First off, apologies for the Craig- and Ryan-like pace of updates to danvk.org.
On Sunday, Ryan and I rode out to the far Western edge of San Francisco, just north of Ocean Beach. While it’s only six miles from my apartment, this felt like a much longer trip. There are no freeways in this part of the city, so our route was stop and go through neighborhood after neighborhood: Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Pac Heights, Laurel Heights, Inner Richmond and Outer Richmond.
This is the land of Adolph Sutro, a former mayor of San Francisco who I learned about from this Sparkletack episode. Sutro’s two claims to fame in this area are:
The second Cliff House, which lasted from 1896-1907. This must have been especially dramatic back then, when this area was completely uninhabited. Nowadays we’re on the third Cliff House, a swanky restaurant with spectacular views. I’d love to eat there someday, but that degree of swankiness requires a special occasion.
The remains of the Sutro baths, which Sutro once hoped would be his great legacy. It’s a shame that these public baths no longer exist. I can only imagine how nice it would be to relax here with a magnificent view of the ocean and feel the sea breeze coming in. The rocks you can see peeking out of the sea were covered in mussels, which made the waves slowly drain off them, rather than crashing. It was a sight to behold.
Here’s what the baths used to look like. I believe you can see the lack of a Cliff House in the background.
I was disappointed to find out that the baths were enclosed. While it is a spectacular building, I liked the idea of catching the sea breeze from the baths. I also find it amazing how very old these ruins look, even though the building only burned down in 1966.
I found a disk image I’d made of an old hard drive of mine today (circa 1995) and had some fun browsing through my files. Back then, I was programming in a combination of QBASIC and GW-BASIC. It’s easy to read old QBASIC programs, since QB saved code as human-readable text.
Not so, GW-BASIC. To save space, it stored code in a compact, binary format. This seems like an unnecessary optimization now, but back in 1984 it made a lot of sense. GW-BASIC was an interactive environment, and it stored all your code in memory. Memory was a scarce resource at the time, so every byte counted. Hence the binary format.
I wanted to read my old GW-BASIC programs, so I dug around and found this discussion of the GW-BASIC binary file format. It’s incredibly detailed, which let me whip up a decoder in Python over two solid hours of hacking. Without further ado, here it is:
If you live in San Francisco, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to the History Center on the sixth floor of the downtown library.
I’d heard about it in a Sparkletack episode and decided to do a little research on my apartment this weekend. The staff was incredibly helpful. I walked in and told them that I’d like to learn about the history of my apartment in Russian Hill. The staff took me by the hand showed me which resources I should consult, what sort of information I could expect to find, how to use the microfilm reader, etc.
As a first step, we looked at the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which are accessible online with a SF Library card. Sanborn created detailed block-by-block maps of many American cities from the mid-late 1800′s to the mid-1900′s. We used these to establish that my apartment existed in its present form at least as early as 1913. Here’s a detail from my block in that year:
Next I looked at the San Francisco Block Books, which catalogued the owners of each property at various times from 1894 to 1915. For a span of 25 years, there was surprisingly little turnover on my block. Houses kept their owners, or changed hands within a family. We yuspies must not have found the neighborhood yet!
There was also an 1890 block book on microfilm, but they only had half of the Western Addition maps. Mine was in the other half which, as the main helping me explained, was probably destroyed in the fire after the 1906 earthquake.
Before the library closed, I took a look at the Water department’s records, also on microfilm. The date that the water was turned on at an address is a good indicator of the date the property was built. It also names the owner of the property at the time. There was an entry for 1371/3 Union Street from May 24, 1884 listing “Geo. L. Bradley” as the owner. There was a famous George L. Bradley who lived around this time, but I couldn’t find any evidence that he’d ever been to San Francisco.
That will have to wait for next time. I’ll definitely be heading back to the San Francisco History Center!
I bought one from Fry’s a few months ago because it was the cheapest option and I assumed all wireless routers were more or less the same. Not so. You’d think the D-Link QA people would have discovered that this thing can’t maintain a connection for more than five minutes before it went to market. Here’s a smattering of reviews:
“Strengths: the lights are really pretty with the rest of the blinking lights that make up my computer setup. Weaknesses: how about holding a connection for more then 2 minutes”
“Mistakenly, I didn’t check any reviews before buying it, but if you look, you’ll see the same thing over and over. The WBR-1310 drops its wireless signals, without fail, every 5-15 minutes. Not once, in the entire time I owned it (which was only 2 weeks untill I finally got fed up enough to return it) did it hold a signal for over 15 minutes.”
So do your research before you buy a wireless router! I bought a Linksys WRT54G to replace the D-Link, and have been happy with it in the past two days of use. The Wiki article says that this was the first wireless router to have its firmware open-sourced. As my roommate pointed out, that speaks volumes about Cisco’s confidence in this product.
One of the best perks of working at Google is the Authors@Google program, which brings in authors to speak about their books. We recently hosted xkcd‘s Randall Munroe, who gave a completely hilarious talk. I only caught the end in person, but it’s now available on YouTube for all to see.
For some context, the guy who does the intro is Peter Norvig, the guy who asks the first question is Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, and the the guy who asks the second question is Don Knuth!
