I heard these articles mentioned on The Commandline podcast:
Your analog brain.
A wearable brain computer interface. And for only 9000E, you can type by thinking.
I would have thought that this technology would have made it on the scene a long time ago. It’s very much something that would mesh will well with wearable computers. Just need a VRD to get you an augmented view of reality.
I’m impressed that even though I was so lazy as to not hang a sandbag from my tripod, it was as sharp as it is.
Moon, 2010-03-04
This was a rainy weekend walk, where again I risked my camera. I wasn’t too worried, it’s a pretty tuff camera and it’s not too fragile a lens. Anyhow, it was the 28MM F5 Vivitar tank. It’s actually quite good at close ups. Almost all the pictures I’ve uploaded have been hand held at 100 ISO.
Bark, Bellingham, 2010-01-31
I like taking pictures of … neglect. I don’t like the word neglect, so much, but rather the character a structure expresses after being abandoned to the elements. There’s another shack out on Aldrich Rd that I’ve been meaning to photograph, too.
Shack, Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-03
I was very impressed by Ray Maxwell’s explanation of what a histogram on a digital camera shows in Maxwell’s House episode 60 [http://twit.tv/mh60]. The histogram is showing the amount of pixels that have a particular exposure and that exposure is power. So the further right on the histogram you go, the brighter the luminance.
However, the halfway point on the histogram isn’t necessarily the halfway point of the color resolution. What does this mean? Well, if the furthest right you can go on a histogram is brightest white, say, 256, one stop down (1/2 the exposure, thus, 1/2 the power) is 128. Two stops down is 64. Goodness…how many stops are there on a gray scale? 10? That means 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1….Does that mean that we run out of bits as we enter the dark end of the photo? Yup.
The previous episodes explain how this is managed using color spaces. This episode’s advice indicates a few bits of advice: 1) camera’s don’t themselves have ICC color profiles,
2) shoot in raw because that’s the full color resolution (common knowlege these days)
3) overexposing a bit will give you smoother tones, and a good way to get this effect is to set the “contrast” setting on the camera to “low contrast”.
4) the histogram you see on the camera is actually only possible after converting the raw image thru a color space (like sRGB).
5) what actually determines the information of the raw photo is a) ISO, b) shutter speed, and c) aperature. Other settings, like saturation, contrast, and white balance, are manipulations of the raw photo into JPG format (and that of course is done through color-space).
Neat stuff, good episode. I’m inspired to move towards using DNG format on my Pentax K10 now. The only bummer is that the Gimp doesn’t natively support DNG raw format (last I checked.)
Bob the Build-*cough!* Ahem, ahem! Bob the…get the tune out of my head! Kevin, start whistling, please!
Rebar, 2010-02-19
I’m going to be building and building…software…but not my sink. This is not a matter of confidence, this is a matter of reliability.
I spent all day getting my workstation to build a set of pretty intense C# projects. I’m impressed that we got it working in a day (not counting the four days it took to straighten out my Visual Studio install on my Vista workstation). Having developed projects in Perl, PHP, Java and C, and having been a Linux administrator for 15 years, the process was a bit different, of course.
The biggest difference is how many commercial components I had to manage. Contrast this to a Linux environment where most packages are either pre-installed, or managed by the distribution maintainers. In a Linux distribution, having to hand-roll and maintain out-of-band libraries is not really kosher. One of the things I installed today blew my Windows Explorer away…literally, in one case, a hybrid Java-based installer crashed the Aero interface and dumbed my desktop down to “Windows Basic.” Wow, 64 bit Vista at that.
The other thing that I reflected on was the amount of “oral tradition” that guided the application setup. Since there’s never been a product installer (this being a web based application), setting up the IIS application was never scripted. Wow! This was like nothing I’ve done before using Apache. I can see how an apache .htaccess file would be like black magic compared to an IIS Basic Settings dialog…but its usually just a file kept in source control and often just another bit of automatically deployed collateral…and just another bit of code to a programmer. In this case IIS really involved hand-holding.
The combination of 64-bit and 32-bit libraries was tricky. IIS 7 was not happy for a while until we forced it to run applications as 32-bit. I’ve seen plenty of 32/64 bit dissonance on Linux before. It’s actually quite sad that 64-bit architectures have been around for what…20 years (the Alpha) and it’s still a problem. (It’s still a problem on my home Ubuntu box: Firefox won’t touch my Adobe Flash.) I wish someone, a decade ago, came up with fundamentally better ideas on how to deal with combining 32- and 64-bit software together. The notion of “just keep them separate” is quite unrealistic…unfortunately, it just increases the pain…and quite unacceptable when it comes to customers that have invested in proprietary 32-bit development libraries–people won’t pay for 64 bit versions if the 32-bit ones can be made to work. Makes me appreciate how much work has gone into making so many Linux distros 64-bit friendly, really. The crazy IIS install also made me love bash scripting all the more…it made me think this would be a great time to learn Power Shell and create a PoSH installer for all the components. (It won’t get asked for, tho.)
Time to keep an open mind. Time to shelve my pride. I am now at a place where PHP has being stomped out like a smoking cigarette butt. The last time I coded full time in a Windows GUI was in San Francisco, using JBuilder, approaching a decade ago. The JBuilder eventually got discarded for Notepad++ and well crafted Ant scripts. I wouldn’t think that anyone now would have the chance to discard Visual Studio 2008.
My last thot is…gosh, this is what, like, a million other programmers use every day. I’ve been using F/LOSS components for so long, I forget how much of the world F/LOSS is almost entirely missing. In “typical” desktop and server environment, Windows is still the majority in much of the world. Some day I will develop more with Linux. Mostly, I am grateful to still be employed…that’s is definitely the most important point of all. I won’t let Microsoft be a barrier to that.
Another wide format (dual monitor) desktop background. This included a clever combination of a hard-light filter and a graded mask…otherwise there was only one other trick and you better guess what it was. (No, it was not in post processing.)
Sunset, Aldrich Rd., 2010-02-19
My mom just asked for advice on a computer. C’mon! I can’t pass that up? I showed her some prices on parts to setup a dual 24″, dual SSD, Intel i5 workstation for not too much. I should post links but not tonight. I’m soooo surprised this combination doesn’t pop out in searches easier. (Me: smug? Uh-huh!)
Here’s an attempt at making a very wide desktop background: 2560×1024. There are obviously better photos I could have chosen, but this one was recent. I think I need to figure out how to turn my bicycle into a tripod. I could certainly lose the shake, even on a 28mm lens.
Mt. Baker from Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-19
Feel free to tease me about this photo. You can even do that on twitter now: @jed_reynolds or @bitratchet.
memnoch_proxy Stack Overflow