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Day 2: Lizard Head Pass to Bolam Pass

This morning it was crystal-clear, with no hint of the previous day’s nasty weather. We could clearly see the dramatic surroundings of our campground: the 14,000+ peaks of El Diente and Mt. Wilson stared across the valley, with the eccentric volcanic plug of Lizard Head itself rising nearby. (Lizard Head, by the way, was considered the hardest climb in Colorado for much of the first part of the 20th century, because it’s made out of crumbly, unreliable garbage rock. Climbing guides of the period advised taking a photo of Lizard Head and turning around to head home. The lizard-head-looking part apparently decayed and fell off some time ago, leaving everyone to wonder what was the idea behind the name.) [Continued…]

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Day 1: From Telluride to “A Night At The Y”

(Note: photos of the entire trip can be viewed here.)

This morning broke with a crystal-clear blue sky: my prayers for good weather had been finally answered, or so I thought. I dropped off the rental car in Durango and rode to the rendezvous in back of Mountain Bike Specialists on Main Street to meet the Western Spirit truck, the guides, and the other folks with whom I’d be riding the next 5 days. Our guides were Rachel, Scott and Jason; Rachel and Scott were a married couple looking to be in their 40s and were veteran guides for Western Spirit, while Jason was in his 20s and guiding the route for the first time. [Continued…]

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An Arboreal Addendum, or, More About Flex Trees

Yesterday I discovered one more detail that can potentially fry one’s ITreeDataDescriptor implementation: in the public release of Flex 2, the ICollectionView instance returned from ITreeDataDescriptor.getChildren() will have to implement the [] operator, with integer arguments. In other words, it has to be indexable like an Array. This is not part of the ICollectionView contract; it’s an extra, undocumented requirement imposed by the Tree code. If you use ArrayCollection or ListCollectionView as your concrete type, you’ll be OK, since they do support indexing via []; likewise, FDS collections are probably also OK (though I haven’t tested this).

If you are rolling your own ICollectionView implementations like we are, this means you’d better extend flash.util.Proxy so you can implement []. Fortunately we already had, for other reasons.

Furthermore, data paging is not respected for these child node collection views. Whatever you return from getChildren() will be scanned in its entirety, and any ItemPendingErrors thrown during the process will be ignored. So you’d better not return some huge collection there that you hope will be paged in gradually as the user scrolls through the expanded node’s children. Ain’t gonna happen that way. This probably does affect FDS remote collections, so if you return one of those from getChildren() it might not page in the way you’d hope for.

Suggestive patterns in my tea leaves have led me to retain hope that this will be fixed in some reasonable timeframe. I’m working around the problem for now.

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Holyoke-Skinner State Park

I rode yesterday at the Holyoke-Skinner State Park Topeak-Kenda MTB Adventure, and had the greatest time. The trail system there is exceptional in its variety, pacing, technical challenge, and natural beauty.

Max and I drove out to very early to get breakfast before the ride at a Northampton diner. The plan for the day was, “Boys go riding, girls visit museums and shops”. After our atmospheric (but not altogether tasty) fueling stop at the diner, I hightailed it off to the Notch Visitors Center in nearby South Hadley. The weather was perfect, though a little warm; it would eventually reach the high 80s.

The park is a little linear range of mini-mountains with peaks around 1000 feet, just across the Connecticut River from Northampton, probably about 10 miles in length. It’s much higher than the surrounding land, and you can see it from some distance away as you approach it. The range runs along a west/east axis, with a gap in the middle where Route 116 passes through it. The north side of the range is an unrideably steep escarpment (cliffs, really), so most of the trails wind through the jumbled hilly landscape on the south side. Here is an excellent trail map of the area, made by one of the trail builders.
[Continued…]

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Icelandic Honeymoon

My wife Max and I just got back from our week-long honeymoon in Iceland. It was quite a trip, both literally and figuratively. I highly recommend it as a destination! It was a bit cold in May, and too soon for some of the tourist facilities and accommodations, but the compensation was that there were no crowds and we could take our time enjoying the spectacles.

You can also check out the photos of the trip on Flickr. I’ve linked to some of the photos, but there are many other pix in the set.

Day 1: Spring Fever

We arrived in Reykjavik on Tuesday morning, after a mere 4-1/2 hour flight from Boston. It was in the upper 60s, sunny, hazy and almost windless. (At the same time, New England was receiving the start of a multi-day pounding of rain leading to this week’s severe flooding.) Everybody was out in T-shirts and shorts, and we soon picked up on the fact that this was a heat wave, Icelandic style. [Continued…]

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Software Models, Software Shadows

Software engineers like to talk about models, and build them. We build object models, process models, and, when we’re feeling especially clever, model models or metamodels. I think there’s a collective sense in the profession that modeling is a healthy and useful step in understanding… er… whatever it is that we’re modeling. Come to think of it, just what are we modeling when we do all this stuff? Or, to step back even further, what is modeling?

Here’s a rough definition of modeling that I believe many engineers would agree with: “The selection of a set of symbolic representations of real-life entities, relationships, and operations”. It sounds straightforward enough, although we all know the practice can be difficult. We look at real life, identify some things which are going on, and decide how we will map a set of symbols to those things in a hard-edged fashion amenable to some computing. In doing so, we’ll make some choices that we think best reflect “real life”. We won’t get all of it right, but we’ll get some of it right — the part of interest.

Well… I think I don’t believe in that definition any more. [Continued…]

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