What do you say to two guys in a public park with two huge antennas and an improvised hut in the middle?

"Are you trying to talk to the aliens?"

We got that one about three times. The most common inquiry was, "umm, I have to ask, what are you guys doing?" We got that one about twenty times.

Last weekend my pal Joel (W4LL) and me (N0JDC) operated a ham radio station for ARRL Field Day in a park near my house. Field Day is an event where amateur radio operators across North America simulate emergency conditions — improvised locations, no AC power, getting chewed on by mosquitos — and attempt to contact as many other stations as possible.

I was hoping for some 20m PSK31 DX yesterday evening but I only got some local QSOs on 14.070MHz before the band closed.

Another ham might respond:

Were you running barefoot or did you turn on your linear?

A non-ham, who's a pal and a good sport about ham stories, would respond:

Wow, cool. (nods head, empty stare)

The average non-ham, however, would respond:

Huh? Are you even speaking English?

Truth is, hams have their own made-up language, kind of like Esperanto but it sounds deceptively like English. But the layperson or ham-wannabe can learn to speak ham (or at least comprehend some of it) with a little help.

There's a price, however: the SCM keeps metadata on my machines, and this can add up. Plus there's the time needed to commit files. When it became clear I needed to switch away from Subversion because it doesn't cooperate with iWork files, I decided to look into alternatives.

Mercurial and Git appeared to be the best solutions, but there's quite the holy war going on between the two. Git's confusing, Mercurial is slow, etc.. I decided to run some of my own tests and let the data speak for itself.

Update 2008.04.25: Adding results for Bazaar.

You may have noticed that all URLs go to joshcarter.com now, and hopefully I've got redirects for all possible URLs — let me know if not. That's part of my longer-term plan for this site.

This is partly a how-to article, but mostly a collection of useful tips for Photoshop and Alien Skin Eye Candy filters. I'm using the Cowboy Denim theme I recently created for the T-Mobile Sidekick as an example. The WQVGA version pictured here is part of the final result.

Almost without trying, this theme became a cornucopia of Eye Candy effects. I use Eye Candy Impact on a regular basis in commercial work, but Sidekick themes are a good chance to pull out some of the crazier stuff. Go check 'em out at Alien Skin's web site.

You gotta give Apple credit, they know how to release products. Tonight they released Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) with great fanfare and no shortage of fans, either. I've seen impressive crowds at previous product releases and Apple Store openings. But what impresses me now is that, even though Apple has four stores in the Denver/Boulder area, and this is the sixth version of Mac OS X, they still drew hundreds of people to each store for the release.

I snapped these photos as the Flatirons Crossing store opened for Leopard. Once they packed the store and the line outside had cleared somewhat, mall security brought over the other line of people that couldn't fit in the first line. I went and got a bite to eat. Came back, store's still packed, line still outside. As I said, impressive.

UPDATE 2007.07.11: version 1.2 released.
UPDATE 2007.08.29: instructions for MT 4.0.
UPDATE 2008.05.01: instructions for MT 4.1.

Joel just clued me in on a new Captcha system called reCAPTCHA. What's different about reCAPTCHA is that they use the verification words to correct OCR mistakes in scanned books. In their words: "About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day.... in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort?"

They provide PHP code and a WordPress plugin, but I'm using Movable Type here, so I wrote a Movable Type plugin to use this system. Details follow...

When it comes to photo editing, I'm a do-it-yourselfer. I like to set levels and color adjust by hand, tweaking until I get it just right. Many Photoshop filters I've tried leave me unimpressed -- they tend to clobber any subtlety in the image, screaming, "look at my dazzling filter effects!"

But Alien Skin's Exposure filter is... wow.

Exposure claims to bring "the look and feel of film to digital photography." I don't have any wistful longing for "the film look" but I was suitably impressed by their samples, so I downloaded the demo. It turns out Exposure isn't just about the film look — it's a superb tool for all kinds of photo correction tasks.

Just a quick tip for the caffeine fiends out there: my favorite morning drink these days is a combo of Yerba Maté (South American tea) and Horchata (milk with cinnamon). The best Maté I've found out there, by far, is Coco Maté made by Café Maté. You can buy it in bags or as loose tea. Then I get Rice Dream Horchata, heat it up in the microwave, and mix it 50/50 with the Maté. The combo is stellar: it's like the best parts of a latte, tea, and Turkish coffee all in one.

Also, if you're into loose teas, my favorite accessory is this French Press mug. I use it for both tea and Maté. It's more convenient than tea bags because once you're done steeping, just push the plunger down — you don't need to worry about finding a trash can for the tea bag. Plus you can mix teas if you like, e.g. I'll often mix a green tea with an herbal spice tea.

Here are slides from my presentation at the Boulder/Denver Ruby Group on "Simple MapReduce with Ruby and Rinda." This is much of the same material as my article on the topic, but it focuses on the high points and perhaps better illustrates what's going on. If you were at the meeting and have comments on the presentation, or have time to play with MapReduce, shoot me an email and let me know!

#define FOO       1
#define BAR    3
#define BAZ   (FOO + BAR)
#define REALLY_LONG_DEFINE (BAZ * 2)

What I want is a magic command to line up all the definitions to the column that's the nearest multiple of the tab size, like so:

#define FOO                 1
#define BAR                 3
#define BAZ                 (FOO + BAR)
#define REALLY_LONG_DEFINE  (BAZ * 2)

So here's a script to do that: Download "Reformat Defines" TextMate Command. Source code follows for the curious.

More important to the geek readership is my job: I'm now working at Danger, Inc., makers of the T-Mobile Sidekick. For those of you who followed General Magic, the Sidekick is truly the realization of the vision behind Magic. It's the mobile communicator that becomes your information hub—phone, email, web, SMS, it's all there. Back in the General Magic days, when you heard Bill and Andy talking about their grand vision, the Sidekick is exactly what they were talking about. Fitting, isn't it, that one of Danger's founders was a guy I worked with at Magic.

But despite all that, I've got articles to post here, and I'm going to get on them. Really, I promise.

I use the Rinda framework to distribute tasks to remote workers. This simplifies a great deal of the MapReduce grunt work. The map and reduce code, along with data, is marshaled and sent over the network transparently. Creating a MapReduce job is as easy as creating an object, assigning lambdas for map and reduce, assigning data, then telling it to run.

Here are slides from my presentation at the Boulder/Denver Ruby Group last night. It's Ruby-focused "Lessons Learned" based on the project I've been leading this year, the software for Spectra Logic's new disk arrays. Topics covered include embedded vs. Internet web servers, interfacing with hardware and 3rd party tools, text processing, and a lot of Ruby on Windows stuff.