A few more pictures available. I’ve got the fibreglass and epoxy on the inside, it only needs a final sanding and then installation of gunwales, seats and decks.

I did have some help sanding it…

From Canoe - Stage 2

From Canoe - Stage 2

Here it is. I love the dark accents, they came out very nicely.

From Canoe - Stage 2

The deadline to get this done is August 2, 2010, so the push is on to get it done.

My favourite artist now has a website! Have a look at www.jodiehart.ca.

I’ve been banging my head against the wall for the past day, trying to figure out why my wordpress install on my Mac doesn’t talk to the database. Setup is simple, enable the built-in apache web server, install the Mac Mysql server and setup as per the wordpress instructions.
. But

When you’re on Linux or any other platform I’ve worked on, one specifies the hostname in wp-config.php as ‘localhost’, or whatever hostname the DB is running on.

Seems that when you’re on Mac, you specify the hostname as ‘localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock’. This is not documented anywhere, but works like magic. Hope this saves someone else a headache in the future.

The canoe has come a long way since the last update. Over the past few weeks we’ve laid on the fiberglass and four coats of epoxy, and taken it off the molds. Normally you lay on three coats of epoxy, but the third coat was a bit messy so I sanded it off and added a fourth coat.

Here’s my favourite picture, showing the accent strips really well.

From Canoe - Stage 2

And here’s one of the canoe turned over. It’s starting to look like a boat now!

From Canoe - Stage 2

The full album is available here. Unfortunately the canoe is going to sit for a while, as I’m getting sidetracked on a harp.

I’ve been working hard on my canoe, and thus not a lot of posting. All the strips are on, the stems are on, and all the staples are out.

The whole album is available here, but here are some highlights.

First the sheer line before cutting. If you look closely you can see the line I drew.

From Canoe

And here’s the sheer line cut with the stems epoxied on.

From Canoe

And here’s the pile of staples I pulled out after the stems were on. I used up a whole liter of glue too.

From Canoe

Fooling around with our new Nikon D90, I came up with these two shots. Click through to see the full pictures.

This first one I took while looking out for meteors. I couldn’t see any meteors (too many clouds and fog) but I did find this airplane. The weird light is from a streetlight that’s a good 300′ behind me.

From Miscellaneous

This second one was taken at Grundy Lake, handheld at 1/6th of a second. Almost impossible to do that without a VR (Vibration Reduction) lense.

From Miscellaneous

On the evening of August 8th, 2009, Southern Ontario was struck by an incredible lightning storm. In St. George, rather than direct strikes, the sky was constantly lit up by indirect sheet lightning, although accompanied by very little sound. I took some pictures and the resulting colors are a bit spooky. The full album is here. All pictures were taken through a window (I wasn’t about to sacrifice my hair for the sake of photography), with the shutter staying open for 3 seconds. It was after dark, and the sky was pitch black when there wasn’t any lightning, making the lit sky in the pictures all that much more incredible. I give you these two for weird sky colors.

From Lightning Storm on August 8, 2009

From Lightning Storm on August 8, 2009

Kezia, aged 4, is our resident dancer. There wasn’t enough light in the kitchen for the lens I had on my brand new Nikon D90, but I do think the blurring adds to the effects of her delight in twirling around.

From Family

A bit more work on the canoe, one half of the bottom is complete, center line is cut, and I’ve got two of the sixteen or so planks on the other half complete. The second half of the bottom is tricky, as both ends have to fit perfectly in what feels like 18 different axis. And if you cut the second end too short you start all over again. Pictures below, and more on my Picasa page. Enjoy!

From Canoe

From Canoe

Noah received a model rocket for his birthday, so we built it over the weekend and launched it Sunday evening, when the wind died down to nothing. Here are some pictures of the event. Our new camera was fast enough to pick up the actual launch.

Mikaela recently lost her two front teeth. Here’s a great picture of her attempting to look at said gap. Click thru for a bigger version.

From Family

Noah decided today he needed to make a stop-action lego movie. He pulled out our camera and took over 300 pictures, to make the movie below. Some quick iMovie action, and presto! you have the movie, available below or here.

My Opa, Jan van der Meer, created a few movies this way, but the old-fashioned way, with a 35mm camera. How he got the pictures from single shots to 8mm video is unknown, although my Mom claims it involved a lot of tape. Noah chose to copy some of his style, look for the blocks helping each other up to create the wall.

Here is a video of my son Noah playing at his recital, where he attacks his song. He doesn’t just play it, he marched up to the front and attacked it as if it was a battle he had to win. I’m biased, but I think he won the fight. Noah is accompanied by his Aunt Ang on the piano. Watch below or click here to view it. Enjoy!

A long time ago I decided I would someday build a canoe. That day has come. I decided to build a 17′ Nomad, which is really a typical a 17′ version of the very popular 16′ Prospector. The plans and kit came from Bear Mountain Boats, based nearby in Peterborough. Ron Frenette, of Canadian Canoes, is associated to Bear Mountain Boats, and graciously offered to lend (and deliver!) me his strongback (the red part in the upcoming pictures) and deliver the kit. I can’t say enough about how eager Bear Mountain Boats and Ron are to help out their customers.

The target launching date for this boat is the beginning of September, when we have a Dad & Kid’s canoe trip planned. Whether I’ll make it is yet to be seen, but things are so far going well.

I have an image gallery setup over here that I will update, here follow a few samples for your viewing pleasure.

Due to the harts.name expiring without warning, this blog was moved from harts.name to gybe.ca. Why gybe? First off, it was available. Second, it’s a sailing term (also spelled jibe) for turning through the wind, which fits my current fascination with boats. Third, it was available.

Because the domain expiry coincided with the birth of my fourth child, my venue for announcing it was gone, so here it is. On April 15th my daughter Abriel Josie was born, weighing in at 7 pounds 11 ounces. She is now four weeks old, and all is well. Pictures are available here.

My colleagues at RIM organized a gift basket, and the last few pictures there are the results of that gift. This one is my favourite.

I hope to post a few more times than once a month to this new blog.

After reading this great post of how programmers need to be good typists, I tried out my skill on this typing test. I came out with 75 words per minute… not bad eh!

This bird killed a Mourning Dove right outside my (home) office window this morning. I’m fairly certain it was a young Peregrine Falcon, but the map ranges show they don’t live anywhere close to Southern Ontario. The tail (not really seen in the pictures) was fairly long, with horizontal dark brown stripes on it.

We didn’t see the kill, but based in its behavior I can only speculate that it knocked the Mourning Dove out of the sky, as it sat in the tree above it for a while before going down to the ground, sitting on it for a few minutes, and then flying away with it.

Any ideas what it was?

I realized the other day how much I depend on Google to help find quick answers, and how much information is actually out on the web. I also realized that I don’t contribute much, so I’m hoping to change that.

I needed to check bitmasks against an Oracle DB the other day. My bitmask was in hex (base 16 for the uninitiated), and the Oracle DB’s column was in decimal, so I first needed to convert the hex into decimal, and then do a bit AND operation.

For this example, the table is “TABLE1″ and the column is “BITMASK”. Let’s say that we’re looking for all rows where bit 5 is set, which is 0×10, or decimal 16. (Yes the conversion is simple in this example, but not when you’re looking for bit 78). In that case the query looks like:

SELECT * FROM TABLE1 WHERE BITAND( TO_NUMBER(’10′, ‘XX’), BITMASK) = 1;

Let’s pull that apart. BITAND(val1, val2) is a function that does a bit AND between val1 and val2, similar to the “val1 & val2″ operation in Java and C/C++. The TO_NUMBER() function converts the string “10″ from hex to decimal. Then we look for rows where the BITAND() method returns 1, and presto, we have our bit AND operation against Oracle.

Credits:
Oramoss Blog
Oracle Users’s Coop

I took Noah and his cousin Mitchell to Massassauga park last week, leaving Thursday to site 6, and staying for two nights. The weather was very nice (20 degrees C in the daytime), and the colors were incredible. The reds are so red it looks almost impossible. I’ve uploaded some pictures to my shiny new Picasa page here: http://picasaweb.google.ca/hart.mike/Massassauga2008. As for wildlife, we didn’t see much other than the usual chipmunks, loons and assorted birds. We did hear a moose calling, but never saw it. Oddly enough, we didn’t see any other humans until later Friday afternoon, which was a bit strange, but Noah and Mitchell made up for the lack of noise.