Paradise projects: the next one...

Paradise projects: the next one...  We've been waiting quite a long while for this project to get started – getting a well drilled on the parcel that has our shed on it.  This well is mostly a backup in case something happens to our spring.  The well water won't be nearly as good as the spring water, but it should be far more reliable.  My plan is to run the well feed into the shed, set up a water conditioning system (softening and iron removal) there, along with a cistern (probably 1,000 gallons), secondary pump, and pressure tank.  I'll use the water in the barn and its surrounding landscaping, but mainly it will be there as backup for the spring.  To make that work, I'll have a bit of plumbing done so that I can switch the use of the pipe between feeding the shed from the house and vice versa.  Then if anything ever does go wrong with the spring (or its associated cistern and pump), I can just flip a few valves and get water from the well.

Several of my neighbors recommended the well driller – one Elray Westlake of Preston, Idaho.  Most of these neighbors had had bad experiences with one or another of the other local drillers (Preston is just a few miles north of Logan; we're quite close to the Idaho border here, so Elray is really still local).  Of Elray, though, everybody had only good things to say.

I first contacted Elray in September of 2014, just over a year ago.  He had quite a big backlog of work as the local construction industry was shaking off the recession.  I told him my requirements weren't urgent, and he should just keep me in mind the next time he had his rig down near Paradise.  About six weeks ago, he contacted me and said he'd soon be ready to start.  We've talked a few times since then – he's quite a character, very entertaining to talk with – and yesterday he called to say he was ready to go.  Sometime today he drove his rig over, along with a couple of trailers full of casing pipe.  You can see all that in the photo above, where he's parked along the north side of our little pine forest.  The well is going in just behind the drilling rig.  On Monday the work begins!

What sort of camera do I use?

What sort of camera do I use?  A reader wrote and asked, so I'll answer for everyone: for over a year now, I've used nothing other than my iPhone 5.  Usually I don't even post-process them; they're straight out of the camera.  Occasionally I'll do a little color-correction, temperature-correction, or cropping (I did all three on a few photos this morning). 

Do I miss the 35mm SLR?  Most of the time, no.  And I certainly don't miss lugging all that stuff around!  The iPhone's convenience and the fact that I'm always carrying it on my person trumps the technical advantages of the SLR the vast majority of the time.  Occasionally I miss the telephoto lens (naturally, the biggest and heaviest of the lot), especially for wildlife.  Even more occasionally I miss the macro lens, for flower closeups.  Most of the time, though, the combination of the wide angle lens on the iPhone and its pixel density lets me do anything I want to. We'll be getting a new phone sometime soon, and the new iPhone 6 camera with built-in optical stabilization and even higher pixel density will only increase these factors.

I likely will get a system camera again someday, but I'm guessing that it won't be a 35mm system.  The old standby camera companies (Nikon, Canon, etc.) are struggling because so many of the people who would formerly have purchased their 35mm SLR products are moving to either the smaller dedicated cameras or, like me, are simply using their mobile phone's camera.  The camera companies still have the advantage on the glass (the lenses), but the phone companies (especially Apple) have the upper hand on the software, display, and integration side.  The sensors are pretty much a tossup.  I'm sure this will all settle out one of these days, and somehow some company is going to get the best of both worlds.  I wouldn't dare try to predict which company that would be; there are just way too many possibilities.  About the only thing I'd bet on would be that the sensors in the future will trend smaller than 35mm, and consequently the lenses will be much smaller (and therefore more convenient!).  When it looks like the dust has settled for a while, and that there's something resembling a standard for the glass emerging, that's when I'll likely jump into a system camera again...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Our salmon yesterday afternoon was great.  We had the Ora King salmon again, with Debbie's technique of baking in foil with a mayonnaise-peppadew concoction on top.  Yummy stuff!  She also made a sort of stir-fry of potatoes, onions, and fresh bell peppers from our neighbor's garden.  Also extremely yummy!  We were both so full we could hardly move afterwards, though...

The mutts (Miki and Race) and I went for our walk this morning, after missing the past two days for various and sundry reasons.  We hit the trail shortly after the sun poked its way up over the Wasatch Mountains, in a partly cloudy sky.  This made for some interesting lighting effects, in some cases nicely highlighting the fall color.  I spent the entire time looking at the scenery, and didn't actually notice any wildlife (though I'm sure it was there!) until we were walking back over the irrigation canal bridge in our driveway.  There, in a box elder tree on the north side of the bridge, was a big, noisy flock of chickadees.  There must have been at least two dozen of them, all chattering away like mad, and flitting to and fro for no apparent reason.  Miki (the bird dog) completely ignored them.  Race (the sheep-herding dog) watched them intently, perhaps thinking that they looked like they needed herding :)  Some photos of Paradise for you:

Down the rabbit hole...

Down the rabbit hole...  That's where I've been going, in my bits and pieces of spare time.  The particular rabbit hole of the moment is matrix operations on gigantic (m x n on the order of 10M) but quite sparse (non-zero entries less than a couple percent).  These matrices are used to solve large systems of linear equations, where most operations are done on rows.  There are some special challenges here.  For instance, the sparsity changes (both up and down) as the calculations proceed.

I'm far from the first person to ever solve such problems – people were working on this exact problem back in the '50s and '60s.  There's an enormous body of both research and practical implementations – but remarkably little that's open source, and none that I've been able to find in Java that's well-suited to my problem (circuit simulation).  I'm quite surprised by this. On digging into what it would to implement it myself, I've discovered that it's not really all that hard, and that most of the challenges are in optimizing for the large scale of the operations involved.  Some of the optimization is actually compression.  That all feels like familiar territory – I know very little about matrix arithmetic, but there are a lot of articles and papers on implementation freely available on the web, and it all looks like stuff I should be able to do a good job implementing.

So down the sparse matrix arithmetic implementation rabbit hole I go :) 

SPDX: an interesting (and easy!) solution...

SPDX: an interesting (and easy!) solution ... for one of the more annoying challenges facing software engineers these days: copyright and license notices in source code...

New Enceladus photos from Cassini...

New Enceladus photos from Cassini...  There are lots of interesting raw images (like the one at right) to peruse, and a short article on the recent close flyby (closest one ever; they're accepting more risk as Cassini nears the end of its long and incredibly productive life)...