Mary and I went out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in San Jose. After we had ordered and while we were waiting for our food, we had the lovely experience of a magnitude 5.6 earthquake centered to the northeast of San Jose (see wave form above extracted from the USGS site). The quake started (at least what we noticed) with about 5 seconds of strong side to side motion followed by another 30 seconds or so of slow swaying. It was long enough for people to start to get concerned, but even though the shaking felt pretty strong, nothing seemed to be falling down or anything. For the next 10 minutes or so, no one was able to make a call with their cell phones. After we finished dinner, we headed home to check on things. It turns out our house is only about 6 miles from the epicenter. Fortunately, other than a small table-top picture frame that had fallen over, nothing appeared amiss. One thing is for sure, we’re not prepared for a strong temblor like the Loma Prieta earthquake that wreaked havoc on on the Bay Area in 1989.

Today, Mary and I went to something called the Silicon Valley Code Camp. It’s a free, two day conference “by and for the developer community.” It’s basically a bunch of sessions about various aspects of software development, from Microsoft’s .NET to Google’s KML. There were multiple, concurrent sessions through the weekend, and a free lunch was provided by Microsoft. The sessions were presented by developers with varying experience in development and presentation skills. Mary and I only attended 2 sessions.

The first session was “Programming for Children” presented by Edward Cherlin. The session was supposed to introduce us to the XO Laptop from One Laptop Per Child. The XO is targeted to “provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.” You can read more about the XO on the OLPC website and the OLPC wiki. You can donate an XO and get one for yourself by clicking on the “give 1 get 1″ logo. There are other ways to contribute as well.

From the session description, we expected to get the answers to the following questions:

• What kind of content is needed, and what is the process for creating it?
• What is the process for Sugarizing existing software?
• How will the children adapt software to their needs, and learn to write more?

Unfortunately, the presenter was not very focused. He kept getting easily sidetracked and it didn’t help that a few people in the audience would ask questions that would get him further off topic. About all we did learn is that Edward Cherlin is a well intentioned but very odd individual. I suppose we did get some background on the OLPC project, but most of that is on the wiki. On the bright side, we did have an opportunity to touch and feel an XO laptop in person. There’s a picture of Mary with the XO on on the left.

The second session was “Design Patterns - What They Are and Why You Should Care” by Fletcher Johnson. This was a much better presentation than the first one. In fact, the presenter even taught at San Jose State University for a time, so he is a well seasoned lecturer. According to Wikipedia, a design pattern is “a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design.” It’s a way to describe and classify a solution to common problems. One example given was imagine you are designing a 2 story building and you needed to figure out how people will got from one floor to the next. You could use stairs, escalator, elevator, etc. These are design patterns. The session focused on design patters as they pertain to object-oriented programming (OOP) where design patters typically show the relationships between classes or objects without specifying the final class or object. The lecture was well done, but I don’t have a lot of experience with OOP, so most of it was lost on me.

Last week Ron and I decided that we should include an RSS feed on dishAdish. The idea was to show all the latest comments on dishes and restaurants for the site. Our hope is that by including the feed as a site map on Google Webmaster Tools, it will help our latest changes get indexed quicker. The problem was, neither of us knew anything about RSS feeds, let alone how to implement it within our Ruby on Rail web environment.

I started out, as usual, by doing some quick searches on Google. I found a few references to various Ruby on Rails packages to implement feed and feed readers, but they all seemend a bit complicated for what we wanted. Then I ran across a very simple solution in a post from Paul Sturgess Ruby on Rails Snippets called Creating an RSS feed in Ruby on Rails. This was just what I wanted. By adding 5 lines of code to my controller and creating a very simple RXML view, I was able to easily create The Latest Dish at dishAdish. Further, by adding a simple <link/> directive to the site template, this feed can be automatically discovered by browsers.

Ruby on Rails is pretty cool stuff…

Today Mary and I went to Point Reyes National Seashore to hike the Tomales Point Trail. We stopped at Safeway to pick up some sandwiches for lunch (Chicago South Sider for me and the Primo Italiano for Mary) and also got some Peet’s Coffee next door. It’s about a 1 hour and 40 minute drive from San Jose. We got to the trail head around 12:30 PM and decided to eat our lunch before hiking. We were on the trail by 1. Despite the weather forecast of clear, sunny skies, we were treated to a chilly fog. Fortunately, we were prepared with layers of clothing.

The Tomales Point Trail starts at the Historic Pierce Point Ranch. There’s a short interpretive trail around some of the old ranch buildings. We walked through the main barn hoping to spot a barn owl. No such luck. I’ve never really spent much time looking around the old ranch, so I cant tell you much about it. I mostly just come here for the hiking and the wildlife. I know there are quite a few ranches around Point Reyes. I believe most of those still in operation are dairy farms.

That main attraction of this trail is the Tule Elk Reserve. Apparently there used to be thousands of tule elk around California in the 1800’s, but were hunted nearly to extinction. The last tule elk in Point Reyes was killed in the 1860’s. By 1874 only a few of the animals were left in the state. Discovered in San Joaquin Valley, they protected and served as the breeding stock to rebuild the California population. They were reintroduced to Point Reyes in 1978. Today there are more than 400 elk in Point Reyes and more than 3,000 in the state. Once you pass the cattle guard at the start of the reserve, you have a great chance of seeing them along the road before you reach the Pierce Ranch.

I’ve been on the Tomales Point Trail many times before, but I have never gone all the way to the end at Tomales Bluff. I usually visit the Tule Elk Reserve after visiting other parts of the park and the trail is 4.7 miles to the bluff (8.4 miles round trip). This time we did go all the way to Tomales Bluff. fortunately, the fog cleared for a bit while we were near the end of the point, so we had some nice views of Tomales Bay to the East and Bodega Bay to the North (see picture on left). During the hike we saw some Northern harriers and a red-tailed hawk, but not much else (besides the elk of course).

In spite of the fog we had a great hike. We saw a lot of elk on the drive in and along the hike. For more pictures, check out my Point Reyes October 2007 Galley. You can also see a map of this trail I made at Gmaps Pedometer.

This past weekend Mary and I went to Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park for our annual pilgrimage. We usually go for my birthday but were a bit delayed this year due to my CCTO business competition. We went for three days, October 6-8. Better late than never.

October 6 (Saturday) - We got a late start, around noon, and didn’t make our usual stop at Casa de Fruta. We did stop for lunch at Quizno’s in Los Banos. We saw a lot of red-tailed hawks on the drive. We got to our hotel, the Lazy J Ranch in Three Rivers, by around 4. Went to check out their pygmy goats and sheep. The goats have huge middles (picture on upper right). They look pregnant, but we were assured they were not. While checking out the goats we spotted two red-shouldered hawks chasing after each other. I took a few pictures of one with the S3 (picture on lower right) then went to get my 10D. By the time I got back, it had flown off. The other one was still around, but never let us get close enough for a picture. We drove up to the South Fork area of the park. We had never been to this area of the park before and we wanted to check it out for a hike the next day. It’s about a 30 minute drive on a windy road, some of which is not paved. We took a short hike to find a cave on the trail to Ladybug Camp. It was getting dark so we gave up. On the drive back down we saw two small owls flying all over the dirt road. I think they were screech owls, but neither stayed around long enough to verify. We had dinner at a place called the Cider Mill then went back to our room to watch Samurai Jack on DVD and turn in for the night.

October 7 (Sunday) - We went back to the South Fork area to hike to Garfield Grove. It was a fairly steep three mile hike to the grove with another mile or so among the trees. There was a bit of snow on the ground from a storm a couple days before. The “grove” was more like a string of small groups of sequoias sprinkled among various pines. There were some pretty nice sequoias though (picture on right). We ate a light lunch while admiring a few. The hike out was an uneventful trudge down hill. Once we reached the car we drove back down to the highway then into the park proper. Due to some road construction it took us a while to get to the Wuksachi Lodge. We cleaned up, had a nice dinner at the lodge, then turned in for the night. There are more pictures from the hike in the Garfield Grove Trail Gallery.

October 8 (Monday) - In the morning there were quite a few deer around the parking lot. After watching them we checked out an headed up the road. We stopped near the park boundary to hike to Big Baldy. We were both a little sore from the previous day’s hike and this hike was near 8000 feet of elevation, so we took our time. The hike passed though some nice forest with occasional views out to the Central Valley. At 2.1 miles we made it to the top of the rocky dome called Big Baldy at 8,209 feet. We had lunch at the top. From there we went another 0.7 miles to the end of the ridge for more great views. From here we could see a pillar of rock called Chimney Rock off in the distance. We stayed there a while to enjoy the view. On the hike back we saw a red-tailed hawk, but not much else. There are more pictures from this hike in the Big Baldy Ridge Trail Gallery.

We drove to Grant Grove to enjoy more sequoias while eating a small snack. After a quick stop at the Grant Grove Gift Shop to pick up a sequoia seedling to grow at home and the Market for drinks and a treat, we started the drive home. We stopped for some nectarines at a stand along highway 180. A bit further along we spotted a red-shouldered hawk near the road, but it flew off we we turned back for a view. We watched the sun set as we drove west across 152. We made it home by 8:30. Another great trip to Sequoia National Park was at an end. The full set of pictures from this trip are in the Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park October 2007 Gallery.