My mom is into genealogy in a big way, and has been researching our family history for over 30 years. For a long time, her data existed solely as hard copy documents in a filing cabinet, which made it difficult for other researchers to know what she had discovered. When she came to visit me in August of 2006, she was working on digitizing some of her records, using a piece of genealogy software that had recently become available.

I think the digitization of her records was a good move, but I found the software's interface to be appalling. Furthermore, it was my opinion that the software failed to provide what I think is probably the most important feature that computers can offer genealogists—the ability to search everyone else's records to find people that are working on the same ancestors. The fastest way to increase the span of your family history is to incorporate research already performed by another researcher who shares some distant segment of your family tree.

I volunteered to help set up a publicly-accessible database containing mom's genealogical research along with high-resolution scans of the source documents, etc. We've been working on populating this database for the last 15 months and, finally, the data for direct-line ancestors are all in place (the non-direct ancestors are still a work in progress).

So, without further ado, I present the genealogy project that my parents and I have been working on. And, with this link, Google will index the entire project site making the data accessible to genealogical researchers everywhere.

It is our hope that this will lead to contacts with previously unknown researchers who can gain from mom's research and possibly add to the information contained here.

For an example of a well-populated ancestor details page, check out my great grandfather James Elgie Beals.

Got some rolls of dollar coins from the bank today, partially because they're fun to try and use (a lot of people don't recognize them) and also because I collect coins. Amongst my dollar coins I found the following three non-US coins, all of which are roughly the same size and weight as a dollar coin:

500 Korean Won (~$0.534 equivalent)
1 Indian Rupee (~$0.025 equivalent)
2 Euros (~$2.944 equivalent)

As you can see, these three coins are worth a total of about $3.50, so just by changing money from bills to coins I made 50 cents. Woo! I knew my coin collection would one day pay off.

When will those wacky pagans learn that their "decorated tree" custom is worthless and forbidden by god?

Manishevitz. I made the mistake of trying to use yum to upgrade from FC6 to FC7... Someone said it would work without a hitch. Anyway, it... didn't. So I built an FC8 install disc and tried to just overwrite the /boot and / partitions (leaving the /htpc partition intact, with all of its precious, sweet data). The installer borked trying to mount the /htpc jfs partition (AFTER formatting / and /boot), leaving me with no OS. So I tried reinstalling FC6 from the original disc and ran into the same problem (!??). Note that this was a process I had repeated many times in the past while bringing this machine up, and it never had a problem mounting a previously-existing jfs partition. What have you done, yum?

So now I'm just installing FC8 without trying to mount /htpc, hoping I'll be able to manually mount it later. Then I can just samba share everything over to the arcade machine, nuke the jfs partition, and reformat with something sensible like ext3. What was I thinking using jfs?? Jarod Wilson made me do it.

Summary for non-computer folks: my home theater computer is being a pain in the ass and there went my evening.

Update: I can install FC8 with jfs support (using linux jfs at the boot: prompt), but mounting the existing partition always fails for unspecified reasons. Anyone have any ideas why? There's some data on that partition that I'd sure like to not lose.

My birthday is rapidly drawing to a close here, here's the annual swag report, presented in no particular order:

• Box 'o chocolates, gump-style
  
• "Press button, receive bacon" T-shirt
  
• DVD: The Edge, featuring humorous cover art of Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin yelling
  
• Three long sleeved shirts, identical except for the color (not a bizarre coincidence; they came together)
  
• Portable work stand for my miter saw (gets the award for biggest box; I could tell what I was getting as soon as I saw the UPS guy unload it from the truck out front)
  

And a big FU goes to Amazon, who managed to gimp up two orders which still haven't arrived. Apparently my sister picked some stuff off my wishlist and told Amazon to deliver it to the address associated with the list, but the box came back as undeliverable. She told me, and I checked my list... and found that there was no address associated with it at all. Buh? Not sure if this happened with the missing box from my parents as well, or what. But either way total failure from Amazon this year. Presumably the additional booty will arrive later, and it will be like Birthday 32.1 and 32.2. Woo!

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Here's a breakdown of the movies that were released during 2007 that I've seen.

First, movies that I watched in the theater on opening night: Transformers, Stardust, and The Golden Compass

Movies I saw in the theater after opening night: Smokin' Aces, 300, Ocean's Thirteen, Balls of Fury, and Michael Clayton

Movies I rented via Netflix: Breach and The Invasion

Movie's that friends rented or owned: Superbad

Movies watched on airplanes: Next, Evan Almighty, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hairspray, No Reservations, and Mr. Bean's Holiday

Movies stolen off the internet: Black Snake Moan

Some analysis: I clearly spend more time flying than I probably ought to, and movies shown on trans-continental flights, for the most part, blow. My Netflix habits seem to have trended towards older material this year, and to TV series such as The Wire. Opening night movies were held strictly to effects pieces, which is good. Oddly, of all of the non-opening night movies I went to in the theater, only Michael Clayton was because I wanted to go. The rest were at the request of either Nina or Christina and Mike. I think my three favorites of the movies listed above are probably Breach, Michael Clayton, and Stardust. I don't think it was a very good year for movies, and Transformers was such a let down for me. But next year is looking up.

Will there be a 2007 Broxton Birthday Sighting (BBS07)? Or perhaps a Milkmanination? Or both? I think it has been at least 6 years since at least one of these events didn't occur, and it would be a shame to break that streak. Plus, if the streak were broken, it would mean that I'll probably spend my birthday sitting around at home playing Warhawk.

Those of you who've been to Los Alamos are probably familiar with the 8th wonder of the world, Ed Grothus, and his lab-surplus-o-rama The Black Hole. I bought a bunch of parts for the railgun there. Someone appears to have made a documentary about Ed which is entertaining. He's wearing his purple urban camo that he always has on, plus the largest bolo tie known to man. You get to see a bunch of the odd stuff inside the black hole, hear Ed give a really messed-up overview of how a nuclear weapon works, and as a bonus, the second part starts with a guy I play ultimate with.

I don't remember where I heard about Renaissance or how it ended up in my Netflix queue, but it is one of those movies that I enjoyed enough to want to buy it immediately after watching it. If you read reviews of it, you'll hear a common theme which I agree with: story and character development are ho-hum, but these deficiencies are dwarfed by the incredible visuals. I would add that the foley and score are phenomenal as well (you'll thank yourself for a great sound system w/ subwoofer whenever one of the semi-invisible guys are on screen). I haven't enjoyed an animated film this much in a long time. While I'd recommend watching this film to almost anyone, I'd especially recommend it to people like Brent, Aaron, and Jason, who have an eye for... arty shit. If you guys haven't seen it, give it a look.

Anyway, so I want to buy it. However, I've vowed not to purchase DVDs anymore now that I have a PS3 (which includes a Blu-ray player). Now its possible that obscure French cyberpunk animated films won't make it to the front of the line for high-deffage, and there are movies out there that probably will never make it to Blu-ray. But, in fact, there is already a Blu-ray version of Renaissance available in Europe... of the French original. I'm all for watching foreign movies in their original language—subtitles don't offend me—but the existing Blu-ray cut doesn't seem to include either the English re-dub or any subtitles. (There is also a German HD-DVD available, but that's bad for two reasons.)

Speaking of the English re-dub, it is actually really good. I think it's telling to take a look at the caliber of actors who signed on to do the voiceover work. Ian Holm, Daniel Craig, and Jonathan Pryce are probably the biggest three names. But the point is that these are first-rate actors doing second-language work, which I think is a bit unusual. And if James Bond likes the film enough to do voiceover work on it, shouldn't you?

I'm not sure I want to pay 25 Euros for a movie that I can't understand. So is it a fair assumption that if it is already available in the format for wacky Region 2, that we'll get a cut here eventually? I don't know where to go to find these things out. I hope so; the high contrast and fine lines of this film will only be helped by increased resolution and a reduction in aliasing. And I really don't want to buy it on DVD if there is any chance of it coming to Blu-ray eventually.

Plus, writing this post helped me learn how to spell renaissance. Sweet.

Here's the UK trailer and here is eight and a half minutes of random scenes from the movie with the audio removed and replaced with a really irritating song.

A tasty link for the hardware people out there.

It's a freeware FAT12/16/32 filesystem written in ANSI C and optimized for 8 or 16 bit microprocessors with a focus on small memory usage. It won't do long filenames because Microsoft in their infinite wisdom requires a paid license for that (buh?? Dan? WTF?). In its "tiny" configuration, it only uses 544 bytes of RAM plus 28 bytes per open file.

Anyway, you provide low-level routines for some basic media access and configuration operations (read sector, write sector, init disk, etc.) and it does the rest. Writing these routines for something like an SD card is fantastically simple, though it'll also work with CF, HDD, or pretty much any storage medium where FAT makes sense.

The result, for me, is a datalogger that saves sensor data to an on-board SD card, which can then be ripped out and put into a laptop, and the card comes up as a disk with properly-formatted files on it. We've been doing this for awhile, but we've either had to pay a license fee for a closed-source product or put up with some really poorly-optimized solutions that had hideously limiting constraints (e.g. only one file could be open at a time, no file append, no filesystem management options, etc). Now it's free, well-implemented, and small. Yay.

Fantasygoat is the man.

ps: the number of people who understand this post is likely to be quite small, but I assure you I haven't gone mad.

I've been awake since about 2:45, and I'm struggling with the internet interface at this hotel, which is offered solely through the TV and a wireless keyboard. Please, oh please, if you design low-horsepower computers, don't put Windows on them. This thing grinds to a halt whenever it is... receiving packets. Like keys get dropped, the mouse lags, etc. It is almost unbearable. Oh, and MSIE doesn't render scrollbars here for whatever reason. Thanks.

Anyway, Moscow is predictably cold and dreary. The meeting is going well, though I'm still pretty jetlagged.

Turns out the hotel isn't as fancy as its website leads one to believe. I get the impression that in its day it was the fanciest hotel in the universe; now it... isn't. The internet situation is a real pain, as is the lack of an iron or, a safe, or any real lighting in the bathroom. They do, however, have a sweet breakfast buffet. Stiill, I prefer the Marriott Grand.

Anyway, I'm alive and well, if somewhat jetlagged. And don't expect any email from me as typing on this crap web TV the most irritating thing ever,