has an inspirational book,

Very Hungry Caterpiller

The Giving Tree, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Scuffy the Tug Boat, Oh the Places You’ll Go, Jack and the Bean Stalk, and Old McDonald as a theme. There were over 57 students involved in making it over 2 semesters and both summer sessions. Now that it is open the kids seem to love it.
Thanks to the generous donations and support of the following organizations and foundations, this project was made a reality for the Muncie Children’s Museum: The Boren Foundation, Inc., George and Frances Ball Foundation, The Community Foundation of Muncie and Delaware County, Inc. and Robert A. and Beverly D. Terhune Fund.

Scuffy Tugboat

In other news, David found out Monday that he has been designated an “Indiana Artisan”. Selection of Indiana Artisans is a juried process. You can go to www.indianaartisan.org to learn more about it.

You can see more of David Calvin’s work at his own website, Whimwood.net.

Elvis is gone

cbcalvin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 18:14:58 +0000

Elvis, our 18 year old cat, died in his sleep last evening. He was walking around when I fed him at 1730. I did not check on him again until I went to bed. He was not breathing. I had taken him to the veterinarian at Cedar Lake Animal Hospital last week. He was off his feed and not perky. She said that he was old with some thyroid and metabolism problems. She was reluctant to give medication given his precarious condition. Now he is gone. I miss that old cat.

Attention Air Travelers!

cbcalvin — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:27:59 +0000

I do not know about you but twice a year I go to the dentist office for a cleaning. ONCE per year they take an x-ray. The sign on the wall says “If your are pregnant or think you might be…”. I am a guy so the chances are extremely unlikely but I take it to mean that even that small amount of x-ray energy necessary to penetrate my teeth and expose a sensitive film (now an electronic detector) may cause harm to a fetus, even if I were wearing a lead apron. I suspect that the TSA will not provide a lead apron to any individual.
Oh, did I mention that instead of x-rays, you my be subjected to microwave energy. While you may have a microwave oven in your kitchen, it was specifically designed so that if any leakage could expose you to microwave energy, it would fail to operate. In the late ’60′s, an article in Popular Science claimed that allowable microwave dosages in the USA were 100 times those allowed the USSR. I admit: I have not followed up on the current regulations or research.
Or you can take the physical search.
You choose.

Recent Activity

cbcalvin — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 21:47:04 +0000

I went to Florida to visit my dad. I took some pictures while I was there and put them up on www.wunderground.com. I also put some new pictures up on Flickr.
But one of the best things about the trip was a show of textiles and art created by the indigenous people of Mexico, Central America, and Columbia. The show at the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts, located on the campus of Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, is entitled Fabric of Live: Textiles of Latin America through December 18th. Admission is free but donations are accepted. The gift counter has cards with photographs and a booklet about the show. A half-hour documentary video is available to discuss the issues of changing ways and loss of traditional techniques.

The FIT campus (link opens pdf map) also has a botanical garden with many plants typical of Central and Coastal Florida. An interesting walk.

Limited parking in the lot closest to the Library (North lot off Babcock) for visitors.

Mexican Yarn Painting

Yo! Prez

cbcalvin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 01:27:44 +0000

President Obama, no disrespect intended: The article title is merely a wake-up. Your buddy Nancy has had you again. Did you notice that the lead-off on NPR this morning was that there are still folks in Haiti who have no roofs over their heads (several million). And our government’s best kept secret is the the number of construction jobs is still not where it ought to be. Seems to me a little per-diem, a steady paycheck, and the skills at building hurricane and earthquake proof housing of USA construction workers could go a long way at bootstrapping the Haitian restoration. If we had any leadership. If we had Representatives who were looking out for the workers of the USA, Nancy Pelosi. If we had Senators who were not sleeping, Harry Reid. Hillary Clinton, here is your chance to out-do Chavez. We voted for you. You have let us down. Big time. Again.

Progress Widget

cbcalvin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 02:51:03 +0000

A while ago, I posted that I was learning about GTK and more important (to me), GTK for C++. I have been carefully working through the tutorial. The way I learn best is by preparing to teach others. I have been taking notes and creating some exercises which I will contribute back to the GTKmm project when I get them into decent shape. I have worked through the entry widgets and next is the progress widget.

In the mean time, my wife, a sometime techno-phobe, asked me to help her purchase an online airline ticket. Not a big deal. An hour later, we have a printed ticket at a price that is not prohibitive. My wife, who had not heard the joke before, was amused by the phrase “World Wide Wait”. Forty-five minutes of the ticket time was spent looking at what I call a “spinner” and some at what techies call a “progress bar”.

The spinner is a screen that acts like it is doing something while you are waiting. The spinner that might be part the browser. If it were the cursor on your system, it would slow down or freeze when the local system is waiting for resources. Other times they hang because they are waiting for a remote, synchronous service like a firewall or a security check. But usually, they are just blinky lights, like the ones that used to chase each other around the marquee at the neighborhood theater until they burned out and nobody replaced them.

More important is the “progress bar”. Or more precisely, the lack-of-progress bar. This is supposed to move along steadily and indicate how close the web page is to being complete. I usually see it rush quickly toward half-way. Then slow down until at 75%, the progress becomes nil. Finally, after a time twice as long as the wait to half-way, a message box appears that the request cannot be completed due to a condition the user cannot do anything about. The message never suggests that the web host capacity planner has been sleeping in his chair after a beer at lunch or that that the host DBA meant to re-org the database last month but was at the beach.

And so I propose the “lack-of-progress bar”. This little gem, when embedded in your web page will not only entertain you by advancing in a non-monotonic way, arbitrarily falling back to a lesser state as the http under-covers encounters adversity, it will put out a meaningful message, pointing the finger at the actual cause of the delay, be it end-point host, local system, or the ISP. If there are multiple culprits, it will name them all.

Wait there is more! If supplied with the appropriate information, it will simultaneously, write a letter to the U.S. Representative, both Senators, the President, the FCC, the ICC, the DHS, and least effective but most annoying the TSA. It will Twitter a spurious rumor about the failing service provider, and a short sale order to your broker.

Or maybe it will meet the release date deadline. But probably not both.

Shakin’ it up here boss.

Just Dumb

cbcalvin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:46:40 +0000

The Florida pastor who wants to burn the Quran is wrong headed. Instead of burning a holy book, he should try burning Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design. The act might please God, would not harm soldiers in Afghanistan, it would satisfy the pastor’s arson-istic cravings, and Professor Hawking might enjoy the publicity. Everybody knows banning or burning books increases sales.

Citizen Graham

cbcalvin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 03:02:36 +0000

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has discussed with other lawmakers the possibility of drafting a constitutional amendment to deny U.S. born children of illegally present mothers the U.S. citizenship guaranteed by the constitution. Go for it Senator! Senator Graham and his cronies cannot seem to even get a majority together to properly fund a patrol on the border to keep out drug carriers or bombers. He should be concentrating on sorting the wheat from the chaff of the immigrants who come here by choice. He should leave the newborns that have no choice in the matter alone. Apparently his once keen mind is fading. A trick from Genesis: Distract the audience with something truly inconsequential while the really important stuff slithers by. Time to pass the baton, Senator Graham. I will be voting for whoever makes him Former Senator Graham.

Ice is Nice

cbcalvin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:30:00 +0000

Sitting here on the deck on a seasonally hot day reading The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I have a glass of what was ice water. Before the ice “cubes” melted, they were prisms of a segment. That is the shape that the level water in the ice maker has as the intersection with the arc that is the mold. Someplace around here, I have articles (a,b,c) about ice maker repair but when it works an ice maker is a wonderful thing.

In a previous time, the ice cubes had to be made in the freezer section of the refrigerator. A metal pan held held metal dividers that had to be warmed or shifted with a lever to separate the rectangular prisms from the separators in the tray. When plastic became popular, a plastic tray made “cubes” with trapezoidal faces. These trays ejected the ice everywhere but into the glass you were trying to fill.

Back even farther, chunks of ice were broken from the same block of ice that cooled the food in the ice box. An ice pick was poked at the ice until a chunk came off. The block of ice likely came from an ice plant where ammonia refrigerant cooled a couple of gallons of water in each mold to make thousands of blocks every day.

Even farther back and maybe still today where it is more economical than not, ice was sawn from surface of a lake or even a purpose-built pond. Hauled and stored in an ice-house with sawdust packed between the blocks to keep them from sticking and to insulate.

Just some thoughts on a day when the temperature is 97 or so. A bit of a breeze make it tolerable. And ice water makes it enjoyable.

Software Patents

cbcalvin — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:55:38 +0000

Patents give an inventor the Constitutionally protected exclusive right to a particular process for altering material or to a device for a specific purpose. The US Patent office has managed to extended this to software. Most of the software patents I have read fail to alter material or fail to be a device.
If I ran the zoo, I would permit any software patent given two conditions: 1) It alters something tangible. A general purpose computer does not count. The software needs to turn on a light, roll a bar of steel, catch a mouse. Not tell a broker when to buy. Not bounce a virtual ball screen. Not make a 2-D movie appear 3-D. 2) All of the source code related to the patent must be published as part of the patent grant. It can be secret up to the moment of grant but after that it is public information just as the patent law specifies that the patent enable the reproduction of the process or art at the expiration of the patent. Only the processes included in the published source code are protected. Different code that accomplishes the same end is not infringing.
We will have to wait a little bit to find out what the Supremes have to say about Bilski.