Winter Babies

That's what these two are called.

Getting Ducklings in a Row

All twelve of them.

Littler Crested Grebes

When taking a stroll I saw this family of Great Crested Grebes. I immediately ran home, grabbed the 150-600mm. It quickly became apparent that mommy and daddy Grebe mostly wanted to sleep, but little Grebe was full of energy and kept chirping.

Gasworks

The remains of the Värta Gas Works naphtha steam reforming plant that stood here until January 2011.

The Fluffballs of Husarviken

The ducks had kids, too.

Littlest Crested Grebe

A pair of great crested grebes have had additions to the family.

Supernumerary Rainbows

We've had some sunshowers lately.

What Coding Assistants Excel At

After using coding assistants a bit, I think I know what they excel at, and what they do less well.

Failure Modes of AI in Software Development

Everything old is new again.

AI as a Junior Developer

The short summary of where AI is in its coding skills in mid-2026 is this: AI is like a junior developer. If you have use for junior developers, AI will help you; and if you don't, it won't.

National Museum of the Marine Corps

A museum dedicated to the few and the proud.

Great Falls Park

The Great Falls of the Potomac River. Part of the Great Falls Park.

A Detour to Husarviken

After the cherry blossoms, I popped down to the jetties for some reflections.

Fish Park Playground Cherry Blossoms

I was going to hit the gym, but got sidetracked. High clouds, starting to light up in color, cherry blossoms, in full bloom... and I knew I wouldn't be able to do a single rep unless I first grabbed my camera and photographed this.

Morning Serenade

Spring is here, and with that, early sunrises and birds.

Spiral Staircase

A view down the staircase.

Left Outer Join Lateral

Or - how I stopped worrying and learned to aggregate SQL queries. This is a pattern that can be used when you have multiple SQL SELECT queries Q_(1)...Q_(n), each returning zero or one rows, except for the first which must return a single row, where Q_(n) can depend on the result of Q_(1)...Q_(n-1), and you want to reduce the number of database roundtrips.

A Universe Filled With Stone

I have this memory of a synopsis of a short story: it's an alien living in a universe completely filled with stone, and it's called something like "my stone telescope". Every now and then that memory pops up, but I've never been able to find the story. Now that we live in the age of AI I figured I'd ask, so I started the Gemini app, forgetting that I wasn't interacting with a search engine:

Maqam Machine

When I started my attempts at making music around new year's I had a question on my mind: what makes certain music sound like that kind of music? Or, to be more specific, what makes Middle-eastern music sound Middle-eastern? Is it the instruments? Is it something else?

I googled, and googled, and found that there was something called a maqam. It's an Arabic extension to the older Persian dastgah system, which, in turn, is best described as a set of musical scales and connections between them. (Similar to the Indian ragas.) Could I make music sound Arabic or Persian by restricting the melody to these scales? I tried a little, but then got sidetracked into making a little application where I could explore these scales.

View from Leopoldsberg

Panorama from Leopoldsberg, shot in 2006, assembled in 2009.