Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Greetings from Portland
It's very pretty out here. Monday we went on a tour of the Bonneville Dam, about 30 or 40 miles upriver (the Columbia River) from here. The scenery there and along the way is vedy, vedy, nice. Mountains, rivers, trees, clouds ... what more could you want?
Edgefield is on the eastern edge of the Portland area. Just east of here starts the Columbia River Gorge, a national scenic area. Apparently that means very little development is permitted there, so it all looks very parklike and natural. There are only a few houses on the mountain sides, and few of them can be seen from the river.
Portland itself has only about a million people in the entire metro area, which I think is less than Fairfax County by itself. And they are much more spread out. So at least on the far east side where I am right now, it doesn't feel at all crowded. Unlike the areas of California and Washington State I've been to, it doesn't appear to require a huge income to live here and enjoy the nice environment.
Not only is the scenery great, there don't seem to be any mosquitos! The room I sleep in does not have air conditioning, but the nights so far have been reasonably cool, and I sleep with the unscreened window open and have not seen a bug fly in yet.
The Smalltalk project I've been working on is not, unfortunately, going so well. I'm trying to modify SmallWiki, a package that runs a user-editable web site. SmallWiki operates by keeping the entire web site in memory all the time, and the way you save it is to dump the Smalltalk image to disk. Ralph Johnson wants to use SmallWiki for his web sites at the University of Illinois, but he worries that if the system goes down for some reason, any work on it done since the last image dump will be lost. So he asked a couple of us to find a way to incrementally save site edits and additions as they happen so that they can be restored in the event of a system crash. This sounded like a reasonable idea a couple of days ago, but now that we're into it, it turns out that the design of SmallWiki makes this difficult, if not impossible. I'm beginning to think it's the latter, but there is one more approach we want to try before we give up.
Still, it's been fun hanging out and working with a bunch of fellow Smalltalk bigots.
I have no access to a TV here, and the Oregonian newspaper is a joke. Our only Internet connection is a single 56K modem being shared by about 15 of us. Fortunately not all at once. I have read that Travis Hafner hit 5 homers in two game for my beloved Indians.
It appears Andrea has gone Koosh-Krazy again. Oh well.
Later.
Edgefield is on the eastern edge of the Portland area. Just east of here starts the Columbia River Gorge, a national scenic area. Apparently that means very little development is permitted there, so it all looks very parklike and natural. There are only a few houses on the mountain sides, and few of them can be seen from the river.
Portland itself has only about a million people in the entire metro area, which I think is less than Fairfax County by itself. And they are much more spread out. So at least on the far east side where I am right now, it doesn't feel at all crowded. Unlike the areas of California and Washington State I've been to, it doesn't appear to require a huge income to live here and enjoy the nice environment.
Not only is the scenery great, there don't seem to be any mosquitos! The room I sleep in does not have air conditioning, but the nights so far have been reasonably cool, and I sleep with the unscreened window open and have not seen a bug fly in yet.
The Smalltalk project I've been working on is not, unfortunately, going so well. I'm trying to modify SmallWiki, a package that runs a user-editable web site. SmallWiki operates by keeping the entire web site in memory all the time, and the way you save it is to dump the Smalltalk image to disk. Ralph Johnson wants to use SmallWiki for his web sites at the University of Illinois, but he worries that if the system goes down for some reason, any work on it done since the last image dump will be lost. So he asked a couple of us to find a way to incrementally save site edits and additions as they happen so that they can be restored in the event of a system crash. This sounded like a reasonable idea a couple of days ago, but now that we're into it, it turns out that the design of SmallWiki makes this difficult, if not impossible. I'm beginning to think it's the latter, but there is one more approach we want to try before we give up.
Still, it's been fun hanging out and working with a bunch of fellow Smalltalk bigots.
I have no access to a TV here, and the Oregonian newspaper is a joke. Our only Internet connection is a single 56K modem being shared by about 15 of us. Fortunately not all at once. I have read that Travis Hafner hit 5 homers in two game for my beloved Indians.
It appears Andrea has gone Koosh-Krazy again. Oh well.
Later.
