Today I learned: Lincoln is my hero!

I just finished Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Fantastic book, but even moreso was the brilliance and goodness of Lincoln himself.  I knew most of the history, but this book really focuses on how he worked with his cabinet - his leadership style and deep understanding of human behavior and motivation.

I recommend this to everyone!

Hmmm... Lawyer from Illinois, from humble beginnings, one term in Washington, running for president.  Everyone counted him out, no one thought he had the experience to survive, let alone thrive, in Washington DC.  That sounds vaguely familiar...

Today I Learned... WA 202E is 2 lanes to Sahalee

The construction has been going on for years, but today was the first day I could go from Redmond all the way to Sahalee Way with 2 lanes the whole way.

w00t!!

Today I learned... Mario is cool with a kickin' beat

Slammin'!

Today I Learned... I have cancer!

Sure, most of these posts are nerdy, but this one certainly fits the category of something I learned today.

Rather than fill this blog up with details about it, though, we've started a new blog called the Mutant Kidney and you can read all about it there.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled nerdiness.

Today I Learned... Tapioca Loaf

Tapioca Loaf.

That's actually a thing. It's sitting in our pantry.

Seriously.

Today I Learned... Norad Santa

For that last few years, we've occasionally kept a web page up on NoradSanta.org as they track the big guy across the sky on Christmas Eve. Today's Seattle Post Intelligencer has the back story on how a huge military site got involved in the annual radar tracking of Santa Claus.

The story is here though my favorite part was about the first phone call they ever received.

"The red phone rang," he says. That never happened, and it meant huge trouble. The red phone was the emergency line: It could only be his commander calling, or the Pentagon. "I picked it up and I said: 'Yes, sir? This is Colonel Shoup.' "

There was no answer for a moment. Then came the hesitant voice of a small boy. "Are you really Santa Claus?"

Shoup was taken aback. "I looked around my staff and I thought, 'Somebody's playing a joke on me. This isn't funny.' I said, 'Would you repeat that, please?' "

The boy asked again if he was Santa Claus. "I knew then that there was some screw-up on the phones."

There certainly was. A local Sears Roebuck store had advertised a Santa line, on which children could talk to the man himself as he prepared for his rounds. But the wrong phone number had been published. Instead of talking to a Sears volunteer, the child unwittingly got through to one of the most important lines in America -- and certainly to one of the most uptight men in the country that Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Today I Learned... Mac Mini Memory Enhancement

I'm going to be using some Mac Minis for running some parts of our shows. Since our animations are pretty busy, and the minis use a pretty low end video chip that uses system memory, I need to make sure there is plenty of memory on the machine, so I bought a Mini at the Apple store and then bought 3 GB of PC2 5300 667 memory and was met with the challenge of sticking said memory into said computer.

When Apple wants to make it easy to change memory, they do a beautiful job of designing their computers so you can put more memory in without using any tools. The Mac Mini is not one of those computers, though, and taking it apart is quite a challenge. Fortunately, there are a couple of good walkthroughs on the web of doing just that. The one at MethodShop is the most specific while the one at AppleFritter.com has plenty of nice pictures which help a lot when you're trying to figure out where that doo dad came from.

While they both cover the fact that you need to pop out the airport antenna to get at one of the screws, neither of them mention that if you aren't careful, the cable that connects that antenna to the motherboard will also pop off and there are no diagrams that show where it might have come from. Fortunately, I did find a picture that kinda sort hints at where it might go and I was able to re-attach it. A few minutes later and BING, I've got a 3 GB, 1.83GHz Mac Mini up and running.

Woo hoo!

Today I Learned... Bozzio & Wackerman

I had no idea that Terry Bozzio and Chad Wackerman ever played together. This is awesome!



Terry's set is chromatic and diatonic - that is one huge kit!! You can actually get a better sense of it here.

And is Wackerman the best name for drummer or what?

Today I Learned... My dog can eat a whole pizza

Oh sure, back in the day she was known to eat a loaf of bread and we know we need to keep the butter way back on the counter but generally, Tiki does not jump up and grab things from the counter. She's very good that way.

Last night, while Leslie and I were at a neighborhood Christmas party, Tiki seems to have pulled down not one, but two pizza boxes from the stove which each had a bit more than 1/2 of a pizza still in them. Well, I assume she did cuz when we got home, there were two empty pizza boxes on the floor and one guilty lookin' dog.

One guilty lookin', quite full, dog.

Today I Learned... How to Take Down a Mac

Actually, I learned a few things today, like that I can subscribe to the DeepRockDrive past shows video collection at blip.tv in iTunes and presto, awesome new videos on the iPod!  I also learned that Pearl totally rocks!

But the most interesting one came when I was trying to stress test some PHP code I was writing.  I wrote a javascript function that just posts to the server (also running on my machine) a bunch of times in a loop and then does a get to see what I get back.  This works fine, in general, but I started out with 1000 posts in that loop.  Things got totally crazy.  Of course the machine was locked up during the post cuz it takes a lot of CPU to do a fast loop with async callbacks but even after it was done, nearly every application locked up and I had to do a full system reset to get it back.

Running it a hundred times worked fine later on.  Clearly 1,000 is over some limit and I really don't feel like going further to figure out what that limit is.

So, um, don't do that :)

Today I Learned... Fullscreen mode made easy

I'm gonna start posting little things I learn each day (yeah - like it will actually happen each day...) Perhaps they will be of use to others. Leslie has already done this a few times and it seems like a great way of sharing little tidbits on the intarwebs.

Today's tidbit:
- (BOOL)enterFullScreenMode:(NSScreen *)screen withOptions:(NSDictionary *)options
- (void)exitFullScreenModeWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)options

These two little nuggets of joy from the Cocoa NSView class are incredibly useful when building an app that you want take over the whole screen when it is running (like a certain application I'm working on...) It's one thing that it goes full screen, but it is even cooler that it is for any NSView, not a full window so my custom view that hosts CALayer stuff can take over the whole screen during shows and hide all of the other config stuff around it.

COOL!

Thanks to David for pointing this out.

Edit: Oh, and you need to be very careful with this API. Make sure you have a way to call exitFullScreenModeWithOptions, or activity monitor on a second monitor or you will have a perfectly functioning, yet completely unfunctional computer on your hands :) SSH'ing in from another machine and killing your process is a good back door if you get stuck here :)