About a year ago I wrote this letter to the editors of the Polaris ATV magazine. I included this short movie about Brent and his ATV with the letter. As you can tell from the movie – this all means a lot to me.

I did a little more research and sadly Polaris is just not interested in encouraging handicapped riders of ATV’s because of liability issues. I 100% understand their position – the whole ATV businees is horribly lawsuit prone – stupid people buy machines that are way too fast and floor it and aim at the nearest tree and then want to be paid off for their stupidity the rest of their life. Makes it all the much harder for the majority of ATV riders who are responsible.

Since the letter will never see the light of day, I figured I would blog it – It is a cute bit of writing.

October 16, 2005

Dear Escape Magazine,

My son Brent has Cerebral Palsey and has reduced ability in his legs. He walks with arm crutches. In February, Brent needed hip surgery. We decided that after he recovered from the surgery we would purchase him an ATV. The Polaris Predator 90 was the only choice because of its hand operated transmission. We purchased his new Predator in May and have been riding it all summer. By the end of summer, Brent and I were having so much fun that mom wanted her own, so we added a 2005 Phoenix to the family.

Riding his Polaris is about the only physical activity where Brent does not have to compromise because of his disability. Riding, leaning, and standing up on his Polaris is some of the best exercise that Brent can do. Riding his ATV has improved his strength, flexibility, and balance.

On his Polaris he can go as fast as he wants and do donuts like any other fourteen year old kid. Riding with Brent deep in a forest and chasing him power-sliding through sweep turns makes me think about “escape” in a whole new way.

I really would give my most heartfelt thanks to whomever inside of Polaris made the decision to build a hand-shifted 90 CC quad with reverse in 2005. For us the timing was perfect.

Charles Severance
Lansing, Michigan

——

You are welcome to edit my letter in any way you like. I know that it is too long for the format of the letters page. You are welcome to use the pictures in any way you like.

Brent’s Predator was purchased at Full Throttle MotorSports in Lansing, MI. They have been so wonderful to work with. The Phoenix 2005 was purchased on eBay from a really great guy – it was in wonderful shape and a great deal. It was originally purchased at Spicer’s Boat City in Houghton Michigan. I have added Full Throttle and Spicers to this message.

I have many other photos and video about Brent if you are interested (as you might expect) including what I call “donut practice”. Escape, Full Throttle and Spicers are welcome to use the pictures and letter in any way they like as well.

The basic steps to deploying a portlet in GridSphere by hand are the
following (which can also be a check list if things go wrong):
-1. Shutdown tomcat.
0. Edit Tomcat’s conf/tomcat-users.xml file and add the line
<user username=”gridsphere” password=”gridsphere” roles=”manager”/>
1. Make sure you have a portlet.xml file.
2. Modify your web.xml file to use GridSphere specific settings. The
Ant task should do this for you.
3. Make sure you have the file gridsphere-portlet.xml in your portlet’s
WEB-INF directory. You never need to actually edit this, so you can
copy from one portlet to another.
4. Make sure you have gridsphere-ui-tags.jar in your portlet’s
WEB-INF/lib directory.
5. Compile everything and create a war file. Your war file name is
important–it needs to match stuff in web.xml.
6. Copy this war file to tomcat’s webapps directory.
7. Create an empty file (using unix’s “touch” command) in tomcat’s
webapps/gridsphere/WEB-INF/CustomPortal/portlets directory. This should
have the same name as your war file. If your portlet is myjunk.war,
then “touch /path/to/tomcat/webapps/WEB-INF/CustomPortal/portlets/myjunk”.
8. Restart tomcat.

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Thanks to some timely help from Jim Martino of Johns-Hopkins providing a test uPortal instance – I kind of got after the Sakai JSR-168 portlets. I fixed some bugs and cleaned and tightened things up a lot.

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This is Gibberish

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Three things are messed up in pluto 1.1 right now
==== Bug in pageId lookup in trunk ======
======= Neither trunk nor beta1 will build unless maven.test.skip=true ========
===== The beta1 tag builds but will not pluto:install =======

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UsageSessionSerivce needs a new method that does not demand an Authorization not a httprequest as a parameter.
For now the code is living in SakaiPortalLogin.jws and SakaiLogin.jws so these can be used in older versions of Sakai.
Need to add the method the the BASE API, test it out, then commit it – then sometime later – likey *after* 2.3 – remove the code from the two web service calls.

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There is a bug (I think) in session handling in Pluto 1.1. Why would Pluto 1.1 keep a session across a Tomcat restart!
I think that this has to do with Tomcat’s session serialization across startups and Pluto’s blind dependence on Tomcat session for storing the Pluto session.
../work/Catalina/localhost/sakai-portlets/SESSIONS.ser
If I am crazy – just tell me so.

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http://radio.javaranch.com/balajidl/2006/02/06/1139245423141.html
//based on Axis 1.3
import org.apache.axis.Constants;
import org.apache.axis.MessageContext;
….
….
MessageContext messageContext = MessageContext.getCurrentContext();
String ipAddress = messageContext.getStrProp(Constants.MC_REMOTE_ADDR);

[DEBUG] DefaultPortletPreferencesService – Portlet preferences stored for: user=tomcat;portletName=SakaiGallery
site.list = null sakai.host=null
autoLogin = null autoDone=null remote=tomcat session=null
[DEBUG] PortletRequestImpl – Retreiving portlet session (create=true)
Portal Login and Create http://localhost:8080/sakai-axis/SakaiPortalLogin.jws
SakaiPortalLogin.loginAndCreate id=tomcat pw=plug-xyzzy sec=plug-xyzzy
fn=Tom ln=Cat em=tom@cat.com
Creating Sakai Account…
User Created…
Have User
Site exists…~64674719-ed89-4996-8077-cf21973e6e25
Adding to session site.list=[My Workspace] sakai.session=24dcb926-270f-4ad8-0097-02d1dab03410 sakai.host=http://localhost:8080
loadSiteList site.list=[My Workspace]
From session host=http://localhost:8080 session=24dcb926-270f-4ad8-0097-02d1dab03410
sakai.tool = null Placement = null
Galery tool url=http://localhost:8080/portal/gallery?sakai.session=24dcb926-270f-4ad8-0097-02d1dab03410
[DEBUG] PortletContainerImpl – Portlet Container [Pluto Portal Driver]: Portlet rendered for: SakaiGallery
[DEBUG] PortalDriverServlet – Render request processed.

Wahoo – My media releigion is about to change 180 degrees. First, a couple of things – I am *NOT* a purist. I want clean, fast workflow for video production and I want my video to be seen by as many people as possible without forcing them to install software. I have *despised* the idiotic games that Quicktime, Real, and Windows Media have gone through during the past decade to force us to choose.
In that crappy environment I chose not based on best codecs or even most convienent format -but simply the majority of the desktops. This was my media flow:
Capture on DV – Sony DC30
Use Final Cut Pro on MacBook Pro
Dub Back to DV
Digitize DV into Pinnacle on PC
Trim things up in Pinnacle and produce DV encoded AVI
Priduce MPEG2 1440kbps using Pinnacle
Produce WMV 323 kbps using Windows Media Encoder
Use WMV 323 as my upload format for the web
Use MPEG2 as my upload format for Google Video
This has lots of problems – but it basically hit 90% of the desktops woff the get go.
This is my new pattern
Capture on my (borrowed from Rich) DVCPRO Sony 3CCD PD100
Edit on Final Cut Pro
Produce Full Resolution Export
Run that through JSDeinterlace (yes Victoria the Apple/Quicktime forgot the deinterlace checkbox on the encoding screen)
Run the output of that through Quicktime Pro to produce “Lan/Internet” 1440 kbps MOV file. Send that to Google.
Run the deinterlaced output through Quicktime to FLV using Macromedia Flash. Use that for the web with the Wimpy inline player – also send the FLV up to YouTube.
Go back to Final Cut pro and put a copy on Mini DV
This is pretty dang cool because I get virtually 100% desktops and some PDA devices with FLV. And the MOV format at 1440KBPS is pretty fine quality – especially deinterlaced.
Only fly in the ointment is that FLV seems to croak on certian file sizes and/or movie lengths. Grrr. This seems to be universal across FLV players – Both the Spark and Wimpy player exhibited this behavior.
So that might force me to produce both a 1400 kbps WMV in addition to the 1400 KBPS QT for clips > 8 minutes. The FLV will have to be a preview there.
But all in all, I end up with a much nicer near archival format in the form of 1440 MOV files rather than MPEG2 which did not give quality for the disk space it took. I might need to still run it through a PC for WMV – but the end user experience is much better with both YouTube and Google Video available.
Sweet.
The Quicktime Codec that worked for me on Google Video was: 640×480, Audio – AAC, Video H.264 – this is the “LAN/Internet” preset in the Quicktime Export dialog.