I thought I better make a record of the natural hole in this tree in Duke Forest before it gets filled in by growth. I wonder how long it’s been there and how big it was when it started. I guess a storm bent the branches and they later grew together.
It’s on the Concrete Bridge Road in the Korstian Division of Duke Forest off of Whitefield Rd, a quarter mile or so past the bridge.
We just returned from six days in eastern North Carolina (a.k.a. the Coastal Plains), first in historic New Bern and then at Atlantic Beach. The photo is the Harmony House B&B where we stayed in New Bern. There’s a lot of history in New Bern, being the state’s first capital and second city, but it was also interesting to hear how the town made a concerted effort to become a tourist destination, including little things like burying the utility connections in the downtown area.
The Prius loved the flat roads of the coast, getting over 54 MPG for the trip. It’s the first time I’ve seen it get better city mileage than highway mileage since it could often get by on battery power for a few blocks at a time. The coast is probably a decent approximation of the actual EPA test.
Our second show of the performing arts series was tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake performing Shubert pieces. I can’t decide if I would have liked it better if the singing was in English or not. Being in German, it was sort of like a fancy, solo Gregorian chant to me. Nonetheless, I found it captivating. Between the piano and the singing, there was always something of interest to focus on, and sometimes the combination seemed to put me into some sort of trance.
The program included printed lyrics, both in German and English. I didn’t bother trying to follow along, but most people did. At least they tried to. At one point, there was the sound of a few listeners turning the page of the lyrics sheet. Then a few seconds later, there was a much louder sound of many listeners turning the page. I figure the late turners must have lost their places and took a cue from the early turners. Then again, maybe the early turners were just the quick readers.
Bonnie didn’t enjoy the performance as much as I did (which wasn’t a whole lot), so we left at intermission. Other notes: Bostridge was very pale in the lighting and the way he clutched at the piano for support, you wondered if he was going to feint. He looked startled when rain could be heard as a thunderstorm passed — you could see him look to the piano in wonder until Drake quietly indicated that the sound was just the rain and that it was OK to continue. It must have sounded louder on stage.
Not sure what the clapping protocol is for these kinds of performances. For a while, no one clapped during the brief lulls between pieces, but later they seemed to clap more readily. Maybe the rest of the audience didn’t have a clue either.
Celebrity sighting: Reid Conrad
To celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, Bonnie and I got season tickets for the Carolina Performing Arts Series at the newly renovated Memorial Hall at UNC. We don’t see a lot of performance art, so it will be a good chance to see new things. My only previous experience at Memorial Hall was a Steven Wright concert about 15 years ago. Anyway, I’ll try relating some of the shows we attend for the equally unsophisticated reader.
The first performance of the season was modern dance by Ronald K. Brown/Evidence. I was a little dubious at the outset of the first piece — the dancers were all wearing various Saturday-afternoon casual clothes and barely in sync with each other, but eventually I saw those as intentional effects. The subsequent dances switched to more traditional modern dance garb while maintaining the loose synchronization as an interesting theme. Loose synchronization is certainly not doing them justice; what I mean is that the seven or so dancers in each piece would usually dance in seemingly independent rhythms and yet sometimes come together perfectly for a series of synchronized moves.
I’m sure each piece had some holistic meaning as well, but such things are beyond me. All I could appreciate (besides the obvious physical talent and execution) was the creativity exuded from the performers and the choreography. Some bits of that: changing subgroups of dancers, dancers coming and going from the stage (sometimes returning with a costume change), angles of presentation, music selection, and occasionally background images.
And most importantly, they looked like they were having fun.
When I was involved with the XML Schema Working Group, I sometimes suggested a wiki as a way to hash out some of the more difficult issues, but nothing ever came of it. I don’t know the circumstances of its creation, but now there is a public wiki space for XML Schema.
Sadly, no one has made any edits after the initial contributions. I guess the once-confusing topics have largely been handled by implementors so that most users don’t need to worry about them.
I finally got around to “putting my money where my mouth is” and contributing a page on Unique Particle Attribution. It took much more time than I expected and still needs some work, like how to disambiguate content models, but it’s something.
… I wonder what ever happened to that promising start-up whose mission was to resolve UPA violations … Was it nondeterminism.com? …
Looks like this spider is ready for Fall.
I made another update to the JSPWiki JDBC Providers after a user was getting errors mixing the JDBC page provider with a different, non-JDBC attachment provider. The weird thing is that I have the same mixing in the wikis I maintain without any of those errors. Something must be different, but the error makes perfect sense, and so I fixed it.
Part of the page provider API includes a page info class with a date field of type java.util.Date. Getting my data from a SQL database, I was working with java.sql.Timestamp values, and since java.sql.Timestamp is derived from java.util.Date, it seemed to work OK just handing my java.sql.Timestamp value to the page info class. The problem occurs when the engine sorts pages by date, invoking compareTo() on the date values from two page info instances.
java.sql.Timestamp.compareTo() throws an exception if the argument is a java.util.Date (or anything other than a java.sql.Timestamp). It sounds reasonable since java.sql.Timestamp has more precision than a normal java.util.Date (nanoseconds vs. milliseconds), but is it really worth the hassle? I’d rather see the compare succeed by assuming 0 values for the missing precision.
The lesson may be to not rely on foreign compareTo() implementations. In this case, millisecond comparisons provide more than enough precision, so just write a compareTo() method for the page info class that converts the dates to milliseconds and returns the comparison of those values.