Doug Landauer: pix

Heisenberg's Video Principle

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 06:54:17 GMT

The observer affects the observed. It's much easier to get unobtrusive candid still photos than videos.

Condors in Big Sur

Thu, 10 May 2007 06:55:59 GMT

[image source]

Since it hadn't been affecting my life much, I had sorta lost track of how well the California Condor reintroduction program was going. But Deborah and I were in Big Sur last Saturday, having breakfast at Cafe Kevah (at Nepenthe), and watching the red-tailed hawks and turkey vultures soar in the updrafts just south of us. And then one of the big birds flew straight toward the open deck, passing only about 30 or 40 feet above us. Although it was at least turkey-vulture sized, I had just about become sure that it wasn't a turkey vulture — the dark/light pattern on its wings was reversed fore-and-aft from the t.v.'s pattern, and less distinctly black-and-white — and was admiring the long finger-feathers at the ends of the wings, when someone elsewhere on the patio said "Condor". Wow. Here are some related Condor links:

http://www.bigsurcalifornia.org/condors.html
http://www.montereybay.com/creagrus/MTY_condors.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_condor
A bit farther afield, there is (was?) a Condor trail proposal in Southern California — I wrote about it here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100945/2005/08/13.html . Pity, it looks like all the links from that posting are 404's now.

Python Snippets for the BayPIGgies

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:52:53 GMT

I contributed a comment (about Ruby's "Array#flatten" method) in a mailing list thread about python code snippets, and as a result I was asked to present some python snippets at tonight's meeting of the (SF) Bay Area Python Interest Group. So I picked four little bits of code. The code itself is at http://got.net/~landauer/sw/snippets/dl_snippets.tgz , or as separate python sources in that directory.

1. Invert Color

This snippet is a whole command-line command; it takes a string representing a (hex) html color value, and prints out its bitwise inverse (one's complement). It's non-scientific and pretty much unrelated to any optical notion of color complements. Inspired by a ruby version at http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/582 . There are only two bits of note here:

The join/map/lambda thing expands a three-hex-digit string into a six-digit string, by replicating each digit.
I thought of using the unary "~" complement operator, but it turns on too many other bits.

def invert_color (color):
    if color[0] == '#':
        color = color[1:]
    if len(color) == 3:
        color = ''.join( map( lambda m,n: m+n, color, color ) )
    return "#%06X" % (int(color, 16) ^ 0xFFFFFF)
#
import sys
for a in sys.argv[1:]:
    print invert_color(a)

2. Undent (aka "margin")

This function "undent" is nice to have in a utility library. It allows you to use nice source-relative indentation in triple-quoted strings, and it will strip off the extra indentation. I posted this snippet of code on the BayPIGgies list in February (2007). It was inspired by Hal Fulton's "margin" method from his Ruby book The Ruby Way. This does its work at runtime, and isn't as strict as the similar recipe that's in the Python cookbook. It's short (just four lines of meat) and a bit easier to use (less cluttered-looking at usage site) than other, more efficient compile-time versions. The code is very straightforward except for maybe the "rstrip" -- that removes the last line (of spaces and a newline).

import re
undent_pat = re.compile( r"^\s*\S(.*)$", re.M  )
def undent (str):
     return undent_pat.sub( r'\1', str.rstrip() )
#######################################
# Usage Example:
#
def getCustomerInfo(cust_id):
     sql  = undent( '''\
             |select customers.id as %s,
             |        sum(invoices.amount) as amount_total,
             |        blah as blah
             |   from customer 
             |   etc...
             ''')
     return sql % cust_id
print getCustomerInfo( '2345' )

Update: At the meeting, Drew pointed out that the standard library module "textwrap" has, since version 2.3, had a "dedent" function which does something similar (i.e., dedent does what the abovementioned cookbook recipe does).

3. My time/date stamp

See my "GIGO beH" posting for details. This command prints out my time/date stamp. No tricky code here.

import datetime
from string import digits as d, lowercase as lc, uppercase as uc
dom= '!' + d[1:] + uc[4:]      # Used for day of month
hms= d + uc + lc               # Used for mins, seconds.
now = datetime.datetime.now()
date_code= lc[ now.year - 2001 ] + lc[ now.month-1 ] + dom[ now.day ]
time_code= hms[ now.hour + 10 ] + hms[ now.minute ] +  hms[ now.second ]
print date_code + '_' + time_code

4. "flatten"

Because the flatten method was the subject of my contribution in the abovementioned email thread that got me into this trouble in the first place, I guess I ought to snip a bit of that here. This is a very minor tweak to Alex Martelli's cookbook version. Slightly shorter, probably slightly less clear, but I get to include a "no_can_do" function:

def can_do ( fn, exc = Exception ):
    try:          fn()
    except exc:   return 0
    else:         return 1
#
def no_can_do ( fn ):
    return not can_do( fn )
#
def isScalar(obj):
    return (    can_do( lambda: obj+'', TypeError ) or
             no_can_do( lambda: iter(obj) ) )
#
def flatten(sequence, scalarp=isScalar):
    for item in sequence:
        if scalarp(item):
            yield item
        else:
            for subitem in flatten(item, scalarp):
                yield subitem

Finally, for no good reason, here's a link to the rest of those Point Lobos pix.

A few days in Avalon

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:56:53 GMT

I spent much of last week on vacation on Catalina, in Avalon. We stayed at the Inn on Mt Ada (formerly Wrigley's mansion), above Avalon. It was a wonderful respite from the nonstop startup pace I've been sustaining for the past couple of years. We drove down south Monday after work, and stayed in a doubletree hotel in Carson. Most notable thing was that they had a poster of Winslow Homer's "Breezin' Up", which is a painting my Mom has a copy of on her wall. I may well not have noticed that except that I had snagged a .jpg of that painting, and included in a set of slides I made for her a couple of weeks ago, which I'll try to put up somewhere near here some day soon. Tuesday AM was hectic getting to the boat (freeways stopped up, and the Catalina Landing exit was closed), but the ride over was the smoothest I've ever experienced. We slept most of Tuesday, took the bus tour up to the airport on Wednesday, and the Casino tour on Thursday. The tour guides will tell you that Avalon is a city of contradictions -- Beach Bison; flying fish; swimming birds; a casino with no gambling; a mausoleum where no body was kept; a bird park with no birds; a city with a 3rd street, but no 1st, 2nd, or 4th (and 3rd Street is actually the second street from the beach); etc. The Inn loans you the use of a golf cart for the duration of your stay. I drove it around much of town. Other folks in town have some pretty amusingly customized carts. Fun trip.

My parents around 1965

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:24:11 GMT

A few days ago, I linked to Dick Oakes' Aman Folk Ensemble pages. They include links to a couple of photo galleries, but most of the photos are low resolution shots of groups of dancers, so I didn't really inspect them in much detail. So imagine my delight when I noticed the bottom of page 4 of Tony Shay's photos — a close-up of my parents, singing together.

Strikes me as being somewhat like a nice metaphor for their 58 years together! (Note: the date of this posting date is completely coincidental. No fooling.)

Sentence of the day

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:11:35 GMT

On my way in to work this morning, I heard part of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's press conference about the verdict in the Scooter Libby trial. I found one sentence he said to be somewhat amusing. A while after he makes statements like "we don't talk about anyone not on trial" and "I'm not gonna comment on things that have not happened", some reporter persists with questions about a possible appeal. Fitzgerald's response (about 40 seconds into the "part 2" youtube clip) was

"Out of respect for the appellate process, we're not going to predict how three judges who have not been selected will rule on an appeal not yet filed based upon arguments not yet made."

I just thought it was a nicely crafted amusing response to that kind of persistence. Here are youtube links to the two parts of the press conference:

Here, I try embedding part 2 ...

Home Sunset

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:22:15 GMT

] /RU/Home-sunset.jpg"> [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /RU/Home-sunset-thumb.jpg" align=left alt="2002 sunset, home in ben lomond"> Now that I'm on a roll, aiming (apparently) to break my posting-days-in-a-row record (don't worry, it's only in the low thirties), I look at my referrer stats once in a while. They're dominated by google searches for various nicknames from various cities, due to my city nicknames page. But I kept seeing this one home sunset photo that I shot in 2002 showing up. Weird, why would this nice but relatively obscure picture, that I hadn't really thought about for years, be referenced, on average, once or twice a day via google image search? The question didn't bubble up to being interesting enough to pursue until today. So ... I ran the google image search for home sunset. Whaddaya know, that shot is (currently) the first result shown. An inadvertent case of SEO, I guess.

Penrose Hexagon

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 04:57:32 GMT

A week and a half ago, I wrote about Penrose Triangle Tiling, and showed part of the output of my Scala program that generates such a tiling.

Well, here's output from a modified version, that just outputs a single hexagon, but actually wraps up the edges "correctly". Seems to me like it'd be a nice thing to make a favicon out of.

Once I figure out some better colors and clean up the code, I'll post the Scala sources somewhere.

Weekend ridge-walk

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:07:31 GMT

A "preview" subset of photos from a walk up the ridge this past weekend are here: http://got.net/~landauer/images/gaW-preview/ .

The photos are sans captions; here are a few you can sprinkle on the images:

Romeo's tail is getting nicely feathered this winter;
a neighbor's truck at the cul-de-sac trailhead at the end of my street;
the tree that fell in the Loma Prieta Quake in 1989 (see also this 2003 picture of the same tree);
Sears Portrait Studio photo of the Penny (aka "the überhund");
cool moss and lichen on the north side of our fence;
Romeo sniffing to learn what's going on outside the fence.

Anticip___ation

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:58:23 GMT

I put up just a few of my shots from my Cambria trip of a couple of weeks ago.

This one is my nephew Ben, about to jump a few feet from the log to the sand. Can't really tell from this angle, but he's out about 4 feet straight away from the camera, over the edge of the lagoon.

In the photos of Ben and his mother and of Jim and Cat, they're all sitting on my favorite Cambrian bench. See this entry from a wetter winter. The other three photos are Ben relaxing on a different one of those benches; Ben and Mary a bit farther south; and a dog on Moonstone Beach, just after it delivered a motivational lecture to a flock of seagulls (something about the gulls having wings, so why don't they go ahead and make use of them, instead of just milling about on the beach like a bunch of squirrels).

Penrose Triangle Tiling

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:34:01 GMT

So I wrote this Scala program to make a picture of the tiling that I wrote about in my Quilting entry. Here's a screen-grab from the middle of it:

Point Lobos: Sun through China Cove Arch

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 07:46:33 GMT

About a week and a half ago, after visiting my Mom at CHOMP, I snuck in a very quick visit to Point Lobos and Jack's Peak Park.

At Point Lobos, I took the short walk out the Sea Lion Trail, near Headland Cove, and then zipped down to China Cove. I've never managed to hit China Cove at just the right time before — in none of my photos has that arch been as, um, arch-ey as in this one. Here's a link to my whole set of Point Lobos Photos. A few other related links of interest:

Uwe Steinmueller's Point Lobos Photos.
a previous visit of mine
another previous visit of mine
Wikipedia's strangely unappealing entry on Point Lobos — "Hmm, let's see, how can we make this incredibly gorgeous place look dorky? I know, FISHPIX!!"

Stuffed Pups

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 06:47:28 GMT

Sue came over to house-sit while we were in Cambria. She brought her dog and puppies and stuffed toys:
Just before the little ones were born, their mom Haley was carrying the stuffed toys around and licking them. Practicing, I guess.

Carmel, PB, Cambria visit

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:47:59 GMT

Visited Cambria over the weekend, Deb and I and 'Tish and Ben heading south to there, and Jim and Cat heading north from Santa Barbara and Santa Maria. Outstandingly gorgeously clear. Photos will phollow. Today's best news is that my mom got out of the hospital! Hopefully the antibiotics will solve the problem. I visited her there (at CHOMP) last Wednesday and Thursday, and yesterday. One of those visits, I took a very quick detour through Point Lobos, and got some nice shots of China Beach.

Still more puppies -- Haley

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:59:37 GMT

Sue's dog Haley had puppies about 28 hours ago. I visited on my way home this evening, and got some photos:

All three are Blenheim-colored, two with the "dot". Two females and one male. Three of them are cute. :-)

Half a trip report

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 07:35:53 GMT

I put up a bunch of the photos from Ben & my recent Yosemite trip. I started writing a narrative, but it's not done yet. The half-done thing is up there now.

Nice trip.

Dot, Dash, and the Fridge

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 07:56:27 GMT

No names yet. One of the two black-and-whites, the youngest, needed a little help getting out, and looks like maybe he doesn't move quite as fast as the others. And the blenheim is a big bruiser. So some provisional names might be Dot, Dash, and Bus. Or Refrigerator. So, for now:
[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /fgE-nursing.jpg">
Dot and Dash, nursing.

[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /fgE-onePup.jpg">
I think Dot is front and center, here.

[Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "my_gimages" hasn't been defined.] /fgE-bruiser.jpg">
Refrigebus. Sumoartzenegger. Pup-beast.

Rob and the Texas4000, More Puppies, and a touristy weekend

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 06:15:50 GMT

My long July 4th weekend was hectic: drove up to Grass Valley to pick up Henrike, saw a fun "American Music" performance by the Music in the Mountains orchestra, and returned on Tuesday. Then I turned around and drove back up to San Mateo, to meet my brother Tim, his wife Jorja, and their son Robert. Rob is 21 and is in the middle of the Coastal route of the Texas 4000 bicycle ride, raising money and awareness for the fight against cancer, while riding bicycles from Austin to Anchorage. Monday was the ride from Carmel to San Francisco (passing within ten miles of my home), and he had a day off in S.F. on Tuesday. It was great to see them, and to see how much Rob is enjoying the event -- surely something he'll remember vividly for the rest of his life. Tomorrow, they get a day off, in Redwood National Park. The reason that Deb and I had to be in G.V. and miss Rob's ride-by: last Thursday, Henrike had three puppies. All males; the biggest one is a Blenheim, and the others are tri-color like Henny, though little brown appears on them yet. Tim and Jo were in the area here for the rest of the week; we got together on Saturday to see some of the Santa Cruz tourist attractions -- rode the Roaring Camp steam train up into the redwoods, took the short stroll among Henry Cowell Park's old-growth grove, drove a bit up into UCSC, and spent some time out at Natural Bridges State Park. Fun day — I don't make a point of going and seeing those places as often as I'd like to.

Matanzas Creek Winery

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 18:13:47 GMT

Between Santa Rosa and Sonoma, Bennett Valley Road sorta parallels the Valley of the Moon, but just a bit south of it. Just south of Annadel State Park is Matanzas Creek Winery. We got to attend their annual Lavender Festival a couple of weekends ago. Some photos that I took are here. The one above is from their website.

Reunion Roaring River Road's End Report

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 07:14:37 GMT

Saturday, 17 September, I went to Pasadena for my 35-year high school reunion. Took some photos but haven't put them up on the web yet. The organizer had a photo of my kindergarten class! Sunday, I got to go on a mountain bike ride with my nephew Ben and his mother's partner Marty, in Wildwood Park: http://tinyurl.com/7hnbk Monday, I drove up to Kings Canyon, found my backpacking friends, and we camped overnight near Grant Grove. Then, starting on Tuesday, we did a car shuttle and then walked about 33 miles in 3 days. We drove about a half-hour from Grant Grove to the trailhead at 7400 feet or so. We started hiking into a rainstorm ... saw five little frogs at various points along the trail. We climbed over a ridge and into the sun, for a great view of the newly-snowed-upon Great Western Divide ... After that, we descended gently along the beautiful Sugarloaf Valley, where we camped on Tuesday night. More thunderstorms happened overnight, but we all stayed dry. Pattie had brought a (lightweight, plastic, REI) flask of Cazaderos tequila -- very nice. Wednesday, we dropped down to about 7100 feet, before climbing 400 feet to Roaring River Ranger Station. (Pattie said that the beauty of this station convinced her that "Ranger" would be her next career, and she would find a way to be assigned to Roaring River.) Then we climbed another 1500 feet, to above Moraine Ridge. That was hard, but the views of the headwalls of Deadman Canyon and Cloud Canyon were spectacular! Godfrey had the same sort of flask, but he had brought some 18-year-old Glen Morangie. Yum! Friday (9/22), we started at 9000 feet, climbed up to Avalanche Pass (10,000 feet), and then down, down and down some more. And then some steep downhill, and then more downhill, and then down a cliff. Pix to be linked later ... [Looking down the worst section of the Sphinx Switchbacks] . [Looking up at a few of them] http://sierra-trails.com/sphinx/sphinx10.htm Altogether, we dropped 5000 feet that day. Yow! Here are the photos from the backpacking part of the trip, including the big frog I saw while we were driving out: http://tinyurl.com/9vv8v Oh, yeah: from about an hour before we reached the starting trailhead around noon on Tuesday, we saw no other humans until Thursday afternoon, about an hour before reaching the end of the trail. The last segment of the week was a car-camping weekend at Cedar Grove in the main section of Kings Canyon. (The 20th annual for some of the folks there; it was my 9th year attending it.) Here are a few photos from that get-together, including the annual walk up to Mist Falls. On my way out, I visited the lookout at Buck Rock -- 8500 feet elevation, and only about 12 miles from Grant Grove. Fantastic views! Here's the tinyURL for that segment of the week: http://tinyurl.com/76p8w . Bonus link, in case you missed it last year: photos from my Ansel Adams trip last year, along with brief caption-style trip report. The server goes down sometimes, but seems to be up at the moment: Google: NFSJ Photos, and the first hit (today, anyway) is http://zia.pycs.net/diM-NFSJ/ I'll add URLs later, though you can probably find most of these. [Edit: I added (tiny)URLs.]

Pix from Backpacking with Ben

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 06:48:20 GMT

I went backpacking with my nephew Benjamin a couple of wekeends ago (Friday 15 July through Sunday). The photos are up on my mac.com site. Ben is 10 years old, though he's a big 10. Last year, I took him on the first six or so miles of the High Sierra Trail, and we had a blast. So he'd been asking when we could schedule another backpacking trip this summer. Ben and his mother Mary had flown up from T.O., and she had to be in San Francisco for a work meeting. So I came up with the idea of having her drop Ben and me off on Skyline, and we would walk down through Long Ridge Open Space Preserve, down Ward Road into Portola State Park, and on out through Pescadero Creek County Park. It's a mostly downhill hike :-), but this time Ben's pack would be somewhat heavier.

The captions tell much of the story, but since I ran out of camera space on Saturday afternoon, there aren't captions for the pictures I didn't take. So: Saturday morning, we had headed straight out from Slate Creek Campground to do Peter's Creek Loop. We had seen a total of three people (and one raccoon) since leaving the trailhead. Peter's Creek Loop climbs a bit from camp, then has a very steep descent to the loop part. Near the high point of the trail, there are several spots with a lot of poison oak very close to the trail. Ben did quite well and I think he has a good idea of what poison oak looks like, and can recognize many of its varied forms. ("Toxicodendron diversibolum" is one of my favorite latin-style species names; it's so descriptive.) On the way back to camp, we did see a couple of adults and a couple of kids heading up there. We warned them about the poison oak, and it turned out that even the adults weren't quite sure what it looks like. So I pointed out a couple. Hope they didn't get any. Ben and I returned to camp, filtered some more water and played in the creek some more (it was a pretty hot day). Ben had just attended a house concert where groovelily had performed, and had a song of theirs in his head. Ben's a good-natured guy, and he sings a lot. Unfortunately in this case, he only had about two or three lines of this one song going. I heard that a few times before I finally started singing a few of the amusing songs that I know. His favorites ended up being Eric Bogle's "Nobody's Moggy" and the Austin Lounge Lizards' "Saguaro".
Anyway, we ended up at the Portola State Park HQ around five pm, and discovered to our delight that they had cold sodas and gatorade! We spent a fair amount of time there, rested, and called home to check in. Then we walked the remaining mile and a half to Tarwater Trail Camp. About when we got there, I remembered that I had intended to fill up our waters with tap water at the station, but it had completely slipped my mind. We did have enough for dinner, though, and the freeze-dried spaghetti meal wasn't bad at all. Sunday, we packed up and headed out; I had been thinking of taking the Pomponio Trail, since it's mostly singletrack, but we talked over the options and ended up walking back on Old Haul Road. It was cooler and a bit of marine layer had been sucked in. Old Haul is just inland from Butano Ridge, so it doesn't get much direct ocean breeze, but as we crossed each side canyon, there was a nice light cool breeze coming down it. We made pretty good time, and got out to the trailhead and saw a deer on the (paved) road. (Had not seen any deer at all in the wilderness part of the trip.) Headed over to the ranger station and store for milkshakes! Very fun trip.

Tahoe melting

Wed, 25 May 2005 04:32:38 GMT

Spent the weekend in Tahoe, helping my folks move. Visited Eagle Falls, above Emerald Bay, with nephew Ben and his mother. Awesome flow, I've never seen so much water there. Deb and I had an impromptu renewal-of-our-vows by the lake on Saturday evening, with Ben playing his late father's sax in the background. Drove home via Hope Valley, Carson Pass, frozen Lakes Caples and Silver, nice views of Pyramid Peak and the Crystal Range. Photos one of these days.

Kites, dogs, poppies

Wed, 04 May 2005 05:52:33 GMT

Tim "Due Diligence" Oren posted a photo of some beautiful, huge, octopus kites in Berkeley. I was reminded of my visit there a couple of years ago, with my nephew Ben and his mother Mary. A few other photos (from my 0x32nd B-Day party, and from that spring, which featured a whole lot of poppies in our backyard) can be found here. In this picture, you can see the lavender in our back yard, tidily peering out from their planter. Wait 'till I upload the photos from this year (two years after that photo was taken) -- the lavender are taking over. 'Spretty cool. That series also includes my favorite titmouse picture, from that same year. (So far, it's the only photo I've uploaded to Flickr.) He was standing on top of our backyard birdhouse. This year, 2005, we had a family of titmice living in there, and the parents were working all day, tag-team style, to bring food to the chirping babies inside the bird house. It was just in the past week that I got up, went outside, and it was all quiet. Got that (literal) empty nest syndrome!:-) But the myriad butterflies are making up for it, so far.

A few summer dog and snow pix

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 08:10:06 GMT

Here are some random, uncaptioned pix from August and September of 2004. Nice, misty backyard trees; weird dressed-up mannikin flag-holder at the Lark exit in LG/Campbell; Henrike "nursing"; great sky over Reno; snow on September 19 (still summer!); south end of Tahoe; Echo Lake with (very) cool boat; a sunset on my commute; Allison at Kings Canyon; Sue and her dog Kisses; our three dogs Romy, Penny, and Cody. Ok, I guess they're at least virtually captioned now.

NFSJ backpacking trip photos

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 05:43:21 GMT

I uploaded and captioned my NFSJ photos to the pycs server in New Zealand. Some few thumbnails: