Bang!

Huh. What the heck was that?

Bang! Bang! A muffled scream.

It came from the outside my work area… from the direction of Centennial Olympic Park. Didn’t see anything. Still not sure what’s going on. People are running in the Atrium on the other side of my work area… moving to the building exits. A security officer jogs through my area.

“Everybody, exit this way quickly.”

Everyone congregates in the Atrium. We wait in tense and communal fear. The din of people trying to find out what’s going on is pervasive, somehow different from the usual white noise of people eating and congregating there as they usually do.

…

We were allowed to return to our desks after about 15 minutes. It turned out to be a domestic disturbance. A man and a woman in an argument. They both are injured now, critically, it seems. A window in the entryway was shot out and both people were taken away in ambulances.

It’s certainly foundation shaking to be this close to an event like this. I can only speculate on what it must be to live in areas where things like this are commonplace. I can barely sit still, worried that someone might burst through the doors and start shooting.

In other news, my kids are sick… The last couple of nights have been hell. My poor wife… I’m a real grouch when I get tired and frustrated. I try so hard to hold it in, but it’s so very obvious that there’s a storm of anger and frustration rolling around just under the surface, and it boils over at all the wrong times. With all the whinin, coughing and hanging-on of the kids, I’ve no shortage of tired- or frustrated-ness. I just want to hide in an empty room and sleep in quiet… as if!

Girl Scout Cookie sales seemed to go pretty well this year… I’m not sure, but I think the bill my family will get stuck with will be relatively small. This is the first year I’ve actually participated in cookie sales… same as my daughter. It was a nightmare of organization and torturous on the feet. Door-to-door sales are killer. But my girl gets 2 free days at Girl Scout camp and a plethora of minor prizes as well. So everyone is happy.

Well… have fun, everyone.

My wife recently asked me to build her a new website. One that she could feel proud of and show to her family and friends as well as use to launch future home business ventures on. This is what I came up with.

The symbols are modeled after a celtic symbol called a triskele. If my research is correct, the triskele was a common adornment in celtic art, had some significance in pregnancy, and also evoked the relationship between the domains of earth, water and sky. I don’t get it all myself, really.

All artwork is original and drawn in Adobe Illustrator 10. I laid everything out and applied effects in Adobe Photoshop CS (1).

Much has changed about the site since I generated this preview, including the site title, content and navigation button names, but the overall UI is generally the same.

So I asked my wife to put her on the IM and see if I could help. I’m fairly certain that my wife did the typing….

UncleTravelingRush: Hello Gillian!
Gillian: Hi Daddy!
UncleTravelingRush: How are you doing, today?
Gillian: Good
How are you doing?
UncleTravelingRush: Pretty good. They’re keeping me busy here at the office.
I hear you’re doing school with Mommy, right now.
What’s that like?
Gillian: I’m doing math.
UncleTravelingRush: Is it easy or hard or in-between?
Gillian: Hard
UncleTravelingRush: Really? Is hard math fun or not-so-fun?
Gillian: not-so-fun
UncleTravelingRush: What do you think would help it to be more fun?
Gillian: With jill here beside me.
UncleTravelingRush: If Jill were with you, would you be able to finish it quiockly and not talk to mommy?
Gillian: Well, maybe.
UncleTravelingRush: Ah. Well, why don’t you go get Jill and let’s see if that helps. Okay?
Gillian: That’s still not all
UncleTravelingRush: No? what else?
Gillian: If only I could um uh think that’s it really
I just have one more thing to say
UncleTravelingRush: Okay. Please say it.
Gillian: I think it would it be nice for you to take today off.
UncleTravelingRush: I think it would be too. And I really wish I could. I really want to be home with you and Mommy right now.
..and Jacob , too!
Gillian: i love you
UncleTravelingRush: I love you, too.
Gillian: I think you’re fun
UncleTravelingRush: Thank you.
Now, I must get back to work. Please go get Jill and do your math. When I get home, I want you to tell me all about it. Okay?
Gillian: *blowing sigh* Well. It’s too bad that we couldn’t talk anymore.
UncleTravelingRush: I know. I like talking to you.
bye bye, baby girl.
Gillian: *giggles*
UncleTravelingRush:
Gillian: bye bye daddy

For reference, Jill is a stuffed rabit.

Anyway… I thought this whole conversation was cute.

I’ll save the details for the people who contact me directly.

Hooray!

However, since the most recent nightly’s Web Inspector seems to be broken, I recommend scrolling down on the nightly download page and grabbing r14296, which, at this time, is the last one with a working style inspector.

UPDATE: The nightly from June 11th (r14807) fixes this bug. New nightlies should also contain the fix.

const io_string_t path = kIOServicePlane ":/MacRISC2PE/uni-n@f8000000/AppleUniN/i2c@f8001000/PPCI2CInterface/temp-monitor@92/AppleCPUThermo";

io_registry_entry_t obj = IORegistryEntryFromPath( kIOMasterPortDefault, path );

CFTypeRef ref = IORegistryEntryCreateCFProperty( obj, CFSTR("temperature"), NULL, 0 );

The first line sets the path to the entry in the registry tree. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but apparently you can concatenate strings with just spaces in between when you are defining them… never knew that. Also, it appears that you don’t have to specify either “Root” or the 1st level entry name (as discovered in a dump of the ioreg command line tool). This particular path should only be considered valid for PowerMac3,6 computers.

The second line tries to locate the entry given the path.

The third line (error checking not shown here) loads a property from the entry.

Anyway, it works on my development computer, returning 256 times the current core temp (celcius) of my computer (since it is an integer representing the temp with some precision).

There are functions that can be used to scan the registry and traverse the entire tree. There is a function that can create a CFDictionary of all the properties in an entry. But if you already know the path, this is by far the fastest way to get a value from the IO registry.

Requesting comments… I designed this in Illustrator and added the shadow in Photoshop. I intend to use this design for a Yahoo! widget for MyRatePlan.com.

So woe unto those who standeth in the path of the devine conference. Especially unto the speaker who stayeth on stage overly long keeping me and company mine long into the night. Woe, I sayeth! Woe!

For it came to pass in the land of Rush that said speaker did paseth judgement onto the lowly company of weary conference goers and spake over long allowing too much drink to be imbibed by the masses thusly burdened.

I spent all weekend at the office preparing for this!?

I built this website for the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium (GTAC). This was a full-site redesign incorporating apache Server Side Includes (SSI) for headers, footers, and link-boxes. All content was pre-existing.

Credits: title-bar background by Apple. Photos by multiple unknown.

I designed all layout and background art (other than that used as the background for the header). And built all the CSS from scratch.

GTAC website copyright © Georgia Tech 2006.

The GTAC website is located at: http://www.ece.gatech.edu/research/GTAC.
They have not yet adopted the new design, but you can try it out, here.