Dr. Chucks Blog

It has been a while since I last blogged – things have been crazy – I have been taking a lot of pictures in my image blog. Lots of work, lots of travel, and a new scooter for my son Brent.

I come up with things I want to write about but the 500 message inbox beckons.

Success is not about avoiding chaos. Sometimes the only path to a goal leads through chaos. Success is about understanding and embracing the chaos. With enough chaos and enough time, any problem can be solved. For a good example of this look at the scientific explanation regarding the formation of life.

In the pursuit of success, it is better to be lucky than good. But having both a bit of skill and luck is a good insurance policy.

The overall best combination for success include liberal portions of luck, skill, time, and chaos.

What a week this has been.

My Motorola camera phone has a bug that I finally figured out.

I had noticed that when I took a picture and it goes to the Store / Discard the picture looks good, but after you select send the picture looks funky. I knew it was motion related, but could not tell when the problem occured.

I nailed the problem while taking a picture at IU Fort Wayne (above). I was taking a picture of the campus sign when a car drive through the frame. In the preview (Store/Discard) screen the car was on the right side of the frame. It was well framed – the car was on the right and the campus sign was on the left – it was lucky – so I wanted to save it.

However when I stored it, the car was on the left side of the frame – resulting in a crappy picture because the car obscures the sign.

But – I found the bug. Apparently some how two frames are grabbed about 1/4 second apart. The first frame is used for the preview and the second is stored. There are several possible explanantions for this – the first might be the last frame in the preview frame buffer at a lower resolution (say 160×120) while the second is the fuull 640×480 picture.

But overall this is very cool! I am *not* insane.

If you have a patch that is created with:
sh$ diff -Nur [old-src-dir] [new-src-dir] > my-patch
you apply that patch by typing:
sh$ ls my-patch
my-patch
sh$ cd [src-dir]/
sh$ patch -p1 < ../my-patch
--- Short and sweet

Don’t use cvs update when what you want to use is cvs diff – you get the same information, but if you do it the wrong way you end up all sticky.

I learned this the hard way – I kept checking information out, modifying it, and using cvs update to check where I had mods and then when I wanted to check things back in I had to use cvs update -A to get rid of the sticky bit – cursing CVS the whole time…

Q: What is the difference between open-source and commercial software?

A: If you have a problem with commercial software you can call a phone
number and they will tell you it might be solved in a future version.
For open-source sofware there isn’t a phone number to call, but you
get the solution within a day.