Blogging Roller

Speaking of science writing and making more science accessible to lay people, check out my Dad's article at Luminous Landscape where he explains Why Is My 50mm Lens Equivalent to 80mm on a 35mm Camera and Why Is There More Depth-of-Field? And check out the comment he received:

Nathan Myhrvold: I think that Charles Johnson’s article on DOF and sensor issues is excellent and will inform the discussion of the relative merits of various sensors and cameras. It covers the basic optical facts very well. However, I think that there are some additional points that can help clarify the issue...

Yes, that Nathan Myhrvold. Apparently, he shares both Dad's love of nature photography and of physics. Dad was pretty happy to see such detailed and well-informed feedback. See what happens when you post interesting writing on-line? Cool things! and you might make an interesting new friend or two. Get a blog Dad.

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

The Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport is simply amazing. The center "provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and sapce artifacts  that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall." I could have spent a lot more time there, but not everybody in the family shares my fascination with air, space and military history.

Here's a mosaic I created from some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account (I used Mosaic Maker to put this together).

We opened presents in Chapel Hill on Xmas eve, at home in Raleigh on Xmas day and then drove up to Northern Virginia for one last round of paper ripping, twisty-tie unfastening and worship of the one deity that really matters to the kids: the good lord Lego. Lego ruled christmas here again and this year, for our kids the holy trinity is Lego, Star Wars and the Cars movie.

Lego's hegemony over the Johnson playroom has some history. Long time readers may remember the Jack Stone incident. Jack Stone has been replaced by a series of increasingly complex Lego Star Wars vehicles for the older boys and an oddly intense Lego Boba and Jango Fett fetish on the part of our four year old. And Lego is also serving as a gateway-drug -- Alex (10) got Lego Mindstorms earlier this month and has been spending hours building bots and some pretty complex programs.

I had to include the Cars movie in the holy trinity because Leo eats, sleeps and drinks it now. I'm almost too embarrassed to admit that he's got Cars movie plastic cars, die-cast metal cars, carrying case, models, pajamas, a blanket (known as fuzzy), socks, shoes, underwear and pull-ups -- but no Cars movie Legos (yet).

I got a couple of nice gifts too. As usual my brother gave me some user-generated content; his year he put together a wonderful CD full of about 30 Who covers. I also got a couple of books: Innovation Happens Elsewhere and The Innovators Dilemma.

We'll be in the Northern Virginia area for the next couple of days. After a short pilgrimage to the Lego store today we'll head over to the new Air & Space museum at Dulles airport. Tomorrow, we're expecting good weather so we'll head down to DC to check out the National Mall.

Here's a little video gem I found while working on our annual video review DVD; a little spontaneous singing and cuteness from the kids on Christmas eve last year. It's my first YouTube upload:

We celebrated a milestone tonight, Alex's 10th birthday. He's grown into a great kid, smart, healthy, eager to learn (math) and questioning everything. We're very lucky. It's hard to believe 10 years has gone by since we started building this family. Seems like yesterday, a dream and an eternity ago all at once. I didn't have a blog back then of course, but I had a web site and I posted a birth announcement with photos, measurements, foot-prints, doctor's names and this little stroller that I drew for the printed announcements: 

 

Here's a little something else I'm thankful for. My brother Dan has been low-frequency blogging for a while and he's getting better and better. His blog is called Film Babble and it's definitely babble (and I mean that in the absolutely best way possible), but his writing style is interesting and he got a pretty deep knowledge base to draw on when it comes to movies and music. His latest post is about director Robert Altman, who just passed away.

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate this fine American holiday and happy Thursday to those that don't. As always, I'm thankful for my happy and healthy family and happy that we'll be able to get together this weekend. And, as usual, we enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's place over in Chapel Hill. For us, the traditional dinner is turkey, stuffing, gravy, rice, cranberry sauce, stir-fried veggies and dessert of pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie (my personal favorite). Tomorrow we'll head down to Andi's folk's beach house near Topsail Island, NC for a couple of days of doing mostly nothing -- the water will be cold but with temps around 70F my crazy kids might just brave the icy waves. Hope you have a good one too.

Over the weekend, we drove about three hours west towards the mountains to Statesville, NC for the annual Carolina balloon-fest. We saw a tank, an assortment of military helicopters and we even saw some balloons attempt to inflate. Unfortunately, it was way too windy for ballooning. So it was a bit frustrating, but the kids love any chance to take a road trip so it wasn't a total loss. You can see some of my photos on Flickr.

Alex and I made the jump from Steve Jackson mini-games to our first full-blown wargame tonight with my old copy of Panzer Blitz.

With the book out of my hands again, I'm trying to return to normal life by doing things like leaving the house, watching movies and playing games with the kids. Tonight's fun was The Awful Green Things from Outer Space, an easy-to-play and very cute Steve Jackson mini-game (a board game) with an interesting set of rules. It's perfect for Alex, who at 9 is absolutely fascinated by game systems and rules.

TAGTFOS is about a space ship that is boarded by green monsters; monsters who grow each turn from eggs to babies and from babies to egg-laying adults. To fight off the monsters, the ship's crew members grab whatever weapons they can find, things like bottles of acid, cans of rocket fuel and blow torches. Problem is, the crew has no idea what the weapons do until they use them (and they change every time you play). So, if you fire a stun pistol into a room full of monsters you might blow 'em to bits, which sounds good until you realize that all of those bits will grow into babies next turn.

I got my copy of TAGTFOS from The Dragon magazine back in '79. The game is out of print, but you can find copies at used game stores online (around $15 a copy).

I'm a week late with this post. My first post was April 11, 2002 (also here) but the 17th is the date I remember because that's the day that the Roller article was published at OnJava.com. I started blogging with Userland Radio and moved to Roller in June of 2002 right around the time Leo was born. Ah, the memories...

We just returned from a most excellent spring-break trip down to Georgia for some sight-seeing in Atlanta and a family re-union in Callaway Gardens. I had hoped to get some serious work done on my ROME chapter, which is due Wednesday, but that didn't work out so well. I did get some work done, but I'm definitely gonna blow my deadline. That's OK, I had fun instead. The kids did too. We did the new Georgia Aquarium, which was incredibly crowded but well worth the effort. The next day, the kids managed to sit still through the Cyclorama, which you'll find interesting even if you have only a passing interest in Civil War history. We also had a wonderful dinner at Mu Lan with my parents, thanks in part to little Leo, who slept right through dinner.

Callaway Gardens was beautiful and the villa we picked was the perfect spot for a small family reunion and multi-birthday celebration -- we celebrated my dad's 70th, my grandmother's 90th birthday and others. We visited the butterfly house, the vegetable gardens and then I ducked out on the birds of prey show to get some work done. We also pored over a small mountain of unsorted memorabilia and most of the items pictured on this page about my great great great grandfather James Mason.

Now it's back to the grind. The ROME chapter is a little more difficult that I had thought as I'm finding some deficiencies in ROME (some are my fault) and fighting an overwhelming urge to fix them or at least document them in depth.

Since the book was supposed to be finished by Friday (more on that later), Andi and her friends left town for a girls beach weekend at Topsail Island. So the boys and I have been fending for ourselves and enjoying a beautiful early spring weekend with temps in the high 70s.

On Friday night we went to dinner early, around 5:30PM, hoping to get an outside table at Mellow Mushroom. The patio was packed with after-workers and college kids, so we settled for an inside table. After eating half a pie and a small hill of black olives, we took a long walk around the Glenwood South area stopping for ice cream at Turkish Delights.


Today, I strapped the bikes on the back of the van and we drove down to Meredith College to ride the NC Museum of Art trail. The kids love the bike bridge. Fortunately, Leo at three is still light enough to ride in the bike seat. We took a ride, crossed the bridge and then walked through some of the outdoor pieces, that's one in the (Treo phone) photo above. After that, we went inside to walk through the European collection. It was a quick walk. Alex and Linus are old enough to appreciate the paintings, but Leo no so much. Then we made our way home. All and all a very nice way to spend a warm spring afternoon.

...the birthday of a truly great man and a wonderful father. Happy 70th birthday DAD!!!


(c) Charles S. Johnson, Jr.

After wrapping up writing last night, I took a break from the book for most of the day with some shopping and some time with our neighbors. Our neighbors across the street, invited us over for some candle lighting, latkas and dreidling -- a very nice way to wrap up the holidays.

One of my non-health related resolutions for 2006 is to switch over to Tiger, by which I mean Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and Java 5.0 Tiger. So I dragged the boys over to CompUSA and bought a LinkSys NSLU2 Network Storage Link and a Maxtor 200GB external USB drive. They didn't have Mac OS X, so I drove over to the Apple store in Durham. I bought both Mac OS Tiger and iLife, because I was warned Tiger doesn't include the Apple software goodies I've been digging recently (iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto, grumble grumble). All and alll, a way too expensive day. Once I use my Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my Powerbook (hmm, is that gonna work with a network mounted drive?), I'll feel comfortable installing the new Mac OS.

Another resolution on my list is to do some 'casting. I'll be making the first non-snapshot release of Blogapps this week, so I'd like to make a couple of screencasts. I've got two ideas in mind. One screencast will walk you through the installation and setup of the Blogapps server (i.e. my Roller/JSPWiki bundle). The other will explain Atom protocol (as it stands today) using the Blogapps server and some command-line utillities I wrote for the Atom protocol chapter. I was quite impressed with what Brian McAllister did with Snapz Pro X in his ApacheCon talk, so I'm thinking that is the package to buy for Mac screencasting. Please pipe-up if you know better.

See you next week...

And it's very nice to be home.

For the first time since three-year-old Leo was born, Andi and I dumped *all* of the kids off with my parents (thanks Mom and Dad) in Chapel Hill and headed out to movie, dinner and a show. We saw Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash bio-pic. Ebert gave it the thumbs up, Rolling Stone says its Oscar material and we both loved it.

After the movie we were hoping to try Panang again, but we didn't have time for dinner. We had to meet Andi's brother and head back to Raleigh to see Carbon Leaf at the Lincoln Theater. Carbon Leaf put on an enjoyable show, but the music didn't really grab me, at least not enough to inspire any CD purchases. If I had to triangulate (using my out-of-date reference materal), I'd say they were Connells-style white-boy jam-pop, with celtic influences (penny whistle included) and Phish-like sing-along lyrics.

All and all, a very nice and kid-free night out.

Last weekend, I helped Alex finish his first model: a 1/48th scale replica of a Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter. Alex did everything except for the putty/sanding work and some of the finer painting. I spent a *lot* of time building models and painting miniatures when I was a kid. I entered hobby store contests and even convinced my parents to buy an air-compressor and an airbrush for me. It's cool to rediscover some of that fun with Alex.

Kit by Revell/Monogram.