Inexplicable blog posts

Right now, there’s post up on Boing­Bo­ing by that caped cru­sader about why he won’t be buy­ing an iPad. I get that Mr. Doc­trow has prob­lems with Apple and the iPhone/iPad approach to the world, but I just find it odd to con­tem­plate the fact that peo­ple seem to con­tin­u­ally find some need to write arti­cles telling the world why they don’t do things. I’ve never felt any over­whelm­ing desire to explain why I didn’t buy a Nexus One. Nor have I felt it appro­pri­ate to explain why I didn’t get the sausage pizza instead of the cheese pizza. My pur­chase ofa Mazda wasn’t pre­ceded by blog posts about why I’m not buy­ing a Honda. These things don’t occur to me.

Per­haps my mind is broken.

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Published:
28 April 2010 – 8:49 am
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By petrilli
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The trouble with tribbles^H^H^H^H^H^HWordPress themes

I started out with one them, I’m now on another. I still haven’t found what I’m look­ing for, and I fear that like last time, I’ll need to write it from scratch. They all seem to be either fussy, gar­ish or brit­tle. Some­times all of the above.

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Published:
26 April 2010 – 7:10 pm
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By petrilli
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A kerfuffle in Cupertino

First, I am not a lawyer.

There’s a big ker­fuf­fle going on right now on the Tubes around the search and seizure of equip­ment from the home of one of the edi­tors of Giz­modo. The digerati and the Twit­ter­verse are aghast that such a breach of “ethics” has hap­pened and are all leap­ing to the defense of Jason Chen, the edi­tor in ques­tion. It hasn’t yet been com­pared to the Pen­ta­gon Papers, but like the com­par­i­son of some­one to Hitler, it is inevitable that some­one will overreach.

There’s a few things that I’d like to observe. Things which seem obvi­ous to me, but I’m obvi­ously in the minor­ity of those cur­rently ker­fuf­fling. First, the per­son who “found” the iPhone obvi­ously knew it was valu­able. If not ini­tially, cer­tainly after a short period. Oth­er­wise, how would he know to try and sell it to a web­site as a “scoop”?

From every­thing I’ve read — and I could eas­ily be wrong — it would seem that the finder never tried to return it to the bar, or con­tact any­one at the bar in order to make the con­nec­tion to the per­son who lost it. Also, he likely (although there’s no evi­dence yet) knew it was valu­able and intended to profit from it.

Giz­modo knew that they were buy­ing this iPhone pro­to­type from some­one who was not the legal owner of it. Finally, if this was any­one but Apple peo­ple wouldn’t be defend­ing him.

On that last point, let’s take this into a totally dif­fer­ent realm so that peo­ple might under­stand the kind of intel­lec­tual prop­erty that is being dis­cussed here. Let’s say that an engi­neer at Ford was out test­ing a as-yet-unreleased vehi­cle. Fur­ther­more, let’s say that said engi­neer wan­dered off for an extended period, and left the keys in the igni­tion. If some­one drove the car off and sold it to Car & Dri­ver, would you think it eth­i­cal? Moral? Legal? What if he sold it to GM?

Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t seem to find any “pub­lic good” that is involved here. To me, it’s no dif­fer­ent than if the National Inquirer pur­chased Tom Hanks’ cell phone so they could rum­mage through it and pub­lish the infor­ma­tion found in it. It was done for one rea­son, and one rea­son only: to drive adver­tis­ing rev­enue and profit.

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Published:
26 April 2010 – 6:40 pm
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By petrilli
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Clojure 101

So, for the past few months, I’ve been futz­ing with Clo­jure, and I’ve finally decided to spend a bit more “qual­ity time” learn­ing it. My deci­sion for­tu­nately coin­cided with the start of the Clo­jure 101 course that Ruby Learn­ing is run­ning. So, I signed up. So far, we’re on week one, but it’s pro­vid­ing some struc­ture to learn­ing Clojure.

Now, I’ve read most of the Pro­gram­ming Clo­jure book, and spent many years writ­ing LISP code back when you could still put your hands on a real LISP Machine, but that was a long time ago, and in a dialect far far away. The dif­fer­ence between INTERLISP-D and Clo­jure is pretty dra­matic, even if both qual­ify as a LISP-1; at least I think INTERLISP-D was a LISP-1. The expe­ri­ence should be fun.

Any­way, back to the course. At the end of each week, I’m going to post some thoughts about what was in the course that week. That’ll make me put some of my thoughts in a more struc­tured form.

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Published:
26 April 2010 – 11:17 am
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By petrilli
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Archives

I’ve finally got all the archives up from my pre­vi­ous blog. While not every­thing is per­fectly orga­nized, you can reach all of them through the link at the top of the page. This will take you to the var­i­ous cat­e­gories, and from there, you can find the orig­i­nal posts.

Even­tu­ally, I need to write a script to pull in the ren­dered HTML from the archives. For this iter­a­tion of the blog, I’ve decided not to use any kind of fancy for­mat­ting (e.g. tex­tile), but instead just to write the HTML by hand. I found way too many edge cases that were nearly impos­si­ble to fix.

Published:
26 April 2010 – 9:14 am
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By petrilli
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It’s the glass stupid

One thing you will hear many seri­ous ama­teurs and all pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers tell you is that you invest your money in glass. Specif­i­cally, the care­fully ground, minutely coated and painfully expen­sive glass that makes up a mod­ern cam­era lens. For nearly every sit­u­a­tion imag­in­able, the lens is the decid­ing fac­tor on the upper limit of the qual­ity. Sure, more pix­els in a dig­i­tal cam­era can help; but, they can also hurt. More pix­els means smaller sen­sor area, and there­fore less sen­si­tiv­ity. Less sen­si­tiv­ity means you have to crank up the gain, and as any­one who has worked with analog-digital con­ver­sion, more gain = more noise.

This is why it was espe­cially sur­pris­ing to hear some­one who should know bet­ter make a blind­ingly stu­pid statement

“There will be no need to carry around those heavy lenses,” Nokia’s mar­ket­ing EVP Anssi Van­joki told a gath­er­ing in Helsinki, accord­ing to Reuters.

That’s some­one quite high up in Nokia say­ing that cam­era phones will make dig­i­tal SLRs obso­lete. It’s not sim­ply mis­taken, it’s cravenly stu­pid. It’s either wil­full igno­rance of how the basic physics of pho­tog­ra­phy works, or it’s lit­tle more than pro­to­typ­i­cal mar­ket­ing bull­shit. And while Busi­ness­Week may say he’s one of the 25 most influ­en­tial peo­ple on the web, I’d say he’s just another mar­ket­ing flack who hasn’t the slight­est clue on how to com­pete, and instead man­ages to just spew nonsense.

Now, if he’d said “peo­ple don’t care about image qual­ity”, or “most peo­ple are sat­is­fied with what they get out of their cam­era phone”, then I could agree with him. Then again, most peo­ple were sat­is­fied with hor­ren­dous audio cas­settes blast­ing big hair bands through their Cerwin-Vega speak­ers, so I’m not sure how much that really means in the grand scheme of things. I do think that the ris­ing qual­ity of the cam­era phone has dis­placed a lot of low-end dig­i­tal cam­eras, but that’s a far cry from replac­ing the DSLR market.

Plus, it would seem that most peo­ple who buy DSLR buy them for the same rea­son they buy so many other things. It impresses other peo­ple. It’s hard to do that with a 1/8-inch lens.

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Published:
21 April 2010 – 4:03 pm
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By petrilli
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A pocket full of photos

Next month, I am head­ing to Europe with my sis­ter to see friends, and ful­fill my mom’s wishes of hav­ing her ashes spread some­one she’d always dreamed of going. Since I wanted to take pic­tures while I was there, and didn’t want to lug my DSLR around with me, I’ve been in the mar­ket for a good point-and-shoot cam­era. There were two that made it to the top of my list: Pana­sonic Lumix LX3 and the Canon Pow­er­Shot S90. The rea­son for this is both offer full-manual con­trols and RAW for­mat image cap­ture, two things I really wanted.

After a lot of com­par­isons, and read­ing all the reviews I could find, I was still stuck. Each cam­era had some things to offer that the other didn’t. The Pana­sonic had a bet­ter lens and bet­ter “feel” in the hand. The Canon on the other hand was thin­ner and had more reach with the zoom. In the end it came down to which would give me what I really wanted: pock­etabil­ity at all times. From that, it really was an easy choice: Canon. It was notice­ably thin­ner and lighter, which meant that it would fit in pants pock­ets, where as the Pana­sonic was just a lit­tle too big to do so comfortably.

I ordered it yes­ter­day from Ama­zon, and it arrived today. Not bad ser­vice, con­sid­er­ing they shipped it 2nd day UPS. Now, I sim­ply have to bide my time while I wait for the bat­tery to fully charge. I think the elec­tron­ics move more slowly when they know they’re being watched.

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Published:
21 April 2010 – 1:00 pm
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By petrilli
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Migrating old posts

In try­ing to get every­thing ready to move over, I had been strug­gling with the need to migrate a lot of old posts over. While I’m still run­ning on Word­Press, there was so much cruft in how the old blog worked that I sim­ply couldn’t bring over all the plu­g­ins needed to ren­der things. So, what’s a geek to do? Use wget! I just pulled down every­thing and mir­rored it on the new server so that I could get rid of the under­ly­ing PHP code.

Once that was done, it was time to fig­ure out how to make mod_rewrite work cor­rectly. That’s always a fun time. This time, how­ever, it turned out that the exist­ing rewrite rules from Word­Press were fine. Since I’d stopped blog­ging in 2009, and the archive struc­ture used the year as the top level, I could sim­ply move the files over and poof every­thing worked. Handy. There’s still some resid­ual cruft, mind you, but even­tu­ally that will get resolved. Mostly about mov­ing over some bits and pieces that are needed to prop­erly ren­der things.

Tick, tock; tick, tock. Time keeps on tick­ing. For now, the archives are still in place, at least for the indi­vid­ual posts. Unfor­tu­nately, for now, the cat­e­gory list­ings are offline and once I fig­ure out how to put them back, I’ll keep those in place as well.

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Published:
19 April 2010 – 2:41 pm
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By petrilli
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The trouble with blogging engines

So, my old blog was a Word­Press–based blog, and I was gen­er­ally happy with it, other than the fact that the Tex­tile for­mat­ter would go com­pletely insane on a reg­u­lar basis and mis-format things in a way that really couldn’t be resolved. When I decided to work on a new blog — the one you’re read­ing — I seri­ously wanted to move it over to some­thing more mod­ern (e.g., not based on PHP). Since I’ve been doing a lot of Django for var­i­ous projects, that was where I planned to go … at least initially.

I looked at var­i­ous Django-based blog engines, espe­cially django-mingus, but in the end, they all seemed to be miss­ing some­thing, and I was left with the deci­sion to either write it myself, or just focus on the con­tent. And so, I ended up with Word­Press again.

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Published:
11 March 2010 – 8:40 pm
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By petrilli
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