I just sent out the following press release.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle will perform a staged reading of Circe, chapter 15 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, on Saturday, June 13th, 2009, 1:30-4pm at the University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105. Donations towards costs of posters and props are welcome.

It is late on the night of June 16th, 1904, and Leopold Bloom has followed Stephen Dedalus into Dublin's red-light district. Bloom has a paternal concern for Stephen's welfare and knows that Stephen is now very drunk. In the Circe chapter of Homer's Odyssey, the witch-goddess Circe transforms Odysseus' crew into swine. In Joyce's version, Bloom will have hallucinatory encounters with the denizens of Nighttown and confront some of his deepest fantasies and fears, before emerging victorious. This chapter is extraordinarily long. We will perform the first half this year and read the second half in 2010.

The Wild Geese have been staging readings of Ulysses and other Irish literature in Seattle since 1998. We are a diverse group of people with an interest in Irish literature, and most of us are either Irish-born or have Irish connections. More generally, Wild Geese refers to the Irish diaspora, after the original Wild Geese, exiled Irish soldiers and their descendants who served in European armies in the 16th–18th centuries.

www.WildGeeseSeattle.org

May 1st, 2009.

Edit: May 5th, 2009: Updated time: 1:00–3:30pm.

Emma turned 50 today. She was a mere (late) thirty-something when I met her.

We had dinner at The Georgian in the classic Fairmont Olympic hotel. Until a few years ago, it was the Four Seasons. The Georgian is in an old-fashioned dining room with soaring ceilings that mutes the conversation. The waiters were attentive and made us feel welcome.

The food is not outrageously expensive—we both chose to have the prix fixe dinner at $49. I had the wine for an additional $20. The presentation was superb and we both enjoyed the food. An asparagus salad, followed by chicken wrapped in apple-smoked bacon, and the black-and-white soufflé. Scallops were an alternative to the chicken, but didn't appeal to either of us.

Happy Birthday, my love.

One week from today, our ninth wedding anniversary.

I mentioned last month that we were refinancing our house. We signed the escrow papers today. Aside from the snafu over which Eastside Starbucks to meet in, it went without a hitch.

The new mortgage kicks in on June 1st.

In the late 90s when I worked on the classic Active Server Pages dev team, I tried to convince one of the Program Managers that we should make regular updates to browscap.ini, the file that described browser capabilities. He wanted no part of it.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn via Hanselminutes that Microsoft has stepped up to its responsibilities and is now shipping the Mobile Device Browser File on CodePlex. Over 400 mobile devices are defined, with 67 distinct capabilities.

The Hanselminutes podcast is an interesting discussion of the Mobile Web and designing a different experience for mobile browsers. There's more to it than the small screen. You want to think about the scenarios in which the site is likely to be used. The user is probably traveling: give directions. Make phone numbers dialable by using the tel: scheme. Think about server round trips.

Title: The Star Fraction

Author: Ken MacLeod

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 1995

ISBN: 0765301563

Pages: 320

Keywords: speculative fiction

Reading period: 19–26 April, 2009

A few decades hence, Britain has devolved into balkanized ministates. A Trotskyite, space-loving mercenary inadvertently awakens an AI and sparks the revolution. The plot is unsummarizable, but it's entertaining and complex, mixing action, political theory, cyberpunk, and romance.

I spent much of today playing around with the brand-new Jaunty/9.04 release of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Eee 1000H netbook. Previously I had run the Hardy/8.04 version of Ubuntu Eee on this system. I had never bothered to update to Intrepid/8.10, but now that UNR is fully supported by Canonical, I thought it was time to try it out.

I downloaded the UNR image last night onto my Mac, and transferred the image to a 1GB USB stick this morning. (The Mac instructions required a little tweaking.)

I spent some time running the Live Image first, before clean installing. Everything worked seamlessly except the microphone. WiFi worked, the webcam worked, sound playback worked, the touchpad was configured in a sane way. All of these were problems for me when I first installed Ubuntu Eee. That they worked now was not too surprising, since the Asus Eee 1000 is a Tier 1 supported system, but it's nice to get the confirmation.

One of the first things to strike me about the Live Image was how nice the fonts looked. I'm sensitive to typography and the default font hinting settings on previous versions of Ubuntu have always looked like crap: spindly and awkward. I found it hard to take seriously an operating system that looked so unprofessional. The Jaunty font hinting yields thicker letters, which look a lot more like the Mac's shape-preserving font rendering, though not as good. The main exception, oddly enough, is the font used in the netbook-launcher, which looks jagged.

I went ahead and installed Jaunty. The installer offered me an option to install Jaunty side-by-side with the existing operating systems, Ubuntu Eee 8.04 and Windows XP. I wanted to overwrite the existing Ubuntu partition and I had to jump through several hoops to make that happen. The partition editor is pretty and an improvement over GParted. The timezone picker is also very slick, with a clickable world map.

Partitioning aside, the installation was quick and painless. JPierre has a useful guide to some issues that he ran into.

I've spent most of the afternoon and evening installing various applications that I care about. Sleep and hibernate just work now. Sleep worked before but there were always some obnoxious errors when going to sleep.

As a hardcore Vim user, I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. Alt+Tab (or Apple+Tab) is my primary method for switching between applications on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I had never found a keyboard shortcut for switching back to the netbook-launcher: I'd always have to click the Ubuntu logo in the top-left corner of the desktop. Buried in the Keyboard Shortcuts Preferences, I finally found Ctrl+Alt+Tab, which shows a popup, and Ctrl+Alt+Escape, which switches immediately.

Other random notes:

• I had to rediscover ntfs-config to automount my NTFS drives.
• Useful apps like Skype can be installed from the Medibuntu repository.
• It's necessary to run dropbox start -i before Dropbox will download the real daemon and actually start running.

I have a Linux machine at work that runs Kubuntu. I kicked off the upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty yesterday before I left. I'll find out on Monday how well that worked.

Scrum and Agile revolve around sprints. At my previous employer, I spent two years working in one-week sprints. At my current job, I've spent another two years working in four-week sprints.

Each has their own rhythm. We ran the one-week sprint from Wednesday to the following Tuesday. Wednesday morning, we'd demo the previous week's work and we'd plan, drawing up a series of task cards, measured in hours. With a one-week horizon, you couldn't go very far off track. You can't get a huge amount done in a week either. You need to have a bigger picture in mind that transcends several weeks. We released every couple of months.

On the first Monday of the four-week sprint, we review the sprint backlog and break down the features into finer grained tasks. In the fourth week, we look at the product backlog and prioritize the features to go on to the next sprint's backlog. Features are measured as Small (1 week), Medium (2 weeks), or Large (4 weeks). On the fourth Friday, we have demos. We also estimate our velocity for the next sprint, based on how much we delivered in the current sprint. This determines how much we sign up for at the beginning of the next sprint.

With the four-week sprint, you build up momentum and you have enough time to deliver significant functionality. The planning is harder though.

I prefer the rhythm of a four-week sprint, but I could go back to the shorter one.

Today is the last day of a four-week sprint. We got a lot done, though it came down to the wire yesterday.

Many of the screenshots that show up on my blog were captured with ImageWell, a little Mac app with resizing, uploading, and rudimentary image editing functionality. It used to be freeware. Now it costs $20 after the trial period runs out.

InstantShot! is a menu bar app that does a good job of taking screenshots, but that's all it does.

ChocoFlop, which I've only just discovered, seems like the best of the free image editors for the Mac. The rest are pretty bad. Nothing as good as Paint.NET on Windows.

GIMP on OS X has finally become more or less usable, but that's heavyweight.

Python has long had a string interpolation operator, %.

Python 2.6 and 3.0 introduced a new, richer set of string formatting operations. See PEP 3101 for the rationale.

One trick that I liked with the old way of formatting was to put the locals() dictionary or self.__dict__ on the right-hand side

>>> def stuff(a, b):
...  c = a+b; d = a-b
...  return "%(a)s, %(b)s, %(c)s, %(d)s" % locals()
...
>>> stuff(3, 17)
'3, 17, 20, -14'

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do the equivalent with string.format: use the ** syntax to unpack the dict into kwargs.

>>> class Person(object):
...  def __init__(self, name, age):
...   self.name = name
...   self.age = age
...  def old(self):
...   return "name=%(name)s, age=%(age)d" % self.__dict__
...  def new(self):
...   return "name={name}, age={age}".format(**self.__dict__)
...  def dict(self):
...   return "name={0[name]}, age={0[age]}".format(self.__dict__)
...
>>> gb = Person('George Burns', 100)
>>> gb.old()
'name=George Burns, age=100'
>>> gb.new()
'name=George Burns, age=100'
>>> gb.dict()
'name=George Burns, age=100'

The getitem variant ({0[name]}) might be slightly more efficient, since the dict does not need to be flattened, but I doubt it makes a perceptible difference in practice.

I took today off and headed north to the Skagit Valley with Emma and Lyndol to see the tulips. It was a glorious spring day, sunny, not too warm, a light breeze. The tulip fields were busy for a weekday; they're completely overrun at the weekends.

We wandered around Tulip Town for an hour, had lunch in La Conner, and headed back to Seattle via Camano Island.

We had intended to take Chuckanut Drive up to Fairhaven, but Emma wasn't feeling well. Some other time. Chuckanut Drive is pretty year round; the tulips are good only for another couple of weeks.

More photos at Flickr.

I gave a poetry reading tonight, of Frank Maloney's poems. I'm working through a book of Interpretive Reading projects at Freely Speaking Toastmasters. I had to read some poetry for tonight's project and Frank's work was an obvious choice. (Had I remembered, I would have recorded the reading and made a podcast.)

Frank was most active as a poet in the 1970s when he published his collection, How to Eat a Slug.

Six poems follow that give a taste of his work. The material in [square brackets] I omitted from the reading.

Title: Deadly Decision

Author: Kathy Reichs

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Pocket

Copyright: 1999

ISBN: 0671028367

Pages: 368

Keywords: crime

Reading period: 15–18 April, 2009

There are two Dr. Temperance Brennan's. Both are forensic anthropologists. One is the heroine of Kathy Reichs' novels, who, like Reichs herself, is a professor in North Carolina and works with the Montreal police. The other is the star of the TV show, Bones, is brilliant but devoid of social skills, works with the FBI in Washington DC, and has a state-of-the-art lab and a crack team of geeks.

A war has erupted between biker gangs in Montreal. Old bones have been found in the ground, including the skull of a teenaged girl, whose other bones were found years ago in North Carolina. Brennan works hard to find evidence that will convict some of the bikers.

The plot moves along briskly, the characters act like real humans, and the medical detail is interesting. Too many threads are implausibly tied together for my liking, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

I fear going into my home office. It's a huge mess of clutter, books piled everywhere, boxes of unsorted papers, crap all over my desk. (No, it's not as bad as the accompanying photo.)

My office overwhelms me. As a result, I don't go in there, except to drop more stuff off and make it worse. I rarely use the desktop system there.

The living room couch has become my sub-office. I sit there of an evening and surf the web from my laptop. I pull out the bills every couple of weeks and take care of them from the couch. Then I dump them in the office.

I know what the solution is. I've known for a long time. I should go into the office for an hour at a time and impose order on some section of it. Repeat often enough and the office will feel welcoming again. I just spent an hour in there tonight and dealt with a big pile of books. The odds of my doing more sorting anytime soon are low, though, so the problem will persist.

One app that I really want for my iPhone is iKeePass, an port of the KeePass password safe. I've mentioned it before. I'm up to about 400 entries now. It's completely indispensable to me for keeping track of not just passwords, but identities, and which websites I've registered on.

Apple is holding up approval of iKeePass, apparently indefinitely. It seems to be some combination of not wanting to approve strong encryption for export and hangups about open source. Or something. Whatever it is, it's damned annoying.

KeePassX works on Mac and Linux and means that I can move my password database back and forth to Windows without problem. Only my iPhone is without some form of KeePass.

I spent part of my day fighting with CSS for an email template. CSS support is poor in both desktop and web clients, and much worse than in current browsers.

Gmail, for example, does not support <style> in either the head or the body of HTML email. You have to explicitly set style attributes on individual nodes. You might as well be using <font> tags!

You can't assume that images will be downloaded, so the mail has to make sense without them. And forget iframes.

CampaignMonitor seems to have the definitive guide to CSS support.

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The accountant completed our return last night. Usually we have something of a rebate, so the amount that we owed came as an unwelcome surprise. It's paid now. Bah!

I pay taxes willing enough, but “like” is too strong. We cannot run a complex society without taxes. There are many functions that the vaunted free market performs poorly if at all: roads, sewers, schools, police, health care, education, defense, emergencies. The profit motive is at odds with providing good, dispassionate service. Government doesn't necessarily do it well either, especially when it's run by people who are ideologically opposed to taxes. Vide Katrina.

Title: Nameless Night

Author: G.M. Ford

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Harper

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0060874430

Pages: 340

Keywords: suspense

Reading period: 14 April, 2009

Seven years ago, “Paul Hardy” was found with his head smashed in. He recovered physically, but not mentally. After another accident, his wits come back and a few memories. Googling for the one name he remembers brings the NSA to his door. He goes on the run, causing the unravelling of a coverup.

Efficient, well-plotted thriller in the paranoid vein. The plot is as risible as most such books, but no matter. Enjoy it for a few hours.

A Toastmasters meeting has three parts: prepared speeches, table topics, and evaluations of the prepared speeches.

Table Topics offer a chance for those present to wing it on some topic for one or two minutes. The Table Topics Master sets up the topics and the speaker has as most a few minutes to prepare.

Sometimes, when I'm running Table Topics, I present a topic for everyone at the beginning of the section. On a winter's day, I might ask people to tell us about some favorite food they associate with winter. Or I might ask them to tell us about where they're going for their summer vacation.

At other times, I spring the topic on the speaker after they've volunteered. Tonight at Freely Speaking, I had two envelopes filled with slips of paper. One envelope had names of people, the other was some dastardly crime. I told them that they had to plead their case before a judge, the school principal, Oprah, or some court of opinion. Perhaps plead for mercy or maybe proclaim their innocence.

The People

• Snow White
• The Big Bad Wolf
• CEO of AIG
• Charlie Brown
• George W. Bush
• Tom Cruise
• Sherlock Holmes
• Dorothy (from Kansas & Oz)
• Joan Crawford
• Sarah Palin
• Bill Gates
• Dolly Parton
• Mr. Spock
• Simon Cowell
• Barney (purple dinosaur)

The Actions

• Pulling your little sister's hair
• Being an insufferable jerk
• Blowing the Three Little Pigs' House Down
• Doing 90mph in a 40mph zone
• Cheating at cards
• Cheating on your partner
• Kicking a dog
• Swindling old ladies
• Plagiarizing your assignment from the Internet
• Amputating the wrong leg of the patient
• Beating up the small kids for their lunch money
• Pushing Humpty Dumpty off the wall
• Jaywalking
• Tying the heroine to the train tracks
• Telling offensive jokes

Miranda opened as Joan Crawford, plagiarizing her assignment from the Internet, and skilfully evaded the question by channeling Mother Dearest on the rampage. Phil was Bill Gates, swindling old ladies with a crooked version of Windows. Barry was an arrogant Mr. Spock, who did 90mph in a 40mph zone in his spaceship. John was on his knees as Charlie Brown, pathetically denying that he beat up the small kids for their lunch money. Guillaume spoke as Dorothy who had dreamt of blowing the Three Little Pigs' house down and waking to find her own house flattened by a tornado. Kim explained away Sherlock Holmes, cheating at cards. Joe was Simon Cowell, claiming that being an insufferable jerk helped toughen up American Idol competitors. Don was the CEO of AIG, on trial for tying the heroine to the train tracks, who thought it was ridiculous and that he should have been on trial for more serious crimes. Barb closed as Sarah Palin, who had pulled her little sister's hair, an act of family values.

Title: Anathem

Author: Neal Stephenson

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: William Morrow

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0061474096

Pages: 937

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 29 March–12 April, 2009

Anathem takes place on Arbre, a world where those of an intellectual bent sequester themselves in monasteries apart from the Sæcular world. When an alien ship is noticed orbiting the planet, avout from concents all over Arbre are drawn together for a Convox to determine how to respond to the threat of the Geometers.

Stephenson's Anathem is an ambitious project, pulling together physics, metaphysics, world-building, anthropology, and an adventure tale. It's an alien world as he keeps reminding us by the huge vocabulary he's invented. Said vocabulary alternates between exasperating and entertaining, but one becomes accustomed to it. The plot mostly meanders along, with long philosophical detours, accelerating in the final third of the book. The ideas and the explanations come thick and fast. The characters are enjoyable, if improbably talented and versatile nerds.

Vintage Stephenson.

I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.

When I upgraded my MacBook to a bigger drive, more RAM, and OS X 10.5, I partitioned the drive. I created two 25GB partitions with the intention of putting Windows and Linux on them with BootCamp. It turns out that BootCamp doesn't like that. It wants the system drive to have only one partition, which it would shrink. I never bothered to go any further.

The disk has been filling up recently and I wanted the extra space back, to extend my primary HFS+ partition by 50GB. I found a guide to nondestructively resizing volumes with the command-line diskutil tool.

With some trepidation, I set out to reclaim the end of my drive. Happily, it turned out to be both quick and painless.

Here's the old disk layout:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 25.0 Gi    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   22.8 Gi    disk0s4

First, I merged the two FAT32 partitions into one HFS+ partition:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s3 disk0s4
The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N) y
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s3 WINDOWS
     Finish partition: disk0s4 LINUX
Started erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3
Erasing
Mounting disk
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3 End
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS End                     47.6 Gi    disk0s3

Then, I merged the two HFS+ partitions:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s2 disk0s3
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s2 GeorgeR Mac
     Finish partition: disk0s3 End
Attempting resize
Changing filesystem size on disk 'disk0s2'...
Attempting to change filesystem size from 268435456000 to 319728959488 bytes
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             297.8 Gi   disk0s2

And everything is good:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   624470624 508168048 115790576    81%    /

Disclaimer: back your disk up and read the diskutil man page very carefully before using: one misstep could ruin the contents of your disk.

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

• Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
• Fragmentation happens too easily.
• Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
• Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
• ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

New post to the Cozi Tech Blog: Iframes: thinking outside the box.

Using an iframe to host some content turned out to be a big pain, so I came up with a different approach.

As I mentioned the other night, I introduced two narrators into the chapter of Ulysses that we're reading in June.

I'd say from the rehearsal tonight that the additions are successful, that they clarify the text for the listener, without being intrusive. I expect that I'll have to produce a third draft of the script in a few weeks, but I think the next round of changes will be minor. The second draft required hundreds of small changes.

We gained three new readers tonight. There are plenty of parts to go around, so it's all to the good. We had great difficulty initially last year in getting enough readers from the old guard, until we recruited several new readers.

On Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down their state's gay marriage ban. Today, the Vermont Legislature legalized gay marriage.

It's been a great week for fairness. We still have a long way to go: 29 states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriage.

I'm sure the right wing are beating the fund-raising drums for all they're worth. We can expect more Proposition 8-style backlashes, I'm afraid.

But the news still made my day.

Moments ago, I completed the second draft of the Circe Part I script for this year's Ulysses reading.

The chapter is couched in the form of a play, making it relatively straightforward to convert to a staged reading. There are, however, huge numbers of “stage directions”, often ironic, generally unactable: A vast, detailed procession in Bloom's honor; Bloom burning at the stake; camels offering mangoes to Molly; and much, much more.

In addition, there are over one hundred characters, most of whom have a line or two, then disappear. They need to be introduced somehow.

So I added two narrators to handle all of this. They steer the reading along, adding much-needed context to aid the audience who won't be nearly as familiar with the text as we are.

Next rehearsal is Wednesday, when I'll get to hear the changed text for the first time. I'm confident that most of the changes that I made will work, but I'll probably need to produce another draft in a few weeks.

In Seattle, it is said that moss grows on the north side of the rain. To be sure, moss thrives in the shadier parts of our yard.

On a cold, dry February day, I rented a pressure washer with the intention of scouring the moss from the ground and the flaking paint from the garage walls. Although it was quite effective at removing moss, it made a godawful mess. There were muddy flecks of moss everywhere. Against the flaking paint, it made little impression and I still have to deal with that. I had dealt with perhaps a third of the moss when the pressure washer died. I got a partial refund, but didn't feel like renting another one.

The following weekend, I scraped up more moss with a shovel. Not messy, but not wholly effective either, leaving small, low patches of moss that are starting to return.

Today, I took on the exterior basement stairs. They are always in shade and the moss carpeted the steps. I used an old grill brush that had grown too foul with grease to be used on the grill. It did an excellent job; I've never seen those steps look so clean. The scraper peeled most of the moss off the ground and the brass bristles ripped up the roots with ease.

Bloody hard work, though.

It's been a long, dreary winter in Seattle. After a horrible, wet Saturday, last Sunday was glorious, the first nice day in weeks. Then the cold and rain came back. It snowed on April 1st, for Pete's sake.

And now we have another lovely weekend, with promised highs in the high Sixties tomorrow. I did some yard work today and cleaned the grill and outdoor furniture. We've invited a handful of friends over for dinner tomorrow night.

I am greatly heartened by today's news of Iowa's Supreme Court unanimously striking down the state's gay marriage ban. The passage of Proposition 8 in California was a setback. The Iowa Court made a strong ruling, gutting the arguments against same-sex marriage.

It's hard to believe now that interracial marriage was illegal in many states until 1967. President Obama's parents could not have married in those states. We look back at that now with bemusement and a little horror. The opposition, then as now, was led by cultural conservatives, making religious arguments.

Someday soon, we'll look back at the gay marriage debate with the same bemusement and wonder what all the fuss was about.

About three weeks ago, I answered a question on StackOverflow about generating the most readable color of text on a colored background.

I suggested flipping the top bit of each component, (r ^ 0x80, g ^ 0x80, b ^ 0x80). This has the same effect as adding 128 if the component is less than 128, and subtracting 128 otherwise.

Another way to think about it is to imagine the 256x256x256 color cube. Inside that cube, erect another cube half as wide. One corner is at your original color and the diagonally opposite corner is the one computed above.

The questioner liked my answer the best, but I decided to experiment further. I wrote some JavaScript to compute that color. As you can see in the table of 549 colors below, it works well most of the time, but it's not perfect.

Someone else suggested an earlier SO question on good-looking font colors. Looking at that thread, I decided to try inverting the HSL value to (h + 180, s, l + (l < 0.5 ? 0.5 : -0.5)). That works well too. Generally, it yields different colors than my first approach. It looks like one of the two always contrasts well.

I found that the most effective approach was to compute the gray-level intensity of the original color, (0.30*r + 0.59*g + 0.11*b). If it was dark, use white; otherwise, black.

Really, though, unless you have a requirement to work with arbitrary colors, you should pick your color scheme carefully. I found a really nice site this afternoon, ColorSchemeDesigner.com

Here's the source of my colortable.

I love Spring. The winter recedes, the weather grows warmer, the young plants appear, the dormant trees bloom, and all is right with the world.

I dread Spring. My nose itches, it runs, it blocks up, it explodes.

This year, my eyes itch too. A lot. It's really, um, irritating.