mr_nice_gaius

For katanubis

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:51:54 GMT

Here's that picture I was talking about at Spot of Kings

The rest of the set is at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/avsfoto/3839736502/in/set-72157594398988276/ This particular picture is apparently dated 1460 and is from a set taken at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremburg.

This caught my eye because I've been looking at the Charles de Blois pourpoint which even though it's a century earlier has much the same shoulder construction, a little bit of research led me to the term for this sort of shoulder assembly, it's called a "grande assiette" and there's a pretty interesting write up about it at http://www.cottesimple.com/blois_and_sleeves/grande_assiette/grande_assiette_overview.htm.

Heh, this period's all new to me, so much fun :)

Jupon

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:50:36 GMT

So, if a person was suddenly looking at putting together something c. 1350-60. Are there any particular must-see references, either online or in the library that they should look at?

A friend is looking at having me make him a padded gambeson based upon the Charles de Blois pourpoint, and the more I looked at it, the more I was thinking that it would be fun to make myself a somewhat less padded version. But it won't exactly go with my c16 pants and boots, so I guess one piece will lead on to more...

Storm Large is so awesome!

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:41:28 GMT

Storm Large is quite the Portland rock celebrity and this is her latest music video.

OK, fair warning time:

This is totally NSFW.
Listening to this song is really likely to get it stuck in your head.
Singing said song under your breath gets you really strange looks, especially if you're a guy.

Otherwise, it's fully awesome:

OK, I've spent the whole morning posting this on to friends, guess I should start work. Thanks Jeff. :)

The words of God do not justify cruelty to women

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:39:11 GMT

Snagged from vesta_aurelia , I think this is just too good to not repost.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/jimmy-carter-womens-rights-equality

How computers have changed

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:59:10 GMT

An interesting performance metric reared it's head today. I just downloaded the source for and then built a complete copy of GNU Emacs for my MacBook in under 11 minutes (and my MacBook's actually on the slow side based on the current models). It really doesn't seem that long since that same thing used to take hours.

That said, I had Gnu Emacs running on an Atari ST and I think that building that freak was the work of a weekend, though bootstrapping the tools needed might well have been a good chunk of that.

MacBook for sale

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:41:57 GMT

I've upgraded to a MacBook pro and have a very nice, 6 month old MacBook for sale. This is a really good deal, both as a Mac and as a light functional laptop, in fact I liked it so much I got a bigger one rather than another Windows laptop.

Details here: ebay link

Cats...

Wed, 20 May 2009 05:35:56 GMT

First came "An Engineer's Guide to Cats"

Now they bring us 'Advanced Cat Yodeling":

Fully awesome :)

Seriously cool music video

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:25:54 GMT

Left me smiling and then playing their other videos.

One for the foodies

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:19:56 GMT

NPR had a really interesting piece last night about medieval Islamic cooking, in part talking about how over half of extant cookbooks from pre-1500 are in Arabic. Apparently, they wrote a lot of cookbooks. Anyway, they made this book sound really interesting so I thought I'd pass it on.

It's called: Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes by Lilia Zaouali

http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Cuisine-Islamic-World-California/dp/0520247833/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239031014&sr=1-1

http://splendidtable.publicradio.org/store/?0520261747

Because silence isn't always golden.

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:24:36 GMT

</lj-embed>

snagged from karjack

UC Men's Octet

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:53:20 GMT

Full of awesome.

Costume questions: Kingdom of Sicily

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:12:42 GMT

I saw this in Vienna a while ago: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_nice_gaius/1050712317/in/set-72157601306437835/ a very nice 12th century Norman Sicilian dalmatica, it got me thinking :)

A) It's a fascinating period in history.
B) Sicily was one of the most interesting parts of the world in that period being a crossroads between western Europe, Byzantium and the Arab world.
C) It would make for something cooler to wear than full Elizabethan during hot summer events.

Can anyone recommend any particular costuming resources that I could use to persue this a bit further? I've got enough photos that I can probably make a pretty good stab at a tunic quite like that one, at least as far as seam placement and cut is concerned, but other than that one item, I'm a bit in the dark.

Fun with "balloons"

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:08:42 GMT

http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:article&newsId=133773

Depending on where you work, this is most likely NSFW, but man it's funny.

An Tir Kingdom A&S questions....

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 19:09:58 GMT

I know it's a bit late, katanubis reminded me that if I want to enter I should do so quickly since apparently the deadline has been extended.

So I thought, well that's easy, I should be able to work this out, what's the new deadline, and what do I have to do. More to the point, have I already dithered too much to meet any new deadline.

So, off to the events list, find the event web site, obviously the answer should be there.

Wrong.

Kingdom A&S might be at Wastekeep, but as far as the web site's concerned, it's something you visit, and if you want to compete you must get the information elsewhere. There's reference to a 12th night deadline, well I missed that, and anyway it sounds like that's incorrect. There's reference to an Entrant's Handbook, but no suggestion as to where you'd get such a thing. Finally there's a blank reference to the A&S web site, but no link. I also remember that the format of the competition has changed from previous years, again, details of this would be handy.

So, can anyone fill in the gaps and point me to how you are meant to find this stuff out?

Thank you.

12th night

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:08:04 GMT

In a word, Awesome!

I saw my friends Vik Vikingsson and ya_inga crowned King and Queen of An Tir, which was particularly special, since this is the first time I've actually known the people involved in any way other than just recognizing them at a distance.

I saw landsknecht_po put on vigil to become a member of the Order of the Laurel. Mathias Bane has barely returned to us from his sojourn in Scotland and he was put on vigil for his Knighthood, again awesome. And I got to see gulenay_barb 's face when her beau Einar was put on vigil for knighthood. Oh I wish I'd had a camera handy then, talk about stunned and ecstatic :) Achaxe got a court baronessy (if that's even a word). Honestly, I don't really know her personally, but I've heard about the amount of work she puts in to make the game we play more enjoyable and was very happy to see it recognized. It was also very clear that the audience at court thought the same :)

I got to see a wealth of cool clothing. From the coronation clothes and onwards. That said, seeing Inga's dress and realizing that it was made from the fabric that I'd seen khalja showing off earlier in the year after she'd finished weaving it, and OMG it was lovely. The fabric was a lovely tight blue herringbone and it made for an awesome viking dress. Then there were Vik and Inga's embroidered shirts. Wow, I really can't describe them adequately, but I did get some photos, I must post them soon.

Saturday night was spent catching up with the crew from Adiantum, many of whom I just don't get to see anywhere near often enough. They threw one hell of a good party :)

The hotel was wonderful, I found the staff to be so very nice, cheerful and helpful. The decorations around the hotel we amazing, whoever thought of the stained glass and then went ahead and produced them, my hats off to them. They really added to the ambience of the event.

My only real gripe was that the event was so short. Sure I got to see a ton of people, but I miss that I didn't get to hang out with many more. You spend the friday night saying hi to the folks that you find, everything gets into full swing on the Saturday and by Saturday night you know what's where, who's in which room etc. Then on Sunday it's over and it's time to drive away. I really wish that there was another day in there somewhere.

Now it's time to prep for whatever's next. The great thing about a good event is that it's fires the enthusiasm for other events. I'll have a flying visit to Estrella, then there's KA&S. Since I don't have a schedule conflict there this year, maybe I should enter something. I started the documentation for the Dudley doublet, maybe now's the time to finish it :)

For Santa

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:44:02 GMT

Awesome, clicky here: http://photognome.livejournal.com/297181.html

Mac part two

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:29:10 GMT

$30 later I have my macbook hooked up to a nice 24" widescreen monitor. Very nice :)

Did discover another annoyance though. The single menu bar, I always thought that it was rather dumb, separate the control UI spatially from the objects that you are working on, but oh well, that's the mac way, get used to it. And honestly, on a single monitor, it works pretty well. But with multiple monitors, it's freaking awful. Try to put work on one screen and a browser for reference on another, and you're hopping between screens to get at the menu for whatever's on the off screen? WTF!

Still not used to the keyboard. I'd never realized just how much I'd used home and end before they stopped working for me. What's worse, is that I have my nice ergonomic keyboard from my PC hooked up now, and home and end on there don't work either. Maybe if I hunt around I'll find some hack to make them work again.

I also need to find some way to remap the windows and alt keys if I'm going to use a PC keyboard on the mac for any length of time since the mac has it's key order reversed WRT the PC keyboard, and I'll never get used to it if my desktop keyboard doesn't match the laptop.

I don't suppose that Microsoft makes one of their nice ergonomic keyboards for a mac.

Mac part one

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:00:22 GMT

I've been a long time PC user, and I mean long time; I've been using them since before Windows 1 came out. Anyway, I've got a new MacBook, so I thought that I'd write up first impressions whilst they were actually first impressions :)

Pros:

It's small, this is a very good thing, I like having a laptop that I can take everywhere without feeling that I'm lugging a great weight around. It's actually a bit heavier then my carbon fiber Sony Vaio SZ160, but surprisingly it's a chunk thinner.

It's fast. This is more a factor of it simply being three years newer then my Sony, but from the point of view of an upgrade, it's clearly faster. That said, one of the higher end models might have been a better long term choice.

The multi touch track pad is really nice. The setup utility for it was really very good, one of the nicest designed "look I'm a Mac" apps I've seen so far. The two finger drag to scroll a page is very nice and beats the earlier touchpad route of just dragging down a magic region of the touchpad. Thought you can still end out using regions if you want a right mouse button option. No option (that I've found) to deal with a middle mouse button.

It's Unix :) I still find it a bit of a mind-f**k that Apple, the worlds most pretentious command line hater, is now the worlds largest Unix distributer. I've been using Unix in one form or another pretty solidly for over the last 20 years, so having a unix laptop really is pretty awesome.

The screen automatically dims if I'm in a darkened room, very cool :) Nothing I couldn't do manually, but a vert nice touch.

Cons:

All of the window buttons are in the top left, weird and I guess I'll get used to it, but it's going to be a while before I stop automatically going to the top right to close or minimize an application.

Gunmetal grey. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the default, dismal, color scheme, weird. I always felt that iTunes on the PC was butt-ugly, now the whole OS looks like it, which is consistent, but still pretty blech.

Keyboard. WTF no home and end keys? Fn and arrow work in some apps, but not all of them. Command and arrow works in others, but again, not all of them. Likewise the backspace key is called delete, but there's no delete key. Then there's opt, cmd and ctl keys. opt is pretty similar to alt on a pc, fair enough. Command is much more like ctrl on a PC, so what is control for on a mac? Seems like it's there to confuse PC noobs who might think they know what to press. I've got to say that having the command key where it is makes for much more awkward typing than over to the left side like on a PC. I'm used to ctrl-C, ctrl-V holding down the crtl key with my pinky, and that just doesn't work on the macbook, so I've got some finger retraining to do. Guess I'll get used to it.

No Microphone port! Woot, I have an audio in port instead. Apparently if I want to use a microphone for Skype or ventrilo I have to get one with its own pre-amp or just get a usb headset. Nice job Apple catering to the 1% of the population who care about such things.

Have to go and buy an adapter to connect it to my monitor :( I knew that this was likely, but still it would have been nice if an adapter had been in the case. Apple have a reputation for nickel and diming their customers so I guess I should get used to it.

----

There'll probably be more, but that's it for now. Off to buy an adapter :)

Grouting

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:47:24 GMT

So, grouting bathroom tiles sucks. Part of it's easy, and part of it is like trying to wipe up hardened concrete with a sponge. In fact it's not just like that, it is that. Bah. Anyway, Lowes put me on to "DuPont heavy duty Grout Haze Remover" and it's freaking awesome! Still a good bit of scrubbing involved, but way the heck easier :) I'll trade $10 for hours of hard work any day.

Happy day.

Source Control geekitude

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:15:30 GMT

I've used quite a number of source control systems over the years (rcs, cvs, SourceSafe and Visual SourceSafe, Clearcase, SVN and now Bazaar), so I feel that on the whole I've got a reasonable appreciation of what they should do, and have a reasonable ability to detect when they suck. Having to use something that sucks regularly, is not conducive to keeping ones opinions to oneself (for me at least).

At one point in a distant past our company used Visual Source Safe, we had a cross platform product and so it's MS Windows centric model killed that stone dead very quickly. From there we moved to Clearcase. A number of us had used it in the past, liked it and once we were up and running things actually were quite smooth for a long time. However, it's very expensive to manage in cash terms, and eventually more importantly in terms of man power. We decided to find another source control system, which was a good thing. For reasons that to this day I don't completely understand we chose SVN and for us that wasn't a good decision.

Anyway, the point of this post is to talk about what we've moved to instead and explain why I'm so happy about the move.

We've switched over to Bazaar. Unlike every other vcs I've used it's a distributed system, there's no explicit central repository, though you can, and we have, nominated a specific repository as the SCM department's repository which is our "gold" copy, gets the off-site backup, is referenced for the official builds etc.

All of that's good, but my main cause for joy is that branches and merges actually work.

We have a reasonable sized dev team, and within that group we have three to four or so separate feature teams. Each feature team comprises several developers, all of whom want access to each others code, but want to remain insulated from the other feature teams This translates into a trunk branch and then one branch off trunk for each feature team. As a feature team completes a given feature, that branch gets merged to trunk and that branch most likely disappears. The other branches may or may not want completed features merged from trunk to their feature branch so that they can stay up to date with other product changes. The desire here is that merging generally only really happens on stable code. Those other feature branches get merged to trunk as and when they are done. And yes, I know that this is a very Clearcase way of doing things, but honestly, that's because it works and I've yet to find another methodology that caters to how we want to develop as well.

I expect a vcs system to track merges, and to be able to merge between branches without generating crap because they don't know what's already been merged. SVN failed this test big time. SVN talks a good story on branching, but basically it's all smoke and mirrors. Branches are complete clones of the code base and the tools just don't provide enough information to do the job. SVN 1.5 added some metadata to the file store to track some of this and it certainly cut down on the number of completely broken merges but still, you've got a lot of book-keeping to do if you expect long lived branches to not be a pain.

Enter Bazaar, honestly I was a bit skeptical. Another open source system, couldn't we just buy Perforce and be done with it?

Short summary, it's freaking awesome.

Branching is fast, an operation that might take 20 or 30 minutes on svn, took about 5 for me on the same hardware, and the disk space used is smaller by about 40%. The command set is pretty similar to all the other vcs systems that I've used so it's fairly simple to get a handle on. Also, since it's a distributed system, it's got a complete copy of the repository when you do a branch so many vcs commands can be performed locally.

The big difference is that merges actually work and more to the point seem to do what you'd like them to do as the first choice as opposed to barfing, and then making you hunt for obscure command line switches before failing and making you do them by hand anyway.

You can also do peer to peer merges completely ignoring the so called parent branch, and the final merges to the parent branch actually do something sensible.

Honestly I'm rather stunned, I keep adding obscure edge cases to test scripts expecting to reach the "got it" stage of tricking it into doing something stupid and so far I've failed.

Oh, and an added bonus, if I want all of my work on a laptop to take away and geek, it's already got the push and pull commands to just mirror all of the branch from my desktop to my laptop, and since it's just schlepping change-sets around, it's nice and fast even over a vpn.

So, I realize that this is a bit of an aimless ramble, but if you are looking for source control system I just can't recommend Bazzar enough. It's got a great feature set, was a trivially easy install, and as far as I can tell so far, really works, and really works well.

Keith Olbermann on prop 8

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:41:33 GMT

I'm sure that some of you have seen this (since khalja and I share some of the same friends and I snagged it from her). But in case you haven't, here's Keith Olbermann, eloquent as ever.

ACNW T Shirts

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:49:00 GMT

hehe

I've seen the new t-shirts and they are made of awesome :)

Link here http://www.amberconnw.org/OrderShirts-2008.html

simonepdx just picked them up and they are sitting on the living room table, leemoyer just rocks, nuff said :)

Today's news

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:22:31 GMT

I got stung in the neck by a wasp! Evil f**ker. That's teach me to be helpful outside, should have stuck to the 'puter.

Weirdly enough it's the first time I've had a wasp sting, not to bad - say on the level of a serious nettle sting, but definitely a bit annoying.

Windows networking question

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:19:27 GMT

I have a batch of Windows boxes at home, some desktops, some laptops. One of them is a media PC with a batch of external hard disks that I use as a general purpose media dumping ground as well as a central backup location. I don't have any of the windows server OSs.

My problem is user management and the lack of any sort of centralized user management, user guy on machine a is not the same SID as user guy on machine b and I'm getting very tiered of it. You can't even add remote users to shared groups since the only sort of remote user authentication is tied to domains and I don't have any sort of DC.

Sharing on Windows seems to get more inconvenient with each passing revision of the OS, there's something wrong where to get it working you end out having to open up permissions to everyone and add everyone to the file credentials :(

In an ideal world my user ID on all machines would either be the same or at least equivalent, and shares would have specific rights that refer to specific users, not just ones on the sharing computer. Oh, and I'd like to do all of this without reinstalling all of the boxes or any hideous user migration, or spending much money.

So, clearly I'm doing something wrong, and I'm happy to admit this might well be due to lack of knowledge on my part, and that leads to two questions.

How are you meant to get this working.
How would you recommend getting this working.

since there's quite a good chance that the two answers are not the same :(

Any suggestions?

Mavericks: The Blathering

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:33:01 GMT

A friend of a friend came up with this bit of awesomeness :)

Maverick: The Blathering

thanks to jdurall for the link :)