Wed Aug 6 13:51:39 PDT 2003

So two weekends ago we got out to Cannon Beach with my 7ft Delta-Coyne kite and after a little messing with the bridle, got it up. The we attached the camera, and really couldn’t quite get the camera up where we were flying (up on the beach), We then moved the camera up the line and in the process forgot to turn the camera back on, so even though by moving down the beach and having a great flight due to the higher winds closer to the water we didn’t get any pictures!

But the real issue is that I was moving up the beach to keep it flying high, and that was in a 15-20mph wind. Clearly for inland use we need a lower weight camera payload, or a bigger kite. Visiting a local kite shop, I managed to talk them out of a pair of fairly thick (5/8in?) 4ft fiberglass spars for a reasonable price, and they had a really nice "double french military" kite, which is like a double-box Delta-Coyne, but without the delta. I was really tempted to buy it since it was under $70 for an 8ftx4ft kite (http://www.mrkites.com/), and they even claimed that you could lift a video camera with it. But I enjoy building the kites, so I looked at theirs and I’m seriously planning on building my own double-box but integrating with Delta wings.

The new kite will be roughly 4×11, which is much larger than the 3×7 that I originally built. I’ve got most of the parts already, and only need an additional yard of fabric to build it. I’m going to go with mostly red and black with some yellow highlites.

I started work on the new kite and it is a lot more work than the previous one. Part of it is that I’m piecing most of the panels from two or more pieces of fabric for design/asthetic reasons. I’m having some difficulities with the piecing, but the end results should be worth it.

I’ve also been working on the prismiq. After getting the linux server working I started tinkering with the xml configuration files. I wrote a quick perl script/hack that created a well ordered list that is artist-based instead of album based. But bottom line, the client code on the prismiq doesn’t support hierarchy, and slowness between pages makes navigation unacceptably slow, even worse than the rio’s interface.

The other thing I tried was modifying a bookmark to point at the TVGuide site. For some reason the bookmarks have the funky ids but the id values don’t show up anywhere else in the config files. So I modified one of the entries and now when I try and access the bookmarks page on the prismiq it just displays a grey screen so the bookmarks.xml file must have some other relationship or interactions.

The two things that are bothering me are: the prismiq user interface isn’t at the level of quality that I expected and while they aren’t releasing developer docs, which makes any simple changes like adding a bookmark an exercise in reverse engineering.