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I just installed PostgreSQL version 8.0 on my tiger box using Fink but it was disappointingly difficult to get it working. Here's what I did to make it work:

• apt-get install postgresql80-ssl (this is the easy part)
• Use NetInfo Manager to give user postgres a shell (/bin/bash) and a home directory (the postgresql data directory, /sw/var/postgresql-8.0)
• Run daemonic enable postgresql80-ssl (this depends on your exact postgresql version: see /sw/etc/daemons/ for a list of possibilities. I took this opportunity to run daemonic disable mysql :-). Note, I find it surprisingly and dissapointingly difficult to find documentation for daemonic.
• Run sudo /sw/bin/pgsql.sh start to start the database. This initializes postgresql's database directory the first time it is run. Fink will do this after daemonic enable... but only if the machine is restarted.
• Run sudo su postgres createuser [my username]. I let my new postgres user, same name as my main account, create databases.
• Run createdb [my username] under my main account to create the database opened automatically by psql.

PostgreSQL is my favorit large SQL database. It is too bad that fink makes it so difficult to install; if there is an easier way I would be interested. Most glaring to me was that although fink created the posgres user (the superuser for all things PostgreSQL, needed to create the first user and to do certain admin things), it did not set up a reasonable shell or home directory. /dev/null just doesn't match up feature-to-feature with bash.

(gadfly is my favorite SQL database. It's written entirely in Python, it's super simple and easy to set up. It will never touch PostgreSQL for raw functionality / number of features, but it is my #1 database measured by affection.)

Jon was kind enough to find this city opossum under a van, grab it by the tail, and show it to us.

“An Opassom hath an head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignes of a Cat. Under her belly she hath a bagge, wherein shee lodgeth, carrieth, and suckleth her young.” -- John Smith, 1612

posted by James

Last night the sun set on dry scrub east of El Paso: the American West.

And this morning the sun rose just out of Houston on cypress swamp, crape myrtle, and Spanish moss: the American South.




At a stop in Beaumont, I detrained and got the first blast of Southern humidity that I've felt since last August. From here to Orlando the land is wet and green, the air wet and warm, and the towns are frequent. I see a Confederate flag flying from a wood-frame house.

We disembarked at Houston to try some Texas Bluebell ice-cream: it lives up to its reputation.





The train's (lack of) speed leaves time to mull things over. It took over an hour to get out of the Los Angeles metro area; several hours to pass Palm Springs. Thick city gives way to suburbs, which give way to mountains and desert, and thoughts about leaving are as gradual as the departure itself.

Arizona went by in darkness, and at morning light we entered New Mexico. El Paso by lunchtime.

Of the seventy-eight hour train ride, at least twenty-four were spent passing through Texas (having crossed the Sabine river, we're now straddling Louisiana's bayou). It's a big state and a beautiful one. San Antonio, sadly, went by after midnight.

Train food is superb.

At lunch, while the train was stopped in El Paso for repairs, we chatted with a lady from Tyler and another from Houston. It was refreshing to hear that thick Southern accent again, and my own drawl returned with gusto. We talked about sweet tea and cattle farming.




It's rumored that we'll have a very long layover in New Orleans-- long enough to visit the French Quarter.

After a year in Los Angeles, I'd forgotten what it means for the earth to be green. Now I feel as though I'd never left the South. California already seems distant: a vivid but preposterous dream that no lucid person would believe. Just try describing Los Angeles. It sounds absurd, frighteningly possible but as far-out as a Philip K. Dick dystopia.




Necessary music as one crosses Texas:

"All my exes live in Texas" sung by George Strait

All my exes live in Texas.
Texas is the place I really long to be.
All my exes live in Texas--
That's why I hang my hat in Tennessee."

"Folsom prison blues" sung by Johnny Cash

I hear the train a-comin.
It's rollin round the bend,
And I ain't seen the sunshine since
I dont know when.
I'm stuck in Folsom Prison
And time keeps draggin on,
But that train keeps a-rollin
On down to San Anton.

When I was just a baby
My mother told me, "Son,
Always be a good boy.
Don't ever play with guns."
But I shot a man in Reno
Just to watwch him die.
When I hear that whistle blowin
I hang my head and cry.

I bet there's rich folks eatin
In a fancy dinin car.
They're probably drinkin coffee
And smokin big cigars.
well I know I had it comin.
I know I can't be free,
But those peopel keep a movin,
And that's what tortures me.





Well, if they freed me from this prison,
If that railroad train was mine,
I bet I'd move it on a little farther down the line.
Far from Folsom prison:
That's where I want to stay,
And I'd let that lonesome whistle
Blow my blues away.

"Streets of Laredo," sung by Johnny Cash

"Down in Texas," sung by the Allman Brothers Band

We're now crossing Lake Charles. Much of this voyage has parallelled Interstate 10, and will continue to do so all the way to Jacksonville, FL.

These are the mountains at sunrise near the New Mexico border.

Let's harvest the wind. Perhaps a windharvest helps power dingoskidnesy.com (currently hosted in N. California).

We walked through the concourse in Union Station underneath the many tracks, turning left through a disappointingly small tunnel inclined upwards towards the platform. The reward was our majestic, intimidatingly large double decker train. This is how train travel should be -- travel in impressively huge vessels. Since we've splurged for the sleeper car, James and I get a small cabin to ourselves facing each other. More room to stretch than the coach part of the train, a bit of space to spread out, a fantastic view out the window.

We left on time at two thirty in the afternoon, 31 July. Both James and I give Los Angeles a sad farewell, and the nature of the train gives us time to reflect on this. We pull out of the city, slowly, watching the concrete rivers and graffiti scroll by. I think of all the amazing people James introduced me to in a mere eleven days and wonder how much more this is to him.

Three point six miles to the saddle of a mountain, then down again. It was a great and populous trip.

We arrived early in the morning and were surprised to see how popular it was by eight thirty with almost no parking left. You can see John climbing out of his back seat after we'd parked two cars extra close together in a manouever known as extreme parking. Not everyone was able to make it to the saddle, but everyone had a nice time. It was my first hike in California, it will certainly be some time before I have a chance to do anything like this again.

the gallery

See! A Mall! Currently I'm inside a large three story cathedral of commerce, complete with vaulted skylight ceilings, known as the Galleria Mall in South Bay. James introduced it to me when we saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory here. That there are nice things in a place called South Bay is just a little funny to me, because South Bay, Florida is a pitiful small place, pop. approx. 4,000, in the middle of sugar cane country.

“Hey! You're sitting in my seat! That's why I put those napkins there!” spake a fellow coffee shop patron. Ah, napkins. The universal symbol of the sav'ed spot... I found a much better spot, thank you! And am currently blogging about you from it. (later she tells me, she is in a bad mood today. too bad.) Snippy reply thought of five minutes later, when it's too late: “That's okay, m'am, I don't mind if you sit with me.”

Posted from inside the mall.

This stuff is delicious. Roast chai spice as sold by world spice merchants. Black pepper, coriander, cumin, cinnamon, all roasted to tasty perfection. Mix these in at a rate of about 1 tsp/cup to your half milk, half water base, and boil the whole thing with tea for about ten, fifteen minutes, add sweetener, strain, drink. Delicious.

Just the other day I've bought these spices separately and in bulk from Grand Central Market in Los Angeles, to save money and experiment with the proportioning.

Here is where I'm staying in Los Angeles, right under the LAX flight path.

My friends and I went to the LaBrea tar pits. They are disgusting bubbling pits of smelly tar, with the upside being a very nice park, a great museum, and zillions of amazing fossils embedded in that tar.

Today is a beautiful day for travel. Little traffic on the way to Orlando, quick, easy access to the gate. If I'd paid a little more attention to the web I could have even printed a coupon for free headphones to watch the in-flight movie “Miss Congeniality 2”. Very pleasant conditions. Rented a car at 8:00 one-way, dropped it off in extremely hassle-free fashion under an awning where someone walks up to the car, tells you “yes, it did cost the same as your estimate, would you still like it on your credit card?”, then it's just twenty meters of walking to board an airport bus departing every five minutes.

Once at the airport, the boarding pass I printed at home and a driver's license got me through security. It probably took less than twenty minutes from stepping off the shuttle to sitting at the gate. With two hours of driving, I'm waiting to fly only two and one half hours after leaving home.

This is my first trip as an ultra-wired mobile e-person, too. No huddling over barbaric rent-by-the-minute e-mail terminals so. It's GPRS internet through one of my cell phones instead. Send, receive e-mail, blog unnecessarily, work, whatever. I'm happy with the service, it is very cool. Nift-a-licious perhaps.

Another pretty cool thing about this trip comes courtesy of my approx. $6.00 Orbitz booking fee... right about the same time I was parking the rental car, my phone starts ringing. It's a handy automated call informing me my plane, scheduled to leave at noon, was delayed eight minutes. Neat service! Maybe they are a little too enthusiastic about this though. It was kindof annoying to get a call while I was at the gate telling me, oh, they were wrong, the plane's really departing only four minutes late. Yikes! How will I pass the intervening time!?! It would have been more interesting if I was not at the gate of course. Kindof cool anyway.

From MCO to IAX I'm flying in a Continental Boeing 737. I was a little surprised that the flight began by flying southwest around Tampa/St. Petersburg as shown on an in-flight map, but we got a fabulous view of St. Petersburg from the air this way.

Flying in a holding pattern... Houston in ten, twenty minutes after their thunderstorms clear up. “That is just an estimate however”. Hooray! Land ho!

... Houston airport: nice, brief, on another plane. In this airport the PA gave some strangely worded announcement about how, by the way, you might want to know if you make jokes about security it'll land you in jail. I fly again to Los Angeles, CA. It was great to see this building greeting me first thing as I walked out of the airport. The world should have more restaurants shaped like spaceships, don't you think?

And my friend greeted me and off to his humbly furnished, lavishly wired apartment.

I had a difficult time finding a way to format XML in Python, so here it is. XML generators have this nasty habit of not putting any whitespace, linefeeds, or indentation between tags. This code will turn that mess into nicely indented XML.

#!/usr/bin/python
# XML pretty printer
# based on pyxml XHTML pretty print example.
# I believe this requires pyxml

from xml.dom.ext.reader.Sax import FromXmlStream
from xml.dom import ext

def pretty(stream):
    doc = FromXmlStream(stream)
    ext.PrettyPrint(doc)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys
    pretty(sys.stdin)

Photos from Myakka River State Park, earlier today, taken with my new digital camera. The weather was fantastic, I took a new trail, and as always it was a good place to experience the solitude and peace of the outdoors.

This past weekend (May 7 and 8) I spent the night at Myakka River State Park.

See the Photos

Lake Wales Ridge State Forest is a great place to take a hike; click on the above image to see my new photos.

Kissimmee State Park has several hiking trails of reasonable length. The land is very flat, growing pine trees, palmetto, and oak. There is some pasture there too - the park has a cow camp where people pretend to be old fashioned cattlemen and you can talk to them about what their lives are like.

My trail was a loop about six miles long. The trail, not delineated on the map, starts heading South over a bridge over the canal, circling around Buster Island. It passes through some pasture and varying areas of oak, pine, and palmetto.

It was a very good walk. I saw morning deer wading in the water, lots and lots of armadillos, a few squirrels and, on the way out, one huge alligator. The loop trail around Buster Island has a primitive campsite at its far extreme - where I would have preferred to camp if I hadn't gotten in so late the night before. The highlight of the trail came about three miles along the walk (clockwise), after the primitive campsite. Here there is a perfectly winding path carpeted in brown pine needles. It cuts through patches of green tufted grass in a pine wood. Absolutely beautiful.

In the middle of this fantastic part of the trail I said hi to the latest armadillo snuffling through the dirt for something to eat, sat down on the carpet of pine needles and had a snack of my own. It is very good to simply absorb the peace of the forest.

[ scrollable map ]

This park makes a great side trip on a drive through Florida's Panhandle. I have been there with my family and it's always enjoyable - even though one year, during a drought, the waterfall was at most a drip! The park has some very nice woods with a boardwalk tour of several sinkholes. The waterfall is the only one in Florida, falling 67 feet to be swallowed up by the ground.

See the photos

The Florida National Scenic Trail travels through the Juniper Prairie Wilderness, in the Ocala National Forest. When I heard about it I knew I had to go. This Labor Day weekend I did, and spent one night on the trail. It was an enjoyable, solitary hike through many miles of beautiful Florida landscapes, starting with pine flats, traveling through scrub and marsh, and ending with very gratifying swims in Juniper and Silver Glen springs.

Since the most recent USGS topographic map of the area is about thirty years old, I have approximated the location of the trails I hiked based on the forest service's Ocala National Forest map.

See the map and read all about it

After hiking a bit with my Coleman Model 400 stove - nearly four pounds with fuel - I knew it was time for a change. I found the elegantly designed aluminum can stove. This stove burns alcohol and is made from two aluminum drink cans; it is about 1/3 ounce by itself. It is quite capable of bringing a small pot of water to boil.

The design is simple: the aluminum transfers heat from the flame to the alcohol, the alcohol boils and the vapor, forced out of the side holes, burns to produce heat. The initial flame comes from the center hole but after the fuel starts to vaporize the outer flame starves the inner hole of oxygen.

I made this stove (and four others) mostly by following the instructions found here on the website www.pcthiker.com.

I've found that with a little practice a working stove can be made without any glue at all - my favorite so far, pictured, is the shortest at 1 3/8 in. It is made with two pepsi cans (instead of e.g. a Pepsi and a Guiness Draught) slid inside each other and an inner wall that simply overlaps itself. I have added JB Weld to one of these friction fit stoves, for comparison and paranoia, but only to seal the inner ring - I couldn't get the outer pieces apart!

The Jack's River Run trip now has its own page complete with trail map and photo. The map, like the Zion map, is a piece of a USGS 1:24 000 quadrangle. These paper topographic maps are also available scanned as 250dpi GeoTIFF DRGs - tiff format files with special tags that relate the image data to its location on Earth.

See it now

I've updated my account of my trip to Zion National Park. Now you can see the trail we hiked on a lovely topographic map.

See the maps and photos

My friend and I hike Jack's River Run in North Georgia. Details at 11.

My friend Jason and I went to Zion National Park in late March, 2003. You can see some of our photos in the gallery linked below.

We got to Zion in the early afternoon after driving from Las Vegas. There was just a little snow at the edge of the valley and a reasonable looking trail that wound up the side of the canyon. The problem was that every time we reached some kind of summit, we found there was more, and more, and more.

Our excursion into Zion took us up (and back down again) approximately 1600 feet of elevation gain. Our muscles were tired and our feet were cold and wet from the snow but it was well worth it. It was great to be there because the surroundings were so beautiful. Colored rocks and white snow, frosted cliffs, jagged switchback pathways. Every time we climbed another ten feet I could look at even the same scenery and it was wonderful and surprising from my new vantage.

Jason and I had the satisfaction of being the only ones crazy enough to go past the first campsites. The second day we were all alone, breaking fresh snow for several miles. We didn't make it to our assigned campsite (you can see a picture of our tarp on a non-snowy patch near campsite four) but it didn't matter. We were all alone. No one would come to challenge our dominance of the area.

We climbed up the West rim and climbed back down and when we were done we were very sore, tired, hungry, and happy. On the way down I noticed a thin jagged path cut into the other side of Zion Canyon - the East rim. It calls my name. I must go back and climb it someday.

See the gallery

Say hello to xmmspy version 0.4. Compile and install this distutils module and you too can control xmms from your Python scripts.

Example:

>>> import xmms
>>> r = xmms.Remote()
>>> r.is_playing()
1
>>> r.playlist_pos
5
>>> r.playlist_pos=6
>>> r.get_playlist_time(4)
216790
>>> r.get_output_time()
39320
>>> r.get_playlist_title(5)
'Maranatha - Doxology'
>>> r.get_playlist_title(7)
'Joy to the World - A Nutcracker Christmas - Russian Dance: Trepak'

Get it from xmmspy's homepage. Licensed under the LGPL.

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