uplink.to

Monday morning did not begin well at the uplink.to campus:

Fortunately I have a 2TB external drive connected to my iMac, running Time Machine every day. You can pick up an external 1TB USB drive for less than $100. If you don’t have one already do it today, especially if you have a laptop. Setting up Time Machine is trivial. If you are on a PC the drive itself comes with backup software pre-installed on it you can start using right away as well as the Windows backup software.

I also have discrete file backups and GitHub repositories, but they are not as consistently updated as the automated backups are. I was a still a little nervous, if the backup file was corrupted, etc, etc. I booted off the Snow Leopard DVD (make sure you know where your install discs are located also!) by inserting the DVD and restarting with C pressed. The Disk Repair Utility was used to erase and reformat the drive. This was a tense few moments. I then ran the Time Machine restore option, picked the most recent backup image date, and the screen you see above was soon replaced with this:

You don’t even have to have the external drive plugged in all the time, just do a full image back up now at least. Beware though that the backup image file itself would become a single point of failure if a main drive goes down. Time Machine images are compressed deltas and have been known to be corrupted, so keep an alternate backup of the most critical files.

By all accounts, it was a beautiful day. The most I got to experience it though was the through the window next to the laptop! These pictures are from last year courtesy of sfcharterboat.com:

Jack London Square has been an epicenter of sailing this spring. The square was deserted a few years ago, it has definitely rebounded. Strictly Sail Pacific was back in town so the marinas of the square were festooned with sail boats and all the booths along the promenade. Oracle Racing had one of their catamarans on display there – more pics on my Flickr page.

In the space of a few weeks, new restaurants have opened to welcome the crews of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, about 10 boats of a custom class of ocean yachts. The Geraldton West Australia had been hit by a massive wave 250 miles offshore. Two injuries, but fortunately they were within range of the US Coast Guard who brought them back here to Coast Island. The Geraldton arrived a few days later, and left with the rest of the pack on the next leg through the Panama Canal.

Braid Paisley, in a reflective mood.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside…

Like millions of other people, I was sitting in front of a Mac with Xcode open when the news came that Steve Jobs passed away, deeply focused on the iPhone application I was working on. The day had already started off on a dark footing to say the least. Cupertino was front page, headline news already that morning.

Shareef Allman, an employee of Lehigh Hanson Cement Plant in Cupertino, began his 4am shift emptying a handgun and then an AK-47 killing three co-workers and injuring seven others. As I prepared to drive to work for a 10am start in Palo Alto from Oakland, Allman was running from police, armed and dangerous, in that area.

It was a dark and rainy morning also, a major storm also hit the Bay Area overnight. Power was out in some areas, flooding, and uprooted trees caused havoc with the morning commute and I drove down 880 through intermittent cloud bursts and across the Dunbarton Bridge into Palo Alto. Allman was still at large and had even attempted to carjack an HP employee near the HP campus close to the office park I was headed to. I was wary of the situation as I arrived at work, a mere 7 miles from Steve Job’s house.

By mid afternoon, the gunman was still on the loose in the Mountain View area, and several schools had been locked down as a house to house search continued. This still mattered somewhat as I went outside the building occasionally throughout the day. But life went on at work, and I focused on the task at hand, dealing with some release / retain issues in the iPhone code I was working on, and trying to trace object ownership through several NSArrays and NSDictionaries passing between subroutines. I was kind of stuck at that moment, so I reached out for some historical perspective.

This started with a thorough re-read of NSObject, and then a foray to the OpenStep timeline – Objective-C first emerged in Connecticut in the 80′s based on Smalltalk. In 1988, NeXT licensed Objective-C and used it for NextStep and then OpenStep which led to YellowBox etc and ultimately Mac OS X. Reading that lead me back to the object lifecycle discussion on apple.com, after a little biographical info on the NeXT company founding. So as Steve Jobs passed away a few miles from my desk, I was immersed about as deep as you could get into his life work.

I kept checking my Android phone for the latest on the gunman’s afternoon suicide as I read all this on my MacBook, and this is why I got the news of his death almost immediately. Like so many others, the man was a giant in my life, an almost constant mental companion and inspiration for 15 years, the moment was as if a power cord had been yanked from the wall to me, I just slumped forward onto the keyboard. It was a little early to be leaving the office, but clearly my work day was done. The streets were safe, the rain had stopped, and it was time to go home.

With apologies to Kim Wilde, its quite a commute but I am really enjoying it. I’ve spent most of the last 15 years driving all over the Bay Area anyway. Grabbed these shots while parked in one of the shoulder areas, was pretty dramatic!

(Bonus Kim Wilde track!)

This is where I find myself working for the next few months. It is a truly amazing place to work, what a Renaissance like center of learning and innovation it is.

Here is a robot’s eye view of my office location:

More information about their participation in the Willow Garage ROS program is here. And it uses Kinect, with Linux based drivers and a reference platform for all!

Another bonus for me is of course Bosch’s participation in the racing world, including being recently selected (along with McLaren!) for NASCAR’s switch from carburetor to fuel injection.

Another Australian victory, and this time I was there to see it! The first repeat winner since the series started running at Infineon Raceway in 2005. This is the second time I’ve seen this race at Sonoma. All the crashing, fights and action occurred in New Hampshire last weekend but this was a great day.

A great year to be an Australian racing fan. Mark Webber is holding second place right now in the Formula One standings, and Marcos Ambrose, so often the bridesmaid, finally wins one in NASCAR’s top rung of competition. Bonus, incredible racing every lap, wild wrecks, and a fist fight reminiscent of the pre-2000 days of NASCAR before the big networks starting broadcasting it!

Had some quality Xbox / Kinect time with my 5 year old over the 4th July weekend. It’s a little frustrating with the difference in height but the two player recognition is definitely improving; he still struggles with the holding still part while it identifies both of us though! I read briefly the official Microsoft Kinect SDK docs, that’s still a long way off for me, focusing on getting to the Android Market for now!

Cars 2 for Xbox has just been a delight and a visual feast. Still sticking to mainly racing games, they are easy to understand and brilliantly educational when it comes to math and physics! Most of them are split screen two player which is key for our household. Also, finally had a chance to catch up on races before the Tivo deleted them – the debut Kentucky NASCAR race was much better than the predictable Daytona run, and Silverstone delivered again for Formula One this weekend. I couldn’t get to Sonoma this year for the NASCAR race but it was great to watch that one finally too. The last time I was there Juan Pablo Montaya won (the weekend after that incredible Montreal F1 race), but that was five years ago!