Go ahead, browse the archives.
They haven't let us back home yet, but the major progress of the fire appears to be on the west side now and some other neighborhoods are being let back in.
I can see these plumes from where I’m staying now, and they would be visible from my street as well. I think they’re around 34.487403, -119.903975 and have been quite dramatic at sunset the last couple of days.
I am proud to announce an experimental piece of software I’ve written to help recovering broken rars. Say you've got a rar set for your favorite Linux iso, but some random part is bad and you have no recovery volumes. In this situation, you also have a torrent available, but don’t feel like downloading the whole thing. This tool will take your (broken) rars and reconstruct the full file for you, so the missing blocks can be recovered using the torrent.
Check it out in the projects section.
Today is the first time I've honestly wondered, "what is the proper whitebalance for a sky that's raining ash?" The Gap Fire which has simply been making it uncomfortable to breathe, threatened my neighborhood last night so an evacuation order was issued while I was out setting up a UPS to keep the network gear alive at the office. I'm staying with my coworker Roberto and his wife Karen now (thanks, guys).
The sky at the office last night
Cathedral Oaks near La Patera, two days ago
I wasn't conscious of the area covered by smoke until I left it last night
— in the normal course of life I've been under it for three straight
days. In the evenings it blows south, straight to the ocean; during the day,
to the west. 
The fire is creeping around so instead of being just a mile west,
it's also a mile north (see map at the side, pulled from Google Earth with the Forest Service's fire kmz overlay).
I just went by the post office on Patterson and they have an area labeled “cycle parking only” with an actual place to lock your bike. Cool.
Among the things I’m getting around to unpacking is my desktop computer. I was planning a switch to the Athlon64 I have since the dual Athlon XP bit the dust just days before I left Denton (it was bridge modded and three years was longer than I expected to get out of it anyway). The Athlon64 no longer POSTs due to I believe a momentary short in the front panel USB ports of the case, which has fried the northbridge — it gets burning hot within seconds of applying power now, and never gives a post beep even with the motherboard out of the case).
Computer’s don’t travel well, it seems. Oh well, trip to Fry’s! They had a Q6600 combo on sale (and they’re real good about having boxed cpu deals now) so I made the trek last weekend. I don’t know why I still get CDs from Fry’s, since the last three I have all had broken jewel cases found after the fact... but I did. I think it’s the instant gratification as opposed to the value and relative quality of Amazon’s music selection.
The motherboard was an ECS G31T-M, which features some impressive onboard video (quite well supported on Linux, although no DVI connector) and good overall performance. FSB1333 is not supported, and the USB2 ports onboard use up a lot of cpu, but that’s easily worked around by a USB2 PCI card I had sitting around. Also the MS Wireless Optical Desktop 4000 has pretty good range (around 5-6 feet reliably) so I’m using it at home and taking to work so I have a consistent keyboard feel. It’s slightly ergonomic but not too goofy. (I hit H with the wrong hand so all the MS Natural keyboard slow my typing considerably unless I use them all the time.)
After I got all that working, I bicycled 5 miles and came back tired. Still not ready for long rides.
It’s long. Even flying, it’s something like 5 hours and a pretty boring flight. That should be some sort of warning. Luckily my family and I managed to avoid finding $5/gal gas everywhere except in the middle of the desert (it’s still well under $5 here in SB right now). I got around 33mpg so it was around as cheap as flying if you just consider fuel costs, just took a bit longer (3 long days). Dealing with plant inspections is something new to me, so I had to leave my Ikea plant back with my grandparents in Lubbock. Now that I’m here I bought another from the Ikea in Carson (I was in Long Beach visiting my great aunt’s family).
I now have a California driver’s license, which entailed a trip to the DMV which is quite interesting. I got to queue to get a form to fill out, then queue again to turn in the form to get a number, which when called would let me go to a window to figure out the next window to queue at, take a test, and queue again to get it graded. The test is quite a bit different from the one I took in Texas (which was more concerned with right-of-way in different road size situations), and had topics like curbing wheels on hills and safety zones for trolleys.
Last week was another World Wide Panorama event, and since I was still moving in, I wasn’t sure I’d participate. Curious for ideas, one of my housemates named Paige helped out and showed me how to get to Old San Marcos Pass which is a real windy road that heads up into the hills. The modern San Marcos Pass is highway 154 which has a speed limit of something like 55mph. Signage is a bit more sparse on OSMP and it’s not like you’re going to hit anything more than 25mph average anyway. The few signs warning of sharp turns were especially disconcerting after you’ve passed 10 really sharp turns with no sign and wonder exactly how much sharper this one must be to get a sign.
The photo to the side is from the location that I think I’ll submit, and is a view southwest from the location of the map above.
I read that there are something like 1000 fires burning at any given point in time in California which seems like a large number to an outsider. I saw an odd-shaped cloud on the way home from work today and realized that it is a fire burning on the side of the hills, visible from Goleta around two miles from home. I don’t know if any structures were involved or if it was just a forest fire, but nobody seemed much alarmed about it so I suppose it’s a regular occurrence. The location was around Wylie Canyon somewhere (which is about a mile rightward of the photo here).
Update: The Independent is reporting on the fire.
I’ve arrived! Things have finally slowed down enough that I can get a weblog post in edgewise. First things first, I’m now moved to the Pacific coast in California, and have a new job as well.
Santa Barbara is literally pretty cool. The temperatures are almost always perfect (in the dead of winter the high is in the 60’s), and moving from a wooded part of Texas it’s a big shock how cool it can get at night, even when the days are hot. I’m renting a room, in a house with a view of the channel islands (on a clear day, over some other houses and power lines).
Another shock was that there is no FIOS available here, so I actually have to plan ahead if I have large data files I need to move around. I got a bit spoiled in Denton since if needed to move a 4GB VMWare image, it could transfer faster than I could drive home to burn it. 3-5Mbit DSL and Cable seem to be the norm here, with miniscule upload speeds by comparison.
The company I’m working for is called Nutricate, and I found out about the job from the Python Job Board so I can tell you that it really does work. I started there in June and it’s been a lot of fun so far. I get to write Python, primarily for an embedded ARM system, but a good part of it is interacting with serial peripherals, having only a partial spec for how the communication is to occur. Our product is to add nutrition information to receipts whenever you order food, which is currently a box (but we’re “not a hardware company”).
I've gotten a new job in Santa Barbara, California and am on my way there by car. I'll post an update with pictures and more about the area soon.
I had the pleasure of testing out a Sierra Wireless Aircard 750 last month and had to make some tweaks to get it working on OSX 10.4.11. It now responds to AT commands at least but I didn't get a successful connect (perhaps it's not activated).
Be warned the driver doesn't include a top-level folder so create one and extract into it. The original site is xochi.com/aircard.
You may get errors while loading the kernel module. If so, you just need to adjust the ownership to root:wheel (root:admin doesn't count).