After being down for maintenance since Sept 17, GOES 13 is back in service. Which is good because my AppleScript more or less broke while it was down. “The trouble stemmed from a motor vibration, which caused a lubricant buildup that obstructed the spinning motion of the filter wheel in the sounder. A team of engineers from NOAA, Boeing and ITT suppressed the vibration, the filter wheel restarted and is running smoothly, with improved performance. ” (http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/)
Here’s today’s view of Hurricane Sandy, which is just now clobbering the East coast. It’s from the Visualization Lab, and has a floating URL that will be something else tomorrow.
An interesting natural record. Xanthophyll, a water-soluble pigment in the maple leaf dissolves in the rain. The solution diffuses outward from the leaf. Apparently there are repeated cycles of diffusion and evaporation, leaving concentric outlines of the leaf.
Today’s note arises from installing Lion updates to my video editor workstations, which should have taken 20 minutes, but ended up taking 4 hours. Today I did not have typical problems just launching the App Store. These are often fixed by a re-boot, trashing various preferences, etc. However I did have two really annoying experiences I’ll share, with solutions.
First, I logged in to the App store using our admin account, and clicked the download button next to Lion. I got a spinning icon in the title bar, but no actual activity. In our environment this probably indicates a firewall issue; the App Store needs to communicate with the universe but is being blocked by our firewall, which is waiting for authentication from me. The Store doesn’t always handle this gracefully, and I know better. Behind a firewall, it’s best to authenticate first by hitting Google or somewhere that loads fast. Anyway, I then tried to cancel the download by clicking the “x” icon next to the button. This actually makes the Lion app disappear from the “Purchased” list, not the behavior I wanted. Hmmm, how do I get it back? I tried quitting and restarting the app store, even rebooting, these activities don’t restore the app, but may help to goose the App store into behaving appropriately. As it turns out, the button “hides” the app. This is a fairly handy feature, but isn’t the obvious function of what looks like a “stop” (or delete) button. To unhide it, one goes to the Store menu | View my account , where one will find a “View hidden purchases” gadget. So that’s easy when you figure it out. Then hopefully the restarts and so forth will rejigger the system enough that the download will actually start, indicated by a progress bar.
On another client, I went to download Lion and I got the “You have updates for other accounts” alert appears. The full text for the search engines is “You have updates for other accounts. To update this application sign in with the account you used to purchase it” God only knows what this is intended to mean. You are logged in correctly, you log out and log back in, restart, authenticate, whatever, and get the same message, and no download appears to start. You probably don’t have any other account. It probably should say, “You have already downloaded this thing”. In any case the fix is again simple. The download already has occurred, and it lives in Applications:Install Mac OS X Lion.app. When you launch that everything proceeds very nicely.
In 1965, the Ohio State University produced a film about the US Air Force’s use of instructional technology, called “Teacher-Centered Television”. The film contained this brief excerpt of an interview with Edward Teller as an example of one of the capabilities of the medium. Dr Teller responds to the question “Are there peaceful uses of nuclear explosions?”
Some time ago I was asked (about my beard) “how long are you going to let that thing grow?” I replied that I thought it had about maxed out, which it seems to do after 3 or 4 months.
Brownian motion routine from Processing.
I immediately think of a constrained random walk model for beard growth and
Our outdoor woodburner heats two houses and provides really hot water. And it’s carbon neutral!
forget about it. Still, I usually hit a point where the beard makes a nuisance of itself and something has to give. We had our first frost last night, and it felt very nippy doing the chores. I’ve already had a few beard-zipper conflicts with various coats and went, hmmm. I decided to fire up the old Woodmaster tonight, and after flipping a breaker and adjusting various valves in the basement, started a nice blaze in the thing. There was a smell I couldn’t immediately place. Perhaps a bit of plastic in with the wood? Of course the tip of the beard had been licked by an over-exuberant flame and fused into a kinky mess. So maybe it’s time to trim the beard….
Maybe can’t tell from this self-portrait, but the bottom inch or so is singed pretty good.
This annoying feature (related to version 10.0.5) was fixed by trashing the Matrox component “com.matrox.vpg.MPEG2IFrame.component” (ver 1.0.2) from the Macintosh HD:Library:QuickTime:
Hopefully I won’t be missing the Matrox component.
With the dairy barn, we inherited a big mess,including 2 or 3 hundred bales of straw that had long since been eroded into piles rather than stacks. Apparently mice like to munch the string, so most bales had broken. And ground hogs had burrows all through them.
Job is King of the Mountain
We wanted to recover the space in the barn and use or sell the straw, which while old, is fine for landscaping or mulch. We arranged with Caleb K to bring his New Holland baler over and planned for a day of baling He arrived as planned, and we made to move our tractor, a 1970’s vintage Ford 4000, and implements out of the way, . Of course, the battery was dead. It took the combined jump from the truck and a booster to fire it up. I’ll probably wait until Spring to replace the battery, which is about 6 years old. When Caleb fired up the baler and we started feeding, it got jammed up and the shaft broke with a bang, pretty much on the first bale. Not a good start.
Caleb working on the baler.
He headed off to get the part. Of course no one had the thing in stock, so around noon he called and said it would be at least Monday. We rescheduled for the following Friday.
Thursday Jean leaves a note on my desk. We had a half beef on order from Links, a local meat processor, and they were going to let us know a “week or so ahead” when it would be ready so we could make space in the freezer. I had doubts it would fit in our freezer anyway. I ended up taking a half vacation day, and we went and picked up a new freezer and 500 odd pounds of meat. Not exactly the original plan, but we got everything put away that evening. Friday Caleb got the baler running without too much issue and we got started. I will say that re-baling is wildly more painful than baling in the field, although at least it wasn’t 95 degrees… Even so, I think I didn’t hydrate well enough. When I got home after Friday’s work, I felt chilled and ached pretty much everywhere. By about midnight I felt fine, which is good because we still had sixty or eighty bales to finish up on Saturday. We had already sold a hundred bales, and as we finished baling, a truck arrived to start loading. These were nice tight bales, easily 60 pounds.
Caleb says the New Holland folks stand behind all their equipment…except the manure spreader!
I use an AppleScript to scrape files from the GOES archives at http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goeseast/fulldisk/ir4/ The collected files are then processed a bit in Photoshop, named with sequence numbers and fed to QuickTime Player 7 as an image sequence to make a QuickTime movie. Today, the script broke, and upon investigation, I found that the GOES 13 satellite is unavailable and that 14 had been activated for US East coast coverage. That will create a hop in the movie. Here’s the difference in coverage:
Consecutive images (with about a 21 hr gap) from 13 on the left and 14 on the right showing difference in coverage.
Planted some garlic last night, in time for vampire season. 3 inches deep about 6 inches apart, in nice rotted manure. Startled a big old toad who thought he had the place to himself.
