Journal:

Ah, life on a boat, even in the Caribbean, is a lot of work when you have to do it all and pay for it all.

I have a worklist, some fifteen or more items long. Some of the items are not critical, such as: install the remote microphone for the VHF radio. Others are very critical; for example, stop the leak from the main engine sea water pump so that it doesn't fill the bilge to alarming levels every time I run the engine for more than an hour. Or, how about, the fact that the dinghy is coming apart at the seams, or the forestay (for the jib and a major structural elment of the mast is untwisted at mast top threatening to part.

As Kristen, my stepdaughter, is so good at reminding me: take a deep breath. Put order and priorities to what can be done when and what it immediately necessary (water in bilge). And.. don't wince when you have to pay the bills in boat units. One boat unit is $1000 USD.

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The first day was great. Seventeen knots of wind on the beam. We able to get our hoped for 7 knots velocity made good. If we could keep this up, we would reach the Virgin Islands in 48 hours, 9 AM on Frisday. But that wasn't to be. The wind dropped to five knots in the middle of the night. We began motor-sailing slowly, assuming that we arrive in

It qas nor meant to be. On the second afteroon, some 80 miles from the narrow reef bordered passage into the BVI's, the wind completely died and cross seas built. The seas were expected at the northern most Windwards, but the trade winds should have been 15 or 20, with sails preventing rolling.

We have a chartplotter and decent radar. I knew where we were going (Round Rock Passage) and could do visuals using the lights of the islands beyond to be sure we had Round Rock on our right. Rather than wallow in rough seas (and incure both the fatigue and stress on the rigging), we pushed the throttle up to 80% and drove on to island. We approached Round Rock at 1AM (0100hrs). Time drop all the sails. But no, the roller reefing jib was jammed. As we were fast approaching the passage, Pete braved it on the bowsprit in the dark, and unfouled the roller sheet.

Since we had to check in the BVIs the next morning we headed for mooring field outside Spanish Town. After making quite a din motoring around and shouting out to a late night dinghy rider, we discovered there were no moorings available. So on to Trellis Bay, about an hour away. No problem now that we were inside the protected waters of the BVIs. In fact, there were several free moorings. It was a familiar place. Bruce and Carole bought a mooring here for Mother of Perl. It was not to be trusted without daylight inspection, but we took an empty Moor Secure mooring right next to it. Next morning, the private mooring was brought back into service and we had moved to our old spot. Halleuia!

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For Christmas (and the winter) I'm wrapping up the programming of fields2xml.py. The basic use can be understood by running fields2xml.py --help. It has the option of turning off the metadata in the XML output with -s option. Sample code is on cowfish projects/bendev/ShipTracking.

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I've downloaded the entire GTS data set to my server at home, and, after adding some more exception handling to the fields2xml.py program, ran the entire data set: once with tab delimited formating to a single file, and then to separate xml files for each file in the data set. That is 83 files. Each file took about 20 seconds to run. The single tab delimited file resulted in 487565 records!

I need some place on the CCOM servers to put this stuff. If it gets down to the crunch before I leave, I'll just make a CD of it.

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After some code cleanup, I ran the program on a full months data (6400 records) of GTS format. It took approximately 15 seconds to produce the XML. This was done on my Toshiba laptop model A-105 with:

model name      : Genuine Intel(R) CPU           T2050  @ 1.60GHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 800.000
cache size      : 2048 KB

Not bad

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I have added data types to input specs so that I can do expression evaluation specs for the output. In other words, instead of just making a reference in the output value to an input field (e.g. "lat"), you can have an expression that evaluates (e.g. "lat / 100" "( hour * 60 * 60 ) + ( min * 60 ) + sec" ). Notice that all tokens must be delimited by white space for this to work.

The project sits at https://cowfish/projects/bendev/ShipTracking

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I have a working program for generating XML (or tab delimited, or ASCII) from ASCII records. I'm trying to find a place that is easy to retrieve this from. I will put it on the Subversion site (cowfish:Projects/ShipTracking) but need to give read access to all and read/write to Kurt. This needs Will F.'s assistance.

Now, I need to get it to align with useful data fields in the VOS ASCII data. This just means editing the configuration file until it works. This is a bit better than awk.

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After having had a code review of my python data to xml program for the VOS ship tracking, I've gone back and simplified my "elegant" program. It didn't feel right.. trival things were layers deep in objects and methods. The XML handling was painful. It would have been easier to just parse the XML configuration file by hand to generate the structures I wanted. As it turns out, most of the structures, classes, and methods were not necessary. What do you expect for only my third python program that I want, so much, to be appreciated by my peers (I flatter myself with whom I call "peers").

I've gone back to a more proceedural program.. less layers, less classes, less structures. I give credit to Brian L. and Roland A. for getting things back to a manageable level. But I give even more credit to Kurt S., and his persistance on my using lxml. It really feels good and simple.

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I've had my Nokia N800 Linux handheld computer for about a month now. The thrill of having a Linux handheld doesn't dominate my evaluation (as much as the first week). I had my ups and downs including believing that it had totally bricked. I flashed a newer version of the 2007 distribution, and it came back to life, in fact worked without flaws in performance.

Once the flashing was no longer as scary as I thought, in other words, once I used the Linux version of the flasher rather than the Windows dumbed down version, I decided to see what the 2008 version looked like. After all, I plan to port Xtide and I should do that for the newest OS.

Wow! The 2008 OS is much more usable than the 2007. First the GUI interface is more flexible, the default fonts and application screen layouts are more readable (some apps went overboard in making their interface finger based rather than stylus based). I haven't had a single OS hiccup. Some apps and libraries haven't yet been ported to OS2008, but that is minor.

My only complaint so far is in the lack of quality applications. The PID apps are weak when compared to the Palm Pilot. The OS2008 PID apps are now ports of GPE applications, a great improvement, but not enough to sell the N800 as a PID. There is only the most trivial of calculator apps. I use RPM on the Palm. I carry my Palm just for that.. and Xtide.. and a decent address book, phone dialer.

On the subject of Xtide: I have installed the scratchbox development environment on my laptop. I've the cross compilation toolchain. I've compiled and downloaded the example "hello, world" application. I've download Xtide sources and gave it a first try. Missing some libraries, it seems. So, I'll track those down and compile them. My first goal is to compile the non-GUI version of Xtide (just generates text tide and current tables). Since the Maemo (Nokia) GUI environment is different from the simple X11 environment, I'll need to design and build a GUI more appropriate to the Nokia. I hate GUI programming, so the text based version may be as far as I go.

A few weeks until I'm on Mother of Perl so I'll put this off until I'm swinging on my mooring in Tortola.

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Gretchen and I are snuggled in for the day (or two). This is the third big snow. It is coming down hard and soon to be followed by sleet and freezing rain. We aren't even planning on going out for church or to visit. There are Christmas presents to wrap and things around the house that need fixing (which reminds me that this is somewhat like being on a mooring during a torrential rain or big blow).

I am thinking more and more about being in the Caribbean right now. We bought Gretchen's tickets to visit MaPerl in February (13-26). Just a few weeks before Kris, Pete, and I leave to bring the boat from St. Lucia to Tortola. I'm smiling about that!

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